Where was it coming from? It sounded like…
Then her eyes closed.
Kara panicked. She was in total darkness. It was like being blind. She fought to raise her lids but they might as well have been someone else's for all the response she elicited.
The last thing she remembered seeing was the gold mantle clock over the fireplace. It had read 3:20. Through the darkness she heard faint noises from the street outside—horns, trucks shifting gears. She had always hated the incessant street sounds of New York for keeping her awake, for intruding on her concentration. Now she loved them. They proved that she was still alive. And she heard the clock's chime—once on the half hour, once for each hour of the day on the hour.
When her eyes reopened, the afternoon light was fading and the clock said 4:32.
"I feel better now. Stronger."
Her body sat up, then stood and walked a few wobbling steps around the dining room before stumbling back to the couch.
"Though not strong enough to negotiate the steps, I fear. But that is not important now. What is important is a little phone call we must make."
Kara watched her hand reach out and lift the phone receiver, saw it dial 4-1-1. She heard the operator come on the line.
And then she heard her own voice speaking.
"Manhattan, please. The Midtown North police precinct."
Her own voice, speaking someone else's words. Mentally she jumped at the sound of it, but her body remained still. She heard the recorded answer, then watched her hand punch in the number.
She listened as she asked for Detective Harris, heard herself explain how she wasn't feeling well and wanted to go to bed early tonight. She heard the concern and disappointment in Rob's voice and tried to scream out, Rob! No! It's not me! Not me! But instead her voice went on lying, promising that they'd get together tomorrow.
After hanging up with Rob, her eyes closed and she spent another couple of hours in terrified darkness, listening to the clock and the street.
When her eyes opened again she saw that it was almost seven.
"We'll have to call Aunt Ellen."
She thought she had become inured to shock by then, but she was jolted by watching herself dial Ellen's number and listening as her voice glibly informed her aunt that she would be staying at Kelly's again and would explain later.
"There! That should give us a respite." .
Sudden fury blazed up in Kara. She wanted to attack this thing, this voice… but it was only a voice. How did you attack a voice?
And who was the voice?
She thought she knew. Words formed in her mind. A question. Mentally, she spoke the thought.
You're not Janine, are you?
"No."
Something about the voice… something familiar. The rhythm, the choice of words. She was sure now who it was.
Are you Doctor Gates?
"Doctor Gates is dead."
Then who—?
"Quiet! I need to rest."
There came another period behind closed eyelids, a long one during which Kara thought she might have slept—not because she felt safe enough, but to escape the horror temporarily, and maybe to awaken and learn that it was all a terrible nightmare.
She was roused by abrupt movements of her body, and by noises from the front door. Someone was rattling it.
The dining room was dark but light poured down the hall from the chandelier. Her body rose from the couch and walked unsteadily but stealthily to the kitchen where it pulled a long-bladed knife from a drawer.
She waited. The door rattled once more, briefly, then all was silent.
"That, I would say, was your friend, Detective Harris. Even after midnight, when he believes you home and asleep, he is still nosing round. He is going to be trouble."
Kara had no doubts now.
You are Doctor Gates!
"I told you: Doctor Gates is dead."
Then who are you? And why are you doing this to me?
"You'll know in a moment. I believe I'm strong enough now." Her body moved to one of the cabinets and she pulled out two jars of junior foods, the kind Kara used to feed Jill when she was a baby. Then she was heading across the hall toward the door to the cellar.
"I'm not being coy. It's simply that it's easier to show you who I am than to explain. And now you will see."
Steadying itself on the banister, her body started down the cellar stairs.
▼
Rob turned downtown on Seventh after leaving the townhouse. As he passed the Kramer Medical Arts building, he checked his coat pocket. He still had them: the keys he had taken from Gates' secretary this morning. He pulled into the curb.
Up in the office he searched Gates' desk for keys to the filing cabinets but found nothing. Frustrated, edgy, he sat in Gates' high-backed chair. He realized that it wasn't the files that had drawn him back to the office. It was the other back room—the padded cell. He needed one more look at it.
He propped the cell door open with copies of the PDR and Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary—he didn't want to be accidentally locked in here. He'd probably die of starvation before anybody found him. He turned on the overhead light and stood in the center of the cell.
What on earth had Gates used this for? Who had he kept here?
The questions plagued him. Questions existed to be answered. They never went away until they were answered.
He paced the narrow dimensions of the room, tapping on the padding with the heel of his hand and the side of his shoe. It was thick. If you were the sort who was inclined toward such things, you might be able to knock yourself out by banging your head against these walls, but you wouldn't be able to crack your skull. You might even—
Something crunched.
Rob's shoe had tapped against a slight bulge in the lower padding. Something else was under the fabric. He reached down and found a split seam along the floorline. Dropping to his knees, he wriggled his fingers up under the fabric. There was paper crammed in there. He vised a couple of sheets between his fingers and yanked them out. Then he pulled more out. The space was stuffed with scraps from notepads, prescription blanks, used envelopes, all covered with tiny script. And a pencil, short, looking as if someone had sharpened it with his teeth.
Rob studied the script. He was no handwriting expert, but these looked like they were written by the same hand that had sent Kara the warning note. And they were dated.
Rob began setting them in order. He had some reading to do.
He had a feeling one of his questions was about to be answered.
▼
The basement was small, as Rob had mentioned earlier. Had it been less than twelve hours since they'd arrived here together? It seemed ages. After all the high ceilings upstairs, these low-slung pipes overhead gave her a hemmed-in feeling, seemed to press down on her.
Her body took her to a paneled partition. Her hand reached up among the pipes and pulled a lever. Something clicked inside the wall. She pushed on a panel which dropped back then slid to the left, revealing a small room.
A foul odor wafted out—urine, feces. Had she been in control of her body she might have gagged.
"Unpleasant, isn't it? But if I've got to smell it, so should you. I've been living in that for almost two days."
A Tiffany-type floor lamp threw a cone of light on the room's single piece of furniture. A crib. In the crib was the source of the odor.
"Let me introduce myself properly. My name is Gabor. This is my body."
Had she a voice, Kara would have screamed. In the crib was a wrinkled, shrunken thing with thick, mottled skin and whispy white hair trailing off its scalp. The head was too big for its body—adult-sized on a body no bigger than the average five-year old's. It's face was a caricature of humanity with its flattened nose, its drooling, toothless mouth, its white-coated eyes stared blindly upward. In contrast to its short, warped, wizened limbs, its body was a bloated, corpulent, barrel-chested mass, the pelvis sheathed in a stained, fouled diaper.