“Well, I must be running along,” Briggs said affably. “I hope you’ll excuse the intrusion, at this hour. I have a busy day ahead of me. Oh, and by the way…”
Already in the doorway, he turned.
“If Linda should turn up, do be kind to the poor girl.”
“Naturally.”
“But don’t forget…”
“Forget what?” Michael snapped.
“She might be dangerous,” Briggs said softly. “Be careful.”
He went out, and just in time; the itching in Michael’s fingers was almost intolerable. He slammed the door and leaned against it, twisting his hands together. When he was able to speak without stammering, he went back to the bedroom.
She lay quiet, staring at him over the gag, her eyes liquid and enormous. Michael took the gag off and untied the cords that held her down. Neither spoke. He sat down on the edge of the bed, knowing he dared not touch her, and watched the tears slide down her cheeks and soak into the pillow on either side of her face.
II
Michael put down the telephone.
“They expect him tonight or early tomorrow,” he said. Sun streamed in the window. It was mid-morning, and a beautiful spring day. Outside. The room had another atmosphere. They had both fought their way back to some kind of calm, but the air was cold with tension.
“Tonight,” Linda repeated thoughtfully.
“Or tomorrow. He never knows till the last minute what plane he’ll be catching. Usually he wires to let them know, but not always; he drives himself, so he doesn’t have to be met.”
Michael knew he must sound like a host trying to entertain an unwanted guest. He couldn’t help it; something had happened to his brain. Up to this point he had been able to consider and discuss everything that had happened; he had even been able to apply logic to a concept that was considered to be beyond logic. But last night…His mind balked at that, he couldn’t even think about it, much less discuss it. He was behaving as if it hadn’t happened. Which was not only stupid; it was potentially dangerous.
He looked at Linda. Sitting upright on the bed, she sipped her coffee. Her hands were free, but her ankles were still bound; at her insistence, he had again fastened them to the footboard of the bed. He had felt sick while doing it, and he felt sick every time he looked. But it was a small price to pay for the composure of her face. She had fought this latest catastrophe, and come through it, as she had come through all the others; but he thought that she must be like someone clinging to a single strand of rope, over an abyss, slipping inexorably down each time her grasp on reality failed. The frantic hands might tighten, temporarily stopping the descent, or even claw their way back up the rope, a few precious inches toward safety. But inevitably the grasp would weaken again, and each time the fall would be arrested a little farther down, toward the end of the rope and the final plunge.
“I left a message,” he said. “Asking him to call the minute he gets in.”
“We’re acting like children,” Linda said. “Waiting for this man as if he were God, or…Why do you think he can help us?”
“I don’t. I just don’t know what else to do.”
“How is your arm?”
“Hurts. It’s not that, nor the fact that I’m bushed. Something’s happened to what passes for my brain. I can’t…I can’t think.”
“Physical exhaustion doesn’t help,” she said, with a briskness that was contradicted by the tenderness of her mouth. They both knew that they could not afford an exchange of sympathies. In a battle, minor wounds must go untended.
“My own brain isn’t working very well either,” she went on. “But one thing is clear, Michael. I can’t spend another night with you.”
“It’s a good thing nobody is listening to this conversation,” Michael said wryly.
She gave him a strained smile.
“I mean it, though.”
“Why is it night you’re afraid of? Isn’t that childish too?”
“Fear of the dark…Maybe. But everything that has happened so far happened at night.”
“When the powers of evil walk abroad…”
“You see? It means something to you. What was it you said, last night-about the dark on the other side?”
Michael twitched uncomfortably.
“Kwame-Joe Schwartz-said that. About Gordon. He was talking about the old Platonic image of the shadows on the wall of the cave, but it turned me cold to hear him, I can tell you. Not the shadows, but the Things that cast the shadows, the Things that prowl the dark, on the other side of the fire. Gordon knows about them, he said. It was pretty obvious that he did, too.”
“Poor Joe.”
“He takes dope,” Michael said. “Some kind of hallucinogenic.”
“But you don’t. Why does the phrase make you so uncomfortable?”
“Racial memory?” Michael offered wildly. “Some hairy, beetle-browed ancestor of mine, squatting in his cave, with his puny fire and his club the only defense against the things that prowled outside in the dark. Saber-toothed tigers and mastodons…”
There was no answering spark of amusement in her face.
“Go on,” she said.
“Well…Too many horror stories when I was a kid. The other side of what? Eternity? The threshold of this world? The doorway that separates the living from the dead? Spiritualists talk about ‘the other world,’ don’t they, to describe the region from which they get their communications?” He was getting interested; he went on, catching the impressions as they floated up into consciousness. “When Kwame talked of the dark on the other side of the fire, he was thinking of The Republic, but also of that other image. This world, narrow and circumscribed as opposed to the spiritual reality of the other side. The dark…That idea is not in Plato, damn it, if I remember my classics, which I probably don’t. For him, the non-material, ideal world was one of light, of true consciousness. A spiritualist would see it that way, too. What do the discarnate entities keep mumbling when they are asked about their world?”
“Sunshine, light, flowers, love,” Linda said promptly.
“Right. So why does this world of light and flowers seem to Kwame to be transmuted into darkness-not empty night, but a place where shadows live? Darkness and light, the primeval symbols of evil and good; the notion of a balance of forces, eternally warring, never ending. There are times, for everyone, when he feels himself the plaything of forces from somewhere outside, forces beyond his control, which strike him when he least expects it. ‘Out of the night that covers me…’”
“Imagery, poetic,” Linda said, as his voice trailed away. “It’s frightening, though, isn’t it? ‘Black as the pit from pole to pole…’”
“Poetic imagery is part of the picture I get. Black as the pit…black as Hell…There’s a nice conventional image of fire and darkness for you.”
“The familiar Calvinist Hell.”
“It’s funny,” Michael went on thoughtfully, “how many of the pre-Christian afterworlds were dark. That terrible twilight place the classical poets describe, where the dead speak with faint voices like the piping of birds… Didn’t the Egyptians go down under the earth into darkness where the sun-god never came?”
“You’re out of my field,” Linda said.
“Darkness and light, black and white; even the colors have symbolism. White is the color of purity, the garments of the Virgin and the priest… What’s the matter?”
“Sorry. It reminded me of Briggs, and every time I think of him I get a chill.”
“Why Briggs?” Michael grinned. “Not the color of purity, surely.”
“Didn’t you know? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Gordon must have told you about Briggs’s being unfairly dismissed from his job, and all that? He never told you what the job was, though… Briggs is an unfrocked priest.”
“What?”
“I guess that sounds melodramatic. Actually, he was a student for the priesthood. They threw him out. Very politely, I imagine. I can also imagine why.”