“Don’t go on! Stop!” whispered Nancy.
He pretended not to hear, continuing as though horribly entranced. “Then you wake up. The darkness is like the sand. It stifles your lungs. A scream builds up high in your throat. You snap on the light and you see your own room there about you—your clothes on a chair perhaps, and your book on the table and everything as familiar as a painting. That’s it. It’s only a painting. It’s all dead, and you’re dead with it and in it. You’ll never get outside that frame into the living world where the air can be breathed. If you’re lucky, maybe you don’t scream, but you jump out of the bed and run to the window. You fall on your knees and lean out in the night. You tell yourself that it’s only a dream. But the horror won’t leave, and your heart is going crazy. You gasp and bite at the air. There’s no taste of life in it. The whole world is darkness or else a few little funeral lights along the street to show you it’s a city of the dead with nothing but the black of the night to breathe…”
“I can’t stand it!” cried Nancy.
He got out a handkerchief and dragged it across his forehead. He scrubbed the wet from his face, up and down, as one poor devil always had done in the hospital.
“I shouldn’t have talked about it,” said Kildare huskily. “It’s like a ghost story, and it’ll give you the horrors. Only—I want you to understand what it means—to some of us—to be alone at night and to fall asleep in the dark and wake up throttled by the blackness. Are you going to forgive me for telling you all this?”
“Forgive you?” said the girl. “Don’t you see? That’s what sleep means to me!”
He had expected to be triumphant if he caught her in his trap, but all that he felt was a stroke of profound pity.
“D’you mean that you have been that way?” he said, as though surprised.
“Why else was I herding around with swine tonight? Johnny, if you look at me I know that you can see the horror in my eyes. I can feel them like shadows of apes here in the corners of my brain.”
He looked straight into the staring of her eyes. She needed comforting, like a child, but that could not be his role. He had to diagnose before he could cure.
“I know,” said Kildare.
“Is there the same feeling in you, Johnny?”
“It’s exactly the same,” he said.
“Then I’m not going crazy? It can’t be insanity if two of us have the same imaginings?”
“Of course it can’t,” said Kildare.
“Sometimes even having people in the room doesn’t help, does it?” she went on.
“Not a bit.”
“They’re like ghosts, not flesh and blood. There’s a dreadful graveyard sense of darkness and decay and horrible death…”
Her voice had not grown louder, but her face looked like screaming. Kildare put an arm around her. She pushed at him with her hands.
“You get that jitter out of you, he said.
“It’ll never go; it’ll never leave me,” said Nancy Messenger. “It’s going to throttle me some night; it’s going to drive me out the window into the street; it’s going to kill me, Johnny.”
“It can’t do that now,” said Kildare. “We’ve found one another. We can put up a fight together because we understand.”
“Could I call you when things get bad?”
“Day or night.”
“And you won’t mind?”
“Mind? I’ll be going through the same thing probably.”
“If we’ve got each other, Johnny, we can fight off the horrors, can’t we?…Poor Johnny, poor boy! What was it that started the dreadfulness in you? But I mustn’t ask.”
“Why not?” he demanded, trying to keep the eagerness out of his voice, for he saw that he was on the verge of making the great discovery. “I’ll tell you all about what started it in me.”
She shook her head violently, her eyes closed to keep out the very thought.
“No, we’ll never ask questions,” she insisted. “Then there’ll never have to be any horrible answering.”
He saw that it would be foolish to keep on; but there was a silent groan in his throat when he realised how close he had come to the secret.
“Look—over there to the right!”
“I see them—those black clouds, you mean?” she said. She held close to Kildare as though she hardly dared to face a moment in the world without him.
“Of course they’re black because the sun is rising behind them, Nancy. The day’s beginning, and we can put this one night behind us.”
Her head dropped back against his shoulder.
“You’ll stay with me, Johnny, will you?”
“Yes,” he promised.
“You won’t let them take you away from New York?”
“I’m going to stay here where I can find you when things go black for me.”
“You’ll stay with me, Johnny, till the end? Promise me, promise me! It won’t be long. I’m going to finish it all; but promise me to stay till the end?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
KILDARE wakened from a dream of sinful delay and mountainous defeat. His eyes refused to recognise the big four-poster in which he lay. He felt for an instant as though some reshuffling of time had dealt him into a far-off country. The tall figure in the doorway with the white, close-clipped beard and moustache was a perfect part of the illusion of the past for an instant, then he was sitting up and saying good morning to Paul Messenger.
“Go back to sleep,” said Messenger, smiling. “Doctor Carew has been on the telephone with me from the hospital to say that a certain Gillespie has been asking for you; and I’ve told Carew that you’re not to be disturbed. I’ve only looked in on you to tell you that everything is all right. Go back to sleep and get your rest.”
The sleep which was stagnating his brain gradually cleared away. From the speech of Paul Messenger he retained one singular phrase: “a certain Gillespie.”
“Have you never heard of Dr. Leonard Gillespie?” he asked, bewildered.
“No,” said Messenger, “but I’ve seen Nancy, and I’ve heard enough from her to realise that the Chanlers were right and that you are the man for this work. She speaks of you with real affection, Kildare. She talks almost as though you were a brother.”
He came toward the bed, smiling. “I began to think that no one in the world ever could win her confidence. Herron failed; I failed; but you have the special talent. You’re already inside her mind, and I know that you’ll get at the root of everything that’s wrong.”
The comprehension of Kildare fumbled at these words and made nothing of them. There was only one prime consideration: Gillespie was calling for him, and he was not at hand.
“Will you tell me the time, please?” he asked.
“It’s only ten; you’ve hardly begun to sleep,” answered Messenger.
Kildare stumbled out of the bed and stood up in blue pyjamas much too large for him.
“I should have been there at least an hour ago!” he exclaimed.
“My dear fellow, forget the hospital,” said Messenger. “I’ll make everything perfectly all right for you there.”
“Nobody can make things all right for me there. Gillespie—but you haven’t even heard of him?”