I put out a hand to grab the desk, seeking something solid to which I might anchor against this unknown menace. But instead of the desk, my fingers grasped a basket and tipped it so that the papers in it fell onto the floor. I got down on hands and knees and scrabbled for the papers, stacking them together. They were all neatly folded and they had a legal feel, that funny, important texture that legal papers have.
I got off my knees and dumped them on the desk top and ran quickly through them, and every one of them—every single one—was a property transfer. And every one of them was made out to a Fletcher Atwood.
The name rang a distant bell and I stood there groping, fumbling back through a cluttered—and a faulty—memory for some clue that would let me peg the man.
Somewhere in the past the name of Fletcher Atwood had meant something to me. Somewhere I’d met the man, or Written about him, or talked to him on the telephone. He was a name filed away deep inside the brain, but so long forgotten, perhaps even at the time of so little moment, that the fact and place and time had slipped clean away from me.
It was something that Joy had said to me, it seemed. Walking past my desk and stopping to say a word or two—the little idle talk of a busy newsroom where no name may live for long in the headlong rush of hourly happenings.
Something about a house, it seemed—a house that Atwood had bought.
And just like that I had it. Fletcher Atwood was the man who’d bought the storied Belmont place out on Timber Lane. A man of mystery who had never fitted in with the horsey set in that exclusive area. Who had never, actually, lived in the house he’d bought; who might spend a night or week there but had never really lived there; who had no family and no friends; who, furthermore, seemed to have no wish for friends.
Timber Lane had resented him at first, for the Belmont place at one time had been the center of that elusive thing which Timber Lane had called society. He was never mentioned now—not in Timber Lane. He was a moldy skeleton that had been shoved aside into a dusty cupboard.
And was this revenge? I wondered, spreading out the transfers underneath the lamp. Although it scarcely could be that, for there’d been no evidence, one way or the other, that Atwood had ever cared what Timber Lane might have thought of him.
Here were properties that ran into billions. Here were proud business firms, hoary with tradition and gemmed with family names; here small industries; here the ancient buildings that had been a byword in the town as long as the oldest man remembered. All of them transferred to Fletcher Atwood in ponderous, precise legal language—all stacked here and waiting to be processed and filed.
Waiting here, perhaps, I speculated, because no one as yet had had the time to file them. Waiting because there was too much other work to do. Too much, I wondered, of what kind of other work?
It seemed incredible, but here it was—the very legal proof that one man had bought up, in a bundle as it were, a more than respectable segment of the city’s business district.
No man could have the amount of money that was represented in this batch of papers. Nor, perhaps, any group of men. But if, indeed, some men had, what could be their purpose?
To buy up a city?
For this was but one small group of papers, left lying in a naked basket atop the desk as if the papers were of small importance. In this very office there were undoubtedly many times their number. And if Fletcher Atwood, or the men he represented, had bought out this city, what did he mean to do with it?
I put the papers back into the basket and moved out from the desk back to the rack of clothes. I stared up at the shelf where the hats were ranged in line and I saw, among the hats, what seemed to be a shoe box.
Perhaps a box with more papers in it?
I stood on tiptoe and worked the box out with my fingertips until it tipped and I could get a grip on it. It was heavier than I had expected. I carried it back to the desk and placed it underneath the lamp and took the cover off.
The box was filled with dolls—and yet something more than dolls, without the studied artificiality one associates with dolls. Here were dolls so human that one wondered if they might not be actual humans, shrunken down to something like four inches long but shrunken in such an expert manner that their proportions were unchanged.
And lying on top of that mass of dolls was a doll that was the perfect image of that Bennett who had sat with Bruce Montgomery at the conference table!
I stood there thunderstruck, staring at the doll. And the more I looked at it, the more it looked like Bennett, a stark-naked Bennett, a little Bennett doll that waited for someone to dress him and sit him in a chair behind a conference table. He was so realistic that I could imagine the fly crawling on his skull.
Slowly, almost afraid to touch the doll—afraid that when I touched it, it might turn out to be alive—I reached down into the shoe box and lifted Bennett out. He was heavier than I had expected, heavier than any normal, four-inch doll should be. I held him underneath the light, and there was no question that this thing I held between my fingers was an exact replica of the living man. The eyes were cold and stony and the lips as thin and straight. The skull looked not simply bald but sterile, as if it had never grown a hair. The body was the kind of body that a man near the end of middle age would have—a body tending toward flabbiness, but with the flabbiness held in check by planned exercise and a close attention to very careful living.
I laid Bennett on the desk and reached into the box again, and this time I picked up a girl doll—a very lovely blonde. I held her underneath the lamp, and there was no doubt of it: here was no doll as such, but the faithful model of a woman with no detail of anatomy ignored. She was so close to living that it seemed one would only have to speak a certain magic word to bring her back to life. Delicate and dainty and lovely to the fingertips, she had about her none of the mechanical irregularities or grotesqueness of a manufactured article.
I laid her down alongside Bennett and put my hand into the box and stirred the dolls around. There were a lot of them, perhaps twenty or thirty, and there were many types. There were alert young eager beavers and old staid business beagles and the slick, smooth maleness of the accomplished operator; there were the prim career girls, the querulous old maids, the Young things in the office.
I quit stirring them around and went back to the blonde again. I was fascinated by her.
I picked her up and had another look at her and tried to be professional about it by puzzling at the material with which the doll was made. It might have been a plastic, although, if so, a type I’d never seen before. It was hard and heavy yet had a yielding quality. If you squeezed hard enough, it dented and then sprang back again when the pressure was released. And it had the faintest feel of a certain warmth. The funny thing about it was that it seemed to have no texture, or so fine a texture it could not be detected.
I rummaged through the box again, picking up the dolls, and they were all the same in the skill and artistry of their manufacture.
I put Bennett and, the blonde back with the rest of them and put the box back on the shelf, carefully inserting it into the space between the hats.
I backed away and looked around the office and there was a roaring in my brain at the madness of it—the dolls upon the shelf and the clothes upon the rack, the hole with the giddiness of cold and the stack of papers that bought out half a city.
Reaching out my hand, I closed the drapes. They slid easily into place with the faintest rustle, closing in the dolls and the clothes and the hole, but not closing in the madness, for the madness still was there.
You could almost feel it, as if it were a shadow moving in the darkness outside the circle of the lamplight.