Eye in the Sky (1957) (27 page)

“No
dice,” Laws said dispassionately. “You’re down
too far.”

Giving up,
Hamilton pulled his aching arm back and settled down on the step.

“Wait
where you are,” Laws said. “I’ll be back.” With a series of
crashing noises, he bolted back up the stairs
to
the hallway, dragged Marsha with him, and was gone.

When he
returned, he had David Pritchet with him.

“Take hold of Mrs. Hamilton’s hand,” he instructed the
boy. “Don’t ask questions; do as I say.”

Gripping the corner of the wall at the top of the stairs,
Marsha closed her fingers around the boy’s small hand. Laws
herded the boy down the stairs, as far as be could go. Then, taking hold of
David’s other hand, he himself
descended.

“Here I come,” he grunted. “You ready, Jack?”

Clutching
at the railing, Hamilton extended his other
hand
into the invisibility behind him. Laws’ harsh breath
ing sounded near by; now he could feel the stairs
quake as Laws came lower and lower. Then, incredibly, Laws’
hard, sweat-slippery hand closed around his own.
With a
furious tug, Laws wrenched
him loose from his position
at the railing and forcibly dragged him up
the stairs.

Panting,
gasping, Hamilton and Laws sprawled into the cheery hallway. David scrambled
off in fright;
Marsha, climbing unsteadily
to her feet, reached quickly
to take hold of her trembling husband.

“What
happened?” Laws demanded, when he could talk. “What was going on down
there?”

“I—”
He could hardly speak. “I couldn’t get back up. No matter which way I
turned.” After a minute he a
dded,
“Both ways were down.”

There’s
something down there,” Laws said. “I saw it.”

Hamilton nodded. “She was waiting for me.”

“
She
?”

“T
hat’s where I left her. She was
on the stairs when
Edith Pritchet abolished
her.”

Marsha moaned
sharply. “He means the waitress.”

“She’s
back,” Hamilton said methodically. “But she’s
not a waitress. Not in this world.”

“We can board up the stairwell,” Laws suggested.

“Yes,” Hamilton agreed. “Board it up. Close her off, so
the can’t get me.”

“We
will,” Laws assured him; both he and Marsha hung tightly onto Hamilton as
he stood staring back down into the gloomy, web-ridden depths of the stairwell.
“We’ll board it up. We won’t let her get you.”

XIV

“we’ve
got to get hold of Miss Reiss,” Hamilton said, as
the balance of the group filed up the front walk of the
house and into the living room. “And then we’ve got to
kill her. Quickly and completely. Without
hesitation. As
soon as we can physically reach her.”

“She’ll destroy us,” McFeyffe muttered.

“Not all of us. Most of us, maybe.”

“But it would be better,” Laws said.

“Yes,” Hamilton said. “It would be a lot better than
sitting here waiting. This world has
to come to an end.”

“Does anybody disagree?” Arthur Silvester inquired.

“No,” Marsha said. “Nobody disagrees.”

“How
about you, Mrs. Pritchet?” Hamilton asked.
“What do you say?”

“Of
course she must be put to sleep,” Mrs. Pritchet
said. “The poor creature—”

“Poor?”

“This is the world she’s always lived in. This awful, in
sane world. Imagine it
…
year after year. A world of
predatory
horrors.”

Eyes fixed
on the boarded-up door to the basement,
David
Pritchet asked nervously, “Can that thing get up
here?”

“No,”
Laws told him. “It can’t. It’ll stay down there
until it starves. Or until we destroy Miss Reiss.”

“Then
we all agree,” Hamilton said with finality.
“That’s something, at least. This is one world none of us wants to
stay in.”

“All right,” Marsha said, “we’ve decided what we want
to do. Now how do we do it?”

“A good question,” Arthur Silvester said. “It’s going to
be hard.”

“But not impossible,” Hamilton said. “We succeeded
with you; we succeeded with Edith
Pritchet.”

“Have you noticed,” Silvester said thoughtfully, “that
each time it becomes more difficult?
Now we wish we
were back
in Mrs. Pritchet’s world—”

“And when we were in her world,” McFeyffe finished glumly,
“we wished we were back in his.”

“What are you trying to say?” Hamilton demanded
uneasily.

“Maybe we’ll wish it again,” Silvester said, “when we
get to the next world.”

“The next world should be the real world,” Hamilton
said. “Sooner or later we’re
going to be out of this rat
race.”

“But not yet,” Marsha objected. “There are eight of
us, and we’ve only gone through three.
Do we have five
still
ahead?”

“We’ve been in three fantasy worlds,” Hamilton said.
“Three closed worlds that don’t
touch on reality at any
point.
Once we’re in them we’re stuck—there’s no way out. So far, we’ve had bad
luck.” Thoughtfully, he said,
“But
I’m not so sure the rest of us live in total fan
tasies.”

After a moment, Laws said, “You smug sonofabitch,”

“It could be true.”

“Possibly.”

“It
includes you.”

“No thanks!”

“You,”
Hamilton said, “are neurotic and cynical, but you’re also a realist. So am
I. So is Marsha. So is McFeyffe. So is David Pritchet I think we’re almost out
of
the fantasy realms.”

“What
do you mean, Mr. Hamilton?” Mrs. Pritchet asked, troubled. “I don’t
understand.”

“I didn’t expect you to,” Hamilton said. “It isn’t neces
sary.”

“Interesting,” McFeyffe commented. “You may be
right I’ll agree about you and myself
and Laws and the
boy. But
not about Marsha. Sorry, Mrs. Hamilton.”

Pale,
Marsha said, “You haven’t forgotten that, have
you?”

“That’s my idea of a fantasy world.”

“It’s my idea of a fantasy world, too.” White-lipped,
Marsha said, “Your kind of person—”

“What are they talking about?” Laws asked Hamilton.

“It isn’t important,” Hamilton said impatiently.

“Maybe it is. What’s this all about?”

Marsha
glanced at her husband. “I’m not afraid to
drag it out in the open. McFeyffe has already made an
issue of it.”

“We have to make an issue of it,” McFeyffe said so
berly. “Our whole lives depend
on it”

“Marsha
has been accused of being a Communist,”
Hamilton
explained. “McFeyffe brought up the charges.
They’re absurd, of course.”

Laws considered. “This could be serious. I wouldn’t
want to wind up in that kind of fantasy.”

“You won’t,” Hamilton assured him.

A cold, bitter grimace touched Laws’ dark face. “You
let me down once, Jack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No,”
Laws disagreed, “you were probably right I wouldn’t have liked the smell
of perfumed soap very
long. But—” He
shrugged. “As it stands, you’re wrong
as hell. Until we can get ourselves out of this mess—” He
broke off. “Let’s forget the past and deal
with the here-
and-now. There’s
plenty of it.”

“One more thing,” Hamilton said. Then we can for
get it”

“What’s that?”

Thanks for
pulling me up those stairs.”

Fleetingly, Laws smiled. “That’s okay. You sure looked
little and sad, crouched down there. I think I would have
gone down, even if I couldn’t have got back out.” There wasn’t enough of
you, there on that step. Not with what I saw at the bottom.”

* * * * *

Turning
toward the kitchen, Marsha said, I’ll put the
coffee
back on. Does anybody want anything to eat?”

“I’m
plenty hungry,” Laws said alertly. “I came directly up from San Jose
when the soap factory disap
peared.”

“What
showed up in its place?” Hamilton asked, as they moved down the hall after
Marsha.

“Something
I wasn’t able to figure out. Some kind of
factory
that made instruments. Tongs and pincers, s
tuff that clamped, like
surgical tools. I picked up a couple and took a good look at them but they
weren’t
really anything.”

“No such product?”

“Not
in the real world. It’s probably something Miss Reiss saw at a. distance.
Something she never made sense out of.”

“Torture instruments,” Hamilton guessed.
“Very possibly. I got the hell out of there,
naturally, and grabbed the bus up the peninsula.”

Getting up
on a little stepladder, Marsha opened the cupboards over the kitchen sink.
“How about some canned peaches?” she asked.

“Fine,”
Laws said. “Anything that’s handy.”

As Marsha reached into the cupboard, the can slipped from its stack,
rolled forward, and dropped with a sick
ening
crunch on her foot. Gasping with pain, Marsha
jumped
away. A second can rattled forward, hung on the li
p of the cupboard for
an instant, and then dropped straight down. Twisting to one side, Marsha barely
managed to avoid it

“Close
the cupboards,” Hamilton ordered sharply
stepping
forward. Without using the ladder, he managed
to reach up and slam the
wooden doors shut. The dull
bump of heavy
metal cans striking the door was audible.
For an interval the sound
continued; then, reluctantly, it died.

“Accident,” Mrs. Pritchet said lightly.

“Let’s
try to work this out rationally,” Laws said. “It happens all the
time.”

“But
this isn’t the regular world,” Arthur Silvester pointed out. “This is
Miss Reiss’ world.”

“And if this happened to Miss Reiss,” Hamilton agreed,
“she wouldn’t think it was an
accident,”

“Then it was intentional?” Marsha asked faintly, hud
dled over and rubbing her injured foot “That can of
peaches—”

Hamilton
scooped up the can and carried it to the wall opener. “We’ll have to be
careful. From now on we’re accident-prone. With a vengeance.”

At the
first bite from his dish of canned peaches,
Laws
made a face and immediately set the dish down on
the drainboard. “I
see what you mean.”

Warily,
Hamilton tasted. Instead of the usual blandness of canned fruit, his tongue was
curled by an acrid, metallic taint that made him retch and quickly spit his
mouthful into the sink.

“Acid,” he choked.

“Poison,”
Laws said calmly. “Well have to be careful of that, too.”

“Maybe we ought to take an inventory,” Mrs. Pritch
et said uncomfortably. “We should try to find out how
things are acting.”

“Good
idea,” Marsha agreed, with a shiver. “So we
won’t be surprised.” Painfully, she put her shoe back on
and
limped over to her husband. “Everything with a life of its own, vicious
and hateful, trying to do harm.”

As they
were starting back down the hall, the light in the living room quietly winked
off. The living room plunged into darkness.

“Well,”
Hamilton said mildly, “there’s another accident. Bulb burned out. Who
wants to go in and change it?”

Nobody volunteered.

“Well
leave it,” Hamilton decided. “It’s not worth it. Tomorrow, when it’s
daylight, I’ll take care of it”

“What
happens,” Marsha asked, “if they all go out?”

“Good question,” Hamilton admitted. “I can’t answer
it. Then we try like hell, I guess, to find
candles. Inde
pendent power sources like
flashlights, cigarette lighters.”

“The
poor insane thing,” Marsha murmured. “Just think— every time there’s
a blown-out power line, she sits in the dark waiting for the monsters to
descend on her. Thinking, all the time, that it’s part of an elaborate
plot”

“Like we’re thinking now,” McFeyffe said sourly.

“But it is,” Laws said. This is her world. Here, when
the lights go out—”