The Dark Descends (13 page)

Joyce drew deeply on the cigarette, filling her lungs with smoke. Stale smoke. God, it tasted foul. Better not to think about the taste. Better not to think at all. Empty the mind. It could be done. It was done. But instantly a picture flashed into her mind's eye to fill the vacuum: a little boy, mouthing a song about blood on the saddle, blood on the ground, blood all around. Now where did that come from? Some movie. Some movie she had seen long ago. A lifetime ago.

Obviously it wasn't such a good idea to empty the mind. Think about something, then. The cigarette. Think about how wonderful it was to be able to pull a cigarette out of thin air. Concentrate on the irrelevant, since facing the relevant would be unbearable at the moment. At the moment? At any moment in the foreseeable—

A protracted moan. Joyce whirled, so abruptly that the smoke she was inhaling lodged in her throat. Choking, coughing, she saw, through eyes dimmed with tears, that Charlotte Bancroft's eyes were open. Imagination? She wiped the tears away. No, not imagination. Charlotte Bancroft's eyes were open, open as wide as the swollen lids would permit.

"I've telephoned for help, Miss Bancroft. It's on the way."

Fatuous. Bright and chipper—the patter of a student nurse.

"The ambulance should be here any minute now." Worse than fatuous that time. Wasn't there anything she could say that wouldn't make her sound mentally retarded? What did people say at times like this?

It hardly seemed to matter what she said, though. There was no light in the blue eyes to testify to a consciousness of anything outside the prison of pain. But now, around the blood-encrusted mouth, agitation was visible. The flesh quivered. The crust strained, parted. The lips began to work sticky, forming words. Inaudible words. Were they words at all?

"Don't try to talk, Miss Bancroft. You'll tire yourself out. A doctor will be here soon. Very soon."

The lips continued to work, with an urgency that could not be ignored. If some kind of message was going to be spewed out, Joyce would have to listen to it. Tossing her cigarette into the sink, she went over to kneel on the floor in front of Charlotte Bancroft.

The poor thing was murmuring. Unintelligibly, almost inaudibly, through lips that barely moved. The blue eyes opened wider—wider than seemed possible—and something flickered in them. Recognition? The murmuring grew louder, faster. Joyce bent her head to hear better.

"Your fault." A whisper, but clear as a bell.

Joyce jerked her head up.

"Your fault. All your fault. Yours, yours, yours..." The whisper trailed off into indistinct murmuring; the eyes snapped shut, as though the effort of keeping them open had suddenly become too much.

The murmuring continued. On and on and on it went, a stream of sound conveying no sense. Would it ever end? Would it ever—

"—said naughty things—callled me a bad name—wasn't about to let him call me a bad name in my own—told him to go but he wouldn't—grabbed me and bit me and—" Charlotte Bancroft's eyes flew open, focused straight ahead sightlessly, terror in their depths. "
Why are you taking off your belt?
Why, it's not a belt at all. It's— No! You're not going to—" An agonized gasp, and the eyes snapped shut. "No, no,
no! NO!
Stop! It hurts!"

"Miss Bancroft, you shouldn't try to talk. You shouldn't—"

"Stop, stop, stop! Oh, my lord, stop! Stop!. I'll be good, I promise, I'll do anything you say. Only stop. I can't bear it.
I can't bear it!
You're hurting me, you're hurting me, you're—"

"Miss Bancroft—"

"—hurting me.
Hu-urting me!
" The words gave way to a spasm of sobbing, muted and weak, yet passionate.

The outside doorbell rang. At last. Joyce got to her feet and went to press the buzzer. The sobbing—the out-pouring of a soul oblivious of anything but its own pain—went on steadily. To get away from it, Joyce stepped outside the open door. No real hope of getting away from it, of course. Not now. Not ever.

They came up the stairs quickly, though not quickly enough for her. Two uniformed patrolmen in the lead, and behind them three men in white hospital tunics, one carrying a folded stretcher. They filed past her and into the apartment, only a nod from one of the patrolmen acknowledging her existence.

She waited outside, leaning against the wall. All was quiet now. Even the sobbing had stopped. She was sorely tempted to flee. To dash down the stairs and into her own apartment and once there to pretend it had never happened. Instead she wrenched herself away from the wall and went back into the torture chamber.

They had taken up positions around Charlotte Bancroft, a dark-blue uniform at either side, a white tunic at head and feet; the fifth man was on his knees, and his hands were gently probing the flesh of the naked, blood-streaked back, moving down inch by inch over the hips and thighs.

One of the patrolmen—the one who had nodded—detached himself from the group and came up to Joyce. Gripping her elbow firmly, he steered her through the door and into the hall, out of the line of vision. "Did she say anything?"

"She started to describe the beating, but she didn't get very far because—because—" Joyce swallowed hard. "It was ghastly. My God, it was ghastly. She started—started—"

"Take it easy." The patrolman gave her elbow a squeeze and let go of it. He smiled. He had one of those dark, Mediterranean faces on which smiles sit easily. "Just take it easy for a minute. I'll ask the questions and you just answer yes or no. Okay?"

"Yes."

"Did she say who he was?" No more smile: all business now.

"No."

"Or what he looked like?"

"No."

"Were you around when it happened?"

Joyce swallowed hard again. "No. I got home only a little while ago—I live downstairs—and I heard her rapping—" She broke off as his eyes traveled clown to her robe, registered the fact that she had nothing on underneath. She clutched the lapels together. "I started to take a bath first thing. I was very tired and— There's water standing in my bathtub. You can go downstairs and take a look if you don't believe—"

"Take it easy. Just take it easy now. Nobody's interested in your bathtub. It's obvious you couldn't have done that." He waved casually at the door. "You're not big enough. Now look, Miss—"

"Chandler. Mrs. Chandler."

"Mr. Chandler's a very lucky guy." The smile returned. Briefly. Too briefly. "Now look, Mrs. Chandler, I can see you're about ready to go down for the count, but I'd appreciate it if you could just hang on for a few more questions and then I'll let you go. Okay? First off, did you phone us as soon as you found her?"

"Yes. That is— I'm not really sure. I don't know how much time I wasted just standing there after I saw her. It was such a shock and—"

"It wouldn't have been more than a minute or two. It never is. Okay. So you got home a little while ago, ran the water for your bath, then when you shut it off you heard her tapping and—"

"Tapping S.O.S. She was tapping S.O.S. Over and over again."

"Okay. So then you came up to investigate and found her. Does that about cover it?"

"Yes."

"You didn't see anybody hanging around the building when you came home? Or hanging around the street nearby?"

"No. I mean, I saw people on the street, of course. There are always lots of people on the street in the Village, no matter how late it is. I was out late myself because I got stuck in the subway and then I had to take a long walk to unwind. If that hadn't happened—"

"Now don't get off on that track. The question was pretty much a formality. From the look of things, the guy finished up here quite some time ago. Be glad you weren't at home. It was a damn sight healthier for you."

"Oh, don't. Please—"

"You're overwrought, Mrs. Chandler. You'd better run along now. There's no need for you to stick around any longer."

"But isn't there something—"

"Not a thing. We'll have to get an official statement from you sometime, but not tonight. Go and have that bath now, Mrs. Chandler."

"But—" She bit her lip: it was on the tip of her tongue to say that the water must be cold by now.

Probably it wouldn't have mattered if she had said it. He had already turned away from her, blotting her out, and was on his way back into Charlotte Bancroft's apartment. "You do like I say," he threw over his shoulder. "You'll feel a lot better afterwards."

Joyce started on her way, but as she passed the open door, something forced her to look inside. She had a clear, unobstructed view of Charlotte Bancroft. The blue eyes were open once more, and, as they met her own, something stirred in their depths. The blood-encrusted lips parted wide, exposing a large gap where the two upper front teeth had been; in the gap, the tongue moved in what appeared to be preparation for speech. But then, abruptly, the eyelids closed and, a second later, so did the lips, without uttering the accusation Joyce was steeling herself to hear.

The police questioning did not amount to much. Two plainclothesmen came to see Joyce on the evening following the assault on Charlotte Bancroft by "person or persons unknown," as they put it, or by "X," as they also put it, and made it abundantly clear that the interrogation was purely a matter of routine. Offering perfunctory assurances that "the victim's" injuries, although serious, were not expected to endanger life, they questioned Joyce in some detail about her movements the night before and seemed satisfied with her responses, if keeping the kid gloves on the whole time could be interpreted as satisfaction. For her part, she told her story coherently and convincingly. And why not? It was the truth. To be sure, she had a few bad moments when they inquired about the recent activities upstairs, displaying a knowledge alarmingly thorough: "She believed in advertising," one of them remarked cryptically. Was he fishing for a reaction?

"You have the real law-abider's mentality," Anita said, when told about the interview. "The pigs suspect everybody of everything, that's their job, but they're not Big Brother yet. They can't find out what's going on in your head unless you tell them, can they? Even if she accuses you of passing out the cards, you'll probably be only one of a crowd of suspects. Given her charming nature, she must have well-wishers galore. All you have to do is deny it. How are they going to prove anything?”

How indeed? The reasoning was sound. But Joyce couldn't help worrying. She dreaded further contact with the police, having serious doubts of her ability to bring off the lie direct before experts trained to spot it. In her mind, she went over and over the most plausible reactions to the accusation (incredulity? horror? outrage? amusement?); gave up the mental review lest her response, when the time came to make it, seem too rehearsed; went over the reactions again. But the days passed, stretched out into weeks, and the police didn't come near her. Why didn't they come near her? Did they consider Charlotte Bancroft too deranged by shock to take anything she said seriously? Did they consider her accusations against anybody except the person who had administered the beating none of their concern? Or was it possible that a guilty conscience had read recognition and accusation into what had merely been a cry of protest from a creature too far gone in pain to know what she was saying?

It was absurd to let the mind run round and round the same track. Joyce knew it was absurd, knew she should make efforts to forget. Easier said than done. The trouble was, of course, that she felt responsible. And that, too, was absurd, or at any rate illogical. Granted her plot had set passions boiling in the dark places of Charlotte Bancroft's soul, still, they must have been ready to boil. Ready for a long time. "You turned on a light switch. You didn't put the current there," Hank McDermott had said. He went on saying it. Anita, too, pooh-poohed the idea of guilt, advised a trip to the Cloisters. They were right, of course they were right, Joyce told herself over and over again. And yet, several times, she had to restrain herself from giving way to an impulse to telephone the police and confess her part in the affair. Once she got as far as settling down with the telephone directory in her lap before common sense reasserted itself, so instead of telephoning the police she telephoned Bellevue, and listened to a crisp, chirpy female voice at the other end pronounce Charlotte Bancroft completely out of danger. That should have been the end of it. But somehow it wasn't, however much Joyce castigated herself for being all kinds of a fool. The trip to the Cloisters was ineffectual as distraction, and so were a few concerts she attended, including one all-Vivaldi program that was effervescent enough to perk up the spirits of a moribund. Obviously more drastic measures were called for. Joyce decided to move.

But she had barely begun the hunt for a new apartment—barely gone beyond ascertaining that, with rents rising minute by minute, finding one within her means was going to be even more difficult than it had been last time—when she came up against a problem that relegated Charlotte Bancroft and any guilt feelings, real or imaginary, to the shade. It started mildly enough, with a feeling of lassitude she couldn't seem to shake. It wasn't too worrisome at first, being tired all the time. If she had trouble getting up in the morning, well, there were periods for everybody when the metabolism went haywire. She increased her sleeping time to ten hours. Twelve. And still it wasn't enough. She yawned her way through her waking hours, and at work it took cup after cup of black coffee to keep her eyes from closing over the copy.

When it began to seem as though she would never again get enough sleep, she decided to seek medical counsel. She knew no doctors in Manhattan apart from the ear, nose, and throat man she had been sent to months ago by Sheila, who was a fanatic on the subject of health. The idea of appealing to Sheila now was daunting, because Sheila was sure to make a fuss, so Joyce was grateful for Ann Berger's recommendation of her family doctor on West End Avenue—"a no-nonsense type and an absolute darling to boot." The doctor, ancient, silver-haired, and kindly, made a diagnosis of "run down and too damned skinny," and prescribed a tonic.