What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (15 page)

“Blanche!…”

Her head jerked up, and she glanced around her with a kind of stunned perplexity. She was so tired, so terribly, terribly tired. But still she could not rest, not just yet. With great heaviness, she got up, moved to the cupboard and opened the door. Taking out a glass, she filled it with water. And then, looking up to the higher shelves, she found a box of soda crackers and reached them down. Carrying these, she turned and walked into the hallway.

Crossing the gallery into the upper hall, she stopped in front of the door to Blanche’s room. For a long moment she simply stood there in the darkness, in an effort, it seemed, to make herself perfectly still. She thought, with a sickening thrill of horror, that she could feel, even through the soles of her shoes, the damp spot on the carpet where she had wiped up the blood which, even now perhaps, still contained some faint stirring of life, some small, glinting part of the brief illusion which had been Mrs. Stitt. Putting the box of crackers under her arm, she reached into the pocket of her jacket and brought out the key.

Even when she had unlocked the door and shoved it open, she
did not immediately go inside. For some moments she hesitated on the threshold, aware only in the first instant of the stench that reached her nostrils from inside. Finally she took a reluctant step forward, found the panel that contained the light switches and turned the nearest of them on.

The lamp on the bedside table came alight, casting its dim, circular radiance weakly against the deeper darkness beyond the bed. Jane took another step, hesitated, then came forward.

At the edge of the bed she stopped, staring down at the still, sprawled figure that lay there, at the twisted and soiled nightgown, at the pallid face upon which the mouth had been obliterated by a wide strip of adhesive tape. Here, close to the bed, the stale smell was much stronger, but she seemed not to notice.

The face of Blanche Hudson, its precise features pinched and somehow diminished, was as quiet and bloodless as a plaster death mask. The eyes remained closed and unmoving in heavily shadowed sockets, and across the left cheek bone, like a sooty smudge upon the waxen whiteness, was a slanting bruise. Her hair, a dull gray in this light, radiated from the still face and out across the pillow in a matted tangle. Her wrists, lashed together with a piece of stout brown twine, were tied to the head board of the bed. The bedclothes, twisted around and beneath her like her nightdress, gave mute testimony of a vain struggle for freedom.

Jane stared, her face impassive. And then, turning away to the bedside table, she put down the crackers and water. Leaning down close to the still figure on the bed, studying it closely, she reached out to the adhesive on the mouth, worked it loose at one corner and tore it off.

“Blanche?” Her tone was flat, unmarked by any decipherable emotion. “Blanche?”

The white, withered lips of Blanche Hudson remained still. After a moment Jane moved away, looking back toward the bed as if in deep perplexity. Finding a chair, she dragged it close to the bed and sat down.

“Blanche?”

The name hung upon the foul air for a moment, then drifted away into the eddying silence. Jane reached up to the bound wrists, found the knotted cord and worked it loose. The hands, numbed, grasping claws, fell stiffly to the pillow, just above the head, and lay motionless.

“Blanche?” Jane said. “Blanche, wake up!” And then the emotion came as her face contorted with a spasm of terrible doubt. “Blanche!”

For a moment longer the face upon the pillow was still and then, in apparent answer to Jane’s sharp command, the slack folds over the eyes stirred, very faintly, and struggled to open.

“Blanche!… Blanche!…”

The eyes flew open suddenly, going wide so that they looked up with a bright terror that seemed surely to contain all the remaining life in the pathetic body. Blanche Hudson stared up at her sister, her eyes crying out in silent, eloquent alarm.

Jane motioned with her hand toward the water and crackers. “I brought you something,” she said softly.

The eyes continued to stare, fixedly and utterly without comprehension. The room filled with silence.

“Your dinner!” Jane said suddenly, her voice strained and sharp. “There!”

At that the eyes blinked as if with understanding, and the white lips, beginning to show a faint bruise of color, formed some silent word. Then the eyes turned and strained in their sockets to follow the direction Jane had pointed. When they found the glass of water, they stopped, and the lips moved again. A faint whisper, the sound really of an indrawn breath and no more, issued into the room. Blanche’s lips formed the word, “Water.”

Above the wasted head, the hands stirred, and a look of surprise came into the fevered eyes. The hands moved again, but without direction and they still retained the rigidity of brittle claws.

“Water…” Blanche breathed again, pulling her hands down stiffly next to her face. “Water… please.…”

Jane’s gaze, though it had remained fixedly on Blanche, was distant and unseeing. Then, quite suddenly, her eyes shifted and came alive.

“Blanche,” she said almost breathlessly, putting her hand out to the edge of the bed, “it wasn’t really my fault. It wasn’t… I told her to go away… I told her she was fired… but she came back… she
sneaked
back… after I was gone… and she said she was going to call the police.” Her face collapsed upon itself in a spasm of self-pity. Bringing her hands up to her eyes, she began to make moist, snuffling sounds. “I was so frightened,” she sobbed, “so
scared
!”

On the bed, her eyes fixed with glittering brightness on the glass of water, Blanche inched her hand down and down, slowly, painfully, toward the edge of the filthy pillow.

“Listen to me!” Jane cried. “
Listen
to me!”

B
ands of sunlight fanned out wanly from either edge of the heavy drapes, and Blanche knew by their short reach that it was still morning.

In her fright she had lost track of time there in the darkness and now she had no idea how many days had passed since she had been locked in the room, how long it had been since that first awful moment when she had regained consciousness and found herself trussed up on the bed. After the first day when she realized Jane had started drinking and that she might be held captive indefinitely, she had begun to hover, it seemed, in some teeming, panic-filled middle distance, in some desperate walled-in place where time and space and light would never penetrate. She had felt almost disembodied, curiously cut loose even from her own animal senses. Now that she was free again, it was all so strange, so mixed up.

Her head lolled on the pillow, and again her eyes closed. Then, suddenly, her lips parted as if to cry out, and in her mind there was a terrible vision, a vision of someone standing in an open doorway.… But almost instantly it was gone again, forgotten. She sighed and drew her hand down across the pillow. She was too tired to think about anything, too weak, and she’d had quite enough of nightmares for a long, long time.

Aware, then, that she had moved her hand, she opened her eyes again with a quick thrill of pleasure. She had forgotten that her
hands were free and that she could move them. She moved her hand again, savoring the feel of it sliding across the fabric of the pillow. Turning her head so that she could look at her hand, she flexed her fingers and smiled at the accomplishment. Dry twigs, she thought, twigs within which life still stubbornly stirred.

Hope, she supposed, was the thing which had sustained her in that first awful day of imprisonment. And hope was the thing she had lost when she had let herself drift off into the limbo of unknowingness. Now, like the life ebbing back into her stiffened fingers, hope had begun to return to her. And then she had a memory of Jane sitting there in the lamplight, her face so close—so sad and lost. Her gaze moved beyond her hand and caught a glimpse of the glass on the table and the bit of water that remained in it.

Remembering that she had spilled some of the water before, she reached out to the glass with both hands and wrapped them carefully around it. At the same time she tried to lift herself up slightly so that she could drink more safely and comfortably, but the effort was too great for her, and after only a moment she was forced to relinquish her hold on the glass. Her breath coming harshly from this exertion, she fell back and closed her eyes. At the same moment, however, she heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and she looked up in bright alarm.

Her thoughts, following what she had been through, were automatically those of fear and self-preservation. Her gaze darted toward the precious glass of water. Jane was coming to take it away from her!

Trembling with anxiety, she reached for the glass. The water was hers, and she meant to have it. She moved too swiftly, too carelessly; her stiffened fingers struck against the glass instead of curving around it, and she could only stare in horror as she saw it fall, heard it crash to the floor. She collapsed to her pillow, her body wracked with dry sobs of despair. Across the room, the door opened and Jane, wearing her soiled white wrapper, came in.

Blanche turned her face away. If Jane had come to tape her
mouth and tie her hands again she didn’t care; she wouldn’t resist. She had lost the water and next to this tragedy nothing else mattered, nothing else in the whole world. Through her near-hysterical misery she was only faintly aware of the sounds of movement in the room, the opening of the door into the bathroom, the hiss of running water. She was still lost in her own wretchedness when something moist and warm softly touched her face. Her eyes flew open, and she saw that Jane was bending over her, washing her face with a damp cloth.

But Jane looked so old to her, so incredibly old somehow, and for a moment she wondered if it wasn’t really someone else who only resembled Jane. The face above hers made her think of a piece of coarse paper which had been wadded up in anger and then only partially straightened out again. As Jane’s eyes looked suddenly into her own, she glanced quickly away with a new tremor of fright.

“Blanche,” a voice said softly, “Blanche, please… I’m sorry.…”

A sigh, a faint breath of relief, touched Blanche’s lips. Then it was over, the horror, really, really over, at last. She looked up at Jane, feeling a sudden and totally unreasoning rush of love. Too weak still to speak without an effort, she nodded her head to indicate her forgiveness.

The damp cloth left her face and moved upon her arms and her hands. It felt good, good.… She let her eyes close again and felt herself drifting off into a state of blissful suspension. She did not actually sleep, for she was aware of Jane lifting her up to change the bed linen, and then again, to put a fresh pillow beneath her head. Then Jane’s voice brought her gently back to full wakefulness, and she was given food, warm soup from a cup, one careful spoonful at a time. As the food reached her stomach, she had a slight sensation of nausea, but there was also a feeling of revitalization; a gradual loosening of the numbness that had gripped her body.

“Blanche?…”

She looked around to find Jane sitting close to the bed, hunched forward, tears streaming down her face. It was hard to see, though, because the drapes were still pulled and in the dimness only the closest objects were clear to her. She moved a hand weakly across the bed in Jane’s direction. Noticing, Jane looked up, her eyes shining with tears.

“You’ll help me, won’t you?” she said. “I’m—I’m so afraid, Blanche—and there’s nobody but you. If they find me—if they find out—I don’t know what they’ll do to me!”

Blanche stared at the frightened, contorted face in confusion, trying to put words together in her weary mind so that they made sense. She moved her lips, but the words still would not come. Then Jane had clasped her hands before her like an imploring child.

“It was her own fault—you heard what she said. She wouldn’t go away. I told her to go—and she wouldn’t. You have a right, don’t you, to—to do something—when a person won’t get out of your own house? Oh, Blanche! I didn’t know—I didn’t mean to kill her!”

Kill! The word leapt into Blanche’s awareness as if it had been shouted with fierce stridency out of a dead silence. She felt herself go cold all over. Kill! Again a vision rose mistily at the back of her mind. There was a figure—falling—falling—and then—the slam of a door. It hovered briefly on the threshold of recall and then abruptly vanished. But the cold, frightened feeling remained. If only she were strong enough to think clearly, to know what it meant.

“We have to stick together, Blanche, you and me,” Jane was saying tensely. “Daddy always told us that, remember? We’re the same flesh and blood—no matter what. Blanche, you won’t let them hurt me, will you? Blanche?…”

Blanche continued to stare in silent horror. Kill. Jane had said kill. She shrank back against her pillow, pulling herself away from Jane. It was a mistake; Jane’s tear-stained face instantly hardened.

“Talk to me!” she demanded harshly. “Why don’t you talk to me? You don’t care, do you? You’re jealous of me… and you
hate me… and you want bad things to happen to me. You always have!” And then, evidently shocked by her own harsh words, she stopped, staring down at Blanche in white-faced alarm.

“No, I didn’t mean it,” she said quicky. “Blanche, I’ll take care of you—I will—and you’ll see—you’ll like me again. You need me to take care of you; you really do.… I’ll comb your hair and fix it so you’ll be pretty. You’re the pretty one. Blanche—everyone always said so. I’ll be good to you, Blanche—if you’ll just help me and not leave me alone. You heard.… And they’ll believe you. They always believe you.…”

Caught and held by the intensity of Jane’s gaze, Blanche could only stare back at her. Still she was unable to understand. Jane wanted something of her, that much was clear, but she didn’t know what it was. Nonetheless, the black dizziness of fatigue beginning to turn inside her head, she nodded.

“Yes,” Jane said eagerly, interpreting for her. “Yes.…” She sat quietly for a moment and then, thoughtfully, rose. “If they come, you’ll talk to them. You won’t let them hurt me.…”

Blanche managed a second nod; poor Jane, she looked so sad, so desperately sad. Her eyelids drooped and closed. She heard Jane leave the room and shut the door, and she let herself go completely limp. The feeling of dizziness gradually passed away and she experienced a pleasant floating sensation. She was just drifting off into the oblivion of sleep when the word came again, as if shouted in her ear:

Kill!

A figure fell, crumpling silently downward. A door slammed.

Her pulse quickened with terror, now as then, and she knew that she must flee, must save herself. Her eyes flew open, and she looked quickly, dartingly around the room. Her pounding heart was a red pain within her breast.

And then the room came more clearly into focus, and realizing where she was, she closed her eyes again. Almost at once the floating sensation returned and she knew she was falling asleep.