Woman in the Window (26 page)

With the last bit of her consciousness she suddenly clawed at his face, felt her nails dig in, heard him scream in surprise and pain, saw him pulling away … saw with mounting, searing horror the bulbous nose come away in her fingernails, felt the gray hair giving way as she tore at his face. …

In that last millisecond she saw the face of Dr. Drummond turn into the tortured, maddened face of someone she had never seen before, eyes burning holes in her, teeth flashing like a ferrets, brows furrowing like things with lives of their own.

She was face to face with Barry Hughes.

She woke with a cool, moist cloth bathing her forehead. When she opened her eyes, Barry Hughes leaned back from his ministrations and looked at her curiously, said nothing. He had a plain, nondescript sort of face, thinner than the characters he’d played, light brown hair cut very short and nearly bald on top. His eyes were brown, his expression strangely vacant, like a blank sheet of paper on which his emotions and character were yet to be written. He watched her come fully awake, folded the wet towel, and stood up.

She was stretched out on the couch and her neck was stiff and the fire was still going brightly. He had placed another log on the flames. She blinked, trying to get things clear. He had set her on the couch, gotten the towel for her bruised forehead. Now he was standing at the mantlepiece holding a cup.

“I was afraid you’d really hurt yourself,” he said. “You’ve been out for fifteen minutes anyway. I had time to make some hot chocolate.” He nodded at the coffee table and a cup he’d already poured for her. “You want an aspirin or anything?”

She shook her head. “Why haven’t you killed me, too?” Her voice seemed unable to rise above a whisper.

“Jesus, give me a break, Mrs. Rader. You think I like killing people? You think I’m crazy or something? I want us to get out of here alive. Both of us … Christ, a month ago I was just an actor with a cocaine habit he was having a little trouble supporting—that was me, Barry Hughes, for Christ’s sake. Then it all began turning to shit, the pressure kept building up, I didn’t know what the hell to do. Now, what a mess …”

She nodded. “I’m not exactly a stranger to pressure,” she whispered. Her mind was spinning:
He seems to have forgotten his history of mental breakdowns, he’s thinking he’s just a hard-luck guy and I think he believes it, just a victim of circumstance who’s shot a coke dealer, hacked his friend into pieces, and opened a seventy-year-old lady from stem to stern with a butcher knife.
But where was he now? How far from a fourth murder? That was all that mattered and she didn’t want to the—

“Well,” he said, “what are we going to do?” He was very calm, almost philosophical. He seemed much younger than the florist’s deliveryman, D’Allessandro, or Dr. Drummond. “How are we going to get out of this alive? The way I see it, either we both get out alive or neither of us does. But maybe I’m wrong—what do you think, Mrs. Rader? Maybe I’ve got the plot all wrong … the way I see it, I’m the victim of fate, some weird little misfire in the brain that makes me capable of killing people. Like George Segal in
The Terminal Man,
remember? I mean, remember Tony Perkins in
Psycho
? Nice kid, like me—I really am a perfectly nice guy … remember Robert Montgomery with the guy’s head in the hatbox, carrying it around with him?” He looked at her almost pleadingly and she made herself nod yet again. “So what do you think?”

She sat up on the couch, feeling fingers of pain digging at her head. “Nobody else has to die,” she said. “Nothing will happen to you if you give yourself up. You won’t die, they won’t throw you into prison—” He squinted at her: there was nothing in the face to remind her of Dr. Drummond. Nothing. When in the name of God would the Staten Island cops get here? Where were they? Where was MacPherson and his police launch? How long could she hang on? Stupid questions. She wanted to scream and she had to stay calm.

Barry Hughes was shaking his head. “No, no, please don’t insult my intelligence, Mrs. Rader. And I won’t insult yours. What I say, you can depend on, it’ll be true. But let me give you one word of advice—don’t start with the you-need-help crap, okay? You think I’m nuts? Of course I need help—maybe not as bad as you need help, but I need it. Right? But I begin to go crazy when people start insulting my intelligence—Brad Nichols gave me that and I didn’t take kindly to it, get it? By the time I was finished with old Brad—well, why bring that up?” He smiled disarmingly. “Not one of my prouder accomplishments. You listening?”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“Are you scared?”

“What are you talking about? Of course I’m scared!”

“That’s good, that’s the spirit. I may be a class-A psycho or I may not, neither you nor I are really qualified to decide that … but I really don’t want to wind up in a rubber room somewhere. So you and I had better come up with some alternatives. That is, if you want my opinion.”

He poured himself another cup and went back to leaning against the mantelpiece. There were sweat stains spreading from his armpits and his forehead was gleaming. His voice stayed very calm. “While you were unconscious from your fall, I picked up the telephone just to see if it was working—it’s not. No pizza for us tonight.” He flashed a weird, crooked smile at her. “I turned on the radio and heard an interesting bit of news—a police motor launch just came apart out there when it ran into the Staten Island ferry. Can you believe that? They’re picking bodies out of the water now—what’s the matter? You look funny—”

“No, nothing funny, just a terrible accident—”

“Yeah. Terrible. My heart goes out to them. Anyway, the bridge is blocked, too. Or did Dr. Drummond tell you that? Seems to me he did.” He chuckled at his witticism.

He rattled on, talking to himself. Natalie wondered if MacPherson had wound up in the water. How many motor launches could the cops have out there tonight? But that still left the Staten Island police. … My God, where were they? It seemed hours since she’d talked with MacPherson. He was going to call them right away—

“You really didn’t know it was me, did you? The deliveryman and D’Allessandro?”

“No, I didn’t. Your Dr. Drummond was especially brilliant.”
Keep him talking,
she thought,
ask him questions.
“But how did you know about him?”

“Nothing to it,” he said smugly. “I was following you, you must have looked right at me a hundred times, but I kept changing who I was. I was fascinated by you, the way a man can be fascinated by a beautiful woman who holds his fate in her hands. I thought maybe you could identify me. Maybe. But I also felt there was something between us, a relationship between you and me, Natalie. I read about you, I followed you, I watched you walk … I wanted to know more about you. I wanted to know everything about you. Everything. Body and soul, as they say. You have a really snotty look, arrogant, you know that? You literally have your nose in the air and I thought about you all the time, all kinds of things.” He giggled almost shyly. “I wondered what it would be like to kiss your naked belly and pull your panties down and spread you open and look inside, all that stuff … but I wanted to talk with you, too, and find out if you were, like afraid. …”He grinned at her, a half-smile playing across his small mouth. “Watching you and the cop buying the Christmas tree I wondered how often you fingerfuck yourself, how long it had been since you’d screwed and if you were going to fuck the cop. … Christ, it made me so hard I couldn’t believe it. But the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you … I don’t know what I wanted to do, it was a game, I wanted to know about you—that’s it, I just wanted to know everything. One day I followed you to the Algonquin, you were meeting this guy for a drink and I came in with a copy of
Variety
and sat down near you, near enough to hear your conversation. That’s how I heard about Drummond, so I called you. If you’d already talked to Drummond, then I was just a voice at the end of a telephone and you couldn’t find me. … And if you hadn’t called him, then I could become Drummond for you, get closer and closer. I mean, it really was like a movie, I was right in the middle of a scary movie, it reminded me of
Flesh and Fantasy,
the Edward G. Robinson segment where the fortune-teller Podgers, Thomas Mitchell it was, tells him he’s going to kill somebody and Robinson can’t believe it; what I was doing had that same feel, black and white, lots of texture, a helluva movie, y’know? I was the innocent guy driven to shoot that little whore Quirk but I did it, I got up my courage and rid the world of the rotten bitch, she wouldn’t pay me for doing a fuck movie with her, I should be a hero, but then—by crazy chance—somebody who’s totally uninvolved sees me throw the gun away … and the story gets in the paper … and then the weird fear starts working on me, can she recognize me? I don’t know what I was going to do, I didn’t have a plan, now I never will know—and it’s all that asshole Brad’s fault, he had to stick his nose and more particularly his cock into things—I mean Jesus you were mine and he got you down on the floor and you fucked him and he had to write all that shit down in his diary. I mean I saw red, he’s coming on all tough and shape-up-Barry to me and I’ve just read his diary all about what it was like to push it into you, how soft and wet you are, and poor old Brad was a dead man, dead, dead, dead … and I knew I had to have you myself. I mean, if you’d do it with him, you were bound to do it with me, made sense, right?” He seemed to become aware of her for the first time in his monologue and shouted at her, “Right? You’d do it with me, too, right?”

“I don’t know. Barry. He made it up. I didn’t do it with him, truly I didn’t—”

“I told you, I warned you, don’t insult my intelligence! You fucked him!” Then he calmed down. “Well, we’ll get to that in a little while. I’m not sure what movie all this is from—I have a little trouble with movies and real life. Actor, you know. I’m an actor. I get by. Not enough projection, voice, I mean, but I get by, sing a little, dance a little, used to juggle—anyway, fuck all that. Like they say, Actors Equity, where are you when I need you? Does my agent get ten percent of this load of trouble? Ha! I’m finally in the movies and you and I are the only ones who know. So the big question is, how does this end? Is it a night at the movies? Or is it real life? Do I go up the river and say goodbye to Pat O’Brien before I walk the last mile? Or maybe it’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
… or
Night Must Fall. …
Are we Tony Perkins and Janet Leigh or are we Barry Hughes and Natalie Rader?”

He was loving the sound of his own voice and she listened, forcing the images of the gutted woman upstairs, the mangled cats out of her mind, concentrating on Barry, listening, waiting for anything she could use, get hold of.

He was relaxed.
He feels safe,
she thought,
he knows we’re alone and going to stay that way.
He kept talking, rattling on about his parents and how he’d always wanted to be an actor, on and on. A character actor, he said, a faceless man. “I can be anyone, Natalie, the invisible man.” He went to the coffee table, knelt, and poured himself another steaming cup, poured one for her, held it out to her.

“Here, Natalie, it’s really very good—”

With all the strength in her legs she suddenly slammed the coffee table toward him, felt it hit his chest, straightened her legs, pushing with all the force in her hips and thighs, saw the moment disintegrate into its components: the gleaming silver pot tilting toward him, the cup he was holding flying into the air and the steaming liquid hanging in the air, then falling across his face like a whip. She heard him scream, sprawling on his back with the table and the tray of cups and saucers and the pot littering him. He was rubbing at his face and she was on her feet, leaping past him and putting the couch between them, stupidly stopping to look back and see him thrashing about on the floor. While she watched he slowly stopped moving, lay quietly, breathing deeply like a man utterly exhausted. He was staring at the ceiling.

“That was a very predatory act,” he said between gasps. He was wiping his sleeve back and forth across his eyes, wiping away the hot chocolate. There were red streaks across his flesh and on his balding head. A cut above his eye was bleeding. “So, I guess it’s going to be a movie, Natalie. So what do you do now in this movie, Natalie? Let’s see, let’s think it through. I’m going to have to do something just plain god-awful to you when I catch you. … So, I’d say you’d better get a move on, Natalie!”

His voice had risen to a shriek on the last few words and suddenly he was horribly alive, like a flashing, thrusting reptile, throwing aside the coffee table and slipping and getting to his feet. …

Adrenaline fueled her instincts. She had no sense of what she was doing, she was moving as fast as she could but it seemed like slow motion.

She was in the hallway.

She heard him knock over another piece of furniture.

She was out the front door and across the porch.

She was in the clutches of the storm.

F
OR A MOMENT THE
storm’s impact hit her like a hammer and she reeled backward, feet and ankles plunging painfully through the snowcrust, falling to her knees, blinded by the blowing snow. Her mind was clicking, telling her to hide,
don’t try to run in this, you’ll never make it … hide, don’t let him get you.
…

She struggled back to her feet and plunged off toward the barn, which would be dark and sheltered from the wind. She’d been there before, she knew it better than he did, somehow she could hide there. She needed to get away and she couldn’t take time to think … she heard him stomping out onto the porch, heard the wind slam the door back on its hinges.

As she lost breath the sound of the night roared in her ears, she felt sweat and panic breaking out, felt her legs weaken each time they sank through the crust.

The barn loomed out of the darkness. Maybe he wouldn’t know where she’d gone, it was too dark and the wind too loud for him actually to see or hear her flailing away. She began to feel faint from lack of oxygen and stopped, desperately sucking at the wind. She looked back, trying to see him, thought she saw his shape thrashing through the snow … what she could see was the black, twisting trail she had left behind her, a black scar stretching from him inevitably to her. …