Being careful not to come in contact with the jagged bits of broken glass still held within the frame, I put in my hand and found the knob that turned the lock. I twisted and the lock came back. With my other hand, I turned the outside knob and pushed and the door came open.
I oozed into the place and shut the door behind me, then slid along the wall and stood there for a long moment, with my back against the wall.
I felt the hairs rising on the back of my neck and my heart was thumping, for the smell was there—the smell of Bennett’s shaving lotion. Just the faint suggestion of a smell, but unmistakable, as if the man had put it on that morning and in the afternoon had brushed past me on the street. I tried once again to define it, but there was nothing I could compare it with. It was the kind of odor I had never smelled in all my life. Nothing wrong with it—not very wrong, that is—but a kind of smell I had never known before.
Out in the space beyond where I stood against the wall were dark shapes and humps, and as I stared at them and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the place I could see that it was just an office and not a thing unusual. The dark
shapes and black humps were desks and filing cabinets and all the other furniture you expect to find inside a business office.
I stood tensed and waiting, but absolutely nothing happened. The grayness of deep twilight seeped in through the windows, but it seemed to stop just beyond the windows; it did not penetrate into the room. And the place was quiet, so utterly quiet that it was unnerving.
I looked around the room and now, for the first time, I noticed something strange. In one corner of the room an alcove was curtained off—a strange arrangement, certainly, for a business office.
I looked around the rest of the office, forcing my eyes to go over it almost inch by inch, alert to the slightest thing out of the ordinary. But there was nothing else—nothing strange at all except the curtained alcove. And the lotion smell.
Cautiously, I moved out from the wall and across the room. I didn’t know exactly what I was afraid of, but there was a fear of some sort crouching in the room.
I halted at the desk in front of the alcove and snapped on a desk lamp. I knew it wasn’t smart. I had broken into this office, and now I was advertising it by turning on the light. But I took the chance. I wanted to see, immediately and without question, what was back of the drapes closing off the alcove.
In the light I could see that the drapes were of some heavy, dark material and that they were hung on a traverse rod. Moving to one side and groping, I found the cords. I pulled and the drapes parted, folding smoothly out to either side. Behind the drapes was a row of garments, all neatly ranged on hangers which were hung upon a pole.
I stood there, gaping at them. And as I looked at them I began to see them, not as a mass of garments, but as separate garments. There were men’s suits and topcoats; there were half a dozen shirts; there was a hanger full of ties. On the shelf above the rack, hats were primly ranged. There were women’s suits and dresses and some rather frilly garments that I suppose you would call gowns. There was underclothing, both men’s and women’s; there were socks and stockings. Underneath the clothing, on a long rack standing on the floor, shoes were precisely placed, again both men’s and women’s.
And this was stark crazy. A place to hang topcoats, raincoats, jackets, a place to put the hats—if there were no closet, it would be very likely that some f ussbudget in the office might fix up a place like this. But here were complete wardrobes for everyone in the entire office, from the boss down to the lowliest of the secretaries.
I racked my brains for an explanation, but there wasn’t any.
And the craziest thing about it was that the office now was empty, that everyone had gone—and they had left their clothes behind. Certainly they would not have left the office without wearing any clothes.
I moved slowly along the line of clothing, putting out my hand to touch them, to make sure they were really fabric, that they were really there. They were ordinary fabrics. And they were really there.
As I walked along the line, I felt a sudden draft of coldness at the level of my ankles. Someone had left a window open— that was the way it felt. As I took another step, the draft as suddenly was gone.
I made my way to the end of the rack of clothing, turned around, and walked back again. Once again the coldness hit my ankles.
There was something wrong here. There was no window open. For a draft from an open window does not creep along the floor at ankle height; nor is it channeled so that with one step you are in it and the next step out.
There was something behind the rack of clothes. And what, in the name of God, could be cold behind a rack of clothes? Unthinking, I hunkered down and swept the clothes apart and found where the coldness came from.
It Came from a hole, a hole that went through the McCandless Building, but not outside the building, not clear through the building, for if it had been a simple hole knocked clear through the wall, I would have seen the lights on the street outside.
There were no lights. There was an utter darkness and a giddiness and a cold that was more than simple cold—more like the complete lack of any heat at all. Here, I sensed—and I don’t know how I sensed it—was a lack of something, perhaps the lack of everything, a complete negation of the form and light and heat that was upon the Earth. I sensed a motion, although I could see no motion—a sort of eddying of the darkness and the cold, as if the two were being stirred by some mysterious mixer, a sucking whirlpool of the darkness and the cold. As I stared into the hole, the giddiness that was in it tried to tip me forward and to suck me in and I jerked back in terror, sprawling on the floor.
I lay there, stiff and tense with fright, and felt the seeping cold and watched the motion of the clothing as it fell back in place to mask the hole punched in the wall.
Slowly I got to my feet and edged toward the desk, putting the barrier of the desk between myself and what I’d found behind the curtain.
And what was it I had found?
The question hammered at me and there was no answer, as there was no answer to the clothing hanging in a row.
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 fn 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 cente
r 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 At-wood 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!
XI
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.
Whatever does one do, I asked myself, when he stumbles into something that is impossible of belief and yet with its surface facts entirely evident? For they were evident; one thing one might have imagined or misinterpreted, but there was no possiblity of imagining all the things within this office. I turned out the lamp and the darkness closed in, muffling the room. With my hand still on the lamp switch, I stood un-moving, listening, but there was no sound.
Tiptoeing, I made my way among the desks back to the door, and every step I took I sensed the creeping danger at my back—an imagined danger, but strong and terrifying. Perhaps it was the thought that there had to be a danger and a threat, that the things I had uncovered were not meant to be uncovered, that there must, in all logic, be a. certain built-in protection for them.
I went out into the corridor, closed the door behind me, and stood a moment with my back against the wall. The corridor itself was dark. Lights had been turned on hi the stairwell and faint light, reflected from the street below, filtered through the window.
There, was nothing stirring, no sign of life at all. The squeal of braking wheels, the honking of a car horn, the gay laughter of a girl came up faintly from the street.
And now, for some reason I could not understand, it became important that I should leave the building without being seen. As if it were a game, a most important game with very much at stake, and I could not risk the ending of it by being apprehended.
I went cat-footing down the corridor and had nearly reached the stairs when I felt the rush.
Felt is not the word, perhaps, nor is sensed. For it was not sensing; it was knowing. There was no sound, no movement, no flicker of a shadow, nothing that could have warned me— nothing except the inexplicable danger bell that clanged within my brain.
I wheeled about in frantic haste, and it was almost upon me, black in the shadow, man-sized, man-shaped, coming in a rush without the slightest sound. As if it trod on air so it would make no sound to cancel out the sound of footsteps.
I moved so suddenly that I spun back against the wall and the thing rushed past me but pivoted with a whiplash swiftness and launched itself toward me. I caught the paleness
of a face as the faint lights of the stairwell outlined the massive body. Without conscious thought, my fist was coming up, aiming at the paleness in the black outline. There was a spattering smack as the fist slammed against the paleness, and my knuckles stung with the violence of the blow.
The man, if it were a man, was staggering back, and I followed, swinging once again, and once again there was the hollow smack.
The man was going over, falling, the small of his back caught against the iron railing that protected the open stairwell above the flight below—pivoting over the rail and falling free, spread-eagled, into the gaping space above the marble stairs.
I caught one glimpse of the face as it turned into the light, the mouth wide open for the scream that did not come. Then the man had fallen out of sight and there was a heavy thud as he smashed onto the staircase a dozen feet below.
There had been fear and desperation when I had faced the man, and now there was a sickness from knowing that I had killed a man. For no one, I told myself, could have survived the fall and landing on the staircase stone.
I stood and waited for a sound to come up from the stairwell. But there was no sound. The building was so still that it seemed to hold its breath.
I moved toward the stairs and my knees were shaky and my hands were clammy. At the railing, I looked down, braced for the sight of the sprawling body which must lie broken on the stairs.
And there was nothing there.
There was no sign of the man who had fallen to almost certain death.
I whirled around and went clattering down the stairs, no longer intent on maintaining silence. And mingled with the relief at not having killed a man there was a vague beginning of another fear—that, having failed to kill him, he still remained a stalker and an enemy.
Even as I ran, I wondered if I might have been mistaken, if the body might have been there and my eyes had missed it. But one, I told myself, does not miss a body broken on the stairs.