a critical one. Hearing his voice and knowing that the idea she had examined in a Sidecar was gaining shape and dimension, she felt a terrible compulsion to cradle the instrument without answering. But in the end, she talked, she let him come, and the idea grew materially over a period of time that seemed ages to her but was actually no more than a week. And now, tonight, in the night club, in the taxi, in the ascending elevator, she understood that it had grown to its ultimate monstrous proportion, and that it was, in spite of her desperate good intention, a bad thing, the worst thing for herself that she had ever done.
In the hall, he unlocked the door to his apartment and pushed it inward. “Welcome to my sanctuary, baby,” he said. “I warn you, you won’t find an etching in the place.”
She accepted this as a bald statement of intention, and she felt her flesh crawl, sucking in her breath in brief anguish at the sharp contraction of her stomach. She had no reason to take offense, certainly, and even less to be alarmed. The intention had been implicit in their relationship from the start, was indeed the whole reason for her allowing the relationship to exist, and she had accepted the essential with a cold, sacrificial despair that now threatened to disintegrate in terror.
It wasn’t too late. There was still time. She was still free to turn and walk back down the hall to the elevator, to descend in the whispering car to the half-life, the dim, precarious way beyond a translucent barrier. She stood without moving outside the open door until her inner disintegration had arrested itself, and then she moved past him into the room and waited rigidly for him to come up behind her and take the wrap from her shoulders. His fingers brushed her skin, and she shivered, the response traveling in a kind of peristaltic action over the whole surface of her body.
“What a nice place you have,” she said.
He laughed. “It serves. Relax a minute, baby, I’ll fix you a Sidecar.”
He went into a bedroom with her wrap and reappeared almost immediately to cross the end of the living room and enter a tiny kitchen. She heard in order the small click of the light switch, the slightly larger sound of the refrigerator door opening and closing, the faint, confused tinkling of ice and glass. Standing there in the middle of the room, she turned her head stiffly, taking in the heavy furniture, a bright hunting print on the wall, a scattering of masculine trivia. Against the wall below the hunting print, flanked by narrow windows, was a desk. On its surface was a variety of items, but all she saw was the desk set, a silver-colored pen extending at an angle from a black base. Terror came washing back, mounting on a tide to the level of hysteria. Turning, walking like an automaton, she went over to the sofa and sat down, bending sectionally at knees and hips.
After all, she thought, it’s such a simple thing. You need only to be passive. That’s it. You let everything happen in its own time, in its own order, and at first it’s very bad, but then it gets better, it gets better and easier each lime after the first time, and after a while it’s perfectly right and normal and perhaps even enjoyable, because the way things are now is nothing more than a twist, something you learned wrong a long tine ago, and it’s only the very simple matter of learning it all over again now the right way.
Then Angus Brunn came back in from the kitchen with her Sidecar in one hand and a Scotch-and-soda for himself in the other. He handed her the Sidecar and said, “What’s the matter, baby? You look stiff.”
Reaching up for her drink, she managed a laugh a sound as thin and brittle as the stem she took between her fingers. “Maybe I’m a little scared,” she said. “It could be the first time I’ve been in a man’s apartment.” He sat down beside her and grinned, the twist of his tight mouth above the narrow, jutting chin giving to his gray face a Satanic expression that was without humor. “Oh, sure. It could be the first time I’ve ever had a woman here, too.”
“You don’t believe it’s possible? My never having been in a situation like this before?”
“You, baby? A looker like you? Let’s just say it isn’t likely. The ones without experience are the ones who haven’t had opportunities.”
“That could probably be taken as a compliment. I suppose I should thank you.”
“No. Just drink your Sidecar.”
She lifted the glass and tilted some of the tart liquid into her mouth, and at that moment he deposited his own glass on the arm of the sofa at his side and let the emptied hand fall onto her knee. It lay there like a branding iron, burning through a triple intervention of silk and nylon, but the heat did not diffuse itself. It remained localized in the small area of the violated knee, while all the remainder of her was cold and clammy, and her flesh was filthy with crawling things. It occurred to her that the delusions of delirium tremens might be something like this, and that that, too, was an experience she might someday accomplish. Deliberately, functioning under a total exertion of her will, she drained her glass and let it fall and leaned forward into him with her head back and her lids lowered against the awful encroachment of his face.
She gagged. A thin, bitter fluid rose up into her throat and nostrils, and she couldn’t breathe. She was drowning, drowning in a stagnant sea, and she lifted one arm above her head, as a drowning person does, to grasp the receding sky. The hand was held there for a second, hanging downward from the wrist like a claw, and then it descended in an attack of talons. Her long, pointed nails slashed into his cheek below the bone and plowed four parallel furrows to the jaw. With a harsh cry that was mixed pain and fury and surprise, he pushed her away and lashed out violently. The back of his hand caught her across the eyes and knocked her sprawling onto the floor. She lay there, cowering away from him, looking up at him with hate and revulsion. Blood welled slowly from his gashed cheek, making of it a shining, scarlet half-mask, and he began to curse her softly, an inflectionless recital of invective more terrifying than violence. Getting to her feet, she turned and ran through the door behind her into the kitchen.
It was so small. And it kept getting smaller. The walls closed in on her, compressing the air, threatening to crush her. She stood with her back to the cabinet, her hands spread behind her on the working surface. Her breasts rose and fell and rose again in labored gasps. She watched the door through which she had come, and pretty soon she heard him following, in no hurry, his steps light and measured on the carpet. He was still cursing, quietly and fluently, his voice never rising above a conversational level.
She looked around frantically for an exit that wasn’t there, and it was then she saw the final deadly essential of the bad end. An old-fashioned ice-pick with a rough wooden handle, stuck half the length of its spike between the back of the cabinet and the wall. Reaching over, she pulled it loose with a jerk and held it in her right hand behind her back.
Angus Brunn appeared in the doorway and stopped. The entire side of his face was now a scarlet sheen, and his eyes glittered with cold, controlled fury. Looking at her down the negligible length of the tiny room, a distance he could almost have spanned by stepping forward and reaching out with one arm, he said with a queer, incongruous dullness, “So that’s the kind of little slut you are. A just-so-far girl. A non-producing harlot. Maybe you think I’m a snotty kid to be led by my glands until you’re ready to call the turn. That’s your mistake, baby. That’s your big mistake.”
But it wasn’t. It was his. He took two steps aid grasped her by the hair, jerking her head back above the strained arch of her throat, and she brought the ice-pick around and up, and the slim spike slipped into him smoothly at an angle just below the apex of the inverted V of his ribs. His breath sucked through his lips with a shrill, ragged sound that was like a reversed whinny, and he wrapped both hands around the protruding handle of the pick and looked down at it in an attitude of stunned, incredulous wonder. Then, without looking at her again, he released his held breath in a long sigh and folded slowly in the middle.
Lifting her skirt, she stepped over the body and went back into the living room. She stood in the middle of the room, almost in the identical position in which she had waited a little while ago for him to return from the kitchen with her Sidecar. Now he was in the kitchen again, and she was waiting again, but this time he would not come out even though she waited forever. The thought struck her as very funny, and she began to laugh silently, her body shaking with a swelling inner storm