Helen glanced at the clock again. It was after midnight now. I must go to bed, she thought, even if I can"t sleep. She began to switch off lamps in the living room. She caught a glimpse of herself in a wall mirror. She thought she could see the beginning of little crow"s tracks around her eyes and mouth. I"m twenty-eight, she thought. That makes me a spinster, I guess. She had devoted the best of her youth to taking care of her younger sister.
She was about to turn off the last of the lamps, when there was a sudden, loud knocking at the door to the apartment.
She stood frozen for a moment, paralyzed with fear. It"s the police, she thought. Paul must have collapsed from loss of blood and somehow they"ve found out what happened here.
There was a little peephole in the door, covered by a hinged metal lid. Helen raised the little lid. The fat old man who lived in the front apartment was standing at the door, thudding down repeatedly with the small bra.s.s knocker.
Helen said through the small peephole, "Please stop that knocking! My sister"s asleep. What is it?"
It was the first time she had ever heard the old man speak. His voice was deep and unctuous, though he made an attempt to keep it low.
"Open up, my dear," he said. "It"s most important. A matter of life and death, in fact. I can"t speak through this little hole."
Helen hesitated. Finally she opened the door, attempting to block the entrance with her body, but the bulk of the old man pushed her aside and he walked into the room.
"Really!" Helen exclaimed. "Please tell me what this is all about. It"s after midnight!"
"I apologize for the intrusion, my dear," the old man said calmly. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Heavenridge. George M. Heavenridge. Past seventy, retired, and quite harmless, I a.s.sure you, my child. And there you have my history. Now, as to my business." His thick lips smiled at Helen. The room was filled with the odor of his unclean clothes and of stale cigar smoke. He rubbed his gray-stubbed chin, the flabby jowls, with a pudgy hand. The fingers were brown with nicotine and tipped by black half-moons.
"What business?" Helen asked, realizing her voice was far too shrill.
The old man seated himself, without an invitation.
"It"s about the room, my dear," he said. "The room you advertised for rent in the evening paper."
Helen regarded the old man in blank astonishment, for a moment. Then she said, "I advertised no room for rent! There"s some mistake. Even if I had, this is an odd time of night to inquire about it."
The old man waggled a stained and stubby finger at Helen. His thick, moist lips smiled over dentures that were ghastly white.
"Ah, yes, my dear. You advertised a room for rent. We"ll agree on that, I think. And we"ll agree at once that I become your boarder. Immediately. Tonight, you understand? I live in the front apartment. I will bring only the things I need tonight. Tomorrow and in the days to come I can move in my other possessions. I have the right to sublease my own flat. There"s no hurry. I"ll wait to find a proper tenant who will pay a proper price. But your own need is great. Yours and your sister"s. You must have my protection immediately. That is vital, my dear. We"ll agree on that, too."
Helen regarded the smiling old man, dumbfounded. She shook her head slowly.
"This is quite mad!" she said. "Why on earth should my sister and I require your "protection," as you call it?"
The fat old man was still smiling as he said, "Because they found the body, my dear. The police, I mean. They found the body just outside the house a little while ago. Such a young man. So tragic to be struck down in the prime of life."
Suddenly, Helen was conscious of only one sensation. She was very cold. Then she realized she could not focus her eyes properly. She saw the old man and the familiar furniture of the room, but everything was distorted, as if she were observing objects through the tumbling stream of a waterfall. She clutched the back of a chair and forced herself to speak.
"I"ll ask you to explain yourself as briefly as possible, Mr, Heavenridge. Then you will please leave this apartment, or I will be forced to call the superintendent."
Mr. Heavenridge was lighting a foul cigar. He blew smoke, said, "I hope you don"t mind cigars. I smoke a great many of them. An old man"s only vice, my dear. I prefer very strong tobacco, but I"m sure you"ll become used to it."
He regarded the glowing tip of the cigar, nodded with satisfaction. Then he said, "You and your sister are most careless about your window shades, my child. Perhaps it is because you live in the rear of the building, on the first floor, and fancy you aren"t observed. But I have watched you often. I sit in darkness, you see. The dark is kinder to an old man than the light. The darkness is filled with memories. In the darkness my own two daughters come back to me from the grave. I see them plainly in their summery frocks and their broad-brimmed hats, with the sweet flush of youth upon their cheeks. Then one day, soon after you and your sister moved into this apartment across the areaway, I realized that those dim figures of the darkness had become real, alive! You are so like my eldest, Alice. Sweet and calm, always obedient. And your little sister, she is like my younger daughter, Dora. Willful, but lovely. I see now I was not stern enough with her. But it is not too late to rectify my mistake. You and your sister will become my daughters, my dear. And I will become your loving father, always near to protect you, from this night until the dear Lord calls me to his bosom. Oh, we will be so happy, the three of us!"
The old man expelled cigar smoke. "I killed my daughters, you know," he said. "I killed them more than twenty years ago."
The waterfall veiled Helen"s eyes and thundered in her ears. She could no longer control her voice.
"You - you killed your daughters?" she fairly shrieked.
The old man nodded calmly. "It wasn"t exactly murder, my dear," he replied. "Not like the terrible thing that happened here tonight. I indulged my daughters too much. Their mother died when they were very young. When they became young ladies, they wanted a car. I bought one, but I was a poor driver and so one day I smashed the car. Now you don"t think I did that on purpose, do you? At any rate, Alice and Dora were both killed. I alone was spared to exist in lonely solitude. But that is ended now. You and your sister will become my daughters. I will be firm with you, but always understanding."
Helen"s teeth were chattering from the strange, numb cold that had crept over her. "No!" she cried. "No! No!"
The old man shrugged his heavy shoulders. "It is your choice, entirely," he said. "I doubt they would electrocute your sister; she is so young and lovely. But she will spend her life behind gray prison walls, that is certain. I saw it all. I saw her strike him down. When he left, I saw how he staggered. I know something of these head injuries. It takes a little while to die after one is inflicted. I watched him through my front window as he reeled out into the deserted street. He fell. I went out and examined him. His heart had stopped. I called the police, but I did not tell them my name. They rang the superintendent"s apartment and talked to him. I listened through the crack of my door. But the superintendent knew nothing. If I move in here and I am questioned, I will swear I was with you all evening. Any father would do that much for his daughters."
The old man paused, sighed, waggled his bald head. "But if you refuse - then I must tell what I know, of course, as any good citizen doing his duty would."
Someone cried out. Marcia was standing in the room supporting herself against the bedroom door. Her eyes were wild and glazed.
"Don"t call the police!" she begged. "Oh, please, Helen, don"t let him!"
The old man rose from the chair. He was remarkably agile for a fat old man. He crossed the room rapidly and gave Marcia a resounding slap in the face.
"Go to your room, Dora!" he thundered. "Your sister and I will arrange matters."
And matters were arranged, because there was nothing else to do. At least, the dazed and terrified Helen could think of nothing else to do. And Marcia had fled to her bed. The covers were pulled up around her head and the bed, shook with her sobbing.
Mr. Heavenridge moved in that night. He took the room which had served as Helen"s bedroom-studio. Helen had to move into the small room with Marcia.
Mr. Heavenridge said that loud sounds disturbed him. He could not abide street noises and he disliked sunlight. He kept all the windows shut, and the blinds lowered. He called the business office of the telephone company at once and had the phone service discontinued. He removed the tubes from the television and radio receivers.
The apartment became insufferably stuffy; it no longer had its pleasant girl-smell of perfume and powder and scented soap and fresh flowers. It took on the overwhelming, heavy odor that clung to the old man. The two girls had only one closet between them for all their clothes, for he claimed the others. This problem was alleviated, in a sense, by a dictatorial step that the old man took. He made an inventory of their wardrobes and if he considered a garment immodest, he ripped it to pieces and suggested the fragments of cloth be used for dust rags.
On the very first morning, Helen found him examining her bank book and account books and personal correspondence. When she protested, he simply waved her away, and chided her for rising at so late an hour.
"From now on," he said, "you and your sister will rise at six-thirty. That is my accustomed hour. I will expect to have my breakfast on the table by seven sharp."
He demanded that they retire at ten-thirty. One evening he found a light showing beneath the girls" bedroom door after the hour he had set. He stormed in and detached all the light bulbs. From then on, he removed the light bulbs every night at the bedtime he had ordered.
He called the sisters "Alice" and "Dora." He brought a heavy family Bible from his apartment and required one of them to read to him every evening, as his daughters had done, for an hour or more. He was especially fond of pa.s.sages from the Book of Revelations.
He was an enormous eater. He preferred food heavily seasoned with garlic and went into a towering rage if a window of the kitchen was opened while a meal was being cooked. He was inordinately fond of strong cheeses that he kept ripening on kitchen shelves. Often he would sit and listen to Marcia or Helen reading the Bible, while he nodded his egg-bald head and licked Limburger or Liederkrantz from his soiled fingers.
Sometimes Helen thought that he was senile, completely out of his mind. He would charge them with pranks and misdeeds that his two daughters had apparently committed when they were children. He did not hesitate to slap them and rain blows on them when he was displeased.
He was a messy old man. He spewed ashes over the carpets. He burnt the polished wood of tables with his smoldering cigar b.u.t.ts. He said that he was afraid of slipping in the bathtub. So, when he bathed at all, he took sponge baths at the bathroom sink. He would splash a pool of soapy water over the tile floor, for the girls to clean away.
They were not only his daughters, his servants, his cooks, his companions. They also served as his nurses. He took several different kinds of medicine. There was a liquid for his dyspepsia which they had to give him at mealtimes. There were his vitamins first thing in the morning. He had a weak heart and high blood pressure. For these ills, he kept white pills in a little vial on the bathroom shelf. He warned them to give him a pill promptly if he had a seizure. One of the girls had to rub his flabby old back with alcohol every night.
He demanded that the sisters address each other by the names of "Alice" and "Dora." If they forgot, he made a scene.
Each day he left the house for an hour or so. He would force Helen to write a check made out to "Cash" and endorse it. With this he would buy food, medicine, cigars. During his brief absences they at least could air out the fetid apartment. And they talked ineffectually of escape. He had possessed himself of all the keys. When he went out, he locked them in. The apartment was on the street level and all the windows were barred. Helen had often complained that the bars made the apartment seem like a prison, never realizing the prophecy of the remark. The idea she had of sawing through them with a nailfile, she dismissed as hopeless melodrama.
Mr. Heavenridge would not allow Helen to deliver her art work to magazines. He forced her to write letters to all the art editors she knew, stating that her telephone had been disconnected because its ringing distracted her and that from now on, she would accept commissions only by mail. Commissions arrived and the old man was a grim taskmaster in seeing that she fulfilled them. When she wrote to the magazines, he read her letters carefully. He even read the instructions to the engravers that she penciled on her drawings, to see if she had inserted some sly appeal for help. When checks came from publishers, Mr. Heavenridge forced Helen to endorse them. He would fold the checks and place them in his wallet. Helen never saw the money. Often the checks were for large sums.
On the first day of his occupancy, the old man had appropriated Marcia"s diary. From that he had learned that the man he had seen in the apartment was Paul Carter.
He always brought a newspaper back with him from his shopping tours. During the first week after he moved in, the first or second page of the paper would have an item torn from it. Mr. Heavenridge said the missing items were stories of Carter"s murder. He thought it would distress the girls to read too much of it. After the first week, there were apparently no further stories about Carter, for no items were torn from the papers he brought home.
Apparently, the old man had forgotten his intention of renting his own apartment down the hall. From time to time he would visit his old quarters and bring back shoddy pieces of furniture that would crowd the overcrowded apartment even more.
Only at night, when they slept together on a narrow single bed, in a pitch-dark room, did Helen and Marcia have any semblance of privacy. And even then they were afraid to whisper. The fat old man was a hovering presence in their lives. They always fancied he was listening at the crack of their bedroom door.
To Helen, the most abhorrent thing of all was calling him "Daddy." His own daughters had called him that, he said, and he insisted Helen and Marcia do the same. The taste of the word was sour bile in Helen"s mouth.
Marcia tried desperately to retreat into the world of fantasy that had always been her haven in the past, but for once it failed her. The presence of the old man bulked too large. When Marcia sought refuge in this peculiar world of her own, Mr. Heavenridge always noticed immediately. He would loom over her threateningly and say, "You"re daydreaming, Dora! Don"t make Daddy angry! You know what happens when you make Daddy angry, child!"
He supervised their dress and their toilettes. He threw out their wave sets, demanded that they let their hair grow and fix it in a knot at the back of their necks. He would not permit them to use rouge or perfume or nail polish.
It wasn"t surprising that Helen"s hand was shaky when she held a pen or brush or crayon. Drawings were returned more and more frequently by editors who found them unsatisfactory. She lost several of her best accounts, and the old man raged at her.
As for Marcia, she hardly ate or slept at all. The old man had found her sleeping pills and had thrown them in the garbage, calling her a dope addict.
Marcia grew ill and feverish with flu. Helen begged the old man to call a doctor, but he refused. He forced Marcia to dose herself with salts and aspirin. As she lay helpless and burning with fever, he sat beside her bed by the hour, reading aloud from the Bible.
Marcia recovered. Despite her weakness, the old man drove her to perform her share of household tasks. Helen, he said, must have the time to make a living for all of them with her art work.
In time, Helen found herself moving mechanically, like a puppet manipulated by the fat man"s pudgy fingers. She had lost all sense of time, all ambition, all hope. They would never escape, and she resigned herself to that fact. She thought wildly of screaming at pa.s.sing policemen from the window; then she realized what that would mean for Marcia. She thought, too, of murdering the old man, and when that occurred to her, she realized she had retreated into her younger sister"s impossible world of fantasy.
She told herself that she had died the night the old man knocked upon the door. She and her sister had been parties to the awful act of murder and now they were in h.e.l.l. She seldom spoke to her sister any more. There was no use in recalling the past - if there had ever really been a past. Nothing was real except the old man and his whims and his power over them, which was now complete.
He had been with them more than a month the night that Marcia came into the living room, her face flushed, her eyes unnaturally bright, a queer little smile playing on her pale lips. The old man was sitting in a big chair, munching Limburger and crackers. A cigar was burning on the scarred edge of a maple end-table at his side. Ashes and cracker crumbs littered the floor around him.
Helen roused from her usual lethargy enough to look curiously at her sister. Marcia was carrying a newspaper the old man had brought home from his shopping tour.
"I want to read you something, Daddy-O," Marcia said.
The old fat man almost choked. Cracker crumbs drooled over his beard-spiked chin.
"What did you call me, Dora?" he demanded.
"I called you Daddy-O," Marcia answered. "It"s kind of a pet name for a fat old man."
The old man rose from the chair, still spluttering crackers from his mouth. He advanced toward Marcia, his loglike arm raised threateningly.
Marcia laughed at him. "You shouldn"t hit me until after I"ve read you something, Daddy-O," she said. "I might scream for the police and tell them what a dirty old man you are."
The old man stood stock-still and lowered his arm. There was a look of alarm on his face. It was followed by a look of cunning. He backed to his chair and dropped heavily into it.
"You are right, daughter," he said. "It is almost time for the Bible. Read to me."
"Not the Bible, Daddy-O. I want to read you something from the newspaper."
"I"ve read the paper, child," the old man replied. "I have little interest in worldly news. You and your dear sister and I have a warm little world of our own here. We must keep it to ourselves, sacred to our happy little family."
"I don"t think we can any longer, Daddy-O," said Marcia. She unfolded the paper.
She looked at the old man. There was mockery in her smile now.
"This is from the society page, Daddy-O," Marcia said. "I doubt you ever read the society page."
She paused, teasing the old man. He sat perfectly still, staring at her. His cigar dropped from the table and began to scorch the rug. Helen saw it but did not move to pick it up.
Marcia began to read.
Mr. and Mrs. Paul Carter of Rye, N.Y. were among the pa.s.sengers on the S.S. Const.i.tution which sailed for Europe today. They will make an extended tour of England and the Continent. Mrs. Carter is the former Sylvia Enright. Mr. Carter is vice-president of the Enright Advertising Agency.
Marcia put the paper down and laughed aloud at the old man.
"Paul Carter is the man you claim I killed, Daddy-O," she said.
The old man"s face went suddenly ashen. He began to breathe heavily, noisily.
"Mistake," he gasped. "I told you, police -"
Suddenly, his face was contorted with pain and his body bent forward. His hands clutched at his chest.
"Attack," he said. "Get tablets. Quick. Bathroom."
Marcia continued to snicker. "Why, sure, Daddy-O. Dear little Dora will get you your tablets."
She walked toward the bathroom. Helen sat, her body stiff, staring fixedly at the old man.
I really believe he"s dying, she thought. I didn"t think he could ever die. I never saw anyone die before. Mother and Dad died when we were both so little. I never saw anyone die before, and I don"t feel a thing.
Marcia returned from the bathroom, the little smile still on her face.
"I"m sorry, Daddy-O," she said. "But you must have taken all the tablets. There"s not one left. Not a single one left. It"s too bad we haven"t got a phone. I might call a doctor if we had."
The old man was making snorting sounds. He slumped forward until half his body was on the floor.
He gasped, "Please ... please ..."
He might have been pleading with Marcia. He might have been pleading with his G.o.d.
He said "Please," again, and then he stopped breathing.
Marcia, still smiling, reached down and began to twine a single wisp of hair on his bald head between her fingers.
"Poor Daddy-O," she said. "I think poor Daddy-O is dead, Helen."
There was a long silence.
Finally, Helen said, "Oh, my G.o.d, Marcia, what will we do? They mustn"t find him here!"
For once Marcia didn"t run away.