Gail watched the closet door to see if it would open again and listened to hear if anything moved inside.
She held her injured hand before her frightened face, gripping the swelling fingers tightly.
Blood dripped slowly from her smashed nails onto her white canvas shoe.
"It was Margaret"s room," replied Fenner, placing his hat on the rack just inside the front door. His scarf and overcoat followed.
"Where is she now?" She spoke to him from the landing, hoping the psychological effect of her elevation would help the inquiry.
"Montpelier, Vermont. She has a boyfriend. I paid for four years of college and two years of graduate school. So now, of course, she"s painting houses for a living."
"What about your wife?" asked Gail.
"A lump."
"A lump?"
"In her breast," explained Fenner, slicing open the top envelope on the stack of his mail that had arrived earlier.
"Mastectomy. Another lump. A second mastectomy."
"Ia"" Gail had started to protest that this wasn"t what she was asking about at all, but Fenner didn"t choose to notice her embarra.s.sed fumbling.
"Chemotherapy. Spleen, liver. Death and inheritance taxes."
"I can"t get that closet door open," Gail said abruptly.
"Of course not. I told you that when you moved in."
"It was open this afternoon when I got home from school.
Then it shut by itself and I can"t get it open again. I tried a screwdriver."
"That"s why I put the standing wardrobe in there," he said with caustic logic. He crumpled a letter and simply dropped it on the floor. "So you wouldn"t have to bother with that closet."
"There"s something living inside that closet, Dr. Fenner!"
He did not answer, and as if Gail"s difficulties with the closet were both trivial and boring, he began to read a printed article that had been sent him in a large manila envelope.
It had rained late in the afternoon, and hours later the evergreens in the yard still slowly dripped water onto the sodden ground.
Gail lay beneath her cover, her face turned toward the wall. The covers were drawn up to her neck. Her breathing was slow and regular.
Ritttch. Ritttch.
h.o.r.n.y nails scratching furtively on wood.
It was what Gail had been waiting for, for an hour now, absolutely still beneath the covers. She sat up suddenly and straight in the bed and flicked on the light, pointing it directly on the k.n.o.b of the closet door.
The bra.s.s gleamed as the k.n.o.b was turned this way and that. Turned by whatever was on the other side of that closet door.
She turned off the flashlight, threw back the covers, and slid quietly off the bed to the floor. With the flashlight held so it wouldn"t knock against the floor, Gail crawled across the darkened room toward the closet door.
Click.
The door was unlocked now.
As she crawled closer, the door of the closet swung slowly open.
The dresses, the neatly folded underwear and blouses, the polished shoes, all were gone again. Inside the closet was only blackness.
She raised her flashlight, directed it into the interior of the closet, and then flicked it on.
The creature writhed and squealed in the glare of the flashlight. Yellow and naked, it was scarcely two feet high, no larger than the china-headed doll that had so startled Gail that afternoon. Hairless, with bowed legs and flat feet with webbing between the toes. Its arms were bony and short, the fingers long, with sharp, h.o.r.n.y nails. It had large, wet eyes and no ears, and many small yellow teeth. When it squealed, its anger was like that of Gail"s younger r.e.t.a.r.ded brother when he was interrupted at play.
The creature swiped the flashlight out of her hand. When Gail turned and fled, the creature leapt upon her back. Its webbed feet had claws, too, for they tore through her nightgown and raked deep into her flesh.
One of its hands caught in her hair, and the creature"s strength was such that it tore that fistful of hair out of her scalp.
When she started to scream, the creature clapped its other clawed hand across her face, dragging bloodily across cheek, lip, and gum. Gail stumbled against the cheap tea table that had belonged to Fenner"s daughter, and fell to the floor. Her head cracked against the floorboards.
The creature, who had leapt clear, lifted Gail"s head, then knocked it twice more against the floor, even more sharply.
Then with one clawed hand entwined in her hair, and the other nails digging deeply and bloodily into her wrist, the creature pulled Gail into the closet and shut the door after them.
"I spoke to her briefly last night, yes . . ." Fenner admitted impatiently. He held the letter opener between the palms of his hands, slowly turning it point-up and point-down as he talked into the telephone cradled against his shoulder.
"No, I didn"t see her this morning," he answered in the sort of patient voice that very clearly expressed impatience.
"Mrs. Aynsley, I rented your daughter a room in my house.
I did not become her legal guardian."
Mrs. Aynsley fretted on at length, and Fenner did not hear the door on the third-floor landing as it was softly opened, then softly closed again.
"Probably she wasn"t even awake when I left this morning,"
Fenner said. "I have early office hours on Thursdays."
Fenner stabbed the letter opener through the cover of one of Gail"s art history books, which had been left on the hall table. His back was to the staircase, and he did not hear the soft, bare tread on the thick stair carpet.
"No, I will not see if she has an appointment book, Mrs. Aynsley. I teach veterinary science, not espionage. I"m sure she"ll call you when she"s settled in," he said hurriedly, interrupting another torrent of distress. "Now you really must excuse me, I"m having root-ca.n.a.l work done in half an hour.
Good-bye."
He hung up the telephone with a smile and- --and cried aloud at the pain in his leg. Something sharp had sheared through the cloth of his trousers and raked through his skin. Fenner gazed down at the creature that was holding tightly to his leg.
It peered coyly up at him.
"Oh, you bad, bad girl!" Fenner cried reprovingly. "Do you know what kind of trouble you"ve gotten me into?"
The creature hung its head and chittered a guilty sort of chitter.
"What am I going to do with you?" said Fenner softly, shaking his head. The creature bowed its head between its bony yellow shoulders, then peered up pitifully at Fenner. He grabbed up the creature, shook it with playful wrath, nuzzled its tiny head against his cheek, and laughed indulgently.
"What am I going to do with my naughty, naughty little girl?!"
The creature chittered its happiest chitter, the happy sound of a loved, forgiven child.
PRINTER"S DEVIL.
by Ron Goulart.
This isn"t about making a pact with Satan.
Alex Kellaway never claimed to be the devil or even one of his emissaries. He was nothing more, Kellaway always maintained, than a crack literary agent who used unorthodox meth ods.
Me and the Devil was the t.i.tle of a barely pa.s.sable occult novel by Junior Harmon that was rejected by eleven paperback houses in Manhattan in the s.p.a.ce of nine weeks. A proposal, tattered and coffee-stained long since, was returned to him by the eleventh housea"with an insulting note from the fresh out-of-college a.s.sociate editor saying it was G.o.d-awful, and inquiring, further, why a worn-down hack who was pushing fifty still signed himself "Junior"a"Harmon decided to seek out an agent.
He"d been peddling his own stories, articles, and books for the last three years, ever since his then agent had leaped to her death from her fifth-floor offices in the East Sixties.
Although there"d been a half-read proposal of Harmon"s on her desk, he attributed her plunge to economic woes.
The past few months he"d been hearing good things about a relatively new literary agent named Alex Kellaway. Kellaway didn"t exactly conduct his business in a style that impressed Junior favorably, though. There were, for instance, ads in all the writers" magazines. ANY SCHMUCK CAN SELL WHAT HE WRITES!.
a typical headline proclaimed. LET KELLAWAY PUT SOME MAGIC IN YOUR CAREER! Another, accompanied by a grainy photo of the pudgy Kellaway holding up fistfuls of cash, blared MAKE BUCKS AS A WRITER! For the unpublished author there was a modest reading fee; for pros like Harmon, there was only a commission charged.
"Let"s get that straight right off," Kellaway said to him on his initial visit. "I take twenty percent of all your dough."
"20 percent? The standard comma""
"I don"t do a standard job, kiddo."
Kellaway in the flesh was not impressive. He was even fatter than his photos suggested, somewhere in his forties, clad in a rumpled brown suit that dated back to the late 1950s.
His tie, which had several blackish splotches, was decorated with an enormous flock of geese going south. And so matter when you encountered him, he always looked as though he hadn"t shaved since yesterday.
"Well, I have heard good things about thea""
"Before we go any further," cut in Kellaway, holding up a pudgy hand.
"Let me check something, Junior."
Reaching into his worn briefcase, Harmon said, "I brought a list of all my publisha""
"I already know all that c.r.a.p." With a grunt, Kellaway opened a low drawer of his claw-footed wooden desk. He produced a milky, slightly greasy crystal ball and plopped it down in a small clear s.p.a.ce amidst the clutter on his desk. "We need to take a gander into the future."
Harmon sat up in his lopsided chair. "The future?"
"b.u.t.ton your bazoo for a while," suggested the agent.
Harmon dropped his briefcase back onto the faded carpet and glanced around the room. It didn"t exactly reek of success. The office was small and the ceiling so low, it gave you the impression it was lowly descending to crush you. The solitary window was smeared with soot and gave a view of a stone wall the color of a starless midnight. Bookshelves lined one wall, but they held few books. Instead, there were small stuffed animals, old bra.s.s candlesticks, strings of gaudy gla.s.s beads, three human skulls, framed photos of faded people from the last century, little lacquered boxes, and a few odd knives.
"Ommmmmmmmmm," Kellaway was droning, both fat hands stro king the crystal ball.
Clearing his throat, Harmon glanced over his shoulder at the door out.
"Maybe I made a mistake ina""
"Shut your yap." Kellaway continued to fondle the crystal. "Draw back thy curtain, O Time. Huh . . . here she comes . . . a hundred thousand smackers a year. Not bad. I"ll make a neat twenty thou on that. Yeah, not a bad take for a schlep like you, Junior."
Blinking, Harmon inquired. "You see a hundred thousand in income in there for me?"
"I see eighty thousand for you and twenty thousand for yours truly."
"Listen, I"ve been free-lancing sincea""
"Nineteen sixty-four, when your first wife dumped you and her pappy fired you as manager of his shoe store in Queens,"
said the fat agent. "Feldman"s Shoetree. What a dimwit name.
You"ve never earned more than seventeen thousand in any given year since then. Which isn"t surprising, considering your talent."
Harmon got to his feet. "Wait now, if you think I"m lousy, why do youa""
"What the h.e.l.l does lousy have to do with it" Have you read Lobo Sardinian"s new thriller, The d.i.c.kensheet Interface?
Six hundred forty-two pages of c.r.a.pola, but I got the simp four hundred thousand from Pillar Books for the frapping paperback rights. That"s not bad money for these troubled times, Junior."
"If writing ability doesn"t mean anya""
"Magic is what does it." The agent grinned.
"You mean your gifts as a salesman anda""
"Naw, I mean sorcery and witchcraft," said Kellaway impatiently. "Haven"t you ever perused The New York Times bestseller list of a Sunday and wondered how a book about how to make your backside lovelier could be the hottest tome in the whole flapping country? Or how a novel about a h.o.m.os.e.xual midget could sell to the movies for a million five? Witchcraft and magic. Simple. And I"m far from the only literary agent working this angle, kiddo."
"Yeah, but I"m a good writer," protested Harmon. "Any success I"ve had has been because people like what I do anda""
Kellaway made a loud raspberry noise. "Bushwa," he said.
"I can take any dimwit off the street and make him or her into a successful author. Well, no, not every single dimwit." He tapped the crystal with his plump forefinger. "I"ve never exactly figured this out, but I can work the trick only with certaina""