The young man looked at her with very ugly eyes.
She faced his look. “I’m just going to stand here and scream until you let me in.”
Her desperation, though not the reason for it, evidently impressed itself upon him. Several things, most of them frightening, passed through the young man’s face in quick succession. Finally caution in some form prevailed.
“All right, I’ll come take a look at your goddamned car,” he muttered. “Breaking the goddamned window—” He turned away as if meaning to grab a coat from somewhere close at hand. As he retreated he pushed the door from inside, shutting it almost completely.
Not giving herself time to think, Judy sprang forward, throwing her body against the closing door. It burst open before her rush. “Johnny!” she screamed.
A ceiling light just inside the entry had now been switched on. The rest of the house, as far as she could tell, was all in darkness. The floor of the large entryway was tiled, and on the opposite side of it the young man stood before an open closet door. Not the closet that she wanted, no. He was in the act of pulling on a bulky sheepskin jacket, and in his free hand there dangled a long-barreled, very real-looking revolver. His face was just now turning toward Judy in fresh astonishment.
To Judy’s left, a great living room, devoid of furniture but thickly carpeted, stretched to a distant red-brick fireplace wall. Somewhere in that direction, a little farther off, Johnny was cowering in his prison, chained and gagged by fear, radiating pain like heat from glowing metal. Judy’s screaming of his name still rang like a distant alarm in his dazed brain, and from there back to her own mind again.
“Johnny!” she cried again. “I’m here!” And she moved toward the living room, to place herself between her helpless brother and this armed maniac.
The young man in the sheepskin stepped across the entry and slammed the front door closed again. His face was evilly contorted now. Without a word he moved toward Judy, the weapon in his hand rising with what seemed like endless slowness.
At last remembering what she was supposed to do, Judy cried out: “Come in, Dr. Corday, help me!” As she cried she ducked away from her attacker, to find herself falling softly down the single step from entryway to sunken living room. Her arms were raised to protect her head from blows or bullets. Her last glimpse of the young man as she turned away showed him reaching toward her with his left hand.
Even as the house spun with her spinning fall, she heard the front door fly open with a violent crash. There was a roaring of cold air in the room, an incomprehensible sudden wind that had blasted open the closed door. The hand that had just brushed Judy’s arm fell away. Then the door slammed shut again with a thunderous bang.
The wind gave one last, trailing howl, and disappeared.
The house was quiet.
Judy raised her face from the thick carpet and sat up. Corday was in the act of crouching down beside her, one hand outstretched. His fingers touched her hair. “Judy, it is all right now. You are not hurt?”
She jumped to her feet. “Find Johnny.”
Her companion was already in motion, his long strides carrying him off into the darkness engulfing the rear portion of the house.
Before following, Judy looked around. The front door was tightly closed once more, though now a portion of its lock hung in at an angle among splinters of newly broken wood. On the other side of the living room, near the great fireplace, the young man’s sheepskin coat lay in a bulky mound, and near it the long-barreled revolver. He must have run outside. . . .
“Judy?” Corday’s penetrating voice reached her from some distant room. “He is in here.”
She ran down a dark hallway, past dim, unfurnished bedrooms, and a bathroom where she could make out a dirty towel hung on a rack, soap in a grimy puddle on a lavatory top. Light shone out of another bedroom, where Corday was waiting for her. A small lamp burned on an upended crate that served as bedside table for an unmade cot. Odds and ends of men’s clothes were strewn about, along with girly magazines, weightlifting journals, bits of food and garbage, tin cans, paper cups, plates, a small transistor radio.
Corday stood beside the open door of the huge closet, gesturing for Judy to go in ahead of him. “He looks bad,” he said with his usual calm. “But I believe he will recover.”
No clothes were hanging in the closet. Inside, Judy dropped to her knees beside the horrible, pale figure contracted into one dim corner. The figure stirred, raising a head matted with long, dirt-colored hair. Against its naked chest were folded two mummified Egyptian hands, covered with dried brownish stains, their fingers clenched and twisted.
Startlingly pale eyes appeared, in a face that might once have been her brother’s. “Judy,” a stranger’s voice croaked at her. “They caught you, too.”
“No, oh no. Oh, Johnny, your poor hands.”
Corday was in and out of the closet now, moving with impersonal gentleness and quite improbable speed. He helped Johnny stand, looked at his throat closely for some reason, then wrapped him in two blankets from the cot. Somehow he found Johnny’s own boots and helped Judy get them on his feet. There seemed, for some reason, to be a tremendous hurry.
“You are to drive him directly home, Judy, stopping for nothing, except to avoid a collision.”
“The car—”
“There is a car in the garage, and unless I am mistaken these are its keys.” He handed her a jingling ring. “Hurry ahead and get the engine started—down the hall to your right. I shall bring John.”
In grabbing for the keys Judy accidentally bumped her brother’s arm and he cried out in pain. Then she flew down the hall in the direction Corday indicated. She caught a last glimpse of the living room in passing; the bundle of sheepskin coat had legs, she saw from this angle, and it was stirring now, raising a face.
A light was on already in the garage, and its door had been rolled up. She was already behind the wheel of the Cadillac, engine started and headlights on, as Corday arrived to stow her brother in beside her.
“Shouldn’t we telephone someone first—”
“Joe will be calling for help. Drive straight home now, stop for nothing. Leave all else to me.”
“Judy?” The voice coming from the pale face beside her did sound a little like her brother’s now, though terribly weak. “Take me home now?”
Corday had already slammed the Cadillac’s door shut and vanished back into the house. Even as Judy gunned the engine and pulled out of the garage, two muffled banging noises from in there reached her ears. She had driven miles toward home before it occurred to her excited mind that they might possibly have been shots.
TWELVE
Of the two uniformed Cook County sheriff’s deputies who had met Joe at the country gas station in response to his phone call, and had then followed him back to this lonely house, one was now outside in their official car, busy with its radio. The other deputy was with Joe in the house, and had begun a more or less methodical questioning of the only other person who had been on the scene when they arrived.
“Now, you say he fired twice at you, Dr. Corday? Where were you standing when that happened?”
“I believe—here.” And Corday moved decisively to a position in the living room not far from the entry. He seemed to have been not in the least shaken by the peril through which, according to his own story, he had so recently passed.
“Uhuh,” the deputy remarked. He was not especially excited either. Following the old man closely he pointed to, without quite touching, a shattery-looking place in the otherwise new-looking plaster wall behind him. “If that is a bullet hole, I guess you weren’t standing exactly where you are right now, when she hit.”