“Dake! What on earth happened to Molly?”
“I don’t know. She just stared at me and looked horrified and fainted. I guess it’s a faint.”
Patrice knelt by the small frail figure, began to rub her wrist, pat her wan cheek. “Molly! Molly dear!”
She frowned and then glanced up at Dake. “I don’t know what—” She stopped and stared at him intently, and her face suddenly looked like chalk. “God,” she whispered softly. “God!” She shut her eyes tightly, squinching up her face. She swayed on her knees as though she would topple over the figure of the maid.
“What’s wrong!” Dake demanded. “What is it?”
She kept her eyes shut. “I don’t want to... look. It’s... your face.”
Dake instinctively lifted his hand to touch his face. He rubbed his left cheek with his right hand. It felt completely normal. He ran his hand across his mouth and suddenly stopped, his heart thudding. He gingerly touched his right cheek, his fingertips making a whispering sound against the hard polished bone. He slid his fingertips up to touch the empty ivory eye socket.
He reached the big hall mirror in three strides and stared at himself. Had a polished skull-head stared back at him it would not have been anywhere near as horrible as to see the face evenly divided between life and death. One side flushed, warm, alive. On the other side the naked teeth.
Impossibility!
Face to face with all the myriad logical answers. None of them logical. Take half a man’s face off and he bleeds to death. He looked into the mirror and saw, behind him, the reflected image of Patrice, her face in her hands, kneeling beside the still form of Molly — the little maid who had been so proud of learning the syllable L that she had changed her name.
He saw a cliff in the back of his mind, and sanity clung, scrabbling with bleeding fingers, to the sheer edge. Easier to drop into nothingness, turning over and over through the endless fall. Easier to scream and giggle and destroy the two women with murderous fear.
He walked slowly to a position behind Patrice, looked down on her shining head.
His voice sounded rusty. “Would you ever try to tell anyone about this?”
“No. No!”
“Then how many others have seen things... like this, and knew they dared not speak of them, Patrice?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Are we dreaming this? Is it happening? Are you the Patrice of my dreams?”
“You’re... in my dream, Dake. In my nightmare.”
“How do we go about waking up?”
“You know we’re awake,” she whispered. “What... are you?”
“A beastie? A demon? I’m Dake. I don’t understand it any better than you do. Look at me.”
“No.”
He took the shining hair in his fist and wrenched her head back. “Look at me!” She moaned, but kept her eyes tight shut. With his free hand he thumbed back her eyelid, even as she clawed at his wrist. She did not move or breathe. The wide eye stared at him. She screamed then. A scream that tore his nerves. That final utter scream of the last panic. She jumped and spun away, staring at him, still screaming, pausing only to fill her lungs and scream again. And stopped. And stood in the echoing silence and began to laugh, bending and twisting and holding herself with laughter, running then, doubling over with laughter, running against the door and rebounding to run again and at last tearing it open, running out into the night, laughing, tripping, falling, lying there in the diagonal of light from the open door, her legs still making spasmodic running motions, her laughter sounding as though her throat were slowly filling with blood...
He understood. Her bold proud mind had been full of arrogance, of certainty, of the knowledge of infallibility. Faced with the hideous and inexplicable, the mind had been unable to bend, unable to accept impossibility. And so, under strain, it had broken clearly, cleanly. Her example oddly gave him an understanding of how close he was to the same fracture line, gave him that necessary increment of pliability that kept him from breaking.
He knew that they would bring her back, quickly perhaps, to a relative sanity. But that new sanity would be a weak patch on the broken mind. She would walk in uncertainty, with the morbid expectation that around the very next corner she might find... a new inexplicable horror.
Molly, the Japanese maid, was a different case. Here was no proud and rigid mind, dependent on an explicable world. Here was a willingness to accept the unknown on its own terms. It would give her bad night dreams. It would give her delicious chills from time to time. But she would not break through the necessity of having to find a reason for something that was without reason.
They came, the obsequious and silken little doctors of the very rich, murmuring their concern, manicured fingers timing the flutter of pulse, phoning in subdued voices for the very best of hospital suites, the most accomplished of private nurses, and making the deft quieting injections, cautioning the attendants who levered the still Viking body into the chrome and gold of the huge Taj ambulance for the hushed flight through the night streets of the city.
One doctor rode with the sleeping woman, and the other, with many nervous glances at his watch, questioned Dake and Molly. Dake had known from the vaguely irritable glances the doctors had given him that his face was no longer horror. He had furtively fingered his cheek to make certain.
Molly sat in a straight chair, her fists propped rigid atop her thighs, her ankles neatly together, the black hair drawn back tightly, sheening oiled blue and green in the lamplight. Her eyes would flick toward Dake, slide uneasily away.
“It seems,” the doctor said, “to be a form of hysteria. It may help the diagnosis, Mr. Lorin, if you would tell me the apparent cause.”
“I was only here a few moments before it happened, Doctor. I flew down from New York this evening, and taxied out here.”
“When you first saw her did she seem upset in any way?”
Dake was laughing inwardly. It was unpleasant laughter. Try to tell this neat fussy little man the truth and he would have you wrapped up and labeled for delivery to one of the state institutions, despite the shortage of beds and treatment for the insane. The spiraling curve of psychosis during the past fifteen years had altered the admission requirements. Potential violence seemed to be the only remaining criterion. The milder species of manic-depressive, psychopathic personalities, schizos, paranoids — all roamed the streets, lost in their ritualistic fantasies. There had been a rebirth of that dark ages belief that to give money to the mad is one of the doorways to grace. Membership in the most marginal cults was, to many, an accepted release for obsession.
“She did not seem upset,” Dake said. “It seemed to happen quickly.”
The doctor turned to Molly. “Has she been herself lately?”
“Yes, sir.” Soft voice that trembled.
He looked at the maid and knew she would say nothing. The doctor sighed and looked at his watch again. “You aren’t much help, either of you. Miss Togelson has always impressed me as a very strong personality. This is rather... shocking, from a personal point of view. Neither of you know what she meant with all that babbling about skulls?”
Dake saw the maid shudder. He said, “Sorry, no.”
“I’ll be off then.”
“Could you give me a lift, Doctor, if you’re heading downtown?”
“Come along.”
As they went onto the porch Dake heard the maid slide the locks on the big door. As they got into the car he saw the lights coming on in room after room. Molly would want a lot of light around her. She would want the night to be like day.
The doctor drove with reckless casual impatience. “Where are you going, Mr. Lorin?”
“I checked luggage at the CIJ downtown terminal.”