I nodded, slowly. "You've got a point," I admitted. "All right, I'll wait and learn it right, if you don't get Alister. Want to finish that game of chess?" I glanced toward Beautiful, now sound asleep, but still perched where she could overlook the game. "I promise you that Beautiful won't kibitz."
"Too late," Jack said. "It's after three. How long have you had that cat, Brian?"
"You should remember. You were with me when I bought her. Four years ago, wasn't it? Funny how a pet gets to mean so much to you. I wouldn't sell her for anything on earth."
Jack wrinkled his nose. "A dog, now, I could understand. They're some company to a guy."
Moving my hand in a deprecating gesture, I laughed at him. "That's because you're not used to such intelligent and aesthetic company. Next to women, cats are the most beautiful things on earth, and we rate women higher only because we're prejudiced. Besides, women talk back and cats don't. I'd have gone nuts the last few months if I hadn't had Beautiful to talk to. I've been working twelve to fourteen hours a day, and--that reminds me. I'd better get some sleep. How about you?"
"Not sleepy yet, but don't let me stop you. I'll go in the other room and read.
What have you got that might give me some dope on Alister Cole. Got any good books on abnormal psychology?"
"Not a lot. That's out of our line here. We don't have courses in the abnormal brand. We work with fundamentals, mostly. Oh, I've got a couple of general books.
Try that Outline of Abnormal Psychology on the top shelf, the blue jacket. It's pretty elementary, I guess, but it's as far as you'll cover in a few hours reading anyway."
I started undressing while Jack got the book and skimmed the table of contents. "This looks okay," he said. "Chapters on dementia praecox, paranoia, waking hypnosis--Never heard of that. Is it common?"
"Certainly," I told him. "We've tried it. It's not really part of abnormal psychology at all, although it can be used in treatment of mental troubles. We've subjected whole classes--with their consent, of course--to experiments in automatic writing while under suggestion in waking state amnesia. That's what I used for my senior thesis for my B.A. If you want to read up on what's probably wrong with Alister Cole, read the chapter on paranoia and paranoid conditions, and maybe the chapter on schizophrenia--that's dementia praecox. I'd bet on straight paranoia in Cole's case, but it could be schiz."
I hung my clothes over the chair and started to pull on my pajamas.
"According to Jeanette," Jack said, "Dr. Roth thought Cole might have a touch of schizophrenia. But you bet on paranoia. What's the difference?"
I sighed. "All right, I'll tell you. Paranoia is the more uncommon of the two disorders, and it's harder to spot. Especially if a subject is tied up in knots and won't talk about himself. A man suffering from paranoia builds up an air-tight system of reasoning about some false belief or peculiar set of ideas. He sticks to these delusions, and you can't convince him he's wrong in what he thinks. But if his particular delusion doesn't show, you can't spot him, because otherwise he seems normal.
"A schizophrenic, on the other hand, may have paranoid ideas, but they're poorly systematized, and he's likely to show other symptoms that he's off-balance.
He may have ideas that other people are always talking about him, or trying to do him harm, and he's subjected to incoherence, rambling, untidiness, apathy--all sorts of symptoms. Cole didn't show any of them."
"A paranoiac, then, could pretty well hide what was wrong with him," Jack said, "as long as no one spotted the particular subject he was hipped on?"
"Some of them do. Though if we'd been specialists, I think we'd have spotted Cole quickly. But listen. Hadn't you better get some sleep too?"
"Go ahead and pound your ear. I'll take a nap if I get tired. Here goes the light."
He turned it out and went into the next room. He left the door ajar, but I found that if I turned over and faced the wall, the little light that came in didn't bother me.
Beautiful, the cat, jumped down from the mantel and came over to sleep on my feet, as she always does. I reached down and petted her soft warm fur a moment, then I lay back on the pillow and quit thinking. I slept.
A sound woke me--the sound of a window opening slowly.
Death--to Rats
With me, as with most people, dreams are forgotten within the first few seconds after waking. I remember the one I was just having, though, because of the tie-up it had with the sound that wakened me.
My dream had changed that slow upward scrape of the window into the scrape of claws on cement, the cement of the basement. There in the little front room of the basement, Dr. Roth was standing with his hand on the latch of a rat cage, and a monstrous cat with the markings of a Siamese was scraping her claws on the floor, gathering her feet under her to spring. It was Beautiful, my cat, and yet it wasn't. She was almost as large as a lion. Her eyes glowed like the headlights of a car.
Dr. Roth cowered back against the tier of rat cages, holding a hand in front of him to ward off the attack. I watched from the doorway, and I tried to open my mouth to scream at her to stop, not to jump. But I seemed paralyzed. I couldn't move a muscle or make a sound.
I saw the cat's tail grow larger. Her eyes seemed to shoot blue sparks. And then she leaped.
Dr. Roth's arm was knocked aside as though it had been a toothpick. Her claws sank into his shoulders and her white, sharp teeth found his throat. He screamed once, and then the scream became a gurgle and he lay on the cement floor, dead, in a puddle of his blood. And the cat, backing away from him, was shrinking to her real size, getting smaller, her claws still scraping the cement as she backed away. . . .
And then, still frozen with the horror of that dream, I began to know that I was dreaming, that the sound I heard was the opening of a window.
I sat up in bed, fast. I opened my mouth to yell for Jack. Some-one stood there, just inside the window!
And then, before I had yelled, I saw that it was Jack who stood there. Enough light came in from the other room that I could be sure of that. He'd raised the shade.
He was crouched down now, and his eyes, level with the middle of the lower pane, stared through it into the night outside.
He must have heard the springs creak as I sat up. He turned. "Shhh," he said.
"It's all right--I think."
He put the window back down again then, and threw over the lock. He pulled down the shade and came over to the bed and sat down in a chair beside it.
"Sorry I woke you," he said, very quietly. "Can you go back to sleep, or do you want to talk a while?"
"What time is it?" I asked.
"Three-forty. You were asleep only half an hour. I'm sorry, but--"
"But what? What's been happening? Did you think you heard a sound outside?"
"Not outside the window, no. But a few minutes ago I thought I heard someone try the knob of the hall door. But when I got there and listened, I couldn't hear anything."
"It could have been Alister Cole," I said, "if he got in the back way. Wheeler isn't watching the back door."
"That's what I thought, even though I didn't hear anything back there. So I went to the window. I thought if I could attract Wheeler's attention, he'd come in the front way. Then I'd take a chance opening the hall door--with my gun ready, of course. If Cole was there, we'd have him between us."
"Did you get Wheeler's attention?"
He shook his head slowly. "His car isn't where it was. You can't even see it from the window. Maybe he moved it to a different spot where he thought he'd be less conspicuous, or could watch better."