“Dr. Slyker,” I said as evenly as I could, “I-”
“Quiet! Activating a ghost for viewing involves certain risks. Silence is essential, though it will be necessary to use—very briefly— the suppressed Tchaikovsky music which I turned off so quickly earlier this evening.” He busied himself with the hi fi for a few moments. “But partly because of that it will be necessary to put away all the other folders and the four ghosts of Ewie we aren’t using, and lock the file drawers. Otherwise there might be complications.”
I decided to try once more. “Before you go any further, Dr. Slyker,” I began, “I would really like to explain—”
He didn’t say another word, merely reached back across the desk again. My eyes caught something coming over my shoulder fast and the next instant it clapped down over my mouth and nose, not quite covering my eyes, but lapping up to them—something soft and dry and clinging and faintly crinkled feeling. I gasped and I could feel the gag sucking in, but not a bit of air came through it. That scared me seven-eighths of the rest of the way to oblivion, of course, and I froze. Then I tried a very cautious inhalation and a little air did seep through. It was wonderfully cool coming into the furnace of my lungs, that little suck of air—I felt I hadn’t breathed for a week.
Slyker looked at me with a little smile. “I never say ‘Quiet’ twice, Carr. The foam plastic of that gag is another of Henri Artois’ inventions. It consists of millions of tiny valves. As long as you breathe softly— very, very softly, Carr—they permit ample air to pass, but if you gasp or try to shout through it, they’ll close up tight. A wonderfully soothing device. Compose yourself, Carr; your life depends on it.”
I have never experienced such utter helplessness. I found that the slightest muscular tension, even crooking a finger, made my breathing irregular enough so that the valves started to close and I was hi the fringes of suffocation. I could see and hear what was going on, but I dared not react, I hardly dared think. I had to pretend that most of my body wasn’t there (the chameleon plastic helped!), only a pair of lungs working constantly but with infinite caution.
Slyker had just set the Cordew folder back in its drawer, without closing it, and started to gather up the other scattered folders, when he touched the desk again and the lights went out. I have mentioned that the place was completely sealed against light. The darkness was complete.
“Don’t be alarmed, Carr,” Slyker’s voice came chuckling through it. “In fact, as I am sure you realize, you had better not be. I can tidy up just as handily—working by touch is one of my major skills, my sight and hearing being rather worse than appears—and even your eyes must be fully accommodated if you’re to see anything at all. I repeat, don’t be alarmed, Carr, least of all by ghosts.”
I would never have expected it, but in spite of the spot I was in (which actually did seem to have its soothing effects), I still got a little kick—a very little one—out of thinking I was going to see some sort of secret vision of Evelyn Cordew, real in some sense or faked by a master faker. Yet at the same tune, and I think beyond all my fear for myself, I felt a dispassionate disgust at the way Slyker reduced all human drives and desires to a lust for power, of which the chair imprisoning me, the “Siegfried Line” door, and the files of ghosts, real or imagined, were perfect symbols.
Among immediate worries, although I did a pretty good job of suppressing all of them, the one that nagged at me the most was that Slyker had admitted to me the inadequacy of his two major senses. I didn’t think he would make that admission to someone who was going to live very long.
The black minutes dragged on. I heard from time to time the rustle of folders, but only one soft thud of a file drawer closing, so I knew he wasn’t finished yet with the putting-away and locking-up job.
I concentrated the free corner of my mind—the tiny part I dared spare from breathing—on trying to hear something else, but I couldn’t even catch the background noise of the city. I decided the office must be soundproofed as well as light-sealed. Not that it mattered, since I couldn’t get a signal out anyway.
Then a noise did come—a solid snap that I’d heard just once before, but knew instantly. It was the sound of the bolts in the office door retracting. There was something funny about it that took me a moment to figure out: there had been no preliminary grating of the key.
For a moment too I thought Slyker had crept noiselessly to the door, but then I realized that the rustling of folders at the desk had kept up all the time.
And the rustling of folders continued. I guessed Slyker had not noticed the door. He hadn’t been exaggerating about his bad hearing.
There was the faint creaking of the hinges, once, twice—as if the door were being opened and closed— then again the solid snap of the bolts. That puzzled me, for there should have been a big flash of light from the corridor—unless the lights were all out.
I couldn’t hear any sound after that, except the continued rustling of the file folders, though I listened as hard as the job of breathing let me—and in a crazy kind of way the job of cautious breathing helped my hearing, because it made me hold absolutely still yet without daring to tense up. I knew that someone was in the office with us and that Slyker didn’t know it. The black moments seemed to stretch out forever, as if an edge of eternity had got hooked into our time-stream.
All of a sudden there was a swish, like that of a sheet being whipped through the ah- very fast, and a grunt of surprise from Slyker that started toward a screech and then was cut off as sharp as if he’d been gagged nose-and-mouth like me. Then there came the scuff of feet and the squeal of the castors of a chair, the sound of a struggle, not of two people struggling, but of a man struggling against restraints of some sort, a frantic confined heaving and panting. I wondered if Slyker’s little lump of chair had sprouted restraints like mine, but that hardly made sense.
Then abruptly there was the whistle of breath, as if his nostrils had been uncovered, but not his mouth. He was panting through his nose. I got a mental picture of Slyker tied to his chair some way and eying the darkness just as I was doing.
Finally out of the darkness came a voice I knew very well because I’d heard it often enough in movie houses and from Jeff Grain’s tape-recorder. It had the old familiar caress mixed with the old familiar giggle, the naivet6 and the knowingness, the warm sympathy and cool-headedness, the high-school charmer and the sybil. It was Evelyn Cordew’s voice, all right.
“Oh for goodness sake stop threshing around, Emmy. It won’t help you shake off that sheet and it makes you look so funny. Yes, I said ‘look,’ Emmy—you’d be surprised at how losing five ghosts improves your eyesight, like having veils taken away from in front of them; you get more sensitive all over.