Hell's Gate

CHAPTER 7

Once, he opened his eyes and saw a faint gray light seeping through the windows and across the floor, playing like soft fingers on his eyes. He thought about getting up, seriously thought about it. That seemed like the proper thing to do. He got his hands under himself and pushed, managed to raise his head a foot off the floor. Then the little strength he had left was gone, carried away by the fingers of gray light. His head fell and he cracked his chin on the floor. There was no more light at all.

He was in a beautifully furnished room of pleasant and airy proportions, waiting for something, though he could not remember what. He paced around, admiring the decorating job, wondering if the Fabulous Bureau had done it, just generally passing time. When he touched the top of a smooth and darkly finished writing desk, the thing opened like a mouth. There were little sharp-edged teeth made of pipe. It slammed shut, trying to chomp off his hand. He retreated from the desk and sat down in a comfortable black chair, sucking the ends of his fingers which the desk had barely nipped. Suddenly bars slid out of the chair arms across his lap, locking him in. Nothing, it seemed, was what it appeared to be. He screamed as the chair began to swallow him.

Someone told him to take it easy, that they were going to get help, get help very soon… now… He smiled- or at least he tried to smile-and told them that was all very nice and quite thoughtful of them but that the chair was swallowing him and could they please hurry. The black chair. The comfortable one. DO SOMETHING! Then the swirling face that he could not see clearly and the reassuring voice that accompanied it were gone. He was fading back into the room with the vicious chair and the cannibalistic desk.

He didn't want to be in this room. He looked for a way out, found a tall, white door set flush with the walls. As he walked toward it, the desk to his right began flapping its wooden mouth and growling angrily. The chair, taking up the chorus, began thumping around, rattling its sturdy wooden legs against the floor and slowly converging on him. The ends of the legs were carved like animal paws, and Salsbury was certain he saw the toes wriggle. He hurried to the white door, flung it open, and found there was no escape. The door was nothing more than another mouth. He had opened it and stepped slightly into it. Beyond was a pink, wet throat, the heavy nodes of the tonsils hanging like stalactites. The big, black teeth started coming down to cut him in half. Oddly enough, he noticed that their biting match would be perfect. Behind, the chair rattled closer, snarling thickly. He screamed again.

This time when he woke from the room of living furniture, there were two voices. He recognized one as the same that had gotten him to open his eyes earlier. It was soft, concerned, and sweet, the sort one hears in television commercials and over public address systems in some of the more pleasant airline terminals. The new voice was gruff, older, definitely male. It was closer to Salsbury, almost directly over him.

Then he saw the face that matched the second voice: heavy-jowled and wide-mouthed with a ski-slope nose, two velvety black eyes, a heavy, bushy mustache the same gun-metal gray as the thinning head of hair.

“I think it's chiefly exhaustion,” the man said.

“Will he be all right then?” the woman asked.

“With some rest, yes.”

“What about his… his chest?”

“Nothing deep here. I don't see how the deuce he got that. Doesn't make sense.”

“You've seen the car?”

“Yes. That still answers nothing.”

“Will it hurt when you take the slivers out?”

“It won't hurt me a bit,” the man said. When she slapped him playfully, he said, “I've never seen you so solicitous of anyone.” He chuckled deep in his throat. “Especially a man.”

“You're an old goat,” she said.

“And you're a young lamb. About time you found yourself another pasture mate. One marriage doesn't mean a thing, dear. This one might not be anything like Henry.”

“You're insane!” she said. Then she said, “He isn't.”

The man chuckled again. “Well, it won't hurt him. I'll just give him a sedative first to make sure. A mild one. He won't feel a thing.”

“I don't want to have a sedative,” Salsbury said, still dazed. His voice sounded as if he had the vocal chords of a frog.

“What's that?” the man asked.

The woman's face appeared, a truly lovely face that he had seen somewhere before… Certainly… he just could not remember where. He could not remember much of anything, in fact.

“Vic,” she said, reaching a hand to touch his face.

“Shush,” the gruff man said. “He's delirious. You can wait to talk to him.”

“If you give me a sedative,” Salsbury said, “The door will swallow me up.”

“No it won't,” the gruff one answered. “I've muzzled the door.”

“The chair, then. The chair or the desk will eat me alive!”

“Not much chance,” he said. “I've given both of those devils a very strict warning.”

Then there was a sudden sharpness in Salsbury's arm, a coolness, a moment of exhilaration, and darkness. It was a quiet, empty darkness this time, without any mystery room or cannibalistic furniture or other horrors. He settled into it, pulled a flap of blackness across him like a blanket, and stopped thinking.

When he woke much later, he was one big stomach. There was no room in him for any sensation but hunger. He blinked at the white ceiling until he was certain he was not dizzy, then took stock of his body, lying there quietly letting the nerves signal the brain, cautiously interpreting the reports they made. There was a dull ache in his jaw; he remembered cracking it against the floor. His hands tingled as if he might have scraped them. His chest felt odd, as if it might be afire, though the feeling was not altogether unpleasant. His feet were tender; he had a brief memory of running barefoot across sharp stones.

Then the whole fabric of his memory returned like a gunshot. He sat up in bed, trembling, expecting a hot and golden beam of light to slice through him. Instead, he saw only Lynda Harvey.

She had been sitting in the emerald colored chair to the left of the bed. She rose and came to him, put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him down. He allowed himself to relax. The robot was dead. A pile of debris in the other bedroom. He could afford to relax now, surely.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

He stretched, considered the question, said, “Not too bad, considering.”

“Don't try to get up. I'm supposed to feed and water you the moment you come around.”

“I'm about to start gnawing on the furniture.”

“No need. I've got everything downstairs that you'll need. Give me a few minutes.” She started for the door.

“Wait.”

“Huh?” She half turned, stunning in profile.

“How did you find me? Who was that man poking at me? What-”

“Later. Let the cook do her job first.” Then she was gone, trim legs flashing brown. He leaned into the pillow, smiling, and thought about her puttering around in his kitchen. He liked that thought very much. But there were other thoughts which he was not too fond of at all

He thought of the robot It had taken so long to kill simply because it was so loaded with backup circuits and secondary tubes to replace primaries when they were shattered by fragmenting slugs. He was also unsettled by the consideration that it was his almost superhuman reflex pattern that had saved him and that a normal man (like Harold Jacobi) would not have survived. So it seemed that the robot had come to kill Jacobi, not Salsbury. Is that what the computer meant when it said Jacobi would have died in a month anyway? But a month had not passed. Hardly a week, even. Oh, yes, two weeks of sleep in the cave. But that was still more than a week shy of a month.

Was that why the 810-40.04 was maintaining silence? Did it think the target date was still over a week away? If so, Salsbury hoped, if there were more to this operation, the damn machine broke silence before any future encounters with the enemy.

As there should most certainly be. Nasty encounters.

The lizard-things were not the type to give up easily. He had no doubt at all that the robot had come through the portal in the cellar wall, through the blue circle of light, the window to another world.

But why hadn't one of the lizard-things come to do the job itself? Fear? That seemed unlikely. The lizards, he thought, would show little fear in a battle situation. They had the look of a race that had come up too fast. Technology had boomed, had grown like a nuclear mushroom, while their cultural and social development had progressed slowly from the caveman stage. They looked like savages-keenly intelligent, clever savages. Savagery is only applicable in a social sense; they looked as if killing and other assorted uglinesses were a very recent part of their heritage.

When would they send the next robot through the portal? Or make their first in-person visit? He thought a moment, realized all the nights of the singing noise and the arrival of the robot had been at approximately one-thirty in the morning. Whether that was the only time the portal could be opened or the time most preferred, he did not know. But by one-thirty tomorrow morning, he better be prepared.

She came back into the room, carrying a tray which she slipped onto the night table. She sat on the edge of the bed. “Toast. Buttered, although the doctor said plain. Chicken soup with noodles, though the doctor said just broth.”

“You get a kick out of disregarding doctor's orders?”

She ignored him. “Also fruited jello, a glass of orange juice, cuts of bologna and cheese and tomato. Coffee. Broth is for sick little girls, not beefy gorilla types like you.”

He tasted the soup, said it was delicious. After she smiled, he said, “Now how did you find me?”

She hopped onto the bed, sitting in a yoga position, a delightful expanse of brown legs showing. She seemed unaware of her own attractiveness. “I was handling the rental of a Barberry Road cottage out this way. When I was done there, I decided to stop by since you were only five minutes out of my way. I called you last evening,” and here she blushed, “but you weren't home yet I thought I'd stop by this morning and see what you'd found about that dead man in Harrisburg.

“I parked out front behind your car, saw its door open and the ceiling light on. I shut it, wondering why you'd forget something like that and let your battery run down. Then I saw the smashed window. I thought you'd had an accident, I came up and knocked on the porch door. You didn't answer, but I could see the front door was open. I went to the front door, shouted for you, and was greeted by Intrepid. He yipped like a mad dog. Scared me at first. He kept stumbling up the stairs, then falling down, then stumbling back up until I understood he wanted me to follow him, just like in Lassie movies. I found you lying here on the floor.”

He finished the soup, started on the cold cuts and cheese. “The doctor. Who was he?”

“Jake West. He's been our family doctor for years. He's stopping by tomorrow to look you over, chiefly to find out what happened to you. After he left, I found that your bathroom door-”

He found it a bit hard to swallow, washed the meat down with juice.

“What did happen?” she asked, green eyes wide, leaning slightly forward toward him.

“I'd rather not say just yet. Maybe later. It's hard to believe anyway.”

He expected a typical female reaction: sly wheedling at first, then cajoling and fencing to get him to spill something, and when that did not work, a bit of conjecture with an attempt to get him to agree or disagree. Maybe some indignation after that, then fury in hopes a woman's anger could break him. But she simply shrugged, smiled and was perfectly willing to forget it- at least outwardly.

He was thankful for her reaction. How could he have gone about explaining this sort of thing? Lynda, there was a robot here last night. He was sent by a bunch of lizard-things. Intelligent lizard-things, Lynda. He came to kill me. Had a vibrabeam in his finger, for Christ's sake! Lynda, I killed Harold Jacobi.

“But I can tell you something I found in Harrisburg,” he said.

She grinned, leaned forward again.

He went through the story, about the body being a mistake, about Mrs. Dill, about buying art supplies.

“They came,” she said. “A drafting table and everything. I had them pile it all in the living room because I didn't know where to tell them to put everything. They brought it around two.”

“In the afternoon? What time is it?”

“Nine o'clock in the evening,” she said. “You slept all day.”

One-thirty was just four and a half hours away. He would have to get rid of her before that and plan something for the lizard-things and their robot zombies. Well, he could let her stay another two hours perhaps

“Why did you go to all this trouble?” he asked.

“I guess I'm just the motherly type. I take in lost kittens, tattered dogs, birds with broken wings-”

“You're fishing.”

“… and half-crippled men with bloody chests,” she finished, blushing. “I'm sorry. You don't want to talk about it, and I don't want to force you. You know, of course, my curiosity is eating me alive, malting up stories far worse than the truth, most likely. But in your own good time.”

She was a magnificent woman, far more lovely with her crooked front tooth (which he had just noticed) than a hundred starlets with plasticized lips and artificial mouths behind them. She radiated an earthy sensuality that almost had an odor, a taste, a touch. She carried herself so casually yet coolly. He found that he liked her far more than he had realized; maybe it went beyond a mere liking.

“How is Henry these days?” he asked.

The question had the effect of a pile driver coming down on top of her head. Her face grew depressed, then savage. She fisted her little hands, then seemed to grow calmer. “Why do you ask that?”

He felt instantly crude. It was not the thing to do, dredge up old pains and make a friend relive them. He realized he was beginning to feel possessive towards her and that the question had been spawned by jealousy. “I heard Dr. West mention him just before he put me to sleep.”

“Let's say I'll tell you later, Vic. That makes us even.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I should have known that was restricted grounds for conversation.”

“Oh, hell, now it sounds like a 'dark mysterious mess,' which it really isn't at all.”

“Nice weather we've been having, huh?”

“I want to tell you,” she said. “Does that make me an emotional bore?”

“Do you spill your woes to everyone?”

“You're the first.”

“Which doesn't mean you're working in an emotional bore pattern.”

“Why should I want to tell you, though? I mean, I don't really know you. In fact, I disliked you at first. You were cold and uncommunicative. Even when you started being friendly, I thought you seemed sort of-”

“Yes?”

“Well, hollow. Like you were pretending to be someone you really weren't.”

The response shook him considerably, though he thought maybe he concealed his surprise. “Now?”

“Well, there's still something odd about you. But you seem fuller, more of a person than before.”

Perhaps, Salsbury thought, that was because he had recently gone through hell and come back alive. Trials made any man a more solid individual.

They looked at each other, felt their gazes click and mesh. They each held a new understanding of their friendship, one that either would make it strained or help it grow into more than friendship. Slowly, haltingly, she told him about Henry.

Henry March was brutishly handsome, rugged, with a muscular body he preened as a cat preened. Dimples in his cheeks. Slightly conceited, not boringly so. From a well-to-do family. Himself a graduate of Princeton. A social figure. To an eighteen-year-old girl who had been reading Hemingway since she was thirteen, he seemed almost perfect. At first, the marriage was good: the joy of taking meals together, of finding his dark hairs on the brush, the smell of his cologne, the sound of electric razors at early hours, the touch of warm flesh in the middle of the night, both waking with surprise at their separate but similar needs… Then something happened.

At first, he began complaining of her coffee. Then her meals. Then the acts of their most private sanctums. She began to wonder why she was no good in bed. Or at anything else. Under his tongue, she lost weight, began mixing herself extra drinks to be able to face him when he came home from his graduate classes.

There is a sort of man who can never face his own inadequacies, who must find a scapegoat. In America, where success is considered the only essential commodity of life, this man abounds. He drives his women to despair, eventually breaks them. The woman is his child-raiser, his maid, cook, and sex machine. No thought is given to her, for she is merely a thing, a necessary acquisition on the road to success. These are the most despicable criminals of contemporary society. They kill human dignity. But first they torture it.

Henry was one of these.

Relatively few women escape them. The ones who do are usually shocked into awareness when they take an outside job out of desperation to prove they are worth something. They find they are good workers, earn promotions and praise. Suddenly they see through their

Henry and seek a quick divorce or enter into a knock-down, drag-out, teeth and nail, fist and feet fight to bring reality back into their marriage. Or maybe they have an affair and find out they are good in bed. Or finally something happens to show that hubby isn't perfect either.

She came home from work early because the Dean of Instruction (her boss) was ill and closed his office. She found Henry in bed with the girl. A student. Sophomore. In Henry's class. Buying her grade, apparently. When Henry, confused, almost incoherent, took the girl away, Lynda went into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet.

“God, Vic,” Lynda said, taking a sip of his coffee, replacing the cup on his bed tray, “what was so bad was that when he returned he tried to act like he was still on top. He bullied me, told me she was better in bed than me. And she was a scrawny nothing! Her face wasn't even pretty. Tiny eyes, close-set. No chin. And he was trying to make me think she was more desirable than me. He almost succeeded. He almost really did. He had me so twisted up that-”

Still sitting yoga fashion, she lowered her head onto her breasts, balled her fists at her side, and cried softly. He sat the tray aside, brought her to him, stroked her yellow hair, murmured comforting things to her. She had bottled this up, thinking it was over. She had only wanted out of the marriage, time to find herself as a human being. The quickest way to do that was to deny that she had been-almost-turned into an egoless, self-pitying wretch by a man unworthy of her pity, unworthy of her. Now she had been forced to pull the cork and taste what was in the bottle. The fumes had made her nauseous.

He caressed her, trying to think how to calm a woman. When her crying softened, he raised her head and kissed her. He found her lips were parted. There was a moment when the world was nothing more than a tongue. Then they pulled apart, breathless, and engaged their eyes again. She came back after a moment, more demanding now. His hand found the light, flicked it off. Somehow, he had a strength he was unaware of.