The Long Sleep

XXI

His deception worked well.

They passed two days alone in their suite. They made love in every style, every position, at any hour of the day or night. They read and watched old movies on the gram screen and made love again and slept and napped and talked. She was quick to laugh, witty, and beautiful: she entranced him, even though he knew that they were living a lie. He supposed that he had been hypno-programmed not to want to leave the room; therefore, he didn't once mention the world outside, as if they would spend the rest of their natural lives inside the hotel.

Two days later, when Richard delivered their dinner on a silver cart, he was confident enough to turn his back on Joel. He knelt down and took the food out of the heated storage compartment beneath the cart,

That was a mistake.

Joel picked up a silver wine goblet and knocked the other man unconscious with two savage blows.

Red wine speckled the carpet and showered across the rumpled bed sheets.

Allison said: “You weren't fooled.”

“No.”

“Don't hurt me.”

“Only a little.”

He clipped her gently on her delicate chin. She should have gone down, but she only swayed on the balls of her feet and made a face as if she were about to scream for help. He chopped at her jaw again, harder this time, surprised at her strength. She slumped into his arms.

“Sorry,” he said. He lifted her and carried, her to the bed where she would be comfortable.

Richard groaned, shook his head, and tried to get back onto his knees.

“Hold it,” Joel said. He used the goblet again: two sharp blows to the back of the neck.

He listened.

The house was quiet. No alarm had gone off; no one had heard or seen what he'd done. Yet. However, if Richard were too long in reporting back to Galing, it was all over before it began.

He bent down, rolled Richard onto his back, and searched the man's pockets. He found the hypodermic glove in the inside pocket of the white serving jacket. It was thicker than he had thought it would be, and the rolled cuff was a hollow tube in which most of the glove's mechanisms lay. He pulled it on and gave both Richard and Allison a dose of their own medicine.

Then he picked up the room service phone and, when Henry Galing answered, said, “I think you'd better come up here right away.” He hung up.

He went and stood by the door, stretched his fingers in the glove, and raised his hand.

A minute passed.

Then another…

Come on, dammit!

No one knocked. The door was suddenly flung open, and the faceless man came into the room. He was wearing a hypodermic glove.

Joel stepped away from the wall and used his own glove on the back of the freak's neck before it had time to turn on him.

Galing came in a moment later, confident, sure that all was in order now, not aware of how drastically the balance of power had shifted. When he saw Joel, he turned and ran. He didn't make it out of the room. When Joel's glove touched him, he sighed and took one more step and crumbled.

For an instant Joel was elated-and then he heard quick footsteps on the stairs. Gina! He had forgotten the damned maid.

He ran out into the upstairs corridor of the Galing mansion and hurried to the stairs. She was in the downstairs hall. He went after her, taking two steps at a time. By the time he gained the downstairs hall, she was in the kitchen.

“Wait!”

She didn't wait, of course.

She started for the back door, but she realized that she would never make it across the lawn with him at her heels. As a small cry escaped her lips, she turned, pushed a chair at him, and ran for the cellar door.

Stumbling over the chair, kicking it out of his way, he lunged for her.

She went through the cellar door and pulled it shut behind her, barely avoiding the swipe of his glove. The hypodermic needles struck the door and bent. He tried the knob; it was locked. When he put his ear to the door, he heard her going down the basement steps as fast as she could.

So close. So damned close!

He tried to force the door. He wrenched the knob violently back and forth, applied his shoulder to the panel. It was stronger than it appeared to be. Perhaps the wood veneer concealed not porous panelboard but metal.

He pulled open one kitchen drawer after another until he found a knife, then went back to the cellar door. He slipped the blade between the edge of the door and the frame, tried to force up the lock. But it was too sophisticated a mechanism for that crude an approach.

Worried now, he threw the knife down.

If there had been nothing down there except an empty cellar, he would have blockaded the door from this side and would have forgotten all about her. As long as she was out of his way, he didn't care if she were conscious or drugged. But she now had access to those nutrient tanks in which other men and women rested and waited to be called to action.

She would know how to wake them. He was positive of that. In no time at all, she would rally a small army. And then she would move against him.

He stripped off the damaged glove and threw if down.

He had still not won.