Gordon Randolph had excelled at half a dozen different careers. Michael wondered why he had never gone on the stage. He had an actor’s instinct for a good, punchy line of dialogue.

Then Michael shook his head, as his habitual sense of fairness reproached him. Gordon didn’t have to dramatize the situation. It was theatrical enough. And he, Michael, had provoked that simple, shocking punch line. He had more or less set it up. Nobody could resist a line like that one.

“Six months ago she tried to kill me.”

The man has guts, Michael thought. He’s still there-not only in the same house, but right in the next room.

Gordon’s description of that incredible event hadn’t been theatrical at all; if anything, it had been understated. But Michael’s writer’s imagination had not required any details. He could picture it only too vividly: to wake from a sound sleep to see, standing over you, a figure out of a nightmare-or out of a Greek tragedy, a figure with the terrifying beauty and malignancy of Medea, arm upraised, knife poised to strike-and to know that the would-be killer was your own adored wife… No wonder primitive people had believed in demoniacal possession.

Because he had the muscles of an athlete and the quickness of a cat, Randolph had survived the encounter, but he still bore the mark of it, a long, puckered scar along his forearm. Michael’s insistent imagination presented him with another picture that was even worse than the first. To wrestle for your very life with some Thing that had the cunning and strength of the insane, and yet the familiar soft body of the woman you loved; held back by fear of hurting the beloved, but knowing that if you failed to hold her, the Other would have your life. Demoniac possession? God, yes, surely that was how you would think of it, despite the centuries of rational skepticism that had supposedly killed that superstition.

The soup on the bottom of the pan was scorched. Michael’s food always was; he cooked everything at top heat. He ate absently, without noticing the taste. There was a bad taste in his mouth anyhow. That house-that sick, evil house…

He paused, the spoon dripping unnoticed onto his knee, as his mind grappled with this new and absorbing notion. Evil. Now why had he thought of that word? It was a concept he avoided because it was at once too simple and too complex-meaningless, he would have said once. And yet, during that whole weekend, the word had come up again and again. They had all used it, talked about it.

A thud and then a clatter came from the dark kitchen, and Michael jumped and swore as he noticed the puddle of soup on his trouser leg. He put the spoon back into the pan and swabbed ineffectually at the spot with his hand. That only made it worse. Then he looked up, glaring, as the pad of heavy paws announced the arrival of Napoleon.

The cat stood in the doorway, returning Michael’s glare with interest. He was an enormous animal, as big as a small dog, and uglier than any dog Michael had ever met. His ancestry must have included cats of every color, for his fur was a hideous blend of every hue permitted to felines-orange, black, brown, white, gray, yellow, in incoherent patches. Now he looked leprous, having lost a good deal of fur in his encounters with other tomcats. One ear was pretty well gone, and a scar on one side of his whiskered countenance had fixed his jaws into a permanent maniacal grin. From the glow in his yellow eyes, Michael deduced that he had just returned from another victory. After a moment, Napoleon nodded to himself, sat down, lifted his back leg into an impossible position, and began licking his flank.

“Don’t bleed on the rug,” Michael said automatically.

Napoleon looked up from his first aid, gave Michael a contemptuous stare, and returned to his labors. Michael returned to his thoughts, which were considerably less pleasant than Napoleon’s.

Homicidal mania. They didn’t call it that nowadays, did they? Paranoia? Schizophrenia? He shook his head disgustedly. Gordon was right: words, words, words. They meant nothing to a man whose wife had tried to kill him.

Evil. Another word, but it was a word rooted deep in human experience; it satisfied the demand for understanding more than did the artificial composites of a new discipline. It had the solid backing of centuries of emotional connotations. It brought back references from every literary source from Holy Writ to Fu Manchu. Out of this accumulation of literary and racial memory, one quotation came to Michael’s mind:

By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something evil this way comes.

Nobody ever expressed an idea quite as aptly as Shakespeare. But in this case the evil was not approaching. It was already there-in that house.

Napoleon finished his ablutions and stalked over to lean heavily on Michael’s leg. It was his only means of expressing an emotion, which Michael, in his softer moments, liked to interpret as affection. Someone had once said of that hard-bitten monarch, Henry VII, that he was not, to put it mildly, uxorious. In the same vein of irony one might say of Napoleon that he was not a lap cat. He did lean, occasionally, and his weight being what it was, the effect was noticeable. Michael got up with a weary sigh and extracted a can of cat food from the supply on the shelf. Affection? Gluttony, rather. Napoleon applied himself to supper with uncouth gulps, and Michael wandered back to the couch.

Not even the cat, for whom he felt a sneaking fondness compounded with envy, could distract him from the black current of his thoughts. How the hell could he write a biography of a man who was as hag-ridden as Gordon Randolph without tearing the man’s soul to bloody shreds? Especially if he went on in this vein of half-baked mysticism. Evil deeds, evil men, he had said-but Evil, in the abstract? If there was evil in the beautiful house, it had to emanate from some living individual.

There weren’t that many candidates. The revolting old woman, Andrea, was one of them; she was a constant visitor, and she was crazy as a loon. Michael wondered how genuine her belief in witchcraft was. Ninety-nine percent, he thought. What other hang-ups did she have? Certainly the old woman’s blend of malice and superstition was not a healthy influence; but how profoundly had it really affected Linda Randolph? Had Andrea implanted her own insane ideas, or merely strengthened neuroses that had already begun to form? Even insanity has its own brand of logic. The paranoid schizophrenic may kill a complete stranger, suddenly and seemingly without cause; but in terms of the murderer’s delusion, his action makes perfectly good sense. As the object of a widespread conspiracy aimed at his life and reason, he is only acting in self-defense when he kills one of the conspirators. Was that why Linda had attacked her husband? Could such a delusion have been planted by a third party-such as Andrea?

Then there was Briggs, the fat little man who looked like a moribund pig. Physiognomy was not a science. Under his pale, pudgy façade, Briggs might have the soul of a saint. But Michael doubted it. Briggs’s feelings toward the Randolphs were obvious. He idolized his employer and resented-because he desired-his employer’s wife. Which was natural. Randolph had been modestly vague about the circumstances that had brought Briggs to his present post, but Michael had got the impression of persecution, a miscarriage of justice, the loss of a profession for which the man had prepared all his life. Briggs wasn’t the type to square his shoulders and march back out into the arena after someone had kicked him where it hurt. Randolph ’s offer of a job might, literally, have saved his life. No wonder the little man admired his boss. His attitude toward Linda was equally comprehensible, if less attractive. Malice-plenty of it. Michael wondered whether Gordon was too damned high-minded to see how his secretary felt about his beautiful wife. But Briggs’s brand of feeble frustration was not evil, not in the sense Michael meant.