Chapter 10

I

SHE MOVED VERY SLOWLY. WHEN SHE REACHED THE couch, she stood motionless for several long moments. He could see the knife distinctly now, it was only inches from his face. It hung from fingers so lax that they seemed about to lose their grip altogether. He could hear her breathing. It was quick and deep, long gasps of effort.

Her fingers tightened and her arm began to move. Up-slowly, in abrupt jerks and starts, as if struggling against a force that tried to hold it. Michael watched in an unholy fascination; the whole bizarre episode might have been happening to someone else, with himself an unwilling and helpless spectator. Now her arm was high above her head. A strained, impractical position for a downward blow…The arm started down.

Michael moved. To his outraged nerves it seemed as if the whole thing were taking place in slow motion: that he had an infinite amount of time in which to act before the knife struck. In an almost leisurely movement his right arm lifted and his fingers clamped around the wrist of the hand that held the knife.

His touch affected her like a jolt of electric current; every muscle in her body stiffened, her wrist twisted frantically in his grasp. She screamed, a thin, high sound that was more like the voice of an animal in agony than anything human. It was the scream as much as anything else that made Michael take more than defensive action. A few more moments of that, and someone would call a cop.

He tried not to hurt her. Rolling sideways off the couch, he pulled her down with him, pinning her kicking legs with his body, his right hand still tight around her wrist, his left fumbling for her mouth. They struggled in darkness; the back of the couch cut off the feeble light from the bedroom. He could feel her struggling, feel the writhing of her lips against his palm. He had half expected the maniacal strength he had read about, but he encountered very little difficulty; she was a small woman, and it took only seconds to immobilize and quiet her. Flaccid and cold under his hands, she lay still. He couldn’t even feel her breathing.

It never occurred to him that her collapse might have been a ruse. He scrambled up. His need for light was more than a need to see, it was a craving for the power that opposed the dark.

She looked like a sick child in a sleep troubled by pain-tumbled hair, pale face, mouth drawn down in a pathetic grimace. She was wearing his old bathrobe, which had helped to hamper her movements; the struggle had torn it open, but she was still wearing her slip and underclothing. Michael revised his comparison. Not a child, no. But she looked pitifully young. The wrist he had twisted seemed too fragile to resist the lightest touch. By her right hand lay his big carving knife.

Michael kicked it out of the way. He knelt down and put his ear to her breast. Faint and abnormally slow, but it was there-the pounding of her heart. He straightened, studying the pale face with a mixture of different terrors. The closed lids veiled the eyes; he wondered what he would see in those eyes when the lids lifted.

After a moment he stood up and went into the bedroom. When he came back, she hadn’t moved. Carefully he wrapped the bathrobe around her; the coldness of her skin and the sluggish pulse suggested shock. Then he set about the rest of the job. His mouth was set in a tight, twisted line as, using the neckties he had brought from the bedroom, he tied her wrists and ankles together.

A pale, ugly dawn was breaking before she came to. Michael had tried everything he could think of to bring her out of her faint-wondering, all the while, whether he really wanted her to wake up. Faces in sleep or unconsciousness were like blank pages; waking intelligence, the expression of eyes and mouth, are what give individuality and character. What would he see when her eyes opened? The face, now familiar and beloved, of the girl he wanted; or the Medea figure who had stood over him with a knife?

He had carried her back into the bedroom and piled every blanket he owned over the waxen body. He had bathed her face and rubbed her wrists. The slow, mechanical breathing did not change; the muscles of face and body remained flaccid. And the night wore on. It seemed to Michael at times as if the sun would never rise, as if some astronomical miscalculation had stopped the earth on its axis. Then the first sullen streaks stained the clouds; and her eyes opened.

Michael saw what he had hoped, but not really expected, to see. His relief was so great that he dropped with a thud onto the edge of the bed. But the realization that dawned in her face, as memory returned, was almost worse than the madness he had feared. Her horror and consternation were genuine; if he had had any lingering doubts of her honesty, they vanished then. Her eyes moved from his face, downward, toward her bound wrists and ankles. They were hidden under the piles of blankets, but he knew she could feel the bonds.

“I’ll take them off,” he said quickly. “I just wasn’t sure…It’s all right now, I’ll get them off…”

He turned the covers back, and she twisted frantically away from his hands.

“No-no! Leave them on, don’t let me-”

“It’s gone,” Michael said, hardly knowing what he was saying. “It’s all right.”

“How do you know?” Her voice was quieter, under a fierce control, but she still held herself away from him. Michael’s hands dropped back onto the blankets.

“Don’t you see,” she went on, “that we can’t take the chance? I can’t take it, even if you will. Call your friend. Call Bellevue, some hospital. And leave me tied until they come for me.”

Michael shook his head dumbly. He was incapable of speech, but she read his face, and her own expression changed. Her eyes flickered and then dropped away from his.

“All right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was upset. Untie me.”

She held her bound wrists toward him. The cloth was soft, and he had not tied the knots tightly; but he saw the red marks on her wrists, and his first impulse was to do as she asked. Yet he hesitated-noting her reluctance to meet his eyes, remembering the quick, cunning expression that had flickered across her face.

“What will you do if I untie you?” he asked.

Her silence was all the answer he needed. The minute his back was turned, she would run, and not stop running until she had found a safe padded cell in which to hide. She might even go back to Gordon, she was desperate enough for that… And through the black despair that enveloped him he felt an incongruous flash of something like triumph. She hadn’t reacted this way after her attempt on Gordon. Rather than risk hurting him, she would run to meet the fate she had been fleeing.

“No,” he said decisively. “Not that way, Linda.”

Her eyes blazed up at him, and she started to speak. The words caught in her throat as they heard the sound of a knock at the front door.

The same idea came to both their minds simultaneously: Gordon. Michael moved just in time to stop the scream that had gathered in her throat. He knew what she meant to do, and he knew what his course of action must be. The struggle was short but ugly, because now he was not fighting some sick manifestation of hate, but Linda herself. When he stood up, he was wet with perspiration. His stomach contracted in a spasm of sickness as he looked down at the writhing figure on the bed-gagged with a towel, its wrists and ankles tied firmly to the bedposts. The knock was repeated. It had come again twice while he was…Whoever it was must know he was there.

Michael turned on his heel and went out, closing the bedroom door tightly behind him. As he reached the front door the knock was repeated. He wrenched the door open with a violence that did little to relieve his fury and frustration. He was almost hoping that his surmise was correct. It would have been a pleasure to get his hands on Randolph.