Orbit 9 Read online

  “Rudeman used his library shelves as keys throughout. Things like one — eleven — two ninety-eight — three — six. Top row, eleventh book, page two ninety-eight, line three, word six. First three letters correspond to ABC and so on. He’d use that for a while, then switch to another book. Chris memorized those shelves, so she can find the key books. Stumbled onto it a couple of years ago. That’s why she dragged all of his books with her when she ducked out of that house. She just didn’t have time to go through the notebooks to sort out the ones he had used.”

  “Lenny, are you sure? Isn’t it just the sick-bird syndrome? I mean, my God, maybe she really is crazy! A lot of beautiful, charming, talented people are.”

  “No. She isn’t. Rudeman would have known after all those years. He wanted her to be, but he couldn’t convince himself in the slightest that she was.” He stood up. “I didn’t expect you to believe me. I would have been disappointed in you if you had. But I had to get it out, get some of this stuff said. Let you know you’ll have the shop to yourself for a year or so.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Go home. Move in the Donlevy house. She’s on tranquilizers, and they make it awfully hard to hold on to the present. She keeps wandering back and forth. It’ll take a week to get things ready to leave.” He mock-cuffed me and said, “Don’t look so worried. I know what I’m doing.”

  When he was gone I wished that he had a real inkling of what he was doing, and I knew that he would never know. I thought about that line that everyone has that he can’t cross, no matter what the evidence, unless there is an inner revelatory experience. Rudeman couldn’t believe she looked into the past, until he experienced it through her. Then he drew the line at possession, until it was proven again, and with its proof he had come to doubt his own sanity. Lenny could accept the research that proved she could see the past, but no farther. Whatever Rudeman had said about possession he had written off as insanity. And I had blundered in and swallowed the whole thing without reservation, through experience, firsthand experience. I tried to think in what ways I was like Rudeman, making it possible for me to do what he had done, wondering why Lenny couldn’t do it, why others hadn’t. My gift. Like my fingerprints were mine alone. I gave Lenny ten minutes to make sure that he really was gone, then I looked in on her. I said it to myself that way, Think I’ll look in on her now.

  Met by a wave of hatred stronger than anything I’d ever experienced. Resistance. Determination not to be taken again. Thoughts: not going crazy. You’re real and evil. Die! Damn you, die! I killed you once! How many times! Die!

  I drew back, but not all the way. She thought she was winning. She conjured a vision of a man in pajamas, orange and black stripes, walking, a pain in the chest, harder and harder, gasping for air… I clutched the arms of the chair and said, “No! Stop thinking. No more!” The pain returned, and this time I was falling, falling… I had to get out. Get away from her. The witch, bitch, which witch bitch. Falling. Pain. I couldn’t get loose. Falling. Out the window, over the rail, backward, seeing the ground… She screamed and let go.

  I lay back in the chair, trying to catch my breath, trying to forget the pain in my chest, my shoulder, my left arm. I didn’t have a heart condition. Perfectly all right. Medical exam just last year. Perfectly all right. I flexed the fingers in my hand, and slowly raised the arm, afraid the pain would return with movement.

  Bitch, I thought. The goddam bitch. She hadn’t taken the tranquilizer, she had been waiting, steeled against me, ready to attack. Treacherous bitch. I pushed myself from the chair and stood up, and saw myself in the mirror. Grey. Aged. Terrified. I closed my eyes and said again, “Bitch!”

  Was she panting also, like a fighter between rounds? If I went again now, would she be able to attack again so soon? I knew I wouldn’t try. The pain had been too real.

  I looked at my watch then and nearly fell down again. An hour and a half? I held it to my ear, and shook it hard. An hour and a half! Shakily I called Weill’s office and told Hendrickson that he could have the machine tool picked up any time. I was going home.

  There wasn’t much else there, nothing that I couldn’t get to the car alone. And by five I was on the highway. An hour and a half, I kept thinking. Where? Doing what?

  She would kill me, I thought over and over. Just like she killed her husband. The notebooks, I had to get them myself. I couldn’t let Lenny take them away. Rudeman must have discovered too late that she had power too. But he must have suspected before the end. His psychosis. The new code, afraid she had learned the old one. He must have learned about this. He had kept her ten years before she killed him. It would be in the notebooks. I drove too fast, and got home in six hours. And not until the car squealed to a stop in the driveway did I even think about what I would tell Lenny or Janet. But I didn’t have to tell her anything. She took one look at my face and cried, “Oh, my God!” And she pulled me from the car and got me inside and into bed somehow, without any help from me, but without hindrance either. And I fell asleep.

  I woke up when Janet did to get the kids off to school. “Are you better? I called Dr. Lessing last night, and he said to bring you in this morning.”

  “I’m better,” I said wearily. I felt like I was coming out of a long drugged sleep, with memories hazy and incomplete. “I need to sleep and have orange juice, and that’s about it. No need for you to stay home.” She said she’d see about that, and she went out to get Rusty up, and to find Laura’s red scarf. I hadn’t seen them for almost a week, hadn’t even thought of them. They would expect presents. They always expected presents. When Janet came back in fifteen minutes, I convinced her that I really was all right, and finally she agreed to go on to work. She’d call at noon.

  I had breakfast. I showered and dressed. And smoked three cigarettes. And convinced myself that I wasn’t sick at all. And then I walked over to Christine’s house.

  Lenny met me at the door. “What the hell are you doing up and out? Janet said you came in sick as a dog last night.” He gave me more coffee. At the kitchen table.

  “I kept thinking about what you were saying about her.” I indicated the rest of the house. “And I was sick, feverish, and decided I couldn’t do anything else in Chicago. So I came home. Anything I can do to help?”

  Lenny looked like he wanted to hug me, but he said merely, “Yeah, I can use some help.”

  “Tell me what to do.”

  “Just stick around until Chris wakes up. I gave her a sleeping pill last night. Should be wearing off soon. What I’ve been doing is going down the notebooks line by line and every time he used another book for his key, Chris visualizes the shelf and finds it there. Then we find that book in the boxes. And I go on to the next one. While she rests, or is busy with her work, I find the key words in the books and decode a line or two to make sure. Rather not lug that whole library with us if I can avoid it.”

  I was watching him as if he were a stranger. I was thinking of him as a stranger. I had no definite plan worked out, just a direction. She had to get rid of him. Before he learned any more from the notebooks.

  And her. What did she know? I knew I had to find out without any more delay. I tried to reach her and found a cottony foggy world. The sleeping pill. I tried to jar her awake, and got glimpses of a nightmare world of grey concrete expanses. A hall, the grey of the floor exactly matched the grey of the walls and ceiling. The joints lost their squareness ahead of me, and the hallway became a tube that grew narrower and narrower and finally was only a point. I was running toward the point at a breakneck speed.

  You’re not Karl! Who are you? I pulled out. What if she brought the pain again? The pseudo heart attack? I was shaking.

  “Jesus, Eddie, you should be in bed.” Lenny put his hand on my forehead. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

  I shook my head. “I’m okay. Just get a chill now and then. How about the couch here? At least I’ll be handy when she gets up.”

  He installed me in the stud
y on the deep green couch, with an Indian throw over me. I drifted pleasantly for a while. Then, Get out! Who are you?—I’ll never get out again. Karl knew, didn’t he? I’ll finish what he started. You can’t hurt me the way you hurt him. I’m too strong for you. We’ll go away, you and me. I laughed, and laughing pulled away. At the same instant I heard her scream.

  I sat up and waited. Lenny brought her down in a few minutes. I didn’t join them in the kitchen. I watched and listened through her, and she was so agitated now that she wasn’t even aware of my presence. I was getting that good at it.

  “Listen, Lenny, and then leave me alone. I thought it was Karl, but it isn’t. I don’t know who it is. He can get inside my mind. I don’t know how. I know he’s there, and he makes me do things, crazy things. He’ll use me, just like Karl did all those years. I can’t help myself. And night after night, day after day, whatever he wants me to do, wherever he wants me to go…” She was weeping and her talk was beginning to break up into incoherent snatches of half-formed thoughts.

  “Chris! Stop that! Your husband was crazy! He thought he could possess you. That’s insane! And he half convinced you that he could do it. But God damn it, he’s dead! No one else can touch you. I won’t let anyone near you.”

  “He doesn’t have to be near me. All these weeks… He’s been in and out, watching, listening to us go over the notebooks. He knows what’s in them now. I… He won’t stop now. And if he says I have to go with him, I’ll have to.”

  Her voice went curiously flat and lifeless. She was seeing again that tube that ended in a point, and suddenly she longed to be on it, heading toward that point. “I’d rather die now,” she said.

  Lenny’s big face twisted with pain. “Chris, please, trust me. I won’t let anyone near you. I promise. Let me help you, Chris. Please. Don’t force me out now.”

  “It won’t make any difference. You don’t understand. If he makes me go with him, I can’t fight it.”

  But she could. I didn’t know if my thoughts reminded her of the heart attack, or if she would have thought of it herself. Karl sitting in her room, watching her with a smile on his face. “You will turn them down, of course, my dear. You can’t travel to Africa alone.”

  “No, I won’t turn them down! I want to take this assignment…” Slipping, blurring images, fear of being alone, of not being able to keep the world in focus. Fear of falling through the universe, to a time where there was nothing, falling forever… Staring at the rejection of the offer in her own handwriting. Karl’s face, sad, but determined.

  “You really don’t want to travel without me, my dear. It wouldn’t be safe for you, you know.”

  And later, waking up from dreamless sleep. Knowing she had to get up, to go down the hall to his room, where he was waiting for her. No! It’s over! Leave me alone. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, standing up, NO! I HATE YOU! Your soft fat hands! You make me feel dirty! Why don’t you die! Have a heart attack and die.

  Fighting it to the door, dragging herself unwillingly to the door, fighting against the impulse, despising him and even more herself. He was forcing her up flights of stairs, without rails, straight down for miles and miles, and he was at her side, forcing each step. She pushed him, and he screamed. Then he was there again, and she pushed again. And again. Then he was running, and she, clinging to the doorknob in her bedroom, she was running too, pushing him off the steps as fast as he managed to climb back on, and he stumbled and fell and now she knew he would fall forever, even as she fell sometimes. Swirling into darkness with pain and terror for company. She slipped to the floor, and awakened there much later knowing only that something was gone from her life. That she felt curiously free and empty and unafraid.

  I lay back down and stared at the ceiling. I could hear her footsteps recede up the stairs, across the hall to her room. Lenny’s heavy tread returned and there was the sound of measured pacing. Soon, I thought. Soon it would end. And after today, after she recovered from the next few hours… She would have to remain nearby, here in this house as long as possible. Above me she was starting to dress. I was there. She didn’t doubt a presence haunting her. Nor did she question that he could force her to go away with him if he chose.

  “Who?” she whispered, standing still with her eyes closed. She imagined the suppressed fury on Lenny’s big face, the pulse in his temple that beat like a primitive drum summoning him from this time back to a time when he would have killed without a thought anyone who threatened his woman. I laughed and forced his face to dissolve and run like a painting on fire.

  Suddenly I was jerked from my concentration by the sound of Janet’s voice. “Where is he? How is he?”

  “He’s sleeping in the study. Feverish, but not bad.” Lenny’s reassuring voice.

  Janet came into the study and sat on the couch and felt my face. “Honey, I was scared to death. I called and called and no answer. I was afraid you’d passed out or something. Let me take you over to Dr. Lessing.”

  “Get out,” I said without opening my eyes. “Just get out and leave me alone.” I tried to find her, and couldn’t. I was afraid to give it too much attention with Janet right there.

  “I can’t just leave you like this. I’ve never seen you like this before. You need a doctor.”

  “Get out of here! When I need you or want you I’ll be in touch. Just get the hell away from me now.”

  “Eddie!”

  “For God’s sake, Janet, can’t you leave me alone? I’ve got a virus, a bug. I feel rotten, but not sick, not sick enough for a doctor. I just want to be left alone.”

  “No. It’s more serious than that. Don’t you think I know you better than that? It’s been coming on for weeks. Little things, then bigger things, now this. You have to see a doctor, Eddie. Please.”

  Wearily I sat up and stared at her and wondered how I’d ever found her attractive or desirable. Freckled, thin, sharp features, razorlike bones… I turned away and said, “Get lost, Janet. Beat it. Yeah, it started a long time ago, but it takes a club over the head, doesn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what you think I mean. I’m sick. I’m tired. I want to be alone. For a long time. Tonight. Tomorrow night. Next week. Next month. Just get out of here and leave me alone. I’ll pick up some things later on after you’ve gone to work.”

  “I’m going to call Dr. Lessing.”

  I looked at her and hoped I wouldn’t have to hit her. I didn’t want to hurt her, too. Her freckles stood out in relief against the dead white of her skin. I closed my eyes. “I won’t see him. Or anyone else. Not now. Maybe tomorrow. Just leave me alone for now. I have to sleep.”

  She stood up and backed away. She had seen. She knew that I’d hit her if she didn’t get out. At the door she stopped, and the helplessness in her voice made me want to throw something at her. “Eddie? Will you stay here for the next hour?”

  So she could bring in her men in white. I laughed and sat up. “I had planned to, but I guess I’d better plan again. I’ll be in touch.”

  She left then. I could hear her voice and Lenny’s from the kitchen, but I didn’t try to make out their words. A clock chimed twelve. I wanted to go out there and throw Janet out. I didn’t want her around for the next half hour or so. I heard the back door, then the sound of a motor, and I sighed in relief.

  I went to the kitchen and got coffee and stood at the window watching snow fall.

  Lenny joined me. “Janet says you had a fight.”

  “Yeah. I was rough on her. Sickness brings out her mother-hen instincts, and I can’t stand being fussed at. What was wrong with Christine?”

  “A dream.” He stared at the snow. “Supposed to get a couple of inches by night, I think. Won’t stick long. Ground isn’t cold enough yet.”

  “Lenny, for God’s sake quit kidding yourself. She’s sick. She needs professional help.”

  “She thinks—she’s certain that he learned enough about her to put an end to this so-called illn
ess. She’s desperately afraid of a relapse. Hospitalization, shock therapy…”

  “What if you are causing her present condition? Isn’t it suggestive? Her husband, now you. It’s a sexual fantasy. By making her reach a decision about you, you might push her off the deep end irreversibly.”

  He looked shocked. “That’s crazy.”

  “Exactly. Lenny, these things are too dangerous for a well-meaning but non-professional man to toy with. You might destroy her…”

  “If she was crazy you’d be making good points,” Lenny said distinctly. “She isn’t.”

  I finished my coffee. A doctor. Shots, pills, all yesterday and last years and decades ago. Questions. Lost forever and forever falling. Through all the yesterdays. Lenny wants to get a doctor for you. A psychiatrist. You have to get him out of here now. Immediately. Even if it kills him.

  She resisted the idea. She kept trying to visualize his face, and I wouldn’t let it take shape. Instead I drew out of her memories of the institutions she’d been in.