contents into his coffee.
He forced himself to vomit into the basin, but still felt queasy when Vera arrived an hour later.
‘You look fed up,’ she told him cheerfully. She nodded at the books scattered around the place. ‘I can see you’ve been reading again.’
‘I’m lending some books to a friend,’ Pangborn reversed his chair away from her as she ambled around the chamber with her valise. Under the seat of his chair he held the handle of a vegetable knife. Looking up at the girl’s overbright make-up and guileless eyes it was hard to believe that she might be in collusion with the intruder. At the same time he was surprised that she could not hear the obvious sounds of the man’s breathing. Once again Pangborn was amazed by his nimbleness, his ability to move from one end of the solarium to the other without leaving more than a few fragments of his presence on the monitor film. He assumed that the man had found a secure hiding place, perhaps in a service shaft unknown to Pangborn.
‘Mr Pangborn! Are you awake?’
With an effort, Pangborn rallied himself. He looked up to find Vera kneeling in front of him. She had pushed back her cap and was shaking his knees. He searched for the knife handle.
‘Mr Pangborn — all those pills in the bathroom. What are they doing?’ Pangborn gestured vaguely. Concerned only to find a weapon, he had forgotten to wash away the capsules.
‘I dropped the bottle in the basin — be careful you don’t cut your hands.’
‘Mr Pangborn -’ Confused, Vera stood up and straightened her cap. She glanced disapprovingly at the huge blow-ups from Psycho on the television screens, and at the blurred fragments of shoulder and elbow recorded by the solarium camera. ‘It’s like a jig-saw. Who is it? You?’
‘Someone else — a friend who’s been visiting me.’
‘I thought so — the place is in a mess. The kitchen… Have you ever thought of getting married, Mr Pangborn?’
He stared at her, aware that she was deliberately being coquettish, trying to unsettle him for his own sake. Once again his skin began to scream.
‘You ought to get out of here more,’ she was telling him sensibly. ‘Visit your friend. Do you want me to come tomorrow? It’s on my route. I can say your aerials need tuning.’
Pangborn reversed around her, keeping an eye on the bathroom and kitchen. Vera hesitated before leaving, searching for an excuse to prolong her stay. Pangborn was certain that this amiable scatter-brain was not an accomplice of the intruder, but if he once divulged the man’s presence, let alone the murder attempt, she would probably panic and then provoke an openly homicidal assault.
Controlling his temper, he waited until she left. But any irritation he felt was soon forgotten when a second attempt was made on his life.
As with the first murder attempt, Pangborn noticed that the method chosen was both devious and clumsy. Whether because he was still half-doped by the sleeping pills, or out of sheer physical bravado, he felt no sense of panic, but only a calm determination to beat the intruder at his own game. A complex duel was taking place between them, its fragmentary course displayed in a lengthening series of giant blow-ups on the screens — his own suspicious hands a few feet from the camera, the intruder’s angular shoulder silhouetted against the kitchen door, even a portion of an ear reflected in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. As Pangborn sat in his chair, comparing sections of this visual jigsaw with the elements from the shower sequence in Psycho, he knew that sooner or later he would assemble a complete picture of the intruder.
Meanwhile, the man’s presence became ever more evident. The smell of his body filled the solarium and stained the towels in the bathroom. He openly helped himself to the food in the refrigerator, scattering shreds of salad on the floor. Tirelessly, Pangborn maintained his round-the-clock surveillance, trying to shake off the effects of the sleeping pills. So determined was he to defeat the intruder that he took for granted that the water in the bathroom tank had been fouled with cleaning soda. Later, in the kitchen, as he bathed his stinging face with mineral water, he could hear the self-satisfied breathing of the intruder, celebrating another small deceit.
Later that night, as he lay half-asleep in front of the television screens, he woke with a start to feel the hot breath of the stranger against his face. Startled, he looked round in the flickering light to find the vegetable knife on the carpet and a small wound on his right knee.
For the first time a foul smell pervaded the solarium, an unpleasant blend of disinfectant, excrement and physical rage, like the atmosphere of some ill-maintained psychiatric institution.
Retching on to the carpet beside his chair, Pangborn turned his back to the television screens. Holding the vegetable knife in front of him, he headed for the hall. He unlocked the front door, waiting for the cool night air to invade the solarium. Leaving the door ajar, he wheeled himself to the telephone beside the screens.
As he held the severed flex in his hands he heard the hall door close quietly. So the intruder had decided to leave, resigning from their duel even though Pangborn was now unable to contact the outside world.
Pangborn looked at the screens, regretting that he would never complete the jig-saw. The foul smell still hung on the air, and Pangborn decided to take a shower before going out to use a neighbour’s telephone.
But as he entered the bathroom he could see clearly the bloody rents in the shower curtain. Pulling it back, he recognized the body of the young repair-woman, lying face down on the tiled floor, and the familiar postures he had analysed in a thousand blow-ups.
Appalled by the calm expression in Vera’s eyes, as if she had known full well the role in which she had been cast, Pangborn reversed his chair into the solarium. He gripped the knife, feeling her wounds in the pain in his leg, and aware once again of the deep breathing around him.
Everything now, in this final phase, was in close-up. After recording the position of the girl’s body with his portable camera — the film would be vital evidence for the investigating police — Pangborn sat in front of the wall of screens. He was certain that the last confrontation was about to take place between himself and the intruder. Holding the knife in his hand, he waited for the imminent attack. The sounds in the solarium seemed amplified, and he could hear the intruder’s pumping lungs and feel his frightened pulse drumming through the floor into the arms of his chair.
Pangborn waited for him to come, his eyes on the screen, the monitor camera focused directly upon himself. He watched the huge close-ups of his own body, of the film actress on the floor of her bathroom, and of Vera’s sprawled form entangled with the white shower curtains. As he adjusted the controls, moving these areas of tile and flesh into ever-closer focus, Pangborn felt himself rising beyond anger into an almost sexual lust for the intruder’s death, the first erotic impulse he had known since he had begun watching these television screens so many years earlier. The smell of the man’s body, the beat of his pulse and hot breath seemed to be moving towards an orgasmic climax. Their collision when it came in the next few minutes would be an act of intercourse, which would at last provide the key he needed.
Pangborn held the knife, watching the whitening screens, anonymous rectangles of blank skin that formed a fragmented sky. Somewhere among them the elements of the human form still remained, a residual nexus of contour and texture in which Pangborn could at last perceive the unmistakable outline of the stranger’s face.
Eyes fixed upon the screens, he waited for the man to touch him, certain that he had mesmerized the intruder with these obsessive images. He felt no hostility towards the man, and was aware now that over the years in the solarium he had become so detached from external reality that even he himself had become a stranger. The odours and sounds that disgusted him were those of his own body. All along, the intruder in the solarium had been himself. In his search for absolute peace he had found one last limiting obstacle — the intrusive fact of his own consciousness. Without this, he would merge forever into the universe of the infinite close-up. He was sorry for the young woman, but it was she who had first provoked him into his disgust with himself.
Eager now to merge with the white sky of the screen, to find that death in which he would be rid forever of himself, of his intruding mind and body, he raised the knife to his happy heart.
A Host of Furious Fancies
