“Not again what?” In view of the weather and the close approach of Christmas, this wing was surprisingly quiet, and Mrs. Peralta, on duty at the desk, was trying to decipher a letter from her son in South Korea: It appeared that he wrote in the dark, with a broken goose quill.
“Six-twelve, the woman with the stroke. Someone told me she’s one of our volunteers, by the way. She can’t have any more sedation until three o’clock, but I can’t get her quieted down.”
“. . . Oh. Mark says that the penalties for pot are very stiff, but in the village the bars sell a drink that’s actually embalming fluid,” reported Mrs. Peralta absorbedly.
“The mysterious East,” said Mrs. Syce, and walked resignedly along the corridor to Mrs. Balsam’s room.
Chapter 13
In her nightmare, Mrs. Balsam had been sewn tightly into a black bag which kept getting into her mouth when she tried to scream. She woke, heart thudding, to the blessed feeling of air and space around her, and then the gradual realization that half of the nightmare was reality. She was voiceless.
In spite of excellent eyesight—she wore glasses only for driving—she had always harbored a fear of going blind, but it had never occurred to her to worry about losing the faculty of speech. Now, to quiet her heart, she tried to concentrate on the more cheerful aspects of her situation, reminding herself that it might be only temporary, that she had complete faith in Dr. Simms and St. S within’s was a very good hospital, that sixty-seven was not antique.
Such was the cling of the sleeping pill, along with her sense of deliverance from the muffling black bag, that she only rediscovered her paralyzed right side when she attempted to turn to a more comfortable position, and remembered all over again what had sent her here.
The signal cord was clipped to the draw sheet where her left hand could find it automatically. Mrs. Balsam pulled it, and lay trembling in the half-dark.
Her memory was blank in spots, like a roll of defective film on which some pictures had not come out. She knew that she had gotten out of her car, although she had no recollection of where she had been going or why she had started back to the house, and that in a mirror inside she had seen the sudden impossible reflection of a man’s face contorted in a grimace.
It was a dark-stubbled face alien to Mrs. Balsam’s world, the kind that she imagined sprang out of hiding in the back of cars left unlocked or waited in shadowy apartment-building lobbies. Her doors were secure; she had not left the house since the morning of the day before; Apple had not uttered a single bark. So he had been concealed inside—a crawl space came to mind, because he had seemed to be rising up in the mirror— for at least that long, while she had thought herself alone.
He hadn’t seen her. In shock and simple horror at all those unsuspecting hours, she had whirled and started back to her car, where Apple waited, intending to drive to the police station—and there the film went empty. She recalled a girl in a puzzling brown uniform, and then the hospital and the doctor, and finally Amanda.
Who had said she would take care of the Afghan and the mare and bring some personal belongings to the hospital, and who must be warned if it was not already too late.
Before she had been implacably sedated, Mrs. Balsam had tried to force “cellar’ out of her stony throat, from a conviction that the man had been nowhere in the house proper; mightn’t they attach significance to that, when she had been found outside? Now, straining again to unite brain and vocal cords (or was that a good idea? Would her treacherous body obey her only once, with no one to hear?) she produced only harsh exhalations and then, in a queer tone which she would not have recognized as her own, “shell.”
Her tongue and lips were awkward and half frozen, but was it a slur or a subconscious prompting? She was of a different generation than her niece and remembered very well the commotion over bomb shelters: the single-minded pros, the moralistic cons. It seemed inexplicable that she could possess one without knowing it; on the other hand, her house was the right age, and such a place would be windowless, descended into from within. Where, in that particular area, she couldn’t imagine nor did she care; her mind could grapple only with the immediate issue of warning Amanda.
It never entered her head to believe that the man had departed hours ago, any more than it would have to assume that a rattlesnake coiled beside a path was fast asleep. He was clearly not an ordinary thief, or robber or burglar or whatever the precise definition was, and if he had worn that furious grimace when he thought himself unobserved, how would he look if he were suddenly surprised by Amanda?
The propped door opened wider, the light flooded on, a nurse who looked remarkably like Harpo Marx came in. Mrs. Balsam half remembered her from earlier blood-pressure and temperature checks. She flipped off the signal light, made an automatic inspection of the I.V. needle, said cheerfully, “Would you like a drink of water? No? Warm enough?”
Mrs. Balsam gazed piercingly up at her. She had decided to try for “cellar” again, because “shelter” by itself did not mean much. She opened her mouth and instructed her throat, and nothing happened; she was as helpless as a year-old child handed a pencil and told to draw a capital B.
Her muscles felt stretched to snapping point. She tried to will her eyes full of a plea to wait, but
