XI
Wreckage
Pat opened her eyes reluctantly, with the impression that something unpleasant awaited her return to full consciousness. Something, as yet she could not recall just what, had happened to her; she was not even sure where she was awakening.
However, her eyes surveyed her own familiar room; there opposite the bed grinned the jade Buddha on his stand on the mantel—the one that Nick had—Nick! A mass of troubled, terrible recollections thrust themselves suddenly into consciousness. She visioned a medley of disturbing pictures, as yet disconnected, unassorted, but waiting only the return of complete wakefulness. And she realized abruptly that her head ached miserably, that her mouth was parched, that twinges of pain were making themselves evident in various portions of her anatomy. She turned her head and caught a glimpse of a figure at the bedside; her startled glance revealed Dr. Horker, sitting quietly watching her.
“Hello, Doctor,” she said, wincing as her smile brought a sharp pain from her lips. “Or should I say, Good morning, Judge?”
“Pat!” he rumbled, his growling tones oddly gentle. “Little Pat! How do you feel, child?”
“Fair,” she said. “Just fair. Dr. Carl, what happened to me last night? I can’t seem to remember—Oh!”
A flash of recollection pierced the obscure muddle. She remembered now—not all of the events of that ghastly evening, but enough. Too much!
“Oh!” she murmured faintly. “Oh, Dr. Carl!”
“Yes,” he nodded. “ ‘Oh!’—and would you mind very much telling me what that ‘Oh’ of yours implies?”
“Why—” She paused shuddering, as one by one the events of that sequence of horrors reassembled themselves. “Yes, I’d mind very much,” she continued. “It was nothing—” She turned to him abruptly. “Oh, it was, though, Dr. Carl! It was horrible, unspeakable, incomprehensible!—But I can’t talk about it! I can’t!”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said the Doctor mildly. “Don’t you really want to discuss it?”
“I do want to,” admitted the girl after a moment’s reflection. “I want to—but I can’t. I’m afraid to think of all of it.”
“But what in Heaven’s name did you do?”
“We just started out to go dancing,” she said hesitatingly. “Then, on the way to town, Nick—changed. He said someone was following us.”
“Someone was,” said Horker. “I was, with Mueller. That Nick of yours has the Devil’s own cleverness!”
“Yes,” the girl echoed soberly. “The Devil’s own!—Who’s Mueller, Dr. Carl?”
“He’s a plain-clothes man, friend of mine. I treated him once. What do you mean by changed?”
“His eyes,” she said. “And his mouth. His eyes got reddish and terrible, and his mouth got straight and grim. And his voice turned sort of—harsh.”
“Ever happen before, that you know of?”
“Once. When—” She paused.
“Yes. Last Wednesday night, when you came over to ask those questions about pure science. What happened then?”
“We went to a place to dance.”
“And that’s the reason, I suppose,” rumbled the Doctor sardonically, “that I found you wandering about the streets in a table cloth, step-ins, and a pair of hose! That’s why I found you on the verge of passing out from rotten liquor, and looking like the loser of a battle with an airplane propellor! What happened to your face?”
“My face? What’s wrong with it?”
The Doctor rose from his chair and seized the hand-mirror from her dressing table.
“Look at it!” he commanded, passing her the glass.
Pat gazed incredulously at the reflection the surface presented; a dark bruise colored her cheek, her lips were swollen and discolored, and her chin bore a jagged scratch. She stared at the injuries in horror.
“Your knees are skinned, too,” said Horker. “Both of them.”
Pat slipped one pajamaed limb from the covers, drawing the pants-leg up for inspection. She gasped in startled fright at the great red stain on her knee.
“That’s mercurochrome,” said the Doctor. “I put it there.”
“You put it there. How did I get home last night, Dr. Carl? How did I get to bed?”
“I’m responsible for that, too. I put you to bed.” He leaned forward. “Listen, child—your mother knows nothing about this as yet. She wasn’t home when I brought you in, and she’s not awake yet this morning. We’ll tell her you had an automobile accident; explain away those bruises.—And now, how did you get them?”
“I fell, I guess. Two or three times.”
“That bruise on your cheek isn’t from falling.”
The girl shuddered. Now in the calm light of morning, the events of last night seemed doubly horrible; she doubted her ability to believe them, so incredible did they seem. She was at a loss to explain even her own actions, and those of Nicholas Devine were simply beyond comprehension, a chapter from some dark and blasphemous book of ancient times—the Kabbala or the Necronomicon.
“What happened, Pat?” queried the Doctor gently. “Tell me,” he urged her.
“I—can’t explain it,” she said doubtfully. “He took me to that place, but drinking the liquor was my own fault. I did it out of spite because I saw he didn’t—care for me. And then—” She fell silent.
“Yes? And then?”
“Well—he began to talk about the beauty of evil, the delights of evil, and his eyes glared at me, and—I don’t understand it at all, Dr. Carl, but all of a sudden I was—yielding. Do you see?”
“I see,” he said gently, soberly.
“Suddenly I seemed to comprehend what he meant—all that about the supreme pleasure of evil. And I was sort of—swept away. The dress—was his fault, but I—somehow I’d lost the power to resist. I guess I was drunk.”
“And the bruises? And your cut lips?” queried the Doctor grimly.
“Yes,” she said in a low voice. “He—struck me. After a while I didn’t care. He could have—would have done other things, only we were interrupted, and had to leave. And that’s all, Dr. Carl.”
“Isn’t that enough?” he groaned. “Pat, I should have killed the fiend there!”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Do you mean to say you’d care?”
“I—don’t know.”
“Are you intimating that you still love him?”
“No,” she said thoughtfully. “No, I don’t love him, but—Dr. Carl, there’s something inexplicable about this. There’s something I don’t understand, but I’m certain of one thing!”
“What’s that?”
“That it wasn’t Nick—not my Nick—who did those things
