Magic Terror (15 page)

Fee bought a steaming hot dog and squirted ketchup onto it, wrapped it in a flimsy paper napkin, and hurried back into the theater. He heard the door of the men’s room sliding across the lobby carpet. He rushed down the aisle and took his seat as the titles came up on the screen.

The stars of
From Dangerous Depths
were Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino. It was directed by Robert Siodmak. Fee had never heard of any of these people, nor of any of the supporting actors, and he was disappointed that the movie was not in color.

Charlie Carpenter (Robert Ryan) was a tall, well-dressed accountant who lived alone in a hotel room like those at the St. Alwyn. Charlie Carpenter put a wide-brimmed hat on the floor and flipped cards into it. He wore a necktie at home and, like Bob Bandolier, he peered into the mirror to scowl at his handsome, embittered face. At work he snubbed his office mates, and after work he drank in a bar. On Sundays he attended mass. One day, Charlie Carpenter noticed a discrepancy in the accounts, but when he asked about it, his angry supervisor (William Bendix) said that he had come upon traces of the Elijah Fund—this fund was used for certain investments, it was none of Charlie’s business, he should never have discovered it in the first place, a junior clerk had made a mistake, Charlie must forget he’d ever heard of it. When Charlie wondered about the corporate officers in control of the fund, his supervisor reluctantly gave him two names, Fenton Welles and Lily Sheehan, but warned him to leave the matter alone.

Fenton Welles (Ralph Meeker) and Lily Sheehan (Ida Lupino) owned comfortable houses in the wealthy part of town. Charlie Carpenter scanned their lawn parties through field glasses; he followed them to their country houses on opposite sides of Random Lake, fifty miles north of the city.

Lily Sheehan summoned Charlie to her office. He feared that she knew he had been following her, but Lily gave Charlie a cigarette and sat on the edge of her desk and said she had noticed that his reports were unusually perceptive. Charlie was a smart loner, just the sort of man whose help she needed.

Lily had suspicions about Fenton Welles. Charlie didn’t have to know more than he
should
know, but Lily thought that Welles had been stealing from the company by manipulating a confidential fund. Was Charlie willing to work for her?

Charlie broke the lock on Fenton Welles’s back door and groped through the dark house. Using a flashlight, he found the staircase and worked his way upstairs. He found the master bedroom and went to the desk. Just as he opened the center drawer and found a folder marked
ELIJAH,
the front door opened downstairs. Holding his breath, he looked in the file and saw photographs of various men, alone and in groups, in military uniform. He put the file back in the drawer, climbed out the window, and scrambled down the roof until he could jump onto the lawn. A dog charged him out of the darkness, and Charlie picked up a heavy stick beneath a tree and battered the dog to death.

Lily Sheehan told Charlie to take a room at the Random Lake Motel, rent a motorboat, and break into Welles’s house when he was at a country club dance. Charlie and Lily were both smoking, and Lily prowled around him. She sat on the arm of his chair. Her dress seemed tighter.

In the dark behind him, somebody whistled.

Charlie and Lily kissed.

The music behind Charlie Carpenter announced
doom, ruin, death.
He pulled a carton from a closet in Fenton Welles’s lake house and dumped its contents onto the floor. Stacks of bills held together with rubber bands fell out of the carton, along with a big envelope marked
ELIJAH.
Charlie opened the envelope and pulled out photographs of Fenton Welles and Lily Sheehan shot through the window of a restaurant, Fenton Welles and Lily walking down a street arm in arm, Fenton Welles and Lily in the backseat of a taxi, driving away.

“Aha,” said a voice from the back of the theater.

An angry, betrayed Charlie shouted at Lily Sheehan, waved a fist in the air, kicked at furniture. These sounds, Fee knew, were those that came before the screams and the sobs.

But the beatings did not come. Lily Sheehan began to cry, and Charlie took her in his arms.

He’s evil,
Lily said.

A stunned look bloomed in Charlie’s dark eyes.

It’s the only way I’ll ever be free.

“Watch out,” the man called, and Fee turned around and squinted into the back of the theater.

In the second row from the back, far under the beam of light from the projectionist’s booth, a big man with light hair leaned forward with his hands held up like binoculars. “Peekaboo,” he said. Fee whirled around, his face burning.

“I know who you are,” the man said.

I’m all the soul you need,
Lily said from the screen.

Fenton Welles walked in from a round of golf at the Random Lake Country Club, and Charlie Carpenter came sneering out from behind the staircase with a fireplace poker raised in his right hand. He smashed it down onto Welles’s head.

Lily wiped the last trace of blood from Charlie’s face with a tiny handkerchief, and for a second Fee
had
it, he knew the name of the man behind him, but this knowledge disappeared into the dread taking place on the screen, where Lily and Charlie lay in a shadowy bed talking about the next thing Charlie must do.

Death death death
sang the soundtrack.

Charlie hid in the shadowy corner of William Bendix’s office. Slanting shadows of the blinds fell across his suit, his face, his broad-brimmed hat.

A sweet pressure built in Fee’s chest.

William Bendix walked into his office, and suddenly Fee knew the identity of the man behind him. Charlie Carpenter stepped out of the shadow-stripes with a knife in his hands. William Bendix smiled and waggled his fat hands—what’s going on here, Miss Sheehan told him there wouldn’t be any trouble—and Charlie rammed the knife into his chest.

Fee remembered the odor of raw meat, the heavy smell of blood in Mr. Stenmitz’s shop.

Charlie Carpenter scrubbed his hands and face in the company bathroom until the basin was black with blood. Charlie ripped towel after towel from the dispenser, blotted his face, and threw the damp towels on the floor. Impatient, Charlie Carpenter rode a train out of the city, and two girls across the aisle peeked at him, wondering
Who’s that handsome guy?
and
Why is he so nervous?
The train pulled past the front of an immense Catholic church with stained-glass windows blazing with light.

Fee turned around to see the big head and wide shoulders of Heinz Stenmitz. In the darkness, he could just make out white teeth shining in a smile. Joking, Mr. Stenmitz put his hands to his eyes again and pretended to peer at Fee through binoculars.

Fee giggled.

Mr. Stenmitz motioned for Fee to join him, and Fee got out of his seat and walked up the long aisle toward the back of the theater. Mr. Stenmitz wound his hand in the air, reeling him in. He patted the seat beside him and leaned over and whispered, “Sit here next to your old friend Heinz.” Fee sat down. Mr. Stenmitz’s hand swallowed his. “I’m very very glad you’re here,” he whispered. “This movie is too scary for me to see alone.”

Charlie Carpenter piloted a motorboat across Random Lake. It was early morning. Drops of foam spattered across his lapels. Charlie was smiling a dark, funny smile.

“Do you know what?” Mr. Stenmitz asked.

“What?”

“Do you know what?”

Fee giggled. “No, what?”

“You have to guess.”

There was blood everywhere on the screen but it was invisible blood, it was the blood scrubbed from the office floor and washed away in the sink.

The boat slid into the reeds, and Charlie jumped out onto marshy ground—the boat will drift away, Charlie doesn’t care about the boat, it’s nothing but a stolen boat, let it go, let it be gone . . .

An unimaginable time later Fee found himself standing in the dark outside the Beldame Oriental Theater. The last thing he could remember was Lily Sheehan turning from her stove and saying
Decided to stop off on your way to work, Charlie?
She wore a long white robe, and her hair looked loose and full.
You’re full of surprises. I thought you’d be here last night.
His face burned, and his heart was pounding. Smoke and oil filled his stomach.

He felt appallingly, astoundingly dirty.

The world turned spangly and gray. The headlights on Livermore Avenue swung toward him. The smoke in his stomach spilled upward into his throat.

Fee moved a step deeper into the comparative darkness of the street and bent over the curb. Something that looked and tasted like smoke drifted from his mouth. He gagged and wiped his mouth and his eyes. It seemed to him that an enormous arm lay across his shoulders, that a deep low voice was saying—was saying—

No.

Fee fled down Livermore Avenue.

PART TWO
1

He turned into his street and saw the neat row of cement blocks bisecting the dead lawn and the concrete steps leading up to the rosebushes and the front door.

Nothing around him was real. The moon had been painted, and the houses had no backs, and everything he saw was a fraction of an inch thick, like paint.

He watched himself sit down on the front steps. The night darkened. Footsteps came down the stairs from the Sunchanas’ apartment, and the relief of dread focused his attention. The lock turned, and the door opened.

“Fee, poor child,” said Mrs. Sunchana. “I thought I heard you crying.”

“I wasn’t crying,” Fee said in a wobbly voice, but he felt cold tears on his cheeks.

“Won’t your mother let you in?” Mrs. Sunchana stepped around him, and he scooted aside to let her pass.

He wiped his face on his sleeve. She was still waiting for an answer. “My mother’s sick,” he said. “I’m waiting for my daddy to come back.”

Pretty, dark-haired Mrs. Sunchana wrapped her arms about herself. “It’s almost seven,” she said. “Why don’t you come upstairs? Have some hot chocolate. Maybe you want a bowl of soup? Vegetables, chicken, good thick soup for you. Delicious. I know, I made it myself.”

Fee’s reason began to slip away beneath the barrage of these seductive words. He saw himself at the Sunchanas’ table, raising a spoon of intoxicating soup to his mouth. Saliva poured into his mouth, and his stomach growled.

By itself, a sob flexed wide black wings in his throat and flew from his mouth.

And then, like salvation, came his father’s voice. “Leave my son alone! Get away from him!” Fee opened his eyes.

Mrs. Sunchana pressed her hands together so tightly her fingers looked flat. Fee saw that she was frightened, and understood that he was safe again—back in the movie of his life.

And here came Bob Bandolier up the walk, his face glowing, his eyes glowing, his mustache riding confidently above his mouth, his coat billowing out behind him.

“Fee was sitting here alone in the cold,” Mrs. Sunchana said.

“You will go upstairs, please, Mrs. Sunchana.”

“I was just trying to help,” persisted Mrs. Sunchana. Only her flattened-out hands betrayed her.

“Well, we don’t need your help,” bellowed Fee’s glorious dad. “Go away and leave us alone.”

“There is no need to give me orders.”

“Shut up!”

“Or to yell at me.”

“LEAVE MY SON ALONE!”
Bob Bandolier raised his arms like a madman and stamped his foot. “Go!” He rushed toward the front steps, and Mrs. Sunchana went quickly past Fee into the building.

Bob Bandolier grasped Fee’s hand, yanked him upright, and pulled him through the front door. Fee cried out in pain. Mrs. Sunchana had retreated halfway up the stairs, and her husband’s face hung like a balloon in the cracked-open door to their apartment. In front of their own door, Bob Bandolier let go of Fee’s hand to reach for his key.

“I think you must be crazy,” said Mrs. Sunchana. “I was being nice to your little boy. He was locked out of the house in the cold.”

Bob Bandolier unlocked the door and turned sideways toward her.

“We live right above you, you know,” said Mrs. Sunchana. “We know what you do.”

Fee’s father pushed him into their apartment, and the smell from the bedroom announced itself like the boom of a bass drum. Fee thought that Mrs. Sunchana must have been able to smell it, too.

“And what do I do?” his father asked. His voice was dangerously calm.

Fee knew that his father was smiling.

He heard Mrs. Sunchana move one step up.

“You know what you do. It is not right.”

Her husband whispered her name from the top of the stairs.

“On the contrary,” his father said. “Everything I do, Mrs. Sunchana, is precisely right. Everything I do, I do for a reason.” He moved away from the door, and Mrs. Sunchana went two steps up.

Fee watched his father with absolute admiration. He had won. He had said the brave right things, and the enemy had fled.

Bob Bandolier came scowling toward him.

Fee backed into the living room. His father strode through the doorway and pushed the door shut. He gave Fee one flat, black-eyed glare, removed his topcoat, and hung it carefully in the closet without seeming to notice the smell from the bedroom. He unbuttoned his suit jacket and the top of his shirt and pulled his necktie down a precise half inch.

“I’m going to tell you something very important. You are never to talk to them again, do you hear me? They might try to get information out of you, but if you say one word to those snoops, I’ll whale the stuffing out of you.” He patted Fee’s cheek. “You won’t say anything to them, I know.”

Fee shook his head.

“They think they know things—ten generations of keyhole listeners.”

His father gave his cheek another astounding pat. He snapped his fingers. At the code for cat food, Jude stalked out from beneath the chaise. Fee followed both of them into the kitchen. His father spooned half a can of cat food into Jude’s dish and put the remainder of the can into the refrigerator.

Bob Bandolier was an amazing man, for now he went whirling and dancing across the kitchen floor, startling even Jude. Amazing Bob spun through the living room, not forgetting to smile up at the ceiling and toss a cheery wave to the Sunchanas, clicked open the bedroom door with his hip, and called
Hello, honeybunch
to his wife. Fee followed, wondering at him. His father supped from a brown bottle of Pforzheimer beer, Millhaven’s own, winked at Sleeping Beauty, and said,
Darling, don’t give up yet.