Legacy Of Terror (7 page)

“Not much, but it's home for me,” he said.

“I like it,” she said.

She meant that. She had been prepared for a room full of plush and expensive furniture, deep pile carpeting, senseless knicknacks, a playboy's notion of what a working artist's studio was like. This was more the sort of place she could feel at ease in, utilitarian, sensible.

“I'm glad you like it,” he said.

He closed the door to the stairs so that they were, more than ever, completely alone.

Here at the very top of the mansion, the storm was nearer, and its fits of temper were more explosively loud than they had been downstairs. At times, it was even necessary to stop talking and wait until a roll of thunder had abated before continuing.

The lightning forked the sky directly overhead, spearing the blue- black clouds and making-for brief instants-a flat mirror of the panes of the skylight.

Elaine did not consider herself an art critic, but even so she felt that Dennis Matherly actually did have some talent. More than she would have guessed before seeing his work. True enough, the paintings were all too colorful to be comfortable with, splashed through with fantasy, disembodied faces, weird landscapes not. of this earth, detail so intense-at times-that it bordered on madness to have spent such time to trace the tiniest of lines. But they were good, no question about it. Good, she decided, in a way that was not exactly professional. Who, after all, could stand to live with such blatant fantasies and such unreal bursts of color hanging on their walls? He might be good, but he would not be financially successful.

As she made the tour of the room, she stopped before a painting of a startlingly beautiful woman. The entire canvas was composed of her face and a few, detailed yet indecipherable shadows behind her. She looked out upon the room with a gaze that appeared empty, directionless-strangely inhuman. Her flesh was tinted a light blue, as was nearly everything about the portrait. Only the green droplets of some fluid, glistening on her face, were at variance with the dominating blues.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

He was close behind her, so close she could feel his breath. But she had nowhere to move as she stared at that woman's strange face.

“Yes,” she said.

“It's one of my favorites too.”

“What is it called?”

“Madness,” he said.

When she looked again, she could see that was quite appropriate. And, in a moment, she realized who the subject must have been. Amelia Matherly. His own mother.

A crackle of lightning, reflected downwards by the skylight, made the green droplets on her face glisten and stand out as if they were real and moist and not dried oils.

“The spatters of green are blood,” he said.

Elaine felt dizzy.

He said, “The person who is mad, I think, might not look upon death with the same viewpoint as the sane. The madman-or madwoman- might very well see death as a new beginning, a chance to start over. They might not see it as an end, a final act. That's why I chose the green for the droplets of blood in the picture. Green is the color of life.”

She could not say anything. She was grateful when a clap of thunder relieved her of that duty.

"The woman in the painting is a murderess,” he said

She nodded.

He said, “You know who?”

“I've heard the story,” she managed to say.

“I loved my mother,” he said. “She was always doing odd things and reacting strangely. But I loved her just the same.”

Elaine said nothing.

She considered excusing herself and walking for the door, but she had a terrible premonition that she would not reach it. Best to wait.

“When I discovered what she had done to the twins, what she tried to do to grandfather, I almost lost my mind.”

Lightning and thunder. The door: so far away.

He said, “You can't imagine how adrift I was. For more than a year, I wanted to die. I had counted so strongly on my mother, depended so deeply on her love. And then she was gone-and she had ruthlessly destroyed two of her children-and might have destroyed me if I had been there at the time. I was possessed with a pessimistic certainty that no one in this world could be trusted, and I dare not turn my back on anyone, even for a moment, no matter how much they might profess their love for me.”

Elaine managed to turn from the picture and look at him. His squared, handsome face was drained, drawn in fatigue and paled by the memory.

“I can imagine how terrible it was,” she said.

“Fortunately, my father understood that. He saw what was happening with me, and he went out of his way to see that I knew I was loved. For long months, he left the business in the hands of his accountant and spent endless hours trying to assure me, to make me forget. In the end, he succeeded. But without his care, I'm afraid I would have given up long ago.”

Abruptly, he turned away from her and walked to the largest easel where a work-in-progress was clipped.

He said, “Look here.”

Reluctantly, she walked to his side.

“Do you think it's shaping up well?” he asked.

“It's Celia, isn't it?”

He said that it was. Half of her face had been painted in, while the other half was still in sketch form and pasteled over with a pink- brown stain.

“I thought you were bad at portraits,” she said.

“Funny thing is, I am. But with my mother, and now Celia, I haven't had any trouble.”

“You must love her a good deal.”

“Celia? Not at all. She's a fine girl, but I don't have those emotions for her. It's just that-that I seemed only to be able to paint the faces of those who have fallen under the misery of the Honneker legacy of madness. I have two other portraits, of the babies. They turned out not as well, for they were too young to have distinct images, individual faces.”

“I see this is done in tones of orange,” she said.

“Except for the blood,” he said. “When I paint the blood, I'll make it red. Very bright red. Celia did not see death as a beginning, but as an end. She wasn't mad.”

He picked up a palette knife and tested it against his finger.

It was not sharp, but long and flexible.

And pointed.

He picked at a section of the canvas he didn't seem to like, peeling away the coarse peaks of the oils.

“It will make a nice set-this one and the portrait of my mother.”

“Yes,” Elaine agreed.

She saw that, now, he was standing between her and the door, and she did not know how she could have let that happen.

Stop it! she told herself. You are acting like a fool, a silly, empty-headed fool.

He squeezed some paint onto the palette and began mixing it with the palette knife. It was scarlet paint. It clung in lumps to the silvery tool like-like-

“Blood,” he said.

She started, though he did not notice, and she said, “What?”

“I want to see how the blood will work against that orange pallor of her skin.”

Be still, she told herself. There is no need to be afraid. He is only a man, and you have learned how to deal with people. But she also knew that he might be mad, as mad as Amelia Matherly had been, and she realized that she could never cope with anything like that. Madness had no place in her world of logic and reasonableness. Madness was complex. She wished for everything to be simple.

He held the knife up, staring at it as the red paint ran slowly down toward the handle and his fingers.

“It looks good,” he said.

The rain beat more harshly upon the skylight, larger drops that sounded almost like hail.

“Well,” she said, “I ought to be going.”

He continued looking at the knife. “But you just came.”

“Nevertheless, your grandfather-”

“He didn't like the first painting-the one of mother.”

His voice seemed so distant and unconnected to the moment, that she did not understand just what he meant. She said, “Who didn't?”

“Grandfather,” he said.

“Why not?”

Dennis twisted the knife, forcing the paint away from his fingers and back up the blade. He said, “Grandfather took one look at it and refused to examine it in detail. He said he never wanted to remember anything about that afternoon and what he had seen- and he said that my painting was too vivid, that it was too true for him to study it calmly. He's always been interested in my work, genuinely interested, but he never could stand that painting. And it's the best I've ever done, I think.”

“I liked it.”

“Thank you.”

“And your grandfather's reaction might be interpreted as praise rather than rejection.”

“I suppose so.”

She said, “I think I'll be going now.”

He wiped the red pigment from the knife.

“Do you mind?” she asked.

“He's your job,” Dennis said.

“Yes he is. And I can't leave him unlooked after. I thank you for showing me around your studio. Your work is very interesting, and that is the truth. Well-”

Some of the red paint had gotten on his fingers. He stood there, staring at it, as if he saw something on the surface of the crimson blob, some image which he would have to use in a painting of his own.

She took a step away from him.

He did not turn.

She walked to the door, certain that he would come after her any moment now.

When she reached the door, she looked back, and she saw that he was painting crimson droplets on Celia Tamlin's face. He seemed to have forgotten that Elaine had ever been there.

She took the attic steps two at a time, even though she realized that he might hear her panicked flight. She opened the bottom door, stepped into the corridor, and closed the door behind her.

Her breathing was fast and ragged. She sucked each breath deep into her lungs, as if she had never expected to breathe outside of that attic room again. It was cool and clean and delicious.

When her nerves had quieted considerably, she smoothed her hair and straightened her blouse. The attention to grooming details helped calm her even more. Recovered, she wondered what she ought to do now. Should she go immediately to Jacob Matherly's room and tell the old man what Dennis had been like and what she had feared he was leading up to?

No. That would do her no good whatsoever. What, after all, had Dennis done? Talked of his mother. Painted pictures of madness. Showed a morbid fascination for blood. Toyed with a palette knife as if he might turn upon her and use it. None of it, in itself, was conclusive or even vaguely incriminating. Only if one were there could one understand what he had been like. It had not been only what he did, but how he did it, his mood, his expressions, the tone of his voice. And since no one but Elaine had seen those things and could grasp how they had been, the rest of it seemed silly.

Besides, Jacob would only tell her not to worry, that the killer was, after all, a stranger. A hitchhiker. He must be. Captain Rand said he was.

All she could expect to gain from Jacob Matherly was a little bit of conversation, a momentary escape from the dark house and the brooding people who lived there. He was the only haven of brightness in the place. But that was enough. Rather than sit alone in her room, she went down to talk to the old man. Disaster was brewing. She could feel it in the air, weighing down on her. At least, when it struck, she could be with someone else. Not alone. Please, not alone.

If events in the Matherly house had seemed to describe a descending circle towards a distant point of terror ever since the attempt on Celia Tamlin's life, they plummeted toward that terror like a falling star on the evening of the third day. The night gradually evolved into something like a hideous dream which, at some of its worst moments, she was sure would never end for her.

It began gradually, at supper.

Dennis, immersed in his painting of Celia Tamlin, did not come to the table, but had his meal sent up. This seemed to please Lee, Jerry and Bess. They reacted as if his sudden intense interest in his work was an omen of a return to normality. Didn't they understand what sort of painting it was? Didn't his flamboyant fascination with madness make them ill at ease? How could they ever evidence pleasure at such a decadent preoccupation?

Anyway, whatever Dennis did to lift their spirits, Paul more than compensated for. He had not yet returned from his trip to town and was, apparently, still in some barroom squandering a sizeable sum of his trust check. From time to time, Lee Matherly cast a fretful glance at the empty chair, as if he hoped to look up once and miraculously find Paul there.

Celia Tamlin, they had learned, had come out of her coma but had not yet been questioned and would not be for at least another twenty- four hours. Her doctor was keeping her heavily sedated.

This last bit of news should, Elaine supposed, be cheering. But it only made her feel a greater, deeper tension. If the would-be killer was a member of the Matherly household, wouldn't the threat of Celia's soon-to-be-regained consciousness drive him closer to the brink? If he were frightened that she would point the finger at him, wouldn't his borderline madness become a berserk spree against which none of them were safe?

Dinner would have been a terribly depressing affair if Gordon had not been there. He engaged her in conversation, and he seemed able to draw from her things she would never ordinarily have talked about. His quiet, somewhat shy manner, so much like her own, gave her confidence.

They were finishing dessert-strawberries and peaches in heavy cream-when Paul Honneker returned home. He slammed the front door so hard the noise reverberated throughout the house like a cannon shot. Then, for a time, he stood in the vestibule, out of sight of the dining room, and cursed someone-perhaps himself-quite loudly.

“Will you excuse me?” Lee Matherly asked, wiping his lips with a napkin and rising. He was embarrassed for his brother-in-law.

Gordon stopped talking and listened closely to what was said in the vestibule, and Elaine pretended to be interested in the last of the fat red strawberries swimming in the cream in her dish.

“What the hell do
you
want?” Paul Honneker asked.

From the sound of his voice, the slight slur on his words, it was clear that he was very drunk indeed.

“Lower your voice,” Lee Matherly said. His own voice was calm, sympathetic, even.

“Why in hell should I? Why
shouldn't
I yell all I want? I've had an afternoon to make a man yell!”

“Come upstairs, and you can tell me about it, Paul.”

“I'll tell you now. Those damned townspeople-”

“Upstairs, Paul.”

“I want something to drink.”

“You seem to have had plenty.”

“I want another,” Paul said. His voice had gone whiny, but there was an underlying rage in it that Elaine had never heard before.

“You have a bottle in your room?” Lee asked.

“Yes.”

“Let's go up, then. You can have a drink and tell me about it.”

There was quiet for a moment, as if the big man was considering the suggestion. Then, suddenly, there was an explosive sound of shattered glass. “Damned mirrors,” Honneker said. “I hate damned mirrors like that. You know I do, and still you have mirrors around. What the hell? Is everyone against me around here? Does everyone hate me?”

“Of course not,” Lee said.

“I'm going up to get a drink,” Honneker said.

He cursed and hollered the whole way up the steps, and his voice died slowly to a distant grumbling as they went into his room.

Gordon pushed his unfinished dessert aside. His face had gone white, his lips tight and angry. “I'm so sorry you had to be subjected to that.”

“It's all right, Gordon.”

“It really isn't all right,” he said. “He's a disgusting man, most of the time. I don't like people who don't achieve things. He's lazy and drinks too much. Despite mother's will, I think father ought to see about putting Paul on his own. It might do him good.”

She agreed, but she did not say anything, for she felt that it was a family affair which was none of her business.

Gordon said, “My brother's another who needs a bit of discipline. Living up there, doing nothing but his oils, dreaming about critical acclaim. It would be funny if it weren't that he reminds me, so much, of mother.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Flighty, excitable. Given to a lot of fantasy. Some of that's in Paul, too. It's terrible the way father does nothing to curb that attitude in both of them. It frightens me at times.”

She knew just what he meant.

Once she had seen to Jacob Matherly's well being and had heard him promise that he would take a sedative when he was finished with the book he was reading, she went to her own room and dressed for bed. She intended to read something light, the comedy-adventure novel which was among those she had purchased before she came here. But the novel was a bit too silly for her tastes and, besides, Paul Honneker's periodic noisy ramblings would not allow her to settle in for more than a few pages without being disturbed. When it was clear she was not going to become absorbed in the story, she put the book down and busied herself with a number of small chores.

She washed out two pair of stockings in the bath attached to her room and hung them to dry.

Paul Honneker was still rambling.

She filed her nails and painted them with clear polish to keep them from chipping more than they usually did. She really did not care much about the appearance of her nails, but this was, at least, something to help pass the time.

She dusted her room and straightened things a bit-mostly things that did not need straightening.

She wrote a short letter to a girlfriend who had attended nurses training with her. They were not really that close, and Elaine had intended to let the friendship gradually wither once they had gone their separate ways. But now it was nice to be able to make even this limited contact with the outside world.

She watched a television documentary about the ecology movement. Ordinarily, she did not care for situation comedies or westerns, preferring those shows which she felt were educational. Tonight, however, she watched several intolerably ridiculous programs when the ecology hour was over. She watched, in fact, until she grew sleepy. At a few minutes past midnight, she turned off the set, rolled over, pulled the covers up around her and reached out for the shimmering aura of sleep which was close at hand.

She dreamed of a painting.

The painting was her face, so huge it filled all horizons. Her face, in that painting, was covered with droplets of blood. Her own blood. Her eyes stared sightlessly out of the universal canvas, her mouth parted in a wordless scream of pain…

She woke to the sound of the emergency buzzer and leaped out of bed, her professionalism taking precedence over her grogginess. She pulled on her robe and hurried down the corridor toward Jacob's room.

The door was standing ajar, but she did not stop to consider the importance of that. She went in, turning on the light as she passed the switch, and found the old man doubled over, retching, panting for breath, his angina as fierce as it had ever been.

She got two glycerine tablets from the medicine cabinet, poured a glass of water. She held his head while he swallowed the first pill and lowered him back onto his pillows again. His face was furiously red; perspiration dotted his forehead and streaked along his cheeks. His hair was damp, as was the pillowslip under it. She gave him the second glycerine tablet, then began filling a syringe with a charge of morphine.

“The key-” he wheezed.

His voice was thin and birdlike, all but unintelligible.

“Key?”

He pointed toward the top of the nightstand where a ring of keys lay, his long fingers shaking uncontrollably.

“The key… for this room,” he said.

“Relax,” she told him, working up a smile that she thought would soothe him.

“Lock me in… when you… when you go!”

“Please rest, Mr. Matherly. Relax, and we'll have you better in no time at all.”

“Swear… swear you'll… lock me in.”

“Let's just roll up your sleeve,” she said.

“Swear it!” He was purpling with fury. His whole body shook as if someone were repeatedly striking him. She saw that it was worse to ignore his rantings than to give in to them.

She said, “I will.”

He slumped back, his face quickly paling, his lips taking on the blue tint of death.

She rolled up his sleeve, swabbed the area on the inside of his elbow joint and administered the morphine.

Shortly, color returned to his cheeks. His eyes looked heavy, but they were devoid of the agony they had contained.

“Better?” she asked.

“Tired,” the old man said. “Very tired… so tired.”

She listened to his heart with a stethoscope, listened for a long while. At first the beat was so ragged it frightened her, and she had decided to call an ambulance if it did not soon subside into a more regular cadence. In a few moments, the beat did soften and fall into a steady rhythm.

Jacob's face was healthy again, both in color and tone-except, of course, for the damaged half-and his lips had lost the deathly pallor.

She filled a basin with water from the adjacent bath and wiped his forehead and face with a cold washcloth. That done, she changed his bedclothes and made him comfortable once more.

“Now?” she asked.

“Better.”

“I'll stay with you until you're asleep.”

“You won't forget your promise?”

“I'll lock the door,” she assured him, though she didn't know why she should.

“I don't want him getting in again.”

“Who?”

“I don't know who it was. All I saw-I saw the knife, in the light from the window.”

She felt her own heart beat faster. In her professional role, so deeply involved in carrying out her nurse's functions, she had momentarily forgotten the Matherly house and its legacy of madness.

“You don't mean that someone tried to kill you, again?”

He nodded his head affirmatively.

She knew that she should drop the subject, but she could not. She said, “But why couldn't you see who it was? The nightlight would have-”

“There was no nightlight when I woke up.”

She knew, then, that he must have dreamed the entire affair, for there was always a nightlight burning here, at his own insistence. She clearly remembered seeing to it before she left the room earlier in the night.

He continued: “I was awakened when he stumbled against the chair in the dark. When I opened my eyes, there was no nightlight. Just the dim light from the window. I reached for the cord and pulled the buzzer to get your attention, because I found I couldn't build the lung power to scream.”

“There's no one here now,” she said. “When the buzzer sounded, he fled.”

“You rest now,” she said. “He's gone and can't hurt you.”

“Do you believe me?” he asked, fighting the drugs that worked on him.

“Of course,” she lied.

He leaned back, exhausted, and soon found sleep.

Elaine listened to his heartbeat again, took his pulse. Satisfied that the attack had passed, she turned to leave-and saw the small, blue bulb of the night-light. It was lying on the floor where someone had dropped it after unscrewing it from its baseboard fixture.

Numbly, she picked it up and threaded it into its socket again; it lighted and glowed against the palm of her hand. When she had entered the room and switched on the main lights, she had been too concerned with Jacob's condition to notice that the night-light was out. The old man had not been dreaming, after all. When she left his room, she carefully locked his door as he had requested.

In the corridor, she stood in darkness, holding the ring of keys and wondering what her next move should be. Back to bed? Or should she wake Lee Matherly and tell him what had happened? The darkness seemed to close in, like a living thing, and it made clear thought impossible.

She hurried down the corridor to her room, closed and locked her door behind.

She could not sleep.

The storm had begun again, complete with rolling thunder and the heavy patter of rain on the roof and against the windows. Lightning snapped open the clouds and peeled back the darkness for brief moments, then gave way to the thunderclaps again.

But it was not the storm which kept her awake. She could have slept through a hurricane if only she had not had to cope with the certainty that a madman roamed the night in Matherly house.

Perhaps she should not have left Jacob alone. She doubted that the killer would force the door. But if she had remained with the old man, she would not be alone now…

Elaine remembered the dream from which the buzzer had awakened her, remembered the mammoth canvas that filled the universe with a skillfully rendered portrait of her blood-stained countenance. And that did not help her state of mind at all. It so disturbed her, in fact, that when she first heard the noise at the door of her room, she thought it was nothing more than a figment of her overworked imagination, generated by these unpleasant memories. She tried to turn away from the door and concentrate on regaining sleep.

But the noise continued.

It sounded as if someone were testing the lock.

Finally, unable to ignore it any longer, she rolled over. In the light of the bedside lamp, which she had not been able to bring herself to extinguish, she looked at the door. The brass knob moved slightly. It turned first to the left-then to the right.

She sat up in bed.