Chapter 12
M aria had expected to see spiders in something as old and dusty as the abandoned hotel. She hadn't expected to see one so suddenly. It had lowered itself deliberately in front of her, dangling like a miniature monster on a string. She jumped back instinctively and, when she did, slashed her right hand on a piece of broken glass.
"What's the matter, Maria? Those spiders are harmless."
"It scared me."
Then he noticed her cut hand and reached out to take hold of it. His touch seemed cold and unreal to her, and she watched him examining the blood which welled up steadily out of the gash in her palm. He seemed preoccupied about something back there in the distance behind them, and he even had the gall to suggest she shouldn't leave any drops of blood on the ground.
"They might see it."
He reached into his pocket after a minute and gave her his handkerchief. His every action seemed to her to be getting weaker than ever, to be losing something of his masculinity, but she had been forced to follow him, to escape with him. She kept wondering about him. And she knew that if only she could depend on him, everything would have been all right.
"Hurry up, Maria. We've got to get inside."
"Okay."
She lowered herself again and hunched through the opening. She sat on the wall, then dropped inside the basement room. The spider was still there, but she didn't look at it. In the room itself, the light made the high walls look milky and unreal, and a strange heavy smell like that of rotten cabbages welled up in her nostrils.
Jim took a swing at the spider, missed, then dropped in after her. She didn't look at him. She looked around the strange white room and wondered what it had been used for. There was no real sign to give any indication. There was a high shelf, a dangling light bulb, nothing else. Two closed doors led out of the room, but both of them were closed.
She watched Jim walk back to the one which faced the window through which they had just come. He hesitated, reached out for the door knob, then opened it. Beyond him, she could see a long dark corridor leading into the depths of the hotel. Jim stood indecisively, fumbling for something in his pocket. When he pulled it out, she saw it was a flashlight, and then he motioned for her to follow.
She listened, but the only sound she heard was a distant dripping. It seemed to her that they were moving endlessly down a narrow tunnel of enamel black, pulled ahead endlessly by a cone of yellow light. The sharp acrid smell of rotten cabbages wouldn't leave her nose. She felt like sneezing, but forced herself not to.
One constant thought stayed in her brain. Ken had been a real buddy to her. She couldn't stop thinking about him. He was dead. Arlene had murdered him. She could visualize it rather easily. That bitch had only extended her talents. Somehow, she had led him on. She had enticed him, and then she had killed him...
But how?
They stopped at the end of the tunnel. Jim flashed his light around, but didn't say anything. He looked more indecisive than ever. After watching him for awhile, seeing he was frozen, she suggested rather sarcastically, "You want to stay here?"
That shook him up. He turned and faced her. "No, it's too much like being rats trapped in a hole some place. We've got to get higher. We've got to find some place where they can't take us by surprise."
She looked around, peering into the dark corners. In one, hidden by shadows, she saw a ladder that appeared to lead up into a round hat-box structure above. She pointed it out to him. "Jim, I wonder where that goes?"
He looked at her, forced a smile, then started up it. She watched him climbing. His big feet moved slowly, and his hands reached up one after the other, and she got the distinct impression of a caterpillar crawling up a stem of grass. Half way up, his shoe slipped off one rung; he almost fell.
"Jim, please be careful."
"Yeah."
He got to the top, strained for a second against something above him, then raised a trap-door over his head. He appeared to be looking around, shining his flashlight into the upper darkness, leaving her in a thick puddle of darkness underneath. Then he held his flashlight steady, apparently staring at something for a long time. Finally he lowered himself back down the ladder. "It's okay. I think I've got a place for us up on top."
"What were you looking at so long?"
"You'll see when you get up there."
This time, he moved up even more slowly than the first. He was holding the light down so she could see the rungs of the ladder. She didn't feel afraid. She was used to ladders. Back on the farm, she had been up and down them frequently.
Jim went through the trap-door, and she followed him. He closed it carefully behind her, so she wouldn't step back and fall through. She looked around, and the first thing she saw was a rope ladder. It dangled right in front of her. As she watched it sway back and forth, she kept wondering what made it move. She sensed that there must be a hidden draft, but she couldn't stop looking at the ladder itself. She knew instinctively Ken had died on it. Jim had not told her anything about that. Perhaps he hadn't known it either, but now he did. This was Ken's noose, Arlene's web.
She expected to feel nauseated and sick, but she didn't. She looked up towards the ceiling. High overhead, at least three stories above them, was a huge round disk. It hung suspended like a moon in the top center of the huge room, and Jim's flashlight painted it white. She knew then that this was the infamous ballroom.
This was the whispered-about Circus Room, and she remembered some of the stories about it. They had called it the Circus Room for a very definite reason. The sex circus they gave there had been something in the old days. When Mrs. Karster recalled them, a slight blush crossed her kindly German face.
A crowd of rich men had come up from Chicago, and from that high disk, when the orchestra gave a signal from the very podium where they were now standing, something dramatic happened. A group of completely naked girls held onto rings and slid down tight wires to the extremities of the room.
Through the present darkness, the silence, out of the depth of time, Maria could hear the bursts of long-gone raucous masculine laughter, the raw trumpets blasting hot jazz notes, the swift wild flurry of white female flesh.
Champagne had flowed. It was always a stag affair. The men had an orgy, and it had been a yearly tradition until prohibition was repealed, when the hotel lost its attraction for fun-seekers, lust-seekers, booze-seekers.
Jim studied the ladder, felt it with his fingers, but said nothing. After a couple of minutes, he looked back at her. His voice was solemn, restrained. "Maria, how in hell did she do it?"
His question was her question, and she had no way of putting the answer into words. But she knew. Right then, she could look up, just as Ken must have looked up, and she could visualize Arlene up there on the disk, with the ladder coming down through the round central hole, and Arlene directing a flashlight down over the lush perfection of her naked body. She must have offered an interesting invitation.
Maria had even seen her do it once. Arlene had stood on a tall rock in Vermont, and had held a light with the beam slashing down across her white legs, her white naked thighs, leaving a black slash of hair. For Maria, it had not been tempting, but she could understand how, for a man seeking such a sight in the darkness, it would have held invincible drawing power. Arlene would have whispered down to Ken: "Think you can make it?"
"Yeah."
Maria could hear the tension and desire throbbing in Ken's voice, and then Ken would have begun to climb. What he was climbing to was not a woman's red-hot body, but his death. Jim's voice cut suddenly into her thoughts.
"What gets me is why the Chief said it was so damn fiendishly clever."
"Let's go up," she suggested, and Jim led the way. Scaling the rope ladder appeared to be much harder for him than the wooden one, for as he ascended his body jerked back and forth. He kept at it though, until he was a few yards from the disk. She saw him stop and look at a rung of the ladder, then look at his hand.
"When you come up," he said, "watch out for this rung. There's something sharp on it."
She waited. He climbed the rest of the way, got his arms over the edge and pulled himself through. When he was standing on the disk, he stepped back and shone the light down for her.
"Think you can make it?" He asked.
"Sure."
She climbed up slowly, trying to keep the rope from swaying too much, but the rhythm caught her, and she found herself swinging as much as several feet back and forth. She forgot the dizzy swinging. She had a much stronger question in her mind, and when she got to the same place in the ladder where Jim had stopped, she understood the answer to that, too.
It surprised her, and the shock whispered through her like the thin sound of a breaking wire. It didn't seem possible Arlene could be that devilish. At that point, the ladder was stiffened by two long steel bars in the ropes, and she examined a loose dangling coil of wire at their lower extremity. The wire had blood and skin still on it, and she tried to understand the mechanism, and then she understood that part, too.
The ladder had been triggered like a snare. At the last second, Ken had looked up, listening to Arlene's voice, looking at Arlene's widespread crotch. He had touched the rung which had the sharp particles of glass in it. He had jerked his hand instinctively up and grabbed the next thing above him. It had been the trip wire. He had pulled it out.
The noose had whipped over his head. The stiffened section of ladder had given way like an unfolding section of picture post-cards, and he had been snapped by the neck. The explosive, horrible, shock would have killed him instantly.
Maria shivered. She forced herself not to think about it, and she avoided the glass particles, looked up at Jim and climbed. But even when she tried not to, she could hear, in the thick, turgid darkness, Arlene's sick laughter. It must have rained down over Ken's dead, dangling body like so much venom dripping from a snake's mouth.
Jim took her hands and helped her over the edge. When she had sat down on the floor of the disk, far from the hole, he looked down at her. "I guess you figured how it happened, huh?" "Yeah."
"I didn't think she could be so damn clever - or so damn mean. What in hell could she have placed in his pocket?"
Maria sat there, with her hands firmly planted on the wooden floor. The whole world of darkness welled up around her like a universe completely separated from the earth, and she tried to think that part out to its inevitable end. It was harder to do.
Arlene could have gone back to her apartment, before contacting Ken and making a date. She had probably called him on the phone- perhaps, Maria had heard the phone ringing- and suggested, since she was married, a very private place. She must have spent the day, while Jim and she were in the Coffee Shop, looking around the old hotel, figuring things out. Maria glanced at Jim quickly. "Didn't she tell you?"
"No."
She tried to clear her head. It must have been something linking her name very clearly to Ken, and to his dead body. She shivered, and then she knew. She had a prescription for special pills. She wasn't supposed to have it, really, but one time, she had had a serious infection of the fallopian tubes. She couldn't have any children. She had provided herself with the pills for such time as she might find a man.
Unfortunately, Ken had never been that man.
She smiled grimly at the thought-Ken had gotten her pills anyway. He had them in his pocket, as he hung there dead. Poor Ken! Maria saw the final vision of Arlene descending the rope ladder, crossing over his dead body, spitting on him probably, then stuffing the pills in his pants pocket.
That clue would have seemed too pat to anyone save Jerry Williams, but Jerry would have been trying to shake his head saying that she, Maria, couldn't ever do such a thing. And then one of the police officers would have found the pills.
"Maria!" Jim said suddenly, "There's nothing to be afraid of."
"But what's that whining noise? Don't you hear it?"
"It's those damn wires. They're strung too tight. The air-currents blow across them. They just sound funny, that's all."
"But, Jim, I keep hearing footsteps."
"I don't."
But he stopped talking and strained to listen in the darkness. Within the vast structure, there was a shuffling, moaning sound. She did seem to hear footsteps, but they came from somewhere above, not from below. She tried to reason it out, then knew that the two of them must be very close to the top of the hotel, and that there couldn't possibly be anything over them except the roof.
She felt his hand move over and touch her knee. It moved up her leg. He touched her all over, and her body shivered with fright as if she had been out all night like a puppy in the snow and rain. She couldn't control herself. She had to shiver.
"Come here," he said softly, "let me hold you."
Jim sat down beside her and held her, and they we"re silent. There was nothing for them to do. They had to wait. She felt him beside her, but she couldn't see him, for he had turned off his flashlight. His breathing sounded like the soft touch of cat claws on wood.
She asked, "You scared?"
He didn't answer, and again she wondered what she was doing there. It didn't seem possible that she could depend on Jim, who was no longer a man, who no longer had guts, sexual power or anything else.
"I'm not scared," he said finally, "I'm trying to figure some way out of this thing. Maybe we should have run away."
"Where?"
"I don't know, but anything would be better than just sitting here like stupid jerks."
She was the one who got scared first. The thick darkness moved in tight across her face. She could feel it, and then she felt it inserting slippery black hands under her dress. Finally it was inserting itself inside her. She jerked back. She couldn't stand it. She reached for Jim, grabbed his arm. "We've got to do something. I'm scared, Jim. I can't stand it anymore. We've got to get out of here."
He wrapped his arms around her, and when she felt his warmth, she began to feel better. He kissed her on the lips, on the neck. She felt his hands moving in the right way, the old skillful way, and she was thankful. He gave her some relief.
"Jim," she said softly, "I'm sorry that I thought so bad of you."