10

After dinner, Jerry North read manuscript, shuddering from time to time. Pam North read Jameson Elwell on hypnotism, at intervals saying, “Jerry! It says here—” To which Gerald North said, for the most part, “Um-m-m,” and now and then, “You ought to see what it says here, for God’s sake.” Reading Elwell on hypnotism turned out, Pam found, to be more like eating peanuts than, as she had first supposed, plumbing a Christmas cake. As the evening progressed, she learned to skip over those passages in which technics were stressed—“you are growing sleepy; you are falling into a deep sleep,” for example—to avoid autosuggestion.

“You don’t talk in your sleep much,” Pam said, at one point, and Jerry said, “Um-m-m,” and then, hearing her, “Huh?”

“Which probably explains it,” Pam said, and got a more emphatic “Huh?” “Your not responding earlier,” Pam said, and at this Jerry laid down the manuscript and invited Pam to come again.

“When I pretended to try to hypnotize you,” Pam said, “and you pretended I had. Cad, incidentally, while I think of it. People who talk in their sleep are usually good subjects, and if they will let you talk back without waking up, they’re even better. That’s what it says here. And those who actually get up and walk around in their sleep are the best of all.”

“This man,” Jerry said, and tapped the manuscript—“this man talks in my sleep. What does that mean?”

“I haven’t come across that yet,” Pam said, and then, “If you’re not interested. Martini—it says here that all animals can be hypnotized. Teeney!”

Martini flicked the extreme tip of her tail.

“You,” Pam said, to Martini, “are falling fast asleep. Fast, fast asleep.”

Which was true enough.

“Only,” Jerry pointed out, “she was already.”

But this time it was Pam who said “um-m-m,” having found another peanut. Jerry watched Pam for a moment, always, to him, a satisfying activity, even when she is not doing anything. Then, with a sigh, he returned to duty. If only something would happen to somebody. Jerry was not particular what; he realized he was reading a modern novel and made no great demands. Any little thing. He would be satisfied if the hero, if he could be called that, would trip on something and fall downstairs. Or upstairs. Or, if that was too much to ask, catch a bad cold. Or even a slight cold. Anything to dam the stream of his consciousness.

It was getting so, Jerry thought, that there are only two kinds, and both of them long. Nobody will buy them any more unless they’re long. Fiction goes by the pound, Jerry thought. Often enough, a pound of flesh. That is one kind—the sexual mechanics kind; the “let-me-tell-you-how-it-happens” kind, the telling each time with a fervor suitable to the newly discovered. That kind was, commonly, written by the middle-aged who would, one would have supposed, long since have lost the wide-eyed enthusiasm of puberty. But they had not, and, which was of more immediate importance to publishers, the reading public had not either. There was the other kind, and this—this which was, it had to be admitted, not completely holding his present attention—was of its species. In such, nothing whatever happened, including the obvious. And how the reviewers loved them. The trouble with me, Jerry thought, is that I’ve had a long day—a day with too many words in it. So I’m not being fair to “this” and—

“Jerry,” Pam said, “it says here—”

She waited. He came up, and now thankfully.

What it said there was that people did not—unlike modern novels—come in two kinds. They were not—

“—not just hypnotists or hypnotees,” Pam said. “One person can be both. He—Elwell, I’m talking about—”

“I know who you’re talking about,” Jerry said.

“Whom,” Pam said. “He stresses that to prove it isn’t a question of dominant will power. He says—I’ll read you what he says—‘The belief that the operator is a person of dominating will and the subject one easily dominated is, of course, without validity, being one of the superstitions which have clustered immemorially about the science in the popular mind.’ He does write like a professor, doesn’t he?”

“A little,” Jerry admitted. “I especially like the ‘of course,’ don’t you? Like the Russian ‘as is well known.’ Anticipatory reinforcement of the improbable, it’s called.”

“Is it?”

“As of the moment,” Jerry said. “By me, anyhow.”

“Let’s stay on the subject,” Pam said. “Anticipatory reinforcements of the improbable another time. All right? Anyway, he goes on—no, I’ll translate as I go—he cites several cases in his own experience in which a single person was both an excellent subject for hypnotism and an experienced operator. By operator, he means ‘hypnotist.’”

Jerry knew. He had, after all, read the book. Since he had—

“Published it,” Pam said. “I know. Anyway, I know what you say. Then, you remember his case history? In this connection?”

Jerry did not contend that he remembered, in exact detail, each of the many case histories used for exemplification in the numerous pages of Hypnotism in the Modern World.

“About,” Pam said, “a Mr. H. A young assistant of Jamey’s in experiments; a man who was not only a good hypnotee but a good hypnotist—one of the best of each Jamey had ever encountered, although by no means unique in—‘in having this dichotomous character.’ Phew!”

“Phew indeed.”

“‘Mr. H.’” Pam repeated. “‘H’ for ‘Hunter,’ wouldn’t you think?”

It was quite possible.

“A man of unusual intelligence and strength of character, Jamey says ‘Mr. H.’ is—was. In this field, as in others, a man uncommon not only in the discernment of his approach to the fields of research, but in the persistence and inventiveness with which he meets the problems of technic which so constantly arise in the science of psychology as, of course, in other sciences. I was reading that.”

“I thought,” Jerry said, “that I detected a somewhat different style.”

“Mr. Hunter,” Pam said. “Persistent. And—inventive.”

“If,” Jerry said, “a touch posthypnotic.”

He was invited to be serious. He said by all means. Carl Hunter was persistent and inventive, in the judgment of a man who should have known; who was trained to know. And, where did it get them? In, as he supposed was the point, the question of the murder of Jameson Elwell, Ph.D.?

“I don’t know,” Pam said. And then she closed Hypnotism in the Modern World. “For all we know, Bill’s solved it already. Is it too late to call up and ask him? After all, Jamey was your author.”

It was, Jerry thought, a somewhat tenuous “after all.” Furthermore, it was almost eleven o’clock.

“I suppose you’re right,” Pam said, without enthusiasm, and the door chimes sounded. “Now who ever at this hour?” Pam said, and went to see.

A slight woman in a close-fitting woolen dress stood at the door; a woman young of body, much less young of face; a woman with very brown hair and somewhat light blue eyes. She wore a beige fall coat and carried a black handbag under her left arm.

“Is Faith here?” the woman said. The voice was thin.

There was, inescapably, a moment of confusion. The Norths live in downtown Manhattan, where mankind still is variable. (Although not, residents of the area will tell you, wistfully, in the old way.) There are variables who offer tracts.

“Yes,” Pam said, adopting the method experience had proved the most efficacious. “We are both saved.”

This usually resulted in a “Bless you, sister,” or even, now and again, in a “Hallelujah!” and, eventually, in departure, in most cases after the purchase, for a modest sum, of a tract.

“I don’t—” the slight little woman said. “Oh—you are Mrs. North?” Pam nodded. “You didn’t understand me,” the little woman said. “Faith Oldham. My daughter. Is she here?”

Now Pam noticed that the thin voice was also a strained voice; that there was an odd intentness in the light blue eyes.

“No,” Pam said. “But come in, Mrs. Oldham. Perhaps we—”

Hope Oldham did not wait for Pam to finish. She came into the room and looked around it, quickly, as if she had not believed denial, thought to see her daughter. But then, it seemed blindly, she groped for a chair and sat in it, and put her hands over her face.

“I so hoped—” she said. “I’m—so afraid something—”

The woman’s slim body, which seemed to parody youth, began to shake as if mind had lost all control of trembling nerves. Pam went to her quickly, bent over the chair and put an arm around the shaking shoulders, holding the older woman close. “I’ll be all right,” Hope Oldham said, and said it again, in a voice which was not “all right.”

She was crying—sobbing, at any rate. She was close to hysteria, Pam thought, holding her and making small meaningless sounds intended to bring comfort. And at the same time, apropos of nothing, uninvited, a thought edged into Pam North’s mind. Those subject to hysteria are, “notoriously”—the word was Professor Elwell’s—subject also to hypnosis. What had that to do with anything? “There,” Pam said to Hope Oldham. “There. There.” And again, the frail woman said she would be all right.

“Take a deep breath,” Pam said. “A really deep breath.”

Hope Oldham’s breast—a younger woman’s breast—rose as she breathed deeply. And her shoulders did not shake so under Pam’s comforting, reassuring, arm. Again Hope drew air slowly, deeply, into her lungs.

“I’m all right now,” she said, and this time the tone was different, this time the words had meaning. Pam released her and Hope Oldham managed a smile and said, “Thank you, my dear. It was just—” She stopped and again drew a deep breath.

“I so hoped she would be here,” Mrs. Oldham said. “Was almost certain. To find she isn’t—”

She seemed about to begin shaking again.

“Wait,” Pam said. “We’ll get you something. Coffee? Or—”

“Here,” Jerry said, and held a small glass out. “Maybe this will help, Mrs. Oldham.” She looked at it. “Cognac,” Jerry said. “It’ll be good for you.”

She took it doubtfully. But she sipped from it and nodded her head over it.

“We’ll all have—” Pam began, but Jerry had thought of that, also. They all had.

“I—“Mrs. Oldham began and Jerry, his voice very gentle, said, “Finish it first.” She finished. “Now,” Jerry said. “Your daughter is—she’s gone some place? You’re trying to find her?”

“I thought she had come here,” Mrs. Oldham said, and now her voice was reasonably steady. “I know I should have telephoned. Not just—forced my way in on you. At this hour, too. But I was so certain. I said to myself, ‘Of course! That’s it. Mrs. North was so kind earlier, so understanding, and now—of course she’s gone there.’ It was as if something told me. And—”

She stopped suddenly.

“She was here this morning?” Mrs. Oldham said, and spoke very quickly, with a return of excitement. “It wasn’t just something she—told me? To throw me off the track?”

“She was here,” Pam said. “To—” It was Pam’s turn to stop, to consider. To find out, through her, what the police thought, specifically about Carl Hunter? That was, Pam supposed, the answer. (Although there might, of course, have been more to it.) “She just wanted somebody to talk to,” Pam said. “She’s so upset about Jamey and—”

“But not,” Mrs. Oldham said, “not her own mother. Somebody she hardly knew at all!”

Which was certainly true.

“Well,” Pam said.

“Sometimes,” Jerry said, his voice still gentle, “sometimes it’s easier to talk to people one isn’t close to, Mrs. Oldham. One feels freer. With no past associations to—intervene.”

“Her own mother,” Mrs. Oldham said, as if she had not heard. “The poor, poor child. What have they done to her, Mrs. North? What have they done to her?”

She seemed to be working herself back into the mood of near hysteria. Certainly she was proceeding in anything but a straight line.

“Who?” Pam North said, seeking to direct traffic. “Who do you think has done something to her?”

“And for that matter,” Jerry said, “done what?”

Now she looked at both of them, first at Pam, then at Jerry. Her eyes were very light blue; they did not hold tears. Her sobs, then, must have been part of a kind of nervous chill. She had not really been weeping. Probably it would be better for her if she could. But—about what?

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Oldham said. “It’s the shock of—of realizing. I’m afraid I’m not very coherent. But—”

And then she started to get up from the chair.

“I’m terribly sorry to have barged in this way,” she said, the idiom contemporary, the tone unexpectedly formal. “So late in the evening. Bothering you with things which can’t possibly interest you, really. Although you have been very kind. Very kind. Since Faith isn’t here—”

“Mrs. Oldham,” Pam said, “if there’s anything we can do to help.” The young-old woman hesitated. “Look,” Pam said. “Your daughter’s gone away somewhere and you don’t know where. You’re worked up. But probably nothing’s happened to her. Of course nothing’s happened to her.”

Pam got assurance into her clear voice; spoke as if she knew.

“It isn’t—” Mrs. Oldham said, but then let herself sink back into the chair. “I do feel you want to help. Both of you.”

“You speak,” Jerry said, “as if something violent had happened. As if your daughter had been—taken away. But you surely didn’t think we—we had done anything to make her come here?”

“Like,” Pam North said, to her own surprise, “dragging her by the hair?”

Mrs. Oldham did not appear to hear that, which was probably as well. She said, to Jerry, that she hadn’t meant that, of course, and that he didn’t understand.

“I don’t,” Jerry said. “If there’s any way we can help. But we’ll have to know, first, what’s happened.”

They would, of course, think she was only a foolishly worried woman. She realized that. Anybody would think that who didn’t—well, really know how things were. Because on the surface nothing had “happened” except that Faith Oldham had got a telephone call and, afterward, gone out without telling her mother where she was going.

“As if,” Hope Oldham said, “she didn’t trust me. And, didn’t care how much I worried.”

“Well,” Pam said, “she isn’t exactly a child, Mrs. Oldham. It’s more considerate to tell people where you’re going, of course, but one can’t always.” Her remark started a faint echo in Pam’s echo-prone mind. Of course, “after every meal.” It is pleasant to settle such things as one goes along.

“For all you know, then,” Jerry said, and he was very calm. “For all you know some friend called her and said, come over for a drink. Or a cup of coffee. And you weren’t around and—”

Mrs. Oldham was shaking her head from side to side. She had been around.

She had, to be sure, been in the tub. This had been—oh, about ten. “I always take a hot bath before I go to bed,” Mrs. Oldham said. “It makes it so much easier to sleep. Because of course I never take anything.”

Pam nodded her head, acknowledging the rectitude of that non-behavior, resisting the temptation to remark that she didn’t either, for the most part, but did not regard this as a special mark of virtue.

“You were in the tub,” Jerry said, “and?”

She had heard the telephone ring. She had got out of the tub as quickly as she could, and dried herself briefly, but by then the telephone had quit ringing—

“You didn’t know your daughter was in the house?” Pam asked her.

“Why do you say that?” Mrs. Oldham said. “Yes, I knew she was downstairs. Reading, probably. She has to read a great deal for all these courses she’s taking.”

“Then why—?” Pam began, but stopped, because Jerry was shaking his head at her.

“You got to the phone,” Jerry said. “And?”

She had gone to the extension on the second floor, and found that her daughter had already answered. She heard her daughter say, “All right, I’ll come over,” and then cut the connection.

She had got a robe on, and gone out into the stair hall and called her daughter’s name down the stairs and been just too late. The front door was closing, closed. She had gone downstairs, then, hurrying, and opened the door and looked out, and not seen anyone.

“Of course,” she said, “I couldn’t go out on the sidewalk and really look because I wasn’t dressed.”

It still, to Jerry, sounded as if Faith Oldham might have been invited to join a friend—for a drink, for a cup of coffee. He said so. He said that, possibly, Faith had thought her mother already asleep and had not wanted to waken her. It was, also, he pointed out, possible that Faith was home by now and wondering where her mother was.

“I wish I could believe that was all it was,” Hope Oldham said. “I do wish I could.”

Part of it, at any rate, could easily be checked. Jerry asked for a telephone number, got it and dialed it. A telephone rang in the Oldham house. Jerry let it ring for some seconds before he hung up. It didn’t, he pointed out, prove anything.

“No,” Mrs. Oldham said. “It’s no use. She’s—she’s gone to him. That’s the dreadful thing. Deep down, I knew it all the time. He’s—he’s made her come to him. The poor, poor child!”

Jerry spoke for both of them. Jerry said, “He?”

The expression in the pale blue eyes seemed one of surprise.

“Why,” she said, “that Carl Hunter, of course. That dreadful—evil—man.” She looked from one to the other. “You didn’t even suspect,” she said, and her tone was incredulous. “He—took you in, too.” She shook her head, slowly, as if in despair. “He and the professor,” she said. “Two evil men. And evil turned against evil.”

The Norths looked at each other and Jerry shrugged. It was Pam who repeated. “Evil?”

“Twisting people’s minds,” Hope Oldham said. “Making them do—horrible things. Getting into their minds, breaking down all the right things—the true things.” She paused; she looked at them and shook her head again. “You don’t know about such things,” she said. “I tried to tell that friend of yours—Weigand? His name’s Weigand, isn’t it?—what kind of a man Jameson Elwell was. I could tell he didn’t understand. Didn’t even believe me. And this Hunter—”

She stood up suddenly.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, and her voice now was shrill. “I’ve got to find her before he makes her be—makes her do some other dreadful thing. I’ve—”

It was obvious to Pam that hysteria had once again gripped Hope Oldham.

“Wait,” Pam said. “There’s something you’ve forgotten. Mr. Hunter—whatever he is, if he’s all you say he is—can’t do anything to anybody. Not now. He’s in the hospital.” She paused and repeated the word very slowly. “Hospital. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps Faith has gone to him. But—don’t you see?—there are all sorts of people at the hospital. Nurses and doctors and—and all sorts. So—what can he do? Supposing he wants to do anything?”

“They couldn’t stop him,” Mrs. Oldham said. She spoke quickly, almost feverishly. “Nobody could. Anyway—I called the hospital. He’s got around them, too. They said he couldn’t be disturbed. She’s there with him and—”

She did not finish that. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Find them.”

Jerry said “Wait,” this time. He said that, too, was something easy to check on. Probably Hunter was asleep; he might have been given a sedative. It should be easy enough to find out. He looked up the number, he dialed. Answered, he said that he wanted to enquire about a Mr. Carl Hunter. He waited for some time.

“Mr. Hunter,” a mechanically pleasant voice told him, “is doing as well as can be expected.”

“I wonder,” Jerry said, “if I could be connected with his room? I realize it’s late, but it’s rather important for me to talk to him. And I understand his injury isn’t—”

“One minute, please,” the pleasant voice said.

It was a minute—it was more than a minute. And the next voice was not a woman’s formally soothing voice. A man spoke. He said, “I understand you want to talk to Mr. Hunter?”

Jerry said he did.

“Who’s calling?” the man said, and Jerry told him who was calling.

There was another long pause. It was as if the man had turned away from the telephone, covering the transmitter with his hand. But then he spoke again.

“Sorry,” he said. “Mr. Hunter can’t be disturbed.”

Hung up on, Jerry hung up. He turned and looked at Pam, at Hope Oldham. His face was puzzled, reflecting a puzzled mind.

“They’re—” he began, and reconsidered. “It sounds,” he said, “rather as if they’re keeping something back. Maybe Hunter’s worse. Maybe—”

He did not finish. He dialed again. After a little time he was answered by a voice—a somewhat sleepy voice—which he knew well.

“Is he ever?” Dorian Weigand said. “No, Jerry. He was in, too late for dinner. Now he’s gone, too early for breakfast.”

Bill had gone about ten minutes earlier. She had been in bed, three-fourths asleep; he had been undressing. The telephone had rung. He had said, “Right, I’ll be along,” and dressed again and leaned over to kiss a sleepy wife.

“Wh—” Dorian had begun but he had said, “Go on to sleep, darling. Tell you all about it in the morning,” and then had gone.

“The sort of thing that happens all the time,” Dorian Weigand said in the disconsolate tone of one much put upon. “Tell Pam she doesn’t know how lucky she is.”

Bill Weigand might have gone any place, for any purpose. His sudden return to duty did not, necessarily, have anything whatever to do with Faith or Carl Hunter or, indeed, the Elwell case. But as his wife and the frail, excited woman looked at him, Jerry felt growing uneasiness. They had been very guarded at the hospital; very—careful. Because Hunter wasn’t, in fact, there any more? It seemed disturbingly likely.

“I’m afraid—” Jerry began, but Hope Oldham, standing now, her little hands clenched convulsively, interrupted.

“They’ve let him go!” she said. “Let him go! To kill somebody else! Faith. Because she—”