THE OTHER MAN

With his back to the window he had broken, he stood listening to the faintly dusty silence in the cottage.

Gradually he allowed himself to relax. There was no one here, he was now quite sure. Even if there were a bed-ridden occupant who had chosen to ignore his earlier use of the front door knocker, his eventual entry would at least have provided some sort of query by this time.

He looked about him. The room in which he stood was a kitchen, its walls white and carrying no decoration. There were three doors, two panelled and the third a lighter affair that obviously led to a pantry. The table and four wooden chairs were plain waxed wood, and a recess beside the pantry door contained a small stove, with a gas bottle leaning in the corner.

He glanced over his shoulder through the window, carefully studying the sunlit clutter of the woods and the tire-rutted dirt road beyond the white fence that enclosed the untended garden behind the cottage; then he moved across the kitchen to the nearer panelled door and opened it.

It led directly into the living room, a surprisingly large room that must at one time have been two smaller ones. A staircase was on his right, and the front door of the cottage was directly in front of him. He crossed the living room to the nearest window and moved the closed curtain fractionally to one side. Glances in both directions reassured him that the path he had left little more than a minute before was still deserted, an empty strip of baked earth that curved gently beside the placid sheen of the river.

He wandered about the room, studying its contents. These walls were also white, but this time they carried simply framed reproductions of paintings. With a start of pleasure he saw that one of them was a Rousseau, a personal favourite—a thing of sombre greens and one patch of sullen red, a scene of shadowed violence that had gripped his imagination ever since he had first seen it in a museum.

He looked at the other pictures. There were a Klee and a Shahn, the Klee only vaguely familiar, but the Shahn one that he remembered clearly—the violinist in his dark and formal suit contrasting sharply with the rural dress and simple instruments of his fellow musicians.

He brushed a hand absently.at the dusty front of his overalls and looked thoughtfully at the rest of the room. The furniture was a carefully chosen blending of old and new—modern lounge chairs contrasting pleasantly with the more traditionally styled items. There was a recess on each side of the open fireplace, one with unpainted shelving filled with books, the other containing a cabinet with a portable record player on top of it. He went over to the cabinet, knelt, and slid the doors back. One compartment contained glasses and bottles, the other long-playing records.

He reached for a bottle, uncorked it, and tilted it against his mouth. The whiskey fumes, unfamiliar after so long a time, caught at his throat. He coughed, corked the bottle, placed it on top of the cabinet, then reached inside the second compartment and pulled out the top record.

He read the bold type on the cover with a cautiously wondering look, his pose suddenly one of disbelieving wariness. Placing the record beside the bottle, he reached for others, extracting a few this time. He flipped through them with a kind of numbed fascination, hungrily identifying them. Then he spread them in a neat semicircle around him, muttering names in a barely audible voice.

Stravinsky, Ellington, Bartok, Ravel, Armstrong, Parker, Hoist, Basie. He rested a hand that shook slightly on the nearest cover. It was firm to his touch, a tangible link with things he had once had and lost, and their loss was now suddenly more terrible than it had ever been, a knife of memories that dug deep into his mind.

He rose and moved aimlessly about the room, touching things with nervous fingertips. Despite their reassuring solidity he returned to each item several times, now smoothing or gripping it, as though afraid that each was a fragment of a mirage that would fade and vanish unless he repeatedly obtained tactile and irrefutable evidence of its reality.

At last he paused and found himself looking directly at the bookshelves. He stared at them for some time without moving. Something, he knew, had pulled him past them during his circuit of the room, so that in fact he had not touched them once or even glanced closely at them. He absently acknowledged this, and also the inescapable fact that this omission had been occasioned by sheer funk, a fear that what he might find there would in some way disturb the pattern that was gradually resolving around him.

“Thurber,” he said aloud. His voice was slightly hoarse. “Waugh. Chandler. Wodehouse.” He paused, and laughed, nervously. “Bradbury.”

Kneeling, he ran his eyes slowly across each shelf, savouring familiar titles like a gourmet who had long been denied food that would genuinely excite his palate. They were all there, sandwiched between tantalisingly unread authors and titles, some of whom he knew vaguely by name, others that were totally unfamiliar.

He fumbled one of these from the shelf and glanced at the contents page. It was a science-fiction anthology, its stories striking chords of varying resonance in his memory.

He replaced it carefully, let his eyes wander hungrily along the other shelves, nodding frequently as though acknowledging the presence of old friends.

After a time he rose and crossed the room to the stairs, still moving cautiously, but with an undercurrent of elation that now added briskness to his walk.

He found a solitary bedroom at the top of the house, a long, low-ceilinged room that contained a double bed, modern unmatched chairs, and a dressing table with a smudge of face powder on its top. There was a curtained alcove at the far end, empty except for a few wire clothes hangers. He moved back to the bed and tested it with both hands, smiling at the softly sprung reaction that he felt.

He went downstairs again, through the living room and into the kitchen. One of the panelled doors yielded a toilet. Behind the pantry door he saw a handful of cans and bottles—meat loaf, peas, beans, soup, apricots, and condensed milk. One of the bottles contained instant coffee. He walked slowly back into the living room and slumped ia a chair, tilting his head back and closing his eyes.

The picture was now clear. This was a weekend cottage, the property of a man whose tastes matched his own to an almost uncanny degree, even to the style of decor and furnishings. A successful man, who possessed enough money to create a sanctuary where he could temporarily escape his work and responsibilities, lulled by the restful quiet of the surroundings and the books and music of his choice.

A man like himself in many ways—but with one irremovable difference.

He grimaced, and moved restlessly in his chair. It was almost as though his discovery of this place was a piece of sadistically calculated punishment, a cruel and deliberate demonstration of what might have been. But he had blundered, and the last five months, surrounded by bleak grey stone and whitewashed walls, had been the price of his greed and stupidity.

Now these things were forever beyond attainment, dreams that would torment him for a while and then inevitably fade and die in the furtive future of running and hiding that confronted him, never knowing when an authoritative hand would seize his shoulder or a uniformed figure block his path.

He swore, a sudden burst of directionless invective, and opened his eyes. Sunlight was cutting a swathe down the wall in front of him, ending dazzlingly on the polished wooden top of a small gate-leg table.

In the centre of this almost blinding brightness was a framed photograph that he had somehow bypassed during his earlier exploration of the room.

He stared at it without moving, slitting his eyes against the glare, sullenly reluctant despite his burning curiosity to confront what he assumed to be a portrait of his unwitting host. Then reasoning doubt tempered his initial flush of animosity.

Would such a person be likely to keep a photograph of himself? He queried his own streak of narcissism, and found the answer to be a firm negative. Pushing himself out of the chair, he crossed the room and looked down at the portrait.

It was a photograph of a woman in a sweater and skirt, with a large kerchief on her head knotted beneath her chin. Fair hair showed in a careless fringe that covered part of her forehead. She was leaning against a stone wall, her feet crossed, and she was laughing. He judged her to be a little younger than his own twenty-seven years. He picked up the frame, walked back to the chair and sank into it, holding the picture in front of him with both hands.

It was a good photograph, the details sharp and clear. The two rings on her left hand showed plainly the carelessly displayed badges of respectability and ownership. He stared woodenly, his mouth hot arid dry. Here, then, was the ultimate seal of triumph, the possession of a beautiful woman; one who could love such a man, sharing his tastes and desires, the partner who slept with him in the bed upstairs. A woman who might, in other times and other circumstances, have been his.

His mind slid dully back to his own amours, a spasmodic series of shallow and unresolved relationships that had all concluded flatly, their collective after-taste more one of relief than misery. He had always been finicky about women, consciously seeking one with whom he could experience genuine rapport, a true partner whom he could turn to with the knowledge that his emotions were shared; but his idealistic search had been fruitless, inevitably terminating in cul-de-sacs of misunderstanding or boredom.

But this must be such a woman. He stared at the laughing face and trim figure in the photograph, a hard lump of futility lodged tightly in his throat.

He rose again, tiredly, and replaced the frame on the table, then wandered back into the kitchen. Common sense nudged at his apathy, telling him that he must eat—he had had no food for over twenty-four hours—and then decide on his next move. The cottage was a temporary refuge only, a place of blessed shelter that he had been fortunate to find; but the prison from which he escaped was a bare twenty miles away and isolated houses such this would inevitably be included in the ever-widening net that the authorities would have spread by now.

It was only in a city that he could hope for permanent freedom, some large anonymous place where money, which he would have to steal, would buy the means of getting him out of the country. As he saw it, he had no other choice. His attempt to rob his employers had been a solitary affair, and his parents’ reaction at the time of his arrest and imprisonment had left him with no illusions that help of any kind could be expected from that quarter. None of his friends possessed enough money, and he wryly conceded that even if they did, not a single one of them could be trusted not to salvage his conscience and respectability by turning him in.

He took some cans from the pantry and opened them. The bottle of gas, he found, was half full. He lit the stove and made coffee, swallowing the hot and bitter fluid greedily between spooned mouthfuls of beans as he sat at the kitchen table, his mind drifting greyly back over the events that had brought him to this sanctuary.

At first, almost numbed by his sense of guilt, he had not found prison the total nightmare he had expected. But as time dissipated this protective coating he had begun to view his surroundings with a queasy sense of horror, gradually aware of the vast gulf that separated him from the majority of its occupants.

There were others like himself, a handful of withdrawn, quiet men whose solitary falls from grace had similarly led to apprehension and punishment; but they formed a small segment of the prison’s population. For the most part, the men with whom he worked, ate, and shared sleeping quarters were practiced criminals, the possessors of an inverted code of ethics that he found wholly terrifying.

His escape he genuinely considered to have been a natural consequence of his awareness, an evolutionary step in his existence that had become as necessary as air and water. It had been traditional in procedure and surprisingly easy; a sudden pall of mist had permitted him to simply walk away from the working gang of which he was a member, and then circle around it to head north instead of the to-be-expected eastern route to the towns and cities.

An aimless period of skulking flight had followed, an exhausting passage of time that had at last brought him to the woods and eventually to this cottage.

He finished eating, carefully washed the utensils, and replaced them where he had found them. He returned to the living room and once again lay back in the chair, some of his tension now gone.

He closed his eyes, deliberately shutting out the photograph, reluctant to do so but realizing that its distraction would only aggravate his maudlin thoughts.

Drowsily, he tried to marshal his limited knowledge of the neighbourhood, the location of roads and towns, but his thoughts persistently returned to his immediate surroundings and the strange pattern of coincidence that had brought him there.

He knew he must leave, that to stay meant an inevitable magnification of his personal danger; but the world outside, unfamiliar and inhabited by a menacing multiplicity of people and things, both horrified and repelled him.

The walls of the cottage and what they contained, this chair in which he sat, were safe refuges against these terrors.

Gradually his head lolled and his breathing deepened. One arm slid down slowly and limply beside the chair…

It was dusk when he woke. He shivered involuntarily and blinked at the shadowed room, fuzzily reorienting himself, unwilling to leave the comforting blankness of his sleep, but already experiencing again the strange sense of compatibility that he shared with his surroundings.

It was very quiet, with only faint insect sounds disturbing the orange-tinted silence outside. He pushed himself to his feet and padded to the kitchen, drank deeply from the cold-water tap, then returned to stand in the centre of the living room.

In the dim light the photograph was an enigmatic patch of shadow now barely visible. He stared at it watching it gradually merge with the deeper shadows until at last it seemed to vanish.

The room was almost dark when he moved forward, his hands outstretched before him. They found the invisible indentations of the frame, and he fumbled it hungrily from the table, staring down at the featureless wedge of blackness between his hands, the gloom somehow assuaging the turmoil of emotions that bit like acid into his body and mind.

Stiffly, and with his head bowed, he groped his way up the stairs, sprawling exhaustedly on the bed, the glass that covered the picture smoothly cold beneath one outstretched palm…

* * * *

The sun was high when he finally rolled onto his back and opened his eyes again. He stared at the low ceiling, listening to the sharp bird calls that occasionally cracked the warm silence of the woods; he was reluctant to move but he knew he must.

He shifted restlessly against the covers. Must? Why must he? Where could he find another shelter that in any way compared with his present one, where he would find refuge, food, and a bed? He thought of the books and records downstairs, a sudden hunger for just the sight of them tugging at his mind.

Why not stay for a day or two more, until the food was gone and he was forced to move on? By then the search would probably have passed him by, moving farther cast toward the more heavily populated areas. Surely it was at least possible that the cottage might be overlooked…

He jerked, himself up off the bed in one convulsive movement, cursing at the wheedling voice in his mind. This was simply an extension of the dream, a tenuous, futile hope that somehow the existence of the house would be removed from the consciousness of the people searching for him so that they would flow out and around the spot where it stood, carelessly passing it by as they would a rock or a tree.

He paced feverishly about the room, willing himself away from this lassitude that a cold and prickling corner of his mind told him he must cast out now, before it was too late. The cottage, he realized, was in its own way becoming another prison, a padded snare where, unless he moved on, he would cower until the inevitable time of discovery—if not by the police then some passer-by or even the owners.

He stood stock-still, staring at the crumpled covers on the bed. The photograph lay partially covered by an overturned sheet, the glass dull and blank in the shadow it cast.

He moved slowly back to the bed and picked up the picture, staring down at it with suffering eyes, then with a muffled cry hurled it across the room. It struck the wall beside the stairs with a splintering crack and fell to the carpet, shards of glass surrounding the frame.

He went past it and down the stairs, moving quickly, trying by sheer speed of action to shut his mind against the clamour of anger and frustration that boiled inside him. He savagely rifled the pantry, carelessly stuffing cans into the pockets of his overalls, then a can opener and a knife. About to slam the table drawer closed, a final gesture of impotent fury, he suddenly froze.

Through the window he saw movement beyond the white fence. A man was walking there, a creel slung from his shoulder and a canvas-wrapped fishing rod in one hand.

He shrank back into the room, listening to the muffled, measured footsteps that unhurriedly approached, and then, mercifully, went on.

There was no break in their rhythm that he could detect, no hesitation that would indicate that the window he had broken had been seen.

Moving silently, he went back into the living room and flattened himself beside a window. Through the slit beside the curtain, he saw the man moving away down the path, casually studying the surface of the water.

He relaxed gradually, taking in deep, shuddering breaths, appalled at the narrowness of his escape. If he had wakened one minute earlier and then followed the same pattern of action, by this time—

He smeared a shaking hand across his face, and moved quietly back across the room, feeling suddenly strangely calm.

It was as though his attempted departure and its conclusion had resolved his relationship with the cottage, relieving him of any further decision. Simply, his near-encounter with the fisherman meant that the woods were not the safely empty place he had assumed them to be, and he would plainly have to wait until cover of darkness before he could leave without fear of further such meetings.

He emptied his pockets, replacing their contents, then went back into the living room and up the stairs to the bedroom.

Kneeling, he picked up the photograph, carefully, removing the remains of splintered glass inside the frame and collecting the pieces that littered the carpet.

He carried them downstairs, dumped the broken glass in a pail beneath the sink, then took the picture back into the living room and returned it to the table, repositioning it carefully before turning away with an air of tired finality.

A cedar-wood box on the mantelpiece that he had failed to examine before yielded a handful of cigarettes. He took one, lit it with a book match that lay beside the box, and drew the smoke deeply and luxuriously into his lungs, ducking his head at the faintly dizzy reaction that this caused. The tobacco was stale, but not too unpleasantly so.

He selected a book from the shelves, the science-fiction anthology he had picked out on the previous day, seated himself in one of the lounge; chairs, and began to read.

He read unhurriedly for several hours. His absorption in the stories was complete, a period during which he was relaxed, cocooned in a kaleidoscope of other places and times, distant futures where men and other beings played out their destinies in bizarre and ingenious ways. He enjoyed the book enormously, as he had known he would.

He finished it and selected another, sprawling back in the chair again, glancing once at the photograph on the table before opening the book and re-commencing reading.

When he became hungry, he went out to the kitchen and heated soup, completing the meal with canned meat and fruit. He cleaned the dishes again, lit another cigarette, and returned to the living room.

He read for a while, then placed the book on one side and rose to study the record player. It was battery-operated, and a faint hum replied to his pressing of the ON switch.

He selected a record from the cabinet, placed it on the turntable, and carefully lowered the arm and needle onto its rim. The impressionistic patterns of Ravel languorously filled the room, a blanket of gentle sound that pricked nostalgically at his mind. He reduced the volume to a little above a whisper, then sat down again, his eyes closed and his hands crossed loosely in his lap.

He spent the remainder of the afternoon alternately playing records and reading. Despite the streak of pragmatism that assured him of the true nature of the situation, he was immensely soothed, devouring the imaginative play of word and sound with the voracity of a starving man, as near to being at peace for the first time since—when? He couldn’t remember.

His surroundings induced a sense of well-being that was unknown to him, a formula for serenity that he had never considered attainable and which, while he still saw it as an ingredient of some calculated trick of fate, he was at last able to accept without bitterness.

The light was beginning to fade when he finally rose, replaced the book, and stood looking at the slowly darkening room for the last time.

There was something fitting about this last sight of it, as though its gradually softening contours were deliberately dimming his memory, making his departure less of a wrench than if he had been able to see clearly.

Finally he looked at the photograph, once again a blurred and featureless shape, and he nodded to it, briefly expressing regret for what he had done and also for what might have been.

He went out to the kitchen and brewed coffee, staring through the window at the darkening tangle of the woods as he slowly drank, tentatively wondering which would be his safest route once he was in the clear.

He washed and replaced the cup and saucer and once again took cans from the pantry, unhurriedly selective now, then opened the table drawer and took out a spoon, a can opener, and lastly a knife.

Faintly, ever so faintly, a car engine sounded outside in the gathering dusk.

He stiffened, his hand clamped on the wooden handle of the knife, an icy coldness abruptly gripping his throat and stomach.

The sound was like a sudden violent blow, a thunderous buffet that crashed through the barrier of his tranquillity and savagely thrust him back into a world of shadows, a place where he could only run and hide, dwelling briefly in one patch of darkness before encroaching danger forced him to run and hide again, a compulsory and terrifying game that he must almost certainly lose.

Dry-mouthed and sick, he stood motionless beside the table as the sound grew steadily louder, faded, then coughed gently to a silence directly outside the cottage.

He heard the sound of a door opening, a muffled exchange of conversation, then a metallic slam. Footsteps came quickly toward the front of the cottage.

He moved then, numbly turning to face the open door that led into the living room. A detached part of his mind told him that one rapid movement would take him up onto the table against which he rigidly leaned, another would release the window catch, and a third take him outside to where he could leap the low fence and be immediately lost in the darkening woods.

He knew that it would take only seconds, but still he stood facing the doorway, staring fixedly through the shadowed living room at the dark patch of the front door.

Then above the paralyzing thunder inside him he heard the scrape of an inserted key and the faint dick as it was turned.

The door opened.

For several seconds she failed to see him where he stood, statue-like, in the gloom of the kitchen. He saw her near-silhouette against the oblong of twilit trees, and then she was inside, setting down a small suitcase. Straightening, she paused, and in a flush of shame he knew that she had caught sight of the missing glass in the photograph frame.

She stood motionless for a second, then her head darted in rapid, searching movements. She froze again when she finally saw him, her sharp intake of breath a small explosion in the deep silence of the room.

He stepped forward, searching the shocked but still beautiful face with shy hunger, hoping to reassure her by unhurried movement, lifting his hands in a gently placatory way.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m not going to—” He broke off in horror as the forgotten knife rose up before his eyes, its blade a flash of menace in the gloom. Then the woman screamed a name.

“John!” She backed a solitary step, then screamed again, “John, John!”

He blundered to a halt, jerking the knife fretfully, shaking his head rapidly from side to side. “No, no please—”

Outside there was a startled exclamation, the sound of something striking the ground, then a pounding of footsteps. A shadow bulked in the doorway, paused momentarily, then lunged toward him.

In the seconds before the man reached him, despite his terror he was conscious chiefly of a feeling of surprise. While he had never attempted to draw a picture in his mind of his emotional counterpart, he had assumed in a hazy and perhaps vain way that he bore at least a passing physical resemblance to himself.

But the figure before him was tall and solidly built, contrasting sharply with his own slenderness, a dark and hugely handsome manifestation beyond his wildest imaginings.

Confronted by it, he quailed, feeling himself shrink to an awed and insignificant shadow that crouched spellbound, a rabbit before the magnetically freezing approach of a stoat.

The blow took him on the side of the face and he spun away from it, the knife still tightly in his fist, reeling back across the kitchen and colliding heavily with the table. A vice-like set of fingers gripped his shoulder and heaved him around. He stumbled and somehow broke free, and they confronted each other. He jerked the knife in front of him, sobbing.

And then he looked across the heavy shoulder, past the darkly handsome face that held its own shadow of fear now, and he saw the woman, her hands squeezing flatly at the sides of her head, framing her agonized eyes and mouth, and in that still and terrible moment he knew that she must not be hurt, and also that to harm the man in front of him would be to mutilate himself in some obliquely bitter way.

He stumbled back, lowering the knife and turning his eyes once again to the figure that loomed in front of him. “No—”

The huge fist struck his face again, a shattering blow that had terror behind it, and he fell, striking the wall before slumping heavily to the floor, his fading mind mercifully blanketing the pain as the knife slid searchingly between his ribs and the final darkness overtook him.

“Get up,” the big man said, panting. “Get up, you dirty little toad.”

Then he saw the slowly spreading blood that came from beneath the motionless figure on the floor, “Oh, God,” he said in a suddenly weak voice.

The woman said, “What is it?” She moved shakily into the doorway, her hands still pressed against her face. She looked down and recoiled. “Oh, no!” She spun away and leaned shudderingly against the door frame.

The man knelt and gingerly touched the body, fumbling at the wrist of a limply sprawled arm. After a few moments he rose.

“I think he’s dead,” he said thickly.

The woman moaned wretchedly. The man caressed his knuckle, scowling furiously, then abruptly dropped his hands to his sides. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said.

Bowed, the woman continued to sob. The man went rapidly to her and gripped her arm. “Betty, for God’s sake! We must go!”

The woman turned to him, her face haggard, “But we can’t just leave him here—”

“We have to,” the man said urgently. He stared at her uncomprehending face, then shook her again, “What the hell else can we do? Do you mean we have to take him somewhere and dump him? How do we know they won’t trace him back here somehow? We have to leave him and let somebody else find him, hope they think there were two of them, or something—” His voice trailed away at the shocked expression on her face.

“You mean let Peter and I find him when we come down here again?” the woman said. “Do you think I shall ever be able to come here again? Oh, God, do you think 1 could bear to come, knowing what we’d find?”

She wrenched herself away from him.

“You don’t realize what you’ve done,” she whispered. Her voice was barely audible.

“Done?” the man said. His voice rose. “You bloody fool, I saved you from getting knifed, didn’t I?”

The woman moved away from him into the living room. He followed her, his voice still high and furious. “Well, didn’t I?”

She turned toward him, her face an empty, tear-stained mask.

“Peter will never forgive me,” she said, “when he finds out about us and my bringing you here.” Her voice was low and cold. “Here, of all places.”

They stared at one another in a confusion of fear and sudden hatred as the light faded and the shadows slowly filled the room and the still and silent kitchen beyond.