15
IN HIS NIGHTMARE Argyle fled along a stone corridor deep in the earth. The shadows of insects twitched on the walls, and there was a metallic rasping and clicking like beetles in a can. Orange firelight glowed from vast rooms hidden behind half-closed doors, and from all around him there came the sound of moaning and shrieking and knocking, as if from something that had once been human but was human no longer, shrieks cut off sharp only to be taken up again in a monotony of pain.
There came into his mind the terrible certainty that he was running headlong toward something, not away from it now, running, perhaps, to embrace that pain. Soon the shrieks and howls would be his own. Inevitably there hovered before him, far away down the dim corridor, a disembodied head, its mouth working spasmodically, its face half turned away so that its eyes were hidden by an iron-dark shadow. There was the smell of sulphur and the corruption of rotten things, of death and hot metal. The face swiveled slowly toward him, and a voice whispered unintelligibly, like a sand-laden wind off the desert. He held his ears against it.
He woke up trying to scream. He heard his own voice rasp in his throat, and he launched himself forward, scrambling off the end of the bed, falling to the floor, his legs tangled in the sheets, his eyes adjusting to the moonlight in the dim bedroom. There was a slow and steady knocking, like someone beating on the pipes beneath the house, and a creaking sound like loose floorboards. Distantly, like ghost voices over a telephone, there sounded the echo of the shrieking and moaning that he’d heard in his nightmare, and he pressed his hands over his ears as he staggered to his feet, yanking open the top drawer of his dresser.
Inside lay two jars—common pint-size peanut butter jars, seemingly empty. He drew one out and shakily unscrewed the lid, and there was the faint, brief sound of a human cry in the closed air of the room. And at that moment the knocking ceased, the moaning and shrieking evaporated. The air was still heavy with sulphur and the smell of hot metal lingering like smoke, but that, too, was dwindling.
He was safe. For the moment he was safe.
He pulled himself free and pushed up onto his hands and knees. Although the window was open to the wind and rain, he was sweating hot. This wasn’t the first time that he had fought to wake up from the dream. Each time it was more real, more solid, and even now the walls of his bedroom looked insubstantial to him, barely opaque, as if they were film projections on black basalt. There was a noise like the rustling of insect wings in the depths of his mind, and staticky, disembodied voices muttering obscenities—infantile idiot gibberish.
He picked up the jar and twisted the lid back on tight. What had been in it was used up, and what remained was a useless leathery shaving of human flesh. He dropped the jar and its contents into the trash can next to the dresser, then walked across to the window, where he leaned out into the morning darkness. Soon, it seemed to him, there would come a night when the dream would take him with it, just as some similar tentacle of Hell had reached out to clutch at Murray LeRoy.
Stop it. He squeezed his eyes shut. This was nonsense. He would still beat it.
There weren’t many jars left. He needed something else to offer—more spirit jars. Something. And soon it would demand something more solid than the dying exhalations in the spirit jars. But when? Each night was worse than the last: the shadows more dense, the sounds more anxious, closer. Yesterday morning the bedsheets had burst into flame—spontaneous combustion, just like the five-dollar bill at Watson’s, just like Murray LeRoy.
He noticed suddenly that there were a couple of limbs broken off the hydrangea beneath the window, hanging by strips of bark. The dirt of the flowerbed was stomped down, the outlines of shoe soles in the wet soil clearly visible even in the moonlight. It took a moment to work it out: somebody had been there snooping around. And not the gardener, either; he hadn’t been on the property since Thursday.
Argyle thought suddenly about the parcel he’d found last night on the porch. He hadn’t looked closely at it, at the box itself; he’d been too anxious to get at the contents, and had simply slit the thing open and dumped it out, only to find that the item he wanted, that he had been waiting for, was missing.
It hadn’t occurred to him that it might have been stolen. Now he was certain it had.
Someone had meddled with the address on the box. They’d crossed out the name Dilworth and written in Argyle. Why? Who would have done such a thing? The man in China who gathered these things for him knew him only as Dilworth. The post office? It didn’t seem likely that they’d mark up the outside of the box like this. They never had before. He switched on the lamp on the dresser and peered closely at it. It was easy to see, now that he looked, that the box had been opened and then re-taped.
He looked closely at the handwriting in the rewritten name—the vertical, elongated letters, the way the G looked like a pulled-apart number eight, the way the A was crossed with a line about twice as long as necessary. It was Walt Stebbins’s handwriting. Stebbins had got hold of the box, opened it, ditched the invoice, and stolen the only thing of real value in it.
How could he have known what it was?
Probably he didn’t; he was just being a meddlesome hick, and this was some kind of pathetic joke.
Of course Stebbins could be compelled to return it. The thought came to him that perhaps he should spare Walt for Ivy’s sake.
Ivy … He stood for a moment, thinking about her, about them, him and Ivy—about the way things had been only a few short years ago—and suddenly he knew he was wrong: Walt Stebbins wasn’t any kind of asset to her, and the world would be a happier place if he fell off the edge of it and disappeared.
He pulled on his bathrobe and walked out of the room, up the hall, and across a broad living room heavy with oak moldings and built-in cabinets. Another narrow hall led off the living room, and he followed it to a locked door at the end, switching on the hallway lamp and taking a key from his pocket. He opened the door and stepped into a room furnished with an easy chair and bookcases. On the floor lay a coffin-sized packing crate, the wooden lid covered with Chinese ideographs. He leaned over and opened the lid, tilting it back on recessed hinges. Within lay a body. It might have been his identical twin. Did it look dead, or merely asleep?
Without the item that Stebbins had taken from the carton, the thing in the box might as well be dead. What if he never recovered it? What if that fool Stebbins had destroyed it out of common stupidity?
Full of a sudden fear, he closed the box, locked the room, and went into his study, where he picked up the phone and punched in Flanagan’s number. Of course the bastard wouldn’t be in. He was never in. He kept you waiting and wondering….
“Flanagan.”
The voice startled him. “It’s me,” he said breathlessly.
“I know who it is.”
“Can you help me? Have you considered my offer?”
“It would be better if you helped yourself.”
“So what? Do you want more? Is that it?”
“It’s quite likely that you can’t buy your way out of this, that you’re wasting your money.”
Argyle laughed out loud. “Wasting it? That’s rich. How much was Murray LeRoy worth when he went down that alley?”
There was a silence for a time. Argyle could hear Flanagan breathing. “You haven’t forgotten Obermeyer’s address?”
“Of course not,” Argyle started to say, but Flanagan hung up on him.