Night Walker by Donald Hamilton

Author:Donald Hamilton [Hamilton, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780857683854
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2011-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

He spoke into the telephone. “This is Lawrence Wilson. Yes, Wilson. I’d like to speak to Dr. Henshaw, please... Doc, you’d better get out here on the double. Elizabeth’s throwing some kind of a wingding and I’ll be damned if I can get her to snap out of... All right, Doc.”

He put the phone down, drew a long breath, and went back up the stairs to the big light room with its basically neat, old-fashioned furniture that was overlaid, as if with tidal debris, with the litter of Elizabeth’s occupancy. She looked a little like tidal debris herself, lying where she had flung herself across the big, untidy bed. She had a pillow pressed to her face and he thought she had stuffed part of it into her mouth to silence herself. Her body had a look of trembling rigidity like that, he thought, of a hawser stretched to the breaking point; when a line began to vibrate like that you slacked off quickly if you did not want it to carry away.

But there was nothing he could do. He had considered slapping her face — a popular remedy — and had found himself incapable of striking her. He had also debated putting her into the bathtub and turning on the cold shower, but this had seemed like a messy and humiliating procedure, especially if it did not work. Besides, the sight of him, or his touch, seemed to set her off again; and although he was tremendously worried about her he could not help resenting, a little, being considered so excruciatingly funny, even by a girl who at the moment was obviously not responsible for her own behavior.

It was a relief to hear the car in the drive. Young stepped out of the room as silently as he had entered, and waited by the stairs. Presently the doctor’s bald head appeared, and Henshaw came up, somewhat breathless from the climb, carrying his bag. He passed Young with a nodded greeting, went to the bedroom door and looked in, and turned back again.

“What happened, Mr. Young?”

“We had a kind of rough night out here, Doc,” Young said. He had had time to think things over; and now he studied the man facing him with some care. Henshaw looked as middle-aged and respectable as ever in the same or another baggy brown suit: a heavy, sagging man with a lined, honest face, the mouth of which, however, had a slightly peevish and womanly look. Young had not noticed that look before, but he noticed it now. A man with a mouth like that was not to be trusted. “Kind of rough,” Young said softly. “I guess it just got her down. I almost threw one myself when it happened. I’ve been shot at by a lot of people, mostly Japs, but I’ve never had a ghost use me as a target before.”

Something changed in Henshaw’s eyes. “A ghost?”

“Let’s quit kidding, Doc,” Young said gently. “I don’t know what’s going on around here, but I do know that Larry Wilson’s alive.

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