You're All Alone by Fritz Leiber

Author:Fritz Leiber [Leiber, Fritz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1972-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVIII

Maybe some day the whole engine’ll wake. Maybe some day the meanness’ll be washed, or burned, out of us. And maybe not . . .

THE ORNATELY-carved nine-foot door was of golden oak grimed with the years and it was bordered, Carr noticed, with a ridged blackness that once had been a rainbow frame of stained glass. It scuffed complainingly across humped-up rug, as the gate had across gravel. He followed Jane inside and pushed it shut behind them.

“I still don’t like leaving the roadster that way,” he said.

“We didn’t want it too near here,” she told him.

“But it’s such a big thing to have displaced in the pattern.”

She shrugged. “It was probably a display model, if I know my . . . friend. And I think the big machine has an automatic way of correcting large displacements like that. But look.”

The circle of her flashlight’s beam traveled over walls cobwebbed with soot, picked up here and there dull glints of a figured gold paper and huge pale rectangles where pictures had once hung. It jumped to two shapeless bulks of sheet-covered chairs, hesitated at a similarly shrouded chandelier looming overhead, finally came to rest on a curving stairway with a keg-thick newel post carved in the form of a stern angel with folded wings. Jane took Carr’s hand and led him toward it.

“What do you know about John Claire Beddoes?” she asked him.

“Just the usual stuff,” Carr replied. “Fabulously wealthy. Typical Victorian patriarch, but with vague hints of vice. Something about a mistress he somehow kept here in spite of his wife.”

Jane nodded. “That’s all I knew when I first came here.”

The musty odor with a hint of water-rot grew stronger. Even their cautious footsteps raised from the tattered but heavily padded stair carpet puffs of dust which mounted like ghostly heads into the flashlight’s beam.

“In spite of everything he did to us,” Carr said, “I almost hate leaving your friend like that.”

“He can’t go on betraying people for ever,” Jane said simply. “One of the reasons I brought you here is that he doesn’t know about this place.” They reached the second-story landing and a door that was a mere eight feet high. It opened quietly when Jane pushed it. “I’ve oiled things a bit,” she explained to Carr.

Inside the flashlight revealed a long dark-papered room with heavy black molding ornamented with a series of grooves that were long and very deeply cut, especially those in a picture rail that circled the room a foot from the ceiling. Round about were old-fashioned bureaus and chests and other furniture so ponderous that Carr felt it would take dynamite to budge them. While at the far end of the room and dominating it was a huge grim bed with dark posts almost as thick as the angel downstairs.

“Behold the unutterably respectable marital couch of the Beddoes,” Jane proclaimed with a hint of poetry and laughter. Then she entered one of the alcoves flanking the head of the bed, laid the

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