But she didn’t really read this; she only looked at it. Her eyes went back and forth, back and forth, between the dedication page which had been inscribed in August of 1961 and the one which had been inscribed in April of 1985.
‘You see?’ Martha asked softly.
Darcy nodded. She saw.
The thin, sloping, somehow old-fashioned backhand script was the same in both books . . . and so, given the variations afforded by love and familiarity, were the signatures themselves. Only the tone of the written messages varied, Darcy thought, and there the difference was as clear as the difference between black and white.
The Moving Finger
When the scratching started, Howard Mitla was sitting alone in the Queens apartment where he lived with his wife. Howard was one of New York’s lesser-known certified public accountants.
Violet Mitla, one of New York’s lesser-known dental assistants, had waited until the news was over before going down to the store on the corner to get a pint of ice cream. Jeopardy was on after the news, and she didn’t care for that show. She said it was because Alex Trebek looked like a crooked evangelist, but Howard knew the truth: Jeopardy made her feel dumb.
The scratching sound was coming from the bathroom just off the short squib of hall that led to the bedroom. Howard tightened up as soon as he heard it. It wasn’t a junkie or a burglar in there, not with the heavy-gauge mesh he had put over all the windows two years ago at his own expense. It sounded more like a mouse in the basin or the tub. Maybe even a rat.
He waited through the first few questions, hoping the scratching sound would go away on its own, but it didn’t. When the commercial came on, he got reluctantly up from his chair and walked to the bathroom door. It was standing ajar, allowing him to hear the scratching sound even better.
Almost certainly a mouse or a rat. Little paws clicking against the porcelain.
‘Damn,’ Howard said, and went into the kitchen.
Standing in the little space between the gas stove and the refrigerator were a few cleaning implements — a mop, a bucket filled with old rags, a broom with a dustpan snugged down over the handle. Howard took the broom in one hand, holding it well down toward the bristles, and the dustpan in the other. Thus armed, he walked reluctantly back through the small living room to the bathroom door. He cocked his head forward. Listened.
Scratch, scratch, scritchy-scratch.
A very small sound. Probably not a rat. Yet that was what his mind insisted on conjuring up.
Not just a rat but a New York rat, an ugly, bushy thing with tiny black eyes and long whiskers like wire and snaggle teeth protruding from below its V-shaped upper lip. A rat with attitude.
The sound was tiny, almost delicate, but nevertheless —
Behind him, Alex Trebek said, ‘This Russian madman was shot, stabbed, and strangled . . . all in the same night.’
‘Who was Lenin?” one of the contestants responded.
‘Who was Rasputin, peabrain,’ Howard Mitla murmured. He transferred the dustpan to the hand holding the broom, then snaked his free hand into the bathroom and turned on the light. He stepped in and moved quickly to the tub crammed into the corner below the dirty, mesh-covered window. He hated rats and mice, hated all little furry things that squeaked and scuttered (and sometimes bit), but he had discovered as a boy growing up in Hell’s Kitchen that if you had to dispatch one of them, it was best to do it quickly. It would do him no good to sit in his chair and ignore the sound; Vi had helped herself to a couple of beers during the news, and the bathroom would be her first stop when she returned from the market. If there was a mouse in the tub, she would raise the roof . . . and demand he do his manly duty and dispatch it anyway. Posthaste.
The tub was empty save for the hand-held shower attachment. Its hose lay on the enamel like a dead snake.
The scratching had stopped either when Howard turned on the light or when he entered the room, but now it started again. Behind him. He turned and took three steps toward the bathroom basin, raising the broomhandle as he moved.
The fist wrapped around the handle got to the level of his chin and then froze. He stopped moving. His jaw came unhinged. If he had looked at himself in the toothpaste-spotted mirror over the basin, he would have seen shiny strings of spittle, as gossamer as strands of spiderweb, gleaming between his tongue and the roof of his mouth.
A finger had poked its way out of the drain-hole in the basin.
A human finger.
For a moment it froze, as if aware it had been discovered. Then it began to move again, feeling its wormlike way around the pink porcelain. It reached the white rubber plug, felt its way over it, then descended to the porcelain again. The scratching noise hadn’t been made by the tiny claws of a mouse after all. It was the nail on the end of that finger, tapping the porcelain as it circled and circled.
Howard gave voice to a rusty, bewildered scream, dropped the broom, and ran for the bathroom door. He hit the tile wall with his shoulder instead, rebounded, and tried again. This time he got out, swept the door shut behind him, and only stood there with his back pressed against it, breathing hard. His heartbeat was hard, toneless Morse code high up in one side of his throat.
He couldn’t have stood there for long — when he regained control of his thoughts, Alex Trebek was still guiding that evening’s three contestants through Single Jeopardy — but while he did, he had no sense of time passing, where he was, or even who he was.
What brought him out of it was the electronic whizzing sound that signaled a Daily Double square. ‘The category is Space and Aviation,’ Alex was saying. ‘You currently have seven hundred dollars, Mildred — how much do you wish to wager?’ Mildred, who did not have game-show-host projection, muttered something inaudible in response.
Howard moved away from the door and back into the living room on legs, which felt like pogo-sticks. He still had the dustpan in one hand. He looked at it for a moment and then let it fall to the carpet. It hit with a dusty little thump.
‘I didn’t see that,’ Howard Mitla said in a trembling little voice, and collapsed into his chair.
‘All right, Mildred — for five hundred dollars: This Air Force test site was originally known as Miroc Proving Ground.’
Howard peered at the TV. Mildred, a mousy little woman with a hearing aid as big as a clock-radio screwed into one ear, was thinking deeply.
‘I didn’t see that,’ he said with a little more conviction.
‘What is . . . Vandenberg Air Base?’ Mildred asked.
‘What is Edwards Air Base, birdbrain,’ Howard said. And, as Alex Trebek confirmed what Howard Mitla already knew, Howard repeated: ‘I didn’t see that at all.’
But Violet would be back soon, and he had left the broom in the bathroom.
Alex Trebek told the contestants — and the viewing audience — that it was still anybody’s game, and they would be back to play Double Jeopardy, where the scores could really change, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. A politician came on and began explaining why he should be re-elected.
Howard got reluctantly to his feet. His legs felt a little more like legs and a little less like pogo-sticks with metal fatigue now, but he still didn’t want to go back into the bathroom.
Look, he told himself, this is perfectly simple. Things like this always are. You had a momentary hallucination, the son of thing that probably happens to people all the time. The only reason you don’t hear about them more often is because people don’t like to talk about them . . .
having hallucinations is embarrassing. Talking about them makes people feel the way you ‘re going to feel if that broom is still on the floor in there when Vi comes back and asks what you were up to.
‘Look,’ the politician on TV was saying in rich, confidential tones. ‘When you get right down to cases, it’s perfectly simple: do you want an honest, competent man running the Nassau County Bureau of Records, or do you want a man from upstate, a hired gun who’s never even — ‘
‘It was air in the pipes, I bet,’ Howard said, and although the sound which had taken him into the bathroom in the first place had not sounded the slightest bit like air in the pipes, just hearing his own voice — reasonable, under control again — got him moving with a little more authority.