They kissed. Her arms locked around him like manacles.
He felt his lungs bursting as they kissed and spun, thrashing, through the water, while the feathery clouds of blood spread out; and as they turned Chandler saw the great torpedo shapes, now incredibly close, coming toward them incredibly fast.
The last he saw was the great yawning grin of teeth; and then he could not help it, he fled. He abandoned Rosalie, abandoned the borrowed body of the carabinieri, fled and did not stop until he was back in his own flesh, still frightened, and violently ill.
XVII
CHANDLER COULD sleep only tardily that night, and not well. His sleep was punctuated with sudden wakenings, illuminated with dreams. Ellen Braisted came and spoke to him, and Margot his wife. They did not threaten or terrify him. They only looked at him with reproach…
and when he woke and it was broad daylight, and the Kanaka was whirring the lawnmower across the grass outside just as though no murders had been committed by the inmates of the house, he slouched angrily around the living room for an hour and then began to drink.
By the time Rosalie Pan came downstairs, yawning and looking slaked and contented, he was drunk enough to coax her into breakfasting on. Bloody Marys.
By the time she had had her third, and no longer minded the fact that she had not eaten, Chandler was stumbling and stammering. Rosalie did not object. Perhaps she understood, or understood at least that she had shown him something of herself that took getting used to. Even when the other members of the exec began calling in, usually through the person of the beach boy who was her handyman, she laughed and made excuses for Chandler.
But when they were gonewhen it was only the Kanaka who was in the room with them, turning to leave with a tired fearshe reproached him gently: “Not quite so much of the arm-around-the-neck, love. Do you mind? I mean, everything in its place.”
“You didn’t mind yesterday,” said Chandler sullenly.
“Oh, really! I’m not trying to reform you, you know.
But these are members of the exec, and you need then-votes.”
“I certainly wouldn’t want to behave badly in the pres-ence of a member of the exec,” said Chandler, and lurched to the kitchen for another bottle. He was at that stage of drunkenness when he felt he was not going to be able to get drunk: he observed the symptoms of hands and feet and mouth, and cursed the clarity of his brain that would not anesthetize him. In the kitchen he paused, staggered over to the sink and on impulse put his head under the cold-water tap.
When Rosalie came looking for him minutes later she found him brewing coffee. “Why, that’s better, love,” she cried. “I thought you were going to drink the island dry!”
He poured a cup of the stuff, hot and black, and began to swallow it in small, painful gulps. Rosalie fetched a cup for herself, added cream and sugar and sat at the table.
“Time’s wasting,” she said practically, “and you don’t have the votes yet, love. I want you to work on Koitska today.
Tell him all about the geraniums and what-you-call-thems; he can bring you fifty votes if he wants to.”
Chandler finished the coffee and poured another cup.
This time he added a generous shot of whiskey to it.
Rosalie tightened her lips, but only said, “Then there’s that bunch from the East Coast, the Embassy girls and Brad and Tony. They’ve already voted, but they could get out some more for you if you got them interested. Brad’s been a doll, but the girls have all sorts of friends they haven’t done anything with.”
Chandler lit a cigarette and let her talk. He knew it was important to him. He knew she was trying to help him, and indeed that without her help he was a dead man. He simply could not bring himself to play up to her mood. He stood up and said, “I’m going to take a bath.” And he left her sitting there.
And ten minutes later he came shouting into her room, his body still wet from the shower, wearing a pair of khaki shorts and nothing else. “Who?” he cried. “Who did you say? What’s the name of your friend?”
Rosalie, sitting at her vanity mirror, wearing nothing but underwear and her coronet, took her hands away from her hair and looked at him. “Love! What’s the matter?”
“Answer me, damn it! Brad! Brad who?”
She said, with little patience, “Do you mean Brad Fenell? I must say, the way you’re acting I don’t know why be should go out of his way What’s the matter?”
Chandler’s eyes were glaring and he had begun to shake. He sat down limply on her bed, staring at her.
“You mean Brad Fenell is helping me? If I get elected to the exec, it will be because of Brad Fenell?”
“Well, love, I have a little something to do with it, too.
But Brad’s been lovely.”
Chandler nodded. “Lovely,” he said faintly. “A real doll.”
“You remember him, don’t you? At the party night before last? The little dark fellow?”
“I remember him.” And he did; but he hadn’t, there for a while. He hadn’t remembered at all what Ellen Braisted had told him. The Brad Fenell who had debased and tortured her, who had finally murdered her, was now a powerful friend. There was a joke about that, mused Chandler. With that sort of friend, you didn’t need any enemy.
But on all the Executive Committee, what other sort of friend could there possibly be?
Rosalie’s irritation was lost in alarm now. Something was clearly wrong with Chandler. She was in very little doubt what it was; she knew nothing of Ellen Braisted, but she knew enough of the exec in general, herself includ-ed, to have a shrewd notion of what personal nerve had somehow been touched, and she came over and sat beside him. “Love,” she said gently, “It’s not as bad as you think.
There are good things, too.”
Chandler said unrelentingly, “Name one.”
“Oh, love! Don’t be awful.” She put her arm around him. “It’s just another few days,” she soothed, “and then you can do what you like. Isn’t that worth it? I mean really what you like, love. A whole world to play in… .”
Get thee behind me, thought Chandler numbly. But she was right. It was too bad, but facts were facts, he told himself reasonably. Good-by, Ellen, he thought. Good-by, Margot. And he turned to the girl beside him… .
And stiffened and felt himself seized.
“Vi myenya zvali?” his own voice demanded, harsh and mocking.
The girl tried to push him away. Her eyes were bright and huge, staring at him. “Andrei!”
“Da, Andrei! Kok eto dosadno!”
“Andrei, please. I know you’re”
“Filthy!” screamed Chandler’s voice. “How can you? I do not allow this carrion to touch you sonot vot is mine 1 do not allow him to live!” And Chandler dropped her and leaped to his feet.
He fought. He struggled; but only in his mind, and helplessly; his body carried him out of the room in spite of his struggles, running and stumbling, out into the drive, into her waiting car and away.
He drove like a madman on roads he had never seen before. The car’s gears bellowed pain at their abuse, the tires screamed.
Chandler, imprisoned inside himself, recognized that touch. Koitska! He knew who Rosalie Pan’s lover had been. If he had been in doubt his own voice, raucous and hysterical with rage, told him the truth. All that long drive it screamed threats and obscenities at him, in Russian and tortured English.
The car stopped in front of the TWA facility and, still imprisoned, his body hurried in, bruising itself deliberately against every doorpost and stick of furniture. “I could have smashed you in the car!” his voice screamed hoarsely. “It is too merciful. I could have thrown you into the sea! It is not painful enough.”
In the garage his body stopped and looked wildly around. “Knives, torches,” his lips chanted. “Shall I gouge out eyes? Slit throat?”
A jar of battery acid stood on a shelf. “Da, da!”
screamed Chandler, stumbling toward it. “One drink, eh?
And I von’t even stay vith you to feel it, the painjust a momentthen it eats the guts, the long slow dying…”
And all the time the body that was Chandler’s was clawing the cap off the jar, tilling it
He dropped the jar, and leaped aside instinctively as it splintered at his feet.
He was free!
Before he could move he was seized again, stumbled, crashed into a wall
And was free again.
He stood waiting for a moment, unable to believe it; but he was still free. The alien invader did not seize his mind.