“Cyn! Here, darling, here!”
She turned her head toward him and exclaimed, “Teddy!” then added, “I had such a bad dream — Oh!” She had caught sight of them staring greedily at her. She looked slowly around her, wide-eyed and serious, then turned back to Randall. “Teddy — is this still a dream?”
“I’m afraid not, darling. Chin up.”
She looked once more at the company, then back to him. “I’m not afraid,” she said firmly. “Make your play, Teddy. I won’t faint on you again.” Thereafter she kept her eyes on his.
Randall stole a glance at the fat chairman; he was watching them, apparently amused by the sight, and showed no present disposition to interfere. “Cyn,” Randall said in an urgent whisper, “they’ve done something to me so I can’t move. I’m paralyzed. So don’t count on me too much. If you get a chance to make a break for it, take it!”
“I can’t move, either,” she whispered back. “We’ll have to wait.” She saw his agonized expression and added, ” ‘Chin up,’ you said. But I wish I could touch you.” The fingers of her right hand trembled slightly, found some traction on the polished table top, and began a slow and painful progress across the inches that separated them.
Randall found that he could move his own fingers a little; he started his left hand on its way to join hers, a half inch at a time, his arm a dead weight against the movement, At last they touched and her hand crept into his, pressing it faintly. She smiled.
Stoles rapped loudly on the table. “This little scene is very touching,” he said in sympathetic tones, “but there is business to attend to. We must decide the best thing to do with them.”
“Hadn’t we better eliminate them entirely?” suggested the one who had jabbed Cynthia in the ribs.
“That would be a pleasure,” Stoles conceded, “but we must remember that these two are merely an incident in our plans for…for Mr. Randall’s client. He is the one who must be destroyed!”
“I don’t see — ”
“Of course you don’t see and that is why I am chairman. Our immediate purpose must be to immobilize these two in a fashion which will cause no suspicion on his part. The question is merely one of method and of the selection of the subject.”
Mr. Parker spoke up. “It would be very amusing,” he suggested, “to return them as they are. They would starve slowly, unable to answer the door, unable to answer the telephone, helpless.”
“So it would be,” Stoles said approvingly. “That is about the caliber of suggestion I expected from you. Suppose he attempted to see them, found them so. Do you think he would not understand their story? No, it must be something which seals their tongues. I intend to send them back with one of them — dead-alive!”
The whole business was so preposterous, so utterly unlikely, that Randall had been telling himself that it could not be real. He was in the clutches of a nightmare; if he could just manage to wake up, everything would be all right. The business of not being able to move — he had experienced that before in dreams. Presently you woke up from it and found that the covers had become wound around you, or you had been sleeping with both hands under your head. He tried biting his tongue so that the pain might wake him, but it did no good.
Stoles’ last words brought his attention sharply to what was going on around him, not because he understood them — they meant very little to him, though they were fraught with horror — but because of the stir of approval and anticipation which went around the table.
The pressure of Cynthia’s hand in his increased faintly. “What are they going to do, Teddy?” she whispered.
“I don’t know, darling.”
“The man, of course,” Parker commented.
Stoles looked at him. Randall had a feeling that Stoles had intended the — whatever it was that was coming! — for the man, for him, until Parker had suggested it. But Stoles answered, “I’m always grateful for your advice. It makes it so easy to know just what one should do.” Turning to the others he said, “Prepare the woman.”