Читать книгу Ordeal by Terror - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 5

CHAPTER 1

The grandfather clock in the hallway struck eleven. It was a Friday morning in early July, and for Adelle Gernyan the moment was one she had commemorated. Three weeks earlier, an interview with an odd little woman whose name Adelle still did not know had resulted in her being hired as a Researcher/Word Processor by an even odder business establishment called Z-R Publications. The building she worked in and the room that served as her office were the quintessence of oddness. Oddest of all was her salary, which was fantastic.

Only the work was mundane. Z-R Publications used “Researcher/Word Processor” as a euphemism for typist. For eight hours each day, minus whatever breaks she decided to give herself, Adelle sat in front of a computer copying handwritten or typewritten material supplied by the firm’s other two employees and arranging it in attractive page formats for eventual publication.

She was doing excellent work, but any competent typist could have done as well. That was what made her salary so unbelievable. As a bonus, she had this incredible office and an entire unoccupied wing of the building to shield her from interruptions. Such splendid isolation would have been a distraction to some employees, but Adelle had always been able to work diligently without supervision.

On this particular morning, however, her concentration faltered. She sat frowning at her computer screen, fingers poised rigidly above its keyboard, while the clatter of a tractor lawn mower swelled to a sputtering roar. It was her fourteenth day of typing statistics—Z-R Publications had given its staff the 4th of July off—and she could copy scrawled numerals almost without thinking. She was oblivious to most disturbances, but the tractor defeated her. Its explosive pulsations sounded like an evil spirit frothing in frustration before gates where spirits of whatever intent were forbidden to enter.

As the racket continued, with the tractor roaming among the hedges of a charming formal garden and circling its large, sculpture-cluttered, unused fountain, Adelle left her desk and went to one of the room’s windows to look out. They were oriel windows, with stained glass in delicately leaded patterns that converted the outside world into a jigsaw mosaic of contrasting tints. The tractor, snorting its way from one color segment to another, looked out of place in all of them.

Its driver was known to Adelle only as Goon 2. Like the other Z-R Publications maintenance men, he wore a dark green shirt and trousers and was as incongruously neat and clean in appearance when shoveling dirt as when vacuuming plush carpets or fastidiously wielding a feather duster. Despite striking individual differences, all of the goons seemed cut from the same mold—large and hulking—and all of them were strangely inarticulate and anonymous. They neither introduced themselves nor were given in introductions. They did not speak even when spoken to. After enduring a week of that peculiar anonymity, Adelle dubbed them goons and assigned numbers to them.

Goon 2 was the eldest of the five. He had a circle of baldness on his head surrounded by a fringe of surprisingly black hair, and he was the only goon who wore glasses. The formidable disapproval with which he gazed at her when he thought she wasn’t looking had disturbed her until she noticed that he disapproved of everyone and everything else just as formidably. He was one of those unfortunate individuals who moved through life with the conviction that whoever was responsible for the universe hadn’t quite got it right.

Adelle was about to turn away when she saw two people standing in an opposite doorway. The starkly beautiful Romanesque contours of that wing made it her favorite, but she had never seen anyone using its entrance. Now the maintenance worker she called Goon 1 stood at the bottom of the steps, and above him, holding the door open, stood the little woman who was his boss—and Adelle’s.

Goon 1 was Adelle’s personal goon. He could be surprised watching her surreptitiously whenever she went anywhere—home, or to lunch, or to the rest room down the hall. Her two coworkers also had personal goons spying on them, which seemed ridiculous. If the firm wanted to know whether they were working, Adelle thought, all it had to do was study their productivity.

Goon 1 had a large, beefy face, a crew cut, and the sternest blue eyes she had ever encountered. She called him number one because he looked like a top sergeant and giver of orders. He was taking orders now and not liking them. He stood rigid with resentment, fists clenched, arms partially bent and held out from his sides.

The plump little woman who hovered above him, gesticulating impatiently, was known to Adelle only as Madam. She bustled about absent-mindedly and seemed like the most improbable person imaginable to be entrusted with running a business. Perhaps she didn’t run it. The indecipherable signature on the firm’s checks bore no resemblance to her handwriting, and the firm’s conspicuous prosperity and grandiose planning suggested clouds of invisible corporate officers and incognito directors.

But this odd creature was the boss, unmistakably. She hired and fired, she passed out work assignments, and she gave orders. Especially to the goons she gave orders.

Adelle couldn’t make out expressions at such a distance, but she had no difficulty imagining them. Goon 1’s face would be livid. As for Madam, her streaky gray hair always hung in a straight droop, and her wrinkled face was testimony to a lifetime of virginity at least from cosmetics. She would be peering down at Goon 1 through the thick, ugly, bespattered horn-rimmed glasses that always perched precariously on her monstrously oversized nose, talking at him cheerfully, calling him “Darlink” in every other sentence even though each word stung like a lash. She called everyone “Darlink.” Probably it was because she never remembered names. In return, she didn’t expect anyone to remember hers. Her first words to Adelle had been, “Call me Madam, Darlink. Everyone else does.” So Adelle did, and so did everyone else, and it hadn’t occurred to Adelle until a week later that Madam was as nameless as the maintenance workers.

Abruptly Madam turned and tiptoed away. She always tiptoed. The door swung shut behind her, but Goon 1 remained motionless, fists still clenched. Adelle wondered what kind of maintenance problem could have produced such a dramatic clash of personalities and such taut emotions. Had Goon 1 put tulip bulbs in the wrong place?

In its normal, everyday operations, Z-R Publications seemed odd enough, but a totally inexplicable incident such as this one took the firm beyond oddness and into the realm of the strange or eerie.

The tractor, having attended to the grass in the formal garden, moved off. Goon 1 finally stirred and disappeared around the corner. The threatening evil spirit fled with the mower’s fading clatter, but it had been doomed to frustration in any case. This magnificently sprawling Feinstwaller Manor was phony from one end to the other, a sham environment that would repel evil spirits in any guise. Further, it was headquarters for that most unhauntable of Earthly institutions, a corporation.

“Z-R Publications,” Adelle murmured, “hail.” During her job interview she had asked what the letters stood for, and Madam shrugged and told her, “It’s just a name, Darlink.” At first she had thought it was a word, spelled something like Zeeare. Either way, it was immune to specters. A sign that read, “Z-R Publications, Inc.,” would have banished ghosts from a mausoleum.

Adelle returned to her desk, which was the type normally occupied by whatever executive officer of a firm had the least work to put on it—enormous, ornate, expensive, and totally inappropriate for a Researcher/Word Processor—but then, so was the room Adelle worked in. To go with the oriel windows and their tinted jigsaw puzzle view of garden and fountain, it had fielded paneling and a high, fan vaulted ceiling. Computer, desk, and oversized, plushly upholstered office chair—like the desk, more suitable for a corporation president than a mere employee of whatever status—looked like brash intruders, and Adelle felt like one. The room was otherwise furnished with pseudo-antique chairs, tables, bureaus, and sofas. On the floor was a thick pseudo-oriental carpet.

Adelle resumed typing, and row after row of crisp numbers took their places on the computer screen in orderly columns:

1975 12,472 127,896 921

1976 14,798 124,310 1,014

1977 19,490 125,747 1,823

1978 20,244 128,165 1,769

1979 22,314 130,002 1,854

1980 23,562 129,773 2,331

Madam tiptoed silently into the room. Adelle finished the column she was typing before looking up. By that time, Madam had placed Adelle’s paycheck on the corner of her desk.

She stood beaming down at her. Today she was wearing what Adelle called her alternate dress, which was less baggy and more flowery than the one she usually wore. Her face, seen from close up, looked like the side of a house from which paint had just been removed with a blowtorch. Adelle also shunned cosmetics, but Madam’s peeling visage was almost enough to convert her to the use of lipstick, rouge, nail polish, and eye shadow in clashing colors. Madam’s other outstanding features, in addition to her two dresses, were her one pair of shoes with badly worn, flat heels—one of the many mysteries about her was how she could wear out heels when she always tiptoed, but Kevin Mondor, one of Adelle’s two coworkers, maintained that she tiptoed because her heels were worn; her neck, which always was slightly dirty but never got dirtier; her manner of squinting nearsightedly through bespattered glasses; and, of course, the exceptionally broad nose upon which the glasses rode so precariously. She was infuriatingly absent-minded and fluttered about hysterically when she mislaid something, which happened frequently.

She stood for a moment studying the computer screen. “That’s nice, Darlink. I like wide margins. I like your new clothes, too. Pants. That’s different. So attractive. Did you hear what Write said about Add?”

Madam’s failure to remember names resulted in a cryptic speech of her own fabrication. Adelle, called “Darlink” to her face, knew she was “Type” behind her back. Kevin Mondor, with an official title of Researcher/Statistician, was “Darlink” and “Add.” And Craig Dolan, the concern’s Researcher/Writer, was “Darlink” and “Write.”

Adelle smiled. “No. What did he say?”

“He said Add’s parents fed him nothing but alphabet soup—made with numbers instead of letters!” Madam cackled shrilly.

Adelle feigned another smile and asked calmly, “But did you hear what Add said about Write?”

“No!”

“Write grew up on a farm, you know. They didn’t have indoor plumbing. Instead of catalogs, they used old dictionaries for toilet paper.”

All of that was sheer improvisation on Adelle’s part. Madam threw up both hands and quickly tiptoed away, laughing convulsively. Adelle wondered if she repeated these stories to the goons and if they found them as hilarious as Madam did. Adelle couldn’t imagine the goons laughing at anything.

Of course Madam would tell Dolan what Mondor was supposed to have said about him, and Dolan would quickly discover that the remark came from Adelle. Before another day passed, Madam would be back with some tale from Dolan, attributed to Mondor, about an alleged peculiar habit of Adelle’s. Such silly by-play, nourished by Madam’s childish tattling, had puzzled Adelle when she first came to work there. Now she felt splendidly indifferent to it. She disliked Mondor thoroughly and despised Dolan, and she knew the two of them scorned her and hated each other, but their offices were in three different wings of the sprawling building, and they were able to keep personal contacts to a minimum.

Further, all three of them were in this together and doing good work, however silly that work might be. Her own names for Mondor and Dolan were Cad and Clod, and her job would have been much pleasanter with more congenial people to work with, but she could have put up with Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster for the fabulous dimensions of her salary.

She picked up her check and regarded it with the same studious disbelief she had directed at the first two. More than nine hundred dollars in take-home pay for doing a week of—what? She had put in her time faithfully, she had worked steadily and well, she had followed instructions scrupulously, and she knew she hadn’t earned half than that. Supposedly the salary was justified by her highfalutin title, Researcher/Word Processor, but the only research she did was with a dictionary, correcting Dolan’s spelling errors.

“Mine not to reason why,” she murmured. But she couldn’t suppress her feeling that something was very wrong about this job. No honest business could afford to pay its employees so well to work in such a costly environment and produce so little.

“Just getting started, Darlink,” Madam had said cheerfully. “Books aren’t made in a day. All of ours will be annuals, and the business firms we serve will be buying replacements every year or two.” Adelle wanted to ask how many firms were likely to buy the books in the first place, but of course that wasn’t her problem. Perhaps it wasn’t Madam’s problem, either.

Paychecks were delivered promptly just before noon on Friday—a truly generous gesture since they weren’t due until the end of the day. “In case you want to shop during lunch hour,” Madam said. The Z-R Publications logo on the checks was both stylish and dignified, the checks were prepared on a check writer and looked thoroughly professional—corporate, in fact—and despite the interminable, scrawling, illegible signature, neither of Adelle’s two previous checks had bounced. The solvency of Z-R Publications could not be challenged by anything she had observed.

Even so, she couldn’t shrug off that feeling of uneasiness.

“If they’re smuggling heroin or running a numbers racket, the police can hardly blame me for something I know nothing about,” she told herself philosophically. The numbers racket seemed the more obvious guess—she certainly had typed enough of them in the past three weeks—and unemployment was the worst thing that could happen to her if Z-R Publications collapsed, whether due to a police raid or bankruptcy. With each passing week, as her nest egg became larger, that possibility seemed less menacing.

She was a recent graduate of Darwood College, a small, non-sectarian school located in Darwood, Illinois, where she was born and grew up. She had lost her parents, one after the other, when she was still in high school, and then, in her third year of college, her guardian died, leaving her entirely alone in the world. In both high school and college she made the mistake of taking courses that interested her rather than those that were practical, but the solid common sense of her guardian kept the error from being a fatal one. He insisted that she attend a business school during her summer vacations. Typing came easy for her—she’d had ten years of piano lessons—and she thought computers were fun.

She finished college on a scholarship and the last of her father’s insurance money, and she chose Ann Arbor, Michigan as a place to look for work because a friend at the University of Michigan sent her an exaggerated description of employment opportunities there. Her first reaction to the city was one of shock. The cost of living there was wildly exorbitant compared with Darwood. After she paid a deposit and a month’s rental on a cramped apartment in a garish tower called Chateau Arb, whose name enabled its promoters to add twenty dollars monthly to its already inflated rates, and bought an overly used, used car from a kindly-looking salesman who reminded her of a favorite college professor, she barely had enough money left to keep going until her first paycheck. Fortunately the car ran and continued to run. She was completely dependent on it—first to find a job, and then to drive to work.

She had been too intelligent to waste time looking for a position that would make use of her small college bachelor’s degree in English Literature. The day after her arrival she answered an ad for a Researcher/Word Processor, and Z-R Publications hired her. She began work the following Monday, and now she was about to cash a third fantastic paycheck.

She gave the check another disbelieving glance, and then she returned to her computer and the columns of figures with the nice wide margins.

When the grandfather clock in the hallway outside her door struck noon, Adelle finished the page she was typing, saved it, and made a backup copy. Then she picked up her purse and coat—although the day was sunny, the weather was unexpectedly cool for mid-summer—and stepped into the hallway.

As she started for the stairs, she glanced back over her shoulder. Goon 1, ever faithful, was watching from the remote end of the hall. She smiled and waved to him; as usual, he made no response. She shrugged and began her descent of a lovely, curved, hanging staircase. She always found it delightful because it gave her a sense of flying. Craig Dolan, with a writer’s gift for polluting the poetic with the mundane, said the sensation was one of sliding down a fire pole in slow motion. At the bottom she turned into the broad main corridor that led to the massive front door.

It was a pleasant day for the half-mile walk to the Arbor Vista Shopping Mall, so she left her car in the mansion’s parking lot and moved briskly along the left edge of the neat, crushed-rock drive that led out to the highway. A thick grove of trees screened the building from passing motorists.

A car approached from the rear, but Adelle didn’t bother to look back. She knew the sound of its motor only too well. As it zoomed past, it swerved close enough to her to whip her coat in the breeze it stirred up. Adelle made no response, but inwardly she was seething.

The driver was Kevin Mondor, and that was his juvenile notion of a joke. His squat little deep blue foreign convertible, which looked much the same coming and going because it was rounded on either end, screeched to a stop at the highway and then made its turn in a swirl of dust and roared out of sight. Fortunately Craig Dolan had already left. Dolan’s maliciousness was more imaginative. If he saw her walking ahead of him, he would slow down until he could catch her at the muddy spot between the end of the crushed rock and the highway and spatter her when he passed.

When she reached the highway, she saw a goon at work beside the road, poking with a shovel at something in a wheelbarrow. She identified him from his pot belly and his hat—it was Goon 4—and he seemed seemed to be mixing cement. Madam had mentioned putting up a sign by the highway, and the pole-like object lying on the ground beside him probably was the support to attach the sign to. Z-R Publications, which thus far had lurked invisibly behind the trees, was about to lose its anonymity.

She continued to walk briskly, and—since there was little traffic to distract her—she thought about her coming weekend. Because she had never been in Michigan before, she planned something touristy each week to familiarize herself with her new home. The previous Saturday, she had visited the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Detroit Historical Museum. This Saturday, it would be Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. On Sunday afternoon, she would attend a concert with a young man who also lived at Chateau Arb—her first date in Ann Arbor. It would be an eventful weekend, and she was looking forward to both days.

In the shopping mall parking lot, Mondor’s convertible stood beside Dolan’s wreck of a car. The latter’s junkyard appearance was as distinctive as that of Mondor’s exotic import. Dolan would be taking his repast at a place called Barney’s Pub, swilling beer with a sandwich. Mondor, a food faddist who believed all meat was poisonous, ate at The Greenry, where the salad bar was reputed to be the most lavish in Washtenaw County. Adelle had never seen the inside of either establishment. She went to her bank’s branch office and split her paycheck into three parts—savings, checking, and a small amount of cash for pocket money. Then she treated herself to a light lunch, without soup, at a tidy little restaurant that called itself The Soup Kettle.

When she finished, Mondor’s silly little foreign car was gone, but not Dolan’s rusted junker—he would stay with the beer until the last minute of his lunch hour if not beyond it. His lateness is returning from lunch was the subject of some of the jokes Mondor told Madam about him. Madam gleefully relayed them to both Dolan and Adelle, but—as far as Adelle knew—her cackle was Dolan’s only reprimand. Dolan’s excuse for every tardiness, which he would tell with a straight face even when surrounded by clocks, was that he didn’t have a watch.

Goon 4 was still at work when Adelle turned in at the meandering, crushed rock drive to the manor. The pole had been erected, and he was mixing the last of the cement needed to fill its hole. She waved at him, and as usual she was ignored. She walked on, maintaining a steady pace until she abruptly emerged from the trees that screened the manor from the road. There she halted. The building was a familiar sight to her by now, but she always stopped to admire it.

It seemed to sprawl endlessly, with bulging wings in a conglomerate of architectural styles and materials that was at once breathtaking and hilarious. Oddly enough, there seemed to be a weird kind of logic about it. Only when one considered that this building was also the editorial and production headquarters of Z-R Publications did it become preposterous.

The south wing, on the left, was a miniature Gothic cathedral, complete with flying buttresses. The large portico was from ancient Greece, a miniature Parthenon complete with sculptured friezes, but its imposing effect had been spoiled somewhat by the insect screening that had been added between the fluted shafts. Behind the portico, the upper story’s facade could have been lifted intact from Shakespeare’s Tudor Stratford. The wing beyond was imitation Georgian.

The same hodgepodge continued all around the building, with incongruities at the sides and rear that Adelle was still discovering. On her first puzzled glimpse of it, the structure had seemed like a montage of illustrations from a textbook on the history of architecture. She learned later that it actually was a textbook. The strange, extremely wealthy professor of architecture who created it, Adolph Feinstwaller, intended it to illustrate different types and styles of buildings and their construction problems. The project was a lifelong obsession with him. There always was one more wing and one more interior to design, and in the end it became an architect’s dream turned nightmare.

Adelle usually brought her lunch from her apartment, and on pleasant days she ate it in a neatly kept French jardin from which she could look at a miniature palace of Versailles on one side and the simple beauty of the Romanesque wing on the other. While she ate, she wondered about the builder—whether he was genius or crackpot to sink a fortune into such a monstrous mutation and whether he had accomplished what he wanted and got his money’s worth. Probably the fun had been more in the doing of it than in having done it, the traveling hopefully rather than arriving, which was why he continued to add wings as long as he lived.

Adelle had no idea what his heirs had made or tried to make of such a white elephant, or how Z-R Publications came to locate there. If the firm flourished as Madam predicted, the stained glass, the fan and ribbed vaultings, the bay and oriel windows, the linenfold and fielded and sunken panels, the hammerbeam roofs, the sculpture ornamented domes and cupolas, the hard carved balustrades, and all the rest were forever doomed to look down on humming and purring and clanking business machines and offset presses. Even a crackpot’s dream, she thought, deserved a better fate.

But even if this gloomy future was not irrevocable, Adelle still had the uneasy foreboding that something was very wrong about Z-R Publications.