Talmage Powell
Scales and Blindfold

The tall, erect man moved very easily in the darkness. He hadn’t been in this room in three years, but he knew every inch of it. It was his room, the room his mother kept readied for him whenever he should return.

He paused a moment in the moonlight that filtered through the window. The pale light touched a broad, heavy, yet young face. An open face. His gray eyes were glowing; a smile played eagerly about his broad, warm mouth.

Up here the house was silent save for the whispering of the wind through the great oaks outside and the expectant thud of the man’s pulse in his ears. In the next room he knew his son was sleeping, and in the room beyond that his mother would be alone. Silent and dark up here in this great house, yet downstairs the laughter and bubbling noise of an informal party drifted to him faintly.

The tall man stood quite still in the patch of moonlight. His whole being exuded expectant pleasure, yet there was something lonely in the tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the cast of his lips. He was thinking of a lovely, wealthy young Spanish-English girl. The girl he’d married and who had died over three years ago, taking part of him with her. He was thinking that he had been away from this huge, somehow grim house a long time. He’d missed his son. He’d seen too much tired death as a war correspondent. There is a limit to the amount of death a man can see and still not be lonely.

But he was hack now. Back like a little child with a surprise gift. The gift was himself, his presence, and it struck him that he should be embarrassed, pulling a childish trick like this. He’d crept into the house quietly. It had been very easy with the party downstairs and the silence up here. No one knew he was home; no one would know until tomorrow morning. They would sit down to breakfast, and he would walk down the sweeping stairway into the dining room. He’d pause in the doorway of the dining room, and it would be a silent moment. Then Haywood and Terry and Ida would get their dropped jaws back in place and spring from the table to envelope him with greetings. His son would fly into his arms and perhaps cry a little. His mother would touch his arm gently, unbelievingly. It would be a warm scene tomorrow morning in the dining room.

He stood in the darkness, that planned scene so vivid in his mind, widening his expectant smile. Then abruptly his eyes darkened and his smile left his face. All the expectancy he had built within himself during the long voyage home, was suddenly flat, sour. The surprise he’d planned was ruined. Or had he only imagined that someone was breathing here in the darkness of the room with him?

Perhaps it was the whisper of the wind outside. This was a house of almost silent whispers, he knew. A large, stone house, set apart from others on a broad estate, Terry Bliss’ sole inheritance from his father. Terry’s research lab adjoined the house, and Frederick had left his son and mother here because Terry, his wife Ida, and Terry’s brother Haywood were the only relatives Frederick had, his cousins.

Frederick Sole stood rigid, listening. Moonbeams danced at his feet. Faintly, he heard the gay sounds of the party downstairs, the breathing of the wind, a beam creaking distantly like the timber of a great, rugged ship. And there was something else…

He murmured, “Who’s there?”

The wind whispered a reply; the house was alive about him. Battlefield reporting had given him strange ears, tuned to death. Dryness spread in his mouth. The room was silent, starkly silent, and vet…

Then he seemed to imagine the ruffling whisper of rug nap beneath a shoe. He knew that strange quality of his ears wasn’t playing him tricks. He was quite alone — save for the presence of Death…

Elsie Sole’s knitting needles clicked with a steady rhythm. From downstairs, the gay, brittle laughter of suave people drinking and talking informally beat its way into the darkness of her everlasting night. She sat by her bed, rocking slowly, one part of her mind intent on the party downstairs, the warm, bright lights and gaiety. She was an old woman, a square peg in a round hole, a bothersome fool to Terry’s and Ida’s and Haywood’s modern, horribly efficient way of thinking. But she would stay here, she promised herself. She would stay because of Peter. A seven-year-old boy needed the warmth and understanding of his granny.

Her needles clicked again, swift, sure. She sat alone in the darkness and knitted without dropping a single stitch. After all, one learned to knit quite well after three years of utter blindness.

She had learned other things, too. The sometimes halting footsteps of Terry entering a room when his blonde, young wife. Ida, was present would tell Elsie Sole that all was not right between them. The sudden cutting tone in his voice was like a banner declaring his rebellion against her domination. But those occasions were rare. He was a meek, tubby little husband, a strange sort of person to do the things he had done in research chemistry. His one mental quirk was a rather amusing allergy to double-breasted suits. It was the one thing in which he would override Ida’s suggestions. He always insisted on single-breasted models in pin stripe material in hopes that he would appear slimmer. In her world of darkness, Elsie Sole had recognized in this Terry’s almost pathetic rebellion against his wife. Or perhaps it was simply a pathetic attempt to find an ego on Terry’s part and express it through what he hoped was an emphatic characteristic.

Haywood Bliss, Terry’s younger brother, would have been more of the man to subdue Ida, Elsie Sole thought. She remembered Haywood as a tall, powerful man with a steady gaze and firm, thin-lipped mouth. Now, since her blindness, she’d learned other things about Haywood, the latent strength when he touched an old woman to help her down the stairs, the barging, straight course with which he walked across a room.

And Ida. With her petulant way of running up stairs, the almost hidden explosiveness in every word she said. Last night young Pete had woke, afraid of the darkness in his large, almost barren, room. Elsie Sole had soothed him with gay bedtime stories. She’d broken off in the middle of a sentence as the door to Pete’s room had opened. She recognized the outraged tapping of a spike-heeled shoe. “Elsie!” Ida’s voice had been tight with impatience. “How many times must I tell you that you’re ruining the child? Utterly ruining him! Such nonsense — his being afraid of the dark!” That was Ida. So sure, so filled with answers. She didn’t know the dark, not real darkness, but Elsie Sole did. Elsie Sole knew how a child waking in darkness might feel. Yet it was Ida who had the answers.

Elsie Sole’s needles clicked, never dropping a stitch. Then with a suddenness that was jarring they stopped. She half rose, her knitting spilling to the floor, her hands, lean and old and strained, on the arms of her chair. “Frederick…!” Like that the thought of her son had come to her, like a dark cloud over the face of the sun, like a sudden roll of bursting thunder in a world of silence.

She stood, half risen, her body trembling, while dark, strange shadows played against the black curtain behind her eyes. It was unexplainable, this sudden plunging into a wild world of crazed thoughts and clammy feeling. Yet it wasn’t; for like footsteps and voices, she’d learned to tabulate everything in her world of darkness, every whisper of the house, every nuance of life about her. A quickly drawn breath, too sudden laughter, rain against the windowpanes in April bringing a travelogue of vivid green springtime to life in her mind. Now, distinctly, she had heard a groan that would have escaped other ears, a tremulous ghost of a sound finding its way down the hallway from Frederick’s room.

Then the house was the same again, with the rustle of the rising, (hill wind outside, the murmur of laughter from downstairs, the creak of a beam in the depths of the house somewhere.

She sat in her chair again. “I’m acting the old fool,” she told herself. She reached for her knitting; and, for the first time since those terrible days after the accident three years ago that had taken her sight, her hands fumbled, uncertain.

The clamminess gathered in the valleys of her face and would not leave; the house whispered to her darkly. She rose and went into the hallway. She turned toward Frederick’s room. She moved without the aid of a cane. Every room in this house, even to Terry’s laboratory downstairs, was indelibly mapped in her mind. It had been something to occupy her time.

She moved with the silence of one accustomed to searching out for guidance the tiny, ethereal sounds that are a part of silence. Eight paces. The low table with the dragon’s heads carved on it would be here. She stepped aside to skirt the dragon head table, edged toward the wall once more. Then she was standing quite still.

She was achingly attuned to the house, to the night outside. She sensed the presence near her, perhaps the rustle of cloth or the quick stopping of shallow breathing. She froze against the wall, pulses thudding. She whispered, “Pete? What are you doing out of bed, Pete?”

There was nothing, no sound, no awareness except deep inside her, a thousand wings pounding up to her throat. “Terry? Haywood? Ida?” Distantly she heard her voice rising. No one answered; nothing moved save the rustic of the earth beneath the wind and the mocking gaiety of the laughter in brightness downstairs. “Who’s there?”

In her own private world she was swathed in total darkness. Yet she knew dial someone was here in the hallway with her. Someone who would not answer to her question; someone who had stopped breathing until she should pass. And moments before she had heard her son groan…

She moved a still step; then she whirled, almost dropping to her knees, her hand upflung, as she heard the crack of a knee joint in that other world beyond her own.

She waited without knowing what she was waiting for. Then she knew that she was alone. There’d been only the cracking of a knee joint as someone had turned in slow, awkward, silent motion, then long seconds later the crack of a stair down the hall.

She straightened, trembling. She stumbled down the hallway, found the door to Frederick’s room.

The door whispered a creak as she opened and closed it. She stood inside the doorway, her hands clutched before her. If her son had returned, he might have slipped in. she knew. He’d done (hat sort of thing before, lie took a robust pleasure in sending warm little gifts home as total surprises. It was rather late, and if he had returned, he might have planned to surprise them at the breakfast table tomorrow.

“Frederick?”

She moved through the morass of silence. She felt his bed, the rovers untouched. She moved along the bed and her mind was forming new words: “Perhaps it was all in your nerves. Are you growing old and imagining things? It seems…”

She tripped, went to her knees. She shouldn’t have tripped. She should have been passing in front of the chair near the bookcase. There should have been nothing there to trip her…

Enhanced, the clamminess poured back over her like frigid, thick molasses. She touched the shoe that had tripped her, the worsted material of a trousers’ cuff.

He was sprawled in the chair, unmoving. Her exploring fingers increased their tempo, felt for a heartbeat. found none. Found only a wetness that left her fingertips sticky, the heavy, solid shaft of a knife…

She shuddered, closing her eyes tightly as if the darkness cloaking her wasn’t enough. She fell his hand, the signet ring she knew so well. His hand was clenched, and she uncurled the cooling fingers slowly. A button dropped in her palm. A button from a coat.

She sank very quietly in a shrunken, sitting heap on the carpet. She endured a convulsion of silent, dry, hard sobbing deep down inside: her lips whispered, “Frederick… My son…”

Then she rose unsteadily and left the room. She’d never moved about the house without caution before, but in the hallway she moved quickly. In her palm she felt the pressure of the button she’d taken from his hand. It was important, that button, for hint to have torn it loose and clutched it in death. She wondered what sort of grim, short struggle had taken place in the darkness of her son’s room. From downstairs, the brittle laughter of the party beat at her.

The scroll-legged table with the vase was at the end of the hall, below the window. She dropped the coat button into the vase, turned, started toward the stairway, measuring and counting each pace.

She knew when she reached the mouth of the stairway. Without pause she turned, and driving pains clashed across her shins. She tattered swayed, and then she and the ridiculous, low, dragon head table that had been in its customary place down the hallway only moments ago were tangled together, twisting and failing.

In her black maw of night, she knew that whoever had passed her in the hall as she’d gone to Frederick’s room had moved that table, knowing she would start down the stairs and that she never used a cane. It would be so very simple to murder her; move a single piece of furniture from its customary place and she was agonizingly helpless. Then the flashing thought broke off as she clutched at the rail, missed. Somewhere below her she heard the dragon head table in a crashing fall. Then she was plunging down, her world topsy-turvy, pain stinging her shoulder, her head, firing the dark mantel over her sight with flaming stars. Then the stars all fell and went out.

Ida’s voice bit into her consciousness: “Well, can’t you do something for her, Terry?”

And Terry’s voice, quivering with low patience, “Darling, you’ll have to give her a moment.” Elsie Sole felt a hand under her head, cool liquid on her lips. She stirred.

“Well!” Ida’s voice brought a picture of Ida with arms akimbo. “What in the world were you doing. Elsie, trying to carry that table down the stairs?”

She passed her hand over her wrinkled brow, trying to remember. Pictures grew in the black walls of her eyes as consciousness returned. “I wasn’t trying to carry the table down,” she whisperer. “It was placed at the head of the stairs to trip me.”

“Really!” Ida said.

“For God’s sake, shut up!” Terry snapped. “I told you that she’d broken no bones, only stunned herself, when we brought her in here. Hut can’t you have a little mercy on Elsie?”

The click of teeth: Ida was throbbing, eyes blazing. Hut she said nothing else to her weary, tubby husband.

“Peter?” Elsie said. “Where is Peter?”

Haywood helped her to a sitting position. “Asleep,” he said. “Your fall woke him, but I sent him back to bed. Elsie, as the boy’s guardian. I feel that you… well, the way you handle him occasionally has made the boy a very nervous…”