The Answer

John Reeve sighed. Because now he remembered the one important thing he had to remember. He remembered why he had come here, to Lisa's uptown apartment, now in the darkest corner of the hot summer's night. All in a rush it came to him, a rush of tremulous feeling. There was no thought behind it. It was pure feeling. He didn't stop to analyze the wherefores to any degree, or to catalog them neatly in the pigeonholes of his brain. He just knew what he had to do and he did it.

He walked over to the bed and strangled Lisa.

It wasn't bad, but the long moment afterwards was.

The room was just the same. The windless heat, the jealous scent of Lisa's perfume mingled with the scent of her tawny unseen hair. His hands saw it though, blindly, so soft and silky under them. Lisa was so still, she died so gently.

The silence, while he hung there over Lisa, barely touching her hair, held as in a cup all the ache and the agony a man can endure.

Then the telephone started to ring.

He didn't look at it. This sudden sound, shattering the cup of silence, made him shudder.

It rang and rang.

Answer it.

It was a prickling voice in his mind. No, it wasn't. It was a tiny ghost that had hidden in the curve of his ear and was whispering into his ear's cavern, then shouting merrily against the membrane of his eardrum:

Answer it!

It was Lisa. He recognized her voice.

He pulled up sharply, tossing a heavy breath across the bed.

Lisa, you fool! If I answer it, then they'll know I was here. They'll say I killed you and they'll strap me down in a chair and send ten-million volts of electricity through me and I'll be as dead as you are.

The voice changed now. It wheedled, it caressed, it coaxed him. It made a joke out of it. Then--

Please answer the telephone, darling. You know I can't stand to leave it ring like that. It's somehow--sacrilegious. Please, darling.

It was true. If Lisa were alive she wouldn't leave her telephone ringing like that, never. That was one thing Lisa was meticulous, even fetishistic, about. She might not be so meticulous about other things, such as husbands, but she invariably flew to the telephone when it rang. She used to lie on her silken bed and talk to it for hours, caressing it with her long red-tipped fingers. Lisa had loved the telephone. She had loved it above everything else. Maybe more than John. What do you mean, maybe? Of course she loved it more than she loved John!

He didn't move, so the ghost in his ear began to taunt him.

_You always used to want to know who was calling me, John. You used to insist on knowing. You used to try to beat me to the telephone. Well, now's your chance_--

John Reeve stiffened. That was true, too. All too humiliatingly true. He made a rough noise in his throat, then brushed a hand across the darkness. He located the telephone by its impudent burring. He reached for it--and almost had it.

Then he woke up.

And always the same. That was why he couldn't remember going to Lisa's apartment, or getting in, or anything like that. Just being there, feeling the oppressive summer heat, the dark silence, scenting Lisa's jealous perfume, wondering why she never opened a window, and then strangling Lisa.

But the telephone was the worst thing.

He didn't like to strangle Lisa, it was definitely not the act of a gentleman, and John Reeve considered himself a gentleman. He was never crude, at least. When Lisa said casually one night after dinner. "Darling, I'm leaving you," he didn't exactly yawn but put something of the effect of a yawn into his smile. "Are you, dear?" He was too much of a gentleman to try to hold her if she wanted to go, even for one day.

But it hurt. It had clawed his heart all that night, and the next, and all the next nights until--

Of all the things that tortured him in his dream, the telephone was by far the worst. Why, why, why did the dream have to end just there? It was just as Lisa, or Lisa's ghost in the dream, said. He was curious. He had to know. It was driving him crazy not to know. Once he thought that by straining at the dream and forcing it to go on, his fingers did actually contact the cold surface of the telephone. But he wasn't sure. He wasn't sure.