A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (best reads .TXT) 📗

      John didn’t answer. With his shoulder still braced against the wood, his face pale, his fingers working with desperate haste, he was turning the heavy bolts on each of the four separate locks and latches that held the door shut tight.

      The expression he turned to Angie stilled her startled questions in her throat.

      “Angie, we can’t let them in,” he was beginning, in a frightened voice. Then he stopped, looking wildly about. “Where’s Liz?” he demanded, a sudden edge of panic in his voice.

      For a moment Angie only continued to stare at her fiancé in astonishment. She had never seen him look like this—he was pale to the lips and absolutely terrified.

      But in the next moment she turned her gaze around the living room and entryway. The other woman was gone. “She said something about going out the service entrance. I guess there must be one…”

      “Oh, my God!” John’s words were quiet, but desperately urgent. Already he was running at top speed for the back door, or for the place where Angie supposed the back door would have to be if it existed.

      “What is it?” But he wouldn’t delay in his headlong flight, wouldn’t pause to answer. Angie followed, helplessly infected by his fear.

      Running on bare feet, they pounded through the apartment to the kitchen. There, set in one wall of the tiny adjacent laundry room, the back door stood open as far as its security devices, similar to those on the front door, would allow. Elizabeth was standing just inside, talking to someone through the gap. When John shouted at her she turned, as if with great difficulty, to present a face of helpless horror to John and Angie.

      Knocking her out of the way, not pausing to see who might be outside, John leaped at this door as he had the other. Again a heavy barrier slammed shut. Again Angie had the impression that whoever was outside might have made an abortive effort to hold it open.

      In another moment John had the locks on this door fastened.

      Then he turned, leaning his back against the door, fixing the trembling waitress with a baleful stare. “Don’t call out. Don’t ask any of them in. I’m warning you.”

      Elizabeth, shivering despite coat and scarf, had retreated to sit in a chair at the kitchen table. She shook her red curls. “I didn’t,” she said in a tiny, helpless voice. “I won’t.”

      Angie, scowling at the man she was planning to marry, moved to stand beside Elizabeth, silently stroking the woman’s hair with her right hand. Meanwhile Elizabeth had seized Angie’s left hand and was clinging to it, almost as if she needed help from drowning. Liz was still trembling. Angie was silent now, but her anger was going to burst out at John in about fifteen seconds, unless he came up with some very good explanations.

      The video panel beside the back door was identical with the one in the front room. John, having made sure the door was sealed—and having terrorized everyone in the process, Angie thought—had switched on the video and was studying the screen intently. He muttered: “Not a real hallway at this end, just service stairs. There’s a landing, and the back door of someone else’s apartment. He’s still there. Know this guy, Angie?”

      Angie looked at the viewer, and beheld another male figure, not Mr. Stewart, also unfamiliar. How many people were with Kaiser, and why would he send someone to the back door, when he came to the front? Was he some kind of a policeman? Or—

      The buzzer on the back door sounded, and simultaneously the door chime from the front.

      John ignored the nearer summons. Moving at a reluctant walk, almost a sleepwalker’s groping stumble, he was halfway back to the living room when Angie gave up calling his name—he couldn’t seem to hear her—and ran to stop him with a hard pull on his arm.

      Once she had his attention, she said, calmly and firmly: “I don’t know what it is about the people out there that upsets you so. If they’re so scary, don’t you think it’s about time we called the police?”

      “No!” It was anything but a sleepwalker’s answer. “Don’t you see? That’s just what they want us to do.”

      “What?” The two of them were arguing on the threshold of the living room, with the front door in sight, its adjacent video screen showing that Valentine Kaiser was out there still. Elizabeth Wiswell, moving like a lost soul, still in coat and scarf, came wandering past John and Angie and sank down in a chair at some distance from the door.

      John must have seen his fiancée’s fear and confusion. He made a conscious, visible effort to speak to her calmly. “If we call the cops, those people out in the hall will disappear. For the time being. And if the cops get a call saying there are mysterious people in the hall threatening us, they’ll insist on coming in and looking the place over. Just to make sure we’re not lying when we meet them at the door and say everything is fine now. The cops will want to make sure there’s no one being held hostage in here:”

      “All right! So, let them come in and—”

      He overrode her. “No! Once the cops see Uncle Matthew, in the shape he’s in, nothing will stop them calling an ambulance and having him carried out.”

      “Frankly I think we ought to call one ourselves. John, he really looks like—”

      I know what he looks like. The trouble is, once they move him outside the walls of his own house—well, there’ll be no way we or the police can protect him, if your acquaintance who came to the door means to do him harm.”

      Angie blinked “Protect him?”

      “It looks to me like someone’s poisoned him. Then those—strangers show up out in the corridor and want to see him. I don’t like it.”

      “You mean—you’re saying the police couldn’t protect him from Valentine Kaiser and his—”

      “Do you know what Kaiser is?”

      “What he is? He gave me