A MAN OBSESSED - Chapter 5

His first impulse was to turn and run. There was no explaining it, no rationalizing the feeling of dread and danger that struck him as he walked into the room. The feeling swept over him with almost overpowering intensity; something was unbearably wrong here.

Jeff walked in slowly, closing the door behind him. The door seemed to be pulled tight shut, sucked out of his hand. That was when the tension in the air struck Jeff like an almost physical force, and his mind filled with dread.

No one noticed him. He stared around himself curiously. He watched the Nasty Frenchman shoulder his way through the crowd. One of Silly Giggin's particularly maddening nervous-jazz arrangements was squawking from a player somewhere in the room, and the air itself was filled with a jagged rattle of conversation that rose above the music.

Most of the faces were new to Jeff. There were tired, old ones, marked indelibly with lines of fear, lines of hunted hopelessness. There were faces with tight, compressed, bloodless lips; faces with eyes full of coldness and cynicism, and faces radiating sharp, perverted intelligence.

Crowds leaned tensely around the tables and watched the cards with eager, calculating eyes. Side bets were made as the hands were opened. Other groups huddled on the floor and watched the dice with beady, avaricious eyes.

The music jangled and scraped, and little bursts of harsh laughter broke out to compete with it. And through it, all ran the chilling inescapable feeling of error, of something missed, something has gone horribly wrong.

He moved slowly through the room and searched the faces milling around him. His eyes caught Blackie's, far across the room, for the barest instant, and the chill of something gone wrong intensified and sent a quiver up his spine. He stopped a passerby and motioned at the nearest dice huddle. "How do you get in?" he asked.

The man shrugged, looking at him strangely. "You lay down your money and you play," he snapped. "If you got no money, then you've got the next job's payoff to bet with. 'Smatter, Jack, you new around here?" And the man moved on, shaking his head.

Jeff nodded, realization striking. What would be more natural to a group of people teetering from day to day on the brink of death? The need for excitement, for activity, would be overpowering in a dismal prison-place like this. And with the huge sums of money yet unearned to bet with—Jeff shuddered. Cut-throat games, yes, but could they really explain this strange tension he sensed? Or had something happened, something to change the atmosphere, to pervade every nook and cranny of the room with an air of explosive tension?

Jeff started moving toward the Nasty Frenchman. The little man was gulping coffee in the corner. He sucked on a long, black cigar and appeared to be in deep conversation with a bald-headed giant who leaned against the wall. Jeff spotted Blackie again. She was across the room on her knees. She faced a little buck-toothed man, as she swiftly rolled the three colored dice. Her eyes followed them, quick and unnaturally bright.

Jeff shook his head. Panmumjon was a high-speed, high-tension game—a game for the steel-nerved. Its famous dead-locks had often led to murder, as the pots rose higher and higher. The girl seemed to be winning. She rolled the dice with trance-like regularity, and the little buck-toothed man's face darkened as his money pile dwindled.

Across the room a corner crap game was moving swiftly, with staggering sums of money passing from hand to hand; the card games, though slower, left the mark of their tension on the players' faces. Jeff still stared, until he had seen every face in the room. Paul Conroe's face was not one of them.

No, he had not expected that. But what had happened? It was maddening to stand there, to feel the tension in the room, sense that it was growing until it seemed to pound at his temples. No one else seemed to notice it. Was he the only one aware of the change in the air, in the sounds, even in the color of the light against the walls? Something was impelling him, urging him to run, to get away, to leave the room now while he could. Yet when he tried to analyze the creeping, poisonous fear, tried to pin it down, it wriggled away into the fringes of his mind, and mocked him.

Finally, he reached the corner of the room. His ear caught the Nasty Frenchman's nasal voice, and he froze as he stared at the little man.

"I tell you, Harpo, I heard it with my own ears. You never saw Schiml so excited. And then Shaggy Parsons was saying that the whole unit was being split up—that's the A unit. I saw him when I was going through this afternoon. He was all excited, too."

"But why split it up?" The huge bald-headed man called Harpo growled, his heavy lips twisting in disgust. "I don't trust Shaggy Parsons for nothin', and I think you hear what you want to hear. What's the point of it? Schiml's coming along fine in the work he's using us in—"

The Nasty Frenchman turned red. "That's just it: we've been in and we're going to be out, right out in the cold. Can't you get that straight? Something's going to break. They're onto something—Schiml and his boys—something big. And they've got a new man, somebody they're excited about, somebody that's been knocking walls down just by looking at them, or something—"

Harpo made a disgusted noise. "You mean, the old ESP story again. So maybe they go off on another spook hunt. They'll get over it, same as they did the last time or the time before."

The Nasty Frenchman's voice was tense. "But they're changing things. And changes mean trouble." He glanced at Jeff and his eyebrows went up. "Look, they get on a line of work, they assign men to different parts of a job, they get work lined up months in advance. Then all of a sudden something new comes along. They get excited about something and they toss out a couple of dozen workers, add on a couple of dozen new ones, change the fees, change the work. And they end up handing the best pay to somebody who's just come in. I don't like it. I've been in this place for too long. I've had too many tough, lousy jobs here to just get pushed aside because they don't happen to be interested anymore in what they were doing to me before. And they never tell us! We never know for sure. We just have to wait and guess and hope."

The little man's eyes blazed. "But we can pick up some things, a little here, a little there—you learn how, after a while. And I can tell you, something's wrong, something's going to happen. You can even feel it in here."

Jeff's skin crawled. That was it, of course. There was something wrong. But it hadn't happened yet. It was going to happen. He stared at a huddled group around a Panmunjom game, watched the bright-colored dice cubes roll across and back, across and back. A newcomer, the Nasty Frenchman had said, someone who had come in and disrupted the smooth work schedule of the Center, someone who had the doctors suddenly excited. Someone whom they were planning to use—on a spook hunt.

What kind of a spook hunt? Why that choice of words? Could Conroe conceivably be the newcomer they had been talking about? It didn't seem possible that it could have happened so suddenly if Conroe were the one—but who? And what did this have to do with the ever-growing sense of impending danger that pervaded the room, right now?

Jeff's eyes wandered to the dice game, and the fear in his mind suddenly grew to a screaming torrent. Go away, Jeff. Don't watch, don't look—He scowled, suddenly angry. Why not look? What was there so dangerous in a dice game? He moved over to the nearby huddle and watched the moving cubes in fascination. No, Jeff, no, don't do it, Jeff—With a curse, he dropped to his knees and reached out for the dice.

"You in?" somebody asked. Jeff nodded, his face like a rock. The voice had stopped screaming in his ear, and now something else grew in his mind: a wild exhilaration that caught his breath and swept through his brain like a whirl-wind. His eyes sparkled and he pulled money from his pocket. He laid the bills on the floor and his hands closed on the dice.

He faced a little, pimple-faced man with beady black eyes and he raised the three brightly colored dice, rolling into the familiar pattern. The dice deadlocked in four throws. He sweated out seven more with new dice. Then Jeff saw a break in the odds, boosted the ante on his next throw, and caught his breath as the man facing him matched it.

The dice rolled, fell into deadlock again, and the crowd around them gasped, moved in closer around them. The third set of dice was brought out, for the attempts at dead-lock-breaking. Then a fourth set followed, as the complex structure of the game built up like a house of cards. Then Jeff's dice, at last, rolled the critical number, and the structure began to break apart—throw after throw falling faster and faster into his hands.

Four or five people moved in at his side with side bets and began to collect along with him, as he moved into another game, built it up. This one he lost cold, but still, he played on, his excitement growing.

And then, suddenly, pandemonium broke loose in the room. Eyes glanced up, startled, at the two men, far across the room, who stood facing each other, eyes blazing.

"Throw them down! Go on! Throw them, see how they land!"

Somebody shouted, "What happened, Archie?"

"He's got loaded dice in here, somehow." Archie pointed an accusing finger at the other man. "They don't fall right. There's something wrong with them—"

The other man snarled. "So you aren't winning anymore—so what? You brought the dice in yourself."

"But the odds aren't right. There's something funny going on."

Jeff turned back to the dice, his mind still screaming, sensing that disaster hung in the air like a heavy sword. His own game moved on, faster and faster. Somewhere across the room, another fight broke out, and another. Several men dropped out of games and stood up against the walls. Their eyes were wide with anger as they watched the other players. And then Jeff rolled three sixes, fourteen times in a row. He tossed the dice down in front of his gaping opponents with a curse and walked shakily back to the corner. The whole room spun around his head.

Suddenly, in this room, probabilities had gone mad. He could feel the shifting instability of the atmosphere, as real and oppressive to him as if it were solid and he were attempting to wade through it. This was what had been bothering him, plaguing him. Quite suddenly and without explanation, something impossible had begun to happen. Cards had begun to fall in unbelievable sequences, repeating themselves with idiotic regularity; dice had defied the laws of gravity as they spun on the tables and floor.

A hubbub filled the room as the players stopped and stared at each other, unable to comprehend the impossible that was happening before their eyes. And then Blackie was passing Jeff, her face flushed, a curious light of desperation in her eyes.

An impulse passed through Jeff's mind. He reached out an arm, stopped the girl. "Game," he said sharply.

Her eyes flashed at him. "What game?"

"Anything." He held up his wrist before her eyes and showed her the gold watch. "We can play for this."

Something flared in her eyes for a moment before she gained control. Then she was down on her knees, pushing her sleeves up, a tight look of fear and dread haunting her eyes as she looked up at Jeff. "Something's happening," she said softly. "The dice—they're not right."

"I know it. Why not?" His voice was hoarse, his eyes hard on her face.

She threw him a baffled look. "There isn't any reason. Nothing is different, but the dice don't fall right. That's all, they just don't."

Jeff grinned tightly. "Go on, throw them."

She threw the dice, saw them dance on the floor, caught her number. Jeff rolled them, beat her on it, picked up the money. He rolled again, then again. The tightness grew around the girl's eyes; little tense lines hardened near her mouth. Nervously, she fumbled a cigarette into her mouth, lit it, puffed as the dice rolled.

She lost. She lost again. Side bets picked up around them, the people as they watched catching the tension that was building up.

"What's happening?"

"The dice—my God! They've gone crazy!"

"Blackie's losing. What do you think—"

"—losing? She never loses on dice. Who's the guy?"

"Never saw him before. Look, he took another one! Those dice are hexed."

"My cards were crazy too: king-high full every time, a dozen hands in a row. How can you bet on something like that, I ask you."

The Silly Giggins record screeched louder, then gave a squawk as the record suddenly shattered in a thousand pieces. Somebody cursed and threw a pack of cards on the floor, and a scream broke out across the room. One group came suddenly to blows; several dice games tightened down to a bloody conflict between individuals. A man burst into tears, suddenly, and sat back on his haunches, his face stricken. "They can't act this way," he wailed. "They just can't—"

Jeff's eyes watched the spinning dice, and again something was screaming in his ear. He felt as though his head were going to burst, but he continued to roll and he saw the girl's face darken with each throw. He saw the fear shine out from her blue eyes. Suddenly she let out a curse, snatched the dice from Jeff's hand, and threw them sharply across the room. She stared at Jeff venomously, then glared at the people around her as if she were a cornered animal.

"It's all of you," she snarled. "You're turning them against me. You're making them fall wrong." She spat on the floor and started for the door. Jeff moved after her but felt a restraining hand on his arm.

"Leave her alone," said the Nasty Frenchman. "You'll have trouble on your hands if you don't. You see what I meant about something being wrong? The whole crowd here is on edge as if somebody were picking them up and throwing them down. Whoever saw dice fall that way, or cards fall that way"—the little man's eyes flashed slyly—"unless somebody was controlling them."

Jeff's breath was faster as he stared at the Nasty Frenchman, and his voice was hoarse. "What are you talking about?"

The little man's lips twisted angrily. "You saw what happened in here, didn't you?"

Jeff turned away in anger. He wove through the crowd, his jaw tight as he moved toward the door. The Nasty Frenchman could only glimpse the truth, but someone else saw more, much more. Somehow, Jeff knew that this past hour held the key to the whole problem if he could only see it. Here was the answer to the whole tangled puzzle of the girl and Paul Conroe, of Dr. Schiml and the Mercy Men.

And he knew that when he reached the room, the girl would be waiting. She would be waiting with cold fire in her eyes, as she sat at the table, a small pair of colored dice lying before her in the dim light.

Jeff hurried down the darkened corridor, fear exploding in his brain. She would be there and he knew why she would be smoldering when he walked into the room. He had seen her eyes, seen her face as they had thrown the dice. He knew beyond any shadow of a doubt who had been controlling the dice.

The girl was waiting, just as he had known she would. He stepped into the room and closed the door gently behind him, facing her desperate eyes as she rolled the colored dice back and forth in front of her. "Game," she challenged, her voice harsh and metallic.

The room was tense with silent fear as he sank down opposite her at the table.

Next: Chapter 6