in front of the doors in the other wing with her baskets of cleaning gear and fresh bed linen.
“Good mawnin’,” she said. I waved and started across towards the road just as she let herself into one of the rooms. Then I heard her scream.
She came plunging down the long porch that linked the rooms, running like a fat bear, and crying, “Oh, Miss Georgia! Oh, Good Lawd in Heaven, Miss Georgia—!”
I didn’t bother with her. I whirled and went across the courtyard on the run, towards the door she’d left open as she fled. I slid to a stop, braking myself with a hand on the door-jamb, and looked in, and I could feel the cold rage come churning up inside me. It was a masterpiece of viciousness. I’d seen one other before, and you never forget just what they look like.
Paint hung from the plaster on walls and ceilings in bilious strips, and some of the piled bedclothes and curtains still foamed slightly and stank, and the carpet was a darkened and disintegrating ruin. Varnish was peeling from all the wooden surfaces of the furniture, the chest of drawers, the night table, and the headboards of the beds. I heard them running up behind me, and then she was standing by my side in the doorway.
“Don’t go in,” I said.
She looked at it, but she didn’t say anything. I was ready to catch her and put out my hand to take her arm. but she didn’t fall. She merely leaned against the door-jamb and closed her eyes. Josie stared and made a moaning sound in her throat and patted her clumsily on the shoulder.
“What is it?” she asked me, her eyes big and frightened. “What make them sheets and things bubble like that?”
“Acid,” I said. I reached down and picked up a fragment of the carpet. It fell apart in my hands. I smelled it.
“What’s the carpet made of, do you know?” I asked.
She stared at me without comprehension.
I asked Mrs. Langston. “The carpet. Do you know whether it’s wool or cotton? Or a synthetic?”
She spoke without opening her eyes. “It’s cotton.”
Probably sulphuric, I thought. I could walk in it if I washed my shoes right afterwards. From the doorway I could see both the big mirrors had been placed on one of the beds and smashed, covered with bedclothes to deaden the sound, and I wanted to see just what he’d used on the bath and wash-basin. “Watch her,” I warned Josie, and started to step inside. She cracked then.
She opened her eyes at last, and then put her hands up against the sides of her face and began to laugh. I lunged at her, but she turned and ran out on the gravel and stood there in the sun pushing her fingers up through her hair while tears ran down her cheeks and she shook with the wild shrieks of laughter that were like the sound of something tearing. I grabbed her arm with my left hand and slapped her, and when she gasped and stopped laughing to stare inquiringly at me as if I were somebody she’d never seen before I grabbed her up in my arms and started running towards the office.
“Come on,” I snapped at Josie.
I put her down in one of the bamboo armchairs just as Josie came waddling frantically through the door behind me. I waved towards the telephone.
“Who’s her doctor? Tell him to get out here right away.”
“Yessuh.” She grabbed up the receiver and began dialing.
I turned and knelt beside Georgia Langston. She hadn’t fainted, but her face was deathly pale and her eyes completely without expression as her hands twisted at the cloth of her skirt.
“Mrs. Langston,” I said. “It’s all right.”
She didn’t even see me.
“Georgia!” I said sharply.
She frowned then, and some of the blankness went out of her eyes and she looked at me. And this time I was there.
“Oh,” she said. She put her hands up to her face and shook her head. “I—I’m all right,” she said shakily.
Josie put down the phone. “The doctor’ll be here in a few minutes,” she said.
“Good.” I stood up. “What was the number of that room?”
”That was Five.”
I hurried over behind the desk. “Do you know where she keeps the registration cards?”
“I’ll get them,” Mrs. Langston said. She started to get up. I strode back and pushed her down in the chair again. “Stay there. Just tell me where they are.”