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.
Of course it was only a dream. Of course! He hadn't really killed Lisa. It was only this dream he kept on having over and over and over. A man could go out of his mind—
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.