Escape the Night Read Online Free PDF

the Committee’s power to gain an end which would fulfill him.
    In memos and meetings he reported the Careys’ defiance; finally, HUAC ordered him to probe their support of left-wing writers. Within two weeks, without any one person’s knowing the scope of his invasion, Englehardt arranged through several agencies to bug the Careys’ homes and offices, to open their mail and watch their every movement.
    Secret parcels of reports and tapes began arriving in his office.
    At night, unseen by those for whom he worked, he began retreating to his apartment to re-live the Careys’ loves and hates and listen to their quicksilver rivalries, until he knew that what he had seen in them was real, and he no longer felt alone.
    Englehardt had learned that men who spied on other men, out of the loneliness of such a job, came to like or dislike their chosen quarry. But, in his soul, he knew that this secret passion for the Careys grew from something stronger.
    The brothers’ rivalry was also his.
    He sensed, with the same bone-deep affinity that had first drawn his eyes toward Phillip Carey, that there was nothing their contest did not touch: Phillip, who hoped that Charles’s defiance of HUAC would prove to show poor judgment, feared that the pregnancy of Charles’s wife might return him to John Carey’s favor.
    Englehardt began to measure the time for his allotted task by the growth of life inside Alicia Carey …
    Now, his thoughts were broken by a single click, like the short electric impulse that changes the chemistry of a madman’s brain.
    The tape had finished rewinding.
    For a final moment, Englehardt teased himself by watching the contest of raindrops skittering down the windowpane, and then he pushed the button. Once more Phillip Carey told his father: “They’re watching us …”
    By design, he had made the Careys feel his pervasive presence: their authors were called to testify, there were new delays in the Careys’ mail and fresh problems with their tax returns; Charles was conspicuously followed. Englehardt did not care if this was of no use to HUAC: he acted only for himself, with a passion that enraged him, to persuade John Carey that Charles’s defiance was the act of an unworthy son.
    â€œ Englehardt ,” Charles shot back to his brother. “You’d trade a gifted writer for the smile of a cockroach?”
    Englehardt clenched his fists in helpless fury.
    His father had died without a word for him, his legacy a preference for the elder son, a smiling, careless athlete, the father of his grandson. Reaching for intimacy without this risk of pain, a one-way mirror into others’ hearts, Englehardt had looked too deeply into his own.
    He had seen himself in Phillip Carey.
    â€œAll you have to do,” Charles said once more, “is ask.”
    Englehardt bent closer.
    The tape reached its silent end.
    Englehardt’s shoulders sagged: John Carey did not have the words to ask his oldest son to leave.
    With Phillip Carey, his second self, he must await the birth of Allie Fairvoort’s child.
    From its earliest moment, Alicia Carey disowned the child she bore.
    She stopped going out. Water weight bloated her thighs and stomach, she vomited, her nipples were sore. She learned nothing about the life inside her, and took no pleasure in it. She felt awkward. Her eyes lost quickness, transfixed by some black hole between reality and imagination. She had never imagined children.
    The baby was an abstraction, subverting the chemistry between her mind and body. Straining to envision herself as a mother, she was betrayed by the ugliness she saw in the mirror, and the sickness she felt. Her imagery vanished. She could not imagine her child’s face or the smell of its hair. Her husband seemed a stranger; she saw with stark clarity that his body did not move her.
    As months passed, she was brutalized by this destruction of her fantasies. Her manic