What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Read Online Free PDF Page A

She had paused, staring at Blanche for a long time, her eyes bright with malevolence. “Oh, yes,” she went on, “you got the looks all right. But that’s all yougot! I got the talent! Even if nobody cared… And I’ve still got it. And you, you’re—you’re nothing! You’re not any damn thing at all! So don’t go trying to act so—so big with me you—you—nothing—nothing-at-all! Don’t try to make out you’re better than me!…”
    Blanche shuddered against the memory, wondering if these same thoughts were echoing through Jane’s mind now as she sat watching the picture. Get rid of the past, she told herself with sudden force; wipe it from your mind. And Jane’s, too. Banish these foolish shadow images to the darkness and oblivion they deserve. Her eyes fast upon Jane, she moistened her lips to speak, awaiting the sound of her own voice as if it would herald the beginning of some impending disaster.
    “Jane?…”
    Before she could go on, Jane rose from her chair, crossed to the television set and summarily turned it off. On the screen the girl with the sooty eyes, smiling with false rapture, fell away into a fretful, wriggling band of light and then vanished altogether. The light from the desk lamp seemed suddenly to grow brighter, spreading its yellowish stain in a wider arc upon the rich fabric of the rug. Conversely, the shadows beyond the bed and in the far corners of the room appeared to deepen and creep forward. Blanche stared in surprise and then, as Jane turned back in her direction, managed a quick smile.
    “I—I was just going to ask you to turn it off.” Jane’s gaze glittered toward her through the dimness. There was a moment of silence, and then Blanche laughed nervously. “I really don’t think we should waste our time on any more of those old things. They’re so awful.…”
    With a slight, noncommittal shrug, Jane moved off toward the door. Reaching down to the wheel of her chair, Blanche swung herself around.
    “Will you come back?” she asked anxiously. “To help me into bed?”
    At the doorway Jane stopped, her squat, fleshy figure outlined dimly against the deeper darkness of the hallway. Again her eyes seemed alight with some painfully withheld emotion. When she spoke, however, her voice was flat and unrevealing.
    “All right… if you want…”
    Turning even as she spoke, she disappeared into the hallway.
    Blanche sat perfectly still, hunched slightly forward, staring after her. A wash of silence seemed to break over the house, causing the shadows to stir and pulse around her. Slowly she reached out a hand to the wheel of her chair, thinking that if she went to the window and pulled back the drapes she would be able to see the night and the stars. And then, suddenly, she stopped, her body gripped with shock as the silence was shattered by the thunderous slam of Jane’s door at the end of the hall. The whole house seemed to shout back in anger.
    For a long moment Blanche was perfectly motionless, listening tensely for the silence to come back into the house, waiting for the thunderous slam of the door to stop reverberating against her strained and frightened nerves.

2
    W hen they had first brought her home from the hospital and carried her upstairs to this room she had decided that the heavy exterior grillwork over the window would have to be removed. Almost immediately after the accident the big gates at the front drive, made from the same design, had been taken away and sold for scrap, and she wanted no further reminders here in the house. Her mind at that time, though, had been more concentrated on other matters, filled with the shock of the absolute certainty that she would never walk again, and so, through procrastination, the grillwork had remained. Now, with the passing years, her eye had become so trained at looking around and beyond the grille’s flamboyant iron tracings that she barely knew it was there at all.
    This morning the window was open, and Blanche