And he moved his arm toward Buddy, as if to let one fly at him across the ear. The other man, laughing, had to quickly reach over and hold him back.
“A little practice work won’t hurt you.”
“On level ground maybe; not up six flights of stairs.”
He stalked out and slammed the door so hard that several pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling.
* * *
—
The other man sent for a cop—this time one of the kind in uniform. For a minute Buddy thought he was going to be arrested then and there, and his stomach nearly sank down to his feet.
“Where do you live, son? You better take him back with you, Lyons.”
“Not the front way,” Buddy pleaded, aghast. “I can get in like I got out.”
“Just to make sure you get back safely, son. You’ve done enough damage for one day.” And the man at the desk waved him, and the whole matter he’d tried to tell them about, out the door.
Buddy knew better than to fight a policeman. That was about the worst thing you could do, fight back at a policeman. He went along with him tractably, his head hanging down in shame.
They went inside and up the stairs. They stopped in front of his own door. “Here, son?”
Buddy quailed. Now he was going to get it!
The policeman tapped, and his mother, not his father, opened the door. She must have been late leaving for work today, to still be there. Her face got white for a minute.
The policeman winked at her to reassure her.
“Nothing to get frightened about, lady. He just came over and gave us a little story, and we thought we better bring him back here where he belongs.”
“Buddy!” she said, horrified. “You went and told them?”
“Does he do it very often?” the policeman asked.
“All the time. All the time. But never anything as bad as this.”
“Getting worse, huh? Well, you ought to talk to the principal of his school, or maybe a doctor.”
There was a stealthy creak on the stairs, and the Kellerman woman had paused on her way down, was standing looking at them. Curiously, but with cold composure.
The cop didn’t even turn his head.
“Well, I gotta be getting back,” he said, and touched the visor of his cap to Buddy’s mother.
Buddy got panicky.
“Come in, quick!” he whispered frantically. “Come in quick, before she sees us!” And tried to drag his mother in out of the doorway.
She resisted, held him there in full view.
“There she is now. You apologize. You say you’re sorry, hear me?”
The woman came the rest of the way down. She smiled affably, in neighborly greeting. Buddy’s mother smiled in answering affability.
“Nothing wrong, is there?”
“No, nothing wrong,” Buddy’s mother murmured.
“I thought I saw a policeman at the door here, as I was coming down.”
“Buddy did something he shouldn’t.” Without taking her eyes off the woman, she shook Buddy in an aside. It was the signal for him to apologize. He hung back, tried to efface himself behind her.
“He looks like a good little boy,” the woman said patronizingly. “What did he do?”
“He’s not a good boy,” Buddy’s mother said firmly. “He makes things up. He tells things on people. Horrible things. Things that aren’t so. It can cause a lot of trouble especially when the people are living in the same house with us—” She didn’t finish it.
The woman’s eyes rested speculatively on Buddy for a long cool moment. Speculation ended and conviction entered them. They never wavered. She might have been thinking of a blanket that suddenly fell down the fire escape from one floor to the next when there was no wind. She might have been thinking of a razor salesman who asked too many questions.
Something about that look went right through you. It crinkled you all up. It was like death itself looking at you. Buddy had never met a look like that before. It was so still, so deep, so cold, so dangerous.
Then she smiled. The look in her eyes remained there, but her mouth smiled.
“Boys will be boys,” she said sweetly.
She reached out to try and playfully pull his hair or something like that, but he swerved his head violently aside, with something akin to horror, and she failed to reach him.
She turned away and left them. But she went up, not down. She had been coming from above just now, and she went back that way again.
“I’m always forgetting something,” she murmured as if to herself. “That letter I wanted to mail.”
Buddy knew, with an awful certainty. She wanted to tell him. The man. She wanted to tell him right away, without losing a minute.
The politeness forced on her by the spectator at an end, Buddy’s mother resumed her flurried handling of him where she had left off. She wrestled him violently into their flat and closed the door. But he wasn’t aware of anything that she said to him. He could only think of one thing.
“Now you told her!” he sobbed in mortal anguish. “Now they know! Now they know who!”
His mother misunderstood, beautifully and completely.
“Oh, now you’re ashamed of yourself, is that it? I should think you would be!” She retrieved the key from his sleeping father’s pillow, unlocked the door, thrust him in, and relocked it. “I was going to let you out, but now you’ll stay in there the rest of the day!”
He didn’t hear her, didn’t know what she was saying at all.
“Now you told her!” he said over and over. “They’ll get me for it!”
He heard her leave for work. He was left alone there, in the stifling flat, with just his father’s heavy breathing in the outside room to keep him company.
Fear didn’t come right away. He knew he was safe while his father was out there. They couldn’t get at him. That’s why he didn’t mind being in there. He didn’t even try to get out through the window a second time.
He was all right as long as he stayed where he was. It was tonight he was worried about, when his father was away at work and just his mother would be in the flat.
The long hot day burned itself out. The sun started to go down, and premonitory terror came with the creeping, deepening blue shadows. The night was going to be bad. The night was going to be his enemy, and he didn’t have anyone he could tell it to—no one to help him. Not his father, not his mother, not even the police. And if you didn’t have the police on your side, you might as well give up; there was no hope for you. They were on the side of everyone in the whole world, who wasn’t a crook or murderer. Everyone. But not him. He was left out.
His mother came back from work. He heard her bustling about as she prepared supper. Then she called his father, to wake him. He heard his father moving around getting dressed. Then the key was inserted, the door unlocked. Buddy jumped up from the chair he’d been huddled on. His father motioned to him.
“Now are you going to behave yourself?” he asked gruffly. “Are you going to cut that stuff out?”
“Yes, sir,” he said docilely.
“Sit down and have your supper.”
They sat down to eat.
* * *
—
His mother didn’t mean to give way on him, he could tell that; it came out accidentally, toward the end of the meal. She incautiously said something about her employer having called her down.
“Why?” his father asked.
“Oh, because I was five or ten minutes late.”
“How’d you happen to be late? You seemed to be ready on time.”
“I was ready, but by the time I got through talking to that policeman that came to the door—” She stopped short, but the damage was already done.
“What policeman that came to the door?”
She
didn’t want to, but he finally made her tell him.
“Buddy sneaked out. One of them brought him back here with him. Now, Charlie, don’t. You just finished eating.”
Buddy’s father hauled him off the chair by his shoulder.
“I belted you once today. How many times am I going to have to—”
There was a knock at the door, and that saved Buddy for a minute. His father let go of him, went over and opened it. He stood out there a minute with someone, then he closed it, came back, and said in surprise:
“It’s a telegram. And for you, Mary.”
“Who on earth—?” She tore it open tremulously. Then she gave him a stricken look. “It’s from Emma. She must be in some kind of trouble. She says to come out there at once, she needs me. ‘Please come without delay as soon as you get this.’ ”
Emma was Buddy’s aunt, his mother’s sister. She lived all the way out on Staten Island.
“It must be the children,” his mother said. “They must both be taken sick at once or something.”
“Maybe it’s Emma herself,” his father said. “That would be even worse.”
“If I could only reach her! That’s what comes of not having telephones.”
She started to get her things together. Buddy pleaded, terrified:
“Don’t go, Mom! It’s a trick. It’s from them. They want you out of the way. They want to get me.”
“Still at it,” his father said, giving him a push. “Get inside there. Go ahead, Mary. You’ll be half the night getting there as it is. I’ll take care of him. Gimme a hammer and a couple of long nails,” he added grimly. “He’ll stay put. I’ll see to that.”
He drove them through the two sash joints of the window in there, riveting it inextricably closed.
“That oughta keep you. Now you can tell your stories to the four walls, to your heart’s content!”
His mother patted his head tearfully, “Please be a good boy, listen to your father,” and was gone.
Buddy had only one protector left now. And a protector who had turned against him. He tried to reason with him, win him over.
“Pop, don’t leave me here alone. They’re going to come down and get me. Pop, take me with you to the plant. I won’t get in your way. Honest, I won’t.”
His father eyed him balefully.
“Keep it up. Just keep it up. You’re going to a doctor tomorrow. I’m going to take you to one myself and find out what’s the matter with you.”
“Pop, don’t lock the door. Don’t. Don’t. At least give me a chance so I can get out.”
He tried to hang on to the knob with both hands, but his father’s greater strength dragged it slowly around in a closing arc.
“So you can run around to the police again and disgrace us? Well, if you’re so afraid of them, whoever they are, then you ought to be glad I’m locking the door. That’ll keep you safe from them. You confounded little liar!”
Click! went the key in the lock.
Agonized, Buddy pressed his face close to the door-seam and pleaded:
“Pop, don’t leave the key in. If you gotta lock me up, at least take the key with you.”
“The key stays in. I ain’t taking a chance on dropping it somewhere and losing it.”
He began to pound with his fists, frantic now and beyond all control.
“Pop, come back! Take me with you! Don’t leave me here alone! Pop, I take it back, It wasn’t so.”
His father was thoroughly exasperated by now. Nothing could have made him relent.
“I’ll see you when I come back from work, young fellow!” he rasped. “You’ve got something coming to you!”
The outer door slammed, and he was gone beyond recall.
Buddy was alone now. Alone with crafty enemies, alone with imminent death.
He stopped his outcries at once. Now they were risky. Now they could no longer help him. Now they might bring on the danger all the quicker.
He put out the light. It made it more scary without it, but he knew it was safer to be in the dark than in the light.
Maybe he could fool them into thinking nobody was there if he stayed in the dark like this. Maybe—but he didn’t have much hope. They must have watched down the stairs, seen his father go alone.
Silence, then. Not a sound. Not a sound of menace from overhead, or from the outside room. Plenty of sounds outside in the back—the blurred harmless sounds of a summer night. Radios, and dishes being washed, and a baby crying somewhere, then going off to sleep.
Too early yet; he had a little time yet. That almost made it worse, to have to sit and wait for it to come.
A church bell began to toll. St. Agnes’s, the little neighborhood church a couple of blocks over. You could always hear it from here. He counted the strokes. Nine. No, there was another one. Ten already. Gee, time had gone fast. In the dark you couldn’t keep track of it very easy.
It would take Mom a full hour and a half to get over to Aunt Emma’s even if she made good connections. She’d have to cross over to lower Manhattan first, and then go by ferry down the bay and then take the bus out to where Emma’s place was. And another hour and a half to get back, even if she left right away.
But she wouldn’t leave right away. She’d stay on there for awhile, even after she found out the message was a fake. She wouldn’t think there was any danger. She trusted everyone so. She always saw the good in everyone. She’d think it was just a harmless joke.
He’d be alone here until at least one, and maybe even after. They knew that. That’s why they were taking their time. That’s why they were waiting. They wanted things to quiet down. They wanted other people to be asleep.
* * *
—
Buddy got up every once in awhile and went over to the door and listened. The ticking of the clock in the other room was all he could hear.
Maybe if he could push the key out, and it fell close to the door, he could pull it through to his side underneath the door. It was an old, warped door, and the crack seemed rather wide along the floor.
It was easy to push the key out of the lock. He did that with a pencil stub he had in his pocket. He heard the key fall. Then he got a rusty old wire coat hanger that was in the room, and pushed that through the crack on its flat side and started to fish around with it, hoping the flat hook at the top of it would snag the key and scoop it toward him.
He could hear the hook striking the key, but each time he’d ease the hanger through, the hook would come back empty. Finally he couldn’t hit the key at all. It was out of reach now entirely. He’d lost it.
The church bell sounded again. Again Buddy counted. Eleven. Had a whole hour passed, just doing that?
Most of the lights in the back windows were out now. The last radio had stopped playing.
If he could last through the next hour, maybe he’d be all right. From twelve on time would be working in his favor. Mom would be on her way back, and—
He stiffened. There was a single creak, from directly overhead. From them. The first sound they’d made. Trying not to be heard. You could tell the person was going on tiptoe by the slow way it sounded. Cre—ak. It took about a half minute to finish itself.
Then nothing more for a long time. Buddy was afraid to move; he was afraid to breathe.
Then came another kind of sound, from a different place. Not wood, but shaky iron. Not overhead, but outside. Not a creak, but a kind of soft clank.
Buddy’s eyes flew to the window.
The shade. He should have thought about that sooner. But if there was no light on, nobody could see into the room anyway, even with the shade raised.
He peered through the window. He couldn’t see much—just a sort of sooty dark-gray color, a little bit lighter than the room itself. That was all. And now this was getting darker, even while he watched it. It was blott
ing out, as if something was coming down from above, out there in front of the window.
He crouched back against the wall, hunched his head low between his shoulders, like a turtle trying to draw its head into its shell.
The looming shape was up close now. It covered the whole pane like a black feather-bolster. He could see something pale in the middle of it, though, like a face.
Suddenly the middle of it lit in a disk about the size of an egg, and a long spoke of light shot through the glass and into the room.
It started to swing around slowly, following the walls from one side all the way around to the other. It traced a white paper hoop as it went. Maybe if he got down low he could duck under it. He bunched himself up into a ball, head below his knees now.
It arrived right over him, on the wall, and there was nothing he could push in front of him, nothing he could hide behind. Suddenly it dropped.
It flashed square into his squinting face, blinding him. Then it went out, as suddenly as it had gone on. It wasn’t needed any more. It told them what they wanted to know. They knew he was in there now. They knew he was alone in there.
He could hear fingers fumbling about the woodwork, trying the window. It wouldn’t move. The nails held it tight.
The looming black blur rose and drifted slowly upward, out of sight. The fire escape cleared. There was another creak overhead, on the ceiling. Not so slow or stealthy any more. The need for concealment was past now.
What would they do next? Would they try to get in the other way down the front stairs? Would they give up? He knew they wouldn’t—they’d already taken too much trouble, sending that phony telegram. It was now or never. They’d never have such an opportunity again.
St. Agnes’s bell chimed the half-hour. Buddy’s heart was going so fast, it was just as though he’d run a mile race at top speed.
Silence for minutes. Like before thunder, like before something happens. Silence for the last time. He was breathing with his mouth open; that was the only way he could draw enough air into his lungs. With all that he felt as if he were going to choke.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 25