“Mr. Officer! Mr. Policeman! Help me, will ya? Help me!”
The policeman turned on his course, came toward them slowly. A kid’s cry for help wasn’t the same as a grown-up’s cry for help; it wasn’t as immediate, as crucial.
He looked in the cab window at the three of them. He even rested his forearm negligently along the rim as he did so. He wasn’t on the alert. It couldn’t be anything much—a kid squawking in a taxicab.
“What’s up?” he asked idly. “What’s he hollering for?”
“He knows what he’s going to get when we get home with him—that’s what’s up!” the woman said primly. “And you can holler at all the policemen you want to, young man. That won’t save you!”
“ ’Fraid of a licking, huh?” the cop grinned understandingly. “A good licking never hurt any kid. My old man used to gimme enough of them when I was—” He chuckled appreciatively. “But that’s a new one, calling the cops on your old man and lady to keep from getting a licking! I tell you, these kids nowadays—”
“He turned in a false alarm one time,” Joe complained virtuously, “to try and keep me from shellacking him!”
The cop whistled.
The cabdriver turned his head and butted in, unasked.
“I got two of my own, home. And if they gave me half as much trouble as this young pup’s been giving these folks here since they first hailed me, I’d knock their blocks off. I’m telling you.”
“They m-m-murdered a man last night, with a knife, and then they cut him up all in pieces and—” Buddy sobbed incoherently.
“What a dirty mind he’s got,” the cop commented disapprovingly. He took a closer look at Buddy’s contorted face. “Wait a minute! Don’t I know you, kid?”
There was a breathless silence. Buddy’s heart soared like a balloon.
At last, at last—
“Sure, I remember you now. You came over to the station house with that same story and made a lot of trouble for us this morning. Wasting everybody’s time. Brundage even sent somebody over to investigate, like a fool! And was his face red afterwards! A lot of hot air. You’re the very one—I seen you there meself. Then one of the guys had to take you home afterwards to get rid of you. Are you the parents?”
“Do you think we’d be going through all this if we weren’t?” Joe demanded bitterly.
“Well, you sure got my sympathy.” He waved them on disgustedly. “Take him away! You can have him!”
The cab glided into lethal motion again. Buddy’s head went over supinely, in ultimate despair. Wasn’t there anyone in the whole grown-up world who would believe a kid? Did you have to be grown-up yourself before anyone would believe you, stop you from being murdered?
He didn’t try to holler out the window any more at the occasional chance passerby he glimpsed flitting by. What was the use? They wouldn’t help him. He was licked. Salty water coursed from his eyes, but he didn’t make a sound.
“Any p’tickler number?” the driver asked.
“The corner’ll do,” Joe said plausibly. “We live just a couple doors up the street.” He paid him off before they got out, in order to have both hands free for Buddy once they alighted.
The cab slowed, and they emerged with him, started walking hurriedly away. His feet slithered along the ground more than they actually lifted themselves. The cab wheeled and went back the way it had come.
“Think he’ll remember our faces later?” the woman breathed worriedly.
“It’s not our faces that count, it’s the kid’s face,” Joe answered her. “And nobody’ll ever see that again.”
As soon as the cab was safely gone, they reversed directions and went up another street entirely.
“There it is, over there,” Joe said guardedly.
It was a derelict tenement, boarded up, condemned, but not demolished. It cast a pall of shadow so that even while they were still outside in front of it, they could scarcely be seen. It sent forth an odor of decay. It was, Buddy knew, the place where death was.
They stopped short.
“Anyone around?” Joe demanded warily.
Then suddenly he embraced the boy; a grim sort of embrace if there ever was one, without love in it. He wrapped his arm around his head and clutched him tight, so that his hand sealed Buddy’s mouth. Buddy had no chance to bite him as he had the woman. The pressure against his jaws was too great, he couldn’t even open them.
He carried him that way, riding on his own hip so to speak, over to the seemingly secure boarded-up doorway. He spaded his free hand under the door, tilted it out, wormed his way through, and whisked Buddy after him. The woman followed and replaced it.
A pall of complete darkness descended on the three of them. The stench was terrific in here. It wasn’t just the death of a building; it was—some other kind of death, as well. Death in two suitcases, perhaps.
“How’d you know it was open?” the woman whispered in surprise.
“How do you suppose?” Joe answered with grisly meaning.
“This where?” was all she said.
The man had taken his torch out. It snapped whitely at a skeleton stair, went right out again, instantaneously as the lens of a camera. “Wait here where you are and don’t smoke,” he warned her. “I’m going up a ways.”
Buddy guessed that he didn’t knock him completely out because that would have made him too heavy to handle. Joe wanted him to get up there on his own two feet, if possible. They started to climb, draggingly.
The soundtrack went: crunch, crunch, skff. That was Buddy’s feet trailing passively over the lips of the stairs.
He was too numbed with terror now to struggle much any more. It was no use anyway. No one anywhere around outside to hear him through the thick mouldering walls. If they hadn’t helped him outside on the street, they were never going to help him in here.
Joe used his torch sparingly, a wink at a time. Only when one flight had ended and they were beginning another. He wasn’t taking any chances using it too freely. It was like a white Morse Code on black paper. Dot, dot, dot. Spelling out one word: DEATH.
They halted at last. They must have reached the top now. There was a busted skylight somewhere just over them. It was just as black as ever, but a couple of dim stars could be seen in the sky.
Joe pressed Buddy back flat against the wall, held him that way with one hand at his throat. Then he clipped his light on, left it that way this time. He wanted to see what he was doing. He set it down on the floor, left it that way, alight, trained on Buddy. Then his other hand closed in to finish the job.
A minute, maybe a minute and a half, would be all he needed. Life goes out awfully quick—even manually, which is one of the slowest ways.
“Say good-bye, kid,” Joe murmured ironically.
You fight when you die, because—that’s what everything alive does. That’s what being alive is.
Buddy couldn’t fight off the man’s arms. But his legs were free. The man had left them free, so he could die standing up. Buddy knew a man’s stomach is soft, the softest part of him.
He kicked upward with his knee, rammed it home. He could feel it pillow itself into something rubbery. A flame of hot body-breath was expelled against him, like those pressure things you dry yourself with.
* * *
—
The death-collar opened and the man’s hands went to his middle. Buddy knew that one such punch wasn’t enough. This was death and you gave no quarter. The man had given him the space he needed. He shot his whole foot out this time, sole flat. There was almost a sucking noise, as if it had gone into a waterlogged sponge.
Joe reeled all the way back. He must have trodden on the cylindrical light. It spun crazily around.
There was a splintering of wood. There was a strange sagging feeling that made everything shake. Then came a roaring sound as if a lot
of heavy stuff were plunging down a chute.
The light flashed across space once, and showed nothing—no Joe, no rail. Then it pitched down into nothingness itself.
There was a curious sort of playback, that came seconds later, from somewhere far below. It was almost like an echo—of something heavy and firm, something with bones in it, bones and a skull, smacking like a gunshot report.
A woman’s voice screamed “Joe!” hollowly.
Then a lot of loose planks went clat-clat, clat, bang!
The woman’s voice just groaned after that, didn’t scream any more. Then the groans stopped, too. A lot of plaster dust came up and tickled Buddy’s nose. His eyes began to smart.
It was very still, and Buddy was alone in the dark. Something told him not to move. He just stood there, pressed flat against the wall.
He didn’t know what it was, maybe the way his hair stood up on the back of his neck. As if his hair could see in the dark better than he could, knew something that he didn’t.
It didn’t last long. There were suddenly a lot of voices down there, as if people had come running in from the street. Lights began to wink below. Then a stronger one than the rest, a sort of thick searchlight beam, shot all the way up, jockeyed around and found him.
The whole stair-structure was gone. Two narrow planks had held fast against the wall, and he was standing on them. It was like a shelf—a shelf that ended at his toes. Five floors up.
A voice came up to him through a megaphone, trying to be very calm and friendly though it shook a little around the edges.
“Close your eyes, kid. We’ll get you down. Just don’t look. Keep your eyes closed. Think hard about something else. Do you know your multiplication tables?”
Buddy nodded cautiously, afraid to move his head too much.
“Start saying them. Two times two, two times three. Keep your eyes closed. You’re in school and the teacher’s right in front of you. But don’t change your position.”
He was in Six-A. Didn’t they know that? You got multiplication in the first grade. But he did it anyway. He finished the twos, he finished the threes. He stopped.
“Mister,” he called down in a thin but clear voice. “How much longer do I have to hold out? I’m getting pins and needles in my legs, and I’m stuck at four times twenty-three.”
“Do you want it fast and just a little risky, kid, or do you want it slow and safe?”
“Fast and just a little risky,” he answered. “I’m getting dizzy.”
“All right, son,” the voice boomed back. “We’ve got a net spread out down here. We can’t show it to you, you’ll have to take our word for it.”
“There may be loose planks sticking out on the way down,” another voice objected, in an undertone.
“It’ll take hours the other way, and he’s been through enough already.” The voice directed itself upward again. “Keep your arms close to your sides, keep your feet close together, open your eyes, and when I count three, jump.”
“One—two—three!”
He was never going to get there. Then he did, and he bounced, and it was over. He was safe.
He cried for a minute or two, and he didn’t know why himself. It must have been left over from before, when Joe was trying to kill him. Then he got over it; you can only do that at twelve.
He hoped they hadn’t seen him.
“I wasn’t crying,” he said. “All that stuff got in my eyes and stung them.”
“Same here,” Detective Ross, his one-time enemy, said gravely. And the funny part of it was, his eyes were kind of shiny, too.
Joe was lying there dead, his head sticking out between two planks. They’d carried the woman out on a stretcher.
Somebody came up and joined them with a very sick look on his face.
“We’ve pulled two valises out from under what’s left of those stairs back there.”
“Better not look in them just yet,” Ross warned.
“I already did.” The man gulped and bolted out into the street, holding his hand clapped to his mouth.
They rode Buddy back in state, in a departmental car. In the middle of all of them, like a—like a mascot.
“Gee, thanks for saving me,” he said gratefully.
“We didn’t save you, son. You saved yourself. We’re a great bunch. We were just a couple of minutes too late. We would have caught them, all right, but we couldn’t have saved you.”
“How’d you know where to come, though?”
“Picking up the trail was easy, once we got started. A cop back there remembered you, a cabdriver showed where he let you out. It was just that we started so late.”
“But what made you believe it now all of a sudden, when you wouldn’t believe it this morning?”
“A couple little things came up,” Ross said. “Little, but they counted. The Kellerman woman mentioned the exact program you were supposed to have overheard last night. It sounded better that way, more plausible. It’s the exact time, the exact type; it fitted in too good to waste. But by doing that she saved your life tonight. Because I happened to tune in myself tonight. Not out of suspicion, just for my own entertainment.
“If it was that good, I wanted to hear it myself. And it was that good and even better. It’s a serial; it’s continued every night. Only at the end, the announcer apologized to the listeners. For not being on the air at all last night. Tuesday is Election and the program gave up its time to one of the candidates. And what you said you heard was sure no campaign speech!
“That was one thing. Then I went straight over to their flat. Pretty late, and almost as bad as never. They must have already been on the way with you. Everything was in order, just like I’d seen it the first time. Only, a towel fell down from in back of the bathroom door as I brushed past. And under it, where nobody could be blamed for overlooking it, not even the two of them themselves, there was a well-worn razor strop. The kind you use for an open blade, never a safety. With a fleck of fairly-fresh soap still on it. Just a couple of little things that came awfully late, but counted!
“Come on, Buddy, here’s your home. I’ll go in with you.”
It was already getting light out and when they knocked, Buddy said in a scared whisper:
“Gee, now I’m going to get it for sure! I been out the whole night long!”
“Detectives have to be sometimes, didn’t you know that?” And Ross took his own badge off and pinned it on him.
The door opened, and his father was standing there. Without a word, he swung his arm back.
Ross just reached up and held it where it was.
“Now, now, just be careful who you raise the back of your hand to around here. It’s a serious matter to swat a member of the detective bureau, you know. Even an auxiliary, junior grade.”
The House of Numbers
JACK FINNEY
THE STORY
Original publication: Cosmopolitan, July 1956; later expanded to a full-length novel (New York, Dell, 1957)
FOR A WRITER with a relatively modest output of only ten novels, Walter Braden “Jack” Finney (1911–1995) had an inordinate number of books and stories that inspired motion pictures. Ironically, his best-known work, and one of the most memorable mystery novels of all time, Time and Again (1970), is not one of them.
This superb novel, crossing genres between a mystery and time travel, is a beautiful evocation of the New York City of 1882 that conjures nostalgic sensibilities in readers with its description of trolley cars, gas lamps, horse-drawn vehicles, and the apparently simpler, slower time. A bored advertising illustrator volunteers for a secret government project that promises to change his life. It does when he undergoes a form of hypnosis that takes him back in time by nearly a century. He becomes involved in a mystery when he settles into the life of the time. Finney wrote a sequel, From Time to Time (1995),
which was set in the New York of 1912.
Finney’s first novel, 5 Against the House (1954), is a caper about five college students who set out to rob a casino in Reno, Nevada. It inspired the 1955 movie of the same title directed by Phil Karlson and starring Guy Madison, Kim Novak, and Brian Keith.
The science fiction classic The Body Snatchers (1955), Finney’s second book, also was adapted for film. Titled Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), it was directed by Don Siegel and starred Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, and Larry Gates; it is the terrifying story of aliens who emerge from pods and invade the bodies of humans. Some saw the film as a metaphor for the fear of a Russian Communist takeover during the Cold War era, though Finney denied that that had been his intent. The phrase “pod people” to describe unthinking, emotionally challenged people is derived from the book. The story was filmed two more times, released in 1978 as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and in 2007 as The Invasion.
Finney’s next crime story, “The House of Numbers” (1956, novelized the following year), also made it to the screen in 1957.
Assault on a Queen (1959) continued Finney’s remarkable success with Hollywood, being released on film under that title in 1966. Directed by Jack Donohue, it starred Frank Sinatra, Virna Lisi, and Anthony Franciosa and is another thriller about an ambitious caper. Much of the story is devoted to an eccentric gang attempting to raise a German U-boat sunk during World War II. What isn’t known for a long time by readers or filmgoers is that it will be used in an attempt to rob the giant luxury liner RMS Queen Mary.
Revealing another side of his personality, Finney left the crime and science fiction genres to write a comedy, Good Neighbor Sam (1963), about his career working in the advertising business. It, too, was filmed, with Jack Lemmon starring in the 1964 version. Marion’s Wall (1973), the story of a fading silent screen actress who attempts to salvage her career by taking over the body of a shy young woman, is a slightly more benign variation of the pod people attack; it was released in a much-altered version as Maxie (1985).
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 27