Skeleton Key

by Lenore Glen Offord

  Her breath whistled through a constricted throat, her eyes stayed fixed as if to pierce the blackness. She ought to be finding the staircase and crawling under it, but she could not seem to detach her hand from this doorknob. It’s all that’s holding me up, thought Georgine wildly, over a host of other chaotic thoughts. I’ve always wondered how I’d act if there were a real raid. Now I know; I’m so scared I can’t move… How long have I been standing here? What’s that funny noise in the street, not like the other one, more like someone groaning, or breathing?

  The knob turned silently under her fingers, and as silently the door swung inward. It was in defiance of all orders, but she couldn’t stay alone here in the dark, not knowing what had happened. Let the warden scold her if he liked, he was here to reassure people. That padding noise sounded rather like his footsteps again, but softer.

  “Mr. Hollister,” Georgine said, her voice coming back with startling loudness from the echoing wall. “Is that you, Mr. Hollister?”

  The padding noise stopped.

  “Please, what was it? Is anyone hurt?”

  There was no answer at all; no voice, no other steps.

  Only, from the middle of the street came the sound of harsh breathing.

  At a little distance across the road there was a dull glow, dim and tiny as fox-fire. It looked like the warden’s torch, but if he was holding it, why didn’t he answer her?

  Somewhere a chime struck the half-hour. The wind came up again slightly, but the odd breathing went on. It sounded—painful. There were no more loud sounds.

  “Someone has been hurt,” Georgine whispered. She gritted her teeth and stepped out into the cool blackness, somehow darker even than that inside the house, because unconsciously one expected light from the sky.

  She was halfway across the street, making for the dim torch, when her foot touched something soft. She froze instantly, and for a moment not all her will-power could make her bend over to feel what lay beside her.

  In that moment all the sensations of the past week crystallized within her: the seemingly unfounded fears, the creeping uneasiness that she had tried so hard to overcome, the dreamlike warnings of her unconscious self. It was something like this that she had expected; it was the worst horror of all that she was not surprised.

  Yet to have it come at last was almost a relief. She bent over, and her hand found warm wet flesh. Whoever it was must be badly hurt, but not dead, for his hand beat weakly against the pavement as if he were trying to rise. Was it that sound she had heard, and mistaken for footsteps?

  Her groping hands went farther, and felt the round metallic crown of a helmet.

  The warden was hurt. That must have been blood she had touched. Georgine tried to recall her lessons in first aid, she felt gently for a spurting artery and found none that could be determined by touch. She thought, though, that there must be broken bones. How could one tell?

  The small torch still glowed through its layers of paper, at the side of the road. It must have been flung from his hand at the moment of that impact, whatever it had been; doubtless the flashlight had fallen on the carpet of leaves beside the road. But what had hit him? What had made that frightful crash?

  Her groping fingers encountered and held something small, hard, cylindrical, which she thought must be his whistle. It was dry and clean to the touch; nevertheless, Georgine conquered a moment of shuddering repugnance before she put it to her lips and blew a long steady note. There was no shrilling vibration, only a melancholy hoot that seemed to mingle with the night like an owl’s call. She blew it again. The man beside her stirred and moaned.

  Far up the road a door opened. Georgine could see a sliver of light, instantly extinguished. A voice came quavering down to her, “Wh-what is it?”

  With a tremendous effort she made her own voice come steadily. “I’ll need some help. The warden’s been hurt.”

  The other voice came in a little shriek. “A bomb?”

  “I don’t think so. Who is that—Mrs. Gillespie? Can you feel your way down here?”

  “I—we’re not supposed to come out,” the voice floated plaintively down to her. “Can’t it wait till the lights come on?”

  “How do we know when that’ll be? We ought to do something now! You come down here—he’s breathing so queerly—” Georgine felt herself beginning to crack under the strain. She got up unsteadily, very slowly stumbled over to the flashlight and picked it up. If you held it close to the surface of the road, you could see where you were going. It took her back to the unconscious form in mid-pavement; as she regained Hollister’s side she heard cautious steps feeling their way downhill.

  Georgine held the light close to Hollister’s face.

  Three feet away, Mimi Gillespie stopped in her tracks and began to scream. “Oh, turn off that light! Don’t! Don’t shine it on him, I can’t—”

  It wasn’t the bleeding from the scraped and lacerated face that was the worst; curiously, what made Georgine’s head swim and weighted her stomach with cold lead was the mark of a tire-tread, clearly printed in dust across the man’s jacket, across the white felt of his armband.

  “How could it have been a car?” she said weakly. Mimi’s screams had died to gasps, now. “Nobody would have been driving in the blackout. Nobody’d drive down here, anyway. Mrs. Gillespie, get back to your house or find a telephone somewhere, and call a doctor and the ambulance.”

  “You can’t,” Mimi wailed. “Nobody can get one, the telephones don’t answer. I tried when the blackout began, and you can’t even raise Central.”

  “Isn’t there anybody?” Georgine said desperately. “An advanced first-aider, someone who can help?”

  “Not up here, not tonight. The old Carmichael ladies—they might do it, but they’re away,” Mrs. Gillespie babbled. “You do something, can’t you? Oh, poor Roy!”

  “I don’t know enough about it. And there’s nothing to work with, I daren’t move him; all we can do is cover him up,” said Georgine dully.

  “That’s a good idea.” Mrs. Gillespie’s voice was stronger, as if all the problems had been solved. “I’ll get a blanket, if I can—” She bent over suddenly. “Listen! Did he say something? Maybe he’s not so badly hurt, maybe he was just stunned.” Georgine, bending close to Hollister, put her ear down to his lips; Mimi leaned shudderingly over them both, gasping, “Oh, he said, ‘I am dying. Come, I’m dying.’ Wasn’t that it?”

  After a moment, Georgine said, “It sounded like that.” And under her hand the body of Roy Hollister relaxed with a dreadful finality.

  Now that it was too late, someone else was coming down the road. “What’s the matter down there?” said a male voice, hoarse with anxiety. “Was that you screaming, Mrs. Gillespie? Where’s the warden?”

  “Oh, Mr. Devlin,” Mimi cried, “I’m glad you came, we were all alone—the warden’s here, something hit him.”

  “Hurt?” John Devlin said on a long groan. “How?”

  The light shone once more, dimly, on the tire marks. Devlin said, “My God. Oh, God, so I was right about that noise. Ricky’s car, his jalopy, isn’t—isn’t there any more. It must have got away, and—and plunged downhill, and Hollister was in the way.” Through the darkness Georgine could hear him panting hoarsely. “Why don’t the damned lights go on?” he shouted, startling her.

  Mrs. Gillespie had begun to shuffle away. “I’ll get that blanket,” she said, almost cheerfully.

  John Devlin knelt, and his hand went along Hollister’s lax arm and found the wrist. “But listen,” he said in a shocked tone, “he’s—I can’t find a pulse. He’s dead.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Georgine said faintly.

  “We can’t leave him like this, my God! Where’s there a doctor—”

  Mrs. Gillespie went once more through her explanation.

  “Well, but the warden’s own phone ought to work!” Devlin said. “I heard they’d made some arrangement about that, so it gets the switchboard when nobody else’s does. Try that,
Mrs. Gillespie!’

  “In Roy’s house?” Mimi said on a kind of shriek. “With him out here dead? Oh, I couldn’t go in there!”

  “I’ll go with you,” Georgine said.

  “That’s right. I’ll stay with him. This is no place for women,” Devlin’s voice said gruffly. There was a jingling sound. “Here are his keys, in his side pocket, a whacking big bunch. You take that little torch, might need it to find the door key.”

  It was an incredible relief to Georgine to rise and move away from the limp form on the pavement. She thought vaguely, How queer people are about death; Mrs. Gillespie was glad to be given an errand somewhere else—or was that why she sounded almost sprightly? And here’s Mr. Devlin, cheerfully staying right here, feeling in Hollister’s pockets. There’s no accounting for reactions.

  The darkness still pressed about her like something tangible. There was the night breeze on her face, the sting of the fog, the tautness of eye-muscles straining to pierce the black air; the gray of pavement and cement walks did give off a faint sort of glimmer that helped her to find her way, but that was all she could see. Beside her, Mimi Gillespie pressed close, breathing quickly. Georgine could feel the soft fuzziness of a loose sleeve. “Were you undressed?” she said absently.

  “I—no,” Mimi faltered. “It was cold, I sat up reading but I put on a house robe over my clothes. And when the sirens went, I just turned off the lights and waited. We’ve got blackout curtains, but they take too long to fix.”

  The street was hard and uneven underfoot. Georgine felt for step after step, holding the light downward. She wondered for a moment if she could be dreaming all this. There was the front walk of Hollister’s house; she went along it, Mrs. Gillespie in her wake; both women holding out groping hands toward the wall of the projecting garage. “Ricky’s car must have gone right down into the canyon,” Georgine said. Funny how you found yourself speaking in a whisper, as if a little noise mattered now. “Didn’t you think it was a bomb when the fence splintered?”

  “Oh, yes. It seemed like—as if I couldn’t move. Here, don’t bother with those keys, the door’s unlocked.”

  Then why on earth, Georgine thought, had he carried that great bunch? “You know where the telephone is?”

  “Yes. On a little table by the—here it is. What’ll I say? You do it.”

  Georgine listened for the operator’s voice, but nothing came except the hum of wires. Surely in just one more minute someone would answer? The light shone as if in a spot of phosphorescence on Mimi’s white robe, moving slightly with her nervous breathing.

  Then all at once the white robe wasn’t there. Georgine heard a gasp and a rush, and felt wind coming through the open door. “Something in the house,” a terrified murmur sounded from the path outside.

  Was that someone moving in one of the rear rooms?

  Georgine flicked off the light. If there had been a little glow under the living-room door, if she hadn’t imagined that yellowish line, it was gone now.

  Her heart was doing its best to thunder its way through her ribs. She could have turned on her torch again, and moved to the door and peered through the layers of darkness in that room—to see if anyone was there.

  Probably that’s what a really brave woman would do.

  Instead, sheer instinct prompted her. “Police!” she said breathlessly into the dead transmitter. “Hello, operator, will you give me the police station?”

  If there had been a rustling sound in that room, that too was gone.

  She could not gauge the time, nor even guess how long it was she stood there, clutching the smooth vulcanite of the unanswering telephone. New voices sounded, hushed, in the street outside; she thought she recognized Ricky Devlin’s tones, and heard him calling softly, reassuringly, to his mother. She would have given a great deal to rush out and join the others; but a stubborn sense of duty held her where she was. It could have been five minutes, or twenty, before an operator responded to her repeated jigglings of the connection bar. It was minutes later before a voice answered, “Emergency hospital.”

  Georgine’s knees were weak with relief as she gave her message. She managed to remember the cross-streets nearest to Grettry Road, for help in location; she was switched to the police-station, after another long wait. As soon as the blackout was over, an ambulance and a squad car would start for the Road; perhaps sooner.

  She wondered if she’d given all the right details. Her hand was cramped from its hard clutch on the telephone, the cool darkness seemed to press on her and make breathing difficult. She stumbled out into the Road.

  From the campus, far below, came the notes of the Campanile, rising slowly and heavily. Eleven o’clock. And, as if that had been a signal, a long sustained note droned through the night, and the fog began to reflect light. The windows of Grettry Road flashed into illumination, and around the bend came a car on which shone the great red eye of the police signal.

  “Stand back there, please, and let me get to him. Don’t crowd… Did anyone see the car hit him?…Where was it parked?…His name—no, just one of you, please… Any family? Who got to him first?”

  Questions, and voices answering them, sometimes singly, sometimes in chorus; the glare of the police-car’s headlights, shining on the Road’s inhabitants, some fully dressed, some in the odd combinations of clothing snatched up in the dark; the calm listening face of the young officer from the squad car, and the glinting top of his pencil as it moved back and forth over the pages of a notebook; voices, babbling in the street…

  Sheila Devlin: “Ricky, stay right here near me, won’t you, dear? You were certainly sleeping soundly, not to hear the sirens.—But you heard me when I called through your door, didn’t you, dear? I was sure you answered.”

  Ricky (absently): “Yeah, sure I did. I must of thought it was morning, and rolled over again, until I—I heard that crash.”

  Claris Frey: “Oh, how terrible! How perfectly awful! Is he—is he dead?… No, I didn’t wake Daddy, he went to bed ages ago with a headache. He’s there now. Of course he hasn’t heard a thing. Oh, what a shame about Mr. Hollister. It was just yesterday afternoon he was laughing so, with Daddy…”

  John Devlin: “Hell, no. I didn’t come out when I heard that crash. I thought it was a bomb, just like all the rest of you, and I was looking for something to get under so I wouldn’t be killed. Lord knows Hollister himself pounded that into us often enough: stay in your house, don’t look out the door.”

  “…bombs…” “…that awful crash…” “Alone in the house…”

  They buzzed and racketed in Georgine’s ears until she felt deafened. She went into the Professor’s house to wash her hands and get a drink of water, only then discovering that she had left the door swinging wide. Fortunately, it had done no harm, and the Professor would never know.

  The lights were perversely easy to find, this time. There was no one in the house, but—Georgine paused on her way to the kitchen, lifting her head and sniffing—there was a funny smell that reminded her of baking in an old-fashioned range. Had someone been burning paper?

  She made a brief detour around the house, cautiously switching on the lights before she entered each room. She must have dreamed that, too. There was nothing in the fireplace but a neatly laid fire which would never be lit.

  When she returned to the street the ambulance had come. The body of Roy Hollister had been left where it was, however, and the blanket had been drawn up over the lacerated face. She could see more clearly, now that the shock was wearing off; little details, magnified by the sharp contrast of darkness with the white glare of headlights, stood out in her vision. She saw Ricky Devlin and Claris Frey standing together, a little apart from the others, not looking at each other; their lips moved cautiously as if they were exchanging guarded words. Ricky moved away at a summons from the officer, and Georgine saw him reach down a hand to rub his knee, gingerly, before he went on. He was limping just perceptibly.

  She saw a shadowy figure joining th
e group, and recognized Professor Paev. He had come up from the canyon, through the Gillespies’ back yard. Presumably he had walked up via the short-cut, for burrs and foxtails clung to his trouser-legs. He was in a mood so brusque that it hinted at a crushing disappointment as well as annoyance. “I was only halfway home from the train,” the Professor barked, “when the lights went out. I’ve been sitting on someone’s front porch for an hour. On someone’s front porch!” he repeated angrily, as if this were the last straw.

  The keys that John Devlin had pressed into Georgine’s hand were still in her coat-pocket. Perhaps the officer would want them.

  She went slowly up to the young policeman, who was talking to Mimi. Mrs. Gillespie, with her golden swirl of hair and her curves noticeable even through the folds of a white chenille robe, was the sort of witness any man would like to question. “We heard him say ‘Come, I’m dying,’” Mimi told the officer earnestly. “I guess he—he was conscious for just that minute. Don’t you think so, Mrs. Wyeth?”

  Georgine, who had already told her story, nodded thoughtfully. “Here are his keys,” she said.

  The young officer held out a hand for the heavy bunch, and bent over them. Georgine had not looked at them before; one or two were of an unusual shape, she thought.

  The policeman looked up at her with sudden attention, and opened his lips as if to speak. Then he changed his mind. He was frowning slightly as he pocketed the keys.

  “That car must have been smashed to bits,” said Mrs. Gillespie, her eyes wide with pleasurable horror. “I’m going down to look at it, do you want to come?”

  “I’d better take a look myself,” said Ricky Devlin from behind them, rather huskily. The officer had already inspected the wrecked car in the canyon; nevertheless he accompanied the two women and the boy as they climbed through the gap in the low fence, and slipped and scrambled down the slope, following the trail of broken bushes.