The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  I lifted the receiver finally, to try to silence it in that way. Then, because I already held it in my hand, I put it to my ear, stood quiet with it like that.

  A man’s voice said instantly, and with a sort of hurried intimacy, “Hello, Mia?” And then over again, because there was no answer from my end, “Hello, Mia?”

  That voice. I would have known his voice anywhere. I put my free hand down on the desk slab and braked myself against it while I curved over weakly above it, like when you have a pain in your stomach.

  “Hello?” he kept saying. “Hello, Mia?”

  The colors in the room ran a little; a drop or two of turquoise seemed to swim around in my eyes. In this damn place you even shed turquoise teardrops.

  I didn’t have the heart for any cheap surprises, for any punishing triumphs. I didn’t want to be cruel to him. He was being cruel enough for the two of us. I put it down again quietly, almost tenderly.

  I didn’t have to worry about whether I had the right person or not now any more.

  Crazy thoughts without logic took turns slashing at me. “Why do they get you to learn to love them, if this is how they’re going to treat you after you do? Why do they come around you when you’re seventeen and aren’t doing anything to them, are just minding your own business, getting along all right without them, if this is how they’re going to act when you’re twenty-two? Why don’t they leave you alone?” I sobbed deep inside where it couldn’t be heard. “Why don’t they leave you alone if they don’t mean it?”

  I walked haphazardly back toward the arched opening leading to the next room again. I think I thought it was the outside door. Then when I noticed what it was I stopped, to turn and go the other way.

  But in there, on the vanity table in a crystal frame, I could see her picture smiling mockingly out at me, as if to say: “You see? Aren’t you sorry you came around here now? If you hadn’t you still wouldn’t have been sure.” And hate came on, and bitterness came on, and I strode forward, to go to it and pick it up. I suppose to smash it, or some other equally childish thing.

  I didn’t watch where I was going and I stumbled over something as I made my way around the foot of the impeding chaise longue.

  A foot, a leg, projecting from the other side of it. What I had taken to be a discarded boudoir slipper until now. Even from where I was standing at the moment, but for the hideous clarity of that one unmistakable silk-clad limb, it still looked like a tumbled mass of boudoir pillows, perhaps a discarded negligee and a chaise coverlet, all intermingled and allowed to fall in a neglected heap to the floor, there in that one place.

  I suppose I gave a smothered scream. I don’t remember. I got down waveringly and edged aside one of the pillows. Coral sateen it was, and so soft, so harmless. But someone had smothered her to death with it.

  Though no man was the breath of her life, one of them had taken the breath of her life away, and she was dead.

  I was sorry I’d tampered with that concealing pillow. For that grimacing, suffused mask with the protruding tongue didn’t look at all like the photograph in the crystal frame over there any longer.

  I got up again, cold and sick and frightened. I’d never seen a dead human being before. I couldn’t seem to turn my eyes away. I retreated stealthily backward, a step at a time, as if afraid that if I dared to turn my back on her she’d rise up and come after me.

  When I had regained the archway between the rooms and had at least a head start, then panic came on briefly. The panic of any young, unversed, not very bright thing. I made several confused half turns, this way and that; then I located the door and sped for it, my frightened mind screaming: “Let me out of here! I want to get out of here! I don’t want to stay in this place—with her!”

  Then at the last moment, just as I’d reached the door, the thought of Kirk came to me, and some sort of protective instinct—I don’t know what it was—brought me up short, held me there a moment.

  They mustn’t connect him with her. They mustn’t know he’d known her or——I turned and saw the phone standing there across the room with the slab let down before it the way I’d left it. And next to it that little private address book of hers. I went running over and picked it up and leafed through it. There it was, on the M page, big as life. His name and office number.

  First I was just going to tear the page out bodily and leave the rest behind. Then I realized that maybe they would notice that; it would look too incriminating. So I thrust the whole booklet into my handbag intact and snapped it closed on it. They weren’t going to find his name around here, not if I could help it.

  I looked around questioningly. There wasn’t anything else out here that I could see that might involve him, and not even for his sake could I have gone back into that—that other room a second time.

  I told myself I’d better get out of here fast myself. Somebody was liable to come along at any moment and——

  Even so, I knew enough not to bolt out without reconnoitering first and thereby running a risk of blundering head-on into someone on the outside. It’s uncanny how quickly your instincts, if left to their own guidance, will adapt themselves even to the most bizarre, unlooked-for situations, as though you were used to meeting those situations every day in your life. Accordingly, instead of throwing the door open forthwith, I stood there listening intently beside it for several moments before making any further move.

  It was because I stood there motionless like that, and with my head tilted at just a certain angle, that I had a chance to become aware of this fleck of color against the creamy expanse of the door. It was in the seam, the opposite one where the hinges were located, and it was just over the lower one of these, as though it had sidled downward until the hinge had blocked its further descent.

  Even after it had caught my eye it meant nothing; there was not enough of it to convey any meaning in my present state of tension and anxiety to get out. Only, as I turned the knob and slowly drew the door inward from its frame, motion, the motion of a dab of color, caught my eye back to where it had been again, and I saw that it had fallen out with the reverse widening of the seam at that end and now lay on the floor, a postage-stamp-sized square from where I stood. I reached down and picked it up, and it was only then that I could make out what it actually was.

  It was simply the pasteboard cover of a match folder, or rather half the pasteboard cover of a match folder, torn off, then folded still again to smaller size and thrust into that seam to serve as a wedge. Its purpose obviously had been to retard the swing of the door slightly so that, though it might give the appearance of being closed, the latch tongue would fail by a fraction of an inch to meet and thrust into the socket meant to hold it. In other words, it could be reopened later and at will from the outside, simply by turning the knob, as I had done myself.

  It had clung to the seam during three entire passages, I felt sure: the entrance and exit of whoever had done this to her, and then my own entrance just now, only to be finally dislodged when I disturbed the door a fourth time, to leave. Until now, apparently, it had simply slid lower down within the seam until the hinge blocked it off.

  To my novice’s mind it seemed for a minute a great, a dazzling clue, but then as I breathlessly unpleated it my excited hopes died again and I saw that it was nothing, told nothing, except what was implicit in its being there in the first place.

  It was one of hers. It had the ubiquitous M on it. It was blue, but of a darker shade than the turquoise she favored so. It must have been a leftover from some previous color scheme that had preceded the turquoise deluge. I was about to throw it back again where it had been, let them find it for themselves, make what they could of it. And then the thought of fingerprints occurred to my unversed mind, and because I had already handled it generously and had a layman’s typical awe of that mystic science, I thrust it instead into my handbag with the address book.

  I peered out through the eye-width gap I had made ready in the door. There was no one in sight. I stepped qui
ckly outside and closed the door after me. There was a staircase beside the elevator, and I chose that in preference to the car, as being both quicker and more secretive. There was no one below either. It was a tactfully serviced building.

  I opened the street door and came outside, and with the first fresh air a sense of unreality that I had been where I had been, had seen what I had seen, came over me overpoweringly. I walked quickly away from that bad place without looking back. I was frightened and sick and all the things you are after such a thing, but over and above everything else there was a persistent refrain running through my mind: “I have him back again now. She can’t take him from me ever, ever again.”

  For a moment I was glad he wasn’t there yet when I got home. For a moment or two only. I needed time, a little time to myself, to get over this thing, to pull myself together after it. I had the creeps. My hands were cold and clammy, and every few minutes I’d tremble uncontrollably, then stop again as suddenly. I took off the carefully selected outfit I’d worn and put it away out of my sight. It hadn’t been appreciated.

  I began to feel better, grow calmer, as soon as the outward vestiges of the horrible expedition had disappeared from view. And then suddenly, just as I was about to brew myself a cup of black coffee to complete the restorative process, fright struck again. But this time full-fledged, direct, and personal, here in the place where I lived, and having to do with me and him. Not the childish fright of some stranger’s dead body in a strange place into which I had had no right to venture in the first place. Suddenly I realized what the real thing was to be frightened of.

  He might go over there and become hopelessly enmeshed. I must get hold of him, warn him not to go near there, to stay away. He had already tried to reach her on the telephone right while I was in the place. He might have repeated that again, since I’d come away. And then, that failing, he might go there himself in person.

  Even while I dropped what I’d been doing as suddenly as though I’d been burned, fled out to our telephone, I couldn’t understand how I’d failed to take this into account until now. I had even taken the precaution of removing her address book with his name in it, yet it had never occurred to me to take the greatest precaution of all: to forewarn him. My mind must have somehow slipped a cog. Just because I was aware of what had happened to her I seemed to have taken it for granted that he was too. How could he be, until he’d gone there and stumbled on her, just as I had myself?

  I was dialing so fast the slotted wheel made a blur beneath my hand. I shouldn’t have waited this long to try to reach him. I still couldn’t understand what had made me overlook such a glaring necessity. I should have called him the moment I was out of there, from the first corner drugstore I’d happened upon.

  The office girl down there got on again.

  My voice was a spasm of sound that had no words in it, only a thought transfer. “Kirk—Mr. Murray—quick!” At least she got it.

  She said, “You just missed him. If you’d called only a minute sooner! He passed me on the way out just a moment before you——”

  I let my eyes fall slowly closed, sipped in my own breath.

  My voice came back again, frayed uncontrollably. “Frances, go after him; see if you can get him back! It’s desperately urgent! I’ve got to speak to him before he leaves that building!”

  I knew that place down there; there was a long walk out to the elevators.

  She took fright from my fright. “Wait, maybe I can still catch up with him out in the hall!” I heard the clatter she made getting away from the switchboard, even heard the diminishing patter of her footsteps across the floor. He must have still been in sight outside as she flung open the outer office door, because I even heard her call his name. It came back hollowly and from a distance, as something does echoing down a long, empty hallway. “Mr. Murray!”

  There was a wait that I thought was never going to be over. The hell with mutual embarrassment; the hell with diffidence; we were down to essentials now; we were down to bedrock, he and I. I’d say, “Kirk, stay away from that woman! Don’t ask me whom I mean or how I know! Listen to me now, if you never listened to me before. Don’t go near there!” And then I’d have to tell him, “She’s dead—something’s happened to her!” And then, because he’d have to have some direction given to him in that first moment of shock, gently, understandingly, without reproach: “Come home to me; come home where you belong—I’ll have some supper for you, and we won’t talk about it.”

  We wouldn’t, either. No, we wouldn’t. Just bring him back to this phone for me now, and I wouldn’t talk about it again, even in my heart.

  Her steps came back. I could hear her breathing fast from her efforts even before her voice sounded. She was going to say, “Here he is, Mrs. Murray. I just caught up with him in ti——”

  She said, “I saw him getting on down the hall and I called to him, but he didn’t hear me in time. And before I could get over there the operator had closed the door. It must have been an express car; they won’t come back for you no matter how you pound on the glass afterward.” And then those oh, most inadequate of words, when spoken to someone in her death throes: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Murray.”

  There was no way I could reach him in time now. He was going there to that place, and there was no way I could stop him. The slender thread had snapped. I’d been given my half an hour’s grace, from the time I left there until the time I got back here, and I’d thrown it away. And thrown him away with it. And thrown myself away with him.

  In the twilight I stumbled around there, like a dimly focused figure moving through the steam room of a Turkish bath. That was what it was like inside me, anyway, no matter what it was like on the outside. More terrible than anything else was the knowledge that while I floundered here helplessly, dying by inches, unable to interfere, to prevent, he was moving steadily through the streets—on foot, or in a cab, or on a subway—toward that grim destination. And in my overheated fancy I could see a grinning death’s-head waiting for him behind that boudoir door, bony arms stretched out to clutch him in a more terrible embrace than hers had ever been in life, to twine about him and never let him go.

  Once it occurred to me I might have saved him by reporting it to the police myself, if I’d only done it in time. Then at least he would have walked in there after them, not ahead of them. I could see why I’d shied away from this until it was already too late, though. I’d been afraid of bringing on the very thing I wanted above all to avoid: his involvement. And now it was too late; I daren’t do it now any more; it might only succeed in bringing them there right on his heels.

  Dusk had inked into night now, and I still didn’t light the lights. What for, what did I want to see? Lights are to see something by, and the only thing I wanted to see was his face. They couldn’t show me that because it wasn’t here.

  A light green circle with twelve slanting eyes, like a kid’s outline drawing of a face, peered at me from where the clock was. And all it did was hurt, and hurt, and hurt some more. For a little while there’d been a slim chance that he might have intended coming back here first after all; even if only to pick up his packed valise, even if only to say, “Alberta, I’m leaving you.” But that slim hope was long since gone now. The eyes on the clock had killed it. It was long past his time for coming home now. He hadn’t intended coming here first. It was already the hour for me to do the dishes. It was already the hour for him to tune in the Bob Hope program and sit in there laughing with that choked sound he made when he was laughing to himself.

  And the rooms were dark. There was no laughing sound in them, no odor of cigarette smoke. I was alone, a lost, frightened thing straying around, my whole world crumbled away all around me like the shell of an egg.

  Once I took the clock and lifted it and squeezed its cold round shape between my hands and shook it as if to wring some pity into it, pleading with it: “Oh, make him come—please make him come! Give him back——”

  It just tittered, “Tk—tk—
tk.”

  Sometimes I stood by the window, cooling my heated face against the glass. Sometimes I sat still, pressing my eyes against my hands. Sometimes I got up and moved around from room to room, in and out and in again, but never going anywhere. Sometimes I would go to the door and swing it wide and stand there looking for him, as if hoping the draft would sweep him in to me. But it never did; he never came.

  It seemed to have been going on for so long. This couldn’t be the same night, could it? This must have been some trick arrangement of a week of nights, a month of them, lumped solidly together without any days in between.

  Then finally, like an unmistakable warning inside me, came the point at which I knew I couldn’t stay on in here any longer. Oh, I’d said to myself I couldn’t stand it a hundred times over already, but that was just saying it; this was the real feeling now. This was the strange calm, the lull, that precedes hysteria. I knew if I didn’t get out, even if only to roam the streets, I’d begin screaming his name out in another minute, and the neighbors would all open their windows and——

  I jammed on my hat in the dark—the first, the last, the only time I ever did it that way. I found my way to the door; I wrenched it open—and there he was, standing right on the other side of it, nearly filling the narrow frame.

  It was uncanny; it was almost like mental telepathy. I put my hand up and I touched him where the necktie went down into the vest. He felt so good. So good and solid and warm and present. I’d never known that gladness was a lot like gin; they both burned like the dickens inside you.

  Hysteria deflated into a couple of bedraggled whimpers that crept out and slunk off, as if ashamed of themselves, and that was the end of it.

  I reached out with my other hand and threw the switch and lit him up. Lit him up from in front, from inside our place, as well as from that dim light way down the hall.

  He’d been standing there like that, in that funny way, looking for his key, I supposed. He almost never could find it at the moment he needed to use it. I could even hear the faint clash of metal as he fumbled for it in his pocket.