He might be lurking down there in the shadows of the street right now, watching these windows as he had once watched hers. He’d seen the light go out behind them, and now in a little while he’d venture forth and creep up to the door and suddenly vanish within, like something whisked away.
It was very quiet inside and out. There was a half-moon, enough to dust the air with pollen without bleaching it. I had the shades drawn down to three-quarter length, and the oblong boxes of light that came in below them reproduced themselves just high enough on the door, slantwise to them, to take its knob. The knob was glass, and when it turned it would blur, create a momentary pinwheel of light. And then another way of knowing would be this: the third step from the top on the stairs outside was faulty; it would creak. I’d learned to skip it whenever I ascended them myself. But he wouldn’t know.
It was four o’clock now, and I’d been sitting like this ever since shortly after one. I thought about them, the two of them. And, for that matter, the two of us: Kirk and myself. What a strange way for their love story to end up. A harmless, fluffy little girl of eighteen on a dance floor one night ten years ago, waltzing to the strains of “Always.” And a boy comes in and looks at her, takes just one look, and from then on he’s in love. And another boy and another girl, somewhere else, a thousand miles away, maybe, who didn’t know either of them at the time and didn’t even know one another yet. The girl, as a matter of fact, still a child in a middy blouse and bangs, probably chewing her pencil nightly under a lamp while she pored over her algebra homework. And now, ten years later, the first girl is already dead; murdered and infamous and vile. And a derelict, a stumble bum, who was once the boy, is about to creep up the stairs of a strange house, to murder someone he has never seen before, in the depths of the night. And the second boy is a shaven-pated, hollow-cheeked inmate in a penitentiary, awaiting execution for something he didn’t do. And the second girl, the “little” girl, is hiding behind a chair in the dark in that same strange room, waiting to watch, to look on at a murder that is to be no murder, that is to be the act without the deed.
How strange, it came to me then, are the patterns of human experience! The meaningless life lines that start out singly and so simply from here, from there, draw slowly toward one another over a period of time, until finally they come together, mesh, to form into a design that never could have been guessed at, foretold, by what had gone before. And the completed fabric is the sum of all the threads that have gone into it.
If another boy hadn’t gone to a dance one night and seen a girl there, floating in a blue dress to the strains of “Always,” the boy I’d married would not now be in a cell under sentence of death, and I would not now be hiding here in the dark, my cheek pressed to the back of a chair, listening, waiting.
The clock went tick, tick, tick.
Outside there, past the door, the third step from the top snarled all at once, as when you nudge a sleeping cur lying in your path. That was the sound it habitually made, a canine simulation. Then its queerly warped surface relapsed into silence again as the pressure quitted it.
I flung out my hand quickly, struck out the red ember that had been held in it against something. Then I drew myself together, made myself smaller, cowered there, and watched the telltale knob from low down around the side of the chair back.
Nothing happened for a while. For a while that seemed much longer than it probably was. Tick, tick; tick, tick; tick, tick. Hundreds of them, it sounded like. If there was anyone out there at all, he must be standing with his ear close to the door seam, listening to hear if there was anyone astir in here. Or perhaps exploring the door, gauging its surface with stealthy finger tips. He would not think, at first, that it would open at trial, and yet the instinctive thing to do was test the knob; that would show him when he did.
I was frightened, for I knew violence was at hand, was coming in here with me.
Tick, tick; tick, tick; tick, tick. Oh, was it that loud always, or did it just seem so now? Like a small-sized trip hammer hitting against something.
Suddenly the knob gave a warning flash, a coruscation, as its facets slowly began to revolve and the light glanced off each successive one. He had been out there and he was coming in. It turned so slowly, and yet somehow so remorselessly, as though there were no power on earth could keep it from completing its appointed orbit. With not a forewarning sound to go with it. If I had stayed in that bed, if my eyes hadn’t already been wide open and fixed on it, there would have been no way of detecting that entry was being gained. I would have gone from sleep to deeper sleep with scarcely a fluttering of eyelids, and our story, Kirk’s and mine, would have had an ending not very dissimilar to theirs after all.
I couldn’t even tell very accurately when the door parted from the frame, slanted inward. By the time a sluggish current of air, a displacement, had eddied toward and reached me, to show that something, someone had come in, the door was back in place again and there was a shadowy, blurred outline between myself and it, so that I could no longer see the knob.
This blur, this new darkness against the old darkness, stood motionless for a while, then gradually started to shift over toward the bed. As it sidled in that direction the knob behind it came clear again, but that no longer held interest for me. Motion could only be detected in this shadowy mass by the contrasting motion it seemed to give the things around it that were not moving. As when you look from a train window and the things beyond seem to be moving. Thus the white plateau of the bed seemed to sidle forward and cut it off below the knees, but it was not the bed that had moved but the figure in the background.
Again it fell motionless and stood looking down now at close range. Breathing was beginning to be audible, the strained, harsh breathing of slowly mounting, slowly unleashed rage. Deepening, thickening, strangling, until it began to approach the catarrhal. My own had stopped, or seemed to have.
Tick, tick, tick——
Suddenly, in the smoky dimness there was a flash midway down the vague form and close in against it. Oh, not a bright flash; the flicker of a tongue of ghostly gray flame. And a burnished blade had sprung into being, with a small wooden tick.
I bit my lip and heaved soundlessly against the padded chair surface.
It went up overhead, catching more light as it did, blurring into a low-toned silvery flash; poised there, foreshortened to a point. The strained breathing choked, formed into a sob. I could hear words all run together in a bated paroxysm of torment and fury. “You dirty devil! Why couldn’t you leave her with me?”
The silvery radiance slashed down and vanished, and there was the crunch of steel puncturing tight-packed layers of fabric; the bed quivered. The shadowy form crouched low above it, then straightened again, took a heavy, sodden step or two toward the door.
He’d killed the nothingness in the bed because he hadn’t killed the woman. This was the final test; there could be no greater test than this.
I pulled my face from the chair back, reached out without thinking, and tugged on the chain pull of a near-by lamp. Light bloomed out, dazzling as a sunburst after the preceding gloom. I don’t know if he saw me clearly or not. I must have seemed like an apparition over there in the corner in that sudden welling up of light.
He cast a single explosive look over that way that seemed not to strike me at all, only to verify that there was light there and someone there who’d seen what he had done. Then he floundered out through the door opening as I reared up to my full height behind the chair.
I thrust it aside, tried to go after him. “Marty!” I called. “Wait! Don’t run like that!”
He was already lunging down the stairs like one possessed. He must have taken my voice, too, for a hallucination of his overheated mind. It only stung him to an added frenzy of flight. I reached the head of the stairs and could see his leaping shadow glancing from the walls below. There was no light up here, but there was one down at the foot. I kept calling down, “Marty, come back! Wait, you haven’t—�
�” I was afraid to scream too loudly; I was afraid it would rouse the entire house. I don’t think he would have heeded even if I had.
The street door gave an empty slap, and he had gained the open night. Something touched my foot, and the knife was lying there on the topmost step with its blade still out.
I turned and ran back into the room and across it and flung up the window, hoping I could head him off from there. I could see him flitting along down there, making a scalloping detour of each successive doorway. I leaned far out, calling, “Marty, wait! Come back and listen to me a minute! Don’t run away!”
I saw his arms go up, and he put his hands over his ears as he ran along to keep the sound out. He must have taken me for an accusing voice of his own conscience resounding against the night. He darted over to the other side, where the shadows were even thicker, and was lost there. In a moment more the street was empty.
I turned slowly back into the room. The knife lay on the bed where I’d thrown it, atop the punched-in mound of clothes. If he’d only taken time to look at it, I thought ruefully, he could have seen there was no blood on the blade.
The night was empty and quiet again, just as it had been before. Inside the room something was going tick, tick; tick, tick; tick, tick.
I had to find him and I had to tell him. So I went back there to that place of the unburied dead to seek him out, to sit beside him for a moment or two, to say: “You didn’t kill anyone in that room last night; don’t be frightened. I lied. No one knows who did it, Marty. We’ll have to let it go at that.” I had a ten-dollar bill with me. I was going to touch his hand in parting, leave it behind. At that, it seemed a paltry enough thing to do. But what could I, what could anyone, do for him? Give him back his love, give him back his life?
The barman looked up when I came in, and I could tell he remembered me, knew me from the time before. But he was busy just then, so I made my own way back through the place unaided, looking for him among the wan, hopeless faces that were raised to me as I went past. There was that same strange hush as when I’d come in here the first time. Life walking amid the dead. Empty eye sockets looking up at me with no light behind them. A hand, a hand that didn’t belong to a living man and therefore couldn’t be resented as such, even reached gropingly toward me as I moved by, fell short, dropped back again. Asking some sort of help; it knew not what.
I found myself all the way at the back of the place at last, beside the same table he had been at the time before. “His” table, I suppose, that he always sought out when he came in here, for habit is a strange thing, surviving even reason. There was a clear place there. Two empty chairs and an empty jigger standing before each one. His drink and hers. I knew then that he’d only recently gone.
I stood there looking down in silence, two fingers touching the table top, the frustrated ten-dollar bill still held tucked under my palm by my thumb.
The barman had come down and was standing beside me. “You looking for Heartbreak?” he said. “He was here and he went away again. Just a little while ago, not very long before you got here.” He adjusted one of the chairs, picked up the two jiggers by the fingers of one hand. “Yeah, I seen him get up and go out.”
He wanted to make conversation. I was as close to being carriage trade as this place would ever see. “He did a funny thing. I couldn’t make him out tonight. He only had two bits left on him. I know for a fact it was his last two bits, because it’s what I gave him back myself after the last two drinks. Then on his way out he stops and has me break it up into nickels. Four of them he hands to the four guys that are standing nearest to him, without even looking to see who they are. Then the fifth one, he goes over to the juke box and stands picking out a tune. Takes his time until he’s found just what he’s looking for. They never do that around here, you know; the house has to feed them things. He puts it in and starts it up, and then instead of waiting to hear it out, he goes on out right while it’s in the middle of playing”—he swept his arm toward the darkness out before the entrance—”walking real steady, much straighter than usual, and with a kind of a halfway smile on his face. Like he got good news or was going to meet somebody who had good news for him. We was all looking at him by that time.”
“And the song?” I murmured quietly, staring at the table without seeing it much. He didn’t have to tell me.
“‘Always.’”
I knew then.
I remembered what I’d thought to myself the first night I’d come in here searching for him. The lower depths, this place was. The lowest depths of all this side of the grave. There was nothing beyond this, nothing further. Nothing came after it except—the river.
The girl was dead, and now the boy was too. That story was over, the story that began on a dance floor ten years ago to the strains of “Always.”
“He may be back a little later on,” the barman tried to suggest. “They come and they go——”
I knew he wouldn’t be back. Anywhere. Ever again.
I turned and walked slowly back toward the entrance again, the scene around me fading out as my thoughts turned inward. The thing that preoccupied me was this: Did I kill that man? Was it I, by what I did last night?
And the answer was obvious, undeniable. I shook my head slowly and without hypocrisy. No, I was kind to him. I gave him something to die for. That was more than he’d had before. It is better to die for something than to live for nothing. I gave him completion, vindication. He did not hear me call out to him there in that room last night. In that bed lay the assassin of what he held most dear, brought to justice by his own hand. I gave him that much to take with him: the kindly illusion that he’d requited her loss.
No, I did not kill him. All I did was give him something worth dying for.
I stopped beside the juke box and took out a nickel. I searched the slots and found the one that I was looking for. I dropped the coin in and stood by there, waiting for the strains to come. Then when they had, his song and hers—
Not for just an hour, not for just a day,
Not for just a year, but
Always
I quirked my finger from the temple in a parting salute to someone they could not see.
“Good-by, Heartbreak. Better luck some other time, some other where——”
I turned and walked slowly outside into the dark while the cheap music, the costly, precious music, softly ebbed away behind me.
7
Atwater 8–7457 ……… Mordaunt
THIS ONE WENT EASY; THIS ONE TOOK CARE OF ITSELF. I found out all my self-rehearsing had been superfluous when a young woman’s voice, immediately upon answering, said pleasantly: “Dr. Mordaunt’s office, good day.”
He was a doctor, then. Her doctor. She hadn’t had it that way in the book, though; “Dr. Mordaunt,” the usual way of putting down one’s doctor’s name. Just “Mordaunt,” like any other man she knew.
For a moment, because he was a doctor, I was almost tempted to hang up without going any farther, without speaking at all. Saying to myself, “A doctor cures his patients; a doctor doesn’t kill them.” But, I reminded myself, he may not have been her doctor in that sense; he may have been just a doctor whom she knew. A doctor who was a friend. A doctor who was even—something else.
A doctor is a man, after all. A doctor loves or hates, fears or avenges himself, just as anyone else.
All this within my mind in the space of an outward second. And meanwhile the young woman’s voice was waiting.
“May I speak with the doctor?”
“Are you one of his regular patients? May I have the name, please?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then I’m sorry, I can’t put the doctor on. I can give you an appointment, if you’d like. Would you care for an appointment?”
I’d have to do it that way then. I told her yes, I would.
“Thursday at four?” This was Wednesday. I said that would be all right. It gave me twenty-three hours’ grace. “The name, please?”
“Miss or Mrs.?”
She wanted to know everything, it seemed. I chose Miss, for obvious reasons. Mia Mercer had been unmarried too.
“Can you tell me who recommended the doctor to you?”
I had known that was coming. I could have said she did. I intended to eventually. But not to her. I wasn’t going to waste any possible surprise value it might have on a third person over a wire. I was saving that for him, direct and to his face.
I said, “I’ll give the doctor that information personally when I see him.”
I was afraid she might argue the point and even end up by cancelling the appointment, so to forestall her and keep the appointment valid by default, so to speak, I hung up on her without further ado.
I sat and thought about it for a good long while there by the phone. Trying to map out something that would at least carry me safely past the preliminary consultation. This was not going to be as easy as the Marty matter, for instance. There was an arbitrary limitation imposed here. I had to work within the framework of a single visit, little better than half an hour, forty minutes at the very outside. Within that I might possibly find some means of extorting a second one; from the second one I might extract a third, and so on. But you had to have some surface reason for going to a doctor in the first place.
There was nothing the matter with me that I knew of. I had a badly wrenched heart, but that didn’t show. Since I had no legitimate symptoms to offer I would have to produce some ersatz ones. Yes, but if he were any kind of doctor at all, wouldn’t he see through them at once? It might put him on his guard. If there were only something I could swallow to derange my system for a while without permanently impairing it. If there were only something I could rub onto my skin that would cause an irritation, produce an evanescent rash. I even thought of holding my hand for a moment or two under the hot-water tap to scald it more or less sufficiently to require treatment, but with clouds of steam already rising from the drain vent my courage failed me. The stray drop or two that leaped upon it stung so vengefully.
The Black Angel Page 9