The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  I was still pondering the problem unsolved twenty-two and a half hours later when I alighted from the bus around the turn from my destination and struck out the remaining short distance on foot. It was too late now; I would have to rely on improvisation, summoning up my symptoms as he explored for them. And yet perhaps that would be the best way after all, I now realized; an intangible something that he could not immediately pin down might give me more stay with him than some minor blemish that could be cleared up at a single prescription.

  I rounded the turn, told off numbers—nearly faltered to a halt for a moment. I was stunned at my first sight of the place. The telephone exchange covering this entire district had fooled me. I had expected a swank, towering apartment house on one of the avenues, or a smaller but still ultrasmart one just off them at the very least. Instead, it turned out, it was an old-fashioned, high-stooped brownstone house. Badly weather-worn, and not even very clean at that. People like her, when they had a doctor at all, had one of these modish, bedside-manner practitioners, I had always thought. It occurred to me there was an anomaly here: a show girl, a woman in night life, with an old-fashioned family doctor. Well, I still had no proof that he was her doctor. He might have been a friend.

  The whole aspect of the place was that of one of these houses forgotten by time, even to what might be called the details of everyday occupancy as they showed themselves from the street, let alone the structural signs of age. The very curtains on the parlor-floor windows, which was what they had called the first floor above the street in the days of this house, ended in a row of ball fringe.

  There was no brass plate affixed to the doorway, nothing like that. A small black-lettered placard thrust into the rim of one window, inside the pane, gave his name: “J. Mordaunt, M.D.”

  I climbed to the top of the stoop and I rang the bell. How strange, I thought, to go into a house like this, at what to our modern eyes really amounted to second-story level. To stand there waiting admittance as I was now, as on a perch, well above the heads of passers-by or the roofs of passing vehicles, looking down on the street from above.

  A flicker of motion snagged my eye, and I turned to look along the face of the house to one side of me. Someone had just been watching me through a gap between curtain edge and side of window. I was too late to see them. It was the fall of the curtain back into true, after the figure was already gone, that had caught my notice.

  It struck me as a rather untrustful way to be admitted to a doctor’s consulting room, where, at least during visiting hours, the door is usually open to all comers.

  The inner door behind the vestibule had opened, and a stocky, better-than-middle-aged woman of Finnish or some similar northern Mongoloid descent stood looking at me.

  “Is the doctor in?” I asked deprecatingly.

  “You godt an appointment to see, yas?” she said surlily.

  “I have an appointment for four.”

  I must have neglected to nod along with the remark, thinking it unnecessary. She heightened her voice: “You speak louder, yas? I cannot hear goodt.”

  I spoke louder. “I have an appointment for four.”

  “So, come in. I tell.”

  At first glance her hair had seemed white. It was whitening, but the process had not completed itself; what gave the all-over impression, I saw, was that its former natural color had been a straw blonde, almost white in itself.

  I wondered what had become of the assistant; this was definitely not the voice that had spoken to me yesterday.

  She ushered me into the front parlor with a rather browbeating sort of imperiousness. “Go in. I tell.” She went toward the stratified dimnesses at the back of the hall, herself dimming, tone by tone, as she drew away from me, until she was all gone. But whether upstairs or down, I couldn’t tell.

  The place was stale with that stale smell that only old houses can attain. It was not a question of dust; it exuded from within the very walls themselves. It was the ichor of the dwelling’s bones. This room where I sat waiting was, decoratively speaking, a sort of port of last call. It was filled with flotsam and jetsam of bygone eras, all mixed in together, a piece from this one, a piece from that one, but even the most recent items stopped well short of the first Great War.

  I saw things that I recognized only by hearsay, had never seen with my own eyes before. For instance, on a center table there stood a platter of wax fruits under a glass dome. Then there was a phonograph with a crank handle protruding from the side and a great tulip-shaped horn rearing over it and threatening the middle of the room. Against a shield on the wall hung two mallards in high relief, complete with natural feathers, under convex glass. At the small of my back, until I dislodged it to find comfort, was a lumpy, battered mass that had once been a leather pillow with a decorative motif burned into it.

  What had she had to do with anyone like this? What had been the connection between them?

  He must have had to come down from above. I heard a fairly audible masculine tread coming down a staircase, although at some distance to the rear. Then it approached along the hall toward where I waited. Slow and unenthusiastic, as though finding in the summons only a wearisome, unwelcome task. It stopped short of the room I was in, however, and a door opened and closed to admit it close by.

  He had gone into the next room. An unsuspected seam that had lurked unseen until now down the center of a pair of sliding doors glowed silver with high-powered examining light, and there were vague sounds of fumbling preparation from the other side of it. Disquietingly audible to me.

  What sounded like an enamel panful of loosely rolling instruments was shifted sleazily aside to make room. Water ran, and there was even the suck of soap, produced by the suction between two hand hollows.

  I found the whole thing terrifying. Had I been a bona fide patient, I suspected, I should have run forth into the street without waiting to be accosted by this wretched sloven.

  The floor kept creaking as he moved back and forth; I imagine he was drying his hands on a towel. Evidently it was too tedious a process to pursue through to the end. A moment later there was a patting sound against starched linen or some similar stiffened fabric. He was completing the act by patting his hands down his sides!

  The woman, the housekeeper, must have looked in at him. I heard the other, lateral door creak slightly and suddenly heard her voice in there with him. “You liff you glasses oppstairs.”

  I heard him say, “What’d she do with that appointment pad of hers?” He had to speak loudly because of her deafness. I heard him quite clearly out where I was. At least there was no conspiratorial whispering.

  The housekeeper answered with that same congenital surliness she had displayed toward me: “That I godt nodding to do with. You ask her. You don’t ask me.”

  It was the assistant’s day off, apparently. Or else she only worked for him on a part-time basis.

  It might have been an unfair test I was subjecting him to, judging him by his surroundings and by sounds overheard through a door; he might very well have been a genius, a savant of medical science, unrecognized and unrewarded, in spite of all this, but I found myself insisting: “This man is no good. He is no good as a doctor.”

  And the inescapable corollary to that, of course, though I failed at the time to take sufficient note of it, was: “Because he doesn’t want to be. Because he’s not interested in being.” But then, if you don’t want to be a doctor, if you don’t care, why be one?

  The doors parted with a grunting and wobbling; the seam of silver became a four-square flash flood pouring in on me, and he was ready for me at last.

  He stood there, and I looked at him and he looked at me.

  Antagonists for a coming duel, though only one of us was aware of it yet. He was lumpy and yet powerful with it. Bent at the shoulders and neck, but not from weakness, from lack of regard for holding himself upright, straight, all his life through. His hair was dark, and there was that most objectionable type of baldness to be discerned thr
ough it; the strands brushed straight across the scalp from side to side, with pink interstices alternating with their pitiful attempt at concealment.

  His by-courtesy white jacket had stains of iodine on it, some of them worn to faint yellow by age, and his bared ankles were thrust into crumbling leather house slippers.

  I said, “How do you do, Doctor?” and rose warily to my feet.

  He said, “Come right this way. By all means. Come right this way.”

  Even that bit of phrasing smacked of the musty, the old-fashioned, somehow. Why “by all means”? That was what I was there for. It was as though there had been some imponderable objection and he were effacing it. Had there been—in his own mind?

  I stepped past him, and he smelled a little. Doubly. Of some old-fashioned antiseptic, carbolic or something; it might have been the soap he’d just used. And the other component was bodily uncleanliness.

  A thrill of repulsion ran its course through me and spent itself again as the broad table intervened between us.

  He said, “My assistant has mislaid the record of your appointment. Do you mind giving me your name again and all the rest? I have to do this, you see.”

  Yes, I thought, you have to. “Alberta French.”

  “I believe I have never treated you before, Miss French?”

  “No, you haven’t. I’m not often ill.”

  He left the notation on the desk before him. It was obviously uncompleted. He hadn’t come to whom it was had given me the recommendation yet. And I knew he surely would before I was through.

  “Ah,” he said about my seldom being ill. “And what do you complain of now, Miss French?”

  I’d decided upon a fairly vague symptom. That is to say, one that could not be easily disproved, centered upon any particular cause at sight. “Doctor, I’ve been getting spells of dizziness lately, more and more often, and I don’t like them.”

  “Hm,” he said. Which might have meant anything. Which probably meant nothing.

  “The other day I was coming home, and the whole street got black; I had to hold my hand out against a wall and stand still for a minute until it passed over.”

  “How long since you first began to notice this?” He was looking at me, but somehow the expression on his face matched the tempo of his tread as I had heard it before: complete disinterest in this case. And all other cases as well. “That,” I thought, “will change at mention of a name presently. I hope.”

  “For quite some time now. Several months. At first I didn’t think anything of it——”

  He took something out of a balky drawer beside him that he had to wrench open; he curled his underlip; he stood up.

  “Take off your coat, please. Roll up your sleeve. There, that’s high enough. No, just that one.”

  I wondered why his simplest instructions, such as this, seemed to quicken a little current of fear in me. Maybe it was the atmosphere here. Or something about his own personality.

  “Make a tight fist.” He was dangling a rubber tube.

  He tied it excruciatingly tight and took my blood pressure.

  I kept watching his hands while he was about it. They were strong, sinewy; the veins on the back stood out like whipcord. Those filthy, yellowed nails. Those brutal, lumpy fingers, almost looking swollen with their own bulk. They could have smothered someone to death under a pillow so easily, those hands.

  It seemed to me he was doing it unnecessarily—yes, even vindictively—tight, as though not he but his hands themselves, autonomously, detected my dislike and unspoken accusation. As though his brain were down there in those two lumpy pads.

  I drew in my breath, cold, and closed my eyes.

  Finally he unwound it. The blood burned, struggling to get back into where it had been.

  I didn’t ask him and he didn’t tell me.

  He resumed his seat, made a steeple of his hands. “You sleep well?”

  “No, very poorly.”

  “You eat well?”

  “No, I scarcely eat at all.”

  A sudden little gleam of interest lit up his eyes at this point that I failed totally to understand. It was the first interest he had shown throughout the entire proceeding.

  “Tell me.” He stopped, as though arranging the way he wished to phrase it. “Do you eat poorly because you have no appetite or because——” He slowed a little. I wondered what he was going to say; what other reason was there for not eating well than lack of appetite?

  He finished it. “Or because your circumstances will not permit you to eat as well, as fully, as you would like?” But why that mischievous little eye glitter with it? Was that funny?

  I didn’t answer, feeling that there was a fork in the road here and, rather than take the wrong one, preferring not to take any.

  He seemed to accept the silence for an answer. He looked down again at the form or whatever it was that he still had before him. “I see here that I have not yet completed——Tell me, who recommended me to you? In what way did you hear of——?”

  “Here it comes,” I said to myself.

  I got a grip on the lower leg of my chair with the turn of my instep. “A friend of mine. Mia was the one who told me.” Then, as though in recollection that her given name might not be enough, that he might not recognize her by that alone, “Mia Mercer,” I expanded. A trick of speech to suggest the closest intimacy.

  We looked at each other a long time, long and hard, both of us. I said to myself, “The duel is on.”

  He said, “She’s gone now, isn’t she?”

  He seemed not to know, said it as if he had heard it vaguely somewhere or other, wanted me to confirm it.

  “Yes, it was in the papers.” I said it vacantly, distrait, as if still mildly sad about it even this long after.

  “By some man named——”

  “Somebody she knew, I guess,” I said, looking down, still saddened.

  “Some man named Murray.”

  There was something almost obscene about it, having my own name thrown at me like that in a place like this. It was good he didn’t have his stethoscope to me just at that minute; he would have heard it jump.

  “Did you know him?”

  “I didn’t know anyone she knew. I just knew her.”

  He nodded, thought awhile.

  “Those she knew, in any case, are scattered to the wind,” he went on. “The fabric of her—how shall we say it?—acquaintanceship is all tattered and no good any more.” I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say to me, except that he was looking at me quite intently.

  Then he said, “Tell me, how did she come to speak of me? Were you ill at the time?”

  “Well, I suppose I must have been feeling—low, depressed.”

  “And she said——? Tell me, what were her exact words? How did she——?”

  There was something here. I had to be careful; I had to be vague; I could sense that without understanding why. “Well, it’s quite some time past. She said, ‘Why don’t you go to see Dr. Mordaunt? He might be able to do something for you.’”

  The choice of phrase seemed to be satisfactory. His eyes enlarged, then became their normal size again.

  “But it’s quite some time since. Were you working in the meantime?”

  “Oh yes, I——”

  “But you’re not at the moment?”

  I took the cue offered for what it was worth. “No, not just now——”

  “Yes, and when one doesn’t work one’s appetite—suffers,” he said in sanctimonious reflection.

  “And then these dizzy spells——” I began, to lend a little plausibility.

  He waved that aside, as though we were both too intelligent, knew too much, to waste any more time with that. That was the translation I got from the flip gesture.

  “You live alone?”

  I said yes, told him where.

  He danced the point of his pencil awhile. “Have you ever taken anything to steady your nerves?” he asked absently, upending it and looking at the le
ad closely.

  I moistened my lips, uncertain of direction. “Not that I——”

  “Not yourself? I see. Many people do, you know.”

  From a consultation this had long ago become a rambling conversation. Or was it as rambling as it seemed? Now even that dwindled; from a conversation it became just meditation.

  He seemed to be looking down. I received quite a shock, suddenly, when I saw that he wasn’t, that he was looking at me from under his thick, creased lids without seeming to.

  He leaned forward again, this time did look at the paper below him on the table. “Come back—let me see, this is Thursday—come back Saturday, two days from now.”

  Then he sort of died out, looking down.

  “At what time, Doctor?”

  “Oh, any time after dark. Ring the basement bell. In case Sophia—in case my housekeeper—is out that night I may not hear you if you come to the upstairs door.”

  So he was going to be alone and he wanted me to come after dark, when no one would be likely to see me enter! What had I said that was wrong? What had I done? What trap had I fallen into, unknowing, during that long, rambling, seemingly innocuous conversation?

  He pried apart the sliding doors with a horrid grating sound.

  The last thing he said was, “I’ll see what I can do for you then.” He gave a funny glance over one shoulder as he did so, as if to see whether anyone was around.

  I carried that away with me, memory of that self-betraying little backward look. That and a grisly, unclean sort of fear, as unclean in sensation as his office and his instruments and his person had been in contemplation. And this unshakable conviction, reiterating itself continually in my mind: “If you go back into that house again the doctor’s name may not be Mordaunt the second time; the doctor’s name may be death.”

  So I wasn’t going back, and oh, I wasn’t going back, and no, I wasn’t going back, and in between each recurrent resolve not to go back I’d see his face, Kirk’s face, or think of him, or say his name down in my heart, and when nine o’clock on Saturday came I was back; I was creeping, inching, down the darkened side street toward that darkened, waiting house. Frightened and helpless and alone, yet moving steadily forward, slow as it was; mincing, as though feeling of the ground first each time I brought my foot forward to set it down, yet getting nearer, nearer all the time.