The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  It was not an unduly prosperous place, even of its kind. Though I was no connoisseur I could sense in its atmosphere something static, stagnant, as of an establishment keeping its head above water, no more, the moment I put my foot across the threshold.

  There were only men at the bar, but on the other side of the narrow aisle that was all it provided for ingress or egress there were tables set within head-high partitions that came out from the wall like the teeth of a comb, though far fewer, naturally. At one or two of these sat women of the type, I supposed, you would find in a place like this. Shell-like and brittle and empty inside, where they were young; like those celluloid dolls they used to sell, weighted at the bottom, so that they reared upright again no matter how often you pushed them flat. Lumpy and doughy and filled with a sort of resentful despair, where they were less than young. They were not, for one thing, young or old, of the outright demimondaine type. One bloated, stringy-haired woman was obviously drinking beer with her own husband, and they would finish up the night by beating one another around the walls of their tenement flat until the police were called.

  The last of these tables, in this case, was already occupied, though I had not been definitely instructed to seek the last in here as I had in the cafeteria, to the best of my recollection. The one before it, however, was vacant, and I sidled into the rather difficult crevice between fastened-down bench and clamped-down table. The rather bovine, stupidly protracted looks from the sitters at the bar that had formed a necklace of ogling strung out the entire length of the place dropped off one by one like beads falling away, until at last I had been accepted within the establishment without further visual inquiry.

  The barman had a helper for the tables, and he came over to me. I said, “I’m waiting for a call,” and he turned away again without resentment.

  A moment after I found out I’d forgotten the name I was to answer to, and a brief flurry of fright came over me. Then I quickly reassured myself that wouldn’t be crucial in any case; I would be reminded of it when the call came, and it was hardly likely there would be two such calls in a single night to an unaccompanied woman in a hole in the wall such as this. And as I relaxed from the hunched-over position across the edge of the table that I had inadvertently thrown myself into it came partially back to me of its own accord, as is often the way with the mind when tension is relieved. It had been something with an R, hadn’t it? Rice, I thought. Yes, that was it.

  It was very hard to know where to look, for on one side of me there was just the blankness of the wall, and if I looked out on the other side I might meet one of their looks and invite intrusion. There was nothing but the shellacked pine-board panel opposite me to direct my eyes at. Over it would occasionally peer a little blue haze, from a freshly lighted cigarette, drifting slowly over to my side. And once a curious object, like the black triangular fin of a fish, thrust briefly above it, was gone again. I knew what it was; the uptilted wing on a woman’s hat. On it presently, the panel, I made out a faint tracing, still visible though it had been shellacked over. Somebody, some long-forgotten night ago, had once gouged out his or her initials with the point of a knife or the tine of a fork or perhaps even the point of a pin. Like children do on tree bark. These were older children, though; infinitely sadder, wiser children.

  Where was he now, or she? Dead? Still living? Richer? Poorer? Probably not. You don’t change; only in the storybooks. Did he guess that some night a woman would sit here, in the same place where he’d been, carrying something in her bag that, though it was death to everyone else, she hoped would help her gain her husband’s life back?

  The bar assistant was standing beside me again, having grown impatient, I supposed, that I was taking this long to order anything.

  He leaned over confidentially, said: “Excuse me, are you Flo Ryan?”

  That was the name; now that I’d heard it I remembered it, as I’d known I would.

  I told him yes, I was.

  “There’s a party calling you in the second booth. Straight back at the end there.”

  I hadn’t even heard it ring. These partitions might have helped deflect it. I sidled outward as inconspicuously as I could and straightened once I was clear of the bench and table and went back there.

  There was somebody already talking in the first booth, through some unfortunate mishap of coincidence, and this propinquity made me uneasy; I remembered only too well how highly audible everything is through those lathlike inner partitions. I glimpsed the turn of a neck, the back curve of a hatbrim as I passed the glass.

  The bar helper had left the receiver off, waiting for me. I drew the slide closed and picked the receiver up with five sticks of ice that would scarcely bend at the middle.

  There was no sound. I didn’t know what to say. “This is Flo Ryan,” I said smotheredly. I used my free hand to contain the sound still farther.

  A man’s voice said, “Is the light on in there with you?”

  I looked. It was so pale I’d hardly noticed.

  “If it is, reach up and give it a turn.”

  I reached up and twisted it and it went out. I wondered how he’d known; then I remembered they went on automatically as you closed the door in most pay booths.

  He said, “Okay, that’s all. Put what you’ve got in the coin-return slot. Then hang up and go back to your table. You know what to do. Count ten and come back after something you forgot. Don’t let anyone beat you back to the booth.”

  I hung up. I opened my bag and put one of the packets into the coin-return slot. Then I came out. The adjoining booth was still occupied, but I hadn’t said enough at my end to give anyone who was listening an inkling.

  I slumped back at my table. I counted, and with each numeral there came a sort of shudder, as if it had been a death knell. Then I fumbled in my bag and pretended to miss something, a coin or a lipstick or a handkerchief. I got up and went back a second time.

  There was darkness outside and the bite of open air. It was a walled-in alley that ran up to the street.

  The first booth now yawned open and empty too. And yet no one had followed me back into the bar. I went into the one I’d been in a moment ago and probed the coin slot with two fingers. The packet was gone, but there was one of those same layered wedges of spongy currency, this time with a rubber band about it, as I’d received at the cafeteria.

  I closed my bag on it, and then I came out and looked around. The narrow lane the booths looked out upon widened a little just past where they were, then ended as it widened. There were three doors there, two the doors of comfort rooms and a third one that had no designation to it. I went to this, hesitated a moment, then reached out and opened it, as if I had lost my bearings and mistaken it for one of the others.

  I turned back the other way. An odor of cigar smoke, only freeing itself now at last, hovered about the vacant booth adjoining the one I had been in. I shivered uncontrollably, as though there were some sort of malign miasma to be detected in it, as I hurried past.

  I didn’t stop at my former table when I had reached it; I kept on toward the front, my frightened steps quickening all the time until I had emerged from the place almost at a terrified run.

  Not too quickly, though, to catch the diagnosis offered by one barman to the other as they stared after me curiously. “He musta changed his mind about where he’s meeting her.”

  I kept running for several doorways afterward, as though the feel of the air as I coursed through it were cleansing me like a tide. Then I forced myself to slacken and bridled my instinctive repugnance to a quick walk carrying me away from there.

  My emergence, had anyone been watching or waiting for it, would have been sudden enough to take them by surprise. In one of the near-by enshrouded doorways, as I hastened obliviously past, I caught the lumpy outlines of two men who had been standing there as if conferring. The little red dart of a cigarette was quickly shifted rearward out of sight, as if behind someone’s person, but not soon enough to strike out at my eye in pa
ssing.

  I looked back once, from beyond the next crossing, simply to reassure myself, but neither one had come into view, so their being sheltered there had had nothing to do with me.

  Dancers were wavering in a tight, lashed-together cluster on a small mat of floor with a colored spotlight bearing down at each end to light it, and the rest was a zone of murky dusk. They undulated like a form of marine life seen through rippling apple-green and mollusk-purple water. None could displace the others; they were so tightly packed together, and each in the same order as before would come around again in due course, but long after. It was like the turning of an infinitely slow, clotted wheel pushed by droves of chained slaves.

  I came in. I went toward this pyre of green and magenta flaming in the darkness.

  There is something abysmally sad about all such group dancing late at night; it is like a publicly performed ritual to mortality, and I found it grimly melancholy over and above the grim melancholy of my own errand. A bacchanalia at fixed prices. The never-ending, never-succeeding attempt to hold pain, despair, death at bay for a little while. A little while longer.

  I remembered, for some strange reason, that night clerk at one of the hotels to which I’d gone looking for Marty, and the macabre cast of his eyes. “O God,” I thought, “there is such a thing as seeing too much. As seeing too much and too clearly.”

  I lurched soddenly into the first vacant chair at hand, and a woman who had been sitting there with her shoulder to it turned and said, “There’s someone there.”

  She meant it belonged to one of the dancers.

  “I know,” I said, without even looking at her. I shaded my eyes with my hand, but ripples of green and purple crept through the seams of my fingers nevertheless. “Just let me rest a minute. I’ll get right up again.”

  The music stopped, and the laboring wheel stopped with it. They clapped, holding their hands up over their heads, for there was no room to clap them down below at body level. And the music began again, pushing back their fear of dying for a few minutes more.

  I got up and I skirted around the outside of them, having to squeeze my way through between their backs and the nearest tables, they were so compressed. A seated man reached out to catch my hand as I brushed past him, but I threw it forward and he was too late.

  I opened the door and went in.

  It was deathly quiet for a minute, with the suddenness of an inverted explosion. I saw myself coming forward in a warped mirror, so that I shook a little in the middle. There was an effluvium of cheap perfumery in the air but a degree above the rancid. There was a bulky colored woman sitting on a chair, her skin the color of dark maple sugar. She had been looking idly at the fingers of her own hands, inert in her lap, when I first came in. Telling them off against one another but without mathematical purpose. She rose beside me with a sort of easygoing laboriousness as I stopped before the mirror.

  “Get you something, child?”

  There wasn’t a mean line in her face. And yet how reliable is a face anyway? And she spoke in the softest, most dulcet, most lulling tones I’d ever heard from a human throat. Benign was the word for her. Benign and motherly and comforting. Showing that nature sometimes does copy art. For here in New York, and of New York, and probably having never been out of it in her entire life, she was par excellence the broad-bosomed, yearning Southern mammy of the songs and the farina posters.

  I said, “Are—are you Beulah?”

  “I’ve heard myself called that, child. ’Tain’t rightly my name, but you just go ’head and call me that if you’ve a mind to. There’s been others that have.”

  My other hand roamed to the handbag I already held in one. “Well, I was—I was told to ask for——”

  She said as though she were soothing some fretful pickaninny tugging away at her skirts, “Not out here, child. That door opens straight in. Here, you come in here. Beulah’ll show you.”

  She took it from me and went out.

  I heard her opening something: her own clothes locker, most likely. I took a step forward that she must have sensed rather than heard, for I was scarcely aware of doing it myself. “No, don’t come out, child. You just stay there a minute more. Beulah won’t be long.”

  The locker closed again, and keys jingled lightly, blanketed under a skirt.

  I went back to the mirror again, still quivering at the middle. But now quivering in other places as well that didn’t reflect. She had placed things on the glass slab below it that I might want to use. The money was there between comb and soiled, pancakelike puff. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it for a minute, just ran a little cold water and kept trying to wipe off one hand under it, as though it were——

  She said, “Don’t leave nothing behind that belongs to you, child. So many folks are always doing that.”

  I caught her studying me with a sort of indulgent fondness. She placed one hand on my shoulder maternally, the other on the fritterlike puff. “My, you’re a pretty little thing. You must be just a baby. Here, let Beulah fix you up; she’ll show you how.”

  I squirmed suddenly from under her hand and struck the puff aside, so that it exploded into a cloud of white haze. I backed all the way across the place, still shaking in the middle in the mirror, this time with aversion. “Don’t touch me! You’re—you’re a monster! You ought to be——!”

  She didn’t show any resentment. I don’t think she knew what it was to feel anger. She stood there looking so benign, smiling after me so indulgently. “Bless your little heart,” she kept crooning, as though she were pronouncing a benediction; “bless your little heart.”

  I effaced her with a single back sweep of the door, like you wipe a smirch off glass.

  There is nothing more horrid in crime than the failure to regard it as crime.

  They were still dancing, turning slowly from green to purple, from purple back to green, like sloppy colors that run into one another. They were chanting in unison now as they danced, and that made it even more horrible.

  “Dance, dance, dance, little lady,

  Life is fleeting to the rhythm beating

  Through your mind.”

  I beat my way out around their massed fringes, actually beat with flailing arms and fists, and they scarcely noted it. The music was a local anesthetic, numbing their backs and shoulder blades.

  “Oh, Kirk, what am I doing here?” shot up through me like a rocket of dazzling sanity that went right out again, but while it lasted it sent me running full-tilt down the entryway to the sanctuary of the open.

  There was a man there, reading his paper, to one side of the entrance as I rounded the turn, so close I almost grazed him. He was holding it up very high and very close to him. I had a strange optical illusion of just-then-completed motion, as if he’d been holding it lower, had just raised it that very instant to where it was now; I don’t know why.

  The light wasn’t very good, and at another time I might have wondered why he’d choose such a place. But I didn’t then.

  He must have heard the little sob of gratitude I gave, I passed so close to him, but he was too intent to notice.

  I hurried down the street, and the intermittent sign back there behind me kept getting smaller each time it flashed on. Like this:

  MIMI CLUB

  Mimi Club

  mimi club

  I could tell because I kept looking back repeatedly, almost in synchronization with it each time it flashed on, as though fearful the spirit of disembodied evil itself would materialize and come after me out of that place.

  But it didn’t. Nothing did. That casual bystander stood motionless there to the last, lost in his newspaper, unable to tear himself from it. That was all.

  Once I thought I heard a faint whistle somewhere back there behind me. Not a mechanical whistle, one pursed by lips. I couldn’t tell from where, to where, for what reason, or what meaning it had had. Nor even if there really had been one at all. It didn’t come again. A thing like that didn’t alarm me. The night is
full of such sounds. I had my own private terrors to contend with.

  And this they called the Gem Theater, and it had a history, a past, I suppose, like men and buildings all do. Once tight-waisted ladies in ostrich-plume hats must have stepped from high-bodied, square-topped limousines to attend opening nights here. Then later, for weary seasons, lines of indifferent, underdressed girls had pranced back and forth across its stage, four, five, six times a day. Then it had outlived even that. Now it was senile, nearing the death that awaits even piles of stone.

  Now homeless strays wandered in here to sleep and have the soles of their feet kicked awake by the ushers at regular intervals and sleep again until the next time they came by.

  It never closed. Continually, throughout the night and throughout the day and around to the night again, lines of hissing, spitting, bluish motes given off by the livid screen ran downward in the darkness like rain, and cracked, mechanical voices, sounding just like voices talking outside in a rain, echoed hollowly through it. This was the conversation of ghosts in every sense of the word, for even the photographed lips that uttered the phrases were never even with them, moved long after or long before.

  I stopped and bought a ticket for twenty-five cents. They had a man in the booth. They weren’t allowed to use girls this late at night. Another man took the ticket from me at the inner entrance, and that ended the formalities of admission.

  I went into the dark and glimpsed the pale blue opening the screen made in it, like a window, ahead of me, and a scattering of somnolent heads, buried low among the seat backs. Then I turned aside and went up the stairs that led to the balcony. The branch on the left-hand side, for there were two, facing one another. He’d said the left-hand side of the balcony.