The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  The carpeting was still on them from former days of glory but worn to a pulp and clinging to the feet almost like something spongy now. The stairs turned, and just past there I met an old woman feeling her way down. She looked like a charwoman. She came very cautiously, holding to the rail and exploring the turn of each step well with the toe of her foot before she would trust herself down. She left a tracery of alcohol hovering behind her all the way to the top.

  I heard a knell-like sound just as I gained it myself, and when I looked back she had stood an empty bottle very primly, very tidily, in the exact corner of the turn, out of harm’s way. I saw her moisten her finger tips, touch them to the side of the bottle, as if in affectionate farewell, and then go on.

  I came out on the balcony floor at the back of the seats. The “window,” the flow of ceaseless-falling light lines, was below me now, and a stout shaft of fuming white light, swimming with dust spirochete, was slanted downward over my head from a glowing eye at the rear to strike at it.

  The majority of the scattered heads up here were in the first few rows. The last row, at least on the left-hand side, held no one in it. It was divided, like all the others, into two segments by the center aisle, and the strip I had to do with was completely vacant. Two rows below a man sat audibly sleeping. Then no one else for several more rows. I sidled into it, stood over the third seat in for a minute, then changed my mind, shifted back to the second. Why, I couldn’t have told.

  I looked around me, toward the stairs where I’d just come from, and saw no one. I looked forward and watched the window into the world of make-believe for a dulled, unhappy moment or two.

  A man far down in the first row got up from his seat and made his way up the terraced aisle. He seemed not to look at me, however, and after the first quickly inquiring glance I took him for somebody simply on his way out of the theater.

  For several more moments I sat looking forward. Then suddenly a tendril of smoke drifting close to me made me turn my head, and he was standing directly behind me, almost at my shoulder, arms propped on the wooden bulkhead that walled off the seats from the open transverse beyond. He was, or seemed to be, unaware of me, eyes directed downward at the screen. He’d posted himself there so subtly that I hadn’t even detected his presence.

  I didn’t know which of us was to speak first; I hadn’t been told. The non-existent scarf could have belonged to either of us. It wasn’t late enough in the year, however, for men to be wearing scarves yet, as a general rule, so I took my cue from that.

  “Did I drop my scarf under your seat?” I mumbled half audibly.

  “That’s right,” he said and deftly made the turn of the aisle gap and settled himself in the seat beside me.

  He didn’t remove his hat. He sat leaning outward, away from me, rather than in toward me, and still kept his eyes on the screen with a dissimulation that must have been second nature to him by now, I reflected queasily.

  I fumbled in my bag and removed the last of the things Mordaunt had given me. I balanced it on the spindly seat arm between us and edged over as far away from it as possible. When next I looked it was gone, and I could have sworn he hadn’t moved at all. His arms were folded across his chest, but they hadn’t stirred.

  “I hope I never, as long as I live, set eyes on another of those little white pa——” I was thinking with devout intensity, when suddenly an unscheduled interruption took place.

  There was a single quick, muffled footfall directly behind us. I never saw who it was, for he must have remained crouched over there where the bulkhead opened into the aisle beside us. The whiteness of a hand suddenly spawned over my seat neighbor’s shoulder from behind; a voice whispered with hot urgency: “Blow! She’s a plant! I just spotted ’em coming in below!”

  Then the hand and the voice and whoever they had belonged to all disappeared alike as swiftly as they had descended on us.

  The man next to me was suddenly standing erect, his face, turned my way now, an almost luminous grimace of incandescent rage. I didn’t see his hand coming in time. It struck like a snake. The only lucky thing was he didn’t have time to close it himself; it lashed against me open. The slap echoed all over the silence like a firecracker going off, and all the somnolent heads came up higher and turned one by one. A scalding wash of pain spread out all over my face and even down my neck on that side, and my eyes watered and made me lose him for a minute.

  “Wait, give me what you were supposed to!” I cried blindly and tried to grasp at him.

  “I’ll get you for this!” I heard him hiss. And then he, too, went. The row lay empty. After a second or two of time lag my eye caught a flurry of motion, something dark against the dark, ricocheting down the tiered outside aisle, far over against the building wall itself. A door giving onto a fire escape squeaked a little, scarcely seeming to move inward at all, then settled heavily still again.

  And then nothing happened. A slap must have been a commonplace in that milieu, even against a woman’s cheek. The heads slowly turned away again, took up once more the thread of the more public drama being presented in that direction.

  I crouched there uncertainly a moment longer. Then I was on my own feet and out on the carpeted passage behind the seats, not knowing which way to turn. A plant, a plant, what was that? They? Who were they downstairs?

  I was afraid to go down those stairs now. I was even more afraid to go out the way I had seen him go, down the outside fire escape; afraid of what I might find waiting for me when I got to the bottom of it, in the dark alley it probably descended to.

  I stood there at the head of the stairs a long time, my eyes alternately on them and on the balcony seats I had left behind. No one came up. No one came near me. That bottle was still standing down there where the crone had placed it.

  I summoned up courage and started down them at last. I felt my way down almost as she had. Step by step and with both hands to the rail beside me, one following the other. How quickly you learn. How quickly you become part of the scene, fit into it.

  I was at the turn now and I must either quicken my descent or not go down at all. I mustn’t creep down like this, for I could be seen from below, from here on down.

  I found myself almost wishing there had been something left in that bottle, so I could nerve myself with it. But I had to go the rest of the way on cold courage. I braced myself and struck out. The lower floor slowly opened into view. Those same somnolent heads, like raisins studding a dark pudding. Would one or more of them suddenly rise up, come after me, as I gained a level with them?

  The steps were ticking off under me now in a quick, rippling, final descent. It carried me off them and over to the main center door. No one moved. I got out slantwise through the door, keeping it to its narrowest possible seam in order to let as little light in as I could and avoid attracting attention to myself.

  Nothing happened. No one came out after me. No one was there before me, waiting on the outside. No one at all. Not even a man reading a newspaper this time.

  No one seemed to be looking, only New York and the night and me.

  The thought that it might be dangerous to go back was slow in coming, but it came finally: dangerous to go back to where I was supposed to. Mordaunt’s house.

  In the lawful world what I had to tell might have been believed. I wasn’t in that world any more; I wasn’t dealing with it now. In the jungle they didn’t believe you. Where money was involved they would have lied to you, and they knew it, so they acted on the supposition you were lying to them. No allowances were made, no quarter given.

  But then if I didn’t go back——

  No, I had to. He’d have to believe me.

  There was nothing left of that ghastly night by the time I tottered home and barricaded myself behind the door. I couldn’t have slept if there had been. I was afraid of whom I’d meet in my sleep if I did. “Let Beulah fix you up, child; she’ll show you how.”

  I sat there holding my head in both hands—it seemed to throb a
nd burn so with remorse—an untouched glass of water with a few drops of spirits of ammonia sprinkled in it standing beside me. After a while the world switched over to sunlight again, and that made it better, made it more bearable. I drew up the shades and hooked back the curtains; I couldn’t get enough of it into the room. It seemed so healing and so cleansing. It was like God’s own soapsuds, sparkling on the panes and lathering the walls, rinsing my face and tired eyes.

  After a while I dozed, sitting there like that, fully dressed in the chair and with a pillow packed behind me, and when I woke up was when I first started to be afraid to go back.

  It would be tonight, and tonight was coming soon. Awfully soon.

  “He won’t do anything to you if you go,” I kept reassuring myself. “It’s if you don’t go that—something’s liable to happen to you.”

  And again I was overcome by the same argument that had proved so effective outside his house the second time I went there. “If you’re going to give the undertaking up now, then why did you begin it at all in the first place? You mean all last night’s terror of soul is to be for nothing? No, you’ve got to go ahead with it now, finish it out to the end, come what may.”

  Night came down like a series of curtains one behind the other. First transparent, simply filming the daylight, then deeper, so that it could scarcely peer through any more, finally black with accumulated density, blotting it out altogether.

  It was nearly time now. I couldn’t eat, and the pits of my hands were cold.

  I rose and crossed the room in the dark, and I went over to restore the curtains and shades to their normal position now that the sun was gone. Then I stopped in the act and looked intently out. I knew the look of the street by night so well already; that was the only reason I saw him there. I knew that doorway down there should not have a darkened curvature to it. It should be a straight up-and-down line, not go in and out and in again, like a projecting shoulder, then waist, then hipbone. There was someone standing in it.

  It brought back last night too vividly to mind, and perhaps for that reason rather than any current logic of disbelief I forced myself to turn away from the window. If there was someone there, it had nothing to do with me; why should it have?

  “You know it does. You and no one else. You alone, of all the dwellers on this street.”

  I sat for a while in the depths of the unlighted room, curbing continual impulses to go back and stealthily pry again.

  Someone sent by Mordaunt, to make sure I kept the appointment, didn’t abscond with the rest of his profit? It must be that; who or what else could it be?

  I said to myself, “Sometimes a car turns that lower corner down there on too wide an arc, and if its lights are on high enough their beam will flicker along that entire side of the street, wash over the walls and doorways as it swings into position. I’ve seen that happen myself. He doesn’t know that, isn’t expecting it. I do.”

  I went back to the vicinity of the window again and waited, sheltered off side to the frame.

  They seldom came. One did at last, but its lights had no force to speak of, just a dull glow.

  Then one of the kind I’d been hoping for slewed abruptly into view. It was a small truck or commercial vehicle of some kind, and it had its beams powered far above regulations. In the act of turning they threw a parabola of reflection glancing along that side. It was gone again in a moment, but it had been sufficient. It was the same principle as sheet lightning on a stormy night. It threw everything into high relief for an instant. The figure in the doorway was trapped. He stood out for a brief second or two like a leaden soldier, then was gone into the dark again.

  I turned away with a mental shrug that was insincere. I had wanted to know; now I knew. There was someone down there, and he hadn’t wanted to be seen. I’d caught the convulsive recessive movement he’d begun just as the darkness rescued him again.

  There was no other way out of the house.

  I saw that it was already past the time for me to have started for Mordaunt’s house. To put off any longer was to have the appointment lapse by omission. I was going and I knew I was. I was dreadfully afraid, but I was going.

  I thought, “I should take something with me this time.” I looked around, but I didn’t know what to take. There wasn’t anything. Then I thought, “What good would anything be, anyway, in that basement trap buried all the way back there under the house?” In the end I left as I was, empty-handed.

  I was acutely conscious of that doorway as I came out. It showed in the straight line now that it should have all along, but too late to convince me. It wasn’t directly opposite my own building entrance; it was some little distance down. My way took me past it, though the width of the street over.

  It was so deserted-looking now, so patently lifeless. Somehow I knew, though. All its pretended vacuity availed it nothing. I knew there was someone still in it. Deep within it, all the way back to the rear of it now, where he couldn’t be seen.

  It was hard to keep my face looking forward as I came abreast, then passed beyond it, but I compelled myself to. If he intended coming out at all he wouldn’t come right out at my heels. From the turn below I shot a quick glance back and over. It still showed empty. It refused to betray itself.

  I could see a bus coming in the distance, and I ran the rest of the way. Still no sign of anyone or anything. I boarded the bus, and if I was sure of nothing else, I was sure no one boarded it with me. So if any attempted trail had been in the forming it had been broken off short.

  At the other end I went down the street toward his house, and though outwardly I may have walked far more steadily, far more surely than that last time, I think if anything there was a greater fear within me. It was a different kind. No longer the half-childish fear of a dark house and a possible maniac attack without provocation. A deeper, because more plausible, fear of the rancor I might meet with on the part of the thoroughly vicious criminal whose accomplice I had made myself and whose task I had failed to perform satisfactorily.

  I turned aside and stepped down into the abyss of the areaway with the feeling of treading a quicksand whose action was delayed, was withheld, purposely to lull me, until I had crossed a certain distance over it.

  His voice struck through the basement grating at me without preamble, as it had the last time.

  “You took your time.”

  I didn’t answer.

  His hands fumbled, and the grating came undone.

  “I was about giving you up. And I would’ve hated to have to do that.” There was a humorless threat in it.

  I didn’t answer.

  He said a third thing as he stepped forward to reconnoiter. “Go ahead. You know your own way now.”

  I traveled blindly along the tunnellike basement bore like someone pacing in a dream. A dream whose foreknown outcome is doom but yet which must unfold itself without reprieve to its appointed climax.

  I couldn’t find the light, that macabre shaded light I’ve spoken of, as readily as he had. Once I thought I had it, but it glanced away again.

  Suddenly it went on, and he’d done it. He was in there already, and so close to me I jumped spasmodically and I suppose my face showed it.

  “You’re nervous, aren’t you?” he said unkindly.

  He motioned to the same packing case as that other night. “Sit down.” It was still said unkindly.

  He sat down himself, opposite me, crouched sleepily forward on his elbows. Though I didn’t see his lips move I received a mental impression of his tongue licking over them; I don’t know why.

  “Did you go to those places?”

  “Yes, I went to those places.” I’m not sure, but I think this was the first thing I’d said since I’d entered.

  I put one of the crushed nuggets on the table. “This was given to me in the cafeteria by a man who sat down——”

  “I know, I know.” A sweep of his hand stifled the details.

  “This was given to me in that bar.”

&nbs
p; Each one disappeared as the next appeared.

  “This was given to me at the night club.”

  He waited a second or two. “I think there was a fourth place, wasn’t there?”

  “Something happened there. You’d better let me tell you what happened there first.” I was starting to be frightened already before I had received any cause to be. I could feel it while I spoke. My own voice had a sort of resonance to it within my chest.

  His expression didn’t change, and if anything I liked that less than if it had.

  “You made delivery, and then somebody whispered to him; he jumped up and ran off.” He sounded as though he were mulling it over. He shook his head slightly, as if there were some flaw of motivation there. “He’s no fool; he knows what would happen to him if he——” he started to say. Then he changed that, said: “He wouldn’t do that——”

  “But he did; I even tried to hold his arm.”

  He kept looking at me. I couldn’t read the look. “About what time was this?”

  “Around three this morning.”

  His lips formed into a thin, compressed line. “Let’s go upstairs, shall we? We can talk better up there.”

  He rose and held his hand to the light, and, I suppose, because the act of darkness would have resulted if I stayed, I moved trailingly through the doorway ahead of him, my head turned his way and my eyes clinging to his face until the switch snapped and blotted it out.

  I groped my way up a darkened staircase enclosed within a shaft, more by dint of trying to remain ahead of him, clear of his oncoming tread, than through any deftness of my own. I palmed into a door standing closed above, and he wrenched it out for me, and there was the feeling of his thrusting me curtly through, though his hands failed to contact me.

  This was the back of a first-floor hall, and there was a dim light to show it.

  He opened the nearest of three doors that broke it, touched something, and it lighted to an equal duskiness with the hall. But at least darkness was banished.

  “Stay in here a minute. Don’t go out of here.” He closed the door and separated us.