The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  It was an inscrutably fitted place, so that it was impossible to tell just what its purpose was. There was an iron cot frame in it, but this bore no bedding. It was just a room, perhaps, situated behind the so-called examination room in which I had consulted him on my first visit, on the reverse side of it from the parlor in which I had waited that day.

  I listened for a moment, and he seemed to have drawn away, though I hadn’t heard any retreating footfall.

  I tried the knob, and though it circled its socket the door wouldn’t give.

  He’d locked me in there.

  Panic flurried over me, and my first instinct was to batter frenziedly against it for outlet. My clenched hands were already backed to strike, but I held them frozen. “Wait, don’t start anything. He hasn’t done anything to you yet. If you don’t provoke him you may yet be able to——”

  In the silence I could hear the dial of a telephone creaking, but then after that stopped I couldn’t hear what he said, he spoke so low.

  Each breath was drawn from me as by a pulmotor.

  I turned my head swiftly, thinking of the other door I’d seen and should have thought of sooner, the one giving into the consultation room beyond. And even as I did so I was too late; a white line sprang up around it like a ray, and a tiny white nick took the place of where its black keyhole had been until now.

  The turning on of that highly powered light in there was the first inkling I had that he was no longer at the phone. I heard the slight clatter of instruments as he shifted aside the enamel pan that held them. I remembered that same sound from the first day.

  I changed to the new direction, crouched down, and tried to look through the livid keyhole.

  He was at the washstand, but he wasn’t washing his hands this time. He was holding both hands down, seeming to draw something up through the one by means of the other. Some sort of plunger; I couldn’t tell what. I thought I saw the shimmer of glass, like a tube or rod, glint through the intricate play of his fingers, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Then his figure changed focus, blurring as it came on toward the keyhole.

  I reared, felt my way backward step by step, the ability to turn my body cataleptically denied me. I found the other doorknob, the first one, with my eyeless hands and, back still to it, pleaded twistingly to it. It still wouldn’t open. I ran toward the cot. There was no other place to go. No other barrier, no other impediment, in the little foursquare rabbit hutch.

  I flung it away from the wall and cleared a lane behind it and waded in there, covered only as high as the knees. The door was opening; the door had opened; the door had closed.

  His face told nothing. His voice was guilefully moderate, matter of fact. “There’s something coming to you. Here’s your part of it.” He was holding a bill or two in his carelessly extended hand. Lettuce for the rabbit about to be inoculated.

  I breathed hissingly.

  “Well, take it. Don’t you want it?”

  “Wait a minute. Why are you holding your other hand behind you like that? You’ve got something in it. What have you got in it?”

  He spoke as quietly as when he’d gone out; it was just the text that had altered, not the tone of voice or the expression of his face. “You cuddly little rat. You baby-faced little squealer. Come over here a minute. Come over here to me.” He actually beckoned at such a time and under such circumstances, beckoned me with fingers of his free hand in a mock-cajoling sort of way!

  “Show me your other hand. Show me what you’ve got in it.”

  He came on toward me, and I widened the canal I stood in by thrusting the cot out toward him. “Don’t come near me. What are you going to do? Stay away, do you hear me? I haven’t done anything to you.”

  “You haven’t and you won’t. I’m going to see that you don’t.”

  He moved into the channel at one end. I moved out at the other, balancing on my two hands planted against the cot frame.

  “I haven’t done anything, I tell you!”

  “No. Rocky was picked up within ten minutes after you’d fingered him at that theater last night. I just got word about it now.”

  My voice was all over the place. He was the quiet one. “I don’t even know what you mean by fingered, so how could I——?”

  “And now I suppose you’ve come here to poke it on me. Well, get this, you little she-louse. I’m in the clear. You’re the only link between me and all of them. I can be out of here in ten minutes flat. I’ve moved fast before, and I can move fast again if I have to. But I’m willing to give nine of them up to——”

  The needle was out. You couldn’t see it; you could just see the V-shaped stance of his fingers, index toward point, thumb to plunger. A low scream sobbed from me, not very shrill, more of a moan. He’d left the lane of clearance again. I re-entered it at the other end an instant after. He reversed; I did too, and this horrible Virginia reel of death took a new direction.

  “You won’t even feel this. But it’s a sure cure for your trouble. That’s what you came to me for, isn’t it? Well, I’m prescribing for you now. Sleep is what you need. Here it is here in my hand.”

  “They’ll know you did it!” I gabbled. “You’re only incriminating your——”

  “They won’t even know what was done. Morphine poisoning, my dear patient, leaves only one trace. Dilated pupils of the eyes. A drop of belladonna in each one before you’re quite gone, and even that will be taken away. Death from an unknown cause. Suppose it did take place in my house? What they suspect and what they’re able to prove in court are two different things.”

  I suddenly crouched low, shoved the entire cot frame back upon him with my entire strength. He was caught in mid-channel, equidistant from each end. It pinned him against the wall, at that most awkward point of leverage, just under the break of the knees, so that he couldn’t use them to prod it back; they were held fast. He had to bend to it to use his own hand for a minute, easily as it shifted. And the blow must have stunned his leg bones, cramped them for a minute.

  I used that minute for all it was worth. He’d locked the original opening, but there was still the door into the brightly lighted office from which he’d just come. I flung it out of the way and got in there.

  From here there was only one other way out now. Those sliding door panels giving beyond into the front room. I wrenched at the finger sockets, splintering my nails. They gave with balky resistance, and before I could widen them sufficiently he was entering at the rear behind me.

  There was that pan of instruments teetered beside me on the washstand rim. I picked it up and heaved it at him. Most of the things were light little things, short wands and what not. They sprayed out all over his chest and dropped without hurting him.

  I gave one more wrench, and there was enough space to bolt through. The minute was compressed to thirty seconds now, to less. It was dark in there. I couldn’t see my way, but I tried to remember. You went over to the left, and there was a door into the hall. If you got out through that, then the front door to the house lay straight ahead to your right.

  I did something wrong. Turned toward it on too wide a sweep. He got over to it first and slammed it, and I was trapped. The minute was up now; the minute was gone. Our forms even brushed together lightly there at the door, then separated again for the last brief time. He would have caught me even sooner, I think, except that he spared his one arm, was only grasping for me with the other.

  Something caught at the back of my leg as I twisted and turned to get away from him, and I fell floundering back on the sofa. He came down partly across me a minute later, pinning me there.

  I didn’t know how to defend myself. There was no defense. You can hope to deflect a knife; you can even manage to ward a gun aside. But this was like fending off a snake, a one-fanged snake. One strike and there was no use in further struggle.

  Dimly, in the back of my own mind, I thought I heard a whistle blow. As I had that night, walking along the street, doing his errand. This one was swi
fter, sharper, shorter, directly outside the house somewhere. I knew it wasn’t so; it wasn’t real, just some trick of returning memory churned up in the midst of this death struggle. There was a sudden lisping surge of leather scuffing on stone, as if feet were trooping up the stoop outside. Then blows against wood.

  He desisted just long enough to listen. “Well, I’ll still get you first. They can’t prove anything on me without you. They never have been able to. They never will.”

  I had my hands locked in the side fringes of his hair, one on each side of the semibald crown, as if trying to tear his skull apart by main force, but it did no good.

  He wanted to make sure of where he——He deliberately pulled down the shoulder of my dress, clawed at it until he’d forced a bare spot for his purpose, the turn of my shoulder.

  I heard the door go in. The outside one, beyond in the hall. It thudded like a wooden drum.

  “They still can’t——”

  I could sense his arm go back in the dark. I didn’t know where it was coming from, up, or down, or straight. Nor how soon, a second, two seconds, three.

  I twisted my shoulder, flung it over, narrowed it toward its opposite, as in a last convulsive shudder.

  His hand slapped up against it in a sort of raking blow. I heard something puncture the taut stuffing of the sofa with a little pock! Something wet seeped out of it, traced a stray tickling line or two over the unbroken skin of my shoulder where it met the sofa back.

  A light glowered fiercely in at us, very hard-cored and round and silver-backed, poised down at full arm’s length. It cast a pale aura all over the room. I lay there in it, and he lay prone athwart me, slowly starting to turn his head and face it with a sort of crafty, evasive delay in timing.

  My eyelids began to blink more and more rapidly, and the light blurred, swirled smaller, went out.

  I’d never fainted before. I never did again.

  In a moment I’d come back again. Not to any rescue, not to any salvation, but to an unreality as bad or worse than the nightmare that had just preceded oblivion.

  So little time had passed that it was as though a tiny segment of a progressing film had been snipped off and the continuing action had taken a short jump forward from where it had left off. Mordaunt was leaving the room, head dangling over as though his neck had been broken, though it was his own feet that supported him. There was a glint of steel from his wrist as his arm was held back for a moment by the projection of the doorframe and stayed behind him. Then it was drawn around after him and followed him out, drawing after itself in turn the arm of the man behind him that it was fastened to.

  The room was lighted up now, and I could hardly place it. It was as though I had awakened in a strange place I had never been in before. The tulip horn of the gramophone was there in the background; the same mallards were under glass on the wall. Some vintage magazine or other, of a number that had been in here for his patients to read, had fallen to the floor and fluttered open. And as someone’s foot trod unknowingly on it in passage it kicked free one of the leaves, carried it before it a short distance along the floor.

  There were men in the room, on their various faces no sign of any compunction or solicitude for me. They were all stony-faced, truculent. One stood looking at me, waiting for my eyes to find him.

  “Get up,” he said gruffly when they had.

  I forced my back away from the vise of the sofa joint. I righted my dismantled dress there where he’d wrenched it down.

  “Your name’s Alberta French,” he said curtly. He was looking at a loose-leaf memorandum pad he held in his hand that opened horizontally.

  “Yes,” I breathed low.

  “And you live at—West Sixty-eighth.”

  I said yes again.

  “Get on your feet,” he jerked at me.

  I staggered upright, thrust myself out from the sofa on one stiff arm.

  He took hold of the other in two places, at the break of the elbow and at the wrist. He held it that way, like a lever. His grip wasn’t gentle. I had to go in whichever way he went to avoid wrenching it at the arm socket.

  “Now walk straight ahead. Out through that door in front of you.”

  I said, planting unwilling feet before me staccato, at his pace, not my own, “Why are you doing this to me? Where are you taking me? He——Didn’t you see what he tried to do to me?”

  His voice was harsher by far than Mordaunt’s had been at any time from first to last. It was the impersonal harshness of official retribution, not personal animosity. “You’re under Federal arrest for the transportation and selling of narcotics.”

  I went out with my own head dangling over, as though my neck were broken, just as he had. The fox and the chicken had been caught in the same trap.

  Immediately following the last of the many times I’d been brought up before them for exhaustive questioning—or I should say the latest, for I hadn’t known then that it was going to be the last—instead of being returned to the detaining cell, I was transported from there over to the police-headquarters building by car.

  I was brought into an office, and when I saw Flood there I knew he’d had something to do with this change in the previous days’ routine.

  They turned me over to him, left me in there in his hands.

  He was rather grim about it, like a man who has performed a thankless task at no little trouble to himself and is still not entirely convinced of his own wisdom in doing so.

  “You’re being freed; did they tell you?”

  I was too numb to react much at first. I’d been in custody four days by now. “No, they didn’t. I noticed their line of questioning took a different turn the last time or so; that was all. It was more about Kirk’s trouble and what I’d been trying to do for him than this—this other thing.”

  “Well, that’s why you were brought up here. I interceded. I had a hard time convincing them. I’m no one, you know. I have no particular influence. It was just that I happened to be acquainted with certain factors in the background, in your particular case, and I put them before them. Put them before them for all I was worth, I might add. You’re not freed technically, but you’ve been released into my custody, and you won’t have to face Federal charges. Which is a good deal to be grateful for. It will be necessary for you to give evidence against this man Mordaunt, along with three other men and a colored woman, eventually, but that won’t come up for several months yet.”

  He was waspishly unsympathetic. “Don’t cry about it. You brought it on yourself.”

  I uncurled my enfolded arm and lifted my face from his desk blotter. “Can I go now?” I faltered helplessly.

  “Yes, you can go now,” he said ungraciously. “Take my advice and go home and rest up and stay out of trouble from now on. You see, this whole thing wouldn’t have happened if you’d listened to me in the first place. I told you when you were in here that day——”

  I’d risen and gone toward the door while he went on talking.

  I was still far from admirable to him. “You’ve been a very dumb person, little Mrs. Murray. I’m willing to take your innocence in this mess at its face value on faith alone, but——”

  I whirled on him from the door, almost aghast. If it did nothing else, it drove all self-pitying weakness out of me forthwith. “You don’t think I voluntarily co-operated in such a——!”

  “I happen to be inclined to believe you. But I have no actual proof, you know. You could have.”

  He opened a drawer, took out a folder or dossier of some kind. He moistened his thumb and leafed over several loose papers contained in the seam of it. “Before you go it might interest you to know that the whole undertaking was a waste of time, anyway. His name is Mordaunt, right? And what was the date of the Mercer woman’s murder? Never mind, I have it right here. May the twelfth. I took pains to look up this man’s record—he has one that goes back to when I was in knee pants myself—and here are some interesting facts that I culled from our files. The most recent of h
is arrests took place on the fifteenth of March. He was evidently arrested on suspicion of some more serious charge, but with the help of a little adroit juggling he seems to have managed to plead guilty to a lesser charge and served time for that instead. Anyway, he served sixty days on Welfare Island for disorderly conduct and a few other little odds and ends, and the date of his release is down on the records as May the fifteenth, three days after her death.” He closed the folder with a snap. “In case you still have any doubts, I’ve checked on the fingerprints and it’s the same man.”

  My chin only went down for a minute; it didn’t stay down. It came right up again, higher than before.

  “That’s what mistakes are for,” I murmured quietly, “so you’ll keep on going and not quit too easily.”

  He looked at me curiously. I don’t know, for some strange reason he seemed to like me a little better when he saw me square off like that than he had only a moment ago.

  “I like your spirit,” he admitted, “but your line of reasoning is all flooey.”

  “You can keep me from going ahead with it, I suppose, as long as I’m sort of paroled to you, as you say.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “There’s only one way you can. By having me put back in jail again.”

  “Don’t you see it’s no use? Believe me, Mrs. Murray, it’s no use. Give up this harebrained idea, quit trying——”

  “No, I won’t give up trying. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I believe, and that’s all I’ve got. Don’t take it away from me; I won’t let you.” I opened the door to go. “Why should I quit trying? Because I was wrong this time? The next time I may be right. You’re always wrong until the last time. And then when you’re right, at the end, that wipes out all the times before when you were wrong. I’m going ahead, Mr. Flood; I’m going ahead. Whether with your sanction or without it. This very next time may be the right time, the last time of all. I may be just an hour away, a block away, from him. He may be waiting just around the corner. The next time I pick up the phone he may answer; it may be his voice I hear saying ‘Hello. Who is this?’”