FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum

by Cornell Woolrich

  I cut diagonally away from the house, to get out of sight of the roadway that fronted it and bisected the woods all the way to Ferndale. It took a turn, however, halfway between the two points, so going through the woods was really a short-cut.

  Within five minutes after I had left the kitchen-door, and less than a quarter of an hour since Thelma had left the house all told, the first skinny saplings closed around me and hid me from sight.

  By a quarter to twelve the trees were starting to thin out again, this time in front of me, and the lights of Ferndale were glimmering through them. I was half-shot and my feet were burning, but it was worth it; I hadn’t seen a living soul—and what was more important, not a living soul had seen me. I’d kept from getting lost and going around in a circle, which could have happened to me quite easily in those woods, by always managing to keep the highway to Ferndale parallel with me on my right. Even when I was out of sight of it, an occasional car whizzing by gave it away to me. Otherwise, I might very well have done a Babe-in-the-Woods act and come out again where I started from. I’d opened the parcel and retied it again on my way. Took out the two slugs and the bloody rag and buried them in three separate places.

  The clothes themselves were too bulky to bury with my bare fingernails, and I wasn’t just going to leave them under a stone or anything. Nor could I risk putting a match to them and burning them—the light might have given me away to someone. The safest thing was to keep them with me and get rid of them long afterwards at my leisure.

  Ferndale wasn’t much more than a crossroads, but the interstate buses stopped there. I stopped for a minute and brushed myself off as well as I could before I showed out in the open. I looked respectable enough, but that was almost a drawback in itself.

  A well-dressed guy dropping down out of nowhere at midnight to board a bus, without a through ticket, wasn’t really the most unnoticeable thing in the world. But I had no choice in the matter. Nor very much time to make up my mind. The last one through was sometime between twelve and one. I decided, however, not to buy a Middleburg ticket from here but ride right through past it to the end of the line, and then double back to Middleburg from that end in a couple of days. That would make the trail a little harder to pick up—just in case.

  As for the sun-glasses, which I’d been carrying in my pocket, I decided against them altogether. That was the one detail, it seemed to me, about which Thelma hadn’t shown very good judgment. No one in Ferndale knew me in the first place, and they’d only attract attention instead of lessening it. People don’t wear those things in the middle of the night, no matter how weak their eyes are supposed to be.

  I straightened my shoulders and strolled casually out of the trees into the open, past an outlying cottage or two, dead to the world at this hour, and onto the single stretch of paved sidewalk that Ferndale boasted. A quick-lunch place was open and blazing with light, and the bus depot was down at the far end. There was a small but up-to-date little waiting-room there, washrooms, a magazine-stand, etc. No one around but the colored porter and an elderly man who looked like he was waiting to meet somebody getting off the incoming bus.

  I went up to the ticket-window as casually as I could and rapped on the counter a couple of times. Finally the porter called out, “Johnson! Somebody at the wicket!” and the ticket-seller came out of the back someplace.

  I said, “Gimme a through ticket to Jefferson.” That was the neighboring state capital, terminus of this line.

  He said, “I don’t know if I can get you a seat at this hour; usually pretty full up. You shoulda put in a reservation a-head— There’s a six-o’clock bus, though.”

  “Lissen,” I said, looking him in the eye, “I gotta get home. Whaddya think I’m going to do, sit around here all night waiting for the morning bus?”

  He called over my shoulder to the elderly gent, who was reading a paper, “You meeting somebody on the next bus, mister?”

  The old fellow said, “Yep, my nevvew’s coming down on it—”

  “That’s that, then,” he said to me indifferently. “’Leven eighty.”

  “When’s it get in?” I asked, pocketing my change.

  “Ten minutes,” he said, and went back inside again.

  I was down at the quick-lunch filling up on hot dogs when the bus slithered in. I picked up my package and went up toward it. A young fellow of high-school age was getting off and being greeted by the elderly gent. I showed my ticket and got on.

  Its lights were off and most of the passengers were sprawled out asleep. The ticket-seller had been right: there was only a single vacant seat in the whole conveyance, the one that the kid had just got out of! It was a bum one on the aisle, too.

  My seat-mate, by the window, had his hat down over his nose and was breathing through his mouth. I didn’t pay any attention to him, reached up and shoved my bundle onto the rack overhead, sat back and relaxed. The driver got on again, the door closed, and we started off with a lurch.

  My lightweight bundle hadn’t been shoved in far enough in the dark: the motion of the bus promptly dislodged it and it toppled down across the thighs of the man next to me. He came to with a nervous start and grunted from under his hat-brim.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “didn’t mean to wake you—”

  He shoved his hat back and looked at me. “Why, hullo, Cook!” he said. “Where you going at this hour of the night?” And held his hand spaded at me.

  A couple of years went by, with my face pointed straight ahead and ice-water circulating in my veins. There wasn’t very much choice of what to do about it. Even if the bus had still been standing still with its door open, which it wasn’t any more, it wouldn’t have done any good to jump off it. He’d already seen me.

  And to try to pass the buck and tell him to his face he had the wrong party, well what chance had I of getting away with that, with our shoulders touching, even though it was dark inside the bus? I couldn’t stop it from getting light in a few hours, and there wasn’t any other seat on the bus. All I’d succeed in doing would be snubbing him, offending him, and making him start thinking there must be something phony afoot; in other words, indelibly impressing the incident upon his memory.

  Whereas if I took it in my stride, lightly, maybe I could keep it from sinking in too deeply; maybe I could do something about the timing to blur it a little, make him think later on that it was the night before and not tonight that he’d ridden with me on a bus. It had to be the night before; it couldn’t be the same night that I was supposed to be bumping myself off down in the cellar back at Copeland Drive!

  “Well, for the luvva Pete, Sherrill!” I said with shaky cordiality. “Where you going yourself at this hour of the night?” I shook his mitt, but there was less pressure now on his side than mine.

  “Y’acted like y’didn’t know me for a minute,” he complained, but rapidly thawed out again. “What’d you get on way the hell out at Ferndale for?” he said.

  But that one had to be squelched at all costs, no matter how unconvincing it sounded. After all, he’d definitely been asleep when they pulled into Ferndale, he couldn’t have seen who got on there.

  “I didn’t. What’s the matter with you?” I said in surprise. “I changed seats, come back here from up front, that’s all.” There was a little girl holding one of the front seats in her own right, but she was asleep with her head on her mother’s lap; it looked like the seat was vacant from where we were. “He’ll forget about it by the time she straightens up in the morning—let’s hope,” I thought.

  He seemed to forget it then and there. “Funny I missed seeing you when I got on,” was all he said. “I was the last one in; they even held it for me a minute—” He offered me a cigarette, took one himself, seemed to have no more use for sleep. “Where you heading for, anyway?” he asked.

  “Jefferson, I said.”

  “That’s funny,” he said, “I am too!”

  If he could have heard the things I was saying inside myself about him at the moment,
he would have let out a yell and probably dived through the window, glass and all. “How come?” I said, between unheard swear-words.

  I knew it would be my turn right after his, and I was so busy shaping up my own explanation, I only half-heard his. Something about the manager phoning him at the last minute after he’d already gone home that afternoon, to pinch-hit for our store’s buyer, who’d been laid up with the flu, and look after some consignments of neckties that were waiting down there and badly needed in stock. “What’s taking you down there?” he asked, as I knew he would.

  I told him I had to see a specialist, that I’d been below par for some time and none of the docs back home had seemed able to do a thing for me.

  “When you going back?” he wanted to know.

  “’Morrow afternoon,” I said. “Be home in time for supper—” I had to be “back” by then; I couldn’t hope to fog him on the time element by more than twenty-four hours. That I’d even be able to do that much was highly doubtful, but I might just get away with it.

  “That’s just about when I’ll be going back, too,” he said chummily. “Be back at work Friday morning.”

  I answered with careful emphasis: “Whaddya mean, Friday? The day after tomorrow’ll be Thursday. Tonight’s Tuesday.”

  “No,” he said innocently, “you’ve got your dates mixed. Tonight’s Wednesday.”

  This went on for about five minutes between us, without heat of course. I finally pulled my horns in when he offered: “Wait, I’ll ask the driver, he ought to be able to straighten us out—”

  “Never mind, guess you’re right,” I capitulated. I wasn’t keen on attracting the driver’s attention to myself in any shape, form, or manner. But I’d done what I wanted to: I’d succeeded in conditioning Sherill’s mind. Later he wouldn’t be sure whether it was Wednesday or not, when he thought back to tonight.

  Right on top of that came a honey. “Whaddya say we split expenses while we’re there?” he offered. “Share the same hotel room.”

  “What do I need a hotel room for?” I said shortly. “I told you I’m going back on the afternoon bus!”

  “Hell,” he said, “if you’re as rundown as you say you are, funny you should be willing to go without sleep a whole night! We don’t get into Jefferson till seven. You got a before-breakfast appointment with your doctor?”

  The skepticism in his voice had to be nipped before it got steam up, I could see; the only way seemed to be by falling in with his suggestion. I could let him start back alone, pretend my appointment had been postponed until afternoon and I had to take a later bus. Technically, even one of those could get me home in time for my own suicide.

  We had our breakfasts together at the bus depot and then we checked in at a hotel down the street called the Jefferson. I let him sign first, and stalled shaking a clot out of the pen until he’d already started toward the elevator. Then I wrote “Ned Baker” under his name, “Frisco.” That was far enough away—a big enough place to assure anonymity. I’d met him en route; that was all. I wasn’t going to do it to him right here in this hotel, anyway, and there was no earthly reason for him to take another look at that register in checking out, nor for the clerk to mention me by name in his presence; we’d paid in advance on account of our scarcity of baggage.

  He asked for a ten-thirty call and hung a “Do not disturb” on the door when we got up to the room. Then we turned in, one to a bed. “I’m dead,” was the last thing he yawned.

  “You betcha sweet life you are, brother!” I thought grimly. He dropped off into a deep, dreamless sleep—his last one. I knew I was safe enough while I had him right with me, and until he got ready to start back; I wasn’t going to do it in this hotel room anyway. So I just lay there on my back staring up at the ceiling, waiting, waiting. The wings of the death-angel were spread over us in that room; there was the silence of the grave.

  The phone-peal, when it came, shattered it like a bomb. I felt good, because the time was drawing shorter now. This new self of mine seemed to be agreeing with me. “Toss you for the shower,” I offered.

  “Go ahead,” he stretched, “I like to take my time.”

  It was a little thing like that changed my plans, brought it on him even quicker. Just before I turned on the water I heard him open and close the door. He called in, “Gee, pretty liberal! They hand you a morning paper compliments of the management in this place!”

  When I came out he was sitting there on the bed with it spread out alongside him. He wasn’t looking at it, he was looking at me; he was holding his head as though he’d been waiting for me to show up in the bathroom doorway. There were three white things there on that bed, but it was his face that was whiter even than the pillows or the paper.

  “What’re you looking at me like that for?” I said gruffly, and then my own got white too.

  He began shrinking away from me along the edge of the bed. He said: “They found your body in the cellar of your house—last night at eleven—you committed suicide. It’s here, on the first page of this Jefferson paper—”

  I dropped the towel and picked the paper up, but I didn’t look at it; I was watching him over the top of it. He was shaking all over. He said, “Who—was that? Who’d you do it to?”

  “This is a mistake,” I said furrily. “They’ve got me mixed up with somebody else. Somebody by the same name, maybe—”

  His back was arched against the headboard of the bed by now, as if he couldn’t get far enough away from me. He said, “But that’s your address there—25 Copeland Drive—I know your address! It even tells about your working for the store—it gives your wife’s name, Thelma—it tells how she found your body, with your face all eaten away with lye—” I could see beads of sweat standing out in a straight line across his forehead. “Who was that, Cook? It must have been—somebody! My God, did you—?”

  I said, “Well, look at me! You see me here with you, dontcha? You can see it’s not me, cantcha?” But that wasn’t what he was driving at, and I knew it as well as he did. He knew I was alive, all right; what he wanted to know was who was dead.

  I don’t know what the outcome would have been, if he hadn’t given himself away by starting to dress in that frightened, jerky way—snatching at his clothes as if he was afraid of me, trying to stay as far out of my way as he could while he struggled getting his things on. I suppose it would have happened anyway, before I would have let him go back to our own town, knowing what he now did. But not right then, not right there.

  I told myself, coldly, as I watched him fumbling, panting, sweating to get into his things in the least possible time, “He’s going straight out of here and give me away! It’s written all over him. He won’t even wait till he gets back tonight—phone them long distance right from here, or else tip the cops off right here in Jefferson. Well—he’s not going to get out that door!”

  The phone was between the two beds. He was bent over on the outside of his, which was nearer the door, struggling with his laces. What was holding him up was that in his frenzied haste he’d snarled them up into a knot. The door didn’t worry me as much as the phone. I moved around, naked, into the aisle between the two beds, cutting him off from it.

  “Why all the rush?” I asked.

  “I gotta hustle and get after those ties,” he said in a muffled voice. He couldn’t bring himself to look around at me, rigidly kept his head turned the other way.

  I moved up closer behind him. My shadow sort of fell across him, cutting off the light from the window. “And what’re you going to do about what you just read in the paper?”

  “Why, nothing,” he faltered. “I—I guess like you said, it’s just some kind of mistake—” His voice cracked into a placating little laugh; you wouldn’t have known what it was by the sound of it, though. And the last thing he ever said was to repeat, “Nothing—nothing at all, really.”

  “You’re blamed tooting you’re not,” I rasped. I don’t know if he even heard me. I suddenly pulled him down flat on his ba
ck, by the shoulders, from behind. I had a last flash of his face, appalled, eyes rolling, staring up at mine. Then the two pillows were over it, soft, yielding, and I was pressing them down with my whole weight.

  Most of the struggle, of course, was in his legs, which had been hanging down free over the side of the bed. They jolted upward to an incredible height at first, far higher than his head, then sank all the way back to the floor again, and after that kept teetering upward and downward like a seesaw between bed-level and the floor.

  It was the very fact that they were loose like that that prevented his throwing me off him. He was off-balance, the bed ended just under his hips, and he couldn’t get a grip on the floor with his heels. As for his arms, they were foreshortened by the pressure of the big pillows like a bandage. He only had the use of them below the elbows, couldn’t double them back on themselves far enough to get at my face, claw as he might. I kept my face and neck arched back just beyond their reach, holding the pillows down by my abdomen in the center and by the pressure of my shoulders and splayed arms on each end.

  The bedsprings groaned warningly once or twice of approaching doom. Outside of that there wasn’t a sound in the room but my own breathing.

  The leg-motion was the best possible barometer. It quickened to an almost frenzied lashing as suffocation set in, then slowed to a series of spasmodic jerks that would slacken inevitably to a point of complete motionlessness. Just before it had been reached, I suddenly reared back and flung the pillows off, one each way. His face was contorted to the bursting-point, his eyes glazed and sightless, but the fingers of his upturned hands were still opening and closing convulsively, grabbing at nothing; he was unmistakably still alive, but whether he could come back again or would succumb anyway in a minute or two more was the question. It was important to me to beat his heart to the final count.

  I dragged him off the bed, around the second bed, and got him over to the window. I hoisted him up, turned him toward it, and balanced him lightly with one arm against my side, as if I was trying to revive him. I looked, and I looked good. The room was on the fourteenth floor, and we’d taken one of the cheaper ones; it gave onto an air-shaft, not the street. There were, probably, windows all the way down, under this one—but the point was, there weren’t any opposite; that side was blank. No one could look in here.