He turned aimlessly back along them, light still on. He stopped parallel to the corner of the house, strengthened the beam’s focus by bringing the torch down closer to the ground. “Here’s something else,” Bliss heard him say. “Funny how you can notice every little thing in this fine floury dust. His front left tire had a patch on it, and a bad one, too. See it? You can tell just what they did. Alden evidently ran the car out of the shed alone, ahead of his wife. She got in here at the side of the house, to save time, instead of going out the front way; they were going down the road the other way, anyway. His wheel came to rest with the patch squarely under it. That’s why it shows so plain in this one place. Then he took his brake off and the car coasted back a little with the tilt of the ground. When he came forward again, the position of his wheel diverged a little, missed erasing its own former imprint. Bet they have trouble with that before the night’s over.”
He spoke as though it were just a trivial detail. But is anything, Bliss was to ask himself later, a trivial detail?
“Come on,” Stillman concluded, pocketing his light, “let’s go get the law and see what it looks like on the inside.”
The constable’s name was Cochrane, and they finally located him at his own home. “Evening,” Stillman introduced himself, “I’m Stillman of the city police. I was wondering if there’s some way we could get a look inside that Alden house. Their—er—stepdaughter has disappeared down in the city; she was supposed to have started for here, and this is just a routine check. Nothing against them. They seem to be out, and we have to make the next bus back.”
Cochrane plucked at his throat judiciously. “Well, now, I guess I can accommodate you, as long as it’s done in my presence. I’m the law around here, and if they’ve got nothing to hide, there’s no reason why they should object. I’ll drive ye back in my car. This feller here your subordinate, I s’pose?”
Stillman said, “Um,” noncommittally, favored Bliss with a nudge. The constable would have probably balked at letting a man already wanted by the police into these people’s house, they both knew, even if he was accompanied by a bona fide detective.
He stopped off at his office first to get a master key, came back with the remark: “This ought to do the trick.” They were back at the Alden place once more inside of ten minutes, all told, from the time they had first left it.
Cochrane favored them with a sly grimace as they got out and went up to the house. “I’m sort of glad you fellers asked me to do this, at that. Fact is, we’ve all been curious about them folks ourselves hereabouts for a long time past. Kind of unsociable; keep to themselves a lot. This is as good a time as any to see if they got any skeletons in the closet.”
Bliss shuddered involuntarily at the expression.
The constable’s master key opened the door without any great difficulty, and the three of them went in.
They looked in every room in the place from top to bottom, and in every closet of every room, and not one of the “skeletons” the constable had spoken of turned up, either allegorical or literal. There wasn’t anything out of the way, and nothing to show that anything had ever been out of the way, in this house.
In the basement, when they reached it, were a couple of sagging, half-empty bags of cement in one corner, and pinkish traces of brick dust and brick grit on the floor, but that was easily accounted for. “Left over from when he was putting up that wall along the roadside a while back, I guess,” murmured Cochrane.
They turned and went upstairs again. The only other discovery of any sort they made was not of a guilty nature, but simply an indication of how long ago the occupants had left. Stillman happened to knuckle a coffeepot standing on the kitchen range, and it was still faintly warm from the residue of liquid left in it.
“They must have only just left before we got here,” he said to Bliss. “Missed them just by minutes.”
“Funny; why did they wait until after dark to start on a long trip like that? Why didn’t they leave sooner?”
“That don’t convict them of anything, just the same,” Stillman maintained obdurately. “We haven’t turned up a shred of evidence that your wife ever saw the inside of this house. Don’t try to get around that.”
The local officer, meanwhile, had gone outside to put some water in his car. “Close the door good after you as you come out,” he called out to them.
They were already at the door, but Bliss unaccountably turned and went back inside again. When Stillman followed him a moment later, he was sitting there in the living-room raking his fingers perplexedly through his hair.
“Come on,” the detective said, as considerately as he could, “let’s get going. He’s waiting for us.”
Bliss looked up at him helplessly. “Don’t you get it? Doesn’t this room bother you?”
Stillman looked around vaguely. “No. In what way? What’s wrong with it? To me it seems clean, well kept, and comfortable. All you could ask for.”
“There’s something about it annoys me. I feel ill at ease in it. It’s not restful, for some reason. And I have a peculiar feeling that if I could figure out why it isn’t restful, it would help to partly clear up this mystery about Smiles.”
Stillman sliced the edge of his hand at him scornfully. “Now you’re beginning to talk plain crazy, Bliss. You say this room isn’t restful. The room has nothing to do with it. It’s you. You’re all tense, jittery, about your wife. Your nerves are on edge, frayed to the breaking point. That’s why the room don’t seem restful to you. Naturally it don’t. No room would.”
Bliss kept shaking his head baffledly. “No. No. That may sound plausible, but I know that isn’t it. It’s not me, it’s the room itself. I’ll admit I’m all keyed up, but I noticed it already the other night when I wasn’t half so keyed up. Another thing: I don’t get it in any of the other rooms in this house; I only get it in here.”
“I don’t like the way you’re talking; I think you’re starting to crack up under the strain,” Stillman let him know, but he hung around in the doorway for a few minutes, watching him curiously, while Bliss sat there motionless, clasped hands hanging from the back of his neck now.
“Did you get it yet?”
Bliss raised his head, shook it mutely, chewing the corner of his mouth. “It’s one of those things; when you try too hard for it, it escapes you altogether. It’s only when you’re sort of not thinking about it that you notice it. The harder I try to pin it down, the more elusive it becomes.”
“Sure,” said Stillman with a look of sympathetic concern, “and if you sit around in here brooding about it much more, I’ll be taking you back with me in a straitjacket. Come on, we’ve only got ten more minutes to make that bus.”
Bliss got reluctantly to his feet. “There it goes,” he said. “I’ll never get it now.”
“Ah, you talk like these guys that keep trying to communicate with spirits through a ouija board,” Stillman let him know, locking up the front door after them. “The whole thing was a wild-goose chase.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Well, what’d we get out of it?”
“Nothing. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t around here waiting to be seen. It’s just that we’ve missed seeing it, whatever it is.”
“There’s not a sign of her around that house. Not a sign of her ever having been there. Not a sign of violence.”
“And I know that, by going away from here, we’re turning our backs on whatever there is to be learned about what became of her. We’ll never find out at the other end, in the city. I nearly had it, too, when I was sitting in there. Just as I was about to get it, it would slip away from me again. Talk about torture!”
Stillman lost his temper. “Will you lay off that room! If there was anything the matter with it, I’d notice it as well as you. My eyes are just as good, my brains are just as good. What’s the difference between you and me?” The question was only rhetorical.
“You’re a detective and I’m an architect,” Bliss said in
attentively, answering it as asked.
“Are you fellows going to stand there arguing all night?” the constable called from the other side of the wall.
They went out and got into the open car, started off. Bliss felt like groaning: “Good-bye, Smiles.” Just as they reached the turn of the road that would have swept the house out of sight once they rounded it, Stillman happened to glance back for no particular reason, at almost the very last possible moment that it could still be seen in a straight line behind them.
“Hold it,” he ejaculated, thumbing a slim bar of light narrowed by perspective. “We left the lights on in that last room we were in.”
The constable braked promptly. “Have to go back and turn them off, or they’ll—”
“We haven’t time now, we’ll miss the bus,” Stillman cut in. “It’s due in six more minutes. Drive us down to the crossroads first, and then you come back afterward and put them out yourself.”
“No!” Bliss cried out wildly, jumping to his feet. “This has a meaning to it! I’m not passing this up! I want another look at those lights; they’re asking me to, they’re begging me to!” Before either one of them could stop him, he had jumped down from the side of the car without bothering to unlatch the door. He started to run back up the road, deaf to Stillman’s shouts and imprecations.
“Come back here, you welsher! You gave me your word of honor!”
A moment later the detective’s feet hit the ground and he started after his prisoner. But Bliss had already turned in through the opening in the wall, was flinging himself bodily against the door, without waiting for any master key this time. The infuriated detective caught him by the shoulder, swung him violently around, when he had reached him.
“Take your hands off me!” Bliss said hoarsely. “I’m going to get in there!”
Stillman swung at him and missed. Instead of returning the blow, Bliss threw his whole weight against the door for the last time. There was a rendering and splintering of wood, and it shot inward, leaving the whole lock intact against the frame. Bliss went flailing downward on his face into the hallway. He scrambled erect, reached the inner doorway, put his hand inside, and put the lights out without looking into the room.
“It’s when they go on that counts,” he panted.
The only reason Stillman wasn’t grappling with him was that he couldn’t locate him for a minute in the dark. The switch clicked a second time. Light flashed from the dazzingly calcimined ceiling. Bliss was standing directly in the middle of the opening as it did so, just as he had been the first night.
Stillman was down the hall a few steps, couldn’t see his face for a minute. “Well?” he asked.
Bliss turned to him without saying anything. The look on his face answered for him. He’d gotten what he wanted.
“Why, they’re not in the center of the ceiling! They’re offside. That’s what made them seem glaring, unexpected. They took my eyes by surprise. I’ve got professionally trained eyes, remember. They didn’t go on where I expected them to, but a little farther over. And now that I have that much, I have it all.” He gripped Stillman excitedly by the biceps. “Now I see what’s wrong with the room. Now I see why I found it so unrestful. It’s out of true.”
“What?”
“Out of proportion. Look. Look at that window. It’s not in the center of that wall. And d’you see how cleverly they’ve tried to cover the discrepancy? A thin, skinny, up-and-down picture on the short side; a big, wide, fat one on the longer side. That creates an optical illusion, makes both sides seem even. Now come over here and look this way.” He pulled the detective in after him, turned him around by the shoulder. “Sure, same thing with the door frame; that’s not dead center, either. But the door opens inward into the room, swings to that short side and partly screens it, throws a shadow over it, so that takes care of that. What else? What else?”
He kept pivoting feverishly, sweeping his glance around on all sides. “Oh, sure, the rug. I was sitting here and I dropped some ashes and looked down at the floor. See what bothered me about that? Again there’s an unbalance. See the margin of polished woodwork running around on three sides of it? And on the fourth side it runs right smack up against the baseboard of the wall. Your eye wants proportion, symmetry; it’s got to have it in all things. If it doesn’t get it, it’s uncomfortable. It wants that dark strip of woodwork on all four sides, or else the rug should touch all four baseboards, like a carpet—”
He was talking slower and slower, like a record that’s running down. Some sort of tension was mounting in him, gripping him, Stillman could tell by looking at him. He panted the last few words out, as if it took all his strength to produce them, and then his voice died away altogether, without a period.
“What’re you getting so white around the gills for?” the detective demanded. “Suppose the room is lopsided, what then? Your face is turning all green—”
Bliss had to grab him by the shoulder for a minute for support. His voice was all furry with dawning horror. “Because—because—don’t you see what it means? Don’t you see why it’s that way? One of these walls is a dummy wall, built out in front of the real one.” His eyes were dilated with unbelieving horror. He clawed insensately at his own hair. “It all hangs together so damnably! He was a mason before he married her mother; I told you that. The storekeeper down at the crossroads said that Alden built a low brick wall in front of the house, ‘just to keep in practice,’ he guessed. No reason for it. It wasn’t high enough for privacy, it didn’t even run around all four sides of the plot.
“He didn’t build it just to keep in practice! He did it to get the bricks in here from the contractor. More than he needed. He put it up just to have an excuse to order them. Who’s going to count— Don’t stand there! Get an ax, a crowbar; help me break this thing down! Don’t you see what this dummy wall is for? Don’t you see what we’ll find—”
The detective had been slower in grasping it, but he finally got it, too. His own face went gray. “Which one is it?”
“It must be on this side, the side that’s the shortest distance from the window, door, and light fixture.” Bliss rushed up to it, began to pound it with his clenched fists, up and down, sounding it out. Sweat flew literally off his face like raindrops in a stiff wind.
The detective bolted out of the room, sent an excited yell at the open front door:
“Cochrane! Come in here, give us a hand, bring tools!”
Between the two of them they dug up a hatchet, a crowbar, cold chisel, and bung starter. “That wall,” the detective explained tersely for the constable’s benefit, without going into details. Cochrane didn’t argue; one look at both their faces must have told him that some unspeakable horror was on the way to revelation.
Bliss was leaning sideways against it by now, perfectly still, head lowered almost as though he were trying to hear something through it. He wasn’t. His head was lowered with the affliction of discovery. “I’ve found it,” he said stifledly. “I’ve found—the place. Listen.” He pounded once or twice. There was the flat impact of solidity. He moved farther over, pounded again. This time there was the deeper resonance of a partly, or only imperfectly, filled orifice. “Half bricks, with a hollow behind them. Elsewhere, whole bricks, mortar behind them.”
Stillman stripped his coat off, spit on his hands. “Better get out of the room—in case you’re right,” he suggested, flying at it with the hatchet, to knock off the plaster. “Wait outside the door; we’ll call you—”
“No! I’ve got to know, I’ve got to see. Three of us are quicker than two.” And he began chipping off the plaster coating with the cutting edge of the chisel. Cochrane cracked it for them with the bung starter. A cloud of dust hovered about them while they hacked away. Finally, they had laid bare an upright, coffin-shaped segment of pinkish-white brickwork in the plaster finish of the wall.
They started driving the chisel in between the interstices of the brick ends, Stillman steadying it, Cochrane driving it home w
ith the bung starter. They changed to the crowbar, started to work that as a lever, when they’d pierced a big enough space.
“Look out. One of them’s working out.”
A fragment of brick ricocheted halfway across the room, dropped with a thud. A second one followed. A third. Bliss started to claw at the opening with his bare nails, to enlarge it faster.
“You’re only impeding us; we can get at it faster this way,” Stillman said, pushing him aside. A gray fill of imperfectly dried clayey mortar was being laid bare. It was only a shell; flakes of it, like dried mud, had begun dropping off and out, some of their own weight, others with the impact of their blows, long before they had opened more than a “window” in the brickwork façade.
“Get back,” Stillman ordered. His purpose was to protect Bliss from the full impact of discovery that was about to ensue.
Bliss obeyed him at last, staggered over to the other end of the room, stood there with his back to them as if he were looking out the window. Only the window was farther over. A spasmodic shiver went down his back every so often. He could hear the pops and thuds as brick fragments continued to drop out of the wall under the others’ efforts, then a sudden engulfing silence.
He turned his head just in time to see them lowering something from the niche in the wall. An upright something. A rigid, mummified, columnar something that resembled nothing so much as a log covered with mortar. The scant remainder of bricks that still held it fast below, down toward the floor, shattered, spilled down in a little freshet as they wrenched it free. A haze of kindly concealing dust veiled them from him. For a minute or two they were just white shadows working over something, and then they had this thing lying on the floor. A truncated thing without any human attributes whatever, like the mold around a cast metal statue—but with a core that was something else again.
“Get out of here, Bliss,” Stillman growled. “This is no place for you!”
FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum Page 14