FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum
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Forty-five seconds left. The last dilatory passengers had already gone up. There were two ways of getting up, a long flight of stairs and an escalator.
He wavered toward the escalator, made it. He wouldn’t have been able to get by the ticket-taker but for his hackman’s cap—an eventuality he and Pauline hadn’t foreseen.
“Just meeting a party,” he mumbled almost unintelligibly, and the slow treadmill started to carry him up.
A whistle blew upstairs on the track platform. Axles and wheel-bases gave a preliminary creak of motion.
It was all he could do to keep his feet even on the escalator. There wasn’t anyone in back of him, and if he once went over he was going to go plunging all the way down to the bottom of the long chute. He dug his nails into the ascending hand-belts at both sides, hung on like grim life.
There was a hubbub starting up outside on the street somewhere. He could hear a cop’s whistle blowing frenziedly.
A voice shouted: “Which way’d he go?”
Another answered: “I seen him go in the station.”
They’d at last found what was in the cab.
A moment after the descending waiting-room ceiling had cut off his view, he heard a spate of running feet come surging in down there from all directions. But he had no time to think of that now. He was out on the open platform upstairs at last. Cars were skimming silkily by. A vestibule door was coming, with a conductor just lifting himself into it. Paine went toward it, body low, one arm straight out like in a fascist salute.
He gave a wordless cry. The conductor turned, saw him. There was a tug, and he was suddenly sprawled inside on the vestibule floor. The conductor gave him a scathing look, pulled the folding steps in after him, slammed the door.
Too late, a cop, a couple of redcaps, a couple of taxi drivers, came spilling out of the escalator shed. He could hear them yelling a car-length back. The trainmen back there wouldn’t open the doors. Suddenly the long, lighted platform snuffed out and the station was gone.
They probably didn’t think they’d lost him, but they had. Sure, they’d phone ahead, they’d stop the train to have him taken off at Harmon, where it changed from electricity to coal power. But they wouldn’t get him. He wouldn’t be on it. Just his body.
Each man knows when he’s going to die; he knew he wouldn’t even live for five minutes.
He went staggering down a long, brightly lighted aisle. He could hardly see their faces any more. But she’d know him; it’d be all right. The aisle ended, and he had to cross another vestibule. He fell down on his knees, for lack of seat backs to support himself by.
He squirmed up again somehow, got into the next car.
Another long, lighted aisle, miles of it.
He was nearly at the end; he could see another vestibule coming. Or maybe that was the door to eternity. Suddenly, from the last seat of all, a hand darted out and claimed him, and there was Pauline’s face looking anxiously up at him. He twisted like a wrung-out dishcloth and dropped into the empty outside seat beside her.
“You were going to pass right by,” she whispered.
“I couldn’t see you clearly, the lights are flickering so.”
She looked up at them in surprise, as though for her they were steady.
“I kept my word,” he breathed. “I made the train. But oh, I’m tired—and now I’m going to sleep.” He started to slip over sidewise toward her. His head dropped onto her lap.
She had been holding her handbag on it, and his fall displaced it. It dropped to the floor, opened, and everything in it spilled out around her feet.
His glazing eyes opened for one last time and centered feebly on the little packet of bills, with a rubber band around them, that had rolled out with everything else.
“Pauline, all that money—where’d you get that much? I only gave you enough to buy the train tickets—”
“Burroughs gave it to me. It’s the two hundred and fifty we were talking about for so long. I knew in the end you’d never go near him and ask for it, so I went to him myself—last night right after you left the house. He handed it over willingly, without a word. I tried to tell you that this morning, but you wouldn’t let me mention his name. . . .”