by Fritz Leiber
He examined them more closely. Those leading toward the port-cochère were deeper and more widely spaced. He remembered that Jane had been almost running.
But the most startling discovery was that the footprints apparently didn’t enter the house at all. They clustered confusedly under the port-cochère, then returned toward the gate. Evidently Jane had waited until he was gone, then retraced her steps.
He walked back to the gate. A submerged memory from last night was tugging at his mind. He looked along the iron fence. He noticed a scrap of paper lodged in the low back shoots of some leafless shrub.
He remembered something white fluttering from Jane’s handbag in the dark, drifting through the fence.
He worked his way to it, pushing between the fence and the shrubbery. Unpruned shoots caught at his coat.
The paper was twice creased and the edges were yellowed and frayed, as if it had been carried around for a long time. It was not rain-marked. Unfolding it, he found the inside filled with a brown-inked script vividly recalling Jane’s scribbled warning. Moving toward the center of the lawn to catch the failing light, he read:
Always keep up appearances.
Always be doing something.
Always be first or last.
Always be alone.
Always have a route of escape.
Never hesitate, or you’re lost.
Never do anything odd—it wouldn’t be noticed.
Never move things—it makes gaps.
Never touch anyone—DANGER!
MACHINERY.
Never run—they’re faster.
Never look at a stranger—it might be one of them.
Some animals are really alive.
Carr looked over his shoulder at the boarded-up house. A lean bird skimmed behind the roof. Somewhere down the block footsteps were clicking on concrete.
HE CONSIDERED the shape of the paper. It was about that of an envelope and the edges were torn. At first glance the other side seemed blank. Then he saw a faded postmark and address. He struck a match and, holding it close to the paper, made out the name—Jane Gregg; and the city—Chicago; and noticed that the postmark was at least a year old.
The address, lying in a crease, took him longer to decipher.
1924 Mayberry St.
The footsteps were closer. He looked up. Beyond the fence an elderly couple was passing. He guiltily whipped out the match, but they walked by without turning their heads. After a minute he slipped out and walked west.
The streetlights winked on. The leaves near the lights looked an artificial green. He walked faster.
The houses shouldered closer together, grew smaller, crept toward the street. The trees straggled, gave out, the grass sickened. Suddenly the houses coallesced, reached the sidewalk with a rush, shot up in towering brick combers, became the barracks of the middle classes.
His mind kept repeating a name. Jane Gregg. He’d half believed all along she was the girl loony Tom Elvested had talked about—the girl he’d made a date with, through Tom, this very afternoon.
A bent yellow street sign said, “Mayberry.” He looked at the spotty gold numerals on the glass door of the first apartment. They were 19S4-S8. As he went down the street he had the feeling that he was walking back across the years.
The first floor of 1922-24 was lighted on the 24 side, except for a small dark sunporch. Behind one window he saw the edge of a red davenport and the head and shoulder of a gray-haired man in shirt-sleeves reading a newspaper. Inside the low-ceilinged vestibule he turned to the brass letter boxes on the 24 side. The first one read: “Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Gregg.” After a moment he pushed the button, waited a moment, pushed It again.
He could hear the bell clearly, but there was no response, neither a mumble from the speaking tube, nor a buzz from the lock of the door to the stairs.
Yet the Gregg apartment ought to be the one in which he had seen the old man sitting.
Beyond the inner door, in the darkness of the stair well, he thought he saw something move. He couldn’t tell what it was. When he stepped closer and peered in, he saw nothing.
He went outside. He craned his neck. The old man was still sitting there. An old man—perhaps deaf?
Then, as Carr watched, the old man put down his paper, settled back, looked across the room, and from the window came the opening triplets of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.
Carr felt the wire that fenced the tiny, nearly grassless plot press his calf, and realized that he had taken a backward step. He reminded himself that he’d heard Jane play only the third movement. He couldn’t know she’d play the first just this way.
He went back into the vestibule, again pushed the button, heard the bell. The piano notes did not falter.
He peered once more through the inner door. A little light trickled down from the second landing above. He tried the door. Someone must have left it off the buzzer, for it opened.
He hurried past the blackness of the bottom of the stair well. Five steps, a turn, five steps more. Then, just as he reached the first landing, he felt something-small and silent come brushing up against his ankle from behind.
THE NEXT moment his back and hands were pressed to the plaster wall across the landing, where it was recessed about a foot.
Then he relaxed. Just a cat. A black cat. A black cat with a white throat and chest, like evening clothes.
And a very cool cat too, for his jump hadn’t even fazed it. It walked suavely toward the door of the Gregg apartment.
But about two feet away it stopped. For several seconds it stood there, head upraised, making no movement except that its fur seemed to thicken a trifle. Then, very slowly, it looked around.
It stared at Carr.
Beyond the door, the piano started the sprightly second movement.
Carr edged out his hand. His throat felt dry and constricted. “Kitty,” he croaked.
The cat arched its back, spat, made a twisting leap that carried it halfway up the next semi-flight of stairs. It crouched on the top step, its bugged green eyes peering down.
One of the notes came back to Carr’s mind: “Some animals are really alive.”
There were footsteps. Carr shrank back into the recess. The door opened, the music suddenly swelled, and a gray-haired lady in a blue and white dress looked out and called, “Gigolo! Here, Gigolo!”
She had Jane’s small chin and short straight nose, behind veils of plumpness. She was rather dumpy. Her face had a foolish look.
And she must be short-sighted, for although she looked up the stairs, she didn’t see the cat, nor did she notice Carr. Feeling uncomfortably like a prowler, he started to step forward, then realized that she was so close he would give her a fright.
“Gigolo!” she called again. Then, to herself, “That cat!” A glance toward the dead bulb in the ceiling and a distracted headshake. “Gigolo!”
She backed inside. “I’m leaving it open, Gigolo,” she called. “Come in when you want to.”
Carr stepped out of the recess with a husky, “Excuse me,” but the opening notes of the fast third movement drowned him out.
He crossed to the door. The green eyes at the top of the stairs followed him. He raised his hand to knock. But at the same time he looked through the half-open door, across a tiny hall, into the living room.
It was small, with too much heavy furniture and too many lace runners and antimacassars. He could see the other end of the red davenport and the slippered feet of the old man sitting in it. The woman had returned to the straight-backed chair across the room and was sitting with her hands folded, her lips worriedly pursed.
Between them was the piano, an upright.
There was no one sitting at it.
To Carr, the rest of the room seemed to darken and curdle as he stared at the rippling keys.
Then he puffed out his breath. Of course, it must be some kind of electric player.
Again he started to knock, hesitated because they were listening to the mu
sic.
The woman moved uneasily on her chair. Her lips anxiously puckered and relaxed, like those of a fish behind aquarium glass. Finally she said, “Aren’t you tiring yourself, dear? You’ve been at it for hours.”
Carr looked toward the man, but he could still see only the slippered feet. There was no reply.
The piano stopped. Carr took a step forward. But just then the woman got up. He expected her to do something to the mechanism, but instead she began to stroke the air a couple of feet above the piano bench, Carr felt himself shivering.
“There, there, dear,” she said, “that was very pretty, I know, but you’re really spending too much time on your music. At your age a girl ought to be with other young people.” She bent her head as if she were looking around the shoulder of someone seated at the piano, wagged her finger, and said, “Look at the circles under those eyes.”
FOR CARR, time stopped, as if a clockworks universe hesitated before the next tick. In that frozen pause only his thoughts moved. It was true, then. Tom Elvested. . . The dumpy man . . . The room clerk . . . The Negress . . . Marcia in her bedroom . . . Last night with Jane—the bar, the music shop, the movie house, the chess players . . . The horizontal mannequin . . . The tobacconist . . . And now this old woman . . . All, all automatons, machines!
Or else (time moved again) this old woman was crazy.
Yes, that was it. Crazy. Behaving in her insanity as if her absent daughter were actually there. Believing it.
He clung to that thought.
“Really, Jane,” the old woman was saying vapidly, “you must rest.”
The slippered feet protruding from the davenport twisted. A weary voice said, “Now don’t worry yourself over Jane, Mother.”
The woman straightened. “Too much practicing is bad for anyone. It’s undermining her health.”
The davenport creaked. The man came into sight, not quite as old as Carr had guessed, but tired-looking. “Now, Mother, don’t get excited,” he said soothingly. “Everything’s all right.”
The father insane too, Carr thought. No, humoring her. Pretending to believe her hallucinations. That must be it.
“Everything isn’t all right,” she contradicted tearfully. “I won’t have Jane practicing so much and taking those wild long walks by herself. Jane, you mustn’t—” Suddenly a look of fear came over her. “Oh don’t go. Please don’t go, Jane.” She stretched out her hand toward the hall as if to restrain someone. Carr shrank back. He felt sick. It was horrible that this mad old woman should resemble Jane.
She dropped her hand. “She’s gone,” she said and began to sob.
The old man put his arm around her shoulders. “You’ve scared her off,” he said softly. “But don’t cry, Mother. Tell you what, let’s go sit in the dark for a while. It’ll rest you.” He urged her toward the sunporch. “Jane’ll be back in a moment, I’m sure.”
Just then, behind Carr, the cat hissed and retreated a few steps higher, the vestibule door downstairs was banged open, there were loud footsteps and voices raised in argument.
“I tell you, Hackman, I don’t like it that Dris excused himself tonight.”
“Show some sense, Wilson! This afternoon you didn’t want him to come here at all.”
“Not by himself, no. With us would be different.”
“Pft! Do you always have to have the two of us in the audience when you chase girls?”
The first voice was cool and jolly, the second brassy. They were those Carr had overheard in the cigarette shop.
Before he had time to weigh his fears or form a plan, Carr had slipped through the door in front of him—Jane’s parents were out of sight—, tiptoed down the hallway leading to the back of the apartment, turned into the first room he came to, and was standing with his cheek to the wall, squinting back the way he had come.
He couldn’t quite see the front door. But in a little while long shadows darkened the calcimine of the hallway.
“I came to check on her first, to chase her second,” he heard Wilson say. “She doesn’t seem to be around.”
“But we just heard the piano and we know she’s a music student.”
“Use your head, Hackman! You know the piano would play whether she was here or not. If it plays when she’s not here, that’s the sort of proof we’re looking for.”
Carr waited for the footsteps or voices of Jane’s parents. Surely they must be aware of the intruders. The sunporch wasn’t that isolated.
Perhaps they were as terrified as he. “She’s probably wandered off to the back of the flat,” Hackman suggested.
“Or hiding there,” Wilson amended. “And there may be photographs. Let’s look.”
CARR WAS already retreating noiselessly across the fussy, old-fashioned bedroom toward where light poured into it from a white-tiled bathroom a short distance away.
“Stop! Listen!” Wilson called. “The sunporch!”
Footsteps receded down the hall, crossed the living room.
“It’s the parents,” he heard Hackman say in the distance. “I don’t see the girl.”
“Yet—listen to that!—they’re talking as if she might be here.”
The footsteps and voices started to come back.
“I told you I didn’t like it when Dris bowed out, Hackman. This makes me more suspicious.” For once the jolliness was absent from Wilson’s voice. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got in ahead of me and taken the girl somewhere.”
“Dris wouldn’t dare do a thing like that!”
“No?” The jolliness came back into Wilson’s voice, nastily. “Well, if he’s not with her, he’s fooling around with dead girls, you can bet.”
“That’s a dirty lie!” Hackman snarled. “Dris might fool around with dead girls when we’re all having fun together. Naturally. But not by himself, not alone!”
“You think you’re the whole show with him?”
“Yes! You’re just jealous because I dropped you.”
“Ha! I don’t care what Dris—or you—do in your private lives. But if he’s taking chances to cheat with this girl, when he knows that the four men in black hats are hunting for us, he’s endangering us all. And if that’s the case I’ll erase him so fast that—What’s that?”
Carr stiffened. Looking down he saw that he had knocked over a stupid little porcelain pekinese doorstop. He started for the bathroom door, but he had hardly taken the first painfully, cautious step when he heard, from that direction, the faint sound of movement. He froze, then turned toward the hallway. He heard the stamp of high heels, a throaty exclamation of surprise from Wilson, a softly pattering rush, the paralyzing fighting-squall of a cat, a smash as if a cane or umbrella had been brought down on a table, and Wilson’s, “Damn!”
Next Carr caught a glimpse of Hackman. She had on a pearl gray evening dress, off the shoulders, and a mink wrap over her arm. She was coming down the hall, but she didn’t see him.
At the same moment the cat Gigolo landed in the faultless hair, claws raking. Hackman screamed.
The ensuing battle was too quick for Carr to follow it clearly. Most of it was out of his sight, except for the shadows. Twice more the cane or umbrella smashed down, Wilson and Hackman yelled at each other, the cat squalled.
Then Wilson shouted, “The door!” There was a final whanging blow, followed by, “Damn!”
FOR THE next few moments, only heavy breathing from the hallway, then Hackman’s voice, rising to a vindictive wail, “Bitch! Look what it did to my cheek. Oh, why must there be cats!”
Then Wilson, grimly businesslike: “It’s trapped on the stairs. We can get it.”
Hackman: “This wouldn’t have happened if we’d brought the hound.”
Wilson: “The hound! This afternoon you thought differently. Do you remember what happened the first time you brought the hound here? And do you remember what happened to Dris?”
Hackman: “It was his own fault that he got his hand snapped off. He shouldn’t have teased it. Besides, the hou
nd likes me.”
Wilson: “Yes, I’ve seen him look at you and lick his chops. We’re wasting time, Hackman. You’ll have a lot more than a scratched cheek—or a snapped-off hand—to snivel about if we don’t clear up this mess right away. Come on. To begin with, we’ve got to kill that cat.”
Carr heard footsteps, then the sound of Wilson’s voice growing fainter as he ascended the stairs, calling wheedlingly, “Here, kitty,” and a few moments later Hackman’s joined to with a sugariness that made Carr shake: “Here, kitty, kitty.”
Carr tiptoed across the room and peered through the bathroom door. The white-tiled cubicle was empty, but beyond it he could see another bedroom that was smaller but friendlier. There was a littered dressing table with lamps whose little pink shades were awry. Beside that was a small bookcase overflowing with sheet music piled helter-skelter.
His heart began to pound as he crossed the bathroom’s white tiles.
But there was something strange about the bedroom he was approaching. Despite the lively adolescent disorder, there was a museum feel to it, like some historic room kept just as its illustrious occupant had left it. The novel open face down on the dressing table was last year’s best-seller.
He poked his head through the door. Something moved beside him and he quickly turned his head.
He had only a moment to look before the blackjack struck. But in that instant, before the cap of pain was pulled down over his eyes and ears, blacking out everything, he recognized his assailant.
The cords in the neck stood out, the cheeks were drawn back, exposing the big front teeth like those of a rat. Indeed the whole aspect—watery magnified eyes, low forehead, taut and spindle-limbed figure—was that of a cornered rat.
It was the small dark man with glasses.
CHAPTER X
I’ve told you to forget the secret, but I’ve got to admit that’s a hard thing to do. Once a mind wakes up, it’s got an itch to know the whole truth . . .