He’s lying flat on his back on the staircase landing between the two floors, and he’s threshing about and squirming horribly, as if he’s in convulsions. The agonized movement of his body is what’s making the woodwork creak like that. Something seems to be jerking him all over, his arms and legs will stiffen to their full length and then contract again like corkscrews. His tongue’s sticking all the way out of his mouth, and saliva or foam or something is bubbling around it. His eyes are glazed over.
One jump brings me down to where he is, and I lift his head and get it off the floor. As I do so, his whole face begins to blacken in my hands. There is one last hideous upheaval, as if I was trying to hold down a wild animal, and then everyrthing stops. There’s not a twitch left in his whole body after that.
Vin’s heard the racket and he comes tearing out of his room.
“Whiskey,” I pant. “Don’t know what it is, gotta bring him to!” But there isn’t any bringing to. Before the kid can sprint down past me and then up again with it, he’s stiff as a board in my arms. I’m holding a lead weight, with a color that matches.
The blackness has spread all over his body like lightning and shows up in the veins in his throat and on his wrists, as if ink had been poured into his arteries. Nothing to be done, he isn’t breathing. We pour the whiskey into his open mouth, but when we tilt his head to make it go down it comes right back again.
I pass him to Vin and get out from under and go down and take a miniature Keeley cure right then and there. It isn’t because he’s Mary’s old man or because it happened right in my arms, it’s those terrific spasms and that blackness that have gotten me. I get over it in a minute and we bring him down off the landing between us and lay him out. Then I let the kid have a double bracer and the hell with his extra growth.
We look at him lying there on the divan, stiff as a ramrod, and I try to flex his arms and legs. A peculiar muscular rigidity has already set in all over, even in those few minutes. I’m no medical student but I know it can’t be rigor mortis that soon. This is the United States, but this was an unrecognizable death, a sudden, thrashing, black, tropical death—here in the States.
“Get your hat,” I say to Vin, “and thumb yourself down into town and bring back the medical expert. Damn this place anyway for not having a telephone!” I push him out the door.
Now there are only four of us left in the house, two of them women and one a dead man, and the moon’s peeping in at all the windows and filling the place with black shadows. From the minute the kid’s dogs have left the wooden porch, you don’t hear another sound outside, not the snapping of a twig, not the rustling of a dry leaf.
I’m not scared of stiffs. That’s because of the unpleasant business I’m in. I cover his face to hide the blackness and then I pull down all the shades to keep the nosey moon out.
Then, as I start up the stairs to break the news to Mary, I see a thread hanging, moving in the air above the landing where he fell. It shows up against the light shining down from the upstairs hall, and that’s how I happen to notice it.
It’s a cigarette burning itself out where he dropped it when he fell. It’s the same one she gave him when I left them before the fire. I said those Russian ones are long, it’s lasted all this while, as long as a cigar would. There’s still an inch or two left of it, there’s still a dab of unburned tobacco in it; and the end, the mouth part, is still intact. That’s all that matters, so I pinch it out and wrap it in my handkerchief.
After I’ve told Mary and persuaded her it’s better if she doesn’t go down and look at him, I knock on the other door across the hall, her door. No answer. So I open it and I go in. Not there. She must have gone downstairs while I was in Mary’s room just now.
The air is loaded with that sticky musk smell that follows her wherever she goes. It’s even worse up here though. Downstairs, it was more like a perfume; up here it’s rank, fetid. It recalls stagnant, green pools and lush, slimy, decaying vegetation.
On the dresser, she had a lot of exotic scents and lotions in bottles, the same as any other woman would, the only difference being that hers hail from India. Sandalwood, attar of roses—but one of them’s just ordinary everyday liquid mucilage mixed in with the others. No label on it, but my nose tells me this—and my fingertips, when I try it. I even take a pretty good-sized chance and test it on the tip of my tongue. Just mucilage. Anyone that’s ever sealed an envelope or licked a stamp knows the taste. I wonder what it’s doing there among those other things, but I put it back.
In the drawer, I come across a box of those extra-long cigarettes of hers, and I help myself to two or three just to see how they’ll stack up against chemical analysis. She has some other peculiar junk hanging around too, that I can’t make head or tail of. I know what it is all right, but I can’t figure what she’s doing with it.
First off, she has a cake of that stuff they call camphor ice—in a tin box. It freezes the skin, closes up the pores, is supposed to be good for chapped hands or something. But since when do they have chapped hands in India? All right, I argue to myself, maybe she brought it with her to guard against the colder climate over here, and I put that back too.
Then there’s a funny little Indian contraption of wood about the size of a cup and saucer, which looks like a baby-sized pestle and mortar. The hollow part of it is all smeared red, like she was in the habit of pounding out and mixing her own rouge instead of buying it ready-made. Well, maybe they do that in India too.
Next I come across a hell of a whole lot of flannel. At first I think it is bandage, but there is too much of it for that. So the best I can figure she makes her undies out of it.
So much for the dresser, and I haven’t gotten anywhere much. She has a lot of trunks, bags, boxes, etc., ranged around the room—all the stuff that I saw the driver unload from the car when she and the old man got here. One of the biggest pieces has a cover draped over it.
When I yank this off, lo and behold, a chicken-coop! Not only that, but the peculiar rank smell I’ve mentioned seems to come stronger from there than anywhere else. It nearly throws me over when I try to go near it. So she keeps pets, does she? I get up close to the thing and try to peer down into it between two of the slats, and I can’t see a thing, there’s a very close wire mesh on the inside. There’s something alive in it though, all right, because while I’m standing there with my face up against it, I hear the wire netting sing out. The wing of a chicken must have brushed against it.
I cluck a little at it. No answering cluck. I shift it around a little and shake it up a little to try to get a peep out of them—it must be more than one chicken, one chicken couldn’t smell that strong—and the wire sings out plenty, zing, zing, zing.
I go around on the other side of it and I spot a saucer of milk standing there on the floor next to it. One of the slats on that side is hinged, so that it can be opened up just about six inches from the floor. I reach down and I put my hand on it and I’m just fixing to lift it, then I think: “The hell with her and her chickens, I’d better go down and find out what she’s up to instead of wasting my time up here.” So I ease out of the room and go downstairs.
She’s down there with the body. I stop and watch her for a minute from the stairs. She’s uncovered his face and she’s groveling upon him—sort of twined about him. Her face is hidden against him as if she was trying to burrow her way into his clothes and she couldn’t have got any closer if she tried. Maybe it’s just the Oriental mode of displaying grief, but I have my doubts. There’s something pathological in this, that creature is less than human—or thinks she is.
Something snaps in me. “Don’t coil up on him like that!” I bark at her. “You’re like a damn snake nesting on something it’s killed!”
She untwines slowly and raises her head and turns it my way, and a ghoulish smile flickers on her face. Maybe I just imagine that, for it’s dark in the room.
There’s a pounding outside at the door and Vin has come back with the medical exp
ert and a policeman. There’s a motorcycle throbbing against a tree out there, and it’s the friendliest sound I’ve heard in twenty-eight years. They’ve parked the ambulance as close to the house as they can get it, which is about half a mile down the dirt road which gives up at about that point.
“So what’s the riot?” says the medical guy. “This kid comes tearing in on a Ford without brakes, which he stole from a Jap farmer, and knocks over one of the lamp posts outside headquarters—”
“That was the only way I could stop it,” explains Vin.
“Stole ain’t the word,” I squelch the hick. “I’m Lawton of the L. A. homicide bureau, and since he was deputizing for me, you call that commandeering. I want an autopsy from you.”
“When’d it happen?”
“Five after eleven.”
He goes over and he fumbles around a little, then he straightens up and his mouth is an O. “P. M., huh?”
“Not last year and not last week, eleven tonight!” I snap.
“Never saw anything like it,” he mutters. “Stiff as a board and all black like that! You’re gonna get your autopsy, mister.”
“And make it gilt-edged, too.”
There’s a rustling on the stairs and we all look upward. Veda’s on her way back to her room, with that damn long dress of hers trailing after her up the steps like a wriggling tail.
“Who’s the spook?” asks the examiner.
“We’re coming to her. First, the autopsy,” I tell him. “Don’t put it off, I want it right away—as soon as you get back with him!”
The driver comes in with a rubber sheet and he and the cop carry the old man out between them.
“Turn these over for me too,” I say, “and get me a chemical analysis on them,” and I pass him the butts I swiped in her room and the one the old man was smoking on the stairs when he fell. “And make room for my wife on the front seat. I’m sending her in with you.”
He gives me a surprised look. “You sure you want her to ride with us on a death car like that?”
“One sure thing, she’s not staying another minute in this house, not while I know it. Wait, I’ll bring her right down!”
I go up to get her, and I find her in the hall shivering and pop-eyed. She’s standing outside Veda’s door bent over at the keyhole like she was rooted to the spot. But as soon as she sees me she comes running to me and goes into a clinch and hides her head on my shoulder and starts bawling and shaking all over. “Charlie, I’m afraid to stay here! That awful woman, that awful heathen woman in there, she’s possessed of the devil.”
I lead her downstairs and out, and walk her down the road to where the car is, and on the way she tells me about it. “It’s enough to make your hair stand on end,” she whispers. “Such awful goings-on in there.”
“All right,” I say soothingly, “tell Charlie about it, Charlie’ll know if it’s bad or not.”
“I heard the gentlemen come downstairs,” she says, “so I got up to come down and make them a cup of coffee. As I was going past her door, I heard funny sounds from there. I’m only a woman after all, so I stopped and took a look through the keyhole. And after that I couldn’t move from there. I was held there against my will, until you came along. Charlie, she was dancing —all by herself in such a weird way, and it kept getting worse all the time. She kept getting nearer and nearer the door, until I think she would have caught me there if you hadn’t come. She seemed to know someone was outside her door, and she kept her eyes on it. I couldn’t budge!”
I know she isn’t exaggerating, because I myself noticed a sort of magnetism or mild hypnotism about this Veda from the minute she came in the house. “What kind of a dance was she doing?” I ask her.
“First, she was just standing in one place and just wriggling back and forth and curving in and out like she didn’t have any spine at all. She still had on that horrible, glittery dress clinging to her like a wet glove and that ugly hood on her head and she kept making a hissing noise and sticking her tongue in and out like she was tasting something. But then, afterwards, it got even worse than that. All of a sudden she went down on the floor in a heap and began crawling around on her stomach and switching her legs from side to side, like she was a fish or mermaid got stranded outside of the water—”
“Or a snake?” I put in.
She grabs my arm. “That’s it, that’s it! Now I know what she reminded me of! Every once in awhile she’d lift her head off the floor and raise it up and look around, and then she’d drop it back again. Then, finally, she squirms over to a little saucer of milk standing next to a big packing case and she starts drinking from it, but just with her tongue, without using her hands at all.”
“O.K., Toots, get in, you’re going to town.”
“Charlie, I think you’d better notify the state asylum,” she whispers. “I think his death has made her lose her mind. She must really think she’s a snake.”
This is putting it so mild that I have a hard time not laughing right in her face. That creature lurking back there in the house doesn’t only think she’s a snake; for all practical purposes, she is one. I don’t mean in the slang sense, either. She is sub-human, some sort of monstrosity or freak that India has bred just once in all its thousands of years of history.
Now, there are two possibilities as I see it. She is what she is, either of her own free will—maybe a member of some ghastly snake-worshiping cult—or without being able to control herself. Maybe her mother had some unspeakable experience with a snake before she was bom. In either case she’s more than a menace to society, she’s a menace to the race itself.
As for Mary’s tip about the asylum, what’s the sense? She could beat an insanity rap too easily. The strangeness of her ways, the far country she comes from, would be points in her favor. It would be a cinch for her to pass off the exhibition Mary saw through the keyhole as just an Asiatic way of showing grief for the departed. And even if I could get her booked in an institution, look what I’d have on my conscience, unloading her on a bunch of poor harmless nuts clipping paper dolls! She’d depopulate the place in a week. No, I tell myself, if I can only get the goods on her for the old man’s death, she goes up for first-degree murder without any fancy insanity trimmings. The rope’s the only sure cure for what’s the matter with her.
So far I haven’t got a thing, no motive and not even any evidence, and won’t have until that damned medical examiner reports to me. The law being what it is, a person’s innocent until you can prove him guilty. I can’t prove her guilty just because I don’t like how she dresses, how she hisses when she talks, how her room smells, and how she drinks milk off the floor.
I go back to the house alone. The moon’s on the late shift and now there are only three of us there—one of them a kid of twenty who’s just goofy enough to fall for this exotic vamp of death.
My footsteps don’t make any noise on the dirt road, and as I come up on the porch, the living-room windows are orange from the fire going inside. I look in through one of them and I see her and the kid there in the room. He’s standing there motionless, as if fascinated, and she’s coiled up next to him and I see one of her white arms creeping, wavering like a vine up his coat sleeve. I freeze all over with dread. Their heads start coming closer together, slowly, very slowly, and in another minute their lips will meet.
Maybe this first kiss won’t hurt him any, but I’m not in the mood to take a chance; I’d rather see him kissing poison ivy. Her head starts to weave a little and her neck lengthens in that old familiar movement. It’s the almost hypnotic slowness of the thing that gives me a chance to do something about it. I nearly take the front door off its hinges and before they can even turn their heads to look, I’ve split them wide apart with my shoulder for a wedge.
They each react differently. He flops back, and I can tell the buildup she has given him has already taken effect, because he turns sore. Maybe he’s ashamed too. She sinks back into a sort of coiled watchfulness and tries to look very innocent a
nd harmless. She wets her lips a little.
“Watch what you’re doing!” he shouts wrathfully, and before I can get out of the way, wham, right below the ear! I go down holding onto my jaw and I feel rotten, not from the blow either. Something tells me he’s a goner, unless I can reason with him. If he won’t listen to me nothing can save him. “Vin, for Pete’s sake, you don’t know what you’re up against!”
“In the East,” she lisps, “a kiss means only friendship, peace.” But the look she squirts at me would drop an ox.
“Your kind of kiss means death. East or West!” Maybe I shouldn’t show my hand like that, but my busting in has told her enough already. She goes slinking up the stairs like a noisome reptile crawling back into its hole.
“You let up on her!” the kid blusters. “You’re all wrong! Being a detective has gone to your head! She told me herself you suspect her of all kinds of God-awful stuff. She didn’t have anything to gain from the old guy’s cashing in!”
I pick myself up and brush myself off. “No? Not much!”
He points at the fireplace. “Know what she just did before you got here? She brings down a codicil to the old guy’s will, that he signed on the boat coming over, and shows it to me—makes me read it. It cut her in on his estate instead of leaving it to me and your wife, Mary. It was done against her wishes, as a wedding present to her. Then she throws it in the fire. She don’t want his money, especially when there’s suspicion attached to her!”
Damn clever! I swear softly to myself. Not that I believe for a minute that she isn’t interested in the old guy’s money. She isn’t throwing it away that easy. Probably it was only a carbon-copy and the original’s put away in a safe place. But, this way, she’s given herself an out; gypped me out of my motive. If I jump on her now, I can’t produce any—and without one where am I?
Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Page 14