Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  Eddie stands there, still off-balance from the kick-back. So it was as easy as all that! Where’s all his magic now? Strength, will-power flood back through him as if a faucet was suddenly turned on. The little smoke there was can’t get out of the sealed-up room, it hangs there in thin layers. Suddenly he’s shaking his fist at the dead thing on the bed. “I’m gonna live now! I’m gonna live, see?” He gets the door open, sways for a minute. Then he’s feeling his way down the stairs, past the unconscious watchdog, mumbling it over and over but low, “Gonna live now, gonna live!”

  The Commissioner mops his face as if he was in the steam room of a Turkish bath. He exhales like an oxygen tank. “Judas, Joseph and Mary, Mr. Bloch, what a story! Wish I hadn’t asked you; I won’t sleep tonight.” Even after the accused has been led from the room, it takes him some time to get over it. The upper right-hand drawer of his desk helps some—just two fingers. So does opening the windows and letting in a lot of sunshine.

  Finally he picks up the phone and gets down to business. “Who’ve you got out there that’s absolutely without a nerve in his body? I mean a guy with so little feeling he could sit on a hatpin and turn it into a paper-clip. Oh yeah, that Cajun, Desjardins, I know him. He’s the one goes around striking parlor-matches off the soles of stiffs. Well, send him in here.”

  “No, stay outside,” wheezes Papa Benjamin through the partly-open door to his envoy. “I’se communin’ with the obiah and yo’ unclean, been drunk all last night and today. Deliver the summons. Reach yo’ hand in to me, once fo’ every token, yo’ knows how many to take.”

  The crippled negro thrusts his huge paw through the aperture, and from behind the door the papaloi places a severed chicken-claw in his upturned palm. A claw bound with a red rag. The messenger disposes of it about his tattered clothing, thrusts his hand in for another. Twenty times the act is repeated, then he lets his arm hang stiffly at his side. The door starts closing slowly. “Papaloi,” whines the figure on the outside of it, “why you hide yo’ face from me, is the spirits angry?”

  There’s a flicker of suspicion in his yellow eyeballs in the dimness, however. Instantly the opening of the door widens. Papa Benjamin’s familiar wrinkled face thrusts out at him, malignant eyes crackling like fuses. “Gro!” shrills the old man,” ‘liver my summons. Is you want me to bring a spirit down on you?” The messenger totters back. The door slams.

  The sun goes down and it’s night-time in New Orleans. The moon rises, midnight chimes from St. Louis Cathedral, and hardly has the last note died away than a gruesome swampland whistle sounds outside the deathly-still house. A fat Negress, basket on arm, comes trudging up the stairs a moment later, opens the door, goes in to the papaloi, closes it again, traces an invisible mark on it with her forefinger and kisses it. Then she turns and her eyes widen with surprise. Papa Benjamin is in bed, covered up to the neck with filthy rags. The familiar candles are all lit, the bowl for the blood, the sacrificial knife, the magic powders, all the paraphernalia of the ritual are laid out in readiness, but they are ranged about the bed instead of at the opposite end of the room as usual. The old man’s head, however, is held high above the encumbering rags, his beady eyes gaze back at her unflinchingly, the familiar semicircle of white wool rings his crown, his ceremonial mask is at his side. “I am a little tired, my daughter,” he tells her. His eyes stray to the tiny wax image of Eddie Bloch under the candles, hairy with pins, and hers follow them.

  “A doomed one, nearing his end, came here last night thinking I could be killed like other men. He shot a bullet from a gun at me. I blew my breath at it, it stopped in the air, turned around, and went back in the gun again. But it tired me to blow so hard, strained my voice a little.”

  A revengeful gleam lights up the woman’s broad face. “And he’ll die soon, papaloi?”

  “Soon,” cackles the weazened figure in the bed. The woman gnashes her teeth and hugs herself delightedly. She opens the top of her basket and allows a black hen to escape and flutter about the room.

  When all twenty have assembled, men and women, old and young, the drum and the gourds begin to beat, the low wailing starts, the orgy gets under way. Slowly they dance around the three sides of the bed at first, then faster, faster, lashing themselves to a frenzy, tearing at their own and each other’s clothes, drawing blood with knives and fingernails, eyes rolling in an ecstasy that colder races cannot know. The sacrifices, feathered and furred, that have been fastened to the two lower posts of the bed, squawk and flutter and fly vertically up and down in a barnyard panic. There is a small monkey among them tonight, clawing, biting, hiding his face in his hands like a frightened child. A bearded negro, nude torso glistening like patent-leather, seizes one of the frantic fowls, yanks it loose from its moorings, and holds it out toward the witch-doctor with both hands. “We’se thirsty, papaloi, we’se thirsty fo’ the blood of ou’ enemies.”

  The others take up the cry. “We’se hung’y, papaloi, fo’ the bones of ou’ enemies!”

  Papa Benjamin nods his head in time to the rhythm.

  “Sac’fice, papaloi, sac’fice!”

  Papa Benjamin doesn’t seem to hear them.

  Then back go the rags in a gray wave and out comes the arm at last. Not the gnarled brown toothpick arm of Papa Benjamin, but a bulging arm thick as a piano-leg, cuffed in serge, white at the wrist, ending in a regulation police-revolver with the clip off. The erstwhile witch-doctor’s on his feet at a bound, standing erect atop the bed, back to the wall, slowly fanning his score of human devils with the mouth of his gun, left to right, then right to left again, evenly, unhurriedly. The resonant bellow of a bull comes from his weazened slit of a mouth instead of the papaloi’s cracked falsetto. “Back against that wall there, all of you! Throw down them knives and jiggers!” But they’re slow to react; the swift drop from ecstasy to stupefaction can’t register right away. None of them are overbright anyway or they wouldn’t be here. Mouths hang open, the wailing stops, the drums and gourds fall still, but they’re still packed close about this sudden changeling in their midst, with the familiar shriveled face of Papa Benjamin and the thick-set body, business-suit, of a white man—too close for comfort. Blood-lust and religious mania don’t know fear of a gun. It takes a cool head for that, and the only cool head in the room is the withered cocoanut atop the broad shoulders behind that gun. So he shoots twice, and a woman at one end of the semicircle, the drumbeater, and a man at the other end, the one still holding the sacrificial fowl, drop in their tracks with a double moan. Those in the middle slowly draw back step by step across the room, all eyes on the figure reared up on the bed. An instant’s carelessness, the wavering of an eye, and they’ll be on him in a body. He reaches with his free hand and rips the dead witch-doctor’s features from his face, to breathe better, see better. They dissolve into a crumpled rag before the blacks’ terrified eyes, like a stocking-cap coming off someone’s head—a mixture of paraffin and fiber, called moulage—a death-mask taken from the corpse’s own face, reproducing even the fine lines of the skin and its natural color. Moulage. So the 20th Century has won out after all. And behind them is the grinning, slightly-perspiring, lantern-jawed face of Detective Jacques Desjardins, who doesn’t believe in spirits unless they’re under a neat little label. And outside the house sounds the twenty-first whistle of the evening, but not a swampland sound this time; a long, cold, keen blast to bring figures out of the shadows and doorways that have waited there patiently all night.

  Then the door bursts inward and the police are in the room. The survivors, three of them dangerously wounded, are pushed and carried downstairs to join the crippled door-guard, who has been in custody for the past hour, and single-file, tied together with ropes, they make their way through the long tortuous alley out into Congo Square.

  In the early hours of that same morning, just a little more than twenty-four hours after Eddie Bloch first staggered into Police Headquarters with his strange story, the whole thing is cooked, washed and bottled. The Com
missioner sits in his office listening attentively to Desjardins.

  And spread out on his desk as strange an array of amulets, wax images, bunches of feathers, balsam leaves, ouangas (charms of nail parings, hair clippings, dried blood, powdered roots), green mildewed coins dug up from coffins in graveyards, as that room has ever seen before. All this is state’s evidence now, to be carefully labelled and docketed for the use of the prosecuting attorney when the proper time comes. “And this,” explains Desjardins, indicating a small dusty bottle, “is methylene blue, the chemist tells me. It’s the only modem thing we got out of the place, found it lying forgotten with a lot of rubbish in a comer that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed for years. What it was doing there or what they wanted with it I don’t “

  “Wait a minute,” interrupts the commissioner eagerly. “That fits in with something poor Bloch told me last night. He noticed a bluish color under his fingernails and a yellowness to his eyeballs, but only after he’d been initiated that first night.

  “This stuff probably has something to do with it, an injection of it must have been given him that night in some way without his knowing it. Don’t you get the idea? It floored him just the way they wanted it to. He mistook the signs of it for a give-away that he had colored blood. It was the opening wedge. It broke down his disbelief, started his mental resistance to crumbling. That was all they needed, just to get a foothold in his mind. Mental suggestion did the rest, has been doing it ever since. If you ask me, they pulled the same stunt on Staats originally. I don’t believe he had colored blood any more than Bloch has. And as a matter of fact the theory that it shows up in that way generations later is all the bunk anyway, they tell me.”

  “Well,” says Dij, looking at his own grimy nails, “if you’re just going to judge by appearances that way, I’m full-blooded Zulu.”

  His overlord just looks at him, and if he didn’t have such a poker face, one might be tempted to read admiration or at least approval into the look, “Must have been a pretty tight spot for a minute with all of them around while you put on your act!”

  “Nah, I didn’t mind,” answers Dij.

  Eddie Bloch, the murder charge against him quashed two months ago, and the population of the State Penitentiary increased only this past week by the admission of twenty-three ex-voodoo worshippers for terms varying from two to ten years, steps up on the platform of the Bataclan for a return engagement. Eddie’s pale and washed-out looking, but climbing slowly back up through the hundred-and-twenties again to his former weight. The ovation he gets ought to do anyone’s heart good, the way they clap and stamp and stand up and cheer. And at that, his name was kept out of the recently-concluded trial. Desjardins and his mates did all the states-witnessing necessary.

  The theme he comes in on now is something sweet and harmless. Then a waiter comes up and hands him a request. Eddie shakes his head. “No, not in our repertoire any more.” He goes on leading. Another request comes, and another. Suddenly someone shouts it out at him, and in a second the whole place has taken up the cry. “The Voodoo Chant! Give us the Voodoo Chant!”

  His face gets whiter than it is already, but he turns and tries to smile at them and shake his head. They won’t quit, the music can’t be heard, and he has to tap a lay-off. From all over the place, like a cheering-section at a football game, “We want the Voodoo Chant! We want !”

  Judy’s at his side. “What’s the matter with ‘em anjrway?” he asks. “Don’t they know what that thing’s done to me?”

  “Play it, Eddie, don’t be foolish,” she urges. “Now’s the time, break the spell once and for all, prove to yourself that it can’t hurt you. If you don’t do it now, you’ll never get over the idea. It’ll stay with you all your life. Go ahead. I’ll dance it just like I am.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  He taps. It’s been quite some time, but he can rely on his outfit. Slow and low like thunder far away, coming nearer. Boom-putta-putta-boom! Judy whirls out behind him, lets out the first preliminary screech, Eeyaeeya!

  She hears a commotion in back of her, and stops as suddenly as she began. Eddie Bloch’s fallen flat on his face and doesn’t move again after that.

  They all know somehow. There’s an inertness, a finality about it that tells them. The dancers wait a minute, mill about, then melt away in a hush. Judy Jarvis doesn’t scream, doesn’t cry, just stands there staring, wondering. That last thought—did it come from inside his own mind just now—or outside? Was it two months on its way, from the other side of the grave, looking for him, looking for him, until it found him tonight when he played the Chant once more and laid his mind open to Africa? No policeman, no detective, no doctor, no scientist, will ever be able to tell her. Did it come from inside or from outside? All she says is: “Stand close to me, boys—real close to me, I’m afraid of the dark.”

  (1935)

  The Corpse and the Kid

  Larry didn’t even know his father was in the house until he met him coming down the stairs. It was a little after five and he’d just come in from the beach. “Hello, Dad,” he said, and held his hand out in welcome. “You didn’t tell us you were coming down from New York tonight!” Then he said: “Gee, you look white! Been working too hard?”

  Larry idolized his father and worried continually about the way he kept slaving to provide for and indulge his family. Not that they weren’t comfortably well off now—^but the doctor had told the elder Weeks that with that heart of his— It was only a matter of months now.

  Mr. Weeks didn’t answer, nor did he take his son’s outstretched hand. Instead he sat down suddenly in the middle of the staircase and hid his face behind his own hands. “Don’t go upstairs, kid!” he groaned hollowly. “Keep away from there!”

  Larry did just the opposite. His own face grown white in dread premonition, he leaped past his father and ran on up. He turned down the cottage’s short upper hallway and threw open the door at the end of it and looki^ in. It was the first room he’d come to. The right room.

  She lay partly across the bed with her head hanging down above the floor and her light brown hair sweeping the carpet. One arm was twisted behind her back; the other one flailed out stiff and straight, reaching desperately for the help that had never come. She was his father’s wife, Larry’s stepmother. TTie dread he had felt on the stairs became a certainty now as he looked in. He had expected something like this sooner or later.

  The Corpse and the Kid I 191

  He turned her over, lifted her up, tried to rouse her by shaking her, by working her lower jaw back and forth with his hemd. It was too late. Her eyes stared at him unblinkingly, her head rolled around like a rubber ball. Her neck had been broken. There were livid purple marks on her throat where fingers had pressed inward.

  Larry let her drop back again like a rag doll, left the room and closed the door behind him. He stumbled down the hall to the head of the stairs. His father was still sitting there halfway down, his head bowed low over his knees. Larry slumped down beside him. Aft«r a while he put one hand on his father’s shoulder, then let it slip off” again. ‘Tm with you,” he said.

  His father lift«d his head. “She gone?”

  Larry nodded.

  “I knew she must be,” his father said. “I heard it crack.” He shuddered and covered his ears, as though he were afraid of hearing it over again.

  “She asked for it and she got it,” Larry remarked bitterly.

  His father looked up sharply. “You knew?”

  “All the time. He used to come down week-ends and she’d meet him at the Berkeley-Carteret.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “She was your wife,” Larry said. “Wouldn’t I have looked great.”

  On a little table down at the foot of the stsiirs the telephone started to ring, and they both stiffiened and their pale faces grew even paler. They turned and looked at each other without a word while it went on shattering the ominous stillness of the house with its loud pealing.

>   “I’ll get it,” Larry said suddenly. “I know all the answers.” He got up and went down to it, while his father gazed after him fearfully. He waited a minute to brace himself, then swiftly unhooked the receiver. “Hello,” he seiid tensely. Then with a quick let-down of relief, “No, she hasn’t come back from the beach yet.” He exchanged a glance with his father, halfway up the stairs. “Why don’t you pick her up there instead of calling for her here at the house? You know where to find her. She won’t be back for hours yet, amd you’d only have to hang around here waiting.” Then he added: “No, I don’t mean to be inhospitable, only I thought it would save time. ‘Bye.” He puffed his cheeks and blew out his breath with relief as he hung up. A couple of crystal drops oozed out on his forehead. “Helen’s boy-friend,” he said, turning to the man on the stairs. Helen was his sister. “If he does what I told him, it’ll give us a couple of hours at least.”

  The older man spoke without lifting his head at all. “What’s the use? Better phone the police and get it over with.”

  Lairry said: “No.” Then he yelled it at the top of his voice. “No, I tell you! You’re my father—I can’t, I won’t let you! She waisn’t worth your life! You know what the doctors said, you haven’t much time anyway— Oh, God.” He went close and jabbed his knee at Weeks to bring him to. “Pull yourself together. We’ve got to get her out of here. I don’t care where it happened, only it didn’t happen here—it happened some place else.”

  Twenty-one years of energy pulled forty-two years of apathy to its feet by the shoulders. “You—you were in New York. You are in New York right now, do you get me? You didn’t come down here, just as none of us expected you to.” He began to shake his father, to help the words and the idea that was behind them to sink in. “Did anyone see you on the train, at the depot just now, or coming into the house? Anyone who knows you by sight? Think hard, try to remember, will you, Dad?”