Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  Just under the stairs was the power room doorway. A heavy smell of oil and machinery seeped out as he got the door open. The place was a labyrinth of greasy generators and what not, shot through with weird, futuristic shadows. It was empty—and it looked very much as if it needed someone in charge of it at the moment.

  Quantities of newspapers were scattered about wholesale, all transparent with oil, soaked with it. Nobody read that many newspapers and drenched them that way. The door clapped back on its hinges behind him and the smell became almost overpowering. The two overworked bulbs overhead couldn’t get into the comers and angles and light them up.

  He advanced warily and an overturned copper oiler on the floor clanged loudly under his foot. A moment later he stumbled over one of the newspapers and a man’s upturned shoe was revealed. Whitey crouched down and found a man in the dungarees of an engineer lying flat on his back in a narrow lane of blackness between two pieces of machinery, only his feet protruding into the light. A hefty wrench lying at his heels told most of the story.

  The engineer was out cold, but still breathing. Whitey crouched down above him to haul him out into the open, careless of which way he turned his back. It was then that the wrench started to move slowly along the floor like something possessed. The comer of his eye saw it—but not quickly enough. The wrench swung up into the air just as he turned his head, then came down again. Whitey just had time to see the arm wielding it, the face behind it—then both were wiped out in a flash of white fire that seemed to come from his own head.

  The fire was still there when he came to a minute or so later, but it wasn’t white and it wasn’t at his head any more. It was down near his legs. The way it was stinging and biting him would have brought the dead to life. And the blow hadn’t been as accurate as intended, or it would have finished him; too much emotion and not enough aim had been put into it. The biting and stinging made him jackknife his legs up out of the way before he had even opened his eyes.

  When he did so, bright yellow flame was fluttering from the scattered newspapers all over the room, in three or four places at once. One of the burning papers had been lying across his own legs. He was partly across the body of the engineer, who was still motionless. His splitting head was still trying to drag him back into unconsciousness again, but pain defeated it. He shoved backward with his buckled legs, and felt his back slip up the oily wall behind him until he was totteringly erect.

  He still saw everything double, but the oil-soaked overalls of the man at his feet were already smoking, and the air was full of dancing sparks from the papers. Grease-rags began to smoulder ominously here and there and make it tough to breathe. The room got hot. One of the two bulbs overhead suddenly popped into nothingness. The fire was past the stamping-out stage now.

  Whitey grabbed the engineer by one ankle and dragged him out of the little lane that had hidden him. The slippery floor made it easier. Half of the burning papers had taken wings now and were swirling about in the torturing air like huge fire-birds. One of Whitey’s own lisle socks began to peel back in a red thread, and he rubbed it out against his other leg like a mosquito bite. He struggled through the inferno toward the door, the body of the man he was dragging after him snuffing out buttercups of flame along the floor as it passed over them. A belt on the machinery suddenly burned in two and sent up a shower of sparks like a rocket.

  He had just enough strength left, in the wilting heat-waves swirling about him, to claw at the door like some idiot thing wanting out and unable to show it in any other way. The door wouldn’t move—was either warped by the heat or else locked. Whitey could feel himself going, knew he’d never get up again, would be cremated in here. But his fall was his salvation. As his body slumped against the door it gave outward under his weight—and quite easily. In his torment he’d forgotten it opened that way.

  Air that was air came rushing past him. He fell on his hands and knees, and behind him the room gave a roar and turned itself into a furnace as it found the draught it had been waiting for. He tugged, strained, and the body of the engineer came slipping over the threshold after him, bringing patches of fire with it like a human torch. The door, released, clapped back again.

  He beat out the fire on the man he had saved with his bare hands, listened for heart-action. Too late. There wasn’t any; he was dead. Whitey had been through all that for nothing. Chalk up two murders now instead of one. And there were the living to be thought of, dozens of them, up above. He knew better than to yell “Fire!”

  He staggered to his feet, reeled down the passageway he had traversed so often tonight, looked in at the chorus girls’ dressing room. It was empty, they were onstage once more. The clink of a glass attracted him and he looked beyond, into the room where Carrots Kirby’s body was. The lady commodore sat there big as life, a bottle of gin in one hand, a glass in the other.

  “Heresh lookin’ atcha, sport,” she announced blithely. “I’m the only mourner.”

  She had probably never been torn away from a bottle so suddenly in her life before. It actually bounced and cracked in two.

  “Never mind lookin’ at me!” he rasped. “There’s a fire—keep still about it and get the extinguishers, quick!” One look at his face and she was sober. She came tottering out after him.

  “Oh, Lord, and I don’t even carry insurance!” she mourned.

  “Rockets!” he yelled back. “Send up rockets if you’ve got any— attract someone on shore or some other boat!”

  The clatter of a rumba held the audience spellbound as his head emerged from the companionway. Dulcy was standing there where he’d left her, looking very sulky. He flashed past and on up to the searchlight-nest. The sailor had a grievance.

  “Now you come,” he growled. “First you tell me to watch the water, then you don’t show up! I picked up a guy out there five minutes ago—I’m following him with the light, but he’s halfway across the river already.”

  “Yeah? Well, I was busy having my nails manicured,” Whitey said. He peered out into the searchlight beam, his eyes still smarting from the fire.

  “See him?” encouraged the sailor. “Mean to say you can’t see him?”

  A black dot bobbed up and down, the head of a swimmer desperately trying to make land. He was going diagonally with the current.

  “The Missouri side,” said Whitey. “He’ll have all St. Louis to hide in once he steps out!” He turned and hopped down again to the deck, twisting out of his coat.

  The lady captain was busy fanning herself weakly with one hand, a new gin-bottle in the other.

  “The fire’s under control,” she panted. “A minute more and it would have sent the lighting system out of commish! After this, I stick to running a tea shop.”

  The bartender came up from below, face smudged, dragging an empty extinguisher after him. “Wotta evening!” he grunted. Whitey was kicking off his shoes. Dulcy appeared beside him.

  “Wait a minute, you can’t walk out on me like this—” she began. He clambered up on the low rail. “You just finish seeing your show, honey. I gotta little job to do out there,” Whitey pleaded.

  He went overboard in a long, not too graceful curve and sent up a thin mushroom of water. Her voice split the air behind him.

  “Oh no, you’re not leaving me behind—how do I know what’s going to happen to me?” There was a second splash and she bobbed up right beside him.

  “Get back there, you little fool!” he spluttered. “What are you trying to do, drown yourself?”

  IV

  She kept abreast of him without any effort. “I can swim circles around you,” she said.

  There was a pull to the current that set their course for them automatically, just as it had the fugitive’s. “All right?” Whitey kept asking. “Sure you’re all right? I gotta get that guy out there.”

  “If you’re going to get him, get him!” Dulcy said crossly at last. “I can last, but I can’t make speed.”

  He went into the crawl and outdistanced
her. His banged head throbbed; he’d been seasick, hit with a wrench, singed and scorched— but there was no place else to go but down if he quit.

  By the time it felt as if he should have been all the way into Kansas, he was still only a quarter of the way to shore. But the quarry, he reasoned, must be having his troubles too. A fellow that stayed up all night shaking to jazz music wasn’t cut out for a cross-river swim. They were sending up rockets behind Whitey, lighting the sky green. That ought to attract a police launch.

  Weariness began to creep in, a shortening of stroke, a slowing-up. He went into a side stroke, to give slightly different muscles play. His legs began to drag after him like so much dead weight. He threatened to fold up and go down any minute, could almost feel something pulling at him from below. He had to quit altogether finally, and not a moment too soon, roll over on his back and float open-mouthed, like a stranded fish. He paddled backhand with one hand to keep from being carried too far out of his course.

  A faint threshing, a slapping noise, came from somewhere nearby. The sound of someone agonizedly trying to stay up. At first he thought it was Dulcy, but the cry, when it came, was a man’s. Whitey trod water, trying to locate the direction.

  The cry came again, far over to the right but a little behind him, not in front. He’d almost passed the murderer in the head-down crawl, or else the other had lost all sense of direction and was heading back toward the boat again! By the time Whitey got to the man there he wasn’t swimming any longer but was already in the earlier stages of drowning. The face that turned up despairingly to the sky was the same one that had been limned in white fire when the wrench glanced off Whitey’s head.

  Whitey came up behind him and caught him by the suspenders. Instantly he tried to turn and get a death-grip on his rescuer, coughing and retching with the water he was swallowing. Before Whitey could jerk away, one madly groping hand had caught inextricably in his shirt and they both went under together.

  Whitey kicked like a horse, brought them up again. He pounded his fist like a sledge-hammer into the middle of the band-leader’s contorted face. The impact was soggy but shattering. The clutching hand relaxed, the murderer floated unconscious on the water, harmless as a lily.

  But the little strength Whitey had had left was gone now. He needed rescuing almost as badly as the bandmaster had a moment ago. Like the proverbial bulldog that won’t let go, he kept his hold on the other’s suspenders, keeping the two of them afloat somehow with one wearied, slowly circling arm that felt as though it were going to drop off his shoulder at every stroke.

  Thin cries of encouragement were coming across the water; yellow pinpoints marked the portholes of the showboat. Two other boats were standing by it now, attracted by the rockets, and from one of them a second searchlight beam came into play and swept the water with sketchy strokes. The river was talcum-white where it hit.

  For Whitey to reach shore was out of the question, even if he let go of the bandmaster and struck out alone. To get back to where the rescue ships were congregating was equally impossible. In about three strokes more he was going to go down.

  Nearer than either shore or rescue ships, though, a peculiar round white object was showing in the glare of the interlocked beams. It looked like a large poker chip floating on the water. He moiled slowly toward it, with strokes that no longer bore any resemblance to the act of swimming. It tilted from side to side, but whatever it was it didn’t go down. The three strokes were spent, but now the nearness of the objective, the feasibility of getting to it, lent him three more, and then another three—on borrowed time.

  Dulcy’s head showed up in back of the white thing, paddling it toward him. Water flushed the top of it but it stayed stubbornly afloat. As the space narrowed, she suddenly swung in between them, caught at his flailing wrist, and hooked it onto the circular rim of the white thing. He couldn’t have made the gesture himself, the last inch would have defeated him. She quickly shifted over to the other side as the added weight made the object veer over toward him.

  It was the bass drum from the showboat orchestra. Somebody had helpfully thrown it in after her.

  “Let go of him,” she panted, makeup running down her face. “He’s gone an5rway, and he’s weighing you down.” Whitey couldn’t answer, but he held on. The reason may have been he could no longer extricate his numbed hand from the other’s suspenders. The seeking searchlight-beams swept back and forth across them. A police cutter was rapidly drawing near, its green light dipping and rising in its hurry.

  “He died on me in the water,” apologized Whitey to his chief, sitting beside the hospital cot, “but at least I got him. A girl in the show threw him down and he went haywire, cut her throat, slugged an electrician to death, and then committed arson to cover up what—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” interrupted the chief. “Never mind about that now, he’s dead and that closes the case. You stay under that blanket and don’t be afraid of that whisky the boys sent you.” He got up to go. “I’ll probably have a little news for you after you’ve turned in your report. Somebody else waiting out here to see you.”

  Dulcy came in and shot the muffled figure in the bed a rather forbidding look.

  “You all right?” he asked timidly. “I—I’m sorry if your evening was spoiled—”

  “I give up,” Dulcy said wearily. “I thought taking you out to that thing would get you away from crime for one evening. What’s the use? Separating you from crime is like trying to part a pair of Siamese twins. It follows you around!”

  (1935)

  Hot Water

  Hot water is two things. In slang it means getting into trouble, in geography it means a gambling joint just across the California state line in Mexico. Agua Caliente means hot water in Spanish. It means both kinds to yours truly, after what happened that time. I never want to hear the name again.

  Ten o’clock Friday night, and all is quiet in Fay North’s forty rooms and swimming pool, out in Beverly Hills. Fay has just finished a picture that afternoon and has said something about going to bed early and sleeping until next Tuesday. I have been all around, upstairs and down, seeing that the doors and windows are all locked and that the electric burglar-alarm is in working order, and I am in my own room just ofTthe main entrance, peeling to pajamas and ready to pound the ear, when there is a knock at my door. It is the butler.

  “Miss North has changed her mind,” he announces. “She is spending the week-end at Agua Caliente. Please be ready in ten minutes.”

  I am not asked to go, you notice, I am told I am going. That is part of my job. Miss North parts with a generous helping of her salary each week, in my direction, and it is up to me to stick close and see that no bodily harm comes to her. It really isn’t an unpleasant job for this reason: on the screen Miss North has become famous for playing tough, rowdy characters, but in real life she isn’t like that at all. She doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and never goes to parties or even night clubs; so all I really have to do is ride back and forth to work with her and shoo salesmen and newspaper writers away from the door.

  But she has one great weakness, she is crazy for gambling. She never wins, but that doesn’t seem to stop her. I feel sorry for her, but it is her money and none of my business what she does with it.

  Anjrway, she has stayed away from Agua for some time now, after dropping so much there the last time, so she is entitled to blow off steam, I guess, after working so hard. I shake my head about all the good sleep I’m going to miss, but I sling on my shoulder holster, pack a couple of clean shirts, and go out and wait for her in the car without saying a word. A plane would get us there in a couple of hours, but that is another thing about Fay, she won’t get in one, so it means we have to drive all night to be there when the border opens at nine.

  Well, she comes out of the house in about five or ten minutes and it seems just the three of us are going, her, me and the driver. For once she is giving Timothy the slip. He is her manager and a very good one, too, but he raised Cain
about her losses the last time he was down there with her, and I guess she doesn’t want him around to rub it in. He doesn’t like the place anyway, doesn’t think it’s safe for her to go down there carrying so much money. She has brought several big bags with her, enough to stay for a month, but I guess that is because she is a woman and you have to dress up there. She gets in back and away we go.

  “Well, Shad,” she says, “I guess you could kill me for this.”

  “No, ma’m,” I say, “you haven’t had a day off in quite some stretch.”

  Shad isn’t my name, but she calls it to me because when I was new on the job she got the habit of speaking about me as her Shadow.

  “Timothy doesn’t need to find out,” she says. “We’ll be back by Monday morning, and if he calls up tomorrow I told the butler to say I have a bad headache and can’t come to the phone.”

  It doesn’t sound to me like that is very wise; Timothy might come over twice as quick if he thinks anj^thing is the matter with her, on account of she is such an important investment, but she doesn’t ask for my opinion so I keep it to myself.

  Then she says: “This time I can’t lose! I’ll show him, when I come back, whether I’m jinxed or not, like he always says. I’ll make up all my losses, because I know now just what to do. I consulted an astrologer in my dressing room during lunch today, and she gave me a grand tip. I’m dying to see if it’ll work or not.”

  First off I figure she means just another new system, every time we go down there she has a new system, none of which ever works, but later I’m to find out it isn’t that at all. The funny part of it is that with me it’s just the other way around. I don’t give a rap about betting or games of chance, in fact I don’t believe in it at all, but I never yet chucked down four bits or a dollar on any kind of a table at all without it collected everyone else’s dough like flypaper and swept the board clean. So then I always picked the nearest sucker with a long face and made him a present of the whole wad—minus the original buck of course—and he went right back and lost it. The wages I get from Miss North are enough for me; I’m no hog.