And So To Death

by Cornell Woolrich

Author of “Cinderella and the Mob.”, “All at Once, No Alice,” etc.

Ever had a nightmare—and dreamed you killed a man? And then did you ever wake up and find him dead? The gripping story of a man whose worst dreams came true. A short novel

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes

CHAPTER I

THE FIRST HORROR

FIRST all I could see was this beautiful girl’s face; like a white, slightly luminous mask swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little bluish spotlight of its own was trained on it from below.

It was so beautiful and so false, and I seemed to know it so well.

There was no danger yet; just this separate, shell-like face-mask standing out. But there was danger somewhere around; I knew that already, and I knew that I couldn’t escape it.

I knew that everything I was about to do, I had to do; and yet I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to turn and get out of wherever this was.

I even turned and tried to, but I couldn’t any more. There had been only one door when I slipped in just now. It had been simple enough. Now when I turned, the place was nothing but doors—an octagon of doors, set frame to frame with no free wall-space between.

I tried one, another, a third. They were the wrong ones; I couldn’t get out.

And by doing this, I had unleashed the latent menace that was lurking there around me all the time; I had brought on all the sooner the very thing I had tried to escape from. Though I didn’t know what it was yet.

The flickering white mask slowly, before my horrified eyes, became malign, vindictive. It snarled: “There he is right behind you. Get him!” The eyes snapped like fuses, the teeth glistened in a grinning bite.

The light became more diffused: it was murky, bluish-green now, the kind of light there would be under water. And in it my doom slowly reared its head, with a terrible inevitability. This was male.

First it—he—was just a black huddle, like solidified smoke, at the feet of this opalescent, revengeful mask. Then it slowly uncoiled, rose, lengthened and at the same time narrowed, until it loomed there before me upright.

It came toward me with cataleptic slowness. I wanted to turn and run, in the minute, the half minute that was all there was left now. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t lift a foot; I just wavered back and forth on a rigid base.

Why I wanted to get out, what It was going to do to me, wasn’t clear. Only there was soul-shrivelling fear in it. And horror, more than the mind could contemplate.

The pace was beginning to accelerate now as it near its climax.

He came on, using up the small remaining distance between us. His outline was still indistinct, clotted, like a lumpy clay image. I could see the arms come up from the sides, and couldn’t avoid their lobster-like conjunction.

I could feel the pressure of his hands upon my neck. He held it at the sides rather than in front, as if trying to break it rather than strangle me. The gouge of his thumbs, was excruciating, pressing into the tender slack of flesh right beside and under the jawbone.

I WENT down in a sort of spiral, around and around, following my head and neck around as he sought to wrench them out of true with my spinal column.

I clawed at the merciless hands, trying to pull them off. I pried one off at last, but it wrenched itself free of my restraint again, trailing a nail-scratch on my forearm just across the knob of the wristbone.

The hand clamped itself back where it had been, with the irresistibility of a suction-cup.

I beat at his arched body from underneath; then—as my resistance weakened—only pushed at it, at last only grasped at it with the instinctive clutch of a drowning man. A button came off loose in my hand and I hung onto it with the senseless tenacity of the dying.

And then I was so long dying, my neck was so long breaking, he tired of the slower surer way. He spoke to the macabre mask. I heard every word clearly: “Hand me that sharp-pointed bore lying over there, or this’ll go on all night.

I raised mutely protesting hands, out and past him, and something was put into one of them. I could feel the short transverse handle. A thought flashed through my mind—and even one’s thoughts are so distinct in those things—“She’s put it into my hand instead of his!”

I fixed my hand on it more securely, poised it high, and drove it into him from in back. It seemed to go in effortlessly, like a skewer into butter. I could even feel myself withdraw it again, and it came out harder than it went in.

He went with it, or after it, and toppled back. After a moment, I drew near to him again, on hands and knees.

And now that it was too late his face became visible at last, as if a wanly flickering light were playing over it, and he was suddenly no formless mud-clotted monster but a man just like I was. Harmless, helpless, inoffensive.

The face looked reproachfully up at me, as if to say, “Why did you have to do that?”

I couldn’t stand that, and I leaned over him, tentatively feeling for the position of his heart. When I’d located it, I suddenly drove the metal implement in with ungovernable swiftness from straight overhead, and jumped back as I did so.

The mask, still present in the background, gave a horrid scream, and whisked away, like something drawn on wires.

I HEARD a door close and I quickly turned, to see which way she had gone, so that I might remember and find my own way out. But I was too late: she was gone by the time I turned, and all the doors looked alike again.

I went to them and tried them one by one. Each one was the wrong one, wouldn’t open. Now I couldn’t get out of here, I was trapped, shut in with what was lying there on the floor. It still held fear and menace, greater even than when it had attacked me.

For the dread and horror was now more imminent than ever, seemed about to burst and inundate me. Its source was what lay there on the floor. I had to hide it, I had to shut it away.

I threw open one of the many doors that had baffled me so repeatedly throughout. And behind it, in the sapphire pall that still shrouded the scene, I now saw a shallow closet.

I picked up what lay on the floor—and I could seem to do it easily; it had become light. I propped it up behind the closet door; there was not depth enough behind it to do anything else.

Then I closed the door upon it, and pressed it here and there with the flats of my hands, up and down the frame that bordered the mirror, as if to make it hold tighter. But danger still seemed to exude through it, like a vapor. I knew that wasn’t enough; I must do more than that, or it would surely open again.

Then I looked down, and below the knob there was a keyhead sticking out. It was shaped a little like a three-leaf clover, and the inner rim of each of the three scooped-out “leaves” was fretted with scrollwork and tracery.

It was of some yellowish metal, either brass or iron gilded over. A key such as is no longer made or used.

I turned it in the keyhole and I drew it slowly out. I was surprised at how long a stem it had; it seemed to keep coming forever. At last it ended in two odd little teeth, each one doubled back on itself, like the single arm of a swastika.

I pocketed it. Then the knob started turning from the inside; the door started to open, slowly but remorselessly. In another minute I was going to see something unspeakably awful on the other side of it. Revelation, the thing the whole long mental-film had been building to, was upon me.

And then I woke up.

CHAPTER II

THE KEY

I’D lost the pillow to the floor, and my head was halfway down after it, dangling partly over the side of the bed. My face was studded with oozing sweatdrops.

I propped myself upon one elbow and blew out my breath harrowedly. I mumbled, “Gee I’m glad that’s over with!” and drew the back of my pajama sleeve across my forehead to dry it. I looked at the clock, and it was time to get up anyway; but even if it hadn’t been, who would have risked going back to sleep after such a thing? It might have reformed and started in again, for all I knew.

I flung my legs out of the ravaged coverings, sat on the edge of the bed, picked up a sock and turned it inside out preparatory to shuffling it on.

Dreams were funny things. Where’d they come from? Where’d they go?

A basinful of stinging cold water in the bathroom cleared away the last lingering vestige of it, and from this point on everything was on a different plane—normal, rational and reassuringly familiar. The friendly bite of the comb. The winding of the little stem of my wristwatch, the looping together of the two strap-ends around my—

They fell open and dangled down straight again, still unattached and stayed that way. I had to rivet my free hand to the little dial to keep it from sliding off my wrist.

I stared at the thing for minutes on end.

I had to let my cuff slide back in place and cover it at last. I couldn’t stand there staring at it forever. That didn’t answer anything. What should it tell me? It was a scratch, that was all.

TALK about your realistic dreams! Well, I thought, I must have done that to myself, with my other hand, in the throes of it. That was why the detail entered into the dream-fabric.

It couldn’t, naturally, be the other way around: because the other way around meant transference from the dream into the actuality of a red scratch across my wristbone.

I went ahead. The familiar plane, the rational everyday plane. The blue tie today. I threw up my collar, drew the tie-length through, folded it down again.

My hands stayed on it, holding it down flat on each side of my neck, as if afraid it would fly away. Part of my mind was getting ready to get frightened, fly off the handle, and the rest of my mind wouldn’t let it, held it steady just like I held the collar.

But I hadn’t had those bruises—those brownish-purple discolorations, faintly visible at the side of my neck, as from the pressure of cruel fingers—I hadn’t had those last night when I undressed.

Well—I hadn’t yet had the dream last night when I undressed either. Why look for spooks in this? The same explanation that covered the wrist-scratch still held good for this too. I must have done it to myself, seized my own throat in trying to ward off the attack passing through my mind just then.

I even stood there and tried to reconstruct the posture, to see if it was physically feasible. It was, but the result was almost grotesquely distorted. It resulted in crossing the arms over the chest and gripping, the left side of the neck with the right hand, the right with the left

I didn’t know; maybe troubled sleepers did get into those positions. I wasn’t as convinced as I would have like to be. One thing was certain: the marks had been made by two hands, not one.

But—more disturbing than their visibility—there was pain in them, soreness when I prodded them with my own fingertips, stiffness when I turned my neck acutely. It seemed to weaken the theory of self-infliction. How was it I hadn’t awakened myself, exerting that much pressure?

I forced myself back to the everyday plane again: buttoned the collar around the bruises, party but not entirely concealing them, knotted the tie, shrugged on vest and coat. I was about ready to go now.

The last thing I did was what I always did last of all, one of those ineradicable little habits. I reached into my pocket to make sure I had enough change available for my meal and transportation, without having to stop and change a bill on the way.

I brought up a palmful of it, and then I lost a good deal of it between my suddenly stiff outspread fingers. Only one or two pieces, stayed on, around the button. The large and central button.

I let them roll, not stooping to pick them up. I couldn’t; my spine wouldn’t have bent right then.

It was a strange button. I knew I was going to check it with every article of clothing I had, but I already knew it wasn’t from one of my own things.

Something about the shape, the color, told me; my fingers had never twisted it through a buttonhole, or they would have remembered it.

That may sound far-fetched; but buttons can become personalized to nearly as great an extent as neckties.

And when I closed my hand over it—as I did now—it took up as much room inside my folded palm, it had the same feel, as it had had a little while ago in that thing. Oh, I could remember clearly. It was the button from the dream.

I THREW open the closet door so fast and frightenedly it hit the wall and bounced. There wasn’t anything hanging up in there that I didn’t hold that button against—even where there was no button missing, even where its size and type utterly precluded its having been attached.

It wasn’t from anything of mine; it didn’t belong anywhere.

This time I couldn’t say: “I did it to myself in the throes of that thing.” It came from somewhere. It had four center holes, with even a wisp or two of black tailor’s thread still entwined in them. It was solid, not a phantom.

But rationality wouldn’t give in. No, no. I picked this up on the street, and I don’t remember doing it. That simply wasn’t so; I’d never picked up a stray button in my life.

Or the last tailor I sent this suit out to left it in the pocket from someone else’s clothing by mistake. But they always return dry-cleaned garments to me with the pocket-linings inside out; I’d noticed that a dozen times.

That was the best rationalization could do, and it was none too good. I said out loud, “I better get out of here. I need a cup of coffee. I’ve got the jitters.”

I shrugged into my coat fast, threw open my room door, poised it to close it after me. And the last gesture of all, before leaving each morning, came to me instinctively: feeling to make sure I had my key and wouldn’t be locked out when I returned that evening.

It came up across the pads of my fingers, but it was only visible at both ends. The middle part was bisected, obscured by something lying across it. My lips parted spasmodically, and refused to come together again.

It had a head—this topmost one—a little like a three-leaf clover, and the inner rim of each of the three “leaves” was fretted with scroll work and tracery. It had a stem disproportionately long for the size of its head, and it ended in two odd little teeth bent back on themselves, like half of a swastika.

It was of some yellowish composition, either brass or iron gilded over. A key such as is no longer made or used.

IT LAY lengthwise in the hollow of my hand, and I kept touching it repeatedly with the thumb of that same hand. That was the only part of me that moved for a long time, that foolish flexing thumb.

I didn’t leave right then, for all my preparations. I went back into the room and closed the door after me on the inside, and staggered dazedly around for a moment or two.

Once I dropped down limply on the edge of the bed, then turned around and noticed what it was, and got hastily up again, more frightened than ever.

Another time, I remember, I thrust my face close to the mirror in the dresser, drew down my lower lid with one finger, stared intently at the white of my eyeball. Even as I did it, I didn’t know what it would tell me. It didn’t tell me anything.

And still another time, I looked out of the window, as if to see whether the outside world was still there. It was. The houses across the way looked just as they’d looked last night. The lady on the third floor had her bedding airing over the windowsill, just like every morning. There was nothing the matter out there. It was in here, with me.

I decided I’d better go to work; maybe that would pull me out of this. I fled from the room almost as if it were haunted. It was too late to stop off at a breakfast-counter now. I didn’t want any anyway. My stomach kept giving little quivers.

In the end I didn’t go to work either. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have been any good. I telephoned in that I was too ill to come—and it was no idle excuse.

I roamed around the rest of the day in the sunshine. Wherever the sunshine was the brightest, I sought and stayed in that place, and when it moved on I moved with it. I couldn’t get it bright enough or strong enough.

And yet the sunshine didn’t warm me. Where others mopped their brows and moved out of it, I stayed—and remained cold inside. And the shade was winning the battle as the hours lengthened. The sun weakened and died; the shade deepened and spread. Night was coming on: the time of dreams, the enemy.

CHAPTER III

DEAD END

I WENT to Cliff’s house late. The first time I got there they were still at the table; I could see them through the front window. I walked around the block repeatedly, until Lil had gotten up from the table and taken all the dishes with her, and Cliff had moved to another chair and was sitting there alone.

I did all this so she wouldn’t ask me to sit down at the table with them; I couldn’t have stood it.

I rang the bell and she opened the door, dried her hands, and said heartily: “Hello, stranger. I was just saying to Cliff only tonight, it’s about time you showed up around here.”

I wanted to detach him from her, but first I had to sit through about ten minutes of her. She was my sister, but you don’t tell women things like I wanted to tell him.

Finally she said, “I’ll just finish up the dishes, and then I’ll be back.”

The minute the doorway was empty I whispered urgently, “Get your hat and take a walk with me outside. I want to tell you something—alone.”

On our way out he called in to the kitchen, “Vince and I are going out to stretch our legs. We’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

She called back immediately and warningly: “Now Cliff, only beer—if that’s what you’re going for.”

It put the idea in his head, if nothing else, but I said: “No, I want to be able to tell you this clearly. It’s going to sound hazy enough as it is; let’s stay out in the open.”

We strolled slowly along the sidewalk; he was on his feet a lot and it was no treat to him, I suppose, but he was a good-natured sort of fellow and didn’t complain. He was a detective. I probably would have gone to him about it anyway even if he hadn’t been, but the fact that he was, of course, made it the inevitable thing to do.

He had to prompt me, because I didn’t know where to begin. “So what’s the grief, boy friend?”

“Cliff, last night I dreamed I killed a fellow. I don’t know who he was or where it was supposed to be. His nail creased my wrist, his fingers bruised the sides of my neck, and a button came off him somewhere and got locked in my hand.

“And finally, after I’d done it, I locked the door of a closet I’d propped him up in, put the key away in my pocket. And when I woke up—Well, look.”

We had stopped under a street light. I turned to face him. I drew back my cuff to show him. “Can you see it?” He said he could.

I dragged down my collar with both hands, first on one side, then on the other. “Can you see them? Can you see the faint purplish marks there? They’re turning a little black now.”

He said he could.

“And the button, the same shape and size and everything, was in my trousers-pocket along with my change. It’s on the dresser back in my own room now; if you want to come over, you can see it for yourself.

“And last of all, the key turned up on me, next to my own key, in the pocket where I always keep it. I’ve got it right here; I’ll show it to you. I’ve been carrying it around with me all day.”

IT TOOK me a little while to get it out, my hand was shaking so. It had shaken like that all day, every time I brought it near the thing to feel if it was still on me.

He took it from me and examined it. curiously but noncommittally.

“That’s just the way it looked in—when I saw it when I was asleep,” I told him. “The same shape, the same color, the same design. It even weighs the same, it even—.”

He lowered his head a trifle, looked at me intently from under his brows, when he heard how my voice sounded. “You’re all in pieces, aren’t you?” He put his hand on my shoulder for a minute to steady it. “Don’t take it that way, don’t let it get you.”

That didn’t help. Sympathy wasn’t what I wanted; I wanted explanation. “Cliff, you’ve got to help me. You don’t know what I’ve been through all day.”

He weighed the key up and down. “Where’d you get this from, Vince? I mean, where’d you first get it from, before you dreamed about it?”

I grabbed his arm with both hands. “But don’t you understand what I’ve just been telling you? I didn’t have it before I dreamed about it. I never saw it before then. And then I wake up, and it turns real!”

“And that goes for the button too?”

I quirked my head.

“You’re in bad shape over this, aren’t you? Well what is it that’s really got you going? It’s not the key and button and scratch, is it? Are you afraid the dream really happened; is that it?”

By that I could see that he hadn’t understood until now, hadn’t really gotten me. Naturally it wasn’t just the tokens carried over from the dream that had the life frightened out of me. It was the implication behind them.

If it were just a key turned up in my pocket after I dreamed about it, why would I go to him? The hell with it. But if the key turned up real, then there was a mirrored closet door somewhere to go with it.

And if there was a closet to match it, then there was a body crammed inside it. Also real. Real dead. A body that had scratched me and tried to wring my neck before I killed it.

I TRIED to tell him that. I was too weak to shake him, but I went through the motions. “Don’t you understand? There’s a door somewhere in this city right at this very minute, that this key belongs to! There’s a man propped up dead behind it!

“And I don’t know where, nor who he is, nor how or why it happened; only that—that I must have been there, I must have done it—or why would it come to my mind like that in my sleep? Why?”

“You’re in a bad way.” He gave a short whistle through his clenched teeth. “You need a drink, Lil or no Lil! Come on; we’ll go some place and get this thing out of your system.” He clutched me peremptorily by the arm.

“But only coffee,” I said. “Let’s go where the lights are good and bright.”

We went where there was so much gleam and so much dazzle even the flies walking around on the table cast long shadows.

“Now we’ll go at this my way,” he said, licking the beer-foam off his upper lip. “Tell me the dream over again.”

I told it.

“I can’t get anything out of that.” He shook his head. “Did you know this girl, or face, or whatever it was?”

I pressed the point of one finger down hard on the table. “No, now I don’t; but in the dream I did, and it made me broken-hearted to see her. Like she had doublecrossed me or something.”

“Well, in the dream who was she, then?”

“I don’t know; I knew her then, but now I don’t.”

“Cripes!” he said, swallowing more beer fast. “I should have made this whisky with tabasco sauce! Well, was she some actress you’ve seen on the screen lately, maybe? Or some picture you’ve seen in a magazine? Or maybe even some passing face you glimpsed in a crowd? All those things could happen.”

“I don’t know. I seemed to know her better than that; it hurt me to see her, to have her hate me. But I can’t carry her over into—now.”

“And the man?”

“No, I couldn’t seem to see his face through the whole thing. I only saw it at the very end, after it was already too late. And then when the door started to open again, it seemed as if I was going to find out something horrible—about him, I guess. But I woke up…”

“Last of all, the place. You say nothing but doors all around you. Have you been in a place like that lately? Have you ever seen one? In a magazine illustration, in a story you read, in a movie?”

“No.”

“Well then, let’s get away from the dream. Let’s leave it alone.” He flung his hand back and forth relievedly, as if clearing the air. “It was starting to get me myself. Now what’d you do last night, before this whole thing came up?”

“Nothing. Just what I do every other night. I left work at the usual time, had my meal at the usual place—.”

“Sure it wasn’t a welsh rabbit?”

“A welsh rabbit is not responsible for that key. A locksmith is. Drop it on the table and hear it clash! Bite it between your teeth and chip them! And I didn’t have it when I went to bed last night.”

HE LEANED toward me. “Now listen, Vince. There’s a very simple explanation for that key. There has to be. And whatever it is, it didn’t come to you in a dream. Either you were walking along, you noticed that key, picked it up because of its peculiar—”

I semaphored both hands before my face. “No, I tried to sell myself that this morning; it won’t work. I’d remember the key itself, even if I didn’t remember the incident of finding it. It’s a unique key, and I never saw it before.”

“All right, it don’t have to be that explanation. There’s a dozen-and-one other ways it could have gotten into your pocket without your knowledge. You might have hung the coat up under some shelf the key was lying on, and it dropped off and the open pocket caught it—”

“The pockets of my topcoat have flaps. What’d it do, make a U-turn to get in under them?”

“The flaps might have been left accidentally tucked in, from the last time your hands were in your pockets. Or it may have fallen out of someone else’s coat hung up next to yours in a cloakroom, and been lying there on the floor, and someone came along, thought it belonged in your coat, put it back in—”

“I shoved my hands in and out of those pockets a dozen times yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. Where was it then? It wasn’t in the pocket. But it was this morning. After I saw it clear as a photograph in my sleep during the night!”

Cliff rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a minute. “All right, have it your way. Let’s say that it wasn’t in your pocket last night. That still don’t prove that the dream itself was real.”

“No?” I shrilled. “It gives it a damn good foundation-in-fact as far as I’m concerned!”

“Listen, Vince, there’s no halfway business about these things. Either you dream a thing or it really happens. You’re twenty-six years old; you’re not a kid.

“Don’t worry; you’d know it and you’d remember it damn plainly afterward if you ever came to grips with a guy and he had you by the throat, like in this dream, and you rammed something into his back.

“I don’t take any stock in this stuff about people walking in their sleep and doing things without knowing it. They can walk a little ways off from their beds, maybe, but the minute anyone touches them or does something to stop them, they wake right up. They can’t be manhandled and go right on sleeping through it.”

I said, “I couldn’t have walked in my sleep, anyway. It was drizzling when I went to bed last night; the streets were only starting to dry off-when I first got up this morning. I don’t own rubbers, and the soles of both my shoes were perfectly dry when I put them on.”

“Don’t try to get away from the main point at issue. Have you any recollection at all, no matter how faint, of being out of your room last night, of grappling with a guy, of ramming something into him?”

“No; all I have is a perfectly clear recollection of going to bed, dreaming I did all those things, and then waking up again.”

“Then that’s all there is to it. Then it didn’t happen.” And he repeated stubbornly: “You either dream ’em or you do ’m. No two ways about it.”

I shook my head. “You haven’t helped me a bit, not a dime’s worth.”

He was a little put out, maybe because he hadn’t. “Naturally not, not if you expected me to arrest you for murdering a guy in a dream. The arrest would have to take place in a dream too, and the trial and all the rest of it. What do you think I am, a witch doctor?”

“I’m going to sleep in the living-room at your place tonight,” I said to him. “I’m not going back to that room of mine till broad daylight. Don’t say anything to Lil about it, will you, Cliff?”

“I should say not,” he agreed. “D’you think I want her to take you for bugs? You’ll get over this, Vince.”

“First I’ll get to the bottom of it, then I’ll get over it,” I answered sombrely.

CHAPTER IV

THE EIGHTH IMAGE

I SLEPT bout an hour’s worth, and it was like any other night’s sleep I’d had all my life—until the night before. No better and no worse. Cliff came in and he stood looking at me the next morning. I threw off the blanket they’d given me and sat up on the sofa.

“How’d it go?” he asked half-secretively. On account of Lil, I suppose.

I eyed him. “I didn’t have any more dreams, if that’s what you mean. But that has nothing to do with it. If I were convinced that was a dream, I would have gone home to my own room last night, even if I were going to have it over again twice as bad.

“But I’m still not convinced. Now are you going to help me or not?”

He rocked back and forth on his feet. “What d’you want me to do?”

How could I answer that? “You’re a detective. You’ve got the key. The button’s over in my room. You must have often had less than that to work with. Find out where they came from! Find out what they’re doing on me!”

He had my best interests at heart maybe, but he thought the thing to do was bark at me. “Now listen, cut that stuff out, y’hear? I dowanna hear any more about that key. I’ve got it, and I’m keeping it, and you’re not going to see it again. If you harp on this spooky stuff any more, I’ll help you all right—in a way you won’t appreciate. I’ll haul you off to see a doctor.”

The scratch on my wrist had formed a scab; it was ready to come off. I freed it with the edge of my nail, then I blew the little sliver of dried skin off. And I gave him a long look, more eloquent than words. He got it, but he wouldn’t give in.

Lil called in: “Come and get it, boys!”

I left their house—and I was on my own, just like before I’d gone there. Me and my shadows.

I STOPPED in at a newspaper office, and I composed an ad and told them I wanted it inserted in the real estate section. I told them to keep running it daily until further notice.

It wasn’t easy to word. It took me the better part of an hour, and about three dozen blank forms. This ad:

I am interested in inspecting, for lease or purchase, a house with an octagonal mirror-paneled room or alcove. Location, size and all other details of secondary importance provided it has this one essential feature, desired for reasons of a sentimental nature. Communicate Box 37a, World-Express, giving exact details.

On the third day there were two replies waiting when I stopped in at the advertising office. One was about a house with a mirror-lined powder room on the second floor; only foursquare, but wouldn’t that do?

The other told of an octagonal breakfast nook of glass bricks…

There wasn’t anything on the fourth day. On the fifth there was a windfall of about half a dozen waiting for me when I stopped in. Five of them were from real estate agents, offering their services; the sixth from an individual owner who was evidently anxious to get a white elephant off his hands, for he offered to have a mirror-paneled room built in for me at his own expense, if I agreed to take a long-term lease on the property.

They started tapering off after that. One or two more drifted in by the end of the week, but they obviously weren’t what I was looking for. And after that the ad brought no further results; apparently the supply of mirrored compartments had been exhausted.

The advertising office phoned to find out if I wanted to continue it. “No, kill it,” I said, disheartened.

Meanwhile Cliff must have spotted it and recognized it. He was a very thorough paper-reader, when he came home at nights. Or perhaps he just wanted to see how I was getting along. At any rate he showed up good and early the next day, which was a Sunday. He was evidently off, for he was wearing a pullover and slacks.

“Sit down,” I told him.

“No,” he said, with some embarrassment. “Matter of fact, Lil and I are going to take a ride out into the country for the day, and she packed a lunch for three. Cold beer, and…”

So that was it. “Listen, I’m all right,” I said dryly. “I don’t need any fresh-air jaunts, to exorcise the devils in me, if that’s what the strategy is.”

He was going to be diplomatic—Lil’s orders, I guess—and until you’ve seen a detective trying to be diplomatic, you haven’t lived. Something about the new second-hand Chev that he’d just gotten in exchange for his old second-hand Chev. And just come down to the door a minute and say howdy to Lil; she was sitting in it.

So I did, and he brought my coat out after me and locked up the room, so I went with them.

THE thing was a hoodoo from the beginning. He wasn’t much of a driver, but he wasn’t the kind that would take back-seat orders on the road from anyone either; he knew it all.

We never did reach where they’d originally intended going; he lost it on the way, and we finally compromised on a fly-incubating meadow, after a thousand miles of detouring.

Lil was a good sport about it. “It looks just like the other place, anyway,” she said. We did more slapping at our ankles than eating, and the beer was warm, and the box of hard-boiled eggs had disappeared from the car at one of those ruts he’d hit.

And then, to complete the picture, a big bank of jet clouds piled themselves up the sky and let go all of a sudden, and we had to run for it.

The storm had come up so fast we couldn’t even get back to the car before it broke, and the rest was a matter of sitting in sodden misery while Cliff groped his way down one streaming, rain-misted country road and up another, getting more thoroughly off our bearings all the time.

Lil’s fortitude finally snapped short. “Stop at the first place you come to and let’s get in out of it!” she screamed at Cliff. “I can’t stand any more of this!” She hid her face against my chest.

“I can’t even see through my windshield much less offside past the road,” he grunted. He was driving with his forehead pressed against the glass.

I scoured a peephole on my side of the car and peered out. A sort of rustic arch sidled past in the watery welter. “There’s a cut-off a little way ahead, around the next turn,” I said. “If you take that, it’ll lead us to a house with a big wide porch; we can get in under there.”

They both spoke at once. He said, “How did you know that?” she said, “Were you ever up around these parts before?”

I couldn’t answer his question. I said, “No” to hers, which was the truth.

Even after he’d followed the cut-off for some distance, there was no sign of a house. “Are you getting us more tangled up than we were already, Vince?” he asked in mild reproach.

“No, don’t stop; keep going,” I insisted. “You’ll come to it—two big stone lanterns; turn the car left between ’em—”

I shut up again, as jerkily as I’d commenced, at the peculiar back-shoulder look he was giving me. I poked my fingers through my hair a couple of times. “Gee, I don’t know how I knew that myself,” I mumbled half-audibly.

He became very quiet from then on; I think he kept hoping I’d be wrong, there wouldn’t be any such place.

But it was Lil who tapped him on the shoulder and said, “There they are, there they are! Turn, Cliff, like he told you!”

You could hardly make them out, even at that. Faint gray blurs against the obliterating pencil-strokes of rain. You certainly couldn’t tell what they were.

He turned without a word and we glided between them. All I could see was his eyes, in the rear vision mirror, on me. I’d never seen eyes with such black, accusing pupils before; like buckshot they were.

A minute passed, and then a house with a wide, sheltering veranda materialized through the mist, phantom-like, and came to a dead halt beside us. I heard his brakes go on.

I WASN’T much aware of our dash through the curtain of water that separated us from the porch roof, Lil squealing between us, my coat hooded over her head.

Through it all I was conscious of the beer in my stomach; it had been warm when I drank it back at the meadow, but it had turned ice-cold now, as if it had been put into a refrigerator.

I had a queasy feeling, and the rain had chilled me—but deep inside where it hadn’t been able to wet me at all. And I knew those weren’t raindrops on my forehead; they were sweat turned cold.

We stamped around on the porch for a minute, the way soaked people do.

“I wish we could get in,” Lil mourned.

“The key’s under that window-box with the geraniums,” I said.

Cliff traced a finger under it, and brought it out. He put it in the keyhole, his hand shaking a little, and turned it, and the door went in. He held his neck very stiff, to keep from looking around at me. That beer had turned to a block of ice now.

I went in last, like someone toiling through the coils of a bad dream.

It was twilight-dim around us at first, the rainstorm outside had gloomed up the afternoon so. I saw Lil’s hand go out to a china switch-mount sitting on the inside of the door-frame, on the left.

“Not that one; that’s the one to the porch,” I said. “The one that controls the hall is on the other side.”

Cliff swept the door closed, revealing the switch; it had been hidden behind the door until now. He flicked it and a light went on a few yards before us, overhead. Lil tried out hers anyway, and the porch lit up; then blackened once more as she turned the switch off.

I saw them look at each other. Then she turned to me and said, “What is this, a rib? How do you know so much about this place anyway, Vince?” Poor Lil, she was in another world.

Cliff said gruffly, “Just a lucky guess on his part.” He wanted to keep her out of it, out of that darkling world he and I were in.

THE light was showing us a paneled hall, and stairs going up; dark polished wood, with a carved handrail, mahogany or something. Cliff said, pointing his call up the stairs: “Good afternoon. Anybody home?”

I said, “Don’t do that,” in a choked voice.

“He’s cold,” Lil said. “He’s shaking.”

But she could not know the origin of my strange chill.

She turned aside through a double doorway and lighted up a living room. We both looked in there after her, without going in; we had other things on our mind than warmth and comfort.

There was an expensive parquet floor, but everything else was in a partial state of dismantlement. Dust covers made ghostly shapes of the chairs and sofa and a piano.

“Away for the summer,” Lil said knowingly. “But funny they’d leave it unlocked like that, and with the electricity still connected. Your being a detective comes in handy, Cliff; we won’t get in trouble walking in like this…”

There was a black onyx fireplace, and after running her hands exploringly around it, she gave a little bleat of satisfaction and touched something. “Electric.”

It glowed red. She started to rub her arms and shake out her skirt before it, to dry herself off, and forgot us for the time being.

I glanced at Cliff, and then I backed away, out of the doorway. I turned and went up the staircase, silently but swiftly. I saw him make for the back of the hall, equally silent and swift. We were both furtive in our movements, somehow.

I found a bedroom, dismantled like downstairs. I left it by another door, and found myself in a two-entrance bath. I went out by the second entrance, and I was in another bedroom.

Through a doorway, left open, I could see the hallway outside. Through another doorway, likewise unobstructed, I could see—myself.

Poised, quivering with apprehension, arrested in mid-search, white face staring out from above a collar not nearly as white. I shifted, came closer—dying a little, wavering as I advanced.

Two of me. Three. Four, five, six, seven.

I was across the threshold now. And the door, brought around from its position flat against the outside wall and pulled in after me, flashed the eighth image of myself on its mirror-backed surface.

CHAPTER V

INQUISITION

I TOTTERED there, and stumbled, and nearly went down—all nine of me. Cliff’s footfall sounded behind me; and the eighth reflection was swept away, leaving only seven. His hand gripped me by the shoulder, supporting me.

I heard myself groan in infinite desolation, “This is the place; God above, this is the place!”

“Yeh,” he bit out in an undertone.

“Have you got it?” I said.

He knew what I meant. He fumbled. He had it on a ring with his other keys. I wished he hadn’t kept it; I wished he’d thrown it away.

The other keys slithered away, and there it was. Fancy scroll-work—a key such as is no longer used or made…

One glass was a door, the door we’d come in by. Four of the remaining seven were dummies, mirrors set into the naked wall-plaster. You could tell that because they had no keyholes. They were the ones that cut the corners of the quadrilateral. The real ones were the ones that paralleled the walls, one on each side.

He put the key into one, and it went in smoothly. Something went cluck behind the wood, and he pulled open the mirror door.

A ripple coursed down the lining of my stomach. There was nothing in there, only empty wooden paneling. That left two.

Lil’s hail reached us. “What are you two up to, up there?” From that other world, so far away.

“Keep her downstairs a minute!” I breathed desperately.

He called down: “Hold it. Vince has taken off his pants to dry them.”

She answered, “I’m hungry, I’m going to see if they left anything around to—” And her voice trailed off toward the kitchen at the back.

He was turning the key in the second door; and when he said, “Look!” I saw a black thing in the middle of the closet, and for a minute I thought—

It was a built-in safe, steel painted black but with the dial left its own color. It had been cut or burned into.

“That’s what he was crouched before, that—night, when he seemed just like a puddle on the floor,” I heard myself say. “And he must have had a blow-torch down there on the floor in front of him; that’s what made that bluish light. And made her face stand out in the reflection, like a mask—”

A sob popped like a bubble. in my throat. “And that one, that you haven’t opened yet, is the one I propped him up in.”

He straightened and turned, and started over toward it.

I turned to water, and there wasn’t anything like courage in the whole world; I didn’t know where other fellows got theirs. “No, don’t,” I pleaded, and caught ineffectively at his sleeve. “Wait just a minute longer; give me a chance to—”

“Cut that out,” he said remorselessly, and shook my hand off. He went ahead; he put the key in, and turned it…

He opened it between us. I mean, I was standing on the opposite side from him. He looked in slantwise first, when it was still just open a crack, and then he widened it around my way for me to see. I couldn’t until then.

That was his answer to my unspoken question, that widening of it like that for me to see. Nothing fell out on him; nothing was in there. Not any more.

He struck a match, and singed all up and down the perpendicular woodwork.

There was light behind us, but it wasn’t close enough.

When the match stopped traveling, you could see the faint, blurred, old discoloration behind it. Old blood, dark against the lighter wood.

There wasn’t very much of it; just about what would seep through a wound in a dead back, ooze through clothing, and be pressed out against the wood.

He singed the floor, but there wasn’t any down there; it hadn’t been able to worm its way down that far. You could see where it had ended in two little tracks, one longer than the other, squashed out by the blotter-like clothed back before they had gotten very far.

The closet and I, we stared at one another.

The match went out, the old blood went out with it.

“Someone that was hurt was in here,” he conceded grimly.

Someone that was dead, I amended with a silent shudder.

LIL dozed off right after the improvised snack she’d gotten up for us in the kitchen, tired out from the excitement of the storm and of getting lost. The two of us had to sit with her and go through the motions, while the knowledge we shared hung over us like a bloody ax, poised and waiting to crash.

He could hardly wait to tackle me. All through the sketchy meal he’d sat there drumming the fingers of his left hand on the table top, while he inattentively shoveled and spaded with his right.

My own rigid wrist and elbow shoved stuff through my teeth; I don’t know what it was. And then after it got in, it wouldn’t go down anyway; stuck in my craw.

“What’s the matter, Vince? You’re not very hungry,” Lil said one time.

He answered for me. “No, he isn’t!” He’d turned unfriendly.

We left her stretched out on the covered sofa in the living room, the electric fireplace on, both our coats spread over her for a pieced blanket.

As soon as her eyes were safely closed, he went out into the hall, beckoning me after him with an imperative hitch of his head without looking at me. I followed.

“Close the doors,” he whispered gutturally. “I don’t want her to hear this.”

I did, and then I followed him some more, back into the kitchen where we’d all three of us been until only a few minutes before. It was about the furthest you could get away from where she was. It was still warm and friendly from her having been in there.

He changed all that with a look. At me. A look that belonged in a police-station basement.

HE LIT a cigarette, and it jiggled with wrath between his lips. He didn’t offer me one. Policemen don’t, with their suspects. He shoved his hands deep in pockets, like he wanted to keep them down from flying at me.

“Let’s hear about another dream.”

His voice was flat, cold.

I eyed the floor. “You think I lied, don’t you?”

That was as far as I got. He had a temper. He came up close against me, sort of pinning me back against the wall. Not physically—his hands were still in pockets—but by the scathing glare he sent into me.

“You knew which cut-off to take that would get us here, from a dream, didn’t you?

“You knew about those stone lanterns at the entrance from a dream, didn’t you?

“You knew where the key to the front door was cached from a dream, didn’t you?

“You knew which was the porch switch and which the hall—from a dream, didn’t you?

“You know what I’d do to you, if you weren’t Lil’s brother? I’d push your lying face out through the back of your head!” And the way his hands hitched up, he had a hard time to keep from doing it then and there.

I twisted and turned as if I was on a spit, the way I was being tortured.

He wasn’t through.

“You came to me for help, didn’t you! But you didn’t have guts enough to come clean. To say, Cliff, I went out to such-and-such a place in the country last night and I killed a guy. Such-and-such a guy, for such-and-such a reason.

“No, you had to cook up a dream.

“I can look up to and respect a guy, no matter how rotten a crime he’s committed, that’ll own up to it, make a clean breast of it. And I can even understand and make allowances for a guy that’ll deny it flatly, lie about it; that’s only human nature.

“But a guy that’ll come to someone, trading on the fact that he’s married to his sister, making a fool out of him, like you did me—!

“He’s lower than the lowest rat we ever brought in for knifing someone in an alley! ‘Look, I found this key in my pocket when I got up this morning; how’d it get in there?’ ‘Look, I found this button—’

“Playing on my sympathies, huh? Getting me to think in terms of doctors and medical observation, huh?”

One hand came out of his pocket at last. He threw away his cigarette. “Some dream that was, all right! Well the dream’s over and baby’s awake now.” His left came out of the pocket and soldered itself to my shoulder and stiff-armed me there in front of him.

“We’re going to start in from scratch, right here in this place, you and me. I’m going to get the facts out of you, and whether they go any further than me or not, that’s my business. But at least I’m going to have them!”

HIS right had knotted up; I could see him priming it. How could that get something out of me that I didn’t have in me to give him?

“What were you doing out at this place the night it happened? What brought you here?”

I shook my head helplessly. “I never was here before. I never saw it until I came here today with you and Lil.”

He shot a short uppercut into my jaw. It was probably partly pulled, but it smacked my head back into the wall. “Who was the guy you did it to? What was his name?”

“I’m in Hell already, you blundering fool, without this,” I moaned.

He sent another one up at me; I swerved my head, and this time it just grazed me. My stubbornness—it must have seemed like that—inflamed his anger. “Are you gonna answer me, Vince? Are you gonna answer me?”

“I can’t. You’re asking me things I can’t.” A sob of misery wrenched from me. “Ask God—or whoever it is watches over us in the night when we’re unconscious.”

He kept swinging at me. “Who was the guy? Why’d you kill him? Why? Why? Why?”

Finally I wrenched myself free, retreated out of range. We stood there facing one another for an instant, puffing, glaring.

He closed in again. “You’re not going to get away with this,” he heaved. “I’ve handled close-mouthed guys before. I know how to. You’re going to tell me, or I’m going to half kill you with my own hands—where you killed somebody else.”

He meant it. I could see he meant it. The policeman’s blood in him was up. He could put up with anything but what he took to be this senseless stubbornness in the face of glaring, inescapable facts.

I felt the edge of the table the three of us had peacefully eaten at so short a time before grazing the fleshy part of my back. I shifted around behind it, got it between us.

He swung up a rickety chair; it probably wouldn’t have done much more than stun me. I don’t think he wanted it to. He didn’t want to break my head. He just wanted to get the truth out of it.

And I—I wanted to get the truth into it.

He at least had someone he thought he could get the truth out of. I had no one to turn to. Only the inscrutable night that never repeats what it sees.

He poised the chair high overhead, and slung his lower jaw out of line with his upper.

I heard the door slap open. It was over beyond my shoulders. He could see it and I couldn’t, without turning. I saw him sort of freeze and hold it, and look over at it, not at me any more.

I looked too, and there was a man standing there eyeing the two of us, holding a drawn gun in his hand. Ready to use it.

CHAPTER VI

THERE WAS A MURDER

HE SPOKE first, after a second that had been stretched like an elastic band to cover a full minute had snapped back in place. “What’re you two men doing in here?”

He moved one foot watchfully across the threshold.

Cliff let the chair down the slow, easy way, with a neat little tick of its four legs. His stomach was still going in and out a little; I could see it through his shirt.

“We came in out of the rain, that suit you?” he said with left-over truculence that had been boiled-up toward me originally and was only now simmering down.

“Identify yourselves—and hurry up about it!” The man’s other foot came in the room. So did the gun. So did the cement ridges around his eyes.

Cliff took a wallet out of his rear trousers pocket, shied it over at him so that it slithered along the floor and came up against his feet. “Help yourself,” he said contemptuously.

He turned, went over to the sink, and poured himself a glass of water to help cool off, without waiting to hear the verdict.

He came back wiping his chin on his shirtsleeve, holding out a hand peremptorily for the return of the credentials. The contents of the wallet had buried the gun muzzle-first in its holster, rubbed out the cement ridges around his owner’s eyes.

“Thanks, Dodge,” he said with noticeably increased deference. “Homicide Division, huh?”

Cliff remained unbending. “How about doing a little identifying yourself?”

“I’m a deputy attached to the sheriff’s office.” He silvered the mouth of his vest-pocket, looked a little embarrassed. “I’m detailed to keep an eye on this place. I was home having a little supper, and—uh—”

He glanced out into the hall behind him questioningly. “How’d you get in? I thought I had it all locked up safe and sound.”

“The key was bedded in a flower box on the porch,” Cliff said.

“It was!” He looked startled. “Must be a spare, then. I’ve had the original on me night and day for the past week. Funny, we never knew there was a second one ourselves—”

I swallowed at this point, but it didn’t ease my windpipe any.

“I was driving by just to see if everything was okay,” he went on, “and I saw a light peering out of the rear window here. Then when I got in, I heard the two of you—”

I saw his glance rest on the chair a moment. He didn’t even ask what we had been scrapping about. Cliff wouldn’t have answered it if he had, I could tell that by his expression. His attitude was plainly that it was something just between the two of us.

“I thought maybe ’bones had broken in or something,” the deputy added lamely, seeing he wasn’t getting any additional information.

Cliff said, “Why should this house be your particular concern?”

“There was a murder uncovered in it last week, you know.”

Something inside me seemed to go down for the third time.

“There was,” Cliff echoed tonelessly. There wasn’t even a question-mark after it. “I’d like to hear about it.” He waited a while, and then he added, “All about it.”

HE STRADDLED the chair, legs to the back. He took out his pack of smokes again. Then when he’d helped himself, he pitched it over at me, but without deigning to look at me.

Like you throw something to a dog. No, not like that. You like the dog, as a rule.

I don’t know how he managed to get the message across; but in that simple, unspoken act I got the meaning he wanted me to, perfectly. Whatever there is between us, I’m seeing that it stays just between us—for the time being, anyway. So shut up and stay out of it. I’m not ready to give you away to anybody—yet.

“Give one to the man,” he said in a stony-hard voice, again without looking at me.

“Much obliged; got my own.” The deputy went over and rested one haunch on the edge of the table. That put me behind him, which maybe was just as well. He addressed himself entirely to Cliff.

He expanded, felt at home, you could see. This was shop talk with a big-time city dick, on a footing of equality. He haloed his own head with comfortable smoke. “This house belonged to a wealthy couple named Fleming—”

Cliff’s eyes flicked over at me, burned searchingly into my face for a second, whipped back to the deputy again before he had time to notice.

How could I show him any reaction, guilty or otherwise? I’d never heard the name before myself. It didn’t mean anything to me.

“The husband frequently goes away on these long business trips. He was away at the time this happened. In fact we haven’t been able to reach him to notify him yet. The wife was a pretty little thing—”

“Was?” I heard Cliff breathe.

The deputy went ahead; he was telling this his way.

“—kind of flighty. In fact, some of the women around here say she wasn’t above flirting behind his back, but no one was ever able to prove anything.

“There was a young fellow whose company she was seen in a good deal, but that don’t have to mean anything. He was just as much a friend of the husband’s as of hers; three of them used to go around together. His name was Dan Ayers.”

This time it was my mind that soundlessly repeated, “Was?”

THE deputy took time out, spat, scoured the linoleum with his sole. It wasn’t his kitchen floor, after all. It was nobody’s now. Some poor devil’s named Fleming that thought he was coming back to happiness.

“Bob Evans—he leaves the milk around here—he was tooling his truck in through the cut-off that leads to this place, just about daybreak that Wednesday morning, and in the shadowy light he sees a bundle of rags lying there in the moss and brakes just offside.

“Luckily Bob’s curious. Well sir, he stops, and it was little Mrs. Fleming, poor little Mrs. Fleming, all covered with dew and leaves and twigs—”

“Dead?” Cliff asked. “Dying. She must have spent hours dragging herself flat along the ground toward the main road in the hope of attracting attention and getting help. She must have been too weak to cry out very loud; and even if she had, there wasn’t anybody around to hear her.

“She must have groaned her life away unheard, there in those thickets and brambles. She’d gotten nearly as far as the foot of one of those stone entrance lanterns they have where you turn in. She was unconscious when Bob found her.

“He rushed her to the hospital, let the rest of his deliveries go hang. Both legs broken, skull fracture, internal injuries; they said right away she didn’t have a chance, and they were right. She died early the next night.”

Breathing was so hard; I’d never known breathing to be so hard before. It had always seemed a simple thing that anyone could do—and here I had to work at it so desperately.

The noise attracted the deputy. He turned his head, then back to Cliff with the comfortable superiority of the professional over the layman. “Kinda gets him, doesn’t it? This stuff’s new to him I guess.”

Cliff wasn’t having any of me. How he hated me right then! “What was it?” he went on tautly, without even giving me a look.

“Well that’s it; we didn’t know what it was at first. We knew that a car did it to her, but we didn’t get the hang of it at first, had it all wrong.

“We even found the car itself; it was abandoned there under the trees, off the main road a little way down beyond the cut-off. There were hairs and blood on the tires and fenders. And it was Dan Ayers’ car.

“Well, practically simultaneous to that find, Waggoner, that’s my chief, had come up here to the house to look around, and he’d found the safe busted and looted. It’s in an eight-sided mirrored room they got on the floor above, I’ll take you up and show you afterwards—”

“Cut it out!” Cliff snarled unexpectedly. Not at the deputy.

I put the whiskey-bottle back on the shelf where it had first caught my eye just now. This was like having your appendix taken out without ether.

“Why don’t he go outside if this gets him?” the deputy said patronizingly.

“I want him in here with us; he should get used to this,” Cliff said with vicious casualness.

“WELL, that finding of the safe gave us a case, gave us the whole thing, entire and intact. Or so we thought. You know, those cases that you don’t even have to build, that are there waiting for you—too good to be true?

“This was it; Ayers had caught on that Fleming left a good deal of money in the safe even when he was away on trips; had brought her back that night, and either fixed the door so that he could slip back inside again afterwards after pretending to leave, or else remained concealed in the house the whole time without her being aware of it.

“Some time later she came out of her room unexpectedly, caught him in the act of forcing her husband’s safe, and ran out of the house for her life—”

“Why didn’t she use the telephone?” Cliff asked unmovedly.

“We thought of that. It wasn’t a case of simply reporting an attempted robbery. She must have seen by the look on his face when she confronted him that he was going to kill her to shut her up. There wasn’t any time to stop at a phone.

“She ran out into the open and down the cut-off toward the main road, to try to save her own life. She got clear of the house, but he tore after her in his car, caught up with her before she made the halfway mark to the stone lanterns.

“She tried to swerve offside into the brush, he turned the car after her, and killed her with it, just before she could get in past the trees that would have blocked him.

“We found traces galore there that reconstructed that angle of it to a T. And they were all offside, off the car-path; it was no hit-and-run, it was no accident; it was a deliberate kill, with the car chassis for a weapon.

“He knocked her down, went over her, and then reversed and went over her a second time in backing out. He thought she was dead; she was next door to it, but she was only dying.”

I blotted the first tear before it got free of my lashes, but the second one dodged me, ran all the way down. Gee, life was lovely! All I kept saying over and over was: I don’t know how to drive, I don’t know how to drive.

CLIFF took out his cigarettes again and prodded into the warped pack. He threw it at me, and looked at me and smiled. “Have another smoke, kid,” he said. “I’ve only got one left, but you can have it.”

And I lit it and smiled too, through all the wet junk in my eyes.

“He rode the car a spell further down the main road away from there, and then he thought better of it, realized there must be traces all over it that would give him away even quicker than he could drive it, so he ran it off a second time, ditched it there out of sight where we found it, and lit out some less conspicuous way.

“I don’t want to spend too much time on it. This is the case we thought we had, all Wednesday morning and up until about five that afternoon.

“We sent out a general alarm for Dan Ayers, broadcast his description, had the trains and roads and hauling-trucks out of here watched at the city end.

“And then at five that afternoon Mrs. Fleming regained consciousness for a short time—Waggoner had been waiting outside there the whole time to question her—and the first thing she whispered was, ‘Is Dan all right? He didn’t kill Dan, did he?’ And then she talked.

“What she told us was enough to send us hotfooting back to the house. We pried open the various mirror panels we’d overlooked the first time and found Ayers’ dead body behind one of them. He’d been stabbed in the back with some kind of an awl or bit.

“He’d been dead since the night before. She died about eight that next evening. There went our case.”

Cliff didn’t ask it for quite a while; maybe he hated to himself. Finally he did. “Did you get anything on the real killer?”

“Practically everything but the guy himself. She was right in the alcove with the two of them when it happened. She got a pretty good look by torchlight, and she lasted long enough to give it to us. All the dope is over at my chief’s office.”

Cliff smacked his own knees, as if in reluctant decision. He got up. “Let’s go over there,” he said slowly. “Let’s go over and give it the once over.” He stopped and looked back at me from the doorway. “C’mon, Vince, you too. I’ll leave a note for Lil.”

He stood out there waiting, until I had to get up. My legs felt stiff.

“C’mon, Vince,” he repeated. “I know this is out of your line, but you better come anyway.”

“Haven’t you got any mercy at all?” I breathed, as I brushed past him with lowered head.

CHAPTER VII

WRONG WAY OUT

CLIFF trod on my heel twice, going into the office from the deputy’s car, short as the distance was. He was bringing up behind me. It might have been accidental; but I think without it I might have faltered and come to a dead halt. I think he thought so too.

Waggoner was a much younger-looking and trimmer man than I had expected. The four of us went into his inner office, at the back of the front room, and the three of them chewed the rag about it—the case—in general terms for a while.

Then he said “Yes,” to Cliff’s question, opened a drawer in one of the filing cabinets and got out a folder.

“We do have a pretty good general description of him, from her. Here’s a transcription of my whole interview with her at the hospital. I had a stenographer take it down at her bedside.”

From the folder he removed a typescript on onionskin. “All that,” I thought dismally. The room had gotten very quiet. “Our reconstruction of the car assault on Mrs. Fleming was perfectly accurate, as was our motivation of the safe looting and its interruption.

“The only thing is, there’s a switch of characters involved; that’s where we went wrong. Instead of Mrs. Fleming being killed by Ayers, Mrs. Fleming and Ayers were killed by this third person.

“She saw the awl plunged into Ayers’ back, fled from the house for her life, was pursued down the cut-off by the murderer in Ayers’ car and crushed to death. The murderer then went back, completed his interrupted ransacking of the safe, and concealed Ayers’ body.

“He also relocked the house, to gain as much time as possible…” His voice became an unintelligible drone. “And so on, and so on.”

He turned a page, then his tracing finger stopped. “Here’s what you want, Dodge. The killer was about twenty-five, and fairly skinny. His cheekbones stood out, cast shadows in the torchlight as it wavered on his face—”

I cupped my hand lengthwise to my cheek, the one turned toward the three of them, and sat there as if holding my face pensively. I was over by the night-blacked window and they were more in the center of the room, under the cone light Waggoner had turned on over his desk.

His tracing finger dropped a paragraph lower, stopped again. “He had light-brown hair. She even remembered that it was parted low on the left side—take a woman to notice a thing like that even at such a moment—and an unusually long forelock that kept falling in front of his face.”

My hand went up a little higher and brushed mine back. It only fell down again like it always did.

“His eyes were fixed and glassy, as if he was mentally unbalanced—”

I saw Cliff glance thoughtfully down at the floor, then up again.

“He had on a knitted sweater under his jacket, and she even took in that it had been darned and rewoven up at the neckline in a different color yarn—”

Lil had made me one the Christmas before, and then I’d burned a big hole in it with a cigarette spark, and when I’d taken it back to her, she hadn’t been able to get the same color again. It had left a big star-like patch that hit you in the eye.

It was back at my room now. I looked out the window, and I didn’t see anything.

HIS voice went on: “It took us hours to get all this out of her. We could only get it in snatches, a little at a time, she was so low. She went under without knowing Ayers had been killed along with her.”

I heard the onionskin sheets crackle as he refolded them. No one said anything for awhile. Then Cliff asked, “They been buried yet?”

“Yeah, both. Temporarily, in her case; we haven’t been able to contact the husband yet. I understand he’s in South America.”

“Got pictures of them?”

“Yeah, we got death photographs. Care to see them?”

I knew what was coming up. My blood turned to ice, and I tried to catch Cliff’s eye, to warn him in silent desperation: Don’t make me look, in front of them. I’ll cave, I’ll give myself away. I can’t stand any more of it, I’m played out.

He said off-handedly, “Yeah, let’s have a look.”

Waggoner got them out of the same folder that had held the typescript. Blurredly, I could see the large, gray squares passing from hand to hand. I got that indirectly, by their reflections on the polished black window square.

I was staring with desperate intensity out into the night, head averted from them.

I missed seeing just how Cliff worked it, with my head turned away like that. I think he distracted their attention by becoming very animated and talkative all at once, while the pictures were still in his hands, so that Waggoner forgot to put them back where he’d taken them from. I lost track of them.

The next thing I knew the light had snapped out, they were filing out, and he was holding the inner office door for me, empty-handed. “Coming, Vince?” We passed through the outside room to the street.

The deputy said, “I’ll run you back there; it’s on my own way home anyway.” He got in under the wheel and Cliff got in next to him. I was just going to get in the back when Cliff’s voice warded me off like a lazy whip.

“Run back a minute and see if I left my cigarettes in Mr. Waggoner’s office, Vince.”

Then he held Waggoner himself rooted to the spot there beside the car by a sudden burst of parting cordiality. “I want you to be sure and look me up anytime you’d down our way…”

His voice dwindled behind me and I was in the darkened inner office again, alone. I knew what I’d been sent back for. He didn’t have any cigarettes in here; he’d given me his last one back at the Fleming house. I found the still-warm cone, curbed its swaying, lit it. They were there on the table under my eyes; he’d left them out there for me purposely.

The woman’s photograph was topmost. The cone threw a narrow pool of bright light. Her face seemed to come to life in it, held up in my hand. Sight came into the vacant eyes.

I seemed to hear her voice again: “There he is, right behind you!” And the man’s came to life in my other hand. That look he’d given me when I’d bent over him, already wounded to death, on the floor. “What did you have to do that for?”…

THE cone light jerked high up into the ceiling, and then three pairs of feet were ranged around me, there where I was, flat on the floor. I could hear a blur of awed male voices overhead. “Out like a light.”

“What did it, you suppose, the pictures? Things like that get him, don’t they? I noticed that already over at the house, before, when I was telling you about the case.”

“He’s not well, he’s under treatment by a doctor right now; he gets these dizzy spells now and then, that’s all it is.” The last was Cliff’s. He squatted down by me on his haunches, raised my head, held a paper cup of water from the filter in the corner to my mouth.

Hi’s face and mine were only the cup’s breadth away from one another. “Yes,” I sighed soundlessly. “Shut up,” he grunted without moving his lips.

I struggled up and he gave me an arm back to the car. “He’ll be all right,” he said, and he closed the rear car-door on me. It sounded a little bit like a cell grating.

Waggoner was left behind, standing on the sidewalk in front of his office, in a welter of so longs and much obligeds.

We didn’t say anything in the car. We couldn’t; the deputy was at the wheel. We changed to Cliff’s car at the Fleming house, picked Lil up, and she was blazing sore.

She laced it into him halfway back to the city. “I think you’ve got one hell of a nerve, Cliff Dodge, leaving me alone like that in a house where I had no business to be in the first place, and going off to talk shop with a couple of corny Keystone cops.”

Once, near the end, she said: “What’s matter, Vince, don’t you feel well?” She’d caught me holding my head, in the rear-vision mirror.

“The outing was a little bit too strenuous for him,” Cliff said bitterly.

That brought on a couple of postscripts. “No wonder, the way you drive! Next time, try not to get to the place we’re going, and maybe you’ll make it!”

I would have given all my hopes of heaven to be back in that blessed everyday world she was in—where you wrangled and you squabbled, but you didn’t kill. I couldn’t give that, because I didn’t have any hopes of heaven left.

We stopped and he said, “I’ll go up with Vince a minute.”

I WENT up the stairs ahead of him. He closed the door after us. He spoke low, without fireworks. He said, “Lil’s waiting downstairs, and I’m going to take her home before I do anything.

“I love Lil. It’s bad enough what this is going to do to her when she finds out; I’m going to see that she gets at least one good night’s sleep before she does.”

He went over to the door, ready to leave. “Run out; that’s about the best thing you can do. Meet your finish on the hoof, somewhere else, where your sister and I don’t have to see it happen.

“If you’re still here when I come back, I’m going to arrest you for the murder of Dan Ayers and Dorothy Fleming. I don’t have to ask you if you killed those two people. You fainted dead on the floor when you saw their photographs in death.”

He gave the knob a twist, as if he was choking the life out of his own career. “Take my advice and don’t be here when I get back. I’ll turn in my information at my own precinct house and they can pass it on to Waggoner; then I’ll hand over my own badge in the morning.”

I was pressed up against the wall, as if I was trying to get out of the room where there was no door, arms making swimming-strokes. “I’m frightened,” I said, in a still voice.

“Killers always are,” he answered. “—afterwards. I’ll be back in about half an hour.” He closed the door and went out.

I stayed there against the wall, listening to his steps grow fainter and fainter and finally fade away.

I didn’t move for about half the time he’d given me. Then I put on the light over the washstand, and turned the warm water tap. I felt my jaw and it was a little bristly. I wasn’t really interested in that.

I opened the cabinet and took out my cream and blade and holder, from sheer reflex of habit. Then I saw I’d taken out too much, and I put back the cream and holder.

The warm water kept running down. I was in such pain already I didn’t even feel the outer gash when I made it. The water kept carrying it away down the drain.

It would have been quicker at the throat, but I didn’t have the guts. This was the old Roman way; slower but just as effective. I did it on the left one too, and then I threw the blade away. I wouldn’t need it anymore to shave with.

…I was seeing black spots in front of my eyes when he tried to get in the door. I tried to keep very quiet, so he’d think I’d lammed and go away, but I couldn’t stand up any more.

He heard the thump when I went down on my knees, and I heard him threaten through the door, “Open it or I’ll shoot the lock away!”

It didn’t matter now any more. He could come in if he wanted to; he was too late. I floundered over to the door knee-high and turned the key. Then I climbed up it to my feet again. “You could have saved yourself the trip back,” I said weakly.

All he said, grimly, was: “I didn’t think of that way out”; and then he ripped the ends off his shirt and tied them tight around the gashes, pulling with his teeth till the skin turned blue above them. Then he got me downstairs and into the car.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CANDLE FLAME

THEY didn’t keep me at the hospital, just took stitches in the gashes, sent me home, and told me to stay in bed a day and take it easy. I hadn’t even been able to do that effectively. These safety razor blades; no depth.

It was four when we got back to my room. Cliff stood over me while I got undressed, then thumbed the bed for me to get in.

“What about the arrest?” I asked. “Postponed?” I asked it just as a simple question, without any sarcasm, rebuke or even interest. I didn’t have any left in me to give it.

“Canceled,” he said. “I gave you your chance to run out, and you didn’t take it. As a matter of fact I sent Lil home alone; I’ve been downstairs watching the street door the whole time.

“When a guy is willing to let the life ooze out his veins, there must be something to his story. You don’t die to back up lies. You’ve convinced me of your good faith, if not your innocence.

“I don’t know what the explanation is, but I don’t think you really know what you did that night.”

“I’m tired,” I said, “I’m licked. I don’t even want to talk about it any more.”

“I think I better stick with you tonight.” He took one of the pillows and furled it down inside a chair and hunched low in it.

“It’s all right,” I said spiritlessly. “I won’t try it again. I still think it would have been the best way out…”

OUR voices were low. We were both all in from the emotional stress we’d been through all night long. And in my case, there was the loss of blood.

In another minute one or both of us would have dozed off. In another minute it would have eluded us forever. For no combination of time and place and mood and train-of-thought is ever the same twice.

He yawned. He stretched out his legs to settle himself better; the chair had a low seat and he was long-legged. The shift brought them over a still-damp stain, from my attempt. There were traces of it in a straight line, from the washstand all the way over to the door. He eyed them.

“You sure picked a messy way,” he observed drowsily.

“Gas is what occurs to most people first, I imagine,” I said, equally drowsily. “It did to me, but this house has no gas. So there was no other way but the blade.”

“Good thing it hasn’t,” he droned. “If more houses had no gas there’d be fewer—”

“Yeah, but if the bulb in your room burns out unexpectedly, it can be damn awkward. That happened to the fellow in the next room one night, I remember, and he had to use a candle—”

My eyes were closed already. Maybe his were too, for all I knew. My somnolent voice had one more phrase to unburden itself of before it, too, fell silent. “It was the same night I had the dream,” I added inconsequentially.

“How do you know he had to use a candle? Were you in there at the time?”

His voice opened my eyes again, just as my last straggling remark had opened his. His head wasn’t reared, but his face was turned toward me on the pillow.

“No, he rapped and stuck his head in my door a minute, and he was holding the candle. He wanted to know if my light had gone out too; I guess he wanted to see if the current had failed through the whole house, or if was just the bulb in his room. You know how people are in rooming houses.”

“Why’d he have to do that? Couldn’t he tell by the hall?” Cliff’s voice wasn’t as sleepy as before.

“They turn the lights in the upper halls out at eleven-thirty, here, and I guess the hall was dark already.”

His head had left the pillow now. “That’s still no reason why he should bust in on you. I’d like to hear the rest of this.”

“There isn’t any rest. I’ve told you all there is to it.”

“That’s what you think! Watch what I get out of it. To begin with, who was he? Had you ever seen him before?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “We weren’t strangers. His name was Burg. He’d been living in the room for a week or ten days before that. We’d said howdy passing each other on the stairs.

“We’d even stood and chatted down at the street door several times in the evening, when neither of us had anything to do.”

“How is it you never mentioned this incident to me before, as many times as I’ve asked you to account for every single minute of that evening, before you fell asleep?”

“But this has nothing to do with what came up later. You’ve kept asking me if I was sure I didn’t remember leaving the room at any time, and things like that. I didn’t even step out into the hall, when he came to the door like that.

“I was in bed already, and I didn’t even get out of bed to let him in. Now what more d’you want?”

“Oh, you were in bed already.”

“I’d been in bed some time past, reading the paper like I do every night. I’d just gotten through and put out my own light a couple minutes before, when I heard this light knock—”

CLIFF made an approving pass with his hand. “Tell it just like that. Step by step. Tell it like to a six-year-old kid.” He’d left the chair long ago and was standing over me. I wondered why this trifling thing, this less than an incident, should interest him so.

“I turned over, called out ‘Who is it?’ He answered in a low-pitched voice, ‘Burg, from next-door.’”

He wrinkled the skin under his eyes. “Low-pitched? Furtive? Cagey?”

I shrugged. “He didn’t want to wake up everyone else on the whole floor, I suppose.”

“Maybe it was that. Go on.”

“I can reach the door from my bed, you know. I stuck out my arm, flipped the key and opened the door. He was standing there in his suspenders, holding this lighted candle in front of him. So he asked if my room light was okay. We tried it, and it was.”

“Then did he back right out again?”

“Well, not instantly. We put the light right out again, but he stayed on in the doorway a couple of minutes.”

“Why’d he have to stand in the doorway a couple of minutes once he’d found out your light was okay?”

“Well—uh—winding up the intrusion, signing off, whatever you’d want to call it.”

“In just what words?”

Gee, he was worse than a school teacher in the third grade. “You know how those things go. He said he was sorry he’d disturbed me; he wouldn’t have if he’d realized I was in bed. He said, ‘You’re tired, aren’t you? I can see you’re tired.’ ” I looked up at Cliff’s face.

“With the light out.” It was a commentary, not a question.

THE candle was shining into my face. He said, ‘Yes, you’re tired. You’re very tired.’ And the funny part of it was I hadn’t been until then, but after he called it to my attention, I noticed he was right.”

“Kind of repetitious, wasn’t he?” Cliff drawled. “You’ve quoted him as saying it four times, already.”

I smiled tolerantly. “I guess he’s got kind of a one-track mind, used to mumbling to himself maybe.”

“All right, keep going.”

“There’s no further to go. He closed the door and went away, and I dropped right off to sleep.”

“Wait a minute; hold it right there. Are you sure that door closed after him? Did you see it close? Did you hear it? Or are you just tricking your senses into believing you did, because you figure that’s what must have happened next anyway?”

Was he a hound at getting you mixed up! “I wasn’t so alert any more,” I told him, “I was sort of relaxed.”

“Did it go like this?” He opened it slightly, eased it gently closed. The latch-tongue went click into the socket. “Did it go like this?” He opened it a second time, this time eased it back in place holding the knob fast so the latch-tongue couldn’t connect. Even so, the edge of the door itself gave a little thump as it met the frame.

He waited, said: “I can see by the trouble you’re having giving me a positive answer, that you didn’t hear either of those sounds.”

“But the door must’ve closed,” I protested. “What was he going to do, stay in here all night keeping watch at my bedside? The candle seemed to go out, so he must’ve gone out and left me.”

“The candle seemed to go out. How do you know it wasn’t your eyes that dropped closed and shut it out?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I want to ask you a few questions,” he said. “What sort of an effect did his voice have on you, especially when he kept saying, ‘You’re tired’?”

“Sort of peaceful. I liked it.”

He nodded at that. “Another thing: Where did he hold that candle, in respect to himself? Off to one side?”

“No; dead center in front of his own face, so that the flame was between his eyes, almost.”

He nodded again. “Did you stare at the flame pretty steadily?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t tear my eyes off it. You know how a flame in a dark room will get you.”

“And behind it—if he was holding it up like you say—you met his eyes.”

“I guess—I guess I must have. He kept it on a straight line between my eyes and his the whole time.”

HE WORKED his cheek around, like he was chewing a sour apple. “Eyes were fixed and glassy as if he was mentally unbalanced,” I heard him mutter.

“What?”

“I was just remembering something in that deathbed statement Mrs. Fleming made to Waggoner. One more thing: when you chatted with him downstairs at the street door like you say you did once or twice, what were the topics, can you remember?”

“Oh, a little bit of everything, you know how those things go. At first general things like the weather and baseball and politics. Then later more personal things—you know how you get talking about yourself when you’ve got an interested listener.”

Cliff said: “Mmm… Did you ever catch yourself doing something you didn’t want to do, while you were in his company?”

“No. Oh wait, yes. One night he had a box of mentholated coughdrops in his pocket. He kept taking them out and offering them to me the whole time we were talking. Gosh, if there’s one thing I hate it’s mentholated cough drops. I’d say no each time, and then I’d give in and take one anyway. Before I knew it, I’d finished the whole box.”

Cliff eyed me gloomily. “Testing your will power…”

“You seem to make something out of this whole thing,” I said helplessly. “What is it?”

“Never mind. I don’t want to frighten you right now. You get some sleep, kid. You’re weak after what you tried to do just now.” I saw him pick up his hat.

“Where you going?” I asked. “I thought you said you were staying here tonight.”

“I’m going back to the Fleming house—and to Waggoner’s headquarters too, while I’m at it…

“And Vince,” he added from the doorway, “don’t give up yet. We’ll find a way out somehow; don’t take any more short cuts.”

CHAPTER IX

KILL ME AGAIN

IT WAS noon before I woke up; and even then he didn’t show up for another two or three hours yet. I didn’t dare leave my room, even for a cup of coffee; I was afraid if I did I’d miss him, and he’d think I’d changed my mind and lammed out after all.

He finally showed up around three, and found me worriedly coursing back and forth in my stocking feet, holding one bandaged wrist with the opposite hand. Stiffening was setting in, and they hurt plenty.

But I was fresh as a daisy compared to the shape Cliff was in. He had big black crescents under his eyes from not getting to bed all night, and the first thing he did was sprawl back in the easy chair and kick off his shoes. Then he blew a big breath of relaxation that fanned halfway across the room.

“Were you up there all this time?” I gasped.

“I’ve been back to town once, in between, to pick up something I needed and get a leave of absence.”

He’d brought a large flat slab wrapped in brown paper. He picked it up now, undid it, turning partly away from me, scissored his arms, and then turned back again.

He was holding a large portrait-photograph in a leather frame against his chest for me to see. He didn’t say anything; just watched me.

It took a minute for the identity to peer through the contradictory details, trifling as they were.

The well-groomed hair, neatly tapered above the ears instead of shaggily unkempt; the clean-shaven upper lip instead of a sloppy walrus-tusk mustache…

And, above all, a look of prosperity, radiating from the perfect fit of the custom-tailored suit-collar, the careful negligence of the expensive necktie, the expression of the face itself—instead of the habitual unbuttoned, tieless, slightly soiled shirt-collar, the hangdog look of middle age inevitably running to seed.

I said, “Hey, that’s Burg! The man that had the room next to me! Where’d you—”

“I didn’t have to ask you that; I already know it, from the landlord and one or two of the other roomers here I’ve shown it to.”

He reached under it with one hand and suddenly swung out a second panel, attached to the first. It was one of those double-easel arrangements that stand on dressers.

She stared back at me; and like a woman, she was different again. She’d been different on each of the three times. This was the third and last time I was to see her.

She had here neither the mask-like scowl of hate at bay I had seen by torchlight, nor yet the rigid ghost-grin of death. She was smiling, calm, alive, lovely.

I made a whimpering sound.

“Burg is Dorothy Fleming’s husband,” Cliff said. “Waggoner gave me this, from their house.”

HE MUST have seen hope beginning to flicker in my eyes. He snuffed it out, with a rueful gnawing at his under lip, a slight shake of his head.

He closed the photofolder and threw it aside. “No,” he said, “no, there’s no out in it for you. Look, Vince. D’you want to know now what we’re up against, once and for all? You’ve got to sooner or later, and it isn’t going to be easy to take.”

“You’ve got bad news for me.”

“Pretty bad. But at least it’s better than this weird stuff that you’ve been shadow-boxing with ever since it happened. It’s rational, down-to-earth, something that the mind can grasp.

“You killed a man that Wednesday night. You may as well get used to the idea. There’s no dodging out of it, no possibility of mistake, no shrugging off of responsibility.

“It isn’t alone Mrs Fleming’s deathbed description, conclusive as that is; and she didn’t make that up out of thin air, you know. Fingerprints that Waggoner’s staff took from that mirror door behind which Ayers’ body was thrust check with yours. I compared them privately while I was up there, from a drinking glass. I took out of this room here and had dusted over at our own lab.”

I looked, and my glass was gone.

“You and nobody but you found your way into the Fleming house and punctured Dan Ayers’ heart with an awl and secreted his body in a closet.”

He saw my face blanch. “Now steady a minute. You didn’t kill Dorothy Fleming. You would have, I guess, but she ran out of the house and down the cutoff for her life.

“You can’t drive, and she was killed by somebody in a car. Somebody in Ayers’ car, but not Ayers himself obviously, since you had killed him upstairs a minute before yourself.

“Now that proves, of course, that somebody brought you up there—and was waiting outside for you at a safe distance, a distance great enough to avoid implication, yet near enough to lend a hand when something went wrong and one of the victims seemed on the point of escaping.”

THAT didn’t help much. That halved my crime, but the half was still as great as the whole. After being told you’d committed one murder, where was the solace in being told you hadn’t committed a dozen others?

I held my head. “But why didn’t I know I was doing it?” I groaned.

“We can take care of that later,” Cliff said. “I can’t prove what I think it was, right now; and what good is an explanation without proof? There’s only one way to prove it: show it could have happened the first time by getting it to happen all over again a second time.”

I thought he was going crazy—or I was. “You mean, go back and commit the crime all over again—when they’re both already buried?”

“No, not quite-that. Don’t ask me to explain until afterward; if I do, you’ll get all tense, keyed up; you’re liable to jeopardize the whole thing without meaning to. I want you to keep cool; everything’ll depend on that.”

I wondered what he was going to ask me.

“It’s nearly four o’clock now,” he said. “We haven’t much time. A telegram addressed to Mrs. Fleming was finally received from her husband while I was up there; he’s arriving back from South America today.

“Waggoner took charge of it and showed it to me. He’s ordered her re-buried in a private plot, and will probably get there in time for the services.”

I trailed him downstairs to his car, got in beside him limply. “Where we going?” I asked.

He didn’t start the car right away; gave me a half-rueful, half-apologetic look. “What place would you most hate to go to, of all places, right now?”

That wasn’t hard. “That eight-sided mirrored alcove—where I did it.”

“I was afraid of that. I’m sorry, kid, but that’s the very place you’re going to have to go back to, and stay in alone tonight, if you ever want to get out from under the shadows again. Whaddye say, shall we make the try?”

He still didn’t start the car, gave me lots of time.

I only took four or five minutes. I slapped in my stomach, which made the sick feeling go up into my throat, and I said: “I’m ready.”

*    *    *

I’D BEEN sitting on the floor, outside it, to rest, when I heard him come in. There were other people with him. The silence of the house, tomblike until then, was abruptly shattered by their entrance into the lower hall. I couldn’t tell how many of them there were. They went into the living room, and their voices became less distinct.

I stood up and got ready, but I stayed out a while longer, to be able to breathe better. I knew I had time yet; he wouldn’t come up right away.

The voices were subdued, as befitted a solemn post-funerary occasion. Every once in a while, though, I could make out a snatch of something that was said.

Once I heard someone ask: “Don’t you want to come over to our place tonight, Joel? You don’t mean you’re going to stay here alone in this empty house after—after such a thing?”

I strained my ears for the answer—a lot depended on it—and I got it. “I’m closer to her here than anywhere else.”

Presently they all came out into the hall again, on their way out, and I could hear goodnights being said. “Try not to think about it too much, Joel. Get some sleep.”

The door closed. A car drove off outside, then a second one. No more voices after that. The tomblike silence almost returned.

But not quite. A solitary tread down there, returning from the front door, told that someone had remained. It went into the living room and I heard the clink of a decanter against a glass.

Then a frittering of piano notes struck at random, the way a person does who has found contentment, is eminently pleased with himself.

Then a light switch ticked and the tread came out, started unhurriedly up the stairs. It was time to get in.

I put one foot behind me, and followed it back. I drew concealment before me in the shape of a mirror panel, all but the ultimate finger’s breadth of gap, to be able to breathe and watch.

The oncoming tread had entered the bedroom adjacent to me, and a light went on in there. I heard a slatted blind spin down. Then the sound of a valise being shifted out into a more accessible position, and the click of the key used to open it.

I could even glimpse the colored labels on the lid as it went up and over. South American hotels.

I saw bodiless hands reach down, take things out: striped pajamas and piles of folded linen, that had never seen South America. That had probably lain hidden on a shelf in some public checkroom in the city all this time.

My heart was going hard. The dried blood on the woodwork at my back, of someone I had killed, seemed to sear me where it touched. It was the blood of someone I had killed, not this man out there. No matter what happened now, tonight nothing could absolve me of that.

There was no possibility of transfer of blame. Cliff had told me so, and it was true.

A light went up right outside where I was, and an ice-white needle of it splintered in at me, lengthwise, from top to bottom, but not broad enough to focus anything it fell on—from the outside.

I could see a strip of his back by it. He had come in and was squatting down by the damaged safe, mirror-covering swung out of the way. He swung its useless lid in and out a couple of times. I heard him give an almost soundless chuckle, as if the vandalism amused him.

Then he took things out of his coat pockets and began putting them in. Oblong manila envelopes such as are used to contain currency and securities, lumpy tissue-wrapped shapes that might have been jewelry.

Then he gave the safe door an indifferent slap-to. As if whether it shut tight or not didn’t matter: what it held was perfectly safe—for the present.

Then he stood, before turning to go out. This was the time. Now.

CHAPTER X

THE SPARK WENT OUT

I TOOK the gun Cliff had given me, his gun, out of my pocket, and raised it to what they call the wishbone of the chest and held it there, pointed before me. Then I moved one foot out before me, and that took the door away, in a soundless sweep.

I was standing there like that when he turned finally. The mirror covering the safe-niche had been folded back until now, so he didn’t see the reflection of my revelation.

The shock must have been almost galvanic. His throat made a sound like the creak of a rusty pulley. I thought he was going to fall down insensible for a minute. His body made a tortured corkscrew-twist all the way down to his feet, but he stayed up.

I had a lot to remember. Cliff had told me just what to say, and what not to say. I’d had to learn my lines by heart, and particularly the right timing of them.

That was even more important. He’d warned me I had a very limited time in which to say everything I was to say. I would be working against a deadline that might fall at any minute; but he didn’t tell me what it was.

He’d warned me that we both—this man I was confronting and I—would be walking a tightrope, without benefit of balancing poles. Everything depended on which one of us made a false step first.

It was a lot to remember, staring at the man whom I had only known until now as Burg, a fellow rooming-house lodger; the man who held the key to the mystery that had suddenly clouded my existence.

And I had to remember each thing in the order it had been given me, in the proper sequence, or it was no good.

The first order was: Make him speak first. If it takes all night, wait until he speaks first.

He spoke finally. Somebody had to, and I didn’t. “How’d you get here?” It was the croak of a frog in mud.

“You showed me the way, didn’t you?”

I could see the lump in his throat as he forced it down, to be able to articulate. “You’re—You remember coming here?”

“You didn’t think I would, did you?”

His eyes rolled. “You—you couldn’t have!”

The gun and I, we never moved. “Then how did I get back here again? You explain it.”

I saw his eyes flick toward the entrance to the alcove. I shifted over a little, got it behind me, to seal him in. I felt with my foot and drew the door in behind me, not fast but leaving only a narrow gap.

“How long have you been in here like—like this?”

“Since shortly after dark. I got in while you were away at the funeral services.”

“Who’d you bring with you?”

“Just this.” I righted the gun, which had begun to incline a little at the bore.

HE COULDN’T resist asking it; he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t asked it, in his present predicament. “Just how much do you remember?”

I gave him a wise smile, that implied everything without saying so. It was Cliff’s smile, not mine; but formed by my lips.

“You remember the drive up?” He said it low, but he’d wavered on the wire, that tightrope Cliff had mentioned. “You couldn’t have! You had the look, the typical look—”

“What look?”

He shut up; he’d regained his equilibrium.

“I was holding a thumb tack pressed into the palm of each hand the whole way.”

“Then why did you do everything I—you were directed to, so passively?”

“I wanted to see what it was leading up to. I thought maybe there might be some good in it for me later, if anyone went to all that trouble.”

“You purposely feigned? I can’t believe it! You didn’t even draw back, exhibit a tremor, when I let you out of the car, put the knife in your hand, sent you on toward the house, told you how to get in and what to do? You mean you went, ahead and consciously—”

“Sure I went ahead and did it, because I figured you’d pay off heavy afterwards to keep me quiet. And if I’d tried to balk then, I probably would have gotten the knife myself, on the way back, for my trouble.”

“What happened, what went wrong inside?”

“I accidentally dropped the knife in the dark somewhere in the lower hall and couldn’t find it again. I went on up empty-handed, thinking I’d just frighten them out the back way and get a chance at the safe myself.

“But Ayers turned on me and got me down, he weighed more than I do, and he was going to kill me—to keep it from coming out that he and your wife were cheating, and had been caught in the act of breaking into your safe in the bargain.

“Only by mistake, she put the awl that he cried out for into my hand instead of his. I plunged it into him in self-defense.”

He nodded as if this cleared up something that had been bothering him. “Ah, that explains the change of weapon that had me mystified. Also how it was that she got out of the house like that and I had to go after her and—stop her myself.

“Luckily I was crouched behind the hood of Ayers’ car, peering at the open door, when she came running out. She couldn’t drive herself, so she didn’t try to get in but ran screaming on foot down the cut-off.

“I jumped in without her seeing me, tore after her, and caught up with her. If I hadn’t, the whole thing would have ended in a ghastly failure. I might have known you were under imperfect control.”

HE’D fallen off long ago, gone hurtling down. But I still had a deadline to work against, things to say, without knowing why.

“Your control was perfect enough; don’t let that worry you. You haven’t lost your knack.”

“But you just said—”

“And you fell for it. I didn’t know what I was doing when you brought me up here and sent me in to do your dirty work for you that night.

“Haven’t you missed something from your late wife’s bedroom since you’ve been back? There was a double photo-folder of you and her. The police took that.

“I happened to see both pictures in one of the papers. I recognized you as Burg. I’d also recognized my own description, by a darned sweater I wore that night, and had a vague recollection—like when you’ve been dreaming—of having been in such a house and taken part in such a scene.

“You’ve convicted yourself out of your own mouth to me, right now. I haven’t come back here to be paid off for my participation or take a cut in any hush money. Nothing you can give me from that safe can buy your life.

“You picked someone with weak willpower, maybe, but strong scruples. I was an honest man. You’ve made me commit murder. I can’t clear myself in the eyes of the law—ever.

“You’re going to pay for doing that to me. Now. This way.”

His face was working, his voice hoarse as he said:

“Wait; don’t do that. That won’t help you any. Alive, maybe I can do something for you. I’ll give you money, I’ll get you out of the country. No one needs to know.”

“My conscience’ll always know. I’ve got an honest man’s conscience in a murderer’s body, now. You should have let me alone. That was your mistake. Here you go, Fleming.”

He was almost incoherent, drooling at the mouth. “Wait—one minute more! Just sixty seconds.” He took out a thin gold pocket watch and snapped up its burnished lid. He held it face toward me, open that way.

I SAW what he was trying to do. Cliff had warned me to be careful. I dropped my eyes to his feet, kept them stubbornly lowered, brow furrowed with resistance, while I held the gun on him. Something kept trying to pull them up.

A flash from the burnished metal of the inside of the watch-lid wavered erratically across my chest-front for an instant, like when kids tease you with sunlight thrown back from a mirror.

“Look up,” he kept pleading. “Look up. Just one minute more. See—the hands are at six to. Look, just until they get to here.”

Something was the matter with the trigger of the gun; it must have jammed. I kept trying to close the finger that was hooked around it, and it resisted. Or else maybe it was the finger that wouldn’t obey my will.

I kept blinking more and more rapidly. The flash slithered across my shuttering eyes, slid off, came back again. They wanted so bad to look up into it; it prickled.

There was a slight snap, as if he had surreptitiously pulled out the stem-winder, to set the watch back. That did it.

I glanced up uncontrollably. He was holding the watch up, brow-high—like he had the candle that night—as if to give me a good, unobstructed look at its dial. It was in about the position doctors carry those little attached head-mirrors with which they examine throats.

I met his eyes right behind it, and all of a sudden my own couldn’t get away any more, as if they’d hit glue.

A sort of delicious torpor turned me into wax; I didn’t have any ideas of my own any more. I was open to anyone else’s. My voice control lasted a moment longer than the rest of my functions. I heard it say, carrying a left-over message that no longer had any willpower behind it, “I’m going to shoot you.”

“No,” he said soothingly. “You’re tired; you don’t want to shoot anybody. You’re tired. The gun’s too heavy for you. Why do you want to hold that heavy thing?”

I heard a far-away thump as it hit the floor. As far away as if it had fallen right through to the basement. Gee, it felt good to be without it!

I felt lazy all over. The light was going out, but very gradually, like it was tired too. The whole world was tired.

Somebody, was crooning. “You’re tired, you’re tired—you dirty bum now I’ve got you!”

THERE was a white flash that seemed to explode inside my head, and it hurt like anything.

Something cold and wet pressed against my eyes when I tried to flicker them open. And when I had, instead of getting lighter as when you’re slowly waking up, the world around me seemed to get darker and weigh against me crushingly, all over.

The pain increased, traveled from my head to my lungs. Knives seemed to slash into them, and I couldn’t breathe.

I could feel my eyeballs starting out of their sockets with strangulation, and my head seemed about to burst. The pressure of the surrounding darkness seemed to come against me in undulating waves.

I realized that I was under water and was drowning. I could swim, but now I couldn’t seem to. I tried to rise and something kept holding me down.

I doubled over, forced myself down against the surrounding resistance, groped blindly along my own legs. One seemed free and unencumbered; I could lift it quite, easily from the mucky bottom.

About the ankle of the other there was a triple constriction of tightly-coiled rope, like a hideous hempen gaiter. It was tangled hopelessly about a heavy iron cross-bar.

When I tried to raise this, one scimitarlike appendage came free, the other remained hopelessly hooked into the slime it had slashed into from above. It must have been some sort of a small but weighty anchor such as is used by launches and fishing craft.

I couldn’t release it. I couldn’t endure the bend of position against my inner suffocation. I spiraled upright again in death-fluid. My jaws kept going spasmodically, drinking in extinction.

A formless blur came down from somewhere, brushed lightly against me, shunted away again before I could grasp it, shot up out of reach. I couldn’t see it so much as sense it as a disturbance in the water.

There were only fireworks inside my skull now, not conscious thoughts any more. The blurred manifestation shot down again, closer this time. It seemed to hang there, flounderingly, upside down, beside me.

I felt a hand close around my ankle. Then a knife grazed my calf and withdrew. I could feel a tugging at the rope, as if it was being sliced at.

Self-preservation was the only spark left in my darkening brain. I clutched at the hovering form in the death-grip of the drowning. I felt myself shooting up through water, together with it, inextricably entangled.

I wouldn’t let go. Couldn’t. Something that felt like a small ridged rock crashed into my forehead. Even the spark of self-preservation went out.

CHAPTER XI

LAST ORDEAL

WHEN I came to I was lying out on a little pier or stringpiece of some kind, and there were stars over me. I was in shorts and undershirt, wringing wet and shivering, and water kept flushing up out of my mouth.

Somebody kept kneading my sides in and out, and somebody else kept flipping my arms up and down.

I coughed a lot, and one of them said: “There he is; he’s all right now.” He stood up and it was Cliff. He was in his underwear and all dripping too.

A minute later Waggoner stood up on the other side of me. He was equally sodden, but he’d left on everything but his coat and shoes. There hadn’t been any time by then, I guess.

He said, “Now get something around him and then the three of us better get back to the house fast and kill the first bottle we find.”

There was light coming from somewhere behind us, through some fir trees that bordered the little lake. It played up the little pier. By it, I could see my own outer clothes neatly piled at the very lip of it.

There was a paper on top of them, pressed down by one of my oxfords. Cliff picked it up and brought it over and read it to us.

I’m wanted for the murder of those two people at the Fleming house, they’re bound to get me sooner or later, and I have no chance. I see no ether way but this.

Vincent Hardy

It was in my own handwriting; the light was strong enough for me to see that when he showed it to me. I was silent.

He looked at Waggoner and said, “Do we need this?”

Waggoner pursed his lips thoughtfully and said, “I think we’re better off without it. These coroner-inquest guys can be awfully dumb sometimes; it might sort of cloud their judgment.”

Cliff took a match from his dry coat and struck it and held it to the note until there wasn’t any to hold any more.

I was feeling better now, all but the shivering. I was sitting up. I looked back at the glow through the trees and said, “What’s that?”

“Fleming’s car,” Cliff answered. “He tried to take a curve too fast getting away from here, when we showed up on his tail, and he turned over and kindled.”

I grimaced. That was about all that could have still stirred horror in me after the past ten days: a cremation alive.

“I shot him first,” Cliff said quietly.

“One of us did,” Waggoner corrected. “We all three fired after him. We’ll never know which one hit him. We don’t want to anyway. The machine telescoped and we couldn’t get him out. And then I had to give Dodge a hand going down after you; he’s no great shakes of a swimmer.”

“We had to hit him,” Cliff said. “It was the only way of breaking the hypnosis in time. You were drowning down there by your own act, and there was no time to chase him and force him at gun-point to release his control, or whatever it is they do.

“We only found out about the anchor after we’d located you.”

A figure was coming back toward us from the glow, which was dwindling down now. It was the deputy. He said, “Nothing left now; I wet it down all I could to keep it from kindling the trees.”

“Let’s get back to the house,” Cliff said. “The kid’s all goose pimples.”

We went back and I got very soused on my third of the bottle. I couldn’t even seem to do that properly. They let me sleep it off there; the four of us spent the night right there where we were.

IN THE morning Cliff came in and had a talk with me before the other two were up. I knew where I was going to have to go with him in a little while, but I didn’t mind so much any more.

I said, “Did that help any, what I did last night? Did it do any good?”

“Sure,” he said. “It was the works; it was what I wanted and had to have. What d’you suppose I was doing around here all day yesterday, before he got back? Why d’you suppose I warned you to make him stay right there in the alcove with you and not let the conversation drift outside?

“I had it all wired up; we listened in on the whole thing. The three of us were down in the basement, taking it all down. We’ve got the whole thing down on record now. I’d emptied that gun I gave you, and I figured he’d be too smart to do anything to you right here in his own house.

“Only he got you out and into his car too quick, before we had a chance to stop him. We darned near lost you. We turned back after one false start toward the city, and a truckman told us he’d glimpsed a car in the distance tearing down the lake road That gave us the answer.

“We wouldn’t have even been able to hold your suicide against him. You did all that yourself, you know, even to shackling your foot to that boat-anchor and dropping it over ahead of you. A person who is afraid of the jump into water but determined to go through with it might have taken such a precaution as that.

“I had a hunch it was hypnosis the minute you told me that candle incident. But how was I going to prove it? So much of that stuff is fake that most people don’t want to believe in it.

“Now I’ve got two other police officers, beside myself, who saw—or rather heard—the thing happened all over again.

“You were in a state of hypnosis when you committed this crime; that’s the whole point. You were simply the weapon in the actual murderer’s hands. Your own mind wasn’t functioning; you had no mind.”

He stopped and looked at me. “Does that scare you?”

“Does it?” I must have looked sick.

“It would me too. I’d better begin at the beginning. Joel Fleming used to be a professional hypnotist in vaudeville years ago. I found enough scrapbooks, old theater programs, and whatnot in trunks here in this house to testify to that. Stage name, ‘Dr. Mephisto.’

“He undoubtedly possesses a gift of hypnotic control—over certain subjects. (With my wife Lil, for instance, I’m afraid he’d come a complete cropper—and wind up helping her dry dishes.)”

He was trying to cheer me up; I grinned appreciatively.

HE WENT on, more seriously: “Well, he got out of vaudeville years ago while the getting out was still good, and he went into another line of business entirely, which doesn’t need to concern us here, and he made good dough.

“Then he made the mistake of marrying someone years younger than him, a hat-check girl he met at a nightclub.

“It wasn’t only that she married him simply for his money and to be able to quit handling people’s sweatbands at four bits a throw; she was already the sweetie of a convict named Dan Ayers, who was doing time just then for embezzlement.

“You get the idea, don’t you? Ayers got out, found a ready-made situation crying to be profited by—so he profited by it. He cultivated Fleming, got in solid with him; he didn’t have to get in solid with Dorothy, he was already.

“All right. Fleming did make these trips to South America, all but the last time. It’s obvious that he found out what was going on quite some time back, somewhere between the last real trip he made and the fake one just now.

“It’s equally obvious that he brooded and he planned revenge. It wasn’t just a case of marital disloyalty involved either: he found out they were planning to make off with all his available funds and securities the next time he was away, just strip him clean and goodbye.

“You notice he didn’t entrust her with the safe combination here in the house.

“That’s conjecture: the three principals are dead now and can’t give evidence. I’m not trying to defend Fleming, but I can see why he wanted Ayers dead—and wanted Dorothy dead too.

“But he picked a low, lousy way of getting it done. He wasn’t going to endanger himself. No, he started off for ‘South America’, dropped from sight, holed up in a rooming house in the city under the name of Burg.

“Then he picked an innocent kid, who had never done him any harm, who had just as much right as he had to life and the pursuit of happiness, to do his murdering for him.

“He tested you out, saw that you were a suitable subject, and—well, the rest we got over the dictaphone last night. To give him his due, he wasn’t deliberately trying to have you apprehended for the crime either. He would have been just as satisfied if you were never caught.

“But if they ever caught the man the clues pointed to, if they ever caught the killer, it would always be you, not him.

“True, he had to drive you up there, because you don’t drive. It was just as well he did, from his point of view. You lost the knife, only killed Ayers by a fluke in struggling with him, and Dorothy would have gotten away if he hadn’t been lurking outside to lend a hand himself.

“If she had lived to raise the alarm, you probably would have been nabbed then and there, before you could make a getaway—which would have brought the investigation back to the rooming house too quickly to suit him. So he crushed her to death and whisked you back to immunity.”

I’D BEEN thinking hard through all of this. “But Cliff,” I said, “how is it I remembered the whole murder scene so vividly the next morning? Especially their faces—”

“His control wasn’t one hundred percent effective; I don’t know if it ever is. The whole scene must have filtered dimly through to your conscious mind, and remained in your memory the next morning after you woke up—just the way a dream does.

“And other particles, that remained imbedded in your subconscious at first, also came out later when they reproduced themselves in actuality: I mean your memory of the stone entrance lanterns, the cut-off, the spare door key, the hall light-switch, and so on.

“All that stuff is way over my head; I’m not qualified to pass expert judgment on it. I’d rather not even puzzle too hard about it; it scares me myself.”

“Why did I seem to know her, when I didn’t? Why was I so sort of hurt, heartbroken, at the sight of her face?”

“Those were Fleming’s thoughts, not yours, filtering through your mind. She was his wife, about to desert him, helping another man to rob him.”

I was sitting down on the edge of the bed, lacing my shoes. That reminded me of something else. “It was drizzling in town that night when I went to bed, and the streets were only starting to dry off when I woke up the next morning.

“Yet the soles of my shoes were perfectly dry. How could they be, if I followed him even across the sidewalk to where he had a car waiting.”

“I remember you mentioned that to me once before, and it’s puzzled me too. The only possible explanation I can think of is this—and that’s another thing we’ll never know for sure, because that point didn’t come up when he was giving himself away in the alcove last night.

“Can you remember whether you got your shoes off easily that night, when you were undressing in your own room; or as sometimes happens with nearly everyone, did the laces get snarled, so you couldn’t undo the knot of one or both of them?”

I tried to remember. “I’m not sure, but I think a snag did form in the laces of one of them, so I pulled it off the way it was without opening it properly.”

“And in the morning?”

“They both seemed all right.”

“That’s what it was, then. You couldn’t undo the knot in time while you were hurriedly getting dressed under his direction. You followed him out and around to wherever the car was in your stocking feet, shoes probably shoved into the side pockets of your coat. He got the knot out for you at his leisure in the car, before starting.

“It wasn’t raining up here that night, and by the time you got back to town again the sidewalks were already starting to dry off, so your shoes stayed dry.”

“But wouldn’t my socks have gotten wet?”

“They probably did, but they’d dry off again quicker than shoes.”

I WAS ready now. Waggoner and his deputy went over ahead without waiting for us. I guess he figured I’d rather just go alone with Cliff, and he wanted to make it as easy as he could for me.

He said, “Bring the kid over whenever you’re ready, Dodge.”

Cliff and I started over by ourselves about half an hour later. I knew I’d have to go into a cell for a while, but that didn’t worry me any more; the shadows had lifted.

When we got out in front of the office Cliff asked: “Are you scared, kid?”

I was a little, like when you’re going in to have a tooth yanked or a broken arm reset. You know it’s got to be done, and you’ll feel a lot better after it’s over.”

“Sort of,” I admitted, forcing a smile.

“You’ll be all right,” he promised, giving me a heartening grip on the shoulder. “I’ll be standing up right next to you. They probably won’t even send it all the way through to prosecution.”

We went in together.

The End.

Notes and proofing history

Scanned George Rice with preliminary proofing by A\NN/A
August 10, 2008—v1.0—22,500 words
from the original source: Argosy, March 1, 1941