CORNELL WOOLRICH'S

superb literary skill and storytelling ability have made him one of the world's foremost writers of suspense. Here are six fascinating and frightening examples of Mr. Woolrich at his superlative best.

"PLENTY OF SUSPENSE... SMOOTH"

—Saturday Review

Published by
DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.
750 Third Avenue, New York 17, N.Y.

Copyright © 1938, 1941, 1942, 1956, by Cornell Wootrich

Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

All rights reserved

Reprinted by arrangement with
Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc.
New York, N.Y.

First Dell printing—May, 1964

Printed in U.S.A.

CONTENTS

I'LL TAKE YOU HOME, KATHLEEN

SCREEN-TEST

I O U

THREE O'CLOCK

NIGHTMARE

BEQUEST

I'LL TAKE YOU HOME, KATHLEEN

The night was dark blue, and a big silver-dollar for a moon was stuck into it up above. He was only two years older—and that was young enough yet—but the walk along the road out to the dance pavilion seemed longer than it used to be, maybe because he was walking it alone and not with her.

A car racketed by, going the same way he was, bulging with girls and fellows all piled in pell-mell, on their way to the Saturday night dance. Every Saturday night they still came from miles away, as he used to with her. Only, she was coming with somebody else now.

He wouldn't talk to her; he wouldn't even let her see that he was there. He'd just stand quietly by for a few minutes, looking at her once again. Then he'd take that away with him.

He passed under some kind of skinny tree, with its branches all sticking out with no leaves on them, and the moon shining down through them made a lot of horizontal stripes show up across his body, as if he were wearing a convict's suit. He side-stepped quickly, as though the illusion had frightened him, and brushed his hands slowly down his clothes, as if he were trying to rub the phantom stripes out. Then he went on quickly, with his head lowered a little. Yes, it seemed a longer walk than it used to be.

The pavilion looked the same, as it slowly came into sight around the last turn of the road. The same russet glow like a smoky sunset or a harvest moon gleaming out from under its low eaves. The same semicircle of darkened cars parked around its entrance. The same wind sighing through the trees, dropping scattered notes of music as it went, like raindrops shaken off the boughs.

When you have another's arms about you,
Do you ever think of me?

He stopped a minute there by the roadside looking at it. Then he went up the graveled walk, past the parked cars with their sly red cigarette-embers winking here and there and their stifled gusts of laughter, to the entrance and inside.

The music turned loud and the lights turned bright. The same quadroon girl was there behind the hat counter and the same colored ticket-taker stood by the inner doors, watching the dancers through the crack.

They both looked at him and they recognized him right away, but they didn't smile right away. She took his hat and sort of looked it over, and then she said:

"You've been away quite a spell, Mr. Burke, sir."

He just said yes with the lids of his eyes. Then he looked down at the check she'd given him and his face changed. "Not that number!" he cried out sharply. "Oh, gee, don't give me that number, tonight of all nights!"

It was a thirteen. "It's the only one I've got left," she said. "They plumb cleaned me out of checks."

"Give me a blank then," he said.

She looked around her alcove helplessly. Finally he took out a metal pencil he had hooked to his inside coat pocket, and darkened out the thirteen—so vigorously that the lead wore down to the quick, and he had to give the barrel a twist to bring some more out. She gave a little admiring quirk of her head, as though she'd never seen a pencil like that before.

He turned the check over on its blank side when he'd finished and took it up from the counter that way, and dropped it into his pocket. "This way I get an even break, at least," he said. "It's still there underneath, though," he added softly, as he went in.

The floor was packed with dancers, but in another minute, as he found a place on the sidelines and stood watching, it seemed to him that it emptied by magic without the music stopping, and there was no one on it any more but a girl in green dress, dancing alone, holding her arms up to a ghostly partner.

Kathleen.

She was so beautiful she hurt the eyes. So beautiful she hurt the heart.

There was some girl or other standing at his right, and a man standing at his left. He heard a guarded voice remonstrate: "Don't stand there, honey; move over this way," and the girl wasn't next to him any more. He heard a slurring breath say, "Jailbird," and the man on the other side of him wasn't near him any more, either. There was no one around him, he was by himself in the middle of an empty space, in all that crowd. But there was no one in the place except her, anyway, so what difference could that make?

They were doing fancy dances now, and the affair was nearing its end. The shag or something, he didn't know what it was called. That was the man she was going to marry, that empty space between her two arms. He was a banker's son, he had all kinds of money, a swell house to move her into, probably a car waiting outside to take her home in, and the only stripes he'd ever worn ran up and down in pencil lines, not across in bars. He had everything already, and now he was going to have her, too.

"But I'm going to have this last night with her; he's not getting that," the man on the sidelines said to himself suddenly. "One more walk home through the moonlight, the way we used to." He put his hand to his inside coat pocket to take out a cigarette, and he touched the sleek, slippery, rounded cylinder of the mechanical pencil clasped to its lining.

They moved by close to him on the outer edge of the floor. His legs, her partner's, were spiraling in fancy steps; he was the fatuous kind that wanted everyone to see how good he was. He wasn't satisfied with just holding heaven in his arms. And suddenly one of his legs shot unmanageably out from under him and he went crashing down on top of it, twisted it beneath him in some way.

She'd stepped clear just in time, and she stood by for a minute, starting to laugh as they all were. But then they saw that he couldn't get up again, had to be helped up, and a small crowd gathered near him. Two of the men put their arms around him and he hobbled painfully out into the vestibule between them, and she went with them.

Then in a few minutes she came back again to let everyone know how he was. "It's started to swell; I think he's sprained it. One of the boys has driven him in to see a doctor, It's the right one, you know, and he can't put it down on the accelerator. He asked me to stay and enjoy myself, but I'm afraid I'll have to find somebody else to take me home."

The man who had been waiting there on the sidelines pushed his way through the little group standing around her and said in a quiet voice: "I'll take you home, Kathleen, just like I used to." A voice that didn't ask; it told.

You could hear a pin drop. She didn't wait to smile, like the two attendants outside in the entry; she smiled right away and said, "Hello, Denny."

A man said to her, "I'll take you home—"

A girl offered, "Kathleen, you can come with us—"

They didn't say it, but you could almost hear it beating on the air around her from all sides: "Kathleen, don't. Look out. Be careful."

Another girl said, "Kathleen, can I talk to you alone a minute?" and drew her a step away, while he stood there alone in the crowd. He didn't hear what the girl was whispering to her, but he didn't have to; he could have told what it was word for word. "Kathleen, take my advice, don't go alone with him. He's been in jail, so I heard; he's probably not the same as he was. And these men that feel they've been thrown over are dangerous; sometimes they turn on you when you least expect it."

She came back again beside him, and looked at all of them in turn, and then at him. "Shall we go now, Denny?" was all she said, and slipped her arm through his. And he knew they had made her do it, not he; she was that kind of girl.

In the vestibule she left him for a moment to get her bottle-green cloak and a little old-fashioned draw-bag with her powder and things in it. The check-room girl smiled when he handed her back the blacked-out "13" for his hat, and rebuked, "Now you see?"

The night was dark blue and the silver-dollar moon hadn't tarnished any, and they walked down the road under it side by side.

"I suppose you're used to riding it these days," he said. "But this'll be the last time with me, and I wanted you to walk it with me like we used to."

"Like we used to," was all she said.

They walked a long way without saying anything after that. "I only came back just to look at you once more, watch you at one of the Saturday night dances. Tomorrow I'm going away again for good."

"That's the best," she agreed wistfully. "They're such fools."

A car came whistling up behind them, tore past, tapered to a coast on the road ahead. It was full of people either from the dance they had just left or from somewhere else. A voice called back: "Want a lift, you two?"

She threw up her arm for a minute in ready acceptance, perhaps caught off guard by the invitation; then, as he quickly made a restraining gesture toward her, canceled it again.

"No, don't; finish it out with me alone."

"All right," she consented.

He called down to them for her, "No, we're doing all right."

It may have sounded more brusque than he had intended it to. The car picked up speed and disappeared in the distance with a red blink.

They came to a log bridge thrown over a ridiculous trickle of water and he laughed and said, "The Mississippi's still here, I see." Then a little farther on, as the road bellied out in a great loop and the trees began to thicken, they came to a place where a little footpath started aside through them.

"Here's our old short cut," she said. "Aren't we going to take it?"

"It goes in pretty deep. Aren't you afraid to go through there alone with—a jailbird at this hour of the night?"

"They've hurt you, Denny," she said gently. "You mustn't take it out on me; I haven't done anything to you. You see, you're an old friend, and my friends don't stop being my friends whether they've been in jail or not. And I'm not afraid to go through the woods at night with one of my friends."

"All the harm that would ever come to you from me," he said, with a touch of ancestral brogue coming out under the stress of emotion, "would give you small cause to worry."

It got so narrow in places they had to go single file. Sometimes she went first, swinging her bag blithely around by the little loop that held it, and he'd tread behind her. Sometimes he took the lead, to sweep low-hanging branches out of her way, and she followed. Sometimes the moon came through in silver splashes, sometimes it was dark as a tunnel.

He stopped and said: "Here's that place where we kissed good-by. I still remember the tree. Let me just once more, for the last time."

She stood beside him and turned her face toward him and their forms blended for a moment in the shadows.

"That was a salute to the past, a ghost kiss," she let him know.

"It felt like it," he said ruefully.

She laughed, and swung the little bag around some more on the end of its cord. Something tinkled faintly, nearby but treacherously vague as to direction.

The bag fell motionless.

"What is it?" he asked, sensing her silent dismay.

"My key! My key to the house flew out." She backed her hand to her mouth. "Oh, what'll I do now?"

"We'll get it; don't get excited."

He struck a match, crouched down with it, started circling slowly around her. She stood in one place, peering down, shifting slowly in company with the little flame.

"The thing must have opened without my noticing it."

"It's all right; it's got to be around here some place," he said soothingly. "I'll have it for you in a minute." He was on his second match now, widening the circle around her with each circuit.

"It sounded to me as though it went over this way."

"Stay there where you are; otherwise we'll get balled up," he warned.

She had already gone off away from him, however, looking on her own, ferns rustling against her dress.

They moved around in absorbed silence for a few moments. "Oh, why did that have to happen? I should have been more careful," she said once. And another time, "Find it yet?" And then presently: "You wouldn't think a thing like that could disappear so completely right under our noses, would you?" Each time her voice sounded a little less distinct.

"I'm on my last match. Don't you think we'd better let it go? I know it's a shame to wake them up, but—"

"But you don't understand. They're both over at Hartsdale for the night. I won't be able to get in without it. Denny, we've got to find it!"

"I wish I had one of those pocket lights," he said.

Apparently preoccupied, she didn't answer. He had to bend over closer than before, now that he had no more matches to rely on. He straightened finally, in defeat.

"Kathleen, it's no go. I'll have to climb in through one of the upper-story windows and let you in that way."

She didn't answer.

She hadn't said anything for the past several moments; he noticed that only now.

He made his voice louder. "Kathleen, there's no use looking any more. Come on, we'll have to go."

She didn't answer.

He turned and went after her, but when he got to where he thought she'd be, she wasn't there.

"Kathleen," he called.

Not a sound. He turned and went over another way.

"Kathleen, where are you?" he called, puzzled.

The trees and the night were still.

He went back to their starting point, the tree of the last kiss. "Where the devil did she go, anyway?" he said out loud, the way a man does.

He raised his voice to a full-bodied shout now, that she couldn't fail to hear. "Kathleen!"

Silence lay around him. "What's she doing, kidding me?" He added hands to it, at the sides of his mouth, but the shout couldn't come out any louder than before. "Kathleen!" She couldn't be that far away, not to hear that. And yet—she was. "Kathleen!" His voice cracked with the pressure he put on it.

Suddenly, fright, like a cold, black shower blotting out the moon. Nameless fear all over him. He lost his head for a minute, in the first flush of it, and started to pound the call out in rapid succession like the beating of an alarm drum.

"Kathleen! Kathleen! Kathleen!"

2

His cries burgeoned out under the trees, while he ran this way and that, grazing their trunks, stumbling over their roots, getting stung by their twigs.

Then he stood stock-still wiped his forehead and pulled himself together. "She couldn't get lost. Not even if she tried to. She's lived around here all her life, she's passed through here a thousand times before. What's the matter with me, anyway? She's played a joke on me, that's what it is. She picked up the key herself without telling me, and gave me the slip; went on the rest of the way home alone. Maybe I frightened her by kissing her. Or maybe she wanted to avoid the final parting scene at her door, afraid I was going to reproach her for ditching me. I'll probably catch up with her just ahead. Or else I'll see the light in her bedroom window when I get to her house."

He started running down the footpath. He was lying to himself, or he would not have gone so fast, still bucking briars and branches as before, and stumbling as he ran—panting, "Kathleen!" every once in a while, without much volume to it any more.

The trees burst open and there was the road again, its futile detour over with, and there was her house, not far down it from here, on the other side. He kept on running along the side of the road, just jogging now, the few remaining yards, and then he ran across to the white picket fence that stood around her place. Past the mailbox like a dovecot on its skinny support, and in at the gate that still had one hinge defective like two years ago.

The window of her bedroom, on the upper left-hand corner, was dark. Only the moon swam on its black pane. He ran up on the porch just the same, and rattled the doorknob hectically and pounded his way all over the panel.

"Kathleen!" he called futilely. "Kathleen! Are you in there?" It was so easy to see she wasn't. "Kathleen, don't joke. Are you in there?"

At last he turned and came down off the porch and turned again and looked hopelessly upward at the blank windows. Then he went out through the gate once more, and stopped by it to slap the gatepost smartly with his open hand in his turmoil and distress.

He crossed back again to the wooded side of the road and followed it to where the footpath went in, and started back along that at a trot.

"Kathleen!" he called futilely. "Kathleen!" It died away among the trees, and the crashing, blundering course of his running died out after it, as though he were chasing his own voice.

He came back to the tree of their parting, with the glow of the moon higher up on the trunk now as the orb sank lower in the sky. He beat around the spot in ever-widening circles that carried him far away from it. But she wasn't in here any more, she couldn't be. She would have heard him shout; she would have come out to him long ago. She had gone back the other way, toward the pavilion, instead of on toward her house. Perhaps to find some other girl to stay with for the night, now that she'd lost her key. But why walk off like that without a word? He knew it wasn't so, she hadn't; but he wouldn't admit it to himself yet; he had to find out for sure first. It was the only rational explanation left, and he couldn't face the night without one.

Finally he started back that way himself. There were scratches on his face from twigs and brambles, and his hair was down in front of his eyes, and his hat was gone, and the lower end of his tie was out. Still he weaved along from side to side, hoarsely exclaiming, "Kathleen!" from time to time. Not loudly any more, for she never answered. Just to show that he wanted her. And once, just before he emerged at the lower end of the short cut, the thought came to him: "Why are you so frightened? What is it you feel already about this, that tells you she won't be at the pavilion either?" He didn't know, he couldn't answer.

The log bridge thudded hollowly with the hurried passage of his footsteps. When he came to the pavilion, only one car was left in frent of it, and though a little music still sounded, the orange glow was dimmed to just a wan reflection coming now from far inside it.

He ran in through the unlighted vestibule and out on the barren, gleaming dance floor. A single bulb shone nakedly down over it. A scrubwoman was working her way along one side, doing more kneeling and observing than scouring. A man and a girl were sitting at the piano together; he was doing the playing and she was holding a gin bottle for him. The check-room girl, dressed to go home, was trucking deftly by herself in the middle of the floor. The doorman was standing there shouting his encouragement and approval from the sideline.

Burke came flinging in on them, and everything stopped—the piano-playing and the shouts of praise and the dancing and even the mopping-up. He had to wait a minute to get his wind back, he'd been running so long and steadily, and they didn't make a sound, any of them, while he stood there with his chest going up and down, and the assorted scratches on his face, and his hair stringy over his forehead.

"Have you seen her?" he panted finally. "Did she come back here?"

The man at the piano got up, pocketed his own gin, came down off the musicians' platform. "Who?" he asked curtly.

"Kathleen Leary."

"What were you doing out with her, Burke?" The man's voice wasn't friendly.

His own girl answered him. "He took her home, while you were driving Larry Kirby to the doctor. We all told her not to—"

The check-room girl and the doorman had edged together in the face of this white people's crisis.

The man from the piano said, in a confidential aside: "Go out and get me my coat, Sam. Bring it just the way it is." But he didn't look at the doorman; he kept looking steadily at Burke.

The scrub woman took a mesmerized half-turn on her cleaning rag and the water in it went splop! into the pail.

"Then she didn't come back here?" Burke asked. "We got separated out there, you know in that patch of woods between the creek and her house. I've been out to her house already and she wasn't there either." His voice wavered, steadied again. "Something's happened to her—"

The other man's girl drew in her breath with a shudder, closed her eyes, murmured commiseratingly, "Oh, Jodey."

"Yeah, something has," the man answered Burke. His voice was so rough it was like sand ground between his teeth. The doorman bad brought back his coat, was holding it out toward him. He didn't take the coat, he took a gun out of its pocket instead. "Go outside and ring up Sheriff Myers' office, honey-pie," he said matter-of-factly to his girl. "He's done something with her. You can see they had a fight; look at the scratches all over his face. I'll hold him here. Get over there by the door, Sam."

Burke said, almost dazed with astonishment: "No, don't. Wait. What's this for? I told you we got separated"—

The other man just looked at him with a sort of hard contempt. "What did you think? That by coming back here and handing us that, you could get away with it?" He made a scoffing sound deep down in his larynx. "Men don't lose the girls they're taking home that easy." He made the sound again. "She's not my girl; if she was, I wouldn't stand waiting this long with a gun all ready in my hand, for Myers to get here. She's Larry Kirby's girl; he's the one I feel sorry for."

Burke tried to keep his voice reasonable. "Why, you're full of that gin. Don't do this to me. You're accusing me without a— You grew up around here as well as me. Don't you know what that means in these parts? I've got a record; I've been in jail once already."

"Don't talk to me," the other man said stonily. "I'm not an officer; I'm just doing my duty the way any man would. If Kathleen Leary turns up unharmed, you've got nothing to worry about."

A whisper reached Burke's ears from over by the door. "He got the thirteen tab tonight for his hat. Mn, mn, man!"

"Stay out there where you are till they get here, sugar," the man with the gun cautioned his concealed young woman companion, as the swing doors bulged tentatively against Sam's back once or twice.

Burke wanted to fling the gun up out of position, wrench it away from him, bolt for one of the two windows on either side of the bandstand, jump out into the night. He could have made it; the other man's reflexes were slowed up with gin. He knew he mustn't, that was the worst thing he could do. He fought the urge down, kept himself from it by gripping and twisting the hem of his coat in his hands. And he knew now, too, what that formless fear was that had assailed him almost from the moment he had first lost her. An instinctive sense of jeopardy, of doom—his own, not hers—that he hadn't been able to recognize at the time.

That soft drawly whispering was sounding by the door again.

"Go on, tell him, child."

"Unh-unh. Don't pay for me to go mixing up in it."

The man with the gun didn't take his hard little buckshot pupils off Burke, but he asked: "Tell me what, Leah? Let's hear."

"I don't want to get Mr. Burke in no more trouble than he is already, Mr. Allen," she said timorously. "Only, that pencil that one of the gentlemen picked up from where Mr. Kirby fell—the one they said they thought maybe was to blame—it just come to me now, I saw Mr. Burke use it on his way in."

"What've you got to say about that, Burke?"

"Yes, it's mine. I rolled it at his feet. But we're not talking about Kirby's fall; we're talking about Kathleen."

"Well, we'll tell that to Myers when he gets here, too."

Burke flared out tormentedly: "D'you realize while you're standing around here making a tin hero of yourself over me, she may be lying out there somewhere, hurt or unconscious?"

"Youd know more about that than I would," was the suggestive answer. "We'll get going as soon as Myers gets here."

3

Myers got there with a flourish of the swing doors that pushed Sam cavalierly out of the way. A shaggy deputy in a khaki shirt was with him.

"Well, now, what's this about little Kathleen Leary?" the sheriff demanded authoritatively.

Allen motioned for his coat, dropped his gun back into its pocket now that Burke was safely surrounded. "This fellow took her out of here while I was driving Larry Kirby down to the doctor. Then he showed up about twenty minutes, half an hour ago, the way you see him now, asking if we'd seen her. I reckon it's up to us to ask him that, don't you?"

"I agree with you there!" said Myers aggressively. "Wait a minute. Aren't you that Burke that used to live hereabouts? Somebody told me you were in jail."

Burke moistened his lips. "That has nothing to do with this," he said, looking down at the floor.

"How'd you get in that condition?"

"Looking for her."

"What'd you do to make her run away from you like at?"

"She didn't run away. She dropped her key and we both started to hunt for it. When I looked up, she was gone."

The sheriff sliced his hand at him disparagingly. "Oh, now don't give me that. A girl don't just up and disappear from a fellow while she's on her way home with him. Well, we can't stand here all night. Let's get out there quick as we and see what's to be seen."

"I phoned her mother and father at Hartsdale already," Allen's girl said virtuously. "And I phoned Larry, too, and told him about it. He and a lot of the men are coming out to help look for her. He feels terrible. Why, their wedding was only a month off." She seemed to want to rush matters toward their worst possible conclusion.

They left in a welter of confusion, everyone talking at once.

"Look after him, Birdsall," Myers said to his deputy. "He's staying with us until we find out what this is."

Something clinked, and Burke protested with smothered heat: "Wait a minute. You can't put that thing on me. I haven't been guilty of anything."

"He's right, Birdsall," said Myers juridically. "We have nothing against him yet. Just keep a good tight grip on his shoulder."

Allen was arguing with his excitement-thirsting girl. "No, you can't come with us, sugar-lump; only men'll be along. Hush up. What kind of talk is that?" And interrupting himself to take sips from his gin bottle.

"Oo-oo, and to think I borrowed a safety-pin from her in there just before she left here tonight! I still have it on me. Look, this is it, right here!"

"Ain't going to be so good for somebody, the way it looks tonight," Sam told Leah.

"If they do, it'll be the first white one they've had around here since my grampa's time. He told me about seeing one once,"

Burke was taken in the sheriff's car with the two officials. Allen bundled his protesting girl into his own car, to drop her off at her house before joining in the Roman holiday.

The lights of the search party that had preceded them out there could already be seen twinkling in and out among the trees like fireflies, from all the way down at the log bridge when they rumbled across it. As they neared the footpath, a line of parked cars strung along the side of the road came into view ahead. The sheriff braked behind the last one, and Burke got out between him and the deputy.

"Now take us in there to where you say you last saw her," Myers ordered. That "you say" gave a glimpse of what his opinions on the matter already were. "Stand back, you men. You shouldn't have begun until I got here; I'm in charge of this. Here, give us one of those lanterns."

They went in, Burke midway between the two, with Birdsall's grip still riveted onto his shoulder to keep him from bolting off into the darkness. The little footpath that had been so lonely and quiet before in piebald moonlight and shadow seemed to be alive with people now. Every few minutes they passed someone, either going in or coming out or half-submerged in the underbrush, ferreting around, some with lights, some without. A cur that someone had brought was yapping around, too, and raising nothing but false alarms at every squirrel or titmouse it discovered.

"Why'd you bring her through here?" Myers said cold as they trudged Indian file. "Funny place to bring a girl a party dress and dancing slippers."

Why say that she had suggested it? They wouldn't h believed it, anyway. "It was the shortest way to her house."

"That's what you told her, too, I reckon."

Larry Kirby confronted them suddenly, one foot a shoeless bandaged club, supporting himself on a pair of crutches to keep it clear of the ground. He was taking it hard; apparently he was one of those men who can cry easily. His face was contorted in a weeping grimace, though without any tears.

"You oughtn't to be in here on that foot, Larry," Myers said considerately. "We'll take care of it for you."

"I can't sit still out there on the road; I've got to find her!" He turned poignantly dramatic, swung himself directly before Burke on his two crutches. "Where's my girl?" he shouted in venomous anguish. "I'll get you, if you've done anything to her!"

They led Burke on past him, his head lowered in silent denial.

They reached the tree where he had lost her twice, the first time to another man, the second—to the night itself.

"Here's where she dropped her key and we started to look for it."

The sheriff was the sheriff. "How are you so sure of that, just where it was? You didn't have a light like we have."

"We were standing right—" He checked himself too late. He couldn't teil them all he'd kissed her.

"Oh, you were standing. How'd you come to be standing still in such a God-forsaken place?"

"I mean we were walking along by here."

"Now wait a minute. First you say you were standing, then you say you were walking along. You're starting to lie your way around in it already."

Burke pointed to the lantern-lighted ground. "Look! See? There're still some of the matches I used trying to find it. There and there and there."

Birdsall called out vindictively: "Some of these ferns up this way are bent and broken and flattened out like there could very well have been wrestlin' going on on top of 'em."

"She did that herself," Burke said. "She was moving around through them, looking up that way."

Myers ignored him, went and examined them for himself, but then shook his head. "Not positive enough. There's been so many of these fools swarming all over the place before we got here."

A distant shout was raised, so far off it sounded faint where they were, but they all stiffened to attention.

"That sounds like something, now. Send him over here to me, whoever he is," Myers called out commandingly.

Burke could feel the blood slowly draining out of his face and neck, leaving a cold, prickling feeling in its wake.

It took no little time for the envoy to make his way back to them, and he came quadruply accompanied. "We found her bag. Look. Isn't this hers? This powder-gadget has her initials on it. It was dangling from a bush."

They'd all seen it already, but someone finally gave it voice in the dead hush that had fallen; someone had to be the first to put it into words. "Look. There's blood on it."

Burke's neck strained out, whipcorded.

"Kathleen!" he yelled harrowingly for the last time that night, as though there were both their death-cries in one, his and hers. And the night brooded dark around him.

"Hang onto him, Birdsall," Myers barked. "Where was it found? Show us the place."

There was a sudden concerted surging after them in the one direction, as the beating about was abandoned where it had been going on until now. The sporadic lanterns started to converge, like reversed rays, toward a single point, from all over the woods.

It was far across the woodland. It was nearly at the other side of it, where the fields and the meadows set in once more. It was just a bush now, without the bag on it any more.

Myers began to spatter orders like a machine-gun. "Anything that happened to her, happened right around here! Now spread out, and be careful where you put your feet! Anyone without lights drop out of this! There's too many of you fellows here."

Discoveries began to come in sickening succession. Burke recoiled, psychically if not physically at each additional one.

"Hey, Myers! Here's a dark stain on this moss."

"Wait a minute! Over this way! Look at this piece of light green stuff I found! I thought it was a leaf first, but it's a torn scrap of thin dress goods."

And then in catastrophic culmination, the ubiquitous cur started yapping.

"Ar-r-r, there goes that blamed mutt again!" somebody said disgustedly. "Don't pay any attention to him. Hey, Parker, call your dog off!"

Unheeded whistling and commands of "Here, Spot!" mingled with the frenzied barking. "He won't come away this tume. I better go and see—"

The yapping died abruptly. There was a sudden tense, waiting silence all around under the trees; it seemed to get to all of them at once. Those who were bending, straightened up; those who were moving about, stood still; those who were standing still, turned inquiringly in that direction.

Then the voice of the dog's owner, calling out low, almost furtively, in contrast to the previous hubbub: "Myers. Better come here, where I am." That told the story.

They all drew into a tight little knot around the man and the collared dog—and her.

So beautiful she had hurt the eyes only a little while ago. She still hurt the eyes—she was so horrible now. A welter of bloodied, battered inanimateness nestled hidden within the dark green cloak, like a shroud, that the mongrel had pulled open with his teeth.

So motionless, so unaware, so dead.

4

They said the things that men say at such a time, in husky, bated voices. The ineffectual, paltry, anticlimatic things.

Then they stopped saying them. The knot began to contract still more, bunching up, passing beyond her entirely to try to close around a different center. Myers saw it coming first. He was no slouch, for a rural official. He breathed warningly across his shoulder to the deputy:

"They're turning sour. Get him out of here quick. Back to the car as fast as you can."

He started to work his gun free, backing away a step at a time to cover their retreat. Birdsall clicked his manacle and the arrest had become an actuality; it was almost a benefit, now, compared to the worse thing that was impending.

They were like a troop of dangerous, lowering apes, hesitant only because they hadn't found a leader yet to give them their voice. Myers' own voice sounded, throbbing with asort of forced calmness.

"Now wait a minute, you men. Easy, now; take it easy. Now, none of that. We have no proof this man did it yet. Stand back. I'll fire at the first one of you that—"

And then suddenly the lacking leader—Allen, arriving with a gun on him, and his disappointment at being delayed changing to a fierce, ginny glee as he took in the situation at a glance. "She's Kirby's girl. Look at her there! Is that how you'd want your girl to look? Are you going to let him get away with that? Don't pay any attention to Myers. I've got a gun of my own here. Spread out, you fools. Get around behind them, cut them off!"

A shot blasted out, echoing like a roll of thunder under the trees. Abruptly the frozen grouping liquefied, turned into a headlong footrace through the woods. The deputy and his prisoner, handcuffed together, bent double, speeding along in the lead, risked dashing their brains out at any moment if a tree should come between them, Myers, midway between them and the pack, was stopping and turning every few steps to hold them back with a flourish of his gun or an actual warning shot over their heads.

They made the car by the grace of moments. Myers jumped for it at their heels, after the deputy, straining across Burke's body from the outside position, already had it swerving out into the road. Myers made it, held on, finally worked his way inside. Flashing lanterns and dark figures came streaming out across the roadway in their wake.

"Shoot for their tires, get their tires!" cried Allen's voice. They did a couple of times, and missed. They had cars of their own, but they didn't attempt to pursue in them. It would have been too flagrant out here, on the open highway; they preferred the anonymity of the woods to avenge a murder by another murder.

None of the three could speak, prisoner or captors; they were breathing too hard. Finally, as they neared the lights of the village, Myers panted:

"Drive straight through. Don't stop till we get him to the jail at Glen River." He added apprehensively: "This'll come up again in a night or two, and the next time it does, it'll be the real thing."

When they had him safely there in a cell, Myers linger a moment, looking at him while the turnkey held the gate. "You sure got yourself in a mess, friend."

The moon that had seen Kathleen Leary die was stilt peering in through the barred window opening. It should have been red, but it was still only innocent white.

Burke raised his head suddenly, and said: "Look. I'm not afraid to die. Fact is, I care less now than ever before. But why should I die for something I didn't do?"

Myers said, crisply but not unkindly: "I just arrest. I don't try. All I can point out is: people that don't do something, don't get in the position you're in right now."

"I may live to be tried," Burke told him resignedly, "or I may only live until the sun goes down again tomorrow night. That's why I'd like to ask you to do something for me while I'm still alive. And while it still can do me some good. Send for Bill Bailey."

"Who's Bill Bailey, one of your crook pals down in the city?"

"You'll laugh. He's the dick I had to report to when I was first out on parole. But we got to be friends. He never jumps you when you're down."

"What makes you think he'd bother about a—"

"Jailbird," Burke supplied. "He told me if I was ever in trouble, and didn't deserve it, to let him know and he'd stand by me. And he said if I was ever in trouble, and did deserve it, he'd make it so hot for me I'd wish I'd stayed in the first time!"

Myers had one more question to ask him. "What do you expect him to be able to do for you?"

"Nothing. I don't care if he does nothing. It's just that you got to have a friend. Just one friend, at a time like this. That you know is around, somewhere around. Or else there's nothing to go on for any more."

"Tell me where I can reach him," the sheriff acquiesced thriftily, "and I'll call him long distance before the day rates go into effect."

5

Bill Bailey was slim and of medium height, and looked as if he might be easy to handle in a physical encounter. He wasn't, as more than one adversary had found out to his cost. He had alert black eyes, crackling with intelligence, and all his movements were quick and impatient, so much so that he seemed out of place in the South. He'd lost his drawl, too, but one of his tricks was to reassume it at times, perhaps to give a misleading impression of languor.

He dropped lithely off the rear platform of the local, without waiting for it to stop, around sundown the day after Kathleen Leary's murder. Even ordinary locals didn't stop here, just the caterpillar type that halted at every other telegraph pole along the way. The sun was glaring crimson all around him and made him squint.

Birdsall edged over, said, "You Mr. Bailey from the city?" In the car he confessed ruefully "I lost ten bucks to Myers. I didn't think you'd come. He didn't either, but we couidn't both be on the same end of the bet, so we tossed for it. All for the sake of a jailbird, too!"

Bailey gave an apologetic shake of his head. "I was just born soft-hearted, I reckon. But my own curiosity got the better of me. Why, he used to 'most say his prayers to her every night!"

"Well, he said 'em to her last night in a different way."

They stopped at Myers' office first. Myers, like his subordinate, expressed surprise that the detective had actually answered Burke's summons for aid.

"Well, suh," Bailey explained deprecatingly, "there wasn't much doing down my way right now, anyway. And I did try pretty hard to straighten him out while he was repo'ting to me. Man hates to think he's wasted his time. Course, when he told me he was coming up here—"

"He told you he was coming up here?" Myers exclaimed in surprise.

"Sure 'nough he told me. I was the one staked him to the trip. He wouldn't have gotten very far 'thout telling me. I may try to straighten out the ones that seem worth it, but I don't give them their own heads, not for years and years."

They got back in the car and, at Bailey's request, drove to the undertaker's in the village where the girl's body was, before he interviewed the prisoner.

Later, when they got to the jail, Myers led the way to the far end of the rickety cell deck.

"He's in here. Do you want to talk to him alone?"

Bailey nodded. "It may help him to talk freer. I'll just hear what he has to say. It won't take very long, especially if I think he's lying. In that case, I'll still be in time to take the 7:10 back."

When the crossbarred gate had been relocked behind him, Myers said, "Just let us know when you're through, Mr. Bailey," and sauntered back along the corridor to the front.

"So now they've got you for murder," Bailey said. "Bet you wish you were back where they just had you in for holding up a filling station."

"No," said Burke doggedly. "Because then I knew I had done it; this time I know I haven't."

"I saw her at the undertaking parlor before I came here. She looked pretty again. Don't know how they did it, but you sure couldn't notice—anything. Well, hardly, anyhow."

Burke looked up relievedly. "I'm glad," he said gratefully. "I want to remember her like she was, dancing so sweet and pretty."

"Hold out your hand," Bailey said casually. There was suddenly a little lock of auburn hair lying in Burke's palm. "That's hers," Bailey said. "I snipped it off her, lying there on the slab. I thought you might want some little thing like that to remember her by."

Burke raised it a little higher toward his face with both hands, as if it were something very precious. "Thanks," he breathed. His eyes misted a little in tenderness, looking at it.

The interview was suddenly over. Bailey gripped him by the shoulder, turned his back on him. "Comin' out, gents," he called through the grate.

"Gee, that was fast," Myers remarked surprisedlty, when they were out of earshot once more. "Did he tell you anything at all?"

"The whole thing. But not in words. You've got the wrong man."

Bailey had supper at the sheriff's house. He was staying now, he'd made that plain. Myers remarked when the meal was over:

"I don't take no stock in that fellow's innocence. He may have convinced you, but he hasn't me. You trying to argue she strayed away from him while they were looking for the key, and some vagrant or hobo lurking in there set upon her? Why, your man's own story won't allow for that. He tells us over and over he didn't hear a sound, not a whisper. He claims she just disappeared like a puff of wind."

Bailey raised his hand, silencing the flow of argument. "I don't think a vagrant did it. If she'd been alone in there, it'd be a different matter. But whoever saw her couldn't help but see this boy Burke, too, the way he was lighting matches, calling back and forth to her. What vagrant's going to set on a girl when he knows there's a husky young fellow along with her? She was killed by somebody that knew her."

Myers nodded vigorously. '"That's what we say, too, but we go the whole hog and say that somebody was Burke, and nobody but him! And I take it you mean someone who knew her, outside of him."

"Exactly. Someone who knew her—besides Burke."

"How could it be done at all, without him hearing it?" said Myers disgustedly. He poured some more blackberry brandy for his guest, but it was easy to see the latter had lost caste in his eyes.

"Why couldn't it be? It's not a physical impossibility." Bailey used the side of a fork to diagram on the cloth. "Once you accept my theory, it's easy enough to reconstruct it. Now look. There's no road along the far side of those woods, where she was found lying. She knew those woods pretty well, from passing through them all her life. She didn't get lost, therefore, and stray all the way over there by accident. Neither is it likely she went looking for her key that far away. My idea is somebody followed them in, unnoticed, by the very same footpath they used themselves, spied on them, saw something he didn't like or that enraged him, and instead of coming out like a man and tackling Burke, waylaid her when she began drifting away from him, stunned her with an unexpected blow to the head so that she didn't even cry out, and then carried her out of earshot all the way over to where she was found and struck her repeatedly with something in an ungovernable rage."

"With what?" interrupted his host sharply. "No lethal object was found around there."

"Probably a large, flat rock of some kind. I understand there's a small woodland stream near there, probably studded with them. He could have dropped the murder stone into it's bed after he'd finished, so the natural action of the water would cleanse it of all traces." He stopped a moment, then went on: "It's capable of variation in details, of course. He mayn't have followed them; he may have been coming the other way, toward them along the footpath, and been just in time to see something that he resented."

"Suppose he did stun her at first, as you say," scoffed Myers, "how is it she didn't revive by the time he got her over to the far side of the woods, at least long enough to let out one good scream? Mean to say Burke wouldn't have heard that, even in the distance?"

"He might have held something over her mouth until Burke was out of the woods entirely. Remember, Burke went chasing clear up to her house first off, to see if she was there. The murderer may have counted on his doing that. And that suggests something else to me. I think the final act, the murder itself, was a deliberate afterthought, perpetrated to frame Burke."

Myers just rolled his eyes at the ceiling, as though his patience were being taxed beyond endurance.

"You see, this person is not normal, whoever he is," Bailey explained. "She was a girl of good character, so whatever he saw was little enough excuse in itself. His real hatred was directed toward Burke. But he was a yellow coward, afraid to tackle Burke directly. So he took it out on the girl instead. Then when he had calmed down again, he could tell he'd already hurt her badly. That frightened him. It meant jail at the very least, if she had recovered, and she mightn't have recovered by that time. His natural cowardice came uppermost, and also his unsatisfied longing to get even with Burke. He saw the way both to escape the blame for his own act and at the same time to revenge himself upon Burke. He cold-bloodedly, fiendishly and knowingly finished what he'd begun—changed her from badly injured to beyond help—so that the other man would be accused of it and suffer for it."

The sheriff made one of his delayed, catlike jumps, which had always been enormously successful with the colored population. "And doesn't the whole thing still fit your Burke better than anyone else? He loved her, didn't he? He came back to see her, didn't he? He found her on the point of marrying another man, didn't he?"

"Absolutely not! Not in a million years!" Bailey said. "This crime wasn't Burke's type of crime! That proves it for me. His way to pay off would have been to single out the guy that he blamed for his losing her and beat him up, probably with half the town looking on. Try to get this through your head, Myers. Given a certain set situation, people can only react to it according to their own characteristics. They can't vary it, no matter how hard they try. Burke's just a man that's had a tough break in outer life, but he's not all sick inside. This other man is, must be, whether the people he's living among know it or not. He's got an inferiority complex, and he's got some valid reason for it that none of you suspect. He's a victim of abnormal jealousy, because of that same complex. On top of all that he's a coward, Burke isn't. He wasn't afraid to come back here just to see her once again when the whole town knew he'd been in jail and had no use for him; was he? He wasn't afraid to step up to her in front of a couple hundred people and tell her he was taking her home; not beg her, tell her! That took courage, didn't it? One man did those things. Another man, an entirely different type of man, skulked around behind the trees after her and beat her to death in the dark. One and the same man couldn't have done both things. That's elemental psychology, and in town it solves our cases for us."

"You're in the country now," observed Myers dryly. "We just use facts, not fancy words. A man's been in jail already for one crime, he takes a girl home alone through the woods, a girl that's thrown him over for somebody else. She turns up dead, he turns up all mussed up and covered with scratches. Those're elemental facts, and out here— Where you going?" he asked, as Bailey angrily shoved his chair back.

"I'm going out and look for someone who's an instinctive coward, who's got an inferiority complex, who's cursed with insane jealousy, who's subject to maniacal rages or even worse and who's suffering from some congenital handicap or ailment that's at the bottom of everything else." He held up one hand, fingers spread. "Those five things will tell me who the man is."

Myers' derisive, stentorian laughter boomed insultingly after him as he slammed out of the house. "And when you've found him, come back and I'll still show you the guy who killed Kathleen Leary—in my jail!"

6

"Yes, I grew up with all of them," said the grocery store owner. "Sure we had an old swimming hole. Just us boys did, I mean. Now there's a new crop of kids using it."

"Who was the best swimmer in your day?" asked Bailey.

"Johnny Green was, I reckon."

"Who took the most chances?"

"This feller Burke. Too bad he turned out like he did."

"Who was always the last one in when the water was cold in the early spring? Who was afraid to dive in from 'way up high, always spoiled it by flinching at the last minute and did a bellywopper?"

The grocer laughed and told him. "You must have grown up around an old swimming hole yourself to know so much about it."

Bailey sauntered out of the store. Unseen by the owner, he held up his right hand, ticked off its little finger as if keeping count. "Coward," he murmured.

"Yep," said the kindly looking man in the white coat, "when their grinders ache, they all come to me. Ain't nobody else in town for them to go to."

"Scare the wits out of them all, huh?" Bailey grinned.

The dentist grinned back. "Well, you know the old saying, nobody loves a dentist. Some don't mind so much, others act up right ornery in the chair."

"Offhand, who would you say was the hardest to handle of all your patients?"

The dentist told him, then went on: "Of course, there's some excuse in his case. Doc Morgan, that's his family doctor, advised me against giving him an anesthetic. Didn't say why; heart, maybe."

Bailey strolled out, ticked off that same little finger. "Still a coward, even grown up," he murmured.

"Who would I say, offhand, is the most popular feller comes into my place?" said the bartender, wiping the counter with his bar rag. "Well, I dunno." He mentioned a name—a name Bailey had already heard twice before. "I guess he is. The place always seems quiet when he's not in here. He's lively, convivial; know what I mean? Telling stories, buying rounds of drinks for the whole house, sort of gathering everyone in the place around him."

"In other words, he works hard at being popular."

"Well, he is popular," argued the barman.

"Well, he buys frequent rounds of drinks, you say," Bailey came back at him. "Anyone who does that is bound to be popular. The real test is not to buy them, and then if there's still a crowd around you, you've got something."

Outside he ticked off the third finger of the hand he was keeping score on. "Inferiority complex."

"Yassuh, boss, we is fixed mo' comf'table than mos' the colored folks he'abouts," the old mammy agreed, corncob pipe in mouth, leaning across the fence. "How come? It's 'count of our misfo'tune, I reckon. You know how good sometime' come' out of evil."

"What misfortune?" asked Bailey, that sixth sense all good detectives should have warning him there was something here relevant to his purpose.

"We ain't s'posed to speak about it," she said reticently. She didn't appear inclined to give him any further information, but just then a peculiar, goatlike bleating sounded from inside the open doorway. "Dat's my li'l boy," she said. "Hush, honey; mammy's coming. Reckon de flies must be pestering him again."

She turned and went in. Bailey promptly unlatched the gate and moved after her, unbidden. Something about that cry had sounded unnatural.

A moment later he recoiled from the doorway into the open again, horrified. The woman rejoined him presently.

"How old is he?" he asked.

" 'Bout twenty-two now. He'll always be just five, like when it happen', though. We don't 'zactly like to show him to folks," she reproached him mildly.

"I'm sorry, auntie." He slipped a five-dollar bill into her hand. "Who did that to his head?"

"Please don't ax me that, boss. Bettah if it's fo'gotten. Us folks gotta guard our tongues."

"Never mind, I know already." He murmured a name, to test her reaction. It was the same one that had cropped up in the previous interviews. "Isn't that right? Isn't that who did it?" he prompted.

Her expression was an admission in itself, without the need of words. She looked fearfully up and down the road as if to make sure they weren't being overheard. "He didn't mean it," she said defensively. "Just los' his temper for a minute 'cause my little boy tease him. Bash his haid with a flat stone he pick' up. His fambly gave us five thousand dollars, make us a present of this plot of ground. Strange are the ways of the Lawd."

Bailey moved slowly out to the road again, saddened and sickened. He told off the middle finger of his hand. "Subject to insane rages."

Dr. Morgan came scuffing down the stairs in leather house-slippers. "Kind of late for a consultation, isn't it?" he said mildly.

"Sorry, doc. I'm not a patient, I'm an insurance investigator. " Bailey hitched his chair forward confidentially. "A man whom we know to be a patient of yours has applied to us to take out quite a heavy insurance. I've been sent down here to find out if there's any reason we shouldn't underwrite this policy—that you know of."

"Why come to me? Haven't you medical experts of your own?"

"Yes, and he's already passed the physical examination. But there are often things that don't reveal themselves in a physical examination."

"Who is it?"

Bailey mentioned the name, the name that had already occurred in his conversations with the grocer, the dentist, the bartender, the Negro mother. It was just a wild guess, but it worked. Morgan's face went white. He rose unsteadily to his feet, recoiled a step.

"I read the answer in your face, doctor," Bailey said, tight-lipped. "What is it, what's wrong with him?"

"I can't tell you that! Don't you know a doctor's patients are treated in strictest confidence?"

"I know, the Hippocratic oath. But unless you speak out, this thing's going through; you'll be a party to a fraud."

"Why do I have to be dragged into this? Your company has its own medical testimony to go by; the transaction should stand or fall on the strength of that."

"All right, let's skip the insurance gag. I'm a detective and here are my credentials. Now out with it."

Morgan eased his collar as though it constricted him, but his mouth remained stubbornly shut. Bailey knew there was no way in which he could force him to speak, if he didn't choose to of his own free will. He tried aspersion, to loosen the doctor's tongue.

"How much hush money have you been getting from him?"

Strangely enough, the doctor didn't flare up. "No, it isn't that," he said, almost submissively. "He did offer me money, but I refused it. He's threatened to kill me if I ever breathe a word about it. I know he would, too."

"Then you refuse to tell me just what's wrong with this man?"

"I can't. It would cost me my life."

Bailey thrust out his thumb, tapped it. "Very well. You've given me my fifth factor. I don't need to know the exact name of his ailment, I can go ahead without that."

7

The sky was overcast at the time of Kathleen Leary's funeral the next afternoon. Bailey didn't attend; he had business of his own to occupy him. He visited the village tailor shop, run by a nearsighted undersized man, on the pretext of having a new crease pressed in his trousers. While he was waiting around in his shirt-tail, he asked the tailor if he did any work for—mentioning that recurrent name again.

"Yeah, that's his suit there. Just come in for a cleaning job."

"Swell tweed" said Bailey, examining it idly. "Peculiar-looking buttons, too, all covered with leather. If one of them was missing, what would you do?"

"Gee, I dunno. I wouldn't be able to match them with what I got here. I'd have to phone him and ask him if he knew where he dropped it." His head disappeared momentarily behind a cloud of steam raised by the iron, "They're all in place, though, ain't they? I ain't had a chance to look it over yet."

"No," Bailey said quietly, "one of those small ones down at the bottom of the sleeve is off; that's why I asked you." He dropped it unseen into his own coat pocket, covertly edged aside the razor blade he'd just severed it with.

"Gee, I'll have to phone him right away," said the tailor, worriedly. "See if he knows where he lost it. Otherwise he'll think it come off in the shop here; blame me. Can't send his suit back to him with three on one sleeve, four on the other."

Bailey made straight from there to the house of Allen's girl, Mary Lou Davis. The women of the community had come back from the funeral by now, but there was still something strangely deserted, lifeless, about the village; he couldn't tell exactly what it was at first. Then as he hurried past the saloon in the dusk, that gave him his clue. There wasn't a soul in it. The usual array of corner loafers outside was ominously missing, too. The barman was standing by the door without a thing to do.

"Kind of siow, isn't it?" Bailey remarked in passing.

The fellow gave him a wink meant to impart secret information. "There'll be a big rush of business 'fore midnight—after it's all over."

Suddenly Bailey knew what the strangeness was he had detected about the village. There had been a wholesale disappearance of the adult male population. There wasn't an able-bodied man in sight. They seemed to have all gone off to some secret meeting, by prearrangement, right after the funeral was over.

So tonight was the night. Myers should be warned, if he didn't know already. The detective hesitated, about to turn back. But then he saw that he couldn't; he'd have to work faster than ever. He had a deadline of mob fury to work against now. The surest way of saving Burke was to prove him innocent. The only way to prove him innocent—in time—was by going ahead with what he had been about to do.

He fairly ran the rest of the way to the Davis girl's house, in the deepening twilight. She was on the porch, luckily, for every second counted. There was a deadline within a deadline to beat. The more immediate one was the tailor's phone call to his customer about that missing button.

"Where they-all took and disappeared to?" she complained at sight of him. "Joe just drop' me like an old glove right after the funeral was over."

He had no time to waste on preliminaries. "You like excitement, don't you, Miss Davis?" he panted, drawing up short in front of the porch rail.

"Do I!" Her eyes sparkled.

"I've got some for you. But it'll take courage," he warmed.

"What do I have to do?"

"Remember that dance dress Kathleen Leary had on, Saturday night?"

"Sure 'nough, poor soul. Sort of wispy and trailing, like leaves all over. I've got one just like it, 'cepting it's yellow."

"Go upstairs and put it on. Fix your hair the way she wore hers, closely as you can; sort of down over one eye and loose in back. Then get some kind of thin veil and put it over your head, so your face can't be seen too clearly through it. See if you can do the whole thing in two minutes flat. There isn't much time."

"My stars!" The girl could hardly contain herself. "Where we-all goin'?"

"Into the woods where Kathleen was killed Saturday night."

"Oo-o-o!" she breathed shiveringly. "What do you want me to go in there for?"

He thrust his face close to hers and whispered it. This time she shrank back a step, put her hand over her open mouth, and stared at him round-eyed. She would have given anything to back out, he could tell. If he'd pressed her, she probably would have. But he was wise in the ways of human nature, this Bailey. "Sorry," he said shortly. "Guess I came to the wrong party. Just forget all about it." He turned on his heel and made as if to stride off.

She came running down the steps after him, plucked at his sleeve. "Mr. Bailey, wait a minute! I'll do it. I didn't say I wouldn't, nohow. Just wait heah, I'll be down in no time."

"Make it even faster than that," said Bailey gruffly. "We've got to get there first."

Dark clouds filled the sky as they drove part of the way out in her family's car to save time. They left it just before the mouth of the short cut, off the road and well hidden from sight. Then he led her in along the same route Burke and Kathleen had taken that night. They didn't follow the path through to the other end, they left it in the middle and made their way through the woods to the far side, where Kathleen's body had been found two nights before. Bailey chose a large tree and motioned her down out of sight behind it. Then he crouched down protectively beside her.

"Who're we waiting for?" she asked breathlessly.

"You'll see. Here, take this pocket light. Now listen while I tell you just what I want you to do." And when he'd finished: "Got that straight? I'll be right here in back of you with a gun out, so don't be afraid, nothing will happen to you. Don't go too close, though."

As their whispering died out, an oppressive silence fell over the woods all about them. They could hardly see one another's faces, it was so dark where they were ensconced. He could make out the pale gleam of her dress; that was all. Once a twig snapped, and she gave a nervous start. He quickly laid a reassuring hand on her arm to steady her, put his finger to his lips in warning reminder.

The wait probably seemed much longer than it actually was. Then at last the hushed sound of footfalls treading the turf and moss. Someone was drawing near them in the darkness. A small stone struck a root. A bough rustled as it was swept aside.

The girl turned her veiled head toward Bailey inquiringly. He nodded, signed to her to get ready. He unlimbered his gun. A pocket light—someone else's, not the one the girl was holding—suddenly bloomed at a distance of about ten yards or so from them, and began to play slowly around on the ground. Little by iittle it drew nearer. It was impossible to see who was behind it, wielding it.

Bailey waited until it had drawn within five yards of them, then touched the girl on the elbow. She stood up, moved out around the trunk of the tree, paced slowly forward like someone walking in her sleep. She was holiding the pocket light flat up against her at waist level, by his instructions; she shifted the little catch on it and softly diffused light, like a ghostly halo or nimbus, peered upward from below, suffusing her bosom and shoulders and veiled head. She was tempering the directness of the beam by shielding it with one hand.

There was a gasp. The oncoming light opposite her fell to the ground, went out. Then a man's voice screamed in ungovernable terror. It was unrecognizable, it was so highpitched, almost equine. "No! No!" the voice keened. "Not you! You're dead! They buried you today! Get away from me, Kathleen! I'll kill you all over again, if you come near me."

The light the girl was holding went out. Bailey jumped quickly forward in the dark, thrust her aside, in case a firearm should be brought into play. "That's enough. Get back, get behind the tree." He took the light from her, turned it on again, pointed forward now.

Larry Kirby, the banker's son, the man Kathleen had been pledged to marry, stood writhing there in its beam, doing a dance of nameless horror, as though every muscle in his body had gone mad. Bailey put his gun away; he didn't need it after all; the man before him was held transfixed in the grip of something more powerful than any weapon could be. Right while they looked, he dropped in a threshing mass to the ground, clawing at it, foam coming from his mouth.

"Don't look," Bailey breathed to the girl. He snapped off the light, mercifully blacking out the monstrous sight before them. "Epilepsy," he murmured. "That's what Morgan knew, and wouldn't tell me. You heard what he just said, didn't you?"

"Yes." She shuddered. "He said he killed her the other night."

"Then come on, you're my witness." He caught her by the wrist. "We've got to get to Burke before the mob does. Let him stay where he is, he'll be helpless until he gets over it."

He started running full tilt through the woods, pulling her after him by the arm. Behind them the groveling sounds, as of a hog rooting for acorns, died out in the darkness. When they had reached the road once more, they flung themselves into the car and Bailey took the wheel.

"There's a slim chance we may be able to beat them out to Glen River," he panted, "if they were slow in starting."

"How'd you know he'd come back there just now? What was he looking for?"

"A button off his suit. He thought he lost it there when he killed her, and was afraid somebody would find it and trace it to him." Bailey palmed it out of his own pocket. "Here it is."

They roared through the village. It still had that same half-empty appearance Bailey had noted earlier.

He covered the distance to Glen River at a speed that was enough to peel the skin from their faces, but their very first glimpse of the jail was enough to show them-—it was already over. Too many lights were winking from the cell openings, for such a sparsely tenanted jail. And there was an impalpable haze still hovering over it. Not fire, but dust raised by the trampling of countless feet, with perhaps the smudge given off by numerous resin torches thrown in. When they slashed up before the entrance, all the nondescript litter that marks the passage of a big unruly crowd lay thickly about on the ground; shards of shattered glass, loose planks that had been used for battering rams, stones and bricks that had served as missiles, tattered newspapers, discarded liquor flasks.

The sheriff was standing there in the devastated doorway, coatless and with several big tears in his shirt, as though he'd been roughly handled, but otherwise apparently unhurt.

"You got here too late!" he shouted hoarsely. "They broke in and took him out five minutes ago!"

"Couldn't you hold them off?" Bailey bellowed wrathfully.

"We did the best we could! There was only three of us against fifty or sixty. They cut the phone wires, and tied me and Birdsall and the turnkey up."

"I finally got my proof the man's innocent! And this girl's my witness! Which way'd they go?" Myers pointed. "Go back where Kathleen was killed and take Larry Kirby into custody; you'll find him in there—" The rest of it was drowned out as the car plunged on ahead in the direction the lynching party had taken.

The hum of voices coming through the thickets—and even gleeful shouts, as at a picnic or barbecue—told them where it was before they could even see anyone. The mob hadn't gone very far in off the road. Fitful lantern flashes, like fireflies on a spree, peered through the trees toward them. Bailey braked, vaulted out without opening the car door and tore in toward the commotion, unlimbering his gun as he went.

They were milling around in a clearing, like a pack of bloodthirsty head-hunters. Burke stood in the center of them all, stripped to the waist, bound to a tree with rope. He was facing them unflinchingly, head up, without uttering a sound. There was no noose around his neck. Instead, Allen, his face a mask of brutal satisfaction, was slowly emptying the contents of a gasoline can over Burke's shoulders, shifting from side to side so that both of them got wetted down equally. A short distance away a group was trying out a blowtorch to make sure it was in working order. Even as Bailey came plunging through the trees, too quickly for them to see who it was and try to stop him, its forked, fiery tongue shot out with a deep-throated hum.

The gasoline can went hurtling into the air, Allen went sprawling out full lengh on the ground and Bailey was standing there in his place, covering Burke with his own body and watchfully sweeping his gun around from side to side.

"Turn this man loose!" he grated. "Larry Kirby killed Kathleen! Get back, you hear me?"

A dull growl of resentment went up. They started to close in on him. They were past listening to reason. Their appetite for cruelty had been whetted and couldn't be checked that abruptly. The foremost ones crouched, watching for a chance to rush in and overpower him. From somewhere in the rear he heard a voice say: "Throw your lit cigarette at him, Rufe. He's all wetted down, ready to go. Let the damn stranger blaze with him if he loves him so much."

Bailey glimpsed the poised wrist just in time, sighted at it, fired. There was a yell of pain, something red looped up in the air, and the wrist flopped over, limp as a wrung chicken neck.

Mary Lou Davis suddenly came wriggling through their midst, all disheveled and no longer pretty to look at, but more admirable now than she had ever been before in her life. She turned to face them at Bailey's side, held up her hands commandingly. "Call him a stranger if you like, but you can't call me one. I was born and bred here; I'm one of you, and Kathleen was my friend. You know I wouldn't lie to you. He's telling you the truth. I heard Larry Kirby say he did it. I heard him with my own ears just now. He has fits or something, that none of us knew about until now."

"Keep them going," encouraged Bailey under his breath. Gun still pointed forward, he edged around toward the back of the tree, started working on the knots that held Burke fast.

By the time Myers and Birdsall arrived, it was all over. Most of them had already slunk off, ashamed. A few lingered, brazening it out; stood around talking it over in sheepish little knots of two and three. Bailey still had his gun out, but perhaps that was just an oversight. Burke was sitting on a stump, slowly refastening his shirt button by button, as if still dazed by the sudden turn events had taken. Mary Lou Davis was standing with arms folded, her back scornfully turned to Allen's whining attempts to whitewash himself.

"I don't want anything more to do with you, Joe Allen," she declared in a clear, ringing voice, "after what I found out about you tonight." And then with a look at Bailey that was plainly inviting: "There are all kinds of men in this world. A girl'd be a fool to take your kind."

"Did you get him?" Bailey asked the sheriff.

"He'd dragged himself back to his own house, from the woods," Myers said, "but when we went over there after him, we were just a minute too late. Upstairs in the bedroom, with his own gun, when he saw us coming up toward the front door."

"That was probably the best thing he could have done after all," Bailey said soberly. "He was just a burden to himself and a menace to others."

"But how could he get in there, into the woods, that night, on that injured foot of his?"

"He got in there again tonight on it, and without any crutches, didn't he? Miss Davis and I both saw him with our own eyes. That was probably nothing but a painful little wrench he got, but he borrowed the crutches simply to show off how badly hurt he'd been and to attract attention. He was that kind. As it turned out later, they came in very handy as an alibi.

"Then something happened to start that slow fuse of his rage to sputtering. Somebody coming away from the dance probably tipped him off that Kathleen had left it with Burke. Maybe he waited for her at her house first, and when she didn't show up he started in along the short cut from the other end, looking for her. He was so cursed with a sense of his own inferiority, that he couldn't even trust the girl who'd promised to marry him; had to spy on her.

"Maybe he saw them stop and kiss for old times' sake. Who knows now any more? The demons in him came to the surface. He waited until they'd drifted apart hunting for her key, then he stunned her with a vicious blow, caught her in his arms as she went limp, carried her off soundlessly out of reach.

"The exact mechanics of what came next we'll never know, because he and she are both gone now, and the moon can't talk. A frenzied, jealous beating before she'd even revived—then remorse; failure to revive her—and then deliberate murder, completing what he'd begun, to frame Burke. It must follow along those lines.

"Tonight he thought he saw her again, and—coward to the bitter end—spoke his own confession."

Bailey rested a sympathetic hand on Burke's shoulder. "If it's all the same to you, I'd like to take this man back to the city with me now. He needs someone to keep a friendly eye on him."

They went down the road together side by side, Burke and the man who was the closest thing to a friend he had ever known. The night was dark and the silver-dollar moon that had seen Kathleen Leary die was gone, just as she was herself. And though Bailey was beside him, Burke walked alone.

SCREEN-TEST

"She's been getting threatening letters," he finished telling me.

"Don't they all?" I said. "Any time the press agent can't think of anything else—"

"No, not this time," he said firmly. "I saw some of them myself. They were sent down here to us."

I didn't answer.

I suppose he could tell by my face I didn't like the deal. He looked me over curiously. "What've you got against people like them, her and the rest? You don't like them, do you? I've noticed that before."

"Why should I?" I said sullenly. "They're all phony and a yard wide. What makes them so special, anyway? Who were they before? One of them used to lather men's kissers in a barber shop. Anyone that had the price of a shave on him and walked in off the street, mind you! Another used to strut the Coney Island boardwalk on stilts. A barker for a side show."

"Does that mean they're not entitled to police protection ?" he inquired pointedly.

"Everyone is," I conceded grudgingly.

"Haven't they ever entertained you?" he wanted to know.

"They're not real up there," I argued. "I go and sit there in front of them. But they're not real. They're just photographs on celluloid."

"They eat, they drink, they sleep, they love, just like the rest of us. Maybe they're even lonely sometimes, maybe they're even scared."

All I said was, "They wanted to be where they are, didn't they? Nothing less would satisfy them. Well, now they're there. What do they want now, sympathy?"

"Did you ever see this one?" he asked.

"I can't tell one from the other," I prevaricated sulkily. "They all look alike to me, They're just names going around without bodies, far as I'm concerned."

"Well, I wouldn't exactly call Betty Grable or Marilyn Monroe, for instance, someone going around without a—" he started to say. Then he didn't. "Anyway, her studio just called and asked us to furnish her with protection. And we are."

"It's just like being a lapdog, going around trailing one of them," I complained, half under my breath. "Babysitter to a— Why me, anyway. Isn't there anyone else?"

He rattled some desk papers definitively. "A while back, before we started this kind of informal conversation, I seem to recall giving you an assignment. Are you refusing it?"

"No, sir, I'm not." What else was there to say to that?

"All right, Galbraith. Get right out there and don't let her out of your sight until further notice. And remember one thing, your job isn't to trace these threats or track down whoever sent them; it's just to keep your eye on Martha Meadows and see that nothing happens to her. You're responsible for her safety."

"Yes, sir," I said. I gave a sigh with it, but I said it just the same.

Unquestionably, I was the most reluctant, unenthusiastic, semimutinous plain-clothes man who ever started out on an assignment, as I walked out of headquarters that day and thumbed up a taxi. The sooner I got busy on the job, I figured, the sooner the chief might relent and take me off it. The taxi, and everything else from now on, was at Miss Meadows' studio's expense, but that didn't make me like her any the better. Without actually wishing her any harm, I was far from being a devoted fan of hers at the moment. In fact, I could even almost sympathize with whoever was writing her the letters; that was the frame of mind I was in about her.

The studio, a biscuit-colored stucco job on Marathon Street, up near where Vine meets the Boulevard, looked more like a railroad car barn (blank side out) than anything else. Having been born here and having lived in Los Angeles all my life, I had never, expectedly enough, been inside one of these places. In the same way that you never visit museums or other points of interest in your own town; it's always the outsiders who do that.

I showed the gateman my credentials; he picked up a phone there in his little booth, said: "From police headquarters, to see Miss Meadows," and at once everything opened up high, wide and handsome. I was passed from hand to hand, like a basketball in a high-voltage game, in the process of getting to her.

She was in her bungalow dressing room, resting between scenes and having her lunch when the last of the receptionist relays tapped, oh-so-apologetically, and convoyed me in. Then he tactfully bowed right out again. Just a studio underling, I guess, in the presence of majesty, and not supposed to hang around her.

The dressing room had chintz drapes, like my wife has at home; only ours aren't as good. Her lunch was a malted milk and a paper-thin sandwich, the lettuce leaf thicker than the bread that held it. Probably something to do with her measurements, which were of national moment. Not to me, but to the entire feminine population, no doubt.

She had a thick make-up on, but somehow it wouldn't work. By that I mean, underneath it she still looked sort of fresh and clean. Soap-and-scrubbing-brush type. She looked like your best friend's kid sister, about like that. The one that suddenly grows up and turns beautiful in front of your eyes, but you still never get used to it; she's always just a kid to you. That one.

"Galbraith, from headquarters, Miss Meadows," I said perfunctorily.

She looked at me for a minute, and then she said, sort of solemnly: "You don't look at all like I thought detectives do."

I came right back with: "And you don't look at all like I thought picture stars do."

She waited, thought about it, then finally asked: "Is that good—about picture stars?"

"Very good," I said earnestly.

Then I asked her: "Is that good—about detectives?"

She dropped her eyes closed, opened them again, to show me she meant yes.

And, I don't know, but then, just like that, all of a sudden we were friends; we liked each other.

A colored woman, her maid I guess, looked in and started to say: "Honey, is you nearly—" Then when she saw me, she scrutinized me good; her eyes traveled down me until they reached my hand, then they locked there and she burst out suddenly: "Look here, man, don't you bring that lit cig-ret in here. What you want to do to that child?" She plucked it unceremoniously away from me, took it outside the door and trampled on it heavily. Far more than was required to deaden it.

I didn't know what it was all about for a minute. I hadn't been drawing on it, and the Meadows girl looked too young to be an asthma sufferer.

"Don't get so peevish, Nellie," Martha Meadows ordered with an indulgent smile, "She means this," she explained to me, and pointed to her dress. "It has celluloid underneath, to stiffen it. If a spark gets on it—" She was dressed as a Civil War belle, with a wide hoop skirt the size of a beach umbrella.

"Just 'cause it ain't happen' so far, don't mean it can't happen yet fore you're through," snapped the protective Nellie. "Wardrobe had no right to make you up such a thing, anyhow." She continued about her business, muttering darkly to herself.

The Meadows girl winked at me and said, half under her breath: "Always looking on the dark side of things."

The dressing-room telephone rang and she picked it up. "All right; I'm ready whenever you are." She turned to me. "I have to go back on the set now. We're shooting the big scene this afternoon. So if you'll ex—"

"Sorry," I said quickly. "You don't understand. I'll have to go right along with you. Those are my orders."

She thought about that for a minute, then shrugged. "I have no objection. But the director mayn't like the idea of admitting outsiders to the set. He hates to have people watch him when he works. He's very temperamental, you know."

I gave her a sleepy-eyed look and said: "He'll get over it."

She put a little antiquated-looking shawl around her shoulders, Nellie handed her a pair of old-fashioned lace mitts and the three of us left the bungalow. I let her and the maid go in front and I followed at a discreet distance. They walked along a number of lanes between low studio buildings —it was like a little city in itself, in there—and finally stopped before an entrance that bore the sign: "Set VIII, Meadows, Civil War Picture." People were hanging around outside it, some in costume and some not. It looked strange to see a girl concealed in crinoline down to her toes chatting with a girl in bullfighter pants and a halter top. They made way for her respectfully as she passed through them and went in. She bowed slightly to one or two and they nearly fell all over themselves bowing back.

Inside, the place had a cement floor, criss-crossed over with a lot of little steel rails like baby train tracks. I suppose they were for moving heavy camera trucks back and forth, I don't know; I'm just giving you a detective's-eye view of something I didn't know the first thing about. Cables and ropes and wires and pulleys galore were dangling from the rafters. Canvas backdrops were stacked, like cards, up against the walls. But it wasn't out here they were going to shoot the scene, I could tell that much. There was a soundproof door with a light bulb over it, leading in to the sound stage itself, where the action was to take place.

Before we got to it, though, a bald-headed man in a pullover sweater came up to Meadows. He was about five feet tall and with a nose like an eagle's beak. A girl carrying a thick script, chunky as a telephone directory, was following him around wherever he went. By a process of elimination, I figured he must be the director. He was too short and homely to be her leading man; he wasn't in costume, so he wasn't the "heavy"; and he wasn't in a business suit and sitting still in an office, so he wasn't the producer.

"Who is this?" he asked, meaning me.

When she explained, he raised both hands to his head, as if he would have liked to tear out some hair, only, as I've mentioned, there wasn't any there that he could.

"Now a detective!" he said. "First it was your colored maid, Then zumbody else. Now him. Who it'll be next? It's already too many people around here. I can't verk in crowds. I am sensitiff!"

She kept trying to calm him down. "Now, Stormy," and I thought that was a very good name for him, "now, Stormy, he won't be in the way—"

"When I was at Oofa, in Behrrrrlin," he declaimed, "you think they would dare do this to me? At Oofa, I got reshpect. At Oofa, was no cops butting into my verk!"

I didn't like being called a cop. I gave him a pun and a sour look, both at the same time. "Well, I'm Oofally sorry, but you're not at Oofa now; you're in the city of Los Angeles!"

"Yah, Loss Ancheles!" he agreed spitefully.

Finally I cut the whole thing short by saying I'd phone in and leave it up to the chief whether I went in or stayed out; he was the one who had given me the assignment in the first place, and I'd put it up to him.

But the one telephone I could locate inside the place was already in use and I had to chase all the way outside and around to the studio commissary before I could find another.

The chief went off like a firecracker when I told him. "What's the matter with those people anyway? I'm beginning to think you're right! First they ask me for a bodyguard for her, then they start shooing him away. You go in there, Gal, and if they try to keep you out, quit the case cold and report back here to me. I'll wash my hands of all responsibility for her safety!" Which was music to my ears, as I hadn't liked the job from the start.

When I got back, sure enough, this stormy petrel of a director had taken advantage of the opportunity; the soundproof door was already closed, the red light was on above it to warn that shooting was ready to start inside and they had all gone in without waiting. There was even a guard stationed outside the door to keep people from opening it by mistake.

"It wasn't her fault," he told me. "Stormann argued her into going in without you. And he's some arguer, that boy."

"Oh, he did, did he?" I burned. "Who does he think he is? He may be the whole cheese around here, but he's not even a bad smell to us down at headquarters!"

I didn't want to crash the door open and force my way in; it would have ruined the scene, cost the company thousands of dollars, and it wouldn't have been fair to Meadows, who wasn't to blame in the first place.

"Only an angel like her," the guard was confiding to me, "could get along with him. Nobody likes him."

"Give her my regards when she comes out," I said bitterly, "and tell her for me—"

With that, almost as though I'd been overheard, the door suddenly opened from the inside without any warning, the red bulb automatically dimmed, and a series of jagged screams stabbed out at us. The screams of the dying, they were like. No one could scream like that and go on living very long.

"That's real, that's not in the scene!" the guard yelped unnecessarily, jolting with shock. He didn't have to tell me. It had to be real; no imitation scream could have sounded like that.

Meadows' maid was suddenly in the doorway, arms pin wheeling all around her in a futile flurry. Her own voice was almost gone from fright. "Oh, somebody—! Quick, somebody—! I've been hammering on this do', I thought I'd never get it open—!" But the screaming went right on behind her, and a sort of a flickering light effect, like a jittery sunrise that kept moving around from this side to that.

I rushed in, the guard after me. Martha Meadows, with the cameras still playing on her, was burning alive there before everyone's eyes. She was a living torch, a funnel of fire from head to foot and screaming her life away. She was running blindly here and there, like some kind of a horrible human firework, and the flames were streaming after her like ribbons, flattened out by the swiftness of her rushing. She was out of her head, mad with agony and kept eluding their extended arms, ducking and doubling back and forth with hellish agility, while her life went up in vivid yellow-white gushes. I'll see that scene for years to come. On every screen I sit before, it will come back again.

I didn't try to catch her in my arms; I couldn't. I flung myself at her bodily, head down right into the flames, like in a football tackle. I whipped stinging hands around something soft and quivering inside that glow that had once been cool human flesh. The pillar of fire toppled over and lay horizontal along the ground, with the flames foreshortened now and just licking upward all around it like bright scallops. A blanket or something was thrown over her, and partly over me, too. As it fell, a puff of horrid black smoke spurted out all around the edges, the last scream stopped and she was still.

I held my breath, to avoid inhaling any of the damned stuff. I could feel rescuing hands beating all around the two of us through the blanket. After a minute I picked myself up. My hands were smarting, my shirt cuffs were scorched brown in places and peeling back and sparks had eaten into the front of my suit. Otherwise I was all right. But what lay under the blanket—alone now—didn't move. Five minutes ago one of the most beautiful girls in America, and now something it was better not to look at.

As if in gruesome jest, the winking eyes of the cameras were still focused on her and, in the deathly silence that had now fallen, you could hear the whirring noise that meant they were still grinding away, unattended. The crew were all down on the floor around her. No one had had presence of mind enough to turn them off.

The guard who had been at the door had sent in a call for help, even before the flames had been beaten out. The studio had a first-aid station of its own a door or two away, and two men arrived with a stretcher and carried her out on it, still under the blanket. Nellie went with them, staggering like a wounded steer, and pleading with someone—someone whose identity only she knew—"No, please, No, don't do this—!" Hands clasped before her eyes.

Stormann, for once, was wordless—stunned with shock, I guess. And shaking like a leaf, with all the cowardice that only loud-mouthed little men like him can know. Terrified even by the other person's calamity—but not by sympathy; only because they were so close to it that it might have happened to themselves. I saw one of the electricians giving him whiskey in a paper drinking-cup. The script girl was the only one there who seemed to have kept her head about her. Staring owlishly through those oblique-shaped glasses she wore down at the pages of her script, as though this whole thing puzzled her.

I went over to her, dabbing some oil they'd given me onto the angry red patches on the backs of my hands and wrists, and asked: "How'd it happen?"

"It's not in here," she said, continuing to pore. "It's not in here."

I swallowed hard, to cork up my patience. "It wouldn't be, would it?" I tried again. "Where— Where was she, when it happened?"

"Right here," she said instantly, and put her finger down. "Right here. See—where it says 'Oh, won't he ever come?' " She even turned the script around helpfully, so I could read it with less difficulty. "That's her line. I was following very closely, the way I'm supposed to. She's supposed to be waiting by the window for her lover. Well, she spoke it, all right, and then the next thing I knew, there was a funny shiny light on the pages of my book. I looked up, and it was coming from her. She had it all over her. I quickly looked back at the book, to see if it was some new effect they'd thought up, but I couldn't find it anywhere—"

I gave her up. This wasn't a girl, this was a machine. I bet even on her own death-bed she'd ask her Maker, "What's my next line, Lord? I've lost my place in the script."

I tackled Stormann next. He was on his third or fourth paper cupful by now and getting bleary in a heavy Teutonic way. You could see that he felt deeply sorry—for himself. "Mein picture," he was lamenting, "mein kleiner picture! Ach, why couldn't it have happened after, not now! We only had two days' verk left."

I wasn't there to express my personal opinion of any of them, and maybe I had no right to, but I couldn't hold it back. "You people," I let him know in a scathing undertone, "must have come up out of the bottom of the breadbox. I never saw such crumbs in my life, and I've sat out in front of many a line-up, believe me. She's thinking about the lines in her script, you're thinking about your picture. Well, there happens to be a poor miserable human being who, if she's conscious at all right now, is probably suffering the tortures of the damned. I'm thinking about her, Mr. Big-Shot-Heinie-Director!"

He was stunned. Probably no one had ever spoken to him like that since he first arrived in the country. His mouth dropped open. "You talk to me?" he breathed.

"Yes, I talk to you!" I tapped my finger insultingly three times against his chest for emphasis. "Now you see that you talk back to me. I'm not on the studio payroll, I don't have to kowtow to you." I hadn't forgotten that it had been his doing that I'd been barred from the set in the first place.

Seeing that he wasn't up against one of his usual yes-men, he was suddenly meek as a lamb, only giving a look or two around to make sure no one was near enough to witness his submission. "What do you wish I say to you?"

"Here's what I'm asking you. Did you or did you not see what caused it?"

"No," he said, like a small kid answering the school truant officer.

"You didn't? Well, where were you when it started?"

"Right here in my chair. This same chair, where I am now. Looking right at her, watching her verk."

"And—"

"Suddenly begins flems. From nowhere, flems. One minute, is nothing. The next minute, flems." He gestured ripplingly.

"They don't begin from nowhere, they got to begin from somewhere. Did you know about her dress?"

A little of his former hauteur returned. "That is Wardrobe; that is not my department. I only create the picture, I do not dress it."

"Was anyone smoking a cigarette in here?"

"Abzolutely not!" he said emphatically. "I would not haf permit it. The lenses would pick up the haze, maybe. You haf to be careful of such things when you direct."

"Did she brush against any wires, maybe?"

"Where do you see any around? This is the inzide of an oldt-time house, you can see for yourself. Viers don't belong. "

"What about this thing?" I picked up a lighted oil lamp that was standing on the fake window sill beside which she had been standing. Then I put it down again. It had an electric torch hidden in the base of it.

"Who was doing the scene with her? She wasn't alone in it, was she?"

"One other player. Ruth Tobias. That girl crying over there."

I let him go back to his paper drinking-cups, and started over toward her.

She was having Academy-Award-winning hysterics across the back of a chair, and for a moment—for a moment only—as I stood looking down at her, I thought: "Someone with a heart at last."

She raised her head and looked at me, and, without knowing she was doing it, blew her chances for my sympathy. "Two whole years," she heaved with ricocheting breath. "Two whole years to make a comeback it's taken me—and now, this. And when you've been on the shelf for two years in this business, you're dead. Now I am finished, now I am through, now I may as well give up."

I felt like saying, "Your skin isn't burned off all over you, though, the way hers is," but I didn't. I said instead, "I want to ask you something. You were right there in the scene with her. Did you see what it was? Did you see what happened to her?"

She was an attractive woman; there were still telltale traces of it to be seen, under the make-up, the unflattering costuming and the alcohol puffiness. But it had taken a terrible beating, her attractiveness. Maybe during those two years.

She was gotten up to look old and severe; old-maidish. She was in black, and carried a lorgnette, and her hair was pulled back tight in a cranky knot.

"I played her older sister," she said, "and I was glad to take the part. I would have played her grandmother, if I'd had to. Why should I kid you? I begged them for it, I practically got down on my knees. I told them I knew the story backwards, and they finally gave it to me. It's a remake, you know."

I didn't. What's more, I didn't care.

"I had the lead in it, the first time around. Don't you remember? Magnolias and Honeysuckle. That's what this is."

I should remember picture titles.

"Don't you remember me?" she said then, wanly.

"They're not real, up there—" I started to say. Then I didn't go ahead. "To get back," I said pointedly.

She ran her hand in front of her eyes. ""What was it you asked me?" she said with an effort.

"Did you see how it happened?"

"No. I was in that rocker there on the set, facing her way—"

"And yet—"

"I wasn't watching for something to happen. How did I know something was going to happen? I didn't have any lines to cue to. My mind was a thousand miles away. All I kept thinking was, 'I won't have to stand behind any more counters in the dime store, I won't have to carry any more trays out to cars—' "

"Please, Miss Tobias," I said, almost embarrassed. "I don't want to know your personal thoughts. I only want to know what your eyes saw."

"I'm supposed not to approve of the fellow she's intending to run off with, but all I do to show it is to keep rocking back and forth, back and forth, through the whole scene. She had her back to me, over at the window. I was looking right at her—and all of a sudden, ffft! She was on fire from head to foot! As quickly as that, and for no earthly reason that I could make out. All I had time to do was jump back out of the way myself—"

"You would," I thought. "That's you."

"Was it unusually hot in here?" I asked. "Do you think that might have done it?"

"No, It's always warm under the lights, but it wasn't unusually so this time. Not hot enough for that. I know, because I'm very susceptible to heat, and I wasn't at all uncomfortable myself."

"Did you know about those hoop skirts? Is yours like that, too?"

She had to examine hers before she could give me the answer. "You mean that stiffening? Mine doesn't have any. Yes, I did hear vaguely something about that, but I didn't think twice about it. They left mine limp because there's a scene—not this one—in which I have to hold her in my arms, and they found it wasn't manageable with two hoop skirts; we couldn't get close enough to each other."

Just then word was brought in that, impossible as it sounded, the Meadows girl was still breathing. She was going fast, though, they said—just a matter of minutes now. They'd given her morphine to kill the pain.

"Is she conscious, or completely out?" I asked.

"Semiconscious. You know; sort of groggy from the hypo."

"Quick, then, let me see her a minute—"

"Oh, you can't question her now," they protested, appalled.

"I won't subject her to questioning. Just take me to her a minute."

It was a slim chance, but maybe she, herself, knew what had caused it. She might have seen it happen, and not been able to prevent it in time. If I could only get her to whisper that to me—

It was a monstrous thing they showed me lying on a cot in a darkened room. Like a mummy, crisscrossed with yards and yards of gauze bandaging. No eyes, no ears, no nose, no anything. A crevice between the bandages for a mouth. Two bandaged paws atop the sheets. The faithful Nellie there on guard beside her.

I put my face down close. "Martha," I whispered. "Martha, can you hear me?" She moved a little, or I thought she did, which amounts to the same thing. "Martha," I begged again, "Martha Meadows, what caused the accident just now?"

I couldn't tell whether she'd heard me or not. There was no way. I repeated the question. Then suddenly I saw her head sway slowly from side to side, slowly and slightly. ""No—accident," she mumbled. Then she muttered something else, but so low I couldn't catch it any more. A minute later her head had lolled loosely over to the side again and stayed that way. She was gone.

I went outside and stood there, lost in thought. I hadn't found out what I'd come to find out—what did it—but I'd found out something else much more important. "No—accident" meant it had been done purposely. What else could it mean? Or was I building myself a case out of thin air? Delirium, morphine—and a shaking of the head in her death throes that I'd mistaken for "no?" I tried to convince myself I was just looking for trouble. But it wouldn't work. I had an answer pro for every argument con. She'd known what I was asking her just now. She'd answered me with her voice, as well as with the motion of her head. She hadn't been out of her mind.

Death will strike during unconsciousness or sleep, maybe, but never during delirium. The mind will always clear just before it breaks up, even if only an instant before.

And hadn't she gotten threatening letters and asked for protection. Anyway, I told myself, as long as there was a doubt in my mind, it was up to me to track it down until there wasn't any doubt left—either one way or the other. That was my job.

Nellie came out. She wasn't pleading any more like she had been on the set. There wasn't anything left to plead for now. She walked as though her legs were in plaster casts. She didn't see me. She didn't see anyone, I guess.

I didn't know what to call a middle-aged colored woman that would stop her most effectively. I didn't want to say, "Hey!" I didn't want to say, "You, there!" Finally I went after her and touched her arm. "Party," I said. "Like to talk to you a minute."

She stopped and turned and looked at me. She still didn't see me, I could tell, but she looked at me anyway. "If I am a party, I ain't a happy one. I'm a fun'ral party. Just call me Desolation and let me go my way."

"Won't keep you long."

"They musta been casting in heaven today, but they sure picked a miser'ble, low-down way to fill their star part," she said with a sort of suppressed rancor. "And what's she going to use for a maid on the set up there? Some skimpy angel that don't even know how to look after her nylons right?"

I wasn't sure if this was her own native poetry or if she'd been listening to actors say their lines around her too long.

"I'm gonna buy me a bottle of gin," she said, "and keep on drinking it down till I can see the clear sky through the bottom. And another, if I have to. And another. Till I can't remember her no more. And till I can't remember me, either. And that's about all the good life is: a bottle of gin and don't remember yourself."

"You sure loved her all right," I said.

"No, I didn't love her," she said with abrasive scorn. Then she said, "It's funny, but I only loved two people in my whole life. My mother, and this little white girl. One of them taught me never to drink. Now the other one's goin' teach me never to stop."

Then she seemed to remember that I was someone, and that I'd stopped her and was standing there. "Whutchu want with me?" she asked with sudden sharpness, and an access of Negroid inflection that hadn't been present before.

"I just want to ask a question or two."

"Who you to ask questions?" she said challengingly.

"I'm a policeman," I said. "We have to, sometimes."

"Police-man," she said accusingly. "Police-man." She broke the word in two. "Police-maan." She bleated it like a goat. "You going to bring her back? You going to make her eyes open, and her mouth speak, and her pretty face whole again? No, you going to ask questions! Well, doan ask 'em round hea', police-man. Ask 'em where they can be answered. Ask God why He took her in such a—"

"Sh-h-h!" I cautioned her primly.

I gave her a minute to quiet down.

"Are you listening?" I tried again when the minute was up. "You don't happen to know of anyone who had a grudge against her, do you?"

She tossed her head impatiently. "Your foolish mouth! She was everybody's honey. She made it Christmas every day of the year, everywhere she went. Didn't she even go to the trouble of asking 'em and coaxing 'em to give that Miss Tobias a job in her picture, for old times' sake, when nobody wanted her any more? Everybody loved Miss Martha!"

"Not really," I said. "Everybody doesn't love anybody. If you get me. Lots may, or some may. Not everybody all at once. That's out of this world. Then how about those threats she got? Were they from someone who loved her, too?"

"Some crank," she said disdainfully. "They weren't anything. Everybody in the business gets 'em one time or another. It means you're a big shot, that's all."

"You were in there with her when it happened. What'd you see?"

"There was nothing to see. I took my eyes off her for a minute; nex' minute she wasn't there any more, only fire— with her voice in the middle of it, screaming. That's how fast it seemed like."

I slapped my hand frustratedly against the side of my thigh.

"Can I go now?" she chafed rebelliously. "I've got a date with a package store."

She turned and went, without waiting for my dismissal. I wouldn't have stopped her anyway. "Take it easy on the gin stuff," I advised her. "That won't bring her back."

"No," she answered mournfully, without turning her head, "but it'll make her go 'way altogether, and that's even better!"

I rang headquarters and gave the chief a full account of what had happened, up to this point. "Something new—an invisible accident. Right under everybody's nose, and yet nobody saw it."

"You'll have to stay on it by yourself, at least for the next couple of hours. I can't send anyone else over before then. There's been a big armed hold-up at one of the downtown stores, and I'm short of men. I'll let the studio brass know you're in charge."

When I got back to the set, they were all there yet—all except Stormann and Ruth Tobias, that is. "I thought I told you," I muttered accusingly to the guard, "to keep your eye on everybody, see that they all stayed here."

"I couldn't stop them," he whined. "I tried, but they didn't pay any attention. I'm only a guard here, and it woulda cost me my job. Besides, they'll be right back, they told me so. Stormy only stepped out a minute to get some more liquor. The electrician that was supplying him ran out of it. And Miss Tobias went to take off her costume. She got jittery because Stormy was nervous and started smoking around her. After what happened to—"

But hers hadn't had the lethal celluloid stiffening under it. So why did she bother to change it?

I checked with the electrician distiller who'd been supplying Stormann. "Why, no," he said flatly. "I've got some left. I told him so, only he got a sudden notion he wanted better quality liquor than I had, and went out after it."

They were both back in no time at all, and at that, Tobias was back first of the two. I made a mental note of that, wondering: Should it take a man longer to obtain some liquor than it does a woman, and a conceited woman, an actress to boot, to change clothes from head to foot?

She looked better now. She'd loosened her hair, and it hung down free. But this wasn't a beauty contest I was holding here.

Stormann already had an uncertain shuffling gait. Proving, if anything, only that he wasn't used to much alcohol. He came up to me and breathed fearfully: "How is she?"

"Dead," I said, for the shock value.

It sure had plenty. He folded up and went down right in front of me. They picked him up and carried him out. I went with them part of the way. Only long enough to finger my lapel, extract a pin from it and sheath it in the back of his hand. He never even twitched. So I withdrew the pin, replaced it in my lapel, turned around and came back. Nothing like being certain in your own mind about a thing, any thing at all. He had passed out.

It being my first time in sole charge of a case, I played it up big. I turned a chair around backwards, sat down on it, and faced the remaining members of the group. I gave them a short speech. Short, but a speech nevertheless. Ending up: "—and all I'm going to do, for the present, is repeat the question I've already asked Mr. Stormann, Miss Tobias, Nellie and this young lady over here, the script girl. Did any of you see what caused it?"

Electricians, stage hands and camera crew all shook their heads.

I got up and banged the chair down hard for emphasis. "She wasn't six feet away from some of you!" I bawled them out. "She was in the full glare of some of the brightest lights ever devised! All eyes were on her at the time, watching every move she made! And yet nobody saw how it started! Two dozen pairs of eyes, and they might as well have all been closed! Well, there's one pair left—and maybe I'll have better luck with them."

I suppose they thought I meant my own. I didn't.

"Now clear out of here, all of you, and give me your names and addresses as you go. You're subject to recall for further questioning. You stay—" This was to the chief electrician, "and check up on those lights of yours for defects—one of them might have got overheated and dropped a spark on her. You take this—" I passed my handkerchief to the guard, "and go over the floor, especially over there around where she was first standing and pick up everything that doesn't belong, no matter what. Every cigarette butt and every cinder."

The rest of them filed out past me one by one, giving their names and addresses as they went. They ail reacted differently. Well, I guess that many different people always do and always will. Some were a little nervous, some indifferent, some wisecracked. One grip, a man a little older than the rest, with graying hair, said to me: "This is your first case, isn't it?"

"I'll ask the questions here," I said noncommitally.

But he compressed the five words into just one, "yes," and took that for the answer. "I could tell. You got so angry about it."

"Next," I said.

The script girl played a script girl to the bitter end: nose actually still buried in her book as she came sauntering on. "They're not going to make that picture any more."

"I know, but it seems a shame not to memorize it to the end. I have only two more pages to go. I like to finish anything I begin."

Ambition, I felt like saying, will get you nowhere.

And Tobias came last. There was a little defiant springiness to her step, I thought. Or maybe she always walked that way, how should I know? "Ruth Helen Tobias. Such-and-such Santa Monica Boulevard."

She had hazel eyes, I saw, as she gave her name. I looked down at my writing.

"This was a day," she said.

That didn't need an answer. Then she said, "I feel as if I'd lost a sister. We were both the same age, you know."

"Thirtieth of next February," I thought. I just minded my business, so she gave up and went on her way. After she was gone, then I did look up. "Any man, just so she can feel young again for a few minutes," I thought. "Even a freshman detective. It must be terrible to be a woman and care how you look."

The chief cameraman came out of his booth with a round, flat, tin box packed under his arm.

"Where you going with that?" I asked him.

"Drop it in the ashcan on my way out," he said. "It's what we took today; no good now any more."

"Ashcan, hell," I let him know. "You hang onto that, but tight. That's what I want. Those lenses of yours are the other pair of eyes I told them about. How soon can you develop that stuff?"

"Why, right away," he told me, looking surprised. "But are you sure you— This has her whole death scene on it."

"And that's just what I want. Don't touch it, leave it just the way it is. Can I trust you?"

"I'll meet you in Projection Room A as soon as I've finished it," he said quietly. "She was a swell kid."

The electrician came down from way up high somewhere and reported the lights and wiring all in order. Not a loose wire, not a screw out of place anywhere.

"You dig up a typewriter, get that all down on paper and sign it," I instructed him. "Then shoot it in to me at Headquarters. " I wasn't sure just what good that was, but it sounded nice and official.

The guard passed my handkerchief back to me with a cigarette butt, a wire frame and a lot of little pieces of glass in it.

"The butt's Stormann's," he pointed out. "He was smoking it after it was all over. I saw him throw it down and step on it before he went out after that liquor. That was when Tobias yapped, 'Don't come near me with that thing! You want it to happen to me, too?' "

I wondered if that remark meant anything. Did he want it to happen to her, too? As if to say, he'd wanted it to happen to Meadows, in the first place. I decided that was stretching it too far; it was just a turn of speech, with no ulterior meaning. I knew what the pieces of glass and the frame were: a shattered lorgnette like the one I had seen Tobias fiddling with.

"Meadows had it around her neck, I guess," he suggested, "and it fell and smashed when she started to run around crazy."

That I disagreed with, but I didn't tell him so. These pieces of glass were clear; the burning celluloid would have smoked them up if they had been on Martha Meadows' person.

I sent for the wardrobe woman and had her bring a complete list of every article she had furnished Meadows and Tobias for this picture. I singled out just the two of them, because there hadn't been any other women in this particular scene with them.

She was an aristocratic-looking person with white hair—a former actress herself, I imagined, judging by the way she was groomed. She had typewritten sheets with her.

"Did you supply Meadows with a lorgnette?"

"Why, no. Young girls didn't carry them, even in those days."

"You did supply Tobias with one?"

"Yes." She showed it to me on the inventory.

I showed her the pieces. "Is this it?"

"It must be. She turned in her costume a little while ago and explained that she'd broken hers while that awful thing was happening to poor Martha. You see, I have everything else crossed off but that. Ordinarily we charge players for anything that isn't returned to us, but in this case I don't suppose that will be done."

It seemed to me I had seen the lorgnette on Tobias after the accident, but I couldn't be sure enough on that point this long after to make too much out of that.

A kid came in and said: "The rushes are ready for you in Projection Room A," and took me over there.

The room had rows of seats just like a miniature theatre, and a screen on one wall. I closed the door and locked the projectionist and myself in.

"You'd better hang on tight," he warned. "This is ghastly."

"If you can stand it," I told him, "I can. Run it through at normal speed first."

I sat down in the front row with the screen almost on top of me. There wasn't much to it at regular speed—maybe about five-minutes' worth of picture, a single sequence. But it was so grisly, it was almost too long at that. It opened on Tobias sitting there in the rocker, broadside to the camera. Meadows came in almost at once.

"I'm going away with him tonight," she said.

Tobias raised her lorgnette and looked at her disapprovingly through it. Meadows went over to the window, and the camera followed her part of the way. "Dollied" after her, I think they call it. That left Tobias over at the left-hand side of the screen and partly out of the picture, with just one shoulder, arm, and the side of her head showing. She started to rock back and forth and tap her lorgnette against the back of her hand. I had my eyes glued to Meadows, though. She turned around to look at her "sister."

"Oh, won't he ever come?" she said.

Her face sort of tightened up—changed from repose to tenseness. A look of horror started to form on it, but it never got any further. Right then and there the thing happened.

The best way I can describe it is that a sort of bright, luminous flower seemed to open up halfway down her dress, spreading, peeling back. But the petals of it were flame. An instant later it was all over her, and the first screams of a voice that was gone now came smashing out at my eardrums. And in-between screams, the hellishly conscientious soundtrack had even picked up and recorded the sizzling that her hair made. Like eggs frying in a pan.

"Cut!" I turned round and yelled back at him. "For Pete's sake, cut." And I mopped my drenched forehead.

"I felt the same way myself while I was processing it," he confessed, looking out of the projection booth at me.

It hadn't told me a thing so far. But then I hadn't expected it to, the first throw out of the bag.

"Go back and start it over," I shivered. "But whatever you do, leave out that finale. Take it up where she turns at the window. Slow motion this time. Can you hold it when I tell you to?"

He adjusted his apparatus. "Sure. Just say when," he called.

The figures on the screen hardly moved at all on this run; eight times slowed down. They drifted lazily—sort of floated. I knew the place to look for on Meadows' dress now, and I kept my eyes focused on it and let everything else ride. A moment later something had shown up there.

"Hold it!" I yelled, and the scene obediently froze into a "stil."

Now it was just a magic-lantern slide, no motion at all. I left my seat and stood close up against the screen, keeping to one side so my own shadow wouldn't blur out that place on her dress. No flame was coming from it yet. It was just a bright, luminous spot, about the size and shape of a dime.

"Back up one!" I instructed him. By "one" I meant a single "frame" or still picture. As most of us know, without having to be technically proficient in cinematography, any strip of "motion" picture film consists of an endless number of little still pictures in succession, which hardly vary one from the next. They carry the thread of motion along, by infinitesimal alteration. It takes about eight hundred of them, speaking loosely, to show a guy raising a cigarette to his mouth.

At any rate, whatever the correct jargon to be used in such an instance, he seemed to understand what I wanted without any difficulty, and carried it out. The scene hardly shifted at all; there was just a momentary blurring of lines, but when they'd settled again, the pinpoint of light was smaller—like a pea now. You couldn't have seen it at all from the seat I'd been in at first.

Two heads are better than one. I called him out and showed it to him with a pencil. "What do you make of this?"

"It's a blob of light coming to a head at that place on her dress. Like a highlight, you might say. A gleam, originating from somewhere else."

Which was just exactly what I'd had it figured for, myself.

"Go three frames forward," I said, "and then hold it."

He came out again to look. It was back to the size of a dime once more, and only a frame or two before the flames were due to show up.

"There's heat in it!" I said, "See that!"

The white spot had developed a dark core, a pinhead of black or brown.

"That's the material of the dress getting ready to burn. See that thread coming out of the dot? Smoke—and all there'll ever be of it, too. Celluloid doesn't give much warning."

So far so good. But what I wanted to know was where that gleam or ray was coming from. I had the effect now, but I wanted the cause. The trouble was, you couldn't follow the beam through the air—to gauge its direction. Like any beam of light, it left no trail—only showed up suddenly on her dress. Maybe one of the powerful Klieg lights, high overhead and out of the picture, had developed some flaw in its glass shield, warping one of its rays. But the chief electrician had gone over them afterward and given them all a clean bill of health.

"Start it up again," I said wearily. "Slow motion," and went back and sat down. I was further away now and had a better perspective of the thing as a whole; maybe that was what did it.

As the scene on the screen thawed and slowly dissolved into fluid motion once more, it gave the impression for a moment of everything on it moving at once. Therefore it was only natural that the one thing that didn't move should catch my eye and hold it.

Tobias' lorgnette, and the wrist and hand that held it.

The three objects stayed rigid, down in the lower lefthand corner of the screen, after everything else was on the go once more. The chair she was in had started to rock slowly back and forth, and her body with it, but the forearm, wrist, hand and lorgnette stayed poised, motionless. There was something unnatural about it that caught the eye at once. I remembered she had opened the scene by tapping her lorgnette as well as rocking.

Now, with the fire due to break out any second, she was only rocking. The lorgnette was stiff as a ramrod in her grasp. Not that she was holding it out at full length before her or anything like that; she was holding it close in, unobtrusively, but straight up and down—a little out to one side of her own body. Maybe the director's orders had been for her to stop fiddling with it at a certain point. Then again maybe not. All I wanted to find out was at what point she had stopped tapping and playing with it. I had been concentrating on Meadows until now and had missed that.

"Whoa, back up!" I called out to him. "All the way back and then start over—slow."

I let Meadows go this time and kept my eye on Tobias and her lorgnette. The minute I saw it stop—"Hold it!" I yelled, and ran over to the screen and examined Meadows' dress. Nothing yet. But in three more "frames" that deadly white spot had already showed up on the celluloid-lined hoopskirt. Effect had followed cause too quickly to be disregarded.

"Lights!" I roared. "I've got it!"

He turned a switch, the room blazed all around me, and I took that handkerchief out of my pocket and examined the pieces of glass it held. Some were thicker than others— the lens had therefore probably been convex, not flat. I held one up and looked at my cuff through it. The weave stood out. A magnifying glass. I held it about a foot away from the back of my hand, where I'd already been burned once that afternoon, and even with the far weaker lights of the projection room working through it, in about thirty seconds something bit me and I jumped.

He'd come out and was watching what I was doing.

"Pack that film up again in the box the way you had it," I said. "I'll be back for it in a minute. I have to see someone first. Then I'm taking it down to Headquarters with me."

I went over and knocked on the door of the dressing room where they'd told me I'd find Ruth Tobias. "Miss Tobias, would you come out here a minute," I said in that flat voice you use when you're going to make a pinch. "I want to talk to you."

She opened the door, and again my impression was, as it had been once before, that her eyes were hazel. Eyes are big when they're trying to flirt; they're also big when they're frightened.

"What're the charges?" the chief asked when I brought her in with me.

"Causing Martha Meadows' death by setting fire to an inflammable costume she had on, by focusing the strong Klieg lights through a magnifying glass, while they were working together in a scene. Here's the glass she used to do it, picked up on the set. Here's the original harmless glass that was in the frame before she knocked it out, picked up in the trash basket in her dressing room. The film, there in that box, shows her in the act of doing it. She's been eaten away with jealousy and hate ever since she faded out and Martha Meadows replaced her. And then what brought matters to a head, I think, was that they decided to remake the very picture that had been her own greatest success, with Meadows in the part she'd originally had, and with she herself playing an older, unsympathetic part."

"You fool!" she hissed in my direction, after she'd been booked and the matron was leading her away. "You fool not-dry-behind-the-ears yet, trying to play the part of a detective—" And being an actress, she could make her lines sound good, even at such a time and in such a place. "You'll never make this stick. You think you've got a case against me, but you'll find out different!" And then, just to give it the final dramatic flourish, I suppose, she spat on the Headquarters building floor.

The chief smiled, and I bristled. I'm still touchy about our prestige.

"She's right in a way, Gal," he commented, after the noise had died down. "We can prove that she was the cause of it happening, in such and such a way, but I doubt very much, even with that film you've got there, that we can prove it was intentional, that it was done purposely."

"She may be able to get around that," I said, "but I have a hunch she won't get around this so easy." I took out an oblong of blotting paper torn into four pieces and passed them to him. "This, too, was in the trashbasket in her dressing room. Since when do people take the trouble to tear up a blotter? Isn't it enough just to throw it away whole, once it's become unusable? If they do tear it up, isn't that an indication there's something on it they want to conceal, to do away with? In other words, a sign of guilt? To me it is."

"And?" he queried.

"I matched the pieces together, in reverse against the dressing-room mirror—you know that old trick. Just one line escaped the general blur of ink pressings. The user had blotted it too close to a blank margin. '–never live to finish this picture–' If that shows up on any of those threatening letters you're holding—"

"You put in quite an afternoon," was his way of patting me on the back. At least, I suppose it was that.

"And now," he added, "I suppose on your next night off you'll go and sit in some movie show with your missus, and take up disliking all of them again where you left off."

"It'll be a long time before you ever catch me at a movie show again," I let him know, with intensity. "I couldn't, not me! No matter what the picture was, she'd be up there in the middle of it, burning like a bonfire, screaming her life away—for the help that never came."

"And you're the fellow who used to say," he reminded me, but rather gently. " 'They're not real up there, just photographs moving around on celluloid.' "

I O U

To the others in the back room, Second-Grade Detective Clinton Sturgess said, "So long, fellows—see you tomorrow." He went down the hall, past the sergeant's desk, out of the precinct house and into the velvety softness of an August dusk. He went around the corner to the garage, got his old car out. He swung it up the ramp to the street, stopped long enough to light a cigarette, exhaled an enjoyable "Aahh!" and started homeward, whistling.

It was a swell night. It was a swell life. He was thirty-five, had a nice wife and a nice kid, he was a second-grader and he wasn't stopping there. He had it all lined up before him, step by step: first-grade, lieutenant, captain, inspector. Still remote those steps were, but not unattainable. The way lay plain before him, with odds just stiff enough to try his mettle, and the rewards generous to a fault. It was a swell night. It was a swell life.

He was out on the lake shore drive now, with its lights curving around before him in a long vista and the lake gray-violet in the twilight. His rented bungalow was a little far out from the city, in a district not yet fully built up; but it was cheaper out there and you got more for your money.

He was whistling My Blue Heaven. It was old but it stayed with him, and the words in his mind fitted his contentment.

A turn to the right—
A little white light—

He made the turn (but it was to the left) and climbed the steep grade that led to their house, The development was called Lakeview Heights because it was strung along the top of this bluff. He parked at the curb instead of backing into the garage because he'd decided to take his family to the movies. He sounded the horn, and the porch light went on and they both came out in a flurry, his wife just to the lower step, the kid flying out all the way to swing from his neck as he stepped from the car and caught her.

The kid was pretty. Everybody said so. She'd been on loan to them from heaven for seven years now, and each time he could see the place she'd come from just by looking at her.

"Get your things ready. We're going to the movies."

The flurry became a whirlwind. His wife said, "I've got supper waiting for you on the table. We're finished already. Barbara, come in and get your hat."

He turned the car around to face downhill, to save time leaving, and braked once more. The kid came racing out past him a second time as he got up to the porch. "I'll wait for you in the car!" she cried gaily.

"All right—but don't monkey with the horn now."

He wasn't even sitting down yet, he was crouched above a chair in the act of pulling it forward under him, and his wife was passing him a plate across the table. He was in a straight line with the porch door. He happened to turn his head that way, and there was something wrong. There was a blankness out there where there shouldn't have been. He could see the opposite side of the street.

His chair cracked over and he was running through the living room to the porch. Behind him a plate shattered on the floor and the SOS of his wife's heels came tapping after him.

He could still hear the whisper of the car's going, receding on the hushed night air. No engine. So then he knew what had happened, and the knowledge nearly felled him, like a crowbar across the top of his head, even before he got out to the porch and could see.

Street lamps made it bright all the way down, all the way to where—the lake was. The car was going straight as an arrow. It didn't swerve at all. Its momentum held it gripped too tightly. A little arm was thrust briefly out at the side, then withdrawn again. A sort of gay wave; coasting was fun.

There wasn't a sound behind him. Somehow he knew, without looking, that his wife had fallen senseless there on the walk. But he was already yards down that fearful incline. He ran down that hill like nothing that had ever run down it before.

It was all over so quickly, so soundlessly. He had been gaining on the car, but the foot of the street came too quickly. Horror such as a man sees only once in a lifetime was fleetingly there before his eyes, then gone again. But never quite gone again until the day he'd die. For the car reached Lakeshore Drive, swept across its triple-lane width, unerringly hurtled the pitifully low pedestrian parapet—it was such a new development, and it would have hidden the beauties of the lake to have built it any higher—cleared the barrier almost by the unaided resiliency of its own tires and springs, with a flaring of dust and a crumbling along the top, and was gone from sight.

It was as instantaneous as the exposure of a snapshot. Two of the limestone blocks along the upper tier, a car's width apart, had been knocked out by the wheels, giving a battlement effect. But the spray that had risen on the other side never seemed to finish falling back into place.

There was a screaming of brakes off to one side of him as he darted across the roadway, and some kind of a pitching, swerving beam of light flicked at him. Somebody's arrested headlights maybe.

A horrid heaving was there below him as he mounted one of the loosened blocks. The high-posted driveway lights behind him played up a single blister-like bubble formed there in the water, a bubble that refused to burst, that kept renewing itself from below. He didn't bother about his coat. He aimed himself face forward into those roiling eddies, and as he went down the thought that he couldn't swim was with him, but that didn't matter.

He went in wrong, with a spanking blow across the chest and stomach. He went down a little way, arms groping before him—toward nothing. Then he was being pushed up again, and he didn't know how to make himself go down any farther. He didn't know how not to breathe either, and long before he could get up again he was nothing but a mass of convulsive muscular spasms, drawing in destruction at every inhalation. He broke the surface briefly, but he didn't know how to take advantage of it. He was already dying himself now, as he went under again.

Something swift and safe and sure got him at some point after that. He never knew when, and it drew him backward through water and up into air; air that now hurt as much as water, but didn't kill. Then he was lying there heaving like a bellows, on a tiny lip of soil that protruded at the base of the parapet, and there was a man standing over him, dripping but not spent, looking down at him with a sort of scorn that had no solicitude or consideration to it. The man said, "What the hell did you go in for, if you can't swim?"

Sturgess turned over on his face, supporting himself on his hands, and between spasms of coughing managed to strangle out: "My kid! In a car down there—!"

The man was suddenly gone again. And in a little while, in only the space between two paroxysms of coughing it seemed, she was there again before his eyes, cradled in the man's arms, her face blue and still in the darkness. From where he lay Sturgess just mutely looked his gratitude, as the stranger climbed up over the parapet still holding her, toward the waiting arms of quickly gathered spectators reaching down to help.

When the inhalator squad had finished, and Sturgess had held her tight to him a minute, with her open-eyed, breathing, he looked around and asked: "Where is he? Where'd he go?"

He saw a car start to glide furtively off in the background. He shouted, "Wait!" and ran directly across the path of its headlights. The car stopped with a poor sort of grace, and the man at the wheel hitched his head in surly inquiry as Sturgess came up alongside. One hand, on the wheel rim, was bandaged.

Sturgess poised his own two hands downward across the edge of the door, and gratude was somehow expressed even in the gesture itself. But the man inside grated impatiently. "Well, whaddye want?"

It was hard to put into words, especially when it wasn't welcome. All Sturgess could say was, "You don't know what this means—"

The rman said with a jeer, a jeer for himself, "I don't know how I come to do it. I never done a thing like that before."

"But isn't there anything I can do? Won't you at least let me have your name?"

The answer was almost venomous. "What d'you care what my name is? I don't go around giving people my name!"

Sturgess would have taken a kick in the teeth from him. His balked gratitude had to find some means of expression, so he gave the man his own name instead.

The stranger just looked at him stolidly. Sturgess couldn't tell if he was bored or contemptuous. His eyes flicked to Sturgess' fingers, which were folded across the rim of the car door. The meaning was plain: Take your hands off; get away from me.

The car inched away, and Sturgess dropped his hands defeatedly.

"If there's ever anything I can do—" he called out helplessly.

His benefactor stayed in character to the end. A cynical "That's what they all say!" came floating back above the dwindling tail light.

The reports on the Torrington murder were coming in faster and more promising by the hour. There had been a lull of half a week first, that preliminary lull that the outside world always mistakes for inactivity, even defeat. But they hadn't been idle. They'd been working behind the scenes, in the laboratory, in the Bertillon files, on the weapon-testing range, in the world of the exact sciences. They had built up their man from nothing, with the aid of nap from his suit, body oil from his finger-tips, a hundred and one other microscopic things. At the end of half a week they had him, although they had never seen him. They had his height, his weight, his habits, almost the way he walked, and what his blood count was. Now came the time to get him, to pull him out of thin air, the way a magician makes a rabbit appear out of a hat—to match him in the flesh to his preconceived identity.

The murderer had had plenty of time to leave the city during those three and a half days. He had left. They'd expected him to, they'd counted on his doing just that. They cast their net in a great wide loop first, overreaching the farthest possible limits of his flight; for in his own mind he was still safely anonymous. They began to draw the net in by telegraph, by radio, by all the means they had. Too late by a matter of hours he tried to break through. He was recognized, the alarm sent out, the highways blocked off. He turned and fled back again; the chase went into reverse. He plunged back into the sanctuary of the city. The net was drawn in slowly but surely.

Yesterday his car had been found, abandoned just inside the city limits, and by that they got his name. It was Murray Forman—there were infinite variations to it, but none of them was of paramount importance. He was guilty of coldblooded murder, and that was.

Tighter and tighter the noose was pulled. From citywide it narrowed to a single neighborhood, from an entire neighborhood down to a single street. And presently they would have the very house, and then the exact room inside that house and then they'd have him. It was a matter of hours only, fractions of hours. They were old in guile, and remorseless, and their combined intelligences never slept. But singly they were only human beings.

First-Grader Sturgess, of the Homicide Squad, was relieved temporarily at two that morning, almost at the zero hour, and sent home subject to immediate recall. He had slept only in snatches for a week past, his reflexes were no longer dependable, and much as he rebelled against it, he recognized the advisability of the respite. The climax might not occur until dawn, in which case he could still be in time for it on his return to duty.

He put his key to the door and let himself into the empty house. The wife and kid were away in the country with relatives for two weeks, and the summer mustiness of rooms that have been shut up tight all day clung to the air. He put on the lights and saw halos around them, from his fatigue.

The image of his girl leaped out at him from the green-gold easel on the radio, and already he was less weary. Just the sight of her likeness was restful. She was still on loan; and now, at twelve, more than a hint of the way she was going to be was apparent. And she was going to be the tops.

He said, "Hello, honey," to her. He said it every time he got back, just as though she were here.

"Your old man's all in," he mourned to her under his breath. He opened the windows first of all, to freshen up the place a little. Then he took off the things that bothered him most, in order—his tie and then his shoes and then his coat. He said to himself, "I'm getting old," but with the complacency that only a man who knows he really isn't can bring to bear on the thought.

He puttered around in his socks a minute or two. He thought, "Where did she keep the cans of salmon, now?" He thought, "I'm too tired to bother." He went in and stood over the bed, sketchily straightened since the last time he'd been in it. He looked at it questioningly. It was too much trouble to pull down that spread. It would take too long— he couldn't wait another minute. He turned slightly, let himself fall back on the bed in a straight line from shoulders to heels, so that his feet kicked up slightly with the fall. The bed sang out threateningly under the impact but held, and before the springs had stopped jarring he was already out of the world.

The tapping alone would never have roused him. It was too low, too furtive. It was the sharper note of the bell that brought him up through layers of oblivion into the shallows of awareness. He raised his head from the neck alone, held it erect, let it drop back again of its own weight.

The ring came again, cut short as though no more than a peck had been given the button. The tapping was blurred, like hail or gravel striking on wood. He got up, wavered through the two rooms toward the front door, said sharply, "Who's there?"

The tapping broke off short.

He opened the door and a man was standing there in the dim light. The man acknowledged the opening with a peculiar, warning gesture, a diagonal cut of his hand that held a plea for caution in it.

He seemed to take his right of admission for granted. His hat was low, and Sturgess didn't know him, didn't know know why he should. The visitor inserted himself obliquely between Sturgess and the door frame, and then as Sturgess gave ground before him, the man closed the door and sealed it with his own body, pressing himself against the knob.

He pushed his hat higher, but inadvertently, by backing a hand to his forehead as though in unutterable relief. "I thought you'd never open the door," he said. "I saw you come in before."

Sturgess said on a rising inflection that held no anger, yet led the way toward it, "Who are you?"

The man leaning dejectedly against the door—he was starting to sag a little now as if some long-sustained tension had relaxed—sneered: "You don't know me?"

There was memory in that sneer alone, in that characteristic tone that never gave the benefit of the doubt. The man's shoulder blades went a noich lower on the doorseam. "You better know me," he said. And then he jeered, "Or don't you want to?"

His eyes found the picture, rested on it, guessed, came back again with a mocking gleam. But he didn't say anything. He didn't have to. Sturgess knew by now.

He'd never been good at saying things. He said, "You're the fellow, you're the man—the lake, that time." His face lit up with long-stored gratitude, but then the light died again as the man brushed by him, seemed not to see the friendly start Sturgess' hand had made. The man found his own way across the room, pitched into a chair.

There was blood on one side of his face, or rather vestiges of it, a thin dark patina.

Sturgess was awake now. He was frightened too, by some kind of foreknowledge. He ran his tongue across his lower lip, said, "What'd you do, hurt yourself?"

The man lowered his head abruptly, glared challengingly "No, I didn't hurt myself. A bullet grazed me getting over here. From one of your crowd."

Sturgess was getting whiter by the minute. The other's eyes held him derisively, forcing knowledge on him that he didn't want. "Why don't you ask me why I'm here?"

Sturgess flinched. "Don't tell me anything you're liable to be sorry—" he said quickly.

The man in the chair stared to repeat what he'd just said. "Don't you want to find out why I'm—"

"Shut up!" Sturgess shouted.

"No you don't! I've got something coming to me. What're you trying to do—leave an out for yourself, welsh out of it? So that when they come ganging around here in a minute or two—See no evil, hear no evil, eh? Well, you're looking at Murray Forman, and what are you going to do about it?"

Sturgess ran a hand through the bird's-nest tangle of his hair. "My God!" he groaned. "Don't you know who I am?"

"D'you suppose I'd be here if I didn't? You're my trump card, the last one I hold. Somebody else told me who you were that night. I came across your picture in the paper once after that, when you were promoted for running down those cop-killers. It gave your address." He laughed mirthlessly. "It pays to change addresses more often, when you've got debts outstanding."

He looked rested now, fit, compared to Sturgess. His color was high alongside Sturgess' agonized pallor. His pores were dry, not glistening like the other man's.

Sturgess flung the door open, folded it back flat against the wall as if he couldn't get it wide enough. "Get out!" he said in a choked voice. "Get out of here! That's the most I can—"

Forman kept looking at the picture, as though he hadn't heard. He said softly, "Is her hair gold-brown like it looks on there? Is that how she smiles all the time, with a little dent in the middle of her cheek?"

"Get out, you dirty killer!"

"I know how they do; sometimes they slip their arm around your neck from behind your chair, and hug you tight. Sometimes they get down on the floor at your feet and lean their head against your knee, and look up and over at you, backwards. She wouldn't do all that, Sturgess, if it wasn't for me. What's her name, Sturgess?"

"Barbara," said Sturgess limply, and closed the door again very slowly, as though it weighed a ton.

They didn't say anything for a long time—either of them. It seemed like a long time anyway. Forman stayed in the chair, which was the most comfortable one in the room. Sturgess stood against the door.

Forman spoke finally, as matter-of-factly as though they had known each other all their lives. "Gimme a cigarette. Got one on you?"

Sturgess felt absently for his coat pocket without looking up. He didn't have any. Forman must have got up and helped himself from the humidor. The next thing Sturgess noticed he was back in the chair smoking.

Sturgess said finally, as though the trivial request had managed to restore his own power of expression, "I'm a police officer, Forman. There isn't anything I can do."

The man in the chair snapped ashes from his cigarette. "You don't have to do a thing. Just let me stay here till the heat cools a little, then you'll turn your back and I'll be gone, the way I came. That's all, and then we're square—quits."

"You struck down and murdered a man in cold blood—"

"That doesn't cancel your obligation. I'd already croaked someone long before that night you first came across me. That didn't keep you from accepting your kid's life from my hands, did it? She breathes just as good, her lungs are just as empty of water, her eyes are just as wide open, as if a right guy saved her, aren't they? I didn't argue the right and wrong of it before I went in, did I? You owe me a life—"

("Two lives," Sturgess admitted to himself. It was clever of him, good psychology, not to mention having saved Sturgess himself, to emphasize only the one that really mattered.)

"—and I want a life back from you. My own."

Sturgess said fiercely, "D'you want a drink? I do!" Three times he started out in the wrong direction, before he could remember where the liquor was kept.

Forman was thoroughly at ease now, sure of himself. Or else that was his game, to seem sure of himself, to appear not to have any doubts, to take it for granted.

He said, holding his little whiskey glass up to the light and studying it idly, "Don't take it so hard." He went on with detached curiosity, as though confronting for the first time some rare trait he'd often heard of but never encountered until now: "You're dead on the level, aren't you? So straight it hurts." He made a grimace. "Gee, it must be hell to be like that! I had you figured that way even that night. The way you jumped in without knowing how to swim. I'm good that way at sizing people up. I've had to be. That's why I came here. D'you think I'd have taken a chance like this on one of those other guys you string along with?"

Sturgess had sat down now, staring sightlessly at the problem as though it were spread out on the carpet before him. He heard the man say, "Is this the only bottle in the place?"

He nodded absently. He heard the thudding of liquid on the carpet and he looked up. Forman was holding the uncorked bottle upside down. Sturgess didn't say anything. A million little things like that didn't matter; there was only one thing that mattered. Forman explained, "I want to keep your thinking straight. And mine, too. I can't take a chance. What it's all about might get too foggy for us to handle—right."

Sturgess nodded again, to himself. That was right, from his own point of view too. Liquor made him sentimental. That could be just as dangerous either way, in this case—romanticize his duty or his debt. He slashed the contents of his little glass jigger viciously across the floor.

"It's simple enough," Forman remarked. Meaning nothing to lose your temper about, nothing to go up in the air about.

"Shut up," Sturgess growled. "The less you say the better. " He looked over at the open bedroom door. "When'd you sleep last? You can go in there and lie down if you want to. Get out of here!" Then as Forman rose to his feet, crooked his arms behind his head and yawned—he was that composed—Sturgess added: "Wait a minute. Have you got a gun on you?"

"Sure. Want it?" he brought it out and indifferently pitched it across at Sturgess butt-first. "You didn't have to worry about that," he assured him. "You're my trump card. I have everything to lose and nothing to gain by—" The rest of it was lost as he went, calmly and leisurely, into the bedroom.

Sturgess heard his shoes drop, one after the other, and the bed creaked a little as it had under him, earlier. He balled his hands into fists and put them up alongside his temples as though he were going to bash his own head in. After a while, as if to give his hands something to do, he picked the gun up from the side of the chair and started to empty it. Long before he'd finished, the harsh breathing of a man in deep sleep was coming from the bedroom…

The knocking came within ten minutes. He stopped dead in the middle of the oval he had been coursing endlessly around the room, one heel raised clear of the floor and held that way. It came again, and the bell chirped, and a voice said, "Sturge! Are you in here?" He recognized it as Hyland's. Hyland was one of his team-mates.

He went over and closed the bedroom door first. Then he came back to the front door, put out his hand to it, breathed deeply and threw it wide open.

Hyland was out there and another man named Ranch, and two uniformed cops. The last two had their guns out. But they'd already started away by the time he got the door open, as though summoning him had been only incidental.

Sturgess said, "What's up?"

Hyland said, "Forman broke through again! At the last minute, just as we were ready to close in! We've picked up a cab driver that brought him as far as the corner below here—he's holed up around here some place! I'm going to case the back."

"You won't find him there," Sturgess said.

He didn't offer to join them. All he said was, "I'm off duty."

Hyland gave him a look, but he turned and went loping off. His voice came drifting back with a cutting edge to it. "Sleep tight—sorry we bothered you."

Sturgess closed the door and stood by it a minute, head down. Down as low as if he were looking at his shoes, but he wasn't.

Behind him Forman's voice said slurringly, through the narrow opening of the bedroom door, "So you went to bat for me."

Sturgess answered viciously through clenched teeth: "I don't have to turn you in behind your back while you're asleep! That isn't my way! I'm not afraid of you!"

"No," was the grudging admission, "it's your own conscience you're afraid of. And her eyes."

"You let me do the worrying about that. And stay in there." Sturgess took a threatening step forward. "Stay out of my sight, or I'll settle the problem with my own two hands!"

The door eased mockingly closed again.

Sturgess was standing in his wife's kitchen, awkwardly jockeying something hot with the help of an enveloping dishcloth, when Forman came out the second time. It was still dark, the gun-metal pall preceding dawn.

Forman lounged there in the alcove a minute, watching him. "What's this, the prisoner's last breakfast? Why so early?"

Sturgess just motioned to a chair drawn up at the formicatopped table. The guest sat down. Sturgess brought over an aluminum percolator, snatched his hand away, blew on his thumb. He sat down opposite the killer.

Forman studied him, detached.

"You look like you been pulled through a knothole. I bet you pounded the carpet in there the whole time I was asleep."

To that Sturgess said, "It took me three tries before I got this right." The sink, lined with black coffee grounds, looked like some kind of flower bed. He pointed to a loaf of white bread. "You can cut some of that, if you want any."

They sat there, after that, facing each other across the table with a peculiar sort of normality, an every-dayness; like two men at a kitchen table while their women were away. Forman, wolfing great chunks of spongy white bread, looked around appraisingly. "How much you pay for this place?"

There may have been a method in his assumption of unshaken confidence, his taking of immunity for granted; or there may not. He may have been as artless as he sounded, or he may have been as wary as a man cornered in a cage with a lion, who knows that to show fear is fatal. Sturgess was past knowing or caring. "Eighty-five," he said.

Forman mused, while he picked his teeth, "I never stayed in one place long enough to pay by the month."

"It might have been better if you had."

They sat a while longer in silence. Then little by little the tension grew—tension that was coming from Sturgess. His hands went down to the edge of his chair seat, gripping it on each side, like a man reluctantly about to stand up. Forman started smoking a little faster, shortening the intervals between puffs. Finally he said, "What're you getting all white like that for? You're getting white as a ghost. You ought to see yoursefl!"'

Sturgess said, "We're going over there. If you feel like starting anything, now's the time."

"Still looking for a way out, huh? No you don't! You don't get off that easy!"

Sturgess got up and left the kitchen without a word. When he came back he had his coat on and was holding an open manacle in his hand. He said thickly, "Come on—let's get started. Shove out your hand."

Forman slowly extended a hand flat across the table top; he started drawing back his sleeve until he had bared his forearm nearly to the elbow. On its upper reaches were transverse white scars, from breaking the glass in the submerged car window that night. He just sat and looked up at Sturgess, holding it exposed that way.

Sturgess' lips got white, he blinked, and the manacle clicked shut on the other's wrist. Forman got up and followed Sturgess out of the kitchen. "You can't go through with it," he said quietly. "It's written all over you; you can't."

The window was open a little from the bottom, just below the shade. Sturgess threw out the handcuff key with a flick of his free hand.

Forman said, "You don't trust yourself, do you? It's going to be a devil of a job now to—"

The picture was lying face down on the radio as they went past. "Is that the way you had to do it?" Forman said. Sturgess turned down the wall switch and the picture vanished. There wasn't enough light outside to penetrate the room. "You'll have to see her again," Forman pointed out. "You'll have to see ber every day of your life. You can't keep her face turned away from you. What'll you do then?"

Sturgess opened the front door, swept his arm around in an arc, and towed Forman through after him. "I'm not going to beg or whine," Forman said. "I'm going to make it tough for you. It'd be a lot easier for you if I went yellow, wouldn't it?"

The killer was right again. His intuition was uncanny. If he had cringed and slobbered and resisted, accepted the role of a squirming, apprehended culprit, somehow he would have weakened the validity of his claims; Sturgess could have dragged him in without compunction. This way—

Sturgess closed the door and they went out side by side. It was steel blue overhead now, but still a litthe murky down at street level.

"You'll get a citation for this," Forman taunted. "You'll get promoted. You'll be the envy of every man in the department. And without having to lift a finger either. A man comes to you, that gave you the one thing you've got that you give a damn about, the one thing that holds you together, that makes you tick, he comes trusting you— You're the lowest thing on the face of God's earth, Sturgess. Even an alley cur has gratitude."

"Shut up!" Sturgess roared.

They went on slowly, almost waveringly, but Sturgess was breathless with effort, as though he'd been running. The green lamps of a precinct house blinked at them as they rounded a corner, and Forman recoiled involuntarily. Sturgess could feel the hitch through the manacle.

Forman said, "They're going to kill me if you take me in there. You know that, don't you? You know that once we go up these steps no power of yours, nothing you can do, will get me out alive again, don't you? I gave you your kid's life, Sturgess. For the last time—I want my own from you!"

Sturgess' face was glossy with sweat, and gray in the early dawn. He brought his forearm up level to his chest and nudged Forman into motion.

"Copper!" the man beside him breathed with contempt as they trudged up the steps and inside together.

Sturgess just stood there rigid, watching the clock, that last night. They tried to tell him, "Sit down, Sturge, don't take it like that," but he didn't seem to hear them.

When the phone call from upstate came through, you couldn't see him breathe at all while the lieutenant was talking. The lieutenant hung up and was quiet.

Sturgess asked, "Was that it?"

"Yeah, that was it."

"Did he leave any word, say anything about—forgiving anybody?"

"He left a message for you," the lieutenant said, unwillingly, looking down at his desk.

Sturgess came closer still. "Tell me what is it! I've got to know!"

"He said, 'Tell Sturgess I'll be seeing him again. He knows where to find me. In her eyes. Tell him I'll always be waiting there.' "

Sturgess put his hand to where he carried his badge, as if something hurt him there, and turned around and walked out of the room without another word.

Barbara said, half-laughingly, when he squatted down before her, his face so strained and white, and peered so closely, "What're you looking at me like that for?"

"Hold still," he said huskily, "and look at me." There was sweat all over his forehead.

Then when he had drawn a great deep breath and straightened up again she asked playfully, "Did you think you'd see something in my eyes?"

His answer to that was, "Yes. The ghost of the man who saved your life—" but he didn't teil her that.

"Well, did you?" she insisted.

"Yes." he admitted sadly, "I guess I always will—a little." He took out his badge and started polishing it. "But the other way," he added mysteriously, "I wouldn't have been able to look into them at all."

THREE O'CLOCK

She had signed her own death-warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man. He knew there was one. He had known for six weeks now. Little things had told him. One day he came home and there was a cigar butt in an ashtray, still moist at one end, still warm at the other. There were gasoline drippings on the asphalt in front of their house, and they didn't own a car. And it wouldn't be a delivery vehicle, because the drippings showed it had stood there a long time; an hour or more. And once he had actually glimpsed it, just rounding the far corner as he got off the bus two blocks down the other way. A second-hand Ford. She was often very flustered when he came home, hardly seemed to know what she was doing or saying at all.

He pretended not to see any of these things; he was that type of man, Stapp, he didn't bring his hates or grudges out into the open where they had a chance to heal. He nursed them in the darkness of his mind. That's a dangerous kind of a man.

If he had been honest with himself, he would have had to admit that this mysterious afternoon caller was just the excuse he gave himself, that he'd day-dreamed of getting rid of her long before there was any reason to; that there had been something in him for years past now urging, kill, kill, kill. Maybe ever since that time he'd been treated at the hospital for a concussion.

He didn't have any of the usual excuses. She had no money of her own, he hadn't insured her, he stood to gain nothing by getting rid of her. There was no other woman he meant to replace her with. She didn't nag and quarrel with him. She was a docile, tractable sort of wife. But this thing in his brain kept whispering, "kill, kill, kill." He'd fought it down until six weeks ago, more from fear and a sense of self-preservation than from compunction. The discovery that there was some stranger calling on her in the afternoons when he was away, was all that had been needed to unleash it in all its hydra-headed ferocity.

And the thought that he would be killing two instead of just one, now, was an added incentive.

So every afternoon for six weeks now when he came home from his shop, he had brought little things with him. Very little things, that were so harmless, so inoffensive, in themselves that no one, even had they seen them, could have guessed. Fine little strands of copper wire such as he sometimes used in his watch repairing. And each time a very little package containing a substance that—well, an explosives expert might have recognized, but no one else. There was just enough in each one of those packages, if ignited, to go Fffft! and flare up like flashlight powder does. Loose like that it couldn't hurt you, only burn your skin of course if you got too near it. But wadded tightly into cells, in what had formerly been a soap box down in the basement, compressed to within an inch of its life the way he had it, the whole accumulated thirty-six-days' worth of it (for he hadn't brought any home on Sundays)—that would be a different story. They'd never know. There wouldn't be enough left of the flimsy house for them to go by. Sewer gas, they'd think, or a pocket of natural gas in the ground somewhere around under them. Something like that had happened over on the other side of town two years ago. That had given him the idea originally.

He'd brought home batteries, too, the ordinary dry-cell kind. Just two of them, one at a time. As far as the substance itself was concerned, where he got it was his business. No one would ever know where he got it. That was the beauty of getting such a little at a time like that. It wasn't even missed where he got it from. She didn't ask him what was in these little packages, because she didn't even see them, he had them in his pocket each time. (And of course he didn't smoke coming home.) But even if she had seen them, she probably wouldn't have asked him. She wasn't the nosey kind that asked questions; she would have thought it was watch parts, maybe, that he brought home to work over at night or something. And then too she was so rattled and flustered herself these days, trying to cover up the fact that she'd had a caller, that he could have brought in a grandfather clock under his arm and she probably wouldn't have noticed it.

Well. so much the worse for her. Death was spinning its web beneath her busy feet as they bustled obliviously back and forth in those ground-floor rooms. He'd be in his shop tinkering with watch-parts and the phone would ring. "Mr. Stapp, Mr. Stapp, your house has just been demolished by a blast!"

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.

He knew she didn't intend running off with this unknown stranger, and at first he had wondered why not. But by now he thought he had arrived at a satisfactory answer. It was that he, Stapp, was working, and the other man evidently wasn't, wouldn't be able to provide for her if she left with him. That must be it; what other reason could there be? She wanted to have her cake and eat it too.

So that was all he was good for, was it, to keep a roof over her head? Well, he was going to lift that roof sky-high, blow it to smithereens!

He didn't really want her to run off, anyway, that wouldn't have satisfied this thing within him that cried, "kill, kill, kill." It wanted to get the two of them, and nothing short of that would do. And if he and she had had a five-year-old kid, say, he would have included the kid in the holocaust, too, although a kid that age obviously couldn't be guilty of anything. A doctor would have known what to make of this, and would have phoned a hospital in a hurry. But unfortunately doctors aren't mind-readers and people don't go around with their thoughts placarded on sandwich-boards.

The last little package had been brought in two days ago. The box had all it could hold now. Twice as much as was necessary to blow up the house. Enough to break every window for a radius of blocks—only there were hardly any; they were in an isolated location. And that fact gave him a paradoxical feeling of virtue, as though he were doing a good deed; he was destroying his own but he wasn't endangering anybody else's home. The wires were in place, the batteries that would give off the necessary spark were attached. All that was necesssary now was the final adjustment, the hook-up, and then—

"Kill, kill, kill," the thing within him gloated.

Today was the day.

He had been working over the alarm-clock all morning to the exclusion of everything else. It was only a dollar-and-a-half alarm, but he'd given it more loving care than someone's Swiss-movement pocket-watch or platinum and diamond wristwatch. Taking it apart, cleaning it, oiling it, adjusting it, putting it together again, so that there was no slightest possibility of it failing him, of it not playing its part, of it stopping or jamming or anything else. That was one good thing about being your own boss, operating your own shop; there was no one over you to tell you what to do and what not to do. And he didn't have an apprentice or helper in the shop, either, to notice this peculiar absorption in a mere alarm-clock and tell someone about it later.

Other days he came home from work at five. This mysterious caller, this intruder, must be there from about two-thirty or three until shortly before she expected him. One afternoon it had started to drizzle at about a quarter to three, and when he turned in at his doorway over two hours later there was still a large dry patch on the asphalt out before their house, just beginning to blacken over with the fine misty precipitation that was still falling. That was how he knew the time of her treachery so well.

He could, of course. if he'd wanted to bring the thing out into the open, simply have come an unexpected hour earlier any afternoon during those six weeks, and confronted them face to face. But he preferred the way of guile and murderous revenge; they might have had some explanation to offer that would weaken his purpose, rob him of his excuse to do the thing he craved. And he knew her so well, that in his secret heart he feared she would have if he once gave her the chance to offer it. Feared was the right word. He wanted to do this thing. He wasn't interested in a showdown, he was interested in a pay-off. This artificially-nurtured grievance had brought the poison in his system to a head, that was all. Without it, it might have remained latent for another five years, but it would have erupted sooner or later anyway.

He knew the hours of her domestic routine so well that it was the simplest matter in the world for him to return to the house on his errand at a time when she would not be there. She did her cleaning in the morning. Then she had the impromptu morsel that she called lunch. Then she went out, in the early afternoon, and did her marketing for their evening meal. They had a phone in the house but she never ordered over it; she liked, she often told him, to see what she was getting, otherwise the tradespeople simply foisted whatever they chose on you, at their own prices. So from one until two was the time for him to do it, and be sure of getting away again unobserved afterwards.

At twelve-thirty sharp he wrapped up the alarm-clock in ordinary brown paper, tucked it under his arm and left his shop. He left it every day at this time to go to his own lunch. He would be a little longer getting back today, that was all. He locked the door carefully after him, of course; no use taking chances, he had too many valuable watches in there under repair and observation.

He boarded the bus at the corner below, just as he did every day when he was really going home for the night. There was no danger of being recognized or identified by any bus driver or fellow-passenger or anything like that; this was too big a city. Hundreds of people used these buses night and day. The drivers didn't even glance up at you when you paid your fare, deftly made change for you backhand by their sense of touch alone on the coin you gave them. The bus was practically empty, no one was going out this way at this hour of the day.

He got off at his usual stop, three interminable suburban blocks away from where he lived, which was why his house had not been a particularly good investment when he bought it and no others had been put up around it afterwards. But it had its compensations on such a day as this. There were no neighbors to glimpse him returning to it at this unusual hour, from their windows, and remember that fact afterwards. The first of the three blocks he had to walk had a row of taxpayers on it, one-story store fronts. The next two were absolutely vacant from corner to corner, just a panel of advertising billboards on both sides, with their gallery of friendly people that beamed on him twice each day. Incurable optimists these people were; even today when they were going to be shattered and splintered they continued to grin and smirk their counsel and messages of cheer. The perspring bald-headed fat man about to quaff some nonalcoholic beverage. "The pause that refreshes!" The grinning colored laundress hanging up wash. "No, ma'm, I just uses a little Oxydol." The farmwife at the rural telephone, sniggering over her shoulder: "Still talking about their new Ford 8!" They'd be tatters and kindling in two hours from now, and they didn't have sense enough to get down off there and hurry away.

"You'll wish you had," he whispered darkly as he passed by beneath them, clock under arm.

But the point was, that if ever a man walked three "city" blocks in broad daylight unseen by the human eye, he did that now. He turned in on the short cement walk when he came to his house at last, pulled back the screen door, put his latchkey into the wooden inner door and let himself in. She wasn't home, of course, he'd known she wouldn't be, or he wouldn't have come back like this.

He closed the door again after him, moved forward into the blue twilight dimness of the inside of the house. It seemed like that at first after the glare of the street. She had the green shades down three-quarters of the way on all the windows to keep it cool until she came back. He didn't take his hat off or anything, he wasn't staying. Particularly after he once set this clock he was carrying in motion. In fact, it was going to be a creepy feeling even walking back those three blocks to the bus stop and standing waiting for the bus to take him downtown again, knowing all the time something was going tick-tock, tick-tock in the stillness back here, even though it wouldn't happen for a couple of hours yet.

He went directly to the door leading down to the basement. It was a good stout wooden door. He passed through it, closed it behind him and went down the bare brick steps to the basement floor. In the winter, of course, she'd had to come down here occasionally to regulate the oil-burner while he was away, but after the fifteenth of April no one but him ever came down here at any time, and it was now long past the fifteenth of April.

She hadn't even known that he'd come down, at that.

He'd slipped down each night for a few minutes while she was in the kitchen doing the dishes, and by the time she got through and came out, he was upstairs again behind his newspaper. It didn't take long to add the contents of each successive little package to what was already in the box. The wiring had taken more time, but he'd gotten that done one night when she'd gone out to the movies (so she'd said—and then had been very vague about what the picture was she'd seen; but he hadn't pressed her).

The basement was provided with a light bulb over the stairs, but it wasn't necessary to use it except at night; daylight was admitted through a horizontal slit of window that on the outside was flush with the ground, but on the inside was up directly under the basement-ceiling. The glass was wire-meshed for protection and so cloudy with lack of attention as to be nearly opaque.

The box, that was no longer merely a box now but an infernal machine, was standing over against the wall, to one side of the oil-burner. He didn't dare shift it about any more now that it was wired and the batteries inserted. He went over to it and squatted down on his heels before it, and put his hand on it with a sort of loving gesture. He was proud of it, prouder than of any fine watch he'd ever repaired or reconstructed. A watch, after all, was inanimate. This was going to become animate in a few more minutes, maybe diabolically so, but animate just the same. It was like—giving birth.

He unwrapped the clock and spread out the few necessary small implements he'd brought with him from the shop on the floor beside him. Two fine copper wires were sticking stiffly out of a small hole he'd bored in the box, in readiness, like the antennae of some kind of insect. Through them death would go in.

He wound the clock up first, for he couldn't safely do that once it was connected. He wound it up to within an inch of its life, with a professionally deft economy of wrist-motion. Not for nothing was he a watch repairer. It must have sounded ominous down in that hushed basement, to hear that crick-craaaack, crick-craaaack, that so-domestic sound that denotes going to bed, peace, slumber, security; that this time denoted approaching annihilation. It would have if there'd been any listener. There wasn't any but himself. It didn't sound ominous to him; it sounded delicious.

He set the alarm for three. But there was a difference now. Instead of just setting off a harmless bell when the hour hand reached three and the minute hand reached twelve, the wires attached to it leading to the batteries would set off a spark. A singly, tiny, evanescent spark—that was all. And when that happened, all the way downtown where his shop was, the showcase would vibrate, and maybe one or two of the more delicate watch-mechanisms would stop. And people on the streets would stop and ask one another: "What was that?"

They probably wouldn't even be able to tell definitely, afterwards, that there'd been anyone else beside herself in the house at the time. They'd know that she'd been there only by a process of elimination; she wouldn't be anywhere else afterwards. They'd know that the house had been there only by the hole in the ground and the litter around.

He wondered why more people didn't do things like this; they didn't know what they were missing. Probably not clever enough to be able to make the things themselves, that was why.

When he'd set the clock itself by his own pocket watch—1:15—he pried the back off it. He'd already bored a little hole through this at his shop. Carefully he guided the antenna-like wires through it, more carefully still he fastened them to the necessary parts of the mechanism without letting a tremor course along them. It was highly dangerous but his hands didn't play him false, they were too skilled at this sort of thing. It wasn't vital to reattach the back of the clock; the result would be the same if it stood open or closed, but he did that, too, to give the sense of completion to the job that his craftsman's soul found necessary. When he had done with it, it stood there on the floor, as if placed there at random up against an innocent-looking copper-lidded soap box, ticking away. Ten minutes had gone by since he had come down here. One hour and forty minutes were still to go by.

Death was on the wing.

He stood up and looked down at his work. He nodded. He retreated a step across the basement floor, still looking down, and nodded again, as if the slight perspective gained only enhanced it. He went over to the foot of the stairs leading up, and stopped once more and looked over. He had very good eyes. He could see the exact minute-notches on the dial all the way over where he now was. One had just gone by.

He smiled a little and went on up the stairs, not furtively or fearfully but as a man does in his own house, with an unhurried air of ownership, head up, shoulders back, tread firm.

He hadn't heard a sound over his head while he was down there, and you could hear sounds quite easily through the thin flooring, he knew that by experience. Even the opening and closing of doors above could be heard down here, certainly the footsteps of anyone walking about in the ground-floor rooms if they bore down with their normal weight. And when they stood above certain spots and spoke, the sound of the voices and even what was said came through clearly, due to some trick of acoustics. He'd heard a commentator clearly, on the radio, several times, while he was down here.

That was why he was all the more unprepared, as he opened the basement door and stepped out into the ground-floor hall, to hear a soft tread somewhere up above, on the second floor. A single, solitary footfall, separate, disconnected, like Robinson Crusoe's footprint. He stood stockstill a moment, listening tensely, thinking—hoping, rather, he'd been mistaken. But he hadn't. The slur of a bureau drawer being drawn open or closed reached him, and then a faint tinkling sound as though something had lightly struck one of the glass toilet articles on Fran's dresser.

Who else could it be but she? And yet there was a stealth to these vague disconnected noises that didn't sound like her. He would have heard her come in; her high heels usually exploded along the hardwood floors like little firecrackers.

Some sixth sense made him turn suddenly and look behind him, toward the dining-room, and be was just in time to see a man, half-crouched, shoulders bunched forward, creeping up on him. He was still a few yards away, beyond the dining-room threshold, but before Stapp could do more than drop open his mouth with reflex astonishment, he had closed in on him, caught him brutally by the throat with one hand, flung him back against the wall, and pinned him there.

"What are you doing here?" Stapp managed to gasp out.

"Hey, Bill, somebody is home!" the man called out guardedly. Then he struck out at him, hit him a stunning blow on the side of the head with his free hand. Stapp didn't reel because the wall was at the back of his head; that gave him back the blow doubly, and his senses dulled into a whirling flux for a minute.

Before they had cleared again, a second man had leaped down off the stairs from one of the rooms above, in the act of finishing cramming something into his pocket.

"You know what to do; hurry up!" the first one ordered. "Get me something to tie him with and let's get out of here!"

"For God's sake, don't tie—!" Stapp managed to articulate through the strangling grip on his windpipe. The rest of it was lost in a blur of frenzied struggle on his part, flailing out with his legs, clawing at his own throat to free it. He wasn't fighting the man off; he was only trying to tear that throttling impediment off long enough to get out what he had to tell them, but his assailant couldn't tell the difference. He struck him savagely a second and third time.

Stapp went limp there against the wall without losing consciousness.

The second one had come back already with a rope; it looked like Fran's clothesline from the kitchen, that she used on Mondays. Stapp, head falling forward dazedly upon the pinioning arm that still had him by the jugular, was dimly aware of this going around and around him, criss-cross, in and out, legs and body and arms.

"Don't—" he panted. His mouth was suddenly nearly torn in two, and a large handkerchief or rag was thrust in, effectively silencing all further sound. Then they whipped something around outside of that, to keep it in, and fastened it behind his head. His senses were clearing again, now that it was too late.

"Fighter, huh?" one of them muttered grimly. "What's he protecting? The place is a lemon, there's nothing in it."

Stapp felt a hand spade into his vest pocket, take his watch out. Then into his trouser pocket and remove the little change he had on him.

"Where'll we put him?"

"Leave him where he is."

"Naw. I did my last stretch just on account of leaving a guy in the open where he could put a squad car on my tail quick; they nabbed me a block away. Let's shove him back down in there where he was."

This brought on a new spasm, almost epileptic in its violence. He squirmed and writhed and shook his head back and forth. They had picked him up between them now, head and feet, kicked the basement door open, and were carrying him down the steps to the bottom. They still couldn't be made to understand that he wasn't resisting, that he wouldn't call the police, that he wouldn't lift a finger to have them apprehended—if they'd only let him get out of here, with them.

"This is more like it," one said, as they deposited him on the floor. "Whoever lives in the house him won't find him so quick—"

Stapp started to roll his head back and forth on the floor like something demented, toward the clock, then toward them, toward the clock, toward them. But so fast that it finally lost all possible meaning, even if it would have had any for them in the first place, and it wouldn't have, of course. They still thought he was trying to free himself in unconquerable oppositon.

"Look at that!" one of them jeered. "Did you ever see anyone like him in your life?" He backed his arm threateningly at the wriggling form. "I'll give you one that'll hold you for good, if you don't cut it out!"

"Tie him up to that pipe over there in the corner," his companion suggested, "or he'll wear himself out, rolling all over the place." They dragged him backwards along the floor and lashed him in a sitting position, legs out before him, with an added length of rope that had been coiled in the basement.

Then they brushed their hands ostentatiously and started up the basement stairs, one behind the other, breathing hard from the struggle they'd had with him. "Pick up what we got and let's blow," one muttered. "We'll have to pull another one tonight—and this time you let me do the picking!"

"It looked like the berries," his mate alibied. "No one home, and standing way off by itself like it is."

A peculiar sound, like the low simmering of a teakettle or the mewing of a newborn kitten left out in the rain to die, came percolating thinly through the gag in Stapp's mouth. His vocal cords were strained to bursting with the effort it was costing him to make even that slight sound. His eyes were round and staring, fastened on them in horror and imploring.

They saw the look as they went on up, but couldn't read it. It might have been just the physical effort of trying to burst his bonds, it might have been rage and threatened retribution, for all they knew.

The first passed obliviously through the basement doorway and disappeared from sight. The second stopped halfway to the top of the stairs and glanced complacently back at him—the way he himself had looked back at his own handiwork just short minutes ago.

"Take it easy," he jeered, "relax. I used to be a sailor. You'll never get out of them knots, buddy."

Stapp swiveled his skull desperately, threw his eyes at the clock one last time. They almost started out of their sockets, he put such physical effort into the look.

This time the man got it finally, but got it wrong. He flung his arm at him derisively. "Trying to tell me you got a date? Oh, no, you haven't, you only think you have! Whadda you care what time it is, you're not going any place!"

And then with the horrible slowness of a nightmare—though it only seemed that way, for he resumed his ascent fairly briskly—his head went out through the doorway, his shoulders followed, his waist next. Now even optical communication was cut off between them, and if only Stapp had had a minute more he might have made him understand! There was only one backthrust foot left in sight now, poised on the topmost basement step to take flight. Stapp's eyes were on it as though their burning plea could hold it back. The heel lifted up, it rose, trailed through after the rest of the man, was gone.

Stapp heaved himself so violently, as if to go after it by sheer will-power, that for a moment his whole body was a distended bow, clear of the floor from shoulders to heels. Then he fell flat again with a muffled thud, and a little dust came out from under him, and a half-dozen little separate skeins of sweat started down his face at one time, crossing and intercrossing as they coursed. The basement door ebbed back into its frame and the latch dropped into its socket with a minor click that to him was like the crack of doom.

In the silence now, above the surge of his own tidal breathing that came and went like surf upon a shoreline, was the counterpoint of the clock. Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.

For a moment or two longer he drew what consolation he could from the knowledge of their continued presence above him. An occasional stealthy footfall here and there, never more than two in succession, for they moved with marvelous dexterity; they must have had a lot of practice in breaking and entering. They were very cautious walkers from long habit, even when there was no further need for it. A single remark filtered through, from somewhere near the back door. "All set? Let's take it this way." The creak of a hinge, and then the horrid finality of a door closing after them, the back door, which Fran may have forgotten to lock and by which they had presumably entered in the first place; and then they were gone.

And with them went his only link with the outside world. They were the only two people in the whole city who knew where he was at this moment. No one else, not a living soul, knew where to find him. Nor what would happen to him if he wasn't found and gotten out of here by three o'clock. It was twenty-five to two now. His discovery of their presence, the fight, their trussing him up with the rope and their final unhurried departure, had all taken place within fifteen minutes.

It went tick-tick, tick-tock, tick-tick, tick-tock, so rhythmically, so remorselessly, so fast.

An hour and twenty-five minutes left. Eighty-five minutes left. How long that could seem if you were waiting for someone on a corner, under an umbrella, in the rain—like he had once waited for Fran outside the office where she worked before they were married, only to find that she'd been taken ill and gone home early that day. How long that could seem if you were stretched out on a hospital bed with knife-pains in your head and nothing to look at but white walls, until they brought your next tray—as he had been that time of the concussion. How long that could seem when you'd finished the paper, and one of the tubes had burned out in the radio and it was too early to go to bed yet. How short, how fleeting, how instantaneous, that could seem when it was all the time there was left for you to live and you were going to die at the end of it!

No clock had ever gone this fast, of all the hundreds that he'd looked at and set right. This was a demon-clock, its quarter-hours were minutes and its minutes seconds. Its lesser hand didn't even pause at all on those notches the way it should have, passed on from one to the next in perpetual motion. It was cheating him, it wasn't keeping the right time; somebody slow it down at least if nothing else! It was twirling like a pinwheel, that secondary hand.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. He broke it up into "Here I go, here I go, here I go."

There was a long period of silence that seemed to go on forever after the two of them had left. The clock told him it was only twenty-one minutes. Then at four to two a door opened above without warning—oh blessed sound, oh lovely sound!—the front door this time (over above that side of the basement), and high-heeled shoes clacked over his head like castanets.

"Fran!" he shouted. "Fran!" he yelled. "Fran!" he screamed. But all that got past the gag was a low whimper that didn't even reach across the basement. His face was dark with the effort it cost him, and a cord stood out at each side of his palpitating neck like a splint.

The tap-tap-tap went into the kitchen, stopped a minute (she was putting down her parcels; she didn't have things delivered because then you were expected to tip the errand boys ten cents), came back again. If only there was something he could kick at with his interlocked feet, make a clatter with. The cellar flooring was bare from wall to wall. He tried hoisting his lashed legs clear of the floor and pounding them down again with all his might; maybe the sound of the impact would carry up to her. All he got was a soft, cushioned sound, with twice the pain of striking a stone surface with your bare palm, and not even as much distinctness. His shoes were rubber-heeled, and he could not tilt them up and around far enough to bring them down on the leather part above the lifts. An electrical discharge of pain shot up the backs of his legs, coursed up his spine, and exploded at the back of his head, like a brilliant rocket.

Meanwhile, her steps had halted about where the hall closet was (she must be hanging up her coat), then went on toward the stairs that led to the upper floor, faded out upon them, going up. She was out of earshot now, temporarily. But she was in the house with him at least! That awful aloneness was gone. He felt such gratitude for her nearness, he felt such love and need for her, he wondered how he could ever have thought of doing away with her—only one short hour ago. He saw now that he must have been insane to contemplate such a thing. Well if he had been, he was sane now; he was rational now; this ordeal had brought him to his senses. Only release him, only rescue him from his jeopardy, and he'd never again…

Five after. She'd been back nine minutes now. There, it was ten. At first slowly, then faster and faster, terror, which had momentarily been quelled by her return, began to fasten upon him again. Why did she stay up there on the second floor like that? Why didn't she come down here to the basement, to look for something? Wasn't there anything down here that she might suddenly be in need of? He looked around, and there wasn't. There wasn't a possible thing that might bring her down here. They kept their basement so clean, so empty. Why wasn't it piled up with all sorts of junk like other people's! That might have saved him now.

She might intend to stay up there all afternoon! She might lie down and take a nap, she might shampoo her hair, she might do over an old dress. Any one of those trivial harmless occupations of a woman during her husband's absence could prove so fatal now! She might count on staying up there until it was time to begin getting his supper ready. And if she did—no supper, no she, no he.

Then a measure of relief came again. The man. The man whom he had intended destroying along with her, he would save him. He would be the means of his salvation. He came other days, didn't he, in the afternoon, while Stapp was away? Then, oh God, let him come today, make this one of the days they had a rendezvous (and yet maybe it just wasn't!). For if he came, that would bring her down to the lower floor, if only to admit him. And how infinitely greater his chances would be, with two pairs of ears in the house to overhear some wisp of sound he might make, than with just one.

And so he found himself in the anomalous position of a husband praying, pleading with every ounce of fervency he can muster, for the arrival, the materialization, of a rival whose existence he had only suspected until now, never been positive of.

Eleven past two. Forty-nine minutes left. Less than the time it took to sit through the "A" part of a picture show. Less than the time it took to get a haircut, if you had to wait your turn. Less than the time it took to sit through a Sunday meal, or listen to an hour program on the radio, or ride on the bus from here to the beach for a dip. Less than all those things—to live. No, no, he had been meant to live thirty more years, forty! What had become of those years, those months, those weeks? No, not just minutes left, it wasn't fair!

"Fran!" he shrieked. "Fran, come down here! Can't you hear me?" The gag drank it up like a sponge.

The phone trilled out suddenly in the lower hallway, midway between him and her. He'd never heard such a beautiful sound before. "Thank God!" he sobbed, and a tear stood out in each eye. That must be the man now. That would bring her down.

Then fear again. Suppose it was only to tell her that he wasn't coming? Or worse still, suppose it was to ask her instead to come out and meet him somewhere else? Leave him alone down here, once again, with this horror ticking away opposite him. No child was ever so terrified of being left alone in the dark, of its parents putting out the light and leaving it to the mercy of the boogy-man as this grown man was at the thought of her going out of the house and leaving him behind.

It kept on ringing a moment longer, and then be heard her quick step descending the stairs to answer it. He could hear every word she said down there where he was. These cheap matchwood houses.

"Hello? Yes, Dave. I just got in now."

Then, "Oh Dave, I'm all upset. I had seventeen dollars upstairs in my bureau drawer and it's gone, and the wristwatch that Paul gave me is gone, too. Nothing else is missing, but it looks to me as if someone broke in here while I was out and robbed us."

Stapp almost writhed with delight down there where he was. She knew they'd been robbed! She'd get the police now! Surely they'd search the whole place, surely they'd look down here and find him!

The man she was talking to must have asked her if she was sure. "Well, I'll look again, but I know it's gone. I know just where I left it, and it isn't there. Paul will have a fit."

No Paul wouldn't either; if she'd only come down here and free him he'd forgive her anything, even the cardinal sin of being robbed of his hard-earned money.

Then she said, "No, I haven't reported it yet. I suppose I should, but I don't like the idea—on your account, you know. I'm going to call up Paul at the shop. There's just a chance that he took the money and the watch both with him when he left this morning. I remember telling him the other night that it was losing time; he may have wanted to look it over. Well, all right, Dave, come on out then." So he was coming, so Stapp wasn't to be left alone in the place; hot breaths of relief pushed against the sodden gag at the back of his palate.

There was a pause while she broke the connection. Then he heard her call his shop-number, "Trevelyan 4512," and wait while they were ringing, and of course no one answered.

Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.

The operator must have told her finally that they couldn't get the number. "Well, keep ringing," he heard her say, "it's my husband's store, he's always there at this hour."

He screamed in terrible silence: "I'm right here under your feet! Don't waste time! For God's sake, come away from the phone, come down here!"

Finally, when failure was reported a second time, she hung up. Even the hollow, cupping sound of that detail reached him. Oh, everything reached him—but help. This was a torture that a Grand Inquisitor would have envied.

He heard her steps move away from where the phone was. Wouldn't she guess by his absence from where he was supposed to be that something was wrong? Wouldn't she come down here now and look? (Oh, where was this woman's intuition they spoke about?!) No, how could she be expected to? What connection could the basement of their house possibly have in her mind with the fact that he wasn't in his shop? Most likely she wasn't even alarmed, so far, by his absence. If it had been evening; but at this hour of the day—he might have gone out later than other days to his lunch, he might have had some errand to do.

He heard her going up the stairs again, probably to resume her search for the missing money and watch. He whimpered disappointedly. He was as cut off from her, while she remained up there, as if she'd been miles away, instead of being vertically over him in a straight line.

Tick-tock, tick-tock. It was twenty-one past two now. One half-hour and nine scant minutes more left. And they ticked away with the prodigality of tropical raindrops on a corrugated tin roof.

He kept straining and pulling away from the pipe that held him fast, then falling back exhausted, to rest awhile to struggle and to strain some more. There was as recurrent a rhythm to it as there was to the ticking of the clock itself, only more widely spaced. How could ropes hold that unyieldingly? Each time he fell back weaker, less able to contend with them than the time before. For he wasn't little strands of hemp; he was layers of thin skin that broke, one by one, and gave forth burning pain and finally blood.

The doorbell rang out sharply. The man had come. In less than ten minutes after their phone talk he had reached the house. Stapp's chest started rising and falling with renewed hope. Now his chances were good again. Twice as good as before, with two people in the house instead of only one. Four ears instead of two, to hear whatever slight sound he might manage to make. And he must, he must find a way of making one. He gave the stranger his benediction while he stood there waiting to be admitted. Thank God for this admirer or whatever he was, thank God for their rendezvous. He'd give them his blessing if they wanted it, all his worldly goods; anything, anything, if they'd only find him, free him

She came quickly down the stairs a second time and her footfalls burried down the hall. The front door opened.

"Hello, Dave," she said, and he heard the sound of a kiss quite clearly. One of those loud, unabashed ones that bespeak cordiality rather than intrigue.

A man's voice, deep, resonant, asked: "Well, did it turn up yet?"

"No, and I've looked high and low," he heard her say. "I tried to get Paul after I spoke to you, and he was out to lunch."

"Well, you can't just let seventeen dollars walk out the door without lifting your finger."

For seventeen dollars they were standing there frittering his life away—and their own, too, for that matter, the fools!

"They'll think I did it, I suppose," he heard the man say with a note of bitterness.

"Don't say things like that," she reproved. "Come in the kitchen and I'll make you a cup of coffee."

Her quick brittle step went first, and his heavier, slower one followed. There was the sound of a couple of chairs being drawn out, and the man's footfalls died out entirely. Hers continued busily back and forth for a while, on a short orbit between stove and table.

What were they going to do, sit up there for the next half-hour? Couldn't he make them hear in some way? He tried clearing his throat, coughing. It hurt furiously, because the lining of it was all raw from long strain. But the gag muffled even the cough to a blurred purring sort of sound.

Twenty-six to three. Only minutes left now, minutes; not even a full half-hour any more.

Her footsteps stopped finally and one chair shifted slightly as she joined him at the table. There was linoleum around the stove and sink that deadened sounds, but the middle part of the room where the table stood was ordinary pineboard flooring. It let things through with crystalline accuracy.

He heard her say, "Don't you think we ought to tell Paul about—us?"

The man didn't answer for a moment. Maybe he was spooning sugar, or thinking about what she'd said. Finally he asked, "What kind of a guy is he?"

"Paul's not narrow-minded," she said. "He's very fair and broad."

Even in his agony, Stapp was dimly aware of one thing; that didn't sound a bit like her. Not her speaking well of him, but that she could calmly, detachedly contemplate broaching such a topic to him. She had always seemed so proper and slightly prudish. This argued a sophistication that he hadn't known she'd had.

The man was evidently dubious about taking Paul into their confidence, at least he had nothing further to say. She went on, as though trying to convince him: "You have nothing to be afraid of on Paul's account, Dave, I know him too well. And don't you see, we can't keep on like this? It's better to go to him ourselves and tell him about you, than wait until he finds out. He's liable to think something else entirely, and keep it to himself, brood, hold it against me, unless we explain. I know that he didn't believe me that night when I helped you find a furnished room, and told him I'd been to a movie. And I'm so nervous and upset each time he comes home in the evening, it's a wonder he hasn't noticed it before now. Why I feel as guilty as if—as if I were one of these disloyal wives or something." She laughed embarrassedly, as if apologizing to him for even bringing such a comparison up.

What did she mean by that?

"Didn't you ever tell him about me at all?"

"You mean in the beginning? Ob, I told him you'd been in one or two scrapes, but like a little fool I let him think I'd lost track of you, didn't know where you were any more."

Why, that was her brother she'd said that about!

The man sitting up there with her confirmed it right as the thought burst in his mind. "I know it's tough on you, Sis. You're happily married and all that. I've got no right to come around and gum things up for you. No one's proud of a jailbird, an escaped convict, for a brother—"

"David," he heard her say, and even through the flooring there was such a ring of earnestness in her voice Stapp could almost visualize her reaching across the table and putting her hand reassuringly on his, "there isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, and you should know that by now. Circumstances have been against you, that's all. You shouldn't have done what you did, but that's spilt milk and there's no use going back over it now."

"I suppose I'll have to go back and finish it out. Seven years, though, Fran, seven years out of man's life—"

"But this way you have no life at all—"

Were they going to keep on talking his life away? Nineteen to three. One quarter of an hour, and four minutes over!

"Before you do anything, let's go downtown and talk it over with Paul, hear what he says." One chair jarred back, then the other. He could hear dishes clatter, as though they'd all been lumped together in one stack. "I'll do these when I come back," she remarked.

Were they going to leave again? Were they going to leave him behind here, alone, with only minutes to spare?

Their footsteps had come out into the hall now, halted a moment undecidedly. "I don't like the idea of you being seen with me on the streets in broad daylight, you could get in trouble yourself, you know. Why don't you phone him to come out here instead?"

Yes, yes, Stapp wailed. Stay with me! Stay!

"I'm not afraid," she said gallantly. "I don't like to ask him to leave his work at this hour, and I can't tell him over the phone Wait a minute, I'll get my hat." Her footsteps diverged momentarily from his, rejoined them again.

Panic-stricken, Stapp did the only thing he could think ot. Struck the back of his own head violently against the thick pipe he was attached to.

A sheet ot blue flame darted before his eyes. He must have hit one of the welts where he had already been struck once by the burglars. The pain was so excruciating he knew he couldn't repeat the attempt. But they must have heard something, some dull thud or reverberation must have carried up along the pipe. He heard her stop short for a minute and say, "What was that?"

And the man, duller-sensed than she and killing him all unknowingly, "What? I didn't hear anything."

She took his word for it, went on again, to the hall closet to get her coat. Then her footsteps retraced themselves all the way back through the dining room to the kitchen, "Wait a minute, I want to make sure this back door's shut tight. Locking the stable after the horse is gone!"

She came forward again through the house for the last time, there was the sound of the front door opening, she passed through it, the man passed through it, it closed and they were gone. There was the faint whirr of a car starting up outside in the open.

And now he was left alone with his self-fashioned doom a second time, and the first seemed a paradise in retrospect compared to this, for then he had a full hour to spare, he had been rich in time, and now he only had fifteen minutes, one miserly quarter-hour.

There wasn't any use struggling any more. He'd found that out long ago. He couldn't anyway, even if he'd wanted to. Flames seemed to be licking lazily around his wrists and ankles.

He'd found a sort of palliative now, the only way there was left. He'd keep his eyes down and pretend the hands were moving slower than they were, it was better than watching them constantly, it blunted a little of the terror at least. The ticking he couldn't hide from. Of course, every once in a while, when he couldn't resist looking up and verifying his own calculations, there'd be a renewed burst of anguish, but in-between-times it made it more bearable to say, "It's only gained a half-minute since the last time I looked." Then he'd hold out as long as he could with his eyes down, but when he couldn't stand it any more and would have to raise them to see if he was right, it had gained two minutes. Then he'd have a bad fit of hysterics, in which he called on God, and even on his long-dead mother, to help him, and he couldn't see straight through the tears. Then he'd pull himself together again, in a measure, and start the self-deception over again. "It's only about thirty seconds now since I last looked… Now it's about a minute…" (But was it? But was it?) And so on, mounting slowly to another climax of terror and abysmal collapse.

Then suddenly the outside world intruded again, that world that he was so cut off from that it already seemed as far away, as unreal, as if he were already dead. The doorbell rang out.

He took no hope from the summons at first. Maybe some peddler—no, that had been too aggressive to be a peddler's ring. It was the sort of ring that claimed admission as its right, not as a favor. It came again. Whoever was ringing was irately impatient at being kept waiting. A third ring was given the bell, this time a veritable blast that kept on for nearly half a minute. The party must have kept his finger pressed to the bell-button the whole time. Then as the peal finally stopped, a voice called out forcefully: "Anybody home in there? Gas Company!" And suddenly Stapp was quivering all over, almost whinnying in his anxiety.

This was the one call, the one incident in all the day's domestic routine, from earliest morning until latest night, that could have possibly brought anyone down into the basement! The meter was up there on the wall, beside the stairs, staring him in the face! And her brother had had to take her out of the house at just this particular time! There was no one to let the man in.

There was the impatient shuffle of a pair of feet on the cement walk. The man must have come down off the porch to gain perspective with which to look inquiringly up at the second-floor windows. And for a fleeting moment, as he chafed and shifted about out there before the house, on the walk and off, Stapp actually glimpsed the blurred shanks of his legs standing before the grimy transom that let light into the basement at ground-level. All the potential savior had to do was crouch down and peer in through it, and he'd see him tied up down there. And the rest would be so easy!

Why didn't he, why didn't he? But evidently he didn't expect anyone to be in the basement of a house in which his triple ring went unanswered. The tantalizing trouser leg shifted out of range again, the transom became blank. A little saliva filtered through the mass of rag in Stapp's distended mouth, trickled across his silently vibrating lower lip.

The gas inspector gave the bell one more try, as if venting his disappointment at being balked rather than in any expectation of being admitted this late in the proceedings. He gave it innumerable short jabs, like a telegraph-key. Bip-bip-bip-bip-bip. Then he called out disgustedly, evidently for the benefit of some unseen assistant waiting in a truck out at the curb, "They're never in when you want 'em to be!" There was a single quick tread on the cement, away from the house. Then the slur of a light truck being driven off.

Stapp died a little. Not metaphorically, literally. His arms and legs got cold up to the elbows and knees, his heart seemed to beat slower, and he had trouble getting a full breath; more saliva escaped and ran down his chin, and his head drooped forward and lay on his chest for a while, inert.

Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick. It brought him to after awhile, as though it were something beneficent, smelling salts or ammonia, instead of being the malevolent thing it was.

He noticed that his mind was starting to wander. Not much, as yet, but every once in awhile he'd get strange fancies. One time he thought that his face was the clock-dial, and that thing he kept staring at over there was his face. The pivot in the middle that held the two hands became his nose, and the 10 and the 2, up near the top, became his eyes, and he had a red-tin beard and head of hair and a little round bell on the exact top of his crown for a hat. "Gee, I look funny," he sobbed drowsily. And he caught himself twitching the muscles of his face, as if trying to stop those two hands that were clasped on it before they progressed any further and killed that man over there, who was breathing so metallically: tick-tock, tick-tock.

Then he drove the weird notion away again, and he saw that it had been just another escape mechanism. Since he couldn't control the clock over there, he had attempted to change it into something else. Another vagary was that this ordeal had been brought on him as punishment for what he had intended doing to Fran, that he was being held fast there, not by the inanimate ropes but by some active, punitive agency, and that if he exhibited remorse, pledged contrition to a proper degree, he could automatically effect his release at its hands. Thus over and over he whined in the silence of his throttled throat, "I'm sorry. I won't do it again. Just let me go this one time; I've learned my lesson; I'll never do it again."

The outer world returned again. This time it was the phone. It must be Fran and her brother, trying to find out if he'd come back here in their absence. They'd found the shop closed, must have waited outside of it for a while, and then when he still didn't come, didn't know what to make of it. Now they were calling the house from a booth down there, to see if he had been taken ill, had returned here in the meantime. When no one answered, that would tell them, surely, that something was wrong. Wouldn't they come back now to find out what had happened to him?

But why should they think he was here in the house if he didn't answer the phone? How could they dream he was in the basement the whole time? They'd hang around outside the shop some more waiting for him, until as time went on, and Fran became real worried, maybe they'd go to the police. (But that would be hours from now; what good would it do?) They'd look everywhere but here for him. When a man is reported missing the last place they'd look for him would be in his own home.

It stopped ringing finally, and its last vibration seemed to hang tenuously on the lifeless air long after it had ceased, humming outward in a spreading circle like a pebble dropped into a stagnant pool. Mmmmmmmmm, until it was gone, and silence came rolling back in its wake.

She would be outside the pay booth or wherever it was she had called from, by this time. Rejoining her brother, where he had waited. Reporting, "He's not out at the house either." Adding the mild, still unworried comment, "Isn't that strange? Where on earth can he have gone?" Then they'd go back and wait outside the locked shop, at ease, secure, unendangered. She'd tap her foot occasionally in slight impatience, look up and down the street while they chatted.

And now they would be two of those casuals who would stop short and say to one another at three o'clock: "What was that?" And Fran might add, "It sounded as though it came from out our way." That would be the sum total of their comment on his passing.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Nine minutes to three. Oh, what a lovely number was nine. Let it be nine forever, not eight or seven, nine for all eternity. Make time stand still, that he might breathe though all the world around him stagnated, rotted away. But no, it was already eight. The hand had bridged the white gap between the two black notches. Oh, what a precious number was eight, so rounded, so symmetrical. Let it be eight forever—

A woman's voice called out in sharp reprimand, somewhere outside in the open: "Be careful what you're doing, Bobby, youll break a window!" She was some distance away, but the ringing dictatorial tones carried clearly.

Stapp saw the blurred shape of a ball strike the basement-transom, he was looking up at it, for her voice had come in to him through there. It must have been just a tennis ball, but for an instant it was outlined black against the soiled pane, like a small cannonball; it seemed to hang there suspended, to adhere to the glass, then it dropped back to the ground. If it had been ordinary glass it might have broken it, but the wire-mesh had prevented that.

The child came close up against the transom to get its ball back. It was such a small child that Stapp could see its entire body within the height of the pane, only the head was cut off. It bent over to pick up the ball, and then its head came into range too. It had short golden ringlets all over it. Its profile was turned toward him, looking down at the ball. It was the first human face he'd seen since he'd been left where he was. It looked like an angel.

But an inattentive, unconcerned angel.

It saw something else while it was still bent forward close to the ground, a stone or something that attracted it, and picked that up too and looked at it, still crouched over, then finally threw it recklessly away over its shoulder, whatever it was.

The woman's voice was nearer at hand now, she must be strolling the sidewalk directly in front of the house. "Bobby, stop throwing things like that, you'll hit somebody!"

If it would only turn its head over this way, it could look right in, it could see him. The glass wasn't too smeary for that. He started to weave his head violently from side to side, hoping the flurry of motion would attract it, catch its eye. It may have, or its own natural curiosity may have prompted it to look in without that. Suddenly it had turned its head and was looking directly in through the transom. Blankly at first, he could tell by the vacant expression of its eyes.

Faster and faster he swiveled his head. It raised the heel of one chubby, fumbling hand and scoured a little clear spot to squint through. Now it could see him, now surely! It still didn't for a second. It must be much darker in here than outside, and the light was behind it.

The woman's voice came in sharp reproof: "Bobby, what are you doing there?"

And then suddenly it saw him. The pupils of its eyes shifted over a little, came to rest directly on him. Interest replaced blankness. Nothing is strange to children—not a man tied up in a cellar any more than anything else—yet everything is. Everything creates wonder, calls for comment, demands explanation. Wouldn't it say anything to her? Couldn't it talk? It must be old enough to; she, its mother, was talking to it incessantly. "Bobby, come away from there!"

"Mommy, look!" it said gleefully.

Stapp couldn't see it clearly any more, he was shaking his head so fast. He was dizzy, like you are when you've just gotten off a carrousel; the transom and the child it framed kept swinging about him in a half-circle, first too far over on one side, then too far over on the other.

But wouldn't it understand, wouldn't it understand that weaving of the head meant he wanted to be free? Even if ropes about the wrists and ankles had no meaning to it, if it couldn't tell what a bandage around the mouth was, it must know that when anyone writhed like that they wanted to be let loose. Oh God, if it had only been two years older, three at the most! A child of eight, these days, would have understood and given warning.

"Bobby, are you coming? I'm waiting!"

If he could only hold its attention, keep it rooted there long enough in disobedience to her, surely she'd come over and get it, see him herself as she irritably sought to ascertain the reason for its fascination.

He rolled his eyes at it in desperate comicality, winked them, blinked them, crossed them. An elfin grin peered out on its face at this last; already it found humor in a physical defect, or the assumption of one, young as it was.

An adult hand suddenly darted downward from the upper right-hand corner of the transom, caught its wrist, bore its arm upward out of sight. "Mommy, look!" it said again, and pointed with its other hand. "Funny man, tied up."

The adult voice, reasonable, logical, dispassionate—inattentive to a child's fibs and fancies—answered: "Why that wouldn't look nice, Mommy can't peep into other people's houses like you can."

The child was tugged erect at the end of its arm, its head disappeared above the transom. Its body was pivoted around, away from him; he could see the hollows at the back of its knees for an instant longer, then its outline on the glass blurred in withdrawal, it was gone. Only the little clear spot it had scoured remained to mock him in his crucifixion.

The will to live is an unconquerable thing. He was more dead than alive by now, yet presently he started to crawl back again out of the depths of his despair, a slower longer crawl each time, like that of some indefatigable insect buried repeatedly in sand, that each time manages to burrow its way out.

He rolled his head away from the window back toward the clock finally. He hadn't been able to spare a look at it during the whole time the child was in sight. And now to his horror it stood at three to three. There was a fresh, a final blotting-out of the burrowing insect that was his hopes, as if by a cruel idler lounging on a beach.

He couldn't feel any more, terror or hope or anything else. A sort of numbness had set in, with a core of gleaming awareness remaining that was his mind. That would be all that the detonation would be able to blot out by the time it came. It was like having a tooth extracted with the aid of novocaine. There remained of him now only this single pulsing nerve of premonition: all the tissue around it was frozen. So protracted, foreknowledge of death was in itself its own anesthetic.

Now it would be too late even to attempt to free him first, before stopping the thing. Just time enough, if someone came down those stairs this very minute, sharp-edged knife with which to sever his bonds already in hand, for him to throw himself over towards it, reverse it. And now—now it was too late even for that, too late for anything but to die.

He was making animal noises deep in his throat as the minute hand slowly blended with the notch of twelve. Guttural sounds like a dog worrying a bone, though the gag prevented their emerging in full volume. He puckered the flesh around his eyes apprehensively, creased them into slits—as though the closing of his eyes could ward off, lessen, the terrific force of what was to come! Something deep within him, what it was he had no leisure nor skill to recognize, seemed to retreat down long dim corridors away from the doom that impended. He hadn't known he had those convenient corridors of evasion in him, with their protective turns and angles by which to put distance between himself and menace. Oh clever architect of the Mind, oh merciful blueprints that made such emergency exits available. Toward them this something, that was he and yet not he, rushed; toward sanctuary, security, toward waiting brightness, sunshine, laughter.

The hand on the dial stayed there, upright, perpendicular, a perfect right-angle to its corollary, while the swift seconds that were all there was left of existence ticked by and were gone. It wasn't so straight now any more, but he didn't know it, he was in a state of death already. White reappeared between it and the twelve-notch, behind it now. It was one minute after three. He was shaking all over from head to foot—not with fear, with laughter.

It broke into sound as they plucked the dampened, bloodied gag out, as though they were drawing the laughter out after it, by suction or osmosis.

"No, don't take those ropes off him yet!" the man in the white coat warned the policeman sharply. "Wait'll they get here with the straitjacket first, or you'll have your hands full."

Fran said through her tears, cupping her hands to her ears, '"Can't you stop him from laughing like that? I can't stand it. Why does he keep laughing like that?"

"He's out of his mind, lady," explained the intern patiently.

The clock said five past seven. "What's in this box?" the cop asked, kicking at it idly with his foot. It shifted lightly along the wall a little, and took the clock with it.

"Nothing," Stapp's wife answered, through her sobs and above his incessant laughter. "Just an empty box. It used to have some kind of fertilizer in it, but I took it out and used it on the flowers I—I've been trying to raise out in back of the house."

NIGHTMARE

First, all I could see was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl's face; like a white, slightly luminuous mask, swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little private 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, and my heart was wrung.

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, I couldn't avoid doing. And yet, oh, I didn't want to do it. I wanted to turn and flee, I wanted to 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 in 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 lost its cameolike placidity; slowly, before my horrified eyes, became malign, vindictive. It spoke, 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, as if a stage-electrician were controlling the scene by a trick switch. It was a murky, biuish green now, the kind of light there would be under water. And in it danger, my doom, slowly reared its head, with typical under-water movements, too; sluggish and held back, with a terrible inevitability about them.

It was male, of course; menace is always male.

First it—he—was just a black huddle, an inchoate lumpy mass, say 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 was still anonymous, a hulk, an outline against the dark blue background, as though the light that had played up the mask until now, were coming from somewhere on the other side of it.

It came toward me, toward me, toward me, with cataleptic slowness. I wanted to get out, 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, it was as though I was set into a concrete block. 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, I didn't know. Only that there was soul-shriveling fear in it. And horror, more than the mind could contemplate.

The pace was beginning to accelerate now as it neared its climax, the way they always do.

He came on, using up the small remaining distance between us. His outline was still indistinct, clotted, like something daubed with mud, like a lumpy clay image. I could see the arms come up from the sides, and couldn't avoid their lobsterlike 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, in particular was excruciating, digging into the straining cords right under the ears, 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 had to keep it from snapping.

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. Fire was in the slight laceration, even in the midst of the total extinction threatening me. 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. His voice sounded, he spoke to the macabre mask. I heard every word with Delphic clarity—like you do in those things. "Hand me that bore, 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. The shock of its going in seemed to be transmitted to my own body, we were so inextricably intertwined. But, for all that, 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-blotted 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. Not for purposes of succor, but to make that face stop looking at me so accusingly. Then 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 like something undone, foiled, 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, as always in those things, 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, and each one was the wrong one, wouldn't open, and now I couldn't get out of here, I was trapped, shut in with what was lying there on the floor, that still held fear and menace for me, greater even than when it had moved, attacked me. For the dread and horror that had been latent throughout, far from being expiated, was now more imminent than ever, seemed to gather itself to a head over me, about to burst and inundate me.

Its source, its focal point, was what lay there on the floor. I had to hide it, I had to shut it away. It was one of those compulsions, all the more inescapable for being illogical.

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. It was as though it hadn't been there until now, it was as though it had just formed itself for my purpose. I picked up what lay on the floor, and I could seem to do it easily, it had become light, as easy to shoulder as a rolled-up rug or mat; 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. Then at last it ended. in two odd little teeth, each one doubled back on itself, like the single arm of a swastika.

After I had extricated it at last, I pocketed it, and then the knob started turning from the inside, the door started to open anyway. Very slowly but remorselessly, and 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.

I'd lost the pillow to the floor, and my head was halfway down after it, I was dangling partly over the side of the bed, and my face was studded with oozing sweatdrops. I righted it and propped myself up on 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 brushed the edge of my hand across my mouth, as if to remove a bad taste. I shook my head to clear the last clinging mists of the thing out of 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 re-formed 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?

The basinful of stinging cold water in the bathroom cleared away the last lingering vestiges 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 wrist-watch, 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 pace 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!" I thought. "I guess 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 transterence from the dream into the actuality of leaving a red scratch across my wristbone.

I went ahead. The familiar plane, the rational everyday plane. The blue tie today. Not that I changed them every day, I wasn't that much of a dude, but every second day I varied them. 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 though afraid it would fly away, although it was a shirt-attached collar. 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 heid the collar.

But I hadn't had those bruises, those brownish-purple discolorations, faintly, not vividiy, visible at the side of my neck, as from the constriction of a powerful grip, the pressure of cruel fingers, last night when I undressed.

Well all right, but 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 traumal attack passing through my mind just then.

I even stood there and tried to reconstruct the posture, to see if it were 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 liked to be. One thing was certain, the marks had been made by two hands, not one; there were as many on one side as on the other, and the four fingers always go opposite to the thumb in a one-hand grip.

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 shouldn't have, but it seemed to weaken the theory of selt-infliction. How was it hadn't awakened myself, exerting that much pressure? To which the immediate and welcome corollary was: but if it had been exerted by someone else, I would have been apt to awaken even more quickly, wouldn't I?

I forced myself back to the everyday plane again. Buttoned the collar around the bruises, partly 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 pocked 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 out 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, I didn't stoop to pick them up. I couldn't; my spine wouldn't have bent right then.

It was a strange button. Somehow I knew that even before I compared it. I knew I was going to check it with every article of clothing I owned, 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.

It was the button from the dream.

I threw open the closet door so fast and frightenedly it swung all the way around flush with the wall, and rebounded off it, and started slowly back again with the recoil. There wasn't anything hanging up in there that I didn't hold it against, even where there was no button missing, even where its size and type utterly precluded its having been attached. Vests and jackets, a cardigan, a raincoat, a lumberjacket, a topcoat, bathing trunks, a bathrobe. Every stitch I owned.

It wasn't from anything of mine, it didn't belong anywhere.

This time I couldn't get back on the naturalistic plane, I was left dangling in midair. 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, it even had 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, tried to rush into the breach, and I was on its side for all I was worth. "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-cleaning garments to you 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. "It just shows you what a thing like that will do to your nerves!" I took out a fresh handkerchief for the day, but I didn't just spade it into my pocked this time, I furtively touched my temples with it before I did—and it came away darkening with damp. "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, as when a sudden thrust is received, 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 scrollwork 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 the quarter part 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 I meant by it myself, didn't know what it was to tell me. It didn't tell me anything.

And still another time, I looked out of the window, as if to see if the outside world was still there. It was. The houses across the way looked just like they'd looked last night. The lady on the third floor had her bedding airing over the windowsill, just like every morning. An iceman was gouging a partition across a cake of ice with one point of his tongs preparatory to picking it in two. A little boy was swinging his books on his way to school, killing as much time as he could by walking along spanning the curb, one foot up, one foot down.

There was nothing the matter out there. It was in here, with me.

I decided I'd better go to work, maybe that wouid exorcise me. I fled from the room almost as though 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, even though I was upright on my two legs.

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. I avoided the shade, I edged away from it, even the slight shade of an awning or of a tree.

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. It outlasted the sun. The sun weakened and died; the shade deepened and spread. Night was coming on, the time of dreams, the enemy.

I went to Cliff's house late. My mind had been made up to go there for hours past, but I went there late on purpose. 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. I don't know why, but you don't. You tell them the things you have under control; the things that youre frightened of, you tell other men if you tell anyone.

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, 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 trouser 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. And I had felt to see if it was still on me every five minutes on the minute. The lining caught around it and I had to free it, but finally I got it out.

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 quavered. "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 confirmed. 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; I've been turned inside-out."

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 one 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 was just a key turned up in my pocket after I dreamed about it, why would I go to him? To 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 room 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; my God, 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?"

"You're in a bad way." He gave a short whistle through his clenched teeth. "Do you need a drink, Lil or no Lil! Come on, we'll go someplace and get this thing out of your system." He clutched me peremptorily by the arm.

"But only coffee," I faltered. "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 baffled. "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 double-crossed me or something."

"Well in the dream who was she, then?"

"I don't know; I knew her then, but now I don't."

"Jese!" he said, swallowing more beer fast. "I should have made this whiskey 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 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, the fellow or whoever he was?"

"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, after I'd locked him in, it seemed as though I was going to find out something horrible—about him, I guess. But I woke up before there was time."

"And 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. No. 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 night. I left work at the usual time, had my meal at the usual place—"

"Sure it wasn't a welsh rarebit?"

I answered his smile, but not light-heartedly. "A welsh rarebit 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 have absolutely no recollection of ever having done that, at any time. I'd remember the key itself, even if I didn't remember the incident of finding it."

"Are you sitting there trying to say you've never in your life forgotten a single object, once you've seen it the first time?"

"No," I said unwillingly.

"You'd better not. Particularly a nondescript thing like a key—"

"This isn't a nondescript key, it's a unique key. And I do say I never saw it before, never picked it up; it's a strange key to me."

He spread his hands permissively. "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!"

"Suppose it was in the pocket and your hand missed it—yesterday and the day before and so on—until this morning? That would be physically possible, wouldn't it?"

I gave him a no on this; I had a right to. "It came up over my own key, it was the top one of the two, when I got them both out this morning. So if it was already in there last night, how could I have got my own key out—as I did when I came home—without bringing it up too? And last night I didn't bring it up."

He waived that point. Maybe because I had him, maybe not. "All right, have it your way, let's say that it wasn't in your pocket last night. That still doesn'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. It's either one thing or the other. Either you dream a thing or you don't dream it, 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 afterwards 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 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."

He cut his hand short at me, to keep the button, key and bruises from showing up again, I guess. "Then that's all there is to it. Then it didn't happen." And he repeated stubbornly: "You either dream 'em or you do 'em. No two ways about it."

I ridged my forehead dissatisfiedly. "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. And I'm off-duty when I'm dreaming. What do you think I am, a witch doctor?"

"How much?" I asked the counterman disgruntledly.

"Seventeen cups of coffee—" he tabulated. It was two o'clock in the morning.

"I'm going to sleep in the living room at your place tonight, " I said to him on the way over. "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 concurred sombrely.

I slept about an hour's worth, but that was the fault of the seventeen cups of coffee more than anything else. The hour that I did sleep had no images in it, was no different than any other night's sleep I'd had all my life. Until the night before; no better and no worse. He 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 her, 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 was convinced that was a dream, I would have gone home to my own room last night, even if I was going to have it over again twice as bad. But I'm not; I'm still not convinced, by a damn sight. 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 coherently? I couldn't. "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 got tough. He had my best interests at heart maybe, but he thought the thing to do was bark at me. "Now listen, cut that staff 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 already about 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 advertising bureau, 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:

"Wanted: I am interested in inspecting, with a view toward leasing or buying, 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 —, World-Express, giving exact details."

The first two days there was no reaction. That wasn't to be wondered at. It had only appeared on the first day, and any answer would still be in process of transmission through the mail on the second. On the third day there were two replies waiting when I stopped in at the advertising-bureau. One was from a Mrs. Tracy-Lytton, on deckled stationery. She had a house that she was anxious to dispose of for the winter season, with a view to going to Florida. It had a mirror lined powder-room on the second floor. It was not, she had to admit, eight-sided; it was only foursquare, but wouldn't that do? She was sure that once I had seen it—

The other was from a man by the name of Kern. He too had one that he thought would meet my requirements. It had 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. Before I'd set to work opening and reading them, I couldn't help being astonished that there should be this many prospective dwellings in the market with such a seldom-encountered feature as an eight-sided mirror-faced cubicle. By the time I'd waded through them I saw I needn't have worried; there weren't. Three of the six were from realty agents offering their services, in case I couldn't find what I wanted unassisted. Two more were from contractors, offering to install such a feature to order for me, provided I couldn't find it ready-made. The last one, the only one from an individual owner, and who was evidently anxious to get a white elephant off his hands, likewise offered to have one 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. A desultory one or two more drifted in by the end of the week. One of these for a moment seemed to strike a spark when I read it, and my hopes flared up. It was from a retired actress with a suburban villa which she did not occupy. She was offering it furnished and mentioned that, although it had no eight-sided built-in mirror arrangement, there was a small dressing room fitted with a movable eight-paneled mirrored screen, which could be adjusted so that it cut corners off and gave the room any number of sides required.

I telephoned, arranged an appointment at her hotel, and she drove me out in her car. I could see that my appearance and youth gave her misgivings as to my financial ability to meet the terms involved, and she only went through it because the appointment had been agreed upon. The villa was a stucco affair, and at first sight of the screen, when we'd gone in, my face got a little white and I thought I had something. It was folded over to the width of one panel and leaning against the dressing-room wall. "Here's how I used to arrange it when I was trying on costumes," she said.

We rigged it up between us in octagon-shape, so that it made sort of an inner-lining to the room, cutting off the four corners and providing eight angles instead. I stood there in the middle of it, and she stood beside me, waiting my decision. "No," I said finally, "no."

She couldn't understand. "But won't it do just as well? It's mirror, and it's eight-sided."

There was no keyhole on any of the eight flaps to fit a key into, a key such as I had found in my pocket that morning; that was the main thing. I didn't explain. "I'll let you know," I said, and we went back to the car and back to our starting-point.

That was the closest I'd come, and that wasn't very close. The ad continued to run. But now it brought no further results, fell on barren ground. The supply of mirrored compartments had been exhausted, apparently. The advertising bureau phoned to find out if I wanted to continue it. "No, kill it," I said disheartenedly.

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 hadn't, he just wanted to see how I was getting along. Brace me up, "take me away from myself" as the phrase goes. At any rate he showed up good and early the next day, which was a Sunday. He was evidently off; I didn't ask him, but I hardly figured he'd wear a pullover and slacks like he had on, to Headquarters.

"Sit down," I invited.

"No," he said somewhat embarrassedly. "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, um—"

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 (his actual phrase) that he'd just gotten in exchange for his old second-hand Chev. And just come down to the door a minute to 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 him.

The thing was a hoodoo from the beginning. He wasn't much of a driver, but he wasn't the kind who 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; 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 consoled. 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 cap the climax, a menacing geyser of black clouds piled themselves up in the sky with effervescent suddenness, and we had to run for it. The storm was so instantaneous we couldn't even get back to the car before it broke, and the rest was a matter of sitting in sodden misery while he groped his way down one streaming, rain-misted country road and up another, surroundings completely invisible.

Lil's fortitude finally snapped short. The lightning was giving her a bad time of it—like most women, she abhorred it—and her new outfit was ruined. "Stop at the first place you come to and let's get in out of it!" she screamed at him. "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, peered out. A sort of rustic torii, one of those squared Japanese arches, sidled past in the watery welter. "There's a cut-off a little ways 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 quite 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; 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, he didn't have much to say any more; I think he kept hoping I'd be wrong, there wouldn't be any—

Lil gave him a peremptory accolade on the shoulder without warning. "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-sight 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, phantomlike, and came to a dead halt beside us. I heard his brakes go on.

I wasn't much aware of the business of making a dash for it through the intervening 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 though 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, like 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 hands 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 it; it had been hidden until now. This one was wood, not porcelain. He flicked it and a light went on a few yards before us, overhead. She 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. It wasn't a cheaply fitted-out place—whatever it was. And I could say that "whatever it was" as honestly as they could.

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."

She turned aside through a double doorway and lit up a living room. We both looked in there after her, without going in; we had other things on our minds, she just wanted warmth and comfort. There was an expensive parquet floor, but everything else was in a partial state of dismantlement. Not abandonment, just temporary dismantlement. Dustcovers making ghostly shapes of the chairs and sofa and a piano. An over-sized linen hornet's nest hanging from the ceiling, with indirect light peering from the top of it, was a crystal chandelier.

"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 exploratively around it, she gave a little bleat of satisfaction, touched something. "Electric," and 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 him, 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 midsearch, white face staring out from above a collar not nearly so 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, pulled in after me, flashed the eighth image of myself on its mirrorbacked surface.

I tottered there, and stumbled, and nearly went down—the 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, all right!"

"Yeh," he bit out in an undertone. He bit it off so short it was like a single letter, shorter than "No" even. Then he said, "Wipe off your forehead, you're all—" I don't know why, for lack of something better to say, I guess. I made a pass with my sleeve across it. We neither of us were really interested in that.

"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. Like an ostrich hides its head in the sand.

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

One 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 it into one, and it went in, so smoothly, so easily, like a key goes into the keyhole for which it was made. 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. I don't know why; you don't want your agonies of soul witnessed by a woman.

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 it in the second one. I thought the "Cluck" would never come, and when it did, I must have shuttered my eyes in mortal terror, his "Look!" caught me with them closed. I saw a black thing in the middle of it, and for a minute I thought—

It was a built-in safe, steel painted black but with the dial left its own color. It was jagged, 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, as though I had just then called his attention to it for the first time—which of course wasn't the case.

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. "Not right away! 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, deep it went, and turned it, and the panel backing the mirror grunted, and my heart groaned in company with 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 blotterlike 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. In that remote, secure world she still inhabited you did things like eat and take naps; not in the one I was in any more. But 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 axe, poised and waiting to crash.

I think if she hadn't started to nod, he would have hauled me outside into the dripping dusk with him then and there, if he'd had to, to get out of earshot. He couldn't wait to tackle me. All through the sketchy meal he'd sat there drumming the fingers of his left hand on the tabletop, while he inattentively shoveled and spaded with his right. Like an engine all tuned-up and only waiting for the touch of the starter to go.

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," she said one time.

He answered for me. "No, he isn't!" He'd turned unfriendly.

We left her stretched out on the covered sofa-shape 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 bounced the match down like he wanted to break it in three pieces. Then he shoved his hands deep in pockets, like he wanted to keep them down from flying at me.

"Let's hear about another dream," he said vitriolically.

I eyed the floor. "You think I lied, don't you—?"

That was as far as 1 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 tumed as if I was on a spit, the way I was being tortured.

He wasn't through. He wasn't even half-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 and he knows he'll give him an ear, abusing his gullibility, making a fool out of him, like you did me—! I've got no use for him, he's low and lousy and no-good! 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, not downward but on an even keel, he was so sore. He spit on the floor to one side of him. Maybe because he'd been talking so fast and furious, maybe just out of contempt. "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 wallplaster. "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 recalcitrance—it must have seemed like that—only 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."

It developed into a scuffle. He kept swinging at me; I sent one or two swings half-heartedly back at him—the instinctive reflex of anyone being struck at, no more.

"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 said. "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. All the stops were out now. He could put up with anything but what he took to be this senseless stubbornness, this irrational prevarication 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 ricketty chair, that didn't have much left to it but a cane seat and four legs, all the rungs were gone. 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 shoulder. He could see it and I couldn't, without turning.

I saw him sort of freeze and hold, and looked over at it, not at me any more.

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

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 room 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 trouser-pocket, shied it over at him so that it slithered along the floor, came up against his feet. "Help yourself," he said contemptuously. He turned and went over to the sink, 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, held out his 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 its owner's eyes. "Thanks, Dodge," the man said with noticeable respect. "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 flowerbox 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 ricketty chair a moment. He didn't ask the question: what had the two of us been scrapping about. Cliff wouldn't have answered it if he had, I could tell that by his expression. His attitude was, plainly it was none of this outsider's business; something just between the two of us.

"I thought maybe 'boes 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 awhile, and then he added, "All about it."

He straddled the chair of our recent combat wrong-way-around, 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, it doesn't sound like anything when you tell it, 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.

It can't be analyzed, but that was the message he got across to me by cutting me in on his cigarettes in that grudging, unfriendly way.

"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, he couldn't see my face. Maybe that was just as well. He addressed himself entirely to Cliff, ignored me as though I were some nonentity. If there had been any room left for objectivity in my tormented, fear-wracked mind, I might have appreciated the irony of that: his turning his back on someone who might very well turn out to have been a principal in what he was about to relate.

He expanded, felt at home, you could see. This was shoptalk 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 soundlessly repeated, "Was?"

The deputy took time out, expectorated, 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, guess."

Cliff wasn't having any of me. God, 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 doesn'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 after pretending to leave, or else remained concealed in the house the whole time without her being aware of it. Sometime 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 ever 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 I 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, we were all busy as a swarm of bees. 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?' 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 awhile; 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 muffledly, as I brushed past him with lowered head.

Cliff trod on my heel twice, going into the constabulary from the deputy's car, short as the distance was. He was bringing up behind me. It must 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. I'd never met a rural police official before. I'd thought they chewed straws and ran to galluses. Instead he was teething on a Dunhill pipe, and his trousers looked as though his wife ran a hot iron over them every day. 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 awhile. 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 beside." From the folder he removed in turn a quadruple-ply typescript on onion-skin, began finger-tracing its double-spaced lines.

"All that," I thought dismally. "Oh God, all that."

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 cutoff 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 cheek-bones 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 conelight 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 though 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 or 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 starlike 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 onion-skin 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 offhandedly, "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're 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. It lost its distortion, the stiff ugliness of death. 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 conelight 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.

His 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. It's a funny feeling, to lean on someone that's your natural enemy from now on; that has to be, through force of circumstances. "He'll be all right," he said, and he closed the rear car door on me. It sounded a little bit like a cell gate.

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! Suppose you did leave a note saying where you were, that isn't the point! This was supposed to be your day off; I can't have one day in the year with you, without squad stuff, squad stuff, squad stuff! Don't you get enough of it all week long in the city—"

I think for once he was glad she kept his ears humming like that, kept him from thinking too steadily—about me.

She only quit past the city limits, and then the cold, empty silence that descended could be ascribed to his sulking after the calling-down he'd gotten. 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-sight 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 and very undramatically, no fireworks. He said, "Lil's waiting downstairs, and I'm going to take her home—first, 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, got 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 though 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 were trying to get out of the room where there was no door, arms making swimming-strokes. "I'm frightened," I said stifledly.

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

I didn't move for about half the time he'd given me, thrown scornfully into my face, so to speak. 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 the red 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 any more 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.

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. He 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.

"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 of 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 think you're telling the truth to the best of your knowledge."

"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. It's like a chemical formula. Vary it one iota and you don't get the same result.

This was the right minute now, our minute, mine and his, 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, he was still supine, 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 bad gone out, too; I guess he wanted to see if the current had failed through the whole house, or it 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?" His voice wasn't as sleepy as before.

"They turn the lights out in the upper halls 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 or had you ever seen him before?"

"Oh, sure," I smiled deprecatingly. "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 that, 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—"

He made an approving pass with his hands. "Tell it just like that. Step by step. Tell it like to a six-year-old kid." He'd left the chair long ago, 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.' "

Cliff wrinkied 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 minutes."

"Why'd he have to stand in the doorway a couple 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 schoolteacher 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.' "

"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; I was."

"Kind of repetitious, wasn't he?" he drawled. "You've quoted him as saying it four times, already."

"He kept saying it over and over, I couldn't even keep track of how many times he said it, and his voice kept getting lower all the time." 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 was sort of relaxed, like I say—" I said baffledly.

"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."

Cliff worked his cheek around, like he was chewing a sour apple. "Eyes were fixed and glassy as though he were 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."

"Getting the feel of your background." He must have meant that for himself, I couldn't make any sense out of it. "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 coughdrops. 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."

He eyed me gloomily. "Testing your will-power to see if it was weak enough."

"You seem to make something out of this whole thing," I said helplessly. "What is it? Blamed if I can see!"

"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."

"Now? You're going all the way back up there, at this hour of the morning?"

"And Vince," he added from the doorway, "don't give up yet. We'll find a way out somehow—don't take any more shortcuts."

It was high noon before I woke up, after all I'd been through, and even then he didn't show up for another two or three hours yet. I got dressed but 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.

Wild horses couldn't have dragged me away. Where was there to go, anyway? He was my only salvation—now.

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 as fresh as a daisy compared to the shape he was in. He had big black crecents under his eyes from not getting to bed all night, and the first thing he did was sprawl back in the chair he'd originally intended occupying the night before, 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—until now?" I gasped.

"I've been back to town once, in-between—to pick up something I needed and get a leave of absence." He wasn't sanguine by any means, I could tell that just by looking at him. He didn't have that steely glint in his eye of your master detective on the home-stretch to a solution. But he looked less harassed than the night before. Maybe the activity of running around, in itself, was good for him.

He'd brought in with him 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—he helped this effect by holding one finger lengthwise under the picture's nose—above all, an intangible aura of prosperity, radiating from the impeccable 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 aura of middle-age running to seed.

I jolted. "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, though this crystallized, arrested glimpse of her preceded the other two in point of time. She had here neither the masklike 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.

Somebody, I guess in Waggoner's office, had stuck a gummed tab uniting the two of them across the division of the folder. Uniting them symbolically in death and mystery. On it was inked: "B-20,263/Fleming-Ayers/7–21–40."

"He's also Dorothy Fleming's husband, Joel," Cliff said. "Waggoner gave me this, from their house."

He must have seen the wan light of hope beginning to flicker in my eyes. He snuffed it out, with a rueful gnaw at his under lip, a slight shake of his head. That was the kindest way, I guess; not to let it get fully kindled. Hope is so hard to kill, anyway. He closed the photo-folder 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 for you 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; imagine someone looking just like you. 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 and had dusted over at our own lab—" I looked, and mine 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 cut-off 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 folded over, seated, held my head. "But why didn't I know I was doing it—?" I groaned anguishedly.

"We can take care of that later," he said. "I can't prove what I think it was, right now, and what good is an explanation without proof? And 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, I mean get the circumstances down on record, repeat the special conditions that surrounded it the first time. Even then, it'll be purely circumstantial and none too good, but it's about the best we can hope for."

"But can't you tell me what—"

"I think it's safer if I don't, until afterwards. You'll get all tense, keyed-up; you're liable to jeopardize the whole thing without meaning to, make it miss fire. 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, showed it to me. He's ordered her reburied in a private plot, will probably get there in time for the services "

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

He didn't start the car right away, gave me a half-rueful, half-apologetic look. "Where is the place you would least rather go, 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, and I gave him the rest of it back. 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, their voices, the sounds they made moving about. 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-funeral 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 bodyless hands reach down, taking 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. My flesh kept crawling away from it in ripples, though my body stood there motionless. It was the blood of someone I had killed, not that this man out there had killed. 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 icewhite 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 though 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-flap an indifferent slap-to. As though 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 when, now. 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 corskcrew-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 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 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, and who held the key to the mystery that had suddenly clouded my existence. And I had to remember each thing in the order they had been given me, in the proper sequence, or it was no good.

The first injunction was, Make him speak first. If it takes all night, wait until he speaks first. Some matter of recognition must have been involved, but I had no leisure for my own side-thoughts.

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 remembered coming here?"

"You didn't think I would, did you?"

His eyes rolled, as at the imminence of some catastrophe. "You—you couldn't have!"

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

His present situation pierced warningly at him through the muffling layers of his panic. 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 thumbtack pressed into the palm of each hand the whole way."

"Then why did you do everyting 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 they were adulterous, 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 though 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, 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 the why or wherefore. "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, 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 will-power, 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."

"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, 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 fiash from the burnished metal of the inside of the watchlid 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 though 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 though 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 will-power 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 faraway thump as it hit the floor. As far away as though 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!"

Mental Lapse—Induced by Hypnosis

There was a white flash that seemed to explode inside my head, and 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 weaved there like a writhing seaweed, held fast to the bottom.

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 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, withdrew. I could feel a tugging at the rope, as if it were 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.

When I came to I was lying out on a little pier or string-piece 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 other 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.

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 coronery-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 turned over and kindled."

I grimaced sickly. That was about all that could have 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. I found out later it was Fleming's own bed I'd occupied, but at the time I wouldn't have cared if it was the mirror-closet itself, with Ayers' body still in it.

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, 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, 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 even have been able to hold the '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 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 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 happen all over again. And that's going to carry weight that no coroner's jury will dare disregard.

"You were in a state of hypnosis when you committed this crime, that's the whole point. In other words, you were as unresponsible, as inanimate, as insensible, as the knife or club that a murderer wields to accomplish his deed. You were simply the weapon in the actual murderer's hands. Your own mind wasn't functioning, you had no mind. Two bodies were being directed by one mind. His." He stopped and looked at me. "Does that scare you?"

"Oh boy." I puffed out my cheeks.

"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 theatre-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 even wind up helping her dry the dishes.)"

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

He went on, more seriously: "But there is such a thing, you know, it's not all bunk by any means. Only, certain types of people are more easily influenced than others. 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, like they all do, 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 sweat bands 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 in between the last real trip he made and the fake one just now. It's equally obvious that he brooded and he planned revenge. They talk about a woman scorned. There's nothing more dangerous than a middle-aged husband who finds himself betrayed by a younger wife. 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 combination of that safe here in the house.

"That's the basic situation. All that we've got to go on is just conjecture. The three principals are dead now and can't give evidence. I'm not trying to defend Fleming, but there is something to be said for his doing what he did. It turned him into a demon. He wanted Ayers dead, and he wanted Dorothy dead, too—now. But he picked a low, lousy way of effecting his purpose. He wasn't going to endanger himself, risk his own security. No, he started off for 'South America,' dropped from sight, holed-up in a rooming-house in the city under the name of Burg and 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 yourself.

"But the point was, whatever clues came into the possession of the police pointing at the killer, would point at you, not him. He had provided himself with a buffer; he would always be one step removed from the crime. If they ever caught the man the clues pointed to, if they ever caught the actual killer, it would always be you, not him, It was a lot safer than just hiring a professional killer, in full possesion of his faculties; it removed all danger of eventual betrayal and implication.

"True, he had to drive you up there, because you don't drive. Maybe he would have had to anyway; I don't know enough about hypnotism, I don't know if control can be effectively maintained over such a great distance. 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 scotfree, 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 in your dazed state; which would have brought the investigation back to the rooming-house too quickly to suit him, his presence there might have been revealed in spite of all his precautions. So he crushed her to death and whisked you back to immunity."

"How is it I remembered the whole murder-scene so vividly the next morning? Especially their faces—"

"His control wasn't one-hundred per cent effective; I don't know if it ever is. The whole scene must have filtered dimly through to your conscious mind, 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 doorkey, the hall light switch, etcetera. 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 in his absence."

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 at the curb? And I doubt that he brought it up that close to the rooming-house entrance, for fear of being seen."

"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 them off easily that night, when you were undressing in your own room, or as sometimes happens with nearly everyone, the laces got snarled, 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 really 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 awhile, but that didn't worry me any more; the shadows had lifted.

When we got out in front of the constabulary 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 the whole time. They probably won't even send it all the way through to prosecution."

We went in together.

BEQUEST

The slate roadster coursed steadily onward along the dusky road, chasing its own headlight beams, never succeeding in overtaking them. Overhead the stars seemed to move slowly along the sky in company with it, while the night-bound earth below streamed backwards, like something on a moving belt. An occasional offside light winking from some farmhouse would trundle slowly rearward, finally blink out. The world was asleep.

The man at the wheel hadn't spoken for half an hour. The woman beside him had been silent that length of time. The dashboard lights illumined their faces from below, cast phantomlike reflections of them on the windshield.

They both had the set look of people who are lost in thought. Their eyes, staring straight ahead, had the fixed aspect of those who do not see what they seem to be looking at.

The road made a leisurely turn, and the car obediently went with it. The woman spoke at last, unexpectedly, without any preliminary, as though the slight shift of equilibrium caused by the turn had finally dislodged the silence sticking in her throat.

"So that's why," she remarked. "That's why we came away on this trip."

The man continued to stare ahead, hands soldered to the wheel, while the road flowed unendingly beneath their front wheels. "That's why," he answered laconically.

A moment or two of silence followed, and then she spoke again. "Why didn't you tell me before we left?"

"What's the difference when I told you? I've told you now, haven't I?"

"Yes, now I know," she said quietly.

Neither of them looked at one another.

"And what are you going to do now?" she said finally.

His mouth thinned a little. "Just keep going."

"You can't keep going forever."

This time he didn't answer. She had spoken so low that perhaps he hadn't heard her.

"They'll come after you."

"I won't wait for them to get there."

"You've torn down something that it's taken me five years to build. Our home, our good name, friends and security—you have thrown it all away in one reckless, insane—"

"You don't have to come with me," he said stonily. "You can go back. You haven't done anything. I can drop you off at the next town, and you can take the train back."

She turned in the seat and looked directly at him for the first time. She reached out and lightly put one hand on his arm, in a pleading gesture. "Why don't you come back with me?"

"It's too late. They'll find it out tomorrow morning if they haven't already."

"Then we'll face it together. I'm your wife, I'll be by your side—"

He gave a short, bitter laugh. "You know what it means, don't you?"

"Anything's better than just running away for the rest of our lives. That's a game you're bound to lose in the end."

He shook his head slightly. "Thanks, no. I've made my choice. I've made my bed, I'm ready to lie in it. But you don't have to share it with me, I told you that before."

The car slowed, coasted, finally came to a full halt over at the side of the road. He pointed to a sign just a few feet ahead. His voice was cold. "We're just outside the next town. You'd better get out now, go in on foot. I don't want to stop in the middle of town. If you're not with me heart and soul, no use your being with me at all."

She just continued to look at him as though she felt infinitely sorry for him.

"All I ask of you," he went on, "is don't tell them where I told you I was going."

"You don't trust me at all, do you, Alvin?" She murmured reproachfully. "First you didn't trust me enough to tell me about it before we left. And now you think I—I'll talk."

He didn't answer that. He reached into his inside coat pocket, took out a wallet, stripped away several bills. "Here, here's some money. This'll see you back. You can take bus or train."

He looked down at it where it lay, discarded on the s eatbetween them. "Don't even want that, do you? You sure have got religion."

She put out her hand to the door-latch. "I'm afraid wasn't cut out for—crime."

The lights of the town where they'd separated flicker out behind him, and the car went winging down the long gloomy road ahead once more, a little faster than before as if to make up for lost time. The world was still asleep.

He gave no sign of being hurt by her defection. If it rankled, he kept it hidden within him. There was only one phantom reflection on the dashboard now, his own. He stared impassively abead, eyes fixed on the road. Once and once only he glanced aside at the vacant seat where she had been until now. The money she had refused to take with her, still lying there, caught his eye. He reached down for it, put it back in his wallet. There was a sad expression for a minute in his eyes, as he did so. Then it flickered out.

Mileage went by. The night and the road wore on.

The headlight-wash picked up the object far ahead. A black object. A log or a bundle of rags lying in the road came sidling forward as the car drove steadily on. Suddenly it sprouted a head at one end, upturned feet at the other. A human form lying on its back in the road, crosswise.

He stopped the car just short of it. He unlatched the door, thrust out one leg. That was as far as he got.

A voice spoke from the opposite side of the car. A face was looking in at him, dimly outlined by the dashboard lights. Just behind it, in the gloom at the side of the road, the indistinct mass of a bush settled back into repose again. "It's all right, buddy, he isn't hurt. We just wanted a lift."

The other man, the one lying in the road, got to his feet grinning. He dusted himself off with his hat, came in toward the car on the outside. There was, even in the half-light something more than just apolegetic good-nature to be in the grin. Something darker. He took hold of the door driver had already half-extended and swung it the rest the way out. The other was already on the seat next to the owner.

The man at the wheel looked watchfully from one to the other. He said, quietly but tautly, "That's a pretty high-handed way of asking for a lift, isn't it?"

"We wanted to make sure of not being turned down," the man beside him slurred.

The man at the wheel sat motionless, like someone at bay. The only part of him that moved were the two last fingers of one hand, resting on the wheel-rim. They rose and fell a couple of times. "Where is it you men want to go?" he said finally. Whatever they answered, he was obviously going to claim his route lay elsewhere.

"Just—that way, the way you're going," the man next to him answered.

"Sorry, I'm in a hurry—"

"You've stopped now, haven't you?" the spokesman pointed out, in the lazy purr of a cat playing with a mouse. "Won't take you any longer to get started up with us than without us."

The driver's mouth had tightened into a thin line. He'd made up his mind. But he'd made it up too late. "It's my car and I'll decide who rides in it, Stand back—"

His unwelcome seatmate's elbow jogged him, as though unintentionally. He glanced over and saw the man absorbed in prodding at his fingernails with a vicious-looking snapknife. It wasn't pointed at the car owner; its user wasn't even looking at him. Somehow the implication was even more forbidding.

His drawl was still misleadingly indolent. "Ought to drive on, mister. Don't look good to keep standing here like this. Somebody might happen along and think there's a hold-up taking place. Which there isn't." And to his friend: "Come around and get in on this side of me. There's room enough for three."

Their unwilling host, white-faced now, slowly reached down and took off the brake.

Nothing more was said. The road slipped by; the wavy dark line of the trees went up and down, up and down. The stars followed them slowly across the sky. There were three phantom faces reflected against the windshield now.

He studied two of them there, surreptitiously. The knife was gone again, but even if he made a sudden lunge grappled for it, he wouldn't win; the man on the outside probably had one too. Besides, he didn't want to become involved in anything that would delay him, bring the police on the scene, with all the lengthy questioning that would inevitably follow.

They didn't give the impression of being just the roadside vagrants or bums. There was something a little better than that about them—and also something a little worse, more sinister.

"Look," he said abruptly, "could you fellows use a little money? Is that what this is about? Suppose I let you have ten bucks apiece and we call it quits."

The one on the outside said nothing at all. That drawl came again. "People that part with money that easy must have quite a lot of it." And then, in reassurance that failed altogether to reassure: "We ain't asked you for any money, mister. We'll just ride along with you a little ways."

He knew he hadn't averted whatever it was that was hanging over him.

Forty minutes went by. Perhaps fifty. Not a word more had been spoken. They were nearing the outskirts of some large town. They could see the preliminary lights sprinkled here and there, in the distance ahead, and the red glow of foundries or blast-furnaces.

The highway suddenly split in two, a main branch and a lesser, back-country detour.

"Take the one on the left," he was instructed. "That loop misses the town."

"But I'm heading for that town, and I've been driving all night. Are you compelling me to go out of my way?"

A truck came thundering up behind them, flashed past. He leaned out, tried to signal the truck driver, but he was already too late. The back of his coat-collar was suddenly tightened into a knot, and he was swung around again. The knife did not show up, but the threat of it peered through every word.

"Take the one to the left. No one's hurting you yet. But you will get hurt if you try that again."

Half an hour later a double-flanged roadside marker went drifting by.

The driver flicked his eyes at his passengers. "That was a state boundary line we just crossed. You know what that makes this, don't you? Interstate kidnaping. You know what the penalty for that is, don't you? The Lindbergh Law—death."

He saw them exchange a glance, by way of the windshield surface. But it wasn't a look of alarm; it was, if anything, one of humorous and mutual understanding.

"It ain't us that's going to get the death penalty," the one on the outside said patronizingly. The remark was driping with ominous double meaning. It's you, they meant. The driver shivered. His lower jaw fluctuated loosely against his upper, like something detachable.

A bar of silver appeared parallel to the eastern horizon, freed itself, floated slowly upward. Then a second one, then a third. They were spaced, like the rungs of a ghostly ladder, with darkness in between.

"It's starting to get light, Chuck," one of them mentioned quietly.

It was an unnecessary remark. He knew it was some kind of a signal that was being exchanged. He knew they had decided on doing—whatever it was they were going to do—at this approaching moment, when the night changed into day.

He saw the two windshield-phantoms turn toward one another, hold it for a second, exchanging notice of readiness.

He was shaking all over now, like some helpless animal with intelligence enough to realize its end is at hand, but without power to escape from it. He scanned the darkened road ahead for sight of some other car, some sign of life that might bring help. There was none. Then he tensed himself, about to fling the wheel around, swerve the car off the road into a tree or ditch, and try to escape from them in that way.

Even that move was frustrated, as though they'd read his mind. The nearer man reached out, grasped the wheelrim in a grip of iron. His foot nudged the driver's own foot off the accelerator with a sidewise kick. He reached across the driver's body with his entire arm and pulled on the emergency brake.

The car screamed agonizingly and swayed to a shuddering stop. The air currents of its own passage went swirling past it for a minute, in the sudden stillness, then died away.

The door-latch clicked and one of them had left the seat. "Think I'll get out and stretch my legs a minute."

A drop of sweat rolled sluggishly down the driver's corrugated forehead. The increasing number of bars of silver, which kept following one another up, was starting to have an effect on the sky in general, like rods of fluorescent lighting.

The voice of the man who had alighted came back from the rear. "Looks like one of your shoes is on the way out. Musta sprung one of them slow leaks."

The driver's knuckles whitened on the wheel-rim. "Ain't you going to get out and take a look?" the man next to him suggested with slumberous detachment.

The driver was past mere fright now; he had reached that ultimate pitch of it at which calmness once more sets in, the calmness of despair. "Wait a minute," he said in a voice that was husky, but steady and urgent. "You can have the car. You can have my driver's license, my registration—all my papers. You can have sixty-five thousand dollars in cold cash I have on my person at this moment, in an oilpaper packet pinned to my undershift. Only just let me walk away from here on foot. I won't even report it, I won't open my mouth—just let me leave here on my own two feet—"

The man beside him drawled, "Then we would be taking these things from you by force, which in a way is the same thing as a hold-up or robbery. That ain't the idea at all. The minute our backs were turned you'd report it as that, no matter what you say now." He smiled disarmingly. "We'd rather just inherit it all from you, and to inherit a thing…" He didn't have to finish it. To inherit a thing, the benefactor first has to be dead.

The driver turned to face the speaker in one last desperate appeal. His mouth opened, to utter it. It never came. His back was to the outside of the road. Death came from that direction, slinking low around the rear of the car. Death was swift—a shattering blow on the brain with a section of lead pipe.

His mouth slowly closed, but that was merely reflex.

They carried the body off into gloom beside the road. Their voices sounded in quiet, unhurried tones. That drawl hadn't been assumed, it was natural. It came again: "Finish him?"

"I think so, but I'll give him another to make sure."

A dull, sodden impact sounded once. Then their footsteps moved off still further afield, with the measured heaviness of a burden borne between them.

They were gone some time. The car remained where it was, empty. One came back first, ahead of the other; the one with the drawl, who had been their spokesman throughout. He got in, started the engine, glanced watchfully up and down the road, then sat there waiting. He completed lacing the dead man's shoes on his feet, thrusting the dead man's shirt more securely down under his belt, adjusting the knot of his necktie.

Then he gave the horn an impatient double-tap. Far off in the distance the pea-sized glow of an approaching pair of headlights had crested a rise, then dipped down into an intervening hollow. It wouldn't reach them for a good five minutes yet.

The second man, Chuck, materialized out of the darkness, was suddenly beside the car again. He was rubbing his hands in satisfaction. "That abandoned well was the right answer," he murmured appreciatively as he got in. "Glad I remembered it from the first time we passed here. Did you hear me cave the rest of it in on top of him?"

"No, it's too far in from here."

"Some day, years from now, they may catch on there was once somebody in there, if they dig down deep enough. But, brother, they'll never know who it was. I did it up brown!" He removed a crumpled, balled-up mass from his pocket that looked as though it had once been part of an undershirt, partially opened it, revealing flecks of rust on the inside, then carefully put it away again.

"What've y' got there?" the new driver said.

"His teeth," was the complacent answer. "I had to take the lead pipe to them, but it was worth it. Didn't you ever hear of 'em identifying them just by that alone?"

The approaching headlights blossomed out, dipped in conventional salute as the two cars flashed past one another, receded along the road.

"Pretty nifty car we inherited," remarked Chuck complacently. "Where do we head for now?"

"We head for the border and out, the way we were trying to before we ran into him."

"We need an exit permit, don't we?"

"We've got one. That's where he was heading for himself. We inherited that along with the car, and the driver's license, and sixty-five thousand dollars in cash and—well, just about everything else you can think of. Oh, by the way, meet Alvin Kern the Second, of Garfield Road, Scranton, Pennsylvania. And meet yourself, his business-partner and associate, making the trip with him. Sole beneficiaries of Alvin Kern the First."

Chuck smote his knee delightedly. "Brother, what a bequest !"

The slate roadster coursed steadily onward under the blazing Gulf Coast sun, chasing its own fore-shortened shadow, never quite able to overtake it. The masses of sand dunes to its left made an undulating line, now up, now down. The flaming mass of the sun seemed to move steadily across the sky in company with it, while the road streamed backwards like something on a moving belt.

There was silence, save for the low hum of the engine.

Chuck broke the silence at last, for the first time in half an hour. "Don't you think we ought to ditch the car? It's two whole days now, and we're far enough away. The car is what might trip us up."

"Alvin Kern", hands glued to the wheel, stared straight ahead. "Ditching the car is what might trip us up, you mean, It would be found inside of an hour or two after we dumped it. They'd start asking questions, wondering why. While we are still in it, we got nothing to worry about. The whole thing hangs together. As long as we sit tight in the car, we're him and a friend of his; the minute we leave the car behind, we start being somebody else, and they start wondering what happened to him."

"Yeah, but he might have been expected someplace. Somebody that knows him might be waiting for him, and when he don't show up where he was supposed to—"

"He was heading for Mexico; the exit permit shows that. Well, so're we. He wouldn't have got there any sooner than we will; we haven't lost any time along the way."

Chuck's elbow suddenly nudged into his side, stayed pressed against it in a frozen signal of warning. Behind them a speck on the road, that had been noticeable for some time past in the mirror, had grown to the size of a car, It came on, closing in fast.

"It's a state trooper patrol car, and it ain't just out for the ride, the way it's tearing along! They must've picked us up at that last roadstand we stopped to eat at. Give it the gun!"

"Pull up, you mean, and see what they want. Hear that? They're tipping us off to stand until they get here."

Chuck's voice nearly rose to a scream as the car began to lose speed. "Come on, will ya? Are you crazy?"

"Listen, if we don't pay attention we get bullets next. But that ain't the point. The point is when you're a couple of respectable businessmen like us, you don't run away from cops."

The car fell motionless by the glaring roadside.

"It's not the speeding; we were only doing—I told you we shoulda ditched this damn car, didn't I?" Chuck jittered.

"And I told you a guy on a business trip don't abandon his car. That's tipping our hand. Shut up, here they are."

A cloud of dust blew away from the new arrival, and one of the men in it alighted and moved toward the front of their car, into a position from which he could scan the number.

"Alvin Kern" leaned partially out, resting comfortably on his forearm. "Something wrong, officer?"

The state cop had opened a notebook, was glancing at their plates and then back at the notebook.

"Pennsylvania three-three-two-eight," he read aloud.

There was a moment of tension that swelled like a bubble about to burst. "Kern" pressed down hard with one hand on his companion's knee to keep him quiescent.

The state cop closed his notebook with a snap, put it away in his pocket before answering.

"Nope, not you. That eight on the end of your plate saved you. The guy we want is Pennsylvania three-three-two-nine, gray roadster with two men in it. Hit and run. Knocked down and killed a pickaninny at a crossroads in Orange County about ten this morning." He shook his head as he moved back to his own car. "Talk about your coincidences, though." He took out a handkerchief, mopped around under and then inside his headgear. "Sure is hot." He tilted his chin slightly, sniffed the air with a grimace. "And blamed if it don't smell like a kiyote died someplace around here! Come on, Carter, let's vamoose."

He climbed in again, gave them a friendly wave of dismissal. The patrol car circled around and went back the way it had come.

Chuck sagged down into his own lap, like ice cream melting in the sun. "Gee, that was close! Let's get out of here," he said weakly. "He was right. It smells like the beach over there was full of rotting shellfish."

"Alvin Kern" stepped on the gas. "Where would we have been now, if we'd listened to you and tried to run for it? On our way back in their custody, to be held in the county jail until they could find out what it was we were running away from, most likely."

The filling-station attendant nodded in agreement. "Yeah, I do kinda, myself, now that you mention it. Maybe you gents been driving through some kind of slimy mud. Don't show none on your tires, though."

"The road was bone-dry all the way in," Chuck contradicted.

"Maybe you ran over a rabbit or something, and carried it along with you underneath the car. I've seen that happen. If you want to run up over the pit a minute, I'll jump down and take a look for you."

"No, we haven't time," Kern cut him short. "How much do I owe you?"

They drove on through the small community, in a few minutes were out on the open highway again, under the glorious Texas stars.

"This is our last lap," the driver said. "Our last night on this side. I'm timing it so we'll pull into Laredo right after daybreak, just in time for the international bridge to open up for the day. That way we won't have to hang around, can cross right over. By tomorrow night this same time we'll be hitting the Pan-American Highway for Mexico City on all six, and they can whistle for us if they want us back. Then, after we're safely over on the other side, is the time to pick up a pair of hot plates for the car, give it a new paint-job, and sell it off to someone. They'll never be able to trace what become of it, down there." He kissed his own knuckles. "And after that, the life of Reilly. Sixty-five thousand dollars makes an awful lot of pesos."

"And all inherited, too!" gloated Chuck. His face weazened up, and he began to fan himself with his hat, "There it comes again—a little. Every time there's a change in the wind. Maybe they use some kind of fertilizer around this part of the country that—"

"Naw, it wouldn't be that," objected the driver. "I noticed it worse in the town, where it was kind of built up around us, than out here in the open. And they don't use fertilizer in towns."

He lit a cigarette to try to kill it a little. "Don't let it get you," he said affably. "It's a small enough inconvenience to go through for the sake of sixty-five thousand dollars."

The slate roadster took its place in the line of cars waiting at the bridge approach to cross over. The barrier hadn't been lowered yet.

"There always that many of them crossing over?" Chuck murmured worriedly, leaning out to peer ahead down the line.

"That's better than if we were the only ones. Safety in numbers. They don't pay as much attention to you that way. Relax, there's nothing to get steamed up about. I've seen worse line-ups waiting to drive into the Holland Tunnel."

"They don't inspect you going into the Holland Tunnel."

"They hold you up a minute for the toll, and that's about as long as this'll take."

Chuck fidgeted, mopped his forehead. "Let's drive around the town half an hour or so, come back again after it's already open. It gets me nervous standing still waiting like this."

The driver glanced up into their mirror. "Too late now, we've been blocked off behind. We can't back out of line, there's other cars behind us."

Chuck gave a sudden jolt, as though something had just occurred to him. His face paled. "What about the picture on the driver's license? It's his, isn't it?"

"I fixed that long ago, like we originally planned to. With that one of my own, and a couple of strips of gelatine-paper to hold it in place where his was before. It's good enough to pass at a quick glance.

A small current of early morning air stirred along the approaches to the bridge. Chuck grimaced. "There comes that funny smell again. I thought we'd lost it—"

"The barrier's down. Here we go." The line of cars started to creep forward with little spurts and stalls, as each successive one cleared the customs booth at the entrance to the bridge. "Now don't act nervous. It'll only take a minute."

Chuck lit a cigarette, leaned back against the seat.

"Okay," he said reassuringly out of the corner of his mouth. "I'm steadied up now."

They shifted slightly forward, stopped again. The Oklahoma plates in front of them cleared onto the bridge. They shifted once more, stopped for the last time.

An armed guard approached, "Driver's license?"

The driver handed it over.

He scanned it. "You Kern?"

"That's me."

He passed it back. "What's the nature of this trip?"

"Business."

"Who's that with you?"

"My business-associate, Charles Kendall." He did the talking for Chuck.

"Exit permit?"

"Kern" handed that over, too. He glanced at it, tendered it back. He raised his arm, about to pass them through the soldiers doing sentry-duty further along on the bridge. "Kern" relaxed his foot on the clutch, ready to roll forward as soon as the signal was completed. A little stale air that Chuck had been holding down in his lungs seeped up and out with relief.

"Carrying any short-wave radios, binoculars, cameras, anything like that?"

"Nope, just as we are," the driver said affably.

"Okay, let's have a look in your rumble a minute, and you can be on your way."

The driver fumbled unexcitedly in his clothes, produced Kern's keyholder, handed it over. "That one there," he said. "Help yourself."

The customs guard drifted back out of sight.

"We never looked in it ourselves," Chuck murmured. "Suppose he does find a camera or something—"

They'll confiscate it and send us on without it. But don't worry, he won't. Here comes the all-clear—"

A gun suddenly poked in at them. Behind it the grim face of the customs guard looked a little greenish. Chuck clawed for the door on his side. A second gun poked in from there, with another guard behind it. A whistle blew and a squad of soldiers came up, rifles at ready.

"Turn off and drop out of line; drive back the other way!" was the order barked. Two of the armed men mounted the car, to see that it was carried out.

"Now get out of there, you two! With your hands over your heads, both of you! You're under arrest!"

"For what— What about—?" stammered the driver as he stepped out, palms tilted. Chuck followed him a moment later, white in the face and weak at the knees.

The familiar, foul odor that had been haunting them for so long seemed to swirl over them overpoweringly. "For that," said the customs guard with a rearward stab of his thumb.

Out of the opened rumble, like a ghastly jack-in-the-box, reared the already badly decomposing head and shoulders of a woman neither of them had ever seen before.

In the cell where they were being held, awaiting removal back to Pennsylvania to face murder charges, Chuck looked up hopelessly after awhile. "What hurts most about it," he lamented bitterly, "is they didn't get us for what we done ourselves, but for what that other guy done! They haven't found out about us, even yet! They're going to take us back and fry us for murder, and we can't prove we didn't do it!"

His head dropped into his hands again with a shudder.

"That was an inheritance, all right! We not only inherited his car and his identity papers and his money, we inherited his murder along with it! Some legacy, that was! Some bequest!"

THE DELL GREAT MYSTERY LIBRARY PRESENTS

THE LISTENING WALLS

by Margaret Millar

"As always in Millar, the smooth convolution of plot and deception are scarcely visible until the shock of the ending reveals them… a glorious job."

—San Francisco Chronicle

"Brilliant"

—Anthony Boucher, The New York Times

NIGHTMARE

by Cornell Woolrich

A masterpiece of suspense by "a master of terror."

—The New York Times

"The very best… a rare capacity for raw shock."

—New York Herald Tribune

THE SECOND MAN

by Edward Grierson

"Exciting courtroom murder mystery … the suspense holds out to the very end."

—Harper's

"One of the best modern trial novels."

—The New York Times.

NO NEXT OF KIN

by Doris Miles Disney

From one of the outstanding mystery writers of all time … "Exciting, skillfully written."

—St. Louis Post Dispatch

DELL BOOKS

each 60c

If you cannot obtain copies of these titles at your local newsstand, just send the price (plus 10c per copy for handling and postage) to Dell Books, Box 2291, Grand Central Post Office, New York, N.Y. 10017. No postage or handling charge is required on any order of five or more books.