Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

“Lights!” ordered the captain, stumbling out. “Train the heads after us — and bring those tools and the oxygen-tanks!” The sward bleached vividly green as the two cars backed sideways into position. It was suddenly full of scattered, moiling men, trampling about, heads down like bloodhounds.

The one farthest afield shouted: “Here’s a patch without grass!”

They came running from all directions, contracted into a knot around him.

“That’s it — see the oblong, see the darker color from the freshly-upturned—!” Coats flew up into the air like waving banners, a shovel bit in, another, another. But Ingram was at it with his raw, bared hands again, like a mole, pleading, “Be careful! Oh be careful, men! This is my girl!”

“Now keep your heads,” the captain warned. “Just a minute more. Keep him back, he’s getting in their way.”

A hollow sound, a Phuff! echoed from the inch of protruding pipe, and the man testing it, flat on his stomach, lifted his face, said, “It’s partly open all the way down.”

The earth parted like a wave across the top of it, and they were lifting it, and they were prying at the lid, gently, carefully, no blows. “Now, bring up the tanks — quick!” the captain said, and to no one in particular, “What a night!” They were still holding Ingram back by main force, and then suddenly as the lid came off, they didn’t have to hold him any more.

She was in a bridal gown, and she was beautiful, even as still and as marble-white as she was, when they lifted the disarranged veil — when they gently drew aside the protecting arm she’d thrown before her eyes. Then she was hidden from Ingram by their backs.

Suddenly the police-doctor straightened up. “Take that tube away. This girl doesn’t need oxygen — there’s nothing the matter with her breathing, or her heart-action. She needs restoratives, she’s in a dead faint from fright, that’s all!”

Instantly they were all busy at once, chafing her hands and arms, clumsily yet gently slapping her face, holding ammonia to her nose. With the fluttering of her eyelids came a shriek of unutterable terror, as though it had been waiting in her throat all this time to be released.

“Lift her out of that thing, quick, before she sees it,” the captain whispered.

Back raced the cars, with the girl that had come up out of her grave — and beside her, holding her close, a man who had been healed of all his fears, cured-even as the Friends of Death had promised.

“And each time I’d come to, I’d go right off again,” she whispered huskily.

“That probably saved you,” the doctor on the other side of her said, “lying still. You’ll be all right, you’ve had a bad fright, that’s all.”

Bud Ingram held her close, her head upon his shoulder, eyes unafraid staring straight ahead now.

“I never knew there could be such a love in all this world,” he murmured.

She smiled a feeble little smile. “Look in my heart sometime — and see,” she said.

There were sensational disclosures the next day, when the Friends of Death appeared in court. A number of leading citizens were among them — men and women whom the weird society was draining of their wealth. Others, there were, who claimed they had been brought back from the grave — and, indeed, there were doctor’s certificates and burial permits to testify to the truth of this. Only later, at the trial of the leaders of the cult, did the whole story come to light. The people who had “died” and been buried were those chosen by the leaders for their reputations for honesty and reliability. They were then slowly poisoned by a member planted in their household by the society for this purpose — sometimes it was a servant, sometimes a member of the person’s own family. But the poison was not fatal. It induced a state of partially suspended organic functions which a cursory medical examination might diagnose as death, the rest was handled by doctors and undertakers — even civil employees — who were members of the “Friends.” Then the victim was resuscitated, persuaded he had been restored to life by the secret processes of the society, and initiated as a member. His testimony, after that, was responsible for gaining many new members, without the dangerous necessity of “killing” and reviving more than the first few. And the “penalties” inflicted upon recalcitrant members made those remaining, participants in capital crime — and made the society’s hold on them absolute.

But the greatest hold of all — the one which made the vast majority of the members rejoice in their bondage, and turn into rabid fiends at the least suspicion of disloyalty in the organization — was the infinitely comforting knowledge that no longer need they fear death.

And, in the words of the state prosecutor, most of them had been punished sufficiently for their sins in the terrible awakening to the realization that they were not immortals — and that somewhere, sometime, their graves awaited them...

Young Mrs. Jacqueline Blaine opened a pair of gas-flame-blue eyes and looked wistfully up at the ceiling. Then she closed them again and nearly went back to sleep. There wasn’t very much to get up for; the party was over.

The party was over, and they hadn’t raised the twenty-five hundred dollars.

She rolled her head sidewise on the pillow and nestled it against the curve of one ivory shoulder, the way a pouting little girl does. Maybe it was that last thought made her do it, instinctively. Water was sizzling downward against tiling somewhere close by; then it broke off as cleanly as at the cut of a switch, and a lot of laggard, left-over drops went tick, tick, tick like a clock.

Jacqueline Blaine opened her eyes a second time, looked down her arm over the edge of the bed to the little diamond-splintered microcosm attached to the back of her wrist. It was about the size of one of her own elongated fingernails, and very hard to read numbers from. She raised her head slightly from the pillow, and still couldn’t make out the time on the tiny watch.

It didn’t matter; the party was over, they’d all gone — all but that old fossil, maybe. Gil had seemed to pin his hopes on him, had said he hoped he could get him alone. She could have told Gil right now the old bird was a hopeless case; Gil wouldn’t be able to make a dent in him. She’d seen that when she tried to lay the groundwork for Gil the day before.

Well, if he’d stayed, let Leona look after him, get his breakfast. She sat up and yawned, and until you’d seen her yawn, you would have called a yawn an ungainly grimace. Not after, though. She propped her chin up with her knees and looked around. A silverish evening dress was lying where she last remembered squirming out of it, too tired to care. Gil’s dress tie was coiled in a snake formation on the floor.

She could see a green tide rising and falling outside of the four windows, on two sides of the room. Not water, but trees swaying in the breeze. The upper halves of the panels were light-blue. The sun was somewhere straight overhead, she could tell that by the way it hardly came in past the sills. It wasn’t a bad lookout, even after a party. “It would be fun living in it,” she mourned to herself, “if the upkeep wasn’t so tough; if I didn’t have to be nice to eccentric old codgers, trying to get them to cough up. All to keep up appearances.”

Gil came out of the shower alcove. He was partly dressed already — trousers and undershirt, but feet still bare — and mopping his hair with a towel. He threw it behind him onto the floor and came on in. Her eyes followed him halfway around the room with growing curiosity.

“Well, how’d you make out?” she asked finally.