Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

This time he just gave a wordless gasp — the sort of sound that is wrenched from a person when something goes hurtling by and narrowly misses hitting him.

She was in a half sleep when some sense of impending danger aroused her. It was neither a sound nor a motion, it was just the impalpable presence of some menace in itself. She started up. There was a late moon tonight, and the room was dark-blue and white, not black. Gil was crouched to one side of the window, peering down, his back to her. Not a muscle rippled, he was so still.

“Gil, what is it?” she breathed softly.

His silencing hiss came back even softer, no louder than a thread of steam escaping from a radiator valve.

She put her foot to the floor, crept up behind him. The sibilance came again:

“Get back, you fool. I don’t want him to see me up here.”

The sound of a stealthy tinkering came up from below, somewhere. A very small sound it was in the night stillness. She peered over his shoulder. Ward was standing down there at the garage doors, fumbling with them.

“If he gets them open and goes in there—”

Suddenly she foreshortened her glance, brought it down perpendicularly over Gil’s shoulder, saw the gun for the first time, blue-black as a bottle fly in the moonlight. Steady, for all Gil’s nerves; held so sure and steady there wasn’t a waver in it. Centered remorselessly on the man outside the garage down there.

“Gil!” Her inhalation of terror seemed to fill the room with a sound like rushing wind.

He stiff-armed her behind him, never even turned his head, never even took his eyes off his objective. “Get back, I tell you. If he gets them open, I’m going to shoot.”

But this would be murder, the very thing she’d dreaded since Monday, and that had missed them the first time by a hairbreadth. He must have the money hidden in there in the garage. She had to do something to stop him, to keep it from happening. She floundered across the room on her bare feet, found the opposite wall, groped along it.

“Gil, get back. I’m going to put on the lights.”

She just gave him time enough to swerve aside, snapped the switch, and the room flared into noonday brilliance that cast a big warning yellow patch on the ground outside.

There was a single retreating footfall on the concrete runway down there, and the next time they looked, the space in front of the garage doors showed empty.

She crept out to the head of the stairs, listened, came back again.

“He’s gone to bed,” she said. “I heard the day bed creak.”

The reaction had set in; the tension Gil had been under must have been terrific. He was shaking all over like someone attached to an electric reducing belt. “He’ll only make another stab at it again tomorrow night. I can’t stand it any more, I can’t stand it any more! I’m getting out of here — now.”

It was no use reasoning with him, she could see that at a glance. He was in a state bordering on frenzy. For a moment she was half tempted to say: “Oh, let’s go downstairs to him now, the two of us, admit you raised the check, give him back the money, and get it over with! Anything’s better than this nightmare!”

But she checked herself. How much did they get for doing what he’d done? Ten years? Twenty? Her courage failed her; she had no right to ask him to give up that much of his life.

Meanwhile he was whipping a necktie around his collar, shrugging on his jacket. She whispered: “Gil, let’s stop and think before we cut ourselves off completely — Where can we go, at this hour?”

“I rented a furnished room in the city today, under an assumed name.” He whispered an address. “We’ll be safe there for a couple of days at least. As soon as I can get boat tickets — I have to get rid of that car, that’s the main thing.”

“But, Gil, don’t you see we’re convicting ourselves, by doing this?”

“Are you coming with me? Or are you doing to let me down just when I need you most, like women usually do? You’re half in love with him already! I’ve seen the looks he’s starting to give you. They all fall for you; why shouldn’t he? All right, stay here with him then.”

She silenced him by pressing her fingers to his mouth. “To the bitter end,” she whispered, misty-eyed, “to the bitter end. If you want it this way, then this is the way it’ll be.”

He didn’t even thank her: she didn’t expect him to, anyway. “Go out there again and make sure he’s sleeping.”

She came back, said: “He’s snoring; I can hear him all the way up here.”

While she began to dress with frantic haste, Gil started down ahead.

“I’ll take the brakes off, you take the wheel, and I’ll push it out into the road so he won’t hear us start.”

Ward’s snoring filled the house as she crept down the dark stairs after Gil moments later. “Why? Why?” she kept thinking distractedly. But she’d made her decision; she went ahead unfalteringly.

He had the garage doors open by the time she’d joined him. The place smelled terrible; a stray cat must have found its way in and died in there some place. She got in, guided the car out backward as he pushed at the hood. Then he shifted around to the rear. The incline of the concrete path helped carry them down to the road. You could still hear Ward snoring inside the house, from out where they were. Gil pushed it down the road a considerable distance from the house, before he jumped in and took over the wheel.

“Made it,” he muttered hoarsely.

She wasn’t a slow driver herself by any means, but she’d never forced the car to such a speed as he got out of it now. The gauge broke in new numbers on their dial. The wheels seemed to churn air most of the time and just come down for contact at intervals.

“Gil, take a little of the head off it.” She shuddered. “You’ll kill the two of us!”

“Look back and see if there’s anything in sight behind us.”

There was, but far away. It had nothing to do with them. It definitely wasn’t Ward; he couldn’t have gotten another car that quickly. But it spurred Gil on to keep up that death-inviting pace long after they’d lost sight of it. And then suddenly, ahead—

The other car peered unexpectedly at them over a rise. There was plenty of room for them both, at a normal rate of speed. They wouldn’t even have had to swerve; neither was hogging the road. But Gil was going so fast, and in the attempt to shift over farther, their rear wheels swept out of line with their front, they started a long forward skid, and the other car nicked them in passing. It wasn’t anything; at an ordinary rate of speed it would have just scraped the paint off their fender or something. But it swept them against a tree growing close to the roadway, and that in turn flung them back broadside on the asphalt again. Miraculously they stayed right side up, but with a bad dent toward their rear where they’d hit the tree. The rumble lid had sprung up and that whole side of the chassis was flattened in.

The other car had stopped farther down the road; it hadn’t been going any too slow itself. She was on the floor, thrown there in a coiled-rope formation, but unhurt. She heard Gil swear icily under his breath, fling open the door, shoot out as though pursued by devils.

She looked up into the rear-sight mirror and there was a face in it. The sunken, hideously grinning face of Homer Burroughs, peering up above the level of the forcibly opened rumble. She could see it so plain, swimming on the moonlit mirror; even the dark bruises mottling it under the silvery hair, even the heavy auto wrench riding his shoulder like an epaulette, thrown up out of the bottom of the rumble as his body had been thrown up — like a macabre jack-in-the-box. And the odor of the woods that she and Ward had noticed earlier was all around her in the night, though she was far from those particular woods now.