Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

She acted quickly, by instinct alone. Almost before Gil had gotten back there, to flatten the rumble top down again, smother what it had inadvertently revealed before the occupants of the other car came up and saw it, she had opened the door on her side and jumped down. She began to run silently along the edge of the road, in the shadows cast by the overhanging trees. She didn’t know where she was going. She only wanted to get away from this man. This man who had killed. This man who was no longer her husband, who spelled Fear and Horror to her now. She saw now that she had lied to him — and to herself — Monday, when she told him she could stand it even if he’d done this, so long as he only admitted it. If she’d seen Burroughs’ battered corpse at the time, as she had now, the same thing would have happened then: she would have fled away from Gil like one demented. She couldn’t stand cowardly murder.

He’d gotten the rumble down, and was standing there pressed slightly backward upon it, at bay, arms out at either side to hold it down. He either didn’t see her scurry by along the edge of the trees, or was too preoccupied in facing the two men who were coming solicitously back toward him, to pay any attention. The half-formed idea in her churning mind was to get into that other, momentarily vacated car and get away from him. Anywhere, but get away!

She was halfway to it now. She could hear their voices, back there where she’d run from:

“Are you all right, brother? How badly did we hit you?”

“Gee, we banged up his rumble, Art.”

And then Gil’s sharp, dangerous: “Get away from it!”

The two shots came with sickening suddenness. Just bam! and then bam! again, and there were two huddled, loglike forms on the roadway in the moonlight up there by Gil’s car.

Murder again. Murder trebled now. How far, how far away they’d stopped that other car! She’d never make it. She saw that now. He’d already called her name warningly once, he was already running toward her like a winged messenger of death. She was up to it at last, had one foot on the running board now. But he had a smoking gun in his hand that could reach out from where he was to where she was quicker than any car could get under way. And this one, too, like theirs, had brought up broadside to the road. Before she could back up for clearance, turn, and get away, he’d be upon her. In her frustrated panic, hand on the door catch, she was conscious of the caked dust spewed upon the sides of the car, thrown up by its wheel action. They’d driven it hard.

Instead of getting in, she ran around it to the opposite side, away from him, as though to take cover. Then she stood there staring at him over it. At last she rounded it once more at the rear and came back toward him, away from it. Met him a few paces before it.

He seized her relentlessly by the wrist. “So now you know,” he heaved. “So you ran out on me.”

“I lost my head for a minute; anyone would have.”

“I watched you. You didn’t go the other way. You started back toward him , the guy you love now.”

He was dragging her toward their own car, swinging her from side to side like a primordial ape with a living victim.

“You’re dangerous to me now, I can see that. I’ve just shot two men; I’m fighting for my life. And anything or anyone that might help to trap me, has got to be removed.”

“Gil, you wouldn’t do such a thing. I’m your wife!”

“Fugitives have no wives.”

He half raised the gun toward her, lowered it again. He looked up the road, and down. The moonlight was crafty in his eyes.

“Get in, I’ll give you one more chance.”

She knew it was only a postponement. One thing at a time; he had to get to cover first. If he left her lying out here on the open road they’d know instantly who had done it. She could read her death warrant in his eyes, as they started off once more toward the city.

It was inconceivable that he meant to go through with such a thing. Even the sight of the grimy tenement room, suggestive of crime and violence, failed to make it more plausible. “This isn’t happening,” she thought, “this isn’t real; my husband hasn’t brought me to this unspeakable room in the slums, intending to do away with me. I’m still asleep, at home, and I’m having a bad dream.

“Yet all these days he’s known, and he hasn’t told me. All these days I’ve been living with a murderer.” She visualized again the way he’d shot those two men down in cold blood, without a qualm, without a moment’s hesitation. Why wouldn’t he be capable of doing the same to her? He was kill-crazy now, at bay. The red tide of murder had swept over him, effacing all love, trust, compassion, wiping away their very marriage itself. And he could kill this woman in the room with him, he could kill anyone on God’s earth tonight.

She sat slumped on the edge of the creaky iron bedstead, fingers pressed to her temples. He’d locked the room door after they came in, pulled down the patched blue shade on the window. He stood listening for a moment by the door, to see if anyone had followed them up, then he turned to her. “I’ve got to get rid of that car first,” he muttered to himself. Suddenly he’d come over, thrust her aside, was disheveling the bed, pulling out the sheets from under the threadbare cotton blankets. They squealed like pigs as he tore long strips down their lengths.

She guessed what they were for. “No, Gil, don’t!” she whimpered smotheredly. She ran for the door, pulled uselessly at the knob. He swung her around back behind him.

“Don’t do this to me!”

“I can’t just leave you locked in here. You’d scream or break a window. You sold out to him, and you’re my enemy now.”

He flung her face-down on the bed, caught her hands behind her back, deftly tied them together with strips of sheeting. Then her ankles in the same way. He sat her up, lashed her already once-secured hands to the iron bed frame. Then he wound a final length around her face, snuffing out her mouth. Her eyes were wide with horror. It wasn’t so much what was being done to her, as whom it was being done by.

“Can you breathe?” He plucked it down a little from the tip of her nose. “Breathe while you can.” His eyes, flicking over to the length of tubing connecting a wall jet with a one-burner gas ring, then back again to her, betrayed his intended method when the time came. He’d stun her first with a blow from his gun butt, probably, then remove her bonds to make it look like a suicide, disconnect the tube and let the gas take its course. That happened so often in these cheap rooming houses; that was the way out so many took.

He listened carefully at the door. Then he unlocked it, and as he turned to go glanced back and said to her:

“Keep your eyes on this doorknob. And when you see it start to turn, begin saying your prayers.”

She heard him lock the door again on the other side, and the faint creak of his step descending the warped stairs.

He would come back — in forty minutes, in an hour — and kill her. But therein didn’t lie the full horror of it. It was that this man and she had danced by moonlight not so long ago, had exchanged kisses and vows under the stars. It was that he had brought her candy, and orchids to wear on her coat. It was that they had stood up together and sworn to cherish and cling to one another for the rest of their lives.

Yet she saw that it must have been in him from the beginning, this fatal flaw of character that had finally led him to murder. People didn’t change that abruptly; they couldn’t. There were some who could never be capable of murder, no matter what the circumstances. And others, like Gil, needed only a slight push in that direction to fall into it almost of their own accords. He’d been a potential murderer all along. He hadn’t known it and she hadn’t, so who was to blame?