Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

Bliss kept shaking his head baffledly. “No. No. That may sound plausible, but I know that isn’t it. It’s not me, it’s the room itself. I’ll admit I’m all keyed up, but I noticed it already the other night when I wasn’t half so keyed up. Another thing: I don’t get it in any of the other rooms in this house; I only get it in here.”

“I don’t like the way you’re talking; I think you’re starting to crack up under the strain,” Stillman let him know, but he hung around in the doorway for a few minutes, watching him curiously, while Bliss sat there motionless, clasped hands hanging from the back of his neck now.

“Did you get it yet?”

Bliss raised his head, shook it mutely, chewing the corner of his mouth. “It’s one of those things; when you try too hard for it, it escapes you altogether. It’s only when you’re sort of not thinking about it that you notice it. The harder I try to pin it down, the more elusive it becomes.”

“Sure,” said Stillman with a look of sympathetic concern, “and if you sit around in here brooding about it much more, I’ll be taking you back with me in a straitjacket. Come on, we’ve only got ten more minutes to make that bus.”

Bliss got reluctantly to his feet. “There it goes,” he said. “I’ll never get it now.”

“Ah, you talk like these guys that keep trying to communicate with spirits through a ouija board,” Stillman let him know, locking up the front door after them. “The whole thing was a wild-goose chase.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Well, what’d we get out of it?”

“Nothing. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t around here waiting to be seen. It’s just that we’ve missed seeing it, whatever it is.”

“There’s not a sign of her around that house. Not a sign of her ever having been there. Not a sign of violence.”

“And I know that, by going away from here, we’re turning our backs on whatever there is to be learned about what became of her. We’ll never find out at the other end, in the city. I nearly had it, too, when I was sitting in there. Just as I was about to get it, it would slip away from me again. Talk about torture!”

Stillman lost his temper. “Will you lay off that room! If there was anything the matter with it, I’d notice it as well as you. My eyes are just as good, my brains are just as good. What’s the difference between you and me?” The question was only rhetorical.

“You’re a detective and I’m an architect,” Bliss said inattentively, answering it as asked.

“Are you fellows going to stand there arguing all night?” the constable called from the other side of the wall.

They went out and got into the open car, started off. Bliss felt like groaning: “Good-bye, Smiles.” Just as they reached the turn of the road that would have swept the house out of sight once they rounded it, Stillman happened to glance back for no particular reason, at almost the very last possible moment that it could still be seen in a straight line behind them.

“Hold it,” he ejaculated, thumbing a slim bar of light narrowed by perspective. “We left the lights on in that last room we were in.”

The constable braked promptly. “Have to go back and turn them off, or they’ll—”

“We haven’t time now, we’ll miss the bus,” Stillman cut in. “It’s due in six more minutes. Drive us down to the crossroads first, and then you come back afterward and put them out yourself.”

“No!” Bliss cried out wildly, jumping to his feet. “This has a meaning to it! I’m not passing this up! I want another look at those lights; they’re asking me to, they’re begging me to!” Before either one of them could stop him, he had jumped down from the side of the car without bothering to unlatch the door. He started to run back up the road, deaf to Stillman’s shouts and imprecations.

“Come back here, you welsher! You gave me your word of honor!”

A moment later the detective’s feet hit the ground and he started after his prisoner. But Bliss had already turned in through the opening in the wall, was flinging himself bodily against the door, without waiting for any master key this time. The infuriated detective caught him by the shoulder, swung him violently around, when he had reached him.

“Take your hands off me!” Bliss said hoarsely. “I’m going to get in there!”

Stillman swung at him and missed. Instead of returning the blow, Bliss threw his whole weight against the door for the last time. There was a rendering and splintering of wood, and it shot inward, leaving the whole lock intact against the frame. Bliss went flailing downward on his face into the hallway. He scrambled erect, reached the inner doorway, put his hand inside, and put the lights out without looking into the room.

“It’s when they go on that counts,” he panted.

The only reason Stillman wasn’t grappling with him was that he couldn’t locate him for a minute in the dark. The switch clicked a second time. Light flashed from the dazzingly calcimined ceiling. Bliss was standing directly in the middle of the opening as it did so, just as he had been the first night.

Stillman was down the hall a few steps, couldn’t see his face for a minute. “Well?” he asked.

Bliss turned to him without saying anything. The look on his face answered for him. He’d gotten what he wanted.

“Why, they’re not in the center of the ceiling! They’re offside. That’s what made them seem glaring, unexpected. They took my eyes by surprise. I’ve got professionally trained eyes, remember. They didn’t go on where I expected them to, but a little farther over. And now that I have that much, I have it all.” He gripped Stillman excitedly by the biceps. “Now I see what’s wrong with the room. Now I see why I found it so unrestful. It’s out of true.”

“What?”

“Out of proportion. Look. Look at that window. It’s not in the center of that wall. And d’you see how cleverly they’ve tried to cover the discrepancy? A thin, skinny, up-and-down picture on the short side; a big, wide, fat one on the longer side. That creates an optical illusion, makes both sides seem even. Now come over here and look this way.” He pulled the detective in after him, turned him around by the shoulder. “Sure, same thing with the door frame; that’s not dead center, either. But the door opens inward into the room, swings to that short side and partly screens it, throws a shadow over it, so that takes care of that. What else? What else?”

He kept pivoting feverishly, sweeping his glance around on all sides. “Oh, sure, the rug. I was sitting here and I dropped some ashes and looked down at the floor. See what bothered me about that? Again there’s an unbalance. See the margin of polished woodwork running around on three sides of it? And on the fourth side it runs right smack up against the baseboard of the wall. Your eye wants proportion, symmetry; it’s got to have it in all things. If it doesn’t get it, it’s uncomfortable. It wants that dark strip of woodwork on all four sides, or else the rug should touch all four baseboards, like a carpet—”

He was talking slower and slower, like a record that’s running down. Some sort of tension was mounting in him, gripping him, Stillman could tell by looking at him. He panted the last few words out, as if it took all his strength to produce them, and then his voice died away altogether, without a period.

“What’re you getting so white around the gills for?” the detective demanded. “Suppose the room is lopsided, what then? Your face is turning all green—”

Bliss had to grab him by the shoulder for a minute for support. His voice was all furry with dawning horror. “Because — because — don’t you see what it means? Don’t you see why it’s that way? One of these walls is a dummy wall, built out in front of the real one.” His eyes were dilated with unbelieving horror. He clawed insensately at his own hair. “It all hangs together so damnably! He was a mason before he married her mother; I told you that. The storekeeper down at the crossroads said that Alden built a low brick wall in front of the house, ‘just to keep in practice,’ he guessed. No reason for it. It wasn’t high enough for privacy, it didn’t even run around all four sides of the plot.