Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

“He didn’t build it just to keep in practice! He did it to get the bricks in here from the contractor. More than he needed. He put it up just to have an excuse to order them. Who’s going to count — Don’t stand there! Get an ax, a crowbar; help me break this thing down! Don’t you see what this dummy wall is for? Don’t you see what we’ll find—”

The detective had been slower in grasping it, but he finally got it, too. His own face went gray. “Which one is it?”

“It must be on this side, the side that’s the shortest distance from the window, door, and light fixture.” Bliss rushed up to it, began to pound it with his clenched fists, up and down, sounding it out. Sweat flew literally off his face like raindrops in a stiff wind.

The detective bolted out of the room, sent an excited yell at the open front door:

“Cochrane! Come in here, give us a hand, bring tools!”

Between the two of them they dug up a hatchet, a crowbar, cold chisel, and bung starter. “That wall,” the detective explained tersely for the constable’s benefit, without going into details. Cochrane didn’t argue; one look at both their faces must have told him that some unspeakable horror was on the way to revelation.

Bliss was leaning sideways against it by now, perfectly still, head lowered almost as though he were trying to hear something through it. He wasn’t. His head was lowered with the affliction of discovery. “I’ve found it,” he said stifledly. “I’ve found — the place. Listen.” He pounded once or twice. There was the flat impact of solidity. He moved farther over, pounded again. This time there was the deeper resonance of a partly, or only imperfectly, filled orifice. “Half bricks, with a hollow behind them. Elsewhere, whole bricks, mortar behind them.”

Stillman stripped his coat off, spit on his hands. “Better get out of the room — in case you’re right,” he suggested, flying at it with the hatchet, to knock off the plaster. “Wait outside the door; we’ll call you—”

“No! I’ve got to know, I’ve got to see. Three of us are quicker than two.” And he began chipping off the plaster coating with the cutting edge of the chisel. Cochrane cracked it for them with the bung starter. A cloud of dust hovered about them while they hacked away. Finally, they had laid bare an upright, coffin-shaped segment of pinkish-white brickwork in the plaster finish of the wall.

They started driving the chisel in between the interstices of the brick ends, Stillman steadying it, Cochrane driving it home with the bung starter. They changed to the crowbar, started to work that as a lever, when they’d pierced a big enough space.

“Look out. One of them’s working out.”

A fragment of brick ricocheted halfway across the room, dropped with a thud. A second one followed. A third. Bliss started to claw at the opening with his bare nails, to enlarge it faster.

“You’re only impeding us; we can get at it faster this way,” Stillman said, pushing him aside. A gray fill of imperfectly dried clayey mortar was being laid bare. It was only a shell; flakes of it, like dried mud, had begun dropping off and out, some of their own weight, others with the impact of their blows, long before they had opened more than a “window” in the brickwork façade.

“Get back,” Stillman ordered. His purpose was to protect Bliss from the full impact of discovery that was about to ensue.

Bliss obeyed him at last, staggered over to the other end of the room, stood there with his back to them as if he were looking out the window. Only the window was farther over. A spasmodic shiver went down his back every so often. He could hear the pops and thuds as brick fragments continued to drop out of the wall under the others’ efforts, then a sudden engulfing silence.

He turned his head just in time to see them lowering something from the niche in the wall. An upright something. A rigid, mummified, columnar something that resembled nothing so much as a log covered with mortar. The scant remainder of bricks that still held it fast below, down toward the floor, shattered, spilled down in a little freshet as they wrenched it free. A haze of kindly concealing dust veiled them from him. For a minute or two they were just white shadows working over something, and then they had this thing lying on the floor. A truncated thing without any human attributes whatever, like the mold around a cast metal statue — but with a core that was something else again.

“Get out of here, Bliss,” Stillman growled. “This is no place for you!”

Wild horses couldn’t have dragged Bliss away. He was numbed beyond feeling now, anyway. The whole scene had been one that could never again be forgotten by a man who had once lived through it.

“Not with that,” he protested, as he saw the crouching Stillman flick open the large blade of a penknife.

“It’s the only thing I can use! Go out and get us some water, see if we can soften this stuff up a little, dissolve it.”

When Bliss came back with a pail of it, Stillman was working away cautiously at one end of the mound, shaving a little with the knife blade, probing and testing with his fingers. He desisted suddenly, flashed the constable a mutely eloquent look, shifted up to the opposite end. Bliss, staring with glazed eyes, saw a stubby bluish-black wedge peering through where he had been working — the tip of a woman’s shoe.

“Upside down at that,” grunted Cochrane, trying not to let Bliss overhear him. The latter’s teeth were chattering with nervous shock.

“I told you to get out of here!” Stillman flared for the third and last time. “Your face is driving me crazy!” With as little effect as before.

Fine wires seemed to hold some of it together, even after he had pared it with the knife blade. He wet the palms of his hands in the pail of water, kneaded and crumbled it between them in those places. What had seemed like stiff wires were strands of human hair.

“That’s enough,” he said finally in a sick voice. “There’s someone there; that’s all I wanted to be sure of. I don’t know how to go about the rest of it, much; an expert’ll have to attend to that.”

“Them devils,” growled Cochrane deep in his throat.

Bliss suddenly toppled down between them, so abruptly they both thought he had fainted for a minute. “Stillman!” he said in a low throbbing voice. He was almost leaning across the thing. “These wisps of hair — Look! They show through dark, bluish-black! She was blond! Like an angel. It’s somebody else!”

Stillman nodded, held his forehead dazedly. “Sure, it must be. I don’t have to go by that; d’you know what should have told me from the beginning? Your wife’s only been missing since Tuesday night, three days ago. The condition of the mortar shows plainly that this job’s been up for weeks past. Why, the paint on the outside of the wall would have hardly been dry yet, let alone the fill in back of it. Apart from that, it would have been humanly impossible to put up such a job single-handed in three days. We both lost our heads; it shows you it doesn’t pay to get excited.

“It’s the mother, that’s who it is. There’s your answer for the discrepancy in the handwriting on the two notes, the snapshot, and that business about the nickname that puzzled you. Come on, stand up and lean on me, we’re going to find out where he keeps his liquor. You need a drink if a man ever did!”

They found some in a cupboard out in the kitchen, sat down for a minute. Bliss looked as if he’d been pulled through a knothole. The constable had gone out on wobbly legs to get a breath of fresh air.

Bliss put the bottle down and started to look alive again.

“I think I’ll have a gulp myself,” Stillman said. “I’m not a drinking man, but that was one of the nastiest jobs in there just now I’ve ever been called on to participate in.”