Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

“Here, wrap yourself around this,” I said. I passed him a pint I happened to have on my tray. It was only a dime out of my own pocket, anyway. He started to pull at the hinge cap like he couldn’t get it off fast enough. He needed it so bad he even forgot to say thanks, which is needing a thing bad all right.

“Take it easy,” I warned him gruffly, “or you’ll give yourself the bends. Bring me down the empty when you’re through.”

Afterward I watched him meander on up the street away from there. I don’t feel sorry for him, I said to myself, he’s only eighteen or nineteen; couple years from now he’ll be making more than I do myself.

Mamie turned her head around and looked at me, much as to say: You’re telling me?

I ran into a sort of minor commotion on the second floor, half a dozen houses further along. A guy was trying to get in Mrs. Hatchett’s door. He belonged in there, but she wouldn’t let him come in. He was plenty lush.

“I warned you!” her voice came back shrilly from the inside, “I warned you next time you came home in that condition I’d lock you out!”

He heard me going by on my way up, and took me into his confidence a hall-length away. “‘S a disgrashe, tha’s what it is! Her own husband!”

“Sure,” I said inattentively. “Sure,” and went on up.

When I came down again, he was very quiet all of a sudden, and I thought the light on the hall walls looked different, kind of flickering. I dropped my trays with a bang and sprinted down to him. He’d hauled some newspapers up against the door seam and put a match to them. I stiff-armed him away and he toppled over into a sitting position. I stamped them out, and then I hammered good and businesslike on the door myself. She seemed to know the difference right away, she came back again.

“You better take him inside with you, lady, before he burns the building down!” I said.

“Oh, so tha’s the kind of a guy you are!” he said offendedly. “Well now I don’t wanna go in no more, how do you like that?”

She opened the door, cracked a whiplike “Get in here!” at him, that brought him submissively to his feet and made him sidle cringingly by her without a word. She only came up to his shoulders.

“Sometimes,” I told Mamie downstairs, “I don’t think I appreciate you half enough.”

I’d never liked the next house over. It was as old as all the others, but had been done over to comply with the housing regulations. That only made it worse, it attracted a lot of fly-bynights who weren’t bound by leases, here today and gone tomorrow; they were always skipping out and gypping me out of my collections. I’d been held up in here once too, six months before, and I hadn’t forgotten it.

I only needed one tray for this house; most of the tenants weren’t great milk-drinkers. I only had one customer on the whole top floor and she was three weeks overdue on her bill. I delivered her order, and a note with it. “No doubt it has escaped your attention—” Like hell it had. You couldn’t get her to answer her doorbell on collection days; she lay low in there. At least she hadn’t moved out, that was something.

On the floor below, the fifth, I had a new customer, dating from the previous week. When I went over to the door, they’d left a note out for me — in the neck of a beer-bottle!

Lieve us a bottle of your Sun-Ray milk, we would like to try it out.

E-5.

While I was standing there puzzling out the scrawl — and it took plenty of puzzling out the way it was written — I could hear the faint wail of a kid coming from inside the flat. Like a kitten left out in the rain, that weak and thin.

It was a sad sort of sound; made me feel sorta blue.

I hadn’t really expected any orders for Sun-Ray, not around this district. It cost twenty-two a quart, pretty steep for these kind of people. I’d brought just one bottle along with me in the wagon, in case I needed it. I went downstairs again to get it. I thought: Michaelman was right, they are starting to call for it, like he said. Starting early—

That reminded me of the Ellerton case. The photostat of the ransom note she’d found this morning in the kid’s bed, which all the papers had shown, came before me again like when Mil had shown it to me. “Lieve the money—” These people upstairs didn’t know how to spell that word either. Such an easy word, too, you wouldn’t think anyone would trip over it. And here were two different note-writers, both in the same day, doing it.

Two different note-writers—?

That started a new train of thought, and my jaw sagged.

I looked up at the windows from the sidewalk. One was lit up, with the shade down all the way, but the other was dark. I was thinking. Funny, there was no kid around when I was in there Monday collecting for the first week. Now they’ve got one all of a sudden, just like that! And even if it was out being aired when I was up there, there would have been some of its clothes or something around, and there weren’t any. Ours always has its — those whaddye-call-it three-cornered things — hanging all around the place. And then I was remembering something else, even stranger. When she left me for a minute to get the change to pay me, I spotted all the milk I’d delivered up to then, five bottles of it, standing untouched under the sink. If they didn’t use it, why did they order it and pay for it? Unless they expected ahead of time to need some milk in the place, but didn’t know just when it was going to be, and wanted to be ready with it when the time came.

There was something sort of chilly about that thought.

I went upstairs again with the delivery they’d asked for. The wailing was still going on, until I got right opposite the door. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Close that door, it drives me nuts!” and the sound died down, you couldn’t hear it any more. So the kid wasn’t in the same room with them.

That diet that Mrs. Ellerton had asked the papers to print for her, it had something else in it too. Oh yeah, oranges. A lot of orange juice.

There was an incinerator door down the hall. I went down there and opened it quietly and looked in. The kind of people that lived here were too lazy to throw the stuff down the chute, just chucked it in behind the door. There was a bag in the corner that had split open from its own fall; it had half-a-dozen orange rinds in it.

I went downstairs again. I felt nervous and spooky, and wished I knew what to do. I wondered if I was making a fool out of myself, and half of me said I was, and the other half of me said I wasn’t.

It was the kind of a toss-up that makes a man pretty darned uncomfortable.

Mamie started to amble down to the next stop when she saw me. I said, “Whoa,” and she stayed where she was, but turned to look around at me kind of questioningly, as if to say, “What’s taking you so long in there tonight?”

I lit a cigarette and stared inside of my wagon, without seeing anything, if you know what I mean. All of a sudden I’d thrown the cigarette down and was going inside a third time, without exactly knowing how it happened. My feet seemed to carry me along of their own accord. I’d left my trays outside.

I went all the way up to the roof this time. The roof-door was only held by a hook on the inside. I got out through it without any trouble. I tiptoed across the tar and gravel and started climbing down the fire escape that served the front windows of the house. I had to go real slow, I wasn’t much used to fire escapes. I thought, “If a cop comes along and looks up and sees me—” but I kept going down anyway.

When I got down level with the fifth floor, I couldn’t see in the lighted window, the shade was fitted to it skin-tight. I was scared stiff the thing would creak under me. I crept over to the dark one next to it. I put the edge of my hands up against the pane and tried to squint through them. All I could make out was a couple of white shapes like beds. But the window was open a couple of inches from the top, and I could hear that same faint wail out here like I had in the hall.