Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

I saw myself landed in jail, with my job gone and Mu worried sick, but somehow I went ahead and started inching the lower pane up from the bottom. It was like something had hold of me that was beyond my control, wouldn’t let me quit. I think it was that wailing, that seemed to keep asking for help and nobody listened.

It was making me feel sorta crazy. I had to stop it, somehow...

When I had the lower pane even with the top, I eased across onto the floor, but careful where I put my feet. You could see an orange line along the floor where the door to the next room was, and you could hear their voices clear and loud every once in awhile, like they were playing cards.

One bed was empty but the other had a bundle of old clothes on it. The wailing was coming right from the middle of them. I shifted my body between them and the room door, and lit a match, and held it covered by my hands so it wouldn’t glow much. There was a little bit of a crinkled red face staring up at me from the middle of all the blankets and things. The top one was pinned down on both sides so it couldn’t fall off the bed. It had a pale-blue initial down in the corner of it; E.

Their name, here, was supposed to be Harris; I had it on my order slip. E. Ellerton began with E. Something tickled my forehead for a minute, and it was a drop of sweat.

I don’t think I’d have had the nerve to go ahead and do it, if they’d kept quiet. I think I’d have backed out again the way I came in, and maybe just gone looking for the cop on the beat and told him what I suspected. Because if I took it out of here without being sure, it meant I was just doing to them what somebody else had done to the Ellertons. Lots of people give their kids oranges and special milk, and the blanket could have been borrowed from a relative.

But all of a sudden a man’s voice said real irritable in the next room, “Can’t you do something to shut it up? I’m going wacky! Go out and see if the milkman left that bilge you ast for, maybe that’ll quiet it.” I kind of lost my head altogether when I heard her footsteps tap-tap down the hall to the front-door. I knew I had to get out in a hurry, couldn’t stand there trying to make up my mind any more, and it took all my presence of mind away. Before I knew what I was doing I started unfastening the safety-pins; I never knew how tricky they were to open until then, it seemed to take me a week to get rid of them.

Then I grabbed up the whole bundle of blankets, kid and all, and backed out the window with them.

It was shorter to go back up to the roof with it than to try to climb all the way down the front of the building to the street. I went up the tricky iron slats fast this time, noise or no noise, and across, and down the inside stairs. I had to get down past their floor before they came out and cut me off.

I just made it. I could hear the commotion, hear the woman yelp, “It’s gone!” as I flashed down and around the landing, but they hadn’t opened their door yet. It was wailing the whole time, but in broken snatches now, not one long stretch, like it liked the hurry and shaking I was giving it.

I ran faster.

I tore out to the wagon with it and shoved it in. It had to go right on the ice, where the butter and stuff was, and I knew that wasn’t going to be good for it, but it couldn’t be helped. Maybe the cold would take awhile to work through all those layers of blankets.

They came racing out right at my heels. All I had time to do was go, “Chk chk” to Mamie and get her to start on with it, reach down to pick up my trays, when they were standing all around me. There were three of them and they were still all in their shirt sleeves. One of them had a gun out in his hand and didn’t care who saw it.

He snarled, “Hey, you! Did anybody just come out of that door?”

He had a real ugly look to him. “Well, did they or didn’t they?” he said again.

When he put it that way, why should I say no? “Yeah,” I said, “a fellow just came out ahead of you, carrying some laundry. He went up that way.” I pointed to the opposite direction from Mamie. The clop-clop of her hoofs and the creak of the wheels drowned out the wailing, from where we were standing. She was starting to slow again, at the next house down, so I went, “Chk chk” again. She turned and looked back at me, as if to say: “Are you crazy, skipping our next stop like this?” but she went on toward the corner.

I didn’t think they’d believe me, Mil says she can always tell when I’m lying, but I guess they didn’t know me as well as she does.

“Laundry, eh?” the one with the gun said viciously, and they turned and went streaming up toward where I’d pointed, one behind the other. “Hijacked right under our noses!” I heard one of them mutter.

The other one cursed back over his shoulder as they ran.

The woman came out just as they started off. She wasn’t crying or anything, she just looked sore and mean. “I’m not staying up there to hold the bag!” she said, and went skittering after them.

I picked up my trays and started after Mamie and the wagon, but I kept going, “Chk chk” so she wouldn’t stop and uncover that wailing sound. A minute after they’d gone around that upper corner I heard a shot ring out. Maybe they’d run into the cop on the beat, and he didn’t like people to come around corners with guns in their hands at that hour. But by that time I’d caught up to the wagon and climbed up behind Mamie. I didn’t hang around waiting to find out what it was, I passed up all the rest of my deliveries and lit out.

Mamie put on speed willingly enough, but I had a hard time with her. She kept trying to head back to the division stable, like other nights when we got through. The papers had said the Ellertons lived at 75 Mount Pleasant Drive. I didn’t have any trouble remembering that, it had been repeated over and over. It was on the outskirts of the city, along Jorgensen’s route.

The nearer I got to it, the more scared I got. I was more scared now than even when I took it out of the room and up the fire-escape with me. Suppose — suppose it wasn’t the one? That was why I didn’t stop and turn it over to a cop on the way; he wouldn’t know any more than I did, Mrs. Ellerton was the only one would know for sure, and I wanted to get the suspense over with as quickly as I could.

A block away from where they lived I remembered to take it up off the ice. I laid it across my lap on the driver’s seat and kept it from falling off with one hand. The outside blanket was kind of cold already, but the inside ones were still warm. It quit wailing and looked up at me with its weazened little face, like it enjoyed riding like that. I grinned at it and it kind of opened its mouth and grinned back, only it didn’t have any teeth.

Their place was all lit up when I got there, with a bunch of cars lined up in front of it. I found a place for Mamie to pull up in, and got down and carried it up to the house with me under one arm. I noticed it was facing upside down, so I stopped a minute and turned it right side up so they wouldn’t get sore.

A man opened the door the minute I rang the bell, like he’d been standing there waiting all night. I started, “Will you ask Mrs. Ellerton if this is her baby—?” but I never got any further than that. He snatched it away from me before I knew what happened. So fast, in fact, that the whole outside blanket fell off it onto the floor.

There were a lot of people in the room behind him, and they all started to get very excited. A man started to call someone’s name in a thick, choked voice, and a lady in a pink dressing gown came flying down the stairs so fast it’s a wonder she didn’t trip.

She never said from first to last whether it was hers or not, all she did was grab it up and hold it to her and sort of waltz around with it, so I guess it was.