Hamilton Craigie - The Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 2, No. 2 — November 1920)

Some knowledge of the construction of stores seemed to be at his command. To the left of the building’s narrow, wooden stairway was a single door—a door that opened into the back room or rooms of the fish market. The man tested its china knob, found it did not respond to his touch and lighted a match, cupping it in the palm of his hands. He held the light aloft, perceived the glass transom over the door, smiled faintly and plunged his light out.

In the murk he fumbled for his folded envelope. He dropped some more of its powder on his hand and inhaled it.

He listened for a minute before mounting a few steps of the stairway.

When he was opposite the transom he leaned over the rail of the stairway and pushed it in with the palms of both hands. To his infinite relief it swung in, squeaking rustily.

He listened again and made his way down the steps.

He wound a dirty handkerchief about the china knob of the door, removed his shoes, placed his left foot on the knob and caught the ledge of the transom.

With sinuous agility he drew himself up and over the sill, wriggling through the small space made by the open transom and dropping with scarce a sound to the floor on the inner side of the door.

It was too dark to ascertain what his surroundings were, so he stood motionless, straining his ears. Suddenly, so close that he recoiled, he heard a sibilant sigh and the creak of bed springs. He drew his brows together again and fingered his lips. It was impossible that he had erred; in all probability this room was a chamber adjoining the fish store — the bedroom of the old woman the two conspirators had spoken of. He decided there must be a door near at hand that opened into the store itself and determined to locate it forthwith.

With the deep, even breathing of the sleeper in his ears, the man followed his sense of direction and groped a careful way forward. With each step his blood warmed within him. Two grands in crook parlance meant two thousand dollars. It was a sum worth striving for. With that amount of money in his possession he could fulfill long cherished ambitions. He could buy enough dope to lead him into a Castle of Dreams; put the city he had entered so recently from him and journey to the coast. The key to all wishes was before him—in a hidden drawer under the counter in a fish store.

The outstretched hand of the man slid over another door. They touched a knob and turned it. The second door did not yield and was keyless. He stood still for a minute, thinking. The woman who owned the shop was canny. She evidently understood the difficulty of breaking in from the outside, and by locking the connecting door and secreting the key made doubly difficult the felon’s progress.

The man turned his head in the direction of the bed. He must possess the key that opened the door or the expedition would be fruitless. He drew the leather covered billy from his pocket and slipped the thong about his wrist. He debated briefly whether it was advisable to wake the sleeper and demand the key or to use the blackjack immediately and search for it at his leisure. His ruminations were abruptly terminated by a sharp inquiry that cut the gloom like a knife:

“Who is there?”

The man stiffened, his fingers winding about the neck of the blackjack. The bed creaked again and two soft footfalls sounded one after the other. He strove to pierce the curtain of blackness with his eyes, but failed. In some way the sleeper had become aware of his presence; he heard hurried, rattling breathing that was an indication of fear.

His fingers about the blackjack grew still tighter.

The dull patter of feet moving preceded the rasp of a key being turned warily in the door that opened into the hall of the tenement. Even though frightened, the woman was not losing her head. She intended preparing an exit if escape became necessary and a vantage point from which she could both survey the bedchamber and raise a quick alarm if her suspicions proved, to be correct.

A dozen rapid steps carried the man across the darkened expanse of room. He brought himself up short as he collided with an unseen figure, clutching a withered throat with his left hand and effectually preventing a scream from surging to lips opened to receive it. At the same moment he thrust the weight of his body forward in such fashion as to put himself next to the door and forced the woman away from it.

“Where’s the key to the other door?”

He released the pressure of his hand on the throat sufficiently to permit a weak voice trembling with terror to croak a panted answer:

“Under—the—mattress—”

Savage elation brought the teeth of the man together with a grinding click. He began to force the woman across the room, laughing at the puny, feeble blows she struck wildly at him. He dug his fingers deeper into the thin throat, an old lust to kill swimming in his blood. He strove to see how far he might choke her before insensibility came, laughing louder at the faint moans and series of agonized gasps that came just before the mad, futile blows ceased and she staggered in his clutch.

Then wearying of the sport and mindful that time was flying, he used his blackjack twice, flung his victim across the bed and delved under the mattress...

The following morning, Abraham Wolger, at the desk in his West Street hotel, looked up from the third morning edition of his favorite paper and addressed a burly youth who was sweeping out the uncarpeted lobby with a worn broom.

“Look it, Jake,” he said, stabbing the newspaper with his stubby finger. “Last night was a murder in a fish store up on Eleventh Avenue. Two thousand dollars was stole and the old woman what owned it got murdered. Ain’t it funny? It says right here she was Mrs. Cragen, the mother of that Guerilla what croaked that guy in a bank four years ago this month—the same guy I was telling you looked just like a man who registered here last night and never showed up again.”

The youth with the broom fingered a twisted ear.

“Was there any pinches made?” he asked succinctly

The proprietor of the hotel looked back at his paper.

“Yes—the cops grabbed the two guys as they were coming out—a coupla friends of Tip Regan they were. They didn’t find the two grands on them, the paper says, but what difference does it make? The chair for both of them sure! Honest, Jake, guys like that who would croak a widow woman ought to get burned in the chair...”

At two bells The Boy determined to commit murder.

It was no swift decision. On the night the Libertine lifted anchor at Melbourne—and Black Michael flogged him with a rawhide lash — the desire to slay had been impregnated in him, a terrible sore whose putrifying poison daily seeped into his blood and brain.

Quite suddenly, standing there in the shadow of the long-boat, he perceived the death of his soul. Black Michael was responsible. He had inoculated him with a dreadful serum of evil that wiped out the germs of his strength; had proceeded, while he was in this weakened condition, to loot his being of all finer instincts. For that Black Michael must die.

The avenger. That was his role. Tonight he would become the champion of his slain self and write in crimson the final chapter of a bitter story.

As he stood there on the deck, swaying with the drunken pitch of the two-masted, square-rigged vessel, it all came back to him—came back for the millionth time, with a burning sharpness that made him visualize, as though etched with steel upon his brain, the lamp-lit Australian water-front, the slinking shadows along the quay; made him feel, as if experiencing again, the sickening emotions following the blow and the return to consciousness in the hold of the trading brig bound for eleven degrees south of the equator.