Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“Something’s happened!” he blurted. “That’s not in the scene! I know, because they were rehearsing it all morning—”

It was Meadows’ maid. Only she was almost white now. Her voice was gone from fright. “Oh, somebody — quick, somebody!” she panted. “I’ve been hammering on this door—” But she wasn’t the victim. The screaming went right on behind her.

I rushed in, the guard with me. The sight that met us was ghastly. Martha Meadows, with the cameras still playing on her, was burning to death there before everyone’s eyes. She was a living torch, a funnel of fire from head to foot, and screaming her life away. She was running blindly here and there, like some kind of a horrible human pin wheel, and they were all trying to overtake her and catch her to throw something over her and put the flames out. But she was already out of her head, mad with agony, and kept eluding them, ducking and doubling back and forth with hellish agility. What kept her going like that, with her life going up in blazing yellow-white gushes, I don’t understand. I’ll see that scene for years to come.

But I didn’t stand there watching. I flung myself at her bodily, head first right into the flames in a football tackle. With stinging hands I grasped something soft and quivering behind that glow that had once been cool, human flesh. The pillar of fire toppled over and lay horizontal along the ground, with the flames foreshortened now and just licking upward all around it like bright scallops. With that, a blanket or something was thrown over her, and partly over me, too. As it fell with a puff of horrid black smoke spurting out all around the edges, the last scream stopped and she was still.

I held my breath, so as not to inhale any of the damned stuff. I could feel rescuing hands beating all around the two of us through the blanket. After a minute I picked myself up. My hands were smarting, my shirt cuffs were scorched brown in places and peeling back, and sparks had eaten into the front of my suit. Otherwise I was alright. But what lay under the blanket didn’t move. Five minutes ago one of the most beautiful girls in America, and now something it was better not to look at if you had a weak stomach.

As if in gruesome jest, the winking eyes of the cameras were still turned upon her and, in the deathly silence that had now fallen, you could hear the whirring noise that meant they were still grinding away. No one had thought of signalling them to stop.

The guard who had been outside the door, though, had had the presence of mind to send in a call for help even before the flames had been beaten out. The studio had a first-aid station of its own a door or two away, and two men arrived with a stretcher and carried her out with them, still under the blanket. Nellie went with them, bellowing like a wounded steer and calling: “Oh, Lawd, oh Lawd, don’t do this to my lamb! Change yo’ mind, change yo’ mind!”

Stormann was shaking like a leaf and incoherent with shock, and had to be fed whiskey by one of the electricians. The girl with the notebook, the script-girl, was the only one there who seemed to have kept her head about her. I went up to her, dabbing some oil they’d given me onto the red patches on the back of my hands and wrists, and asked: “How’d it happen?”

It turned out she wasn’t as bright as I thought she’d be. “It happened right here,” she said. “I was following very closely, the way I’m supposed to — that’s my job.” I looked to find out where “here” was, but instead of pointing any place on the set, she was pointing at her book.

“See — where it says ‘Oh won’t he ever come?’ That’s her line. She’s supposed to be waiting by the window for her lover. Well, she spoke it alright, and then the next thing I knew, there was a funny flickering light on the pages of my book. When I looked up, I saw that it was coming from her. She had flames all over her. Well, just from force of habit, I quickly looked back at the book to find out whether or not this was part—”

I gave her up as a complete nut. Or at least a very efficient script-girl but a washout otherwise. I tackled Stormann next. He was on his third or fourth bracer by now and wringing his hands and moaning something about: “My picture, my beautiful picture—”

“Pull yourself together,” I snapped. “Isn’t there anyone around here who has a heart? She’s thinking about her book, you’re thinking about your picture. Well, I’m thinking about that poor miserable girl. Maybe you can tell me how it happened. You’re the director and you’re supposed to have been watching what went on!”

Probably no one had ever spoken to him that way in years. His mouth dropped open. I grabbed him by the shoulder, took his snifter away from him, and gave him a shake. “Let me have it, brother, before I go sour on you. I’m asking you for your testimony — as a witness. You can consider this a preliminary inquest.”

I hadn’t forgotten that it was his doing I’d been kept out of here earlier, either. Seeing that he wasn’t up against one of his usual yes-men, he changed his mind and gave until it hurt. “No one was near her at the time, I can’t understand what could have caused it. I was right here on the side-lines where I always sit, she was over there by that win—”

“Yeah, I know all that. Here’s what I’m asking you. Did you or did you not see what did it?” Not liking him, I got nasty with him and tapped him ten times on the chest with the point of my finger, once for each word, so it would sink in. The idea of anyone doing that to him was so new to him he didn’t dare let out a peep. “No,” he said, like a little kid in school.

“You didn’t. Well, was anyone smoking a cigarette in here?”

“Absolutely not!” he said. “No director allows it, except when the scene calls for it. The lenses would pick up the haze—”

“Did she touch any wires, maybe?”

“There aren’t any around, you can see for yourself. This whole thing’s supposed to be the inside of an old mansion.”

“What about this thing?” I picked up a lighted oil lamp that was standing on the fake window sill, but when I looked, I saw that it had an electric pocket-torch hidden in it. I put it down again. “Who was playing the scene with her? She wasn’t alone in it, was she?”

“Ruth Tobias. That girl crying over there.” I let him go back to his pain-killer and went over to tackle her. She was having grade-A hysterics across the back of a chair, but, as I might have known, on her own account, not poor Meadows’.

“Two whole years—” she gurgled, “two whole years to make a come back. I’ve waited — and now, look! They won’t hire me again. I’m getting older—”

“Alright sis, turn off the faucets,” I said. “Uncle wants to ask you something. What happened to her?”

She had on one of the same wide dresses as the kid had, but she was gotten up to look older — black gloves and a lorgnette with her hair in a cranky knot. At that, she wasn’t out of her twenties yet, but looked as though she’d been used as a filling-station for a bootlegger while she was out of work the last few years.

“I played her older sister,” she sniffled, “although they really had a nerve to cast me in an older part like that. I had to take anything I could get. I was in that rocker there on the set, facing her way. I’m supposed not to approve of the fellow she’s intending to run off with, but all I do to show it is to keep rocking back and forth. She had her back to me, over at the window — I tell you I was looking right at her and all of a sudden, fffi, she was on fire from head to foot! As quickly as that, and for no earthly reason that I could make out! All I had time to do was jump back out of the way myself—”