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

The blackness has spread all over his body like lightning and shows up in the veins in his throat and on his wrists, as if ink had been poured into his arteries. Nothing to be done, he isn’t breathing. We pour the whiskey into his open mouth, but when we tilt his head to make it go down it comes right back again.

I pass him to Vin and get out from under and go down and take a miniature Keeley cure right then and there. It isn’t because he’s Mary’s old man or because it happened right in my arms, it’s those terrific spasms and that blackness that have gotten me. I get over it in a minute and we bring him down off the landing between us and lay him out. Then I let the kid have a double bracer and the hell with his extra growth.

We look at him lying there on the divan, stiff as a ramrod, and I try to flex his arms and legs. A peculiar muscular rigidity has already set in all over, even in those few minutes. I’m no medical student but I know it can’t be rigor mortis that soon. This is the United States, but this was an unrecognizable death, a sudden, thrashing, black, tropical death — here in the States.

“Get your hat,” I say to Vin, “and thumb yourself down into town and bring back the medical expert. Damn this place anyway for not having a telephone!” I push him out the door.

Now there are only four of us left in the house, two of them women and one a dead man, and the moon’s peeping in at all the windows and filling the place with black shadows. From the minute the kid’s dogs have left the wooden porch, you don’t hear another sound outside, not the snapping of a twig, not the rustling of a dry leaf.

I’m not scared of stiffs. That’s because of the unpleasant business I’m in. I cover his face to hide the blackness and then I pull down all the shades to keep the nosey moon out.

Then, as I start up the stairs to break the news to Mary, I see a thread hanging, moving in the air above the landing where he fell. It shows up against the light shining down from the upstairs hall, and that’s how I happen to notice it.

It’s a cigarette burning itself out where he dropped it when he fell. It’s the same one she gave him when I left them before the fire. I said those Russian ones are long, it’s lasted all this while, as long as a cigar would. There’s still an inch or two left of it, there’s still a dab of unburned tobacco in it; and the end, the mouth part, is still intact. That’s all that matters, so I pinch it out and wrap it in my handkerchief.

After I’ve told Mary and persuaded her it’s better if she doesn’t go down and look at him, I knock on the other door across the hall, her door. No answer. So I open it and I go in. Not there. She must have gone downstairs while I was in Mary’s room just now.

The air is loaded with that sticky musk smell that follows her wherever she goes. It’s even worse up here though. Downstairs, it was more like a perfume; up here it’s rank, fetid. It recalls stagnant, green pools and lush, slimy, decaying vegetation.

On the dresser, she had a lot of exotic scents and lotions in bottles, the same as any other woman would, the only difference being that hers hail from India. Sandalwood, attar of roses — but one of them’s just ordinary everyday liquid mucilage mixed in with the others. No label on it, but my nose tells me this — and my fingertips, when I try it. I even take a pretty good-sized chance and test it on the tip of my tongue. Just mucilage. Anyone that’s ever sealed an envelope or licked a stamp knows the taste. I wonder what it’s doing there among those other things, but I put it back.

In the drawer, I come across a box of those extra-long cigarettes of hers, and I help myself to two or three just to see how they’ll stack up against chemical analysis. She has some other peculiar junk hanging around too, that I can’t make head or tail of. I know what it is all right, but I can’t figure what she’s doing with it.

First off, she has a cake of that stuff they call camphor ice — in a tin box. It freezes the skin, closes up the pores, is supposed to be good for chapped hands or something. But since when do they have chapped hands in India? All right, I argue to myself, maybe she brought it with her to guard against the colder climate over here, and I put that back too.

Then there’s a funny little Indian contraption of wood about the size of a cup and saucer, which looks like a baby-sized pestle and mortar. The hollow part of it is all smeared red, like she was in the habit of pounding out and mixing her own rouge instead of buying it ready-made. Well, maybe they do that in India too.

Next I come across a hell of a whole lot of flannel. At first I think it is bandage, but there is too much of it for that. So the best I can figure she makes her undies out of it.

So much for the dresser, and I haven’t gotten anywhere much. She has a lot of trunks, bags, boxes, etc., ranged around the room — all the stuff that I saw the driver unload from the car when she and the old man got here. One of the biggest pieces has a cover draped over it.

When I yank this off, lo and behold, a chicken-coop! Not only that, but the peculiar rank smell I’ve mentioned seems to come stronger from there than anywhere else. It nearly throws me over when I try to go near it. So she keeps pets, does she? I get up close to the thing and try to peer down into it between two of the slats, and I can’t see a thing, there’s a very close wire mesh on the inside. There’s something alive in it though, all right, because while I’m standing there with my face up against it, I hear the wire netting sing out. The wing of a chicken must have brushed against it.

I cluck a little at it. No answering cluck. I shift it around a little and shake it up a little to try to get a peep out of them — it must be more than one chicken, one chicken couldn’t smell that strong — and the wire sings out plenty, zing, zing, zing.

I go around on the other side of it and I spot a saucer of milk standing there on the floor next to it. One of the slats on that side is hinged, so that it can be opened up just about six inches from the floor. I reach down and I put my hand on it and I’m just fixing to lift it, then I think: “The hell with her and her chickens, I’d better go down and find out what she’s up to instead of wasting my time up here.” So I ease out of the room and go downstairs.

She’s down there with the body. I stop and watch her for a minute from the stairs. She’s uncovered his face and she’s groveling upon him — sort of twined about him. Her face is hidden against him as if she was trying to burrow her way into his clothes and she couldn’t have got any closer if she tried. Maybe it’s just the Oriental mode of displaying grief, but I have my doubts. There’s something pathological in this, that creature is less than human — or thinks she is.

Something snaps in me. “Don’t coil up on him like that!” I bark at her. “You’re like a damn snake nesting on something it’s killed!” She untwines slowly and raises her head and turns it my way, and a ghoulish smile flickers on her face. Maybe I just imagine that, for it’s dark in the room.

There’s a pounding outside at the door and Vin has come back with the medical expert and a policeman. There’s a motorcycle throbbing against a tree out there, and it’s the friendliest sound I’ve heard in twenty-eight years. They’ve parked the ambulance as close to the house as they can get it, which is about half a mile down the dirt road which gives up at about that point.

“So what’s the riot?” says the medical guy. “This kid comes tearing in on a Ford without brakes, which he stole from a Jap farmer, and knocks over one of the lamp posts outside headquarters—”

“That was the only way I could stop it,” explains Vin.