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

Now swiftly, within the space of breath-choked minutes, his mania blew inside-out, like an umbrella in a gale. Or like a sleight-of-hand performer who draws a length of gauze through his fingers and causes it to change magically from one hue to the next. Confinement, craved just now, suddenly became the form of terror itself. Agoraphobia turned into claustrophobia. Both were still the same terror, with another name.

His hand pounded the floor beside him, “I can’t stay here like a rat in a trap, waiting for ’em to come and get me! I gotta get out of here! Gotta get out of here fast!” He lashed his legs out into the open, then padded backward on the flats of his hands until his head was in the clear.

“Gotta get on the outside!” he kept muttering. “Gotta lose myself on the outside! That’s the only thing’ll save me.”

He ran to where the suitcase was standing, tossed the lid up and over. His ravening fingers disemboweled its contents; neckties of tropical brilliance splashed up, like a neon-geyser, to fall back around him and stay that way, in static ripples. Shirts threw up their empty sleeves like struggling ghosts and expired lifeless on the floor.

He was still talking brokenly to his unseen companion: self-preservation. “Who needs neckties, when it’s your neck itself you gotta save?”

Then a gun, bedded in layers of undergarments. He inserted it underneath his coat somewhere. “The only one you can trust, anyway; the one that’s right on you.” Then more money went into the already sausage-plump billfold.

He stood up and turned to go. “That’s all you need,” he said. “That’s all, in this-here world. Money and a gun. A gun and money. Everything else you can get with one or the other of them two.” And leered with his own wisdom.

He went over to the closed door once more — for the last time, this was to be — and opened it sparingly to look out.

A man was standing down the hall, where the elevator-shaft door was. Not moving, not doing anything. Just standing motionless, head lowered attentively, newspaper spread open just across his breastbone. The brim of his hat kept the light from the upper part of his face, as though he were wearing an eyeshade.

He didn’t turn at the sound of Abbazzia opening his door, though he must have heard it in all that stillness. He didn’t even seem to be breathing, he was so still.

Abbazzia’s fear-sensitized nerves jerked and recoiled throughout the length and width of his body. He knew. These were the lookouts, these who stood like this. He knew the ways of those who stalk to kill, he knew them well, they’d done his own errands for him too many a time. Sometimes he’d even watched them at a distance, from within the safe anonymity of a parked car. That rigor-mortis-immobility, the down-held head so that the eyes could not be seen to move, the sheltering hat-brim, the newspaper that provided the excuse. Then when the quarry had passed, they made the signal that doomed him. In many ways, in many different ways, they made it. They lowered the newspaper, or blew their nose on a handkerchief, or threw a cigarette away, so that it made a momentary red streak across the dark. All these were the messages of death. Who should know them better than he, he had prearranged so many of them himself.

The ribbon’s-width of door-opening had already been effaced, instantly, at first glance. “The window—” came racing down the millway of his thoughts like a bright pebble. “There may be a fire ex-cape — get out through there.” He’d first used the word at seven with an x; he’d used it that way ever since, and never known in all that time that it was wrong; no one had ever told him so. A wrong word used many times throughout a life; a wrong deed done many times throughout a life; wherein lies the difference?

He didn’t draw the shade up, he simply slanted it aside, making a crevice to look through. He saw at once that under the ledge there was nothing, only a sheer drop all the way down to the street.

He was cut off, sealed up in here. The room that had been chosen for a sanctuary because of its inaccessibility, had turned for that very same reason into a tomb.

He lurched with sagging knee-joints back deeper into the room, pushing away an impeding table, propping himself in passing against the top of a chair. Then he stood there a moment, both hands inter-crossed and pressed flat against the center of his forehead. As if there were a pasty-colored star affixed there, with spreading fingers for its many rays.

“I’m finished!” he shuddered deeply. “I’ll never get out of here by myself, alive!”

Silence at first, both of voice and of thought. Then that “by myself” began coming back, like an echo, like an afterthought. Louder, more insistent each time, as though he had shouted it out at the top of his voice just now (and he had barely given it breath).

“By myself—” “By myself—” “BY MYSELF—”

Ricocheting, playing back to him, glancing off the walls themselves in eerie polyphonic impetus.

His hand dropped from his forehead, suddenly tightened, as if it were grasping an idea, holding onto it for dear life.

“By myself, not a chance. But with somebody else I could make it!”

Then his hand opened a little, almost let the idea go. “Where’s the somebody else for me, though? They’ve all run out. And it would have to be somebody that they’re afraid of. Somebody bigger than them. Bigger than them and bigger than me, both—”

His hand tightened again. Far tighter than it had been the time before. The idea was caught fast now, had taken form, had taken body.

“Them!” he breathed, as if in amazement at the idea’s simplicity, its logic; in fact, that it had not occurred any sooner than it had. He drove the clenched hand into its opposite now, like a mallet. “Sure! Them! Why not them? I’ve always laughed at them— They were for the chumps— For the little guys, not the big guys like me— They were for decoration. They turned their backs, when I passed the word. But always with a hand sticking up behind them, like a tail. All I had to do was put something in it, and then they were never around where I didn’t want them to be at a certain time. Now I want them to be around, that’s all. It worked that way, why shouldn’t it work this way just as good?”

He hastened to the phone, caught it up.

“I got no bodyguard left?” he breathed above an hysterical, abortive chuckle. “I’ll make a bodyguard out of them!”

Then he talked into the phone.

“Gimme the police,” he ordered.

It was a commanding knock. A double one first, then a single one after. Urgent, demanding. As if to say: “We are the police, and we don’t like being kept waiting.”

He turned with a grin on his face. “Coming, boys!” he hallelu-jahed. “Ri-i-ight with you!”

The brassware under his fingers was like a caress, as he unfastened it. It was like gold, and he had always loved to touch gold. Just for its own sake alone.

This door that had kept death out all the long night through — he opened it now to let life in.

He saw their faces first. Life had three faces. There were three of them, one on each side of the opening, the third in mid-center. Oh, what beautiful faces they had; oh, what handsome guys they were; never such good-looking faces before. Next his eyes feasted on their uniforms, like moths that gorge themselves on fabric. The blue service-garb of the Police Department of the City of New York. The brass buttons, the visored caps, the pewter-looking badges affixed over the heart.

Their eyes regarded him, and that was all. Eyes that revealed nothing, other than that they saw him. They didn’t speak; he was the one did.