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

Girl (more softly than before): Goodbye, love.

He (shouting): Paule, the light’s going out again! Don’t take my light away, the only light I have! (Crying out wildly) Paule, don’t leave me in the dark!

Girl (in a whisper): Goodbye.

(The doorway is standing empty. The sound of her footsteps running down the stairs comes from the other side of it, gradually diminishing in the distance.)

He (screaming in despair): Paule, don’t go! The little clock and I, we want you here! Paule, come back! Come back! The dark! The dark! The terrible dark!

(A closed door on a lower landing of the stair suddenly opens and a woman sticks her head out. Just as she does so, the girl reaches the landing, slows momentarily to make the turn, but without stopping altogether.)

Woman (severely): Will you kindly be more quiet! All that shouting up there! And running down the stairs like that at this hour! People are trying to sleep, you know.

Girl (turning her head for just an instant as she goes by): Be patient, madame. Just a moment or two, and I won’t make another sound. I’ll be still forever after.

(She continues running on down the next flight. Woman stares after her, mouth open, as if not knowing whether she understood rightly what she just heard.)

(At the parapet along the Promenade des Tamaris, the movie poster is still in its center, “Jeux Interdits.” The girl runs by it She is tottering now from exhaustion. As she passes, she is struggling with her dress, trying to get out of it)

The dress flutters down from the tops of the Rocher de la Vierge, flutters down among the rocks, catches there, flickering in the wind. Then another garment. Then finally another. A flash of lightning bleaches the scene for a moment

Girl: I will be clean! I will be clean once more, just as I was before, just as he thinks of me still!

(Her head is upraised toward the night sky, her hair streaming in the wind. Another flash of lightning reveals her features even more clearly. Her face is definitely the face of the woman who stood at the roulette-table, who earlier stood at the foot of this same rock in a white dress, looking up.)

Girl (eyes turned upward, in prayer): Forgive me, Holy Mother. For myself, nothing. I have no claim, I make none. But for him — be merciful, have pity. Don’t let him hurt too much. Don’t let him call my name too much. Don’t let him linger alone in the dark too long.

(As she finishes praying, she lowers her head and turns it to give one last look below and behind her, from where she climbed.)

(At the base of the rock, the discarded garments are still lying there where they fell. But now a woman in a spreading white gown is standing there, looking upward toward the top of the rock. Her face expresses horror. A flash of lightning reveals it even more vividly. Her face is just as definitely the face of the woman who stood by the roulette-table, and at the foot of this rock the time before... As she looks, she hears a long-drawn scream, dwindling into the silence, as when someone is falling from a great height. A flash of lightning illuminates the top of the rock once more. It is empty. The woman in white, looking upward, transfixed.)

Woman (in a trance-like voice): Which is you? Which is I?

It was a sort of car that seemed to have a faculty for motion with an absolute lack of any accompanying sound whatsoever. This was probably illusory; it must have been, internal combustion engines being what they are, tires being what they are, brakes and gears being what they are, even raspy street-surfacing being what it is. Yet the illusion outside the hotel entrance was a complete one. Just as there are silencers that, when affixed to automatic hand-weapons, deaden their reports, so it was as if this whole massive car body were encased in something of that sort. For, first, there was nothing out there, nothing in sight there. Then, as though the street-bed were water and this bulky black shape were a grotesque gondola, it came floating up out of the darkness from nowhere. And then suddenly, still with no sound whatsoever, there it was at a halt, in position.

It was like a ghost-car in every attribute but the visual one. In its trancelike approach and halt, in its lightlessness, in its enshrouded interior, which made it impossible to determine (at least without lowering one’s head directly outside the windows and peering in at nose-tip range) if it were even occupied at all, and if so by whom and by how many.

You could visualize it scuttling fleetly along some overshadowed country lane at dead of night, lightless, inscrutable, unidentifiable, to halt perhaps beside some inky grove of trees, linger there awhile undetected, then glide on again, its unaccountable errand accomplished without witness, without aftermath. A goblin-car that in an earlier age would have fed folklore and rural legend. Or, in the city, you could visualize it sliding stealthily along some warehouse-blacked back alley, curving and squirming in its terrible silence, then, as it neared the mouth and would have emerged, creeping to a stop and lying there in wait, unguessed in the gloom. Lying there in wait for long hours, like some huge metal-cased predatory animal, waiting to pounce on its prey.

Sudden, sharp yellow spurts of fangs, and then to whirl and slink back into anonymity the way it came, leaving the carcass of its prey huddled there and dead.

Who was there to know? Who was there to tell?

And even now, before this particular hotel entrance. It was already in position, it had already stopped.

Then nothing happened.

Ordinarily, when cars stop someone gets out. That is what they have stopped for. In this case it just stood there, as though there were no one in it and had been no one in it all along.

Then the pale, blurry shape of a human hand, as when seen through thick dark glass, appeared inside the window and descended slowly to the bottom, like a pale-colored mussel foundering in a murky tank of water. And with it went the invisible line of a shade. The hand stopped a little above the lower rim and faded from sight again. The shade-line remained where it had been left.

The watch had begun. The death-watch.

In a little while a young man came walking along the street, untroubled of gait, unaware of it. The particular hotel that the ghost-car had made its rendezvous had a seamy glass canopy jutting out over the sidewalk with open bulbs set around the inside of it. But they only shone inward because its outer rim was opaque. Thus, as the young man stepped from the darkness of the street’s back reaches under this pane of light it was as though a curtain had been jerked up in front of his face, and he was suddenly revealed from head to foot as in a spotlight.

In the car the darkness found breath and whispered, “That him?”

And the darkness whispered back to the darkness, “Yeah, same type build. Same light hair. Wears gray a lot. And this is the hotel that was fingered.”

Then the darkness quickly stirred, but the other darkness quelled it, hissing: “Wait, he wants the girl too. The girl too, he said. Let him get up there to her first.”

The young man had turned off and gone inside. The four glass leaves of the revolving door blurred and made him disappear.

For a moment more the evil darkness held its collective breath. Then, no longer in a whisper but sharp as the edge of a stiletto, “Now. Go in and get the number of the room. Do it smart.”

The man behind the desk looked up from his racing form, and there was a jaunty young man wearing a snap-brim felt hat leaning there on one elbow. How long he’d been there it was impossible to determine. He might have just come. He might have been there three or four minutes already. Ghost-cars, ghost-arrivals, ghost-departures.