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

In his travail, words of pain filtered through, suffocated by the pressure of the car-hood against his nose and mouth.

“Mine! She was mine! Mine! Mine!” Over and endlessly over again. “My girl. She was my girl. It was going to be my little baby. I was waiting for it to be my little baby. All my hopes and dreams are gone... Oh, I want to leave this rotten world! I want to get out of this rotten world!”

“You will. You’re gonna.” The eyes that looked down upon him held no pity, no softness, no feeling at all. They were eyes of stone.

“I don’t care what you do to me now,” he said. “I want to die.”

“That’s good,” they told him. “We’ll oblige.”

“Kill me quick,” he said. “The quicker the better.”

“You’re going to get it how we want it, not how you want it.” He wouldn’t walk, or couldn’t. Probably couldn’t — emotional shock. Each took him by a shoulder, and his legs dragged along behind him out at full length, giving little jerks and bumps when they hit stones and other obstacles.

They brought him to the edge of a squared-off pit in the ground and let him fall flat on his face and lie there a minute. A dried-out-well shaft.

“You start the digging, Playback.” It was the first time a name had been exchanged between any of them.

“Yeah, I always get the hard work.”

Playback brought a shovel from the toppled-down tool shed, marked off an oblong of surface soil and started to break it up into clods ready for throwing down into the well-shaft.

The other man was saying to the third one: “These pocket-flashes ain’t going to be enough to see all the way down there. How about one of the heads from the car?”

“Whaddya have to have light for, anyway?”

“You want to see him die, don’tcha? That’s half the kick. Another thing, there might be space left between those chunks the air could get to him through.”

“I have some extension wiring I can rig it up on.”

“I don’t care what you do now,” the man on the ground droned. “I want to die.”

“Always get the hard work,” said Playback.

The detached headlight was set up on the lip of the well-shaft. The man who had brought it returned to the car to control it from the dashboard.

“Why don’t you hurry?” said the man on the ground. “For God’s sake, why don’t you hurry? Why can’t I die, when I want to so badly?”

The one nearest aimed a kick at him along the ground. “You will,” he promised.

The headlight was deflected downward into the aperture. “Give her the juice,” the one beside it called back guardedly in the direction of the car.

A ghostly pallor came up from below, making the darkness aboveground seem even more impenetrable. Their faces, however, were now bathed in the reflection, like hideous devil-masks with slits for eyes and mouths.

The other one came back from the car.

“There’s got to be a lot more fill than that,” the one standing beside Playback criticized dissatisfiedly, measuring the results of his efforts.

“I always get the hard work.”

The other one grabbed the shovel from him and went at it in his place. “If there’s one thing that gets my goat,” he muttered disgustedly, “it’s to have a guy along on a thing like this that’s always bellyaching, the way you do. Just one guy like that is enough to spoil everyone else’s good time.”

The man on the ground had grasped hold of a small rock lying near him. He closed his hand around it, swung his arm up and tried to smash it into his own skull.

The nearest one of the three saw it just in time and aimed a swift kick that averted it. The rock bounced out and the hand fell down limp. It lay there, oddly twisted inside out, as though the wrist had been broken.

After that there was silence for a while, only the sound of the shovel biting into the earth and the hissing splatter of the loose dirt.

They stood him up, his back to the well.

In the dark, desperate sky, just above the scalloped line the treetops made, three stars formed a pleading little constellation. No one looked at them, no one cared. This was the time for death, not the time for mercy.

The last thing he said was, “Helen, sweetheart. Wait for me. I’m coming to you.” The last thing in the whole world.

Then they pushed him down. Took their hands off him, rather, and he went down by himself, for he couldn’t stand up any more.

He went over backward, and in, and down. The sound of the hit wasn’t too much. It was soggy at the bottom yet, from the long-ago water. Probably he didn’t feel it too much. He was all limp from lack of wanting to live, anyway.

He lay there nestled up, like in a foursquare clayey coffin.

He stirred a little, sighed a little, like someone trying to get comfortable in bed.

Playback tipped the shovel over, and a drench of earth granules spewed down on top of him.

One bent leg got covered up. But his face still breasted the terrestrial wave, like a motionless swimmer caught in the upturn stroke of the Australian crawl and held fast that way, face over shoulder.

Playback brought another shovelful, and the face was gone.

One hand crept through, tentatively, like something feeling its way in the dark.

Playback brought another shovelful and erased the hand.

Three fingers wormed through this time, like a staggered insect that has been stepped on. They only made it as far as the second joint.

“If he said he wants to die, then why does he keep trying to break through to the surface and breathe for?” Playback asked, engrossed.

“That’s nature,” the one beside him answered learnedly. “His mind wants to die, but his body don’t know any better, it wants to live no matter what he says to it.”

The stirring fill had fallen motionless at last.

“It’s got him, he’s quit now,” he decided after a further moment or two of judicious observation. “Throw her in on top of him, fill it up the rest of the way, and let’s get out of here. I haven’t had so much fresh air since—”

A girl opened the door first, looked cautiously up and down the deserted hotel corridor. Then she hitched her head at someone behind her, picked up a small valise from the floor and came on outside.

She was a blonde, good-looking and mean-looking, both at the same time.

“C’mon,” she said huskily. “Let’s go while the going’s good.”

A man came out after her. His eyes were the eyes of a poker player. A poker player in a game where the pot is life and death. He had a certain build, a certain way of walking. He was in gray.

He closed the door after him with practiced stealth. Then he stopped and raised his hand to the outside of it.

The girl looked around at him impatiently. “Can that, will you?” she snapped. “This is no time to play games. Every time you go in or out you take time off and fool with that.”

“I’m a gambler, remember?”

“You’re a gambler is right,” she agreed tartly. “That’s why the heat’s on you right now. You should pay up your losses—”

“I’m superstitious. This little number’s been awful good to me. All my big wins come from something with a six in it.”

On the 9 at the end of 119 the bottom rivet was gone; only the top one remained. He swung it around loosely upward, made it into a 6 and patted it affectionately. “Keep on bringing me good luck like you always have,” he told it softly.

“Didn’t you hear me ask for 116 when we first holed up here?” he added. “Only somebody else was already in it...”

The delivery truck drove up and parked alongside the newsstand at exactly 9:29 P.M. This was very good time, since its contents were what was loosely called the “Nine O’Clock Edition.” This in itself was wholly inaccurate since the edition itself bore tomorrow’s dateline. To simplify, it was the next day’s paper going on sale the day before. Tomorrow’s paper in turn would really be the day after’s, with a new headline and make-up. But no one was the slightest bit confused — least of all, the reading public.