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

As far as walking there was concerned, I liked that part of it too. I wasn’t sure I had enough money left to cover a taxi.

We walked along arm in arm, every now and then lurching a little, first to one side, then to the other. I couldn’t tell if I was responsible, or she was, or if it was the two of us together. Oddly enough, the gin seemed to have taken more of a hold out here in the chilly open than it had back in the warm stuffy room. Probably it was the cumulative build-up that was at work.

Presently we’d stepped into what looked like some sort of a furnished rooming-house. There were too many doors up and down the hall for them to be multiple-room apartments. She stood with lowered head chinking a key briefly, and then the door had closed after us and we were in a pitch-dark room.

“Put on the light,” I said in an undertone.

“No, we don’t need any,” she said in an equally confidential voice.

“I can’t see where I’m going,” I said. “I’ll knock myself out.”

“Give me your hand,” she said. “I’ll steer you. The fuse is blown; I have to get it fixed.”

I had an impression it had been done deliberately. Still, it might have been true. It had looked like that kind of a crummy building from the outside.

Something cut me off across the knees and I overbalanced and fell forward onto an unmade bed that smelled faintly of stale face-powder...

... There was a flash of shock, some kind of psychic

shock deep down inside me, that was like lightning tearing a black sky to pieces. I reared backward in a recoil as strong as a kick in the jaw. Then I fell sprawling off the bed onto my head. There must have been a rug or mat there; it didn’t hurt, or if it did I didn’t feel it, I was too anaesthetized with shock.

I crawled on all fours over to the wall, and leaned against it, still on all fours, like a cowed animal. My stomach kept kneading convulsively, trying to empty itself, and it should have been able to, enough of the gin must have still been in it, but the muscles were jammed, they wouldn’t work.

There wasn’t a sound around me, the room was deathly still.

If it had only stayed like that, nothing would have happened. I would have finally picked myself up, groped my way to the door, and escaped out into the clean fresh air.

But first there was this soft slurring sound across the floor, as someone moved furtively toward the door. Then three amber lines, forming the outline of the door, suddenly appeared against the darkness, as it stealthily broke contact with its frame.

I sprang — still from the same crouched position I was in, without waiting to stand first — and the three amber cracks snuffed out, there was the slap of wood back against wood, and I held the fugitive trapped between my body and the door.

I started to work my arms pulverizingly, in and out, in and out, in and out, swinging with the blows, from side to side, from side to side, from side to side. These weren’t punches, these were death-blows.

For a moment, at the very start, a smothered voice pleaded: “Don’t kill me, don’t! I’ll give you money!” Then after that, there wasn’t any more voice left to plead with.

You don’t offer money to the outraged mating instinct.

Very soon there was no more pleading voice. Very soon there was no more spasmic movement. Very soon there was no more anything. The name for that is death.

The supreme insult had been paid back. The body had had its revenge.

My arms had grown heavy as lead, and still I swung them. I was afraid they wouldn’t be massive enough, wouldn’t have enough strength left in them, to inflict final total death, so I picked up some metal object I found at random in the dark. I think it was a wastebasket, but it was too flimsy, it dented inward at the first blow. Then I found something else, a chunky cube, scooped out in the middle. A thick glass ashtray, I suppose. That was better.

After a while I stood still. After a while the red went out of the world, like sparks settling back into a spent fire.

I couldn’t get the door open. The dead obstacle was lying there blocking its inward sweep. I scuffed the impediment over to the side a little with the backs of my heels, until I could get the door open enough to pass through. Then I stepped over it, and passed through the narrow door-opening I’d made. I went a little way on my way, and then I looked down at my hand, and I was still holding that heavy cubed thing. It was an ashtray all right, but one side of it had a growth of matted hairs clinging to it. They looked terrible, like some kind of unclean fungus growing out of the thick glass.

I knew it belonged inside, so I went all the way back, threw it back inside the room through the door-opening, and then I went on my way for good.

I don’t know why I didn’t just drop it where I was; some sense of restoring things to their proper place, I guess; leaving them as you found them.

I couldn’t tell the cabman the name of my hotel, but I found the key in my pocket and handed it to him, and he read it off the little tag attached to it and took me there.

The night-clerk had wise knowing eyes; they could spot a dead-beat or a girl-hustler trying to get past him from a mile away. But this is one time they were fooled. When he saw me straggle by, holding my coat-lapels closed tight under my chin, and shivering all over, all he said was: “Oughtn’t to go out without a topcoat if you’re not used to it here. Gets very raw late at nights.”

Upstairs in the room, all I took off was my shoes. Then I got under the covers just the way I was. I left the light on. I didn’t ever want to be in the dark again for the rest of my life.

After a while I even pulled the covers up over the top of my head, just left a little hole in them I could breath through.

And I shook, and I shook, and I shook.

They came and got me late the following day. I hadn’t even tried to leave the room in the meantime. I didn’t want to run away. Running away is all right from a misdeed or even a crime, but not from a nightmare. The nightmare goes right with you as you run. I think I was almost glad when they knocked and I told them to come in. It was like being back among ordinary men again, it was like being back to normalcy again. The shadows went away.

At the trial the prosecutor’s attitude toward me was almost fatherly. I know that’s a strange word to use of such a person at such a place and such a time, but no other would be accurate. I was young, he said in his summing-up. It hadn’t been premeditated. And nobody in that room (meaning I suppose all the men his own age) would want a son of theirs to suddenly come face to face with such a harrowing, such a beastly, predicament as I had.

And though he didn’t come right out and say it in so many words, his inference was plain. I had taken a life, and therefore I had to be punished for it, I couldn’t be allowed to get off scot-free. But it wasn’t as though I had killed another man. Or even (God forbid) as if I had killed a woman. Or yet (banish the thought) killed a little child. All I had killed was a queer.

They let me out the other day. I’m forty now.

She was tall, for a woman, but not to the point of being an oddity or towering over those around her. There was such a perfect proportion between her height and her girth that her moderate fullness kept her from seeming lanky, and her graceful tallness kept her from seeming stout. In short, she had the classic symmetry of an antique statue, so seldom found in the living bodies of real life.