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

His ways of marking time until she had gained enough of a lead were various. She had seen him do each one in turn, so she knew what they were. One was to gaze steadfastly in the direction in which the bus had gone, as if he intended walking along that way himself. Only he never did. Another was to actually start out in the reverse direction from her, going down the other way. Only to turn and retrace his steps once she was far enough off. One time he had gone behind a kiosk with a circular outer shell papered with colored three-sheets that stood on the twin corner to the bus-stop. From below the protective outer-rim, she could see his shoes standing there motionless, as she made her way up the sidewalk on the other side of the street. But they were pointed the opposite way. They were pointed outward. That told her it was a sham, in itself.

At the head of the second block to her flat — there were only two between it and the bus-stop — there was a neighborhood place where she always stopped in to eat when she came home from work. It couldn’t be dignified by being called a restaurant, although it did have three or four little round white pedestal tables ranged along one wall. But these were mainly for reading your paper over a beer, or playing checkers, or honking your concertina for a quiet evening’s relaxation. Everybody sat at the counter. It was run by a husband-and-wife team; she did the cooking, and he did the carrying and setting-out. The prices were sensible, for people who didn’t have money to throw around.

Leone always sat on the third stool from where you came in. For no reason, just one of those little human habits that soon become fixed and firm. It became known as “Leone’s stool.” If it was taken when she came in, and she had to sit somewhere else, as soon as it was vacant she would move herself and her food back over to it again.

I shouldn’t have to put up with it, she kept telling herself while she sat there waiting for her order to be prepared. But if she went up to a policeman and complained, That man keeps following me everywhere I go, she knew what the outcome would be. Has he come up to you and spoken to you? No. Has he stopped you in any way? No. And even if he were halted and questioned, she knew what the answer there would be, after he gave his side of it. He has a right to take the same bus you do. The buses are free for anyone to ride on. He has a right to walk along the same street you do. The streets are free for anyone to walk on. And the policeman would stroll off with a rebuking shake of his head.

If he would only do something, that I could get my teeth into! she whimpered inwardly. But he was just like a shadow. And like a shadow, he left no mark.

When she had eaten, she opened her handbag to pay for the inexpensive little meal, which had been fish, because it was a Friday. (She didn’t claim to be a good Catholic, but she did claim to try to be one as far as possible, without going overboard.) What was left over in the bottle of the wine that had come with it, he put away for her for the next night. She wasn’t a drinker.

While she was waiting for her change to come back, she held the top flap of her handbag propped up and looked at her face in the mirror that was pasted to the underside of the flap. It was more a reflex of habit than a conscious act, an inattentive idle manipulation without any real meaning. And then suddenly she looked more closely, a second time. For, in the mirror, she saw not one face but two. Her own and — her persecutor’s. Hers was in the foreground, enlarged, so that just a cross-section of one eye and cheek showed. His was in the background, a small-scale, peering in through the eating-place window. Yellow in the face of the light and shaped like an inverted pear. Or like a child’s toy balloon beginning to sag because of losing some of its air. She couldn’t see any of the rest of him, his face seemed to hang there disembodied against the night, to one side of the reversed letters E F A. Perhaps this was because he was bending over sideward to look in, and the rest of his body was offside to the plate-glass. It made him look like an apparition, a hallucination. Then suddenly, as he sensed that he had caught her eye, his face vanished.

She drew a deep breath of helpless frustration. Every move she made, watched. Every mouthful she swallowed. And she couldn’t fight back, shake him off, there was no way. “He has a right to glance into a restaurant-window as he’s passing by outside, anyone does,” they would say.

He had a right to go here, he had a right to go there, he had a right to do this, he had a right to do that. He had a right to do everything, it seemed. But he didn’t have a right to make her life miserable like this and put such fear into her like he was doing now!

She banged her empty coffee-cup down into its saucer so angrily that the owner of the place heard the sound and came over to her.

“What’s the matter, coffee no good?” he queried solicitously. She was a good, steady, nearly everynight customer, and he didn’t want her to be displeased.

“It’s not the coffee that’s the matter, it’s something else that’s the matter,” she answered gloomily. “I was just thinking to myself, that’s all.”

He shrugged and spread his hands out, much as to say: Well, we each have a right to our own problems, after all.

She got up and went over to the door, and looked around from there, before stepping outside. Gone. There was no sign of him. Or more likely he was covered up in some doorway, and she couldn’t distinguish him from here.

There was very little distance left to cover now, but she liked this last lap least of all. On the bus, there were people. In the eating-place, there was the proprietor. But the street was not an overly populous one, and this last had to be made all by herself, strictly on her own.

She almost ran the final few yards until she got safely to her own door. She blew a breath of relief. “Made it once more,” was the thought in her mind. And the inevitable corrollary to it was, but some night I won’t. The pitcher goes to the well once too often.

One foot safely within the open door, she leaned back far enough to turn her head and scan the street, down along the way she had just come from. Nothing, no one. But in a black door-embrasure a few houses down she thought she saw a wavy line that ran up and down one side of it, instead of being clear-cut and straight-edged like the other side was. That must be him, right there. She didn’t hang back to investigate. The door closed after her, and the street kept what it knew to itself.

Winded from the long climb, it was a walk-up of course, she let herself into her own individual flat, and went over to the window to investigate before putting on the lights. She’d been doing this for the last few nights, now. She didn’t need the lights to guide her, she knew the place so well, where everything was and how to go around it to avoid it.

The one thing he still might not know was which floor she was on and which window was hers, and she wanted to keep that final protective margin of error for as long as she could.

She went over to the side of the curtain and looked through from there, instead of dividing it in the middle, which might have been noticeable from the street.

She could see him down there, standing still down there. The olive topcoat stood out palely against the dinginess of the night. He wasn’t moving. Only one thing moved about him, and that moved while remaining in a still position. That is to say, it pulsed or throbbed; it glowed and dimmed and glowed again. It had a beat to it. The little ember-dab at the end of his immovable cigarette. There was something freezing and horrid about the way that nothing moved about him but that. It had in it a suggestion of leashed ferocity. Of hot-breathing, crouched bated-ness. Of a mauler snuffing and scenting its prey-to-be.