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

The window. They’re at the door, but the window — that way out is still open. I remember when I checked in here the small hours of Wednesday, I didn’t ask to be given a room on the second floor, they just happened to give me one. Then when I saw it later that day in the light, I realized the drop to the ground from one of the little semicircular stone ledges outside the windows wouldn’t be dangerous, especially if you held a pillow in front of you, and remembered to keep your chin tilted upward as you went over. Just a sprawling shake-up fall maybe, that’s all.

I pull at the blind cords with both hands, and it spasms upward with a sound like a lot of little twigs being stepped on and broken. I push up the window sash and assume a sitting position on the sill, then swing my legs across and I’m out in the clear, out in the open night.

The little stone apron has this spiked iron rail guard around it, with no space left on the outer side of it to plant your feet before you go over. You have to straddle it, which makes for tricky going. Still, necessity can make you dexterous, terror can make you agile. I won’t go back inside for the pillow, there isn’t time. I’ll take the leap neat.

The two cars that brought them here are below, and for a moment, only for a moment, they look empty, dark and still and empty, standing bumper to bumper against the curb. Someone gives a warning whistle — a lip whistle, I mean, not a metal one. I don’t know who, I don’t know where, somewhere around. Then an angry, ugly, smoldering, car-bound orange moon starts up, lightens to yellow, then brightens to the dazzling white of a laundry-detergent commercial. The operator guiding it slants it too high at first, and it lands over my head. Like a halo. Some halo and some time for a halo. Then he brings it down and it hits me as if someone had belted me full across the face with a talcum-powder puff. You can’t see through it, you can’t see around it.

Shoe leather comes padding from around the corner — maybe the guy that warded off Johnny — and stops directly under me. I sense somehow he’s afraid, just as I am. That won’t keep him from doing what he has to do, because he’s got the backing on his side. But he doesn’t like this. I shield my eyes from the light on one side, and I can see his anxious face peering up at me. All guys are scared of each other, didn’t you know that? I’m not the only one. We’re all born afraid.

I can’t shake the light off. It’s like ghostly flypaper. It’s like slapstick-thrown yoghurt. It clings to me whichever way I turn.

I hear his voice talking to me from below. Very near and clear. As if we were off together by ourselves somewhere, just chatting, the two of us.

“Go back into your room. We don’t want you to get hurt.” And then a second time: “Go back in. You’ll only get hurt if you stand out here like this.”

I’m thinking, detached, as in a dream: I didn’t know they were this considerate. Are they always this considerate? When I was a kid back in the forties, I used to go to those tough-guy movies a lot. Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney. And when they had a guy penned in, they used to be tough about it, snarling: “Come on out of there, yuh rat, we’ve got yuh covered!” I wonder what has changed them? Maybe it’s just that time has moved on. This is the sixties now.

What’s the good of jumping now? Where is there to run to now? And the light teases my eyes. I see all sorts of interlocked and colored soap bubbles that aren’t there.

It’s more awkward getting back inside than it was getting out. And with the light on me, and them watching me, there’s a self-consciousness that was missing in my uninhibited outward surge. I have to straighten out one leg first and dip it into the room toes forward, the way you test the water in a pool before you jump in. Then the other leg, and then I’m in. The roundness of the light beam is broken into long thin tatters as the blind rolls down over it, but it still stays on out there.

There are only two points of light in the whole room — I mean, in addition to the indirect reflection through the blind. Which gives off a sort of phosphorescent haziness — two points so small that if you didn’t know they were there and looked for them, you wouldn’t see them. And small as both are, one is even smaller than the other. One is the tiny light in the radio, which, because the lens shielding the dial is convex, glows like a miniature orange scimitar. I go over to it to turn it off. It can’t keep the darkness away anymore; the darkness is here.

“Here’s to the losers,” the radio is saying. “Here’s to them all—”

The other point of light is over by the door. It’s in the door itself. I go over there close to it, peering with my head bowed, as if I were mourning inconsolably. And I am. One of the four tiny screwheads set into the corners of the oblong plate that holds the lock is gone, is out now, and if you squint at an acute angle you can see a speck of orange light shining through it from the hall. Then, while I’m standing there, something falls soundlessly, glances off the top of my shoe with no more weight than a grain of gravel, and there’s a second speck of orange light at the opposite upper corner of the plate. Two more to go now. Two and a half minutes of deft work left, maybe not even that much.

What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man’s life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.

I can’t get out the window, I can’t go out the door. But there is a way out, a third way. I can escape inward. If I can’t get away from them on the outside, I can get away from them on the inside.

You’re not supposed to have those things. But when you have money you can get anything, in New York. They were on a prescription, but that was where the money came in — getting the prescription. I remember now. Some doctor gave it to me — sold it to me — long ago. I don’t remember why or when. Maybe when fear first came between the two of us and I couldn’t reach her anymore.

I came across it in my wallet on Wednesday, after I first came in here, and I sent it out to have it filled, knowing that this night would come. I remember the bellboy bringing it to the door afterward in a small bright-green paper wrapping that some pharmacists use. But where is it now?

I start a treasure hunt of terror, around the inside of the room in the dark. First into the clothes closet, wheeling and twirling among the couple of things I have hanging in there like a hopped-up discothèque dancer, dipping in and out of pockets, patting some of them between my hands to see if they’re flat or hold a bulk. As if I were calling a little pet dog to me by clapping my hands to it. A little dog who is hiding away from me in there, a little dog called death.

Not in there. Then the drawers of the dresser, spading them in and out, fast as a card shuffle. A telephone directory, a complimentary shaving kit (if you’re a man), a complimentary manicure kit (if you’re a girl).

They must be down to the last screwhead by now.

Then around and into the bathroom, while the remorseless dismantling at the door keeps on. It’s all white in there, white as my face must be. It’s dark, but you can still see that it’s white against the dark. Twilight-colored tiles. I don’t put on the light to help me find them, because there isn’t enough time left; the lights in here are fluorescent and take a few moments to come on, and by that time they’ll be in here.

There’s a catch phrase that you all must have heard at one time or another. You walk into a room or go over toward a group. Someone turns and says with huge emphasis: “ There he is.” As though you were the most important one of all. (And you’re not.) As though you were the one they were just talking about. (And they weren’t.) As though you were the only one that mattered. (And you’re not.) It’s a nice little tribute, and it don’t cost anyone a cent.