Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

A breathless silence engulfed the whole place from top to bottom after the captain’s last order. They could hear the manager slam down some window that had been left open in his office. Then the faraway triple buzz of his signal sounded in the nearly soundproof projection room. His voice came down to them clearly, through his open office door. “You’re in the clear, they’re all down below!” Then the office door banged as he locked himself in up there, out of harm’s way.

There wasn’t another sound throughout the house for maybe five minutes.

The pall of silence lay heavier and heavier upon the waiting, listening men, until their nerves were ready to snap with the increasing tension. Every eye was on the stairs that came down from the mezzanine.

Suddenly a heavy door grated open somewhere out of sight, up above them, and they tensed. He was reconnoitering. Then there was an impact, as though somebody had jumped, immediately followed by a second, lighter one. Then nothing more for awhile, while seconds that were like hours ticked themselves leadenly off into eternity, and the tension had become almost unbearable. One or two faces showed gleaming threads of sweat coursing down them.

Then, like a flash, something appeared on the topmost step, just under where the ceiling cut the staircase off from view, and they all saw it at once, and they all stiffened uncontrollably in unison. A woman’s foot, in a patent leather pump, had come down slowly onto the step, as though it were feeling its way.

That was all for a minute. Then its mate came down on the step below it, showing a short section of ankle this time. Then the first one moved past it, down to the third step. And behind them both, as the perspective lengthened following each move they made as closely as in a lock-step, came a man’s two feet. The sinister quadruple extremities advanced as slowly as some horrible paralytic thing descending a staircase, slowly lengthening.

The heads only came in view when they were near the bottom. He had his right arm around the girl, holding her clamped to him in an embrace from behind. Her head leaned back against his shoulder, as though she were incapable of standing upright any longer.

She didn’t look out at them; it was he who did, and nodded grimly. His free arm, dangling in a straight line from his shoulder, ended in a wink of burnished metal — another gun, for surely there was one already pressed menacingly close to her sagging body.

They came down off the stairs and for a moment presented a perfect double target, broadside to the deathlike row of policemen ranged across the width of the orchestra. The captain held them in leash with a single glance of his dilated eyes, and not one stirred. “Steady!” he breathed. “For God’s sake, steady!”

Slowly the double target telescoped itself into a single one — the girl — as Harriman turned the two of them to face his enemies, then began to back up a step at a time through the long mirrored lobby toward the street.

His voice suddenly shattered the almost unbearable stillness. “I hope you raked ’em all in from out there — for her sake! If I get it in the back, she goes with me!”

“I’ve kept my word, Harriman!” the captain shouted back. “See that you keep yours. That ticket-booth’s the deadline!”

“Back!” snarled Harriman suddenly. “Ba-ack!” The line of men had begun to inch forward, trying to keep the distance between from widening too hopelessly as Chink-eyes retreated through the long funnel of the lobby.

Harriman came abreast of the ticket booth, veered off to one side of it after a single flick of his eyes had show n him it was harmless. He moved a step beyond it, a second step, was out on the open sidewalk now under the marquee. He gave a swift glance up one way, down the other.

“Turn that girl loose, you’re in the clear now!” the captain roared out to him.

He had reached the edge of the curb now with her. His arm went up, signalling off to one side, and a faint droning sounded, coming nearer.

“Merrill!” the captain breathed fervently. “Don’t spoil it, now, boys — there’s still a chance of saving that girl. Hold it,” he pleaded, “hold it!”

The oncoming hum suddenly burst into a sleek, yellow cab body, braking to a halt directly behind Harriman and the girl, so close it almost seemed to graze him. “Open the door!” they heard him growl, without taking his eyes off them.

A gasp went up from them as they watched.

In the full glare of the lights overhead, the grinning bronzed face of a negro flashed around as he turned to carry out the order. The cab door swung free. Harriman had already found the running board with the back of one foot. “D’ye want her?” he snarled back. “Then there she is, come and get her!”

The sudden widening of the space between their two bodies as he stepped back to avoid his own bullet, without dropping the encircling arm, showed what his intent was — murder and not release.

A form suddenly dropped from above, like something loosened from the rim of the marquee, and flattened Harriman with a swiftness impossible for the eye to follow, even in all that bright glare. It was Merrill’s hurtling body, rounded into a ball.

There was a flash in front of the girl, but out from her as the impact jerked Harriman’s curved arm straight. A sprinkling of glass trickled from the canopy overhead.

She went down in the struggle and a moment later emerged unharmed from the squirming tarantula that had formed on the sidewalk, crawling away on her hands and knees toward the sanctuary of the ticket booth. The cab driver, frightened, sped onward with his empty machine without waiting.

What remained as she drew away had two heads, four arms, four legs, all mixed inextricably together, threshing around, tearing itself to pieces. Metal glinted from it, and one head reared above the other. Only a lunatic could have risked a shot at such a target from back in the inner foyer of the theater. Yet a shot roared from inside, and the upper head dropped flat. For a moment the whole thing lay still, as the line of police broke and came rushing out toward it.

Ober came out last, blowing smoke out of his gun.

Merrill slurred Harriman’s body off his gun, and stood up shakily in the middle of all of them. The desperado lay squinting up at the marquee overhead, a black trickle threading out of one ear.

The captain was almost incoherent with rage. He shook his fist in Merrill’s face; acted like he was going to throw himself at him bodily. “I oughta demote you for insubordination! What the devil do you mean by deliberately disobeying my orders? I told you to commandeer a cab and tail him, not pull off a flying-trapeze act out here on the sidewalk!”

It was mostly relief — blowing off high-pressure steam after the terrible suspense.

“We got him, didn’t we?” Merrill blazed. “It was a cock-eyed idea, getting a cab. He could’ve pinged me from the back the minute he got suspicious and then where’d—” He stopped. Betty was squeezing his arm warningly. He caught on what the squeeze meant: we’ll be needing your salary after next June, so shut up.

He did. And he looked up at the marquee while the captain went ahead getting things off his chest and they all stood around and listened. It said up there in screamy fiery letters: Double Feature, Most Exciting Show in Town, Your Money’s Worth for 40c.

“Yeah,” he thought grimly, “that was no lie, either.”

“Double Feature” ( Detective Fiction Weekly, May 16, 1936) is one of the earliest and most vivid and breathless of Woolrich’s action whizbangs. A memorable thriller hung on a simple peg of plot, with a big-city movie palace as the setting and with emotions and action in perfect counterpoint — who but Woolrich could have pulled it off?