Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

“Where d’ye think you’re going,” he shrilled exasperatedly, “right inside my room with me?”

“No,” Rogers said evenly, putting a key to the door directly opposite, “into my own.”

The two doors closed one after the other.

That was at midnight, on the sixth floor of the Congress Hotel. When Blake opened the door of his room at ten the next morning, all freshly combed and shaven, to go down to breakfast, it was on the tenth floor of the Hotel Colton. He’d changed abodes in the middle of the night. As he came out he was smiling to himself behind the hand he traced lightly over the lower part of his face to test the efficacy of his recent shave.

He closed the door and moved down the corridor toward the elevator.

The second door down from his own, on the same side, opened a moment or two after he’d gone by, before he’d quite reached the turn of the hall. Something made him glance back. Some lack of completion, maybe the fact that it hadn’t immediately closed again on the occupant’s departure as it should have.

Rogers was standing sidewise in it, back to door-frame, looking out after him while he unhurriedly completed hitching on his coat.

“Hold the car for me a sec, will you?” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m on my way down to breakfast myself.”

On the third try he managed to bring the cup up to its highest level yet, within an inch of his lips, but he still couldn’t seem to manage that remaining inch. The cup started to vibrate with the uncontrollable vibration of the wrist that supported it, slosh over at the sides. Finally it sank heavily down again, with a crack that nearly broke the saucer under it, as though it were too heavy for him to hold. Its contents splashed up.

Rogers, sitting facing him from a distance of two tables away, but in a straight line, went ahead enjoyably and calmly mangling a large dish of bacon and eggs. He grinned through a full mouth, while his jaws continued inexorably to rotate with a sort of traction movement.

Blake’s wrists continued to tremble, even without the cup to support. “I can’t stand it,” he muttered, shading his eyes for a minute. “Does that man have to—?” Then he checked the remark.

The waiter, mopping up the place before him, let his eye travel around the room without understanding. “Is there something in here that bothers you, sir?”

“Yes,” Blake said in a choked voice, “there is.”

“Would you care to sit this way, sir?”

Blake got up and moved around to the opposite side of the table, with his back to Rogers. The waiter refilled his cup.

He started to lift it again, using both hands this time to make sure of keeping it steady.

He couldn’t see him any more, but he could still hear him. The peculiar crackling, grating sound caused by a person chomping on dry toast reached him from the direction in which he had last seen Rogers. It continued incessantly after that, without a pause, as though the consumer had no sooner completed one mouthful of the highly audible stuff than he filled up another and went to work on that.

The cup sank down heavily, as if it weighed too much to support even in his double grasp. This time it overturned, a tan puddle overspread the table. Blake leaped to his feet, flung his napkin down, elbowed the solicitous waiter aside.

“Lemme out of here,” he panted. “I can still feel him, every move I make, watching me, watching me from behind!”

The waiter looked around, perplexed. To his eyes there was no one in sight but a quiet, inoffensive man a couple of tables off, minding his own business, strictly attending to what was on the plate before him, not doing anything to disturb anyone.

“Gee, you better see a doctor, mister,” he suggested worriedly. “You haven’t been able to sit through a meal in days now.”

Blake floundered out of the dining room, across the lobby, and into the drugstore on the opposite side. He drew up short at the fountain, leaned helplessly against it with a haggard look on his face.

“Gimme an aspirin!” His voice frayed. “Two of them, three of them!”

“Century Limited, ’Ca-a-awgo, Track Twenty-five!” boomed dismally through the vaulted rotunda. It filtered in, thinned a little through the crack in the telephone-booth panel that Blake was holding fractionally ajar, both for purposes of ventilation and to be able to hear the despatch when it came.

Even now that he had come, he stayed in the booth and the phone stayed on the hook. He’d picked the booth for its strategic location. It not only commanded the clock out there, more important still it commanded the wicket leading down to that particular track that he was to use, and above all, the prospective passengers who filed through it.

He was going to be the last one on that train — the last possible one — and he was going to know just who had preceded him aboard, before he committed himself to it himself.

It was impossible, with all the precautions he had taken, that that devil in human form should sense the distance he was about to put between them once and for all, come after him this time. If he did, then he was a mind-reader, pure and simple; there would be no other way to explain it.

It had been troublesome and expensive, but if it succeeded, it would be worth it. The several unsuccessful attempts he had made to change hotels had shown him the futility of that type of disappearance. This time he hadn’t made the mistake of asking for his final bill, packing his belongings, or anything like that. His clothes, such as they were, were still in the closet; his baggage was still empty. He’d paid his bill for a week in advance, and this was only the second day of that week. He’d given no notice of departure. Then he’d strolled casually forth as on any other day, sauntered into a movie, left immediately by another entrance, come over here, picked up the reservation they’d been holding for him under another name, and closed himself up in this phone-booth. He’d been in it for the past three-quarters of an hour now.

And his nemesis, meanwhile, was either loitering around outside that theatre waiting for him to come out again, or sitting back there at the hotel waiting for him to return.

He scanned them as they filed through in driblets; now one, now two or three at once, now one more again, now a brief let-up.

The minute-hand was beginning to hit train-time. The guard was getting ready to close the gate again. Nobody else was passing through any more now.

He opened the booth-flap, took a tight tug on his hat-brim, and poised himself for a sudden dash across the marble floor.

He waited until the latticed gate was stretched all the way across, ready to be latched onto the opposite side of the gateway. Then he flashed from the booth and streaked over toward it. “Hold it!” he barked, and the guard widened it again just enough for him to squeeze through sidewise.

He showed him his ticket on the inside, after it was already made fast. He looked watchfully out and around through it, in the minute or two this took, and there was no sign of anyone starting up from any hidden position around the waiting rooms or any place near-by and starting after him.

He wasn’t here. He’d lost him, given him the slip.

“Better make it fast, mister,” the guard suggested.

He didn’t have to tell him that; the train didn’t exist that could get away from him now, even if he had to run halfway through the tunnel after it.

He went tearing down the ramp, wigwagging a line of returning redcaps out of his way.

He got on only by virtue of a conductor’s outstretched arm, a door left aslant to receive him, and a last-minute flourish of tricky footwork. He got on, and that was all that mattered.

“That’s it,” he heaved gratifiedly. “Now close it up and throw the key away! There’s nobody else, after me.”