Fritz Leiber - The Sinful Ones

“My…?”

“Your note.”

“But, Carr, I didn’t…” she began. Then he felt her jerk and freeze like a frightened animal.

He heard, in the silence, a faint scuffling sound. Again it came—tight, complaining. He recognized it.

It was the porte-cochere door opening.

Then footsteps in the big hall two flights down.

As if it were some other person speaking, some shadowy other Carr who thought of strategies and tactics while the main Carr was hypnotized by fear, he heard himself whisper, “There’s another stairway at the back. We might—”

Just then, like a fantastically amplified echo, the words came booming up from below:

“There’s another stairway at the back.”

But the tones were the deep, hearty ones of Mr. Wilson.

“That’s all right.” Miss Hackman’s happy, strident tones rocketed across his deeper ones. “If they try to use it, Daisy will notice, won’t you, dear?”

Carr felt Jane shake spasmodically, then freeze again. He tried to draw her away from the head of the stairs, but she was rigid as a stick. Everything seemed to him to be happening in very slow motion, so that when a third and brisker voice rose up the well, saying, “Let’s get busy,” the three words came to his ears yards apart. The odor of dust in his nostrils was something to be carefully sensed, precisely examined. In the gathering light he could begin to make out the leaf-and-stem pattern of the wall-paper beyond Jane’s head.

There was a medley of steps on the stairs, and mixed with them, a rhythmic and rapid padding. From where he was standing Carr could peer crosswise down the well to a small segment of the first flight of steps, which were still plunged in blackness. But then it seemed to his heightened vision that a brighter, sleeker blackness momentarily flashed there.

Like a pull of cheap perfume, there came up the stairwell the sugarsweet voice of Miss Hackman: “Don’t hurry Daisy, there’ll be lots of time.”

Again Carr tried to draw Jane away. She wouldn’t move .Yet he inwardly realized that this attempt on his part was little more than a sham, that the other Car who tried to think of the defensive possibilities of the broken-windowed rooms around them was getting dimmer and more shadowy every moment. No, this was it. This was the finish for a pair of lovers who had found that life was very much like a night spent on a wager in a waxworks museum with some of the figures finally coming alive. Escape into a dead and shelterless world was futile. He had a momentary vision of the fate of the small dark man with glasses. No, there was nothing to do at all.

Jane was like a statue in his arms, except that he could feel the terrified breaths creep up and down her throat. His mind was curiously empty, concerned with such trivial things as the wall-paper, the light, and the identity of the figure in the dark slicker he had passed by the car tracks. For some reason that question nagged him.

The steps on the stairs slowed.

“Well, they’re up there, all right. The hair’s broken.” Mr. Wilson’s words had an eminently businesslike ring, though interspersed with puffing. Then, as the steps came onto the second-story landing, “Wait a minute. I’m out of breath.”

“Very well. Down, Daisy.” Miss Hackman’s voice was amiable.

“Sh! They’ll hear you.” This time the voice was Dris’s.

Miss Hackman dwelt lovingly on her reply, lavishing on it all her sugariness. “I know they will.”

Carr studied the pattern of the wallpaper. It seemed to him he could see the light increase by visible stages, like the movements of the minute hand of a watch. He noted a thickening of the musty odor, as if from dust raised by their footsteps.

From the landing below came Mr. Wilson’s puffing and a soft and rapid padding back and forth over a very short distance. Carr could picture them clearly, though his paralyzed mind perversely attached much greater importance to the problem of the figure in the dark slicker. Mr. Wilson seated on the top step, chest heaving, knees drawn up, perhaps carefully holding his coat tails out of the dust. Dris back by the wall, a slim shadow, hand and hook at his sides. Miss Hackman standing with one foot on the top step, one below, leaning forward in some flamboyant suit, elbow on knee, blonde hair dripping around her face, holding in her hand a very short leash at the end of which a brighter, sleeker blackness paced. As they spoke, he could picture their expressions vividly—although the other problem persisted in seeming to him much more important.

“Let’s get on,” Dris said sharply.

“There’s no hurry at all,” Miss Hackman assured him. “Quiet, Daisy!”

“Just the same, it would have been simpler to finish them off back there,” Dris continued stubbornly.

“And have to spend hours cleaning up the mess?” Miss Hackman’s reply was quick and scornful. “Have you forgotten the trouble we had because of the little man with glasses. On your knees for half an hour, scrubbing?”

“You weren’t so keen on that business yourself,” he told her.

“That didn’t happen to strike me. This does. Here we don’t have to rush things or worry about cleaning up afterwards.” She paused reflectively. “Oh, how stupid of them to let themselves be lured here with those notes,” she said gayly. “How stupid of her to think we didn’t know she used to come here. How stupid of them both to be so utterly, completely guileless. How stupid of him not to realize we could get his home address at his office. It’s almost too easy. Still,” she went on thoughtfully, “they’re alive, and it’s really only live things that are any fun.”

“Let’s get on,” Dris repeated insistently.

“Not by any chance a date? With your girls?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. No, I’ve got a feeling…that we’re being watched.”

“Silly lad.” Miss Hackman’s voice was wholly again. “Of course we are, and listened to, too.”

“I don’t mean by them,” Dris told her.

But Carr was hardly listening to what they said, for he had just recaptured a memory that perversely afforded him great satisfaction—the identity of the figure in the dark slicker.

It had been one of the men on South State Street who had stood on the curb when he and Jane—and those three—had fled.

“You’ve a feeling, Dris?” At last Mr. Wilson spoke again, even-breathed, an for once not heartily, instead almost apprehensively.

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get one with this quickly.” The stairs creaked as he heaved up his fat body, the footsteps started again, and there was an eager change in the rhythmic padding then:

“What’s that!” Mr. Wilson almost shouted.

“They’re trying for the back stairs,” Miss Hackman screeched. “Daisy!”

“No, they’re not, you idiot!” Mr. Wilson roared. “I think—”

“I warned you—” Dris began.

“My God, it’s—” Mr. Wilson started to say.

But Carr was so preoccupied with his recaptured memory, that at first it seemed to him of no consequence—perhaps just something his sick mind was imagining—when he heard a sudden rush of footsteps on the floor below, more footsteps than those three could make, and in addition coming with a rush from the back of the house and pounding up the stairs from the first floor.

Even when Jane jerked in his arms, when, with shocking loudness in the echoing stair-well, there came the crash of half dozen gunshots, he hardly roused himself fully to what was happening—or rather he realized how what was happening fitted his recaptured memory, how it led from South State Street by the red glare of a railway flare to Old Jules’s barge, to the man by the car tracks, and so here.

With Jane rocking wildly in his arms, he heard, as the echoes of the gunfire died, a shrill scream that ended in a gargling groan, thud of a body, a squalling animal scream, a rush of paws, another earsplitting burst of gunfire, thud of another body, one last gunshot, and then the fainter diminishing rhythmic thuds of a body rolling down the stairs, step by step.