Charles Williams: Hell Hath No Fury

I straightened up, looking around. Where would he keep it? There was a locker nailed on the front wall near the gun racks. That looked like a good place. I opened it, using the shirt on the glass knob, and found what I was looking for, a can of gun oil, the rod he used for cleaning the shotgun, some oily rags and cut patches, and a can of solvent. I carried it all over and put it on the table.

I rubbed the automatic very carefully with the shirt to get my prints off. Then I wiped both his hands with one of the oily rags—because he’d already cleaned the shotgun—and pressed his fingers to the barrel and the imitation mother-of-pearl butt-plates in several places, flipped the safety off again, and put it down pointing off at an angle away from him on the other side of the table. If he’d been holding it by the barrel with oily fingers, when it went off its recoil would have kicked it over there. I had a hunch that Sheriff was a hard man to fool about guns, and I had to make it look right. I stood back and examined it.

There was one more thing, and then I was through. How many times had he shot? I stood still, trying to remember. He’d shot twice at me after the lightning flash, and then the gun had gone off when it hit the floor. So altogether there should be four cartridge cases around here on the floor. I got down on my knees and started looking. When I’d found all four, I put three of them in my pocket and stood beside the table where he was and tossed the other one in the general direction it would have gone and let it roll where it would. That left only the question of where the bullets had gone. I walked over by the bed and looked towards where I’d been when he shot. There was an open window beyond. I walked over to it. Rain was coming in. It didn’t matter. If he’d shot himself in the afternoon while he was cleaning a gun he would hardly be getting up to close the windows when it started to rain in the middle of the night. I looked around the window frame and couldn’t find any bullet hole, so probably they’d both gone out. The other one, when he’d dropped the gun, wasn’t going to be so easy. But I was lucky. I found it in less than five minutes. It was in the baseplank next to the bed, right down by the floor. There were two thicknesses of plank here, and it hadn’t gone through, so it was all right. They’d never see it.

I stood up, got the pants off the bed, put them in the purse and closed it, picked up the shoes, and stood looking at it. It was all right. It was as good as I had planned it. There was a dead man, who’d never blackmail anybody again. There was the gun he’d killed himself with because he’d forgotten a simple thing lots of others have before him but which very few people have ever forgotten twice—to check the chamber of a gun before you try to clean it.

I looked at my watch. It was two-thirty. I had plenty of time to get back to town. I hadn’t forgotten anything, and I wasn’t scared any more. I leaned over a little and blew out the lamp.

And then the calmness left me. I jerked my head around, listening, feeling my skin tighten up in goose-flesh. I could hear it quite plainly now, and there wasn’t any doubt as to what it was.

It was an automobile horn. It went on blowing, on and on, above the monotonous sound of the rain.

19

I lost my head for a minute. I ran out the front door and leaped off the porch, feeling the rain come pouring on to me, and then I was swallowed up in a world in which there was nothing anywhere except darkness, and water, and that unstoppable sound. It was laughing at me. It was accusing. It was pointing. Everybody on earth would hear it, and people would come from miles around to find out what was causing it and to stare at me— It wasn’t loud, because it was coming from away up on the hill, but it was like all the automobile horns in the biggest traffic jam in the world all rolled into one. I ran on blindly, unable to listen or pay any attention to the warning inside my head which was screaming for me to stop. It was insane. I had to find the road. I was running away from the house, and once I lost contact with that I’d have no place to start from. And then I tripped and fell, and that was the only thing that saved me.

It knocked a little sense into me. I lay there in the mud with the rain pouring over me, fighting to shut out that sound so I could think. Let it blow. Nobody could hear it. There wasn’t another human being within miles. There wasn’t anything to be afraid of in the noise itself; that was just senseless terror. The danger was in something else entirely, and if I didn’t hang on to my senses and find the road I was done for.

I got up to my feet and looked behind me. I could see nothing at all. The shack could have been fifty feet back there, or it could have been a hundred miles. I tried to think, to see the whole clearing in my mind. I had run straight out the front door, so the road had to be somewhere to my left. I turned that way and started walking, feeling my way through the stumps and bushes of the clearing and fighting down that terrible yearning to run. Unless I got back on the road I didn’t have a chance.

Then I felt the ruts under my feet. I had found the road. I turned right, and started running again, trying to keep between them. My breath burned in my throat, and I was cursing in a monotonous kind of frenzy. Of all the cars on the lot, I’d had to pick that one. Why in the name of God hadn’t I at least asked Gulick which one it was when it cut loose on the lot Saturday afternoon? Why hadn’t I had sense enough to see the warning in the way the motor had turned over when I’d started it?

I was soaked now. Water ran out of my hair and down my neck. With every step it sloshed in my shoes. Suddenly, I felt the road swerve left, and then I was out of the clearing and starting uphill through the timber. The horn didn’t seem any louder as I got nearer to it. Was it getting weaker? I listened, holding my breath, but I couldn’t tell. That insane urgency pulled at me, starting me running again. I missed a turn in the road and stumbled into the trees, and tripped over something and fell. The purse slipped out of my hands. I squatted on my knees and groped blindly in the mud with my free hand, afraid to let go of the shoes with the other. The sound of the horn was growing weaker. There wasn’t any doubt of it. I could hear it dying. And then I could hear myself, cursing endlessly in a sort of lost and hopeless madness as I swung my hand around in the mud and water and drowned leaves, feeling for the purse. It never occurred to me I could leave it; nobody would ever find it, and there was nothing in it to identify her anyway. I had the money clasp in my pocket. I had to find it. And then my hand brushed it and it slid. I reached over and grabbed it and floundered back into the road. The pitch of the horn was changing.

I don’t know how I made the last hundred yards. I was gasping, and wind was burning in my throat. I kept falling. And all the time I could hear the horn growing weaker and weaker, like an alarm clock running down. Then I was up to it. It was off to my left. I plunged off the road, feeling ahead of me with my hands to get around the tree trunks. I bumped into the car, felt my way along it to the door and opened it, and tossed the shoes and purse inside. The horn was still groaning faintly. I yanked the hood up and groped around under it, jerking at wires I came in contact with and pounding on the firewall. It stopped. I collapsed weakly on the fender. In the sudden silence the rain sounded louder, falling through the trees and drumming on top of the car.

Getting off the fender with an effort, I closed the hood, and went back to the door and got in. Water ran off me on to the seat. I switched on the ignition with shaky fingers and reached for the starter button, weak with the unbearable suspense of it and wishing I knew how to pray. I pushed it and the starter groaned once, coming around until it engaged the motor, and then it stopped. I tried once more, and there was nothing at all. The battery was dead.