Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

There was a moment on the train, when a man bumped his shoulder, when his nerves seemed to go quivering up and up to a pitch at which he thought something must happen, and a flurry of words rushed to his mind, almost to his tongue: It’s not really a gun in my pocket. I’ve never thought of it as a gun. I didn’t buy it because it was a gun. And immediately he felt easier, because he knew he was going to kill with it. He was like Bruno. Hadn’t he sensed it time and time again, and like a coward never admitted it? Hadn’t he known Bruno was like himself? Or why had he liked Bruno? He loved Bruno. Bruno had prepared every inch of the way for him, and everything would go well because everything always went well for Bruno. The world was geared for people like Bruno.

It was drizzling in a fine, directionless mist as he stepped off the train. Guy walked straight to the row of buses Bruno had described. The air through the open window was colder than New York’s, and fresh with open country. The bus moved out of the lighted community center and into a darker road with houses along both sides. He remembered he hadn’t stopped for coffee in the station. The omission threw him into a state of irritation just short of making him get off the bus and go back for it. A cup of coffee might make all the difference in the world. Yes, his life! But at the Grant Street stop, he stood up automatically, and the feeling of moving on established tracks returned to comfort him.

He step had a moist elastic sound on the dirt road. Ahead of him, a young girl ran up some steps, along a front walk, and the closing of the door behind her sounded peaceful and neighborly. There was the vacant lot with the solitary tree, and off to the left, darkness and the woods. The street lamp Bruno had put in all his maps wore an oily blue and gold halo. A car approached slowly, its headlights rolling like wild eyes with the road’s bumps, and passed him.

He came upon it suddenly, and it was as if a curtain had lifted on a stage scene he knew already: the long seven-foot high wall of white plaster in the foreground, darkened here and there by a cherry tree that overhung it, and beyond, the triangle of white housetop. The Doghouse. He crossed the street. From up the road came the grit of slow steps. He waited against the darker north side of the wall until the figure came into view. It was a policeman, strolling with hands and stick behind him. Guy felt no alarm whatever, less if possible than if the man hadn’t been a policeman, he thought. When the policeman had passed, Guy walked fifteen paces beside the wall, sprang up and gripped its cornice across the top, and scrambled astride it. Almost directly below him, he saw the pale form of the milk crate Bruno had said he had flung near the wall. He bent to peer through the cherry tree branches at the house. He could see two of the five big windows on the first floor, and part of the rectangle of the swimming pond projecting toward him. There was no light. He jumped down.

Now he could see the start of the six white-sided steps at the back, and the misty frill of blossomless dogwoood trees that surrounded the whole house. As he had suspected from Bruno’s drawings, the house was too small for its ten double gables, obviously built because the client wanted gables and that was that. He moved along the inner side of the wall until crackling twigs frightened him. Cut cattycornered across the lawn, Bruno had said, and the twigs were why.

When he moved toward the house, a limb took his hat off. He rammed the hat in the front of his overcoat, and put his hand back in the pocket where the key was. When had he put the gloves on? He took a breath and moved across the lawn in a gait between running and walking, light and quick as a cat. I have done this many times before, he thought, this is only one of the times. He hesitated at the edge of the grass, glanced at the familiar garage toward which the gravel road curved, then went up the six back steps. The back door opened, heavy and smooth, and he caught the knob on the other side. But the second door with the Yale lock resisted, and a flush of something like embarrassment passed over him before he pushed harder and it yielded. He heard a clock on the kitchen table to his left. He knew it was a table, though he could see only blackness with less black forms of things, the big white stove, the servants’ table and chairs left, the cabinets. He moved diagonally toward the back stairs, counting off his steps. I would have you use the main stairway but the whole stairway creaks. He walked slowly and stiffly, stretching his eyes, skirting the vegetable bins he did not really see. A sudden thought that he must resemble an insane somnambulist brought a start of panic.

Twelve steps up first, skip seven. Then two little flights after the turn… . Skip four, skip three, step wide at the top. You can remember it, it’s got a syncopated rhythm. He skipped the fourth step in the first little flight. There was a round window just at the turn before the last flight. Guy remembered from some essay, As a house is built so the pattern of activity of those will be who live in it…. Shall the child pause at the window for the view before he climbs fifteen steps to his playroom? Ten feet ahead on his left was the butler’s door. This is the closest you’ll come to anyone, said Bruno in a crescendo as he passed the door’s dark column.

The floor gave the tiniest wail of complaint, and Guy resiliently withdrew his foot, waited, and stepped around the spot. Delicately his hand closed on the knob of the hall door. As he opened it, the clock’s tick on the landing of the main stairway came louder, and he realized he had been hearing it for several seconds. He heard a sigh.

A sigh on the main stairs!

A chime rang out. The knob rattled, and he squeezed it hard enough to break it, he thought. Three. Four. Close the door before the butler hears it! Was this why Bruno had said between 11 and midnight? Damn him! And now he didn’t have the Luger! Guy closed the door with a bump-bump. While he sweated, feeling heat rise from his overcoat collar into his face, the clock kept on and on. And a last one.

Then he listened and there was nothing but the deaf and blind tick-lock again, and he opened the door and went into the main hall. My father’s door is just to the right. The tracks were back under him again. And surely he had been here before, in the empty hall that he could feel as he stared at Bruno’s father’s door, with the gray carpet, the paneled creamy walls, the marble table at the head of the stairs. The hall had a smell and even the smell was familiar. A sharp tickling sensation came at his temples. Suddenly he was sure the old man stood just the other side of the door, holding his breath just as he did, awaiting him. Guy held his own breath so long the old man must have died if he too had not breathed. Nonsense! Open the door!

He took the knob in his left hand, and his right moved automatically to the gun in his pocket. He felt like a machine, beyond danger and invulnerable. He had been here many, many times before, had killed him many times before, and this was only one of the times. He stared at the inch-wide crack in the door, sensing an infinite space opening out beyond, waiting until a feeling of vertigo passed. Suppose he couldn’t see him when he got inside? Suppose the old man saw him first? The night light on the front porch lights the room a little bit, but the bed was over in the opposite corner. He opened the door wider, listened, and stepped too hastily in. But the room was still, the bed a big vague thing in the dark corner, with a lighter strip at the head. He closed the door, the wind might blow the door, then faced the corner.

The gun was in his hand already, aimed at the bed that looked empty however he peered at it.