Black Curtain (17 page)

But they didn't. They opened and missed touching him by sixteenths of an inch. If he'd needed a shave, they might have contacted the stubble on his face, that was how close they were.

She had seen something that drew her away. Yet he would have rather had her stay, when he understood what the magnet was.

"Shouldn't these things get rusty?"

There was a little -plink- as she tossed something down again.

His razor blade, left on a scrap of paper to dry. He cursed inwardly.

The threshold creaked in reverse passage. The awful propinquity was over. He could feel his stomach fill out with released breath, and something wet tracked down the side of his nose.

Her next remark sounded from the open again. "I tell Bill he should have this property fenced in. Left open the way it is, on all sides, anyone at all could hide out in it. I never feel safe, even in the daytime. At least, while that man's still at large."

"What man?" he heard Ruth ask guilelessly.

The answer was bursting with double-edged meaning. Accusation was implicit in it. "-You- know what man I mean. Dan Nearing. The man who murdered my husband."

Ruth didn't answer.

"Well, I'll be getting back now. I was just curious to see the attraction that keeps drawing you out here day after day. I've noticed more than once that the tracks of Father's chair led off in this direction--I suppose you'll be sticking around awhile longer, my dear." She managed to get a fiendish distortion into the epithet that suggested grimacing, manual strangulation.

Ruth played out her part with beautiful consistency to the end. She jumped up and the campstool legs clicked hastily together. "Oh no, wait for me, Miss Alma! You've got me so frightened now myself, I wouldn't stay here alone another minute, not on a bet!" The rustling hiss of the chair wheels went speeding down the path.

The last thing he heard was the contralto voice already a considerable distance away: "Your hands -are- clammy--for some reason or other." She must have found some excuse for touching one of them.

Townsend came out of his hiding place feeling like a bath towel after three people have used it. Unless she was a whole lot dumber than she sounded--and he didn't think she was--she'd caught on somebody had been hiding out in here lately, even if she didn't guess he'd been there at the same moment she was.

He released his compressed burden of papers, started to pry at one of the warped floorboards with the saw-toothed lid of a can for lever.

Need for food drew him back to the shack, after darkness had safely fallen. He'd been out of it all day, hidden among the trees, turned into a woodland thing now, without even a roof over his head. He wanted to side-step any possible surprise raid that her denunciation might bring on. He intended to sleep out. It was a clear, warm night, and there would be no harm in that. He could snag one of the blankets Ruth had provided for him and roll up in that; there wouldn't be such a vast difference between the bare ground and the lodge flooring after all. But first he had to get something into his stomach, even if it went down cold.

No Indian brave ever stalked a lone cabin in a clearing more craftily. He worked his way up toward it from the rear. He huddled motionless for a long time, screened by the trunk of a tree, listening. If there'd been anyone hiding in there, they couldn't have remained so silent for so long. Reassured at last, he slithered up close to the back wall, rounded the corner, and crept along the side toward the front, bent carefully low to make as little outline as possible, even in the gloom. Arrived at the outermost corner, he stopped again and listened. The dirt path before him was lifeless. The lodge itself was empty.

He moved again, covered the short remaining distance toward the doorway. The door was slanting inward now, whereas he'd left it closed. That worried him for a minute, but maybe the wind had done it.

He saw the white square adhering to the doorr up near the top, on the inside. He could make out lines of writing on it, even in the dark. He took it down. It had been stuck in with a bent pin or piece of wire, and that flew out.

He closed the door first, then he struck a match, carefully shielded it from raying too far out under the front of his coat. He held the paper before it. The paper turned salmon, the lines on it sprang into legibility.

-Dan--I've found out something terribly important. You will have to see it with your own eyes. Come over to the house at nine. I'll fix the door so you can get in. They won't be here, they're going into the city, so don't worry-.

    -RUTH-.

He studied it carefully, longer than seemed necessary to take in its simple meaning.

He'd only had one other piece of writing from her, the note she'd left for him that morning at Tillary Street. He looked to see if he still had this. He did, stuck away in his rear trouser pocket, with little clots of wool dust sticking to it. Funny that he should have kept it until now. Not so funny, maybe. Lucky. Darn convenient that he should have kept it until now.

He held them both with the same thumb, fanned out side by side. Then he struck a fresh match, poised it over them.

The match went out in his hands. He put the two pieces of paper back in his pocket. He had a few things to do before his rendezvous at nine.

21

There was a blurred moon up, and it spilled a platinum-gray wash over the house.

He came out from under the trees and stood Looking across at it for a while, without moving. Not so much watching it--he knew there wouldn't be anything to watch for--as thinking things over. To go in there was final. He couldn't be wrong more than once. This was the once, right now, and there'd never be a twice.

This was the story's end, one way or another. This was the night. This was the time. This was the place.

His thoughts were a little like those of a man about to enter an execution chamber. He thought of the rag doll with the piquant face, Virginia. He thought of Dan Nearing's sweetheart, Ruth. He thought of the strange story that he'd lived, hi3 own story. The first placid, uneventful twentyfive years. The three lost years; not fully visualized even yet, even with the aid of Ruth's eyes. Never to be entirely regained. The dismal, fugitive life that came of a blending of the two. And tonight--either an end or a beginning. The beginning of a fourth life. Four lives in thirty years. Whatever happened, he'd never be quite like other people again.

There it was, waiting for him over there, across the dim level of the lawn. Dark on all sides, not a light showing. Not a sign anyone was in it.

It was nine o'clock.

He started forward, closed in across the lawn, to keep his rendezvous. The short grass hissed under his feet, and a wavering black shadow like running water coursed after him, for he was going against the moon.

He went up the two low flagstone steps, a moment later was at the inscrutable doorway. His shadow, tacking stood up against it like a cut-out litmus-paper man. Doorway to the past and to the future.

The knob felt cold and glibly elusive under his touch. -Here I go-, sparked in his mind. His belt buckle followed his stomach inward, closing the gap his tightly indrawn breath had left. He flexed his wrist and the door gave way before him. The Latch had been fixed for him just as the note had said it would be.

He closed it after him. The darkness of the interior lay as thick and palpable upon him as a drift of black feathers. It all but tickled his nostrils. He reached over to the left, found the electric switch, pressed it. Nothing happened. The bulb in the fixture must have burned out. Or been removed.

The futile clicks went chasing one another down the dark of the hallway, magnified by the silence until they sounded like rumbling balls. It wouldn't have surprised him to hear pins go over at the other end.

He started forward, arm half bent before him in a vague swimming gesture, to guard against collision. An even deeper darkness, floating over the darkness that was already there, to one side of him, frizzed the hair on his neck for a minute, but it was only his own reflection flitting across an invisible mirror. It had stopped, with utter synchronization, as he did himself. He remembered, now, the night he'd been in here, having noticed one hanging at just about that place.

He went on again, dragging the shadow off the mirror after him. He stopped at the foot of the staircase, gave a short interrogative whistle. Two notes, one up, one down. You hear it on the streets a lot. Meaning: Hey, there! Where are you?

He repeated it, and the second time it got results. He heard a cautious tread coming out along the upper hall. It was very soft. There was stealth implicit in every lightest scuff of it. When it reached the boundary of the railing enclosing the stair well up there, directly over his head, it stopped, hung fire, as though the person were leaning over, silently questioning the gloom below.

"It's me, Ruth," he whispered huskily.

The answer came down blurred with excess caution. "Shhh! I'm com' ri' dow'."

The tread started down the left-hand branch of the forked upper stairs and, as it reached the intersection midway down them, he could see an outline vaguely, like a ghost riding the dark above his head. He could make out the two white cross strips of Ruth's familiar uniform and the apron below, like something outlined in faintly luminous paint.

The apparition descended toward him, stopped about four steps above him. He saw the white of an arm reaching out toward him. A voiceless whisper went with it. "Give me your hand. I want you to follow me--"

"Wait a minute, I'll light a match--"

"No, don't! Give me your hand," she insisted. "I'll lead you."

She refused to shorten the distance between them. She seemed stubbornly determined to force him to take the steps that would close the short gap between them. The white pad that was her hand stretched out demandingly toward him, across the gap. He clasped it with his own, felt the warm smoothness of her skin. Her second hand came out and joined the first, sidling about his wrist. It could not close entirely because of the bulk.

He started up and she began to draw him on, to make him come faster. The warning scent of gardenia touched his brain. The outstretched arms suddenly folded up at the elbows like treacherous levers, drew him in close and fast with unexpected, clinging strength. He lurched upward off balance. A taut rope stretched from bannister post to bannister post caught him just below the knees, and he went floundering helplessly down at nearly full length, face buried against other, softly impeding knees. A shattering shriek rent the air over his head. "He's down, Bill! Get him, quick!"

Something crushingly heavy flung itself down upon him from behind, pinning him there in floundering confusion, while he wrenched to try to get his hands free and bring them into use over arm and backwards.

All he succeeded in doing was to bring her entire, resisting body up short against him.

"Have you got him, Bill? Have you got him? Hurry up, he's killing my wrists!"

A male voice spoke for the first time, winded with effort, and so close behind his ear that he could feel its warmth. "Gimme his hands! Bring them together and bend them over this way--"

A knee at the back of his neck was holding his face ground into the concave joint where two steps were seamed together, pushing the soft part of his nose awry to one side. He kept trying to thresh free, but the dead weight resting on him crushed resistance.

She crossed her own arms, which were, while she was able to maintain her clinging grasp, simply a continuation of his, and thus brought his together at the wrists. "Here they are, here they are--quick!" Something that felt like a leather strap twined around them, first snugly close. Then its ends were twined spirally, cruelly, crushingly tight, so that the wrists pancaked over one another in tormented compression.

"There. Now just hold him where he is a minute. Put your foot on him so he'll stay down, until I can get up."

The crushing weight lifted from his back, was replaced by the sharper pressure of a woman's shoe, riding crosswise over the back of his neck like a tiny tapered boat mastering a swell.

The female voice, and only now, that it was neither whispering sibilantly nor screaming hectically, could he recognize Alma Diedrich's raspy contralto, said: "God! What he did to my poor hands! They're tingling as though they were frostbitten!"

The man, standing at full height over Townsend and still breathing heavily, said: "Got the bottle?"

"I stood it up there on the floor by the top step. I was afraid it would break."

"All right, bring it down. It'll make it a lot easier."

The foot left his neck, and a thick powerful hand replaced it, forked to hold him supine. He scissored his legs, but the man holding him avoided them by moving up two steps higher on the stairs.

"I can't breathe," Townsend gasped. "Let me get my face out--"

Bill Diedrich didn't answer, just kept the pressure even.

The woman came treading deftly down again, and there was a tiny murmur of liquid inside glass.

She said, "Can they tell afterwards when you've used this stuff on them?"

The man didn't answer that. "Are the shades all down? All right, we may as well do it right here on the stairs, it'll save a lot of trouble. Take this and give me a little light, so I can see what I'm doing."