The Black Angel (19 page)

I went back to the vicinity of the window again and waited, sheltered off side to the frame.

They seldom came. One did at last, but its lights had no force to speak of, just a dull glow.

Then one of the kind I'd been hoping for slewed abruptly into view. It was a small truck or commercial vehicle of some kind, and it had its beams powered far above regulations. In the act of turning they threw a parabola of reflection glancing along that side. It was gone again in a moment, but it had been sufficient. It was the same principle as sheet lightning on a stormy night. It threw everything into high relief for an instant. The figure in the doorway was trapped. He stood out for a brief second or two like a leaden soldier, then was gone into the dark again.

I turned away with a mental shrug that was insincere. I had wanted to know; now I knew. There
was
someone down there, and he hadn't wanted to be seen. I'd caught the convulsive recessive movement he'd begun just as the darkness rescued him again.

There was no other way out of the house.

I saw that it was already past the time for me to have started for Mordaunt's house. To put off any longer was to have the appointment lapse by omission. I was going and I knew I was. I was dreadfully afraid, but I was going.

I thought, “I should take something with me this time.” I looked around, but I didn't know what to take. There wasn't anything. Then I thought, “What good would anything be, anyway, in that basement trap buried all the way back there under the house?” In the end I left as I was, empty-handed.

I was acutely conscious of that doorway as I came out. It showed in the straight line now that it should have all along, but too late to convince me. It wasn't directly opposite my own building entrance; it was some little distance down. My way took me past it, though the width of the street over.

It was so deserted-looking now, so patently lifeless. Somehow I knew, though. All its pretended vacuity availed it nothing. I knew there was someone still in it. Deep within it, all the way back to the rear of it now, where he couldn't be seen.

It was hard to keep my face looking forward as I came abreast, then passed beyond it, but I compelled myself to. If he intended coming out at all he wouldn't come right out at my heels. From the turn below I shot a quick glance back and over. It still showed empty. It refused to betray itself.

I could see a bus coming in the distance, and I ran the rest of the way. Still no sign of anyone or anything. I boarded the bus, and if I was sure of nothing else, I was sure no one boarded it with me. So if any attempted trail had been in the forming it had been broken off short.

At the other end I went down the street toward his house, and though outwardly I may have walked far more steadily, far more surely than that last time, I think if anything there was a greater fear within me. It was a different kind. No longer the half-childish fear of a dark house and a possible maniac attack without provocation. A deeper, because more plausible, fear of the rancor I might meet with on the part of the thoroughly vicious criminal whose accomplice I had made myself and whose task I had failed to perform satisfactorily.

I turned aside and stepped down into the abyss of the areaway with the feeling of treading a quicksand whose action was delayed, was withheld, purposely to lull me, until I had crossed a certain distance over it.

His voice struck through the basement grating at me without preamble, as it had the last time.

“You took your time.”

I didn't answer.

His hands fumbled, and the grating came undone.

“I was about giving you up. And I would've hated to have to do that.” There was a humorless threat in it.

I didn't answer.

He said a third thing as he stepped forward to reconnoiter. “Go ahead. You know your own way now.”

I traveled blindly along the tunnellike basement bore like someone pacing in a dream. A dream whose foreknown outcome is doom but yet which must unfold itself without reprieve to its appointed climax.

I couldn't find the light, that macabre shaded light I've spoken of, as readily as he had. Once I thought I had it, but it glanced away again.

Suddenly it went on, and he'd done it. He was in there already, and so close to me I jumped spasmodically and I suppose my face showed it.

“You're nervous, aren't you?” he said unkindly.

He motioned to the same packing case as that other night. “Sit down.” It was still said unkindly.

He sat down himself, opposite me, crouched sleepily forward on his elbows. Though I didn't see his lips move I received a mental impression of his tongue licking over them; I don't know why.

“Did you go to those places?”

“Yes, I went to those places.” I'm not sure, but I think this was the first thing I'd said since I'd entered.

I put one of the crushed nuggets on the table. “This was given to me in the cafeteria by a man who sat down——”

“I know, I know.” A sweep of his hand stifled the details.

“This was given to me in that bar.”

Each one disappeared as the next appeared.

“This was given to me at the night club.”

He waited a second or two. “I think there was a fourth place, wasn't there?”

“Something happened there. You'd better let me tell you what happened there first.” I was starting to be frightened already before I had received any cause to be. I could feel it while I spoke. My own voice had a sort of resonance to it within my chest.

His expression didn't change, and if anything I liked that less than if it had.

“You made delivery, and then somebody whispered to him; he jumped up and ran off.” He sounded as though he were mulling it over. He shook his head slightly, as if there were some flaw of motivation there. “He's no fool; he knows what would happen to him if he——” he started to say. Then he changed that, said: “He wouldn't do that——”

“But he did; I even tried to hold his arm.”

He kept looking at me. I couldn't read the look. “About what time was this?”

“Around three this morning.”

His lips formed into a thin, compressed line. “Let's go upstairs, shall we? We can talk better up there.”

He rose and held his hand to the light, and, I suppose, because the act of darkness would have resulted if I stayed, I moved trailingly through the doorway ahead of him, my head turned his way and my eyes clinging to his face until the switch snapped and blotted it out.

I groped my way up a darkened staircase enclosed within a shaft, more by dint of trying to remain ahead of him, clear of his oncoming tread, than through any deftness of my own. I palmed into a door standing closed above, and he wrenched it out for me, and there was the feeling of his thrusting me curtly through, though his hands failed to contact me.

This was the back of a first-floor hall, and there was a dim light to show it.

He opened the nearest of three doors that broke it, touched something, and it lighted to an equal duskiness with the hall. But at least darkness was banished.

“Stay in here a minute. Don't go out of here.” He closed the door and separated us.

It was an inscrutably fitted place, so that it was impossible to tell just what its purpose was. There was an iron cot frame in it, but this bore no bedding. It was just a room, perhaps, situated behind the so-called examination room in which I had consulted him on my first visit, on the reverse side of it from the parlor in which I had waited that day.

I listened for a moment, and he seemed to have drawn away, though I hadn't heard any retreating footfall.

I tried the knob, and though it circled its socket the door wouldn't give.

He'd locked me in there.

Panic flurried over me, and my first instinct was to batter frenziedly against it for outlet. My clenched hands were already backed to strike, but I held them frozen. “Wait, don't start anything. He hasn't done anything to you yet. If you don't provoke him you may yet be able to——”

In the silence I could hear the dial of a telephone creaking, but then after that stopped I couldn't hear what he said, he spoke so low.

Each breath was drawn from me as by a pulmotor.

I turned my head swiftly, thinking of the other door I'd seen and should have thought of sooner, the one giving into the consultation room beyond. And even as I did so I was too late; a white line sprang up around it like a ray, and a tiny white nick took the place of where its black keyhole had been until now.

The turning on of that highly powered light in there was the first inkling I had that he was no longer at the phone. I heard the slight clatter of instruments as he shifted aside the enamel pan that held them. I remembered that same sound from the first day.

I changed to the new direction, crouched down, and tried to look through the livid keyhole.

He was at the washstand, but he wasn't washing his hands this time. He was holding both hands down, seeming to draw something up
through
the one by means of the other. Some sort of plunger; I couldn't tell what. I thought I saw the shimmer of glass, like a tube or rod, glint through the intricate play of his fingers, but I couldn't be sure.

Then his figure changed focus, blurring as it came on toward the keyhole.

I reared, felt my way backward step by step, the ability to turn my body cataleptically denied me. I found the other doorknob, the first one, with my eyeless hands and, back still to it, pleaded twistingly to it. It still wouldn't open. I ran toward the cot. There was no other place to go. No other barrier, no other impediment, in the little foursquare rabbit hutch.

I flung it away from the wall and cleared a lane behind it and waded in there, covered only as high as the knees. The door was opening; the door had opened; the door had closed.

His face told nothing. His voice was guilefully moderate, matter of fact. “There's something coming to you. Here's your part of it.” He was holding a bill or two in his carelessly extended hand. Lettuce for the rabbit about to be inoculated.

I breathed hissingly.

“Well, take it. Don't you want it?”

“Wait a minute. Why are you holding your other hand behind you like that? You've got something in it. What have you got in it?”

He spoke as quietly as when he'd gone out; it was just the text that had altered, not the tone of voice or the expression of his face. “You cuddly little rat. You baby-faced little squealer. Come over here a minute. Come over here to me.” He actually beckoned at such a time and under such circumstances, beckoned me with fingers of his free hand in a mock-cajoling sort of way!

“Show me your other hand. Show me what you've got in it.”

He came on toward me, and I widened the canal I stood in by thrusting the cot out toward him. “Don't come near me. What are you going to do? Stay away, do you hear me? I haven't done anything to you.”

“You haven't and you won't. I'm going to see that you don't.”

He moved into the channel at one end. I moved out at the other, balancing on my two hands planted against the cot frame.

“I haven't
done
anything, I tell you!”

“No. Rocky was picked up within ten minutes after you'd fingered him at that theater last night. I just got word about it now.”

My voice was all over the place. He was the quiet one. “I don't even know what you mean by fingered, so how could I——?”

“And now I suppose you've come here to poke it on me. Well, get this, you little she-louse. I'm in the clear.
You're
the only link between me and all of them. I can be out of here in ten minutes flat. I've moved fast before, and I can move fast again if I have to. But I'm willing to give nine of them up to——”

The needle was out. You couldn't see it; you could just see the V-shaped stance of his fingers, index toward point, thumb to plunger. A low scream sobbed from me, not very shrill, more of a moan. He'd left the lane of clearance again. I re-entered it at the other end an instant after. He reversed; I did too, and this horrible Virginia reel of death took a new direction.

“You won't even feel this. But it's a sure cure for your trouble. That's what you came to me for, isn't it? Well, I'm prescribing for you now. Sleep is what you need. Here it is here in my hand.”

“They'll know you did it!” I gabbled. “You're only incriminating your——”

“They won't even know what was done. Morphine poisoning, my dear patient, leaves only one trace. Dilated pupils of the eyes. A drop of belladonna in each one before you're quite gone, and even that will be taken away. Death from an unknown cause. Suppose it did take place in my house? What they suspect and what they're able to prove in court are two different things.”

I suddenly crouched low, shoved the entire cot frame back upon him with my entire strength. He was caught in mid-channel, equidistant from each end. It pinned him against the wall, at that most awkward point of leverage, just
under
the break of the knees, so that he couldn't use them to prod it back; they were held fast. He had to bend to it to use his own hand for a minute, easily as it shifted. And the blow must have stunned his leg bones, cramped them for a minute.

I used that minute for all it was worth. He'd locked the original opening, but there was still the door into the brightly lighted office from which he'd just come. I flung it out of the way and got in there.

From here there was only one other way out now. Those sliding door panels giving beyond into the front room. I wrenched at the finger sockets, splintering my nails. They gave with balky resistance, and before I could widen them sufficiently he was entering at the rear behind me.

There was that pan of instruments teetered beside me on the washstand rim. I picked it up and heaved it at him. Most of the things were light little things, short wands and what not. They sprayed out all over his chest and dropped without hurting him.