Black Curtain (3 page)

As his own car gained the mid-point of the platform, he saw his pursuer on it, still outside the train. Something must have gone wrong with his timing. Any one of countless things could have thwarted him. Maybe he hadn't had the right coin ready--if indeed he had bothered inserting one at all, and not just ducked below the turnstile arm, as seemed more likely. Maybe he'd had too many possibilities to cover at once--the platform, the station washroom, concealment behind one of the weight machines--and the momentary hesitation bad cost him his chance. Or, most likely of all, maybe the outgoing surge of passengers on the stairs, which Townsend had been just in time enough to avoid, had balked his getting down them until it was too late. Townsend had won the gamble.

He was running along, pacing the train but falling steadily behind it, peering hawklike in through the lighted windows one by one as they outdistanced him. Townsend's vestibule door pane caught up with him and their stares met eye to eye, for the second and last time that day. Terror, still unassuaged by safety, meeting with some grim inflexible purpose.

He didn't try to dissemble any more, the man outside the bleared glass. He'd lost Townsend that way the first time. He didn't try to pretend he had no purpose, or that his purpose was anything but Townsend. Without a change shadowing his frozen expression, without a flicker of emotion lighting his cold-gray eyes, he deliberately reached backhand to his hip and drew a gun.

Townsend was too paralyzed with horror at the incredible action to be able even to drop below the shelter of the steel lower half of the door. Knee joints often weaken with terror; his had become locked, unmanageable. He was as rigid as a bird fascinated by a snake. He was too wedged in by the oblivious people around him to have been able to move much in any direction.

He didn't fire in at him, as Townsend had first thought for a crazed moment he intended to. He swung his arm up overhead and slashed at the door panel with the gun heft. It cracked with a dull thud, white veins streaked through it, and it sagged inward in a small, cone-shaped blister, almost as though it were malleable. But it held, none of the pieces fell out.

He was trying to break the pane, to reach in through the opening from where he was, snag the overhead emergency cord, and bring the train to a stop. Maniacal, but not a physical impossibility, provided he balanced a foot on the tiny lip of the car base, clutched one of the outside, between-car hand grips made use of by the conductors themselves, and let the moving train carry him for the remaining moment or two before the tunnel wall nudged him off. He would have been taking a gamble of his own, on being able to bring the train to a stop before he was drawn into the tunnel shaft with it and crushed to death.

Outside forces interfered to prevent him. The serge-sleeved arms of a station guard suddenly twined about him from behind, grappled with him, pulled him up short--and clear. The Laocoönlike formation whisked from sight, left behind. The lighted platform snuffed out, became black tunnel wall. The train sped on unimpeded.

The thought Townsend took with him the rest of the way home was: "He could have shot me. He seemed to want me alive." It had no power to relieve his terror.

He didn't tell Virginia any of it. What was there he could tell her? Only draw terrifying shadow outlines, without being able to fill in their meaning. A stranger on a street had pursued him. That was either too much or too little. He didn't know who the man was, nor what he wanted with him, nor even who it was that -he-, the one wanted, was supposed to be.

He only knew that the bottomless black abyss of that anonymous past was not passive, lifeless, after all; it had just emitted a blood-red lick of flame toward him, as if seeking to drag him back into its depths and consume him.

3

A day went by, holding its breath; then another, beginning to breathe more easily. Then, on the third, the wind was knocked out of his confidence again. He saw it once more, the Face in the Crowd.

An accident saved him. Less than an accident; perhaps the most trivial thing there is that can make a walker stop. On his way out of the building where he worked he stopped. He tripped over a loosened shoelace. He saw Agate Eyes go by outside, at that moment, the man who had hounded him to the subway. They were only feet away from each other, closer even than they had been three days before. Their elbows brushed, metaphorically speaking. The man crossed the width of the arched opening, passed from view on the sidewalk. But for the errant shoelace Town. send would have emerged just in time to cut across his path, practically tread on his toes.

He knew he wasn't mistaken, it was the man. He was already as familiar to Townsend as a bad dream--he had been in so many of them with him the past few nights--the bulky shoulders, the spare waist, his swing when he walked, that comes from perfect muscular co-ordination. He'd had on the same clothes and the same hat, and he'd been wearing the same eyes too, cold and hard and gray.

Townsend's first impulse was to turn and plunge back into the depths of the building, put the length of the arcade between himself and this omnipresent menace.

Instead, he found himself being irresistibly drawn forward to peer out after him, to find out where he was going.

There was a shoeshine stand midway between Townsend's building and the corner, in an excellent position to watch the bus stop. Townsend was just in time to see the gray-clad figure digress from the crowd, step up on the rickety structure, and sit down in one of the two chairs it held. A striped canvas umbrella was poised over them to protect patrons from the sun. That sliced off the top of his head. An expanded newspaper, withdrawn from his pocket, screened the remainder. He became just an anonymous pair of legs raised to the foot rests of the shoeshine platform.

The attendant whipped out his flannel dusting cloth, crouched diligently to begin his task. Then he scratched his head and looked up at the outstretched newspaper over him a couple of times as if undecided what he was expected to do. The shoes must be newly burnished, probably didn't need a shine. But that wasn't why he was sitting there, Townsend knew.

Agate Eyes had only two fixed points to work from, so far, and he was making good use of them. One was that particular bus stop, which might be Townsend's usual embarkation point at the end of the day. The other was that around now might be Townsend's habitual time for reaching it. He could have been wrong on both counts. Townsend knew he was right.

His bus boarding point was lost to him for good; he'd have to skirt danger daily now, coming and going to work. He would have to use the bus line that fed the next avenue over, detour a block out of his way at each end.

He went back and left the building by another exit, and all the way over to the new bus stop his face was turned behind him more than before him. Every gray suit was an enemy until the pink oval above it had come into focus.

At home, drawing false courage from the security of his own walls close about him, he thought: Why don't I go up to him the next time I see him and demand to know what he wants with me once and for all? Why do I run away, when I don't know what I am running away from? It may be merely a mistake in identity. Why don't I at least stand my ground long enough to find out, the next time I catch sight of him?

But he knew that the next time he wouldn't. And the next time he saw the stranger again he didn't.

The pace of the chase was growing quicker. The radius of the contracting coils around him was growing tighter all the time.

Agate Eyes had found the building itself, the next time; entered it. And again Townsend avoided blundering into him by a hair's breadth. Incredible that such a miracle of split-second avoidance should repeat itself a second time--it violated all the laws of probability.

Townsend needed cigarettes, he found when he reached his morning's destination, stopped in at the cut-rate drugstore of his office building to buy them. While the cashier was counting out his change Townsend looked idly out through the window that revealed the lobby of the building.

The sight his eyes found was a segment of the same face he'd first seen three days before, passing by under a gray brim. Agate Eyes was talking to the elevator starter out there, close up against the drugstore show window.

The starter nodded, underlip pursed judicially. The pantomime was as explicit to Town. send as though he'd been able to overhear the actual words. "Yeah, I have seen someone like that coming in and out the last few days. Must work here some place in the building." Townsend had only been back a week and the starter was new to him.

The agate eyes buried themselves deeper behind their lids with baleful calculation. The mouth under them asked something, scarcely stirring its lips at all.

The starter shook his head in negation, waved a hand toward the unending trickle of humanity going by them, and shrugged helplessly. That said as plain as words, "So many people pass. You can't keep track of each and every one of them. You know how it is."

A voice suddenly sounded from across the counter, crumbled the rigidity that had held Townsend gripped until now. "Could I interest you in one of those? We got a special on them."

Townsend turned, walked quickly to the en trance, and flung out of the drugstore.

He gained the street and looked hauntedly back. No gray-eyed Visage was peering after him from around the turn. He scuttled from sight. He'd made it. But he knew that was the end of his job.

He went on--fleeing before the unknown.

Easy enough to say to himself, "Face it! Find out what it is, once and for all! Make sure, at least, that there's something to be avoided, before you avoid it."

He couldn't. It was like jumping off into space from a great height. You may land safely and you may not; the one certainty is you can't get back on your perch again. Once he accosted this pursuer, he wouldn't be a free agent any longer. Whatever this man wanted of him, he'd never get away from him again once he put himself within his reach. There was a deadly tenacity about him; the way he'd chopped at that subway door with his gun butt showed that. This was no halfhearted pursuit, no casual badgering. This was a man hunt in every sense of the word.

As he neared his homeward stop, the thought of Virginia was an added anxiety. Should he tell her that he'd given up his job?

Why not wait? Why burden her with another worry? She'd had enough already. He could get another job and wouldn't have to go into his actual reasons for deliberately chucking this one. He could let her think that he'd found the new one more advantageous. Anyway, he didn't have to tell her right away. He'd stay out the length of his working hours, find a park somewhere, sit in it killing time.

He sat there on a bench, beside a winding path, with green, young spring grass dappled in the sun around him, with the peace of the setting doing its best to claim him and being buffeted back by the turmoil, the knotted tension, within. He sat there far forward on the edge of the bench, occasionally blowing through his hands as if to warm them, for the most part staring wanly down at nothing on the ground. The hours slowly circled past over his head.

But the problem had no answer, no relief. "He comes from That Time. He must, there's no other explanation, no other possibility. It's not a mistake in identity. He really knows me. But I don't know him. He's someone from the Three Forgotten Years." And that, he knew, was why he was really afraid. It was the aura of the unknown. He was no more of a coward than the next; he wasn't really afraid of the man, he would have braved him before now if that had been all there was to it. It wasn't physical cowardice, it was mental.

This man came out of the shadows, bringing them with him. This man was armed with an unknown weapon. There was a terrible remorselessness about his pursuit. Townsend could not bring himself to meet the challenge. He had just experienced a deep-reaching psychic shock, hadn't had time fully to get over it yet. He probably wouldn't get over it completely for years to come.

He was handicapped in being called on to meet fresh tests of spiritual courage at such a time. He needed peace; he needed safety. His lacerated psyche required time to knit itself together again. It was still jittery, sensitized, it needed a chance to convalesce undisturbed.

No one noticed Townsend sitting on the park bench all that day. A quiet figure, desperately trying to pierce the curtain that hid the past.

It grew later. The children began to hurry out of the park.

A random, homeward-bound nursemaid or two, wheeling her charges, followed after that, at intervals. The birds seemed to go too, or at least become voiceless. The sunlight itself started to withdraw from around him. The whole world was leaving the scene. The park became still, hushed, with a sort of macabre expectancy. The daily death of light was about to occur.

The things of the night began to slink into view. Blue shadows, like tentatively clutching fingers, began a slow creep toward Townsend out from under the trees. Deepening, advancing only furtively when they weren't watched closely, pretending to be arrested when they were. At first azure, scarcely visible in the still-strong light of day. Then dark blue, like ink rolling sluggishly amidst the grass blades and dyeing them from the roots up. At last, freed of the vigilance of the closing red eye of the sun, turning black, showing their true color.

One, the longest, boldest of them all, like an active agency trying to overtake him, to trap him fast there where he was, pointed itself straight across the path, advancing upon him by crafty, insidious degrees like a slithering octopus tentacle. He drew his foot hastily back out of its reach, as though it were something malign, with an intelligence of its own. He stared down at it with cold mistrust, watched it waver there frustrated, like a snake whose strike has fallen short.