Black Curtain (6 page)

Three steps toward the kitchen--and then he went on, with only a momentary misstep, as it came to him at last. He threw open a high wooden oblong, like a cupboard cover, set in the wall. brought up the dumbwaiter. "Didn't you once say our building and the one next to it have a single basement between them? I may be able to get you up and out through the next house over."

She started wringing her hands at him in encouraging, prayerful pantomime. It was like talking close to a thundering waterfall.

He wrenched out the horizontal bisecting shelf; it was not fastened down, just wedged in over two supporting braces. "See if you can squeeze in. I'll hold the ropes so you don't shoot down too fast."

She backed in, huddled there, head pressed upward against the low top. He gave the control rope a half turn around one hand to keep her weight from plunging it down too fast. She teetered there, ridiculous in her fur collar.

"Frank, you're coming after me? You're not staying behind?"

"Right away, the minute you get off. Wait down there for me." He was wondering if there'd be time for a second trip. The wood of the door was beginning to splinter, the nails holding the hinges to squawk out, back at the other end of the hall. They must be using hatchets to it.

"Keep your head in, honey, so you don't hit it against the side of the shaft."

The pulleys started to whir, the rope to needle through his restraining hands as he paid it out. Her face went down out of sight, in a sort of hideous parody of entombment alive. The distance was mercifully short. It struck bottom, as gently as he was able to control it. He leaned over the opening, scared stiff she mightn't be able to get out at the lower end. No light showed, but a loose swaying reached him that told she had left it. He brought it up again fast, climbed awkwardly into it, posterior first, still hanging onto the control rope. He went down jerkily, plummetlike. The crash of their entry above, as the remnants of the door finally flattened before them, blended with the crash of his own striking bottom, obliterating it. He landed with a thud that jarred his teeth and smote his hipbones.

She was standing there holding the chute vent open for him. He came tumbling out on hands and knees to the basement floor level, two or three feet below the dumbwaiter bottom.

He struck matches to guide them through the surf of cellar darkness. His foot struck a discarded baby carriage, but its own wheels shifted it away without causing him to overturn across it. Another time a small freshet of lumps of coal, piled in a corner, sidled down, punching his toes cruelly.

Overhead they could hear, with an eery sensation of unreality, the scurry of searching footsteps scattering from room to room, trampling through the flat. The sound came down blurredly through the flimsy horizontal partition. There must have been at least a half dozen of them, judging by the activity.

"They'll know," he murmured bitterly. "Your bed was still warm. They'll be down in a minute. Quick, darling, quick!"

"What is it, Frank, what is it?" she lamented, still unnerved.

They found the fireproof, nailhead-studded door that led up into the other building, guarded only by a lateral bolt. But on their side, fortunately, on their side. He got it open. Cemented steps faced them, making an angular turn. There was a night light somewhere up at their head. They trod warily up, he in the lead. The janitor's living quarters were located over in the other building, their own building, so one added hazard was eliminated. For economy's sake, the same boiler, the same furnace, the same basement, had been made to serve both houses. To some unknown contractor's parsimony, or limited allotment, they owed their chance of escape.

There was still another door bounding these stairs at their upper end. He opened it slightly, listened carefully for sounds of activity out in the hall beyond or on the upper house stairs. Silence. The hunt hadn't reached this building yet. They came out together like two wraiths, hands linked defensively--a hatless, collarless man and a frightened, bare-legged young woman in a fox-trimmed coat.

There was a low-powered wall light shining just within the street entrance. He broke hands, left her where she was, crept edgewise out toward it, inserted two fingers within the wire guard around it, and turned it until he had interrupted the current, plunged them into shielding darkness once more. The street loomed up more visible in contrast. He motioned her forward in the dark, and she must have seen the beckoning silhouette of his arm against the street. She came on. •

"You go first. You have a better chance alone than with me. They don't know what you look like. Don't look back toward our place, and don't look around in here. Just walk toward the corner, minding your own business."

She took a preliminary step out through the outermost glass storm door, within the guiding circle of his arm. He craned his neck, but the street seemed empty of figures up toward their own entrance at the moment; he couldn't see a sign of activity, hostile or otherwise. He urged her gently forward, like someone teaching a child to walk unaided.

"Go on, honey. Go on, like I asked you to. Quick, in another minute it may be too late--"

A plaintive sob was her obedience. Then he was standing there alone, and she was striking out, her shoes making a quiet little ticking along the pavement. That slight, nervous hurry that a respectable woman always gives to her gait when obliged to journey unescorted on the street late at night-- no more.

He lingered behind as long as he could, because she was far safer alone than if he should be detected following. Halfway to the corner she must be now. No hurrying figure went after her, to halt and question her. No discovering hail was raised.

But he couldn't stay here any longer. Any moment they were bound to discover the means of escape he had taken. It was incredible that they already hadn't found it; it was the only possible remaining way out of the apartment.

He drew in a breath of crucial decision, narrowly edged out the door, and came through into the open. For a moment, before he turned, he could plainly see the pale oblongs, cast by his own lighted windows, lying flat on the sidewalk down that way. He faced up the other way, the way she had gone, and struck out. His spine was held unnaturally rigid with the fear of being overtaken, and he had to keep his neck muscles locked against the impulse to turn and look back. But the street was very dark, and in a few short paces he was already beyond range of recognition from a distance. The one street light between him and the corner was on the opposite side of the way. It left, him a narrow causeway of gloom, beyond its outermost perimeter

At the corner, Just before rounding it, he did look back. He couldn't help it. That had been their home back there, that place so suddenly set upon and warred against. He could still, even at this distance, make out the pale cicatrices that were its lighted front windows. They were almost the only ones, even yet, that were lighted at this hour, though pairs of others were beginning to brighten here and there in their immediate vicinity, awakening to the noise.

He turned the corner, and the present became the past, the past became the present.

She had found a driverless cab and was huddled in it, waiting for him, a short distance around the corner. A lighted oblong near by marked an allnight lunchroom.

He went up to it from the far side, keeping it between him and the lunchroom. She wanted him to get in with her. She had the door open in readiness. He closed it again from the outside.

"No, Virginia, I'm not coming with you. Honey, you go back to your mother's, out of the city. You stay there until you hear from me, so I'll always know where to find you. Whatever happens to me, I'll know that you're safe. They won't connect you with that flat back there. You're Mrs. Virginia Townsend, whose husband disappeared three years ago; you haven't seen him since. Don't try to reach me or get in touch with me in any way, for your own sake. I'll see you again--some day. And whatever you hear, whatever it turns out this is about--give me a break in your own mind, like you always have before."

She seized his wrist with both hands. "No! Let me take my chances with you! Frank, I'm not afraid, I'm not a coward! What's a wife for? What's marriage for?"

He disengaged them gently but forcibly, gave them back to her. "Honey, when a guy falls into a sewer or cesspool, he doesn't reach up and pull those he loves best down in with him. Good-by now and do as I tell you if you love me."

Their lips met hungrily, almost furiously, through the open cab window. A tear from one of her lashes penciled down his cheek. He drew his head back by main force. "I'm going over that way. When you can't see me, start sounding the horn for the driver. Good-by, darling."

He shoved off into the anonymity of the night, half of him left behind now. In a few minutes a taxi horn peeped querulously once or twice behind him. A sound that you hear a hundred times a day and never think about twice. He'd never thought a taxi horn could hurt you in the chest like this one did.

He looked back, and a dwindling red mote of taillight was all that was left of his marriage.

He'd never known how fiercely he really loved her until now that he didn't have her any more. He looked back once more; even the taillight was gone. Now there was just himself and the night and the past.

He kept going, ticking off crossings like railway ties under his feet, until the factor of distance alone had secured for him a slight edge of immunity, if only for a while. Once he took out a cigarette, put it to his mouth without breaking stride. Then, at what he saw ahead, he flung it down without lighting it.

The cop came on slowly, inquisitive of all who passed.

He mustn't falter now, or shrink involuntarily, as they were about to cross one another, he and this stray patrolman. Here he came. Here he was.

Their eyes met. "Kind of chilly, isn't it?" he heard himself say unexpectedly.

The other's voice came back, already beyond him: "Yeah, it is, that's no joke."

The step receded. But that had been a tinderbox of suspicion that had just passed him, safely unignited. One stray spark, such as to quicken the step, to glance back, and--

As he strode on through the bight, wearing it out, wearing it thin until the gray started to show through, his future course of action was slowly but finally and immutably taking form in his mind. Since the present held no safety, he must go back into the past, then, to find out why. Back into the past that had done this to him, to force it to retract or let it engulf him. Back into the past--if he could find it.

It was only a small chink so far, like the secret entrance to a bewitched garden in a child's fairy tale. It had only one street on it. Tillary Street. But if he could find his way back into it through there, he could push its boundaries back, widen them out all around him, until again they took in the whole world. His whole world.

Tillary Street. Tillary Street. A part of a coping had fallen and felled him, and the past had become the present, on Tillary Street.

Its mere geographical location, its physical aspect, was no good in itself, wouldn't help him. The way back into the past lay through the mind alone--the minds of others, like lighthouse beams through the fog, glancing across and lighting up his own mind.

Would he find that on Tillary Street? Had he just been passing through it at random, from somewhere else -to- somewhere else, that day? Had it been as meaningless to him even then as it was now? Or had he been a frequenter of it, had he lived on or around it, had it played a fixed part in the habits of his past? There was only one way to find out. By going back there and haunting it, like the ghost he was, until it gave him its answer.

The night was gone and it was lighter now, but it was also chillier. A wind as homeless, as forIornly seeking, as he was himself seemed to blow Out across the steel-blue, mist-blurred, still-unawakened city. He turned the back of his collar up around his neck, and set his face toward Tillary Street--and yesterday.

There must be someone who would know him, along its reaches. He'd course along it every day, by the hour, up one side and down another, over and over, until at last some pair of eyes lit up in recognition, some voice said hello, some figure stopped to greet him.

The street plate at its mouth was like any other, one wing pointing one way, one the other. A flare of newborn sunlight, almost the very first to strike down below the huddled rooftops, caught on it and wavered hazily across the dark-blue enamel and white capitals, like a pinkish spotlight contending against the full daylight.

Back into the limbo from which he had come. A man looking for his other, his forgotten self.

    TILLARY ST.

    ONE WAY ONLY

BOOK II

The Curtain Lifts

7

The room was a ghost from some long-buried yesterday. "You going to be here long?" the weazened old rooming-house keeper asked.

If Townsend could have told him that, he would have known more than Townsend knew himself. Maybe only an hour or two, before they traced him. Maybe days, weeks. No, not weeks, unless he found some job around here to keep him going. He'd had exactly eight dollars and seventynine cents in the pockets of the suit he was wearing at the moment those blank-cartridgelike blows exploded against his door.

He said, "That depends on what you charge me."