The Sinful Ones (24 page)

He found his hands loosely circling black wrought iron bars. He gripped them tighter to rouse himself, and looked up. As in a dream, the old mansion showed as a colorless, shadow-wrapped pile in the first paleness of dawn. All the windows were blind, the lower with boards, the upper with jagged edged blackness. As he made his way up the weedy drive, past the old “For Sale” sign, a tiny wind rustled the dark leaves overhead, then died. The odor from the rank garden was bitter and strong.

The big door under the porte-cochere was an inch ajar. He listened for a moment, then pushed at it. It scuffed complainingly across humped-up carpet, as the gate had across gravel.

He stepped inside, and instantly half his weariness dropped away, as if the old house demanded alertness as its due. The odor changed from bitter to musty, with a hint of water-rot. The dingy beam of his flashlight revealed a floor half-carpeted, half bare; walls cobwebbed with soot showing slightly paler rectangles where pictures had once hung; two shapeless bulks of covered chairs; a wide and curving stairway with an elaborately carved, key-thick newel post; several dark, wide doorways.

He glowed his light into the latter openings, revealing more dirt and emptiness and, down the one leading toward the back of the house, the foot of a second and narrower stairway.

He stood just inside the door, conscious of a mounting anxiety. He realized that he was waiting for Jane to call to him, that he had expected his questing flashlight beam to reveal her face. It occurred to him for the first time that it was strange she should arrange to meet him on the third floor, and that she couldn’t call out or come down, now that she must hear him coming.

He crossed to the wider stairway, straining his ears after each step, and started up it. He switched off his flashlight. The treads creaked faintly under his weight. The odor of old dust grew thicker—even his cautious footsteps must be raising puffs of it. He gazed up the oval stairwell at the smaller oval of paler gloom marking the ceiling of the third floor, where the broken windows must be letting in a little light. It seemed to him that the smaller oval showed an irregularity, as if perhaps a head were peering down. But when he moved up another step he could no longer see it.

For some reason, his imagination kept picturing, not Jane, but the figure in the dark raincoat he had passed back by the car tracks. He had hardly glanced at its face, but now he found himself wishing he had, for he was conscious of a belated sense of recognition.

He paused on the second floor landing, then continued up. After six steps he stopped dead.

There could be no mistaking it now. There it thrust above the heavy banister at the head of the stair, the darkness of a head against the faintly lesser darkness of the wall. The silence seemed to congeal around him as he peered at it.

Suddenly he pointed his flashlight, switched it on. In the yellow circle he saw Jane’s face, staring at him in terror.

He called he name, rushed up the last steps. Then they were in each other’s arms. Carr felt the last of his weariness vanish, then return momentarily with a rush, so that he swayed at the stair-head, hugging her drunkenly.

“Darling, I was so afraid it wasn’t you,” she said in a breath, her fingers digging into his shoulders. “Why didn’t you call out?”

“I don’t know,” he answered stupidly. “I was expecting you to.”

“But I couldn’t be sure it was you,” she told him. “Why were you so long? It was waiting here in the dark that frightened me. It’s been hours and hours. What happened to you?”

In a few slow sentences he explained why he had run away from her and sketched for her his plunge into the river and rescue by the bargeman.

“Yes, but afterwards?” she pressed. “What did you do afterwards?”

“I came straight here,” he told her, “as soon as I got back to my room.”

“You couldn’t have,” she said, stepping back a little. “It’s been hours.”

“What do you mean?” he asked puzzledly.

“And how did it all happen so quickly?” she continued rapidly. “The business with the bargeman, I mean. It couldn’t have been more than half an hour after I lost you by the library that I hurried back to your room, yet when I got there, your note was waiting for me.”

He took her arms. The silence of the old house became deadly.
My
 note?”

“Yes, telling me to come here and wait for you.”

He tried to study her expression in the dark gray light. Under his hands he felt her arms grow rigid, as though his own gathering fear was seeping over into her.

“Jane,” he whispered, “I only got back to my room twenty minutes ago, I didn’t leave any note. I came here because of yours.”

“My…?”

“Your note.”

“But, Carr, I didn’t…” she began. Then he felt her jerk and freeze like a frightened animal.

He heard, in the silence, a faint scuffling sound. Again it came—tight, complaining. He recognized it.

It was the porte-cochere door opening.

Then footsteps in the big hall two flights down.

As if it were some other person speaking, some shadowy other Carr who thought of strategies and tactics while the main Carr was hypnotized by fear, he heard himself  whisper, “There’s another stairway at the back. We might—”

Just then, like a fantastically amplified echo, the words came booming up from below:

“There’s another stairway at the back.”

But the tones were the deep, hearty ones of Mr. Wilson.

“That’s
 all right.” Miss Hackman’s happy, strident tones rocketed across his deeper ones. “If they try to use it, Daisy will notice, won’t you, dear?”

Carr felt Jane shake spasmodically, then freeze again. He tried to draw her away from the head of the stairs, but she was rigid as a stick. Everything seemed to him to be happening in very slow motion, so that when a third and brisker voice rose up the well, saying, “Let’s get busy,” the three words came to his ears yards apart. The odor of dust in his nostrils was something to be carefully sensed, precisely examined. In the gathering light he could begin to make out the leaf-and-stem pattern of the wall-paper beyond Jane’s head.

There was a medley of steps on the stairs, and mixed with them, a rhythmic and rapid padding. From where he was standing Carr could peer crosswise down the well to a small segment of the first flight of steps, which were still plunged in blackness. But then it seemed to his heightened vision that a brighter, sleeker blackness momentarily flashed there.

Like a pull of cheap perfume, there came up the stairwell the sugarsweet voice of Miss Hackman: “Don’t hurry Daisy, there’ll be lots of time.”

Again Carr tried to draw Jane away. She wouldn’t move .Yet he inwardly realized that this attempt on his part was little more than a sham, that the other Car who tried to think of the defensive possibilities of the broken-windowed rooms around them was getting dimmer and more shadowy every moment. No, this was it. This was the finish for a pair of lovers who had found that life was very much like a night spent on a wager in a waxworks museum with some of the figures finally coming alive. Escape into a dead and shelterless world was futile. He had a momentary vision of the fate of the small dark man with glasses. No, there was nothing to do at all.

Jane was like a statue in his arms, except that he could feel the terrified breaths creep up and down her throat. His mind was curiously empty, concerned with such trivial things as the wall-paper, the light, and the identity of the figure in the dark slicker he had passed by the car tracks. For some reason that question nagged him.

The steps on the stairs slowed.

“Well, they’re up there, all right. The hair’s broken.” Mr. Wilson’s words had an eminently businesslike ring, though interspersed with puffing. Then, as the steps came onto the second-story landing, “Wait a minute. I’m out of breath.”

“Very well. Down, Daisy.” Miss Hackman’s voice was amiable.

“Sh! They’ll hear you.” This time the voice was Dris’s.

Miss Hackman dwelt lovingly on her reply, lavishing on it all her sugariness. “I know they will.”

Carr studied the pattern of the wallpaper. It seemed to him he could see the light increase by visible stages, like the movements of the minute hand of a watch. He noted a thickening of the musty odor, as if from dust raised by their footsteps.

From the landing below came Mr. Wilson’s puffing and a soft and rapid padding back and forth over a very short distance. Carr could picture them clearly, though his paralyzed mind perversely attached much greater importance to the problem of the figure in the dark slicker. Mr. Wilson seated on the top step, chest heaving, knees drawn up, perhaps carefully holding his coat tails out of the dust. Dris back by the wall, a slim shadow, hand and hook at his sides. Miss Hackman standing with one foot on the top step, one below, leaning forward in some flamboyant suit, elbow on knee, blonde hair dripping around her face, holding in her hand a very short leash at the end of which a brighter, sleeker blackness paced. As they spoke, he could picture their expressions vividly—although the other problem persisted in seeming to him much more important.

“Let’s get on,” Dris said sharply.

“There’s no hurry at all,” Miss Hackman assured him. “Quiet, Daisy!”

“Just the same, it would have been simpler to finish them off back there,” Dris continued stubbornly.

“And have to spend hours cleaning up the mess?” Miss Hackman’s reply was quick and scornful. “Have you forgotten the trouble we had because of the little man with glasses. On your knees for half an hour, scrubbing?”

“You weren’t so keen on that business yourself,” he told her.

“That didn’t happen to strike me. This does. Here we don’t have to rush things or worry about cleaning up afterwards.” She paused reflectively. “Oh, how stupid of them to let themselves be lured here with those notes,” she said gayly. “How stupid of her to think we didn’t know she used to come here. How stupid of them both to be so utterly, completely guileless. How stupid of him not to realize we could get his home address at his office. It’s almost too easy. Still,” she went on thoughtfully, “they’re alive, and it’s really only live things that are any fun.”

“Let’s get on,” Dris repeated insistently.

“Not by any chance a date? With your girls?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. No, I’ve got a feeling…that we’re being watched.”

“Silly lad.” Miss Hackman’s voice was wholly again. “Of course we are, and listened to, too.”

“I don’t mean by them,” Dris told her.

But Carr was hardly listening to what they said, for he had just recaptured a memory that perversely afforded him great satisfaction—the identity of the figure in the dark slicker.

It had been one of the men on South State Street who had stood on the curb when he and Jane—and those three—had fled.

“You’ve a feeling, Dris?” At last Mr. Wilson spoke again, even-breathed, an for once not heartily, instead almost apprehensively.

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get one with this quickly.” The stairs creaked as he heaved up his fat body, the footsteps started again, and there was an eager change in the rhythmic padding then:

“What’s that!” Mr. Wilson almost shouted.

“They’re trying for the back stairs,” Miss Hackman screeched. “Daisy!”

“No, they’re not, you idiot!” Mr. Wilson roared. “I think—”

“I warned you—” Dris began.

“My God, it’s—” Mr. Wilson started to say.

But Carr was so preoccupied with his recaptured memory, that at first it seemed to him of no consequence—perhaps just something his sick mind was imagining—when he heard a sudden rush of footsteps on the floor below, more footsteps than those three could make, and in addition coming with a rush from the back of the house and pounding up the stairs from the first floor.

Even when Jane jerked in his arms, when, with shocking loudness in the echoing stair-well, there came the crash of half dozen gunshots, he hardly roused himself fully to what was happening—or rather he realized how what was happening fitted his recaptured memory, how it led from South State Street by the red glare of a railway flare to Old Jules’s barge, to the man by the car tracks, and so here.

With Jane rocking wildly in his arms, he heard, as the echoes of the gunfire died, a shrill scream that ended in a gargling groan, thud of a body, a squalling animal scream, a rush of paws, another earsplitting burst of gunfire, thud of another body, one last gunshot, and then the fainter diminishing rhythmic thuds of a body rolling down the stairs, step by step.

Then silence, complete silence, almost more shocking than the noise.

A cloud of acrid smoke mushrooming up the well.

Then, out of the silence below, a voice, unfamiliar, flat, cruel: “Well, that finished them and in a good spot. Get you bad, George?”

Another unfamiliar voice: “Just a scratch.”

A third voice: “Shall we search the rest of the house?”

The first voice, after what seemed to Carr an eternity: “No, there were only these three and the cat when we followed them in. Besides, there were only three in this gang. Old Jules said so.”

Footsteps descending the stairs.

Sound of the porte-cochere door closing.

Carr felt Jane twist from his arms. She hurried into the room behind them. He found her peering over the sill through the dirty and half-shattered window. Kneeling cautiously beside her, he got his own eyes up in time to see, going down the weedy driveway in the chilly light, a half-dozen men in dark slickers.

They crouched there at the window. The driveway emptied. The light was enough now so that the weeds showed a faint shade of green.

He looked at Jane, just as she turned to him.

He hated the thought of going downstairs, of guiding her past what they must find.

He dreaded the realization that they owed their lives to deadly creatures probably no less horrible than those who had been destroyed, that his safety and Jane’s lay solely in the fact that these deadly creatures did not happen to be informed about them.

Nevertheless, he knew that the road back to their lives was at last clear.