Black Alibi (10 page)

A bench went slowly past on one side. Then, after a while, another went slowly past on the other. How she wanted to topple down on one of them and just lie there half senseless—but she daren’t. It was so long ago that the whistle blasts had sounded; would they really have heard her cries? Would they still be waiting, keeping them open? Then why didn’t they come forward, even a little part of the way; why didn’t she see the glimmer of their lanterns down there at the end of this interminable perspect—

There was something wrong. The distance to the gate seemed greater than she remembered it. It
was
greater, there was no mistaking it. This wasn’t a distortion of panic, of darkness; it was a question of the length of time she had been running, and the distance she had covered. She should have reached that gate already two or three times over by now. Even at a walk it had never seemed this far, never
been
this far, before.

The thought of what it was, of what had happened, was like ice creeping through her veins, numbing as it wound its way. And then behind it was heat again, ready to claim her in turn; but not the warmth of sanity, of normalcy, any more. The fever heat of burning madness, the temperature of nightmare.

She was scarcely moving forward now. She couldn’t any more. She was swaying there, her limbs still trying to carry her forward, only succeeding in making little rotary motions on the ground. And still it stretched endlessly before her, to that immutable vanishing point it had had all along, ever since back there at the urn.

She tried to think. Left. Yes, left.
Izquierda
. That was the word, that was the direction. But left
when?
On coming in, when you wanted to go toward your family’s plot? Or on going out, when you wanted to go toward the gate? Left was the word. Rosita had said it that other time, when they had stopped uncertainly for a moment there by it. She could still hear the remark sound in her mind. “No, left, Senorita Conchita.” That part was all right. But left
when?
She couldn’t remember whether they had been coming in or going out at the time. Her mind had been full of him.

She reeled around and looked behind her. The urn had been lost long ago. All that met her eyes was another of those vanishing points, no different from the one in front of her.

She’d made the wrong turning, come the wrong way. She’d plunged deeper into this fastness of the dead, instead of making her way out. The preliminary sobs of hysteria started to form in her throat, each one rising higher than the one before. She drove both hands distractedly through the ringleted hair that Raul had once admired so, dislodged the coronet of twisted black braid that encircled it and the veiling depending from it. They fell to the ground behind her, and she let them stay there unheeded.

The gates must be closed long ago. They’d never heard her, never guessed. She was locked in this hideous place for the night, and no one knew it. They’d gone away and left her in here, with the dead. She knew that nearsighted old man didn’t sleep here on the grounds. The little kiosk that sheltered him during visiting hours was dark and locked up now. Its size had told her that at sight; it was just a daytime niche.

She turned and tried to go back along the way she had come just now. One faltering step was all she could manage. Her courage failed her. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go back into that maw of darkness behind her that she had passed through once already. True, it was as dark ahead of her, but there was something even worse about darkness revisited than about darkness already explored. As though she would be giving latent evil a second chance at her if she returned. That dolorously crooning wind was coming from back there. The trees were rustling and hissing, like living things stalking her, from back there.

She heeled her hands to her eyes, held them tightly pressed there to try to shut out the terrible sights she had not seen yet, but was afraid she might have to see at any minute. Her teeth were chattering with terror, and with the nervous chill induced by it. She took her hands away from her eyes at length, and found she had begun to move again, without knowing it, in the meantime. Slowly now, uncertainly, erratically, without purpose or destination. She was meandering down the center of the avenue, with the wavering gait of someone about to drop in a heap at any moment. Still in the direction in which she had been going all along, for she could still go forward if not back. Her jerky, unpredictable progress was that of something bereft of all reason. Which, temporarily, she was.

A bench edged up beside her along the perimeter of the lane, bleached white, cadaverous against the gloom, like something with an invisible spotlight trained on it. She turned aside, fell rather than walked over to it, and, as though its presence and support were some sort of emotional release, flung the upper part of her body prone against the seat of it, legs trailing out behind her along the ground, and exploded into a cataclysm of sobbing that was so violent it couldn’t by its very nature have lasted long without rendering her unconscious.

It didn’t. She stopped again, from sheer rib stricture and breath stoppage, and remained there quiescent. But not unaware. Fear was creeping back over her again, like a thin glazed coating, even while she huddled there without moving. It touched off reflex action, finally. She scissored her legs suddenly, like a swimmer on dry ground; switched her head around, looked behind her. The instinctive reaction of those in the dark, afraid of the dark. A scream of dismay wrenched through her stiffened lips, and she tried to burrow her head and shoulders into the furthermost inner corner of the bench seat and back with such spasmodic terror that she struck her forehead violently against the cold hard stone and still didn’t even feel the blow.

There was something creeping up along one side of the blurred gray pathway upon her. Something black, sinuous, belly-flat, tail snaking. Sometimes the offside gloom effaced it, sometimes the lighter tone of the path outlined its undulation. But on one side only. There was a wink, a tiny flash too dull to be called bright, every now and again from its forepart, as a ray from some star high overhead struck some glistening or liquefied beadlike area receptive to light.

Its advance was irregular, with the irregularity of stealth. It would undulate quickly, covertly, forward; so quickly the ripple it made seemed almost an optical illusion. Then it would stop short, seem lifeless, nothing but a shadow, gathering itself for the next treacherous little creep. Even while she looked, eyes huge with brain-turning horror, she saw its tail, its slender ropelike after appendage, give a little flirt upward, a twitch, then flatten again. It made another little stealthy, squirming run, stopped again with hair-trigger timing.

She was paralyzed. Approaching dissolution robs the body of movement. She was cataleptically silent, after that first scream of discovery, for the same reason. There is a depth of fright beyond screaming that is silent. She had heaved herself upward off the ground without use of her arms, climbing up the joint between bench back and side arm by motion of her shoulders alone, without turning to look at it. That was the most she could do to try to get away from it, wedge herself distortedly into the shallow indentation of a low stone bench, arched backbreakingly at the waist around its seat. Her face was a frozen grimace of convulsive anticipation.

It gave no warning. It was as unpredictable as mercury or lightning. Suddenly it sprang, streaked out at her feet—and a little beyond, as though it had overreached itself. Its tail part came lashing, switching after it.

All she did was shudder, in a form of death without contact. Then she deflated as suddenly as it had leaped, her waist sank in, rippled down over the edge of the seat, and she sidled inertly to the ground, retched a couple of times. There beside her own discarded black coif, with the two jet ornaments spaced on the front of it, and the long sinuous length of whipped-around veiling, that bulged like muscular haunches in places, that the wind had been sending creeping stealthily up on her a little at a time.

Cruel minutes went by, in a gift of renewed life that was hardly wanted any more, it had been so expensive. She got to her feet again somehow, presently, the black garment on her a biased misfit now, too high up on one shoulder, down off the other one entirely. Smoky ribbons on her white legs where there had been stockings before. She wasn’t a civilized being any more. She wasn’t a young girl of the city. She wasn’t the Viuda de Contreras’ daughter. She had no name, she had no address. She wasn’t feminine, and she wasn’t masculine, she’d sunk to a lower genderless plane. She’d forgotten what love was, and her tears or the action of her hand had carried a surly red streak of lipstick from the corner of her mouth down to the bottom of her chin and under. She was just a blindly instinctive thing, struggling feebly to get from the dark to the light, to get from fear to safety.

Terror now was only something comparative. There were accesses of it at times, then at other times there were diminutions of it; there never at any time was a complete absence of it. She wavered along, on the move once more, head lolling downward on her chest, legs splaying stiffly out behind her, first one then the other, like crutches. There were stars over her, but they were cold and meaningless. They seemed so distant, so aloof; pin-point intelligences without pity, looking down from a great height on something trapped in a black pit, watching it go around and around, trying to find its way out, and knowing that it never would.

Then suddenly a new terror was added to those she was already enduring. A chromatic one, this time. Color began to well up into the cemetery, giving it a new dimension, giving its horrors depth, that the two-dimensional black and gray had lacked until now. It was like a reflection from a distance; she couldn’t see where it was coming from at first. It was like the shine of red fire through the trees and between the graves, not rising high, but creeping closely over the ground.

A great, angry eye was opening behind her. The moon. But not the cool, tapered moon of lovers and of wishes. Full-bellied, carnivorous. With animus toward the living, like everything else in here. Fuming, fevered, glaring diseasedly, redolent of evil and of things they had taught you long ago in church not to believe in. Unhallowed things. Ghouls and goblins, grinning cadavers that pushed their way up out of graves, all subcuticle muscular ligaments in crisscross patches, like something on a medical students’ dissection table. The moon. The planet that controls madness and psychopathic urge to shed blood.

It doubled, tripled the shadows where it had been black before. And in the places where it had been less than black, it brought a horrifying, threatening simulation of motion, filtering through the restless leaves and branches. It made the forms and figures on the graves seem to waver, to sidle and stir and shift in its rays, to mottle like leprous things and glower and leer, where they had at least been still before. Trees became gnarled shapes bending toward her, reaching down to clutch at her. Monuments became things crouched behind the bushes and the flowers, dropping their heads lower at the moment she skirted by, to rear up again and slink out after her the instant her back was to them. Even her own shadow turned against her now, treacherously assailed her by creeping up on her when she least expected it or flinging itself abruptly at her from one side.

She had no leisure to think of anything but the present moment, in the midst of all these terrors, but if she had she would have realized the darkness had already had its victory. She was already a little dead. Whether she ever got out of here again or whether she didn’t she would never be the same. Fright had pushed her permanently back into some atavistic past, lived long ago

And meantime the bilious planet, like everything else in the place, seemed bent on pursuing her. It slowly climbed the sky after her, clearing itself as it went. From angry orange to a sulphurous yellow, and from that to white, the bleached white of a skull, eye sockets faintly discernible, inclining downward to look at her from the sky.

A period of trancelike inanition followed for a short while; she was conscious of still stumbling on, but her mind was a little hazy. Even terror had become a little blunted, lost some of its sharp edge, though it was still with her. She was experiencing a sort of hang-over of the mental faculties, brought on by shock and overstimulation.

And then suddenly a little sound came to her, roused her, brought her back to whiplike alertness again. A little sound of life, the first she’d heard since this horrendous solitude had begun. The first besides her own screams and footfalls; the first
objective
one coming from outside her own travail. The sweetest thing she’d ever heard; sweeter than the sweetest note of music ever struck, lovelier than the loveliest birdcall ever trilled. A little discord, a thing between a squeak and a, grunt, faint, far-off, ugly, awkward, gauche, but, oh, how welcome. The distant honk of a car horn sounded in passage.

The outside world, the world of the living, was someplace near here, closer at hand than she’d suspected. She stood there straining her ears, forcing them beyond their powers of attunement, to try to catch it again. It wouldn’t come again. Just once, and then no more. She held her breath, she even quieted one of the stirring strips of torn garment banging from her, so that there wouldn’t be the slightest sound about her that might cause her to lose it. But no, it wouldn’t come again.

She didn’t know which way to go, for she hadn’t been quick enough to catch which way it had seemed to come from. If she moved incautiously she was afraid she might be going farther away instead of nearer to it, end up by losing it altogether. It hadn’t come from behind her, that was the one thing she was sure of.

Since her ears couldn’t aid her, or were given no second opportunity to, she tried to force her eyes to do service in their stead. But the darkness seemed to lie impartially around her in all the three remaining directions— No, wait; didn’t there seem to be an evenness to it, over there, on her right, as though there were a surface backing it instead of it continuing to an unconfined depth? Didn’t those motelike flicks of moonlight peering through the leaves over there seem
upright
against something, instead of lying flat upon the ground?