Black Alibi (11 page)

She struck out suddenly, all hopes of recovering the original position at which she’d heard the telltale sound gladly cast away on the single chance of being right about it. Through grass, and over lumpy rises at times that, though they might well have been graves, were robbed of all power to terrify her now, for this was life itself that was beckoning to her through their midst. They could have yawned open under her feet and she would have still leaped across them from lip to lip, the quicker to get where she was going.

And there it was at last, something upright looming there ahead of her, coming closer, gliding toward her with her running, striking at last against the flats of her hands, outstretched to it in appeal, with a roughness of masonry, a scratchy prickiness of mortar, that was more caressing to the touch than velvet or satin could have been. The boundary wall, the limit of death, the line beyond which it did not go.

Pressed against it, motionless at last, arms upright at her sides, she put her lips to it, kissed it in poignant gratitude.

She must have been making her way, all unsuspecting, along parallel to it for some time past, although it was set out at a considerable distance away from the path she had been following. It obviously wasn’t the front wail, where the gate was, for she had been moving steadily away from that the whole time. Unless, of course, she had made a complete, blind circuit of the place in the dark, and come back to where she had started from. But more likely it was either one of the side walls, or the rear one. She had probably gone entirely through the dread place, to its other end.

There was a noticeable hum now in the air, coming from the other side of it. Faint and disembodied, an echoing murmur from far off, but still able to intrude upon the stillness that reigned in here. It was the hum, the drone, that comes from houses, from streets, in the distance, in the night. It must be built up on the other side of this wall, or at least to within a short distance of it. A finger of the city must stretch out toward the cemetery from the rear, even though the main gate around at the other side gave onto more or less open country.

And then, in confirmation, the axle of a tramcar wheel grated as it rounded a turn, off in the distance someplace but querulously audible.

She began to beat her way along the inside of the wall, face turned to look up hopefully at the top. It was too smooth, too high, to be scaled unaided, even if she’d had the strength left. Why had they had to make it so high? What had the dead in here to fear from the living?

Some of the trees, she noticed, seemed to grow fairly close to the wall. The branches of certain ones even spanned the top of it, occasionally. Perhaps if she could get up the trunk of one, she could work her way out along one of those overreaching branches and transfer from it to the top of the wall. Even if she couldn’t descend from there unaided, she would at least be in a better position” to attract someone’s attention on the outside. She couldn’t from down below here, where she was. Her voice seemed to be gone, from overuse; she could only make low whimpering noises now. And there was obviously no ground-level gap within this solid bulwark, at least not near enough to be of any use to her.

Most were set too far in; there was a gap up above that would have defeated her even if she had been able to get to the proper height; or else the slenderness of the trunk itself warned that the upper reaches would be even more unsubstantial; she would only have succeeded in killing herself. She found one at last that seemed just right, although it was hard to be sure in the dark. By standing still under it and peering intently for several minutes she thought she could make out a thick, massive bough forking out from it, in a straight line over the wall and beyond. It looked from where she was nearly as broad in girth as the lower trunk itself.

She tried to clasp her arms around its base to gain a fulcrum, and they wouldn’t meet around it, it was too large in diameter. She tried to claw her way up it, then, on one side only; to dig her nails into the rough-edged bark and hang her entire weight on them. The bark only peeled off in little segments, her nails broke, and the tips of her fingers grew lacerated. The tips of her prodding, gouging shoes slipped down again each time without being able to gain a hold. Once she was able to get up as high as half her own height again, but then she slid down again, scratching and bruising her own skin. She let herself lie where she’d fallen a minute, to rest.

Oh, if she’d only been twelve again, she knew she would have been able to do it. When she was twelve, and they’d taken her to the country in the summer, she’d climbed many trees for pears and apples and thought nothing of it. And now, the pear, the apple, was safety, life itself—and she couldn’t do it!

She cried a little with the bitterness of frustration, pleaded with those who weren’t there to hear, with her head lowered toward the ground, there in the darkness at the foot of that pitiless tree. “Raul, Raulcito, why did you go away like that? Mother, mother of my life, let me come back to you. I’ll never do it again. Why didn’t I listen to you? You always were right. You didn’t want me to leave the house—”

The words died to a blurred whimpering, the whimpering muted to disconsolate sobbing breaths.

Then suddenly as she lay there like that, head and shoulders reared off the ground, the rest of her sprawled supinely out upon it, a sound came from over the wall, so matterof-fact, so casual, so close at hand—she couldn’t believe it was real, she couldn’t believe she’d actually heard it. It was the hollow, slightly wooden-sounding clap a car door gives when it is carelessly flung closed against the chassis. And then a lesser sound, the snap of a key in a lock.

An empty car must have been parked outside there all along, close up against the cemetery wall, waiting for someone. And that someone had just returned to it and gotten in, and was about to drive off all unknowing!

It was down farther, a few yards below, judging by the direction of the sound. And yet for all practical purposes, its and,her own parallel placement could be considered a freak of exactitude; they were as good as diametrically opposite one another, she and this potential savior car. Had she seen it, known it was there all the while, she could scarcely have come to a halt much closer to it than she had. Strange are the geometrical patterns devised by night and the stars.

Oh limbs, lift me, bear me up, just this one time more. Oh voice, call out strongly enough in time to be heard. Quick, quick, a second’s inability may be already too late!

She opened her lips spasmodically, and a soundless gush, residue of exhaustion, was all that came the first time. Then a second try and voice followed. She couldn’t hear it. A torrent of mechanical noise drowned out her lungs’ pitiful effort. He’d started the motor. Six cylinders against one fragile larynx. It was a raucous engine, that must have needed oiling somewhat, that bombarded the night.

She was upright and thrashing, almost spinning, frenziedly along the inside of the wall, and even as she did so it already seemed to begin gliding unnoticeably ahead of her, increasing those few yards of differential there had been to start with, as the wheels began to turn. For a long, unendurable moment there was an equipoise; a hideous contest between her fraying screams and the increasing revolutions of its cylinders. Which could keep it up the longest? She was so tired and the engine was so strong.

Then it began to pull away; not just glide now but accelerate into full career. And in the very act was her salvation. It ebbed a little in volume, the rhythm of a more even vibration set in. Her voice found an opening in that, an echo of it managed to slash through its new regularity of tempo.

There was another ghastly equipoise, a second or two before the effects could show, while it seemed to leap away from her. And she couldn’t scream any more, that had been her last one. Then brakes rasped and it slurred to an unwilling, unintended short stop. She could even hear the hiss of reluctant rubber against stone.

Silence.

Then a man’s voice, questioning the blank night. “Who is it? Hello? Hello?”

She could visualize his hand starting toward the clutch once more, to continue, thinking he had been mistaken, it had been some flaw in his own car’s mechanism.

Her swollen heart leaped up like a salmon, turned over, dropped down again, almost stopped beating with the effort, but she managed to get one suffocating sound out. “No—!” And the rest was just unheard lip vibration.

“Who’s that? Where are you?” The car door cracked tentatively open, while he still remained in the seat. Probably one leg out.

“In here, in All Saints, behind this wall.” It was all blurred vowel sounds, she couldn’t articulate consonants any more, but there were enough vowels to carry the burden of the message, to at least
hold
him there.

A leather sole hit stone. The car door cracked a second time—but in token of egress. Saved!

He said an inane thing. “What are you doing in there?” But oh, the sound of his voice alone, it held the wisdom of the ages in it, it was so welcome to her.

“I’m alone in here. I’ve been locked in. Oh, for the love of God, take me out—get me out to the other side—”

“Now just a second. Don’t be frightened. I’ll climb over and get you—”

Shoe leather scorched down stone, futilely, two, three, four times. Each time he landed back on his feet more heavily. Then she could hear him trying to run at it, trying to hoist himself with the help of his own projected momentum. Each time that floundering sound.

“I can’t get up it, it’s too high.” He was breathless now himself. “Wait a minute, I’ll get someone. I’ll get hold of someone with a ladder, and come back with that—”

The car door splitting again, like a hinge of hell.

Her voice rose to an unendurable scream. “No, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me, I can’t stand it!”

He held back, probably half in, half Out, trying to reason with her. “But you’re all right now. Someone knows you’re in there. I know you’re in there. It’s just a matter of a moment. Pequena, pequena, don’t you see?”

She screamed again. Just instinct was screaming, there was nothing there any more he could reason with. “You won’t come back! Stand’ there and talk to me, if you can’t get me out. At least stand there so I’ll know there’s someone near me. Senor, senor, whoever you are, have pity on me. Don’t leave me all alone again.”

“But you
must
be gotten out. There’s a paint shop only a few blocks from here. They must have a ladder there. I’ll get hold of the proprietor, and in less than five minutes I’ll be back here again—”

“You won’t come back, you won’t come back—”

“Little frightened senorita, I swear to you by all that’s holy that I won’t leave you in there. Who could do such a thing? I’m a man. This way I’d only stand here all night without doing you any good. Trust me.”

She held out a moment longer, instinct against reason. Then she gave in. “All right, senor, I trust you,” she said in a watery voice. “But hurry. It’s so dark, and there are things moving in the shadows behind me.”

“Stand with your back to them. Don’t look around. Stand turned toward the wall, until I can get back, and they won’t hurt you.”

“But that way it’s even worse. Then I seem to hear them creeping up behind me, getting ready to pounce, without my seeing them.”

His own voice was wrung with pity, whoever he was, at the state she was in. “
Pobrecita
. Just a minute,
muchachita
, just a minute and we’ll have you out.”

She couldn’t resist one final bleat as the car door closed once more. “Don’t forget me, senor— You Won’t forget me, senor—?”

“Just where you are, and I’ll be back in no time,” his voice sounded over the renewal of the engine. “Don’t move, now, so that I’ll know where to find you.”

The engine evened out, drew away, and she heard him go whirring off on his quest. One last wisp of it came drifting back, after the rest was already gone, like a postscript, like an afterthought from the distance. And then no more.

Silence again. Night again, and by herself again.

She stood there for a while in a sort of state of suspended animation, staring blindly toward the black presence of the wall, as though trying to fix and hold the exact spot at which she had last heard his voice, lest if she lose it by so much as a quarter of an inch, if she deflect her eyes, he would not come back, there would be some magic compulsion gone. Frightened children have that fetishism.

“Don’t move, he said,” she whispered to herself once, in cautioning reminder.

Then suddenly, as though unable to support her upright position any more, as though something had given way under her, she floundered down to her former position on the ground, halflength prone, head and neck and shoulders still upright on one arm. Not senseless, but drained of all strength. Only able to do two things, breathe and wait. Three.

Hope was a white moth, tiny of wing, fluttering around her in the darkness.

Coldness seeped into her legs and the outspread flatness of her own hand from the moss and the damp ground, numbing them. Or was that the ichor of those who lay so thickly scattered about under here being transfused into her by some horrid sort of osmosis? She snatched her hand up and flung it out, as you do when you try to drain something off.

The moth was making wider circles now, not so close around her. How long was it now? Four minutes? Five?

She struggled to her knees, and bunched her hands together, and bent her face to them. “Make him come back. Just this one little thing give me: make him come back.”

The moth was going now, the moth was leaving fast, going somewhere else. Its minute wings were glimmering off into nothingness.

She whispered into her hands, as though it were a secret they alone shared with her: “He told me not to move. See, I’m trying not to be frightened. I’m quiet, you can’t hear me. That one nearly got out, but I didn’t let it, I stifled it. This one isn’t going to either—”

And then a bereft scream went winging up overhead and, almost puzzled, she realized it had come from her.