Black Alibi (5 page)

They exchanged a look of complete mutual understanding. But they didn’t say what they meant. It wasn’t necessary to. So he’d heard about it too. She knew what he was referring to. And he knew that she knew.

She tried to prolong the trivial little transaction all she could. Because while it lasted it spelled safety, light, another’s company. Afterwards would come darkness, fear, solitude again.

“Will it hold that way?”

“Yes, just hold it up straight; hold the two corners together like this.”

“Oh, what a pretty cat!”

“You’ve seen him before. Don’t you remember? I’ve always had him.”

“Yes, that’s right, too. I guess I have.” She gave a brief look at the door behind her, as she put down her money on the counter.

“They didn’t give you enough. It’s gone up.”

“I’ll bring it next time. Will you trust me? I live in the Pasaje del Diablo, over on the other side of the viaduct—”

“Never fear. Next time you come in.” The poor don’t cheat one another, they’re all poor together.

“Well—good night, senor.” She seemed to have to wrench it out of her throat, it clung so.

“Good night, Teresita. Better get back, don’t linger on the way.”

The bellpull jangled once more, and she was out in the dark again. What dismal forlorn sound it had this time, though; a sort of farewell.

The fan of light on the ground behind her slowly closed, wheeled around the other way, as the byway made its turn around. She moved along at a normal gait until the turn had completed itself and she had. come in sight of that black arched causeway maw again. Then she began to hurry up, to go faster and faster—
toward
it, it is true, but in order to get through and out again at the other side as quickly as possible. The excuse she tried to give herself was that her father might be home by now, and she would get the broom for taking so long with the charcoal. But she knew that wasn’t the reason at all.

She could have gone another way, up and over the boulevard. There was a place where there were stairs built into the side of the structure that carried it. But it would have taken her blocks out of her way, to reach it and then come back again on the Opposite side. Oh well, she’d been through here a dozen times before. Just once more couldn’t hurt. If she’d passed through it just now without having anything happen to her, then she could surely pass through a second time on her way back and nothing would happen either.

While she was thus engaged in trying to rationalize her fear, the intervening space had petered out and the viaduct had started to climb the night sky mountainously before her, like a sheer cliff wall, blotting out the stars as it rose. High aloft on the top of it there was a faint powdery-blue haze from the arc lights strung out along it, and cars, she knew, were probably whistling by, all unwitting of the little dramatic adventure occurring below them in the shadowed depths of the ravine. That was the city; spiraling planes of existence that had no knowledge of one another.

Here it came now. The stone oval—or rather half oval—swept over her like a black scythe. Again that hollow ringing beat came into her footsteps. She was not going to look, she was going to male sure of
not
seeing anything, when she came near the place where she had imagined seeing those twin phosphorescences the first time; she had made up her mind to this ahead of time. “If I don’t look,” she said to herself softly, “I won’t see it, and it can’t frighten me again. There is probably nothing there anyway; I just imagined it.” But the real reason was she was afraid it still
would
be there, if she did look.

Since it was, presumably, ahead of her, and it would be difficult therefore to keep it Out of the corner of her eye, she advanced holding her face stiffly averted, turned to the other side, as she went by. She could not identify the exact spot at which it had been, in this all-erasing darkness. You couldn’t see your hand before your face in it. She had to judge more or less by the distance it had been from the entrance, the one she had just come in by, the first time. It had been very close to it; not more than fifteen or twenty paces in. This was about fifteen or twenty paces in now.

Her neck ached with the rigid curvature she maintained it at. It was hard to walk with your head pointed one way, your body another. It kept trying to pull around of its own accord. She started to say the multiplication table over to herself, to keep her mind off it.

She hadn’t stayed at school very long; she’d been working at the laundry since she was twelve or thirteen. But she could write a little, read a little—when the words weren’t too long—and she knew a few of the lower tables, the twos and threes, up to about twenty or so. Her breath started to simmer softly with it. “Three times one is three. Three times two is six. Three times three is—

There, it must be behind her by now. See how easy? See how sensible to do it that way? She let her head swing slowly around to its natural position once more. Nothing ahead of her, nothing at the side; nothing but even, unadulterated black, no greenish glows, no glimmers. Behind her? Well—it was better not to try to find out, to let that alone. Even a little courage came back. A few steps more and she’d be out of the place altogether. She was a big coward to let herself get worked up like that. In a moment more now she’d see the first star out ahead at the other side, and then it would just be a matter of climbing the lower lane, turning up the Pasaje, and she’d be at her own door. The worst was—

Suddenly her heart did something before she could even understand why it had done it, as though it heard better than her very ears. Missed a beat, or got in one too many, or something. Her breath clogged in her throat again, as it had the time before. Only her feet kept on moving, doing the duty for all the rest of her.

That soft, blurred
pat
behind her had been something she hadn’t made. No echo or transfer of any sound of hers. Something disparate, isolate, apart, she was sure of it. One’s senses can identify one’s own aura of sounds at all times. It hadn’t been the impact a shod foot makes; more on the order of something padded or bare pressing incautiously on the ground. A cross between a rustle, such as a leaf might make, and the softest of soft slaps. A tiny sound, a ghost of a sound, yet a sound of monstrous swelling terror, expanding balloon-like within her heart and brain.

She nearly dropped the small-sized sack of charcoal and just regained her hold on it as it started to slip from her grasp. She wanted to do two things, diametrically opposed, at one and the same time. Her limbs wanted to stand still, lock there, give her a chance to listen for it again, confirm it, disassociated from the sounds she herself was making. Terror wouldn’t permit it. To stand still was to die. She wanted to throw the encumbering charcoal bag from her, break into a headlong run then and there, all the rest of the way from here to the door of her house. Again terror wouldn’t let her, held her down to the gait she had been using until now. It was the age-old instinct to avert danger by pretending to ignore its asserting itself in her. Keep walking as you were, and the attack is postponed, if only a moment or two longer. Flee—or try to flee—and you bring it on that much sooner.

She continued to move forward like a rigid automaton, unaware any longer of what her legs were doing, leaving them to their own devices. Her ears were straining to catch the faintest— It came again, closer behind her this time, and yet, inversely, much fainter. A nothing at all, a whisper of the paving stones. So faint indeed that had she not heard it the first time, she would not have known she was hearing it all this time.

Something else now assailed her, again from without herself, but of a different sensory plane than hearing this time. A prickly sensation of being watched steadily from behind, of something coming stealthily but continuously after her, spread slowly like a contraction of the pores, first over the back of her neck, then up and down the entire length of her spine. She couldn’t shake it off, quell it. She knew eyes were upon her, something was treading with measured intent in her wake.

And at this moment, meaningless now, for terror no longer had bounds, was no longer confined but on the move, the black archway of the tunnel roof fell back a second time and she was in the open once more. But dragging terror out into the open after her.

Her numbed feet, beginning to falter with faulty muscular co-ordination, carried her a few yards onward up the lane. She knew she couldn’t manage them any longer; they were slowing, they were stopping, they had stopped. She had fallen still, vibrating all over. A sort of pulsing that came from within, like the ague.

She had to see, she had to know, her fright-distended soul could bear no more. The muscles of her neck started to tug, to pull her head around, to look behind her at the doom-pregnant entrance she had just quitted. And even while they did so, before the motion had been completed, the sack of charcoal started to slowly sidle out from between her nerveless hands, about to topple to the ground at her feet, in catastrophic premonition.

She was trapped there, held fast, as surely as a bird is by a snake, unable to move another step until her head had accomplished that devoted, self-destructive turn to rearward to see what it was that the tunnel mouth was about to spew, rabid, at her heels.

The slowly mounting anger of Teresa’s mother had increased in inverse ratio to the dwindling heat within her
brasero
. When fanning would no longer bring the faintest flush of red to the charcoal ash, then her ire reached its hottest.

She bent low above it, dexterously manipulated her breath upon it, trying at one and the same time to skim the film of incinerated white ash off the top and unearth some spark of continued heat below. That failed too. Her fire, the core of her daily existence, had given up the ghost.

She straightened, flung up her arms, let them fall again. “Out,” she said catastrophically. This was the unforgivable sin, to have one’s fire expire like this. Any woman who had that happen to her—well, she knew what the others about here would say and think of her.

“Why don’t you put some straw on it until she gets back?” the small boy over in the corner suggested.

“Straw! Is straw charcoal? How long does it last? It flames and goes, and fills the room with smoke. And there isn’t any anyway.” She picked up the broom, shook it threateningly in the general direction of the door. “It’s
her
fault. Had she gone when I first warned her to— And even now, is she back yet? Look how she dawdles! How she lingers on the way! A snail would have been here before her!”

She gave the earthenware pot sitting on the
brasero
a slight shift. “He’ll come home, and what will he find? A wife who cannot even keep the food warm for him. A disgraced creature!”

The boy sat watching her in utter silence, palms to cheeks, a rapt smirk on his face.

She made some more passes with the broom. “Oh, I’ll give it to her! I’ll break this
palo
in two over her back. She will ache all day tomorrow—”

Something struck against the door suddenly. It was as though a flurry of footsteps, only audible at the very last, had suddenly ended with a fling against the door. A scream winged its way in, like a knife slicing through all the seams at once, above, below, at the sides. And then words, in a smothered paroxysm, as though the mouth uttering them were cupped to the very woodwork itself. “
Mamacita
, let me in! Oh if you love me, let me in!” They were all run together in a sort of spasm of the voice.

The Senora Delgado had waited for this moment, though not knowing that it would take this precise form. She clasped her enfolded arms to her sides, hugging herself and nodding her head in bitter, long-delayed retribution. “
Now
she comes, eh? Running at the last, eh, now that it’s too late, now that my fire is gone and the damage is done!” She mimicked the suffocating tones outside. ”’
Mamacita
, let me in. Oh if you love me, let me in!’ Afraid of the dark, eh? Afraid of her own shadow, eh? Well she’ll stay out there. We’ll see how she likes that. She’ll learn next time to make more haste—”

There was the sound of nails clawing helplessly at the wood; the voice was crazed, ungovernable, all but incomprehensible, sputtering a gibberish that had to be guessed at rather than understood. “
Ay, madrecita de mi alma
, it’s coming, it’s coming closer, I can see it coming by the wall— It’s closer, it’s closer—!”

The Senora Delgado gave an authoritative bellow that stopped the boy as he was beginning to sidle around the side of the room toward the door. “Pedro! Stay away from it!” Again she mimicked her. “Yes, it’s coming nearer, is it? Lies!
Mentiras!
She thinks her lies will save her. You think I believe there is anything out there? There should be, I only wish there were! It would teach you next time to obey your mother better—”

There was a scream of agonized finality, a veritable catharsis of the lungs, that made all the others before it seem like nothing at all. Mingled with it, and blurring it, quelling it at the end, came an impact of such violence that the whole door structure seemed to start with it from top to bottom, curve inward at the middle, then spring back rigid again a moment later. It seemed incredible that anyone could do that with her body without breaking all her bones. A puff of plaster dust welled up around the sides.

A change had come over the urchin’s derisive face. “
Carajo, Mama!
” he breathed huskily. “She isn’t fooling—”

But the woman, in a reversal of attitude as instantaneous as his own, had already flung herself forward, squat and bulky as she was. “Wait, Teresa,” she panted. “I come, I’m here, I open—” She clawed desperately at the bolt. “Only a moment, my beloved.
Mi querida
, only a moment more. Your mother is here, your mother admits you—”

It wouldn’t move. It had jammed. It had been too long unused. Its surface had roughened too much with rust, or that last impact had warped it. It was fast in its socket. She continued to pluck despairingly at it. She half turned around in helpless appeal, then turned back again. She struck frustratedly at the wood just above it with one open hand, while she tried to wrench it back with the other.