Black Curtain (2 page)

Her hands flew to her mouth, latticing it with rigid intercrossed fingers. A choked cry forced its way through them.

He reared up toward her. on the bed. He pulled the impediment of her hands down by main force. "Virginia, speak to me!"

"Frank, oh my God, what are you saying? -This morning--?- I moved to this apartment from Rutherford Street over a year and a half ago!"

They were two very sick and frightened people. His wrist made a quick hitch and he gulped the bracer of whisky. The glass rocked empty on the bed beside him. He held his skull tightly pressed with both hands, as if to keep it from flying apart.

"I can remember kissing you good-by at the door!" he said helplessly. "I can remember you calling out after me to remind me, 'Sure you've got your muffler? It's cold out.'"

"Frank," she said. "The weather alone should tell you--it's warm out, you're not wearing a muffler or even a coat now. You left me in the winter, and now it's spring. You left me on January thirtieth, 1938. I never forgot that date, bow could I? And today is-- Wait, I'll let you read it for yourself."

She staggered out of the room once more, came back with a newspaper, that evening's newspaper, handed it to him.

He scanned the date line feverishly. "May 10, 1941."

Then he dropped it and its loosened sheets cascaded all over the floor, and he was digging the heels of his hands desperately under the bony ridges of his eye sockets. "My God! 'What happened to all that -time?- Those weeks, those months, those years--I can remember everything so perfectly, every last detail, up to that morning. I can remember what we had for breakfast. I can even remember we went to the movies the night before, to see MacDonald and Eddy in -Rosalie-. It seems like -last- night. And just now, the molding of a building fell on me, on Tillary Street, and when they'd helped me up, I simply kept on coming home, to where I belonged. But what happened to those years between?"

"Don't you remember -any-thing at all?"

"They're gone like the tick of a second. Less than that, for even the tick of a single second can remain in your memory if you try hard enough. They're gone as though they never were."

"Maybe if we get a doctor--"

"No doctor can bring them back. They happeried to -me-, not to him."

"I've read about cases like this before," she tried to reassure him. "Amnesia, I think they call it. Somewhere between home and your work after you left me that last morning, something must have happened to you, some accident, some blow, just like what happened to you tonight on Tillary Street. Maybe a wild baseball thrown by some boys hit you on the head. Whatever it was, you picked yourself up, outwardly unhurt--and you didn't know who you were any more, forgot where you were going, forgot to come back home to me. And none of the people around you, that saw it happen, were any the wiser. Your suit had just come back from the cleaner's that morning. You left in kind of a hurry, without taking time to transfer most of the personal trifles you usually carried around in your pockets from the old one to the new one. Any one of them--an address on an old envelope, a receipted bill--would have helped you. But without them you were cut off completely."

Then, presently, she said, "Frank, you're back now. That's all that counts. Let's forget about it."

He felt less starkly frightened, as the hours wore on and they talked it over. Deep down within him he was still greatly troubled, far more troubled than she. That was natural. It was his identity that had been lost, not hers. She had him back, for her the mystery was solved. For him it was still impenetrable, yawning behind him like an abyss seen from a safely regained, sunlit ledge. One misstep, and--

In the still of that night, long after they'd put out the lights and lay quiet in the darkened room, he suddenly started upright, cold sweat needling his forehead. "Virginia, I'm scared! Put on the lights, I'm frightened of the dark! Where was I? -Who- was I, all that time?"

2

He had his old job back. Or at least, another with the same employers. In the weeks immediately following his disappearance, she had told them, in answer to their repeated inquiries, that he had suffered a nervous breakdown, had had to go away for a rest. Pride had made her do that. She couldn't bear to have anyone think she didn't know where he was, what had become of him. So now, when he had presented himself down there once more, room had been made for him with the fewest possible questions asked, and those wholly of a sympathetic nature. That had made it much less embarrassing.

The old familiar routine was beginning to reclaim his daily life. The blank was beginning to recede more and more into the past. He was even daring to hope that perhaps, at some not too future date, it would become one of those dimly remembered, never-mentioned things that two people share in common but never speak about.

The days were growing longer, and he emerged onto a street still bright with setting sunlight as he left his place of work. He bought a paper at the corner stand to take home with him, then hurried to his usual place for boarding the bus, joining the one or two others who were already standing there.

He spread his paper and began scanning it while he was waiting there. Held that way, it shielded the lower part of his face, although he wasn't thinking of that.

He had been standing there perhaps two minutes--the bus was evidently a little behind schedule--when something made his eyelids twitch and he raised them, It was that feeling of being looked at intently.

There was a man about to pass him in the crowd streaming along the sidewalk. Townsend's suddenly revealed face had caught his vacant attention just as it peered over the paper. The roving glance became a fixed stare. The fixed stare became a searching scrutiny.

The starer broke his headlong stride. He took a shorter step. He forgot to take the next one altogether, held his foot poised toe to ground. He had faltered almost to a full stop by now.

The lens of Townsend's mind snapped, developed, and printed him--all in one instantaneous process. He was sturdily built, a little below medium height but not short. The brim of his hat cut off his hair--except at the sides, where it was sheared too close to show any distinctive color--but his eyes were gray and agatelike under thick, dark brows. Hard eyes, seldom softened. The kind that don't laugh. It was hard to tell who or what he was just by looking at him. He could have been anything. He was a face in the crowd, and Townsend didn't know him, had never seen him before in his life.

But the face didn't go on; held back, like a white rock peering steadily through rippling, coursing water. Something made an alarm bell of danger start ringing in Townsend's heart. People don't stop and scan you exhaustively on the street for no reason. This man recognized him or thought he recognized him but wasn't altogether sure yet. Whatever it was, there was no innocent social acquaintanceship at the root of it. The man's own actions showed that. Still uncertain in his own mind, he realized belatedly that he was attracting attention to himself, putting Townsend on his guard, by staring so overtly. He tried to undo the damage by continuing on his way-- rather too abruptly for it to be plausible--and seeming to recede into the distance along the bustling sidewalk, in the direction he had originally been following.

But not for very far. Some show-window display not far ahead seemed to attract his interest, and he veered inward toward it, on a long diagonal--that began a considerable distance before he could possibly have seen just what it was he was being drawn to with any degree of accuracy. He came to a halt before it, back to sidewalk and peered absorbedly in. Show windows make good reflecting surfaces, Townsend knew.

The alarm bell within was a din by now. "I'm going to get out of here!" he assured himself grimly.

He kept his head inscrutably motionless while be weighed possibilities. The bus would be simply a four-wheeled trap, if this unknown chose to follow him aboard. Once the two of them were inside it, he'd never be able to get out again undetected.

If he returned inside his own place of work and waited a few minutes for a later bus, the stalker might still be lurking around when he came out again--and he would then know where Townsend came from every day at this hour, which he didn't as yet.

If he simply took a walk around the block, in hopes of throwing him off, and then came back here to his original starting point--well, two could walk around the block as well as one, at a spaced distance.

The hunted or troubled thing, whether two legged or four, instinctively seeks a hole in the ground. There is no cover like a hole in the ground. The next street over there was a subway. He'd never used it before, because it diverged a great deal further than just one street at the other end, where his destination was. It was not the straightest line between here and his home.

But some action was better than the threat latent in this veiled surveillance and the acute uneasiness it was instilling in him. He decided to try to gain the subway, if it could be managed.

He edged the tip of his nose around a little, without staring over his shoulder full face. That show case was holding the stranger a long time, back there. Too long a time. Townsend, who worked in the immediate vicinity, knew which one it was. It was a shop displaying surgical belts and trusses. Whatever else he lacked, the window shopper didn't need any corrective aids for posture. His back was ruler straight and his waist was spare and flexible.

Townsend readied himself by surreptitiously telescoping his newspaper's width. He waited for the light to change, and then he made a break for it. Didn't burgeon into full flight, but started off at a brisk, unexpected walk.

He didn't look back while he was still in the open, crossing over between pavements. He felt an awful compulsion, the instinct of all stalked things, but he kept himself from it. He gained the opposite curb, and the corner building line knifed across their mutual line of vision, severing it motuentarily.

Instantly his brisk walk changed to a long, loping run, that ate up ground without being harried enough to arouse suspicion in the passers-by.

The crosswise street wasn't long; in fact wasn't Long enough to gain him a proper head start. But ahead a clean-cut, oblong gap, like a trap in the ground, was his goal. He gained it. His heels ticked off the steel-rimmed steps, with a sound a little bit like dice being shaken. It -was- a chance; he had no choice but to take it.

Then, halfway down the steps, he stopped and looked back the way he had come, eyes on a level with people's shoes. What he saw sent him hurtling the rest of the way down.

The man was careening up the street after him full tilt. He meant business; he meant to hang onto Townsend at all costs.

Townsend, station level gained, had a choice: of crossing below ground to the matching stairs on the opposite side and scampering up them to the street again--in which case the chase would simply be resumed on the opposite sidewalk--or of taking refuge out on the platform. A wait of even a single minute for a train would maroon him, leave him helpless.

A surging roar, like a high wind caught in the tunnel, punctuated with a green eye and a red one, decided him. It might take more than a minute to clear the station again, but he might be able to lose himself in the crowd aboard. He dove for a turnstile just as the track orifice exploded into a razzle-dazzle of illuminated car windows, streaming the length of the platform apron.

He blessed the meticulousness of habit that always made him have a nickel ready at hand, separate from the rest of his change in a pocket of its own, to use as carfare on his way to or from work. It saved, at all times, precious seconds of winnowing through pennies, dimes, and quarters. It averted, now, the catastrophe of having to detour to the change booth, of being almost certainly overtaken while filing by it. The lighted mirror in the receptacle magnified the head of Thomas Jefferson to an ugly death mask, and he cracked through.

Seconds were going to decide the outcome, he knew, but he'd made the gamble and he couldn't back out now. He avoided the nearest car opening as being too obvious a refuge, sprinted for one far down the line, out of sight of the steps, gauging to a nicety how much time he had before they were sealed up again. He reached the third car down as the doors were starting to slide closed. He sandwiched himself in sidewise, just quickly enough to avoid contact with the door, which would have meant thrusting back the rubberinsulated door edge and delaying the whole process of closing up the train, from car to car.

He'd won. Or had he? The tiny illuminated, red door indicators went out. The control signal was relayed to the motorman. The train was effectively walled off from the station, before it had even moved an inch. But if the pursuer had had sense enough to plunge &r the nearest car opening, the one Townsend had avoided, he might have made it, he might be somewhere on the jammed train at this very moment.

Townsend had a sick feeling at the thought, and let his shoulders sag down a little in the corner formed by the two sides of the vestibule that supported him. The cars started to glide forward, the platform to drop behind.

He was spared the added agony of uncertainty, all the long way home, of not knowing from one moment to the next when he might feel the sudden clutch of a heavy, restraining hand falling on him from out the anonymous crowd or of being discovered and kept steadily in view without his knowing it by agate-hard eyes under a shading hat brim, to be followed off the train at his destination and overtaken in more favorable, isolated surroundings.