Black Curtain (5 page)

Always barring mishaps.

5

He had to do a certain amount of juggling to conceal from Virginia that he had quit his job. The check wasn't payment for a full week, so he added to the envelope a proportionate amount out of his small reserve to make the correct total.

He couldn't, of course, do this a second time; he not only hadn't sufficient funds, but the next time the entire amount of his salary would have had to be substituted. But Monday he'd look for another job, and possibly by the next week end he'd have a bona fide pay check to replace the former one

Monday he did Tuesday he did Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. He looked in a way that appli cants seldom do. He didn't go by the compensation offered, nor even by the suitability to his own previous experience. He went by geographical location; discarded those within the danger zone, those too close to the vicinity of his former place of work, fed by the same transportation facilities. He marked off and followed up only those addresses lying at a considerable distance and in an opposite direction, even when that entailed making trips into grimy, industrialized suburbs.

He found he was gyrating in a vicious circle. He needed references, and he was unwilling to refer to his last place, lest he reopen a means of tracing him to the new one.

He could have got references, but he daren't apply for them.

Several openings that he might have had slipped through his fingers for lack of credentials. Then the end of the week was upon him, and he was face to face with the necessity of telling Virginia the whole thing, bringing on the worry he'd been trying all along to spare her.

When he returned Saturday, his supposed payday, primed to confide the whole thing to her, he could tell by her face something was troubling her. "Frank, did your pay check come today? Was it in the letter box when you went out?" she began immediately, before he had a chance to say anything.

"No--"

"Then it's been lost in the mail, something's happened to it!" She rushed on. "It wasn't received over at our old address either. I was just around there to find out--"

Every muscle in his body tensed. "You were over there?"

"Only this morning I happened to pick up the envelope of last week's check--I came across it in, the back of the bureau drawer--and just as I was about to throw it out, I noticed our old address typed on it big as life! You never told me you had to go over there and claim it. Well, I went over to make sure in case it went there a second time by mistake, it would be forwarded to us here--" She stopped when she noticed the look on his face.

"You gave that woman, the new janitress over there, our address -here?-"

"Why yes, I wrote the name and the address down for her on a piece of paper, so she'd be sure to remember it."

Always barring mishaps, he reflected, always barring mishaps.

6

He couldn't sleep. Although he had dozed off for a short time immediately upon touching the pillow, it had been only a half sleep, troubled by a dream. A peculiarly grueling species of dream, though there were no distortions in it, no traumal goblin shapes. No complete persons in it at all. In fact, there had been nothing in it but a pair of feet and a patch of pavement just big enough to contain them.

They kept moving forward, toward him, toward the dreamer's eye, and the pavement they trod kept slipping past beneath them, like a treadmill going the other way. It was as though the dreamer were moving backwards, away from the feet, and the latter were following remorselessly.

The feet kept coming toward him, coming toward him, toes pointed straight at him.

There was more inchoate terror, more undiluted horror, in that simple undistorted pair of black-shod feet (never at a run, always at the same even, implacable, persistent walk) than in all the ogres, monsters, menaces, hooded fonns of dream plasma put together. It was their quiet implacability.

They were as lifelike, as natural, as the moving pavement belt beneath them. They were heavy black brogues; they expressed beetling menace, somehow, by their very thickness and last alone. He could even see the worn breaks across their vamps. He could even catch the high lights glancing from their hubs as they rose and fell, rose and fell, with pistonlike regularity. He could even hear the slight, soft grate of straining leather they made each time--nothing so acute as a squeak-- the cushioned thud of their incessant fall upon the pavement. The rhythm of the walk--pat--pat, -pat--pat--p at-, -pat--pat--pat-, -pat-. You hear the sound at night, when the streets are still, when someone's coming toward you in the distance.

Over them hung trouser legs, of some neutral color that didn't register--gray perhaps. They were naturalistically enlarged (not as to dimension, only as to detail), as through the magnifying glass that the whole dream view was. The cuffs at their bottom, their slight dip and rise over the shoes each time with the break of the unseen knees above, even their very woolliness of texture.

But it was the shoes that held the spotlight. They never faltered, never missed a step. It was as though they knew they needn't hurry, for nothing, no one, could escape them, feet so tireless, so persistent.

And slowly, unnoticeably, they began to gain on the retreating dreamer's eye, to come closer, closer, within the frame of vision that contained them. There was no escape. To turn aside and let them go by was impossible; the dream followed a fixed channel. They would only turn with the beholder, as if both operated on a single direction finder. The crevice between sole and pavement, opening and closing, was like a hungry maw now, grazing, threatening to trap and crush and trample the retreating, rigidly bound dreamer.

The frame shattered into unbearable light at the moment of their finally breaking through it and overtaking him. He awoke from the dream.

He saw, in the slow reintegrating process of psychic cohesion, the knitting up of the intelligence where the ominous vision had come from. That pair of feet raised to the foot rests of the shoeshine stand. The image must have festered since then in his subconscious, finally worked its way free tonight. He had heard that this often happened; you dreamed about things that impressed you, not immediately after, but sometimes days, weeks later. And as for their dogging him so relentlessly, the portent was to be found in actuality rather than in the dream. Wasn't that what they -had- been doing?

Or was the portent that they were somewhere outside there on the surrounding streets right now, pacing through the night, coming toward him, drawing nearer footfall by footfall at this very minute, while he crouched in passive helplessness in his bed?

He touched a match to one of his unfailing nocturnal cigarettes, and Virginia's face, opposite in the other bed, stood out for a minute, a pale golden oval, then dimmed again. Her soft, regular-pitched breathing reached him through the dark. Thank God at least one of us can sleep, be at peace, he thought contritely. She had had her three years of wakefulness, while he--where had be slept, how had he slept, what dreams had troubled him then? Now it was his turn. She had earned her repose.

A jeeringly bright, and not particularly friendly, star was looking in at him through the window from the night sky outside.

He put his cigarette out and lay back and turned over. He couldn't go back to sleep. That dream had finished him. He turned the other way, then the other way, a hundred other ways, but he couldn't regain sleep.

Presently he felt like smoking again, wanted to move around. He sat up and found his slippers. He didn't own a robe, so he put on his trousers instead, and felt his way toward the door, got it open without any noise, and closed it after him from the other side.

He put on a small light in the other room -- simply so he wouldn't jar into anything and rouse Virginia--and started walking back and forth.

How long is this going to keep up, anyway? he asked himself. What am I going to do about it? I've got to do -something- about it sooner or later. I can't just--

He stopped by the window, looked out.

Suddenly the cigarette fell from his lips.

He jumped over to the wall, killed the light. Then he approached the window again, stealthily, edging up to it sidewise along the wall until he could look out--at what he thought he'd seen the first time.

There seemed to be a man standing there, directly opposite, facing these windows in a surveyor's line of directness. He was in the black silt of a shadow that filled a wall indentation like sand blown into a niche. It might have been just an optical illusion, giving the shadow's border the rounded likeness of a shoulder, then lower down a hipbone.

As he peered, trying to decide, a faint flow of motion had altered the silhouette. The rounded scallops of the shoulder, the hip, drew subtly inward, disappeared into the heart of the shadow mass, leaving a clean-cut knife line of dark that should have been there in the first place but hadn't been.

So that, by its very disappearance, what had caught his eye betrayed itself as being a reality. If it had been an illusion it would have remained in sight.

He had to get out of here. He had to get out of here fast. His last hiding place had been found at last. It was coming now. It was here. In fifteen minutes. In half an hour. It was upon him.

He tiptoed out and listened at the front door. There was a low voice murmuring somewhere beyond, as though some amorous swain were loitering out there in the hail taking a lingering leave-taking of his girl; only Townsend knew that it was no swain. That wasn't love whispering out there, that was violence and hate and very possibly death. -He- had others with him. They were all around the place, getting set, getting ready to rush it. Any minute now.

He swung around and looked toward the oblivious bedroom doorway, that contained all he loved in the world. "I've got to get her out of here," he thought distractedly. "I don't want her to get mixed up in it. I don't want it to happen in front of her--whatever it is."

He went into the darkened bedroom, leaned over her, found her ribboned shoulder. He pressed it gently, trying not to startle her too much. Then he shook it, more urgently, until she was fully awake.

"Virginia, can you hear me? Don't be frightened."

She sat up. The soft perfume of her hair was about him.

"You've got to get out of here. I want you to come with me right now. No, don't light up, they may be able to look in and see us through the back window."

She was on her feet now, a silken shadow beside him. "They? Who?"

"Just your coat. Here, I've taken it down for you. Just put your feet into shoes the way they are, there's no time--"

"Don't," she whimpered plaintively, "you're frightening me."

He sought her lips with his, to give her courage. "Do you love me?"

"How can you ask?" Her voice was a frightened whisper.

"Then will you trust me enough just to follow me blindly, without asking any questions? I don't know the answers myself. I only know what I'm doing is right. Ready? Come on."

He went back to the outside door again, she behind him, hair awry, face still half awakened within the towering circle of her red-fox collar.

Outside there was a sort of swelling quiet, like a balloon about to burst.

"I don't think we can make it this--" he started to murmur.

It went right through the two of them, as though a volley of blank cartridges had been fired off under their noses. It was something heavier, harder than fists. The door seemed to explode with impacts. It made the light bulbs jitter in the ceiling. It made a pottery thing on a table sing out with the vibration, carried to it along the floor and up the table legs. It was the earthquake of attempted forcible entry. It was violence in its most ravening form. It was the night gone hydrophobic at their threshold. It was disaster. It was the end.

Too late now. She was going to be right in the middle of the whole thing, see things that those you love shouldn't be called upon to witness.

She huddled against him, terrified. She gave a wordless heave, that was like a bronchial seizure. "Who--? Who's doing that?"

"It's what I wanted to get you away from," he answered bitterly.

Violence flamed in his own mind, catching fire from the violence outside the door. He caught up a wooden chair by one leg, poised it overhead at blow angle. His face was an unbaked cruller of rage. "Bring this to you, will they? Let 'em come--!"

She caught at his arm, pulled it--and the chair--down again. "No Frank, no! Don't! For me, Frank!" And he saw, looking at her twisted, tearing face, that she was more frightened of his rage than she had been of theirs.

That did something to him, snapped him out of it, the sight of that fright of hers. To get her to safety should be his only concern, the hell with everything else.

He drew her back away from the door, arm protectively circled about her shoulder. Like a pair of blundering dancers in half embrace they went this way and that, looking for a way out that wasn't there. Taking three steps toward the hopelessly blocked front windows, then doubling back; three steps toward the bedroom window overlooking the rear court, then doubling back as the telltale grate of feet on the cement reached them, magnified by the sounding board of the enclosing walls.

"There must be some way, there's got to be--!" His grimace was that of weeping for her, but he wasn't weeping.