The Black Angel (14 page)

“Some man named Murray.”

There was something almost obscene about it, having my own name thrown at me like that in a place like this. It was good he didn't have his stethoscope to me just at that minute; he would have heard it jump.

“Did you know him?”

“I didn't know anyone she knew. I just knew her.”

He nodded, thought awhile.

“Those she knew, in any case, are scattered to the wind,” he went on. “The fabric of her—how shall we say it?—acquaintanceship is all tattered and no good any more.” I couldn't make out what he was trying to say to me, except that he was looking at me quite intently.

Then he said, “Tell me, how did she come to speak of me? Were you ill at the time?”

“Well, I suppose I must have been feeling—low, depressed.”

“And she said——? Tell me, what were her exact words? How did she——?”

There was something here. I had to be careful; I had to be vague; I could sense that without understanding why. “Well, it's quite some time past. She said, ‘Why don't you go to see Dr. Mordaunt? He might be able to do something for you.'”

The choice of phrase seemed to be satisfactory. His eyes enlarged, then became their normal size again.

“But it's quite some time since. Were you working in the meantime?”

“Oh yes, I——”

“But you're not at the moment?”

I took the cue offered for what it was worth. “No, not just now——”

“Yes, and when one doesn't work one's appetite—suffers,” he said in sanctimonious reflection.

“And then these dizzy spells——” I began, to lend a little plausibility.

He waved that aside, as though we were both too intelligent, knew too much, to waste any more time with that. That was the translation I got from the flip gesture.

“You live alone?”

I said yes, told him where.

He danced the point of his pencil awhile. “Have you ever taken anything to steady your nerves?” he asked absently, upending it and looking at the lead closely.

I moistened my lips, uncertain of direction. “Not that I——”

“Not yourself? I see. Many people do, you know.”

From a consultation this had long ago become a rambling conversation. Or was it as rambling as it seemed? Now even that dwindled; from a conversation it became just meditation.

He seemed to be looking down. I received quite a shock, suddenly, when I saw that he wasn't, that he was looking at me from under his thick, creased lids without seeming to.

He leaned forward again, this time did look at the paper below him on the table. “Come back—let me see, this is Thursday—come back Saturday, two days from now.”

Then he sort of died out, looking down.

“At what time, Doctor?”

“Oh, any time after dark. Ring the basement bell. In case Sophia—in case my housekeeper—is out that night I may not hear you if you come to the upstairs door.”

So he was going to be alone and he wanted me to come after dark, when no one would be likely to see me enter! What had I said that was wrong? What had I done? What trap had I fallen into, unknowing, during that long, rambling, seemingly innocuous conversation?

He pried apart the sliding doors with a horrid grating sound.

The last thing he said was, “I'll see what I can do for you then.” He gave a funny glance over one shoulder as he did so, as if to see whether anyone was around.

I carried that away with me, memory of that self-betraying little backward look. That and a grisly,
unclean
sort of fear, as unclean in sensation as his office and his instruments and his person had been in contemplation. And this unshakable conviction, reiterating itself continually in my mind: “If you go back into that house again the doctor's name may not be Mordaunt the second time; the doctor's name may be death.”

So I wasn't going back, and oh, I wasn't going back, and no, I wasn't going back, and in between each recurrent resolve not to go back I'd see his face, Kirk's face, or think of him, or say his name down in my heart, and when nine o'clock on Saturday came I was back; I was creeping, inching, down the darkened side street toward that darkened, waiting house. Frightened and helpless and alone, yet moving steadily forward, slow as it was; mincing, as though feeling of the ground first each time I brought my foot forward to set it down, yet getting nearer, nearer all the time.

It never occurred to me that there was someone, somewhere in a hollowed-out concrete block, could have been proud of this. I had no leisure to think of it that way.

There, it was three away now. There, it was two away. There, it was the next one. This foot was trying not to move, to stay back where it had been. Now the other one was trying not to. Smart feet. But they weren't married to Kirk Murray; just my head and heart were.

Oh, it was so dark along this street. Just that hooded, half-dimmed light on the other side, too far behind me to do any good any more. Looking downward into the little pool of its own reflection, like a discreetly retiring eye refusing to see what happened to me. And that little cross of punctured green pin points down the other way at the corner below, like a spark floating a little above the curb, that sometimes turned red and then came back to green again. A car passed once in a while, but even that was nothing, just a swift black shape hastening along on the black tide with a glint of silver at its prow.

I was up to it now, and there it was waiting: black eyes in triple rows, protruding teeth formed by the stoop steps, seeming to say, “I knew you'd come; I knew I'd get you.”

I hadn't even told Flood; I don't know why. I hadn't even taken that most elementary, most ordinary precaution—to let someone else know I was coming here; I was going into this place. So that in case I didn't come out again——

Because I had nothing definite to tell him as yet, I suppose, other than that Mordaunt had told me to come back a second time after dark. Because I was afraid of ridicule, I suppose, and would almost have rather faced this thing, whatever it was to be, alone than have him turn up the palms of his hands and say: “Almost every doctor you go to see asks you to come back a second time.” Or shrug and say: “Then if you're afraid to go there don't go there. No one's making you. Why come running to us? We can't give you a police escort to every doctor who makes evening appointments or happens to look across his shoulder as he's seeing you out the door.”

Now I was here, and the time for what I should have done and what I shouldn't have done was over; this was how I was going to do it.

The parlor floor and the two above it were dark. But now that the impediment of the preceding stoop was out of the way, I saw that the double window in the basement, deep within the areaway, niched within the projection of the two stoops, was showing a sullen brown-orange through a thick, almost opaque, shade. So he was waiting down there, as he'd said.

I didn't even have anything on me to—well, in case anything happened. The lack was only relative, after all. A protective knife, for instance, was only as strong as the wrist behind it. A gun? I had no gun. A whistle, perhaps. Yet what chance would even a whistle have of reaching out here to the street from the deeps, the unsuspected recesses and keeps, of that jealously sealed house? Less chance than my own unaided scream, and that had little chance enough.

I played a forlorn game that kids know well, procrastinating, marking time, saying: “As soon as this next man coming along on the other side goes by I'll go down the step and ring the bell.” Then, “He didn't count; he passed too fast. Well, as soon as this
next
one goes by, then I surely will.” And then, “He didn't count either; he turned in somewhere before he got here.” Until, in sudden helpless discovery, “There's no one else coming. Now I have to go!” And through it all a grown-up voice, the voice of me grown up, scoffing in my ear, “Coward! Coward! Then why did you come here at all? Why didn't you drop the whole thing when you got safely outside the other day?”

I forced myself down into the coal-black sunken pit of the areaway at last. “Kirk, look after me. I'm going in.” I knew he was helpless many miles away, buried in steel and concrete, but I had to have
some
talisman to see me through.

When I'd found the bell I rang it in such a strange way, had anyone been able to see me through the layers of dark. Collared my wrist with my other hand and thrust it home by that means, as though in itself it were atrophied, had no power to move.

Yes, it was childish, I know. It was the last lingering childishness in me giving up the ghost. There would be no more of it left in me after this. This was Alberta Murray, growing up as she stood before this house waiting to go in. Making her debut into an adult world such as she had never dreamed she would enter, such as she had never dreamed existed: a world of jungle violence and of darkness, of strange hidden deeds in strange hidden places, of sharp-clawed treachery and fanged gratitude, where compunction and conscience were just other words for weakness and used as such. Strange debut.

It made a faint sound far back inside, not the usual sound of a bell, a sort of angry, wasplike buzzing. These basement entryways in New York had, or have where they have still remained unaltered, a single common feature : a grilled iron gate giving in under the stoop structure. Then within that, at right angles, comes the wooden house door itself. This, I suppose, was to make access more difficult in the old days. The gate itself is a full-sized door in every sense of the word: it reaches from top to bottom of the embrasure, save that it is slit, can be seen through when it is daylight or when there is a light within the inner passage.

There was no sound of the inner door opening or of anyone coming out. He must therefore have already been in position, standing there concealed in the dark, watching me through the grille the whole time. His voice when it sounded, though it was low and meant to be reassuring, was so close to my face just the other side of the barrier and came so unexpectedly, it made my heels go up. “Good evening. I've been wondering how much longer you were going to take.”

Then, and then only, there was noise enough as he unfastened the heavy obstacle and swung it back for me. A little carbolic, a little uncleanliness came out unseen in the dark.

“You should never do that,” he said. “For fully five minutes you stood up there on the sidewalk, as if you couldn't make up your mind. It—it doesn't look right, gives a bad impression. When you are coming anywhere, especially when you are coming here to see me, go right in, don't stand around like that outside.”

So he'd been watching me the whole time, probably had been on the lookout since before my arrival, like—like some sort of anthropoid lurking behind those iron bars.

I couldn't help commenting to myself, “Where would you have been now if Flood had sent someone with you as an escort, for instance, and you had parted from him within sight of the house? Or even exchanged some unobtrusive signal with him from a distance?”

I dredged up what I thought a plausible enough excuse to cover the hesitant behavior that he didn't approve of, though whether he believed it or not, I couldn't tell. “Oh, I'll tell you why that was, Doctor. I found out from a clock that I passed on the way over here that I was five minutes ahead of time, and I didn't want to be too early. I'm funny that way. I like to keep an appointment to the minute, so I waited outside to——”

“Well, as a matter of fact, you're five minutes late.”

“Then the clock must have been slow.”

He had not, meanwhile, stood back to admit me. He had instead come out past me to the sunken rim of the areaway and peered out over the two upright brownstone slabs that formed a sort of guard for it, first up the street in one direction, then down it in the other.

It was done with an assumption of casualness, even inconsequence, as though he were no more than an ordinary householder who, once summoned to the door, takes the opportunity of savoring the fresh air for a moment as long as he is out that far. But it didn't mislead me. He wanted to make sure that my ingress should pass unobserved.

“Go ahead in, don't stand there.” In itself the remark was innocuous enough; it was the way he uttered it without turning his head toward me, keeping his gaze steadily forward on the street, that made it a conspiratorial something else again. Everything he said and did, he did so——I didn't know what the exact word was myself. Sinisterly.

I would have to go in in another moment anyway, I knew, so long as I was this far, but I grasped at any delay, no matter how fleeting. “But I don't know where the light is, Doctor. I can't see my way.”

“Go in without it. It's just a straight hall; you don't need it. I'll be right there.” Again he didn't turn his head. He wanted to be sure the street was sterile.

I knew. Oh, I knew; any fool would have by now. What doctor receives his patient without a light, scans the street after her as she goes in? The Finnish woman was out of the house, as he had known she would be, as he had planned she should be, and there was something grim going to take place here.

I was too frightened to back out of going in any more. I was too frightened to do anything but go ahead. There are times when that is no figure of speech. I was afraid if I balked now he would overpower me and drag me in with him by main force. And I had at least that little slack left yet to my rope; I was still a free agent for a moment or two longer, provided my direction was forward and inside.

I sidled in backward, feeling of the wall with my hands, shifting my body along it under the stoop embrasure like an ebony portcullis that blacked still further the already seemingly impenetrable blackness there had been beyond it. Through the second door opening, until my feet found wood under them instead of cement. The carbolic was stronger in here; he had lingered so long and it was so confined.