Black Curtain (19 page)

There was a moment of utter stillness. About as long as it takes a person to cross a room. Townsend strained against the chair that held him, his mouth looped in a grimace of excruciation. He could feel Ruth's distended eyes burning into his face from the sofa opposite. He didn't have the heart to meet them; he ignored the mute appeal. There was something obscene about having to sit and look at one another while such a thing was happening.

Suddenly a scream of animal-like unreason kited up, a sound that belonged in a slaughter yard. It stopped again as curtly as it had begun. Then there was a gurgling, slavering moan of dissolution. Then nothing.

He stayed in there awhile. Then the upper door reopened. Townsend heard a chair or bench in the upper hall go over. Not the clatter of an accidental collision. The sound had a careful, deliberate quiet. More stage setting, Townsend thought. The chair would look as though it had been overturned in the course of a hand-to-hand struggle.

His tread came on down, and he showed up in the doorway again. It was a terrible moment for Townsend. He was seeing what a man's face looks like right after he's committed murder. It was parchment yellow with lack of blood, as though the knife had drained -his- off as well as-- someone else's. It was satiny with sweat, and he ran the tip of his tongue along his mouth to get some of it off his upper lip. He looked back, once, before he looked in at them. In the look back, though there was nothing alive back there now, was the racial heritage of fear and awe, no matter how fleeting, that always accompanies violent death.

He still had the knife in his grasp, three quarters of the blade hidden inside a red patent-leather sheath that frayed and unraveled off it as he stood there, letting the steel peer luminously through again in oily patches.

He was the killer still steaming from the kill. He was murder, on two legs and in the flesh.

Not a word had passed Townsend's lips until now, in all the time since the Diedrichs had first descended to the room. He had known that it would be hopeless, to plead or threaten or try to reason. But now a raging resentment simmered up in him, boiled over. He began to swear, in a hissing, monotonous litany. All his horror at the man who stood there was translated into inadequate language.

Diedrich smiled as he closed the door behind him. "That's what I call real big talk," he murmured with almost detached admiration, as though he were listening to a phonograph record. "It's a shame to have to deprive the world of such a vocabulary. Look out, you repeated yourself just then--" He came close, and for a minute Townsend thought, this is it. But he only touched Townsend lightly about the face a few times with the flat of the blade, like someone trying to make lumps disappear by pressing them with cold steel. He was daubing Townsend with telltale traces of a crime that wasn't his.

Then he wiped the handle carefully with a bit of gauze and laid the implement aside for the time being. It lay there waiting for Townsend's hand to close around it--after death.

He picked up the gun. He shot the clip back to make sure it was fully loaded, closed it again. He moved over into a straight line with the man on the chair, then slowly paced backwards six steps, like someone practicing for a duel. He was holding the gun sighted at Townsend, without a tremor of the hand, like someone taking aim at one of those two-dimensional ducks in a shooting gallery.

The little round black bore, centering at him, seemed to expand, to widen, to acquire an active drawing power of its own, as if it were trying to suck him in bodily, like a vacuum nozzle. He could almost feel himself leaning hypnotically toward it, as far as his bonds would permit.

"You better shut your eyes," Diedrich let him know grimly. "That'll make this easier on you."

A pulse in Townsend's cheek, up near the ear, started to tick. He didn't speak. He smiled thinly, way over at one side of his mouth. He forced the smile to stay on his face.

There's something about such a smile that troubles the beholder, that makes him wonder: What's he got to smile about at such a time? What's he got on me that I don't know about? The challenge worked.

Diedrich said, "What's funny?"

"You never heard about an angle of fire, did you?" Townsend had to moisten his lips to make them articulate. "You're firing -down- at me. I'm in a chair and you're on your feet. That's going to look great for self-defense. D'you think they won't notice that? Don't kid yourself." And the smile stayed waveringly on. It had a hard time, but it stayed on.

The way the gun went abruptly vertical, muzzle to floor, showed he'd made his point.

A minute gained? Forty-five seconds gained? Time was the enemy now.

Diedrich dipped one knee under him, tried to correct the discrepancy that way. It was no good, the course of the bullet would now be slightly upward. And the midway position, which would have been the right one, was too awkward. It was impossible to support steadily for any length of time. It required a slight buckling of the knees, a half crouch; he couldn't even be sure of his shot taking effect from such an unsteady stance.

The method he hit upon at last was almost ludicrous. But there was no humor in it to either of the men. Diedrich slung out a vacant chair and placed it in a straight line to the one in which his prisoner was bound. He sat back in it and raised the gun once more.

He didn't fire it. He was unsure now. The subtle objection Townsend had managed to insert into his mind must have kept on unfolding postscripts. There were other things to be considered in addition to the bullet's trajectory line. There was the position of the bodies afterwards. If the bullet entered in a certain way, then they must be found lying in a certain way.

He couldn't take any chances. Townsend had counted on that. Diedrich took what he imagined was the safest and quickest way out. He rose, strode impatiently across the room, and threw open the desk. He pocketed the gun momentarily, took out a scrap of paper and a pencil. Then he pointed--to the girl, to Townsend, to the floor. He was arranging them ahead of time, measuring the arcs of their body falls from the positions in which he wanted it thought they had met their deaths. Townsend could glimpse his marking hasty broken lines on the paper. He worked quickly, like a stage director setting a stage for a crime supposed to be impromptu, a crime committed in the heat of justifiable self-defense.

Once he went so far as to murmur raptly, with a stab of the pencil toward Ruth, "You over here."

It may not have been intentional cruelty. But a sadistic demon out of Dante's hell could not have improved upon it. The girl was almost cataleptic, half expiring. A curtain of beads was forming at the roots of Townsend's hair.

Finally, his blueprint completed, Diedrich tacked it to the outside of the sloping desk slab, for ready reference. He consulted his wrist watch briefly, as if to check on his accomplice's time schedule.

He gave a last comprehensive look around, to make sure everything was in order. No details of the general scenic effect could be overlooked. A chair that would have presumably impeded him in fighting for his life he hooked with his foot and allowed to crack over on its back, then painstakingly stepped over it in order not to disturb its prone position.

He rubbed his hands together a couple of times, to get their circulation up, like a surgeon about to perform a delicate operation.

Then he was ready for it at last.

He went over to Ruth, bent across her, and fumbled at the back of the sofa, where one of the portiere cords had been passed through the slit between back and seat to hold her on the seat.

Her eyes, peering out under his raised arm, gave a concentric swirl in their sockets, her head looped over. She had fainted away.

He seemed not to notice, or if he had, not to care. He freed her after a moment, picked her up bodily in both aims, and staggered out into the middle of the room with her. Her hands and ankles, which had been separately bound, he allowed to remain so for the moment. He set her down on the floor, with a gentleness that was hideous.

Her weight must have been greater than he had expected. A fit of coughing interrupted him before he could draw his arms out from beneath her. He swayed there over her, racked, for a minute. Even went down on one knee to retain his balance.

He stopped at last, got his breath back momentarily. Then Townsend began to cough.

There was something the matter with the air in here. Outlines, in places, weren't rigidly straight any more, were quivering, as if seen through sweltering heat or a dislocating refraction of some kind. The linings of his eyelids began to smart intolerably, protective water formed, and he could only see Diedrich liquidly, as in a trick mirror, one minute tall and skinny, the next squat and bloated.

He heard him go over to the door, still coughing, and stand there a moment, as if listening or questioning something. Woodwork buckled somewhere outside, as if subjected to some intolerable pressure. Diedrich reached out sharply at the sound, opened the door to look out.

What followed was as though a giant eraser had been stroked across his figure. He all but disappeared, faded into gray half-tones. There was an added horror to the phenomenon because of its utter soundlessness. A great gust of dirty, flannelthick smoke mushroomed in. It must have been accumulating out there in the enclosed hall for untold minutes, to acquire the density it already had. Instantly it had diffused itself everywhere, yet scarcely thinning at all as it did so. The room was gone, a sort of swirling twilight filled it, with only a soft-focused glimmer left where the light had been.

Townsend, through almost useless eyes, could glimpse a gray ghost form weaving its way back from the door, one purpose still uppermost in its mind even now, retching up its insides as it went.

Diedrich's foot must have struck the girl's submerged form. He went down flounderingly, in a sudden full-length fall. The gun he had been holding ricocheted loosely almost at Townsend's own feet. He could see it lying there, outlined like a black T square through the thickening, stratified haze that was still thinnest down there by the floor. Then a hand came out, also along the floor, blindly groping for it, twitching spasmodically with the paroxysm of coughing still sounding somewhere out of sight behind the curling masses of gray-brown ostrich plumes.

Townsend tried hectically to reach it with his own foot and push it still farther beyond reach. He couldn't. Three times the tip of his shoe swiveled past in an empty arc, just missing it by inches. Then the crawling, buglike white fingers found it, closed hungrily, drew it back into the pall.

There was a fitful wink of orange light down close to the floor, and the room thudded with a blanketed detonation that seemed to send an outward swirl through the smoke curtain, dying out again lazily before it had traveled very far.

There was a moment of grisly expectancy. Then a face suddenly thrust out at Townsend at half level, as though the body under it were traveling along on bended knees, unable to lift itself erect any more.

A hand pointed waveringly toward him, its index finger black and thicker than the rest and holed at the tip. It swayed from side to side, missing him by whole feet in either direction. The light sparked again; what felt like hot sand stung his cheek and something thudded into the thick chair back alongside his face.

But he was hardly aware of all that any more. He didn't need bullets to rush him off, he was going fast enough. Every breath was more agony than the one before. They went down red hot, halfway to the bottom, then backfired and came up again, ripping the lining from his windpipe. His eyes had gone long ago, sizzling coals extinguished in their own fluid.

There was an inert, sodden clump from the floor right before him, and somebody's head landed on his knee, then sidled off it again, hit his foot and stayed there.

His own head was straining apart, getting ready to fly to pieces.

The last thing he heard was the far-off, useless tinkle of breaking glass.

22

The oxygen going down his throat felt good. He was angry when it stopped. They took the tent off him. He was lying on his back out in the open some place, with an arrested blizzard of stars over him. There were talcum-white shafts of light crisscrossing along the grass here and there, and against them a motionless frieze of black legs stood outlined around him in a half circle.

One pair telescoped into a face that came down close to his. The near-by shine of one of the reflectors showed it to him.

He took a good long look at this face, and it took a good long look back at him. He knew it intimately by now, although it had never been this close to him before. Inscrutable, woodenIndian face that never smiled. It had stopped and stared at him in the crowd. It had glowered balefully through a dusty subway-car window. It had been reflected through a drugstore window. It had started to turn and look along a day-coach aisle. It had even topped a pair of shoes that had followed him in a dream, without becoming visible itself. And here it was, as close as it could get now. It had caught up with him at last. It had him flat on his back on the ground. It had him pinned to the mat.

He spoke finally, with languid unconcern, "You're Ames, aren't you?"

"That's me," the face said challengingly. "And you're Dan Nearing, aren't you?"

"Like hell I am," he said. "I'm Frank Townsend."

They helped him up on his elbow first, and then to a sitting position. He found the oxygen had left him a little lightheaded. "Don't you ever change that hat?" he heard himself say to Ames.