Marihuana (2 page)

Turner looked down one time and a quarter of an inch of charred paper was all that was left between his fingers. Then the next time he looked there was a full-length cigarette again.

There was evidently a sort of sketchy buffet included in the admission charge. Or else Evans, who wasn't a bashful type person, had gone out and helped himself. He came back into the room after a brief absence holding a loaf of white bread tucked under one arm and hacking thick chunks off it with a bright-bladed jack-knife that he must have borrowed from one of the proprietors. The three of them, even the girl, wolfed at the thick slabs. "Find something to spread on it," Turner heard her suggest.

Evans had been standing before Turner. He put the knife down on the arm of his easy chair, turned and went out again. Turner stared bemusedly down at the shimmering blade, as though the gleam it cast half hypnotized him.

From far away he heard the girl's whispered comment to Gordon: "Look at Rain-in-the-face. I told you not to bring him with us, he's a total loss."

"Somebody ought to light a firecracker under him," Gordon agreed.

He didn't connect it with himself. It came from so far away, it wasn't as though they were talking about him at all. He started running the tip of his finger absently up and down the razorlike blade-edge of the knife Evans had left on the arm of his chair.

Evans came back in the room and he heard him say: "How's this? It's all I could find out there."

The girl said "Ugh" in a nauseated voice.

Turner didn't look over to see what it was. He didn't pay any more attention to them from then on. Something much more important was happening. Eleanor had showed up in the place. His Eleanor! The perfect lady that never could have been persuaded to set foot in such a———

First came her music, from the radio, that tune that he and she had danced to so many times in the past.

"After you've gone

And left me crying———"

Then came the thought of her. Then she herself. She was crouched down, trying to hide herself there behind the console, so that he wouldn't catch her in such a place. She peeped over at him, then ducked her head down. It wasn't just a private hallucination of his own brought on by the reefers, either; the others saw her too, he could tell by the way they spoke. Evans called over to him: "Hey, Turner, isn't that your wife across the room there? Better find out what she's doing here."

She stood up and came forward when she saw that they'd spotted her. She was trying to keep her face covered with a gauzy sort of handkerchief, and get over to the hall door and out, before they could stop her.

Turner jolted to his feet, headed her off, got in front of her. He caught her by the shoulders, tried to turn her toward him. "Eleanor! Who brought you to such a place? I'll punch them in the jaw!"

She writhed in stubborn silence, trying to get away from him.

"You got no right being here! You'll get yourself talked about. Come on, let me get you out, before somebody recognizes you———"

She wrenched herself free, turned and ran back to the opposite end of the room, away from him. He went after her.

It must have seemed funny to those other fools. They were laughing their heads off around him, instead of trying to help him. He heard Evans call out to him: "You'll never catch her that way. Here, pin her down with this." And then a muffled cry of alarm from Vinnie, the other girl, "Don't! Don't give him that, you fool!"

It came too late. Something went wrong. She turned midway in full flight, when he wasn't expecting her to, and they collided front to front. The recoil sent him back a step. She stood there perfectly still, only wavering to and fro a little as though the current of the electric fan on the floor was too strong for her. She was holding her hands clasped at one side of her bosom, as though something there hurt her a little———

Then as he stood there facing her, a hideous thing happened. Red peered through the crevices of her intertwined fingers. His eyes dilated and he held her hands protestingly toward her, as if to warn her of her danger———

Suddenly she was gone and the blank wall across the room was all that met his uncomprehending gaze. He looked down, and she was flat upon the floor, almost at his feet. Her hands had separated now, and on the place they'd clasped there was a blotch of red that kept on growing———

But more than that happened to her. In the fall, she seemed to have disintegrated into a flux of light-particles. Then they cohered again, into her face and form, but she wasn't Eleanor any more, she was — Vinnie, that girl that had come here with them.

He glanced behind him, to make sure, and all he met were Gordon's and Evan's frightened faces, livid with paralyzed horror.

One of them jumped forward, crouched over her, said in a choked voice: "Help me get her on the sofa."

Turner missed seeing what they did next; he was staring in dazed consternation down his own arm, at the knife-blade protruding from his folded-over fingers. No longer glistening cleanly but ruddied now. "How'd it get there?" he groaned, mystified. He opened his fingers and it popped on the floor.

They both had their backs to him, they were bending over her on the sofa, in frantic, furtive attempts at first aid. Evans had pulled the tail of his shirt out from under his belt, was trying to do something to her with it. "Gotta find some way to stop the bleeding———"

"That's no good. Hurry up, we better send out for a doctor!"

"They wouldn't let one in here; they're afraid of being reported."

"What'll we do? We can't just let her lie here bleeding to death———"

One of them glanced around remorsefully at him, then turned back again. "She shouldn't have teased him. I told her to lay off that subject———"

Turner's foot edged forward along the floor, pointing toward the hall doorway and escape. His body followed it. He was leaning forward above the waist in crafty, narcotized stealth. They kept their backs turned toward him, absorbed in their befuddled attempts to revive the inert figure on the divan.

He had already gained the doorway unnoticed, was looking back from the semi-sanctuary of the hall, when he saw one of their heads dip down lower over her. Heard the horror-smothered exclamation that followed. "Bill — oh my God, she's gone! I can't hear her breathing any more. It must have grazed the heart———"

He went wavering down the interminable reaches of the hall, rocking from side to side like someone breasting a ship's corridor in a high sea.

Before he was out of earshot one last exclamation reached him. One of them must have looked around and missed him. "Where'd he go? Get hold of him! He can't run out and leave us with her on our hands, we're all in this together!"

And then the reassuring answer, "He probably just went to the bathroom, to be sick. He won't get out without us, don't worry; the door's all chained up."

Oh, won't I? he thought craftily. He kept going, panic simmering deep within him; ready to boil over into a tide of destruction engulfing anyone who stood in his way. The hallway seemed to be of elastic; the more of it he covered, the more of it was stretched away before him. And the seconds went by so slow. He'd been under way, trying to get to that far front door, for fully fifteen or twenty minutes now. They'd come after him soon, they wouldn't wait back there much longer for him to return.

The first of the side doorways that lined the hall came creeping toward him at last. It had been left narrowly ajar. He stopped. The light was on in the room behind it. He crept forward, paying out his hands along the wall as he went, for balance. He found the crack of the door, peered through it. He saw a slice of an iron bedframe, a motionless hand. Emboldened, he advanced to the other side of the doorway, where the gap was. He looked in through that.

One of the two owners, the man who had been sitting in the front room, was stretched out in there asleep, one hand backed against his eyes to ward off the light. He'd taken off his vest and shoes, and that strap that wasn't straight enough to be a suspender-strap was dangling now around one of the knobs at the foot of the bed. It ended in a holster, with a black slab of metal protruding from it. Turner couldn't take his eyes off it, while the long seconds that to him were minutes toiled by.

That meant out, that black slab, more surely than any door. More than that, it meant a continuance of out, for so long as he had it. And he wanted out with all the desperate longing of all trapped things, blindly clawing their way through a maze to the open. To the open where the equal chance is.

He widened the door, until the gap had become entry. He felt his way across the room toward it, using his feet on the floor the way the hands are usually used across an unknown surface, testing for unevennesses that might cause sound, avoiding them where they seemed to lurk. He kept his eyes on the sleeper's half-shielded face; he knew the danger would come from there first, if there was going to be any.

He'd reached it finally. He tilted the bottom of the holster out, to keep it from striking the iron bed-frame. He knew all the right things to do. All the tricks of stealth seemed to come to him instinctively. Or maybe the self-protective facets of his mind had been made keener. Dangerously so.

He drew the gun up until its snub nose had come clear. Then he let the holster down again. He stood there wavering slightly, but with his perceptions diamond-clear. "I've got a gun now. If this town tries to stop me, that'll be this town's hard luck!"

He moved backwards for the room door, in order to keep his gaze on the sleeper's face. Only, now there was a difference: if that face awoke, that face would go to sleep for good. Halfway across, a worn floorboard creaked treacherously, and he flexed his knees and crouched. The sleeper's hand slid down from his eyes to his mouth. But his eyes didn't open.

He went on. The door sill nudged his heel, and he was over and out in the hall. He eased the door back to its original width, and started sidling along shoulder to wall, toward the next doorway down, behind which the card-playing lookout was.

He stopped just short of it and held his breath. He'd never known before that cards, a game of solitaire, could be heard so clearly. He heard: -snap!- and then a long wait, and then -snap!- again, as the unseen player laid them down one by one.

And then, just as he was starting to inch the gun muzzle past the frame of the doorway, preparatory to swerving it around and training it into the room, there was a catastrophic interruption. A sudden knocking on wood sounded, so close by it almost seemed to hit him in the face. A chair scraped back, and the card player cut out into the hall less than a foot ahead of him, so close his back almost grazed the gun point. The doorkeeper turned toward the front without looking back the other way, or he would have seen him there immediately behind him. Turner saw the light blur of his shirt sleeves recede into the shadowy haze of the hall just ahead.

He took a furtive step after him, his intention to champ the gun into his spine as soon as the chains were let down and overawe his way out. Again something happened to freeze his inflamed blood to new lows of panic.

The lookout had stopped before the panel, head tilted to the peephole. "Who are you?" Turner heard him ask gruffly.

A blurred voice answered something indistinguishable from outside. Turner couldn't catch it directly, was too far back, but he got it — or thought he did — indirectly, through the lookout's abbreviated repetition.

"Dicks?" he heard him say clearly.

Dicks! Detectives had already been summoned, were at the door to arrest him. Evans and Gordon must have betrayed him, must have gotten word out in some way, perhaps through the windows overlooking the street, or perhaps by some telephone he had failed to notice, as soon as he'd left the death chamber.

The reaction of the lookout in the face of this situation should have had some meaning, but it failed to register on his jangled faculties. The lookout didn't seem unduly perturbed, he started unlacing the chains without trying to warn those in the front of the flat. Perhaps the password he had heard was: "A friend of Dick's" and not "Dicks!" Turner was never to know.

To retreat was simply to return to the scene of his crime. To step aside into the kitchen was simply to be discovered by the lookout within the next moment or two. To carry out his original idea of weaponing his way out gun-first was now suicide; detectives were a different matter.

Then his eyes focused on this closet door, down ahead but on the opposite side of the hall from the kitchen — and the other doorways. It must have been there all along, but it only now peered through to his taut consciousness. It was so close to the end of the hall it formed nearly a right angle with the front door. It meant almost treading on the lookout's heels to sidle in through it.

There was no time to weigh chances. He crept up behind the lookout, knifed his hand behind the refuge-door — it hadn't been shut tight into its frame — drew it out and slid in in back of it. Then he reversed it to about where it had been before, to avoid the risk of the latch tongue clicking home.

He was in darkness. He could feel something soft hanging beside him, like an old sweater. Whatever noise there had been had blended with the opening of the other door. He heard feet shuffle by outside his hiding-place, and a voice said: "Straight down the hall, gentlemen." That convinced him of who the newcomers were and what they were here for; it sounded like the sort of grudging permission that might be given to detectives forcing their way in. The chains had gone up again. A follow-up tread went by, after the others. The silence fell again.