But she stopped just inside, not closing the door, for there was no light. The dilapidated stairs led up into blackness. Then she remembered one of the countless inconveniences of the ancient place: there were no wall switches. She moved cautiously into the hall with both hands above her head groping in the air, found the chain, pulled it and got light, closed the outer door, and started up the stairs. The sound of her footsteps on the patient old boards penetrated into an encompassing silence. At the top she groped in the air again and pulled another chain, then crossed and opened the door to the anteroom. There was no light there either.
She stood motionless half a moment, and a shiver ran over her.
The shiver was a muscular reflex caused by a flash of panic along her nerves, but it was utterly uncalled for. The dead engulfing silence was certainly profound, but Uncle Arthur would not necessarily be stamping up and down, and there was no reason to suppose that any other noise-producing beings were in the building. As for the absence of light, there was nothing alarming about that; during her employment there Amy had once remarked that leaving after dark was like going through a series of stick-ups. Tingley’s didn’t believe in wasting electricity.
Nevertheless, she shivered. She even felt for an instant an almost uncontrollable impulse to shout her uncle’s name, but succeeded in downing that weakness. She did, however, leave the door to the hall open; and she continued that tactic as she made her way, stopping to grope for more chains throughout her progress, through the maze of partitions which led her to the door that said THOMAS TINGLEY. There, finally, the chain had already been pulled; the door stood open and the room was light. As she entered a glance showed Amy that Tingley was not at his desk. She halted, started forward again, and — according to those who claim that consciousness is an essential of animate existence — there was no more Amy Duncan.
She returned to a state of being — no telling, for her then, how long after leaving it — in much the manner of a slippery thing pushing painfully through the slime at the bottom of a muddy river. The agony was so dull that it was not agony. For some moments she was still not in any real sense a live creature, but merely an incoherent and distant buzz of nerve impulses. Then something happened; namely, her eyes opened; but she hadn’t quite reached the level of knowing it. Soon, though, she did; she groaned and made a mighty effort to lift herself with her arm as a lever; but her hand slipped and she was flat again just as enough consciousness returned for her to know that what her hand had slipped in was a pool of blood, and the object there on the floor an arm’s length away was the face and throat of Uncle Arthur; and the throat...
Chapter 4
She thought — if a numbed and blurred awareness can be called thought — that it was the shock of what she saw that was holding her paralyzed, but the contrary was the fact. Actually the shock gave her strength, in spite of the injury she had sustained, to twist away, pull herself to her knees, and crawl across the floor, skirting the pool of blood, to where the marble wash basin stood against the wall. Still on her knees, she reached to pull a towel from the rack, and with it, steadying herself with a shoulder against a leg of the basin, she wiped at the hand that had slipped in the pool. That action was necessitated by something more primitive than the will, it was instinctive; simply, there could not be blood on her hand. As she let the towel fall to the floor, there was revolt in her stomach. She rested her head against the rim of the basin, shut her eyes, and tried not to breathe. After an eternity she tried desperately to swallow saliva, and managed it. In another eternity she gripped the basin with both hands, pulled herself up, using all her strength, and was on her feet.
It remains problematical what she would have done then if her wits had been clear. It is charitable to her character and intellect to suppose that she would have gone to the telephone and called the police, and probably she would. But her wits were anything but clear. She was still more than half stunned. So she stood there awhile by the basin, gazing with widened but pain-dulled eyes at the body and its blood on the floor, and then relinquished her hold on the basin, found she could stay upright, and started to move. Her course was a wide circle around the obstruction on the floor and the burlap screen which stood there; she achieved it by making it a section of a polygon instead of an arc. At the door she leaned against the jamb to gather more strength. She knew now that there was something wrong with her head other than the shock of seeing Uncle Arthur on the floor with his throat cut, and, resting against the door, she put up her hand to feel and looked at her fingers, but apparently there was no open wound. Then she was driven on.
She would certainly never have made it to the street if anyone had pulled the chains of the lights she had left on as she entered, but no one had, so she reached that goal. It was still raining and she walked into it unheeding without wasting precious energy for closing the door behind her. On the two stone steps to the sidewalk she staggered and nearly fell, but regained her balance without going down, and started east. By now she had a dim feeling that there was something wrong with what she was doing, but its force was weak against the compelling necessity to keep going, keep going. She set her jaw, though that made the hurt in her head worse, and tried to walk faster and straighter. She crossed an avenue, came to another one, saw a taxi at the curb, and got in and told the driver 320 Grove Street.
Only there, at her destination, did she become aware that she didn’t have her bag containing her purse. That made her, for the first time since she had regained consciousness, really try to use her brain. It was a pitiful attempt. The bag, of course, was there in that place. It shouldn’t be there. If it should turn out, for any reason, to be advisable for her to conceal the fact that she had been there — a point much too intricate and abstruse to be given immediate consideration — the bag not only shoudn’t be there, it mustn’t. Then it had to be removed. The only person who could or would remove it was herself. The only way she could remove it was to go back and get it. She wasn’t going back. Her brain having completed that elementary but flawless performance, she asked the taxi driver to come up to her apartment with her, got a ten-dollar bill from a cache in her closet and paid him, and, when he had departed, took the Westchester phone book to the reading lamp, found the number she sought, Croton Falls 8000, and called it.
She pulled a chair up to the table to sit and supported her head with her clenched fist as she talked:
“Hello! Mr. Fox? May I speak to him, please?” A wait; she closed her eyes. “Hello! This is Amy Duncan. No, I... I’m here at home. Something has happened. No, not here, it happened — I don’t want to tell you on the phone. No no, not that — something awful. My head is only half working and I guess I’m not very coherent — I know I have a terrible nerve — there’s no reason why you should except that there’s no one else I can ask — could you come right away? No, I can’t on the phone — I only half know what I’m saying — all right. Yes, I know it will... I... all right, I’ll be here—”
She dropped the phone on its cradle, sat there a moment, and then braced her hands on the table and got to her feet. The collar of the gray fur coat was wet against her neck. She got it off and hung it on the back of the chair, but when she put her hands up to remove her hat she staggered, swayed sidewise, crumpled into the sofa, and passed out again.