The hall — they were in some kind of a hall, she surmised — had the stuffy air of a place closed up all day. She tried to visualize the house by her unaided sense of smell. She was no expert in scents, but over and above its stuffiness the place had an expensive leather-and-woodwork aura to it. Not distinct, that was just the sensory impression. No mouldiness of decay or disrepair, no cookery taints, no sachet of feminine occupancy. Impersonal, austere maybe, but not cheap.
“He’s in the back, on the floor above,” he whispered. “I don’t want to light any lights down here. They might be seen from outside.”
Again a transfer of motion told her his hand had gone into his pocket for something. “No, don’t use matches either,” she cautioned. “You lead the way, I’ll be able to follow. I’ll keep my hand on your sleeve. Wait, let me put this down here somewhere first.”
She groped her way to the wall, set her valise down close against the baseboard of it, where she could find it again readily. Then she moved back to him, took up her position of telepathic accompaniment, hand to his coat-sleeve. They toiled forward in a sort of swimming darkness that was almost liquid, it was so dense.
“Step,” he whispered presently.
She felt him go up. She raised her foot, pawed blindly with it, found the foremost step with her toe. The rest of them followed in automatic succession, were no trouble at all. The staircase creaked once or twice under their combined weights in the stealthy silence. She wondered if anyone else were in the house, anyone still alive. For all they knew, someone might be. Many a nocturnal murder isn’t discovered until the following day.
“Turn,” he whispered.
His arm swung away from her, to the left. She kept contact, wheeled her body obediently after it. The stairs had flattened out into a landing. They made a brief half-pirouette together, like a couple executing a ghostly cotillion in the dark.
She felt his arm go up again, after the brief level space. She found the new flight, reversed in direction to the old. Finally they too had leveled off, there weren’t any more. They were on the second floor now.
“Turn,” he breathed.
His arm crowded in against her, around toward the right this time. She corrected her own direction accordingly. They were moving along an upstairs hall now.
The leather-and-woodwork aroma became a little more personal. The ghost of a cigar lingered in it somewhere or other, too evanescent to be trapped. Something sweeter was in it too, that was not even a ghost, that was a memory, it was so far-away, so long gone by. A single grain of powder, perhaps, in — who knew how many cubic feet of sterile air? Or the exhalation of a single drop of perfume that had passed this way — a year ago, a night ago? She thought of perfumery, remembered it from other places, other times; she did not actually detect it now.
She felt herself go over a wooden door-sill, only slightly raised, not high enough to impede.
The air changed subtly. There was someone in it besides themselves, yet there was no one in it. They say you can’t smell death, at least not recent death. Yet there was a stillness in it, a presence in it that was more than just emptiness.
She was glad they weren’t going forward any more. His arm had stopped. She stopped alongside it. He reached behind them and did something with his other arm, and she felt a slight current of air as a door swept by. She heard it close gutturally just in back of them.
“Get your eyes ready, here go the lights,” he warned.
She shuttered them protectively. Electricity flashed on with unbearable brilliance after the long pilgrimage in the dark. The dead man was the most conspicuous thing in the room; it seemed to form a halo about him.
The room itself was an amalgam, a blend, a sort of all-purpose room. There were books in it to a moderate amount, two or three short rows of them on shelves built into the wall, so that it was a library to a limited degree. There was a Sheraton desk in it, so that it could be termed a study, also to a degree. There were a number of comfortable, leather-covered club-type chairs disposed about it, a liquor cabinet, ashtrays, so that it was perhaps more than anything else a masculine variety of sitting-room. An upstairs living-room, pertaining more to one person than to the house in general. What had been once, in an earlier society, known as a den.
It was not masculine to a sophomoric extent, its character was not blatant. It was first and foremost a room, the rest was insight on the part of the beholder.
The walls were lime-green, but so pale that in the electric light they appeared white. It was only when actual white was placed in juxtaposition with them, as if say a square of paper were held up against them, that their faint tint became perceptible. The woodwork was walnut. The carpet and chairbacks were a dark, earthy brown. The lampshades, of which there were two, were parchment.
It was oblong, lengthwise to the direction from which they had entered. The two short side-walls were blankly unbroken. The one at their backs held, of course, the doorway by which they had entered. The one facing them held two doorways, one leading into a bedroom, the other, at a spaced distance from it, into a bath. Quinn left her side to go into the former. She could see his indistinct figure, in the gloom in there, drawing heavy, sheltering drapes together over the windows, to keep the light from showing through to the rear of the house. This room they were in had no outside openings, no windows, whatever.
He didn’t bother with the bath, so it evidently had none either.
She was aware of him, of his movements, but only dimly, as of something beyond her immediate ken, something on the perimeter of her mind.
She’d never seen anyone dead before. That thought kept turning over and over in the turmoil of her mind, like some sort of a powerful cylinder. She stood there staring down, but it wasn’t with a feverish, unhealthy interest, it was with a stricken, thoughtful awe. So this is that thing we’re all so afraid of, ran the current of her thoughts. This is that thing that has to happen to all of us, to myself, to Quinn, so young, so agile in there, to everyone else, some day. So this is where all my dancing leads to, and all my scraping of pennies; all my snarling and clawing at my annoyers, all my hanging onto my ideals of person. All those rolls I take out of the slots at the Automat day after day, I’m only fooling myself, they can’t keep this away— So this is it. So this.
She thought she’d seen everything, known everything, but this was one thing she’d missed. One night a girl, right out on the middle of the floor at the mill, right in the middle of Begin the Beguine, she suddenly crumpled, went down like a shot. They said, afterwards, she’d taken something, but nobody knew for sure. All Bricky knew was she’d come in the long way, upright, and moving all over; she went out flat, and not moving, just twitching a little. They all rushed over to the windows in a mass and peered down, no matter what the manager said, how he berated them. They saw her down on the sidewalk, being shovelled into the ambulance, looking awfully small, awfully flat, on the white stretcher. She didn’t come around next night. She never came around again.
But even that, that was just before it happened. This was after.
She’d never seen anyone dead before.