He could, of course, if he’d wanted to bring the thing out into the open, simply have come an unexpected hour earlier any afternoon during those six weeks, and confronted them face to face. But he preferred the way of guile and murderous revenge; they might have had some explanation to offer that would weaken his purpose, rob him of his excuse to do the thing he craved. And he knew her so well, that in his secret heart he feared she would have if he once gave her the chance to offer it. Feared was the right word. He wanted to do this thing. He wasn’t interested in a show-down, he was interested in a payoff. This artificially-nurtured grievance had brought the poison in his system to a head, that was all. Without it might have remained latent for another five years, but it would have erupted sooner or later anyway.
He knew the hours of her domestic routine so well that it was the simplest matter in the world for him to return to the house on his errand at a time when she would not be there.
She did her cleaning in the morning. Then she had the impromptu morsel she called lunch. Then she went out, in the early afternoon, and did her marketing for their evening meal. They had a phone in the house but she never ordered over it; she liked, she often told him, to see what she was getting, otherwise the tradespeople simply foisted whatever they chose on you, at their own prices.
So from one until two was the time for him to do it, and be sure of getting away again unobserved afterwards.
II
At twelve-thirty sharp he wrapped up the alarm-clock in ordinary brown paper, tucked it under his arm, and left his shop. He left it every day at this same time to go to his own lunch. He would be a little longer getting back today, that was all. He locked the door carefully after him, of course; no use taking chances, he had too many valuable watches in there under repair and observation.
He boarded the bus at the corner below just like he did every day when he was really going home for the night. There was no danger of being recognized or identified by any bus-driver or fellow-passenger or anything like that, this was too big a city. Hundreds of people used these buses night and day. The drivers didn’t even glance up at you when you paid your fare, deftly made change for you backhand by their sense of touch on the coin you gave them alone. The bus was practically empty, no one was going out his way at this hour of the day.
He got off at his usual stop, three interminable suburban blocks away from where he lived, which was why his house had not been a particularly good investment when he bought it and no others had been put up around it afterwards. But it had its compensations on such a day as this. There were no neighbors to glimpse him returning to it at this unusual hour, from their windows, and remember that fact afterwards.
The first of the three blocks he had to walk had a row of taxpayers on it, one-story store-fronts. The next two were absolutely vacant from corner to corner, just a panel of advertising billboards on both sides, with their gallery of friendly people that beamed on him each day, twice a day.
Incurable optimists these people were: even today when they were going to be shattered and splintered they continued to grin and smirk their counsel and messages of cheer. The perspiring bald-headed fat man about to quaff some non-alcoholic beverage. The grinning laundress hanging up wash. The farmwife at the rural telephone sniggering over her shoulder. They’d be tatters and kindling in two hours from now, and they didn’t have sense enough to get down off there and hurry away.
“You’ll wish you had,” he whispered darkly as he passed by beneath them, clock under arm.
But the point was, that if ever a man walked three “city” blocks in broad daylight unseen by the human eye, he did that now. He turned in the short cement walk when he came to his house at last, pulled back the screen door, put his latchkey into the wooden inner door and let himself in. She wasn’t home, of course; he’d known she wouldn’t be, or he wouldn’t have come back like this.
He closed the door again after him, moved forward into the blue twilight-dimness of the house. It seemed like that at first after the glare of the street. She had the green shades down three-quarters of the way on all the windows to keep it cool until she came back.
He didn’t take his hat off or anything, he wasn’t staying. Particularly after he once set this clock he was carrying in motion. In fact, it was going to be a creepy feeling even walking back those three blocks to the bus-stop and standing waiting for the bus to take him downtown again, knowing all the time something was going tick-tick, tick-tick in the stillness back here, even though it wouldn’t happen for a couple of hours yet.
He went directly to the door leading down to the basement. It was a good stout wooden door. He passed through it, closed it behind him, and descended the bare brick steps. In the winter, of course, she’d had to come down occasionally to regulate the oil-burner while he was away, but after the fifteenth of April no one but himself ever came down here at any time, and it was now long past the fifteenth of April.
She hadn’t even known that he’d come down, at that. He’d slipped down each night for a few minutes while she was in the kitchen doing the dishes, and by the time she got through and came out, he was upstairs again behind his newspaper. It didn’t take long to add the contents of each successive little package to what was already in the box. The wiring had taken more time, but he’d gotten that done one night when she’d gone out to the movies (so she’d said — and then had been very vague about what the picture was she’d seen, but he hadn’t pressed her.)
The basement was provided with a light-bulb over the stairs, but it wasn’t necessary to use it except at night; daylight was admitted through a horizontal slit of window that on the outside was flush with the ground, but on the inside was up directly under the ceiling. The glass was wire-meshed for protection and so cloudy with lack of attention as to be nearly opaque.
The box, that was no longer merely a box now but an infernal machine, was standing over against the wall, to one side of the oil-burner. He didn’t dare shift it about any more now that it was wired and the batteries inserted.
He went over to it and squatted down on his heels before it, and put his hand on it with a sort of loving gesture. He was proud of it, prouder than of any fine watch he’d ever repaired or reconstructed. A watch after all, was inanimate. This was going to become animate in a few more minutes, maybe diabolically so, but animate just the same. It was like — giving birth.
He unwrapped the clock and spread out the few necessary small implements he’d brought with him from the shop, on the floor beside him. Two fine copper wires were sticking stiffly out of a small hole he’d bored in the box, in readiness, like the antennae of some kind of insect. Through them death would go in.
He wound the clock up first, for he couldn’t safely do that once it was connected. He wound it up to within an inch of its life, with a professionally deft economy of wrist-motion. Not for nothing was he a watch-repairer.
It must have sounded ominous down in that hushed basement, to hear that crick-craaaack, crick-craaaak, that so-domestic sound that denotes going to bed, peace, slumber, security; that this time denoted approaching annihilation. It would have if there’d been any listener. There wasn’t any but himself. It didn’t sound ominous to him, it sounded delicious.