He set the alarm for three. But there was a difference now. Instead of just setting off a harmless bell when the hour hand reached three and the minute hand reached twelve, the wires attached to it leading to the batteries would set off a spark. A single, tiny, evanescent spark — that was all. And when that happened, all the way downtown where his shop was the showcase would vibrate, and maybe one or two of the more delicate watch-mechanisms would stop. And people on the streets would pause and ask one another: “What was that?”
They probably wouldn’t even be able to tell definitely, afterwards, that there’d been anyone else beside herself in the house at the time. They’d know that she’d been there only by a process of elimination; she wouldn’t be anywhere else afterwards. They’d knew that the house had been there only by the hole in the earth and the litter around.
He wondered why more people didn’t do things like this; they didn’t know what they were missing. Probably not clever enough to be able to make the things themselves, that was why.
When he’d set the clock itself by his own pocket-watch — one-fifteen — he pried the back off it. He’d already bored a little hole through this at his shop. Carefully he guided the antenna-like wires through it, more carefully still he fastened them to the necessary parts of the mechanism without letting a tremor course along them. It was highly dangerous but his hands didn’t play him false, they were too skilled at this sort of thing.
It wasn’t vital to reattach the back of the clock, the result would be the same if it stood open or closed, but he did that too, to give the sense of completion to the job that his craftsman’s soul found necessary.
When he had done with it, it stood there on the floor, as if placed there at random up against an innocent-looking copper-lidded soap-box, ticking away. Ten minutes had gone by since he had come down here. One hour and forty minutes were still to go by.
Death was on the wing.
He stood up and looked down at his work. He nodded. He retreated a step across the basement floor, still looking down, and nodded again, as if the slight perspective gained only enhanced it. He went over to the foot of the stairs leading up, and stopped once more and looked over. He had very good eyes. He could see the exact minute-notches on the dial all the way over where he was now. One had just gone by.
He smiled a little and went on up the stairs, not furtively or fearfully but like a man does in his own house, with an unhurried air of ownership, head up, shoulders back, tread firm.
He hadn’t heard a sound over his head while he was down there, and you could hear sounds quite easily through the thin flooring, he knew that by experience. Even the opening and closing of doors above could be heard down here, certainly the footsteps of anyone walking about in the ground-floor rooms if they bore down with their normal weight. And when they stood above certain spots and spoke, the sound of the voices and even what was said, came through clearly due to some trick of accoustics. He’d heard Floyd Gibbons clearly, on the radio, while he was down here several times.
That was why he was all the more unprepared, as he opened the basement door and stepped out into the ground-floor hall, to hear a soft tread somewhere up above, on the second floor. A single, solitary footfall, separate, disconnected, like Robinson Crusoe’s footprint.
He stood stock-still a moment, listening tensely, thinking — hoping, rather, he’d been mistaken. But he hadn’t. The slur of a bureau-drawer being drawn open or closed reached him, and then a faint tinkling sound as though something had lightly struck one of the glass toilet-articles on Fran’s dresser.
Who else could it be but she? And yet there was a stealth to these vague disconnected noises that didn’t sound like her. He would have heard her come in; her high heels usually exploded along the hardwood floors like little firecrackers.
III
Some sixth sense made Stapp turn suddenly and look behind him, toward the dining room, and he was just in time to see a man, halfcrouched, shoulders bunched forward, creeping up on him. He was still a few yards away, beyond the dining-room threshold, but before Stapp could do more than drop open his mouth with reflex astonishment, he had closed in on him, caught him brutally by the throat with one hand, flung him back against the wall, and pinned him there.
“What are you doing here?” Stapp managed to gasp out.
“Hey Bill, somebody is home!” the man called out guardedly. Then he struck out at him, hit him a stunning blow on the side of the head with his free hand. Stapp didn’t reel because the wall was at the back of his head, that gave him back the blow doubly, and his senses dulled into a whirling flux for a minute.
Before they had cleared again, a second man had leaped down off the stairs from one of the rooms above, in the act of finishing cramming something into his pocket.
“You know what to do. Hurry up!” the first one ordered. “Get me something to tie him with and let’s get out of here.”
“For God’s sake, don’t tie—” Stapp managed to articulate through the strangling grip on his windpipe. The rest of it was lost in a blur of frenzied struggle on his part, flailing out with his legs, clawing at his own throat to free it. He wasn’t fighting the man, he was only trying to tear that throttling impediment off long enough to get out what he had to tell them, but his assailant couldn’t tell the difference. He struck him savagely a second and third time, and Stapp went limp there against the wall without altogether losing consciousness.
The second one had come back already with a rope, it looked like Fran’s clothesline from the kitchen, that she used on Mondays. Stapp, head falling forward dazedly upon the pinioning arm that still had him by the jugular, was dimly aware of this going around and around him, criss-cross, in and out, legs and body and arms.
“Don’t—” he panted. His mouth was suddenly nearly torn in two, and a large handkerchief or rag was thrust in, effectively silencing all further sound. Then they whipped something around outside of that, to keep it in, and fastened it behind his head.
“Fighter, huh?” one of them muttered grimly. “What’s he protecting? The place is a lemon, there’s nothing in it.”
Stapp felt a hand thrust into his vest-pocket, take his watch out. Then into his trouser-pocket and remove the little change he had.
“Where’ll we put him?”
“Leave him where he is.”
“Naw. I did my last stretch just on account of leaving a guy in the open where he could put a squad-car on my tail too quick; they nabbed me a block away. Let’s shove him back down in there where he was.”
This brought on a new spasm, almost epileptic in its violence. He squirmed and writhed and shook his head back and forth. They had picked him up between them now, head and feet, kicked the basement door open, and were carrying him down the steps to the bottom.
They still couldn’t be made to understand that he wasn’t resisting, that he wouldn’t call the police, that he wouldn’t lift a finger to have them apprehended — if they’d only let him get out of here with them.
“This is more like it,” the first one said, as they deposited him on the floor. “Whoever lives in the house with him won’t find him so quick—”
Stapp started to roll his head back and forth on the floor like something demented, toward the clock, then toward them, toward the clock, toward them. But so fast that it finally lost all possible meaning, even if it would have had any for them in the first place, and it wouldn’t have of course. They stilt thought he was trying to free himself in unconquerable opposition.
“Look at that,” one of them jeered. “Ever see anyone like him in your life?” He drew back his arm threateningly at the wriggling form. “I’ll give you one that’ll hold you for good, if you don’t cut it out.”