“Tie him up to that pipe over there in the corner,” his companion suggested, “or he’ll wear himself out rolling all over the place.”
They dragged him backwards along the floor and lashed him in a sitting position, legs out before him, with an added length of rope that had been coiled in the basement.
Then they brushed their hands ostentatiously and started up the stairs one behind the other, breathing hard from the struggle they’d had with him. “Pick up what we got and let’s blow,” one muttered. “We’ll have to pull another tonight — and this time you let me do the picking.”
“It looked like the berries,” his mate alibied. “No one home, and standing way off by itself like it is.”
A peculiar sound like the low simmering of a tea-kettle or the mewing of a newborn kitten left out in the rain to die came percolating thinly through the gag in Stapp’s mouth. His vocal cords were strained to bursting with the effort it was costing him to make even that slight sound. His eyes were round and staring, fastened on them in horror and imploring.
They saw the look as they went up, but couldn’t read it. It might have been just the physical effort of trying to burst his bonds, it might have been rage and threatened retribution, for all they knew.
The first passed obliviously through the doorway and out of sight. The second stopped halfway to the top of the stairs and glanced complacently back at him — the way he himself had looked back at his own handiwork just now, short minutes ago.
“Take it easy,” he jeered. “Relax. I used to be a sailor. You’ll never get out of them knots, buddy.”
Stapp swiveled his skull desperately, so his eyes indicated the clock one last time. They almost started out of their sockets, he put such physical effort into the look.
This time the man got it finally, but got it wrong. He flung his arm at him derisively. “Trying to tell me you got a date? Oh no you haven’t, you only think you have. Whadda you care what time it is, you’re not going any place.”
And then with the horrible slowness of a nightmare — though it only seemed that way, for he resumed his ascent fairly briskly — his head went out through the doorway, his shoulders followed, his waist next. Now even optical communication was cut off between them, and if only Stapp had had a minute more he might have made him understand! There was only one backthrust foot left in sight now, poised on the topmost step to take flight. Stapp’s eyes were on it as though their burning plea could hold it back.
The heel lifted up, it rose, trailed through after the rest of the man, was gone.
Stapp heaved himself so violently, as if to go after it by sheer will-power, that for a moment his whole body was a distended bow, clear of the floor from shoulders to heels. Then he fell flat again with a muffled thud, and a little dust came out from under him, and a half-dozen little separate skeins of sweat started down his face at one time, crossing and inter-crossing as they coursed. The basement door ebbed back into its frame and the latch dropped into its socket with a minor click that to him was like the crack of doom.
In the silence now, above the surge of his own breathing that came and went like surf upon a shoreline, was the counterpoint of the clock. Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.
For a moment or two longer he drew what consolation he could from the knowledge of their continued presence above him. An occasional stealthy footfall here and there, never more than one in succession, for they moved with marvelous dexterity. They must have had a lot of practise in breaking and entering, he thought inconsequentally. They were very cautious walkers from long habit even when there was no further need for it.
A single remark filtered through, from somewhere near the back door. “All set? Let’s take it this way.” The creak of a hinge, and then the horrid finality of a door closing after them, the back door, which Fran probably had forgotten to lock and by which they had presumably entered in the first place; and then they were gone.
And with them went his only link with the outside world. They were the only two people in the whole city who knew where he was at this moment. No one else, not a living soul, knew where to find him. Nor what would happen to him if he wasn’t found and gotten out of here by three o’clock. It was twenty-five to two now. His discovery of their presence, the fight, their trussing him up with the rope, and their final unhurried departure, had all taken place within fifteen minutes.
It went tick-tick, tick-tock; tick-tick, tick-tock, so rhythmically, so remorselessly, so fast.
An hour and twenty-five minutes left — eighty-five minutes. How long that could seem if you were waiting for someone on a corner, under an umbrella, in the rain — like he had once waited for Fran outside the office where she worked before they were married, only to find that she’d been taken ill and gone home early. How long that could seem if you were stretched out on a hospital-bed with knife-pains in your head and nothing to look at but white walls, until they brought your next tray — as he had been that time of the concussion. How long that could seem when you’d finished the paper, and one of the tubes had burned out in the radio, and it was too early to go to bed yet.
How short, how fleeting, how instantaneous, that could seem when it was all the time there was left for you to live in and you were going to die at the end of it!
No clock had ever gone this fast, of all the hundreds that he’d looked at and set right. This was a demon-clock, its quarter-hours were minutes and its minutes seconds. Its longer hand didn’t even pause at all on those notches the way it should have. It passed on from one to the next in perpetual motion.
It was cheating him, it wasn’t keeping the right time, somebody slow it down at least if nothing else! It was twirling like a pinwheel, that secondary hand. Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock. He broke it up into “Here I go, here I go, here I go.”
There was a long period of silence that seemed to go on forever after the two of them had left. The clock told him it was only twenty-one minutes. Then at four to two a door opened above without warning — oh, blessed sound, oh, lovely sound! — the front door this time (over above that side of the basement), and high-heeled shoes clacked over his head like castanets.
“Fran!” he shouted. “Fran!” he yelled. “Fran!” he screamed. But all that got past the gag was a low whimper that didn’t even reach across the basement. His face was dark with the effort it cost him, and a cord stood out at each side of his palpitating neck like a splint.
The tap-tap-tap went into the kitchen, stopped a minute (she was putting down her parcels; she didn’t have things delivered because then you were expected to tip the errand-boys ten cents), came back again.
If only there was something he could kick at with his interlocked feet, make a clatter with, but the cellar flooring was bare from wall to wall. He tried hoisting his lashed legs clear of the floor and pounding them down again with all his might; maybe the sound of the impact would carry up to her.
All he got was a soft-cushioned sound, with twice the pain of striking a stone surface with your bare palm, and not even as much distinctness. His shoes were rubber-heeled, and he could not tilt them up and around far enough to bring them down on the leather part above the lifts. An electrical discharge of pain shot up the backs of his legs, coursed up his spine, and exploded at the back of his head like a brilliant rocket.