“If you intend to betray me—”
“Oh, no, but I don’t, or I should not be here — alone with you. I am, as you may allow, not quite a fool.”
“Indeed, sir, you are as subtle as—”
“Yes, I wouldn’t mention him.”
“Who?”
“The devil.”
Kenneth mused.
“May I ask, Mr. Lynde, what you intend to do?”
“Certainly — remain here.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Kenneth with an air of perplexity.
“If you will listen patiently, you shall learn why I have acknowledged the deed, why I would bear the penalty. I believe there are vast, intense sensations from which we are excluded, by the conventional fear of a certain kind of death. Now, this pleasure, this ecstacy, this something, I don’t know what, which I have striven for all my days, is known only to a privileged few — innocent men, who, through some oversight of the law, are hanged by the neck! How rich is Nature in compensations! Some men are born to be hanged, some have hanging thrust upon them, and some (as I hope to do) achieve hanging. It appears ages since I commenced watching for an opportunity like this. Worlds could not tempt me to divulge your guilt, nor could worlds have tempted me to commit your crime, for a man’s conscience should be at ease to enjoy, to the utmost, this delicious death! Our interview is at an end, Mr. Kenneth. I held it my duty to say this much to you.”
And I turned my back on him.
“One word, Mr. Lynde.”
Kenneth came to my side and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, that red right hand, which all the tears of the angels cannot make white again.
As he stood there, his face suddenly grew so familiar to me — yet so vaguely familiar — that I started. It seemed as if I had seen such a face, somewhere, in my dreams, hundreds of years ago. The face in the grate.
“Did you send this to me last month?” asked Kenneth, holding up a slip of paper on which was scrawled Watch them — in my handwriting.
“Yes,” I answered.
Then it struck me that these two thoughtless words, which some sinister spirit had impelled me to write, were the indirect cause of the whole catastrophe.
“Thank you,” he said hurriedly. “I watched them!” Then, after a pause, “I shall go far from here. I cannot, I will not die yet. Mary was to have been my wife, so she would have hidden her shame— Oh cruel! she, my own cousin, and we the last two of our race! Life is not sweet to me, it is bitter, bitter; but I shall live until I stand front to front with him. And you? They will not harm you — you are a madman!”
Julius Kenneth was gone before I could reply. The cell-door shut him out forever — shut him out in the flesh. His spirit was not so easily exorcised.
After all, it was a wretched fiasco. Two officious friends of mine, who had played chess with me at my lodgings on the night of the 3rd, proved an alibi; and I was literally turned out of the Tombs; for I insisted on being executed.
Then it was maddening to have the newspapers call me a monomaniac.
I a monomaniac?
What was Pythagoras, Newton, Fulton? Have not the great original lights of every age been regarded as madmen? Science, like religion, has its martyrs.
Recent surgical discoveries have, I believe, sustained me in my theory; or, if not, they ought to have done so. There is said to be a pleasure in drowning. Why not in strangulation?
In another field of science I shall probably have full justice awarded me — I now allude to the Moon-Apparatus, which is still in an unfinished state, but progressing.
Collared
by Cornell Woolrich[9]
I knew something was up, because he came in nervous instead of just plain lit. He’d had his usual liquid transfusion, but his cooling system must have jammed; it wasn’t taking.
He didn’t bother looking at me. Me — last year’s moll, left-over around the place. I was just a part of the furniture. That was his mistake. Chairs don’t stand around waiting to get even on you.
The first six months or so I’d tried to run out on him, but I always got brought back feet first, and I usually had to have a new porcelain cap put on a tooth or two right afterwards. Since then things had changed. Now he was sick of me, but he couldn’t get rid of me for love nor money. I was staying until I could get something on him.
He started dialing a number the minute he came in the door, before he even took his hat off. When he wanted a number that fast and that early — five in the morning — it couldn’t be anyone’s but his mouth’s. So that meant he was in a jam.
I couldn’t read the slots as he spun them, because he was out in the hall and I was inside at the mirror fiddling with my nails, but I could tell by the length of time the dial took slipping back each time about which ones they were. The first three were short turns — the exchange and its subdivision. The next two were long hauls — the end slot. His mouth’s private number began with two zeros; that was it all right. Then he changed his mind, hung up instead of going ahead. So that meant he wasn’t sure whether he was in a jam or not; he’d just done something that worried him and was afraid he might be.
He came in instead, stiff-armed me by the shoulder, twisted me around his way so I nearly broke in two, and blew a lot of expensive Cutty Sark in my face for an atomizer. “Listen, Last Year,” he said. “I been here with you from about three on, get that? I been here with you from the time I left the club.”
“You been here from three on,” I repeated. I had more porcelain caps than I could carry now. He was bending over me and I couldn’t help seeing his collar.
“She’s got the damnedest aim,” I remarked. “Why don’t you hold still when you’re leaving her, so you get it on the kisser and not the Cluett Peabody?”
He yanked the collar off so hard and fast his whole tie stayed on around his neck. He looked at it kind of scared, and blew out a little breath, as though he were relieved I’d spotted it for him in time. He went into the bathroom. I heard a match scratch and I saw flame reflected against the tiles. I got a whiff of scorched linen, and then a lot of water ran down. He’d burned it.
That gave me a hint about what the jam was. He’d done something to her, whoever she was. Because he certainly hadn’t got rid of it on my account. He’d brought those same lipstick trademarks back with him before, and it hadn’t bothered him whether I saw them or not. They wouldn’t come out in the wash, I’d found that out; it was waterproof rouge and they just went a little lighter.
And if it bothered him, that meant he hadn’t meant to do it, whatever it was. Because what was a little kill to him? If he’d cut notches in a stick he’d have had a buzz-saw by now. But he always had it done by remote control, and this was one time he’d been very much all there, judging by his collar; that made a difference. That alone was positive proof to me that it was unintentional.
The way I figured it, one of two things had happened. Either he’d found out something, lost his head for a minute, and couldn’t control his trigger-finger in time, and now he regretted it; or it had been altogether an accident. Maybe she was one of those dumb twists that just had to fool with his gun to kill time between huddles, and had playfully pulled the trigger.