You have to live at night like I did to know the real callousness of passers-by on the street, how seldom they’ll horn in, lift a finger to help you. Even a harness-cop wouldn’t be much good, would only weigh my story against his, end up by sending us both about our business.
Maybe the thought came to me because I spotted a cop ahead just then, loitering toward us. I could hardly make him out in the gloom, but the slow steady walk told me. I didn’t really think I was going to do it until we came abreast of him.
The three of us met in front of a boarded-up condemned house. Then, as though I saw my last chance slipping away — because Nick couldn’t bridge the gap between me and the last of the dance checks any more, it was too wide — I stopped dead.
I began in a low tense voice: “Officer, this man here—”
Julie’s murderer had involuntarily gone on a step without me. That put him to the rear of the cop. The whole thing was so sudden, it must have been one of those knives that shot out of their own hilts. The cop’s eyes rolled, I could see them white in the darkness, and he coughed right in my face, warm, and he started to come down on top of me, slow and lazy. I sidestepped and he fell with a soft thud and rocked a couple of times with his own fall and then lay still.
But the knife was already out of him long ago, and its point was touching my side. And where the cop had been a second ago, he was now. We were alone together again.
He said in a cold, unexcited voice, “Go ahead, scream, and I’ll give it to you right across him.”
I didn’t, I just pulled in all my breath.
He said, “Go ahead, down there,” and steered me with his knife down a pair of steps into the dark area-way of the boarded-up house it had happened in front of. “Stand there, and if you make a sound — you know what I told you.” Then he did something to the cop with his feet, and the cop came rolling down into the area-way after me.
I shrank back and my back was against the boarded-up basement door. It moved a little behind me. I thought, “This must be where he’s taking me. If it is, then it’s open.” I couldn’t get out past him, but maybe I could get in away from him.
I turned and clawed at the door, and the whole framed barrier swung out a little, enough to squeeze in through. He must have been hiding out in here, coming and going through here, all these weeks. No wonder they hadn’t found him.
The real basement door behind it had been taken down out of the way. He’d seen what I was up to, and he was already wriggling through the gap after me. I was stumbling down a pitch-black hallway by then.
I found stairs going up by falling down on top of them full length. I sobbed, squirmed up the first few on hands and knees, straightened up as I went.
He stopped to light a match. I didn’t have any, but his helped me too, showed me the outline of things. I was on the first-floor hall now, flitting down it. I didn’t want to go up too high, he’d only seal me in some dead-end up there, but I couldn’t stand still down here.
A broken-down chair grazed the side of my leg as I went by, and I turned, swung it up bodily, went back a step and pitched it down over the stair-well on top of him. I don’t know if it hurt him at all but his match went out.
He said a funny thing then. “You always had a temper, Muriel.”
I didn’t stand there listening. I’d seen an opening in the wall farther ahead, before the match went out. Just a blackness. I dived through it and all the way across with swimming motions, until I hit a jutting mantel slab over some kind of fireplace. I crouched down and tucked myself in under it. It was one of those huge old-fashioned ones. I groped over my head and felt an opening there, lined with rough brickwork and furry with cobwebs, but it wasn’t wide enough to climb up through. I squeezed into a corner of the fireplace and prayed he wouldn’t spot me.
He’d lit another match, and it came into the room after me, but I could only see his legs from the fireplace opening, it cut him off at the waist. I wondered if he could see me; he didn’t come near where I was.
The light got a little stronger, and he’d lit a candle stump. But still his legs didn’t come over to me, didn’t bend down, or show his face peering in at me. His legs just kept moving to and fro around the room. It was awfully hard, after all that running, to keep my breath down.
Finally he said out loud: “Chilly in here,” and I could hear him rattling newspapers, getting them together. It didn’t sink in for a minute what was going to happen next. I thought, “Has he forgotten me? Is he that crazy? Am I going to get away with it?” But there’d been a malicious snicker in his remark; he was crazy like a fox.
Suddenly his legs came over straight to me, without bending down to look he was stuffing the papers in beside me. I couldn’t see out any more past them. I heard the scrape of a match against the floor boards. Then there was the momentary silence of combustion. I was sick, I wanted to die quick, but I didn’t want to die that way. There was the hum of rising flame, and a brightness just before me, the papers all turned gold. I thought, “Oh, Nick! Nick! Here I go!”
I came plunging out, scattering sparks and burning newspapers.
He said, smiling, pleased with himself, casual, “Hello, Muriel. I thought you didn’t have any more use for me? What are you doing in my house?” He still had the knife — with the cop’s blood on it.
I said, “I’m not Muriel, I’m Ginger Allen from the Joyland. Oh, mister, please let me get out of here, please let me go!” I was so scared and so sick I went slowly to my knees. “Please!” I cried up at him.
He said, still in that casual way, “Oh, so you’re not Muriel? You didn’t marry me the night before I embarked for France, thinking I’d be killed, that you’d never see me again, that you’d get my soldier’s pension?” And then getting a little more vicious, “But I fooled you, I was shell-shocked but I didn’t die. I came back even if it was on a stretcher. And what did I find? You hadn’t even waited to find out! You’d married another guy and you were both living on my pay. You tried to make it up to me, though, didn’t you, Muriel? Sure; you visited me in the hospital, bringing me jelly. The man in the next cot died from eating it. Muriel, I’ve looked for you high and low ever since, and now I’ve found you.”
He moved backwards, knife still in hand, and stood aside, and there was an old battered relic of a phonograph standing there on an empty packing-case. It had a great big horn to it, to give it volume. He must have picked it up off some ash-heap, repaired it himself. He released the catch and cranked it up a couple of times and laid the needle into the groove.
“We’re going to dance, Muriel, like we did that night when I was in my khaki uniform and you were so pretty to look at. But it’s going to have a different ending this time.”
He came back toward me. I was still huddled there, shivering. “No!” I moaned. “Not me! You killed her, you killed her over and over again. Only last month, don’t you remember?”
He said with pitiful simplicity, like the tortured thing he was: “Each time I think I have, she rises up again.” He dragged me to my feet and caught me to him, and the arm with the knife went around me, and the knife pressed into my side.
The horrid thing over there was blaring into the emptiness, loud enough to be heard out on the street: “Poor Butterfly.” It was horrible, it was ghastly.
And in the candle-lit pallor, with great shadows of us looming on the wall, like two crazed things we started to go round and round. I couldn’t hold my head up on my neck; it hung way back over my shoulders like an overripe apple. My hair got loose and went streaming out as he pulled me and turned me and dragged me around...