“Which one is it?”
“It’s on the fourth floor, I’ll show you!” Then when we got up there, “Here — right here.”
When he saw which door I was pushing him to, he suddenly stopped. “That one? No, now wait a minute, young fellow, it couldn’t be. Not that one.”
“Don’t try to tell me!” I heaved exasperatedly. “I say it is!”
“And don’t you try to tell me! I say it couldn’t be!”
“Why?”
“I’ll show you why,” he said heatedly. He went ahead up to it, put his passkey in, threw the door open, and flattened himself to let me get a good look past him.
I needed more than just one. It was one of those things that register on the eye but don’t make sense to the brain. The light from the hall filtered in to make a threadbare half-moon, but to make sure I wasn’t missing any of it, he snapped a switch inside the door and a dim, leftover bulb somewhere further back went on flickeringly. You could see why it had been left in — it wasn’t worth taking out. It threw a watery light around, not much better than a candle. But enough to see by.
“Now! You see why?”
The place was empty as a barn. Unfurnished, uninhabited, whatever you want to call it. Just bare walls, ceiling, and floor-boards. You could see where the carpet used to go: they were lighter in a big square patch in the middle than around the outside. You could see where a picture used to go, many moons ago; there was a patch of gray wool-dust adhering like fiber to the wall. You could even see where the telephone used to go; the wiring still led in along the baseboard, then reared up to waist-level like a pothook and ended in nothing.
The air alibied for its emptiness. It was stale, as though the windows hadn’t been opened for months. Stale and dusty and sluggish.
“So you see? Mister, this place ain’t been rented for six months.” He was getting ready to close the door, as though that ended it; pulling it around behind his back, I could see it coming toward me, the “4F” stencilled on it in tarnished gold-paint seemed to swell up, got bigger and bigger until it loomed before me a yard high.
“No!” I croaked, and planted the flat of my hand against it and swept it back, out of his backhand grasp. “She came in here, I tell you!”
I went in a step or two, called her name into the emptiness. “Steffie! Steffie!”
He stayed pat on the rational, everyday plane of things as they ought to be, while I rapidly sank down below him onto a plane of shadows and terror. Like two loading platforms going in opposite directions, we were already miles apart, cut off from each other. “Now, what’re you doing that for? Use your head. How can she be in here, when the place is empty?”
“I saw her ring the bell and I saw the door open for her.”
“You saw this door?” He was obdurately incredulous.
“The downstairs door. I saw the catch released for her, after she rang this bell.”
“Oh, that’s different. You must have seen her ring some other bell, and you thought it was this one; then somebody else opened the building-door for her. How could anyone answer from here? Six months the people’ve been out of here.”
I didn’t hear a word. “Lemme look! Bring more lights!”
He shrugged, sighed, decided to humor me. “Wait, I get a bulb from the hall.” He brought one in, screwed it into an empty socket in the room beyond the first. That did for practically the whole place. It was just two rooms, with the usual appendages: bath and kitchenette.
“How is it the current’s still on, if it’s vacant?”
“It’s on the house-meter, included in the rent. It stays on when they leave.”
There was a fire-escape outside one pair of windows, but they were latched on the inside and you couldn’t see the seams of the two halves any more through the coating of dust that had formed over them. I looked for and located the battery that gave juice to the downstairs doorbell. It had a big pouch of a cobweb hanging from it, like a thin-skinned hornet’s nest. I opened a closet and peered into it. A wire coat-hanger that had been teetering off-balance for heaven knows how long swung off the rod and fell down with a clash.
He kept saying: “Now listen, be sensible. What are you a child?”
I didn’t care how it looked, I only knew how it felt. “Steffie,” I said. I didn’t call it any more, just said it. I went up close to him. He was something human, at least. I said, “What’ll I do?” I speared my fingers through my hair, and lost my new hat, and let it lie.
He wasn’t much help. He was still on that other, logical plane, and I had left it long ago. He tried to suggest we’d had a quarrel and she’d given me the slip; he tried to suggest I go to her home, I might find her there waiting for me.
“She didn’t come out again, damn you!” I flared tormentedly. “If I’d been down at the corner— But I was right at the front door! What about the back way — is there a back way out?”
“Not a back way, a delivery-entrance, but that goes through the basement, right past my quarters. No one came down there, I was sitting there eating my supper the whole time.”
And another good reason was, the stairs from the upper floors came down on one side of the elevator, in the front hall. Then they continued on down to the basement on the other side of it. To get down to there anyone would have to pass in front of the elevator, for its entire width. I’d been right out there on the other side of the glass vestibule-door, and no one had. So I didn’t have to take his word for it. I had my own senses.
“Is there a Muller in the house anywhere at all?”
“No, no one by that name. We never had anyone by that name in the whole twelve years I been working here.”
“Someone may have gotten in here and been lurking in the place when she came up—”
“It was locked, how could anyone? You saw me open it with the passkey.”
“Come on, we’re going to ask the rest of the tenants on this floor if they heard anything, saw her at all.”
We made the rounds of the entire five flats. 4E came to the door in the person of a hatchet-faced elderly woman, who looked like she had a good nose — or ear — for the neighbors’ activities. It was the adjoining flat to 4F, and it was our best bet. I knew if this one failed us, there wasn’t much to hope for from the others.
“Did you hear anything next-door to you within the past half hour?” I asked her.
“How could I, it’s empty,” she said tartly.
“I know, but did you hear anything — like anyone walking around in there, the door opening or closing, voices, or—” I couldn’t finish it. I was afraid to say “a scream.” Afraid she’d say yes.
“Didn’t hear a pin drop,” she said, and slammed the door. Then she opened it again. “Yes I did, too. Heard the doorbell, the downstairs one, ringing away in there like fifty. With the place empty like it is, it sounded worse than a fire-alarm.”
“That was me,” I said, turning away disheartenedly.
As I’d expected after that, none of the others were any good either. No one had seen her, no one had heard anything out of the way.
I felt like someone up to his neck in a quicksand, and going down deeper every minute. “The one underneath,” I said, yanking him toward the stairs. “3F! If there was anything to be heard, they’d get it quicker through their ceiling than these others would through their walls. Ceilings are thinner than walls.”
He went down to the floor below with me and we rang. They didn’t open. “Must be out, I guess,” he muttered. He took his passkey, opened the door, called their name. They were out all right, no one answered. We’d drawn another blank.
He decided he’d strung along with me just about far enough — on what after all must have seemed to him to be a wild goose chase. “Well,” he said, slapping his sides and turning up his palms expressively. Meaning, “Now why don’t you go home like a good guy and leave me alone?”