And then I looked at the table by the window and saw that the glove was gone.
Almost at once I got the vision of it lifting up and floating through the air at me, fingers first, or else dropping off the table and inching across the floor and up the bed. I don’t know which was worse. The thing on my neck had felt leathery.
My immediate impulse was to check if my door was still shut. I couldn’t tell from where I sat. A very tall clothes cabinet abuts the door, shutting the view of it off from the head of the bed. So I pushed my way down the bed, putting my feet on the floor after looking down to make sure there was nothing in the immediate vicinity.
And then a sharp gust of wind came in the window and blew the last sheet of paper off the table and deposited it on the floor near the other sheets of paper and the glove and the tissue now disentangled from it.
I was so relieved I almost laughed. I went over and picked up the glove, feeling a certain revulsion, but only at the thought of who had worn it and what it had been involved in. I examined it closely, which I hadn’t done earlier. It was rather thin gray kid, a fairly big glove and stretched still further as if a pretty big hand had worn it, but quite light enough to have blown off the table with the papers.
There were grimy streaks on it and a slightly stiff part where some fluid had dried and a faintly reddish streak that might have been lipstick. And it looked old—decades old.
I put it back on the table and set a heavy ashtray on top of it and got back in bed, feeling suddenly secure again.
It occurred to me how the empty finger of a gray leather glove is really very much like a centipede, some of the larger of which are the same size, flat and yellowish gray (though the one that had come out of the banana stalk had been bright red), but these thoughts were no longer frightening.
I looked a last time across the room at the glove, pinioned under the heavy ashtray, and I confidently turned off the light.
Sleep was longer in coming this time, however. I got my fantasy of hotel ghosts going again, but gloves kept coming into it. The lissom maids wore work ones as they rhythmically polished piles of ghostly silver. The bellboys’ hands holding the ghostly notes were gloved in pale gray cotton. And there were opera gloves, almost armpit length, that looked like spectral white cobras, especially when they were drawn inside-out off the sinuous, snake-slender arms of wealthy guesting ladies. And other ghostly gloves, not all hotel ones, came floating and weaving into my fantasy: the black gloves of morticians, the white gloves of policemen, the bulky fur-lined ones of polar explorers, the trim dark gauntlets of chauffeurs, the gloves of hunters with separate stalls only for thumb and trigger finger, the mittens of ice-skaters and sleigh riders, old ladies’ mitts without any fingers at all, the thin, translucent elastic gloves of surgeons, wielding flashing scalpels of silver-bright steel—a veritable whirlpool of gloves that finally led me down, down, down to darkness.
Once again I woke with a start, as if I’d been touched, and shot up. Once again I felt something about four inches long clinging high on my neck, only this time under the other ear. Once again I frantically slashed at my neck and jaw, stinging them painfully, only this time I struck upward and away. I thought I felt something go.
I got the light on and checked the door at once. It was securely shut. Then I looked at the table by the open window.
The heavy ashtray still sat in the center of it, rock firm.
But the rapist’s glove that had been under it was gone.
I must have stood there a couple of minutes, telling myself this could not be. Then I went over and lifted the ashtray and carefully inspected its underside, as if the glove had somehow managed to shrink and was clinging there.
And all the while I was having this vision of the glove painfully humping itself from under the ashtray and inching to the table’s edge and dropping to the floor and then crawling off… almost anywhere.
Believe me, I searched my place then, especially the floor. I even opened the doors to the closet and the clothes cabinet, though they had been tightly shut, and searched the floor there. And of course I searched under and behind the bed. And more than once while I searched, I’d suddenly jerk around thinking I’d seen something gray approaching my shoulder from behind.
There wasn’t a sign of the glove.
It was dawn by now—had been for some time. I made coffee and tried to think rationally about it.
It seemed to boil down to three explanations that weren’t wildly farfetched.
First, that I’d gone out of my mind. Could be, I suppose. But from what I’d read and seen, most people who go crazy know damn well ahead of time that something frightening is happening to their minds, except maybe paranoiacs. Still, it remained a possibility.
Second, that someone with a duplicate or master key had quietly taken the glove away while I was asleep. The apartment manager and janitor had such keys. I’d briefly given my duplicate to various people. Why, once before she got down on me, I’d given it to Evelyn Mayne—matter of letting someone in while I was at work. I thought I’d got it back from her, though I remember once having a second duplicate made—I’d forgotten why. The main difficulty about this explanation was motive. Who’d want to get the glove?—except the rapist, maybe.
Third, of course, there was the supernatural. Gloves are ghostly to start with, envelopes for hands—and if there isn’t a medieval superstition about wearing the flayed skin of another’s hand to work magic, there ought to be. (Of course, there was the Hand of Glory, its fingers flaming like candles, guaranteed to make people sleep while being burgled, but there the skin is still on the dried chopped-off hand.) And there are tales of spectral hands a-plenty—pointing out buried treasure or hidden graves, or at guilty murderers, or carrying candles or daggers—so why not gloves? And could there be a kind of telekinesis in which a hand controls at a distance the movements and actions of a glove it has worn? Of course that would be psionics or whatnot, but to me the parapsychological is supernatural. (And in that case what had the glove been trying to do probing at my neck?—strangle me, I’d think.) And somewhere I’d read of an aristocratic Brazilian murderess of the last century who wore gloves woven of spider silk, and of a knight blinded at a crucial moment in a tourney by a lady’s silken glove worn as a favor. Yes, they were eerie envelopes, I thought, gloves were, but I was just concerned with one of them, a vanishing glove.
I started with a jerk as there came a measured knock-knock. I opened the door and looked up at the poker faces of two young policemen. Over their shoulders Mr. Helpful was peering down eagerly at me, his lips rapidly quirking in little smiles with what I’d call questioning pouts in between. Back and a little to one side was Marcia, looking shocked and staring intently at me through the narrow space between the second policeman and the door jamb.
“Jeff Winters,” the first policeman said to me, as if it were a fact that he was putting into place. It occurred to me that young policemen look very blocky around their narrow hips with all that equipment they carry snugly nested and cased in black leather.