She closed the door, and shut the sight of him out.
She ran and ran and ran, through endless corridors of the night — as Starr had once run the unattainable distance between his bed and his front door — ran for miles and ran for hours, through countless turnings and this-ways and that-ways, and ups and downs, and meshing of cabs and braking of cabs, and the supporting arms of doormen and of elevator men around her, until at last the running stopped and she lay still, holding a palmful of little white pellets in one hand, a small half-empty bottle in the other.
When she opened her eyes in the morning after a tranquilizer-induced sleep, somehow she knew right away. He wasn’t in the world with her anymore. He was dead.
She was so sure, so certain, that she almost didn’t bother to ascertain. When she’d dressed, she went over to the window as she had yesterday and stood looking out. How long ago yesterday seemed.
She looked up at the sky and the clouds skimming by across it like little puff balls of white cotton, some of them unraveling with their own speed. Was it a better world without him? Was it a worse world? It was neither, she knew. It was an oblivious world, it didn’t even know he was gone. One living soul less, that was all.
She happened to glance at the watch on her wrist, and it was twenty-eight before the hour. Just in time for the half-hourly news break. She’d probably missed the lead item, but that was sure to have been political, most likely the Congo. She turned the knob of the little transistor, which had the advantage of not taking time to warm up. The radio came on abruptly in the middle of an item, a drug-related shooting on the West Side. She listened to the full newscast without hearing anything of personal significance.
Then they were playing music again. She left the radio on but paid no attention to what she was hearing. She had the impulse to turn off the radio and switch off the lamp, and she remembered when she’d done that once before, ultimately taking her father’s gun and pressing it to her temple.
If only it had gone off when she squeezed the trigger. She remembered Vernon Herrick, his eyes wild as he told her about his injury on Tarawa. He was right — sometimes the ones who died were the lucky ones.
She started. Was she hallucinating? Or was it her song, playing on the radio?
The tune was unfamiliar, nothing she had heard before. But the lyric was hers, the one lyrical fragment Dell had commented favorably on. The rest of the lyric was as unfamiliar to her as the melody. She heard the song all the way through, entranced by it, and at the end her bit of lyric returned as the song’s climax.
It was easy to guess what must have happened. Dell, more impressed by the words than she’d cared to admit, had passed them on to a professional songwriter. And he’d incorporated them in a song, stealing them without a qualm, and now a singer had recorded the song and it was getting air play. It might even become a hit.
The irony of it, she thought. That a song with that particular lyric should become popular at just this stage of her life.
Because here she was, just as she’d been at the beginning. All alone, on a desert island of her own.
Where the population’s only one.
She was scanning the radio dial, trying to find another news report — or, failing that, perhaps the song again, on another station — when there was a knock on the door.
The police, she thought.
She turned the radio down to a whisper, approached the door. “Who is it?” she called.
The response was muffled. She couldn’t make it out.
“Who is it?”
“Why don’t you open the door and find out?”
It was his voice! Her heart leaped. She opened the door and thrilled at the sight of him.
“A funny thing happened,” he said. “I went through what you must have gone through a year ago, except the gun didn’t misfire and it didn’t go off and shoot somebody else, either. What happened just took place in my mind, but it added up to the same thing. I chose life.”
Her heart hammered in her breast. She looked into his eyes, felt his strength.
“What do you choose, Madeline?”
She was in his arms. He pressed her close, stroked her hair.
Hadn’t she turned off the radio? Of course she had. But the music was playing in her heart, in her mind. Once before she had chosen life — life alone, life of purposeful vengeance. Now once again she chose life — life with him, life spent in love.
The music swelled, drowning all thought.
Afterword
by Francis M. Nevins, Jr
On September 25, 1968, in a corridor of Manhattan’s Sheraton Russell Hotel, a one-legged man in a wheelchair suffered a stroke. He was sixty-four years old but looked almost ninety. His name was Cornell Woolrich. He was the greatest writer of suspense fiction that ever lived. His two dozen novels and more than two hundred short stories and novelettes had the same wrenching impact, the same resonance of terror and anguish and loneliness and despair, as the darkest films of his cinematic soul-brother, Alfred Hitchcock. He had spent most of his adult years living in a residential hotel with his mother, trapped in a bizarre love-hate relationship with her and in the quicksand of his own homosexual self-contempt. When she died, he cracked, and began his own slow journey to the grave.
Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born in New York City on December 4, 1903, to parents whose marriage collapsed in his youth. He spent much of his childhood in Mexico with his father, a civil engineer. When he was eight, his maternal grandfather took him to Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts to see a traveling French company perform Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. The experience gave the young Woolrich his first insight into color and drama, and his first sense of tragedy. Three years later, on a night when he looked up at the low-hanging stars from the valley of Anahuac, he understood that someday, like Cio-Cio-San, he too would have to die. From that moment on he was haunted by a sense of doom. “I had that trapped feeling,” he wrote in his unfinished autobiography, “like some sort of a poor insect that you’ve put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can’t, and it can’t, and it can’t.”
During his adolescence he lived with his mother and aunt and maternal grandfather in the grandfather’s ornate house on 113th Street, near Morningside Park, a short walk from Columbia University. In 1921 he entered Columbia College as a journalism major, with his father paying the tuition from Mexico City. During a protracted illness in his junior year he began experimenting with writing fiction, scrawling the first draft of a novel in pencil on sheets of loose yellow paper that he scrounged from around the house. From the beginning he was a rapid, white-heat writer. “The stream of words was like an electric arc leaping across the intervening space from pole to opposite pole, from me to paper... It was tiring and it wouldn’t let go... You couldn’t stop it, it had to stop by itself. Then it fizzled out again at last, as unpredictably as it had begun. It left me feeling spent...”