The baby next door was crying when they went to bed together at eleven o’clock. The baby kept him awake for a while, and his thoughts on the Walker death revolved and revolved, going nowhere. Once or twice during the evening, he had absent-mindedly reached for a cigarette, but had barely noticed the motion. His concentration and concern for Amy Walker and her mother was strong enough now to make him forget his earlier preoccupation with the problem of giving up smoking. Now, lying awake in the dark, the thought of cigarettes didn’t even enter his head. He went over and over what the mother had said, what the daughter had told him, and gradually he drifted off into deep, sound sleep.
He awoke in a cold sweat, suddenly knowing the truth. It was as though he’d dreamed it, or someone had whispered it in his ear, and now he knew for sure.
She would kill tonight, and she would get away with it. He knew how she’d do it, and when, and there’d be no way to get her for it, no proof, nothing, no way at all.
He sat up, trembling, cold in the dark room, and reached out to the nightstand for his cigarettes. He pawed around on the nightstand, and suddenly remembered, and pounded the nightstand with his fist in frustration and rage. She’d get away with it!
If he could get there in time— He could stop her, if he got there in time. He pushed the covers out of the way and climbed from the bed. Peg murmured in her sleep and burrowed deeper into the pillow. He gathered his clothes and crept from the bedroom.
He turned the light on in the living room. The clock over the television set read ten till one. There might still be time, she might be waiting until she was completely asleep. Unless she was going to do it with pills, something to help sleep, to make sleep a permanent, everlasting sure thing.
He grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of one of the private cab companies on Avenue L. He dialed, and told the dispatcher it was urgent, and the dispatcher said a car would be there in five minutes.
He dressed hurriedly, in the living room, then went out to the kitchen for pencil and paper, and left Peg a short note. “I had to go out for a while. Be back soon.” In case she woke up. He left it on the nightstand.
A horn sounded briefly out front and he hurried to the front of the house, turning off lights. As he went trotting down the walk toward the cab, the baby next door cried out. He registered the sound, thought, Baby next door, and dismissed it from his mind. He had no time for extraneous thoughts, about babies or cigarettes or the rasp of his breathing from only this little exertion, running from the house. He gave the address, Prospect Park West, and sat back in the seat as the cab took off. It was a strange feeling, riding in a cab. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it. It was a luxuriant feeling. To go so fast with such relaxing calm. If only it was fast enough.
It cost him four dollars, including the tip. If she was still alive, it was the bargain of the century. But as he hurried into the building and down the long narrow lobby to the elevators, the sound he’d heard as he’d left his home came back to him, he heard it again in his memory, and all at once he realized it hadn’t been the baby next door at all. It had been the telephone.
He pressed the elevator button desperately, and the elevator slid slowly down to him from the eleventh floor. It had been the ring of the telephone.
So she’d made her move already. He was too late. When he’d left the house, he’d been too late.
The elevator doors opened, and he stepped in, pushed the button marked 4. He rode upward.
He could visualize that phone call. The little girl, hushed, terrified, whispering, beseeching. And Peg, half-awake, reading his note to her. And he was too late.
The door to apartment 4-A was ajar, the interior dark. He reached to his hip, but he’d been in too much of a hurry. The gun was at home, on the dresser.
He stepped across the threshold, cautiously, peering into the dark. Dim light spilled in from the hallway, showing him only this section of carpet near the door. The rest of the apartment was pitch black.
He felt the wall beside the door, found the light switch and clicked it on.
The light in the hall went out.
He tensed, the darkness now complete. A penny in the socket? And this was an old building, in which the tenants didn’t pay directly for their own electricity, so the hall light was on the same line as the foyer of apartment A on every floor. They must have blown a fuse once, and she’d noticed that.
But why? What was she trying for?
The telephone call, as he was leaving the house. Somehow or other, she’d worked it out, and she knew that Levine was on his way here, that Levine knew the truth.
He backed away toward the doorway. He needed to get to the elevator, to get down and away from here. He’d call the precinct. They’d need flashlights, and numbers. This darkness was no place for him, alone.
A face rose toward him, luminous, staring, grotesque, limned in pale cold green, a staring devil face shining in green fire against the blackness. He cried out, instinctive panic filling his mouth with bile, and stumbled backwards away from the thing, bumping painfully into the doorpost. And the face disappeared.
He felt around him, his hands shaking, all sense of direction lost. He had to get out, he had to find the door. She was trying to kill him, she knew he knew and she was trying to kill him the same way she’d killed Walker. Trying to stop his heart.
A shriek jolted into his ears, loud, loud, incredibly loud, magnified far beyond the power of the human voice, a world-filling scream of hatred, grating him to the bone, and his flailing hands touched a wall, he leaned against it trembling. His mouth was open, straining for air, his chest was clogged, his heart beat fitfully, like the random motions of a wounded animal. The echoes of the shriek faded away, and then it sounded again, even louder, all around him, vibrating him like a fly on a pin.
He pushed away from the wall, blind and panic-stricken, wanting only to get away, to be away, out of this horror, and he stumbled into an armchair, lost his balance, fell heavily forward over the chair and rolled to the floor.
He lay there, gasping, unthinking, as brainlessly terrified as a rabbit in a trapper’s snare. Pinwheels of light circled the corners of his stinging eyes, every straining breath was a searing fire in his throat. He lay on his back, encumbered and helpless in the heavy overcoat, arms and legs curled upward in feeble defense, and waited for the final blow.
But it didn’t come. The silence lengthened, the blackness of the apartment remained unbroken, and gradually rationality came back to him and he could close his mouth, painfully swallow saliva, lower his arms and legs, and listen.
Nothing. No sound.
She’d heard him fall, that was it. And now she was waiting, to be sure he was dead. If she heard him move again, she’d hurl another thunderbolt, but for now she was simply waiting.
And the wait gave him his only chance. The face had been only phosphorescent paint on a balloon, pricked with a pin when he cried out. The shriek had come, most likely, from a tape recorder. Nothing that could kill him, nothing that could injure him, if only he kept in his mind what they were, and what she was trying to do.
My heart is weak, he thought, but not that weak. Not as weak as Walker’s, still recovering from his first attack. It could kill Walker, but it couldn’t quite kill me.