“I backed against the wall and says, ‘Who’s there? Who are you?’ It was a man, I could tell by the voice. After a while, when my eyes got a little more used to it, I could make out something white, like a handkerchief, up where his face should be. It made his voice sound all blurry. But I could hear him all right.
“He gave me my own name first, and what my job was; he seemed to know everything about me. Then he asked me if I remember seeing a certain lady at the theater a night ago, in an orange hat.
“I told him I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t reminded me, but now that he’d reminded me of it, I did.
“Then he said, still in that same quiet voice, without even getting excited at all, ‘How would you like to be shot dead?’
“I couldn’t answer at all, my voice wouldn’t work. He took my hand and put it on something cold he was holding. It was a gun. I jumped, but he made me hold my hand there a minute until he was sure I got what it was. He said, ‘That’s for you, if you tell anyone that.’
“He waited a minute and then he went on speaking. He said, ‘Or would you rather have five hundred dollars?’
“I hear paper rustling and he puts something in my hand. ‘Here’s five hundred dollars,’ he says. ‘Have you got a match? Go ahead, I’ll let you light a match, so you can see it for yourself.’ I did, and it was five hundred dollars all right. Then when my eyes started to go up to where his face was, about, they just got as far as the handkerchief, and he blew the match out.
“ ‘Now you didn’t see that lady,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t any lady. No matter who asks you, say no, keep saying no — and you’ll keep on living.’ He waited a minute and then he asked me, ‘Now if they ask you, what is it you say?
“I said, ‘I didn’t see that lady. There wasn’t any lady.’ And I was shaking all over.
“ ‘Now go on upstairs,’ he said. ‘Good night.’ The way it sounded through that handkerchief, it was like something coming from a grave.
“I couldn’t get inside my door fast enough. I beat it upstairs and locked myself in and kept away from the windows. I’d been blazing a reefer already before it happened, and you know what that does to you.”
He gave another of those chilling jangles of laughter, that always stopped dead again as suddenly. “I lost the whole five hundred on a horse the next day,” he added abjectly.
He shifted harassedly, dislodging her from the chair arm she’d been perched on. “You’ve brought it back again, by making me talk about it. You’ve made me scared again and all shaky, like I was so many times afterward. Gimme another weed, I want to blaze again. I’m going down and I need another lift.”
“I don’t carry marihuana on me.”
“There must be some in your bag, from over there. You were just over there with me, you must have brought some away with you.” He evidently thought she’d been using them as well as he.
It was lying there on the table, and before she could get over and stop him he’d opened it and strewn everything out.
“No,” she cried out in sudden alarm, “that isn’t anything, don’t look at it!”
He’d already read it before she could pull it away from him. It was the forgotten slip of paper from Burgess. His surprise was guileless for a moment, he didn’t take in its full meaning at first. “Why, that’s me! My name and where I work and ev—”
“No! No!”
He warded her off. “And to call the precinct house number first, if not there call—”
She could see the mistrust starting to film his face, cloud it over. It was coming up fast, almost like a storm, behind his eyes. Behind it in turn was something more dangerous; stark, unreasoning fright, the fright of drug hallucination, the fright that destroys those it fears. His eyes started to dilate. The black centers of them seemed to swallow up the color of the pupils. “They sent you on purpose, you didn’t just happen to meet me. Somebody’s after me, and I don’t know who, if I could only remember who— Somebody’s going to shoot me with a gun, somebody said they’d shoot me with a gun! If I could only think what I wasn’t supposed to do— You made me do it!”
She’d had no experience with marihuana addicts before; she’d heard the word, but to her it had no meaning. She had no way of knowing the inflaming effect it has on emotions such as suspicion, mistrust and fear, expanding them well beyond the explosion point, providing they are latent already in the subject. She could tell by looking at him that she had somebody irrational to deal with, that much was apparent. The unpredictable current of his thoughts had veered dangerously, and there was no way for her to dam it, turn it aside. She couldn’t reach into his mind, because she was sane, and he — temporarily — wasn’t.
He stood misleadingly still for a moment, head inclined, looking up at her from under his brows. “I been telling you something I shouldn’t. Oh, if I could only remember now what it was!” He palmed his forehead distractedly.
“No, you haven’t, you haven’t been telling me anything,” she tried to soothe him. She had realized she’d better get out of the place without delay, and also, instinctively, that to make her purpose apparent was to invite interception. She began moving slowly backward, a surreptitious step at a time. She had placed her hands behind her back, so they would be in a position to find the door, try to unlock it, before he could realize her purpose. At the same time she tried to keep her gradual withdrawal from attracting his attention by staring fixedly into his face, holding his gaze with her own. She realized she was becoming increasingly taut at the horrible slowness of the maneuver. It was like backing away from a coiled snake, fearful that if you move too fast it will lash out all the quicker, fearful that if you move too slow—
“Yes, I did, I told you something I shouldn’t. And now you’re going to get out of here and tell someone. Somebody that’s after me. And they’ll come and get me like they said they would—”
“No, honest you haven’t, you only think you have.” He was getting worse instead of better. Her face must be growing smaller in his eyes, she couldn’t keep him from realizing she was drawing away from him much longer. She was up against the wall now, and her desperately circling hands, groping secretly behind her, found only smooth unbroken plaster surface instead of the door lock. She’d aimed wrong, she’d have to change directions. Out of the corner of her eye she placed its dark shape a few yards to her left. If he’d only stand there like that, where she’d left him, a second or two longer—
It was harder to move sidewise without seeming to than it had been rearward. She would sidle one heel out of true, then work the ball of the foot over after it, then do the same with the second foot, bringing them together again, all without letting any motion show in her upper body.
“Don’t you remember, I was sitting on the arm of your chair, smoothing your hair, that’s all I was doing. Ah, don’t!” she whimpered in a desperate last-minute effort to forestall him.
It was only a few seconds since this minuet of terror had begun. It seemed like all night. If she’d only had another of those devilish cigarettes to throw at him, maybe—
She grazed some small lightweight table or stand in her crabwise creep, and some little object fell off. That slight sound, that tick, that thud, that inadvertent betrayal of motion going on, did it; shattered the glaze, seemed to act as the signal his crazed nerves had been waiting for; unleashed what she’d instinctively known all along was coming from one moment to the next. He broke stance, like a figure in a waxworks toppling from its pedestal, came at her, arms out in a sort of off-balance lurch.
She floundered to the door with a muted, thin little cry that was no cry at all, only had time to ascertain one thing with her wildly flailing hands — that the key still projected, had been left in. Then she had to go on past it, he gave her no time to do anything with it.