She broke away from the wall, cut the corner of the room and made for the window, which was set into that next side. There was a blind down over it, effacing the exact outline of its sash frame, hampering the single, sketchy attempt to fling up the sash and scream out for help that was all his onrush allowed her. There was a stringy, dust laden drape hanging on each side of the embrasure. She flung one behind her at him, and it slowed him for a moment until he could get its hampering folds off his neck and shoulder.
There was a derelict sofa standing out diagonally across the next wall angle. She got in behind that, and before she could get out at the opposite end, he had sealed her in. They backed and filled along its length twice, she on her side, he on his, in a cat and mouse play, a Victorian beauty and the beast pantomime, that she would have laughed at until five minutes ago as being something that just didn’t occur, that belonged in “East Lynne,” but that she would never laugh at again for the rest of her life — although that apparently would only be for another two or three minutes.
“Don’t!” she kept panting. “No! Don’t! You know what they’ll do to you — if you do this to me up here — you know what they’ll do to you!”
She wasn’t talking to a man, she was talking to the aftereffects of a narcotic.
He suddenly took a short-cut by planting one knee on the seat of the sofa and grasping for her across the top of it. There wasn’t any room in the little triangle for her to withdraw far enough. His fingers caught under the neckline of her dress, at one shoulder. Before they could tighten, close on it, she had freed herself by flinging her body around in two or three complete revolutions. It pulled the whole thing down off her shoulder on that side, but the contact broke.
She flashed out past the gap at the lower end of the sofa while his body was still prone across the top of it, and skimmed along the wall on the fourth and final side of the room. She had now made a complete circuit of it, was coming back to the door again, on the next side. To cut out into the middle was to go toward him again, at any particular point, for he had the inside position.
There was an unlighted opening on this last side, the doorway to either a closet or bath, but after her experience with the sofa just now she flashed past it without stopping, fearful of being trapped even more quickly in whatever narrower space was offered on the other side of it. Besides, the outer door, the only way to final safety, lay just ahead.
She caught at a spindling wooden chair in passage, swung it around, flung it down behind her, in hopes of overthrowing him. He saw it in time, went out around it. It only gained her five extra seconds.
She was wearing down now. As she reached the final wall angle, turned to go along the side where this interminable game of puss-in-corner had first started, he cut out ahead of her, turned, and blocked her. She couldn’t reverse in time, went almost into him. He had her in a pocket now, between him and the wall. His arms scissored for her. She could go neither forward nor back, so she went down, the only direction there was left. She had dropped down through them before they could close, and darted out from below them, so close she grazed his side as she went.
She screamed a name. The one name of all that was most powerless to help her right now. “Scott! Scott, darling!” The door was ahead, but she’d never get to it in time. And she was too spent to go on past it any further—
The little lamp was still there, the one she’d tried to light his memory with before. It was too light to be able to harm him much, but she picked it up and flung it back at him. It failed even to hit him, dropped futilely wide of the mark, and the bulb in it didn’t even shatter against the dingy carpeting. He came on undeterred in the final surge that they both knew—
And then something happened. His toe must have caught in something. She didn’t see these things at the time, but remembered about them later. The unbroken lamp bucked violently on the floor behind him, there was a flash of bright blue from the foot of the wall, and he went sprawling down full-length between the two, arms at full reach.
There was a channel of clearance left between him and the blessed door. She was afraid to trust herself into it, but she was more afraid not to. Those hands of his, flat for a moment, lay partly in the way. She jumped around him, just past his clawing fingers, got to it.
An instant can be so long. An instant can be so short. For an instant he lay helpless like that, flat on his face, an instant only. She could feel her hands wrangling the key. Like something in a dream: they didn’t seem to belong to her at all. She turned it the wrong way first, it wouldn’t work; had to reverse it, bring it all the way around to the other side. He was rippling his belly along the floor, trying to close the couple of inches gap between them from where he lay, without getting up; trying to grab her by the ankles and bring her down to him.
The key clicked, she pulled, and the door swung in. Some-think pecked futilely across the rounded back of her shoe, it was like the tapping of fingernails, as she plunged out through the new-made opening.
Then the rest was a blurred welter of mingled horror and relief; horror at anticipated pursuit that didn’t come. She was careening down dimly lighted stairs, more by impetus than any clear sight of them. She found a door, opened it, and it was cool, and it was night, and she was safe, but she kept staggering on, away from that place of evil, that would haunt her a little bit forever. She was zigzagging along an empty sidewalk, like a drunk, and she was drunk — with overpowering terror.
She remembered turning a corner, and she wasn’t sure where she was any more. Then she saw a light ahead and went toward it, running now, in order to get to it quick, before he had a chance to overtake her. She went in and found herself looking at glass cases holding salami and platters of potato salad, so it must have been an all-night delicatessen.
There was no one in it but a man dozing behind the counter. He opened his eyes and found her standing there dazedly, her dress still diagonally down off one shoulder where he’d torn it. He jumped, came forward, peered, palms to counter.
“What’s the matter, miss? You been in an accident? Something I can do for you?”
“Give me a dime,” she sobbed brokenly. “Please give me a dime — to use your phone.”
She went over and dropped it in, still sobbing by reflex diaphragm action.
The kindly old man called inside to the back, “Momma, come out front, yess? Is here a child in zome kind of trouble.”
She got Burgess at his home; it was nearly five in the morning by now. She didn’t even remember to tell him who she was, but he must have known. “Burgess, will you please come here for me? I’ve just had a terrible time, and I don’t think I can manage it the rest of the way by myself—”
The delicatessen keeper and his wife, the latter in curl papers and bathrobe, were holding a diagnostic consultation over her in the background, meanwhile, “Black coffee, you think?”
“Sure, iss the only thing. Aspirin we ain’t got.”
The woman went over and sat down across the table from her, patted her hand sympathetically. “What they do to you, dolling? You got a mudder?”
She couldn’t help smiling wanly at the thought, even while she continued to sniff. The only mother she had was a supposedly hard-boiled detective.
Burgess came in alone, collar up around his ears, to find her huddled over a thick mug of steaming black coffee. Shivers that had nothing to do with the temperature had set in. but were now waning again. He’d come by himself because this was not official; it was personal, off the record stuff as far as he was concerned.