But I must have brought the memory of something in that blackness around with me, to be fanned in retrospect until it glowed into meaning. For suddenly, startled and unsure, I had quickly whipped my face around once more in that well-known double take that means you’re trying to catch up with something that didn’t sink in the first time. That’s usually done in the light, but I did it now in the bottomless dark.
I couldn’t find it for a minute, and then I did. There was a detail visible. Just one, in all that nothingness. A red mote. A dot, hanging suspended in the air. Like a spark on the loose, but that’s forgotten to finish falling the rest of the way.
I watched it for a bristly, shivery second or two. It didn’t move. I didn’t move either. I didn’t breathe much; maybe just a little, just enough to keep the works going.
Then suddenly I got it, by dint of long hard staring at it. Or, rather, by thinking it out, more than just staring. I knew what it was: it was a cigarette end being kept alight between somebody’s living lips. It had a slow, imperceptible rhythm to it when you looked long enough. It got smaller, dimmer, faded; then it came on again, clearer, brighter, larger. Breath was backing it, probably involuntary breath, like my own breathing was at the moment. Breath that couldn’t be stilled entirely but that was suppressed almost to the point of cessation. There was somebody alive over there, across the dark from me, so still, so watchful of me.
It gave itself away, the red pin point. It went up suddenly, about two feet in a straight vertical line. Then it stopped again, froze there. I translated it. The smoker had risen. He was erect; he was full height now, where he had been seated or crouched or inclined before.
It was deftly done. There wasn’t sound to go with it. He was trying to remain intangible, non-present to me. He didn’t know he’d already given himself away. The red ember must have been an oversight; perhaps long incessant habit made him forget he was holding smoldering tobacco out before his face.
I stared, hypnotized. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was like a red bead of danger, a snake’s eye fixed on me. My spine felt stiff, and a funny sort of air-cooling system seemed to play back and forth across my scalp, under the hair.
It hung there at its new altitude for a questioning, stalking moment or two. I stood at bay, shoulder blades hinging the door seam. It dimmed a little with accumulated ash; then another unconscious suck of air brightened it up again.
It started to move again, in an undulating way that told it was moving forward, toward me. It went up very slowly this time, on perspective as it drew near, and not straight up as it had the time before. It got a little bigger, to about the size of a pea. It came on like a distant red lantern on a buoy riding a pitch-black swell.
It was spooky. It was something to get the creeps about. I got them. But I stood my ground. There wasn’t anything else I could do. One of my knees started to fluctuate treacherously. I locked it, and that held it.
It was close to me now. It was up to me. It was so near to my own face that I almost seemed to feel the heat from it, radiating against my cheek in a hot spot about the size of a dime. That was pure imagination, I suppose, but that was the effect I got.
It was the silence that was so maddening — its and mine. One prolonged the other, as though neither of us — myself or this unknown quantity — wanted to be the first to make the preliminary sound that might lead, a moment after, to a death struggle. I waited for it to reveal itself; it seemed to wait for me.
I could feel my upper lip involuntarily draw back above the canine tooth on one side of my mouth; I didn’t actually growl in warning, but the atavistic impulse was there. After all, the dark, the unknown; what other way was there to express cornered defiance?
My chest was taking short little dips and rises, storing in all the air it could against the coming struggle. My arms flexed, ready to grapple and slam out.
Something cool and metallically pointed found the side of my neck, right where one of the swollen, tight cords were; pushed it in a little way, and then held steady. It was sharp — sharp as the point of a pen or the tine of a fork or somebody’s pointed fingernail, for instance; only just blunt enough to avoid puncturing the skin with the amount of pressure that was being applied to it. Very little more, and it would open it and slide in. Only it wasn’t the point of a pen or the tine of a fork or the tip of someone’s fingernail. It was the business end of a knife blade. And all it needed was one extra ounce of energy and it would go through and nail the door.
The blood couldn’t travel up or down that particular cord; the pressure of the point had choked off its right of way. It dammed up below it as if a surgical clip had been applied. There wasn’t a vibration or a quiver to the blade; you wouldn’t have thought it was held by hand at all, it was so steady. It was nothing to monkey around with, or grab, or fling off. It was just waiting for that, to ride home on an even keel. It was no threat; it was the accomplished act itself, but in two parts. Part two would follow immediately.
The cigarette coal vibrated a little with unseen movement. Movement that didn’t carry to the knife blade, that was apart from that and left it unaffected. I had to guess at what it was.
There was a swirl of air across my steaming face, as if an arm had been swept up overhead. A second arm, not the one coiled behind the knife. Something snapped twiglike up there above eye level, and a match head creased by a thumbnail fizzed and flared out like a rocket, blinding me with its suddenness.
Then it calmed to a steadier flame and came down closer, between our two faces but a little offside, so that it didn’t get in the way. The face in front of me slowly caught on in the back-shine, came through stronger, like something being developed on a photographic plate.
4
It was a woman.
Her face glowed out at me like something transparent lighted from the inside. The typical Cuban type: high Carib cheekbones, sleek black hair parted arrow-straight up the center of her crown and twined circularly about each ear, full pouting lips, red as wet paint without there being any paint on them, biscuit-colored skin, jet-black eyes, probably large but pulled cornerwise into slits now and smoldering and dangerous behind those shuttered slits.
She had on a shawl; not your romantic Spanish-dancer thing, with roses all over it, but black and threadbare and shabby; cheap cotton, with rips in a couple of places where it had caught on nails or something. Down under one arm, up and over the other, and clinging to her person by some unaided trick of its own spiral drapery. Under it a short length of red calico petticoat peered. Under that, pink cotton stockings that didn’t look any too clean. Under them, cheap native moccasins or sandals — I don’t know what they were — felt or maybe straw-soled. They had no heels or arches or anything else. I didn’t look down there right now; I only got that presently. I was still too busy up above, at knife level.
The match light flashed from the blade and struck into my eyes. The tendon in my neck was wearing thin. How she had managed to be so accurate in the dark, I don’t know. Long practice, perhaps, in needling just the right place, sight unseen.
Oh, one other thing: the cigarette that had telegraphed her so far ahead wasn’t a cigarette after all; it was a small plump native cigar, down to quarter length now, its fumes apparently inhaled along with the oxygen her system took in without once removing it from her mouth from first to last and yet without inconveniencing her, it was such second nature. A feat I defy any male cigar smoker to match.