Bornis caught up the rest of his clothes and they went down to the street. He finished dressing in the taxicab.
They went to the City Hospital first, where the police commissioner and his companion were readily admitted. They walked down long rooms, between rows of groaning and writhing bodies; looking into bruised and burned faces, seeing no one they knew. Then to Mercy Hospital, where they found Sylvia Schuyler. She told them that the crush in the theater had separated her from her husband and Althea, and she had not seen them afterward. Then she lapsed into unconsciousness again.
When they got back to the taxicab, Bornis gave directions to the driver in an undertone, but Dowe did not have to hear them to know what they were: “To the morgue.” There was no place else to go.
Now they walked between row s of bodies that were mangled horribly; denuded, discolored, and none the less terrible because they could not scream. Dowe had exhausted his feelings: he felt no pity, no loathing now. He looked into a face; it was not Althea’s; then it was nothing; he passed on to the next.
Bornis’ fingers closed convulsively around Dowe’s arm.
“There! Althea!”
Dowe turned. A face that stampeding leather heels had robbed of features; a torso that was battered and blackened and cut, and from which the clothing had been torn. All that was human of it were the legs; they had somehow escaped disfigurement.
“No! No!” Dowe cried.
He would not have this begrimed, mangled thing his exquisite white Althea!
Through the horror that for the moment shut Dowe off from the world, Bornis’s vibrant, anguished voice penetrated — a shriek:
“I tell you it is!” Flinging out a hand to point at one smooth knee. “See! The dimple!”
The Second-Story Angel
The Black Mask, November 15, 1923
Carter Brigham — Carter Webright Brigham in the tables of contents of various popular magazines — woke with a start, passing from unconsciousness into full awareness too suddenly to doubt that his sleep had been disturbed by something external.
The moon was not up and his apartment was on the opposite side of the building from the street — lights; the blackness about him was complete — he could not see so far as the foot of his bed.
Holding his breath, not moving after that first awakening start, he lay with straining eyes and ears. Almost at once a sound — perhaps a repetition of the one that had aroused him — came from the adjoining room: the furtive shuffling of feet across the wooden floor. A moment of silence, and a chair grated on the floor, as if dislodged by a careless shin. Then silence again, and a faint rustling as of a body scraping against the rough paper of the wall.
Now Carter Brigham was neither a hero nor a coward, and he was not armed. There was nothing in his rooms more deadly than a pair of candlesticks, and they — not despicable weapons in an emergency — were on the far side of the room from which the sounds came.
If he had been awakened to hear very faint and not often repeated noises in the other room — such rustlings as even the most adept burglar might not avoid — the probabilities are that Carter would have been content to remain in his bed and try to frighten the burglar away by yelling at him. He would not have disregarded the fact that in an encounter at close quarters under these conditions every advantage would lie on the side of the prowler.
But this particular prowler had made quite a lot of noise, had even stumbled against a chair, had shown himself a poor hand at stealthiness. That an inexpert burglar might easily be as dangerous as an adept did not occur to the man in the bed.
Perhaps it was that in the many crook stories he had written, deadliness had always been wedded to skill and the bunglers had always been comparatively harmless and easily overcome, and that he had come to accept this theory as a truth. After all, if a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later.
Anyhow, Carter Brigham slid his not unmuscular body gently out from between the sheets and crept on silent bare feet toward the open doorway of the room from which the sounds had come. He passed from his bed to a position inside the next room, his back against the wall beside the door during an interlude of silence on the intruder’s part.
The room in which Carter now stood was every bit as black as the one he had left; so he stood motionless, waiting for the prowler to betray his position.
His patience was not taxed. Very soon the burglar moved again, audibly; and then against the rectangle of a window — scarcely lighter than the rest of the room — Carter discerned a man-shaped shadow just a shade darker coming toward him. The shadow passed the window and was lost in the enveloping darkness.
Carter, his body tensed, did not move until he thought the burglar had had time to reach a spot where no furniture intervened. Then, with clutching hands thrown out on wide — spread arms, Carter hurled himself forward.
His shoulder struck the intruder and they both crashed to the floor. A forearm came up across Carter’s throat, pressing into it. He tore it away and felt a blow on his cheek. He wound one arm around the burglar’s body, and with the other fist struck back. They rolled over and over across the floor until they were stopped by the legs of a massive table, the burglar uppermost.
With savage exultance in his own strength, which the struggle thus far had shown to be easily superior to the other’s, Carter twisted his body, smashing his adversary into the heavy table. Then he drove a fist into the body he had just shaken off and scrambled to his knees, feeling for a grip on the burglar’s throat. When he had secured it he found that the prowler was lying motionless, unresisting. Laughing triumphantly, Carter got to his feet and switched on the lights.
The girl on the floor did not move.
Half lying, half hunched against the table where he had hurled her, she was inanimate. A still, twisted figure in an austerely tailored black suit — one sleeve of which had been torn from the shoulder — with an unended confusion of short chestnut hair above a face that was linen-white except where blows had reddened it. Her eyes were closed. One arm was outflung across the floor, the other lay limply at her side; one silken leg was extended, the other folded under her.
Into a corner of the room her hat, a small black toque, had rolled; not far from the hat lay a very small pinch-bar, the jimmy with which she had forced an entrance.
The window over the fire escape — always locked at night — was wide-open. Its catch hung crookedly.
Mechanically, methodically — because he had been until recently a reporter on a morning paper, and the lessons of years are not unlearned in a few weeks — Carter’s eyes picked up these details and communicated them to his brain while he strove to conquer his bewilderment.
After a while his wits resumed their functions and he went over to kneel beside the girl. Her pulse was regular, but she gave no other indications of life. He lifted her from the floor and carried her to the leather couch on the other side of the room. Then he brought cold water from the bathroom and brandy from the bookcase. Generous applications of the former to her temples and face and of the latter between her lips finally brought a tremor to her mouth and a quiver to her eyelids.