They Walked Like Men
Clifford D. Simak
It was Thursday night and I’d had too much to drink and the hall was dark and that was the only thing that saved me. If I hadn’t stopped beneath the hall light just outside my door to sort out the keys, I would have stepped into the trap, just as sure as hell.
Its being Thursday night had nothing to do with it, actually, but that’s the way I write. Fm a newspaperman, and newspapermen put the day of the week and the time of day and all the other pertinent information into everything they write.
The hall was dark because Old George Weber was a penny-pinching soul. He spent half his time fighting with the other tenants about cutting down the heat or not installing air conditioning or the plumbing’s being on the fritz again or why he never got around to redecorating. He never fought with me because I didn’t care. It was a place to sleep and eat occasionally and to spend what spare time I had, and I wasn’t fussy. We thought an awful lot of one another, did Old George and I. We played pinochle together and we drank beer together and every fall we went out to South Dakota for the pheasant hunting. But we wouldn’t be going this year, I remembered, because that very morning I had driven Old George and Mrs. George out to the airport and had seen them off on a trip to California. And even if Old George had stayed at home, we wouldn’t have been going, for next week I’d be off on the trip the Old Man had been after me to make for the last six months.
I was fumbling for the keys and I was none too steady-handed, for Gavin Walker, the city editor, and I had got into an argument about should science writers be required to cover stuff like council meetings and P.T.A.’s and such. Gavin said that they should and I said that they shouldn’t, and first he’d buy some drinks and then I would buy some drinks, until it came closing time and Ed, the bartender, had to throw us out. I’d wondered, when I left the place, if I should risk driving home or maybe call a cab. I had decided finally that probably I could drive, but I took the back streets, where it was unlikely there’d be any cops. I’d got home all right and had got the car maneuvered into the lot back of the apartment building, but I hadn’t tried to park it. I’d just left it sitting out in the center of the lot. I was having a hard time getting the right key. They all seemed to look alike, and while I was fumbling them around they slipped out of my fingers and fell onto the carpeting.
I bent down to pick them up and I missed them on the first swipe and I missed them on the second, so I got down on my knees to make a new approach to them.
And it was then I saw it.
Consider this: If Old George had not been a tight man with the buck, he’d put in bigger lights out there in the hall, so that one could walk right up to his door and pick out his key instead of going over to the center of the hall and fumbling around underneath that misplaced lightning bug that functioned as a light bulb. And if I hadn’t gotten into the argument with Gavin and taken on a load, I’d never have dropped the keys to Start with. And even if I had, I probably could have picked them up without getting on my knees. And if I hadn’t gotten on my knees, I never would have seen that the carpeting was cut.
Not torn, you understand. Not worn out. But cut. And cut in a funny way—cut in a semicircle in front of my door. As if someone had used the center of my door as a focal point and, with a knife tied to a three-foot string, had cut a semicircle from the rug. Had cut it and left it there—for the rug had not been taken. Someone had cut a semicircular chunk out of it and then had left it there.
And that, I told myself, was a damn funny thing to do—a senseless sort of thing. For why should anyone want a piece of carpeting cut in that particular shape? And if, for some unfathomable reason, someone had wanted it, why had he cut it out, then left it lying there?
I put out a cautious finger to be sure that I was right—that I wasn’t seeing things. And I was right, except it wasn’t carpet. The stuff that lay inside that three-foot semicircle looked for all the world like the other carpeting, but it wasn’t carpeting. It was some sort of paper—the thinnest sort of paper—that looked exactly like the carpeting.
I pulled back my hand and stayed there on my knees, and wasn’t thinking so much of the cutout carpeting and the paper that was there as I was thinking how I’d explain being on my knees if someone in one of those other apartments should come out in the hall.
But no one came out. The hail stayed empty and it had that musty smell one associates with apartment halls. Above me I heard the tiny singing of the tiny light bulb and I knew by the singing that it was on the verge of burning out. And the new caretaker maybe would replace it with a bigger light bulb. Although, I told myself on second thought, that was most unlikely, for Old George probably had briefed him in minute detail on economic maintenance.
I put out my hand once more and touched the paper with a fingertip, and it was paper—just as I had thought it was—or, at least, it felt very much like paper.
And the idea of that cutout carpeting and the paper in its place made me sore as hell. It was a dirty trick and it was a dirty fraud and I grabbed the paper and jerked it out of there.
Underneath the paper was the trap.
I staggered to my feet, with the paper still hanging from my fingers, and stared at the trap.
I didn’t believe it. No man in his right mind would have. People just simply don’t go around setting traps for other people—as if those other people might be a bear or fox.
But the trap stayed there, lying on the floor exposed by the cutout carpeting and until this moment covered by the paper, just as a human trapper would cover his trap with a light sprinkling of leaves or grass to conceal it from his quarry.
It was a big steel trap. I had never seen a bear trap, but I imagine it was as big or bigger than a bear trap. It was a human trap, I told myself, for it had been set for humans. For one human in particular. For there was no doubt it had been set for me.
I backed away from it until I bumped into the wall. I stayed there against the wall, looking at the trap, and on the carpeting between myself and the trap lay the bunch of keys I’d dropped.
It was a gag, I told myself. But I was wrong, of course. It wasn’t any gag. If I’d stepped over to the door instead of stopping underneath the light, it would have been no gag. I’d have a mangled leg—or perhaps both legs mangled and perhaps some broken bones—for the jaws were equipped with jagged, offset teeth. And no one in God’s world could have forced the jaws apart once they’d snapped upon their victim. To free a man from a trap like that would call for wrenches to take the trap apart.
I shivered, thinking of it. A man could bleed to death before anyone could get that trap apart.
I stood there, looking at the trap, with my hand crumpling up the paper as I looked. And then I raised an arm and hurled the wad of paper at the trap. It hit one jaw and rolled off and barely missed the pan and lay there between the jaws.
I’d have to get a stick or something, I told myself, and spring the trap before I could get into my place. I could call the cops, of course, but there’d be no sense in that. They’d create a terrible uproar and more than likely take me down to headquarters to ask me a lot of questions, and I didn’t have the time. I was all tuckered out and all I wanted was to crawl into my bed.
More than that, a ruckus of that sort would give the apartment a bad name, and that would be a dirty trick to play on Old George when he was out in California. And it would give all my neighbors something to talk about and they’d want to talk to me about it and I didn’t want that. They left me alone and that was the way I wanted it. I was happy just the way it was.
I wondered where I could find a stick, and the only place I could think of was the Closet down on the first floor where the brooms and mops and the vacuum cleaner and the other junk were kept. I tried to remember if the closet might be locked, and I didn’t think it was, but I couldn’t be positively sure.