The third-floor corridor was hushed, with the faint light of the dying day filtering into the windows at its end. The carpet was worn and the walls were stained; the woodwork, for all its ancient shine, had a tired and beaten look.
The office doors were frosted glass, with the peeling, tattered gold of firm names fixed upon them. Each door, I noted, was fitted with a lock independent of the ancient lock built into the knob assembly.
I paced the length of the hall to be sure there was no one around. All the offices apparently were deserted. This was a Friday night and the office workers would have gotten out as soon as possible to begin their weekend. It was too early yet for the cleaning women to come in.
The office of Ross, Martin, Park Gobel was near the end of the corridor. I tried the door and it was locked, as I knew it would be. I took out the glass cutter and settled down to work. It was not an easy job. When you cut a piece of glass, you’re supposed to lay it on a flat surface and work at it from above. That way you can manage, if you’re careful, to get a sure and steady pressure so that the little wheel can score the glass. And here I was, trying to cut a piece of glass that was standing on its edge.
It took me quite a while, but I finally got the glass scored and put the cutter back into my pocket. I stood for a moment, listening, making sure there was no one in the corridor or coming up the stairs. Then I bumped the glass with my elbow and the scored piece cracked and broke, leaning at an angle, still held within the doorframe. I nudged it again and it broke and fell inside the room. And I had a fist-size hole just above the lock.
Being careful not to come in contact with the jagged bits of broken glass still held within the frame, I put in my hand and found the knob that turned the lock. I twisted and the lock came back. With my other hand, I turned the outside knob and Pushed and the door came open.
I oozed into the place and shut the door behind me, then slid along the wall and stood there for a long moment, with my back against the wall.
I felt the hairs rising on the back of my neck and my heart was thumping, for the smell was there—the smell of Bennett’s shaving lotion. Just the faint suggestion of a smell, but unmistakable, as if the man had put it on that morning and in the afternoon had brushed past me on the street. I tried once again to define it, but there was nothing I could compare it with. It was the kind of odor I had never smelled in all my life. Nothing wrong with it—not very wrong, that is—but a kind of smell I had never known before.
Out in the space beyond where I stood against the wall were dark shapes and humps, and as I stared at them and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the place I could see that it was just an office and not a thing unusual. The dark shapes and black humps were desks and filing cabinets and all the other furniture you expect to find inside a business office.
I stood tensed and waiting, but absolutely nothing happened. The grayness of deep twilight seeped in through the windows, but it seemed to stop just beyond the windows; it did not penetrate into the room. And the place was quiet, so utterly quiet that it was unnerving.
I looked around the room and now, for the first time, I noticed something strange. In one corner of the room an alcove was curtained off—a strange arrangement, certainly, for a business office.
I looked around the rest of the office, forcing my eyes to go over it almost inch by inch, alert to the slightest thing out of the ordinary. But there was nothing else—nothing strange at all except the curtained alcove. And the lotion smell.
Cautiously, I moved out from the wall and across the room. I didn’t know exactly what I was afraid of, but there was a fear of some sort crouching in the room.
I halted at the desk in front of the alcove and snapped on a desk lamp. I knew it wasn’t smart. I had broken into this office, and now I was advertising it by turning on the light. But I took the chance. I wanted to see, immediately and without question, what was back of the drapes closing off the alcove.
In the light I could see that the drapes were of some heavy, dark material and that they were hung on a traverse rod. Moving to one side and groping, I found the cords. I pulled and the drapes parted, folding Smoothly out to either side. Behind the drapes was a row of garments, all neatly ranged on hangers which were hung upon a pole.
I stood there, gaping at them. And as I looked at them I began to see them, not as a mass of garments, but as separate garments. There were men’s suits and topcoats; there were half a dozen shirts; there was a hanger full of ties. On the shelf above the rack, hats were primly ranged. There were women’s suits and dresses and some rather frilly garments that I suppose you would call gowns. There was underclothing, both men’s and women’s; there were socks and stockings. Underneath the clothing, on a long rack standing on the floor, shoes were precisely placed, again both men’s and women’s.
And this was stark crazy. A place to hang topcoats, raincoats, jackets, a place to put the hats—if there were no closet, it would be very likely that some fussbudget in the office might fix up a place like this. But here were complete wardrobes for everyone in the entire office, from the boss down to the lowliest of the secretaries.
I racked my brains for an explanation, but there wasn’t any.
And the craziest thing about it was that the office now was empty, that everyone bad gone and they had left their clothes behind. Certainly they would not have left the office without wearing any clothes.
I moved slowly along the line of clothing, putting out my hand to touch them, to make sure they were really fabric, that they were really there. They were ordinary fabrics. And they were really there.
As I walked along the line, I felt a sudden draft of coldness at the level of my ankles. Someone had left a window open—that was the way it felt. As I took another step, the draft as suddenly was gone.
I made my way to the end of the rack of clothing, turned around, and walked back again. Once again the coldness hit my ankles.
There was something wrong here. There was no window open. For a draft from an open window does not creep along the floor at ankle height; nor is it channeled so that with one step you are in it and the next step out.
There was something behind the rack of clothes. And what, in the name of God, could be cold behind a rack of clothes?
Unthinking, I hunkered down and swept the clothes apart and found where the coldness came from.
It came from a hole, a hole that went through the McCandless Building, but not outside the building, not clear through the building, for if it had been a simple hole knocked clear through the wall, I would have seen the lights on the Street outside.
There were no lights. There was an utter darkness and a giddiness and a cold that was more than simple cold—more like the complete lack of any heat at all. Here, I sensed—and I don’t know how I sensed it—was a lack of something, perhaps the lack of everything, a complete negation of the form and light and heat that was upon the Earth. I sensed a motion, although I could see no motion a sort of eddying of the darkness and the cold, as if the two were being stirred by some mysterious mixer, a sucking whirlpool of the darkness and the cold. As I stared into the hole, the giddiness that was in it tried to tip me forward and to suck me in and I jerked back in terror, sprawling on the floor.
I lay there, stiff and tense with fright, and felt the seeping cold and watched the motion of the clothing as it fell back in place to mask the hole punched in the wall.
Slowly I got to my feet and edged toward the desk, putting the barrier of the desk between myself and what I’d found behind the curtain.
And what was it I had found?
The question hammered at me and there was no answer, as there was no answer to the clothing hanging in a row.