Whatever does one do, I asked myself, when he stumbles into something that is impossible of belief and yet with its surface facts entirely evident? For they were evident; one thing one might have imagined or misinterpreted, but there was no possibility of imagining all the things within this office.
I turned on the lamp and the darkness closed in, muffling the room. With my hand still on the lamp switch, I stood unmoving, listening, but there was no sound.
Tiptoeing, I made my way among the desks back to the door, and every step I took I sensed the creeping danger at my back—an imagined danger, but strong and terrifying. Perhaps it was the thought that there had to be a danger and a threat, that the things I had uncovered were not meant to be uncovered, that there must, in all logic, be a certain built-in protection for them.
I went out into the corridor, closed the door behind me, and stood a moment with my back against the wall. The corridor itself was dark. Lights had been turned on in the stairwell and faint light, reflected from the Street below, filtered through the window.
There was nothing stirring, no sign of life at all. The squeal of braking wheels, the honking of a car horn, the gay laughter of a girl came up faintly from the street.
And now, for some reason I could not understand, it became important that I should leave the building without being seen. As if it were a game, a most important game with very much at stake, and I could not risk the ending of it by being apprehended.
I went cat-footing down the corridor and had nearly reached the stairs when I felt the rush.
Felt is not the word, perhaps, nor is sensed. For it was not sensing; it was knowing. There was no sound, no movement, no flicker of a shadow, nothing that could have warned me—nothing except the inexplicable danger bell that clanged within my brain.
I wheeled about in frantic haste, and it was almost upon me, black in the shadow, man-sized, man-shaped, coming in a rush without the slightest sound. As if it trod on air so it would make no sound to cancel out the sound of footsteps.
I moved so suddenly that I spun back against the wall and the thing rushed past me but pivoted with a whiplash swiftness and launched itself toward me. I caught the paleness of a face as the faint lights of the stairwell outlined the massive body. Without conscious thought, my fist was coming up, aiming at the paleness in the black outline. There was a spattering smack as the fist slammed against the paleness, and my knuckles stung with the violence of the blow.
The man, if it were a man, was staggering back, and I followed, swinging once again, and once again there was the hollow smack.
The man was going over, falling, the small of his back caught against the iron railing that protected the open stairwell above the flight below pivoting over the rail and falling free, spread-eagled, into the gaping space above the marble stairs.
I caught one glimpse of the face as it turned into the light, the mouth wide open for the scream that did not come. Then the man had fallen out of sight and there was a heavy thud as he smashed onto the staircase a dozen feet below.
There had been fear and desperation when I had faced the man, and now there was a sickness from knowing that I had killed a man. For no one, I told myself, could have survived the fall and landing on the staircase stone.
I stood and waited for a sound to come up from the stairwell. But there was no sound. The building was so still that it seemed to hold its breath.
I moved toward the stairs and my knees were shaky and my hands were clammy. At the railing, I looked down, braced for the sight of the sprawling body which must lie broken on the stairs.
And there was nothing there.
There was no sign of the man who had fallen to almost certain death.
I whirled around and went clattering down the stairs, no longer intent on maintaining silence. And mingled with the relief at not having killed a man there was a vague beginning of another fear—that, having failed to kill him, he still remained a stalker and an enemy.
Even as I ran, I wondered if I might have been mistaken, if the body might have been there and my eyes had missed it. But one, I told myself, does not miss a body broken on the stairs.
I was right. The stairs were empty as I came around the first flight and started down the second.
Now I stopped my running and went more cautiously, staring at the treads, as if by doing this I might catch some clue as to exactly what had happened.
And as I came down the stairs, I smelled the lotion smell again—the same scent I had caught on Bennett and in the office, where I’d found Bennett’s doll.
There was a smear of liquid, thinly spread, on the first steps and on the landing floor—as if someone had spilled some water. I stooped and ran my fingers through the wetness and it was simply wetness. I lifted my fingers and smelled of them, and the lotion smell was there, but stronger than it had been before.
I could see that two trails of wetness ran across the landing and went down the following flight, as if someone had carried a glass of water and the water had been dripping. This, then, I told myself, was the track of the one who should have died; this wetness was the trail that he had left behind him.
There was horror in that stairwell, a place so quiet and empty that it would have seemed that any emotion, even horror, would have been impossible. But the emptiness itself, perhaps, was a portion of the horror, the emptiness where there should have been a body, and the trail of smelly liquid to show the way that it had gone.
I went charging down the stairs, with the horror howling in my brain, and as I ran I wondered what I’d do or what would happen should I meet that shape, waiting on the stairs; but, even thinking of it, I could not halt my fleeing and went hammering down the stairs until I reached the ground floor.
There was no one on the floor except the shoe-shine boy, dozing in a chair tipped back against the wall, and the cigar- counter man, who leaned against the counter, reading a paper he had spread flat before him.
The cigar man looked up and the shoeshine boy crashed forward in his chair, but before either of them could move or shout, I was through the revolving door and outside on the street. The street was becoming crowded with shoppers, who flocked downtown two nights each week for the evening store hours.
Once in the street, I ran no longer, for here I felt that I might be safe. At the corner, I stopped and looked back at theMcCandless Building, and it was just a building, an old and time-stained building that had stood too long and would be torn down before too many years had passed. There was nothing mysterious about it, nothing sinister.
But as I looked at it I shivered, as if a cold wind had come out of somewhere to blow across my soul..
I knew just what I needed and I went down the street to find it. The place was just beginning to fill up, and somewhere in the dimness toward the back someone was playing a piano. Well, not really playing it, just fooling around, every once in a while fingering a snatch of melody.
I went toward the back, where there wasn’t so much traffic, and found myself a stool.
“What’ll it be?” asked the man behind the bar.
“Scotch on ice,” I said. “And while you’re about it, you might make it double. It’ll save wear and tear on you.”
“What brand?” he asked.
I told him.
He got a glass and ice. He picked a bottle off the back bar.
Someone sat down on the stool that was next to mine.
“Good evening, miss,” the bartender said. “What can we do for you?”
“A Manhattan, please.”
I turned around at the sound of the voice, for there was something in it that jerked me to attention.
And something about the girl as well. She was a stunning person, with a beauty that did not erase her personality.