I backed away across the room from the terror that writhed behind the door, with horror welling in me—the bubbling, effervescent horror that can only come when a man’s own home develops fangs against him.
And even as the horror chilled me, I argued with myself—for this was the sort of thing that simply could not happen. A man’s chair may develop jaws and snap him up as he bends to sit in it; his scatter rugs may glide treacherously from beneath his feet; his refrigerator may lie in ambush to topple over on him; but the closet is the place where nothing of the sort can happen. For the closet is a part of the man himself. It is the place where he hangs up his artificial pelts, and as such it is closer to him, more intimate with him than any room within his dwelling place.
But even as I told myself that it could not happen, even as I charged it all against an upset imagination, I could hear the rustling and the sliding and the frantic stealth that was going on behind the closet door. Almost reluctantly, strange as it may sound, half held by a deadly fascination, I backed out of the room and stood in the living room, just beyond the bedroom J door, staring back into the darkness and the slithering. And there was something there: unless I doubted all my senses and my sanity, there was something there. Something, I told myself, that was a piece with the trap beneath the carpet camouflage and with the ordinary shoe box filled with extraordinary dolls.
And why me? I wondered. Since the incident of the dolls and the broken office door and the girl who ordered the Manhattan, it could, of course, logically be me. Stemming from those happenings, I well could be a target. But the trap had been the first—the trap had come before any of the others.
I strained my ears to hear the rustling, but either it had quieted down now that I was gone or I was too far from the closet, for I did not hear it.
I went to the gun cabinet and unlocked the drawer underneath the cabinet and found the automatic. I dug out a box of shells and filled the clip and shoved it home. I dumped out into my hand the cartridges remaining in the box and dropped them in my pocket.
I put on my topcoat and eased the automatic into my right-hand pocket. Then I hunted for my car keys. For I was getting out.
The keys weren’t in the topcoat and they weren’t in my jacket or in the pockets of my trousers. I had my key ring, with the keys to the front door and to the gun cabinet, to my office desk, to my safety-deposit box, plus half a dozen others that belonged to locks long since forgotten—the steady, ridiculous, inevitable collection of useless and forgotten keys that one can never quite bring himself to throw away.
I had all these, but I didn’t have the car keys.
I searched the tabletops and the desk. I went into the kitchen and had a look around. There weren’t any keys.
Standing in the kitchen, I knew just where I’d left them. I knew just where they were. I could see the trunk key and the caddy dangling from the dash, with the ignition key stuck neatly into the ignition lock. When I’d come home that afternoon, I’d left them in the car. Just as sure as shooting, I’d left them in the car, and it was something I almost never did.
I started for the front door. I took two steps and stopped. And I knew, as certainly as I stood there, that I could not go out into the darkness of the parking lot and walk up to the car with the keys already in the lock.
It was illogical. It was crazy. But I couldn’t help it. There was no way to help it. With no keys in the lock—OK, I could have gone out to the lot. But the keys’ hanging in the lock, for some strange, totally illogical, and unknown reason, made a terrifying difference.
I was scared stiff and toothless. I found my hands were shaking, and I hadn’t even realized it until I looked at them.
The clock said it was seven and Joy would be waiting. She’d be waiting and she’d be sore and I couldn’t blame her.
“Not a minute later,” she had told me. “I get hungry early.”
I walked to the desk and stretched out my hand to pick up the phone, but my hand stopped short of touching it. For a sudden terrifying thought came thundering through my brain. What if the phone no longer were a phone? What if nothing in this room were what it appeared to be? What if it all had changed in the last few minutes into booby traps?
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the automatic. I pushed tentatively at the phone with the snout of it and the phone did not erupt into a funny kind of life. It remained a phone.
With the gun still clutched in one hand, I picked up the receiver with the other, laid it on the desk, and dialed the number.
And when I picked up the receiver, I wondered what I’d say.
It was simple enough. I told her who I was.
“What’s keeping you?” she asked just a mite too sweetly.
“Joy, I’m in trouble.”
“What’s the matter this time?”
Only kidding me. I seldom was in trouble.
“I mean real trouble,” I told her. “Dangerous trouble. I can’t take you out tonight.”
“Sissy,” she said. “I’ll come and get you.,,
“Joy!” I shouted. “Listen! For God’s sake, listen to me. Keep away from me. Believe me, I know what I’m doing. Just stay away from me.”
Her voice still was calm, but it had tightened up a bit, it seemed. “What’s the matter, Parker? Just what kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know,” I told her desperately. “There is something going on. Something dangerous and funny. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. No one would believe me. I’ll work it out, but I don’t want you to get mixed up in it. I’ll feel like a fool tomorrow, maybe, but—”
“Parker, are you sober?”
I told her: “I wish to God I weren’t.”
“And you’re all right? Right now, you are all right?”
“I’m all right,” I told her. “But there’s something in the closet and there was a trap outside the door and I found a box of dolls . . .”
I stopped, and I could have cut out my tongue for saying what I had. I hadn’t meant to say it.
“Stay right there,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Joy!” I shouted. “Joy, don’t do it!”
But the phone was dead.
Desperately I hung up and lifted the receiver again to dial her number.
The crazy little fool, I thought. I had to get her stopped.
I could hear the ringing. It rang on and on and there was a terrible emptiness in the sound it made. It rang and rang and rang and there was no answer.
I shouldn’t have said what I said, I told myself. I should have pretended that I was stinking drunk and in no shape to take her out and that would have made her sore and more than likely she’d have hung up on me and it would have been all right. Or maybe I should have thought up some story with at least the sound of plausibility, but there had been no time to think up a really good one. I was too scared to think straight. I still was too scared to think straight.
I put the receiver back into its cradle and grabbed up my hat and started for the door. At the door I stopped for an instant and looked back into the room, and now it had an alien look, as if it were a place I had never seen before, a place I had merely stumbled on, and it was full of slithering and of whispering and almost-silent noise.
I jerked the door open and bolted out into the corridor and went thundering down the stairs. And even as I ran I wondered how much of the almost-silent, stealthy noise I’d heard had actually been in the apartment and how much in my head.
I reached. the lobby and went out onto the sidewalk. The night was quiet and soft and there was the smell of leaf smoke in the air.
From up the street came a clicking noise a queer, rapid, rhythmic clicking—and around the corner of the building, out of the alley that led to the parking lot, came a dog. He was a happy dog, for his tail was wagging and his gait had something close to frolic in it. He was half the size of a horse and so shaggy that he was shapeless and it was almost as if he’d come straight out of the autumn sunlight of that very afternoon.