This movement was too late, had Dick Benson only known it. Harriet’s door would not open because it already had opened — to let Harriet out into the night. But The Avenger could not know that, being no magician with a crystal ball, even if he was a genius in his way.
He had no way of telling that Harriet Smith, even at that moment, was stepping into a cab at the avenue end of Bleek Street.
“Go to Eighth Avenue,” she said. “Just cruise down it, toward the Battery, till I tell you to stop.”
When Nellie had guessed that Harriet hadn’t told all she knew, when she asked for protection, she had guessed exactly right. Harriet apparently knew lots more.
For one thing, it seemed that she somehow knew where the clerk, Smathers, had gone on that night so fateful for him.
“Stop here,” she said to the driver when the cab was a little more than a block from the door which bore the name A.A. Ismail.
The driver stared. This was not only a swell-looking girl in her own right, but also a well-dressed girl. It was plain that he was wondering why she wanted to stop on a dark street like this one.
But he stopped. And Harriet paid him. And then Harriet stood right where she was until the cab got out of sight. Only then did she go on in the dimness caused by insufficient street lighting.
It took all the courage Harriet had to wait like that. It wouldn’t have taken a psychologist to divine that she would much rather have had the driver wait for her. Or even go with her. For she was almost uncontrollably frightened.
But some vital urge drove her on up the dark and deserted street to the fateful door.
A.A. Ismail.
She looked at the name as if she had known it before, but had located the house by its appearance alone. And then she looked at the house.
Not a light showing. No more than there had been on that night of death for Smathers. Empty and ominous, it loomed before her; a shabby frame shack set between two high brick commercial buildings, waiting to be torn down for a newer, larger building to take its place.
Harriet tried the door, flinching at the noise made when the rusty knob creaked around. The door was locked, naturally. She stepped to a window and tried to look in.
If she’d thought the street was dark, she knew better now. The street blazed with light compared to the pitlike blackness beyond the window.
She shivered again but pried at the window. And it went up.
Anyone practiced in that type of entrance would have paused a long time on finding that window unfastened. Because it shouldn’t have been. Empty houses are locked and shuttered as tightly as possible, normally, to keep out vandals. The fact that Harriet seemed to feel no emotion but relief indicated that she was an amateur at burglary.
She stepped soundlessly into the blackness beyond the window, and she did have sense enough to almost close the sash behind her so that an illegal entrance wouldn’t be guessed by the first person to walk past.
Then she stood there, letting her eyes become accustomed to the darkness. And gradually forms became visible.
There was a great, tattered sofa abandoned by whoever had moved out of here last. There was a double doorway leading, evidently, to the old living room and to the next room toward the rear which, correspondingly, must have been the dining room or library.
There was a smaller door to the hall on which the street opened. And eventually Harriet went for that.
She moved like a frightened rabbit, with feet as light as her fear could make them. She took seconds for each step. But finally she reached the hall. She listened, and then jumped a foot.
From down the hall to the rear, it seemed she could hear a sound.
It was a faint, rasping sound. It might have been made by the dry rustle of scales as a big snake moved. It seemed to have nothing human about it.
Then Harriet decided it was her imagination, because minutes of wary listening didn’t bring any more sound to her straining ears.
There was something frightful about this empty place in the blackness of the night. But she flitted silently across the hall and went up the stairs.
This was a true ordeal. Because half the steps made a squeaking sound under her weight. It was like the squeaking of a flock of bats.
When she reached the top, she took a tiny flashlight out of her purse; and now it became evident that she had come here to search the place where Smathers had died.
There were four small rooms upstairs, and she went over each, foot by foot, with the little light held so that no one outside could catch its glow through a window.
She tiptoed to the low, unfinished attic and looked into that.
Then she stole down the stairs again, with the treads making the little batlike squeakings under her feet.
She turned at the foot of the stairs and went toward the rear of the house on this, the ground floor. And as she drifted noiselessly down the narrow hall, something detached itself from the shadows at the front door.
The thing seemed to be a shadow itself — a human-sized shadow that had leaned back against the closed portal and watched from its cave of blackness while Harriet descended. Now, still like an insubstantial shadow rather than a human, it followed after the girl.
After her, down the hall!
Harriet got to the end door and opened it. Cracked plaster showed in the walls; cracks in the dingy ceiling. The floor was inches deep in dust.
But there was a long smear in the dust, almost like a path, streaking from the center of the room to the threshold where she stood. Her little flash showed that.
Harriet seemed to forget some of her terror in this discovery. She bent low over the line where the dirt had been brushed aside. She went along it inch by inch, with the flash busy every instant.
She saw that, in patches, the floor was actually clean; had been recently scrubbed. And then she saw one ragged round dot in the dirt. And she knew why the other patches had the scrubbed look.
That little dot was the rusty brown of dried blood.
The tiny flash started on. It stopped within a foot of the object that had slid from Smathers’s pocket when his body was dragged through here three nights ago. But the flash never quite reached the object.
Just then she snapped it out!
Harriet held the darkened little tube with ice-cold fingers while her heart pounded in her ears. She thought she’d heard a sound again — behind her.
When she whirled, she could see nothing. Small as the light from the flash was, it had broken that accustomed-to-darkness phase of her eyes, at least temporarily.
She couldn’t see a thing in the direction of the doorway. She couldn’t even see the door itself. Thus, she didn’t see that shadow that was only vaguely of the shape and size of a human being; didn’t see it reaching toward her! Reaching—
If the shadowy figure had gotten her at that moment, she might have had some small chance. Because she was facing toward it, and she might have beaten it off long enough to at least scream.
But at that moment her nerve cracked, and she decided to try a dash for the side window.
She took two steps toward it, and hands got her by the throat!
She did try to scream then — tried wildly, horribly. But the iron fingers choked back sound as well as breath. Her body writhed convulsively, and then she was still.
She could see again, a little, when her eyes opened once more. She didn’t know how long she had been unconscious, but she had an idea it was at least five minutes.
She came back to a full horror of her position, with no merciful seconds in which to wonder where she was or why she was there.
She came to with the realization that she was tightly bound, wrists and ankles, and that the rope smelled of kerosene.