Night Has a Thousand Eyes

by Cornell Woolrich

  “Oh, no, Jean,” he drawled comfortingly. “That story of the maid’s that you mentioned? I remember that now. No, dear, no. You’re too sensible, too intell—”

  “And then that night I went there. And that part of it was told me. That you’d be all right. And I came back, and your wire was here. You were.” I shuddered a little.

  He didn’t answer this time. One of his hands left me, and although I didn’t look up to trace it, I knew somehow it was pensively stroking the underturn of his face.

  “How did you happen to stay off?” I said after a while.

  He gave a slight start. Not a violent one; the start of a person whose thoughts have strayed.

  “I got a telegram at the last minute, just as I was about to board the plane. In fact I think my bags were already on, when I heard them calling my name over the amplifier—”

  Fear was like a knife. It had a sharp point. And it went in, and turned around in you. Then withdrew again. But it still hurt where it had been.

  I’d started to send one. I’d drafted form after form. But I’d never put it through.

  “Oh, my God!” I said in a sickened voice, and banked my wrist limply against my forehead.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I thought I hadn’t filed it—I know I hadn’t—”

  He held my shoulders in a reassuring vise. “It wasn’t from you.”

  I felt my head go over limply, like an overripe melon on a vine. I could hear my own breath being blown out exhaustedly.

  His voice tightened up a little. I heard him say, “I don’t like whoever did this to you. I’m going to show him up. I don’t like them monkeying around with my little girl—”

  Then, as if remembering that I was there and could overhear his spoken thoughts, he stroked my hair back once or twice.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said softly. “We’ll go there, and— I’ll show you, you’ll see; it isn’t anything.”

  She was frightened, I could see. Not of us, but of what she knew we were about to ask her, of what she knew we must have come there for. She fell back from the door, at sight of us. Not violently, but in a sort of shrinking way.

  She stammered, “How do you do, miss? How do you do, sir?” and caught at her own upper arms, with opposite hands, and looked about her helplessly, looked behind her, as if trying to draw support from someone else who might be in the place with her.

  I said, “May we come in, Eileen?”

  She said, “Yes—yes, do,” and moved a chair by its arm, but not enough to make it more accessible.

  My father, trying to put her at ease, smiled and said, “How are you, Eileen? How have you been?”

  “Oh, fine,” she said breathlessly, “oh very well, sir,” and again touched the same chair arm, this time to move it back again to where it had been before.

  Then she sort of cowered over it, leaned a trifle over it, herself, as if her balance were untrue and her own legs were insufficient to support her. The way a child does when it is stricken with mental uncertainty.

  I looked at him and he looked at me. The kindest thing, I saw, was to have it out at once, and over. “May we see him?” I asked. “May we speak with him? You know, that friend of yours.” And lowered my own voice a little, as I asked it, perhaps thinking I could inspire more confidence in her in that way.

  She gnawed at her underlip for a moment, the way you do when you wince with pain. Then she released it, and darted between the two of us, and over to the door, almost with relief, as if knowing beforehand that her errand was to be footless. “I’ll see if he’s in yet,” she offered. “I’ll go up there and knock. I haven’t heard him go by, so I don’t think he’s home yet.”

  She ran out and left the door open behind her on a narrow gap. We could hear her soles hastily sandpapering up the outside stairs.

  Her mother came to the inner opening between the rooms and looked out at us. She was holding a plate in her hands and slowly wheeling it about between the folds of a dishtowel.

  She said, “Good evening,” grudgingly. The rotating of the plate stopped, while she eyed us, and then it went on again.

  My father nodded pleasantly, and I answered her in kind.

  The door ebbed back, and Eileen had returned. She was more composed than when she had left. To the timid, postponement is succor. “He didn’t answer,” she said. “He can’t be back yet.”

  The older woman grunted through the opening to her, “What, are ye taking them up to make a spectacle of his gift? Ye shouldn’t do that. Ye know he doesn’t like it.”

  “It’s not Eileen’s fault,” I interceded. “We asked to meet him.”

  “I’d like to know him,” my father said with an easy amiability that pretended to take no note of their halfheartedness. “I’d like to have a talk with him. Surely there’s no harm in that, is there?” He looked about and selected a chair. “May we sit down and wait?”

  “Yes, do,” Eileen faltered. But the act had preceded the permission. And as a last attempt at discouragement, she wound her hands harassedly around one another and murmured, “I hope he doesn’t take too long. He may not be back right away.”

  “We’re in no hurry,” he answered. “I feel he’s really worth speaking to.” He began stripping the cellophane from a cigar and studying it as he did so, with that deliberation and ease of manner he could assume when he chose, that made an impregnable defense against outward currents of opposition. I had seen even more sophisticated people rendered helpless against it, by its seeming obliviousness, which was probably wholly artifice.

  “Do you mind if I smoke here in your parlor?” he said, holding the stripped cigar poised.

  “Oh, no, sir, not at all!” Eileen exclaimed hastily. “Go right ahead.” Here, at least, she was on different ground: the obligations of hospitality. She hurried over to place a receptacle beside him, then stood back again, breathless with her own eagerness.

  Looking at him, I wondered how many years it was since he had last been in some place where he was unwelcome, and determined to stay there in spite of it. A very great many, probably. Perhaps when he was a young man he had sat in one or two business offices like this, persisting in remaining, ignoring the lack of cordiality, until he had accomplished his purpose, concluded the transaction he had determined to conclude. But not since then, surely. Not in all the years since those early, beginning days. And yet he hadn’t lost the knack, it sat on him well.

  I perched on the arm of the same chair he was in, and rested my hand on his shoulder, to add what I could of informality and friendliness to our being there.

  The mother turned and disappeared from the room opening, giving her consent to our remaining by default rather than spoken permission. Eileen remained for a minute or two erect against the wall, as though propped there, as though forced back against it by our being in the room. Then, sensing her own awkwardness of posture, aggravated rather than ameliorated it by sidling downward into the nearest armless chair and perched stiffly on that, too far out from the back of it and too rigidly erect to be either rested or restful to others.

  Silence descended on the room; there was no conversation.

  The mother’s step sounded, and she reappeared, this time entering the room full-depth. She carried with her a stack of dishes. She set them down on the table. Then she opened the wings of a small china cabinet set back against the wall, and began to transfer them to it one at a time, building up various sizes, shapes, and uses.

  “I did everything but the cutlery,” she remarked to Eileen.

  The latter jumped from her chair with an alacrity that was motivated by her own eagerness to escape from us and from the room, and not by any imperativeness or rebuke in the remark itself, for there had been none.

  “I’ll finish that for you,” she offered, and fled outside.

  The mother continued putting the plates in one at a time, in silence, ignoring us.

  “Do you believe in his gift, Mrs. McGuire?” I asked her suddenly.<
br />
  “It’s there.” She didn’t turn to look at me.

  “Have you known him long?”

  “Long, yes,” she said briefly.

  I didn’t think she was going ahead, her attitude had been so forbidding. She took up a plate and wiped it around the edge with her apron. Then suddenly she spoke again, as if there had been no interruption.

  “We were children together, him and my husband and me. We used to play together. We came from the same place.” Then again she stopped.

  It had to be asked. If my father hadn’t asked it, I would have.

  “Did he have it then?”

  “Yes, I guess so. He’s always had it.”

  “Did you notice it then?”

  “How should we? Children don’t think of things like that.”

  “There must have been a first time, though, when you did?” he persisted gently.

  “There was. One day when he was about twelve, we were playing up on a hillside, the three of us. You could see the farm below, his people’s farm. Spread out below us like on a tablecloth. Suddenly he broke off playing and said, ‘I’ve got to get down there. Our barn’s on fire.’ We turned and looked, Frank and me. You could see it plain in the sun. It was a clear day.”

  I was holding my head slightly inclined, looking not at her but down at the floor. He’d stopped smoking. We were both afraid she would stop.

  “‘No, it isn’t,’ we said. The air was spotless above it, there wasn’t a speck of smoke.

  “He went off at a run, so we picked up and ran after him. Until we got down there, not a sign. And then just as we came up to it, the first white wisps crept out from under the barn door, and in a minute it was all riddled with it, it was leaking smoke at every seam.

  “They came running from the house and from the fields, and we all helped and we put it out. Well, we saved it, and then afterwards, I remember, we were lying there resting, and Frank said to him, ‘You must have awfully good eyes. There wasn’t anything to see, from way up there.’

  “And he kept nibbling away at a piece of straw, and he said, ‘I didn’t see it. I knew it was going to burn, that was all.’

  “We didn’t laugh at him, because he’d been right. We asked him how he’d known. He said he didn’t know how he’d known, himself. We saw him trying to think about it, squinting up at the sun. Then he said, and these were his own words, I’ve never forgotten them: ‘I happened to think about it, on the way up there. Every time you think of anything, there’s a picture goes with it, comes before you, of what you’re thinking about. If you think of a tree, you see a picture of a tree for a minute. If you think of a house, you see a picture of a house for a minute. I happened to think about our barn. And all of a sudden my mind got awfully white and clear, like there was a strong light on it. And I saw a picture of the barn burning. A picture of it, burning, came into my mind, awfully strong. I looked, and I saw it wasn’t burning yet, so I knew that must mean it was going to.’”

  There was no sound from either one of us. He’d caught ashes from his cigar in the hollow of his hand, and he held them that way for a moment or two, not moving. Neither one of us stirring. Then he thrust out his hand at last and allowed them to trickle into the receptacle meant for them.

  I kept looking down at the floor. She’d told it so simply, how could it have been anything but the utter truth, I said to myself. How could there have been any artifice, any pretense, in such an account as she had just given us?

  She’d finished putting away the last plate now. She closed the wings of the closet, and then she lingered by it, dusting off the little glass knob with her apron, past all need to do so, over and over, as though unaware herself she was continuing to do so, with her thoughts elsewhere.

  In the silence a chink of silverware sounded, from Eileen, at her duties, in the distance. Sounding strangely on another plane.

  She continued to knead the knob, and to look off, across the room, into the past, toward the remembrance of the things she was telling us of.

  “There were many things like that, afterwards,” she said quietly. “None of them, maybe, quite as sharp, quite as noticeable. But that was the first time of all. That was the first time it happened. There’s no need to tell you of the rest.”

  “And did other people learn of it?” my father asked.

  “A few of them, yes. Not many. Word slowly spread around the countryside, among those that knew him and us.”

  “How did they feel about it?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Like us, I suppose. They were people like us, they were our own kind. It was something we couldn’t understand. We allowed he had some sort of a gift that others didn’t, but outside of that, we didn’t feel that he was any different from anyone else. There wasn’t anything about him to make us feel that way. His father cuffed him many a time, like other fathers do their growing sons, after that day. No more, no less.”

  “Well, didn’t people try to make use, to take advantage, of this—this gift of his, as you call it?”

  “At first, a few of them did, yes. Women who were expecting would come, now and then, to seek to learn if they would bear a son or daughter. A neighbor would ask what success he would have with his crops. Things like that he didn’t mind, if they were sincerely put to him. But when people came out of idle curiosity, just to test him for the sport of it—that he couldn’t stand, that gave him some kind of pain and shame, I don’t know what it was; like being exposed to view. He ran away from some of them, one day, and tried to hang himself. Frank found him in the barn, and cut him down just in time. So after that we spared him. We wouldn’t speak of it to outsiders any more, and we let him be.”

  “Is he alone here?”

  “He’d always be alone, a man like that. Frank and I came to the city within a year after our marriage, and he followed us not long after. His parents died, he sold their place, and we were the only friends he had. Where else should he go? What else should he do?”

  My father said, slowly, thoughtfully, “But he could have all sorts of power, with a thing like that. He could have wealth, and—” He turned to look at her helplessly. “Why?”

  “He’s a good man,” she said devoutly. “He takes what God has given. He doesn’t ask for more.”

  We didn’t speak again for a while. He watched her while she left the knob her hands had been busy with for so long, and moved across the room, and stood finally beside the table, bent slightly and looking down at it, as if scanning her own reflection within its polished surface.

  “What is it, Mrs. McGuire? What would you say it was?”

  “It’s not for me to say,” she answered. “It’s not for me to question it. I didn’t question it when I was young, and I’ll not question it now that I’m old. He’s never done a harm to me with it, nor to anyone else that I know of. It’s God’s will, and other than that, I don’t want to know what it is.”

  Eileen came into the room and said to her, “I’ve finished.”

  Her mother said, “Thank you, darlin’,” with an absent sigh, as though it were she who had performed the task.

  “I hope we haven’t put you out any,” I felt called upon to say.

  “No, not at all,” they both assured me, their protests as insincere as my apology.

  My father took no part in this typically feminine tithe paid to the amenities, men being less responsible in that respect.

  “You’d better tell Cathreen and Danny to come up now,” the older woman suggested. “It’s time they were in bed.” And then, partially for our benefit, “Them kids would stay down on the street all night if they wasn’t called.”

  Eileen moved toward the window, evidently about to raise it and shout down to them from where she was, in the immemorial custom of these parts of town.

  But then she suddenly stopped, and listened, and we heard it too.

  There was a slow step coming up the stairs out in the hall. We could hear it without difficulty in there where we were. It was tired a
nd soggy, and somehow you could tell, by the very sound of it, that its owner had an arm out, clutching at the stair rail for exhausted support, moving progressively along with his footfalls, step over step. It was the sort of step that leaned flaggingly against the rail.

  It was strange to be so close to him, and yet not see him. Just outside the thin partition that encased us, going slantingly up one side of it, from bottommost corner to the opposite upper one, chup, chup, chup, chup, but very slowly, very wilted, very meek—and yet not see him. Just hear the sound of someone passing, through the plaster and the laths. There should have been fanfares, there should have been a glow of light coming through the crevices of the door. There was nothing; just a flat, deflated, shoddy trudge upon worn stairs.

  And yet we were breathing quicker. I know I was. And my father had straightened attentively in his chair, was no longer supine there, his shoulder beneath my hand.

  “There he is now,” Eileen said. We knew already.

  I suddenly left the chair arm, and turned, and took a step toward the door.

  Mrs. McGuire’s hand jabbed out. “Wait, don’t open the door and look out at him. Let him go by in peace. Ye can go up there with Eileen in a few minutes’ time—if ye must.” Her disapproval of the whole intrusion was strong on her face. She got up and left the room without addressing us further.

  We waited in silence. I wondered what my father was thinking. I couldn’t tell by his face. Skepticism, determined to vindicate itself? Eileen was sitting at the table now, elbows close together on it, head averted to one side of her intertwined hands, almost shrinking away from us, cringing, in her reluctance to carry out the errand thrust upon her, yet equally helpless to escape from our unspoken demand. Her whole life must have been a series of these agonies of indecision, I reflected pityingly, for where there is no inner will strong enough to repel, to strike a balance, there is a continual teetering before any slightest outward compulsion. The will power is a weather vane, spinning to whoever blows upon it. And if two currents cross, then it fluctuates helplessly. It must have been that way with her, I reasoned, when she had first tried to tell me about the plane.