Being undemanding also allowed filmmakers to take certain liberties with viewers’ credulity. One example in Fear in the Night would be when four people are caught in a rainstorm and take shelter in a house to which they’ve never been, find it untended, so proceed to make themselves tea and take naps.
There were enough fascinating elements to the plot that it was remade nine years later with a (slightly) bigger budget and better-known actors. Titled Nightmare (1956), it starred Edward G. Robinson, Kevin McCarthy, and Connie Russell. It was again directed by Maxwell Shane, who again wrote the screenplay, so it will be no shock to learn that it didn’t get much better.
The studio also gave away a major plot element when one of its posters had the tagline: “Beware! These Are the Eyes of a Hypnotist!” next to an illustration of a crazed Robinson.
Numerous films have been titled Nightmare that have no connection to the Woolrich story, including those made in 1942, 1953, 1964, 1965, 1981, and too many others to list.
AND SO TO DEATH
Cornell Woolrich
FIRST ALL I COULD SEE was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl’s face; like a white, slightly luminous mask swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little private spotlight of its own was trained on it from below. It was so beautiful and so false, and I seemed to know it so well, and my heart was wrung.
There was no danger yet, just this separate, shell-like face-mask standing out. But there was danger somewhere around, I knew that already; and I knew that I couldn’t escape it. I knew that everything I was about to do, I had to do, I couldn’t avoid doing. And yet, oh, I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to turn and flee, I wanted to get out of wherever this was.
I even turned and tried to, but I couldn’t any more. There had been only one door when I slipped in just now. It had been simple enough. Now when I turned, the place was nothing but doors; an octagon of doors, set frame to frame with no free wall-space inbetween. I tried one, another, a third; they were the wrong ones, I couldn’t get out.
And by doing this, I had unleashed the latent menace that was lurking there around me all the time; I had brought on all the sooner the very thing I had tried to escape from. Though I didn’t know what it was yet.
The flickering white mask lost its cameo-like placidity; slowly, before my horrified eyes, became malign, vindictive. It spoke, it snarled: “There he is right behind you, get him!” The eyes snapped like fuses, the teeth glistened in a grinning bite.
The light became more diffused, as if a stage-electrician were controlling the scene by a trick switch. It was a murky, bluish green now, the kind of light there would be underwater. And in it danger, my doom, slowly reared its head, with typical underwater movements too; sluggish and held back, with a terrible inevitability about them.
It was male, of course; menace is always male.
First it—he—was just a black huddle, an inchoate lumpy mass, say like solidified smoke, at the feet of this opalescent, revengeful mask. Then it slowly uncoiled, rose, lengthened and at the same time narrowed, until it loomed there before me upright. It was still anonymous, a hulk, an outline against the dark blue background, as though the light that had played-up the mask until now, were coming from somewhere on the other side of it.
It came toward me, toward me, toward me, with cataleptic slowness. I wanted to get out, I wanted to turn and run, in the minute, the half-minute that was all there was left now. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t lift a foot, it was as though I was set into a concrete block. I just wavered back and forth, on a rigid base.
Why I wanted to get out, what It was going to do to me, wasn’t clear, I didn’t know. Only that there was soul-shriveling fear in it. And horror, more than the mind could contemplate.
The pace was beginning to accelerate now as it neared its climax, the way they always do.
He came on, using up the small remaining distance between us. His outline was still indistinct, clotted, like something daubed with mud, like a lumpy clay image. I could see the arms come up from the sides, and couldn’t avoid their lobster-like conjunction. I could feel the pressure of his hands upon my neck. He held it at the sides rather than in front, as if trying to break it rather than strangle me. The gouge of his thumbs, in particular, was excruciating, digging into the straining cords right under the ears, pressing into the tender slack of flesh right beside and under the jawbone.
I went down in a sort of spiral, around and around, following my head and neck around as he sought to wrench them out of true with my spinal column. I had to keep it from snapping.
I clawed at the merciless hands, trying to pull them off. I pried one off at last, but it wrenched itself free of my restraint again, trailing a nail-scratch on my forearm just across the knob of the wristbone. Fire was in the slight laceration, even in the midst of the total extinction threatening me. The hand clamped itself back where it had been, with the irresistibility of a suction-cup.
I beat at his arched body from underneath, then as my resistance weakened, only pushed at it, at last only grasped at it with the instinctive clutch of a drowning man. A button came off loose in my hand and I hung onto it with the senseless tenacity of the dying.
And then I was so long dying, my neck was so long breaking, he tired of the slower surer way. His voice sounded, he spoke to the macabre mask. I heard every word with Delphic clarity—like you do in those things. “Hand me that bore, that sharp-pointed bore lying over there, or this’ll go on all night.”
I raised mutely protesting hands, out and past him, and something was put into one of them. I could feel the short transverse handle. A thought flashed through my mind—and even one’s thoughts are so distinct in those things— “She’s put it into my hand instead of his!” I fixed my hand on it more securely, poised it high, and drove it into him from in back. The shock of its going in seemed to be transmitted to my own body, we were so inextricably intertwined. But, for all that, it seemed to go in effortlessly, like a skewer into butter. I could even feel myself withdraw it again, and it came out harder than it went in.
He went with it, or after it, and toppled back. After a moment, I drew near to him again, on hands and knees. And now that it was too late his face became visible at last, as if a wanly-flickering light were playing over it, and he was suddenly no formless mud-clotted monster but a man just like I was. Harmless, helpless, inoffensive. The face looked reproachfully up at me, as if to say “Why did you have to do that?” I couldn’t stand that, and I leaned over him, tentatively feeling for the position of his heart. Not for purposes of succor, but to make that face stop looking at me so accusingly. Then when I’d located it, I suddenly drove the metal implement in with ungovernable swiftness from straight overhead, and jumped back as I did so.
The mask, still present in the background, gave a horrid scream like something undone, foiled, and whisked away, like something drawn on wires.
I heard a door close and I quickly turned, to see which way she had gone, so that I might remember and find my own way out. But, as always in those things, I was too late. She was gone by the time I turned, and all the doors looked alike again.
I went to them and tried them one by one, and each one was the wrong one, wouldn’t open, and now I couldn’t get out of here, I was trapped, shut in with what was lying there on the floor, that still held fear and menace for me, greater even than when it had moved, attacked me. For the dread and horror that had been latent throughout, far from being expiated, was now more imminent than ever, seemed to gather itself to a head over me, about to burst and inundate me.
Its source, its focal point, was what lay there on the floor. I had to hide it, I had to shut it away. It was one of those compulsions, all the more inescapable for being illogical.
I threw open one of the many doors that had baffled me so repeatedly throughout. And behind it, in the sapphire pall that still shrouded the scene, I now saw a
shallow closet. It was as though it hadn’t been there until now, it was as though it had just formed itself for my purpose. I picked up what lay on the floor, and I could seem to do it easily, it had become light, as easy to shoulder as a rolled-up rug or mat; I propped it up behind the closet door; there was not depth enough behind it to do anything else.
Then I closed the door upon it, and pressed it here and there with the flats of my hands, up and down the frame that bordered the mirror, as if to make it hold tighter. But danger still seemed to exude through it, like a vapor. I knew that wasn’t enough, I must do more than that, or it would surely open again.
Then I looked down, and below the knob there was a key-head sticking out. It was shaped a little like a three-leaf clover, and the inner rim of each of the three scooped-out “leaves” was fretted with scrollwork and tracery. It was of some yellowish metal, either brass or iron gilded-over. A key such as is no longer made or used.
I turned it in the keyhole and I drew it slowly out. I was surprised at how long a stem it had, it seemed to keep coming forever. Then at last it ended, in two odd little teeth, each one doubled back on itself, like the single arm of a swastika.
After I had extricated it at last, I pocketed it, and then the knob started turning from the inside, the door started to open anyway. Very slowly but remorselessly, and in another minute I was going to see something unspeakably awful on the other side of it. Revelation, the thing the whole long mental-film had been building to, was upon me.
And then I woke up.
I’d lost the pillow to the floor, and my head was halfway down after it, was dangling partly over the side of the bed, and my face was studded with oozing sweatdrops. I righted it and propped myself up on one elbow and blew out my breath harrowedly. I mumbled, “Gee I’m glad that’s over with!” and drew the back of my pajama sleeve across my forehead to dry it. I brushed the edge of my hand across my mouth, as if to remove a bad taste. I shook my head to clear the last clinging mists of the thing out of it. I looked at the clock, and it was time to get up anyway, but even if it hadn’t been, who would have risked going back to sleep after such a thing? It might have re-formed and started in again, for all I knew.
I flung my legs out of the ravaged coverings, sat on the edge of the bed, picked up a sock and turned it inside-out preparatory to shuffling it on.
Dreams were funny things. Where’d they come from? Where’d they go?
The basinful of stinging cold water in the bathroom cleared away the last lingering vestiges of it, and from this point on everything was on a different plane, normal, rational and reassuringly familiar. The friendly bite of the comb. The winding of the little stem of my wristwatch, the looping-together of the two strap-ends around my—
They fell open and dangled down straight again, still unattached, and stayed that way. I had to rivet my free hand to the little dial to keep it from sliding off my wrist.
I stared at the thing for minutes on end.
I had to let my cuff slide back in place and cover it at last. I couldn’t stand there staring at it forever. That didn’t answer anything. What should it tell me? It was a scratch, that was all.
“Talk about your realistic dreams!” I thought. “I guess I must have done that to myself, with my other hand, in the throes of it. That was why the detail entered into the dream-fabric.”
It couldn’t, naturally, be the other way around, because the other way around meant: transference from the dream into the actuality of leaving a red scratch across my wristbone.
I went ahead. The familiar plane, the rational everyday plane. The blue tie today. Not that I changed them every day, I wasn’t that much of a dude, but every second day I varied them. I threw up my collar, drew the tie-length through, folded it down again—
My hands stayed on it, holding it down flat on each side of my neck, as though afraid it would fly away, although it was a shirt-attached collar. Part of my mind was getting ready to get frightened, fly off the handle, and the rest of my mind wouldn’t let it, held it steady just like I held the collar.
But I hadn’t had those bruises, those brownish-purple discolorations, faintly not vividly, visible at the side of my neck, as from the constriction of a powerful grip, the pressure of cruel fingers, last night when I undressed.
Well all right, but I hadn’t yet had the dream last night when I undressed either. Why look for spooks in this? The same explanation that covered the wrist-scratch still held good for this too. I must have done it to myself, seized my own throat in trying to ward off the traumal attack passing through my mind just then.
I even stood there and tried to reconstruct the posture, to see if it were physically feasible. It was, but the result was almost grotesquely distorted. It resulted in crossing the arms over the chest and gripping the left side of the neck with the right hand, the right with the left. I didn’t know; maybe troubled sleepers did get into those positions. I wasn’t as convinced as I would have liked to be. One thing was certain, the marks had been made by two hands, not one; there were as many on one side as on the other, and the four fingers always go opposite to the thumb in a one-hand grip.
But more disturbing than their visibility, there was pain in them, soreness when I prodded them with my own fingertips, stiffness when I turned my neck acutely. It shouldn’t have, but it seemed to weaken the theory of self-infliction. How was it I hadn’t awakened myself, exerting that much pressure? To which the immediate and welcome corollary was: but if it had been exerted by someone else, I would have been apt to awaken even more quickly, wouldn’t I?
I forced myself back to the everyday plane again. Buttoned the collar around the bruises, partly but not entirely concealing them, knotted the tie, shrugged on vest and coat. I was about ready to go now.
The last thing I did was what I always did last of all, one of those ineradicable little habits. I reached into my pocket to make sure I had enough change available for my meal and transportation, without having to stop and change a bill on the way. I brought up a palmful of it, and then I lost a good deal of it between my suddenly stiff, outspread fingers. Only one or two pieces stayed on, around the button. The large and central button. I let them roll, I didn’t stoop to pick them up. I couldn’t; my spine wouldn’t have bent right then.
It was a strange button. Somehow I knew that even before I compared it. I knew I was going to check it with every article of clothing I owned, but I already knew it wasn’t from one of my own things. Something about the shape, the color, told me; my fingers had never twisted it through a buttonhole, or they would have remembered it. That may sound far-fetched; but buttons can become personalized to nearly as great an extent as neckties.
And when I closed my hand over it—as I did now—it took up as much room inside my folded palm, it had the same feel, as it had had a little while ago in that thing.
It was the button from the dream.
I threw open the closet-door so fast and frightenedly it swung all the way around flush with the wall, and rebounded off it, and started slowly back again with the recoil. There wasn’t anything hanging up in there that I didn’t hold it against, even where there was no button missing, even where its size and type utterly precluded its having been attached. Vests and jackets, a cardigan, a raincoat, a lumberjacket, a topcoat, bathing trunks, a bathrobe. Every stitch I owned.
It wasn’t from anything of mine, it didn’t belong anywhere.
This time I couldn’t get back on the naturalistic plane, I was left dangling in mid-air. This time I couldn’t say: “I did it to myself in the throes of that thing.” It came from somewhere. It had four center holes, it even had a wisp or two of black tailor’s-thread still entwined in them. It was solid, not a phantom.
But rationality wouldn’t give in, tried to rush into the breach, and I was on its side for all I was worth. “No, no. I picked this up on the street, and I don’t remember doing it.” That simpl
y wasn’t so; I’d never picked up a stray button in my life. “Or the last tailor I sent this suit out to left it in the pocket from someone else’s clothing by mistake.” But they always return dry-cleaned garments to you with the pocket-linings inside-out, I’d noticed that a dozen times.
That was the best rationalization could do, and it was none too good. “It just shows you what a thing like that will do to your nerves!” I took out a fresh handkerchief for the day, but I didn’t just spade it into my pocket this time, I furtively touched my temples with it before I did—and it came away darkening with damp. “I better get out of here. I need a cup of coffee. I’ve got the jitters.”
I shrugged into my coat fast, threw open my room door, poised it to close it after me. And the last gesture of all, before leaving each morning, came to me instinctively; feeling, to make sure I had my key and wouldn’t be locked out when I returned that evening.
It came up across the pads of my fingers, but it was only visible at both ends, the middle part was bisected, obscured by something lying across it. My lips parted spasmodically, as when a sudden thrust is received, and refused to come together again.
It had a head—this topmost one—a little like a three-leaf clover and the inner rim of each of the three “leaves” was fretted with scrollwork and tracery. It had a stem disproportionately long for the size of its head, and it ended in two odd little teeth bent back on themselves, like the quarter-part of a swastika. It was of some yellowish composition, either brass or iron gilded-over. A key such as is no longer made or used.
It lay lengthwise in the hollow of my hand, and I kept touching it repeatedly with the thumb of that same hand. That was the only part of me that moved for a long time, that foolish flexing thumb.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 13
