“WANTED: I am interested in inspecting, with a view toward leasing or buying, a house with an octagonal mirror-paneled room or alcove. Location, size, and all other details of secondary importance, provided it has this one essential feature, desired for reasons of a sentimental nature. Communicate Box—, World-Express, giving exact details.”
The first two days there was no reaction. That wasn’t to be wondered at. It had only appeared on the first day, and any answer would still be in process of transmission through the mail on the second. On the third day there were two replies waiting when I stopped in at the advertising-bureau. One was from a Mrs. Tracy-Lytton, on deckled stationery. She had a house that she was anxious to dispose of for the winter season, with a view to going to Florida. It had a mirror lined powder-room on the second floor. It was not, she had to admit, eight-sided; it was only foursquare, but wouldn’t that do? She was sure that once I had seen it—
The other was from a man by the name of Kern. He too had one that he thought would meet my requirements. It had an octagonal breakfast-nook of glass bricks—
There wasn’t anything on the fourth day. On the fifth there was a windfall of about half-a-dozen waiting for me when I stopped in. Before I’d set to work opening and reading them, I couldn’t help being astonished that there should be this many prospective dwellings in the market with such a seldom-encountered feature as an eight-sided mirror-faced cubicle. By the time I’d waded through them I saw I needn’t have worried; there weren’t. Three of the six were from realty agents offering their services, in case I couldn’t find what I wanted unassisted. Two more were from contractors, offering to install such a feature to order for me, provided I couldn’t find it ready-made. The last one, the only one from an individual owner, and who was evidently anxious to get a white elephant off his hands, likewise offered to have one built-in for me at his own expense, if I agreed to take a long-term lease on the property.
They started tapering-off after that. A desultory one or two more drifted in by the end of the week. One of these for a moment seemed to strike a spark when I read it, and my hopes flared up. It was from a retired actress with a suburban villa which she did not occupy. She was offering it furnished and mentioned that, although it had no eight-sided built-in mirror-arrangement, there was a small dressing-room fitted with a movable eight-paneled mirrored screen, which could be adjusted so that it cut corners off and gave the room any number of sides required.
I telephoned, arranged an appointment at her hotel, and she drove me out in her car. I could see that my appearance and youth gave her misgivings as to my financial ability to meet the terms involved, and she only went through it because the appointment had been agreed upon. The villa was a stucco affair, and at first sight of the screen, when we’d gone in, my face got a little white and I thought I had something. It was folded over to the width of one panel and leaning against the dressing-room wall. “Here’s how I used to arrange it when I was trying on costumes,” she said.
We rigged it up between us in octagon-shape, so that it made sort of an inner-lining to the room, cutting off the four corners and providing eight angles instead. I stood there in the middle of it, and she stood beside me, waiting my decision. “No,” I said finally, “no.”
She couldn’t understand. “But won’t it do just as well? It’s mirror, and it’s eight-sided.”
There was no keyhole on any of the eight flaps to fit a key into, a key such as I had found in my pocket that morning; that was the main thing. I didn’t explain. “I’ll let you know,” I said, and we went back to the car and back to our starting-point.
That was the closest I’d come, and that wasn’t very close. The ad continued to run. But now it brought no further results, fell on barren ground. The supply of mirrored compartments had been exhausted, apparently. The advertising-bureau phoned to find out if I wanted to continue it. “No, kill it,” I said disheartenedly.
Meanwhile Cliff must have spotted it and recognized it. He was a very thorough paper-reader, when he came home at nights. Or perhaps he hadn’t, he just wanted to see how I was getting along. Brace me up, “take me away from myself” as the phrase goes. At any rate he showed up good and early the next day, which was a Sunday. He was evidently off, I didn’t ask him, but I hardly figured he’d wear a pullover and slacks like he had on, to Headquarters.
“Sit down,” I invited.
“No,” he said somewhat embarrassedly. “Matter of fact, Lil and I are going to take a ride out into the country for the day, and she packed a lunch for three. Cold beer, and, um—”
So that was it. “Listen, I’m all right,” I said drily. “I don’t need any fresh-air jaunts, to exorcise the devils in me, if that’s what the strategy is—”
He was going to be diplomatic—Lil’s orders, I guess—and until you’ve seen a detective trying to be diplomatic, you haven’t lived. Something about the new second-hand Chev (his actual phrase) that he’d just gotten in exchange for his old second-hand Chev. And just come down to the door a minute to say howdy to Lil, she was sitting in it. So I did, and he brought my coat out after me and locked up the room, so I went with him.
The thing was a hoodoo from the beginning. He wasn’t much of a driver, but he wasn’t the kind who would take back-seat orders on the road from anyone either; he knew it all. We never did reach where they’d originally intended going, he lost it on the way; we finally compromised on a fly-incubating meadow, after a thousand miles of detouring. Lil was a good sport about it. “It looks just like the other place, anyway,” she consoled. We did more slapping at our ankles than eating, and the beer was warm, and the box of hard-boiled eggs had disappeared from the car at one of those ruts he’d hit. And then to cap the climax, a menacing geyser of jet-black clouds piled themselves up the sky with effervescent suddenness, and we had to run for it. The storm was so instantaneous we couldn’t even get back to the car before it broke, and the rest was a matter of sitting in sodden misery while he groped his way down one streaming, rain-misted country road and up another, surroundings completely invisible and getting more thoroughly off our bearings all the time.
Lil’s fortitude finally snapped short. The lightning was giving her a bad time of it—like most women, she abhorred it—and her new outfit was ruined. “Stop at the first place you come to and let’s get in out of it!” she screamed at him. “I can’t stand any more of this!” She hid her face against my chest.
“I can’t even see through my windshield, much less offside past the road,” he grunted. He was driving with his forehead pressed against the glass.
I scoured a peephole on my side of the car, peered out. A sort of rustic torii, one of those squared Japanese arches, sidled past in the watery welter. “There’s a cut-off a little ways ahead, around the next turn,” I said. “If you take that, it’ll lead us to a house with a big wide porch; we can get in under there.”
They both spoke at once. He said, “How did you know that?” She said, “Were you ever up around these parts before?”
I couldn’t answer his question. I said “No” to hers, which was the truth.
Even after he’d followed the cut-off for quite some distance, there was no sign of a house. “Are you getting us more tangled-up than we were already, Vince?” he asked in mild reproach.
“No, don’t stop, keep going,” I insisted. “You’ll come to it—two big stone lanterns, turn the car left between ’em—”
I shut up again, as jerkily as I’d commenced, the peculiar back-shoulder look he was giving me. I poked my fingers through my hair a couple of times. “Gee, I don’t know how I knew that myself—” I mumbled half-audibly.
He became very quiet from then on, he didn’t have much to say any more; I think he kept hoping I’d be wrong, there wouldn’t be any—
Lil gave him a peremptory accolade on the shoulder without warning. “There they are, there they are! Turn, Cliff, like he to
ld you!”
You could hardly make them out, even at that. Faint gray blurs against the obliterating pencil-strokes of rain. You certainly couldn’t tell what they were.
He turned without a word and we glided between them. All I could see was his eyes, in the rear-sight mirror, on me. I’d never seen eyes with such black, accusing pupils before; like buckshot they were.
A minute passed, and then a house with a wide, sheltering veranda materialized through the mist, phantom like, and came to a dead halt beside us. I heard his brakes go on.
I wasn’t much aware of the business of making a dash for it through the intervening curtain of water that separated us from the porch-roof, Lil squealing between us, my coat hooded over her head. Through it all I was conscious of the beer in my stomach; it had been warm when I drank it back at the meadow, but it had turned ice-cold now, as though it had been put into a refrigerator. I had a queasy feeling, and the rain had chilled me—but deep inside where it hadn’t been able to wet me at all. And I knew those weren’t raindrops on my forehead, they were sweat turned cold.
We stamped around on the porch for a minute, like soaked people do.
“I wish we could get in,” Lil mourned.
“The key’s under that window-box with the geraniums,” I said.
Cliff traced a finger under it, and brought it out. He put it in the keyhole, his hand shaking a little, and turned it, and the door went in. He held his neck very stiff, to keep from looking around at me. That beer had turned to a block of ice now.
I went in last, like someone toiling through the coils of a bad dream.
* * *
—
It was twilight-dim around us at first, the rainstorm outside had gloomed up the afternoon so. I saw Lil’s hands go out to a china switch-mount sitting on the inside of the door-frame, on the left. “Not that one, that’s the one to the porch,” I said. “The one that controls the hall is on the other side.”
Cliff swept the door closed, revealing it; it had been hidden behind it until now. This one was wood, not porcelain. He flicked it and a light went on a few yards before us, overhead. She tried out hers anyway, and the porch lit up; then blackened once more as she turned the switch off.
I saw them look at each other. Then she turned to me and said, “What is this, a rib? How do you know so much about this place anyway, Vince?” Poor Lil, she was in another world.
Cliff said gruffly, “Just a lucky guess on his part.” He wanted to keep her out of it, out of that darkling world he and I were in.
The light was showing us a paneled hall, and stairs going up, dark polished wood, with a carved handrail, mahogany or something. It wasn’t a cheaply fitted-out place—whatever it was. And I could say that “whatever it was” as honestly as they could.
Cliff said, pointing his call up the stairs: “Good-afternoon! Anybody home?”
I said, “Don’t do that,” in a choked voice.
“He’s cold,” Lil said, “he’s shaking.”
She turned aside through a double doorway and lit up a living-room. We both looked in there after her, without going in; we had other things on our mind, she just wanted warmth and comfort. There was an expensive parquet floor, but everything else was in a partial state of dismantlement. Not abandonment, just temporary dismantlement. Dust-covers making ghostly shapes of the chairs and sofa and a piano. An oversized linen hornet’s nest hanging from the ceiling, with indirect light peering from the top of it, was a crystal chandelier.
“Away for the summer,” Lil said knowingly. “But funny they’d leave it unlocked like that, and with the electricity still connected. Your being a detective comes in handy, Cliff; we won’t get in trouble walking in like this—” There was a black onyx fireplace, and after running her hands exploratively around it, she gave a little bleat of satisfaction, touched something. “Electric,” and it glowed red. She started to rub her arms and shake out her skirt before it, to dry herself off, and forgot us for the time being.
I glanced at him, and then I backed away, out of the doorway. I turned and went up the staircase, silently but swiftly. I saw him make for the back of the hall, equally silent and swift. We were both furtive in our movements, somehow.
I found a bedroom, dismantled like downstairs. I left it by another door, and found myself in a two-entrance bath. I went out by the second entrance, and I was in another bedroom. Through a doorway, left open, I could see the hallway outside. Through another doorway, likewise unobstructed, I could see—myself.
Poised, quivering with apprehension, arrested in mid-search, white face staring out from above a collar not nearly so white. I shifted, came closer, dying a little, wavering as I advanced. Two of me. Three. Four, five, six, seven. I was across the threshold now. And the door, brought around from its position flat against the outside wall, pulled in after me, flashed the eighth image of myself on its mirror-backed surface.
I tottered there, and stumbled, and nearly went down—the nine of me.
Cliff’s footfall sounded behind me, and the eighth reflection was swept away, leaving only seven. His hand gripped me by the shoulder, supporting me. I heard myself groan in infinite desolation, “This is the place; God above, this is the place, all right!”
“Yeh,” he bit out in an undertone. He bit it off so short it was like a single letter, shorter than “No” even. Then he said, “Wipe off your forehead, you’re all—” I don’t know why, for lack of something better to say, I guess. I made a pass with my sleeve across it. We neither of us were really interested in that.
“Have you got it?” I said.
He knew what I meant. He fumbled. He had it on a ring with his other keys. I wished he hadn’t kept it, I wished he’d thrown it away. Like an ostrich hides its head in the sand.
The other keys slithered away, and there it was. Fancy scroll-work…a key such as is no longer used or made….
One was a door, the door we’d come in by. Four of the remaining seven were dummies, mirrors set into the naked wall-plaster. You could tell that because they had no keyholes. They were the ones that cut the corners of the quadrilateral. The real ones were the ones that paralleled the walls, one on each side.
He put it into one, and it went in, so smoothly, so easily, like a key goes into the keyhole for which it was made. Something went “Cluck” behind the wood, and he pulled open the mirror-door. A ripple coursed down the lining of my stomach. There was nothing in there, only empty wooden paneling. That left two.
Lil’s hail reached us. “What are you two up to, up there?” From that other world, so far away.
“Keep her downstairs a minute!” I breathed desperately. I don’t know why; you don’t want your agonies of soul witnessed by a woman.
He called down: “Hold it, Vince has taken off his pants to dry them.”
She answered, “I’m hungry, I’m going to see if they left anything around to—” and her voice trailed off toward the kitchen at the back.
He was turning it in the second one. I thought the “Cluck” would never come, and when it did, I must have shuttered my eyes in mortal terror, his “Look!” caught me with them closed. I saw a black thing in the middle of it, and for a minute I thought—
It was a built-in safe, steel painted black but with the dial left its own color. It was jagged, had been cut or burned into.
“That’s what he was crouched before, that—night, when he seemed just like a puddle on the floor,” I heard myself say. “And he must have had a blow-torch down there on the floor in front of him—that’s what made that bluish light. And made her face stand out in the reflection, like a mask—” A sob popped like a bubble in my throat. “And that one, that you haven’t opened yet, is the one I propped him up in—”
He straightened and turned, and started over toward it, as though I had just then called his attention to it for the first time—which of course wasn’t t
he case.
I turned to water, and there wasn’t anything like courage in the whole world; I didn’t know where other fellows got theirs. “No, don’t,” I pleaded, and caught ineffectively at his sleeve. “Not right away! Wait just a minute longer, give me a chance to—”
“Cut that out,” he said remorselessly, and shook my hand off. He went ahead; he put the key in, deep it went, and turned it, and the panel backing the mirror grunted, and my heart groaned in company with it.
He opened it between us. I mean, I was standing on the opposite side from him. He looked in slantwise first, when it was still just open a crack, and then he widened it around my way for me to see. I couldn’t until then.
That was his answer to my unspoken question, that widening of it like that for me to see. Nothing fell out on him, nothing was in there. Not any more.
He struck a match, and singed all up and down the perpendicular woodwork. There was light behind us, but it wasn’t close enough. When the match stopped traveling, you could see the faint, blurred, old discoloration behind it. Old blood. Dark against the lighter wood. There wasn’t very much of it; just about what would seep through a wound in a dead back, ooze through clothing, and be pressed out against the wood. He singed the floor, but there wasn’t any down there, it hadn’t been able to worm its way down that far. You could see where it had ended in two little tracks, one longer than the other, squashed out by the blotterlike clothed back before they had gotten very far.
The closet and I, we stared at one another.
The match went out, the old blood went out with it.
“Someone that was hurt was in here,” he conceded grimly.
Someone that was dead, I amended with a silent shudder.
* * *
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 15
