“I been awake all night, practickly.”
“Good. Now tell me just one thing. Did you hear any thunder at all, see anything like heat-lightning flicker outside your window, little while back?”
“Heat-lightning don’t go with thunder. You never have the two together,” rebuked the patriarch.
“All right, all right,” said Courlander wearily. “Any kind of lightning, plain or fancy, and any kind of thunder?”
“Sure did. Just once, though. Tiny speck of thunder and tiny mite of lightning, no more’n a flash in the pan. Stars were all out and around too. Darnedest thing I ever saw!” Courlander gave the hotel dick a look that should have withered him. But Striker jumped in without waiting. “About this flicker of lightning. Which direction did it seem to come from? Are you sure it came from above and not”—he pointed meaningly downward—”from below your window?” This time it was the Hermit who gave him the withering look. “Did you ever hear of lightning coming from below, son? Next thing you’ll be trying to tell me rain falls up from the ground! “ He went over to the open window, beckoned. “I’ll show you right about where it panned out. I was standing here looking out at the time, just happened to catch it.” He pointed in a northeasterly direction. “There. See that tall building up over thattaway? It come from over behind there—miles away, o’course—but from that part of the sky.”
“Much obliged, Pops. That’s all.”
They withdrew just as the hermit was getting into his stride. He rested a finger alongside his nose, trying to hold their attention, said confidentially: “I’m going to be a rich man one of these days, you wait’n see. Those mines o’mine are going to turn into a bonanza.” But they closed the door on him.
Riding down in the car, Courlander snarled at Striker: “Now, eat your words. You said if we found one other person heard and saw that thunder and sheet-lightning—”
“I know what I said,” Striker answered dejectedly. “Funny—private thunder and lightning that some hear and others don’t.”
Courlander swelled with satisfaction. He took out his notebook, flourished it. “Well, here goes, ready or not! You can work yourself up into a lather about it by yourself from now on. I’m not wasting any more of the city’s time—or my own—on anything as self-evident as this!”
“Self-evidence, like beauty,” Striker reminded him, “is in the eye of the beholder. It’s there for some, and not for others.” Courlander stopped by the desk, roughing out his report. Striker, meanwhile, was comparing the note with Dillberry’s signature in the book. “Why, this scrawl isn’t anything like his John Hancock in the ledger!” he exclaimed.
“You expect a guy gone out of his mind with the heat to sit down and write a nice copybook hand?” scoffed the police dick. “It was in his room, wasn’t it?”
This brought up their former bone of contention. “Not the first time I looked.”
“I only have your word for that.”
“Are you calling me a liar?” flared Striker.
“No, but I think what’s biting you is, you got a suppressed desire to be a detective.”
“I think,” said Striker with deadly irony, “you have too.”
“Why, you—!”
Perry hurriedly got between them. “For heaven’s sake,” he pleaded wearily, “isn’t it hot enough and messy enough, without having a fist fight over it?”
Courlander turned and stamped out into the suffocating before-dawn murk. Perry leaned over the desk, holding his head in both hands. “That room’s a jinx,” he groaned, “a voodoo.”
“There’s nothing the matter with the room—there can’t possibly be,” Striker pointed out. “That would be against nature and all natural laws. That room is just plaster and bricks and wooden boards, and they can’t hurt anyone—in themselves. Whatever’s behind this is some human agency, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it if I gotta sleep in there myself!” He waited a minute, let the idea sink in, take hold of him, then he straightened, snapped his fingers decisively. “That’s the next step on the program! I’ll be the guinea pig, the white mouse! That’s the only way we can ever hope to clear it up.”
Perry gave him a bleak look, as though such foolhardiness would have been totally foreign to his own nature, and he couldn’t understand anyone being willing to take such an eerie risk.
“Because I’ve got a hunch,” Striker went on grimly. “It’s not over yet. It’s going to happen again and yet again, if we don’t hurry up and find out what it is.”
Now that the official investigation was closed, and there was no outsider present to spread rumors that could give his hotel a bad name, Perry seemed willing enough to agree with Striker that it wasn’t normal and natural. Or else the advanced hour of the night was working suggestively on his nerves. “B-but haven’t you any idea at all, just as a starting point,” he quavered, “as to what it could be—if it is anything? Isn’t it better to have some kind of a theory? At least know what to look for, not just shut yourself up in there blindfolded?”
“I could have several, but I can’t believe in them myself. It could be extramural hypnosis—that means through the walls, you know. Or it could be fumes that lower the vitality, depress, and bring on suicide mania—such as small quantities of monoxide will do. But this is summertime and there’s certainly no heat in the pipes. No, there’s only one way to get an idea, and that’s to try it out on myself. I’m going to sleep in that room myself tomorrow night, to get the feel of it. Have I your okay?”
Perry just wiped his brow, in anticipatory horror. “Go ahead if you’ve got the nerve,” he said limply. “You wouldn’t catch me doing it!”
Striker smiled glumly. “I’m curious—that way.”
Striker made arrangements as inconspicuously as possible the next day, since there was no telling at which point anonymity ended and hostile observation set in, whether up in the room itself or down at the registration desk, or somewhere midway between the two. He tried to cover all the externals by which occupancy of the room could be detected without at the same time revealing his identity. Dennison, the day clerk, was left out of it entirely. Outside of Perry himself, he took only Maxon into his confidence. No one else, not even the cleaning help. He waited until the night clerk came on duty at eleven-thirty before he made the final arrangements, so that there was no possibility of foreknowledge.
“When you’re sure no one’s looking—and not until then,” he coached the night clerk, “I want you to take the red vacancy-tag out of the pigeonhole. And sign a phony entry in the register—John Brown, anything at all. We can erase it in the morning. That’s in case the leak is down here at this end. I know the book is kept turned facing you, but there is a slight possibility someone could read it upside-down while stopping by here for their key. One other important thing: I may come up against something that’s too much for me, whether it’s physical or narcotic or magnetic. Keep your eye on that telephone switchboard in case I need help in a hurry. If nine-thirteen flashes, don’t wait to answer. I mayn’t be able to give a message. Just get up there in a hurry.”
“That’s gonna do you a lot of good,” Maxon objected fearfully. “By the time anyone could get up there to the ninth on that squirrel-cage, it would be all over! Why don’t you plant Bob or someone out of sight around the turn of the hall?”
“I can’t. The hall maybe watched. If it’s anything external, and not just atmospheric or telepathic, it comes through the hall. It’s got to. That’s the only way it can get in. This has got to look right, wide open, unsuspecting, or whatever it is won’t strike. No, the switchboard’ll be my only means of communication. I’m packing a Little Friend with me, anyway, so I won’t be exactly helpless up there. Now remember, ‘Mr. John Brown’ checked in here unseen by the human eye sometime during the evening. Whatever it is, it can’t be watching the desk all the time, twenty-four hours a day. And for Pete’s sake, don’t take any nips tonight. Lock the bottle up in the safe. My life is in your hands. Don’t drop it
!”
“Good luck and here’s hoping,” said Maxon sepulchrally, as though he never expected to see Striker alive again.
Striker drifted back into the lounge and lolled conspicuously in his usual vantage-point until twelve struck and Bob began to put the primary lights out. Then he strolled into the hotel drug store and drank two cups of scalding black coffee. Not that he was particularly afraid of not being able to keep awake, tonight of all nights, but there was nothing like making sure. There might be some soporific or sedative substance to overcome, though how it could be administered he failed to see.
He came into the lobby again and went around to the elevator bank, without so much as a wink to Maxon. He gave a carefully studied yawn, tapped his fingers over his mouth. A moment later there was a whiff of some exotic scent behind him and the Youngs had come in, presumably from Mrs. Young’s broadcasting station. She was wearing an embroidered silk shawl and holding the Peke in her arm.
Young said, “Hi, fella.” She bowed slightly. The car door opened.
Young said, “Oh, just a minute—my key,” and stepped over to the desk.
Striker’s eyes followed him relentlessly. The register was turned facing Maxon’s way. The Chinese lawyer glanced down at it, curved his head around slightly as if to read it right side up, then took his key, came back again. They rode up together. The Peke started to whine. Mrs. Young fondled it, crooned: “Sh, Shan, be a good boy.” She explained to Striker, “It always makes him uneasy to ride up in an elevator.”
The couple got off at the eighth. She bowed again. Young said, “G’night.” Striker, of course, had no idea of getting off at any but his usual floor, the top, even though he was alone in the car. He said in a low voice to Bob: “Does that dog whine other times when you ride it up?”
“No, sir,” the elevator man answered. “It nevah seem’ to mind until tonight. Mus’ be getting ritzy.”
Striker just filed that detail away: it was such a tiny little thing.
He let himself into his little hole-in-the-wall room. He pulled down the shade, even though there was just a blank wall across the shaft from his window. There was a roof ledge farther up. He took his gun out of his valise and packed it in his back pocket. That was all he was taking with him; no “fantastics” tonight. The fantasy was in real life, not on the printed page.
He took off his coat and necktie and hung them over the back of a chair. He took the pillow off his bed and forced it down under the bedclothes so that it made a longish mound. He’d brought a newspaper up with him. He opened this to double-page width and leaned it up against the head of the bed, as though someone were sitting up behind it reading it. It sagged a little, so he took a pin and fastened it to the woodwork. He turned on the shaded reading lamp at his bedside, turned out the room light, so that there was just a diffused glow. Then he edged up to the window sidewise and raised the shade again, but not all the way, just enough to give a view of the lower part of the bed if anyone were looking down from above—from the cornice, for instance. He always had his reading lamp going the first hour or two after he retired other nights. Tonight it was going to burn all night. This was the only feature of the arrangement Perry would have disapproved of, electricity bills being what they were.
That took care of things up here. He edged his door open, made sure the hallway was deserted, and sidled out in vest, trousers, and carrying the .38. He’d done everything humanly possible to make the thing foolproof, but it occurred to him, as he made his way noiselessly to the emergency staircase, that there was one thing all these precautions would be sterile against, if it was involved in any way, and that was mindreading. The thought itself was enough to send a shudder up his spine, make him want to give up before he’d even gone any further, so he resolutely put it from him. Personally he’d never been much of a believer in that sort of thing, so it wasn’t hard for him to discount it. But disbelief in a thing is not always a guarantee that it does not exist or exert influence, and he would have been the first to admit that.
The safety stairs were cement and not carpeted like the hallways, but even so he managed to move down them with a minimum of sound once his senses had done all they could to assure him the whole shaft was empty of life from its top to its bottom.
He eased the hinged fire door on the ninth open a fraction of an inch, and reconnoitered the hall in both directions; forward through the slit before him, rearward through the seam between the hinges. This was the most important part of the undertaking. Everything depended on this step. It was vital to get into that room unseen. Even if he did not know what he was up against, there was no sense letting what he was up against know who he was.
He stood there for a long time like that, without moving, almost without breathing, narrowly studying each and every one of the inscrutably closed doors up and down the hall. Finally he broke for it.
He had his passkey ready before he left the shelter of the fire door. He stabbed it into the lock of 913, turned it, and opened the door with no more than two deft, quick, almost soundless movements. He had to work fast, to get in out of the open. He got behind the door once he was through, got the key out, closed the door—and left the room dark. The whole maneuver, he felt reasonably sure, could not have been accomplished more subtly by anything except a ghost or wraith.
He took a long deep breath behind the closed door and relaxed—a little. Leaving the room dark around him didn’t make for very much peace of mind—there was always the thought that It might already be in here with him—but he was determined not to show his face even to the blank walls.
He was now, therefore, Mr. John Brown, Room 913, for the rest of the night, unsuspectingly waiting to be—whatever it was had happened to Hopper, Hastings, Dillberry. He had a slight edge on them because he had a gun in his pocket, but try to shoot a noxious vapor (for instance) with a .38 bullet!
First he made sure of the telephone, his one lifeline to the outside world. He carefully explored the wire in the dark, inch by inch from the base of the instrument down to the box against the wall, to make sure the wire wasn’t cut or rendered useless in any way. Then he opened the closet door and examined the inside of that, by sense of touch alone. Nothing in there but a row of empty hangers. Then he cased the bath, still without the aid of light; tried the water faucets, the drains, even the medicine chest. Next he devoted his attention to the bed itself, explored the mattress and the springs, even got down and swept an arm back and forth under it, like an old maid about to retire for the night. The other furniture also got a health examination. He tested the rug with his foot for unevennesses. Finally there remained the window, that mouthway to doom. He didn’t go close to it. He stayed well back within the gloom of the room, even though there was nothing, not even a rooftop or water tank, opposite, from which the interior of this room could be seen; the buildings all around were much lower. It couldn’t tell him anything; it seemed to be just a window embrasure. If it was more than that, it was one up on him.
Finally he took out his gun, slipped the safety off, laid it down beside the phone on the nightstand. Then he lay back on the bed, shoes and all, crossed his ankles, folded his hands under his head, and lay staring up at the pool of blackness over him that was the ceiling. He couldn’t hear a thing, after that, except the whisper of his breathing, and he had to listen close to get even that.
The minutes pulled themselves out into a quarter hour, a half, a whole one, like sticky taffy. All sorts of horrid possibilities occurred to him, lying there in the dark, and made his skin crawl. He remembered the Conan Doyle story, “The Speckled Band,” in which a deadly snake had been lowered through a transom night after night in an effort to get it to bite the sleeper. That wouldn’t fit this case. He’d come upon the scene too quickly each time. You couldn’t juggle a deadly snake—had to take your time handling it. None of his three predecessors had been heard to scream, nor had their broken bodies shown anything but the impact of the fall itself. None of the discoloration or rigidity of
snake venom. He’d looked at the bodies at the morgue.
But it was not as much consolation as it should have been, in the dark. He wished he’d been a little braver—one of these absolutely fearless guys. It didn’t occur to him that he was being quite brave enough already for one guy, coming up here like this. He’d stretched himself out in here without any certainty he’d ever get up again alive.
He practiced reaching for the phone and for his gun, until he knew just where they both were by heart. They were close enough. He didn’t even have to unlimber his elbow. He lit a cigarette, but shielded the match carefully, with his whole body turned toward the wall, so it wouldn’t light up his face too much. John Brown could smoke in bed just as well as House Dick Striker.
He kept his eyes on the window more than anything else, almost as if he expected it to sprout a pair of long octopus arms that would reach out, grab him, and toss him through to destruction.
He asked himself fearfully: “Am I holding it off by lying here awake like this waiting for it? Can it tell whether I’m awake or asleep? Is it on me, whatever it is?” He couldn’t help wincing at the implication of the supernatural this argued. A guy could go batty thinking things like that. Still, it couldn’t be denied that the condition of the bed, each time before this, proved that the victims had been asleep and not awake just before it happened.
He thought, “I can pretend I’m asleep, at least, even if I don’t actually go to sleep.” Nothing must be overlooked in this battle of wits, no matter how inane, how childish it seemed at first sight.
He crushed his cigarette out, gave a stage yawn, meant to be heard if it couldn’t be seen, threshed around a little like a man settling himself down for the night, counted ten, and then started to stage-manage his breathing, pumping it slower and heavier, like a real sleeper’s. But under it all he was as alive as a third rail and his heart was ticking away under his ribs like a taximeter.
It was harder to lie waiting for it this way than it had been the other, just normally awake. The strain was almost unbearable. He wanted to leap up, swing out wildly around him in the dark, and yell: “Come on, you! Come on and get it over with!”
Death Locked In Page 30
