He unpacked his few belongings and put them away as casually as though he were what he seemed to be, an unsuspecting newcomer who had just checked into a hotel. The coiled rope he hid under the mattress of the bed for the time being; the fruit knife and his gun under the pillows.
He killed the next two hours, until the deadline was due; undressed, took a bath, then hung around in his pajamas reading a paper he’d brought up with him.
At twelve he made his final preparations. He put the room light out first of all. Then in the dark he removed the whole bedding, mattress and all, transferred it to the floor, laying bare the framework and bolted-down coils of the bed. He looped the rope around the bed’s midsection from side to side, weaving it inextricably in and out of the coils. Then he knotted a free length to a degree that defied undoing, splicing the end for a counter-knot.
He coiled it three times around his own middle, again knotting it to a point of Houdini-like bafflement. In between there was a slack of a good eight or ten feet. More than enough, considering the ease with which the bed could be pulled about on its little rubber-tired casters, to give him a radius of action equal to the inside limits of the room. Should pursuit through the doorway become necessary, that was what the knife was for. He laid it on the nightstand, alongside his gun.
Then he replaced the bedding, concealing the rope fastened beneath it. He carefully kicked the loose length, escaping at one side, out of sight under the bed. He climbed in, covered up.
The spiny roughness and constriction of his improvised safety-belt bothered him a good deal at first, but he soon found that by lying still and not changing position too often, he could accustom himself to it, even forget about it.
An hour passed, growing more and more blurred as it neared its end. He didn’t try to stay awake, in fact encouraged sleep, feeling that the rope would automatically give him more than a fighting chance, and that to remain awake and watchful might in some imponderable way ward off the very thing he was trying to come to grips with.
At the very last he was dimly conscious, through already somnolent faculties, of a vague sweetness in the air, lulling him even further. Sandalwood incense. “So they’re still here,” he thought indistinctly. But the thought wasn’t sufficient to rouse him to alertness; he wouldn’t let it. His eyelids started to close of their own weight. He let them stay down.
Only once, after that, did his senses come to the surface. The scratchy roughness of the rope as he turned in his sleep. “Rope,” he thought dimly, and placing what it was, dropped off into oblivion again.
The second awakening came hard. He fought against it stubbornly, but it slowly won out, dragging him against his will. It was twofold. Not dangerous or threatening, but mentally painful, like anything that pulls you out of deep sleep. Excruciatingly painful. He wanted to be let alone. Every nerve cried out for continued sleep, and these two spearheads—noise and glare—continued prodding at him, tormenting him.
Then suddenly they’d won out. Thump!—one last cruelly jolting impact of sound, and he’d opened his eyes. The glare now attacked him in turn; it was like needles boring into the pupils of his defenseless, blurred eyes. He tried to shield them from it with one protective hand, and it still found them out. He struggled dazedly upright in the bed. The noise had subsided, was gone, after that last successful bang. But the light—it beat into his brain.
It came pulsing from beyond the foot of the bed, so that meant it was coming through the open bathroom door. The bed was along the side wall, and the bathroom door should be just beyond its foot. He must have forgotten to put the light out in there. What a brilliance! He could see the light through the partly open door, swinging there on its loose, exposed electric-cord. That is to say, he could see the pulsing gleam and dazzle of it, but he couldn’t get it into focus; it was like a sunburst. It was torture, it was burning his sleepy eyeballs out. Have to get up and snap it out. How’d that ever happen anyway? Maybe the switch was defective, current was escaping through it even after it had been turned off, and he was sure he had turned it off.
He struggled out of bed and groped toward it. The room around him was just a blur, his senses swimming with the combination of pitch-blackness and almost solar brilliance they were being subjected to. But it was the bathroom door that was beyond the foot of the bed, that was one thing he was sure of, even in his sleep-fogged condition.
He reached the threshold, groped upward for the switch that was located above the bulb itself. To look upward at it was like staring a blast furnace in the face without dark glasses. It had seemed to be dangling there just past the half open door, so accessible. And now it seemed to elude him, swing back a little out of reach. Or maybe it was just that his fumbling fingers had knocked the loose cord into that strange, evasive motion.
He went after it, like a moth after a flame. Took a step across the threshold, still straining upward after it, eyes as useless as though he were standing directly in a lighthouse beam.
Suddenly the doorsill seemed to rear. Instead of being just a flat strip of wood, partitioning the floor of one room from the other, it struck him sharply, stunningly, way up the legs, just under the kneecaps. He tripped, overbalanced, plunged forward. The rest was hallucination, catastrophe, destruction.
The light vanished as though it had wings. The fall didn’t break; no tiled flooring came up to stop it. The room had suddenly melted into disembodied night. No walls, no floor, nothing at all. Cool air of out-of-doors was rushing upward into the vacuum where the bathroom apparently had been. His whole body was turning completely over, and then over again, and he was going down, down, down. He only had time for one despairing thought as he fell at a sickening speed: “I’m outside the building!”
Then there was a wrench that seemed to tear his insides out and snap his head off at his neck. The hurtling fall jarred short, and there was a sickening, swaying motion on an even keel. He was turning slowly like something on a spit, clawing helplessly at the nothingness around him. In the cylindrical blackness that kept wheeling about him he could make out the gray of the building wall, recurring now on this side, now on that, as he swiveled. He tried to get a grip on the wall with his fingertips, to steady himself, gain a fulcrum! Its sandpapery roughness held no indentation to which he could attach himself even by one wildly searching thumb.
He was hanging there between floors at the end of the rope which had saved his life. There was no other way but to try to climb back along its length, until he could regain that treacherous guard rail up there over his head. It could be done, it had to be. Fortunately the rope’s grip around his waist was automatic. He was being held without having to exert himself, could use all his strength to lift himself hand over hand. That shouldn’t be impossible. It was his only chance, at any rate.
The tall oblong of window overhead through which he had just been catapulted bloomed yellow. The room lights had been put on. Someone was in there. Someone was in there. Someone had arrived to help him. He arched his back, straining to look up into that terrifying vista of night sky overhead—but that now held the warm friendly yellow patch that meant his salvation.
“Grab that rope up there!” he bellowed hoarsely. “Pull me in! I’m hanging out here! Hurry! There isn’t much time!”
Hands showed over the guard-rail. He could see them plainly, tinted yellow by the light behind them. Busy hands, helping hands, answering his plea, pulling him back to the safety of solid ground.
No, wait! Something flashed in them, flashed again. Sawing back and forth, slicing, biting into the rope that held him, just past the guard-rail. He could feel the vibration around his middle, carried down to him like the hum along a wire. Death-dealing hands, completing what had been started, sending him to his doom. With his own knife, that he’d left up there beside the bed!
The rope began to fritter. A little severed outer strand came twining loosely down the main column of it toward him, like a snake. Those hands, back and forth, like a demon fiddler drawing his bow a
cross a single tautened violin string in hurried, frenzied funeral march that spelled Striker’s doom!
“Help!” he shouted in a choked voice, and the empty night sky around seemed to give it mockingly back to him.
A face appeared above the hands and knife, a grinning derisive face peering down into the gloom. Vast mane of snow-white hair and long white beard. It was Peter the Hermit.
So now he knew at last—too late. Too late.
The face vanished again, but the hands, the knife, were busier than ever. There was a microscopic dip, a give, as another strand parted, forerunner of the hurtling, whistling drop to come, the hurtling drop that meant the painful, bone-crushing end of him.
He burst into a flurry of helpless, agonized motion, flailing out with arms and legs—at what, toward what? Like a tortured fly caught on a pin, from which he could never hope to escape.
Glass shattered somewhere around him; one foot seemed to puncture the solid stone wall, go all the way through it. A red-hot wire stroked across his instep and he jerked convulsively.
There was a second preliminary dip, and a wolf howl of joy from above. He was conscious of more yellow light, this time from below, not above. A horrified voice that was trying not to lose its self-control sounded just beneath him somewhere. “Grab this! Don’t lose your head now! Grab hold of this and don’t let go whatever happens!”
Wood, the wood of a chair back, nudged into him, held out into the open by its legs. He caught at it spasmodically with both hands, riveted them to it in a grip like rigor mortis. At the same time somebody seemed to be trying to pull his shoe off his foot, that one foot that had gone in through the wall and seemed to be cut off from the rest of him.
There was a nauseating plunging sensation that stopped as soon as it began. His back went over until he felt like he was breaking in two, then the chair back held, steadied, reversed, started slowly to draw him with it. The severed rope came hissing down on top of him. From above there was a shrill cackle, from closer at hand a woman’s scream of pity and terror. Yellow closed around him, swallowed him completely, took him in to itself.
He was stretched out on the floor, a good solid floor—and it was over. He was still holding the chair in that viselike grip. Young, the Chinese lawyer, was still hanging onto it by the legs, face a pasty gray. Bob, the night porter, was still holding onto his one ankle, and blood was coming through the sock. Mrs. Young, in a sort of chain arrangement, was hugging the porter around the waist. There was broken glass around him on the floor, and a big pool of water with tropical fish floundering in it from the overturned tank. A dog was whining heartbreakingly somewhere in the room. Other than that, there was complete silence.
None of them could talk for a minute or two. Mrs. Young sat squarely down on the floor, hid her face in her hands, and had brief but high-powered hysterics. Striker rolled over and planted his lips devoutly to the dusty carpet, before he even took a stab at getting to his shaky and undependable feet.
“What the hell happened to you?” heaved the lawyer finally, mopping his forehead. “Flying around out there like a bat! You scared the daylights out of me.”
“Come on up to the floor above and get all the details,” Striker invited. He guided himself shakily out of the room, stiff-arming himself against the door frame as he went. His legs still felt like rubber, threatening to betray him.
The door of 913 stood open. In the hallway outside it he motioned them cautiously back. “I left my gun in there, and he’s got a knife with him too, so take it easy.” But he strode into the lighted opening as though a couple of little items like that weren’t stopping him after what he’d just been through and nearly didn’t survive.
Then he stopped dead. There wasn’t anyone at all in the room—any more.
The bed, with the severed section of rope still wound securely around it, was upturned against the window opening, effectively blocking it. The entire bedding, mattress and all, had slid off it, down into the street below. It was easy to see what had happened. The weight of his body, dangling out there, had drawn it first out into line with the opening (and it moved so easily on those rubber-tired casters!), then tipped it over on its side. The mattress and all the encumbering clothes had spilled off it and gone out of their own weight, entangling, blinding, and carrying with them, like a linen avalanche, whatever and whoever stood in their way. It was a fitting finish for an ingenious, heartless murderer.
The criminal caught neatly in his own trap.
“He was too anxious to cut that rope and watch me fall at the same time,” Striker said grimly. “He leaned too far out. A feather pillow was enough to push him over the sill!”
He sauntered over to the dresser, picked up a sheet of paper, smiled a little—not gaily. “My ‘suicide note’!” He looked at Young. “Funny sensation, reading your own farewell note. I bet not many experience it! Let’s see what I’m supposed to have said to myself. I’m at the end of my rope. Queer, how he hit the nail on the head that time! He made them short, always. So there wouldn’t be enough to them to give the handwriting away. He never signed them, either. Because he didn’t know their names. He didn’t even know what they looked like.”
Courlander’s voice sounded outside, talking it over with someone as he came toward the room. “. . . mattress and all! But instead of him landing on it, which might have saved his life, it landed on him. Didn’t do him a bit of good! He’s gone forever.”
Striker, leaning against the dresser, wasn’t recognized at first.
“Say, wait a minute, where have I seen you before?” the city dick growled finally, after he’d given a preliminary look around the disordered room.
“What a detective you turned out to be!” grunted the shaken Striker rudely.
“Oh, it’s you, is it? Do you haunt the place? What do you know about this?”
“A damn sight more than you!” was the uncomplimentary retort. “Sit down and learn some of it—or are you still afraid to face the real facts?”
Courlander sank back into a chair mechanically, mouth agape, staring at Striker.
“I’m not going to tell you about it,” Striker went on. “I’m going to demonstrate. That’s always the quickest way with kindergarten-age intelligences!” He caught at the overturned bed, righted it, rolled it almost effortlessly back into its original position against the side wall, foot facing directly toward the bathroom door.
“Notice that slight vibration, that humming the rubber-tired casters make across the floorboards? That’s the distant thunder’ the Youngs heard that night. I’ll show you the lightning in just a minute. I’m going over there to his room now. Before I go, just let me point out one thing: the sleeper goes to bed in an unfamiliar room, and his last recollection is of the bathroom door being down there at the foot, the windows over here on this side. He wakes up dazedly in the middle of the night, starts to get out of bed, and comes up against the wall first of all. So then he gets out at the opposite side; but this has only succeeded in disorienting him, balling him up still further. All he’s still sure of, now, is that the bathroom door is somewhere down there at the foot of the bed! Now just watch closely and you’ll see the rest of it in pantomime. I’m going to show you just how it was done.”
He went out and they sat tensely, without a word, all eyes on the open window.
Suddenly they all jolted nervously, in unison. A jumbo, triple-toothed fishhook had come into the room, through the window, on the end of three interlocked rods—a single line running through them from hook to reel. It came in diagonally, from the projecting wing. It inclined of its own extreme length, in a gentle arc that swept the triple-threat hook down to floor level. Almost immediately, as the unseen “fisherman” started to withdraw it, it snagged the lower right-hand foot of the bed. It would have been hard for it not to, with its three barbs pointing out in as many directions at once. The bed started to move slowly around after it, on those cushioned casters. There was not enough vibration or rapidity to the maneuver to d
isturb a heavy sleeper. The open window was at the foot of the bed, where the bathroom had been before the change.
The tension of the line was relaxed. The rod jockeyed a little until the hook had been dislodged from the bed’s “ankle.” The liberated rod was swiftly but carefully withdrawn, as unobtrusively as it had appeared a moment before.
There was a short wait, horrible to endure. Then a new object appeared before the window opening—flashing refracting light, so that it was hard to identify for a minute even though the room lights were on in this case and the subjects were fully awake. It was a lighted miner’s lamp with an unusually high-powered reflector behind it. In addition to this, a black object of some kind, an old sweater or miner s shirt, was hooded around it so that it was almost invisible from the street or the windows on the floor below—all its rays beat inward to the room. It was suspended from the same trio of interlocked rods.
It swayed there motionless for a minute, a devil’s beacon, an invitation to destruction. Then it nudged inward, knocked repeatedly against the edge of the window frame, as though to deliberately awaken whoever was within. Then the light coyly retreated a little farther out into the open, but very imperceptibly, as if trying to snare something into pursuit. Then the light suddenly whisked up and was gone, drawn up through space.
With unbelievable swiftness, far quicker than anybody could have come up from the street, the closed door flew back at the touch of Strikers passkey, he darted in, tossed the “suicide note” he was holding onto the dresser, then swiveled the bed back into its original position in the room, scooped up imaginary money.
He stepped out of character and spread his hands conclusively. “See? Horribly simple and—simply horrible.”
The tension broke. Mrs. Young buried her face against her husband’s chest.
Death Locked In Page 33
