Duel

by Richard Matheson

  “I saw it,” she said quietly. “So help me God, I saw that eye.”

  I don’t know why I went on with it. Self torture, I guess. I really wanted to forget the whole thing, pretend it never even happened.

  “Why haven’t we seen it before, Ruth?” I asked. “We’ve seen the back of the man’s head before.”

  “Have we?” she said. “Have we?”

  “Sweetheart, somebody must have seen it. Do you think there’s never been anyone behind him?”

  “His hair parted, Rick,” she said, “and before I ran away I saw the hair going back over it, so you couldn’t see it.”

  I sat there silently. What to say now?—I thought. What could a guy possibly say to his wife when she talks to him like that? You’re nuts? You’re loony? Or the old, tired, “You’ve been working too hard.” She hadn’t been working too hard.

  Then again maybe she had been working overtime. With her imagination.

  “Are you going down with me tonight?” she asked.

  “All right,” I said quietly. “All right, sweetheart. Now will you go and lie down?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Sweetheart, go and lie down,” I said firmly. “I’ll go with you tonight. But I want you to lie down now.”

  She got up. She went into the bedroom and I heard the bedsprings squeak as she sat down, then drew up her legs and fell back on the pillow.

  I went in a little later to put a comforter over her. She was looking at the ceiling. I didn’t say anything to her. I don’t think she wanted to talk to me.

  “What can I do?” I said to Phil.

  Ruth was asleep. I’d sneaked across the hall.

  “Maybe she saw them?” he said. “Isn’t it possible?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “And you know what else is possible too.”

  “Look, you want to go down and see the janitor. You want to …”

  “No,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “You’re going down to the basement with her?”

  “If she keeps insisting,” I said. “Otherwise, no.”

  “Look,” he said. “When you go, come and get us.”

  I looked at him curiously. “You mean the thing is getting to you, too?” I said.

  He looked at me in a funny way. I saw his throat move.

  “Don’t … look, don’t tell anyone,” he said.

  He looked around, then turned back.

  “Marge told me the same thing,” he said. “She said the janitor has three eyes.”

  I went down after supper for some ice cream. Johnson was walking around.

  “They’re working you overtime,” I said as he started to walk beside me.

  “They expect some trouble from the local gangs,” he said.

  “I never saw any gangs,” I said distractedly.

  “They’re here,” he said.

  “Mmmm.”

  “How’s your wife?”

  “Fine,” I lied.

  “She still think the apartment house is a front?” he laughed.

  I swallowed. “No,” I said. “I’ve broken her of that. I think she was just kidding me all the time.”

  He nodded and left me at the corner. And for some reason I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking all the way home. I kept looking over my shoulder, too.

  “It’s time,” Ruth said.

  I grunted and rolled on my side. She nudged me. I woke up sort of hazy and looked automatically at the clock. The radium numbers told me it was almost four o’clock.

  “You want to go now?” I asked, too sleepy to be tactful.

  There was a pause. That woke me up.

  “I’m going,” she said quietly.

  I sat up. I looked at her in the half darkness, my heart starting to do a drum beat too heavily. My mouth and throat felt dry.

  “All right,” I said. “Wait till I get dressed.”

  She was already dressed. I heard her in the kitchen making some coffee while I put on my clothes. There was no noise. I mean it didn’t sound as if her hands were shaking. She spoke lucidly too. But when I stared into the bathroom mirror I saw a worried husband. I washed cold water in my face and combed my hair.

  “Thanks,” I said as she handed me the cup of coffee. I stood there, nervous before my own wife.

  She didn’t drink any coffee. “Are you awake?” she asked. I nodded. I noticed the flashlight and the screwdriver on the kitchen table. I finished the coffee.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s get it over with.”

  I felt her hand on my arm.

  “I hope you’ll …” she started. Then turned her face.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “We’d better go.”

  The house was dead quiet as we went into the hall. We were halfway to the elevator when I remembered Phil and Marge. I told her.

  “We can’t wait,” she said. “It’ll be light soon.”

  “Just wait and see if they’re up,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. She stood by the elevator door while I went down the hall and knocked quietly on the door of their apartment. There was no answer. I glanced up the hall.

  She was gone.

  I felt my heart lurch. Even though I was sure there was no danger in the basement, it scared me. “Ruth,” I muttered and headed for the stairs.

  “Wait a second!” I heard Phil call loudly from his door.

  “I can’t!” I called back, charging down.

  When I got to the basement I saw the open elevator door and light streaming from the inside. Empty.

  I looked around for a light switch but there wasn’t any. I started to move along the dark passage as fast as I could.

  “Hon!” I whispered urgently. “Ruth, where are you?”

  I found her standing before a doorway in the wall. It was open.

  “Now stop acting as if I were insane,” she said coldly.

  I gaped and felt a hand pressing against my cheek. It was my own. She was right. There were stairs. And it was lighted down there. I heard sounds. Sounds of metallic clickings and strange buzzings.

  I took her hand. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Her hand tightened in mine. “All right,” she said. “Never mind that now. There’s something flukey about all this.”

  I nodded. Then I said, “Yeah,” realizing she couldn’t see my nod in the darkness.

  “Let’s go down,” she said.

  “I don’t think we better,” I said.

  “We’ve got to know,” she said as if the entire problem had been assigned to us.

  “But there must be someone down there,” I said.

  “We’ll just peek,” she said.

  She pulled me. And I guess I felt too ashamed of myself to pull back. We started down. Then it came to me. If she was right about the doorway in the walls and the engines, she must be right about the janitor and he must really have …

  I felt a little detached from reality. East 7th Street, I told myself again. An apartment house on East 7th Street. It’s all real.

  I couldn’t quite convince myself.

  We stopped at the bottom. And I just stared. Engines, all right. Fantastic engines. And, as I looked at them it came to me what kind of engines they were. I’d read about science too, the non-fiction kind.

  I felt dizzy. You can’t adapt quick to something like that. To be plunged from a brick apartment house into this … this storehouse of energy. It got me.

  I don’t know how long we were there. But suddenly I realized we had to get out of there, report this thing.

  “Come on,” I said. We moved up the steps, my mind working like an engine itself. Spinning out ideas, fast and furious. All of them crazy—all of them acceptable. Even the craziest one.

  It was when we were moving down the basement hall we saw the janitor coming at us.

  It was dark still, even with a little light coming from the early morning haze. I grabbed Ruth and we ducked behind a stone
pillar. We stood holding our breaths, listening to the thud of his approaching shoes.

  He passed us. He was holding a flashlight but he didn’t play the beam around. He just moved straight for the open door.

  Then it happened.

  As he came into the patch of light from the open doorway he stopped. His head was turned away. The guy was facing the stairway.

  But he was looking at us.

  It knocked out what little breath I had left. I just stood there and stared at that eye in the back of his head. And, although there wasn’t any face around it, that damned eye had a smile going with it. A nasty, self-certain and frightening smile. He saw us and he was amused and wasn’t going to do anything about it.

  He went through the doorway and the door thudded shut behind him, the stone wall segment slid down and shut it from view.

  We stood there shivering.

  “You saw it,” she finally said.

  “Yes.”

  “He knows we saw those engines,” she said. “Still he didn’t do anything.”

  We were still talking as the elevator ascended.

  “Maybe there’s nothing really wrong,” I said. “Maybe …”

  I stopped, remembering those engines. I knew what kind they were.

  “What shall we do?” she asked. I looked at her. She was scared. I put my arm around her. But I was scared too.

  “We’d better get out,” I said. “Fast.”

  “We have nothing packed though,” she said.

  “We’ll pack them,” I said. “We’ll leave before morning. I don’t think they can do …”

  “They?”

  Why did I say that?—I wondered. They. It had to be a group though. The janitor didn’t make those engines all by himself.

  I think it was the third eye that capped my theory. And when we stopped to see Phil and Marge and they asked us what happened I told them what I thought. I don’t think it surprised Ruth much. She undoubtedly thought it herself.

  “I think the house is a rocket ship,” I said.

  They stared at me. Phil grinned; then he stopped when he saw I wasn’t kidding.

  “What?” Marge said.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” I said, sounding more like my wife than she did. “But those are rocket engines. I don’t know how in the hell they got there but …” I shrugged helplessly at the whole idea. “All I know is that they’re rocket engines.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s a … a ship?” Phil finished weakly, switching from statement to question in mid-sentence.

  “Yes,” said Ruth.

  And I shuddered. That seemed to settle it. She’d been right too often lately.

  “But …” Marge shrugged. “What’s the point?”

  Ruth looked at us. “I know,” she said.

  “What, baby?” I asked, afraid to be asking.

  “That janitor,” she said. “He’s not a man. We know that. That third eye makes it …”

  “You mean the guy has one?” Phil asked incredulously.

  I nodded. “He has one. I saw it.”

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  “But he’s not a man,” Ruth said again. “Humanoid, yes, but not an earthling. He might look like he does actually—except for the eye. But he might be completely different, so different he had to change his form. Give himself that extra eye just to keep track of us when we wouldn’t expect it.”

  Phil ran a shaking hand through his hair.

  “This is crazy,” he said.

  He sank down into a chair. So did the girls. I didn’t. I felt uneasy about sticking around. I thought we should grab our hats and run. They didn’t seem to feel in immediate danger though. I finally decided it wouldn’t hurt to wait until morning. Then I’d tell Johnson or something. Nothing could happen now.

  “This is crazy,” Phil said again.

  “I saw those engines,” I said. “They’re really there. You can’t get away from it.”

  “Listen,” Ruth said, “they’re probably extraterrestrials.”

  “What are you talking about?” Marge asked irritably. She was good and afraid, I saw.

  “Hon,” I contributed weakly, “you’ve been reading an awful lot of science-fiction magazines.”

  Her lips drew together. “Don’t start in again,” she said. “You thought I was crazy when I suspected this place. You thought so when I told you I saw those engines. You thought so when I told you the janitor had three eyes. Well, I was right all three times. Now, give me some credit.”

  I shut up. And she went on.

  “What if they’re from another planet,” she rephrased for Marge’s benefit. “Suppose they want some Earth people to experiment on. To observe,” she amended quickly, I don’t know for whose benefit. The idea of being experimented on by three-eyed janitors from another planet had nothing exciting about it.

  “What better way,” Ruth was saying, “of getting people than to build a rocket ship apartment house, rent it out cheap and get it full of people fast?”

  She looked at us without yielding an inch.

  “And then,” she said, “just wait till some morning early when everybody was asleep and … goodbye Earth.”

  My head was whirling. It was crazy but what could I say? I’d been cleverly dubious three times. I couldn’t afford to doubt now. It wasn’t worth the risk. And, in my flesh, I sort of felt she was right.

  “But the whole house,” Phil was saying. “How could they get it … in the air?”

  “If they’re from another planet they’re probably centuries ahead of us in space travel.”

  Phil started to answer. He faltered, then he said, “But it doesn’t look like a ship.”

  “The house might be a shell over the ship,” I said. “It probably is. Maybe the actual ship includes only the bedrooms. That’s all they’d need. That’s where everybody would be in the early morning hours if …”

  “No,” Ruth said. “They couldn’t knock off the shell without attracting much attention.”

  We were all silent laboring under a thick cloud of confusion and half-formed fears. Half formed because you can’t shape your fears of something when you don’t even know what it is.

  “Listen,” Ruth said.

  It made me shudder. It made me want to tell her to shut up with her horrible forebodings. Because they made too much sense.

  “Suppose it is a building,” she said. “Suppose the ship is outside of it.”

  “But …” Marge was practically lost. She got angry because she was lost. “There’s nothing outside the house, that’s obvious!”

  “Those people would be way ahead of us in science,” Ruth said. “Maybe they’ve mastered invisibility of matter.”

  We all squirmed at once, I think. “Babe,” I said.

  “Is it possible?” Ruth asked strongly.

  I sighed. “It’s possible. Just possible.”

  We were quiet. Then Ruth said, “Listen.”

  “No,” I cut in, “you listen. I think maybe we’re going overboard on this thing. But there are engines in the basement and the janitor does have three eyes. On the basis of that I think we have reason enough to clear out. Now.”

  We all agreed on that anyway.

  “We’d better tell everybody in the building,” Ruth said. “We can’t leave them here.”

  “It’ll take too long,” Marge argued.

  “No, we have to,” I said. “You pack, babe. I’ll tell them.”

  I headed for the door and grabbed the knob.

  Which didn’t turn.

  A bolt of panic drove through me. I grabbed at it and yanked hard. I thought for a second, fighting down fear, that it was locked on the inside. I checked.

  It was locked on the outside.

  “What is it?” Marge said in a shaking voice. You could sense a scream bubbling up in her.

  “Locked,” I said.

  Marge gasped. We all stared at each other.

  “It’s true,” Ruth said, horrified. “Oh, my God, it�
�s all true then.”

  I made a dash for the window. Then the place started to vibrate as if we were being hit by an earthquake. Dishes started to rattle and fall off shelves. We heard a chair crash onto its side in the kitchen.

  “What is it!” Marge cried again. Phil grabbed for her as she started to whimper. Ruth ran to me and we stood there, frozen, feeling the floor rock under our feet.

  “The engines!” Ruth suddenly cried. “They’re starting them!”

  “They have to warm up!” I made a wild guess. “We can still get out!”

  I let go of Ruth and grabbed a chair. For some reason I felt that the windows had been automatically locked too.

  I hurled the chair through the glass. The vibrations were getting worse.

  “Quick!” I shouted over the noise. “Out the fire escape! Maybe we can make it!”

  Impelled by panic and dread, Marge and Phil came running over the shaking floor. I almost shoved them out through the gaping window hole. Marge tore her skirt. Ruth cut her fingers. I went last, dragging a glass dagger through my leg. I didn’t even feel it I was so keyed up.

  I kept pushing them, hurrying down the fire escape steps. Marge caught a slipper heel in between two gratings and it snapped off. Her slipper came off. She limped, half fell down the orange-painted metal steps, her face white and twisted with fear. Ruth in her loafers clattered down behind Phil. I came last, shepherding them frantically.

  We saw other people at their windows. We heard windows crashing above and below. We saw an older couple crawl hurriedly through their window and start down. They held us up.

  “Look out, will you!” Marge shouted at them in a fury.

  They cast a frightened look over their shoulders.

  Ruth looked back at me, her face drained of color. “Are you coming?” she asked quickly, her voice shaking.

  “I’m here,” I said breathlessly. I felt as if I were going to collapse on the steps. Which seemed to go on forever.

  At the bottom was a ladder. We saw the old lady drop from it with a sickening thud, crying out in pain as her ankle twisted under her. Her husband dropped down and helped her up. The building was vibrating harshly now. We saw dust scaling out from between the bricks.

  My voice joined the throng, all crying the same word, “Hurry!”