Phantom lady

by Cornell Woolrich

  He was forced to go toward her, because it was in that direction his path lay on leaving here of a night. They passed within a foot of one another, for the sidewalk was fairly narrow and she was posted out in the middle of it, not skulking back against the wall. Though her face turned slowly in time with his passing, he saw that she would have let him go by without speaking, and goaded by this silent obstinacy, he spoke himself, although only a second before he had intended ignoring her.

  “What is it ye want of me?” he rumbled truculently.

  “Have I said I want anything of you?”

  He made to go on, then swung around on his heel to face her accusingly. “You sat in there just now, never once took your eyes off me! Never once the livelong night, d’ye hear me?” He pounded one hand within the other for outraged emphasis. “And now I find you outside here waiting around—”

  “Is it forbidden to stand here in the street?”

  He shook a thick finger at her ponderously. “I’m warning you, young woman! I’m telling you for your own good—!”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t open her mouth, and silence is always so victorious in argument. He turned and

  shambled off, breathing heavily with his own bafflement.

  He didn’t look back. Within twenty paces, even without looking back, he had become aware that she was advancing in turn behind him. It was not difficult to do so, for she was apparently making no effort to conceal the fact. The ticking off of her small brittle shoes was clear cut if subdued on the quiet night pavement.

  An up and down intersection glided by beneath him like a slightly depressed asphalt stream bed. Then presently another. Then still another. And through it all, as the town slowly veered over from west to east, came that unhurried tick-chick, tick-chick, behind him in the middle distance.

  He turned his head, the first time simply to warn her off. She came on with maddening casualness, as though it were three in the afternoon. Her walk was slow, almost stately, as the feminine gait so often is when the figure is held erect and the pace is leisurely.

  He went on again briefly, then turned once more. This time his entire body, and flung himself back toward her in a sudden flurry of ungovernable exasperation.

  She stopped advancing, but she held her ground, made no slightest retrograde move.

  He closed in and bellowed full into her face, “Turn back now, will ye? That’s enough of this now, d’ye hear? Turn back, or I’ll—”

  “I am going this way, too.” was all she said.

  Again the circumstances were in her favor. Had their roles been reversed— But what man has sufficiently stout armor against ridicule to risk calling a policeman to complain that a solitary young girl is following him along the streets? She was not reviling him, she was not soliciting him, she was simply walking in the same direction he was; he was as helpless against her as he had been in the bar earlier.

  He maintained his stance before her for a moment or two, but his defiance was of that face-saving kind that only marks time while it is waiting to extricate itself with the least possible embarrassment from a false situation. He

  spun around finally with a snort through his nose, meant to convey belligerence, but that somehow sounded a bit like windy helplessness. He drew away from her, resumed his homeward journeying.

  Ten paces, fifteen, twenty. Behind him, as at a given signal, it recommenced again, steady as slow rain in a puddle. Tick-chick, tick-chick, tick-chick. She was coming after him once more.

  He rounded the appointed corner, started up the roofed over sidewalk stairway he used every night to reach his train. He halted up above, at the rear of the plank floored station gallery that led through to the tracks, scanning the chutelike incline he had just emerged from for signs of her.

  The oncoming tap of her footfalls took on a metallic ring as her feet clicked against the steel rims guarding the steps. In a moment her head came into view above the midway break in the stair line.

  A turnstile rumbled around after him, and he turned there on the other side of it, at bay, took up a defensive position.

  She cleared the steps and came on, as matter-of-factly, as equably, as though he wasn’t to be seen there at all in the gap fronting her. She already held the coin pinched between her fingers. She came on until there was just the width of the turnstile arm between them.

  He backed his arm at her, swinging it up all the way past its opposite shoulder, ready to fling it loose. It would have sent her spinning about the enclosure. His lip lifted in a canine snarl. “Get outa here, now. Gawan down below where ye came from!” He reached down and quickly plugged the coin slot with the ball of his thumb just ahead of her own move toward it.

  She desisted, shifted over to the adjoining one. Instantly he was there before her again. She shifted back to the original one. He reversed himself once more, again blocked it. The superstructure began to vibrate with the approach of one of the infrequent night trains.

  This time he finally flung his arm out in the back sweep he had been threatening at each confrontation. The blow would have been enough to fell her if it had caught her. She turned her head aside with the fastidious little quirk of someone detecting an unpleasant odor. It fanned her face.

  Instantly there was a peremptory rapping on glass somewhere close at hand. The station agent thrust head and shoulder out of the sideward door of his dingy little booth. “Cut that out, you. Whaddye trying to do, keep people from using this station? I’ll run you in!”

  He turned to defend himself, the taboo partially lifted since this intercession wasn’t of his own seeking. “This girl’s nuts or something, she ought to be sent to Bellevue. She’s been follying me along the street, I can’t get rid of her.”

  She said in that same dispassionate voice, “Are you the only one that can ride the Third Avenue El?”

  He appealed to the agent once more, who continued to hang slant-wise out of the doorway as a sort of self-appointed arbiter. “Ask her where she’s going. She don’t know herself!”

  Her answer was addressed to the agent, but with an emphasis that could not have been meant for him, that must have had some purpose of its own. “I’m going down to Twenty-Seventh Street, Twenty-Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues. I have a right to use this station, haven’t I?”

  The face of the man blocking her way had suddenly grown white, as though the locality she had mentioned conveyed a shock of hidden meaning to him. It should have. It was his own.

  She knew ahead of time where he was going. It was useless therefore to attempt to shake her off, outdistance her in any way.

  The agent rendered his decision, with a majestic sweep of his hand. “Come on through, miss.”

  Her coin suddenly swelled up in the reflector and she had

  come through the next one over, without waiting for him to clear the way for her. A thing which he seemed incapable of doing at the moment, no longer through obstinacy so much as through a temporary paralysis of movement with which his discovery of her knowledge of his eventual destination seemed to have afflicted him.

  The train had arrived, meanwhile, but it was on the opposite side, not theirs. It ebbed away again, and the station breastworks dimmed once more behind it.

  She sauntered to the outer lip of the platform and stood there waiting, and presently he had come out in turn, but digressing so that he emerged two pillar lengths to the rearward of her. Since both were looking the same way, in quest of a train, he had her in view but she did not have him.

  Presently, without noticing what she was doing, she be-began to amble further rearward along the platform, relieving the monotony of the wait by aimless movement as most people are inclined to do at such a time. This had soon taken her beyond the agent’s limited range of vision, and out to where the station roof ended and the platform itself narrowed to a single-file strip of runway. Here she came to a halt again, and would have eventually turned and retraced her steps back toward where she had come from. But while standing
there, peering trainward and with her back still to him, an unaccountable tension, a sense of impending danger of some sort, began slowly to come over her.

  It must have been something about the way his tread sounded to her on the planks. He too was straying now in turn, and toward her. He was moving sluggishly, just as she had. It wasn’t that; it was that his tread, while distinct enough in the unnatural stillness that reigned over the station, had some sort of a furtive undertone to it. It was in the rhythm, rather than in any actual attempt to muffle it. It was somehow a leashed tread, a tread of calculated approach trying to disguise itself as a meaningless ramble. She could not know how she knew; she only knew, before she had even turned, that something had entered his mind in the few moments since her back had been turned. Something that had not been there before.

  She turned, and rather sharply.

  He was still little better than his original two stanchion lengths away from her. It was not that that confirmed her impression. She caught him in the act of glancing down into the track bed beside him, where the third rail lay, as he drifted along parallel to it. It was that.

  She understood immediately. A jostle of the elbow, a deft, tripping sideswipe of the foot, as they made to pass one another. She took in at a glance the desperate position she had unwittingly strayed into. She was penned against the far end of the station. Without realizing it she had cut herself off from the agent’s protective radius of vision altogether. His booth was set back inside to command the turnstiles, could not command the sweep of the platform.

  The two of them were alone on the platform. She looked across the way, and the opposite side was altogether barren, had just been cleared by the northbound train. There was no downtown train in sight yet, either, offering that dubious deterrent.

  To retreat still further would be suicidal; the platform ended completely only a few yards behind her back, she would only wedge herself into a cul-de-sac, be more at his mercy than ever. To get back to the midsection where the agent offered safety, she would have to go toward him, pass him, which was the very act he was seeking to achieve.

  If she screamed now, without waiting for the overt act, in hopes of bringing the agent out on to the platform in time, she ran a very real risk of bringing on all the faster the very thing she was trying to prevent. He was in a keyed-up state, she could tell by the look on his face, on which a scream, more likely than not, would produce the opposite effect from that intended. This temporary aberration was due to sheer fright on his part more than rage, and a scream might frighten him still further.

  She had frightened him badly, she had done her work only too well.

  She edged warily inward, back as far as possible from the tracks, until she had come up close against the row of advertisements lining the guard rail. She pressed her hips flat against them, began to sidle along them, turned watchfully outward toward him. Her dress rustled as it swept their surfaces one by one, so close did she cling.

  As she drew within his orbit he began to veer in toward her on a diagonal, obviously to cut off her further advance. There was a slowness about both their movements that was horrible; they were like lazy fish swimming in a tank, on that deserted platform three stories above the street, with its tawny widely spaced lights strung along overhead.

  He still came on, and so did she, and they were bound to meet in another two or three paces.

  The turnstile drummed unexpectedly, around out of sight from them, and a colored girl of dubious pursuits came out on the platform just a few short yards away from the two of them, bent almost lopsided as she moved to scratch herself far down the side of her leg.

  They slowly melted into relaxation, each in the pose in which she had surprised them. The girl, with her back to the billboards, stayed that way, slumped a little lower, buckled at the knees now. He leaned deflatedly against a chewing gum slot machine at hand beside him. She could almost see the recent fell purpose oozing out of him at every pore. Finally he turned away from his nearness to her with a floundering movement. Nothing had been said, the whole thing had been in pantomime from beginning to end.

  That would never come again. She had the upper hand once more.

  The train came flickering in like sheet lightning, and they both boarded the same car, at opposite ends. They sat the full car length away from one another, still recuperating from their recent crisis; he huddled forward over his lap, she with her spine held convex, staring upward at the ceiling

  lights. In between there was no one but the colored girl, who continued to scratch at intervals and scan the station numbers, as though waiting to pick one at random to alight at.

  They both left the car at the Twenty-Eighth Street station, again at opposite ends. He was aware of her coming down the stairs in his wake. She could tell that he was, although he didn’t look back. The inclination of his head told her that. He seemed passively acquiescent now to letting her have her way, follow him the short rest of the way, if that was her intent.

  They both went down Twenty-Seventh Street toward Second, he on one side of the street, she on the other. He maintained a lead of about four doorways, and she let him keep it. She knew which entrance he would go into, and he knew that she knew. The stalk had now become a purely mechanical thing, with its only remaining unknown quantity the why. But that was the dominant factor.

  He went in, was inked from sight, within one of the black door slits down near the corner. He must have heard that remorseless, maniacally calm tick-chick, tick-chick behind him on the other side of the street to the very last, but he refrained from looking back, gave no sign. They had parted company at last, for the first time since early evening.

  She came on until she had used up the distance there had been between them, stood even with the house. Then she took up her position there, and stood in full sight on the sidewalk opposite, watching a certain two of the dozen-odd darkened windows.

  Presently they had lighted, as in greeting at someone’s awaited entry. Then within a moment they blacked out once more, as if the act had been quickly countermanded. They remained dark after that, though at times the grayish film of the curtains would seem to stir and shift, with the elusiveness of a reflection on the glass. She knew she was being watched through them, by one or more persons.

  She maintained her vigil steadfastly.

  An elevated train wriggled by like a glowworm up at the far end of the street. A taxi passed, and the driver glanced at her curiously, but he already had a fare. A late wayfarer came by along the opposite side of the street, and looked over at her, trying to discern encouragement. She averted her face angularly, only righted it again after he was well on his way.

  A policeman suddenly stood at her elbow, appearing from nowhere. He must have stood watching, undetected, for some little time before.

  “Just a minute, miss. I’ve had a complaint from a woman in one of the flats over there that you followed her husband home from work, and have been standing staring at their windows for the past half hour.”

  “I have.”

  “Well, y’d better move on.”

  “I want you to take hold of my arm, please, and walk me with you until we get around the corner, as though you were running me in.” He did, rather half-heartedly. They stopped again when they were out of sight of the windows. “Here.” She produced a piece of paper, showed it to him. He peered at it in the uncertain light of a near-by lamppost.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “Homicide Squad. You can call him and check on it, if you want to. I’m doing this with his full knowledge and permission.”

  “Oh, sort of undercover work, hunh?” he said with increased respect.

  “And please ignore all future complaints from those particular people about me. You’re apt to get a great many of them during the next few days and nights.”

  She made a phone call of her own, after he had left her.

  “How is it working out?” the voice on the other end asked.

  “He’s alr
eady showing signs of strain. He broke a glass behind the bar. He nearly gave in to an impulse to throw me off the elevated platform just now.”

  “That looks like it. Be careful, don’t go too close to him

  when there’s no one else around. Remember, the main thing is don’t give him an inkling of what the whole thing’s about, of what’s behind it. Don’t put the question to him, that’s the whole trick. The moment he finds out what you’re after, it goes into reverse, loses its effect. It’s the not knowing that keeps him on edge, will finally wear him down to where we want him.”

  “What times does he start out for work, as a rule?” “He leaves the flat around five, each afternoon,” her informant said, as though with documentary evidence at his fingers to refer to.

  “He’ll find me on hand tomorrow, when he does.”

  The third night the manager suddenly approached the bar to one side of her, unasked, and called him over.

  “What’s the matter, why don’t you wanna wait on this young lady? I been watching. Twenty minutes she’s been sitting here like this. Couldn’t you see her?”

  His face was gray, and the seams were shiny. It got that way whenever he had to come this close to her now.

  “I can’t—” he said brokenly, keeping his voice muted so that others wouldn’t hear it. “Mr. Anselmo, it’s not human —she’s torturing me—you don’t understand—” He coughed on the verge of tears, and his cheeks swelled out, then flattened again.

  The girl, less than a foot away, sat looking on at the two of them, with the tranquil, guileless eyes of a child.

  “Three nights she’s been in here like this now. She keeps looking at me—”

  “Sure she keeps looking at you, she’s waiting to get waited on,” the manager rebuked him. “What do you want her to do?” He peered closer at him, detected the strangeness in his face. “What’s the matter, you sick? If you’re sick and want to go home, I’ll phone Pete to come down.”

  “No, no!” he pleaded hurriedly, almost with a frightened sob in his voice. “I don’t want to go home—then she’ll only follow me along the streets, stand outside my windows