Phantom lady

by Cornell Woolrich

  “Darling,” she thought, sidling away from a rabid saxophone player until he gave up following her any more with a final ceilingward blat of unutterable woe, “Oh, darling, you’re costing me dear.

  Futuristic rhythm, never on the beat,

  Any near drum, in my eardrum, throws me off my feet.”

  She managed to work her way around two sides of the room until she got to the boiler factory that was the trap drum. She caught his pistoning arms, held them down, restrained them long enough to make herself heard. “Cliff, take me out of here. I can’t stand it! I can’t stand any more of it, I tell you! I’m going to keel over in another minute.”

  He was already doped with marihuana. She could tell by his eyes. “Where’ll we go, my place?”

  She had to say yes, she could see that was the only thing that would get him out of there.

  He got up, guided her before him toward the door, stumbling a little. He got it open for her, and she fled through it like something released from a slingshot. Then he came out after her. He seemed free to leave at will, without an explanation or farewell. The rest didn’t even seem to notice his defection. The closing of the door cut the frenzied turmoil in half, as with the clean sweep of a knife, and there was sudden silence, so strange at first.

  You’re the unexpected, disconnected time. Let me think in, sleep and drink in —

  The restaurant upstairs was dark and empty, save for a night light left burning far at the back, and when she had gained the sidewalk in front, the open air made her almost light-headed, it was so cool and rare and crystal clear after that fever chamber. She thought she’d never breathed anything so sweet and pure before. She leaned there against the side of the building, drinking it in, her cheek pressed to the wall like someone prostrated. He took a moment longer to come out after her, adjusting the door or something.

  It must have been four by now, but it was still dark and the town was asleep all around them. For a moment there was a temptation to flee for dear life down the street, away from him, and have done with the whole thing. She could have outrun him, she knew; he was in no condition to go after her.

  She stayed there, passive. She had seen a photograph in her room. She knew that was the first thing that would meet her eyes when she opened the door. Then he was beside her, and the chance was gone.

  They went over in a cab. It was in one of a row of old houses done over into apartments, a single one to a floor. He took her up to the second floor and unlocked it and turned on the lights for her. It was a depressing sort of place; age-blackened flooring underneath a thin application of varnish, remote ceilings, high, coffinlike window embrasures. It wasn’t a place to come to at four in the morning. Not with anyone, much less him.

  She shivered a little and stood still, close by the door, trying not to be too aware of the over-elaborate way he was securing it on the inside. She wanted to keep her thinking as clear and as relaxed as she possibly could, and that thought would only muddy it.

  He’d finished locking her in. “We don’t need these,” he said.

  “No, leave it on,” she said matter-of-factly, “I’m cold.”

  There wasn’t very much time.

  “What’re you going to do, just stand there?”

  “No,” she said with absent-minded docility, “no, I’m not going to just stand here.” She moved one foot inattentively forward, almost like a skater trying out the ice.

  She kept looking around. Desperately looking around. What would start it? The color. Orange. Something orange.

  “Well what’re you looking for?” he said querulously. “It’s just a room. Didn’t you ever see a room before?”

  She’d found it at last. A cheap rayon shade on a lamp far over at the other end of the room. She went over to it, turned it on. It cast a small glow in the shape of a halo above itself against the wall. She put her hand on it, turned to him. “I love this color.”

  He didn’t pay any attention.

  She kept her hand on it. “You’re not listening. I said this is my favorite color.”

  This time he looked Wearily over. “All right, what about it?”

  “I wish I had a hat this color.”

  “I’ll buy you one. T’morrow or the next day.”

  “Look, like this, this is how I mean.” She picked up the small base bodily, held it riding on her shoulder with the light still on inside the shade. Then she turned toward him so that the shade seemed to be topping her head. “Look at me. Look at me good. Didn’t you ever see anyone wearing a hat this color? Doesn’t this remind you of someone you once saw?”

  He blinked twice, with owl-like solemnity.

  “Keep looking,” she pleaded. “Just keep looking like that. You can remember if you want to. Didn’t you ever see anyone sitting right behind you in the theater, in the same seat I was in tonight, wearing a hat this color?”

  He said, quite momentously, quite incomprehensibly. “Oh

  —that was that five hundred smackeroos I got!” And then suddenly shading his eyes with one hand as if in perplexity, “Hey, I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about that.” Then he looked up and asked with a sort of trustful blankness, “Have 1 already told you?”

  “Yes, sure.” That was the only answer to give. He might balk at telling her the first time, but not at repeating it, if the damage was already done. Those cigarettes probably did something to their powers of memory.

  She had to grab it on the fly, she daren’t let it go by, even though she didn’t know if this was it yet, or what this was. She put the lamp down fast, moved toward him equally fast, yet somehow managing to give an impression of leisureli-ness. “But tell me about it over again. I like to listen to it. Go on, you can tell me. Cliff, because you know I’m your new friend, you said so yourself. What harm is there?”

  He blinked again. “What are we talking about?” he said helplessly. “I forgot for a minute.”

  She had to get his drug-disconnected chain of thought in motion again. It was like a feeder line that slips its cogs every once in a while and dangles helplessly. “Orange hat. Look, up here. Five hundred—five hundred smackeroos, remember? She sat in the same seat I did.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said docilely. “Right behind me. I just looked at her.” He gave a maniacal laugh, stilled it again as suddenly. “I got five hundred smackeroos just for looking at her. Just for looking at her and not saying I did.”

  She saw that her arms were creeping slowly up his collar, twining around his neck. She didn’t try to stop them, they seemed to be acting independently of her. Her face was close to his, turned upward looking into it. How close you can be to a thought, it occurred to her, without guessing what it is. “Tell me more about it, Cliff. Tell me more about it. I love to listen to you when you’re talking!”

  His eyes died away in the fumes. “I forgot again what I was saying.”

  It was off again. “You got five hundred dollars for not

  saying you looked at her. Remember, the lady in the orange hat? Did she give you the five hundred dollars, Cliff? Who gave you the five hundred dollars? Ah, come on, tell me.”

  “A hand gave ‘em to me, in the dark. A hand, and a voice, and a handkerchief. Oh yeah, and there was one other thing: a gun.”

  Her fingers kept making a slow sweep to the back of his head, and then returning each time. “Yes, but whose hand?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I never found out since. Sometimes I ain’t even sure it really happened. I think it musta been the weed made it seem Hke it happened. Then again, sometimes I know it did.”

  “Tell it to me anyway.”

  “Here’s what happened. I came home late one night, after the show, and when I come in the hall downstairs, where there’s usually a light, it was dark. Like the bulb went out. Just as I feel my way over to the stairs, a hand reaches out and stops me. Kind of heavy and cold, laying on me hard.

  “I backed against the wall and says, ‘Who’s there? Who are you?’ It was a man
, I could tell by the voice. After a while, when my eyes got a little more used to it, I could make out something white, like a handkerchief, up where his face should be. It made his voice sound all blurry. But I could hear him all right.

  “He gave me my own name first, and what my job was; he seemed to know everything about me. Then he asked me if I remember seeing a certain lady at the theater a night ago, in an orange hat.

  “I told him I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t reminded me, but now that he’d reminded me of it, I did.

  “Then he said, still in that same quiet voice, without even getting excited at all, ‘How would you like to be shot dead?’

  “I couldn’t answer at all, my voice wouldn’t work. He took my hand and put it on something cold he was holding. It was a gun. I jumped, but he made me hold my hand there

  a minute until he was sure I got what it was. He said, ‘That’s for you, if you tell anyone that.’

  “He waited a minute and then he went on speaking. He said, ‘Or would you rather have five hundred dollars?’

  “I hear paper rustling and he puts something in my hand. ‘Here’s five hundred dollars,’ he says. ‘Have you got a match? Go ahead, I’ll let you light a match, so you can see it for yourself.’ I did, and it was five hundred dollars all right. Then when my eyes started to go up to where his face was, about, they just got as far as the handkerchief, and he blew the match out.

  ” ‘Now you didn’t see that lady,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t any lady. No matter who asks you, say no, keep saying no —and you’ll keep on living.’ He waited a minute and then he asked me, ‘Now if they ask you, what is it you say?”

  “I said, T didn’t see that lady. There wasn’t any lady.’ And I was shaking all over.

  ” ‘Now go on upstairs,’ he said. ‘Good night.’ The wav it sounded through that handkerchief, it was like something coming from a grave.

  “I couldn’t get inside my door fast enough. I beat it upstairs and locked myself in and kept away from the windows. I’d been blazing a reefer already before it happened, and you know what that does to you.”

  He gave another of those chilling jangles of laughter, that always stopped dead again as suddenly. “I lost the whole five hundred on a horse the next day,” he added abjectly.

  He shifted harassedly, dislodging her from the chair arm she’d been perched on. “You’ve brought it back again, by making me talk about it. You’ve made me scared again and all shaky, like I was so many times afterward. Gimme another weed, I want to blaze again. I’m going down and I need another lift.”

  “I don’t carry marihuana on me.”

  “There must be some in your bag, from over there. You were just over there with me, you must have brought some

  away with you.” He evidently thought she’d been using them as well as he.

  It was lying there on the table, and before she could get over and stop him he’d opened it and strewn everything out.

  “No,” she cried out in sudden alarm, “that isn’t anything, don’t look at it!”

  He’d already read it before she could pull it away from him. It was the forgotten slip of paper from Burgess. His surprise was guileless for a moment, he didn’t take in its full meaning at first. “Why, that’s me! My name and where I work and ev—”

  “No! No!”

  He warded her off. “And to call the precinct house number first, if not there call—”

  She could see the mistrust starting to film his face, cloud it over. It was coming up fast, almost like a storm, behind his eyes. Behind it in turn was something more dangerous; stark, unreasoning fright, the fright of drug hallucination, the fright that destroys those it fears. His eyes started to dilate. The black centers of them seemed to swallow up the color of the pupils. “They sent you on purpose, you didn’t just happen to meet me. Somebody’s after me, and I don’t know who, if I could only remember who— Somebody’s going to shoot me with a gun, somebody said they’d shoot me with a gun! If I could only think what I wasn’t supposed to do— You made me do it!”

  She’d had no experience with marihuana addicts before; she’d heard the word, but to her it had no meaning. She had no way of knowing the inflaming effect it has on emotions such as suspicion, mistrust and fear, expanding them well beyond the explosion point, providing they are latent already in the subject. She could tell by looking at him that she had somebody irrational to deal with, that much was apparent. The unpredictable current of his thoughts had veered dangerously, and there was no way for her to dam it, turn it aside. She couldn’t reach into his mind, because

  she was sane, and he—temporarily—wasn’t.

  He stood misleadingly still for a moment, head inclined, looking up at her from under his brows, ‘i been telling you something I shouldn’t. Oh, if I could only remember now what it was!” He palmed his forehead distractedly.

  “No, you haven’t, you haven’t been telling me anything,” she tried to soothe him. She had realized she’d better get out of the place without delay, and also, instinctively, that to make her purpose apparent was to invite interception. She began moving slowly backward, a surreptitious step at a time. She had placed her hands behind her back, so they would be in a position to find the door, try to unlock it, before he could realize her purpose. At the same time she tried to keep her gradual withdrawal from attracting his attention by staring fixedly into his face, holding his gaze with her own. She realized she was becoming increasingly taut at the horrible slowness of the maneuver. It was like backing away from a coiled snake, fearful that if you move too fast it will lash out all the quicker, fearful that if you move too slow—

  “Yes, I did, I told you something I shouldn’t. And now you’re going to get out of here and tell someone. Somebody that’s after me. And they’ll come and get me like they said they would—”

  “No, honest you haven’t, you only think you have.” He was getting worse instead of better. Her face must be growing smaller in his eyes, she couldn’t keep him from realizing she was drawing away from him much longer. She was up against the wall now, and her desperately circling hands, groping secretly behind her, found only smooth unbroken plaster surface instead of the door lock. She’d aimed wrong, she’d have to change directions. Out of the corner of her eye she placed its dark shape a few yards to her left. If he’d only stand there like that, where she’d left him, a second or two longer—

  It was harder to move sidewise without seeming to than it had been rearward. She would sidle one heel out of true.

  then work the ball of the foot over after it, then do the same with the second foot, bringing them together again, all without letting any motion show in her upper body.

  “Don’t you remember, I was sitting on the arm of your chair, smoothing your hair, that’s all I was doing. Ah, don’t!” she whimpered in a desperate last-minute effort to forestall him.

  It was only a few seconds since this minuet of terror had begun. It seemed like all night. If she’d only had another of those devilish cigarettes to throw at him. maybe—

  She grazed some small Ughtweight table or stand in her crabwise creep, and some little object fell off. That slight sound, that tick, that thud, that inadvertent betrayal of motion going on, did it; shattered the glaze, seemed to act as the signal his crazed nerves had been waiting for; unleashed what she’d instinctively known all along was coming from one moment to the next. He broke stance, like a figure in a waxworks toppling from its pedestal, came at her, arms out in a sort of off-balance lurch.

  She floundered to the door with a muted, thin little cry that was no cry at all, only had time to ascertain one thing with her wildly flailing hands—that the key still projected, had been left in. Then she had to go on past it, he gave her no time to do anything with it.

  She broke away from the wall, cut the corner of the room and made for the window, which was set into that next side. There was a blind down over it, effacing the exact outline of its sash frame, hampering the single, sketchy attempt to
fling up the sash and scream out for help that was all his onrush allowed her. There was a stringy, dust laden drape hanging on each side of the embrasure. She flung one behind her at him, and it slowed him for a moment until he could get its hampering folds off his neck and shoulder.

  There was a derelict sofa standing out diagonally across the next wall angle. She got in behind that, and before she could get out at the opposite end. he had sealed her in. They backed and filled along its length twice, she on her side, he

  on his, in a cat and mouse play, a Victorian beauty and the beast pantomime, that she would have laughed at until five minutes ago as being something that just didn’t occur, that belonged in “East Lynne,” but that she would never laugh at again for the rest of her life—although that apparently would only be for another two or three minutes.

  “Don’t!” she kept panting. “No! Don’t! You know what they’ll do to you—if you do this to me up here—you know what they’ll do to you!”

  She wasn’t talking to a man, she was talking to the aftereffects of a narcotic.

  He suddenly took a short-cut by planting one knee on the seat of the sofa and grasping for her across the top of it. There wasn’t any room in the Uttle triangle for her to withdraw far enough. His fingers caught under the neckline of her dress, at one shoulder. Before they could tighten, close on it, she had freed herself by flinging her body around in two or three complete revolutions. It pulled the whole thing down off her shoulder on that side, but the contact broke.

  She flashed out past the gap at the lower end of the sofa while his body was still prone across the top of it, and skimmed along the wall on the fourth and final side of the room. She had now made a complete circuit of it, was coming back to the door again, on the next side. To cut out into the middle was to go toward him again, at any particular point, for he had the inside position.

  There was an unhghted opening on this last side, the doorway to either a closet or bath, but after her experience with the sofa just now she flashed past it without stopping, fearful of being trapped even more quickly in whatever narrower space was offered on the other side of it. Besides, the outer door, the only way to final safety, lay just ahead.