Silence. Silence that crouched waiting, like an animal ready to pounce. Silence, that pounded, throbbed like a drum. Silence that went on and on, and almost gave birth to hope, it was so protracted.
Then a very slight sound from in there, barely distinguishable at all—the slither of a window sash coming down to the bottom, sealing the room up.
Her own door opened softly, and a ghostly white-gowned form slithered silently past along the wall, lowered the window in here, stuffed rags around its frame. She must have had the water heater turned on for quite some time already—without being lit this time, of course. The sharp, pungent, acrid odor of illuminating gas drifted in after her, thickened momentarily. She slipped out again, on her errand of death.
One of the lower steps of the staircase, far below, creaked slightly at her passage. Even the slight grinding of the oven door, as it came open, reached Janet Miller’s straining ears in the stillness. She must have put them back in there again, while she was washing the dishes.
The odor thickened. Janet Miller began to hear a humming in her ears, at first far away, then drawing nearer, nearer, like a train rushing onward through a long echoing tunnel. He coughed, moaned a little in his sleep, on the other side of the wall. Sleep that was turning into death. He must be getting the effects worse in there. He was nearer the bath, nearer the source of annihilation.
The form glided into Janet’s room again. It looked faintly bluish now, not white any more, from the gas refraction. Janet Miller wanted to be sick at her stomach. There was a roaring in her ears. A train was rushing through her skull, in one side out the other now—and the room was lurching around her.
She was pulled up from the pillow she rested on, a voice seemed to say from miles away, “I guess you’ve had enough to fool them,” and something came down over her head. Suddenly she could breathe pure sweet air again. The roaring held steady for a while, then began receding, as if the train were going in reverse now. It died away at last. The blue dimness went out too.
My son! My son!
Through two round goggles she saw the light of dawn come filtering strangely into the room about her. A wavering figure appeared before them presently, one arm out to support herself against the wall as she advanced. Vera, wavering not because Janet Miller’s vision was defective any longer, but because the quantity of gas accumulated in the airtight rooms was beginning to affect her, even in the short time since she’d taken off her own mask. She held a wet handkerchief pressed to her mouth in its place, and was evidently striving to hold her breath.
She had sense enough to go over to the window first, remove the rags, open it a little from the bottom before she came back to the bed, reared Janet up to a sitting position and fumblingly pulled the mask off her.
The humming started up again in Janet’s ears, the train was coming back toward her.
Vera was gagging into the handkerchief. “Hold your breath all you can, until I get back here,” she sobbed. “I’m telling you this for your own sake.” She trailed the mask after her by its nozzle, went tottering in a zigzag course out of the room.
Janet Miller could hear her floundering, rather than walking, down the stairs. A door far at the back of the house opened, stayed that way.
The humming kept on increasing for a little while, but then drifts of uncontaminated air from the open window began knifing their way in, neutralized it. Gas must still be pouring out of the heater in the bath down the hall, however.
Hold your breath as much as you can, she had said just now. That was to live, though. He’s gone, Janet Miller thought. He must be by now, or she wouldn’t have come in here to take the mask off me. Maybe I can go with him, that’s the best thing for me to do now. She began to take great deep breaths, greedily draw in all the poisoned air she could, hold it in her lungs. Like going under it purposely, in a dentist chair, when they gave you a breath count.
The humming advanced on her again, became a deep-throated roar. The room became a dark-blue pinwheel, spinning madly, rapidly darkening around its edges as it spun.
“We’ll fool them, Vern, we’ll go together,” she thought hazily. The darkness had reached the center of the pinwheel now; only a pinpoint of blue remained at its exact core. Glass tinkled somewhere far off, but that had nothing to do with her.
The pinpoint of blue went out and there was nothing.
She was very thirsty and she kept drinking air. Such delicious air. It poured down her and she couldn’t get enough of it. She couldn’t see anything. She was inside a big tent, something like that anyway, but she could hear a murmur of voices. Then there was a blinding flash of light and the delicious flow of air stopped for a minute. Then the kindly darkness returned, the flow of air resumed.
“She’s coming up. She’ll be all right.”
“Wonderful, isn’t it? You’d think just a whiff of it, anyone in her condition—”
The flash of light repeated itself. Then again, and again, faster and faster all the time, like a flickering movie film, and suddenly it stayed on permanently, there was no more darkness, and her eyes were open.
She was violently sick and, although she thought that was a bad thing, the faces all around her looked on encouragingly and nodded, as though it were a very good thing.
“She’s O.K. now. Nothing more to worry about.”
”How’re the other two?” someone called inside to another room.
“The wife’s O.K.,” the voice of somebody unseen answered. “The husband’s gone.”
They picked her up—she must have been on a stretch-er—and started to carry her out. Just before they left the room with her, a desolate screaming started up somewhere within the house. “No, no, don’t stop! Bring him back! You must! Oh, why couldn’t it have been me instead? Why did it have to be him?”
They carried Janet Miller out and put her into the back of an automobile, and she didn’t hear any more of the screaming.
A pallid, mournful figure came into the room with the nurse. It was hard to recognize Vera in the widow’s weeds. This was two days later.
“You’re going home now, dear,” the nurse told Janet Miller cheerfully. “Here’s your daughter-in-law come to take you back with her.”
Janet Miller blinked her eyes. No, no, no. It was no use. They didn’t know the old code she and Vern had had.
“Can you manage it?” the nurse asked Vera.
“I have a friend waiting downstairs with a car. If you’ll just have somebody wheel the chair down for me, we can take her right in it with us.”
She was taken down in an elevator, still blinking futilely, rolled out to the hospital driveway by the orderly, and a man got out of a sedan waiting there. So now she saw her son’s other murderer for the first time.
He was taller than Vern had been and better-looking, much better-looking, but his face was weaker, didn’t have as much character in it—the kind that the Veras of this world go to hell for.
He and the orderly lifted her out of the chair and got her onto the front seat of the car. Then the chair was fastened to the outside, in back. It was too bulky to go inside the car.
Vera got in next to her—she was between the two of them now—and they drove away from the hospital. She hadn’t been kept there all this time because of the gas, of course, but simply so she could be cared for properly during the first, acute stages of Vera’s “grief.”
“That cost plenty!” Vera said explosively as the hospital receded behind them.
“It looked good though, didn’t it?” he argued. “Anyway, what the hell. We’ve got plenty of it now, haven’t we?”
“All right, but why waste it on her? What’re we going to do, have her hanging around our necks like a millstone from now on?”
The shoulders of both of them were pressed against hers, one on each side, yet they spoke back and forth as though she were five miles away, without pity for her helplessness.
“She’s our immunity. How many times do I have to tell you that? So long as she stay
s with us, under the same roof, looked after by us, there won’t be a whisper raised. We gotta have her around—for a while anyway.”
Vera flipped back her widow’s veil, put a cigarette in her mouth. “I’ll have time for just one before we get up to our own neighborhood. Gee, I’ll be glad when this sob-act is over!”
She threw the cigarette out of the car, lowered the veil again, as they turned down the street that led to the house that had belonged to Janet Miller’s son. A residue of smoke came through the mesh of the veil, made her look like the monster she was.
Vera went in first, head bowed in case the neighbors were looking. He carried Janet in his arms, came back for the chair and took that in afterwards.
“Now come on, clear out,” Vera said to him as soon as Janet had been installed in it. “You can’t begin to hang around here yet; they may be watching.”
“Let me get a pick-up, at least,” he growled aggrievedly. “What’s the idea of the bum’s rush?” He downed two fingers of Vern’s brandy with a single streamlined motion, from decanter to tumbler to mouth.
“I thought you were the one wanted to be careful. We gotta take it easy.”
She came back into the room again after she’d sped him on his way, slung off her widow’s hat and veil. She found Janet’s eyes fastened on her remorselessly, like two bright stones.
She helped herself to a drink like he had, a little jerkily, not quite so streamlined. “Now I’m going to tell you one thing,” she flared out at her unexpectedly. “If you want to stay out of trouble, keep those eyes of yours off me. Quit staring at me all the time! I know what you’re thinking. You may as well forget it; it won’t do you any good!”
His visits increased in number and lengthened in duration each time until, about three weeks after they’d brought her back from the hospital, they were married. They didn’t announce it, of course, but Janet Miller heard them talking about it when they came home one day, and he didn’t leave the house again from then on. He just moved in with them, so she knew what it meant. She found out what his name was then, too, for the first time. Haggard, Jimmy Haggard. Murderer of Vernon Miller.
The community at large would probably think it was one of those “whirlwind” courtships. Young widow alone in world turns to only person who has shown her sympathy in her distress—very natural. Its haste might shock them, but then after all, another three or four weeks would elapse before it could be definitely confirmed, and by then it would seem that much less abrupt.
Janet Miller lived in a state of suspended animation for a while, a trancelike condition between being dead and alive. She undoubtedly drew breath and imbibed nourishment, so technically she was alive, but little more than that could be said for her. Not only the voice was gone now, but the other two primaries had gone with it—the sun and the blue sky. None of the three would ever return again. And so she would surely have died within a month or two at the most, for sheer lack of will to live, when slowly but surely a spark ignited, a new vital force began to glow sullenly, taking the place of the three that had vanished. Revenge.
From a spark it became a flame, from a flame an all-consuming conflagration. She was more alive now than she had ever been since her disabling catastrophe had overtaken her. Fiercely it burned, by day, by night. It needed no replenishment, no renewal. Time meant nothing to it. Hours meant nothing, days meant nothing, years meant nothing. She would wait. She would live to be a hundred, if need be, but she would wreak her retribution on this pair before she went. Surely, inescapably. Someday, somehow.
They played into her hands. They found her a burden, a nuisance. They began to bicker and quarrel about her. Neither one wanted to be annoyed moving her chair or feeding her. He had more humanity than the woman. No, that was not it either—not real humanity, consideration. It was just that he was less reckless than Vera, more craven.
“But we can’t just let her starve, and she can’t feed herself! She’ll die on our hands for lack of attention, and then they’re liable to find out we neglected her, and one thing’ll lead to another, and first thing you know they’ll reopen the other thing, start putting two and two together, asking questions.”
“Well then, hire somebody to look after her. I’m not staying home all the time to spoon mush into her mouth, tuck her into bed! Get a companion for her. We’ve got dough enough for that now. Or else get rid of her altogether, farm her out to some nursing home.”
“No, not yet. We gotta keep her with us a few months, at least, until we’ve cooled off,” he insisted. “And yet I don’t like the idea of letting a stranger in here with us. It’s kind of risky. Especially somebody from the neighborhood that used to know Miller. We’ve got to be careful. One of us is liable to shoot our mouths off when we’ve got a lot of booze in us.”
While he was trying to make up his mind whether or not to take a chance, advertise or go to an agency, the matter was decided for him by one of those fortuitous coincidences that sometimes happen. A well-spoken young fellow, apparently down on his luck, was passing by one morning, and seeing Haggard on the front porch, approached timorously and asked if there was any work he could do, such as mowing the lawn or washing the windows. He explained that he was hitchhiking his way across country, and had just reached town half an hour before. As a matter of fact, he was packing a small bundle with him, apparently the sum total of his worldly goods.
Haggard looked him over speculatively. Then he glanced at the old lady. That seemed to give him an idea. “Come in a minute,” he said.
Janet Miller could hear him talking to him in the living-room. Then he called Vera down and consulted with her. She seemed to approve—probably only too glad to have someone take the old lady off their hands.
She brought him outside with her right after that, minus his bundle now.
“Here she is,” she said curtly. “Now you understand what’s required, don’t you? We’ll be out a good deal. You’ve got to spoon-feed her, and don’t take any nonsense from her. She’s got a cute little habit of going on hunger strikes. Pinch her nose until she has to open her mouth for air, if you have any trouble with her. You sleep out, but get here about nine so you can take her down on the porch. You don’t need to worry about dressing her, just wrap her in a blanket if I’m not up. Take her back to her room at night, after she’s been fed. That’s about all there is to it. I want someone in the house with her while we’re out, just to see that nothing happens.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said submissively.
“All right—what’s your name again?”
“Casement.”
“All right, Casement. Mr. Haggard’s already told you what you’re to get. That about covers everything. You can consider yourself hired. Bring out a chair for yourself, if you want one.”
He sat down to one side of the rubber-tired wheelchair, where he could watch her, hands on knees, legs apart.
They looked at each other, the old woman and the young man.
He smiled a little at her, tentatively. She could read sympathy behind it. She sensed, somehow, that this was his first case of the kind, that he’d never come into contact with anything like this before.
After about half an hour he got up, said, “I think I’ll get a glass of water. You want one too?” as though she could have answered. Then remembering that she couldn’t, he stood there at a loss, looking at her. He was very inexperienced at a job like this; that could be seen with half an eye. He mumbled, half to himself, “How’m I going to tell when you . . .” Then rubbed his neck baffledly.
He turned and went inside anyway. He came out again in a minute, bringing one for her. He carried it over to her and stood with it, looking down at her uncertainly. She blinked her eyes twice to show him she was thirsty. To show him—if possible—a little more than that. He held it to her lips and slowly let its contents trickle into her mouth until it was empty.
“Want any more?” he asked.
She blinked once this time.
He put the glass down o
n the floor and stood looking at her, thoughtfully stroking his chin. “Sometimes you blink twice in a hurry, sometimes you just blink once. What is that for, yes and no? Well now, let’s find out just to make sure.” He picked up a newspaper, found the word “yes” in it, held his finger under it and showed it to her. She blinked twice. Then he found a “no,” showed that to her. She blinked once.
“Well, now we’re that much ahead, aren’t we?” he said cheerfully.
Her eyes seemed to be smiling—they were very expressive eyes. The code—she had her old code with Vern back again, as easy as that! He was a very smart young man.
The afternoon waned. He pushed her chair in to the supper table, sat and spooned her food to her mouth for her, a little awkwardly at first, but he soon got the hang of it, learned he must not load the spoon too much, as her jaws could only open to a limited extent.
Vera gave him a look. “You seem to have better luck with her than we did ourselves. She’ll swallow for you, at least.”
“Sure,” he said comfortably without taking his eyes from what he was doing, “Mrs. Miller and I are going to be great friends.”
Janet Miller couldn’t account for it, but he had spoken the truth. She could feel a sense of confidence, almost of alliance with him, without knowing why.
He carried her up to her room later and she didn’t see him any more that night. But she lay there in the dark, content. The flame burned high, unquenchable. Perhaps . . .
In the morning he came up to get her, carried her downstairs, gave her orange juice to drink, and sat with her on the front porch. For a while he just sat, basking as she was. Then presently he turned his head and glanced behind him at the front windows of the house, as if to ascertain whether anyone was in those rooms or not. But the way he did it was so casual she didn’t read any meaning into it. Perhaps he was just thinking to himself that the Haggards were late risers.
FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum Page 3
