FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum

by Cornell Woolrich

  The telephone rang out shrilly in the almost total darkness of the room. Casement pushed back his cuff, glanced at the radium dial of his wrist watch. A quarter to twelve. He didn’t move, just let it go ahead ringing until it had stopped again of its own accord. He had an idea who it was—trying to find out for sure if there was anyone in this particular house or not. He guessed that if he answered it he wouldn’t hear anything—just a click at the other end, and his scheme would have been a failure.

  “Not taking any chances, is he?” he grunted to himself. “Even though by now he must have gotten that post card in Hamilton’s handwriting I had routed through Boston.”

  He was longing for a smoke, but he knew better than to indulge in one. The slightest little thing, such as a lighted cigarette glimpsed through the dark windows of this supposedly untenanted house could ruin the whole carefully prepared setup. He’d worked too hard and patiently to have that happen now.

  He looked at his watch again presently. A quarter after now; half an hour had gone by.

  “Due any minute now,” he murmured.

  Within the next thirty seconds the soft purr of a car running in low sounded from outside. It slowed a little as it came opposite the house, but neither veered in nor stopped. Instead, it went on past toward the next corner, like a ghost under the pale streetlights. He smiled grimly as he recognized it. It would go around the block, reconnoitering, then come by a second time and stop. Its occupant was taking every possible precaution but the right one—staying away from here altogether.

  The showdown was at hand. Casement finally left the big wing chair he’d sat in ever since dusk, felt for the gun on his hip and moved noiselessly out into the hall. He went back behind the stairs, where there was a door leading into a small storeroom built into the staircase structure itself.

  He disappeared in there just as the whirr of wheels approached outside once more, from the same direction as before. This time they stopped. There was a brief wait, then the muffled sound of a car door clicking open. Then a furtive footfall from the porch. A key turned in the lock.

  Casement nodded to himself at the sound. “Swiped Hamilton’s key, evidently. Took a wax impression for a duplicate, and then got it back to him somehow. That’s how he got them out of here in the first place.”

  The door opened and a little gray light from the street filtered into the inky front hall. Through a hairline door-crack at the back of the stairs Casement could make out a looming silhouette standing there, listening. It was empty-handed, but that was all right. He was just taking every precaution.

  The silhouette widened the door-opening. Then it bent down, scanning the three-days’ accumulation of dummy mail Casement had carefully planted just inside the door, under Hamilton’s letter slot. There was also a quart bottle of milk that he’d bought at a dairy standing outside. The inked-in figure straightened, turned around, and descended from the porch again, leaving the door open the way it was. Casement wasn’t worried, didn’t stir.

  There was another wait. Again the porch creaked. The silhouette was back again, this time with a square object like a small-sized suitcase in one hand. The door closed after it and everything became dark again.

  Cautious footfalls came along the carpeted hall toward the staircase. They didn’t go up it but came on toward the back. He was feeling his way, smart enough not to put on the lights or even use a pocket torch or match in the supposedly untenanted house.

  The storeroom door under the stairs that Casement had gone through opened softly. Still nothing happened. There was the sound of something being set down on the floor. Then of two small suitcase latches clicking open one after the other. Then a great rattling of paper being undone, followed by something scratchy being lifted out of the paper.

  There were hooks along the wall in there, with various seldom-used things hanging from them. Golf bags, cased tennis rackets—and gas masks that Hamilton had brought back from Europe as souvenirs.

  An arm groped upward along the wall, feeling for a vacant hook. Casement had left two conveniently unburdened for just this situation.

  The other found it, by sense of touch alone. The arm dipped down again toward the floor, came up with something in it that rustled—and then suddenly there was a sharp metallic click in the stillness of the enclosed little space.

  There was a gasp of abysmal terror, something dropped with a thud to the floor, and a light bulb went on overhead, lit up the place wanly.

  Haggard and Casement were standing there face to face, across an upended trunk belonging to the house’s owner. Haggard was on the outside of it, the detective on the inside, but they were already linked inextricably across the top of it by a manacle whose steel jaws must have been waiting there in the dark the whole time for Haggard to reach toward that empty hook, like bait in a trap.

  An olive-drab gas mask lay at Haggard’s feet. A second one still nestled in the small suitcase by the storeroom door, waiting to be transferred.

  “Pretty,” was all Casement said. “It’s taken a long time and a lot of work, but it was worth it!” He glanced down at the torn half of a cardboard tag still attached to the handle of the suitcase. “So that’s where you had them hidden all the time I was looking for them. Checked in a parcel room somewhere under a phony name, waiting for Hamilton to be away and the coast clear so you could smuggle them back in again unseen. Not a bad idea—if it had only worked.”

  The sky was blue, the sun was bright, and Janet Miller sat there in her chair on the front porch. She looked at the man and the woman standing before her, each handcuffed to a detective, and the flame within her blazed heavenward, triumphant.

  “Take a look at this woman, whose son you murdered,” Casement said grimly. “Face those eyes if you can—and deny it.”

  They couldn’t. Haggard’s head fell before her gaze. Vera averted hers. They shifted weight uncomfortably.

  “You’ll see her again. She’ll be the principal witness against you—along with Hamilton and his two gas masks. Take them away, boys.” He turned her chair around so she could watch them go.

  “I guess you wonder how I knew just which night he’d show up there at Hamilton’s house,” he said to her. “I made sure it’d be last night. I went to Hamilton, told him the whole story, and he agreed to help me. He went to Boston, mailed Haggard a postcard from there day before yesterday. He said he was staying until today. That made last night the only night Haggard would supposedly have had a chance to get those masks back in the house undetected. I faked some mail and filled the letter box with it, and stood a bottle of milk at the door. He fell for it.”

  An important-looking white-haired man came out of the house, went over to Casement, put his hand on his shoulder. “Great work,” he said. “You sure sewed that one up—and singlehanded at that!”

  Casement motioned toward Janet Miller. “I was just an auxiliary. Here’s where the thanks and the credit go.”

  “Who’ll look after her until the trial comes up?” the captain asked.

  “Why, I guess there’s room enough over in our house,” Casement said.

  The sky was blue, the sun was warm, and her eyes shone softly as they rested on him. She had three things to live for again.

  THE NIGHT I DIED

  The point about me is: that I should stay on the right side of the fence all those years, and then when I did go over, go over heart and soul like I did—all in the space of one night. In one hour, you might say.

  Most guys build up to a thing like that gradually. Not me; why, I had never so much as lifted a check, dropped a slug into a telephone-slot before that. I was the kind of a droop who, if I was short-changed, I’d shut up about it, but if I got too much change back I’d stand there and call their attention to it.

  And as for raising my hand against a fellow-mortal—you had the wrong party, not Ben Cook. Yet there must have been a wide streak of it in me all along, just waiting to come out. Maybe all the worse for being held down all those years without a v
alve, like steam in a boiler.

  Here I’d been grubbing away for ten or twelve years in Kay City, at thirty per, trying on suits (on other guys) in the men’s clothing section of a department store. Saying “sir” to every mug that came in and smoothing their lapels and patting them on the back. I go home one night that kind of a guy, honest, unambitious, wishy-washy, without even a parking-ticket on my conscience, and five minutes later I’ve got a murder on my hands.

  I think it was probably Thelma more than anyone else who brought this latent streak in me to the surface; it might have stayed hidden if she hadn’t been the kind of woman she was. You’ll see, as you read on, that she had plenty of reason later to regret doing so. Like conjuring up the devil and then not being able to get rid of him.

  Thelma was my common-law wife. My first wife, Florence, had given me up as hopeless five years before and gone to England. We parted friends. I remember her saying she liked me well enough, I had possibilities, but it would take too long to work them out; she wanted her husband readymade. She notified me later she’d got a divorce and was marrying some big distillery guy over there.

  I could have married Thelma after that, but somehow we never got around to it, just stayed common-law wife and husband, which is as good as anything. You know how opposites attract, and I guess that’s how I happened to hook up with Thelma; she was just my opposite in every way. Ambitious, hard as nails, no compunctions about getting what she wanted. Her favorite saying was always, “If you can get away with it, it’s worth doing!”

  For instance, when I told her I needed a new suit and couldn’t afford one, she’d say: “Well, you work in a men’s clothing department! Swipe one out of the stock—they’ll never know the difference.” I used to think she was joking.

  After she egged me on to tackle our manager for a raise, and I got turned down pretty, she said: “I can see where you’ll still be hauling in thirty-a-week twenty years from now, when they have to wheel you to work in a chair! What about me? Where do I come in if a hit-and-run driver spreads you all over the street tomorrow? Why don’t you take out some insurance at least?”

  So I did. First I was going to take out just a five-thousand-dollar policy, which was pretty steep for me at that, but Thelma spoke up. “Why not make it worth our while? Don’t worry about the premiums, Cookie. I’ve got a little something put away from before I knew you. I’ll start you off. I’ll pay the first premium for you myself—after that, we’ll see.” So I went for ten thousand worth, and made Thelma the beneficiary, of course, as I didn’t have any folks or anyone else to look after.

  That had been two years before; she had been paying the premiums for me like a lamb ever since. All this made me realize that under her hard surface she was really very bighearted, and this one night that I started home a little earlier than usual I was warbling like a canary and full of pleasant thoughts about “my little woman,” as I liked to call her, and wondering what we were going to have for dinner.

  Six was my usual quitting-time at the store, but we had just got through taking inventory the night before, and I had been staying overtime without pay all week, so the manager let me off an hour sooner. I thought it would be nice to surprise Thelma, because I knew she didn’t expect me for another two or three hours yet, thinking we would still be taking inventory like other nights. So I didn’t phone ahead I was coming.

  Sherrill, who had the necktie counter across the aisle, tried to wangle me into a glass of suds. If I’d given in, it would have used up my hour’s leeway. I would have got home at my regular time—and it also would have been my last glass of suds on this earth. I didn’t know that; the reason I refused was I decided to spend my change instead on a box of candy for her. Sweets to the sweet!

  Our bungalow was the last one out on Copeland Drive. The asphalt stopped a block below. The woods began on the other side of us, just young trees like toothpicks. I had to get off at the drug store two blocks down anyway, because the buses turned around and started back there. So I bought a pound of caramels tied with a blue ribbon, and I headed up to the house.

  I quit whistling when I turned up the walk, so she wouldn’t know I was back yet and I could sneak up behind her maybe and put my hands over her eyes. I was just full of sunshine, I was! Then when I already had my key out, I changed my mind and tiptoed around the house to the back. She’d probably be in the kitchen anyway at this hour, so I’d walk in there and surprise her.

  She was. I heard her talking in a low voice as I pulled the screen door noiselessly back. The wooden door behind that was open, and there was a passageway with the kitchen opening off to one side of it.

  I heard a man’s voice answer hers as I eased the screen closed behind me without letting it bang. That disappointed me for a minute because I knew she must have some deliveryman or collector in there with her, and I wasn’t going to put my hands over her eyes in front of some grocery clerk or gas inspector and make a sap out of myself.

  But I hated to give the harmless little plan up, so I decided to wait out there for a minute until he left, and motion him on his way out not to give me away. Then go ahead in and surprise her. A case of arrested development, I was!

  She was saying, but very quietly, “No, I’m not going to give you the whole thing now. You’ve got seventy-five, you get the rest afterwards—”

  I whistled silently and got worried. “Whew! She must have let our grocery bills ride for over a year, to amount to that much!” Then I decided she must be talking in cents, not dollars.

  “If I give you the whole two hundred fifty before time, how do I know you won’t haul your freight out of town—and not do it? What comeback would I have? We’re not using I.O.U.’s in this, buddy, don’t forget!”

  She sounded a lot tougher than I’d ever heard her before, although she’d never exactly been a shrinking violet. But it was his next remark that nearly dropped me where I was. “All right, have it your way. Splash me out another cuppa java—” And a chair hitched forward. Why, that was no delivery-man; he was sitting down in there and she was feeding him!

  “Better inhale it fast,” she said crisply, “he’ll be showing up in another half-hour.”

  My first thought, of course, was what anyone else’s would have been—that it was a two-time act. But when I craned my neck cautiously around the door just far enough to get the back of his head in line with my eyes, I saw that was out, too. Whatever he was and whatever he was doing there in my house, he was no back-door John!

  He had a three days’ growth of beard on his jawline and his hair ended in little feathers all over his neck, and if you’d have whistled at his clothes they’d have probably walked off him of their own accord and headed your way.

  He looked like a stumblebum or derelict she’d hauled in out of the woods.

  The next words out of her mouth, lightning fizzled around me and seemed to split my brain three ways. “Better do it right here in the house. I can’t get him to go out there in the woods—he’s scared of his own shadow, and you might miss him in the dark. Keep your eye on this kitchen-shade from outside. It’ll be up until eight thirty.

  “When you see it go down to the bottom, that means I’m leaving the house for the movies. I’ll fix this back door so you can get in when I leave, too. Now, I’ve shown you where the phone is—right through that long hall out there. Wait’ll you hear it ring before you do anything; that’ll be me phoning him from the picture-house, pretending I’ve forgotten something, and that’ll place him for you. You’ll know just where to find him, won’t run into him unexpectedly on your way in.

  “His back’ll be toward you and I’ll be distracting his attention over the wire. Make sure he’s not still ticking when you light out, so don’t spare the trigger; no one’ll hear it way out here at that hour!

  “I’ll hear the shot over the wire and I’ll hang up, but I’m sitting the rest of the show out. I wanna lose a handkerchief or something at the end and turn the theater inside out, to place myself. That gives
you two hours to fade too, so I don’t start the screaming act till I get back at eleven and find him—”

  He said, “Where does the other hundred-seventy-five come in? Y’ don’t expect me to show up here afterwards and colleck, do ya?”

  I heard her laugh, kind of. “It’s gonna be in the one place where you can’t get at it without doing what you’re supposed to! That way I’m going to be sure you don’t welsh on me! It’s going to be right in his own inside coat-pocket, without his knowing it! I’m going to slip it in when I kiss him good-bye, and I know him, he’ll never find it. Just reach in when you’re finished with him, and you’ll find it there waiting for you!”

  “Lady,” he whispered. “I gotta hand it to you!”

  “Get going,” she commanded.

  I think it was that last part of it that made me see red and go off my nut, that business about slipping the blood-money right into my own pocket while I was still alive, for him to collect after I was dead. Because what I did right then certainly wasn’t in character. Ben Cook, the Ben Cook of up until that minute, would have turned and sneaked out of that house unless his knees had given way first and run for his life and never showed up near there again. But I wasn’t Ben Cook any more—something seemed to blow up inside me. I heard the package of candy hit the floor next to me with a smack, and then I was lurching in on them, bellowing like a goaded bull. Just rumbling sounds, more than words. “You murderess! Your—own—husband!” No, it certainly wasn’t me; it was a man that neither of us had known existed until now. Evil rampant, a kind of living nemesis sprung from their own fetid plotting, like a jack-in-the-box.

  There was a red-and-white checked tablecloth on the kitchen table. There was a cup and saucer on it, and a gun. I didn’t see any of those things. The whole room for that matter was red, like an undeveloped photographic print.