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

  “So you’re Bliss.” He reached out and shook hands with him. It was a hard shake, but not particularly friendly. His hands were calloused to the lumpiness of alligator hide. “Well, you’re taking it pretty calmly, it seems to me.”

  Bliss looked at him. “How do you figure that?”

  “Joe!” the mother had remonstrated, but so low neither of them paid any attention.

  “Coming up here like this. Don’t you think it’s your business to stick close down there, where you could do some good?”

  Mrs. Alden laid a comforting hand on Bliss’s arm. “Don’t, Joe. You can tell how the boy feels by looking at him. I’m Smiles’ mother and I know how it is; if she said she was coming up here, why, naturally—”

  “I know you’re Teresa’s mother,” he said emphatically, as if to shut her up.

  A moment of awkward silence hung suspended in the air above their three heads. Bliss had a funny “lost” feeling for a minute, as though something had eluded him just then, something had been a little askew. It was like when there’s a word you are trying desperately to remember; it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t bring it out. It was such a small thing, though—

  “I’ll get you something to eat, Ed,” she said, and as she turned to go out of the room, Bliss couldn’t help overhearing her say to her husband in a stage whisper: “Talk to him. Find out what really happened.”

  Alden had about as much finesse as a trained elephant doing the gavotte among ninepins. He cleared his throat judicially. “D’ja do something you shouldn’t? That how it come about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wull, we have no way of knowing what kind of a disposition you’ve got. Have you got a pretty bad temper, are you a little too quick with the flat of your hand?”

  Bliss looked at him incredulously. Then he got it. “That’s hardly a charge I expected to have to defend myself on. But if it’s required of me—I happen to worship the ground my wife walks on. I’d sooner have my right arm wither away than—”

  “No offense,” said Alden lamely. “It’s been known to happen before, that’s all.”

  “Not in my house,” Bliss said, and gave him a steely look.

  Smiles’ mother came in again at this point, with something on a tray. Bliss didn’t even bother looking up to see what it was. He waved it aside, sat there with his arms dangling out over his knees, his head bent way over, looking straight down through them.

  The room was a vague irritant. He kept getting it all the time, at least every time he raised his head and looked around, but he couldn’t figure what was doing it. There was only one thing he was sure of: it wasn’t the people in it. So that left it up to the room. Smiles’ mother was the soothing, soft-moving type that it was pleasant to have around you. And even the husband, in spite of his brusqueness, was the stolid emotionless sort that didn’t get on your nerves.

  What was it, then? Was the room furnished in bad taste? It wasn’t; it was comfortable and homey-looking. And even if it hadn’t been, that wouldn’t have done it. He was no interior decorator, allergic to anything like that. Was it the glare from the recent paint job? No, not that, either; now that he looked, there wasn’t any glare. It wasn’t even glossy paint; it was the dull kind without highlights. That had just been an optical illusion when the lights first went on.

  He shook his head a little to get rid of it, and thought, “What’s annoying me in here?” And he couldn’t tell.

  He was holding a lighted cigarette between his dangling fingers, and the ash was slowly accumulating.

  “Pass him an ash tray, Joe,” she said in a watery voice. She was starting to cry, without any fuss, unnoticeably, but she still had time to think of their guest’s comfort. Some women are like that.

  He looked and a whole cylinder of ash had fallen to the rug. It looked like a good rug, too. “I’m sorry,” he said, and rubbed it out with his shoe. Even the rug bothered him in some way.

  Pattern too loud? No, it was quiet, dark-colored, and in good taste. He couldn’t find a thing the matter with it. But it kept troubling him just the same.

  Something went clang. It wasn’t in the same room with them; some other part of the house, faint and muffled, like a defective pipe joint settling or swelling.

  She said, “Joe, when are you going to have the plumber in to fix that water pipe? It’s sprung out of line again. You’ll wait until we have a good-sized leak on our hands.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. It sounded more like an original discovery than a recollection of something overlooked. Bliss couldn’t have told why, it just did. More of his occultism, he supposed.

  “I’ll have to get a fresh handkerchief,” she said apologetically, got up and passed between them, the one she had been using until now rolled into a tight little ball at her upper lip.

  “Take it easy,” Alden said consolingly.

  His eyes went to Bliss, then back to her again, as if to say: “Do you see that she’s crying, as well as I do?” So Bliss glanced at her profile as she went by, and she was. She ought to have been; she was the girl’s mother.

  When she came in again with the fresh handkerchief she’d gone to get, he got to his feet.

  “This isn’t bringing her back. I’d better get down to the city again. They might have word for me by now.”

  Alden said, “Can I talk to you alone a minute, Bliss, before you go?”

  The three of them had moved out into the hall. Mrs. Alden went up the stairs slowly. The higher up she got the louder her sobs became. Finally, a long wail burst out, and the closing of a door cut it in half. A minute later bedsprings protested, as if someone had dropped on them full length.

  “D’you hear that?” Alden said to him. Another of those never-ending nuances hit Bliss; he’d said it as if he were proud of it.

  Bliss was standing in the doorway, looking back into the room. He felt as if he were glad to get out of it. And he still couldn’t understand why, any more than any of the rest of it.

  “What was it you wanted to say to me on the side?”

  Blunt as ever, Alden asked, “Have you told us everything, or have you left out part of it? Just what went on between you and Teresa anyway?”

  “One of those tiffs.”

  Alden’s small eyes got even smaller; they almost creased out in his face. “It must have been some tiff, for her to walk out on you with her grip in her hand. She wasn’t the kind—”

  “How did you know she took her grip with her? I didn’t tell you that.”

  “You didn’t have to. She was coming up here, wasn’t she? They always take their grips when they walk out on you.”

  There wasn’t pause enough between their two sentences to stick a bent comma. One just seemed to flow out of the other, only with a change of speakers. Alden’s voice had gone up a little with the strain of the added pace he’d put into it, that was all. He’d spoken it a little faster than his usual cadence. Small things. Damn those small things to hell, torturing him like gnats, like gnats that you can’t put your finger on!

  Right under Bliss’s eyes, a bead of sweat was forming between two of the reddish tufts of hair at the edge of Alden’s hairline. He could see it oozing out of the pore. What was that from? Just from discussing what time his bus would get him back to the city, as they were doing now? No, it must have been from saying that sentence too fast a while ago—the one about the grip. The effects were only coming out now.

  “Well,” Bliss said, “I’d better get a move on, to catch the bus back.”

  Her door, upstairs, had opened again. It might have been just coincidental, but it was timed almost as though she’d been listening.

  “Joe,” she called down the stairwell. “Don’t let Ed start back down again right tonight. Two trips in one day is too much; he’ll be a wreck. Why not have him stay over with us tonight, and take the early morning one instead?”

  Bliss was standing right down there next to him. She could have spoken to him directly
just as easily. Why did she have to relay it through her husband?

  “Yeah,” Alden said up to her, “that’s just what I was thinking myself.” But it was as though he’d said: “I get you.”

  Bliss had a funny feeling they’d been saying something to one another right in front of his face without his knowing what it was.

  “No,” he said dolefully, “I’m worried about her. The sooner I get down there and get to the bottom of it—”

  He went on out the door, and Alden came after him.

  “I’ll walk you down to the bus stop,” he offered.

  “Not necessary,” Bliss told him curtly. After all, twice now this other man had tried to suggest he’d abused or maltreated his wife; he couldn’t help resenting it. “I can find my way back without any trouble. You’re probably tired and want to turn in.”

  “Just as you say,” Alden acquiesced.

  They didn’t shake hands at parting. Bliss couldn’t help noticing that the other man didn’t even reach out and offer to. For his part, that suited him just as well.

  After he’d already taken a few steps down the road, Alden called out after him, “Let us know the minute you get good news; I don’t want my wife to worry any more than she has to. She’s taking it hard.”

  Bliss noticed he didn’t include himself in that. He didn’t hold that against him, though; after all, there was no blood relationship there.

  Alden turned as if to go back inside the house again, but when Bliss happened to glance back several minutes later, just before taking the turn in the road that cut the house off from sight, he could still detect a narrow up-and-down band of light escaping from the doorway, with a break in it at one point as though a protruding profile were obscuring it.

  “Wants to make sure I’m really on my way to take that bus,” he said to himself knowingly. But suspicion is a two-edged sword that turns against the wielder as readily as the one it is wielded against. He only detected the edge that was turned toward him, and even that but vaguely.

  He reached the crossroads and took up his position. He still had about five minutes to wait, but he’d hardly arrived when two yellow peas of light, swelling until they became great hazy balloons, came down the turnpike toward him. He thought it was the bus at first, ahead of its own schedule, but it turned out to be a coupe with a Quebec license. It slowed long enough for the occupant to lean out and ask:

  “Am I on the right road for the city?”

  “Yeah, keep going straight, you can’t miss,” Bliss said dully. Then suddenly, on an impulse he was unable to account for afterward, he raised his voice and called out after him, “Hey! I don’t suppose you’d care to give me a lift in with you?”

  “Why not?” the Canuck said amiably, and slowed long enough for Bliss to catch up to him.

  Bliss opened the door and sidled in. He still didn’t know what had made him change his mind like this, unless perhaps it was the vague thought that he might make better time in with a private car like this than he would have with the bus.

  The driver said something about being glad to have someone to talk to on the way down, and Bliss explained briefly that he’d been waiting for the bus, but beyond those few introductory remarks, they did not talk much. Bliss wanted to think. He wanted to analyze his impression of the visit he had just concluded.

  It was pretty hopeless to do much involved thinking with a stranger at his elbow, liable to interrupt his train of thought every once in a while with some unimportant remark that had to be answered for courtesy’s sake, so the most he could do was marshal his impressions, sort of document them for future reference when he was actually alone:

  1. The lights seemed to go on in an unexpected way, when she first pressed the switch.

  2. The room bothered him. It hadn’t been the kind of room you feel at ease in. It hadn’t been restful.

  3. There had been some sort of faulty vocal coordination when she said, “I’m Smiles’ mother,” and he said, “I know you’re Teresa’s mother.”

  4. There had also been nuances in the following places: When Alden’s eyes sought his, as if to assure himself that he, Bliss, saw that she was crying almost unnoticeably there in the room with them. When she ran whimpering up the stairs and threw herself on the bed, and he said, “Hear that?” And lastly when she called down and addressed her overnight invitation to Alden, instead of Bliss himself, as though there were some intangible kernel in it to be extracted first before he passed on the dry husk of the words themselves to Bliss.

  At this point, before he got any further, there was a thud, a long-drawn-out reptilian hiss, and a tire went out. They staggered to a stop at the side of the road.

  “Looks like I’ve brought you tough luck,” Bliss remarked.

  “No,” his host assured him, “that thing’s been on its ninth life for weeks; I’m only surprised it lasted this long. I had it patched before I left Three Rivers this morning, thought maybe I could make the city on it, but it looks like no soap. Well, I have a spare, and now I am glad I hitched you on; four hands are better than two.”

  The stretch of roadway where it had happened was a particularly bad one, Bliss couldn’t help noticing as he slung off his coat and jumped down to lend a hand; it was crying for attention, needled with small jagged rock fragments, either improperly crushed in the first place or else loosened from their bed by some recent rain. He supposed it hadn’t been blocked off because there was no other branch road in the immediate vicinity that could take its place as a detour.

  They’d hardly gotten the jack out when the bus overtook and passed them, wiping out his gain of time at a stroke. And then, a considerable time later, after they’d already finished the job and wiped their hands clean, some other anonymous car went steaming by, this time at a rate of speed that made the bus seem to have been standing still in its tracks. The Canadian was the only one in sight by the stalled car as its comet-like headlights flicked by. Bliss happened to be farther in off the road just then. He turned his head and looked after it, however, at the tornado-like rush of air that followed in its wake, and got a glimpse of it just before it hurtled from sight.

  “That fellow’s asking for a flat,” the Canadian said, “passing over a stretch of fill like this at such a clip.”

  “He didn’t have a spare on him, either,” Bliss comment-ed.

  “Looked like he was trying to beat that bus in.” Just an idle phrase, for purposes of comparison. It took on new meaning later, though, when Bliss remembered it.

  They climbed in and started off again. The rest of the ride passed uneventfully. Bliss spelled his companion at the wheel, the last hour in, and let him take a little doze. He’d been on the road steadily since early that morning, he’d told Bliss.

  Bliss woke him up and gave the car back to him when they reached the city limits. The Canadian was heading for a certain hotel all the way downtown, so Bliss wouldn’t let him deviate from his course to take him over to his place; he got out instead at the nearest parallel point to it they touched, thanked him, and started over on foot.

  He had a good stiff walk ahead of him, but he didn’t mind that—he’d been sitting cramped up for so long. He still wanted to think things over as badly as ever, too, and he’d found out by experience that solitary walking helped him to think better.

  It didn’t in this case, though. He was either too tired from the events of the past few days, or else the materials he had were too formless, indefinite, to get a good grip on. He kept asking himself, “What was wrong up there? Why am I dissatisfied?” And he couldn’t answer for the life of him. “Was anything wrong,” he was finally reduced to wondering, “or was it wholly imaginary on my part?” It was like a wrestling bout with shadows.

  The night around him was dark-blue velvet, and as he drew near his own isolated semi-suburban neighborhood, the silence was at least equal to that up at Denby. There wasn’t a soul stirring, not even a milkman. He trudged onward under a leafy tunnel of sidewalk trees that all but made him i
nvisible.

  Leaving the coupe where he had, and coming over in a straight line this way, brought him up to his house from behind, on the street in back of it instead of the one running directly before it, which was an approach he never took at other times, such as when coming home from downtown. Behind it there was nothing but vacant plots, so it was a shortcut to cross diagonally behind the house next door and go through from the back instead of going all the way around the corner on the outside. He did that now, without thinking of anything except to save a few extra steps.

  As he came out from behind the house next door, treading soundless on the well-kept backyard grass, he saw a momentary flash through one of his own windows that could only have been a pocket torch. He stopped dead in his tracks. Burglars was the first thought that came to him.

  He advanced a wary step or two. The flash came again, but from another window this time, nearer the front. They were evidently on their way out, using it only intermittently to help find their way. He’d be able to head them off at the front door, as they stole forth.

  There was a partition hedge between the two houses, running from front to back. He scurried along that, on his neighbor’s side of it, keeping head and shoulders down, until he was on a line with his own front door. He crouched there, peering through.

  They had left a lookout standing just outside his door. He could see the motionless figure. And then, as his fingers were about to part the hedge, to aid him in crashing through, the still form shifted a little, and the uncertain light struck a glint from a little wedge on its chest. At the same instant Bliss caught the outline of a visor above the profile. A cop!

  One hand behind him, Bliss ebbed back again on his heels, thrown completely off balance by the unexpected revelation.

  His own front door opened just then and two men came out, one behind the other. Without visors and without metallic gleams on their chests. But the cop turned and flipped up his nightstick toward them in semi-salute; so, whatever they were, they weren’t burglars, although one was unmistakably carrying something out of the house with him.