My watch said that it was a quarter of seven and I had to pick up Joy and there was no time to change. I’d just put on a clean shirt and pick out a different tie and Joy wouldn’t mind. After all, we weren’t out to paint the town; we were only going out to eat.
I went into the bedroom without bothering to turn on the light, for the lamp in the living room threw a shaft of light clear across the bedroom. I pulled open a dresser drawer and got a shirt. I stripped off the plastic cover that the laundry had put on and pulled out the cardboard. I shook out the shirt and threw it across a chair back, then went to the closet to pick out a tie. And even as I was pulling the knob on the closet door, I realized that I’d not turned on the light and that I’d need to turn it on before I could pick out a tie.
I had the door open, perhaps a foot or so, and as I thought about the light I shut the door again. I don’t know why I did it. I could just as easily have left it open while I crossed the room to trip up the light switch.
And in that instant of opening and closing the door, which took less time than it takes to tell it, I saw or sensed or heard—I don’t know which it was—the movement of some sort of life inside the darkness of the closet. As if the clothes had come to life and had been waiting for me; as if the ties, hanging on their racks, had metamorphosed into snakes, hanging motionless, as ties, until it came the time to strike. Had I waited for the sensing or the seeing or the hearing of that motion in the closet to slam shut the door, it might have been to late. But the motion in the closet had not a thing to do with my shutting of the door. I had already started to push it shut again before there was any motion—or, at least, before I had become aware of it.
I backed away across the room from the terror that writhed behind the door, with horror welling in me—the bubbling, effervescent horror that can only come when a man’s own home develops fangs against him.
And even as the horror chilled me, I argued with myself— for this was the sort of thing that simply could not happen. A man’s chair may develop jaws and snap him up as he bends to sit in it; his scatter rugs may glide treacherously from beneath his feet; his refrigerator may lie in ambush to topple over on him; but the closet is the place where nothing of the sort can happen. For the closet is a part of the man himself. It is the place where he hangs up his artificial pelts, and as such it is closer to him, more intimate with him than any room within his dwelling place. •
But even as I told myself that it could not happen, even as I charged it all against an upset imagination, I could hear the rustling and the sliding and the frantic stealth that was going on behind the closet door.
Almost reluctantly, strange as it may sound, half held by a deadly fascination, I backed out of the room and stood in the living room, just beyond the bedroom door, staring back into the darkness and the slithering. And there was something there: unless I doubted all my senses and my sanity, there was something there.
Something, I told myself, that was a piece with the trap beneath the carpet camouflage and with the ordinary shoe box filled with extraordinary dolls.
And why me? I wondered. Since the incident of the dolls and the broken office door and the girl who ordered the Manhattan, it could, of course, logically be me. Stemming from those happenings, I well could be a target. But the trap had been the first—the trap had come before any of the others. I strained my ears to hear the rustling, but either it had quieted down now that I was gone or I was too far from the closet, for I did not hear it.
I went to the gun cabinet and unlocked the drawer underneath the cabinet-and found the automatic. I dug out a box of shells and filled the clip and shoved it home. I dumped out into my hand the cartridges remaining in the box and dropped them in my pocket.
I put on my topcoat and eased the automatic into my right-hand pocket. Then I hunted for my car keys. For I was getting out.
The keys weren’t in the topcoat and they weren’t in my jacket or in the pockets of my trousers. I had my key ring, with the keys to the front door and to the gun cabinet, to my office desk, to my safety-deposit box, plus half a dozen others that belonged to locks long since forgotten—the steady, ridiculous, inevitable collection of useless and forgotten keys that one can never quite bring himself to throw away.
I had all these, but I didn’t have the car keys.
I searched the tabletops and the desk. I went into the kitchen and had a look around. There weren’t any keys.
Standing in the kitchen, I knew just where I’d left them. I knew just where they were. I could see the trunk key and the caddy dangling from the dash, with the ignition key stuck neatly into the ignition lock. When I’d come home that afternoon, I’d left them in the car. Just as sure as shooting, I’d left them in the car, and it was something I almost never did.
I started for the front door. I took two steps and stopped. And I knew, as certainly as I stood there, that I could not go out into the darkness of the parking lot and walk up to the car with the keys already in the lock.
It was illogical. It was crazy. But I couldn’t help it. There was no way to help it. With no keys in the lock—OK, I could have gone out to the lot. But the keys’ hanging in the lock, for some strange, totally illogical, and unknown reason, made a terrifying difference.
I was scared stiff and toothless. I found my hands were shaking, and I hadn’t even realized it until I looked at them.
The clock said it was seven and Joy would be waiting. She’d be waiting and she’d be sore and I couldn’t blame her.
“Not a minute later,” she had told me. “I get hungry early.”
I walked to the desk and stretched out my hand to pick up the phone, but my hand stopped short of touching it. For a sudden terrifying thought came thundering through my brain. What if the phone no longer were a phone? What if nothing in this room were what it appeared to be? What if it all had changed in the last few minutes into booby traps?
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the automatic. I pushed tentatively at the phone with the snout of it and the phone did not erupt into a funny kind of life. It remained a phone.
With the gun still clutched in one hand, I picked up the receiver with the other, laid it on the desk, and dialed the number.
And when I picked up the receiver, I wondered what I’d say.
It was simple enough. I told her who I was.
“What’s keeping you?” she asked just a mite too sweetly.
“Joy, I’m in trouble.”
“What’s the matter this time?”
Only kidding me. I seldom was in trouble.
“I mean real trouble,” I told her. “Dangerous trouble. I can’t take you out tonight.”
“Sissy,” she said. “I’ll come and get you.”
“Joy!” I shouted. “Listen! For God’s sake, listen to me. Keep away from me. Believe me, I know what I’m doing. Just stay away from me.”
Her voice still was calm, but it had tightened up a bit, it seemed. “What’s the matter, Parker? Just what kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know,” I told her desperately. “There is something going on. Something dangerous and funny. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. No one would believe me. I’ll work it out, but I don’t want you to get mixed up in it. I’ll feel like a fool tomorrow, maybe, but—”
“Parker, are you sober?” -I told her: “I wish to God I weren’t.”
“And you’re all right? Right now, you are all right?”
“I’m all right,” I told her. “But there’s something in the closet and there was a trap outside the door and I found a box of dolls …”
I stopped, and I could have cut out my tongue for saying what I had. I hadn’t meant to say it.
“Stay right there,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.” “Joy!” I shouted. “Joy, don’t do it!” But the phone was dead.
Desperately I hung up and lifted the receiver again to dial her number.
The crazy little fool, I thought. I had to get her stopped. I could hear the
ringing. It rang on and on and there was a terrible emptiness in the sound it made. It rang and rang and rang and there was no answer.
I shouldn’t have said what I said, I told myself. I should have pretended that I was stinking drunk and in no shape to take her out and that would have made her sore and more than likely she’d have hung up on me and it would have been all right. Or maybe I should have thought up some story with at least the sound of plausibility, but there had been no time to think up a really good one. I was too scared to think straight. I still was too scared to think straight.
I put the receiver back into its cradle and grabbed up my hat and started for the door. At the door I stopped for an instant and looked back into the room, and now it had an alien look, as if it were a place I had never seen before, a place I had merely stumbled on, and it was full of slithering and of whispering and almost-silent noise.
I jerked the door open and bolted out into the corridor and went thundering down the stairs. And even as I ran I wondered how much of the almost-silent, stealthy noise I’d heard had actually been in the apartment and how much in my head.
I reached the lobby and went out onto the sidewalk. The night was quiet and soft and there was the smell of leaf smoke in the air.
From up the street came a clicking noise—a queer, rapid, rhythmic clicking—and around the corner of the building, out of the alley that led to the parking lot, came a dog. He was a happy dog, for his tail was wagging and his gait had something close to frolic in it. He was half the size of a horse and so shaggy that he was shapeless and it was almost as if he’d come straight out of the autumn sunlight of that very afternoon.
“Hi, pup,” I said, and he came up to me and sat down happily and beat his ponderous tail in doggish ecstasy upon the concrete of the sidewalk.
I put out my hand to pat his head, but I never got it patted, for a car came humming swiftly down the street and swung in sharply to stop in front of us.
The door came open.
“Get in,” said Joy’s voice, “and let’s get out of here.”
XV
We ate in another world of candlelight, one of those crazy, corny places that Joy seemed to love—not at the new nightclub that was opening out on Pinecrest Drive. That is, Joy ate. I didn’t.
Women are the damnedest people. I told her all about it I’d already told her so much over the telephone, inadvisedly perhaps, that I had to tell her the rest of it. Actually, of course, there was no reason that I shouldn’t tell her, but I sounded sappy doing it. She went ahead and ate, in her sweet, calm way, as if I’d been telling her no more than the latest office gossip.
It was almost as if she hadn’t believed a word of what I said, although I am sure she did. Maybe she saw I was upset (who wouldn’t be upset?) and was simply doing her womanly duty of getting me calmed down.
“Go ahead and eat, Parker,” she told me. “No matter what is going on, you simply have to eat.”
I looked at my plate and gagged.
At just the thought of food, not at what was on the plate. In the candlelight there was no way of telling what was on the plate.
“Joy,” I asked her, “why was I afraid to go out into the parking lot?”
That was the thing that bothered me. That was the thing that hurt.
“Because you’re a coward,” she said.
She wasn’t helping any.
I dabbled at my food. It tasted the way you’d expect food you couldn’t see to taste.
The tiny, tinny orchestra struck up another tune—the kind of tune that went with a place like that.
I looked around the room and thought about the slithering sound that had come from behind the closet door, and it was impossible, of course. Sitting here, in this kind of atmosphere, it could be nothing more than a thing snatched naked from the middle of a dream.
But it was there, I knew. It was true, I knew. Outside the cloying, muffling influence of this man-made feather bed, there was a stark reality that no one yet had faced. That I had touched, or glimpsed, perhaps, but no more than the very edge of it.
“What,” Joy asked me, reading my thoughts, “do you intend to do about it?” “I don’t know,” I said.
“You’re a newspaperman,” she told me, “and there’s a story out there waiting for you. But, Parker, please be careful.”
“Oh certainly,” I said. “What do you think it is?” I shook my head.
“You don’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t see, this minute, how anyone can believe it.”
“I believe your own interpretation of it. But it is your interpretation right?”
“It’s the only one I have.”
“You were drunk that first night. Blind, stinking drunk, you said. The trap—”
“But there was the cutout carpeting. I saw that when I was bright sober. And the office…”
“Let’s take it step by step,” she said. “Let’s get it figured out. You can’t let it throw you. You can’t let it bowl you over.”
“That is it!” I shouted. For I had forgotten.
“Don’t shout,” she said. “You’ll have people looking at us.” “The bowling balls,” I told her. “I had forgotten them. There were bowling balls rolling down the road.” “Parker!”
“Out in Timber Lane. Joe Newman called me.” I saw her face across the table and I saw that she was scared. She’d taken all the rest of it, but the bowling balls had been the final straw. She thought that I was crazy. “I’m sorry,” I said as gently as I could. “But, Parker! Bowling balls rolling down the road!” “One behind the other. Rolling solemnly.” “And Joe Newman saw them?”
“No, not Joe. Some high-school kids. They phoned in and Joe called me. I told him to forget it.” “Out by the Belmont place?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “It all ties in, you see. I don’t know how, but somehow it all is tied together.”
I pushed the plate away and shoved back the chair. “Where are you going, Parker?”
“First,” I told her, “I’m going to take you home. And, then, if you’ll loan me the car …” “Certainly, but—oh, I see, the Belmont place.”
XVI
The Belmont house was dark, a huge, rectangular blackness reared among the blackness of the trees. It stood upon a high point of land thrust out into the lake, and when I stopped the car I could hear the running of the waves upon the beach. Through the trees I could see the glint of moonlight on the - water and high up, in a gable, a window caught the light, but otherwise the house and its sentinel trees were wrapped in blackness. The rustling of the drying leaves, heard in the silence of the night, sounded like the furtive pattering of many little feet.
I got out of the car and closed the door, gently so it wouldn’t bang. And once I got the door shut, I stayed standing there, looking at the house. I wasn’t scared exactly. The terror and the horror of the early evening had largely ebbed away. But I didn’t feel too brave.
There might be traps, I thought. Not the kind of trap that had been hidden just outside my door, but other kinds of traps. Very fiendish ones.
And then I chided myself for that kind of foolishness. For simple logic said there’d be no traps outside. For if there were, they’d catch the innocent—someone cutting through the property to get down to the lake, or children playing around that most attractive of all childish things, a vacant house—and thus would attract attention where none need be attracted. If there were any traps, they’d be inside the house. And even so, thinking of it, that seemed unlikely, too. For on their own home grounds they—whoever they might be—could deal with an intruder without resorting to traps.
It probably was no more, I told myself, than errant foolishness, this whole idea of mine that the Belmont house was in some way connected with what was going on. And yet I had to go and see, I had to know, I had to run it to the end and eliminate it, or I’d always wonder if the clues had not been there.
I went tensely up the walk, my shoulders hunched against possible attack from an unk
nown quarter. I tried to unhunch them, but they stayed tightened up no matter how I tried.
I climbed the steps to the front door and stood there, hesitating, debating with myself. And decided, finally, to do it the honest way, to ring the bell or knock. I hunted for the bell and found it in the darkness by the sense of touch. The button was loose and wobbled underneath my fingers and I knew it wasn’t working, but I pressed it just the same. I could hear no sound of ringing from inside the house. I pressed it once again and held it there, and there was still no sound of ringing. I knocked, and the knocking sounded loud in the quietness of the night.
I waited and nothing happened. Once I thought I heard a footfall, but it was not repeated, and I knew that it could be no more than my imagination.
Back down the steps, I moved around the house. Uncared for through many years, the foundation plantings had grown into thick, dense hedges. Fallen leaves rustled underfoot and there was a queer, almost acid autumn sharpness in the air.
The screen was loose in the fifth window that I tried. And the window was unlocked.
And it was easy, I thought—far too easy. If I were looking for a trap, here could be the trap.
I raised the window to the top and waited, and nothing happened. There was no sound except the sound of the waves upon the shore and the noisy walking of the wind through the dry leaves still hanging in the trees. I put my hand into my topcoat pocket and the gun was there, and the flashlight I had taken from the glove compartment of Joy’s car.
I waited a little longer, getting up my nerve. Then I boosted myself through the open window.
I stepped quickly to one side, with my back against the wall, so that I wouldn’t be outlined against the window opening. I stood there for a while, straight against the wall, trying to hold in my breathing so I’d catch the slightest sound.
Nothing happened. Nothing moved. And there was no sound.
I lifted the flashlight out of my pocket and switched it on and swept the room with its shaft of light. There was dust-sheeted furniture, there were paintings on the wall, there was a trophy of some sort standing on the fireplace mantel.