Authors: Cornell Woolrich
"And then?"
"And then. The forty-second time I went around there was the evening of the twenty-first day. I got a different message that time. The nurse told me she'd checked out that morning, without leaving any forwarding address. They didn't know where she'd gone."
He fell silent for a minute, and she thought it was over.
But it wasn't. Suddenly he went on, "The nurse was very worldly-wise, you know how nurses are. She looked at me very closely and she said, 'I don't know what happened between the two of you, Mr. Herrick. She didn't tell me, and I don't want to know, it's not my business. But don't you think it's better for her sake if you keep away from her from now on, don't try to go after her, don't try to find her. That young girl we had in here all those weeks wasn't fooling, wasn't acting a part. She's a real sick girl.' And she took a very small envelope out of her desk drawer, one of those little things they use for holding pills and capsules, and handed it to me. It was sealed and nothing was written on it. I didn't open it until I'd taken it home with me."
"What was in it?" she asked when the halt had become noticeable.
"Do you really want me to tell you what was in it? You don't leave me anything, do you?"
She gestured imperturbably with one turned-up hand.
"My wedding ring was in it. Hers. The one I'd bought her. And another thing, a terrible thing. I don't think any husband ever got a thing like that, from the wife who was walking away from him."
And again he couldn't seem to bring it out, but this time she didn't ask.
"A scrap of toilet tissue. That had been soiled. It was folded all around the ring. The ring was embedded in it."
She backed her hand to her mouth, in reflex dismay.
After that he didn't talk anymore. What more was there to say, after what he'd told her at the very last?
Now was the time for her to talk, and after she'd talked, for him to die.
"I met Starr once," she said tonelessly, casually.
She could tell he didn't think he'd heard her right. "You what? What was that you said?"
"I met Starr once."
"After she left me?"
"After she left, yes."
Hope was lighting up his face, even this soon. It was like a flame. He was handsome with hope, dazzle-eyed with it.
"No, no," she said quickly, and motioned to him forbiddingly. "Don't hope. Don't. It'll hurt twice as much after, if you do."
His face died again, went out again.
God, how he loves her, she thought. But what did he do to her--?
His mouth was hanging open, mutely begging, silently pleading.
"Yes, I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you about it, all about it. Just as you told me your story, from your end, I'm going to tell you my story, from my end. Isn't it funny how the two of us come together, and piece the two pieces together, and then we have the whole story."
"Hurry," he panted, almost like a man dying of thirst.
"It was last May, a year ago. I was going to kill myself."
"Why?"
"Do you want to know something? It's hard to remember why. Because life had no meaning, I guess. Because--just because. I had a gun, the only thing my father left me when he drank himself to death. I put the gun to my head and actually pulled the trigger and the gun didn't go off."
"A miracle," he breathed.
"That's what I thought. I felt reborn. I leaped up, ready to dance and sing with joy. I threw the gun down. And--"
"Yes?"
"It went off. The shot passed through the window. Are you sure you want to hear this? Are you sure?"
"Don't torture me."
"That's when I met Starr. She was the one the bullet hit. She died in my arms."
She stopped. There wasn't any more to tell him.
She wondered if he'd cry, or moan, or what he'd do. She'd think a little less of him if he did--she didn't like whimpering men--yet what right had she to set a pattern for his grief?
He didn't move at all for several minutes. Just sat there numbed, dazed.
Then he picked up the brandy snifter. She thought he was going to drain its contents in a gulp.
Instead he stood up, shock-sudden, all six feet of him, and hurled it. The liquor made an amber rainbow of falling drops all across the room and the glass exploded into a hundred pieces against the wall.
"Thanks, Life!" he roared at the top of his voice. "Thanks a load! Thanks a lump!"
And then he balled a fist, and bared his teeth like an animal snarling at a master who has just kicked him, and looked straight up overhead at the ceiling. But she knew he wasn't seeing the ceiling.
"And as for you--!"
She went over to him quickly and sealed his mouth with her hand.
"Don't," she cautioned him, almost superstitiously. "Not that. Haven't you been punished enough? Are you begging for more? Don't turn on your God because of something you've done yourself."
"He's not my--"
She quickly put her hand back again. Then he slumped, and all the defiance went out of him. He turned and went back to the sofa, and sagged into it bonelessly, soddenly.
"Something I've done myself," he kept repeating listlessly, the words she'd just used. "Something I've done myself."
"It must have been," she said finally, in a low, almost inaudible voice. "Why would the girl leave you like that, why send you back your ring defiled? I'll tell you something else, Vick. She wanted you killed, Starr wanted you killed. If she'd lived, she could have known no peace until you were killed. What was it? What was it you did to her?"
She watched him, studied him. She could see a change coming over his face. A look that hadn't been there before. Not the pain of loving and losing Starr. Not the grief-rage of hearing of her death. No, something else.
She tried to translate it, and she thought she did.
While the thing he loved was alive yet, in the same world with him yet, even though they were apart, nothing could slake his thirst for her, fever, addiction, use whichever word you want. Nothing else counted, nothing else mattered, nothing else existed. There was no right, there was no wrong, there was no good, there was no bad.
Now she no longer lived, was gone from the world.
The flame that had fed -on- her body, even though it was only -in- his mind and nowhere else, now had nothing more to feed on. And when flames have nothing more to feed on, they go down, down, down. A flame can't stay alive on a memory.
She could see it expiring in him as he was sitting there. Horror was coming on. It was written on his face, and his eyes were big and round and flickering with horror. Now the blazing flame that must have kept things, unspeakable things, at a distance, beyond the pale, like a burning, slowly turning sword, was gone. Now the skeletons and the worms, the maggots and the vermin, all the things that were fearsome and unclean and foul, crept slowly in toward him, ringing him around, closing in, feeding on him, covering him.
And he, in their center, was in a hell such as this world never knew of, nor even the hell that was the hell beyond this world.
She could see it on his face. It was almost too awful to watch. She looked down into her lap, batedly, fearfully.
She could hear her own words still echoing, ringing faintly in the room around her, though it seemed long ago that they'd been spoken. "What was it? What was it you did to her?"
And suddenly he answered, and everything was over.
"-Because I was her own brother!-"
In the hollow stillness that followed came the sound of faraway voices from the past, drumming in her ears like knells of doom; came the memory of things that had been said, and things that she had read.
She heard Charlotte Bartlett's voice again, in the distance: "We had a little baby boy first, before Starr. Then we lost him. He just disappeared from the face of the earth. One minute he was playing in front of the door. The next minute there wasn't a sign of him."
Starr herself, in a letter to her mother: "... That little-boy look, that husband look. I threw my arms around him and hung from his neck with my feet lifted clear of the ground, and kissed him about eighteen times."
Dell, baring her heart in reminiscence: "I could tell when he'd been with her. The telltale little signs that give a man away. Tired, all vitality spent. A hollowness in the cheeks and at the temples that was gone again inside twenty-four hours. To come back once more inside forty-eight."
Even the nurse at the hospital, as given at second hand by himself: "She's a real sick girl. I don't know what you've done to her, but keep away from her!"
She jolted to her feet, and her face wasn't just white, it was yellow with illness.
"Where's the bathroom? Hurry up--!" she said in a strangled voice.
"In there--the door with the mirror--"
The mirror flashed back the lights of the room as she flung the door open, then an instant later flashed again like a panel of running water as she came out almost immediately afterward.
"False alarm," she said sardonically, to no one in particular. "I must have a stronger stomach than I--"
She looked around for the Hennessy, found it, and poured herself some without asking him to help her. She poured it into a small shot glass, downed it at a throw. She needed it.
She sat down on the sofa without looking toward him. There was silence between them for a long time after that. He seemed to have forgotten she was even there. She couldn't forget that he was.
"How long after you were married did you find it out?" she asked suddenly.
He shook his head doggedly. "I knew it before."
If anything new could have been rung in on the gamut of emotions she'd already experienced in this one evening, this did it now. She felt a mixture of disgust and dismay, and an overall incredulity. "You knew it, and you went ahead and married her!" she choked.
"I was in love with her. I even left my wife for her." Then he corrected, as an afterthought, "My first wife."
"Don't put it that way," she said, grimacing in horror.
For the first time since the thing had come out into the open, he turned and looked directly at her. Her own eyes turned and fled off into a far corner, straining to get away from his look, refusing to endure him. "I never loved anybody like I loved her. Couldn't you see it, the way I looked when you said her name? Couldn't you tell it, the way I spoke when I said it?
"I knew when I married her. She didn't. I married her with my eyes wide open. What was the difference, by then?"
"What was the -difference?-" she gasped.
"We'd already been sleeping with each other while I was still living with Dell. The marriage didn't bring on anything new. I didn't want a paramour. I loved her like a man loves the woman he wants to marry--and does marry.
"It's not so terrible. It's just the idea that frightens you and sounds so terrible."
"It's accursed," she cut in sharply. "It's unclean. It's forbidden," but he paid no attention.
"We were complete strangers," he said, raising his voice in his own defense. "Even if we'd spent a year together as children-- even a half year, a month. But we'd never set eyes on each other in our lives before, until the day we met and I started to fall in love. No one was as complete strangers as we two were. The only thing that was the same was the blood. And what does the blood know, how can it tell? Cousins often marry cousins. In ancient Egypt the law in the ruling family was for brother to marry sister. It was traditional. It's only because it's taboo now that it shocks so."
"That was paganism. This is Christianity. And by that I mean as well Judaism, Islam, call it what you will; it's condemned by all of them alike. It's taboo for a reason," she said coldly, "and it's not meant to be disobeyed."
"You see this beautiful face," he said dreamily. "You love this beautiful face. You love this beautiful person. Then you find out that for a little while, at the start of life, you nursed at the breast of the same woman who nursed her afterward. But if you already love as deeply as you do, it's too late to make a difference anymore. It doesn't seem to matter, it fans your love even more. Now you love not only her, you love the added closeness that brings you that much nearer to her each time. Your sense of owning, of possessing, is strengthened that much more."
"You're not trying to convince me," she said dully. "You're trying to convince yourself. It's written on your face, the guilt, the fear--"
"Yes, because now she's gone. She's not here anymore to keep the guilt, the fear, at a distance, make me forget."
"You can't bury your conscience, you can't kill it completely. You've destroyed yourself. Now you won't be able to bear living, and you'll be terrified of dying. Or you should be."
He hung his head in admission.
"How did you first find out?"
He spoke with his head still downturned, without looking up at her. "Quite simply, nothing complicated about it. My mother died about seven, eight years ago. The night before she passed, I was sitting there beside her bed, and she told me there was something she wanted to get off her mind before she went, she'd feel better about it if she did. It sounds like one of those old melodramas, I know, but it really happened this way.
"She was jilted, as a young girl, after the guy got her pregnant. The child, when it came, was stillborn. This preyed on her mind and, I guess, turned her queer for a while.
"She talked about walking through a certain street one day, and seeing this small child playing there in front of a house. She named the street and even gave the number of the house. She said she couldn't help herself. Before she realized she was doing it, she was leading the child by the hand down the street.
"Around the corner she got into a taxi with it, and had the taxi drive her to a false address, completely away from where she really lived. Then from there she rode a bus back to her own place.
"They lived in one of these old-fashioned private houses, just she and her mother, and so they were at least safe from the prying eyes of neighbors in adjoining flats. I don't know how they got away with it, but they did. I suppose they kept me indoors and away from the windows for the remainder of their stay there. It was easier to get away with things like that in the thirties than it would be in the sixties. The mother was in a wheelchair and couldn't have done much to oppose the thing even if she'd wanted to. But she was all for it, because it made her daughter happy, and in a very short while she herself had grown very attached to me.