By this time there was no doubt, if there had ever been any, that she would eventually kill Hugo Weis. She did not feel messianic about it. It was simply something that had to be done. For awhile the possible consequences to herself were disturbing, even frightening, but soon she found herself unable to think beyond the act of killing, as if her own life would also end in that instant and make her eternally invulnerable to earthly harm. It amused her at night, lying in her bed in her dark room, to think of Hugo Weis, wherever he was, doing whatever he might be, completely unaware that he would surely soon die by the hand of a woman he had never seen and would never really know. It was amusing, very amusing, and she laughed softly to herself in the darkness, a whisper of sound in the still room. The face of Hugo Weis floated above her like an ectoplasmic obscenity, ugly and evil.
In March she bought a gun, a 32 caliber revolver, explaining to the local hardware dealer from whom she bought it that it would give her a sense of security, even though she had never fired a revolver in her life. Since she and her mother lived alone in a large house, she said, it seemed unwise to be without any kind of protection at all. The dealer agreed and suggested that she practice firing the revolver in the country Sunday afternoons. He sold her several boxes of cartridges for the revolver, and she carried the revolver and the cartridges home and put them away carefully in a drawer of the dressing table in her room. She did not practice firing the revolver Sunday afternoons, however, for it wasn’t necessary. Whatever was necessary would be taken care of in its own time.
Early in June, soon after school was let out for the summer, the long period of waiting came to an end. It ended abruptly, without warning, one afternoon in the reading room of the public library. Freda had gone there for no particular reason, except that the public library was a pleasant place to be, quiet and restful with sunlight slanting in through high windows, and she had been going there regularly for almost as long as she could remember. She was sitting alone at a table by a window, a book open before her, but she was not concentrating, was only dimly conscious of words between long intervals of dreaming, and she could not later remember the name of the book or anything in it that she had read.
“It’s time now to do it,” the voice said softly and suddenly.
“What?” she thought.
“It’s time to kill Hugo Weis. We have waited long enough.”
“How?”
“With the gun. Didn’t you buy the gun?”
“Yes. The gun and cartridges.”
“Good. It will be quite simple, really. You’ll see.”
“What should I do?”
“First you must go to the city where he is, of course.”
“What then?”
“Go to a hotel. Later, at the right time, you will go to his office. He sees all sorts of people there, mostly people who come for favors, and no one will think it odd that you have come too. Have you learned where the office is?”
“Yes. It’s on the south side of the city, near the railroad station. On Euclid Street.”
“So it is. I see you have been preparing yourself well.”
“Won’t I have trouble getting in to see him?”
“Probably none at all. He makes a point of trying to see personally all the supplicants who come to him. It’s a trick. He sustains much of his power that way.”
“What will happen to me afterward?”
“Never mind that. Don’t worry about anything.”
Having asked the question, what would happen to her afterward, she felt for an instant a terrible fear, but in the next instant the fear had passed, and she arose and returned the book to the stacks and left the library. Home, she told her mother that she had decided to go up to the city for a day or two, which was something she had done occasionally ever since she had been old enough, and then she went upstairs to her room and at once began to pack the loaded gun and a few things in a small bag. She had no feeling of having come to a point of crisis in her life, not the beginning of anything or the end of anything or even a radical change from what had been. There was a train, she knew, that left for the city at five o’clock, and having packed and said good-by to her mother, she called a taxi and reached the station with several minutes to spare.
That was yesterday and last night, and now here she was in a room of the hotel to which she’d come, and it was, she saw by her watch, nine o’clock in the morning. She stopped brushing her hair and stood up and put on the light coat she had worn on the train. After putting on the coat, she stood quietly with her head bent forward in a posture of abstraction, as if, now that she was prepared to leave, she had forgotten where she was going or for what purpose. Then, moving all at once, she took the loaded revolver from the small traveling bag and put it in her purse and went out into the hall and downstairs. She walked down, ignoring the elevator, and she walked slowly, not like one reluctant to reach a destination, but with a kind of implicit aimlessness suggesting no destination at all.
She had, in fact, plenty of time. It was over a mile from the hotel to the office of Hugo Weis, and it would not be wise, she thought, to get there too early. From the lobby of the hotel, she passed into a coffee shop and sat down at a small table in the rear. A waitress came with a breakfast menu, but she was not in the least hungry, although she had not eaten since noon of the day before. She ordered only a cup of coffee. She drank the coffee so slowly that it was quite cold before it was half gone, and then she sat on over the cold cup for another ten minutes before leaving. By that time it was just past nine-thirty.
Reaching Euclid Street, carrying the purse under her arm and still walking with the implicit aimlessness of one with no place in particular to go, she turned south in the direction of Hugo Weis’ office. She could not recall exactly how she had learned where the office was. Probably it was something she had known for a long time. It was a rather famous location, after all, and had received a lot of publicity at various times. It was the first office Hugo Weis had ever had, two dark rooms in a shabby building in a poor section, and it was evidence of his great vanity that he had remained there all these years, exercising his swollen power and gathering a fortune in the same place where he had begun. It was another trick, she thought. A lie. An illusion of humility sustained by a monster of conceit.
Walking along the street, she felt wonderfully good, almost exhilarated. She felt, indeed, rather gaseous, hardly touching the concrete pavement with her feet, on the verge of rising and floating away with every step. She had felt this way sometimes as a girl, especially early in the morning of a spring day when she had got up ahead of all the others and gone alone into the yard. And there in the window of a department store was a thin dress of palest blue that was just the kind of dress for the effervescent girl that she had been and now wasn’t. She stopped in front of the window and gazed at the dress for several minutes, clutching under her arm the purse, and the gun in the purse, and then she turned away and walked on and came pretty soon to the certain shabby building in the poor section. On the street outside the building, as she waited before entering, the voice spoke to her for the next to the last time it ever would. As always, it was a voice of poignant beauty, with a whisper of sadness running through it.