William Irish
The Man Upstairs
At dawn Mrs. Collins slowly climbed the stairs to her lodger’s room on the second floor, bringing him his hot shaving water. That was the only way it could be supplied; there was no hot running water in her decrepit old house. Daybreak came late these bleak winter mornings. Outside the town was still fast asleep and the streets were dark. A chill, tomblike silence hung over the house; her creaking tread on the worn staircase was the only sound that broke it. She knocked at the door and waited.
He’d lodged with her for over ten years now, ever since — well, ever since Jerry, her stepbrother, had had that trouble and been put away. If it wasn’t for him, old Mr. Davis, she would have lost the very roof over her head, battered and tumble-down as it was. The pittance he paid her for his room each week was her sole means of subsistence. People said he was a miser. They asked her if it was true that he had a large sum of money hidden away up there in the room with him. She didn’t know for sure. But even if she had, she wouldn’t have told them about it. He was her only friend.
He was a little slow in answering her today. She knocked again, more loudly. “Mr. Davis, here’s your hot water,” she called out.
A low-voiced groan reached her. There was something about the sound of it she didn’t like. It was more like the groan of someone dying than the groan of someone waking up. She hastily set the water down and tried the doorknob. The door was open. He always slept with it that way. He felt safe in her house. She pushed it open, and at the very first widening of the seam her nose told her the answer. Coal gas. The insidious death that can’t be seen. That old defective, potbellied stove he had in there. She’d warned him not to try to use it. He must have tried to warm the room with it before he started to dress.
She moved fast and without stopping to think of her own safety. She flung up her apron, held it to her nose with one hand, and darted across the room toward the window. That was the first thing that had to be done, get fresh air in. The death loading the air was invisible to the eye; it was there nonetheless. A faint heat refraction dancing lazily above the smothered-out stove was the only telltale sign. A half-dressed figure lay sprawled backward across the bed, one arm protectively across its face. He had been overcome while in the act of bending to put on his shoes.
She flung the window up as high as it would go. Then she ran back to him, managed to roll him off the bed into her arms, and half dragged, half carried him over to it. He was quite a burden for a frail, elderly little body to manage, but she succeeded in her purpose. She held him propped by the open window and fanned him vigorously with her apron.
She saw that it had almost happened. In another minute or two at the most it would have been too late. But after a breathless moment or two his eyes flickered open, and he coughed strangledly and clutched weakly at his own throat. She’d pulled him through.
She poured water into the malignant stove, to quench it altogether. Then she wetted the corner of her apron and came back and dabbed his forehead with it.
“Wh-what happened?” he faltered. “I... I guess you saved my life.”
“I told you not to go near that stove,” she scolded him. “See what you nearly did to yourself?”
But by the time she left the room and returned to her household duties downstairs he was already up and around on his feet again, a little shaky, but otherwise none the worse for his narrow escape.
When he came down later, on his way to his bookshop for the day, she was sweeping out the doorstep. He kept a little bookstall, singlehanded, over at the other end of town. It must have been purely a labor of love; it was seldom anyone entered it to buy anything. But he loved books so himself, it made him happy just to be among them, browsing all day long. He never came back to the house until late at night. And there were times he even made jaunts out of town, for two and three days at a time, simply to buy some collector’s item, some rare and highly prized volume that he had heard was being offered for sale at some book auction in one of the large cities. Which was probably what had started the rumor about his hoarded wealth.
Mrs. Collins placidly continued her sweeping of the doorstep while she watched him trudge down the street. Her eyes followed his spare, slow-moving figure until it had turned the corner and was gone from sight. Then she suddenly stopped sweeping, re-entered the house, and locked the door after her on the inside. She laid aside her broom, went to the back of the hall, and descended a flight of gloomy stairs that led down to a tightly shut cellar door.
She knocked cautiously on this, and a dog’s low growl sounded somewhere on the other side of it. A bolt was withdrawn, and the door swung back on the crack. Two eyes looked out at her, one above the other — one a human eye, the other the round black bore of a revolver.
“He’s gone for the day,” she whispered. “You can come up now for your coffee, Jerry.”
The lower eye disappeared; the door widened, and a haggard, unshaven man of about fifty stood glowering at her. He had the unmistakable pallor of prison all over his face. “It’s about time,” he answered surlily. “It’s damp enough down here to freeze your bones! Make sure the shades are down on all the windows, get me?”
A dog’s muzzle peered from between his legs, continuing to growl at her suspiciously. The man looked down, suddenly vented all his latent ill-humor on this helpless victim of his whims. “Shut up!” he said viciously. “You’ll be giving me away yet, doing that, one of these times! I’ll teach you to keep quiet!” He began stripping a rawhide belt from his own waist and coiling it around his fist so that the loaded buckle on one end swung free.
“Jerry, don’t...!” Mrs. Collins pleaded.
“You mind your own business,” he grated, avidly moistening his lips. “Crawl out here where I can get at you, Rags!”
She turned and fled up the stairs for dear life, pressing her hands over her ears to try to shut out the horrid sounds of what was about to take place. The cellar door closed, but the hissing bit of the belt and the howling screams of pain filtered thinly through it even after it had.
When he came up to the kitchen after her presently, he was wiping off the belt buckle with a piece of rag, a piece of rag that showed flecks of red on it. She shuddered and turned away.
He refastened the belt, sat down heavily at the kitchen table. She brought him coffee and he sucked it in noisily. She went back to the stove. Presently she spoke, without looking at him. “You can’t stay here any longer, Jerry. You’ve been here three days now. They’ll find out you’re hiding here sooner or later. I never had my window shades down in the daytime like this before. Folks’ll start talking.”
“Then get me some money, like I told you, so I can get out of here.”
“I’ve given you all I had. I haven’t any more.”
“Nickels and dimes!” he jeered. “I mean real money. Enough to take me far enough away so they can’t catch up with me.”
“Where am I to get it?”
He gave a knowing look upward at the ceiling. “What about him up there? He must have a wad of it stashed away in that room.”
She turned away quickly, without answering.
He sat watching her, a cigarette dangling loosely from the corner of his mouth. “What happened up there before? I heard you jumping around kind of smart.”
“Nothing,” she said in a smothered voice.
He reached out and caught her by the wrist, jerked her around so that she had to face him. “Don’t gimme any of that! Come on, answer me, what was it?”
She had to tell him then, against her better judgment. He let go of her wrist. He slitted his eyes at her evilly.