He came to a movie theater. Green-eyed three-sheets leered at him from the lobby and clutched with white claws at shadowy female forms whose terror-stricken faces implored rescue. A sign in front said: “You’ll Stare! You’ll Scream! You’ll shiver with Delicious Panic, as the Mad Monster Roams the Darkened Streets, Seeking His Prey!”
In front of the box office, the oddest thing happened. The trail abruptly veered toward the curb and changed completely in quality. Up to this point it had been quiet, almost sedate, if you could use such words. Now it suddenly became wild, ecstatic, “hot”—the spoor of something crazy and joyful. Carr had come to a place where, if he’d been a dog, he’d have given an excited yelp and bounded off into the brush.
He became suspicious. It wasn’t only that the change in the trail frightened him with its suggestion of the abandonment of sanity.
Dogs usually bounded off at an angle because they’d struck a different scent.
There must be two trails.
He spent almost a quarter-hour beating back and forth. What made it so difficult was that every time he struck the “hot” trail, it ruined his ability to sense the other for several seconds. Eventually he managed to plot them out to his satisfaction.
The hot trail came from around the next corner, circled deliriously in front of the theater, then shot off across the street. The quite trail made one of its side-tracks into the theater and then came out again.
He shook his head. It was all so utterly strange. As if the tails were two of his moods. One melancholy, almost soothing. The other mad, daredevil, crazily impudent.
After a couple of false starts he followed the quite trail across the next street and down another block where it turned a corner. It seemed to grow stronger, or perhaps that was because there was no longer a distinction.
He came into the business district. Here the feeling of hostile desolation, that had accompanied him for some time, increased markedly. It wasn’t only that the liquor was dying in him. Back by the stores and theaters there had been at least the ghost of some sort of human excitement, however cheap and stale, the glamour of tawdry lures hung to enmesh human appetites. But these great looming office buildings, with their trappings of iron-work and facings of granite, actually wanted to be ugly. They gloried in their stony efficiency, their indifference to human desires, their gray ability to crush out happiness.
Carr’s eyes went uneasily from side to side. Did that narrow black façade, shooting up dizzily, jerk forward a little, as if giving an inscrutable nod? There was something exceedingly horrible in the thought of miles of darkened offices, empty but for the endless desks, typewriters, filing cabinets, water coolers. What would a stranger from Mars deduce from them? Surely not human beings. Here reigned grinding death, by day as well as night, only now it put off its disguises.
With a great roar a cavalcade of newspaper trucks careened across the next corner, plunging as frantically as if the face of nations were at stake.
The feeling of active dread, that had first hit him on entering the business district, had increased. There was something that must not hear him, something that must not see him, something that under no circumstances must be allowed to know that it was heard or seen.
Easy enough to understand why a bunch of deserted skyscrapers should give a person a momentary shiver. But why should it give you that certainty of a gang bent on tracking you down? And why, in the name of sanity, should that feeling be tied up with such incongruous items as an advertisement for Wilson’s Hams, a glass panel, a black dog on a leash?
And somehow the number three. Three things? Three persons? Three what?
His feeling of near-memory was mounting toward a climax. He was certain that each hollow in the stone treads had received his foot before; that each naked vista of steel-ribbed and sinewed shafts had trapped his wandering gaze.
It had grown quite light while he’d been thinking. The stars had all gone. He could even make out, some blocks distant, the giant statue of Ceres atop the Board of Trade building. He recalled that she had no face. Being too high for features to be discerned except from an airplane or by telescope, a blank curved surface of stone did just as well.
Then, close, in fact across the street, he noticed three figures. He leaned forward sharply, watching.
For moment he though they might be statues.
There were really four figures, but the fourth was that of a large black animal—doglike yet somehow feline.
The three taller figures seemed to be surveying the sleeping city, somberly, speculatively.
The first was standing beside the dog with one arm extended straight forward towards its neck, as if holding it was the sheen of light, glistening hair, the flare of a wide-shouldered coat.
The second was a portly man.
The third was slenderer, taller, seemingly younger. His head looked small and neat, though not bald. And as he extended his arm to point at something far off, his cuff seemed empty.
Flashes of memory flickered wildly in Carr’s brain. He leaned forward a bit more and craned his neck, as if getting even an inch closer to the group might let him identify him.
It was still too dark for faces. Yet through he knew those three had faces and what the faces looked like, he found himself wondering if they, any more than the statue of Ceres, needed to wear faces now.
He leaned farther and farther forward.
He remembered everything.
Chapter Eleven
The Visible Woman
The knob of Carr’s bedroom door kept turning around and back. First a slow, creaking rotation, until the latch bolt was disengaged. Then a push, so that the door strained against the inside bolt. Then the knob, suddenly released, would spin back with a rattle. Then it would start all over again.
From where he lay, fully clothed except for shoes and coat, Carr watched the knob, peering along his leg and through the intricate brass bars that rose at the foot of the bed. He breathed as shallowly as he could. Although his neck and shoulders ached, he kept his head in the same awkward jerked-up position it had assumed when he first heard someone at the door. All his faculties were concentrated on avoiding any betraying sounds.
An infinitesimal breeze stirred the drawn shade. A big fly buzzed lazily in the muted sunlight, hovered along the ceiling, dipped to the mantle, floated noisily across the room, hit the shade with a loud plop, fell to the sill, crawled along it for a while, buzzed, and then started hovering along the ceiling again.
Carr could hear the throaty breathing of whoever was outside the door. Besides that sound there was a faint shuffling or scrabbling, as if a dog were trying to get in.
The doorknob kept on turning like a broken-down bit of machinery that refuses to gasp its last.
For a moment Carr thought the fly had lit on his forehead. It was just a trickle of sweat, but it was enough to make him jerk a little. The bedsprings creaked. His muscles tightened. His stiffened his aching, nearly trembling arms. The whole room seemed to become a wall-papered funnel narrowing down to the doorknob, which kept on turning and springing back just as before.
He could hear more than the breathing now. A querulous muttering as if whoever were outside was getting impatient.
The fly plopped against the shade, fell, and buzzed along the sill. A bit of laughter floated up from the street.
All the will power in the world could no longer have subdued the shaking in Carr’s arms. Again the bedsprings creaked, so loudly that whoever was outside must surely hear.
Yet the rhythm of the knob did not change, though the mutterings grew a trifle louder. Carr strained his ears, but could not make out the words.