Jane was like a statue in his arms, except that he could feel the terrified breaths creep up and down her throat. His mind was curiously empty, concerned with such trivial things as the wall-paper, the light, and the identity of the figure in the dark slicker he had passed by the car tracks. For some reason that question nagged him.
The steps on the stairs slowed.
“Well, they’re up there, all right. The hair’s broken.” Mr. Wilson’s words had an eminently businesslike ring, though interspersed with puffing. Then, as the steps came onto the second-story landing, “Wait a minute. I’m out of breath.”
“Very well. Down, Daisy.” Miss Hackman’s voice was amiable.
“Sh! They’ll hear you.” This time the voice was Dris’s.
Miss Hackman dwelt lovingly on her reply, lavishing on it all her sugariness. “I know they will.”
Carr studied the pattern of the wallpaper. It seemed to him he could see the light increase by visible stages, like the movements of the minute hand of a watch. He noted a thickening of the musty odor, as if from dust raised by their footsteps.
From the landing below came Mr. Wilson’s puffing and a soft and rapid padding back and forth over a very short distance. Carr could picture them clearly, though his paralyzed mind perversely attached much greater importance to the problem of the figure in the dark slicker. Mr. Wilson seated on the top step, chest heaving, knees drawn up, perhaps carefully holding his coat tails out of the dust. Dris back by the wall, a slim shadow, hand and hook at his sides. Miss Hackman standing with one foot on the top step, one below, leaning forward in some flamboyant suit, elbow on knee, blonde hair dripping around her face, holding in her hand a very short leash at the end of which a brighter, sleeker blackness paced. As they spoke, he could picture their expressions vividly—although the other problem persisted in seeming to him much more important.
“Let’s get on,” Dris said sharply.
“There’s no hurry at all,” Miss Hackman assured him. “Quiet, Daisy!”
“Just the same, it would have been simpler to finish them off back there,” Dris continued stubbornly.
“And have to spend hours cleaning up the mess?” Miss Hackman’s reply was quick and scornful. “Have you forgotten the trouble we had because of the little man with glasses. On your knees for half an hour, scrubbing?”
“You weren’t so keen on that business yourself,” he told her.
“That didn’t happen to strike me. This does. Here we don’t have to rush things or worry about cleaning up afterwards.” She paused reflectively. “Oh, how stupid of them to let themselves be lured here with those notes,” she said gayly. “How stupid of her to think we didn’t know she used to come here. How stupid of them both to be so utterly, completely guileless. How stupid of him not to realize we could get his home address at his office. It’s almost too easy. Still,” she went on thoughtfully, “they’re alive, and it’s really only live things that are any fun.”
“Let’s get on,” Dris repeated insistently.
“Not by any chance a date? With your girls?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. No, I’ve got a feeling…that we’re being watched.”
“Silly lad.” Miss Hackman’s voice was wholly again. “Of course we are, and listened to, too.”
“I don’t mean by them,” Dris told her.
But Carr was hardly listening to what they said, for he had just recaptured a memory that perversely afforded him great satisfaction—the identity of the figure in the dark slicker.
It had been one of the men on South State Street who had stood on the curb when he and Jane—and those three—had fled.
“You’ve a feeling, Dris?” At last Mr. Wilson spoke again, even-breathed, an for once not heartily, instead almost apprehensively.
“Yes.”
“Then let’s get one with this quickly.” The stairs creaked as he heaved up his fat body, the footsteps started again, and there was an eager change in the rhythmic padding then:
“What’s that!” Mr. Wilson almost shouted.
“They’re trying for the back stairs,” Miss Hackman screeched. “Daisy!”
“No, they’re not, you idiot!” Mr. Wilson roared. “I think—”
“I warned you—” Dris began.
“My God, it’s—” Mr. Wilson started to say.
But Carr was so preoccupied with his recaptured memory, that at first it seemed to him of no consequence—perhaps just something his sick mind was imagining—when he heard a sudden rush of footsteps on the floor below, more footsteps than those three could make, and in addition coming with a rush from the back of the house and pounding up the stairs from the first floor.
Even when Jane jerked in his arms, when, with shocking loudness in the echoing stair-well, there came the crash of half dozen gunshots, he hardly roused himself fully to what was happening—or rather he realized how what was happening fitted his recaptured memory, how it led from South State Street by the red glare of a railway flare to Old Jules’s barge, to the man by the car tracks, and so here.
With Jane rocking wildly in his arms, he heard, as the echoes of the gunfire died, a shrill scream that ended in a gargling groan, thud of a body, a squalling animal scream, a rush of paws, another earsplitting burst of gunfire, thud of another body, one last gunshot, and then the fainter diminishing rhythmic thuds of a body rolling down the stairs, step by step.
Then silence, complete silence, almost more shocking than the noise.
A cloud of acrid smoke mushrooming up the well.
Then, out of the silence below, a voice, unfamiliar, flat, crueclass="underline" “Well, that finished them and in a good spot. Get you bad, George?”
Another unfamiliar voice: “Just a scratch.”
A third voice: “Shall we search the rest of the house?”
The first voice, after what seemed to Carr an eternity: “No, there were only these three and the cat when we followed them in. Besides, there were only three in this gang. Old Jules said so.”
Footsteps descending the stairs.
Sound of the porte-cochere door closing.
Carr felt Jane twist from his arms. She hurried into the room behind them. He found her peering over the sill through the dirty and half-shattered window. Kneeling cautiously beside her, he got his own eyes up in time to see, going down the weedy driveway in the chilly light, a half-dozen men in dark slickers.
They crouched there at the window. The driveway emptied. The light was enough now so that the weeds showed a faint shade of green.
He looked at Jane, just as she turned to him.
He hated the thought of going downstairs, of guiding her past what they must find.
He dreaded the realization that they owed their lives to deadly creatures probably no less horrible than those who had been destroyed, that his safety and Jane’s lay solely in the fact that these deadly creatures did not happen to be informed about them.
Nevertheless, he knew that the road back to their lives was at last clear.
Chapter Sixteen
Stop Running