I was dragged out of the depths of sleep—that first blissful plunge—by a persistent knocking. I shouted something angry but unintelligible and when there was no reply made myself get up, feeling furious.
It was Marcia. With a really remarkable effort I kept my mouth shut and even smoothed out whatever expression was contorting my face. The words one utters on being suddenly awakened, especially from that matchless first sleep that is never recaptured, can be as disastrous as speaking in drink. Our relationship had progressed to the critical stage and I sure didn’t want to blow it, especially when treasures I’d hoped to win were spread out in front of my face, as it were, under a semitransparent nightgown and hastily-thrown-on negligee.
I looked up, a little, at her face. Her eyes were wide.
She said in a sort of frightened little-girl voice that didn’t seem at all put on, “I’m awfully sorry to wake you up at three o’clock in the morning, Jeff, but would you keep this ‘spooky’ for me? I can’t get to sleep with it in my room.”
It is a testimony to the very high quality of Marcia’s treasures that I didn’t until then notice what she was carrying in front of her—in a fold of toilet paper—the pale gray leather glove Evelyn Mayne had found behind her couch.
“Huh?” I said, not at all brilliantly. “Didn’t Officer Hart come back, or send someone over to pick it up?”
She shook her head. “Evelyn had it, of course, while I was at my job—her social worker did come over right after you left. But then at supper time her son and daughter-in-law came (Officer Hart did scare them!) and bundled her off to the hospital, and she left the glove with me. I called the police, but Officer Hart was off duty and Officer Halstead, whom I talked to, told me they’d be over to pick it up early in the morning. Please take it, Jeff. Whenever I look at it, I think of that crazy sneaking around with the silver hair down his face and waving the knife. It keeps giving me the shivers.”
I looked again at her “spooky” in its fold of tissue (so that she wouldn’t have to touch it, what other reason?) and, you know, it began to give me the shivers. Just an old glove, but now it had an invisible gray aura radiating from it.
“Okay,” I said, closing my hand on it with an effort, and went on ungraciously, really without thinking, “Though I wonder you didn’t ask Mr. Helpful first, what with all his offers and seeing him at the meeting.”
“Well, I asked you,” she said a little angrily. Then her features relaxed into a warm smile. “Thanks, Jeff.”
Only then did it occur to me that here I was passing up in my sleep-soddenness what might be a priceless opportunity. Well, that could be corrected. But before I could invite her in, there came this sharp little cough, or clearing of the throat. We both turned and there was Mr. Helpful in front of his open door, dressed in pyjamas and a belted maroon dressing gown. He came smiling and dancing toward us (he didn’t really dance, but he gave that impression in spite of being six foot four) and saying, “Could I be of any assistance, Miss Everly? Did something alarm you? Is there . . . er? . . .” He hesitated, as if there might be something he should be embarrassed at.
Marcia shook her head curtly and said to me quite coolly, “No thank you, I needn’t come in, Mr. Winter. That will be fine. Good night.”
I realized Baldy had managed to embarrass her and that she was making it clear that we weren’t parting after a rendezvous, or about to have one. (But to use my last name!)
As she passed him, she gave him a formal nod. He hurried back to his own door, a highlight dancing on the back of his head. (Marcia says he shaves it; I, that he doesn’t have to.)
I waited until I heard her double-lock her door and slide the bolt across. Then I looked grimly at Baldy until he’d gone inside and closed his—I had that pleasure. Then I retired myself, tossed the glove down on some sheets of paper on the table in front of the open window, threw myself into bed and switched out the light.
I fully expected to spend considerable time being furious at my hulking, mincing, officious neighbor, and maybe at Marcia too, before I could get to sleep, but somehow my mind took off on a fantasy about the building around me as it might have been a half century ago. Ghostly bellboys sped silently with little notes inviting or accepting rendezvous. Ghostly waiters wheeled noiseless carts of silver-covered suppers for two. Pert, ghostly maids whirled ghostly sheets through the dark air as they made the bed, their smiles suggesting they might substitute for non-arriving sweethearts. The soft darkness whirlpooled. Somewhere was wind.
I woke with a start as if someone or something had touched me, and I sat up in bed. And then I realized that something was touching me high on my neck, just below my ear. Something long, like a finger laid flat or—oh God!—a centipede. I remembered how centipedes were supposed to cling with their scores of tiny feet—and this was clinging. As a child I’d been terrified by a tropical centipede that had come weaving out of a stalk of new-bought bananas in the kitchen, and the memory still returned full force once in a great while. Now it galvanized me into whirling my hand behind my head and striking my neck a great brushing swipe, making my jaw and ear sting. I instantly turned on the light and rapidly looked all around me without seeing anything close to me that might have brushed off my neck. I thought I’d felt something with my hand when I’d done that, but I couldn’t be sure.
And then I looked at the table by the window and saw that the glove was gone.
Almost at once I got the vision of it lifting up and floating through the air at me, fingers first, or else dropping off the table and inching across the floor and up the bed. I don’t know which was worse. The thing on my neck had felt leathery.
My immediate impulse was to check if my door was still shut. I couldn’t tell from where I sat. A very tall clothes cabinet abuts the door, shutting the view of it off from the head of the bed. So I pushed my way down the bed, putting my feet on the floor after looking down to make sure there was nothing in the immediate vicinity.
And then a sharp gust of wind came in the window and blew the last sheet of paper off the table and deposited it on the floor near the other sheets of paper and the glove and the tissue now disentangled from it.
I was so relieved I almost laughed. I went over and picked up the glove, feeling a certain revulsion, but only at the thought of who had worn it and what it had been involved in. I examined it closely, which I hadn’t done earlier. It was rather thin gray kid, a fairly big glove and stretched still further as if a pretty big hand had worn it, but quite light enough to have blown off the table with the papers.
There were grimy streaks on it and a slightly stiff part where some fluid had dried and a faintly reddish streak that might have been lipstick. And it looked old—decades old.
I put it back on the table and set a heavy ashtray on top of it and got back in bed, feeling suddenly secure again.
It occurred to me how the empty finger of a gray leather glove is really very much like a centipede, some of the larger of which are the same size, flat and yellowish gray (though the one that had come out of the banana stalk had been bright red), but these thoughts were no longer frightening.
I looked a last time across the room at the glove, pinioned under the heavy ashtray, and I confidently turned off the light.
Sleep was longer in coming this time, however. I got my fantasy of hotel ghosts going again, but gloves kept coming into it. The lissom maids wore work ones as they rhythmically polished piles of ghostly silver. The bellboys’ hands holding the ghostly notes were gloved in pale gray cotton. And there were opera gloves, almost armpit length, that looked like spectral white cobras, especially when they were drawn inside-out off the sinuous, snake-slender arms of wealthy guesting ladies. And other ghostly gloves, not all hotel ones, came floating and weaving into my fantasy: the black gloves of morticians, the white gloves of policemen, the bulky fur-lined ones of polar explorers, the trim dark gauntlets of chauffeurs, the gloves of hunters with separate stalls only for thumb and trigger finger, the mittens of ice-skaters and sleigh riders, old ladies’ mitts without any fingers at all, the thin, translucent elastic gloves of surgeons, wielding flashing scalpels of silver-bright steel—a veritable whirlpool of gloves that finally led me down, down, down to darkness.