HE
eased out the door and closed it quietly behind him. He didn’t hate her, he couldn’t hate her. She was just another puppet who danced to the piper’s tune. But she didn’t regret it, like John had.
He lit his pipe, flicked the dead match on the worn carpeting, and started for the hallway. Halfway down the hall, he stopped. The outside door to the apartments had opened and there were footsteps on the stairs.
Somebody coming home, he thought, little twinges of anxiety plucking at his mind. He listened. The footsteps passed the first-floor landing and went on to the second. And then to the third. A woman would have taken the elevator so it was probably a man. A man who was in a hurry … .
Then he knew who it was. He could feel him coming up the stairs, the way a swimmer feels the waves in a lake.
Adam Hart had probably been bored after he had dropped Petey off. A cup of coffee in a restaurant and then a sudden decision to pay Petey a surprise visit. A little sport before morning came.
Tanner stood in the hallway in almost fatal indecision, listening to the quiet footsteps and feeling the moisture starting out on his hands and face. He wanted to find out who Hart was but he had never meant to meet him face to face in a hallway. That kind of meeting could only end one way.
Now the footsteps were at the landing between the third and fourth floors. Calm, sure, and just a little hurried.
Adam Hart didn’t know that he was there.
He hesitated one more second, then turned and fled down the hallway. Behind him, the footsteps on the stairs halted briefly, then bounded up.
who are you …
who are you …
who are you …
The end of the hall, a door, and a small red light burning above it. The fire escape and outside a clearing, cool evening with ten thousand stars spotted in the distant sky. A breeze that tugged at his collar and sifted through his hair, chilling the sweat on his face.
He could go over the side and four stories down to the blessed softness and safety of the concrete, he thought. No worries, no fears …
He clutched at the iron railing, suddenly panicky, then was running on the iron grid, spinning down the steel steps. Four flights of stairs taken two and three at a time. He stumbled and fell at the very bottom and for a second he was looking up at the building, staring at a shadow in a felt hat and a trench coat, silhouetted against the sky.
He got to his feet and started for the end of the alley, his legs shaking so badly he could hardly stand.
don’t run …
don’t run
…
don’t run …
His head suddenly ached and there were subtle probings, sudden pressures and jabs that brought sharp pain to his eyeballs and caused an uncontrollable itching of his skin. He opened his mouth to scream and laughter bubbled out instead, then his lungs suddenly refused to work and his left leg developed an involuntary limp.
A vague thought trickled through his mind. This was it. The master was learning how to pull the strings, like a violinist tuning his violin.
Then there was a sudden pressure on his heart, the feeling of a hand that was slowly squeezing it, choking the arteries and the veins and throttling the valves. The same thing that John Olson must have felt, although not as blessedly quick.
The alley exit was a dozen yards away … .
He fought back, trying to blank his mind, mentally grasping the fingers and trying to make them release, desperately trying to cause some pain in return. There was a brief hesitation, he took a quick strangled breath, and then the pressure was back.
The stars and the night and the cooling air … idiot laughter and curses and his own hands tearing at his chest, his eyes smarting and swelling.
Then he was out of the alley and on a residential street, for the moment out of sight. There was a sudden release, bafflement, and a frenzied groping in the air around him. His heels were a staccato echo on the sidewalk and he hurriedly switched to the dew-covered lawns. Far behind him, in the alley, there was the chatter of feet racing down the fire-escape steps.
He’d have to hide, and hide quickly. He couldn’t outrun Hart and so soon as Hart had him in sight again …
He cut in towards one of the houses whose windows were dark and reflected the dull glow from the street light. A frame house which meant a back porch and …
The space beneath the porch was musty and thick with cobwebs. Planks and ladders and a lawn mower and garden tools had been stowed there. He lowered himself between two stacks of boards and shivered. He had been afraid and fear had pulled the strings as much as anything else. So damned, uncontrollably afraid. He forced himself to relax and to think of something else.
The musty smell of the rotting wood beneath the porch and outside a lukewarm night with the stars like crystal, inanimate ice in a pitch-black sky.
He waited.
The little things of the night. The soft noises from the trees and shrubs as small animals settled for slumber or foraged for food. The creeping things in the woodpile and the faraway echoes of automobiles two blocks over.
There was a scratching at the back fence and the gate creaked open. A boxer dog was framed in the opening for a minute, then trotted casually in. A swift inspection of the grounds, and back towards the garbage can just inside the fence. A nudge and a sudden clatter that filled the night.
If the dog came any closer … But it was pawing through the remains of an evening dinner and didn’t wander over to the porch.
Then he felt a shadow in the yard and knew that Adam Hart had heard the noise and darted in to investigate. He could feel the cold gaze sweep around the moonlit yard, hesitating at the shadows of the rose bushes and the hollyhocks, lingering on the dim recesses beneath the porch … .
Be nothing, be nobody … .
He tried to develop a blank mind, a mind that didn’t think of Adam Hart, that didn’t think of being caught, that didn’t think of hiding under the porch, under the porch, under the por …
Blankness.
Nothing.
A probing under the porch.
Nothing.
A gentle probing at the bushes and the shadows of the shrubs.
Nothing.
There was nothing in the yard but a boxer dog that had been worrying a paper sack of garbage and now looked up, wagging its stumpy tail. It forgot the garbage for a minute and started to trot across the yard, towards the shadowed figure that stood by the front gate.
And then there was
fury.
The small noises in the bushes and under the porch suddenly died. There was an abrupt chittering in the oak tree and then silence. Something crashed down through the branches and thudded on the ground. The boxer growled and the hackles on its neck rose. It trotted stiffly forward, then suddenly froze in a patch of moonlight. It began to whimper.
Tanner watched, fascinated.
A muscle on the dog’s left hind leg bunched and jerked and there was a brittle, snapping sound. He could see the muscles of the throat work as the boxer tried to howl, but not a sound came out.
Fury!
The end was quick. The dog’s skin rippled and it went into convulsions, circling around its useless leg and frothing at the jaws. Suddenly there was a louder snap and it sagged, broken, to the ground. It jerked once, as if somebody had kicked it, and a growing depression showed faintly in its side. Blood gushed abruptly from the mouth and then the yard was still and empty.
Footsteps sounded faintly down the sidewalk. Then silence.
Tanner crawled out from under the porch. He glanced at the boxer, lying crushed in the middle of the yard, and imagined himself lying there. He stared, then went out the back gate and down the alley.
Clouds started to roll in from the west and the night air began to chill.
Downtown, the clock in front of Marshall Field’s said one o’clock. The theater crowd filled the streets, heading for the IC station or waiting on the corners for the bus or thronging the restaurants that stayed open until the small hours of the morning.
People, the blessed people. He felt safe with them, with lots of them.
“Cuppa cawfee, mister?”
Dirty blue shirt and baggy khakis, a stained bristle of white whiskers and eyes that were all pupil and bloodshot lens. A shaking, outstretched hand with ingrained dirt in the palms and grubby fingernails.
Tanner started digging.
“I only need five dollars and thirty-six cents,” the voice said hopelessly.
He pulled his hand out of his pocket as if he had been burned. There was nothing behind the bloodshot eyes, there was no indication that he was anything but a wino on the bum.
But five dollars and thirty-six cents was all the money that he had.
He stared at the bum for a moment, then whirled on his heel and walked away.
I can’t go up to a policeman and say, “Officer, I’m being followed by somebody who isn’t human.”I can’t vanish, I can’t hide. It’s out in the open. I’m the mouse and Hart is the cat. And may God have mercy on my soul for like Petey said, I shall not live through the night … .
There were couples walking slowly down the street, laughing and pressing close to each other. Two sailors stood beneath a dying movie marquee, looking professionally lonesome and eyeing the crowd as it swirled past. A matron, heels clicking loudly on the sidewalk, hurried towards the Grant Park underground garage. A group of soldiers talked in earnest voices to a girl in a doorway, the street light lost in the fuzzy sheen of too-blond hair.
The street was clearing for the short night.
He kept glancing in the store windows, trying to catch a glimpse of anybody who might be following him. Nobody for certain … and possibly everybody. He stopped for a moment longer, looking at the reflections in a Walgreen’s drugstore window.
A glimpse of a man in a felt hat and trench coat? He couldn’t be sure …
“I think that bird is real cute,” a nasal voice said. “Look at him, that one there.”
Pickup.
He glanced at the display. A little wooden bird teetered back and forth on a perch, then swung down to dip its bill in a glass of water. Up—back and forth, back and forth—and down again. No strings, no motor. Just the bird, its perch, and the glass of water.
“It’s real cute. I’d like to …”
The bird lowered its beak into the water and didn’t come up.
Five.
Ten.
Fifteen seconds.
Suddenly he knew what was coming but he couldn’t turn away.
The bird swung up, winked a painted eye, and spewed a stream of water that splashed on the glass a foot away.
“Say, now wasn’t that cute? How do you suppose …” Suddenly she decided it wasn’t cute at all and started screaming.
“Somebody botherin’you, ma’m?”
The soldiers who had been talking to the girl down the street. They clustered around the window and Tanner edged away, not wanting any more trouble.
“He did it! He’s the one!”
She pointed at him and one of the soldiers caught his arms and another hit him in the stomach. He doubled and tried to wrench an arm free. Then one of them slugged him in the face and he could feel the cartilage in his nose give. He went down.
Another soldier tipped his hat and took the girl by the elbow. “Just a cakewalkin’ civilian, ma’m. No trouble at all.”
Tanner shook his head and stumbled to his feet, feeling for a handkerchief to soak up the blood spurting from his nose. He was shaking with fury and started after the soldiers, then changed his mind and turned away
He couldn’t blame them. Adam Hart was actually throwing the punches. Adam Hart was working him over, trying to get even for his getting away the first time. Hart’s human reactions, the curious mixture of man and superman. It was encouraging, if he could only live through it.
He walked aimlessly up Randolph Street, trying to keep with the crowds. A glance at the plastic soldiers on display in a toy shop window. Just a glance—long enough to see one of them present arms and to hear the tinny thudding of a miniature drum.
The night spots were winking out one by one. The actors were disappearing from the stage and he realized that soon there would be only he and Hart, alone on the boards and with no audience to see the final tragic act.
He wasn’t aware, at first, of the old woman walking beside him. Her voice was a whispered croak.