The Black Path of Fear

3

We were threading our way down the alley now, back to the car, and I was thinking it over. It was a funny time and place, maybe, to be thinking things over, but it was a lot better place for it, at that, than the jail cell waiting for me at the other end of this trip. I was still on my own feet and I was still out in the open. From what I’d seen of the other buildings around town that weren’t jails, I could imagine what the one that was a jail was going to turn out to be like. Something from the old Spanish days, most likely, with three-foot-thick walls, and once you got in you stayed in.

I thought it over and I came to a decision. I wasn’t going to any jail for something I hadn’t done. I’d go to the morgue for it, instead, if that was the way it had to be. Or I’d go on the lam for it. And those were about the only two alternatives that were offered. But I wouldn’t go, not even passively acquiescent, like I was walking now, into any jail.

She was gone, anyway, so what did I care? Make it tough for them. Let them work for their pinch. I had to take it out on someone, so it might as well be them.

According to their lights, I supposed, they considered they’d been fair to me. They’d leaned over backward to be fair to me. Maybe, as Acosta had said, because I was a foreigner. They hadn’t even booked me yet; they’d held off until after they’d brought me around to see the Chinaman first. They’d given me every chance to clear myself, and if it hadn’t worked out, that wasn’t their fault; that was — well, just the breaks, I guess. They’d given me every chance but the main one — my own freedom of action. I couldn’t ask them for that, so — I was going to take it without asking.

Let them drop me on the street if they wanted to; I was going to stay out just as long as I still stayed up. The only way I’d go in, if I went in at all, would be the long way, flat. And that’s a handy frame of mind to be in when you contemplate making a break. It simplifies your actions.

It had to be now or never, before they got me back into that car. There were a couple more of them waiting in it, which would double the odds against me, and they’d probably handcuff me this time for the final lap down to police headquarters. Why they hadn’t until now I couldn’t quite make out; probably until this last finishing touch from Chin I hadn’t been in a state of total arrest. Now I was. The distinction, if any, was too fine for the naked eye. But handcuffs or not, this was the place for it.

We were threading our way back the way we’d come in, Indian file, on a sort of chain arrangement. Me in the middle, Acosta behind me, the other fellow in the lead. They were both armed; I knew that for a fact. I didn’t much care. My sense of values had altered now that I’d lost her. A bullet either stopped you or it didn’t; either way, what difference did it make?

The car was sealing up the lower end of the lane. So forward was out. That left me a choice of two directions to bolt in: rearward or sideward into one of these moldering buildings. I had my doubts about rearward, though it should have been the natural choice to make. For all I knew, there mightn’t be any upper outlet to the alley; it might be a corner pocket. I’d only get sewed up fast and pretty. It was too easy for them to shoot me, too, in the narrow chute my flight would be channeled along. The confining walls themselves would almost guide the bullets to their mark, like a sort of mortar gun bore.

That left only the sinister-looking doorways and gaps flanking our line of march. And there weren’t very many left to pick from any more; the delay on my part had used most of them up; we were already getting near the alley mouth again. There were two left, one on each side of the way, both unlighted, both alike as far as looks went.

It was a toss-up. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d picked the one on the left instead of on the right. Two doorways on a darkened alley; one spelled life and one spelled death.

I picked the one on the right.

The break was swift and silent and already over with a minute after it had begun. To succeed at all, it had to be that way. Acosta had that same double grip on me, by cuff and coat collar, as before. The man in front had me more loosely, backhand, by my opposite wrist.

I suddenly stopped short in my tracks, bent all the way over at an acute crouch. Acosta floundered across my bent back, off balance for a moment at the way he’d been telescoped into me.

I clawed around backward at him, up and over my own hunched shoulders. I got a body grip on him, pulled him the rest of the way over me, heaving with my back as well as my arms. He did a somersault to the front of me. His body came down all over the man just ahead of me, crumpled him to his hands and knees. The two of them were in a helpless, floundering mess for a minute. By that time I was already over in the doorway.

The first shot went up the empty alley, and I was already deeper in and safely off at right angles to the line of fire. My foot pickaxed into the wood of an unseen stair, and I floundered flat upon it first, then started to beat my way up it, three-legged; that is, with the aid of one hand patting its way up it in accompaniment.

They’d seen where I’d gone. They came right in after me, fast. The yellow spoke of a pocket light shot up the stairs, acting the part of a tracer bullet to the real ones that were to follow.

The second shot came an instant later, but an instant too late. I’d already made the turn-around and was out of line, just like the first time. I heard the wall substance suck the bullet in with a little popping sound, like bubble gum in someone’s mouth.

I flung around the turn too wide and nearly knocked myself out against the wall on the other side, where the stairs went up again. I didn’t stop; kept going, stunned, carrying a blue flash inside my head for the next flight. Then it dimmed and went out again. I made another turn, this time without collision, and started up a third flight.

The attenuated pencil of light kept whipping around after me, too late each time. It could go only in a straight line, and I could go around in a curve at the head of each flight. They were trying to catch me in it and then shoot along it at me. So it would have killed me in itself, if it had ever touched me, as surely as if it had been some sort of a shriveling death ray. But I managed to stay out of it. Each time it struck wall space, unobstructed, where there had been me a wink before.

And it even helped a little. Gave me its indirect reflection to go by, took the edge off the gloom, at least showed where there were walls and where there weren’t any, revealed the coffin-shaped outlines of doors.

The third turn was the last; there weren’t any more after that to break the deadly aim of the light. There was a square vent in the ceiling at the back of the passage giving on to the roof; I could see stars through it. And there was a ladder of rusty, twisted chains, wood for the crosspieces, spilling down from it. The light showed me that as it started to glow up behind me like a lethal sunrise.

I knew I’d never have time for it. If it had been rigid, maybe. But the chains would whip around with my weight and tangle me. Their arms wouldn’t catch me, maybe, but that light beam and the bullets needling it would. They’d get me in the legs or better. They were nearly up now, the light welling up behind me to imminent calamity, like something about to burst.

I shied my hat over at the drop ladder. It landed at the foot of it, as though I had lost it while climbing. Then I grabbed at the knob of the nearest dark oblong and tried to push through. It wouldn’t give; locked or blocked. The light was nearing full strength now, starting to tip over the rise, slide into the straightaway where it could pick me up. There was only one more dark oblong, past the first one. I tried that, felt it break away inward. I went through.

Just as I got it closed again the baleful light licked by it on the outside. I could tell by the way the seam glowed livid in the very act of closing, then dimmed again as the beam went on past.

I held my body pressed tight against it. I heard their footfalls thud quickly by, following up the beam that had gone on before. Then a smothered remark as the light picked up my fallen hat. “¡Salió por aquí!” or something like that. He went up this way. I suppose. Then the chain arrangement creaked as weight was put to it.

You could almost follow their ascents, one after the other, by the little thumps its loose end gave against the floor, like the tail of a busily wagging dog.

Then that stopped, and they must have been up above on the roof now.

If I’d had any faint hopes of being able to slink out again and retrace my way to the street behind their backs, they were scotched a minute later. A voice called up from the bottom of the well, all the way down at street level, asking something. One of them came back to the edge of the roof gap and called down something in answer. No doubt to stay down there and watch the entrance. That meant the other two from the car had come up at sound of the shots; I was between the two parties of them, trapped there where I was.

Palms still soldering the door seam, one high over my head, the other down lower, I turned and looked across my shoulder. To try to see what this was, where it was, that I’d gotten. There was nothing to be seen. Just utter smooth blackness all around me. Not even that relieving ray was in here with me, as it had been outside. Not a detail, not an outline visible. It was like being in a tunnel. It was like being in a grave. I turned back again, face toward the door.

But I must have brought the memory of something in that blackness around with me, to be fanned in retrospect until it glowed into meaning. For suddenly, startled and unsure, I had quickly whipped my face around once more in that well-known double take that means you’re trying to catch up with something that didn’t sink in the first time. That’s usually done in the light, but I did it now in the bottomless dark.

I couldn’t find it for a minute, and then I did. There was a detail visible. Just one, in all that nothingness. A red mote. A dot, hanging suspended in the air. Like a spark on the loose, but that’s forgotten to finish falling the rest of the way.

I watched it for a bristly, shivery second or two. It didn’t move. I didn’t move either. I didn’t breathe much; maybe just a little, just enough to keep the works going.

Then suddenly I got it, by dint of long hard staring at it. Or, rather, by thinking it out, more than just staring. I knew what it was: it was a cigarette end being kept alight between somebody’s living lips. It had a slow, imperceptible rhythm to it when you looked long enough. It got smaller, dimmer, faded; then it came on again, clearer, brighter, larger. Breath was backing it, probably involuntary breath, like my own breathing was at the moment. Breath that couldn’t be stilled entirely but that was suppressed almost to the point of cessation. There was somebody alive over there, across the dark from me, so still, so watchful of me.

It gave itself away, the red pin point. It went up suddenly, about two feet in a straight vertical line. Then it stopped again, froze there. I translated it. The smoker had risen. He was erect; he was full height now, where he had been seated or crouched or inclined before.

It was deftly done. There wasn’t sound to go with it. He was trying to remain intangible, non-present to me. He didn’t know he’d already given himself away. The red ember must have been an oversight; perhaps long incessant habit made him forget he was holding smoldering tobacco out before his face.

I stared, hypnotized. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was like a red bead of danger, a snake’s eye fixed on me. My spine felt stiff, and a funny sort of air-cooling system seemed to play back and forth across my scalp, under the hair.

It hung there at its new altitude for a questioning, stalking moment or two. I stood at bay, shoulder blades hinging the door seam. It dimmed a little with accumulated ash; then another unconscious suck of air brightened it up again.

It started to move again, in an undulating way that told it was moving forward, toward me. It went up very slowly this time, on perspective as it drew near, and not straight up as it had the time before. It got a little bigger, to about the size of a pea. It came on like a distant red lantern on a buoy riding a pitch-black swell.

It was spooky. It was something to get the creeps about. I got them. But I stood my ground. There wasn’t anything else I could do. One of my knees started to fluctuate treacherously. I locked it, and that held it.

It was close to me now. It was up to me. It was so near to my own face that I almost seemed to feel the heat from it, radiating against my cheek in a hot spot about the size of a dime. That was pure imagination, I suppose, but that was the effect I got.

It was the silence that was so maddening — its and mine. One prolonged the other, as though neither of us — myself or this unknown quantity — wanted to be the first to make the preliminary sound that might lead, a moment after, to a death struggle. I waited for it to reveal itself; it seemed to wait for me.

I could feel my upper lip involuntarily draw back above the canine tooth on one side of my mouth; I didn’t actually growl in warning, but the atavistic impulse was there. After all, the dark, the unknown; what other way was there to express cornered defiance?

My chest was taking short little dips and rises, storing in all the air it could against the coming struggle. My arms flexed, ready to grapple and slam out.

Something cool and metallically pointed found the side of my neck, right where one of the swollen, tight cords were; pushed it in a little way, and then held steady. It was sharp — sharp as the point of a pen or the tine of a fork or somebody’s pointed fingernail, for instance; only just blunt enough to avoid puncturing the skin with the amount of pressure that was being applied to it. Very little more, and it would open it and slide in. Only it wasn’t the point of a pen or the tine of a fork or the tip of someone’s fingernail. It was the business end of a knife blade. And all it needed was one extra ounce of energy and it would go through and nail the door.

The blood couldn’t travel up or down that particular cord; the pressure of the point had choked off its right of way. It dammed up below it as if a surgical clip had been applied. There wasn’t a vibration or a quiver to the blade; you wouldn’t have thought it was held by hand at all, it was so steady. It was nothing to monkey around with, or grab, or fling off. It was just waiting for that, to ride home on an even keel. It was no threat; it was the accomplished act itself, but in two parts. Part two would follow immediately.

The cigarette coal vibrated a little with unseen movement. Movement that didn’t carry to the knife blade, that was apart from that and left it unaffected. I had to guess at what it was.

There was a swirl of air across my steaming face, as if an arm had been swept up overhead. A second arm, not the one coiled behind the knife. Something snapped twiglike up there above eye level, and a match head creased by a thumbnail fizzed and flared out like a rocket, blinding me with its suddenness.

Then it calmed to a steadier flame and came down closer, between our two faces but a little offside, so that it didn’t get in the way. The face in front of me slowly caught on in the back-shine, came through stronger, like something being developed on a photographic plate.