A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Corpse Next Door

Harlan’s wife turned away quickly, trying to hide the canopener in her hand. “What’s the idea?” he asked. She hadn’t expected him to look across the top of his morning paper just then. The can of evaporated milk she had been holding in her other hand slipped from her grasp in her excitement, hit the floor with a dull whack, and rolled over. She stooped quickly, snatched it up, but he had seen it.

“Looks like somebody swiped the milk from our door again last night,” she said with a nervous little laugh. Harlan had a vicious temper. She hadn’t wanted to tell him, but there had not been time to run out to the store and get another bottle.

“That’s the fifth time in two weeks!” He rolled the paper into a tube and smacked it viciously against the table-leg. She could see him starting to work himself up, getting whiter by the minute even under his shaving talcum. “It’s somebody right in the house!” he roared. “No outsider could get in past that locked street-door after twelve!” He bared his teeth in a deceptive grin. “I’d like to get my hands on the fellow!”

“I’ve notified the milkman and I’ve complained to the superintendent, but there doesn’t seem to be any way of stopping it,” Mrs. Harlan sighed. She punched a hole in the top of the can, tilted it over his cup.

He pushed it aside disgustedly and stood up. “Oh, yes, there is,” he gritted, “and I’m going to stop it!” A suburban commuters’ train whistled thinly in the distance. “Just lemme get hold of whoever—!” he muttered a second time with suppressed savagery as he grabbed his hat, bolted for the door. Mrs. Harlan shook her head with worried foreboding as it slammed behind him.

He came back at six bringing something in a paper-bag, which he stood on the kitchen-shelf. Mrs. Harlan looked in it and saw a quart of milk.

“We don’t need that. I ordered a bottle this afternoon from the grocer,” she told him.

“That’s not for our use,” he answered grimly. “It’s a decoy.”

At eleven, in bathrobe and slippers, she saw him carry it out to the front door and set it down. He looked up and down the hail, squatted down beside it, tied something invisible around its neck below the cardboard cap. Then he strewed something across the sill and closed the door.

“What on earth—?” said Mrs. Harlan apprehensively.

He held up his index-finger. A coil of strong black sewing-thread was plaited around it. It stood out clearly against the skin of his finger, but trailed off invisibly into space and under the door to connect with the bottle. “Get it?” he gloated vindictively. “You’ve got to look twice to see this stuff once, especially in a shadowy doorway. But it cuts the skin if it’s pulled tight. See? One tug should be enough to wake me up, and if I can only get out there in time—”

He left the rest of it unfinished. He didn’t have to finish it, his wife knew just what he meant. She was beginning to wish he hadn’t found out about the thefted milk. There’d only be a brawl outside their door in the middle of the night, with the neighbors looking on—

He paid out the thread across their living-room floor into the bedroom beyond, got into bed, and left the hand it was attached to outside the covers. Putting out the lights after him, she was tempted to clip the thread then and there, as the safest way out, even picked up a pair of scissors and tried to locate it in the dark. She knew if she did, he’d be sure to notice it in the morning and raise cain.

“Don’t walk around in there so much,” he called warningly. “You’ll snarl it up.”

Her courage failed her. She put the scissors down and went to bed. The menacing thread, like a powder-train leading to a high explosive, remained intact.

In the morning it was still there, and there were two bottles of milk at the door instead of one, the usual delivery and the decoy. Mrs. Harlan sighed with relief. It would have been very short-sighted of the guilty person to repeat the stunt two nights in succession; it had been happening at the rate of every third night so far. Maybe by the time it happened again, Harlan would cool down.

But Harlan was slow at cooling down. The very fact that the stunt wasn’t repeated immediately only made him boil all the more. He wanted his satisfaction out of it. He caught himself thinking about it on the train riding to and from the city. Even at the office, when he should have been attending to his work. It started to fester and rankle. He was in a fair way to becoming hipped on the subject, when at last the thread paid off one night about four.

He was asleep when the warning tug came. Mrs. Harlan slept soundly in the adjoining bed. He knew right away what had awakened him, jumped soundlessly out of bed with a bound, and tore through the darkened flat toward the front door.

He reached it with a pattering rush of bare feet and tore it open. It was sweet. It was perfect. He couldn’t have asked for it any better! Harlan caught him red-handed, in the very act. The bottle of milk cradled in his arm, he froze there petrified and stared guiltily at the opening door. He’d evidently missed feeling the tug of the thread altogether — which wasn’t surprising, because at his end the bottle had received it and not himself. And to make it even better than perfect, pluperfect, he was someone that by the looks of him Harlan could handle without much trouble. Not that he would have hung back even if he’d found himself outclassed. He was white-hot with thirty-six hours’ pent-up combustion, and physical cowardice wasn’t one of his failings, whatever else was.

He just stood there for a split second, motionless, to rub it in. “Nice work, buddy!” he hissed.

The hijacker cringed, bent lopsidedly to put the bottle on the floor without taking his terrified eyes off Harlan. He was a reedy sort of fellow in trousers and undershirt, a misleading tangle of hair showing on his chest.

“Gee, I’ve been so broke,” he faltered apologetically. “Doctor-bills, an’—an’ I’m outa work. I needed this stuff awfully bad, I ain’t well—”

“You’re in the pink of condish compared to what you’re gonna be in just about a minute more!” rumbled Harlan. The fellow could have gotten down on his knees, paid for the milk ten times over, but it wouldn’t have cut any ice with Harlan. He was going to get his satisfaction out of this the way he wanted it. That was the kind Harlan was.

He waited until the culprit straightened up again, then breathed a name at him fiercely and swung his arm like a shotputter.

Harlan’s fist smashed the lighter man square in the mouth. He went over like a paper cut-out and lay just as flat as one. The empty hallway throbbed with his fall. He lay there and miraculously still showed life. Rolling his head dazedly from side to side, he reached up vaguely to find out where his mouth had gone. Those slight movements were like waving a red flag at a bull. Harlan snorted and flung himself down on the man. Knee to chest, he grabbed the fellow by the hair of the head, pulled it upward and crashed his skull down against the flagged floor.

When the dancing embers of his rage began to thin out so that he was able to see straight once more, the man wasn’t rolling his head dazedly any more. He wasn’t moving in the slightest. A thread of blood was trickling out of each ear-hollow, as though something had shattered inside.

Harlan stiff-armed himself against the floor and got up slowly like something leaving its kill. “All right, you brought it on yourself!” he growled. There was an undertone of fear in his voice. He prodded the silent form reluctantly. “Take the lousy milk,” he said. “Only next time ask for it first!” He got up on his haunches, squatting there ape-like. “Hey! Hey, you!” He shook him again. “Matter with you? Going to lie there all night? I said you could take the—”

The hand trying to rouse the man stopped suddenly over his heart. It came away slowly, very slowly. The color drained out of Harlan’s face. He sucked in a deep breath that quivered his lips. It stayed cold all the way down like menthol.

“Gone!” The hoarsely-muttered word jerked him to his feet. He started backing, backing a step at a time, toward the door he’d come out of. He could not take his eyes off the huddled, shrunken form lying there close beside the wall.

“Gee, I better get in!” was the first inchoate thought that came to him. He found the opening with his back, even retreated a step or two through it, before he realized the folly of what he was doing. Couldn’t leave him lying there like that right outside his own door. They’d know right away who had — and they weren’t going to if he could help it.

He glanced behind him into the darkened flat. His wife’s peaceful, rhythmic breathing was clearly audible in the intense stillness. She’d slept through the whole thing. He stepped into the hall again, looked up and down. If she hadn’t heard, with the door standing wide open, then surely nobody else had with theirs closed.

But one door was not closed! The next one down the line was open a crack, just about an inch, showing a thin line of white inner-frame. Harlan went cold all over for a minute, then sighed with relief. Why that was where the milk-thief came from. Sure, obviously. He’d been heading back in that direction when Harlan came out and caught him. It was the last door down that way. The hall, it was true, took a right-angle turn when it got past there, and there were still other flats around the other side, out of sight. That must be the place. Who else would leave their door off the latch like that at four in the morning, except this guy who had come out to prowl in the hallway?

This was one time when Mrs. Harlan would have come in handy. She would have known for sure whether the guy lived in there or not, or just where he did belong. He himself wasn’t interested in their neighbors, didn’t know one from the other, much less which flats they hung out in. But it was a cinch he wasn’t going to wake her and drag her out here to look at a dead man, just to find out where to park him. One screech from her would put him behind the eight-ball before he knew it.

Then while he was hesitating, sudden, urgent danger made up his mind for him. A faint whirring sound started somewhere in the bowels of the building. Along with it the faceted glass knob beside the automatic elevator panel burned brightly red. Somebody was coming up!

He jumped for the prostrate form, got an under-arm grip on it, and started hauling it hastily toward that unlatched door. Legs splayed out behind it, the heels of the shoes ticked over the cracks between the flagstones like train-wheels on a track.

The elevator beat him to it, slow-moving though it was. He had the guy at the door, still in full view, when the triangular porthole in the elevator door-panel bloomed yellow with its arrival. He whirled, crouching defiantly over the body, like something at bay. He would be caught with the goods, just as he himself had caught this guy, if the party got out at this floor. But they didn’t. The porthole darkened again as the car went on up.

He let out a long, whistling breath like a deflating tire, pushed the door carefully open. It gave a single rebellious click as the latch cleared the socket altogether. He listened, heart pounding. Might be sixteen kids in there for all he knew, a guy that stole milk like that.

“I’ll drop him just inside,” Harlan thought grimly. “Let them figure it out in the morning!”

He tugged the fellow across the sill with an unavoidable wooden thump of the heels, let him down, tensed, listened again, silhouetted there against the orange light from the hall — if anyone was inside looking out. But there was an absence of breathing-sounds from within. It seemed too good to be true. He felt his way forward, peering into the dark, ready to jump back and bolt for it at the first alarm.

Once he got past the closed-in foyer, the late moon cast enough light through the windows to show him that there was no one living in the place but the guy himself. It was a one-room flat and the bed, which was one of those that come down out of a closet, showed white and vacant.

“Swell!” said Harlan. “No one’s gonna miss you right away!”

He hauled him in, put him on the bed, turned to soft-shoe out again when he got a better idea. Why not make it really tough to find him while he was about it? This way, the first person that stuck his head in was bound to spot the man. He tugged the sheet clear of the body lying on it and pulled it over him like a shroud. He tucked it in on both sides, so that it held him in a mild sort of grip.

He gripped the foot of the bed. It was hard to lift, but once he got it started the mechanism itself came to his aid. It began swinging upward of its own accord. He held onto it to keep it from banging. It went into the closet neatly enough but wouldn’t stay put. The impediment between it and the wall pushed it down each time. But the door would probably hold it. He heard a rustle as something shifted, slipped further down in back of the bed. He didn’t have to be told what that was.

He pushed the bed with one arm and caught the door with the other. Each time he took the supporting arm away, the bed tipped out and blocked the door. Finally at the sixth try he got it to stand still and swiftly slapped the door in place over it. That held it like glue and he had nothing further to worry about. It would have been even better if there’d been a key to lock it, take out, and throw away. There wasn’t. This was good enough, this would hold — twenty-four hours, forty-eight, a week even, until the guy’s rent came due and they searched the place. And by that time he could pull a quick change of address, back a van up to the door, and get out of the building. Wouldn’t look so hot, of course, but who wanted to stay where there was a permanent corpse next door? They’d never be able to pin it on him anyway, never in a million years. Not a living soul, not a single human eye, had seen it happen. He was sure of that.

Harlan gave the closet door a swipe with the loose end of his pajama jacket, just for luck, up where his hand had pushed against it. He hadn’t touched either knob.

He reconnoitered, stepped out, closed the flat up after him. The tumbler fell in the lock. It couldn’t be opened from the outside now except by the super’s passkey. Back where it had happened, he picked up the lethal bottle of milk and took it into his own flat. He went back a second time, got down close on hands and knees and gave the floor a careful inspection. There were just two spots of blood, the size of two-bit pieces, that must have dripped from the guy’s ears before he picked him up. He looked down at his pajama coat. There were more than two spots on that, but that didn’t worry him any.

He went into his bathroom, stripped off the jacket, soaked a handful of it under the hot water and slipped into the hail with it. The spots came up off the satiny flagstones at a touch without leaving a trace. He hurried down the corridor, opened a door, and stepped into a hot, steamy little whitewashed alcove provided with an incinerator chute. He balled the coat up, pulled down the flap of the chute, shoved the bundle in like a letter in a mail box and then sent the trousers down after it too, just to make sure. That way he wouldn’t be stuck with any odd pair of trousers without their matching jacket. Who could swear there had ever been such a pair of pajamas now? A strong cindery odor came up the chute. The fire was going in the basement right now. He wouldn’t even have to worry about the articles staying intact down there until morning. Talk about your quick service!

He slipped back to his own door the way he was without a stitch on him. He realized it would have been a bum joke if somebody had seen him like that, after the care he’d taken about all those little details. But they hadn’t. So what?

He shut the door of his apartment, and put on another pair of pajamas. Slipping quietly into the bed next to the peacefully slumbering Missis, he lit a cigarette. Then the let-down came. Not that he got jittery, but he saw that he wasn’t going to sleep any more that night. Rather than lie there tossing and turning, he dressed and went out of the house to take a walk.

He would have liked a drink, but it was nearly five, way past closing-time for all the bars, so he had to be satisfied with a cup of coffee at the counter lunch. He tried to put it to his mouth a couple times, finally had to call the waiter back.

“Bring me a black one,” he said. “Leave the milk out!” That way it went down easy enough.

The sun was already up when he got back, and he felt like he’d been pulled through a wringer. He found Mrs. Harlan in the kitchen, getting things started for his breakfast.

“Skip that,” he told her irritably. “I don’t want any — and shove that damn bottle out of sight, will you?”

He took time off during his lunch-hour to look at a flat in the city and paid a deposit for it. When he got home that night he told Mrs. Harlan abruptly, “Better get packed up, we’re getting out of here the first thing in the morning.”

“Wha-at?” she squawked. “Why we can’t do that. We’ve got a lease! What’s come over you?”

“Lease or no lease,” he barked. “I can’t stand it here any more. We’re getting out after tonight, I tell you!”

They were in the living-room and his eyes flicked toward the wall that partitioned them off from the flat next door. He didn’t want to do that, but he couldn’t help himself. She didn’t notice, but obediently started to pack. He called up a moving-van company.

In the middle of the night he woke up from a bad dream and ran smack into something even worse. He got up and went into the living-room. He didn’t exactly know why. The moon was even brighter than the night before and washed that dividing wall with almost a luminous calsomine. Right in the middle of the wall there was a hideous black, blurred outline, like an X-ray showing through from the other side. Right about where that bed would be. Stiff and skinny the hazy figure was with legs and arms and even a sort of head on it. He pitched the back of his arm to his mouth just in time to douse the yell struggling to come out, went wet all over as though he were under a showerbath. He managed to turn finally and saw the peculiar shape of one of Mrs. Harlan’s modernistic lamps standing in the path of the moon, throwing its shadow upon the wall. He pulled down the shade and tottered back inside. He took his coffee black again next morning, looked terrible.

She rang him at the office just before closing-time. “You at the new place?” he asked eagerly.

“No,” she said, “they wouldn’t let me take the stuff out. I had a terrible time with the renting-agent. Ed, we’ll just have to make the best of it. He warned me that if we go, they’re going to garnishee your salary and get a judgment against you for the whole two-years’ rent. Ed, we can’t afford to keep two places going at once and your firm will fire you the minute they find out. They won’t stand for anything like that. You told me so yourself. He told me any justified complaint we have will be attended to, but we can’t just walk out on our lease. You’d better think twice about it. I don’t know what’s wrong with the flat anyway.”

He did, but he could not tell her. He saw that they had him by the short hairs. If he went, it meant loss of his job, destitution; even if he got another, they’d attach the wages of that too. Attracting this much attention wasn’t the best thing in the world, either. When he got home, the agent came up to find out what was the trouble, what his reasons were, he didn’t know what to answer, couldn’t think of a legitimate kick he had coming. He was afraid now even to bring up about the chiseling of the milk. It would have sounded picayune at that.

“I don’t have to give you my reasons!” he said surlily. “I’m sick o’ the place, and that’s that!”

Which he saw right away was a tactical error, not only because it might sow suspicion later, but because it antagonized the agent now. “You can go just as soon as you’ve settled for the balance of your lease. I’m not trying to hold you!” he fumed. “If you try moving your things out without that, I’ll call the police!”

Harlan slammed the door after him like a six-gun salute. He had a hunch the agent wouldn’t be strictly within his legal rights in going quite that far, but he was in no position to force a showdown and find out for sure. No cops, thanks.

He realized that his own blundering had raised such a stink that it really didn’t matter now any more whether he stayed or went. They’d make it their business to trace his forwarding address, and they’d have that on tap when disclosure came. So the whole object of moving out would be defeated. The lesser of two evils now was to stay, lie very low, hope the whole incident would be half-forgotten by the time the real excitement broke. It may have been lesser, but it was still plenty evil. He didn’t see how he was going to stand it. Yet he had to.

He went out and came back with a bottle of rye, told his wife he felt a cold coming on. That was so he wouldn’t run into any more hallucinations during the night like that phantom X-ray on the wall. When he went to bed the bottle was empty. He was still stony sober, but at least it put him through the night somehow.

On his way across the hall toward the elevator that morning, his head turned automatically to look up at that other door. He couldn’t seem to control it. When he came back that evening the same thing happened. It was locked, just as it had been for the past two nights and two days now. He thought, “I’ve got to quit that. Somebody’s liable to catch me at it and put two and two together.”

In those two days and two nights he changed almost beyond recognition. He lost all his color; was losing weight almost by the hour; shelves under his eyes you could have stacked books on; appetite shot to smithereens. A backfire on the street made him leave his shoes without unlacing them, and his office-work was starting to go haywire. Hooch was putting him to sleep each night, but he had to keep stepping it up. He was getting afraid one of these times he’d spill the whole thing to his wife while he was tanked without knowing it. She was beginning to notice there was something the matter and mentioned his seeing a doctor about himself once or twice. He snapped at her and shut her up.

The third night, which was the thirty-first of the month, they were sitting there in the living-room. She was sewing. He stared glassy-eyed through the paper, pretending to read, whiskytumbler at his elbow, sweat all over his ashen forehead, when she started sniffling.

“Got a cold?” he asked tonelessly.

“No,” she said, “there’s a peculiar musty odor in here, don’t you get it? Sickly-sweet. I’ve been noticing it off and on all day, it’s stronger in this room than in—”

“Shut up!” he rasped. The tumbler shook in his hand as he downed its contents, refilled it. He got up, opened the windows as far as they would go. He came back, killed the second shot, lit a cigarette unsteadily, deliberately blew the first thickly fragrant puff all around her head. “No, I don’t notice anything,” he said in an artificially steady voice. His face was almost green in the lamplight.

“I don’t see how you can miss it,” she said innocently. “It’s getting worse every minute. I wonder if there’s something wrong with the drains in this building?”

He didn’t hear the rest of it. He was thinking: “It’ll pay off, one way or the other, pretty soon — thank goodness for that! Tomorrow’s the first, they’ll be showing up for his rent, that’ll be the finale.”

He almost didn’t care now which way it worked out — anything so long as it was over with, anything but this ghastly suspense. He couldn’t hold out much longer. Let them suspect him even, if they wanted to; the complete lack of proof still held good. Any lawyer worth his fee could get him out of it with one hand tied behind his back.

But then when he snapped out of it and caught sight of her over at the inter-house phone, realized what she was about, he backed water in a hurry. All the bravado went out of him. “What’re you doing?” he croaked.

“I’m going to ask the superintendent what that is, have him come up here and—”

“Get away from there!” he bellowed. She hung up as though she’d been bitten, turned to stare.

A second later he realized what a swell out that would have been to have the first report of the nuisance come from them themselves; he wished he had let her go ahead. It should have come from them. They were closest to the death-flat. If it came from somebody else further away — and they seemed not to have noticed it — that would be one more chip stacked up against him.

“All right, notify him if you want to,” he countermanded.

“No, no, not if you don’t want me to.” She was frightened now. He had her all rattled. She moved away from the phone.

To bridge the awkward silence he said the one thing he didn’t want to, the one thing of all he’d intended not to say. As though possessed of perverse demons, it came out before he could stop it: “Maybe it’s from next-door.” Then his eyes hopelessly rolled around in their sockets.

“How could it be?” she contradicted mildly. “That flat’s been vacant for the past month or more—”

A clock they had in there in the room with them ticked on hollowly, resoundingly, eight, nine, ten times. Clack, clack, clack, as though it were hooked up to a loudspeaker. What a racket it was making! Couldn’t hear yourself think.

“No one living in there, you say?” he said in a hoarse whisper after what seemed an hour ticked by.

“No, I thought you knew that. I forgot, you don’t take much interest in the neighbors—”

Then who was he? Where had he come from? Not from the street, because he had been in his undershirt. “I dragged the guy back into the wrong apartment!” thought Harlan. He was lucky it was vacant! It gave him the shivers, even now, to think what might have happened if there had been somebody else in there that night! The more he puzzled over it, the cloudier the mystery got. That particular door had been ajar, the bed down out of the closet, and the guy had been pussyfooting back toward there. Then where did he belong, if not in there? He was obviously a lone wolf, or he would have been missed by now. Those living with him would have sent out an alarm the very next morning after it had happened. Harlan had been keeping close tab on the police calls on his radio and there hadn’t been anything of the kind. And even if he had lived alone in one of the other flats, the unlatched door left waiting for his return would have attracted attention from the hail by now.

What was the difference where he came from anyway; it was where he was now that mattered! All he could get out of it was this: there would be no pay-off tomorrow after all. The agony would be prolonged now indefinitely — until prospective tenants were shown the place and sudden discovery resulted. He groaned aloud, took his next swig direct from the bottle without any tumbler for a go-between.

In the morning he could tell breakdown was already setting in. Between the nightly sousing, the unending mental strain, the lack of food, he was a doddering wreck when he got out of bed and staggered into his clothes. Mrs. Harlan said, “I don’t think you’d better go to the office today. If you could see yourself—!” But he had to, anything was better than staying around here!

He opened the living-room door (he’d closed it on the two of them the night before) and the fetid air from inside seemed to hit him in the face, it was so strong. He reeled there in that corrupt, acrid draft, not because it was so difficult to breathe but because it was so difficult for him to breathe, knowing what he did about it. He stood there gagging, hand to throat; his wife had to come up behind him and support him with one arm for a minute, until he pulled himself together. He couldn’t, of course, eat anything. He grabbed his hat and made for the elevator in a blind hurry that was almost panic. His head jerked toward that other door as he crossed the hall; it hadn’t missed doing that once for three days and nights.

This time there was a difference. He swung back again in time to meet the superintendent’s stare. The latter had just that moment come out of the elevator with a wad of rent receipts in his hand. You couldn’t say that Harlan paled at the involuntary betrayal he had just committed because he hadn’t been the color of living protoplasm in thirty-six hours now.

The super had caught the gesture, put his own implication on it. “That bothering you folks too?” he said. “I’ve had complaints from everyone else on this floor about it so far. I’m going in there right now and invest—”

The hallway went spinning around Harlan like a cyclorama. The superintendent reached out, steadied him by the elbow. “See that, it’s got you dizzy already! Must be some kind of sewer-gas.” He fumbled for a passkey. “That why you folks wanted to move earlier in the week?”

Harlan still had enough presence of mind left, just enough, to nod. “Why didn’t you say so?” the super went on. Harlan didn’t have enough left to answer that one. What difference did it make. In about a minute more it would be all over but the shouting. He groped desperately to get himself a minute more time.

“I guess you want the rent,” he said with screwy matter-of-factness. “I got it right here with me. Better let me give it to you now. I’m going in to town—”

He paid him the fifty bucks, counted them three times, purposely let one drop, purposely fumbled picking it up. But the passkey still stayed ready in the super’s hand. He leaned against the wall, scribbled a receipt, and handed it to Harlan. “Thanks, Mr. Harlan.” He turned, started down the hall toward that door. That damnable doorway to hell!

Harlan was thinking: “I’m not going to leave him now. I’m going to stick with him when he goes in there. He’s going to make the discovery, but it’s never gonna get past him! I can’t let it. He saw me look at that door just now. He’ll read it all over my face. I haven’t got the juice left to bluff it out. I’m going to kill him in there — with my bare hands.” He let the rent receipt fall out of his hand, went slowly after the man like somebody walking in his sleep.

The passkey clicked, the super pushed the door open, light came out into the dimmer hallway from it, and he passed from sight. Harlan slunk through the doorframe after him and pushed the door back the other way, partly closing it after the two of them. It was only then that Harlan made an incomprehensible discovery. The air was actually clearer in here than in his own place — clearer even than out in the hail! Stale and dust-laden from being shut up for days, it was true, but odorless, the way air should be!

“Can’t be in here, after all,” the super was saying, a few paces ahead.

Harlan took up a position to one side of the bedcloset, murmuring to himself: “He lives — until he opens that!”

The super had gone into the bath. Harlan heard him raise and slap down the wooden bowl cover in there, fiddle with the washbasin stopper. “Nope, nothing in here!” he called out. He came out again, went into the postage-stamp kitchen, sniffed around in there, examining the sink, the gas-stove. “It seemed to come from in here,” he said, showing up again, “I can’t make head or tail out of it!”

Neither could Harlan. The only thing he could think of was: the bedding and the mattress, which were on this side of what was causing it, must have acted as a barricade, stuffing up the closet-door, and must have kept that odor from coming out into this room, sending it through the thin porous wall in the other direction instead, into his own place and from there out into the hall.

The super’s eye roved speculatively on past him and came to rest on the closet door. “Maybe it’s something behind that bed,” he said.

Harlan didn’t bat an eyelash, jerky as he had been before out in the hall. “You just killed yourself then, Mister,” was his unheard remark. “This is it. Now!” He gripped the floor-boards with the soles of his feet through the shoe-leather, tensed, crouched imperceptibly for the spring.

The super stepped over, so did Harlan, diagonally, toward him. The super reached down for the knob, touched it, got ready to twist his wrist—

The house-phone in the entry-way buzzed like an angry hornet. Harlan went up off his heels, coming down again on them spasmodically. “Paging me, I guess. I told them I was coming in here,” said the super, turning to go out there and answer it. “Okay, Molly,” he said, “I’ll be right down.” He held the front door ready to show Harlan he wanted to leave and lock up again. “Somebody wants to see an apartment,” he explained. The door clicked shut, the odors of decay swirled around them once more on the outside of it, and they rode down together in the car.

Something was dying in Harlan by inches — his reason maybe. “I can never go through that again,” he moaned. The sweat did not start coming through his paralyzed pores until after he was seated in the train, riding in. Everything looked misshapen and out of focus.

He came back at twilight. In addition to the dusky amber hall lights, there was a fan of bright yellow spilling out of the deathdoor. Open again, and voices in there. Lined up along the wall outside the door were a radio cabinet, a bridge lamp, a pair of chairs compacted together seat to seat. An expressman in a dirty blue blouse came out, picked them up effortlessly with one arm, and slung them inside after him.

Harlan sort of collapsed against his own door. He scratched blindly for admittance, forgetting he had a key, too shellshocked to use it even if he had taken it out.

Mrs. Harlan let him in, too simmering with the news she had to tell to notice his appearance or actions. “We’ve got new neighbors,” she said almost before she had the door closed. “Nice young couple, they just started to move in before you got here—”

He was groping desperately for the bottle on the shelf, knocked down a glass and broke it. Then they hadn’t found out yet; they hadn’t taken down the bed yet! It kept going through his battered brain like a demoniac rhythm. He nearly gagged on the amount of whisky he was swallowing from the neck of the bottle all at one time. When room had been cleared for his voice, he panted: “What about that odor? You mean they took that place the way it—?”

“I guess they were in a hurry, couldn’t be choosy. He sent his wife up to squirt deodorant around in the hall before they got here. What does he care, once he gets them signed up? Dirty trick, if you ask me.”

He had one more question to ask. “Of course you sized up every stick of stuff they have. Did they — did they bring their own bed with them?”

“No, I guess they’re going to use the one in there—”

Any minute now! His brain was fifty per cent blind unreasoning panic, unable to get the thing in the right perspective any more. That discovery itself wasn’t necessarily fatal, but his own possible implication in it no longer seemed to register with him. He was confusing one with the other, unable to differentiate between them any more. Discovery had to be prevented, discovery had to be forestalled! Why? Because his own corrosive guilty conscience knew the full explanation of the mystery. He was forgetting that they didn’t — unless he gave it to them himself.

Still sucking at the bottle, he edged back to the front door, turned sidewise to it, put his ear up against it.

“T’anks very much, buddy,” he heard the moving man say gruffly, and the elevator-slide closed.

He opened the door, peered out. The last of the furniture had gone inside, the hall was clear now. The fumes of the disinfectant the super’s wife had used were combating that other odor, but it was still struggling through — to his acute senses, at least. They had left their door open. Their voices were clearly audible as he edged further out. Two living people unsuspectingly getting settled in a room with an unseen corpse!

“Move that over a little further,” he heard the woman say. “The bed has to come down there at nights. Oh, that reminds me! He couldn’t get it open when he wanted to show it to me today. The door must be jammed. He promised to come back, but I guess he forgot—”

“Let’s see what I can do with it,” the husband’s voice answered.

Harlan, like something drawn irresistibly toward its own destruction, was slinking nearer and nearer, edgewise along the corridor-wall. A tom-tom he carried with him was his heart.

A sound of bare hands pounding wood came through the bright-yellow gap in the wall ahead. Then a couple of heavier impacts, kicks with the point of a shoe.

“It’s not locked, is it?”

“No, when I turn the knob I can see the catch slip back under the lock. Something’s holding it jammed in there. The bed must be out of true or somebody closed it too hard the last time.”

“What’re we going to sleep on?” the woman wailed.

“If I can hit it hard enough, maybe the vibration’ll snap it back. Run down a minute and borrow a hammer from the super, like a good girl.”

Harlan turned and vanished back where he had come from. Through the crack of the door he saw the woman come out into the hall, stand waiting for the car, go down in it. He said to his wife, “Where’s that hammer we used to have?” He found it in a drawer and went out with it.

He was no longer quite sane when he knocked politely alongside that open door down the hall. He knew what he was doing, but the motivation was all shot. The man, standing there in the middle of the lighted room staring helplessly at the fast closetdoor, turned his head. He was just an ordinary man, coat off, tie off, suspenders showing; Harlan had never set eyes on him before, their paths were just now crossing for the first time. But discovery had to be prevented, discovery had to be prevented!

Harlan, smiling sleepily, said, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help overhearing you ask your wife for a hammer. I’m your next-door neighbor. Having trouble with that bed-closet, I see. Here, I brought you mine.”

The other man reached out, took it shaft-first the way Harlan was holding it. “Thanks, that’s real swell of you,” he grinned appreciatively. “Let’s see what luck I have with it this time.”

Harlan got in real close. The tips of his fingers kept feeling the goods of his suit. The other man started tapping lightly all up and down the joint of the door. “Tricky things, these beds,” he commented.

“Yeah, tricky,” agreed Harlan with that same sleepy, watchful smile. He came in a little closer. Something suddenly gave a muffled “Zing!” behind the door, like a misplaced spring or joint jumping back in place.

“That does it!” said the man cheerfully. “Now let’s see how she goes. Better stand back a little,” he warned. “It’ll catch you coming out.” He turned the knob with one hand and the door started opening. He passed the hammer back to Harlan, to free the other. Harlan moved around to the same side he was on until he was right at his neighbor’s elbow. The door swung flat against the wall. The bed started to come down. The man’s two arms went out and up to ease it, so it wouldn’t fail too swiftly.

Just as the top-side of it got down to eye-level the hammer rose in Harlan’s fist, described a swift arc, fell, crashed into the base of the other man’s skull. He went down so instantaneously that the blow seemed not to have been interrupted, to have continued all the way to the floor in one swing. Again the red motes of anger, call them self-preservation this time—

A dull boom came through them first — the bed hitting the floor. They swirled thicker than ever; then screams and angry, frightened voices pierced them. They began to dissipate. He found himself kneeling there alongside the bed, gory hammer poised in his hand, facing them across it. There must have been other blows.

A woman lay slumped there by the door, moaning “My husband, my husband!” They were picking her up to carry her out. Another woman further in the background was staring in, all eyes. Wait, he knew her — his wife. Someone out in the hall was saying, “Hurry up, hurry up! This way! In here!” and two figures in dark-blue flashed in, moving so swiftly that before he knew it they were behind him holding his arms. They took the hammer away. Nothing but voices, a welter of voices, heard through cotton-batting.

“This man is dead!”

“He didn’t even know him. They just moved in. Went crazy, I guess.”

He was being shaken back and forth from behind, like a terrier. “What’d you do it for? What’d you do it for?”

Harlan pointed at the bed. “So he wouldn’t find out—”

“Find out what?” He was being shaken some more. “Find out what? Explain what you mean!”

Didn’t they understand, with it staring them right in the face? His eyes came to rest on it. The bed was empty.

“God, I think I understand!” There was such sheer horror in the voice that even Harlan turned to see where it had come from. It was the superintendent. “There was a down-and-outer, a friend of mine. He didn’t have a roof over his head — I know I had no right to, but I let him hang out in here nights the past couple weeks, while the apartment was vacant. Just common, ordinary charity. Then people started complaining about losing their milk, and I saw I’d get in trouble, so I told him to get out. He disappeared three days ago, I figured he’d taken me at my word, and then this morning I found out he was in the hospital with a slight head-concussion. I even dropped in for a few minutes to see how he was getting along. He wouldn’t tell me how it happened, but I think I get it now. He must have done it to him, thought he’d killed him, hidden him there in that folding-bed. My friend got such a fright that he lammed out the minute he came to—”

Harlan was mumbling idiotically, “Then I didn’t kill anyone?”

“You went to town on this one, all right,” one of the men in blue said. He turned to the second one, scornfully. “To cover up a justified assault-and-battery, he pulls a murder!”

When another man, in mufti, took him out in the hall at the end of two or three short steel links, he recoiled from the putrid odor still clinging out there. “I thought they said he wasn’t dead—”

Somewhere behind him he heard the super explaining to one of them: “Aw, that’s just some sloppy people on the floor below cooking corned-beef and cabbage alla time, we gave ’em a dispossess for creating a nuisance in the building! He musta thought it was—”