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

The Number’s Up

It was a sort of car that seemed to have a faculty for motion with an absolute lack of any accompanying sound whatsoever. This was probably illusory; it must have been, internal combustion engines being what they are, tires being what they are, brakes and gears being what they are, even raspy street-surfacing being what it is. Yet the illusion outside the hotel entrance was a complete one. Just as there are silencers that, when affixed to automatic hand-weapons, deaden their reports, so it was as if this whole massive car body were encased in something of that sort. For, first, there was nothing out there, nothing in sight there. Then, as though the street-bed were water and this bulky black shape were a grotesque gondola, it came floating up out of the darkness from nowhere. And then suddenly, still with no sound whatsoever, there it was at a halt, in position.

It was like a ghost-car in every attribute but the visual one. In its trancelike approach and halt, in its lightlessness, in its enshrouded interior, which made it impossible to determine (at least without lowering one’s head directly outside the windows and peering in at nose-tip range) if it were even occupied at all, and if so by whom and by how many.

You could visualize it scuttling fleetly along some overshadowed country lane at dead of night, lightless, inscrutable, unidentifiable, to halt perhaps beside some inky grove of trees, linger there awhile undetected, then glide on again, its unaccountable errand accomplished without witness, without aftermath. A goblin-car that in an earlier age would have fed folklore and rural legend. Or, in the city, you could visualize it sliding stealthily along some warehouse-blacked back alley, curving and squirming in its terrible silence, then, as it neared the mouth and would have emerged, creeping to a stop and lying there in wait, unguessed in the gloom. Lying there in wait for long hours, like some huge metal-cased predatory animal, waiting to pounce on its prey.

Sudden, sharp yellow spurts of fangs, and then to whirl and slink back into anonymity the way it came, leaving the carcass of its prey huddled there and dead.

Who was there to know? Who was there to tell?

And even now, before this particular hotel entrance. It was already in position, it had already stopped.

Then nothing happened.

Ordinarily, when cars stop someone gets out. That is what they have stopped for. In this case it just stood there, as though there were no one in it and had been no one in it all along.

Then the pale, blurry shape of a human hand, as when seen through thick dark glass, appeared inside the window and descended slowly to the bottom, like a pale-colored mussel foundering in a murky tank of water. And with it went the invisible line of a shade. The hand stopped a little above the lower rim and faded from sight again. The shade-line remained where it had been left.

The watch had begun. The death-watch.

In a little while a young man came walking along the street, untroubled of gait, unaware of it. The particular hotel that the ghost-car had made its rendezvous had a seamy glass canopy jutting out over the sidewalk with open bulbs set around the inside of it. But they only shone inward because its outer rim was opaque. Thus, as the young man stepped from the darkness of the street’s back reaches under this pane of light it was as though a curtain had been jerked up in front of his face, and he was suddenly revealed from head to foot as in a spotlight.

In the car the darkness found breath and whispered, “That him?”

And the darkness whispered back to the darkness, “Yeah, same type build. Same light hair. Wears gray a lot. And this is the hotel that was fingered.”

Then the darkness quickly stirred, but the other darkness quelled it, hissing: “Wait, he wants the girl too. The girl too, he said. Let him get up there to her first.”

The young man had turned off and gone inside. The four glass leaves of the revolving door blurred and made him disappear.

For a moment more the evil darkness held its collective breath. Then, no longer in a whisper but sharp as the edge of a stiletto, “Now. Go in and get the number of the room. Do it smart.”

The man behind the desk looked up from his racing form, and there was a jaunty young man wearing a snap-brim felt hat leaning there on one elbow. How long he’d been there it was impossible to determine. He might have just come. He might have been there three or four minutes already. Ghost-cars, ghost-arrivals, ghost-departures.

“Do something for you?” said the man behind the desk.

The leaner on his elbow nodded his head languidly, but didn’t say.

“What?”

The leaner considered his bent-back fingernails, blew on them and rubbed them against his coat-lapel a little. “Guy that just came in. Got any idea what his room number would be?”

“Is he expecting—”

“No.” He opened his hand and a compressed five-dollar bill dribbled out onto the desk and slowly began to expand. “He dropped this in front of the door just now. I seen him do it. Thought he might want it back.”

“You taking it up to him?”

“No. You take care of it for me. I ain’t particular.” The elbow-leaner was fiddling with one of his cuff links now.

A conniving look appeared on the clerk’s yeast-pasty face. He said, through immobile lips that made the words sound furtive, “I’ll take it up to One-one-six for you in a little while.”

“Try Streakaway in the third race tomorrow.”

The five-dollar bill was gone now.

So was the jaunty young man in the snap-brim felt hat.

He knocked because they only had one key between them. The tarnished numerals 116 slanted inward as she opened the door for him. They kissed first, and then she said, “Oh God, I’ve been so frightened, waiting all alone here like this. I thought you’d never come back!”

She had sleek bobbed hair with a part on the side, and was wearing a waistless dress that came to her knees. The waist was down at the bottom.

“Everything’s taken care of,” he said soothingly. “The reservation’s made—”

“You don’t think anything will happen tonight, do you?” she faltered. “You don’t think anything will happen tonight?”

“Nothing will happen. Don’t be afraid. I’m right here with you.”

“We should have gone home to my mother. I would have felt safer there. When something like this comes along, a woman wants another woman to cling to, one of her own kind. A man can’t understand that.”

“Don’t be afraid,” was all he kept saying. “Don’t be afraid.”

The knock on the door was craftily casual. It wasn’t too loud, it wasn’t too long, it wasn’t too rapid. It was just like any knock on the door should be.

Their embrace split open down the middle, and they both turned their heads to look that way.

“Wonder who that is,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I can’t imagine,” she said placidly.

He went over to the door and opened it, and suddenly two men were in the room and the door was closed again. All without noise.

“Come on, Jack,” one said. “Nice and easy now.”

“Nice and easy now,” the other said.

“You must have the wrong party.”

“No, we haven’t got the wrong party. We made sure of that.”

“Made sure of that,” the other one said.

“Well I don’t know you. I never saw you before in my life.”

“Same goes for us. We never saw you before neither. But we know someone that does know you.”

“Who?”

“We’ll tell you downstairs. Come on now. Take your hat. Looks better that way.”

The girl’s head kept turning from one to the other, like a frightened spectator watching a ball pass to and fro at a deadly tennis match that is not being played for sport.

“You’re frightening my wife. Won’t you tell us what you—”

“His wife. Did you get that? ‘The-lay-of-the-land,’ they used to call her, and now this guy claims she’s his wife. As that Guinan dame is always saying, ‘Hello, sucker!’ ”

The girl quickly held the man back, her man. “Don’t. I don’t like their looks. Please, for my sake, don’t.”

“You got good sense, wife,” one of them told her.

“Look, if it’s money you want — we don’t have much, but — here. Now please go and leave us alone.”

One of them chopped the extended hand down viciously, and the bills sprayed like an exploded bouquet. His voice thickened to a muddy growl. “Come a-a-an,” he said threateningly. “Outside.” He backed a forearm up over his own shoulder in menace. “Walk,” he said. “Don’tcha hear good?”

“Hear good?” said the other.

“This says you do.” And there was a gun. Not much of it showing, just a sliver of the harmless end, peering above the lip of his pocket. But with one finger hooked down below in position.

“Don’t scream,” the other one warned the girl tonelessly. “Don’t scream, or you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

She shuddered like someone dancing. “I won’t.”

“Now come on,” the first one said to the man. “You’re going to walk with me, like this. Up against me, real close and chummy. Buddy-buddies.”

They went out two by two. Slopping fondly against each other, from shoulder down to hip, like a quartet of drunks coming out of a speak at seven in the morning.

“Where you taking us?” he said in the elevator, going down.

“Just for a little ride.” The expression had no sinister meaning yet in 1929. It meant only what it seemed to say.

“But why at this hour?”

“Don’t talk.”

As they made the brief passage from elevator to street, with a minimum of conspicuousness, the desk man carefully avoided looking up. He was busy, extremely busy, looking down into his racing form at that moment.

They walked her around to the outside of the car and put her in from there, next to a man who was already at the wheel. Him they put in from the near side, and then each one got in on opposite sides of him and pinned him down between them on the back seat. It was all done with almost fluid-drive sleekness, not a hitch, not a catch, not a break in its flow.

And suddenly, like in a dream, the street outside that particular hotel entrance was empty again, as empty as it had been earlier that night. The car was gone. It had departed as soundlessly, as ghostlike, as it had first appeared. A true phantom of the night.

But it had been there. It had brought three people and taken five away. That much was no illusion.

The ride had begun.

The theatre and club spectaculars seemed to stick up into the sky at all sorts of crazy angles, probably because most of them were planted diagonally on rooftops. Follow Thru, Whoopee, Show Boat, El Fay Club, Club Richman, Texas Guinan’s. It gave the town the appearance of standing on its ear.

The car slid through rows of brownstones (each one housing a speakeasy on its lower floors) over as far as Eleventh, which had no traffic lights yet. Its only traffic was an occasional milk or railroad-yards freight truck, since no highway connected with it, and it came to a dead end at Seventy-second without even a ramp to its name. They ran down it the other way, to Canal Street and the two-year-old Holland Tunnel, engineering marvel of the decade.

The girl spoke suddenly, as they glided past endless strings of stalled New York Central freight cars. “Don’t. Please don’t. Please leave me alone.”

“What’s he doing to you?” came quickly from the back seat.

The man at the wheel answered for her. “Just straightening her skirt a little.”

The other two laughed. But it wasn’t even bawdy laughter. It was too cold and cruel for that.

When they reached the tunnel-mouth, the driver slowed. As he rolled the window down to pay the toll, she suddenly stripped off her wrist watch and flung it so that it struck the tunnel cop flat on the chest.

He caught it easily with one hand, so that it didn’t even have a chance to fall. “Hey, what’s that for?” he asked, but laughing good-naturedly.

“My girlfriend here just now said she don’t want to know the time any more from now on, and I guess that’s her way of proving it.”

The girl writhed a little, as though her arm were caught in a vise behind her back, but said nothing.

The cop pitched the watch lightly back into the car. “Just coming home from a party, folks?”

“No, we’re going to one.”

“Have fun.”

“That’s what we intend.”

As they picked up speed, and the white tiles flashed blindingly by, the driver gave her a savage backhand swipe with his knuckles across her mouth.

She cried out piercingly, but it was lost in the roar of the onrushing tunnel. The man who called himself her husband made some sort of spasmodic move on the back seat, but the two guns pressing into his intestines from opposite sides almost met inside him, they dug in so far.

They came out into the open, and it was the grimy backwaters of Jersey City now. Tall factory stacks, and fires burning, and spreads of stagnant stinking water.

On and on the ride went. On and on and on.

They turned north soon and left the big city and all its little satellites behind them, and after a while even the rusty glow on the horizon died down and was gone. Then trees began, and little lumpy hills, and there was nothing but the darkness and the night and the fear.

“Don,” she shuddered, and suddenly flung one hand up over her shoulder and back, trying to find his.

“Please let me hold her hand,” he begged. “She’s frightened.”

“Let ’em hold hands,” one of them snickered.

They held onto each other like that, in a hand-link of fear, two against the night.

“Don, she called me,” he said. “Didn’t you hear her? Don, that’s my name. Don Ackerman.”

“Yeah, and I’m Ricardo Cortez,” countered one of them, with the flipness so characteristic of the period that it even came into play on a death ride.

On went the ride.

At one point his control slipped away from him for a minute. “God,” he burst out, “how far are you taking us?”

“Don’t be in a hurry to get there,” the one on his left advised him dryly. “I wouldn’t, if I was you.”

And then again, a little later, “Won’t you tell me the name of the fellow you think I am? Can’t I convince you—”

“What’s the matter, you don’t know your own name?”

“Well, what’ve I done?”

“We don’t know from nothing. You were just marked lousy, that’s all. We only carry out the orders.”

“Yes, but what orders?” he exclaimed in his innocence.

And the answer, grim, foreboding, was: “Oh, broth-urr!”

Then without any warning the car stopped. They were there.

“The ride’s over,” someone said. “End of the ride.”

For a moment nobody got out. They just sat there. The driver cut the ignition, and after that there was silence. Complete, uncanny silence, more frightening than the most threatening noise or violence could have been. Night silence. A silence that had death in it.

Then one of them opened the door, got out and started to walk slowly away from the car, through ankle-high grass that hissed and spit as he toiled through it. The others just stayed where they were.

There was some sort of an old dilapidated farm building with a slanted roof in the middle distance. It was obviously abandoned, because its windows were black glassless gaps. Behind it was a smaller shanty looking like a tool shed or lean-to, so close to collapse it was almost down flat. He didn’t approach either one of them, he went around to the rear in a big wide circle.

They sat in silence, the four of them that were left. One of them was smoking a cigarette. But that didn’t make any noise, just a red blink whenever he drew on it.

Finally the driver reached out and tapped the button. A single, lonely, guttural horn-blat sounded. Briefer than a question mark in the air, staccato as the span of a second split in two, yet unfolding into a streamer of meaning through the night air: Come on, what’s taking you so long, we’re getting tired of waiting.

The walker-in-the-grass came back to the car again.

“Yeah, it’s there,” he said briefly.

“He told us it would be,” was the sardonic answer. “Didn’t you believe him?”

There was a general stir of activity as the other two got out, each with a prisoner.

“All right, you and me go this way,” the one with the girl said.

“No! Don!” she started to scream harrowingly. “Don-n-n-n!”

His smile was thin as a knife-cut across his face. “Don’ll be taken care. Don’t worry about Don.”

He grasped her brutally by the upper arms, tightened his hold to a crushing vise and drew his lips back whitely, as though the constrictive force came from them and not his hands. He thrust her drunkenly lurching form from side to side before him. Her hair swayed and danced with the struggle, as though it were something alive in its own right. The darkness swallowed them soon enough, but not the sounds they made.

Now Don began to shout himself, frightened, crazed, straining forward like a thing possessed. “Let her go! Let her go! Oh, if there’s a God above, why doesn’t He look down and stop this!” His voice was willowy with too much vibrancy. The movements of weeping appeared upon his face, the distortion without the delivery. Skin-weeping, without tears.

When the man who had been with her came back he was brushing twigs and leaves off his clothing, almost casually.

“Where is she?” they asked him.

“Where I left her.” Then he added, “Wanna take a look?”

“I think I will take a look,” the other assented, grinning with suggestive meaning.

But he turned up again almost at once, and his manner had changed. He acted disgruntled, like someone who’s been given a false scent and gone on a fool’s errand.

“Where is she now?”

“Still there.”

“What’s up?”

He said something low-voiced that the man she’d called Don wasn’t able to catch. His fright-soaked senses let it float past on the tide of terror submerging him.

“A kid!” the other one brayed outright in his surprise. His face flicked around for an instant toward the prisoner, then back again. “Say, maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe she was his—”

“Couldn’t you tell?” the third man demanded of the girl’s original escort, a trace of contempt in his voice.

“Whaddya expect me to do, feel her pulse in the dark?”

“She gone or ain’t she?” he wanted to know bluntly, unmoved by any thought of sparing the prisoner’s sensibilities.

“Sure. What do I know about those things? I only know her eyes are wide open and she ain’t looking.”

The man who was being held thrashed rabidly until he almost seemed to oscillate like the bent wing of an electric fan when its spin is dwindling. “Let me go to her! Let me go to her!”

“Pipe down, Jack,” one of them admonished, giving him a perfunctory slantwise clip along the jawline, but without any real heave behind it. “Nothing there to go to any more.”

He threw his head back, stared unseeingly straight up overhead, and from the furrowed scalp, the ridged pate that his face had thus become, emitted a full-fledged scream, high-pitched as a woman’s, unreasoning as a crushed animal’s.

Then his hands rose, fingers hooked wide, and scissored in from opposite sides, clawing at his own cheeks, digging into them, as if trying to tear them off, pull them out by their very ligaments.

“No!” he shrieked, then “No!” he cried, then “No!” he moaned, on a descending tonal scale.

They had taken their hands off him, knowing he was no longer capable of much movement.

His head fell forward again, like something trying to loosen itself from his shoulders, and now he blindly, snufflingly faced the ground as if he were looking closely for something he’d dropped there. His feet carried him around in an intoxicated, reeling little half-circle, and he collapsed breast-first against the fender of the car, head burrowed down against its hood, clasped hands clamped tight across the back of it as if to keep his skull from exploding. His legs, stretched inertly outward along the ground behind him, twitched spasmodically now and then, as if trying to draw themselves in after the rest of him, and always slipped back again each time.

In his travail, words of pain filtered through, suffocated by the pressure of the car-hood against his nose and mouth.

“Mine! She was mine! Mine! Mine!” Over and endlessly over again. “My girl. She was my girl. It was going to be my little baby. I was waiting for it to be my little baby. All my hopes and dreams are gone... Oh, I want to leave this rotten world! I want to get out of this rotten world!”

“You will. You’re gonna.” The eyes that looked down upon him held no pity, no softness, no feeling at all. They were eyes of stone.

“I don’t care what you do to me now,” he said. “I want to die.”

“That’s good,” they told him. “We’ll oblige.”

“Kill me quick,” he said. “The quicker the better.”

“You’re going to get it how we want it, not how you want it.” He wouldn’t walk, or couldn’t. Probably couldn’t — emotional shock. Each took him by a shoulder, and his legs dragged along behind him out at full length, giving little jerks and bumps when they hit stones and other obstacles.

They brought him to the edge of a squared-off pit in the ground and let him fall flat on his face and lie there a minute. A dried-out-well shaft.

“You start the digging, Playback.” It was the first time a name had been exchanged between any of them.

“Yeah, I always get the hard work.”

Playback brought a shovel from the toppled-down tool shed, marked off an oblong of surface soil and started to break it up into clods ready for throwing down into the well-shaft.

The other man was saying to the third one: “These pocket-flashes ain’t going to be enough to see all the way down there. How about one of the heads from the car?”

“Whaddya have to have light for, anyway?”

“You want to see him die, don’tcha? That’s half the kick. Another thing, there might be space left between those chunks the air could get to him through.”

“I have some extension wiring I can rig it up on.”

“I don’t care what you do now,” the man on the ground droned. “I want to die.”

“Always get the hard work,” said Playback.

The detached headlight was set up on the lip of the well-shaft. The man who had brought it returned to the car to control it from the dashboard.

“Why don’t you hurry?” said the man on the ground. “For God’s sake, why don’t you hurry? Why can’t I die, when I want to so badly?”

The one nearest aimed a kick at him along the ground. “You will,” he promised.

The headlight was deflected downward into the aperture. “Give her the juice,” the one beside it called back guardedly in the direction of the car.

A ghostly pallor came up from below, making the darkness aboveground seem even more impenetrable. Their faces, however, were now bathed in the reflection, like hideous devil-masks with slits for eyes and mouths.

The other one came back from the car.

“There’s got to be a lot more fill than that,” the one standing beside Playback criticized dissatisfiedly, measuring the results of his efforts.

“I always get the hard work.”

The other one grabbed the shovel from him and went at it in his place. “If there’s one thing that gets my goat,” he muttered disgustedly, “it’s to have a guy along on a thing like this that’s always bellyaching, the way you do. Just one guy like that is enough to spoil everyone else’s good time.”

The man on the ground had grasped hold of a small rock lying near him. He closed his hand around it, swung his arm up and tried to smash it into his own skull.

The nearest one of the three saw it just in time and aimed a swift kick that averted it. The rock bounced out and the hand fell down limp. It lay there, oddly twisted inside out, as though the wrist had been broken.

After that there was silence for a while, only the sound of the shovel biting into the earth and the hissing splatter of the loose dirt.

They stood him up, his back to the well.

In the dark, desperate sky, just above the scalloped line the treetops made, three stars formed a pleading little constellation. No one looked at them, no one cared. This was the time for death, not the time for mercy.

The last thing he said was, “Helen, sweetheart. Wait for me. I’m coming to you.” The last thing in the whole world.

Then they pushed him down. Took their hands off him, rather, and he went down by himself, for he couldn’t stand up any more.

He went over backward, and in, and down. The sound of the hit wasn’t too much. It was soggy at the bottom yet, from the long-ago water. Probably he didn’t feel it too much. He was all limp from lack of wanting to live, anyway.

He lay there nestled up, like in a foursquare clayey coffin.

He stirred a little, sighed a little, like someone trying to get comfortable in bed.

Playback tipped the shovel over, and a drench of earth granules spewed down on top of him.

One bent leg got covered up. But his face still breasted the terrestrial wave, like a motionless swimmer caught in the upturn stroke of the Australian crawl and held fast that way, face over shoulder.

Playback brought another shovelful, and the face was gone.

One hand crept through, tentatively, like something feeling its way in the dark.

Playback brought another shovelful and erased the hand.

Three fingers wormed through this time, like a staggered insect that has been stepped on. They only made it as far as the second joint.

“If he said he wants to die, then why does he keep trying to break through to the surface and breathe for?” Playback asked, engrossed.

“That’s nature,” the one beside him answered learnedly. “His mind wants to die, but his body don’t know any better, it wants to live no matter what he says to it.”

The stirring fill had fallen motionless at last.

“It’s got him, he’s quit now,” he decided after a further moment or two of judicious observation. “Throw her in on top of him, fill it up the rest of the way, and let’s get out of here. I haven’t had so much fresh air since—”

A girl opened the door first, looked cautiously up and down the deserted hotel corridor. Then she hitched her head at someone behind her, picked up a small valise from the floor and came on outside.

She was a blonde, good-looking and mean-looking, both at the same time.

“C’mon,” she said huskily. “Let’s go while the going’s good.”

A man came out after her. His eyes were the eyes of a poker player. A poker player in a game where the pot is life and death. He had a certain build, a certain way of walking. He was in gray.

He closed the door after him with practiced stealth. Then he stopped and raised his hand to the outside of it.

The girl looked around at him impatiently. “Can that, will you?” she snapped. “This is no time to play games. Every time you go in or out you take time off and fool with that.”

“I’m a gambler, remember?”

“You’re a gambler is right,” she agreed tartly. “That’s why the heat’s on you right now. You should pay up your losses—”

“I’m superstitious. This little number’s been awful good to me. All my big wins come from something with a six in it.”

On the 9 at the end of 119 the bottom rivet was gone; only the top one remained. He swung it around loosely upward, made it into a 6 and patted it affectionately. “Keep on bringing me good luck like you always have,” he told it softly.

“Didn’t you hear me ask for 116 when we first holed up here?” he added. “Only somebody else was already in it...”