Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol.122, No. 6, October 1, 1938

...and Paul Stapp with only seconds left to enjoy the most beautiful day God ever made.

I

She had signed her own death-warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man but he knew there was one. He had known for six weeks now.

One day he came home and there was a cigar butt in an ashtray, still moist at one end, still warm at the other. There were gasoline-drippings on the asphalt in front of their house, and they didn’t own a car. And it wouldn’t be a delivery-vehicle, because the drippings showed it had stood there a long time, an hour or more at least. And once he had actually glimpsed it, just rounding the far corner as he got off the bus two blocks down the other way. A second-hand Ford.

She was often very flustered when he came home, hardly seemed to know what she was doing or saying at all.

He pretended not to see any of these things; he was that type of man. Stapp, he didn’t bring his hates or grudges out into the open where they had a chance to heal. He nursed them in the darkness of his mind. That’s a dangerous kind of a man.

If he had been honest with himself, he would have had to admit that this mysterious afternoon caller was just the excuse he gave himself, that he’d daydreamed of getting rid of her long before there was any reason to, that there had been something in him for years past now urging: Kill, kill, kill. Maybe ever since that time he’d been treated at the hospital for a concussion.

He didn’t have any of the usual excuses. She had no money of her own, he hadn’t insured her. He stood to gain nothing by getting rid of her. There was no other woman he meant to replace her with. She didn’t nag and quarrel with him. She was a docile, tractable sort of wife.

But this thing in his brain kept whispering: Kill, kill, kill. He’d fought it down until six weeks ago, more from fear and a sense of self-preservation than from compunction. The discovery that there was some stranger calling on her in the afternoons when he was away, was all that had been needed to unleash it in all its hydra-headed ferocity. And the thought that he would be killing two instead of just one, now, was an added incentive.

So every afternoon for six weeks when he came home from his shop, he had brought little things with him. Very little things, that were so harmless, so inoffensive in themselves that no one, even had they seen them, could have guessed — fine little strands of copper wire such as he sometimes used in his watch-repairing. And each time a very little package containing a substance that — well, an explosives expert might have recognized, but no one else.

There was just enough in each one of those packages, if ignited, to go Fffft! and flare up like flashlight-powder does. Loose like that it couldn’t hurt you, only burn your skin, of course, if you got too near it. But wadded tightly into cells, in what had formerly been a soap-box down in the basement, compressed to within an inch of its life the way he had it, the whole accumulated thirty-six-days’ worth of it (for he hadn’t brought any home on Sundays) — that would be a different story.

They’d never know. There wouldn’t be enough left of the flimsy house for them to go by. Sewer-gas they’d think, or a pocket of natural gas in the ground somewhere around under them.

Something like that had happened over on the other side of town two years ago, only not as bad, of course. That had given him the idea originally.

He’d brought home batteries too, the ordinary dry-cell kind. Just two of them, one at a time. As far as the substance itself was concerned, where he got it was his business. No one would ever know where he got it. That was the beauty of getting such a little at a time like that. It wasn’t even missed where he got it from.

She didn’t ask him what was in these little packages, because she didn’t even see them, he had them in his pocket each time. (And of course he didn’t smoke coming home.)

But even if she had seen them, she probably wouldn’t have asked him. She wasn’t the nosey kind that asked questions, she would have thought it was watch-parts, maybe, that he brought home to work over at night or something. And then too she was so rattled and flustered herself these days, trying to cover up the fact that she’d had a caller, that he could have brought in a grandfather-clock under his arm and she probably wouldn’t have noticed it.

Well, so much the worse for her. Death was spinning its web beneath her feet as they bustled obliviously back and forth in those ground-floor rooms. He’d be in his shop tinkering with watch-parts and the phone would ring. “Mr. Stapp, Mr. Stapp, your house has just been demolished by a blast!”

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.

He knew she didn’t intend running off with this unknown stranger, and at first he had wondered why not. But by now he thought he had arrived at a satisfactory answer. It was that he, Stapp, was working and the other man evidently wasn’t, wouldn’t be able to provide for her if she left with him. That must be it, what other reason could there be? She wanted to have her cake and eat it too.

So that was all he was good for, was it, to keep a roof over her head? Well, he was going to lift that roof sky-high, blow it to smithereens!

He didn’t really want her to run off, anyway, that wouldn’t have satisfied this thing within him that cried: Kill, kill, kill. It wanted to get the two of them, and nothing short of that would do. And if he and she had had a five-year-old kid, say, he would have included the kid in the holocaust too, although a kid that age obviously couldn’t be guilty of anything. A doctor would have known what to make of this, and would have phoned a hospital in a hurry. But unfortunately doctors aren’t mind-readers and people don’t go around with their thoughts placarded on sandwich-boards.

The last little package had been brought in two days ago. The box had all it could hold now. Twice as much as was necessary to blow up the house. Enough to break every window for a radius of blocks — only there were hardly any. They were in an isolated location. And that fact gave him a paradoxical feeling of virtue, as though he were doing a good deed; he was destroying his own but he wasn’t endangering anybody else’s home. The wires were in place, the batteries that would give off the necessary spark were attached. All that was necessary now was the final adjustment, the hook-up, and then—

Kill, kill, kill, the thing within him gloated.

Today was the day.

He had been working over the alarm-clock all morning to the exclusion of everything else. It was only a dollar-and-a-half alarm, but he’d given it more loving care than someone’s Swiss-movement pocket-watch or platinum and diamond wrist-watch. Taking it apart, cleaning it, oiling it, adjusting it, putting it together again, so that there was no slightest possibility of it failing him, of it not playing its part, of it stopping or jamming or anything else.

That was one good thing about being your own boss, operating your own shop, there was no one over you to tell you what to do and what not to do. And he didn’t have an apprentice or helper in the shop, either, to notice this peculiar absorption in a mere alarm-clock.

Other days he came home from work at five. This mysterious caller, this intruder, must be there from about two-thirty or three until shortly before she expected him. One afternoon it had started to drizzle at about a quarter to three, and when he turned in his doorway over two hours later there was still a large dry patch on the asphalt out before their house, just beginning to blacken over with the fine misty rain that was still falling. That was how he knew the time of her treachery so well.

He could, of course, if he’d wanted to bring the thing out into the open, simply have come an unexpected hour earlier any afternoon during those six weeks, and confronted them face to face. But he preferred the way of guile and murderous revenge; they might have had some explanation to offer that would weaken his purpose, rob him of his excuse to do the thing he craved. And he knew her so well, that in his secret heart he feared she would have if he once gave her the chance to offer it. Feared was the right word. He wanted to do this thing. He wasn’t interested in a show-down, he was interested in a payoff. This artificially-nurtured grievance had brought the poison in his system to a head, that was all. Without it might have remained latent for another five years, but it would have erupted sooner or later anyway.

He knew the hours of her domestic routine so well that it was the simplest matter in the world for him to return to the house on his errand at a time when she would not be there.

She did her cleaning in the morning. Then she had the impromptu morsel she called lunch. Then she went out, in the early afternoon, and did her marketing for their evening meal. They had a phone in the house but she never ordered over it; she liked, she often told him, to see what she was getting, otherwise the tradespeople simply foisted whatever they chose on you, at their own prices.

So from one until two was the time for him to do it, and be sure of getting away again unobserved afterwards.

II

At twelve-thirty sharp he wrapped up the alarm-clock in ordinary brown paper, tucked it under his arm, and left his shop. He left it every day at this same time to go to his own lunch. He would be a little longer getting back today, that was all. He locked the door carefully after him, of course; no use taking chances, he had too many valuable watches in there under repair and observation.

He boarded the bus at the corner below just like he did every day when he was really going home for the night. There was no danger of being recognized or identified by any bus-driver or fellow-passenger or anything like that, this was too big a city. Hundreds of people used these buses night and day. The drivers didn’t even glance up at you when you paid your fare, deftly made change for you backhand by their sense of touch on the coin you gave them alone. The bus was practically empty, no one was going out his way at this hour of the day.

He got off at his usual stop, three interminable suburban blocks away from where he lived, which was why his house had not been a particularly good investment when he bought it and no others had been put up around it afterwards. But it had its compensations on such a day as this. There were no neighbors to glimpse him returning to it at this unusual hour, from their windows, and remember that fact afterwards.

The first of the three blocks he had to walk had a row of taxpayers on it, one-story store-fronts. The next two were absolutely vacant from corner to corner, just a panel of advertising billboards on both sides, with their gallery of friendly people that beamed on him each day, twice a day.

Incurable optimists these people were: even today when they were going to be shattered and splintered they continued to grin and smirk their counsel and messages of cheer. The perspiring bald-headed fat man about to quaff some non-alcoholic beverage. The grinning laundress hanging up wash. The farmwife at the rural telephone sniggering over her shoulder. They’d be tatters and kindling in two hours from now, and they didn’t have sense enough to get down off there and hurry away.

“You’ll wish you had,” he whispered darkly as he passed by beneath them, clock under arm.

But the point was, that if ever a man walked three “city” blocks in broad daylight unseen by the human eye, he did that now. He turned in the short cement walk when he came to his house at last, pulled back the screen door, put his latchkey into the wooden inner door and let himself in. She wasn’t home, of course; he’d known she wouldn’t be, or he wouldn’t have come back like this.

He closed the door again after him, moved forward into the blue twilight-dimness of the house. It seemed like that at first after the glare of the street. She had the green shades down three-quarters of the way on all the windows to keep it cool until she came back.

He didn’t take his hat off or anything, he wasn’t staying. Particularly after he once set this clock he was carrying in motion. In fact, it was going to be a creepy feeling even walking back those three blocks to the bus-stop and standing waiting for the bus to take him downtown again, knowing all the time something was going tick-tick, tick-tick in the stillness back here, even though it wouldn’t happen for a couple of hours yet.

He went directly to the door leading down to the basement. It was a good stout wooden door. He passed through it, closed it behind him, and descended the bare brick steps. In the winter, of course, she’d had to come down occasionally to regulate the oil-burner while he was away, but after the fifteenth of April no one but himself ever came down here at any time, and it was now long past the fifteenth of April.

She hadn’t even known that he’d come down, at that. He’d slipped down each night for a few minutes while she was in the kitchen doing the dishes, and by the time she got through and came out, he was upstairs again behind his newspaper. It didn’t take long to add the contents of each successive little package to what was already in the box. The wiring had taken more time, but he’d gotten that done one night when she’d gone out to the movies (so she’d said — and then had been very vague about what the picture was she’d seen, but he hadn’t pressed her.)

The basement was provided with a light-bulb over the stairs, but it wasn’t necessary to use it except at night; daylight was admitted through a horizontal slit of window that on the outside was flush with the ground, but on the inside was up directly under the ceiling. The glass was wire-meshed for protection and so cloudy with lack of attention as to be nearly opaque.

The box, that was no longer merely a box now but an infernal machine, was standing over against the wall, to one side of the oil-burner. He didn’t dare shift it about any more now that it was wired and the batteries inserted.

He went over to it and squatted down on his heels before it, and put his hand on it with a sort of loving gesture. He was proud of it, prouder than of any fine watch he’d ever repaired or reconstructed. A watch after all, was inanimate. This was going to become animate in a few more minutes, maybe diabolically so, but animate just the same. It was like — giving birth.

He unwrapped the clock and spread out the few necessary small implements he’d brought with him from the shop, on the floor beside him. Two fine copper wires were sticking stiffly out of a small hole he’d bored in the box, in readiness, like the antennae of some kind of insect. Through them death would go in.

He wound the clock up first, for he couldn’t safely do that once it was connected. He wound it up to within an inch of its life, with a professionally deft economy of wrist-motion. Not for nothing was he a watch-repairer.

It must have sounded ominous down in that hushed basement, to hear that crick-craaaack, crick-craaaak, that so-domestic sound that denotes going to bed, peace, slumber, security; that this time denoted approaching annihilation. It would have if there’d been any listener. There wasn’t any but himself. It didn’t sound ominous to him, it sounded delicious.

He set the alarm for three. But there was a difference now. Instead of just setting off a harmless bell when the hour hand reached three and the minute hand reached twelve, the wires attached to it leading to the batteries would set off a spark. A single, tiny, evanescent spark — that was all. And when that happened, all the way downtown where his shop was the showcase would vibrate, and maybe one or two of the more delicate watch-mechanisms would stop. And people on the streets would pause and ask one another: “What was that?”

They probably wouldn’t even be able to tell definitely, afterwards, that there’d been anyone else beside herself in the house at the time. They’d know that she’d been there only by a process of elimination; she wouldn’t be anywhere else afterwards. They’d knew that the house had been there only by the hole in the earth and the litter around.

He wondered why more people didn’t do things like this; they didn’t know what they were missing. Probably not clever enough to be able to make the things themselves, that was why.

When he’d set the clock itself by his own pocket-watch — one-fifteen — he pried the back off it. He’d already bored a little hole through this at his shop. Carefully he guided the antenna-like wires through it, more carefully still he fastened them to the necessary parts of the mechanism without letting a tremor course along them. It was highly dangerous but his hands didn’t play him false, they were too skilled at this sort of thing.

It wasn’t vital to reattach the back of the clock, the result would be the same if it stood open or closed, but he did that too, to give the sense of completion to the job that his craftsman’s soul found necessary.

When he had done with it, it stood there on the floor, as if placed there at random up against an innocent-looking copper-lidded soap-box, ticking away. Ten minutes had gone by since he had come down here. One hour and forty minutes were still to go by.

Death was on the wing.

He stood up and looked down at his work. He nodded. He retreated a step across the basement floor, still looking down, and nodded again, as if the slight perspective gained only enhanced it. He went over to the foot of the stairs leading up, and stopped once more and looked over. He had very good eyes. He could see the exact minute-notches on the dial all the way over where he was now. One had just gone by.

He smiled a little and went on up the stairs, not furtively or fearfully but like a man does in his own house, with an unhurried air of ownership, head up, shoulders back, tread firm.

He hadn’t heard a sound over his head while he was down there, and you could hear sounds quite easily through the thin flooring, he knew that by experience. Even the opening and closing of doors above could be heard down here, certainly the footsteps of anyone walking about in the ground-floor rooms if they bore down with their normal weight. And when they stood above certain spots and spoke, the sound of the voices and even what was said, came through clearly due to some trick of accoustics. He’d heard Floyd Gibbons clearly, on the radio, while he was down here several times.

That was why he was all the more unprepared, as he opened the basement door and stepped out into the ground-floor hall, to hear a soft tread somewhere up above, on the second floor. A single, solitary footfall, separate, disconnected, like Robinson Crusoe’s footprint.

He stood stock-still a moment, listening tensely, thinking — hoping, rather, he’d been mistaken. But he hadn’t. The slur of a bureau-drawer being drawn open or closed reached him, and then a faint tinkling sound as though something had lightly struck one of the glass toilet-articles on Fran’s dresser.

Who else could it be but she? And yet there was a stealth to these vague disconnected noises that didn’t sound like her. He would have heard her come in; her high heels usually exploded along the hardwood floors like little firecrackers.

III

Some sixth sense made Stapp turn suddenly and look behind him, toward the dining room, and he was just in time to see a man, halfcrouched, shoulders bunched forward, creeping up on him. He was still a few yards away, beyond the dining-room threshold, but before Stapp could do more than drop open his mouth with reflex astonishment, he had closed in on him, caught him brutally by the throat with one hand, flung him back against the wall, and pinned him there.

“What are you doing here?” Stapp managed to gasp out.

“Hey Bill, somebody is home!” the man called out guardedly. Then he struck out at him, hit him a stunning blow on the side of the head with his free hand. Stapp didn’t reel because the wall was at the back of his head, that gave him back the blow doubly, and his senses dulled into a whirling flux for a minute.

Before they had cleared again, a second man had leaped down off the stairs from one of the rooms above, in the act of finishing cramming something into his pocket.

“You know what to do. Hurry up!” the first one ordered. “Get me something to tie him with and let’s get out of here.”

“For God’s sake, don’t tie—” Stapp managed to articulate through the strangling grip on his windpipe. The rest of it was lost in a blur of frenzied struggle on his part, flailing out with his legs, clawing at his own throat to free it. He wasn’t fighting the man, he was only trying to tear that throttling impediment off long enough to get out what he had to tell them, but his assailant couldn’t tell the difference. He struck him savagely a second and third time, and Stapp went limp there against the wall without altogether losing consciousness.

The second one had come back already with a rope, it looked like Fran’s clothesline from the kitchen, that she used on Mondays. Stapp, head falling forward dazedly upon the pinioning arm that still had him by the jugular, was dimly aware of this going around and around him, criss-cross, in and out, legs and body and arms.

“Don’t—” he panted. His mouth was suddenly nearly torn in two, and a large handkerchief or rag was thrust in, effectively silencing all further sound. Then they whipped something around outside of that, to keep it in, and fastened it behind his head.

“Fighter, huh?” one of them muttered grimly. “What’s he protecting? The place is a lemon, there’s nothing in it.”

Stapp felt a hand thrust into his vest-pocket, take his watch out. Then into his trouser-pocket and remove the little change he had.

“Where’ll we put him?”

“Leave him where he is.”

“Naw. I did my last stretch just on account of leaving a guy in the open where he could put a squad-car on my tail too quick; they nabbed me a block away. Let’s shove him back down in there where he was.”

This brought on a new spasm, almost epileptic in its violence. He squirmed and writhed and shook his head back and forth. They had picked him up between them now, head and feet, kicked the basement door open, and were carrying him down the steps to the bottom.

They still couldn’t be made to understand that he wasn’t resisting, that he wouldn’t call the police, that he wouldn’t lift a finger to have them apprehended — if they’d only let him get out of here with them.

“This is more like it,” the first one said, as they deposited him on the floor. “Whoever lives in the house with him won’t find him so quick—”

Stapp started to roll his head back and forth on the floor like something demented, toward the clock, then toward them, toward the clock, toward them. But so fast that it finally lost all possible meaning, even if it would have had any for them in the first place, and it wouldn’t have of course. They stilt thought he was trying to free himself in unconquerable opposition.

“Look at that,” one of them jeered. “Ever see anyone like him in your life?” He drew back his arm threateningly at the wriggling form. “I’ll give you one that’ll hold you for good, if you don’t cut it out.”

“Tie him up to that pipe over there in the corner,” his companion suggested, “or he’ll wear himself out rolling all over the place.”

They dragged him backwards along the floor and lashed him in a sitting position, legs out before him, with an added length of rope that had been coiled in the basement.

Then they brushed their hands ostentatiously and started up the stairs one behind the other, breathing hard from the struggle they’d had with him. “Pick up what we got and let’s blow,” one muttered. “We’ll have to pull another tonight — and this time you let me do the picking.”

“It looked like the berries,” his mate alibied. “No one home, and standing way off by itself like it is.”

A peculiar sound like the low simmering of a tea-kettle or the mewing of a newborn kitten left out in the rain to die came percolating thinly through the gag in Stapp’s mouth. His vocal cords were strained to bursting with the effort it was costing him to make even that slight sound. His eyes were round and staring, fastened on them in horror and imploring.

They saw the look as they went up, but couldn’t read it. It might have been just the physical effort of trying to burst his bonds, it might have been rage and threatened retribution, for all they knew.

The first passed obliviously through the doorway and out of sight. The second stopped halfway to the top of the stairs and glanced complacently back at him — the way he himself had looked back at his own handiwork just now, short minutes ago.

“Take it easy,” he jeered. “Relax. I used to be a sailor. You’ll never get out of them knots, buddy.”

Stapp swiveled his skull desperately, so his eyes indicated the clock one last time. They almost started out of their sockets, he put such physical effort into the look.

This time the man got it finally, but got it wrong. He flung his arm at him derisively. “Trying to tell me you got a date? Oh no you haven’t, you only think you have. Whadda you care what time it is, you’re not going any place.”

And then with the horrible slowness of a nightmare — though it only seemed that way, for he resumed his ascent fairly briskly — his head went out through the doorway, his shoulders followed, his waist next. Now even optical communication was cut off between them, and if only Stapp had had a minute more he might have made him understand! There was only one backthrust foot left in sight now, poised on the topmost step to take flight. Stapp’s eyes were on it as though their burning plea could hold it back.

The heel lifted up, it rose, trailed through after the rest of the man, was gone.

Stapp heaved himself so violently, as if to go after it by sheer will-power, that for a moment his whole body was a distended bow, clear of the floor from shoulders to heels. Then he fell flat again with a muffled thud, and a little dust came out from under him, and a half-dozen little separate skeins of sweat started down his face at one time, crossing and inter-crossing as they coursed. The basement door ebbed back into its frame and the latch dropped into its socket with a minor click that to him was like the crack of doom.

In the silence now, above the surge of his own breathing that came and went like surf upon a shoreline, was the counterpoint of the clock. Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.

For a moment or two longer he drew what consolation he could from the knowledge of their continued presence above him. An occasional stealthy footfall here and there, never more than one in succession, for they moved with marvelous dexterity. They must have had a lot of practise in breaking and entering, he thought inconsequentally. They were very cautious walkers from long habit even when there was no further need for it.

A single remark filtered through, from somewhere near the back door. “All set? Let’s take it this way.” The creak of a hinge, and then the horrid finality of a door closing after them, the back door, which Fran probably had forgotten to lock and by which they had presumably entered in the first place; and then they were gone.

And with them went his only link with the outside world. They were the only two people in the whole city who knew where he was at this moment. No one else, not a living soul, knew where to find him. Nor what would happen to him if he wasn’t found and gotten out of here by three o’clock. It was twenty-five to two now. His discovery of their presence, the fight, their trussing him up with the rope, and their final unhurried departure, had all taken place within fifteen minutes.

It went tick-tick, tick-tock; tick-tick, tick-tock, so rhythmically, so remorselessly, so fast.

An hour and twenty-five minutes left — eighty-five minutes. How long that could seem if you were waiting for someone on a corner, under an umbrella, in the rain — like he had once waited for Fran outside the office where she worked before they were married, only to find that she’d been taken ill and gone home early. How long that could seem if you were stretched out on a hospital-bed with knife-pains in your head and nothing to look at but white walls, until they brought your next tray — as he had been that time of the concussion. How long that could seem when you’d finished the paper, and one of the tubes had burned out in the radio, and it was too early to go to bed yet.

How short, how fleeting, how instantaneous, that could seem when it was all the time there was left for you to live in and you were going to die at the end of it!

No clock had ever gone this fast, of all the hundreds that he’d looked at and set right. This was a demon-clock, its quarter-hours were minutes and its minutes seconds. Its longer hand didn’t even pause at all on those notches the way it should have. It passed on from one to the next in perpetual motion.

It was cheating him, it wasn’t keeping the right time, somebody slow it down at least if nothing else! It was twirling like a pinwheel, that secondary hand. Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock. He broke it up into “Here I go, here I go, here I go.”

There was a long period of silence that seemed to go on forever after the two of them had left. The clock told him it was only twenty-one minutes. Then at four to two a door opened above without warning — oh, blessed sound, oh, lovely sound! — the front door this time (over above that side of the basement), and high-heeled shoes clacked over his head like castanets.

“Fran!” he shouted. “Fran!” he yelled. “Fran!” he screamed. But all that got past the gag was a low whimper that didn’t even reach across the basement. His face was dark with the effort it cost him, and a cord stood out at each side of his palpitating neck like a splint.

The tap-tap-tap went into the kitchen, stopped a minute (she was putting down her parcels; she didn’t have things delivered because then you were expected to tip the errand-boys ten cents), came back again.

If only there was something he could kick at with his interlocked feet, make a clatter with, but the cellar flooring was bare from wall to wall. He tried hoisting his lashed legs clear of the floor and pounding them down again with all his might; maybe the sound of the impact would carry up to her.

All he got was a soft-cushioned sound, with twice the pain of striking a stone surface with your bare palm, and not even as much distinctness. His shoes were rubber-heeled, and he could not tilt them up and around far enough to bring them down on the leather part above the lifts. An electrical discharge of pain shot up the backs of his legs, coursed up his spine, and exploded at the back of his head like a brilliant rocket.

Meanwhile her steps had halted about where the hall closet was (she must be hanging up her coat), then went on toward the stairs that led to the upper floor, faded out upon them, going up. She was out of earshot now, temporarily. But she was in the house with him at least! that awful aloneness was gone. He felt such gratitude for her nearness, he felt such love and need for her, he wondered how he could ever have thought of doing away with her — only one short hour ago.

He saw now that he must have been insane to contemplate such a thing. Well if he had been, he was sane now, he was rational now, this ordeal had brought him to his senses. Only release him, only rescue him from his jeopardy, and he’d never again—

IV

Five after. She’d been back nine minutes now. There, it was ten. At first slowly, then faster and faster, terror, which had momentarily been quelled by her return, began to fasten upon him again.

Why did she stay up there on the second floor like that? Why didn’t she come down here to the basement, to look for something? Wasn’t there anything down here that she might suddenly be in need of?

He looked around, and there wasn’t. There wasn’t a possible thing that might bring her down here. They kept their basement so clean, so empty. Why wasn’t it piled up with all sorts of junk like other people’s! That might have saved him now.

She might intend to stay up there all afternoon. She might lie down and take a nap, she might shampoo her hair, she might do over an old dress. Any one of those trivial harmless occupations of a woman during her husband’s absence could prove so fatal now. She might count on staying up there until it was time to begin getting his supper ready, and if she did — no supper, no she, no he.

Then a measure of relief came again. The man. The man whom he had intended destroying along with her, he would save him. He would be the means of his salvation. He came other days, didn’t he, in the afternoon, while Stapp was away? Then, oh God, let him come today, make this one of the days they had a rendezvous (and yet maybe it just wasn’t)! For if he came, that would bring her down to the lower floor, if only to admit him. And how infinitely greater his chances would be, with two pairs of ears in the house to overhear some wisp of sound he might make, than just with one.

And so he found himself in the anomalous position of a husband praying, pleading with every ounce of fervency he can muster, for the arrival, the materialization, of a rival whose existence he had only suspected until now, never been positive of.

Eleven past two. Forty-nine minutes left. Less than the time it took to sit through the “A” part of a picture-show. Less than the time it took to get a haircut, if you had to wait your turn. Less than the time it took to sit through a Sunday meal, or listen to an hour program on the radio, or ride on the bus from here to the beach for a dip. Less than all those things — to live. No, no, he had been meant to live thirty more years, forty! What had become of those years, those months, those weeks? No, not just minutes left, it wasn’t fair!

“Fran!” he shrieked. “Fran, come down here! Can’t you hear me?” The gag drank it up like a sponge.

The phone trilled out suddenly in the lower hallway, midway between him and her. He’d never heard such a beautiful sound before. “Thank God!” he sobbed, and a tear stood out in each eye. That must be the man now. That would bring her down.

Then fear again. Suppose it was only to tell her that he wasn’t coming? Or worse still, suppose it was to ask her instead to come out and meet him somewhere else? Leave him alone down here, once again, with this horror ticking away opposite him. No child was ever so terrified of being left alone in the dark, of its parents putting out the light and leaving it to the mercy of the boogy-man as this grown man was at the thought of her going out of the house and leaving him behind.

It kept on ringing a moment longer, and then he heard her quick step descending the stairs to answer it. He could hear every word she said down there where he was. These cheap matchwood houses.

“Hello? Yes, Dave. I just got in now.”

Then, “Oh Dave, I’m all upset. I had seventeen dollars upstairs in my bureau-drawer and it’s gone, and the wristwatch that Paul gave me is gone too. Nothing else is missing, but it looks to me as if someone broke in here while I was out and robbed us.”

Stapp almost writhed with delight down there where he was. She knew they’d been robbed. She’d get the police now. Surely they’d search the whole place, surely they’d look down here and find him!

The man she was talking to must have asked her if she was sure. “Well, I’ll look again, but I know it’s gone. I know just where I left it, and it isn’t there. Paul will have a fit.”

No Paul wouldn’t either; if she’d only come down here and free him he’d forgive her anything, even the cardinal sin of being robbed of his hard-earned money.

Then she said, “No, I haven’t reported it yet. I suppose I should, but I don’t like the idea — on your account, you know. I’m going to call up Paul at the shop. There’s just a chance that he took the money and the watch both with him when he left this morning. I remember telling him the other night that it was losing time; he may have wanted to look it over. Well, all right, Dave, come on out then.”

So he was coming, so Stapp wasn’t to be left alone in the place; hot breaths of relief pushed against the sodden gag at the back of his palate.

There was a pause while she broke the connection. Then he heard her call his shop-number, “Trevelyan 4-4512,” and wait while they were ringing, and of course no one answered.

Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.

The operator must have told her finally that they couldn’t get the number. “Well, keep ringing,” he heard her say, “it’s my husband’s store, he’s always there at this hour.”

He screamed in terrible silence: “I’m right here under your feet. Don’t waste time. For God’s sake, come away from the phone, come down here!”

Finally, when failure was reported a second time, she hung up. Even the hollow, cupping sound of that detail reached him. Oh, everything reached him — but help. This was a torture that a Grand Inquisitor would have envied.

He heard her steps move away from where the phone was. Wouldn’t she guess by his absence from where he was supposed to be that something was wrong? Wouldn’t she come down here now and look? (Oh, where was this woman’s intuition they spoke about!) No, how could she be expected to? What connection could the basement of their house possibly have in her mind with the fact that he wasn’t in his shop? She wasn’t even alarmed, so far, by his absence most likely. If it had been evening; but at this hour of the day— He might have gone out later than other days to his lunch, he might have had some errand to do.

He heard her going up the stairs again, probably to resume her search for the missing money and watch. He whimpered disappointedly. He was cut off from her, while she remained up there, as if she’d been miles away, instead of being vertically over him in a straight line.

Tick, tock, tick, tock. It was twenty-one past two now. One half-hour and nine scant minutes left. And they ticked away with the prodigality of tropical raindrops on a corrugated tin roof.

He kept straining and pulling away from the pipe that held him fast, then falling back exhausted, to rest awhile, to struggle and to strain some more. There was as recurrent a rhythm to it as there was to the ticking of the clock itself, only more widely spaced. How could ropes hold that unyieldingly? Each time he fell back weaker, less able to contend with them than the time before. For he wasn’t little strands of hemp, he was layers of thin skin that broke one by one and gave forth burning pain and finally blood.

The doorbell rang out sharply. The man had come. In less than ten minutes after their phone talk he had reached the house. Stapp’s chest started rising and falling with renewed hope. Now his chances were good again. Twice as good as before, with two people in the house instead of only one. Four ears instead of two, to hear whatever slight sound he might manage to make. And he must, he must find a way of making one.

He gave the stranger his benediction while he stood there waiting to be admitted. Thank God for this admirer or whatever he was, thank God for their rendezvous! He’d give them his blessing if they wanted it, all his worldly goods; anything, anything, if they’d only find him, free him.

She came quickly down the stairs a second time and her footfalls hurried across the hall. The front door opened. “Hello, Dave,” she said, and he heard the sound of a kiss quite clearly. One of those loud unabashed ones that bespeak cordiality rather than intrigue.

A man’s voice, deep, resonant, asked: “Well, did it turn up yet?”

“No, and I’ve looked high and low,” he heard her say. “I tried to get Paul after I spoke to you, and he was out to lunch.”

“Well, you can’t just let seventeen dollars walk out the door without lifting your finger.”

For seventeen dollars they were standing there frittering his life away — and their own too, for that matter, the fools!

“They’ll think I did it, I suppose,” he heard the man say with a note of bitterness.

“Don’t say things like that,” she reproved. “Come in the kitchen and I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

Her quick brittle step went first, and his heavier, slower one followed. There was the sound of a couple of chairs being drawn out, and the man’s footfalls died out entirely. Hers continued busily back and forth for awhile, on a short orbit between stove and table.

What were they going to do, sit up there for the next half-hour? Couldn’t he make them hear in some way? He tried clearing his throat, coughing. It hurt furiously, because the lining of it was all raw from long strain. But the gag muffled even the cough to a blurred purring sort of sound.

V

Twenty-six to three. Only minutes left now, minutes; not even a full half-hour any more.

Her footsteps stopped finally and a chair shifted slightly as she joined him at the table. There was linoleum around the stove and sink that deadened sounds, but the middle part of the room where the table stood was ordinary pine-board flooring. It let things through with crystalline accuracy.

He heard her say, “Don’t you think we ought to tell Paul about — us?”

The man didn’t answer for a moment. Maybe he was spooning sugar, or thinking about what she’d said. Finally he asked, “What kind of a guy is he?”

“Paul’s not narrow-minded,” she said. “He’s very fair and broad.”

Even in his agony, Stapp was dimly aware of one thing: that didn’t sound a bit like her. Not her speaking well of him, but that she could calmly, detachedly contemplate broaching such a topic to him. She had always seemed so proper and slightly prudish. This argued a sophistication that he hadn’t known she’d had.

The man was evidently dubious about taking Paul into their confidence, at least he had nothing further to say. She went on, as though trying to convince him: “You have nothing to be afraid of on Paul’s account, Dave, I know him too well. And don’t you see, we can’t keep on like this? It’s better to go to him ourselves and tell him about you, than wait until he finds out. He’s liable to think something else entirely, and keep it to himself, brood, hold it against me, unless we explain. I know that he didn’t believe me that night when I helped you find a furnished room, and told him I’d been to a movie. And I’m so nervous and upset each time he comes home in the evening it’s a wonder he hasn’t noticed it before now. Why I feel as guilty as if — as if I were one of these disloyal waves or something.” She laughed embarrassedly, as if apologizing to him for even bringing such a comparison up.

What did she mean by that?

“Didn’t you ever tell him about me at all?”

“You mean in the beginning? Oh, I told him you’d been in one or two scrapes, but like a little fool I let him think I’d lost track of you.”

Why, that was her brother she’d said that about!

The man sitting up there with her confirmed it right as the thought burst in his mind. “I know it’s tough on you, sis. You’re happily married and all that. I’ve got no right to come around and gum things up for you. No one’s proud of a jailbird, an escaped convict, for a brother—”

“David,” he heard her say, and even through the flooring there was such a ring of earnestness in her voice Stapp could almost visualize her reaching across the table and putting her hand reassuringly on his, “there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you, and you should know that by now. Circumstances have been against you, that’s all. You shouldn’t have done what you did, but that’s spilt milk and there’s no use going back over it now.”

“I suppose I’ll have to go back and finish it out. Seven years, though, Fran, seven years out of a man’s life—”

“But this way you have no life at all.”

Were they going to keep on talking his life away? Nineteen to three. One quarter of an hour, and four minutes over!

“Before you do anything, let’s go downtown and talk it over with Paul, hear what he says.” One chair jarred back, then the other. He could hear dishes clatter, as though they’d all been lumped together in one stack. “I’ll do these when I come back,” she remarked.

Were they going to leave again? Were they going to leave him behind here, alone, with only minutes to spare?

Their footsteps had come out into the hall now, halted a moment undecidedly. “I don’t like the idea of you being seen with me on the streets in broad daylight, you could get in trouble yourself, you know. Why don’t you phone him to come out here instead?”

Yes, yes, Stapp wailed. Stay with me! Stay!

“I’m not afraid,” she said gallantly. “I don’t like to ask him to leave his work at this hour, and I can’t tell him over the phone. Wait a minute, I’ll get my hat.” Her footsteps diverged momentarily from his, rejoined them again.

Panic-stricken, Stapp did the only thing he could think of. Struck the back of his own head violently against the thick pipe he was attached to.

A sheet of blue flame darted before his eyes. He must have hit one of the welts where he had already been struck once by the burglars. The pain was so excruciating he knew he couldn’t repeat the attempt. But they must have heard something, some dull thud or reverberation must have carried up along the pipe. He heard her stop short for a minute and say, “What was that?”

And the man, duller-sensed than she and killing him all unknowingly, “What? I didn’t hear anything.”

She took his word for it, went on again, to the hall-closet to get her coat. Then her footsteps retraced themselves all the way back through the dining room to the kitchen. “Wait a minute, I want to make sure this back door’s shut tight. Locking the stable after the horse is gone.”

She went forward again through the house for the last time, there was the sound of the front door opening, she passed through it, the man passed through it, it closed, and they were gone. There was the faint whirr of a car starting up outside in open.

And now he was left alone with his self-fashioned doom a second time, and the first seemed a paradise in retrospect, compared to this; for then he had a full hour to spare, he had been rich in time, and now he only had fifteen minutes, one miserly quarter-hour.

There wasn’t any use struggling any more. He’d found that out long ago. He couldn’t anyway, even if he’d wanted to. Flames seemed to be licking lazily around his wrists and ankles.

He’d found a sort of palliative now, the only way there was left. He’d keep his eyes down and pretend the hands were moving slower than they were, it was better than watching them constantly, it blunted a little of the terror at least. The ticking he couldn’t hide from.

Of course every once in awhile when he couldn’t resist looking up and verifying his own calculations, there’d be a renewed burst of anguish, but in-between-times it made it more bearable to say, “It’s only gained a half-minute since the last time I looked.” Then he’d hold out as long as he could with his eyes down. But when he couldn’t stand it any more and would have to raise them to see if he was right, it had gained two minutes. Then he’d have a bad fit of hysteria, in which he called on God, and even on his long-dead mother, to help him, and couldn’t see straight through the tears.

Then he’d pull himself together again, in a measure, and start the self-deception over again. “It’s only about thirty seconds now since I last looked... Now it’s about a minute...” (But was it? But was it?) And so on, mounting slowly to another climax of terror and abysmal collapse.

Then suddenly the outside world intruded again, that world that he was so cut off from that it already seemed as far away, as unreal, as if he were already dead. The doorbell rang out.

He took no hope from the summons at first. Maybe some peddler — no, that had been too aggressive to be a peddler’s ring. It was the sort of ring that claimed admission as its right, not as a favor. It came again. Whoever was ringing was truculently impatient at being kept waiting.

A third ring was given the bell, this time a veritable blast that kept on for nearly half-a-minute. The party must have kept his finger pressed to the bell-button the whole time. Then as the peal finally stopped, a voice called out forcefully: “Anybody home in there? Gas Company.”

And suddenly Stapp was quivering all over, almost whinnying in his anxiety.

This was the one call, the one incident in all the day’s domestic routine, from earliest morning until latest night, that could have possibly brought anyone down into the basement. The meter was up there on the wall, beside the stairs, staring him in the face. And her brother had had to take her out of the house at just this particular time so there was no one to let the man in.

There was the impatient shuffle of a pair of feet on the cement walk. The man must come down off the porch to gain perspective with which to look inquiringly up at the second-floor windows. And for a fleeting moment, as he chafed and shifted about out there before the house, on the walk and off, Stapp actually glimpsed the blurred shanks of his legs standing before the grimy transom that let light into the basement at ground-level. All the potential savior had to do was crouch down and peer in through it, and he’d see him tied up down there. And the rest would be so easy!

Why didn’t he, why didn’t he? But evidently he didn’t expect anyone to be in the basement of a house in which his triple ring went unanswered. The tantalizing trouser-legs shifted out of range again, the transom became blank.

A little saliva filtered through the mass of rag in Stapp’s distended mouth, trickled across his silently vibrating lower lip.

The gas inspector gave the bell one more try, as if venting his disappointment at being balked rather than in any expectation of being admitted this late in the proceedings. He gave it innumerable short jabs, like a telegraph-key. Bip-bip-bip-bip-bip.

Then he called out disgustedly, evidently for the benefit of some unseen assistant waiting in a truck out at the curb, “They’re never in when you want ’em to be.” There was a single quick tread on the cement, away from the house. Then the slur of a light truck being driven off.

Stapp died a little. Not metaphorically, literally. His arms and legs got cold up to the elbows and knees, his heart seemed to beat slower, and he had trouble getting a full breath; more saliva escaped and ran down his chin, and his head drooped forward and lay on his chest for awhile, inert.

Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick. It brought him to after awhile, as though it were something beneficent, smelling salts or ammonia, instead of being the malevolent thing it was.

He noticed that his mind was starting to wander. Not much, as yet, but every once in awhile he’d get strange fancies. One time he thought that his face was the clock-dial, and that thing he kept staring at over there was his face. The pivot in the middle that held the two hands became his nose, and the 10 and the 2, up near the top, became his eyes, and he had a red-tin beard and head of hair and a little round bell on the exact top of his crown for a hat.

“Gee, I look funny,” he sobbed drowsily. And he caught himself twitching the muscles of his face, as if trying to stop those two hands that were clasped on it before they progressed any further and killed that man over there, who was breathing so metallically tick, tock, tick, tock.

Then he drove the weird notion away and he saw that it had been just another escape-mechanism. Since he couldn’t control the clock over there, he had attempted to change it into something else.

Another vagary was that this ordeal had been brought on him as punishment for what he had intended doing to Fran, that he was being held fast there not by the inanimate ropes but by some active, punitive agency, and that if he exhibited remorse, pledged contrition to a proper degree, he could automatically effect his release at its hands.

Thus over and over he whined in the silence of his throttled throat, “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Just let me go this one time. I’ve learned my lesson, I’ll never do it again.”

And on that the outer world returned again.

This time it was the phone. It must be Fran and her brother, trying to find out if he’d come here in their absence. They’d found the shop closed, must have waited outside of it for awhile, and then when he still didn’t come, didn’t know what to make of it. Now they were calling the house from a booth down there, to see if he had been taken ill, had returned here in the meantime. When no one answered, that would tell them, surely, that something was wrong. Wouldn’t they come back now to find out what had happened to him?

But why should they think he was here in the house if he didn’t answer the phone? How could they dream he was in the basement the whole time? They’d hang around outside the shop some more waiting for him, until as time went on, and Fran became real worried, maybe they’d go to the police. (But that would be hours from now, what good would it do?) They’d look everywhere but here for him. When a man is reported missing the last place they’d look for him would be in his own home.

The phone stopped ringing finally and its last vibration seemed to hang tenuously on the lifeless air long after it had ceased, humming outward in a spreading circle like a pebble dropped into a stagnant pool. Mmmmmmmmm, until it was gone, and silence came rolling back in its wake.

She would be outside the pay-booth or wherever it was she had called from, by this time. Rejoining her brother, where he had waited. Reporting, “He’s not out at the house either.” Adding the mild, still unworried comment. “Isn’t that strange? Where on earth can he have gone?” Then they’d go back and wait outside the locked shop, at ease, secure, unendangered. She’d tap her foot occasionally in slight impatience, look up and down the street while they chatted.

And now they would be two of those casuals who would stop short and say to one another at three o’clock: “What was that?” And Fran might add, “It sounded as though it came from out our way.” That would be the sum-total of their comment on his passing.

Tick, tock, tick, took, tick, tock. Nine minutes to three. Oh what a lovely number was nine. Let it be nine forever — not eight or seven — nine for all eternity. Make time stand still, that he might breathe though all the world around him stagnated, rotted away. But no, it was already eight. The hand had bridged the white gap between the two black notches. Oh what a precious number was eight, so rounded, so symmetrical. Let it be eight forever—

VI

A woman’s voice called out in sharp reprimand, somewhere outside in the open: “Be careful what you’re doing, Bobby, you’ll break a window.” She was some distance away, but the ringing dictatorial tones carried clearly.

Stapp saw the blurred shape of a ball strike the basement transom, he was looking up at it for her voice had come in to him through there. It must have been just a tennis ball, but for an instant it was outlined black against the soiled pane, like a small cannonball; it seemed to hang there suspended, to adhere to the glass, then it dropped back to the ground. If it had been ordinary glass it might have broken, but the wire-mesh had prevented that.

The child came close up against the transom to get its ball back. It was such a small child that Stapp could see its entire body within the heighth of the pane, only the head was cut off. It bent over to pick up the ball, and then its head came into range too. It had short golden ringlets all over it. Its profile was turned toward him, looking down at the ball. It was the first human face he’d seen since he’d been left where he was. It looked like an angel. But an inattentive, unconcerned angel.

It saw something else while it was still bent forward close to the ground, a stone or something that attracted it, and picked that up too and looked at it, still crouched over, then finally threw it recklessly away over its shoulder, whatever it was.

The woman’s voice was nearer at hand now, she must be strolling along the sidewalk directly in front of the house. “Bobby, stop throwing things like that, you’ll hit somebody.”

If it would only turn its head over this way, it could look right in, it could see him. The glass wasn’t too smeary for that. He started to weave his head violently from side to side, hoping the flurry of motion would attract it, catch its eye. It may have, or its own natural curiosity may have prompted it to look in without that.

Suddenly it had turned its head and was looking directly in through the transom. Blankly at first, he could tell by the vacant expression of its eyes.

Faster and faster he swivelled his head. It raised the heel of one chubby, fumbling hand and scoured a little clear spot to squint through. Now it could see him, now surely! It still didn’t for a second. It must be much darker in here than outside, and the light was behind it.

The woman’s voice came in sharp reproof. “Bobby, what are you doing there?”

And then it saw him. The pupils of its eyes shifted over a little, came to rest directly on him. Interest replaced blankness. Nothing is strange to children — not a man tied up in a cellar any more than anything else — yet everything is. Everything creates wonder, calls for comment, demands explanation. Wouldn’t it say anything to her? Couldn’t it talk? It must be old enough to; she, its mother, was talking to it incessantly. “Bobby, come away from there.”

“Mommy, look,” it said gleefully.

Stapp couldn’t see it clearly any more, he was shaking his head so fast. He was dizzy, like you are when you’ve just gotten off a carrousel; the transom and the child it framed kept swinging about him in a half-circle, first too far over on one side, then too far over on the other.

But wouldn’t it understand, wouldn’t it understand that weaving of the head meant he wanted to be free? Even if ropes about the wrists and ankles had no meaning to it, if it couldn’t tell what a bandage around the mouth was, it must know that when anyone writhed like that they wanted to be let loose. Oh God, if it had only been two years older, three at the most. A child of eight, these days, would have understood and given warning.

“Bobby, are you coming? I’m waiting!”

If he could only hold its attention, keep it rooted there long enough in disobedience to her, surely she’d come over and get it, see him herself as she irritably sought to ascertain the reason for its fascination.

He rolled his eyes at it in desperate comicality, winked them, blinked them, crossed them. An elfin grin peered out on its face at this last; already it found humor in a physical defect.

An adult hand suddenly darted downward from the upper right-hand corner of the transom, caught its wrist, bore its arm upward out of sight. “Mommy, look,” it said again, and pointed with its other hand. “Funny man, tied up.”

The adult voice, reasonable, logical, dispassionate — inattentive to a child’s fibs and fancies — answered: “Why, that wouldn’t look nice. Mommy can’t peep into other people’s houses like you can.”

The child was tugged erect at the end of its arm, its head disappeared above the transom. Its body was pivoted around, away from him; he could see the hollows at the back of its knees for an instant longer, then its outline on the glass blurred in withdrawal, it was gone. Only the little clear spot it had scoured remained to mock him in his crucifixion.

The will to live is an unconquerable thing. He was more dead than alive by now, yet presently he started to crawl back again out of the depths of his despair, a slower longer crawl each time, like that of some indefatigable insect buried repeatedly in sand, that each time manages to burrow its way out.

He rolled his head away from the window back toward the clock finally. He hadn’t been able to spare a look at it during the whole time the child was in sight. And now to his horror it stood at three to three. There was a fresh, a final blotting-out of the burrowing insect that was his hopes, as if by a cruel idler lounging on a sandpile on a beach.

He couldn’t feel any more, terror or hope or anything else. A sort of numbness had set in, with a core of gleaming awareness remaining that was his mind. That would be all that the detonation would be able to blot out by the time it came. It was like having a tooth extracted with the aid of novocain. There remained of him now only this single pulsing nerve of premonition; all the tissue around it was frozen.

Now it would be too late even to attempt to free him first, before stopping the thing.

Something deep within him, what it was he had no leisure nor skill to recognize, seemed to retreat down long dim corridors away from the doom that impended. He hadn’t known he had those convenient corridors of evasion in him, with their protective turns and angles by which to put distance between himself and menace. Oh clever architect of the mind, oh merciful blueprints that made such emergency exits available. Toward them this something, that was he and yet not he, rushed; toward sanctuary, security, toward waiting brightness, sunshine, laughter.

The hand on the dial stayed there, upright, perpendicular, a perfect right-angle to its corollary, while the swift seconds that were all there were left of existence ticked by and were gone. It wasn’t so straight now any more, but he didn’t know it, he was in a state of death already. White reappeared between it and the twelve-notch, behind it now. It was one minute after three. He was shaking all over from head to foot — not with fear, with laughter...

It broke into sound as they plucked the dampened, bloodied gag out, as though they were drawing the laughter out after it, by suction or osmosis.

“No, don’t take those ropes off him yet!” the man in the white coat warned the policeman sharply. “Wait’ll they get here with the straitjacket, or you’ll have your hands full.”

Fran said through her tears, cupping her hands to her ears, “Can’t you stop him from laughing like that?”

“He’s out of his mind, lady,” explained the interne patiently.

The clock said five past seven.

“What’s in this box?” the cop asked, kicking at it idly with his foot.

“Nothing,” Stapp’s wife answered, through her sobs and above his incessant laughter. “Just an empty box. It used to have some kind of fertilizer in it, but I took it out and used it on the flowers I–I’ve been trying to raise out in back of the house.”