Killer, Come Back To Me

I went from house to house, all down the street, near the empty lot. And I rang every bell and when the door opened I said: ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs. Griswold, but is anyone missing from your house?’ or ‘Hello, Mrs. Pikes, you’re looking fine today. Glad to see you home!’ And once I saw that the lady of the house was home I just chatted awhile to be polite, and went on down the street.

The hours were rolling along. It was getting late. I kept thinking, oh, there’s only so much air in that box with that woman under the earth, and if I don’t hurry, she’ll suffocate, and I got to rush! So I rang bells and knocked on doors, and it got later, and I was just about to give up and go home, when I knocked on the last door, which was the door of Mr. Charlie Nesbitt, who lives next to us. I kept knocking and knocking.

Instead of Mrs. Nesbitt, or Helen as my father calls her, coming to the door, why it was Mr. Nesbitt, Charlie, himself.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s you, Margaret.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Good afternoon.’

‘What can I do for you, kid?’ he said.

‘Well, I thought I’d like to see your wife, Mrs. Nesbitt,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘May I?’

‘Well, she’s gone out to the store,’ he said.

‘I’ll wait,’ I said, and slipped in past him.

‘Hey,’ he said.

I sat down in a chair. ‘My, it’s a hot day,’ I said, trying to be calm, thinking about the empty lot and air going out of the box, and the screams getting weaker and weaker.

‘Say, listen, kid,’ said Charlie, coming over to me, ‘I don’t think you better wait.’

‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘Well, my wife won’t be back,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Not today, that is. She’s gone to the store, like I said, but, but, she’s going on from there to visit her mother. Yeah. She’s going to visit her mother, in Schenectady. She’ll be back, two or three days, maybe a week.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to tell her something.’

‘What?’

‘I just wanted to tell her there’s a woman buried over in the empty lot, screaming under tons and tons of dirt.’

Mr. Nesbitt dropped his cigarette.

‘You dropped your cigarette, Mr. Nesbitt,’ I pointed out, with my shoe.

‘Oh, did I? Sure. So I did,’ he mumbled. ‘Well, I’ll tell Helen when she comes home, your story. She’ll be glad to hear it.’

‘Thanks. It’s a real woman.’

‘How do you know it is?’

‘I heard her.’

‘How, how you know it isn’t, well, a mandrake root?’

‘What’s that?’

‘You know. A mandrake. It’s a kind of a plant, kid. They scream. I know, I read it once. How you know it ain’t a mandrake?’

‘I never thought of that.’

‘You better start thinking,’ he said, lighting another cigarette. He tried to be casual. ‘Say, kid, you, eh, you say anything about this to anyone?’

‘Sure, I told lots of people.’

Mr. Nesbitt burned his hand on his match.

‘Anybody doing anything about it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They won’t believe me.’

He smiled. ‘Of course. Naturally. You’re nothing but a kid. Why should they listen to you?’

‘I’m going back now and dig her out with a spade,’ I said.

‘Wait.’

‘I got to go,’ I said.

‘Stick around,’ he insisted.

‘Thanks, but no,’ I said, frantically.

He took my arm. ‘Know how to play cards, kid? Blackjack?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He took out a deck of cards from a desk. ‘We’ll have a game.’

‘I got to go dig.’

‘Plenty of time for that,’ he said, quiet. ‘Anyway, maybe my wife’ll be home. Sure. That’s it. You wait for her. Wait awhile.’

‘You think she will be?’

‘Sure, kid. Say, about that voice; is it very strong?’

‘It gets weaker all the time.’

Mr. Nesbitt sighed and smiled. ‘You and your kid games. Here now, let’s play that game of blackjack, it’s more fun than Screaming Women.’

‘I got to go. It’s late.’

‘Stick around, you got nothing to do.’

I knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to keep me in his house until the screaming died down and was gone. He was trying to keep me from helping her. ‘My wife’ll be home in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Sure. Ten minutes. You wait. You sit right there.’

We played cards. The clock ticked. The sun went down the sky. It was getting late. The screaming got fainter and fainter in my mind. ‘I got to go,’ I said.

‘Another game,’ said Mr. Nesbitt. ‘Wait another hour, kid. My wife’ll come yet. Wait.’

In another hour he looked at his watch. ‘Well, kid, I guess you can go now.’ And I knew what his plan was. He’d sneak down in the middle of the night and dig up his wife, still alive, and take her somewhere else and bury her, good. ‘So long, kid. So long.’ He let me go, because he thought that by now the air must all be gone from the box.

The door shut in my face.

I went back near the empty lot and hid in some bushes. What could I do? Tell my folks? But they hadn’t believed me. Call the police on Mr. Charlie Nesbitt? But he said his wife was away visiting. Nobody would believe me!

I watched Mr. Kelly’s house. He wasn’t in sight. I ran over to the place where the screaming had been and just stood there.

The screaming had stopped. It was so quiet I thought I would never hear a scream again. It was all over. I was too late, I thought.

I bent down and put my ear against the ground.

And then I heard it, way down, way deep, and so faint I could hardly hear it.

The woman wasn’t screaming any more. She was singing. Something about, ‘I loved you fair, I loved you well.’

It was sort of a sad song. Very faint. And sort of broken. All of those hours down under the ground in that box must have sort of made her crazy. All she needed was some air and food and she’d be all right. But she just kept singing, not wanting to scream any more, not caring, just singing.

I listened to the song.

And then I turned and walked straight across the lot and up the steps to my house and I opened the front door.

‘Father,’ I said.

‘So there you are!’ he cried.

‘Father,’ I said.

‘You’re going to get a licking,’ he said.

‘She’s not screaming any more.’

‘Don’t talk about her!’

‘She’s singing now,’ I cried.

‘You’re not telling the truth!’

‘Dad,’ I said. ‘She’s out there and she’ll be dead soon if you don’t listen to me. She’s out there, singing, and this is what she’s singing.’ I hummed the tune. I sang a few of the words. ‘I loved you fair, I loved you well …’

Dad’s face grew pale. He came and took my arm.

‘What did you say?’ he said.

I sang it again: ‘I loved you fair, I loved you well.’

‘Where did you hear that song?’ he shouted.

‘Out in the empty lot, just now.’

‘But that’s Helen’s song, the one she wrote, years ago, for me!’ cried Father. ‘You can’t know it. Nobody knew it, except Helen and me. I never sang it to anyone, not you or anyone.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘Oh, my God!’ cried Father, and ran out the door to get a shovel. The last I saw of him he was in the empty lot, digging, and lots of other people with him, digging.

I felt so happy I wanted to cry.

I dialled a number on the phone and when Dippy answered I said, ‘Hi, Dippy. Everything’s fine. Everything’s worked out keen. The Screaming Woman isn’t screaming any more.’

‘Swell,’ said Dippy.

‘I’ll meet you in the empty lot with a shovel in two minutes,’ I said.

‘Last one there’s a monkey! So long!’ cried Dippy.

‘So long, Dippy!’ I said, and ran.

The Trunk Lady

Johnny Menlo kicked his shoes and sat down hard on the bottom of the attic stairs. His teacher, his special private tutor, was not coming after all. So he wouldn’t have someone in the house all to himself.

Downstairs the party was running full blast. The sounds of it came up mockingly – the laughter, the cocktail shakers clinking, the music. Johnny thought he had got away from its sounds, sitting way up here, so lonely. His teacher was supposed to have come today. She hadn’t.

Mom and Dad, so busy drinking with people, gave Johnny the kind of look you give your shadow.

Johnny retreated farther up the stairs into the complete musty asylum of the abandoned attic. Even up here the dust and warm afternoon quiet was rustled by the party noises from below.

Johnny glanced around. There were four trunks sitting under veils of webs in the dim corners. A sunbeam fell through a small dirty window, lighted things for Johnny’s curious blue eyes.

The trunk in the north corner, for instance. It was always locked, the key hidden somewhere. The hasps were down now, but the brass tongue in the middle was flipped up, unlocked.

Johnny walked to the trunk and pried the hasps open. He pulled the lid up. Suddenly the attic was very cold.

She was inside.

Curled up, her body was, young, pretty. Her slender face was like chalk etched against the blackboard of her hair. Johnny gasped, but not too loudly. He held onto the trunk rim. Only her perfume was still alive. She looked as lonely and abandoned as he felt. He sympathized. Attics are places for things neglected and forgotten.

Death had apparently come through suffocation. Someone had slammed the heavy airtight lid down upon her curled loveliness. Her hand was like a white fragment of it against her filmy pink cocktail dress.

A moment later he found the balled wad of paper on the floor. It was only part of a note, with her writing on it.

– you’ve got to make it up to me, the way I’ve been treated. It shouldn’t be difficult. I could be Johnny’s teacher. That would explain my presence in the house to everyone. ELLIE.

He looked at her quiet beauty. It seemed as if she might have fallen asleep during the cocktail party and had been carried here and the lid slammed down upon her while in slumber!

The attic dimness moved in about Johnny, shaking him, then drawing out, leaving him numbed and saying, ‘Are you my teacher? Are you the one I was going to have for myself alone? But they – they killed you? Why should anyone kill my teacher?’ Another thought rushed the first away. He, Johnny Menlo, of the society Menlos, had found a body, hadn’t he? Sure. His eyes widened. Mom and Dad’d have to notice him now, more often.

Why, even Grandma would quit playing chess all day with Uncle Flinny, choke on her brandy, stare at him through thick glasses, and cry, ‘My God, child, your snooping finally came to a profit, did it?’

Sure! Sure! Johnny blinked rapidly, his heart pounding.

Cousin William might even faint at the news!

He, Johnny Menlo, had found the body. Pictures in the papers of himself instead of Mother beaming out of the society columns!

Hiding the note in his pocket, Johnny took one last long look at the pretty lashes and the pink lips and the dark black hair of the Trunk Lady. He closed the lid on her sleeping.

He’d scream. Yes, at the top of the grand stairs. Scream till the sky fell down, and the party with it! Scream!

His screaming wasn’t bad at all.

Down the stairs, across the hall, making a path with his screaming through the startled ranks of people, Johnny reached Mother’s glittering cocktail gown and held onto it very tightly.

‘Johnny, Johnny, why are you downstairs? What’s the matter? I told you –’ Mother’s girl-face looked down over the glitter. He grabbed another fistful of spangles. He yelled it:

‘Mom, there’s a body in the attic!’

Like faces in a football stadium, the faces watching them. Mother stiffened, then relaxed. ‘Let go my dress, darling, you’ll get it dirty. Look at your hands, cobwebs and all. Now run up to your room like a good boy.’ She patted his head.

‘But Mom!’ he wailed. ‘There’s a body –’

‘Good Lord,’ someone murmured. ‘Just like his father.’

Johnny spun angrily. ‘You shut up! There is so a body!’

Mother didn’t see him. She looked at her guests, and all Johnny could see was her lovely swanlike throat, the firm chin with the pulse beating under it, her fingers fixing the chestnut shine of hair swept up from her ears.

‘Please forgive Johnny,’ she was saying. ‘Children are so imaginative, aren’t they?’

Her chin came down. There was no light in her blue eyes. ‘You’d better go upstairs, Johnny.’

‘Oh, but, Mom –’

His world was crashing. The spangles slipped from between his fingers. He suddenly hated everyone at the party looking at him.

‘You heard what your mother said, General.’

That was Dad’s resonant voice and it meant the fight was lost. Johnny jerked around, shot one last glare at the people, and ran upstairs, tears coming into his eyes.

He twisted the brass knob of Grandma’s door. She sat playing chess with Uncle Flinny before the great glaring window. Sunlight glinted off her glasses. She hardly looked up.

‘Pardon me, Granny, but –’

She shifted her cane against her thin knee. ‘Well?’

‘There’s a body in the attic and nobody’ll believe me –’

‘Go away, Johnny!’

‘But,’ he cried, ‘there’s a body!’

‘We know it, we know it! Now run get Cousin William a bottle of cognac! Scat! Go!’

Johnny went and got the cognac from the wine pantry, rapped on Cousin William’s door, and thought he heard indrawn breath behind the panelling. Then Cousin William whispered quickly.

‘Who’s there?’ ‘Cognac.’

‘Oh, fine, fine!’ Cousin William’s weak-chinned, rabbity face poked out, his soft hands darting after the offered liquor. ‘Thank God. Now go away and let me get drunk!’

The door slammed, but before it did Johnny got a brief glimpse of the cluttered, disorderly interior of Cousin William’s Designing Room – the mannequins standing stiff around with brilliant silks draped, cut, fixed to them, watercolour sketches of capes, hats, suits, thumbtacked to the plaster walls. Bright heaps of woollens, threaded spools, and all. The door cut it off, locked it in, and Cousin William was nervously attending his cognac behind the shining knob.

Johnny eyed the hall phone, his anger simmering. He thought of Mom and Dad dancing, Uncle Flinny and Grandma playing their eternal chess, Cousin William drinking – and himself a stranger in this great old echoing house. He snatched up the phone.

‘Uh – I want – that is – give me the police station.’

Another deep voice cut in on the operator’s.

‘Hang up the phone, Johnny. Hang up and go to bed.’ Dad’s very resonant and cultured voice.

Johnny hung up slowly. So this was his reward for finding a body? He sat and cried with frustration. He felt like the lady in the trunk, the lid slammed in his face by five people! Slammed!

He was twisting in bed when Uncle Flinny softly opened the door and poked his curly, soft-haired, big head into the room. His eyes were round, black, gentle, peaceful-looking. He came in with slow, soft movements, sat on the edge of the chair beside the bed like a very quiet little bird. He folded his birdlike fingers.

‘Since you’re retiring early,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d better come tell your bedtime story early too. Yes?’

Johnny felt himself too old for stories. Being raised in such an adult house with few contacts with children, and having an advanced education with such mature talk and mature people around, he felt himself far above bedtime stories. But he resigned himself, sighed, and said, ‘Okay, Uncle Flinny. Go ahead. Shoot.’

Uncle Flinny held onto his neatly pressed black trousers at the knees as if they’d explode and slowly pieced out his tale.

‘Well, once there was a young woman who was very beautiful –’

Oh-oh! Johnny’d heard this story a thousand times before. He fidgeted. A body in the attic and he had to listen to this.

‘And,’ continued Uncle Flinny, ‘this beautiful young girl fell in love with and married a young knight. They lived happily for years. Until one day a Dark One kidnapped the beautiful woman and ran away with her.’ Uncle Flinny looked sad and old.

‘And then the husband came home,’ prompted Johnny.

Uncle Flinny didn’t hear him at all. He just kept talking in a funny soft monotone. ‘The husband chased the Dark One into a Dark Land. But no matter how hard he pleaded, or tried to catch up with the Dark One, he never could. His wife was gone forever. Forever.’

Uncle Flinny’s breathing was uneven, harsh. His eyes glowed dark, round. His lips trembled. He wasn’t himself. He was someone else off a million miles in that Dark Land. He seized his knees tighter and bent over them.

‘But the husband searched and searched, vowing that someday he would find and kill the Dark One, and, wonder of wonders, he did! He struck the Dark One down, but oh God above, after striking the Dark One he found that somehow the Dark One looked like his beautiful wife! And he found to his horror that he himself was growing – darker and darker …’

The end. Johnny hoped there’d be no more. Uncle Flinny sat sighing in the atmosphere he’d built from the story. He’d forgotten Johnny was a part of the room. His hands were shaking and he was out of breath. He just sat there.

Johnny shivered for no reason he knew. ‘Thanks. Thanks very much, Uncle Flinny,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the swell story.’

Uncle Flinny turned blind eyes. ‘Unh?’ He relaxed, recognizing Johnny. ‘Oh, yes. Anytime. Anytime at all.’

‘You sure get steamed up, Uncle Flinny.’

Uncle Flinny quietly opened the door. ‘Good night, Johnny.’

‘Oh, Uncle!’

‘Yes?’

Johnny stopped himself. ‘Never mind.’

Uncle Flinny shuffled out. The door closed gently.

Johnny bounced furiously on the springs. ‘The things I’ve had to do the last few days, to keep this family happy! Listen to Uncle Flinny – wait on Grandma – get out of the way of Mother – obey Father. And keep Cousin William drunk. Guh!’

He was tired of them all. For a change why not some attention for himself? He could hear the party continuing downstairs. Slipping from bed, he listened against the door.

In the next hour he heard all varieties of feet upon the stairs, like heartbeats in the house. The crisp, snapping moves of Grandma and her pert cane feeling the layers of altitude. The shuffle of Uncle Flinny. The even long and easy stride of Dad. The glide of Mother. The nervous, uneasy tripping of Cousin William.

And there were voices talking, some arguing, some urging, others hysterical, mixed – Dad calm, Mother criticizing, Grandma stern, Cousin William whimpering, Uncle Flinny quiet. Once or twice the attic door creaked.

No one even came near Johnny’s room. The party still existed downstairs, unaware of all this badinage. Night was coming swiftly on with an autumn chill.

Finally it was quiet again. Johnny hurried up the dark, dusty stairs into the attic, heart beating quickly. He’d show them!

The trunk was not heavy, strangely enough. One could easily tip it toward the stairs, and the stairs led down to the landing. One more push from the landing and down, down, down into the living room. Yes. They’d have to believe him now!

Johnny tipped the trunk.

People were talking. Music was playing on the radio-phonograph. Mom and Dad mingled with the bright swarm, flames about which social moths beat their sophisticated wings.

It was in the very midst of these things that Johnny’s small voice made some sort of declaration from atop the hall staircase. He yelled loudly.

‘Mom! Dad!’

Everybody turned and looked, as at a reception. The woman came down the stairs.

Somebody had to scream. It sounded almost like Cousin William. But everybody watched, falling back, as the woman came down the stairs in her filmy cocktail dress. Well, she didn’t exactly come down. She rolled.

Over and over, arms limp, legs limp, head bobbing, hair flailing in a dark whip, around and down, softly nudging the steps, jointless, boneless, and lifeless. When she reached the bottom Johnny was right after her.

‘I told you, Mother! Dad, I found her again! I found her!’

He’d always and forever remember Mother’s face in that moment and the way she said his name. ‘Johnny …!’ And the way she struck him across the face.

Someone said, ‘Call the police!’

Someone else had the phone, ticking it. Dad’s face was like a wet grey calm, suddenly old and tired. Johnny fell back from Mother’s blow, holding to the banister. He thought She’s never hit me before. Never before. Always kind and good, thoughtless at times, maybe, but she never went and hit me before today.

Then it happened. Everybody began laughing. Somebody pointed at the body, their faces got red, and they laughed. Dad laughed, too, with everything but his eyes.

‘I’ll be damned,’ someone said. ‘So that’s the body the child found upstairs?’

‘A mannequin!’ someone declared.

‘Of course. A store-window dummy. Easy to see how a child might think it a body.’ Again, laughter. Lots of it.

‘A mannequin.’ The laughter grew and grew upon itself.

Johnny, trembling, crept and bent and touched the outflung hand, pulled away, touched it again, felt tremblingly the hard cold plastic.

‘That’s not the body,’ he said, looking up, bewildered. He shook his head, moving back. ‘That’s not the body at all,’ he said. ‘The other body was different. Warmish and soft. It was a real woman!’

‘Johnny!’

Dad had stopped smiling. Mother clenched a fist with white knuckles.

Johnny said, ‘Just the same, it’s not the one!’ He began to cry. Tears came as on the windshield of a car in a storm, erasing the world in wet portions. ‘Just the same, she was dead and she wasn’t made of plaster!’

The house was full of sounds late that night. People talking in locked rooms. Arguments. Once he thought he heard Cousin William sobbing. Feet climbed stairs, lights clicked on and off. Finally everyone was in bed, and Johnny sat up, throwing back the covers. That clicking was Cousin William double-locking his door. Why? … Because someone or something was walking around in the house?

Johnny started. His doorknob was turning. The door pushed open a few inches. Someone was standing there in the darkness, looking in. A heart is an erratic thing. Like mercury. It scurries all over a person’s insides. Johnny’s heart was like mercury.

The door remained open. The shadow remained standing in the doorway, staring, looking in. Johnny said nothing. Then, very matter-of-factly, the shadow withdrew, and the door closed.

Rapping the lock home hard, Johnny threw his breath out and lay trembling on the door. Pressure from outside a moment later, from that withdrawn shadow, could not force the bolt. Johnny listened. The shadow went away.

Very weakly Johnny returned to bed, trembling. ‘Mom! Mom,’ he said to himself, ‘are you mad at me for making a scene before all of society? Would you kill me, Mom? Was there something about the Trunk Lady and Dad, something you didn’t like, and did you kill her because of it? Now, when I come around, in the way, what will you do to me? Oh, Mom, it can’t be you!’’

‘Dad,’ he said, the same way, ‘you made me hang up the phone. Are you afraid it will get out too? Afraid of your business, your money, your reputation at the club, huh, Dad? Was that you standing in the door, silent and dark and thinking? You’ve been my favourite in the family. But now, today, you’re so quiet and you don’t even look at me.’

Cousin William. He could have changed the bodies, tried to fool Johnny. He could have put one of the mannequins in the trunk instead. Was she Cousin William’s girlfriend? Was she causing trouble somehow? Or was Cousin William just afraid for his reputation? Him and his mannequins and his famous, expensive dresses for expensive women. Was it him, twisting the doorknob a moment ago?