The Bowman Touch by Hartley Howard

Author:Hartley Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Chapter XIII

Snooping in the Dark

To walk across a strange room in near-darkness is to risk playing tag with pieces of furniture that are always where they shouldn’t be. I might’ve had no time to spare, but I had to wait until my eyes could pick out the vague path that led between clumps of deeper shadow to the door. Then, one step at a time, I made my way towards it.

The door opened on to the hall. There I could see nothing. With long drawn-out patience, I closed the door behind me and struck my lighter.

There was only a coat-rack and a dingy table near the street door. Down the centre of the hall ran a worn carpet that had lost almost all its pattern. Two other doors led into rooms on the right. On the left was the staircase. With the flame of my lighter casting leaping shadows all around, I began to go up.

The stair carpet was frayed, too, and it had been trodden through to the backing in many places. Patches of damp showed on the wall beside me. And here and there the plaster was flaking off the ceiling.

Conditions on the floor above were no better. Even in the tiny, swaying light, the whole place looked run-down and squalid. Whatever Mister Fenwick’s prospects were, his home was as high-class as a tenth-rate flop-house.

Now the radio music was slightly louder. And a yellow light leaked out from beneath a door near the head of the stairs. I blew out my lighter and put it in my pocket.

Darkness rushed over me. Walls and ceiling came closer and still closer until the air seemed to be squeezed out of the space in which I stood listening for something that wasn’t there. And with the darkness came fear—the fear that had never been far away since I had first heard the music of a radio playing in a lighted room in an empty house.

I wasn’t afraid of the unknown; bogymen are for children. What I was afraid of was something that had become too well known since I had gone to keep a date with a guy called Costigan. It had caught up with Harry Valloni … and Zellig…. And it might be waiting for me in the room where there was no sound but the toned-down music….

That was when the music stopped. It had reached the end and it stopped. Just like that. While I froze outside the door, there was a muffled click, followed by a sharper one a second later. And, after that—nothing.

The crack of light went on shining beneath the door. The darkness was thick enough to possess a weight of its own. The house sat back and waited for me to make the next move. And I didn’t realise what any fool would’ve realised.

It took quite a time before I had crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s. When I did, I took a deep breath and opened the door and walked right in.

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