Waltz into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich

Author:Cornell Woolrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

— 39 —

A SOUND at the door awoke Durand. It was a delicate sort of tapping, a coaxing pit-pat, as if with one fingernail.

As his eyes opened he found himself in a room he had difficulty recalling from the night before. The cooling silvery-green of low-burning night lights was no longer there. Ladders of fuming Gulf Coast sunlight came slanting through the slits of the blinds, and formed a pattern of stripes across the bed and across the floor. And above this, there was a reflected brightness, as if everything had been newly whitewashed; a gleaming transparency.

It was simply that it was day in a place that he had last seen when it was night.

He thought he was alone at first. He backed a hand to his drugged eyes, to keep out some of the overacute brilliancy. “Where am I?”

Then he saw her. Her cloverleaf mouth smiled back at him, indirectly, via the surface of the mirror she sat before. Her hand sought her bosom, and she let it linger there a moment, one finger pointing upward, one inward as if toward her heart. “With me,” she answered. “Where you belong.”

There was something fragilely charming, he thought, in the evanescent little gesture while it lasted. And he watched it wistfully and hated to see it end, the hand drop back as it had been. It had been so unstudied. With me; finger unconsciously to her heart.

The stuttering little tap came again. There was something coy about it that irritated him. He turned his head and frowned over that way. “Who’s that?” he asked sternly, but of her, not the door.

She shaped her mouth to a soundless symbol of laughter; then she stilled it further, though it hadn’t come at all, by spoking her fingers over it, fanwise. “A suitor, I’m afraid. The colonel. I know him by his tap.”

Durand, his face growing blacker by the minute, was at the bedside now, struggling into trousers with a sort of cavorting hop, to and fro.

The tapping had accosted them a third time.

He cut his thumb slashingly backhand toward the door, in pantomime to have her answer it temporizingly while he got ready.

“Yes?” she said sweetly.

“It’s Harry, my dear,” came through the door. “Good morning. Am I too early.”

“No, too late,” growled Durand surlily. “I’ll attend to ‘Harry, my dear’ in a moment!” he vowed to her in an undertone.

She was in stitches by now, head prone on the dressing table, hands clasped across the back of her neck, palpitating with smothered laughter.

“In a minute,” she said half-strangled.

“Don’t hurry yourself, my dear,” the cooing answer came back. “You know I’ll wait all morning for you, if necessary. To wait outside your door for you to come out is the pleasantest thing I know of. There is only one thing pleasanter, and that would be—”

The door sliced back and he found himself confronted by Durand, feet unshod, hair awry, and in nothing but trousers and undershirt.

To make it worse, his face had been bearing down close against the door, to make himself the better heard.

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