SETTLEMENT OUT OF COURT
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1963.
Francis Etheridge was sitting on the floor of a small closet at the foot of the stairs that ascended from the front hall into the shadows of the second floor of the rented house in which he lived with his mother and father. Francis had always lived with his mother and father in rented houses. The house was always old and shabby, furnished with odds and ends that always gave the impression of being strangers to each other, and it was always just a temporary expedient, something to afford shelter until Mr. Etheridge could find something suitable to buy. The funny thing about these houses, as Francis knew them, was that they were all alike. Although they were in different locations and varied somewhat in age and the number of rooms and stories they had, they possessed, nevertheless, a kind of strange and pervasive common denominator that made all these variations unimportant, so that Francis, thinking back, could not remember a single significant difference.
Francis had not been happy in these houses, and that was why, when you came right down to it, he was sitting now on the floor of the small closet in this one. He had learned that any house, no matter how shabby and depressing in general, always had a particular place, a corner or a closet or an attic or someplace where one could withdraw in secret to security and peace. You could sit there, as Francis was now sitting, and do nothing whatever except listen to the silence that formed a soft protective perimeter around a golden core of fantasy. If someone came near, you remained silent. If someone called, you did not answer.
It was dark in the closet. The only light was a dull diagonal swath that fell across the floor from the narrow crack Francis had left in the door. He liked darkness, which was comforting, but he did not like total darkness, which was terrifying. From where he sat, he could look through the crack and up the narrow, steep stairs to the landing above. The upper hall was full of shadows, but an odd layer of light, about eighteen inches thick, lay along the floor like a blanket of fog just at the head of the stairs. Francis was watching this layer of light, because it was odd and interesting and something to watch, and that was how he happened to see the legs move suddenly into the light and stop. The dim scene took on instantly a quality of eerie farce, as if it had been arranged by an intelligence with a sense of insane humor, for the legs appeared to be detached at the knees, the body above them obscured by shadows.
The legs were thin and ugly, a woman’s legs, and they seemed for that reason, their ugliness, to heighten the farcical quality of the scene. Francis felt compelled to laugh, and he covered his mouth with a hand to smother any inadvertent sound, but he did not laugh after all, for there was suddenly a subtle change, an added ingredient of irrational terror. Behind, and a little to one side of the first pair of legs, there was all at once a second pair, simply not there one instant and soundlessly there the next; and it was perfectly clear to Francis, with all the surety of revelation, that the first legs were not aware of the second, and were not meant to be aware.
All was static in utter silence, the four detached legs in a layer of light and Francis watching from the dark closet below, and then the first legs spoke in a high, querulous voice.
“Francis!” the legs said. “Where are you, Francis?”
Francis did not answer. He never answered unless there was a practical certainty that he would be discovered anyhow. The legs, which had remained static, became silent again for an interval of several seconds before speaking again in the same high querulous voice. They did not speak, this time, to Francis, or to anyone else, unless it could be considered that they spoke to themselves.
“Where is the boy?” the legs said. “Why is he never around when I need him? Now I suppose I must go down myself for the aspirin.”
The first legs were his mother, of course, and the second legs were his father. His mother was always taking aspirin, and it seemed that she was always leaving them in a place where she surely wouldn’t be when she needed them next. She was thin and sickly and afflicted with migraine headaches.
His mother’s legs did not begin immediately to descend the stairs. They did not move, the legs of Mr. Etheridge did not move, everything was still and fixed in absolute absence of sound and motion. Then, with startling and almost comic abruptness, like an explosion, the legs of Francis’ mother seemed to fly straight upward into shadows, and an instant later her entire body came flying down across the narrow range of Francis’ vision. It looked for all the world as if she had deliberately dived head foremost down the stairs, and all this odd and comic action was punctuated by a sodden sound that was like the sound made in the imagination by a big, splashy period in an exclamation point.
Francis, who had stopped breathing, took a deep breath and released it slowly with the softest sigh. He continued to sit motionless, Indian fashion, his eyes fixed in the path of his narrow vision. The legs of his father began to descend, steps on the treads exactly cadenced, as if measured slowly by count, the body of his father emerging step by step from the shadows, until it was precisely in view, bounded by door and jamb. His father’s face was like a stone. In his hand, hanging at his side, was a short,
