Just hands coming out of the air and grabbing at my neck.
Powerful hands that closed around my windpipe, squeezing breath out of me, squeezing life out of me.
I fought desperately, but it was a short fight, I know; I was overpowered at the beginning.
The bottom fell out of the world and I went whirling down into the black dark.
6
IT WAS AN AWFULLY long, dark way to climb up again.
I knew I had to climb, though, because there was such a loud, imperative calling for me at the top.
I climbed and climbed, fell back into the dark, climbed again. Even when I was up over the brink, I could just lie still for a while, staring at night over me.
Then I came to with a jump.
I was lying in a heap on the kitchen floor, as if I’d been thrown there. The door to the back porch was closed now; I could see it in the light that came through from my living room.
On the doors in my living room a fist was pounding. There was a voice, too.
“Mrs. Dacres! Mrs. Dacres!” it yelled. “Gwynne, what’s the matter? Gwynne!”
I picked myself up from the floor. The floor wavered when I stepped on it; the ceiling tipped drunkenly. But my feet moved me falteringly toward the other room and the noise.
“Who is it?” I croaked. My throat felt frightfully sore; I could hardly push words up through it.
“By God! What’ve you been doing? It’s me, Hodge Kistler. Let us in!”
I pulled the chairs out from under the knobs and unlocked the doors. They almost hit me in the face, opening; Mr. Kistler was pushing them so hard from the other side. When the doors were open he stood glaring at me; behind him I could see Miss Sands, Mr. Buffingham, Mr. Grant, Mr. and Mrs. Waller, all peculiarly dressed in rumpled pajamas and robes.
“I . . . I . . .” I said.
I threw my arms around Mr. Kistler’s neck and began weeping on his chest. He picked me up and sat down in the big chair with me on his lap; I pushed my face into his neck and kept on crying. It was confusing; people kept patting me here and there and saying: “What happened? What is it?”
And there was a murmurous buzz.
Mr. Kistler said, “Cut it out, drizzle-puss, and tell us what happened.”
I pulled my face out of his neck to wipe it on the handkerchief he was kindly holding in front of me. Crying had softened my throat.
“A man choked me.”
“Go on, you’re foolin’.”
“No, I’m not. My neck’s still sore.”
People crowded around to look at my neck.
“My God, look at the bruises!” Mr. Kistler said. “She did get choked! Who did you have in here?”
Miss Sands and Mrs. Waller screamed; everyone but Mr. Kistler stood off a little to stare at me and the room.
“It wasn’t anyone I knew. I heard a noise in back—near the basement window I thought it was—so I went back to look—”
Mr. Kistler stood up, dumping me unceremoniously on my feet.
“You heard a noise so you went back to look.”
“Yes.”
“Why, you little rattlebrained piece of goof! Opened the door, I suppose, just waiting for whoever it was to get his hands on your neck!”
“No, I didn’t. I leaned over the railing and looked. But I guess he must have been on the other side.”
“Oh, you guess he must have been on the other side.” This time his eyebrows did hit his nose. He pushed me into the chair with one hand and then opened his arms wide to the others.
“No brain,” he said.
“It was someone—”
I looked at the people in my rooms then. Every person who lived in the house, except the Tewmans and Mrs. Garr. Mr. Grant little and shivering in a blue bathrobe. Mr. Waller, burly and pompous even in red-stripe pajamas. Miss Sands, eager and nervous in aluminum curlers and a Japanese kimono. Mr. Buffingham, in rumpled white pajamas, with his eyes quick and dark flickering over both the room and me. Mrs. Waller, hovering near the door as if she thought what was going on was not quite decent, perhaps, and she ought to leave.
What I had started to say was that I thought the choker was someone from the house.
Because now, I thought the stealthy steps I had heard coming from the second floor were real.
I decided not to say it right then.
“I think I’ll call the police,” I said.
Mr. Kistler was the only one who answered.
“Okay, baby; it’s your party,” he said slowly. “First, though, I’ll take a look around the back of the house myself.”
The three other men went out with him. They all came back very quickly.
“Couldn’t see a thing,” they reported.
“All there is out there is a door, an empty porch, two railings, cement, and untouched windows.” Mr. Kistler amplified it. “I’ll call the police for you. A lot of good they’re going to do.”
The others stood hesitantly around the room while he phoned.
“You can just as well stay here,” he told them when he came back. “You’d get called down again anyway.”
The four men again wandered out to the back porch while we waited. Mr. Grant returned first; he sat down in a chair to look vacantly about the room; he wore thick-lens glasses and bent his head to look over the tops of them with his round, popping little blue eyes. Miss Sands asked me breathless questions: what did the man look like, and wasn’t you terribly scared, dearie?
The police came quickly.
Two of them. They were both very young policemen, so young they bristled with importance and assumed boredom. One of them knew Mr. Kistler.
“Hi, Hodge,” he said.
“Hi, Jerry! So you got put on. That’s swell!”
“Yeah, thanks. What’s the trouble here?”
“This young lady got choked by a strange man.”
“You shouldn’t let strange men in, lady.”
“I didn’t.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but I braced myself and let
