Oh, how mistaken he was about that!
But I didn’t know that then. Not knowing, I enjoyed my hamburgers very much. That’s what we had for dinner. Reversal to type, Mr. Kistler said, after our fancy lunch.
Mr. Kistler took the inquest calmly, but I—there’s no second way of diagnosing my emotions—was furious.
“To think a man is capable of handling facts and ideas as beautifully as Lieutenant Strom did in his summing up of the case, and then this is the conclusion he draws! Of all the idiots!”
“Did the thought ever trickle into your sweet little head that Lieutenant Strom might be right? After all, he’s had experience with murders. You haven’t. All you have is a feeling for drama. You feel nothing but murder would fit the particularly nasty circumstances, and so you keep plugging for death by violence.”
“Strom can’t be right. I know he’s wrong.”
Mr. Kistler waved the hand holding the hamburger.
“Let’s hear you prove it. You wouldn’t want to send anyone to the electric chair on feelings, would you?”
I couldn’t prove it, of course.
“All right, that laughs you down. Now forget it. This is a holiday. Anytime I take you out is always a holiday. Let’s go to a movie and otherwise dissipate. Did you ever send any rum down your intellectual neck? I thought not. Tonight sees the beginning of a new life for you. Not too literally, I hope, of course.”
We had fun. I had my first rum sling and saw a movie through it, and we danced. All that hasn’t a lot to do with the death that lived and walked in Mrs. Garr’s house, so I’ll leave it with this honorable mention.
It was perhaps three o’clock when we went home, groping in the dark, quiet, unpoliced hall, pausing to say good night at my door. I unlocked my door, took a swift look to see that all was well—I did this every time, now, knowing how many skeleton keys might unlock my door when I was gone—and reported all okay before Hodge Kistler went upstairs.
I felt good; I was happy, the rum was still a sweet fire inside me. I got ready for bed happy, but not too happy not to hook my chairs under the knobs as usual. I felt awfully safe in the security of those chairs; I smiled back at the evening; I forgot Mrs. Garr entirely, and slept.
—
I HAVEN’T ANY IDEA how much later it was when I woke.
I woke thinking, How dark it is! and lay there, puzzling about the dark. Even if the moon doesn’t shine, the streetlamp on the corner always makes my room full of that yellow haze in which objects are perfectly visible.
There wasn’t any light there now. Only blackness.
I moved my face slowly, enough so I could see where the windows usually were. Blackness. But no. A thread-thin line of light.
My shades were down.
That was the last moment I breathed.
As surely as if I saw it then with my eyes, I saw myself letting those shades up that night, as usual.
There was sound and movement in the room now. Air, shaken, flowed over my stiffened face. Sound of movement—stealthy, purposeful, deadly. Death. The death that lived in Mrs. Garr’s house. Death walking slowly, quietly, surely in my room.
My body was iron, my throat was an empty tube; I opened my mouth to scream and no sound came out of me. An inch at a time I moved my stiffened, weak right arm toward the side of the bed.
The tips of my fingers touched cloth.
—
I DON’T HAVE TO guess what will go on in my mind when my life is over. I got ready to have it end then. Somewhere in the quiet inside me my lost voice said, “Oh, God, I prepare to die.”
The same instant a stunning blow came at me out of the darkness.
16
PEOPLE IN GOOD HEALTH sometimes take a ghoulish enjoyment out of talking about death. I’ve heard them, so that means I’ve listened.
But from now on, anyone is going to have a hard time to make me believe dying is pleasant. The place where you go when you die is black; it’s a pit, and there isn’t even quiet there, no rest, there’s terrible pain; you have to break before there’s rest, you have to break and stop being. There’s terrible pain cracking your weakness, tearing you apart, shredding you, pulling you out thinner and thinner like faint elastic, pulling you out, until the thread of your life is so tenuous it isn’t there at all; you’re gone; you aren’t anymore, here or in heaven or even in death’s black pit.
I was almost there.
I was so close that all I had to do was just that final letting go, and then I could have been quiet, because there was no more of me.
It was frightful, coming back. I had to call my substance back, re-create it out of the black pit, and I was so weak. I’d flag, and flow away from myself again, and start anew.
I came back, of course. You know, or I wouldn’t be writing this.
I came back into white light, white heat, white pain.
Compared to it, even the black was better. I wanted to slip back, but THEY wouldn’t let me. THEY kept doing things to me. Peculiar things; I couldn’t distinguish what. It wasn’t for a long while that THEY began to break down into people. A man in shirtsleeves, working so hard. Hodge Kistler. White face. Mr. Waller. Lieutenant Strom. Funny. Lieutenant Strom. Not another detective . . . until dust in your eye. I tried to
