John D. MacDonald

Night Fright

She knew all the early-morning sounds of the city. The clink of bottles in the grayness, the rubbery snuffle of the patient horse that pulled the silent cart, the hoarse hooting of the early river tugs, and the first rustling of traffic that would deepen to a daylong roar. These were sounds she welcomed after the night silences, after the long, slow terror of the night, and when the hot summer days were well started, she could then fall asleep. It was not good sleep, though, and her weight was going down and her nerves shrilled and crawled along her body.

The summer had been planned for so long and so carefully, and now it was nightmare. The deposit on the cottage was lost, as were the days of mountain coolness and the frog sounds in the Adirondack night. She was a schoolteacher, and during other summers she had worked and she was tired, and this was to have been a summer of laziness, bought with the dollars that could have gone instead for clothes and books and plays and music.

She was a woman in her early thirties. Her bones were good, but she was too thin and she did not carry herself well. She saw herself clearly. In the beginning, she had been too young and too clever and too shy. It was a bad combination. Out of shyness and youth, she had learned to simulate a false arrogance. Cleverness gave her sharpness of tongue. And the combination had driven away those few men who had once been attracted by the curve of lip, the coltlike awkwardness. So arrogance had dried into austerity, and she knew that all the warm dreams had been false.

She had no knack of friendship. When she tried to be warm, it degenerated into nervous laughter and embarrassingly awkward gestures. But she was practical, and she saw herself clearly and saw that she could make a life out of the little satisfactions of books and music and drama and loneliness. Sometimes she was wryly amused at the tidiness of her apartment, at her cold domination of her students, at all the obsessive little routines of spinsterhood. She had contented herself with being Miss Renken of Room 612 and of Apartment 7B a mile from the school. Miss Renken, whose chill anger could awe and subdue the rebellious. And the rebellious never suspected that behind the mask of anger, there was another face, timid, shy, and sourly amused at the deception.

It started three days after school had closed. She had packed efficiently, consulted road maps, charted a course that would take her through points of historical interest, closed the apartment, and started north out of the city in her staid and aged coupe, fresh from its final checkup at the garage where she kept it. She wore a sensible traveling dress that would not wrinkle, and she held the wheel firmly.

She never got out of the city. She was seven blocks north of her apartment when she struck and killed the young woman. She saw the quick flash of the green sweater as the girl hurried out, screened until the last moment by parked cars. Miss Renken stepped hard on the brake pedal and saw for a moment the girl’s startled face turned toward her before it went down and out of sight beyond the hood, while a cheap purse was flung high and seemed to hang for too many long moments in the morning sunlight before it also fell out of sight in front of the stalled and motionless car. There were shouts and people running and horns blowing, while Miss Renken sat and still saw the afterimage of the young face, a startled and pretty face. The girl will now get up, she thought, and there will be a scene and confusion, and I should get witnesses at once, because it was certainly not my fault. I stopped the car within eight or ten feet, and no one could possibly have avoided her. But she knew her knees would not hold her up, so she sat there, still holding the wheel firmly.

The police arrived quickly, and they were efficient. They cleared a way for the ambulance, and took down names and addresses of witnesses, and spoke with firm courtesy to Miss Renken. She gave her name and address and said that she was on her way out of the city. She described how it happened, and they scribbled in notebooks, and she was asked to delay her trip until the investigation was complete and the girl’s condition was ascertained.

So Miss Renken drove back to the apartment and carried her bags upstairs. She wondered if the look of the girl’s face would ever fade completely from her mind. It seemed to remain there, like the bright spot that comes from looking at a naked bulb.

At noon she had to go out and get a light lunch, because she had emptied her small refrigerator and unplugged it the night before. She hurried back and waited. Had she known where they had taken the girl, she would have phoned the hospital.

The man came to the apartment at four o’clock. He looked big in every dimension, and he wore a wilted gray suit. He had tired, mild eyes, and he showed his credentials and introduced himself as Sergeant Moyer. He looked hot and tired, and she wished she could offer him iced tea, but, of course, there was no ice.

He thumbed at his notebook and said, “It looks like you’re all the way in the clear, Miss Renken. The cab behind you says you were doing maybe twenty. Your brakes are in good shape. You stopped within nine feet. Two witnesses saw her run out of a bar and across the sidewalk and right into traffic. The bartender said she and her boyfriend came in the first thing when he opened this morning and they were yammering at each other, and finally she slapped him and ran out, so it looks like she was too sore to look where she was going, besides having taken on three fast shots of liquor. The bartender said she was a little high when she came in. It all adds up to what should have been a simple knockdown, with her getting up and yelling your ears off, but her luck wasn’t so good.”

Miss Renken heard herself asking, “How is she?”

“It was a bad skull fracture. You see, she went down backward because she turned toward the car, and she couldn’t break the fall. She died about five minutes after they got her to the hospital. Doreen Brock, her name was, and she did waitress work and store clerking and things like that. She had been living with the fellow she was with for a couple of weeks, and he says he doesn’t think she had any folks, and I went all through her stuff and couldn’t find any addresses. Say, do you feel okay?”

Miss Renken took her hand from her eyes. “I’m all right.”

“It was one of those things. Don’t think about it too much. The inquest will be routine.” He stood up and said, “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Killing someone. It’s hard to... I saw her face, you know, when she turned toward the car just as I... hit her. She was pretty.”

“You got anybody who can stay with you tonight?”

“I’ll be all right.”

She went with him to the door. He looked around the room for a moment. “Teach school, you said?”

“The seventh grade.”

“A tough racket, I guess.”

“It isn’t bad.”

He coughed and looked uncertain for a moment. “Look, you want anything, you call me.”

After he left, she sat for a long time, knowing there were things she should do, yet feeling trapped in this stasis of inactivity. There were all sorts and degrees of rationalizations she could make to prove it had not been her fault. And there were also the long, cold, philosophic thoughts of death and the responsibility of taking life and the validity of life itself. Yet it all came down to a pretty and frightened face and the slow arc of the cheap purse, and the brittle impact of skull on blue-gray sunlit asphalt.

She plugged in the refrigerator, filled the cube trays, remade her bed, and hurried down to buy supplies. There was no one to say, “Oh, I thought you had gone, Miss Renken! What happened?” It gave her a curious feeling of invisibility, as though she had already gone to the mountains.

She came back with the brown sack of groceries, and put them away and went to the phone and sent a wire to the owner of the cottage, saying she would be delayed a few days.

The death was reported in four lines in the paper she usually read. She had stopped delivery and had to go to a newsstand the next morning to buy it. After she read the paper, she had a second cup of coffee. She felt displaced, and she did not know why. Finally, she realized that for fourteen years there had been a plan for each day, for nearly every hour of every day. Every Sunday had its ritualistic schedule. And now she was adrift. She tried reading, tried music, took a short walk. It made her think of the long, rainy Saturdays of her childhood. “What will I do, Mother?”

The inquest was on the third day. A droning affair, with voices like tired houseflies against dusty windows. A stilted, barely audible report by Moyer, another by a young medical examiner, some bored questions and her own soft-voiced answers, and an official verdict, so that now the pretty face was officially and legally at rest. When she looked for Moyer, he had left, and so she walked out of the dust and varnish smell while behind her the buzzing voices began on another case.

When she got back to the apartment, she knew she should plan to leave in the morning. But it seemed too vast an effort. Tomorrow she would pack again and leave on Saturday.

The shrill phone awakened her, and she clicked on her bed lamp and went to the phone, feeling puffed and blinded by sleep, her fingers clumsy on the phone. “Yes?”

There was no answer. There was no dial tone. There was a presence on the other end of the line, someone who had listened to her voice and now waited in silence. She listened hard, and she heard the soft, slow breathing.

“Hello! This is Miss Renken.” Some of the sleep was dispelled, and she said this in the tart classroom voice, with the acid of authority.

A breathing silence. Someone was there.

And then a husky, whispering voice said a single word. “Killer,” it said, and there was a muted click.

“Hello!” she said again, but she knew the person had hung up. She pressed the button on the top of the cradle, and the dial tone began. She hung up and sat in the darkness in her nightgown, knees pressed tight together. Light from her bedroom patterned the living-room floor. One drop of perspiration traced a slow, cold line from her armpit to her narrow waist.

“How ridiculous!” she said aloud, and her own voice startled her. She went back to bed. She lay in the darkness with her thin fists shut tightly, pressing against her thighs. She smiled into the darkness and thought: How ridiculously theatrical. For a long time she did not sleep.

When she awakened in the morning, she did not feel rested. She mixed the frozen orange juice, put the coffee on, plugged in the toaster, and then, out of habit, started toward the door to get the paper. A triangle of white showed under the door. She pulled it through and picked it up. It was cheap white typing paper. The single whispered word she had heard over the phone was lettered in pencil on the paper. In the morning sunlight, the midnight voice had seemed dreamlike. But the paper was real. And it changed the look of the apartment. Someone had been out there in the hall during the night. Someone had stood there with that same soft breathing and had slid the bit of paper under the door while she slept.

She did not move again until she heard the angry boiling of the abandoned coffee. I will not allow myself to be frightened by this nonsense, she told herself firmly. I am not one of those sniveling and helpless women. She made fresh coffee. She ate an extra slice of toast to prove to herself that she was in good health and unconcerned. She cleaned up and dressed for her trip and walked to the neighborhood garage and brought her car around and parked it in front. She packed, took a last look around, and told herself firmly that she had merely changed her mind in eagerness to get to the mountains sooner. It had nothing to do with not wanting to spend another night in the apartment. She carried her things down, stowed them in the car, got behind the wheel, put her map beside her. She turned the key and pressed the starter button. There was no response. She tried again and again and realized that she was breathing too quickly. She went back upstairs and phoned.

The man who came opened the hood and looked in. He whistled softly.

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Somebody fixed you good, lady. Kids, maybe. See here? They ripped the whole ignition system out of her.”

“Can you fix it quickly?”

“There’s a lot of work there, lady. I’ll call a tow truck. I’d figure you can pick it up Tuesday. No sooner.”

She watched when the tow truck hooked on and lifted the front wheels off the street. As it started away, she saw the word written with a finger in the dust of the car door. Killer. She looked up and down the street. It looked as it always did. She hurried upstairs and when she was inside, she chained the door. Her bags were in the middle of the living-room floor. She carried them into the bedroom and unpacked.

Friday night she got two calls. She did not sleep that night. She found another note in the morning. Always that one word. She slept that afternoon and woke up feeling stale and sick, her head aching in a dull way, her mouth furred. Saturday night she placed a straight chair close to the door. The chain was on. She would wait, and when he came with the note, she would open the door as far as the chain would allow and look at him and tell him to leave her alone.

There was a call at eleven, and another at three. It was a little after four when she heard the heavy, slow steps coming down the hall. They stopped in front of her door. She reached out to touch the knob and pulled her hand back. There was no sound. There was a faint light in the room, the night light of the city sky, hued by neon. She backed away from the door, moving with great stealth. She heard the whisper of the paper, saw the pale triangle. Long minutes passed. And then the footsteps moved away, with no pretense at stealthiness. A long time after she could no longer hear the footsteps, she took the paper and took it to the window and read it in the pale light. You killed her. Three words this time.

It was true, of course. She saw clearly how she could have swerved the car, using brakes and horn simultaneously. She saw how the startled girl would have jumped back, made angry by fear, yelling something as the car passed her. I killed her. It was unnecessary.

When Tuesday came, she did not get the car. Her fear had become obsessive, and she knew that, and yet it seemed in some strange way to be necessary, this night ritual of fear and approach, and the silences on the phone and the silence beyond the door. Some nights he did not come, did not phone. And those were the worst nights of all. She slept poorly by day. When she had to leave the apartment for food, she walked in a wild, quick way and sensed that people had begun to look at her and that clerks had begun to treat her strangely. She avoided looking at her gaunted face in the single mirror in the apartment over the bathroom sink. When she ran her fingers through her hair, it felt matted and coarse, and she remembered she had forgotten to brush it.

When she hurried along the street, she would look at men and wonder whether she looked at any time into the eyes of the one who was doing this. He was right. She had killed the girl. The wire from the owner of the cottage went unanswered. The letter from him told her the deposit was forfeited. It seemed a faraway and unimportant thing. The city grew hotter in July. There was dust on the record albums, on the books, on the dials of the FM radio, and the dishes were crusted in the sink. She felt that her soul and her body had soured with the clear knowledge of her guilt.

For two nights he did not come. He had never stayed away so long before. She felt abandoned in her fear. The next night he did not phone. And it was nearly dawn when he came. She stood flattened against the varnished panel of the door, pressing against it, knowing he stood out there, as silent as she. The bit of paper whispered its way under the door. They stood inches apart in the four-o’clock city, and at last he went away. The moment she could no longer hear his footsteps, she snatched the paper and hurried to the window. In the faint light she read the single word — Jump.

It was a grotesque word, and it made no sense to her. Bump, gump, jump. It was a lover’s code and the encastled maiden could not interpret it. And she looked down at the street below, at the beetle gleam of a car roof that went by forty feet below her, and she knew what the strange word meant and knew, at last, how perfectly logical it was. It had the perfection of a chord of music, of a line from a great poem.

When the sun came up, she began to clean the apartment. She scrubbed and washed and waxed and dusted with frenzied effort, and it was early afternoon before she was at last satisfied that she had brought it back to the gleaming brightness of over a month ago. She took a long hot tub, and scrubbed herself pink, and washed her hair and set it. She put on careful make-up and her prettiest dress and a few discreet touches of the perfume she had gotten one time from a class at Christmas. This, too, was a trip, and demanded careful preparation.

When her hair was completely dry and it was five o’clock in the heat of a late afternoon in that month of July, she opened the window wider and carefully dusted the sill again so as not to soil her dress. She put one thin leg over the sill and sat there for a moment, her eyes closed. She wanted to go out with her eyes closed during the fall to the stone floor of the city. She opened her eyes and looked down.

She was a woman in her early thirties, and her bones were good, but she was too thin, and she had always seen herself clearly. In this moment she saw herself clearly. She saw all of the deadly charade, and it was like awakening from a nightmare. It was a moment of clarity, as though cold water were dashed in the face of someone in hysteria. She felt faint, and she scrambled awkwardly back into the room, knowing in panic that this time of clarity might not last long enough for her to do what could save her, knowing that it was only a tiny time of freedom from the ritual of fear and atonement.

Moyer was in, and she said panting, dissonant words to him, and he at last understood who it was and remembered her and said he would be over at once. She went to the window and banged it down. She bit the inside of her lip until blood came. She was walking slowly toward the window again when he knocked on the door. She stood very still. He knocked again. She turned toward the door. She opened it and saw his face as she tipped forward wildly and awkwardly into an echo chamber of darkness.

Awakening was long and slow. The senses reached out and interpreted. The thin, sour spice of hospital air. A soft bell that called a doctor’s code. Chrome and canvas of the screens around the bed. Oblique light of the bedside lamp. Her own thin hand and a call button pinned to the sheet near it. She turned her enormously heavy head and saw Moyer sitting beside the bed with wise, heavy, expressionless face, sitting with endless, silent patience.

“How do you feel?” he asked softly.

“I’m very tired.”

“They said I could wait. They said it was malnutrition and acute anxiety. Glucose for the malnutrition and a sedative for the anxiety. That’s all, so don’t worry, and the screens are here so we can talk. Do you feel like it? If you’re too tired, just say so, and it can be another time, but I thought I would like to know. This is on my own time. Not official. I was going to stop in and see how you were getting along, because I knew that business about the girl hit you hard, but I never did stop in. I told myself you’d gone on your vacation.”

“I’m not too tired.”

“I found a couple of notes there. You better tell me about it.”

She told him about it. How it started, and about the car, and about the last note, not sparing herself in his eyes. He listened very gravely.

“So you got to where you thought it was your fault.”

“Yes.”

“But you know it wasn’t.”

“I know. I think my mind was...”

“Don’t say that!” he said, his voice changing from the dead level tone of the other things he had said. “You starve yourself, and it does funny things to the way you think. And a woman like you... I mean alone and thinking too much and killing that girl, you don’t want to start talking about your mind.”

“But I was going to...”

“And you didn’t. That is the thing to remember. That you didn’t. My Lord. I know about fear, and I know about being alone. I wondered about you, and I should have stopped in. I’ll pick him up.”

She frowned, not quite understanding. “Him?”

“Isn’t it obvious? She didn’t have anybody else. Just that one she was living with. He fights with her, and she charges out into traffic and gets killed, so he killed her. I mean that was the answer, but he didn’t want to face that. Maybe he loved her. Maybe sometimes the things that look cheap are not cheap at all. He couldn’t face blaming himself, so it had to be you, and so he made himself believe you were at fault, and the police had let you go and it was up to him to take it into his own hands. Play God and keep after you, because nobody could get away with killing his girl. He was at the inquest. Maybe he followed you back to your place. He could watch you when you had to leave your apartment, and he could tell how it was wearing you down and tell by your voice when you answered the phone. Don’t talk to me about your mind. It’s his mind we should talk about. I’ll pick him up. You should sleep now. Can you?”

“Oh, yes!”

“The intern says three days will be enough. I’ll take you back to your place. My sister will stay with you there a couple of days. As long as you want her. She’s a practical nurse.”

“Why are you... doing all this?”

He stood up and frowned down at her. “Have a good sleep, Miss Renken.”

When they released her, she leaned heavily on his arm on the way out to his car. His strength felt safe and good to her. His sister was in the car. Her name was Ruth, and she had quiet eyes like his, and they drove back to the apartment. They ate together there in the apartment, and Ellen Renken learned the shy use of his first name, David, and heard the strange, good sound of Ellen on his lips.

While they were having coffee, David handed her the picture. She looked at the young face incredulously, at the weak, slightly vicious mouth. “This is... the one?”

“That’s the one, Ellen.”

“But I imagined he would be... very different.” She felt strange. The picture had done what the reassurance of David’s presence could not do. The apartment no longer looked alien and fearful to her, and she suddenly no longer dreaded the time when she would be alone in the apartment. This young boy was no one to fear.

Ruth said, “I better get these dishes done.”

“I’ll help.”

“Tomorrow maybe I’ll let you start to help, Ellen.”

David Moyer said he had to report for duty. Ellen Renken went to the door with him. Ruth was rattling dishes briskly and humming to herself in the kitchen. David Moyer stood by the open door. Ellen looked at him, and she did not feel strained and shrill and awkward with this man. She felt no need to call upon a false arrogance with this man. He took her wrist, and he was the awkward one. She sensed the shyness in him, and the uncertainty. She moved into his arms with a quick grace that was new to her, lifting her mouth to his. She felt as if her blood moved warmer and faster, breaking a thousand brittle little dams, swirling away the crisp bits of those dams. His arms were warm and steady and safe. He looked at her for a moment, and she sensed that he had no words, not yet. He left. She went in and closed the door and leaned against it a moment. Her body felt alive, and she felt for the first time in her life that at this moment she must look beautiful, because he had told her in a wordless way that she was, and she felt that way at this moment.

Ruth came to the kitchen doorway with a dish towel in her hand. She looked at Ellen for several moments and then smiled in a quick, satisfied, conspiratorial way and went back into the kitchen, humming a bit louder than before.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Night Fright