Here was a closet without further portal and without window; its light came through the door by which I entered; and it was so dark that, when I was thrust in and the door slammed and bolted, I supposed myself alone.
I stood still, with my hand on the door panel, while the after-images of light faded from my retinas and became replaced by the blackness of pitch dark. I indulged myself—or attempted to—in some of that logic said by Jerry, a little time ago, to be the present prerogative of gervers, guns and gorillas, and in which I felt certain that pumpers of poison gas would not be found lacking.
The last step on their ladder of reason was not difficult for my mind to ascend. I had spoiled their great scheme at the Sencort Trust; therefore now I was to be punished. Perhaps, in contemplation of the certainty of this, I should have been satisfied; but I had to go about the gathering up of earlier starts and sequences.
I felt myself caught in a continuity, frequently suggested but not finally convincing, until suddenly that gat at my stomach summed up everything for me. “Here you are!” it spoke. “You’ve gone this way and that; but now you’ve come to it!”
I got to thinking what Jerry told me of “his friend”—Keeban, his strange, sinister twin—“sitting in with destiny” by knowing, in advance, what he was going to do to others. I’d thought of him sitting in with destiny on Dorothy Crewe and old Win Scofield and on Jerry himself; but I hadn’t thought of him sitting in with destiny on me. Stupid, now that I came to see it; for of course I was in his calculations all along; he’d used me, as long as I proved profitable and now that I’d failed him, he’d finish me.
For I knew than that Keeban had me. He had not shown himself in that circle of reception in the alley. No; every face there had been unknown to me, unless one was the dyke-keeper of Klangenberg’s delicatessen. They were normal-appearing, good-looking youths who made the majority in that circle.
I’d often noticed—haven’t you—how indistinguishable our felons are from the philanthropists of the day. Mix up the captions—as the best of newspapers sometimes do—accompanying the illustrated page pictures of the gentry who last night did “Fanny’s First Play” for the Presbyterian Home and the guests and ladies who last night failed to start their Fiat promptly after they had it all filled from the ring and wrist-watch trays in Caldon’s windows, and who could be sure which words went with which faces?
Admit the truth; you’d hire most murderers on sight. Others do; why not you? They look normal.
Nero was normal, H. G. Wells says; he had a little peculiarity, to be sure, but that was merely incidental to his position, not to his nature. He was so placed, you see, that the ideas, which remain mere passing black thoughts and impulses with the rest of us, could without any trouble or personal effort at all become actual deeds with him. That was the secret of Nero. Before a man condemns Nero as being of a separate species from himself, he should examine very carefully his own secret thoughts. This is Wells’s own advice and monition.
It occurred to me there in the dark in reference to the normals on the other side of the door. They looked all right; but they showed signs of an education decidedly deficient on inhibitions, and altogether too prodigal at translating dark thoughts and impulses into action.