Bertha stepped inside the house, sending the beam of her flashlight around the room. She called once, “This is Mrs. Cool. Isn’t anybody home?”
She sensed motion somewhere in the darkness. A huge, formless shadow appeared on the ceiling, slid silently across it and vanished. Bertha jumped back. Something fluttered close to her face; then, without sound, an object settled against her neck.
Bertha flung up her arm, kicked out viciously. In a rage that was born of terror, she screamed a lusty oath.
Abruptly, the thing left her. For a moment it was caught in the unreal light in her flashlight — a bat with outstretched wings, a bat which sent its shadow projected against the far wall, making the animal seem monstrously big, bizarre, and wicked.
“Pickle me for a herring!” Bertha exclaimed, and then struck viciously at the bat, which eluded her effortlessly and glided out into the darkness.
It was a full ten seconds before Bertha could get her pulse under control and start examining the front room of the house.
Satisfied that the room was empty, she turned back toward the porch, guided by the unreal faint illumination which sprayed out from her pocket flashlight.
It was then she noticed for the first time a jet-black streak running across the floor. At first glance she thought this was merely a stain on the carpet. Then, with another pounding of her heart, she realized that it was some sort of liquid — a little pool of the liquid, then a smear, a zigzag path, another pool, a smear, a zigzag path. It was just as the nature of this sinister track dawned upon her that Bertha Cool discovered the body.
It was sprawled face down over near a window on the far side of the room. Apparently, the man had been shot while standing near the door, and had crawled a few inches at a time, and with frequent stops trying to gather the strength which was oozing out of him even as he waited — until finally, a pause to gather strength just under the window had been long enough to let that last pool of red mark the end of the struggle with a grim period — a period which showed black as ink in the violet light thrown by Bertha Cool’s spotlight.
Abruptly, the possible significance of the open door and of the silent house dawned on Bertha Cool. She recognized the distinct possibility that a murderer was concealed in one of the other rooms, hoping to avoid detection, but ready to shoot his way out should he be discovered. The place was wrapped in Stygian darkness interspersed only by such eerie illumination as came from the flashlight Bertha Cool held in her hand. And this flashlight, designed to be used during a complete blackout, cast no well-defined beam which furnished a sharp illumination. Rather, it dissolved an indeterminate area of dense darkness into a half-darkness, showing objects with sufficient clarity to enable one to avoid stumbling over them. But there was no assurance that it penetrated the shadows in which a murderer might be lurking.