Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

It was coming now, as Billy Kane had known inevitably that it would come. There was no answer needed from either Clarkie Munn or Gypsy Joe. It was written in the ugly menace in their faces, and had been from the moment they had recovered their startled surprise at his entry into the place.

Billy Kane flung a quick glance around him. The girl was a little behind him, close to those electric-light switches, her way clear to the front door, save for the peril of that lighted passage down which she must run. In front of him, just out of arm’s reach, the Cherub’s bland eyes smiled into his with a sort of hideous serenity; while over the Cherub’s shoulders, one on each side, showed the vicious faces of the other two—and, under cover of the Cherub’s body, Clarkie Munn’s hand seemed to be stealing in the direction of his hip pocket.

Billy Kane seemed suddenly to go to pieces and to lose his nerve. His tongue circled his lips with nervous repetition. He put out his hands in an imploring attitude, and stumbled a step forward toward the Cherub, and caught a glint of light on a revolver barrel in Clarkie Munn’s hand, as it came stealing now from the latter’s pocket.

“Wait—wait a minute, Cherub!” Billy Kane whispered thickly, and licked at his lips again, and stumbled forward another step. “Wait!” he whispered—and then, swift as the winking of an eye, Billy Kane flung his body forward with all his weight upon the Cherub, hurling the Cherub back upon Clarkie Munn, and whirling, whipped a lightning left full into Gypsy Joe’s face on the other side. There was a flash, the deafening roar of a report, as the Cherub reeled into Clarkie Munn’s revolver; then a scream of agony, and the Cherub, grasping at his leg with both hands, went to the floor.

“The switches there—beside you!” Billy Kane shouted at the girl. “Put out the lights—both switches! Quick! Run for it!”

Gypsy Joe, recovering his balance, and with a bellow like a maddened bull was charging forward; Clarkie Munn’s hand had swung upward again—and then the place was in darkness. A second late, Clarkie Munn’s revolver cut a vicious flame-tongue through the black, but Billy Kane had flattened himself out on the floor, and was wriggling rapidly backward toward the door and the now dark passageway.

There was a moan, then a shrill scream in the Cherub’s voice, and coincidentally a torrent of blasphemy from Gypsy Joe, as the latter, quite obviously, in his rush and in the blackness now, had stumbled none too gently into the wounded man.

“Youse fool! Curse youse, youse fool!” shrieked the Cherub. “Ain’t youse got a pocket torch? Ain’t either of youse got a torch? Flash a torch on him, an’——”

Billy Kane was across the threshold now; and now, rising to his knees, he groped out for the edge of the door, found it, and, as he slammed it shut, it seemed to cut in two, as a knife might cut it, the sudden, white, piercing ray of a flashlight that leaped out from the interior of the warehouse. And then in another second he had shot the bolt home in its grooves, and, in the darkness, leaning heavily for an instant against the door to recover himself, he stared down the black passage for the girl, and could see nothing.

There came an abortive rush against the door; snarls and oaths came muffled from within. He moved a step forward along the passage. They were a negligible quantity in there now. The door would hold, and when they succeeded in getting out and making their way along the side of the dock perhaps, they would be more concerned in getting to cover themselves than anything else; and besides they would have a wounded man to hamper their movements. It was she now, the Woman in Black, that concerned him.