Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

He stumbled toward the table, and, feeling with his hand, secured the paper—but there was no chair here now, and he stumbled across the room, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He lighted another match, held it close to the paper, and read the pencilled lines.

So you are back, are you?

Well, so am I! Remember!

The match burned down to his fingers, and he dropped it on the floor. What did it mean? Who was she? He shook his head. And then, with a queer, twisted smile, he folded the paper, thrust it into his pocket—and, stretching himself out fully dressed upon the bed, lay there staring into the darkness.

[VII—WHISPERING SHADOWS]

It was the next evening—in the Rat’s den. Through half closed eyes, as he lay stretched out on the bed, Billy Kane watched Whitie Jack across the room. The man was tilted back in his chair, his legs were sprawled across the table, and from his cigarette, which dangled from one corner of his lower lip, a thread of blue smoke spiraled lazily upward. Whitie Jack was not smoking; the cigarette simply hung forgotten on the man’s lip. For the moment Whitie Jack with bated interest was poring over the evening paper.

And then Whitie Jack looked up suddenly, and spoke—out of the unoccupied corner of his mouth.

“Say, dat secretary guy dat croaked de old geezer last night was a sweet, downy bird—nit! But believe me, he made some haul—some haul!”

Billy Kane made no reply. Whitie Jack resumed his absorbing perusal of the newspaper. Billy Kane’s eyes closed completely—but not in sleep. It had been a day that, viewed in retrospect, made the brain whirl. It had been a wild untrammelled phantasmagoria. That was it—phantasmagoria. There was no other word. The day was expressed in shadows, moving shadows, shadows that came and went, many of them, shadows that were paradoxically real and concrete, and shadows that were the reflection of things felt and sensed, but unseen. And these latter, the shadows of the mind, were weird, uncanny things like denizens out of some black world apart—ghoulish things. And the shadows that were real and concrete, that spoke and whispered, seemed to take it for granted that he was and always had been in their evil confidence, and so their words were not rounded out, and there was only the hint of dark and hideous things in which he was supposed to have his part. It had been a day of mutterings, of whisperings, of skulking things that had fled the sunlight. The brain and mind was in riot from it. It was evening now; it had been the strangest day through which any man had ever lived.

He had held court that morning and through the day, here in the Rat’s lair—a sort of grim, unholy court to which grim, unholy courtiers had flocked to pay him homage. And these courtiers had been admitted to the presence one by one, their names announced by Whitie Jack, who had acted—quite innocently, quite free from any thought of connivance—as the master of ceremonies. Billy Kane’s lips twisted in a mirthless smile. It had been very simple, that part of it; much more simple than he had dared to hope it would be. Bundy Morgan, alias the Rat, was supposed to know all those who composed the élite of the underworld intimately and well—but Billy Kane upon whom fate had thrust for the moment the personality and entity of Bundy Morgan, alias the Rat, knew none of them. And yet it had been simple—so simple that, against the peril, the certain death that would follow fast on the heels of even a misplaced word or an unguarded look, it had been even grotesquely absurd in its simplicity. Through the dens and dives of the Bad Lands, spread by Whitie Jack when he had gone away the night before, the whisper had passed that the Rat had returned; and so, throughout the day, stealthy footsteps had descended from the street to the basement door here, and in response to the knock Whitie Jack had opened the door a cautious inch, peering out; and then he, Billy Kane, from the bed, his voice querulous for the occasion, had demanded who it was, and Whitie Jack had answered—and the unsuspected introduction thus performed, he had bidden Whitie Jack admit the visitor.

There had been many like that—very many. And he had learned many things. His hands clenched suddenly at his sides. The rôle he played promised well! Innuendoes, words toying with the fringe of things, had made it only too glaringly clear that the Rat was enmeshed in devilishness that ran the gamut of every crime in the decalogue. And for the moment he was the Rat! There was some hell’s syndicate, whose scope and power he could only dimly plumb though he was satisfied that its branches were rooted in every nook and corner of the underworld. And of this syndicate he was now, by proxy, a member; and he was not only a member, but he was one of those magnates of crime who composed its inner council, its unhallowed directorate.