Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

She leaned against the table.

“I prefer to stand.” There was a challenge in her tones. “What I have to say will not take long.”

Billy Kane waited. The initiative was with her. He meant it to remain so. Her small white hand, ungloved, clenched suddenly at her side until its knuckles stood out like little chalky knobs.

“You look sleeker about the face, clearer about the eyes—you beast!” There was a studied deliberation in her voice that gave the words the sting of a curling whip lash. “Perhaps you’ve been——”

“You were listening there at the door?” suggested Billy Kane imperturbably, as he reached into his pocket for a cigarette.

There was a mocking little lift to her shoulders.

“Of course! That is what I came for. I followed Red Vallon here. I supposed that you would meet at the old place, now that you are back; but since you are an invalid——” Again the shoulders lifted.

“I am afraid it hardly paid you for the trouble—to listen,” Billy Kane murmured caustically. “I’m sorry! I rather fancied I saw the door move, and you see, my illness has affected my voice, and at times I can scarcely speak above a whisper, otherwise you might have overheard——”

“I overheard enough!” She took a sudden step toward him. Her eyes were flashing now; there was a flush, angry red, mounting from the white throat, suffusing her cheeks. She raised her clenched hands. “You will die with insolence and bravado on your lips, I believe!” she cried out passionately. “How I hate you! But I’ve got you—like that”—she flung out an arm toward him, and the small clenched hand opened and then closed again, slowly, as though in its grip it were remorselessly crushing and exterminating some abhorrent thing. And then her hand was raised again, and was brushed across her eyes, and a little quiver ran through her form, and she spoke more calmly. “I overheard enough. I thought this Merxler affair would be worked to-night, and I came to tell you that you are to stop it. I came to tell you to—remember! I promise, before God, that if there is murder done to-night you will be in the hands of the police within an hour. And it’s not very far from the Tombs to the death chair in Sing Sing—Bundy Morgan.”

Billy Kane’s eyes were hidden by drooped lids. His eyes were studying with curious abstraction the pattern of the faded, greasy, threadbare strip of carpet on the floor beside the bed. Murder! The word had come with a shock that for a moment unnerved him. He had not associated anything that Red Vallon or Karlin had said with murder. They had spoken so lightly, referred to it in so humdrum a way. Murder! There was something ghastly in that lightness now. A tightness came to his lips, a horror was creeping into his soul. He was only on the verge of things, of hidden and abominable things, here in this shadow land, this night land of skulking shapes, this sordid realm of the underworld. He pulled himself together. He was the Rat—he had a part to play. He was conscious that those brown, fearless eyes were fixed on him contemptuously.