Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

He was drawing his hand across his eyes like a man dazed from a blow. The light had gone in the winking of an eye. It was pitch black. He was still involuntarily staring, through darkness now, toward the front end of the room. The light had not come from that direction, it had come through a portièred archway in quite the opposite direction, but for the moment his mind was chaotic, out of control. The room was a drawing-room, a large, stately sort of a drawing-room, and there had been a huge pier glass, gilt-framed, between the heavily curtained front windows. What he had seen could not have been a fantasy, nor due to disordered imagination. His eyes, the instant he had entered the room, had gone straight to that glass because it reflected the light from the other room. The surface of the glass had been blank as his eyes had first fallen upon it, and then, like a flash, enduring for but the minutest fraction of a second, the reflection of a figure, a man’s figure, a man’s figure with a crutch, had swept across it—and the light in the other room had gone out.

And now Billy Kane acted quickly. The time that he had stood there, inert, mentally stunned, had been but a matter of seconds exaggerated into seemingly interminable, measureless hours. Swiftly, silently, he reached the archway, and, sheltering himself behind the folds of the portières, but in a position to command the other room with his automatic, which he had whipped from his pocket, he stood still and listened. There was only the quick, fierce pounding in his own eardrums, in tempo with the mad race of blood through his veins. The Man with the Crutch!

How or why the man came to be here, or what the other had to do with what was afoot to-night, scarcely entered his mind. It did not matter! Nothing mattered—save to get the Man with the Crutch. Everything else paled into insignificance. It was the same man that had murdered Peters; there would not be two men with crutches who prowled stealthily at night in other people’s houses! But that it was Peters’ murderer was significant now only because it identified the man as one who held the secret of David Ellsworth’s murder; the man who, if he, Billy Kane, could but get to grips with him, would tell what he knew to the last word, or one or the other of them would never leave this house alive. It was the man who could end this hideous masquerade that he, Billy Kane, was forced to assume; the man who could clear his name of the foul blot that had cost him friends, the companionship of honest men, and that was like at any instant to cost him his life.

There was no sound.

And then Billy Kane’s voice rang suddenly, imperatively through the silence:

“Hands up!”

His flashlight bored through the darkness, circling the room in front of him. The room—it was the library beyond doubt—was empty. His jaws locked. He had taken a chance. It had failed. But now his glance fell upon the door, diagonally across the library from him, that, from its position, obviously opened on the hall. He could have sworn that the doors opening on the hall were all closed when he had entered the house. This one was ajar now!

He crossed the library with a bound, swung the door wide, and peered out into the hall. He could see nothing; but now, from somewhere below, he caught a sound as of a boot heel thudding on a bare floor—or, perhaps, the tap of a crutch!

Along at the rear of the hall his flashlight focused on the head of a basement stairway. He ran for this now; and then, with more caution, wary of offering himself as a target for a shot that would put an end to any hope of getting within reach of the other, his flashlight out, he began to pick his way downstairs. Halfway down, he caught another sound. From the front of the house, softly and cautiously though it was done, there came the unmistakable opening and closing of the basement door.

Billy Kane took the remaining stairs in a leap, and, his flashlight pointing the way, dashed along the hallway below. He reached the door, and pulled at it. Then, with an angry, muttered exclamation, he stood there for an instant hesitant. The man had managed to lock the door behind him! Mechanically his hand went toward his pocket for his skeleton keys, but stopped halfway as, turning suddenly, he raced back upstairs. It would take too long to try out key after key. There was a better way. There was the front door. He had left that unlocked when he came in. He gained this now, jerked it open, lunged through the little vestibule, snatched at the knob of the outer door—and wrenched at it viciously like a madman in mingled rage and chagrin. It was locked! It had not been locked even when he had come in!