Black Curtain by Cornell Woolrich Read Free Book Online Page A

him, hair awry, face still half awakened within the towering circle of her red-fox collar.
     
    Outside there was a sort of swelling quiet, like a balloon about to burst.
     
    "I don't think we can make it this--" he started to murmur.
     
    It went right through the two of them, as though a volley of blank cartridges had been fired off under their noses. It was something heavier, harder than fists. The door seemed to explode with impacts. It made the light bulbs jitter in the ceiling. It made a pottery thing on a table sing out with the vibration, carried to it along the floor and up the table legs. It was the earthquake of attempted forcible entry. It was violence in its most ravening form. It was the night gone hydrophobic at their threshold. It was disaster. It was the end.
     
    Too late now. She was going to be right in the middle of the whole thing, see things that those you love shouldn't be called upon to witness.
     
    She huddled against him, terrified. She gave a wordless heave, that was like a bronchial seizure. "Who--? Who's doing that?"
     
    "It's what I wanted to get you away from," he answered bitterly.
     
    Violence flamed in his own mind, catching fire from the violence outside the door. He caught up a wooden chair by one leg, poised it overhead at blow angle. His face was an unbaked cruller of rage. "Bring this to you, will they? Let 'em come--!"
     
    She caught at his arm, pulled it--and the chair--down again. "No Frank, no! Don't! For me, Frank!" And he saw, looking at her twisted, tearing face, that she was more frightened of his rage than she had been of theirs.
     
    That did something to him, snapped him out of it, the sight of that fright of hers. To get her to safety should be his only concern, the hell with everything else.
     
    He drew her back away from the door, arm protectively circled about her shoulder. Like a pair of blundering dancers in half embrace they went this way and that, looking for a way out that wasn't there. Taking three steps toward the hopelessly blocked front windows, then doubling back; three steps toward the bedroom window overlooking the rear court, then doubling back as the telltale grate of feet on the cement reached them, magnified by the sounding board of the enclosing walls.
     
    "There must be some way, there's got to be--!" His grimace was that of weeping for her, but he wasn't weeping.
     
    Three steps toward the kitchen--and then he went on, with only a momentary misstep, as it came to him at last. He threw open a high wooden oblong, like a cupboard cover, set in the wall. brought up the dumbwaiter. "Didn't you once say our building and the one next to it have a single basement between them? I may be able to get you up and out through the next house over."
     
    She started wringing her hands at him in encouraging, prayerful pantomime. It was like talking close to a thundering waterfall.
     
    He wrenched out the horizontal bisecting shelf; it was not fastened down, just wedged in over two supporting braces. "See if you can squeeze in. I'll hold the ropes so you don't shoot down too fast."
     
    She backed in, huddled there, head pressed upward against the low top. He gave the control rope a half turn around one hand to keep her weight from plunging it down too fast. She teetered there, ridiculous in her fur collar.
     
    "Frank, you're coming after me? You're not staying behind?"
     
    "Right away, the minute you get off. Wait down there for me." He was wondering if there'd be time for a second trip. The wood of the door was beginning to splinter, the nails holding the hinges to squawk out, back at the other end of the hall. They must be using hatchets to it.
     
    "Keep your head in, honey, so you don't hit it against the side of the shaft."
     
    The pulleys started to whir, the rope to needle through his restraining hands as he paid it out. Her face went down out of sight, in a sort of hideous parody of entombment alive. The distance was mercifully short. It struck