Black Curtain Read Free Page B

Didn't burgeon into full flight, but started off at a brisk, unexpected walk.
     
    He didn't look back while he was still in the open, crossing over between pavements. He felt an awful compulsion, the instinct of all stalked things, but he kept himself from it. He gained the opposite curb, and the corner building line knifed across their mutual line of vision, severing it motuentarily.
     
    Instantly his brisk walk changed to a long, loping run, that ate up ground without being harried enough to arouse suspicion in the passers-by.
     
    The crosswise street wasn't long; in fact wasn't Long enough to gain him a proper head start. But ahead a clean-cut, oblong gap, like a trap in the ground, was his goal. He gained it. His heels ticked off the steel-rimmed steps, with a sound a little bit like dice being shaken. It -was- a chance; he had no choice but to take it.
     
    Then, halfway down the steps, he stopped and looked back the way he had come, eyes on a level with people's shoes. What he saw sent him hurtling the rest of the way down.
     
    The man was careening up the street after him full tilt. He meant business; he meant to hang onto Townsend at all costs.
     
    Townsend, station level gained, had a choice: of crossing below ground to the matching stairs on the opposite side and scampering up them to the street again--in which case the chase would simply be resumed on the opposite sidewalk--or of taking refuge out on the platform. A wait of even a single minute for a train would maroon him, leave him helpless.
     
    A surging roar, like a high wind caught in the tunnel, punctuated with a green eye and a red one, decided him. It might take more than a minute to clear the station again, but he might be able to lose himself in the crowd aboard. He dove for a turnstile just as the track orifice exploded into a razzle-dazzle of illuminated car windows, streaming the length of the platform apron.
     
    He blessed the meticulousness of habit that always made him have a nickel ready at hand, separate from the rest of his change in a pocket of its own, to use as carfare on his way to or from work. It saved, at all times, precious seconds of winnowing through pennies, dimes, and quarters. It averted, now, the catastrophe of having to detour to the change booth, of being almost certainly overtaken while filing by it. The lighted mirror in the receptacle magnified the head of Thomas Jefferson to an ugly death mask, and he cracked through.
     
    Seconds were going to decide the outcome, he knew, but he'd made the gamble and he couldn't back out now. He avoided the nearest car opening as being too obvious a refuge, sprinted for one far down the line, out of sight of the steps, gauging to a nicety how much time he had before they were sealed up again. He reached the third car down as the doors were starting to slide closed. He sandwiched himself in sidewise, just quickly enough to avoid contact with the door, which would have meant thrusting back the rubberinsulated door edge and delaying the whole process of closing up the train, from car to car.
     
    He'd won. Or had he? The tiny illuminated, red door indicators went out. The control signal was relayed to the motorman. The train was effectively walled off from the station, before it had even moved an inch. But if the pursuer had had sense enough to plunge &r the nearest car opening, the one Townsend had avoided, he might have made it, he might be somewhere on the jammed train at this very moment.
     
    Townsend had a sick feeling at the thought, and let his shoulders sag down a little in the corner formed by the two sides of the vestibule that supported him. The cars started to glide forward, the platform to drop behind.
     
    He was spared the added agony of uncertainty, all the long way home, of not knowing from one moment to the next when he might feel the sudden clutch of a heavy, restraining hand falling on him from out the anonymous crowd or of being discovered and kept steadily in view