RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK Read Free Page B

over its head and face, but the newspapers had gotten soaked through with something. Something viscous and dark, like gasoline or . . .
    There were jagged pieces of broken glass lying about here and there, dark bottle glass. The entire neck of the bottle, intact, was resting a few feet away.
    Some of the people were craning their necks to look up at the windows of the houses overlooking the scene. Some were even looking higher, along the cornices of the roofs. Some higher still, toward where the sound of that plane engine had come from before.
    Johnny Marr moved at last. He took a peculiar tottering step down from the banked curb and went out alone into the open space--and what it held.
    Instantly the guardian policeman was standing beside him. His hand came down on Johnny Marr's shoulder, to halt him and turn him back.
    Johnny Marr whispered, "Turn the newspaper over a little at the top. I--I just want to see if I know who it is--"
    The policeman stooped, briefly curled one of the sodden newspapers back by its outermost corner, then let it straighten out again.
    "Well, do you?" he asked in an undertone. "Do you?"
    "No," Johnny said sickly. "No, I don't." He was telling the truth.
    That wasn't what he had been going to marry. He hadn't been going to marry that . The girl he'd been going to marry--she hadn't looked like that. Nobody'd ever looked like that.
    His hat had fallen off. They picked it up and gave it back to him. He didn't seem to know what to do with it, so finally someone put it on his head for him.
    He turned and went away as though he hadn't known her. The crowd gave way, as he bored his way through it, and then reclosed its ranks after he had passed, and he was swallowed up in its midst.
    He regained that meeting place of theirs, by the drugstore window, by the powders and the lotions shining amber and chartreuse, that one little place of theirs, and leaned up against it with a palsied lurch.
    No one looked at him any more, everyone kept looking the other way, out at the roadway.
    Something with red headlights, a chariot from hell, was jockeying around out there, backing into position. Something was being shoved into it. Something that no one had any use for, something that no one loved, something to be thrown away. The rear doors of the chariot from hell slapped shut. The red glare swung around, glancing across the crowd for a minute, staining its lurid crimson, like a misfired rocket on the Fourth of July that fizzles around on the ground instead of going up; then it streaked off into the distance with a dolorous whine.
    He was still there. He didn't know where to go. He didn't have any place to go. In the whole world there was no place to go but this.
    The shock wasn't so bad at first. It was more a numbness than anything else. You couldn't tell. He just stood there quietly, swaying a little at times like a highly volatile weathervane in a breeze that couldn't be felt by others. The showcase behind him and the little projection at the side kept him upright between them. But the harm went in deep. Deep, into places where it could never be gotten out again. Into places that, once they're sick, can never be made sound again. Deep into the mind --into the reason.
    Then presently his eyes struck upward, as if the memory of a drone, the winging-away of death, overhead in the sky, had briefly recurred to his foundering senses.
    He clenched his fist, and shot it up toward there, aimed it toward there. And holding it like that, shook it, and shook it again, and again and again, in terrible promise of implacable accounting to come.
    And on that note of dedication, the darkness came down over him.

    Twelve struck from the steeple of the church just off the square. The crowd had gone long ago, the square was empty. Empty but for him. There was nothing in the roadway now. Just a few leaves of newspapers, stained and darkened, like the kind butchers use to wrap fresh meat in.
    She was a few minutes late tonight, but she'd