The Black Door Read Free Page A

man was watching TV, with the lights turned out. I talked to him for maybe fifteen minutes, but nothing conclusive happened, although I got a slight tingling sensation as I left.”
    “A tingling?” His voice was touched with a polite trace of irony.
    Doggedly, I nodded. “I forgot to mention that. Accompanying the feeling of dissociation is a kind of tingling at the base of my neck. I imagine—maybe it’s a fantasy—but I imagine that the hairs at the nape of my neck are stiffening. I know it sounds—” I hesitated, feeling suddenly foolish. But Kanter gestured for me to go on.
    “Anyhow, I left the second house and went to the third. It was a woman, a divorcee. A well-stacked divorcee, incidentally.”
    “Ah, the inevitable well-stacked divorcee.”
    I smiled. “I talked to her for another few minutes. As it happened, she’d been away during the previous night and most of that day, the time when the police were conducting their canvass. I had a picture of the missing girl with me, and I showed it to her. She studied it—she was an intelligent person, very perceptive—and she said she thought she’d seen the girl in the neighborhood the previous Saturday, but she couldn’t be sure.
    “I spent some time trying to get more out of her, but there wasn’t any more to get. ‘All kids look the same when they’re playing,’ she said. And it’s true, I guess. So I left. Well—” I drew a deep breath. In spite of myself, remembering my sensations during the next few moments, I felt a quickening, a vestige of the tingling sensation I’d just described.
    “Well, I left her house and walked across the street. I was just getting into my car, willing to call it a draw, when suddenly I had the same sensation I’d experienced earlier in the day, the same feeling that someone was watching me. So before I actually realized what I was doing, I found myself walking back across the street. I remember being aware of the darkness; there wasn’t any moon, and the weather had been cloudy that day. I remember, too, the sensation of following my feet, you might say. I was just walking, waiting to find out where I was walking.”
    “And where were you walking?” In Kanter’s voice now was a hint of skeptic derision.
    “I was walking toward the second house, where the man had been watching TV in the dark. But I was going around to the side of the house, down the driveway. There were trees on one side, and the house on the other. It was terribly dark, I remember, and it felt very cold. I was shivering. But I kept on. I didn’t seem to have any choice. I found myself standing in the back yard. Just standing there, shivering and waiting for something. Then I heard a movement, a kind of shuffling. A boy was there. He was seventeen, I found out later. He was crouched down by the side of the house, cowering like an animal, watching me. Beside him was a door leading to the basement of the house. I—I knew what was down there in the basement.”
    “The girl’s body?”
    I nodded.
    “What’d you do then?”
    “I turned around and went back the way I’d come. I went to the house next door—the divorcee’s—and called the police. And—” I spread my hands. “And that was it.”
    “Why’d he kill her?”
    I shrugged. “He was one of those retarded kids who should have been put away long before. He was a borderline case, I guess. He’d talked to the Gruenwald girl the week before, when she’d gone to her piano lesson, and he—well—he fell in love with her, I guess. No one knows why, but he did. The girl’s father was a full-time tycoon, and her mother was very busy being a clubwoman. Anyhow, for whatever reason, both the girl and the boy found something in each other. At least that’s the way the police reconstructed it.”
    “What happened then? As far as your end of it was concerned?”
    “Well—” I sighed, lit another cigarette. It was almost ten-thirty. Our breakfast had been eaten long ago, and the city