• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I sat up on the bed and looked around. I was in a small room with the door closed. There was the one window I had seen before, and the single wooden chair, and a battered chest of drawers with innumerable cigarette burns on its otherwise empty top.

I started to get up, and there was something on the floor, something sticky that my feet touched.

Wet and sticky.

I closed my eyes. A shiver went through me, a chill caused by more than the cold and my own nakedness. I kept my eyes closed and folded my arms foolishly across my chest. I did not want to look. I did not want to know. I wanted to go to sleep and stay asleep for ages and wake up elsewhere, miles and years away.

I wondered, briefly, if it was a dream.

I opened my eyes again. I picked up one foot and looked hopelessly at the bottom of it. Blood. I tried to catch my breath, and somehow couldn’t, and I looked at the floor, and the nausea came back again, in a flood, with no warning. I threw up with the spontaneity of the knee-jerk reflex. It was that automatic—I looked, I saw, I vomited. And did so repeatedly, long past the point where there was anything in my stomach to eliminate.

I thought of the way I had reached across the floor as if it were a sea in which I dared not set foot. An apt image. The floor was a sea of blood. A body floated upon this ocean. A girl; black hair, staring blue eyes, bloodless lips. Naked. Dead. Her throat slashed deeply.

It had to be a dream. It had to, had to be a dream. It was not a dream. It was not a dream at all.

I’ve done it again, I thought. Sweet Jesus, I’ve done it again. I believe I spoke the words aloud. And put my head in my hands, and closed my eyes, and laughed and cried and laughed and cried.

2

IN THE YEARS WHEN I TAUGHT HISTORY (SURVEY OF WESTERN Civilization, Europe Since Waterloo, Tudor and Stuart England, French Revolution and Napoleon) we made much of historical imperatives, of the inevitability of virtually all major developments from the fall of Rome to the Russian Revolution. I was never wholly convinced of the validity of this viewpoint. I have since come to reject it utterly. History, I suspect, is little more than the record of accident and coincidence and random chance. The English Reformation was born in a lustful gleam in a regal eye. Presidents have fallen to the lucky shots of madmen.

For want of a nail, says Mother Goose, a kingdom was lost. And well I believe it.

Had there been a telephone in that room, I would have dialed the operator and asked for the police, and they would have come at once to take me away. There was no telephone in the room. I looked, and there was none.

Had my clothes not been so thoroughly soaked with blood, I would have dressed at once and left the building. I would then have proceeded at once to the nearest telephone and summoned the police, with the same results above described. But my clothes were bloody, so very bloody that I could not bring myself to put them on, let alone go anywhere in them. I could barely summon up the strength to handle them.

Accidents, coincidences, chance. That there was no phone. That my clothes were bloody. That a Supreme Court ruling had released me from prison. That I had taken that unremembered first drink a day or a week or a month ago. That I had met the girl, and brought her here, and killed her. For want of a nail, for want of a nail.

I wanted a cigarette, I wanted a drink, I wanted to go away. My first reaction, to call the police, was temporarily stalemated. I had to do something. I couldn’t stay where I was, in the room, with the girl, the dead girl. I had to do something. I had to get out of there.

There was a key on the floor by the side of the old dresser. An old-fashioned brass key attached by a piece of metal to a triangular wedge of pressed board a little longer than the key itself. HOTEL MAXFIELD, 324 WEST 49TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY. DBOP IN ANY MAILBOX. WE PAY POSTAGE. The key itself was stamped with