The door-numbers were stepping up on her. Six on this side, seven on that, eight back on this side again. And then a dead-end, the corridor ended in a door, the last of them all, at right angles to it: 409, there it was. It looked so neutral, so impersonal — and yet behind it lurked her whole future destiny, in shape unseen.
On this single slab, she thought, on this great square of old, dark, scabrous wood, depends whether I become a human being again or remain a rat in a dance-hall for the rest of my life. Why should one door have so much power over me?
She looked down at the back of her own hand, as if to say: Was that
The door swept open before she had time to plan anything, to think what to do when it should open, and they stood looking at each other eye to eye, this unknown woman and she. Hard, enamelled face very close to hers, so close she could see the caked pores in it, like fine mesh. Hostile, wary eyes, so close she could see the red-streaked vessels in their corners.
The upper hall at Graves’ house came back to her again, the memory of creeping through there in the dark with Quinn, and she knew, without being conscious of it, that she must be smelling the same perfume again; that was what was doing it, linking the two experiences.
The eyes had already changed. This thing was going to go fast. Hostile wariness had already become overt challenge. A husky voice came up from somewhere below to join them. A voice that didn’t let you kid around with it.
“Well, what’s the angle? Didje come around to borrow a cup of sugar or didje hit the wrong door? Anything in p’tic’lar in here y’want?”
“Yes,” said Bricky softly, “there is.”
She must have taken a draw on a cigarette just before she opened the door, the other, and been holding it until now and speaking through it. Smoke suddenly speared from her nostrils in two malevolent columns. She looked like Satan. She looked like someone it was good to stay away from. She was still willing to have it that way herself — so far. Her arm flexed, to slap the door closed in Bricky’s face.
Bricky wanted to turn around and go away, turn around and go away fast. Boy, how she wanted to turn around and get away from there. But she wouldn’t let herself. She knew she was going to get in there, even if it was to her own destruction. That door had to stay open.
She did it with her foot and with her elbow.
The woman’s muzzle became a white cicatrice of menace. “Take that out of the way,” she warned in a sort of slow-rolling growl.
“We don’t know each other personally,” Bricky said, borrowing her huskiest dance-hall tones, “but we’ve got a friend in common, so that makes it even.”
The Bristol woman gave her head an upward flip. “Wait a minute, who are
“I’m talking about Mr. Stephen Graves.”
A white flash of consternation came over the Bristol woman’s face. But she might have reacted that same way, Bricky realized, even if she’d only been up there trying to blackmail him and then had walked out again, without anything else.
Until now, on a strip of background-wall visible just behind her, there had been a vague outline-shadow discernible. Not a very sharply etched one, just a faint tracing cast by some impediment in the way of the light coming from the room off to one side. It now moved very subtly, slipped off sidewards, disappeared — as though whatever was causing it had altered position, withdrawn, was secreting itself.
The caraway-seed centers of the woman’s eyes flicked briefly in that same offside direction, then immediately straightened back again, as though she had just received some imperceptible signal attuned to herself alone. She said tautly, and with an undertone of menace: “Suppose you come in a minute, and let’s hear what’s on your mind.” She widened the door. It wasn’t done hospitably, but with a sort of commanding jerk, as if to say: Either come in of your own accord, or I’ll reach out and haul you in.
For one moment more Bricky was a free agent; the hallway stretched unimpeded behind her. She thought: Here I go. I hope I get out of here alive. She went in.
She moved slowly past the other woman, turned aside into a tawdry, smoke-stenched room. Behind her the door champed back into its frame with a sound of ominous finality, as though it were meant to stay that way for good. A key ticked twice; once against the lock in turning, the second time against the keyhole in withdrawal.
