HE HAD SLEPT for only a few hours upon a hard and unfamiliar couch. His brief sleep had been troubled and fitful with dreams of a soft young girl whose eyes were bright with stark and naked terror. In his dreams he saw the young girl in a dark and dreadful place with the bars and padlocks of an ancient donjon keep, and on the edge of the darkness lurked the shadowy figures of evil men who watched the girl and waited. Sometimes enormous hands, gnarled and heavy-knuckled, furred and taloned, would reach out of the darkness toward the girl, seeking to touch and bruise and outrage her. Once he had awakened with a stifled scream pulsing in his throat and his body slimed with sweat because one of the hideous hands he saw had had a missing finger.
Abner Ellison would not have slept at all except for the unaccustomed alcohol he had consumed after he had fled and found sanctuary in the bleak tenement rooms of a former convict. Now, in this half-wakeful state, his senses lulled by the after effects of whisky and restless sleep, he fought against consciousness, against the enormity of facing brutal reality. He kept his eyes tight-closed, for briefly the lowered lids afforded him a shield, just as they had on those other mornings when he had awakened on cold, damp ground and had known that as soon as he opened his eyes he must crawl back into the horror-stricken reality of shrieks and thunder from the protecting womb of his foxhole.
This suspended consciousness had been a bulwark for his sanity then and it was a bulwark now. It was a false euphoria in which the animal took over entirely. He was pleasantly conscious of his strong body, the power of his muscles, the steady breathing of his lungs, the hunger in his belly and the lusts in his loins. The nightmare events and the nightmare dreams of the past hours had receded from his mind. He was content to let his body have its way with his brain, to think of hot food and warm womanflesh, to give full sway to his body’s needs and urges.
It was strange, the defenses that the body built when horror was too much for the mind to bear. He could recall a day in a gutted Norman town when German 88’s and machine guns had cut a whole platoon of men to bloody shreds in the village square. He had burst through a door that hung on one hinge and had crawled over a wooden floor of a darkened room, his carbine ready. He had seen no Germans. He had seen two American soldiers. One was using a knife to shovel food into his mouth from a ration can and was taking great gulps from a wine bottle. The other was in the actual act of love with a writhing, wild-eyed peasant girl. On all sides of them the masonry was crumbling from the reverberations of the guns.
The picture of Pat Linton was still very much in Abner’s drowsy mind but he no longer saw a pale face with fright-dazed eyes. Her face was flushed and her eyes danced with excitement and her mouth was soft and inviting. That had been the time it almost happened. He had lived in the same house with her for many years and he had loved her always, he supposed, in that fierce, possessive, yet oddly secretive way of his, but it had never really happened between them, not even that time it almost did. He had come home from basic training at Benning for his first furlough—it turned out also to be his last—and he’d been proud of his uniform and of his brand-new corporal’s stripes. He had orders for Fort Meade when his ten days and travel time were up and everybody knew that Meade was a port of embarkation, so this was it. Maybe that was what had made the difference. Or maybe it was that Pat, who was barely seventeen, had suddenly become a woman. In the few weeks he’d been away, the legs that had been bare and spindly above bobby socks now filled out nylon stockings and filled them very well indeed. The breasts that had been mere quivering points beneath her sweaters were now rounded to a melon ripeness. Her face still was prettily innocent and the eyes were young and laughing and the mouth was soft and immature, but it was a woman’s body, the kind of body that G.I.s dreamed about in lonely barracks. And when she had kissed him hello it had been a different sort of kiss than they’d ever had before, not a childish peck or a cool, sisterly salutation but a kiss from lips that were warm and moist, lips that clung to his a moment longer than was necessary and that promised more.
During that furlough Pat had broken all her dates, even her dates with Allan Walters, who was Abner’s rival, so that she could be with him every minute. One night Phil Linton had gone to a banquet and Pat and Abner had been alone in the softly lighted living room. She had asked him to build a fire, although the room was warm enough, and when the fire blazed, she had turned off the lights and suddenly she was in his arms. Her lips sought his and her young body entreated him. Her dress became disarranged. Shoulder straps slipped down her arms and for the first time he touched her bare, warm flesh. Nothing in the world seemed real then but their desperate wanting. Her small hands dug into the muscles of his arm and back and she tore her lips away and said in a voice that was not Pat’s voice at all, but a hoarse, almost inaudible whisper. “I want you, darling. Let’s be married . . .”
“When I come back from overseas . . .”
“No, now! Tonight! Let’s pretend we’re married. Carry me up to my room. We’ll lock the door. . . .”
And then the telephone had rung.
Allan Walters had never learned how well-timed that call of his had been.
Abner had always marveled at the self-possession of women in any situation, however young they were. Pat was cool and calm and poised immediately. She rose and shrugged her dress and slip back on her shoulders, smoothed out her skirt and answered the phone in a normal, casual voice, leaving poor Abner there on the sofa, rumpled, red-faced and perspiring.
They had never come that close again, although Patricia Linton had remained the one woman that Abner wanted. It was the thought of that night when their bodies had strained together that had come to him most often when his mind and nerves could no longer stand the sights and sounds and smells of battle. It was the thought of that night that his half-awakened consciousness clung to now to blot out the awful fact of murder.
He had returned from war self-conscious over a minor deformity, realizing that long years of law school were ahead of him before he could hope to make a living for a wife. He had found that Pat and Allan Walters, who was drawing the pay of a first-grade detective now, had gone together fairly steadily during the war and they continued to see much of each other while Abner was attending law school. Abner had erased himself more and more in those years, although his love for Pat and his fevered desire for her had not abated in the least. Pat had accused him of drawing back into his shell like a turtle. Why shouldn’t he? She was the daughter and the grand-daughter of a cop and he was a murderer’s son. He had been maimed in war, not only by losing a finger but by the shock and bitterness war leaves on the mind. Her other suitor was whole and handsome and had a ringing laugh. He was a schoolboy and her other suitor was a cop who had a gun and a badge and authority and a monthly paycheck.
There was much bitterness in him during those years of loneliness and study. Bitterest of all was the thought of Pat in Allan’s arms, straining her body against him, whispering “Let’s pretend we’re married.” He tried to reject such a thought. Deep down he didn’t believe it. But it recurred and it was torture. Even worse was the feeling that the old relationship between Pat and him had vanished, that he was no longer her protector. No longer would she skip along beside him, her small hot hand, clutching his.
Then he’d graduated and had a job and it seemed that Pat and he were back together again when Phil Linton heard the charge that Abner was an errand boy for mobsters. He wondered if Pat had heard, too.
He was fully awake now. No longer could the fragile shield of his eyelids shut out the clamorous present or obscure his desperate situation. He must awaken to the fact of murder and even greater horrors. It was the second time in his life that murder had been waiting there beside his bed when his eyes came open. On the other occasion he had been in a children’s shelter, a small boy with moist eyes and tremulous lips, when they came to tell him that his father had been arrested for a crime so fearful they would not name it.
Abner pulled himself to a sitting posture
