A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

We never got there, though. About midway between the head and where the bench was — in other words at about where the statue’s shoulder came — there was a gap with a chain across it bearing the placard Public Not Admitted. I had noticed this twice before, the first time I came up and then later when I had gone down to look for him. Maybe the chain had thrown me off, the undisturbed chain stretched across it. And then, too, until you stood directly before it, it looked far smaller and more inaccessible than it actually was, the way the lights slurred past it and made it seem no more than a fold on the inside of the lady’s gigantic metal draperies. This time, though, I stopped and asked them what it was.

“Oh, he ain’t up in there!” they assured me instantly. “Nobody’s allowed in there. Can’t you read what that says? That used to lead up into the arm and torch in the old days. The arm started weakening little by little, so they shut the whole thing off a long time ago. It’s boarded up just a little ways past the ch— Hey!” he broke off. “Where you going? You can’t do that!”

“I’m going just that little ways between the chain and where the boarding is,” I told him, spanning the cable with one leg. “If the arm lasted this long, one more guy ain’t going to hurt it, I don’t weigh enough. Throw your lights up after me. And don’t tell me what I can’t do when you see me already at it!”

The thing was a spiral, just like the other staircase that led to the head. Or rather, it started out to be, but at the very first half-turnaround it took, the boarding had already showed up, sealing it from top to bottom. That half-tum, however, cut off their lights, which shone in a straight line like any lights would. A triangle of blackness was left in one corner which they couldn’t eliminate, no matter how they maneuvered the torches.

“Come on a little nearer with those things!” I called impatiently. “Come past the chain!”

They wouldn’t budge. “Against orders,” they called back.

I came down a few steps and reached for a torch myself. “Let me have one of those things. What d’ya think I’m doing, playing hide and seek with you? How we won the last war beats me!” I jumped up again and washed out the stubborn wedge of blackness with the thin beam in my hand.

Sure he was there. And fitted in just as neatly as though the space had been measured off for him ahead of time. In a sitting position on the turn of the steps, back propped against the boarding, legs drawn up under him to help keep him propped. I touched the side of his neck. He was as cold already as the metal statue that made a tomb for him.

“Got him,” I shouted laconically. “Come on up and gimme a hand, you two.”

“What’s he doing up there?” one of those two clucks wanted to know.

“Waiting for judgment day.”

They gasped and came on up, orders or no orders.

I bent down and looked at the backs of his shoes. The leather of both heels was scraped and scarred into a fuzz from lift to ankle. The backs of his trousers were dusty all the way to the knees. “Dragged up by the shoulders,” I said, “by just one guy. If there’d been two, one of them would have taken him by the feet, like you’re going to do getting him down out of here.”

“How could one guy, any guy, haul that baby elephant all the way up there?” one of them wanted to know.

“You’d be surprised what one guy can manage to do if he’s scared enough and has to work in a hurry,” I assured him. “All right, get started. I’ll handle your lights. It wasn’t done up here anyway, so let’s get down before we all take a header into the ocean, arm and all.” It wasn’t easy, even for the two of them, to get down with him. Automatically, I figured that eliminated Alice Colman or any other woman as having had any part in it — except as an accessory.

The thing that had done it was lying under him when they got him up off the ground between them — a wicked-looking iron bar wrapped in a stiffened, blood-brown piece of rag. The wound — it was a deadly fracture — was on the side of the head just over the ear. He hadn’t bled much, outside of the first splash on the padded weapon itself. The little there was after that had clung to the skin, running down behind the jawbone and into the collar of his shirt, hence nothing on the ground around the bench where the attack had occurred.

I examined the ground around the latter place. The two little tracks his heels had made as he was dragged backwards toward the hiding-place were there plain as day under my flashlight’s beam, without the need of any powder or hocus-pocus of any kind. My only wonder was how I’d muffed seeing them when I stooped down to pick up his hat. But of course I hadn’t used my torch then.

“Take him on down the rest of the way,” I said. “No use parking with him here — it’s gotta be done sooner or later anyway.”