Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

“Mama,” wailed the child.

“Shut up,” his mother commanded. Muttering (“Seems to me he could just bust the door in”), she pushed at the front door, twisted the knob, and the panel swung open. “Hey,” she called. “Hey!” She went into the house, and Beta went with her.

She passed through the rooms calling his name, the child trailing after her. In the kitchen she saw the policemen peering in through the window, went to the back door, and let them in. “The front door was open,” she told them. “You should have busted in.”

“Lady,” began the cop called Smitty. The other one shushed him. “No sign of him, huh?”

“He’s here somewhere,” the woman said. “I know he is. I think he’s dead. I’ll bet you — and I’ll never get my money. Gordon, shut up, will you. Well go home when I’m ready.”

They found him upstairs in his bed, all curled up in a ball. “What do you figure?” Smitty asked his partner.

“How should I know? Heart attack? You never can tell with these old guys. The doc will know. Guess we’d better call him.”

“You can go along now,” Smitty told the woman. “You were right. Something was wrong.”

“I told you,” she said. “But what about my money?”

His partner bristled, said, “Lady...”

“Come on, Gordon.” She jerked at the child’s arm. “We’ve been gypped again. Twenty bucks I’m out. Twenty bucks down the drain. Every time something starts looking good, it turns to...” and her voice faded as she disappeared down the stairs.

“Come on, Beta,” Didi exhorted, “get on with it. Bring on the doctor.”

When he came, he was brisk and brusque. “Can’t tell much, but I’ll put down coronary. That’s what got him, that’s what gets us all one way or another. The old ticker stops. Okay, you can haul him off. I’ll do an autopsy sometime tomorrow. When I get to it. He’s number three or four, I figure. Any of you guys got a match? I know I ought to cut out smoking but...”

She turned off the Beta.

Turned it back on and started it up again; Beta, please take me to the morgue, take me to Uncle Willis... she had to shut her eyes, she couldn’t bear to watch. But she could hear. “Uhmm, pretty well preserved considering... uhmm, something here in the vascocon-stricter sector, can’t tell for sure without testing... what did you say, Ernie? Well, could be. High blood pressure, no doubt... these oldtimers never had much medical attention, you know, thought doctor was a dirty word and say hospital to ’em and they run like the devil was on their tail... Well, if you agree, I’m going to let it lie. Coronary, period. Okay? Okay. Next.”

Exhausted, she turned off the Beta and went to bed. Somewhere in the middle of the night she awakened, she’d heard noises? In the kitchen? She listened to silence. Dreaming. Just dreaming. Stop, brain. Go to sleep. Let it lie.

Many a pickle makes a mickle. A stray rhyme from some dark place. Whatever it meant. Pickles and mickles, pickles and mickles, Uncle Willis tickles, Uncle Willis tickles pickles, Uncle Willis had me in a tight embrace...

In the morning she went back to Uncle Willis’s house, let herself in. The stair to the cellar was steep and straight down into muggy darkness, the air below smelled of mold and long-dead things. She clicked the light switch but nothing happened, the electricity had been shut off, of course. Who wants electricity in the house of a dead man?

In her handbag she carried a tiny flashlight attached to a police whistle, a whistle for use if accosted by muggers and or rapists, that was the kind of world her mother could never have managed so just as well that she’d died in childbirth in her forty-second year. (Mother, how could you, how could you have wanted a child at your age? Wasn’t I enough? Wasn’t I good enough?) She shone the pinpoint of light on the steps and on what lay at the bottom of them.

Just as well, she thought, that she couldn’t see what lay in the shadows. (“Didi, you do have such an overactive imagination! I don’t know where you get it from. Must be from your father. That’s all he did leave, bills and a baby with a wild imagination. There are no vampires in your closet, there are no monsters under your bed, there never were and there never will be. Now, go to sleep like a good girl, and maybe Uncle Willis will bring you something nice when he gets back from the railroad.”)

She found the chimney, she found the cubbyhole. Her light wasn’t bright enough, she had to put her hand in, she had to reach through the muck and the cobwebs, was that something crawling up her arm? Was that something soft and sticky and palpitating just beyond her fingers?

What she found was nothing. She took a minute to breathe deeply, then she hurried up and out.

Sitting on the countertop was a jar of pickles. Kosher dill pickles. She panicked and ran, through the little back porch, down the steps past the garbage pail (knocked that over), ran through wet sheets on the clothesline of the next yard before she stopped.

A small boy with thumb in mouth was barring her way.