The Night of the Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page A

liquor souring in the steamy air; and he would stumble out at last into the enchanted night, into the glitter and razzle-dazzle of the midnight April street, his whole spirit luminous with an enraptured and blessed fury at the world these whores had made. That night in his dollar hotel room he might crouch beneath the guttering blossom of the Welsbach flame above the brass bed and count his resources and think to himself: Time to go out again and preach the word? Or is it time for another one? Is it time yet, Lord? Time for another widow? Say the word, Lord! Just say the word and I’m on my way!
    And then like as not he would hear God’s voice in the haunted, twitching boards of the hotel hallway; above the giggle and whisper and soft, wet fumble on the creaking bedsprings of the room beyond his, the gagging of the drunkard over in the bathroom by the stair well. Down in the night, in the Louisville streets, the April tinkle of the cheap music and the coarse night voices were not loud enough to drown out his God’s clear command.
    Once he had nearly been caught, though it is not likely that he knew how close he had come to it nor would have cared much had he known. He had been solicited by a prostitute along Frey’s Alley in Charleston, West Virginia, and had followed her into the house and, smirking at the madam, paid his money and followed the girl up the steps past the roaring, rollicking player piano, and when the girl had lain back upon the worn gray spread and wearily awaited him, her jaws not relinquishing even for this brief business the gum between her teeth, he had merely stood watching, smiling, his eyes alight with the Glory of God.
    Well?
    Well what?
    Don’t you want it?
    He said nothing, his head bent a little, one eyelid fluttering almost closed, listening, harking. God was trying to say something and he could not quite hear the words.
    You paid your money. Don’t you want it now? Say, what
do
you want, mister?
    He had his fingers around the bone hasp and he was already fumbling for the button that held back the swift blade but God spoke to him then and said there wasn’t any sense in bothering. There were too many of
them.
He couldn’t kill a world.
    But the knife had been halfway out of his pocket before God had finished speaking and the girl’s short, hoarse screams had brought a big Negro handyman up the steps and he had been kicked and beaten and thrown out into the alley among the cats and garbage pails. Another night he had taken a young mountain whore drunk to his room in a cheap boardinghouse in Cincinnati and she had passed out naked on the bed and he had taken out the knife and stood by the bed with it unopened in his hand for a while, looking at her and waiting for the Word and when it did not come he pressed the button and the steel tongue licked out, and, bending by the bed on the worn rug, he delicately scratched a cross in the girl’s belly beneath the navel and left there with that brand so frail and faint upon the flesh that it did not even bleed; and when she woke in the morning alone she did not even notice it, so lovingly and with so practiced and surgical a precision had he wrought it there.
    The faces troubled him at night; not with remorse but with self-rebuke at the imprecision of his arithmetic. Were there twelve? Or was it six? Was this the face of the gaunt, boney India Coverley from Steubenville or was it the other one—her ancient, senile sister Ella that he had had to kill because she had surprised him burying the old woman in the peach orchard behind the barn. The faces ran together like the years; like the long rides in the yellow-lit railroad coaches through the clicking river midnights as he wandered from town to town. Lord, won’t I never settle down? Lord, won’t you never say the word that my work is done? Another one, Lord? All right, Lord!
    And he would plunge into the lonely-hearts column again or search the faces at a church picnic and when he came to the