You're All Alone (illustrated) Read Online Free PDF Page A

glance at the sleeping woman, Carr stepped softly out. Just before he reached Marcia’s door, he heard the operator make a funny little sound between a yawn and a sigh and a laugh, and he heard the door close and the cage start down.
    In front of Marcia’s door Carr hesitated, She mightn’t like him barging in this way. But who could be expected always to await the pleasure of that prissy clerk?
    Behind him he heard the cage stop at the ground floor.
    He noticed that the door he faced was ajar.
    He pushed it open a few inches.
    “Marcia,” he called. “Marcia?” His voice came out huskily.
    He stepped inside. The white-shaded lamp showed dull pearl walls, white bookcase, blue overstuffed sofa with a coat and yellow silk scarf tossed across it, and a faint curl of cigarette smoke.
    The bedroom door was open. He crossed to it, his footsteps soundless on the thick carpet. He stopped.
    Marcia was sitting at the dressing table. She was wearing a light gray negligee with a silvery sheen. It touched and fell away from her figure in graceful folds, half revealing her breasts. A squashed cigarette smoldered in a tiny silver ash tray. She was lacquering her nails.
    That was all. But to Carr it seemed that he had blundered into one of those elaborately realistic department store window displays. He almost expected to see faces peering in the dark window, seven stories up.
    Modern bedroom in rose and smoke. Seated mannequin at vanity table. Perhaps a placard in script: “Point up your Pinks with Gray.”
    He stood stupidly a step short of the doorway, saying nothing.
    In the mirror her eyes seemed to meet his. She went on lacquering her nails.
    She might be angry with him for not phoning from downstairs. But it wasn’t like Marcia to choose this queer way of showing her displeasure.
    Or was it?
    He watched her face in the mirror. It was the one he had forgotten, all right. There were the firm lips, the cool forehead framed by reddish hair, the fleeting quirks of expression—definitely hers.
    Yet recognition did not bring the sense of absolute certainty it should. Something was lacking—the feeling of a reality behind the face, animating it.
    SHE FINISHED her nails and held them out to dry. The negligee fell open a bit further.
    Could this be another of her tricks for tormenting him? Marcia, he knew, thoroughly enjoyed his helpless desire and especially those fits of shyness for which he berated himself afterwards.
    But she wouldn’t draw it out so long.
    A sharp surge of uneasiness went through Carr. This was nonsensical, he told himself. In another moment she must move or speak—or he must. But his throat was constricted and his legs felt numb.
    And then it came back: the big fear.
    What if Marcia weren’t really alive at all, not consciously alive, but just a part of a dance of mindless atoms, a clockworks show that included the whole world, except himself? Merely by coming a few minutes ahead of time, merely by omitting to shave, he had broken the clockworks rhythm. That was why the clerk hadn’t spoken to him, why the operator had been asleep, why Marcia didn’t greet him. It wasn’t time yet for those little acts in the clockworks show.
    The creamy telephone tinkled. Lifting it gingerly, fingers stiffly spread, the figure at the vanity held it to her ear a moment and said, “Thank you. Tell him to come up.”
    She inspected her nails, waved them, looked at her reflection in the glass, belted her negligee.
    Through the open door Carr could hear the drone of the rising cage.
    Marcia started to get up, hesitated, sat down again, smiled.
    The cage stopped. There was the soft jolt of its door opening. He heard the operator’s voice, but no one else’s. He waited for footsteps. They didn’t come.
    That was his elevator, he thought with a shudder, the one he was supposed to come up in. The woman had brought it to seven without him, for that was part of the clockworks show.
    Suddenly Marcia turned. “Darling,” she