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

called, rising quickly, “the door’s open.” She came toward him.
    The hairs on the back of his neck lifted. She wasn’t looking straight at him, he felt, but at something behind him. She was watching him come through the living room.
    She moistened her lips. Her arms went out to him. Just before they touched him, Carr jerked back.
    The arms closed on air. Marcia lifted her face. Her back arched as if there were a strong arm around it. There was the sloppy sound of a kiss.
    Carr shook as he backed across the living room. “That’s enough for you, darling,” he heard Marcia murmur sharply to the air. He spun around and darted into the hall—not to the elevator, but to the stairs beyond.
    As he plunged down them in strides that were nightmarishly long and slow, a thought popped to the surface of his whirling mind.
    The meaning of a phrase he had read uncomprehendingly an hour before: “. . . the lion’s tail near the five sisters . . .”



CHAPTER V
If you catch on to the secret, you’d better keep your mouth shut. It never brought anybody anything but grief. If you’ve got friends, the kindest thing you can do for them is not to let them find out . . .
    FEW PEOPLE walk on the east side of Michigan Boulevard after dark. At such times the Art Institute looks very dead. Headlights coming down Adams play on its dark stone like archeologists’ flashlights. The two majestic bronze lions might be guarding the portals of some monument of Roman antiquity. The tail of one of the lions, conveniently horizontal and kept polished by the casual elbows of art students and idlers, now served as a backrest for the frightened girl.
    She silently watched Carr mount the steps. He might be part of some dream she was having. A forbiddingly cold wind was whipping in from the lake and she had buttoned up her cardigan. Carr stopped a half dozen paces away.
    After a moment she smiled and said, “Hello.”
    Carr smiled jerkily in reply and moved toward her. His first words surprised him.
    “I met your small dark man with glasses. He ran away.”
    “Oh? I’m sorry. He really might be your friend. But he’s . . . timid,” she added, her lips setting in bitter lines.
    “He can’t always be depended on. He was supposed to meet me here, but . . .” She glanced, shrugging her shoulders, toward the electric numerals glowing high above the north end of Grant Park. “I had some vague idea of introducing the two of you, but now I’m not so sure.” The wind blew strands of her shoulder-length hair against her cheek. “I never really thought you’d come, you know. Leaving notes like that is just a way I have of tempting fate. You weren’t supposed to guess. How did you know it was one of these lions?”
    Carr laughed. “Taft’s Great Lakes fountain is a minor obsession of mine. I always try to figure out which of the five sisters is which lake. And of course that’s just around the corner.” He instantly grew serious again and moved closer to her. “I want to ask you a question,” he said.
    “Yes?” she asked guardedly.
    “Do you think I’m insane?”
    Headlights from Adams swept across her gray eyes, enigmatic as those of a sphinx. “That’s hardly a question for a stranger to answer.” She looked at him a while longer and shook her head. “No, I don’t,” she said softly.
    “All right,” he said, “grant I’m sane. Then answer this: Do you think it’s reasonably possible for a sane person to meet eight or ten insane ones, some of them people he knows, all in one day? And I don’t mean in an asylum.”
    “I don’t know,” she whispered. Then, unwillingly, “I suppose not.”
    “All right,” he said. “Then comes the big question: Do you think . . . (He had trouble getting the words out) “. . . that most people are really alive?”
    She seemed to shrink in size. Her face was all in shadow. “I don’t understand,” she faltered.
    “I mean,” he said, “do you really believe there’s anything behind