Midnight | Page 4

seconds he stood staring, until the match which he held burned out and scorched the flesh of his fingers. His jaw dropped, his eyes widened. He opened his lips and tried to speak, but closed them again without having uttered a sound save a choking gasp. He tried again, feeling an urge for speech--something, anything, to make him believe that he was here, alive--that the horror within the cab was real. This time he uttered an "Oh, my God!"
The words seemed to vitalize him. He fumbled for another match, found it, and lighted it within the cab. It seemed to have the radiance of an incandescent.
Spike had hoped that his first impression would prove to be a mere figment of his imagination; but now there was no doubting. There, sprawled in an ugly, inhuman heap on the floor, head resting against the cushioned seat of the cab, was the figure of a man. There was no doubt that he was dead. Even Spike, young, optimistic, and unversed in the ways of death as he was, knew that he was alone with a corpse.
And as he gazed, a strange courage came to him. He found himself emboldened to investigate. He was shivering while he did so, shivering with fear and with the terrific cold of the night. He could not quite bring himself to touch the body, but he did not need to move it to see that murder had been done.
The clothes told him instantly that the man was of high social station. They were obviously expensive clothes, probably tailor-made. The big coat, open at the top, was flung back. Beneath, Spike discerned a gray tweed--and on the breast of the gray tweed was a splotch, a dark, ugly thing which appeared black and was not black. Spike shuddered. He had never liked the sight of blood.
The match spluttered and went out. Spike looked around. He felt hopelessly alone. Not a pedestrian; not a light. The houses, set well back from the street, were dark, forbiddingly dark.
He saw a street-car rattle past, bound on the final run of the night for the car-sheds at East End. Then he was alone again--alone and frightened.
He felt the necessity for action. He must do something--something, but what? What was there to do?
A great fear gripped him. He was with the body. The body was in his cab. He would be arrested for the murder of the man!
Of course he knew he didn't do it. The woman had committed the murder.
Spike swore. He had almost forgotten the woman. Where was she? How had she managed to leave the taxicab? When had the man, who now lay sprawled in the cab, entered it?
He had driven straight from the Union Station to the address given by the woman--straight down East End Avenue, turning neither to right nor left. The utter impossibilty of the situation robbed it of some of its stark horror. And yet--
Spike knew that he must do something. He tried to think connectedly, and found it a difficult task. Near him loomed the shadow which was No. 981 East End Avenue--the address given by the woman when she entered the cab. He might go in there and report the circumstances. Some one there would know who she was, and--but he hesitated.
Perhaps this thing had been prearranged. Perhaps they would get him--for what he didn't know. When a man--a young man--comes face to face with murder for the first time, making its acquaintance on a freezing December midnight and in a lonely spot, he is not to be blamed if his mental equilibrium is destroyed.
Wild plans chased each other through his brain. He might dump the body by the roadside and run back to town. That was absurd on the face of it, for he would be convicting himself when the body was found. It would be traced to him in some way--he knew that. He was already determined to keep away from No. 981 East End Avenue. There was something sinister in the unfriendly shadow of the rambling house. He might call the police.
That was it--he would call the police. But how? Go into a house near by, wake the residents, telephone headquarters that a murder had been done? Alarm the neighborhood, and identify himself with the crime? Spike was afraid, frankly and boyishly afraid--afraid of the present, and more afraid of the future.
And yet he knew that he must get in touch with the police, else the police would eventually get in touch with him. He thought then of taking the body in to headquarters; but he feared that his cab might be stopped en route to the city and the body discovered. They would never believe, then, that he had been bound for headquarters.
Almost before he knew that he had arrived at