The Day Time Stopped Moving.
by Bradner Buckner.
_All Dave Miller wanted to do was commit suicide in peace. He tried, but the things that happened after he"d pulled the trigger were all wrong. Like everyone standing around like statues. No St. Peter, no pearly gate, no pitchforks or halos. He might just as well have saved the bullet!_
Dave Miller would never have done it, had he been in his right mind. The Millers were not a melancholy stock, hardly the sort of people you expect to read about in the morning paper who have taken their lives the night before. But Dave Miller was drunk--abominably, roaringly so--and the barrel of the big revolver, as he stood against the sink, made a ring of coldness against his right temple.
Dawn was beginning to stain the frosty kitchen windows. In the faint light, the letter lay a gray square against the drain-board tiles. With the melodramatic gesture of the very drunk, Miller had scrawled across the envelope:
"This is why I did it!"
[Ill.u.s.tration: Dave Miller pushed with all his strength, but the girl was as unmovable as Gibraltar.]
He had found Helen"s letter in the envelope when he staggered into their bedroom fifteen minutes ago--at a quarter after five. As had frequently happened during the past year, he"d come home from the store a little late ... about twelve hours late, in fact. And this time Helen had done what she had long threatened to do. She had left him.
The letter was brief, containing a world of heartbreak and broken hopes.
"I don"t mind having to scrimp, Dave. No woman minds that if she feels she is really helping her husband over a rough spot. When business went bad a year ago, I told you I was ready to help in any way I could. But you haven"t let me. You quit fighting when things got difficult, and put in all your money and energy on liquor and horses and cards. I could stand being married to a drunkard, Dave, but not to a coward ..."
So she was trying to show him. But Miller told himself he"d show her instead. Coward, eh? Maybe this would teach her a lesson! h.e.l.l of a lot of help she"d been! Nag at him every time he took a drink. Holler b.l.o.o.d.y murder when he put twenty-five bucks on a horse, with a chance to make five hundred. What man wouldn"t do those things?
His drug store was on the skids. Could he be blamed for drinking a little too much, if alcohol dissolved the morbid vapors of his mind?
Miller stiffened angrily, and tightened his finger on the trigger. But he had one moment of frank insight just before the hammer dropped and brought the world tumbling about his ears. It brought with it a realization that the whole thing was his fault. Helen was right--he was a coward. There was a poignant ache in his heart. She"d been as loyal as they came, he knew that.
He could have spent his nights thinking up new business tricks, instead of swilling whiskey. Could have gone out of his way to be pleasant to customers, not snap at them when he had a terrific hangover. And even Miller knew n.o.body ever made any money on the horses--at least, not when he needed it. But horses and whiskey and business had become tragically confused in his mind; so here he was, full of liquor and madness, with a gun to his head.
Then again anger swept his mind clean of reason, and he threw his chin up and gripped the gun tight.
"Run out on me, will she!" he muttered thickly. "Well--this"ll show her!"
In the next moment the hammer fell ... and Dave Miller had "shown her."
Miller opened his eyes with a start. As plain as black on white, he"d heard a bell ring--the most familiar sound in the world, too. It was the unmistakable tinkle of his cash register.
"Now, how in h.e.l.l--" The thought began in his mind; and then he saw where he was.
The cash register was right in front of him! It was open, and on the marble slab lay a customer"s five-spot. Miller"s glance strayed up and around him.
He was behind the drug counter, all right. There were a man and a girl sipping c.o.kes at the fountain, to his right; the magazine racks by the open door; the tobacco counter across from the fountain. And right before him was a customer.
Good Lord! he thought. Was all this a--a dream?
Sweat oozed out on his clammy forehead. That stuff of Herman"s that he had drunk during the game--it had had a rank taste, but he wouldn"t have thought anything short of marihuana could produce such hallucinations as he had just had. Wild conjectures came boiling up from the bottom of Miller"s being.
How did he get behind the counter? Who was the woman he was waiting on?
What--
The woman"s curious stare was what jarred him completely into the present. Get rid of her! was his one thought. Then sit down behind the scenes and try to figure it all out.
His hand poised over the cash drawer. Then he remembered he didn"t know how much he was to take out of the five. Avoiding the woman"s glance, he muttered:
"Let"s see, now, that was--uh--how much did I say?"
The woman made no answer. Miller cleared his throat, said uncertainly:
"I beg your pardon, ma"am--did I say--seventy-five cents?"
It was just a feeler, but the woman didn"t even answer to that. And it was right then that Dave Miller noticed the deep silence that brooded in the store.
Slowly his head came up and he looked straight into the woman"s eyes.
She returned him a cool, half-smiling glance. But her eyes neither blinked nor moved. Her features were frozen. Lips parted, teeth showing a little, the tip of her tongue was between her even white teeth as though she had started to say "this" and stopped with the syllable unspoken.
Muscles began to rise behind Miller"s ears. He could feel his hair stiffen like filings drawn to a magnet. His glance struggled to the soda fountain. What he saw there shook him to the core of his being.
The girl who was drinking a c.o.ke had the gla.s.s to her lips, but apparently she wasn"t sipping the liquid. Her boy friend"s gla.s.s was on the counter. He had drawn on a cigarette and exhaled the gray smoke.
That smoke hung in the air like a large, elongated balloon with the small end disappearing between his lips. While Miller stared, the smoke did not stir in the slightest.
There was something unholy, something supernatural, about this scene!
With apprehension rippling down his spine, Dave Miller reached across the cash register and touched the woman on the cheek. The flesh was warm, but as hard as flint. Tentatively, the young druggist pushed harder; finally, shoved with all his might. For all the result, the woman might have been a two-ton bronze statue. She neither budged nor changed expression.
Panic seized Miller. His voice hit a high hysterical tenor as he called to his soda-jerker.
"Pete! _Pete!_" he shouted. "What in G.o.d"s name is wrong here!"
The blond youngster, with a towel wadded in a gla.s.s, did not stir.
Miller rushed from the back of the store, seized the boy by the shoulders, tried to shake him. But Pete was rooted to the spot.
Miller knew, now, that what was wrong was something greater than a hallucination or a hangover. He was in some kind of trap. His first thought was to rush home and see if Helen was there. There was a great sense of relief when he thought of her. Helen, with her grave blue eyes and understanding manner, would listen to him and know what was the matter.
He left the haunted drug store at a run, darted around the corner and up the street to his car. But, though he had not locked the car, the door resisted his twisting grasp. Shaking, pounding, swearing, Miller wrestled with each of the doors.
Abruptly he stiffened, as a horrible thought leaped into his being. His gaze left the car and wandered up the street. Past the intersection, past the one beyond that, on up the thoroughfare until the gray haze of the city dimmed everything. And as far as Dave Miller could see, there was no trace of motion.
Cars were poised in the street, some pa.s.sing other machines, some turning corners. A street car stood at a safety zone; a man who had leaped from the bottom step hung in s.p.a.ce a foot above the pavement.
Pedestrians paused with one foot up. A bird hovered above a telephone pole, its wings glued to the blue vault of the sky.
With a choked sound, Miller began to run. He did not slacken his pace for fifteen minutes, until around him were the familiar, rea.s.suring trees and shrub-bordered houses of his own street. But yet how strange to him!
The season was autumn, and the air filled with brown and golden leaves that tossed on a frozen wind. Miller ran by two boys lying on a lawn, petrified into a modern counterpart of the sculptor"s "The Wrestlers."
The sweetish tang of burning leaves brought a thrill of terror to him; for, looking down an alley from whence the smoke drifted, he saw a man tending a fire whose leaping flames were red tongues that did not move.
Sobbing with relief, the young druggist darted up his own walk. He tried the front door, found it locked, and jammed a thumb against the doorbell. But of course the little metal b.u.t.ton was as immovable as a mountain. So in the end, after convincing himself that the key could not be inserted into the lock, he sprang toward the back.