Into the Night

She happened to glance at the watch on her wrist, and it was twenty-eight before the hour. Just in time for the half-hourly news break. She’d probably missed the lead item, but that was sure to have been political, most likely the Congo. She turned the knob of the little transistor, which had the advantage of not taking time to warm up. The radio came on abruptly in the middle of an item, a drug-related shooting on the West Side. She listened to the full newscast without hearing anything of personal significance.

Then they were playing music again. She left the radio on but paid no attention to what she was hearing. She had the impulse to turn off the radio and switch off the lamp, and she remembered when she’d done that once before, ultimately taking her father’s gun and pressing it to her temple.

If only it had gone off when she squeezed the trigger. She remembered Vernon Herrick, his eyes wild as he told her about his injury on Tarawa. He was right — sometimes the ones who died were the lucky ones.

You and I, together all alone,
In a little country of our own,
Where the population’s only two—

She started. Was she hallucinating? Or was it her song, playing on the radio?

The tune was unfamiliar, nothing she had heard before. But the lyric was hers, the one lyrical fragment Dell had commented favorably on. The rest of the lyric was as unfamiliar to her as the melody. She heard the song all the way through, entranced by it, and at the end her bit of lyric returned as the song’s climax.

You and I, together all alone,
In a little country of our own,
Where the population’s only two.

It was easy to guess what must have happened. Dell, more impressed by the words than she’d cared to admit, had passed them on to a professional songwriter. And he’d incorporated them in a song, stealing them without a qualm, and now a singer had recorded the song and it was getting air play. It might even become a hit.

The irony of it, she thought. That a song with that particular lyric should become popular at just this stage of her life.

Because here she was, just as she’d been at the beginning. All alone, on a desert island of her own.

Where the population’s only one.

She was scanning the radio dial, trying to find another news report — or, failing that, perhaps the song again, on another station — when there was a knock on the door.

The police, she thought.

She turned the radio down to a whisper, approached the door. “Who is it?” she called.

The response was muffled. She couldn’t make it out.

“Who is it?”

“Why don’t you open the door and find out?”

It was his voice! Her heart leaped. She opened the door and thrilled at the sight of him.

“A funny thing happened,” he said. “I went through what you must have gone through a year ago, except the gun didn’t misfire and it didn’t go off and shoot somebody else, either. What happened just took place in my mind, but it added up to the same thing. I chose life.”

Her heart hammered in her breast. She looked into his eyes, felt his strength.

“What do you choose, Madeline?”

She was in his arms. He pressed her close, stroked her hair.

You and I, together all alone,
In a little country of our own,
Where the populations only two—

Hadn’t she turned off the radio? Of course she had. But the music was playing in her heart, in her mind. Once before she had chosen life — life alone, life of purposeful vengeance. Now once again she chose life — life with him, life spent in love.

The music swelled, drowning all thought.

Afterword by Francis M. Nevins, Jr

On September 25, 1968, in a corridor of Manhattan’s Sheraton Russell Hotel, a one-legged man in a wheelchair suffered a stroke. He was sixty-four years old but looked almost ninety. His name was Cornell Woolrich. He was the greatest writer of suspense fiction that ever lived. His two dozen novels and more than two hundred short stories and novelettes had the same wrenching impact, the same resonance of terror and anguish and loneliness and despair, as the darkest films of his cinematic soul-brother, Alfred Hitchcock. He had spent most of his adult years living in a residential hotel with his mother, trapped in a bizarre love-hate relationship with her and in the quicksand of his own homosexual self-contempt. When she died, he cracked, and began his own slow journey to the grave.