Old Mattia Rossi’s body is gone. It no longer lies at the foot of the cellar stairs. This morning, when I finally braced myself to go down and look for those keys I need so badly, it was not there.
And that can mean only one thing.
He is not in hiding. He did not rouse and crawl away into the dark, as a crushed worm might crawl. He does not lie suffering somewhere in those black, netlike passages. To search for him there would drive me mad, I think, though I suppose decency would drive me to it. But he cannot be suffering; he is dead.
Yet he is gone.
I know what other people would say, if they were here to say it. “He never was there. You had a nightmare. You never would have dared to go down into those cellars by yourself.”
But I did go down, and he was there. If you could call that flat, bloody thing himself.... That queer flatness, a kind of emptiness, was what told me he was dead. It was worse, somehow, than the crushed part of his head, than the stains.... It is gone now, that thing that used to be a person. A person I never met, but whom people I know knew and liked. Someone must have taken it away. Who? Who—except the murderer?
That means that he did not go away after he killed old Mattia. Or that if he did, he came back.
Is he here now? Lurking somewhere in this huge place? Watching for me, perhaps, with those eyes I never saw and must not try to imagine. Listening....
I must get help! Yet how can I go away and leave Richard alone here, hurt? My husband is unconscious; no sane man would hurt him. But if the murderer thought him only asleep—