Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994

“It’s Gary, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

He whispered in my ear to avoid being overheard.

“That model stabbed him.”

His head was shiny under the illumination of the floodlights. He kept moving it from side to side, trying yet to deny the undeniable. “Stabbed herself, too. Can you believe it? How am I going to keep this one quiet, that’s what I want to know. It’s only five months since last time...”

“Stabbed, but not dead?” I was praying my premonition was wrong. If it hadn’t been for me, Gary would not have known about the apartment, would still be downtown content with crooked teeth.

“Not dead? Last count was sixteen knife wounds. On herself she had better aim. That only took one.”

A stretcher came out. The body was covered, but I recognized the size and shape. A couple of people yelled, but before they could stop me, I ripped off the sheets.

His wounds were below the neck. Death had not stolen Gary’s hard-won beauty. I suppose I fainted. Next thing I knew I was lying on the leather couch in Mr. Gillespie’s office. When I awoke, he was on the telephone speaking in tones of amusement that were plainly false. “Nah, just coincidence... Don’t be ridiculous — tenants will be fighting for that place!”

That place. That obscene place where people died, where something fiendish urged them to murder others and themselves, be they occupant or friend. However much he denied it, the evidence was overpowering. A ghastly thing lived in that place.

I mourned. I went to work, that was all. I stopped seeing Philip and everybody else. I mourned Gary, but also the demise of the friendly world I thought I knew.

Evil lurked. It waited in ordinary, well-lit places like apartments and supermarkets and bowling alleys, not mausoleums. Evil. A word reserved for the likes of Hitler and the devil. A word we rarely use and never expect to encounter in anything but human form. Evil human beings can be hunted and punished. How could we defend ourselves against a devil? — evil formed in a dimension we did not understand? How could we hope to understand it if men like Mr. Gillespie forever denied its existence, thwarted investigation with words like superstition and coincidence? Something diabolical dwelled in that apartment, and it had a savage, voracious appetite.

One consolation sustained me. The day after Gary’s murder headlines screamed across the city. Ten Tragic Deaths Haunt Midtown Apartment.

And so the place remained empty. No lunatic apartment hunter had surfaced. Yet.

Spring came. Violet-colored crocuses pushed their way into my joyless existence. Children reappeared on park swings. Where evil dwelled, so did kindness and decency and all things heavenly. I concentrated on that and began to feel better.

One Saturday morning I was carrying groceries, weighing the pros and cons of giving Philip a call, when Mr. Gillespie caught me in the lobby.

“I’m telling all the tenants. Management is willing to rent the apartment for half price. Tell your friends, okay? Outsiders won’t look, but you people — you know how safe the building is, right? You could tell your friends?”

For the first time in my life I knew what the urge to spit felt like.

“Don’t ask me to talk, Mr. Gillespie. If I did, I’d be on a soapbox demanding that you board that place up, or at the very least that you smash that mirror. I should have made it clearer at the beginning. It was eerie, threatening. Gary and I weren’t ourselves in it. And it’s the only common factor, the only appointment never changed in all your ‘coincidences.’ ”

For a moment he looked mystified. Then he remembered.

“The mirror? Is that all? Listen, you don’t like it? I’ll rip it off! You remember the apartment, right? Even without the mirror it’s beautiful. Perfect for a young lady like you.” His hand grasped my arm. I pulled away and walked to the elevator. He followed.

“Listen, fifty percent. That’s dirt cheap!”

I almost pitied him. An empty unit in a nice building in the heart of town might be prompting “management” to threaten him with the unemployment office. But he should be standing against them fighting to shut the place up, not groveling.

“Ten cents on the dollar, chop down the mirror, and I’ll consider it.” I said it through clenched teeth, meant it to be an insult, a suggestion so absurd he would leave me alone. To a salesman it must have sounded like a first offer, for his eyes lit and his answer astonished me.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. The elevator arrived, and I made my escape.

Ten minutes later he was at my door grinning from ear to ear and jangling his set of master keys.

“Management says they can’t go that low, but they’ll go another ten percent. Because you’re already a good tenant. That’s forty cents on the dollar and a release on this unit. They’ll even give you the new unit for an extra year. That’s two years, no rate increase!”

So. Bad publicity was enough to make even moguls capitulate. Since it was doubtful they would profit at a rent of forty percent, what they really needed was a tenant who would walk out on her own two feet, survive long enough to prove the apartment was safe. I toyed with the idea of asking for it free of charge, but frankly I was afraid they’d give it to me.