upending two long poles intertwined with canvas.
The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.
In back of them, over by the door, I see the top of someone’s head appear, then come forward, slowly, fearfully forward. Different from their short-clipped, starkly outlined heads, soft and rippling in contour, and gentle. And as she comes forward into fullface view, I see who she is.
She comes up close to me, stops, and looks at me.
“Then it wasn’t—you?” I whisper.
She shakes her head slightly with a mournful trace of smile. “It wasn’t me,” she whispers back, without taking them into it, just between the two of us, as in the days before. “I didn’t go there to meet you. I didn’t like the way you sounded.” But someone was there, I came across someone there. Someone whose face became hers in my waking dream. The scarf, the blood on the scarf. It’s not my blood, it’s not my scarf. It must belong to someone else. Someone they haven’t even found yet, don’t even know about yet.
The preventive has come too late.
She moves a step closer and bends toward me.
“Careful—watch it,” a voice warns her.
“He won’t hurt me,” she answers understandingly without taking her eyes from mine. “We used to be in love.”
Used to? Then that’s why I’m dying. Because I still am. And you aren’t anymore.
She bends and kisses me, on the forehead, between the eyes. Like a sort of last rite.
And in that last moment, as I’m straining upward to find her lips, as the light is leaving my eyes, the whole night passes before my mind, the way they say your past life does when you’re drowning: the waiter, the night maid, the taxi argument, the call girl, Johnny—it all meshes into start-to-finish continuity. Just like in a story. An organized, step-by-step, timetabled story.
This story.
Afterword to “New York Blues”: “New York Blues” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 1970) is the last, best, and bleakest of the original stories EQMM founding editor Frederic Dannay bought from Woolrich during their long association. Within its minimalist storyline we find virtually every motif, belief, device that had pervaded Woolrich’s fiction for generations: flashes of word magic, touches of evocative song lyrics, love and loneliness, madness and death, paranoia, partial amnesia, total despair. If this was the last story Woolrich completed, he couldn’t have ended his career more fittingly.
THE RAVEN
E DGAR A LLAN P OE
West 84th Street
(Originally published in 1845)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door—
“’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
“’Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is and nothing more.”
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my
The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.
In back of them, over by the door, I see the top of someone’s head appear, then come forward, slowly, fearfully forward. Different from their short-clipped, starkly outlined heads, soft and rippling in contour, and gentle. And as she comes forward into fullface view, I see who she is.
She comes up close to me, stops, and looks at me.
“Then it wasn’t—you?” I whisper.
She shakes her head slightly with a mournful trace of smile. “It wasn’t me,” she whispers back, without taking them into it, just between the two of us, as in the days before. “I didn’t go there to meet you. I didn’t like the way you sounded.” But someone was there, I came across someone there. Someone whose face became hers in my waking dream. The scarf, the blood on the scarf. It’s not my blood, it’s not my scarf. It must belong to someone else. Someone they haven’t even found yet, don’t even know about yet.
The preventive has come too late.
She moves a step closer and bends toward me.
“Careful—watch it,” a voice warns her.
“He won’t hurt me,” she answers understandingly without taking her eyes from mine. “We used to be in love.”
Used to? Then that’s why I’m dying. Because I still am. And you aren’t anymore.
She bends and kisses me, on the forehead, between the eyes. Like a sort of last rite.
And in that last moment, as I’m straining upward to find her lips, as the light is leaving my eyes, the whole night passes before my mind, the way they say your past life does when you’re drowning: the waiter, the night maid, the taxi argument, the call girl, Johnny—it all meshes into start-to-finish continuity. Just like in a story. An organized, step-by-step, timetabled story.
This story.
Afterword to “New York Blues”: “New York Blues” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 1970) is the last, best, and bleakest of the original stories EQMM founding editor Frederic Dannay bought from Woolrich during their long association. Within its minimalist storyline we find virtually every motif, belief, device that had pervaded Woolrich’s fiction for generations: flashes of word magic, touches of evocative song lyrics, love and loneliness, madness and death, paranoia, partial amnesia, total despair. If this was the last story Woolrich completed, he couldn’t have ended his career more fittingly.
THE RAVEN
E DGAR A LLAN P OE
West 84th Street
(Originally published in 1845)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door—
“’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
“’Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is and nothing more.”
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my
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