Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, December 1956 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

- thirty-eight, maybe, he thought, with a short barrel. Warm from the depth of the bag and the company of the bottle. The disbelieving part of his mind stood back and knew that noth- ing like this could possibly be hap- pening to him.The rest of him was jolted to incoherence. He could only open his hand flat and shove the gun back into hers, stammer- ing, “No, no, no!” “I’m young and pretty!” she was saying, her hard fingers clenched around his, trying to fold his hand shut on the gun. “Here, take it! I know what I am. I know how I look. Take it, you little damned fool, and do what you stopped me from doing! I can’t do it alone. I need help. Help me! Please!” A wave of the most intense feel- ing washed over him, pity, terror, disbelief all hopelessly canceling each other out. Things like this can’t happen, he thought, not in real life, not to me. And he re- membered with horrified revulsion that he had sat beside her, talked to her, walked with her, actually felt the gun bump against his side, and had not even begun to guess what he was getting into. The cars went by a million miles away, each snatching with it a small, tempo- rary haven of light and safety and leaving him here in the dark, strug- gling with the woman and the gun. He said, “No, no, let me go, Anne! Don’t! Anne!” But her fin- gers were hard as bone and in the desperate, incoherent. struggle nei- ther of them quite knew which held the gun. 7 He thought, Surely somebody will see this. Surely somebody will stop and help me. This can’t be happening—not like this. Not to me! But he felt the gun hard in his palm, and her finger somehow pressed between the trigger-guard and his, very cold, very strong. No matter how hard he fought to let it go, when the pressure tightened on his finger, somehow, somehow the end of the struggle came and she got what she wanted. There had been a terrible jolt and flash between them, and he was not sure at first which of. them it had struck. Though. the noise was loud he felt an immense silence and wondered if it were he who was hit. Because guns kill, he told himself wonderingly. Real guns kill. . Then he felt her fold softly up against him and slide down. It was strange how soft she was, when she had been nothing but hard, twig-like bone before. Her hat fell off and rolled in half a circle, the pale straw horse and rider canter- ing in the moonlight. He stood there shaking con- vulsively, the gun in his hand shaking too. Everything wavered. He had the strange feeling that until a moment ago there had been three of them: Anne, himself, and : 10 a ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE EOMMIGLOOO KS .(e©