To Death! – Three Stories by Cornell Woolrich

Book Details

To Death! Three stories of suspense and murder, fall guys and frames, and good women and bad.

The Fatal Footlights (1950)
Match wits with Police-Dick Benson as he tries to trap the brazen murderer who killed golden Gilda before his eyes—on a burlesque runway.
Chapter One – Curtains for the Cutie
Chapter Two – Vanishing Bottle
Chapter Three – Brazen Killer
Chapter Four – An Eye for an Eye
Chapter Five – The Lady Says “Die!”

The Woman’s Touch (1938)
Warning: Never embroider on murder

And So To Death (1941)
Ever had a nightmare—and dreamed you killed a man? And then did you ever wake up and find him dead? The gripping story of a man whose worst dreams came true. A short novel.
Chapter I – The First Horror
Chapter II – The Key
Chapter III – Dead End
Chapter IV – The Eighth Image
Chapter V – Inquisition
Chapter VI – There Was A Murder
Chapter VII – Wrong Way Out
Chapter VIII – The Candle Flame
Chapter IX – Kill Me Again
Chapter X – The Spark Went Out
Chapter XI – Last Ordeal

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) is one of the most highly regarded writers of mystery and suspense of all of the writers from the pulp fiction era.

Under his pseudonym “William Irish”, Woolrich wrote the story It Had to Be Murder, published in Dime Detective Magazine (February 1942), which was the source of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window. François Truffaut filmed Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black in 1968, and followed that the next year by filming Waltz into Darkness as Mississippi Mermaid.

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Excerpt: And So To Death!

Chapter I

The First Horror

FIRST all I could see was this beautiful girl’s face; like a white, slightly luminous mask swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little bluish spotlight of its own was trained on it from below.

It was so beautiful and so false, and I seemed to know it so well.

There was no danger yet; just this separate, shell-like face-mask standing out. But there was danger somewhere around; I knew that already, and I knew that I couldn’t escape it.

I knew that everything I was about to do, I had to do; and yet I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to turn and get out of wherever this was.

I even turned and tried to, but I couldn’t any more. There had been only one door when I slipped in just now. It had been simple enough. Now when I turned, the place was nothing but doors —an octagon of doors, set frame to frame with no free wall-space between.

I tried one, another, a third. They were the wrong ones; I couldn’t get out.

And by doing this, I had unleashed the latent menace that was lurking there around me all the time; I had brought on all the sooner the very thing I had tried to escape from. Though I didn’t know what it was yet.

The flickering white mask slowly, before my horrified eyes, became malign, vindictive. It snarled: “There he is right behind you. Get him!” The eyes snapped like fuses, the teeth glistened in a grinning bite.

The light became more diffused: it was murky, bluish-green now, the kind of light there would be under water. And in it my doom slowly reared its head, with a terrible inevitability.

This was male.

First it—he—was just a black huddle, like solidified smoke, at the feet of this opalescent, revengeful mask. Then it slowly uncoiled, rose, lengthened and at the same time narrowed, until it loomed there before me upright.

It came toward me with cataleptic slowness. I wanted to turn and run, in the minute, the half minute that was all there was left now. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t lift a foot; I just wavered back and forth on a rigid base.

Why I wanted to get out, what It was going to do to me, wasn’t clear. Only there was soul-shriveling fear in it. And horror, more than the mind could contemplate.

The pace was beginning to accelerate now as it near its climax.

He came on, using up the small remaining distance between us. His outline was still indistinct, clotted, like a lumpy clay image. I could see the arms come up from the sides, and couldn’t avoid their lobster-like conjunction.

I could feel the pressure of his hands upon my neck. He held it at the sides rather than in front, as if trying to break it rather than strangle me. The gouge of his thumbs, was excruciating, pressing into the tender slack of flesh right beside and under the jawbone.

I  WENT down in a sort of spiral, around and around, following my head and neck around as he sought to wrench them out of true with my spinal column.

I clawed at the merciless hands, trying to pull them off. I pried one off at last, but it wrenched itself free of my restraint again, trailing a nail-scratch on my forearm just across the knob of the wristbone.

The hand clamped itself back where it had been, with the irresistibility of a suction-cup.

I beat at his arched body from underneath; then—as my resistance weakened —only pushed at it, at last only grasped at it with the instinctive clutch of a drowning man. A button came off loose in my hand and I hung onto it with the senseless tenacity of the dying.

And then I was so long dying, my neck was so long breaking, he tired of the slower surer way. He spoke to the macabre mask. I heard every word clearly: “Hand me that sharp-pointed bore lying over there, or this’ll go on all night.”

Excerpt From: Cornell Woolrich. “To Death!”