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The Whimper of Whipped Dogs
On the night after the day she had stained the louvered window shutters of her new apartment on
East 52nd Street, Beth saw a woman slowly and hideously knifed to death in the courtyard of her
building. She was one of twenty-six witnesses to the ghoulish scene, and, like them, she did nothing
to stop it.
She saw it all, every moment of it, without break and with no impediment to her view. Quite
madly, the thought crossed her mind as she watched in horrified fascination, that she had the sort of
marvelous line of observation Napoleon had sought when he caused to have constructed at the
Comédie-Française theaters, a curtained box at the rear, so he could watch the audience as well as
the stage. The night was clear, the moon was full, she had just turned off the 11:30 movie on
channel 2 after the second commercial break, realizing she had already seen Robert Taylor in
Westward the Women, and had disliked it the first time; and the apartment was quite dark.
She went to the window, to raise it six inches for the night’s sleep, and she saw the woman
stumble into the courtyard. She was sliding along the wall, clutching her left arm with her right
hand. Con Ed had installed mercury-vapor lamps on the poles; there had been sixteen assaults in
seven months; the courtyard was illuminated with a chill purple glow that made the blood streaming
down the woman’s left arm look black and shiny. Beth saw every detail with utter clarity, as though
magnified a thousand power under a microscope, solarized as if it had been a television commercial.
The woman threw back her head, as if she were trying to scream, but there was no sound.
Only the traffic on First Avenue, late cabs foraging for singles paired for the night at Maxwell’s
Plum and Friday’s and Adam’s Apple. But that was over there, beyond. Where she was, down there
seven floors below, in the courtyard, everything seemed silently suspended in an invisible force-
field.
Beth stood in the darkness of her apartment, and realized she had raised the window
completely. A tiny balcony lay just over the low sill; now not even glass separated her from the
sight; just the wrought iron balcony railing and seven floors to the courtyard below.
The woman staggered away from the wall, her head still thrown back, and Beth could see
she was in her mid-thirties, with dark hair cut in a shag; it was impossible to tell if she was pretty:
terror had contorted her features and her mouth was a twisted black slash, opened but emitting no
sound. Cords stood out in her neck. She had lost one shoe, and her steps were uneven, threatening to
dump her to the pavement.
The man came around the comer of the building, into the courtyard. The knife he held was
enormous--or perhaps it only seemed so: Beth remembered a bone-handled fish knife her father had
used one summer at the lake in Maine: it folded back on itself and locked, revealing eight inches of
serrated blade. The knife in the hand of the dark man in the courtyard seemed to be similar.
The woman saw him and tried to run, but he leaped across the distance between them and
grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back as though he would slash her throat in the next
reaper-motion.
Then the woman screamed.
The sound skirled up into the courtyard like bats trapped in an echo chamber, unable to find
a way out, driven mad. It went on and on....
The man struggled with her and she drove her elbows into his sides and he tried to protect
himself, spinning her around by her hair, the terrible scream going up and up and never stopping.
She came loose and he was left with a fistful of hair tom out by the roots. As she spun out, he
slashed straight across and opened her up just below the breasts. Blood sprayed through her clothing
and the man was soaked; it seemed to drive him even more berserk. He went at her again, as she
