The Collection (114 page)

Of course, this one wouldn't be loaded. Maybe my pal Colin
MacCready didn't know I'd read his most recent book, but I had. In it, he told
his ideas about what he called “shock treatment.” Alcoholism was one of the
things it was supposed to help. I won't go into details, but the basic idea is
to scare the pants off the patient.

He'd described several ways of doing it; apparently the
treatment was varied to suit the individual case. I personally thought the idea
was screwy when I read about it, but then I'm not a psychiatrist, thank heaven.
Anyhow, it sounded interesting, and for a moment I wished that that book hadn't
tipped me off in advance so I could tell how I'd feel if things really were
what they were maybe going to be.

The guy with the gun was talking now, to Mac. He said, “Come
out from behind that desk, Doc. You and this other mug stand close together.
Who is he?”

What faint light came in the window fell on Mac's face when
he stood up, and he was doing it well. He didn't look frightened, but he looked
deadly serious, and a little pale. He kept his hands up level with his shoulders.
He started to edge around the desk toward my chair. Then his face got into the
shadow again.

He said, “This is just a friend of mine, Herman. Now---when
did you escape?”

I stood up and bowed ceremoniously. If I'd been sober, by
that time I'd have been suspecting my diagnosis of the situation. There was
something just a little phony about it to be wrong. It was too slow an
approach, it lacked the zip and tempo, the suddenness of shock described in
that book. But I wasn't sober, quite.

Anyhow, I bowed low and said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,”
or something equally idiotic, and started across the room toward the guy Mac
had just addressed as Herman. The gun jerked up in my direction.

I heard Mac call out sharply, “Don't shoot! I'll---” and I
didn't hear the rest of it for something that must have been Mac's fist clouted
me on the side of the jaw. Mac is no lightweight and that wallop had, I
guessed, his whole weight behind it. I went down, groggy, but not completely
out.

Something---it must have been common sense---told me to stay
there. I heard Mac say, “Whew!” and this guy Herman say coldly, “Another funny
move like that from either of you---”

“Another funny move won't happen, Herman,” said Mac,
soothingly. “My friend is a little drunk, that's all. Quite a little. What can
I do for you?”

“First, you will tie up your friend so I'll not have to
watch him. Who else is in the house?”

I heard Mac say, “No one, Herman. I have one servant but he
has the day off. Drove in to Wellfleet.”

He was telling the truth, I knew. That proved nothing one
way or the other, of course. Mac said, “There's rope in the kitchen, Herman.
Shall I---”

“Take off his necktie and yours, Doc. You tie his ankles
with one and his wrists, behind him, with the other. Tight.”

Mac came over and untied my cravat. He pretended to have
trouble unknotting it, and bent down close and whispered. “Careful, Bryce.
Homicidal maniac. Escaped. I had to sock you or---”

He didn't have to finish that “or---” if the rest of it was
true. At an order from the man with the scattergun, he stepped back. At another
order, he opened a drawer in his desk in which he kept a gun and then stepped
back flat against the wall while the maniac pocketed the gun.

Then he said, “Sit down, Doc.” He kept the scattergun in his
hand ready for action.

I'd rolled over, cautiously, so I could keep an eye on what
went on. Mac had tied my wrists and ankles, and had done a good job of it,
probably thinking he'd be checked up on it. I saw Mac cross cautiously to the
desk and sit down.

He said, “What are you going to do, Herman?”

Sitting at the desk, Mac was in what little light came in
from the windows. The other man was now nothing but a huge dark shadow standing
there. He didn't say anything for a moment, and in the silence you could hear
the waves lapping on the shore outside and the far squeaky cry of a circling
gull.

He said, “I'm going back to finish. To kill the rest of
them. Do you think I'm crazy?” He laughed a little, as though he had said
something very funny.

“Your father and your brother both?” Mac's voice was quiet.
“Why? Your sister---well, I thought you killed her, Herman, because there was
always enmity between you. But Kurt---what have you got against Kurt? Why
should you want to kill your brother?”

The madman chuckled. His voice started out soft, almost a
whisper in the darkness, and got louder. “The
ears,
Doc. Like the rest
of them. Dad, too. I never told anybody about that, but I didn't really hate
Lila, except for them. Those damned ears---they---”

Unless it was magnificent acting, he was starkly mad. His
voice had risen in pitch and volume until he was shouting meaningless
obscenities. I heard Mac's voice cut in quietly, calmly.

“Herman-”

“You can't stop me, Doc. I---I just stopped here to show you
that I'm
not
crazy, like you said I was at the hearing. See? Why don't I
kill you? This friend of yours? Because I don't
have
to. I'll shoot you
in a minute if you try to stop me, both of you, but if what you said about me
was true, why don't I do it now?”

He went on arguing, calmer now, sometimes talking almost
sensibly, sometimes with the perverted logic of paranoia. Mac egged him on,
tried to reason with him from his own premises, tried to convince him without
contradicting flatly any of the madman's statements.

I started quietly to work on the knots in the cravat that
held my wrists behind me. I knew Mac was stalling, trying to hold the fellow as
long as he could. He wasn't stalling for help from me. I knew that from the way
he'd tied those blamed knots so tightly. He figured me as a liability rather
than an asset after that fool stunt I'd pulled, and I couldn't blame him for
that. But I went to work on those knots just the same.

“You won't believe me, Doc,” I heard Herman say. “All right,
so you won't. But don't think I don't know why you're stalling. You think
they're after me, and will trail me here.” He laughed again.

“How did you get away, Herman?”

“They aren't after me, Doc. Not here, I mean. They've got a
swamp surrounded back ten miles from the sanitarium, and I'm supposed to be in
it, armed, and they're taking their time. I've got till morning. I've got lots
of time. It's just getting dark now.”

“Herman, you won't get away with it. They'll catch you
and---”

“And what? Listen, I'm crazy; you said so and you swore to
it, and other doctors, too. If they do catch me, what can they do but put me
back, see? I'm going to tie you up now, Doc, so you won't go running for help.
Stand up and turn around.”

“I'm anxious to talk to you more about your father and about
Kurt. Herman, you mustn't---”

“I've talked enough, Doc. Get up. And before I tie you, I'm
going to hit you on the head hard enough to knock you out, because I don't want
any trouble. But I won't hit hard enough to kill you.”

Mac's voice again, persuasively; the madman's, sharper. He
took a step nearer the desk, and that put him within a yard of where I lay.
Those knots hadn't budged a millimeter. But, standing where the guy was, and
with Mac on hand to finish what I could start, I saw a chance.

If I swiveled around and doubled up my legs and lashed them
out right at the back of his knees, he'd go down like a ton of bricks. And Mac
is no mean scrapper; he should have been able to take over from there.

Maybe if I'd been cold sober, I wouldn't have been ready to take
a chance like that. But I wasn't. And I wasn't entirely convinced that there
wasn't something phony about the set-up. It seemed just a bit theatrical to be
true, like a second act that needs patching.

Anyway, I braced my wrists and heels against the floor and
swiveled myself around, and I made enough noise in doing it to make the guy
with the scattergun take a quick look around behind him to see what was going
on. And that was the end of my little scheme.

I suppose I was lucky he didn't pot me with the gun, but my
luck didn't seem so hot at the moment, for he pulled back his foot and lashed
out a kick at my head that would have killed me if it had landed squarely.

And it missed landing squarely by a narrow margin. I jerked
under it and the toe of his shoe passed safely over, the heel catching my
mouth a glancing but painful blow. There was a taste of blood in my mouth---and
the realization that I'd come within less than an inch of losing my front
teeth. Then and there I abandoned any doubt I'd had about whether that gun was
loaded and whether the man holding it was playing for keeps.

I could hear, but not see, Mac starting across the desk,
trying to close in during the diversion I'd caused. But he didn't have time.
The maniac swung back, raised the barrel of that scattergun and brought it down
on Mac's head with a sickening thump. Mac's momentum carried him on across the
desk and he fell unconscious, on the floor near me.

There didn't seem to be anything to say, so I didn't say it,
and the silence was so thick you could spread it with a knife. The guy who had
just slugged Mac grunted once, then he went out toward the kitchen and came
back with some heavy twine, a ball of it. He kept an eye on me while he tied up
Mac.

Then he said, “You going to lie still while I put some of
this on you, or---” He hefted the gun significantly, a shadowy bludgeon in the
gathering darkness.

“I'll lie still,” I told him. “Is---Mac---all right?”

He came over and began to supplement the two neckties that
held my wrists and ankles with wrappings of the twine. “Sure,” he said, “he's
breathing. I should have killed him and you, too, but---”

He was finishing my ankles now.

I'd been thinking. Maybe I was getting sober or maybe I was
just beginning to feel the effect of what I'd drunk; I don't know. Anyway,
along with the taste of blood in my mouth was a taste of something strictly
phony. I knew now, of course, that this wasn't any idea of Mac's, but it was
still a bad second act.

Yes, that was it---call it a playwright's instinct, but this
was a
second
act; there'd been a first one that I didn't know about. I'd
walked in during the intermission.

“Listen,” I said, “why did you come here at all,
really?”

The moment the words were out, I knew I shouldn't have said
it. He'd just stood up, and the gun was still in his pocket where he'd stuck it
to tie me up. Slowly he took it out again, and, like he was thinking hard while
he was doing it, he swung the muzzle around until it pointed at my head.

At times like that, you think crazy things. The first
thought that popped into my head, while that gun was swinging around
was---“This tears it. It's going to be a
hell
of a second act curtain,
with the hero getting killed!” Sure, I thought of myself as the hero. I don't
know why; but who doesn't?

That screwy notion, though, took just about as long to flash
through my head as it took the gun to move an inch or two. The second thought,
and I guess it was what saved me for the third act, was---“This man isn't
crazy; if he's a real homicidal maniac, then I'm Bill Shakespeare.” And I'm not
Bill Shakespeare, but I
do
have a strong sense of motivation, and that
was the rub here. There
was
a motivation behind the visit of the chap
with the scattergun who was about to use it to scatter my brains over Mac's
carpet. I'd called him on it, and that was how I'd asked for trouble.

And I saw that the reason I was going to die, if I was, concerned
that very question of whether or not he was crazy. He suspected now that I
suspected he wasn't. My only chance was to convince him otherwise, and darned
quick.

I started talking, and I didn't start out by accusing him of
being batty---that would have been a giveaway of what I was trying to do. I
talked fast, but I made my voice soft and calm and soothing, like Mac's had
been when Mac was trying to talk him out of committing a couple of murders. I
talked as though I were talking to a madman and was trying to calm him down.

“Listen,” I told him, “you don't want to shoot me, Herman.
I've never done anything to you, have I? Sure, I made a pass at you before, but
that was because I thought you were going to kill Mac, and Mac's a friend of
mine, Herman. A good friend. You can't blame me for that, can you?” Well, I
went on from there, and I repeated myself with variations, and I guess I got it
across. The gun stayed pointed at my head, but it didn't explode and I began to
think that it wasn't going to.

Funny, come to think of it. Here was a guy who was either a
homicidal maniac or he wasn't, and I felt convinced that if he thought I thought
he was crazy, I'd get by. If he thought I saw through his act, as that
incautious question of mine had indicated, I was a dead duck. And the only way
to convince him that I was being hoodwinked, was to pretend I thought he was
mad and was humoring him. So I humored him; I talked, believe me, I
talked.

And then, abruptly, he grunted and stuck that scattergun
through his belt. He took a large clasp knife from his pocket and opened a
four-inch blade.

He reached down and grabbed a handful of my coatfront and
dragged me across the carpet a couple of yards to where a square of bright
moonlight came in the open window behind Mac's desk, and he held me so my head
was in that moonlight, and---

I gave an involuntary yowl and began to almost wish he'd
decided to use that scattergun after all. He took a handful of my hair in his
left hand, and---sitting on my chest so I couldn't move---he turned my head
around sidewise.

He put the knife down a moment and took hold of my left ear,
bending down as though to examine it carefully. Then he let go and picked up
the knife again. And I remembered what he'd been saying to Mac ten minutes or
so ago---“The
ears,
Doc. Those damned ears---they---”