Skeleton Crew Read online

  "Is there another Fresca, love? My throat's dry as hell."

  The writer's wife fetched him one silently, and when she handed it to him she impulsively bent and kissed his wrinkled, alligator-hide cheek. He smiled, and his eyes sparkled in the dim light. She was, however, a good and kindly woman, and the sparkle did not in any way fool her. It was never merriness which made eyes sparkle that way.

  "Thank you, Meg."

  He drank deeply, coughed, waved away the offer of a cigarette.

  "I've had enough of those for the evening. I'm going to quit them entirely. In my next incarnation. So to speak.

  "The rest of my own tale really needs no telling. It would have against it the only sin that any tale can ever really be guilty of--it's predictable. They fished something like forty bottles of Black Velvet out of my car, a good many of them empty. I was babbling about elves, and electricity, and Fornits, and plutonium miners, and fornus, and I seemed utterly insane to them, and that of course is exactly what I was.

  "Now here's what happend in Omaha while I was driving around--according to the gas credit slips in the Chevy's glove compartment--five northeastern states. All of this, you understand, was information I obtained from Jane Thorpe over a long and painful period of correspondence, which culminated in a face-to-face meeting in New Haven, where she now lives, shortly after I was dismissed from the sanitarium as a reward for finally recanting. At the end of that meeting we wept in each other's arms, and that was when I began to believe that there could be a real life for me--perhaps even happiness--again.

  "That day, around three o'clock in the afternoon, there was a knock at the door of the Thorpe home. It was a telegraph boy. The telegram was from me--the last item of our unfortunate correspondence. It read: REG HAVE RELIABLE INFORMATION THAT RACKNE IS DYING IT'S THE LITTLE BOY ACCORDING TO BELLIS BELLIS SAYS THE BOY'S NAME IS JIMMY FORNIT SOME FORNUS HENRY.

  "In case that marvelous Howard Baker question of What did he know and when did he know it? has gone through your mind, I can tell you that I knew Jane had hired a cleaning woman; I didn't know--except through Bellis--that she had a li'l-devil son named Jimmy. I suppose you'll have to take my word for that, although in all fairness I have to add that the shrinks who worked on my case over the next two and a half years never did.

  "When the telegram came, Jane was at the grocery store. She found it, after Reg was dead, in one of his back pockets. The time of transmission and delivery were both noted on it, along with the added line No telephone/Deliver original. Jane said that although the telegram was only a day old, it had been so much handled that it looked as if he'd had it for a month.

  "In a way, that telegram, those twenty-six words, was the real flexible bullet, and I fired it directly into Reg Thorpe's brain all the way from Paterson, New Jersey, and I was so fucking drunk I don't even remember doing it.

  "During the last two weeks of his life, Reg had fallen into a pattern that seemed normality itself. He got up at six, made breakfast for himself and his wife, then wrote for an hour. Around eight o'clock he would lock his study and take the dog for a long, leisurely walk around the neighborhood. He was very forthcoming on these walks, stopping to chat with anyone who wanted to chat with him, tying the pooch outside a nearby cafe to have a midmorning cup of coffee, then rambling on again. He rarely got back to the house before noon. On many days it was twelve-thirty or one o'clock. Part of this was an effort to escape the garrulous Gertrude Rulin, Jane believed, because his pattern hadn't really begun to solidify until a couple of days after she started working for them.

  "He would eat a light lunch, lie down for an hour or so, then get up and write for two or three hours. In the evenings he would sometimes go next door to visit with the young people, either with Jane or alone; sometimes he and Jane took in a movie, or just sat in the living room and read. They turned in early, Reg usually a while before Jane. She wrote there was very little sex, and what there was of it was unsuccessful for both of them. 'But sex isn't as important for most women,' she said, 'and Reg was working full-out again, and that was a reasonable substitute for him. I would say that, under the circumstances, those last two weeks were the happiest in the last five years.' I damn near cried when I read that.

  "I didn't know anything about Jimmy, but Reg did. Reg knew everything except for the most important fact--that Jimmy had started coming to work with his mother.

  "How furious he must have been when he got my telegram and began to realize! Here they were, after all. And apparently his own wife was one of them, because she was in the house when Gertrude and Jimmy were there, and she had never said a thing to Reg about Jimmy. What was it he had written to me in that earlier letter? 'Sometimes I wonder about my wife.'

  "When she arrived home on that day the telegram came, she found Reg gone. There was a note on the kitchen table which said, 'Love--I've gone down to the bookstore. Back by suppertime.' This seemed perfectly fine to Jane... but if Jane had known about my telegram, the very normality of that note would have scared the hell out of her, I think. She would have understood that Reg believed she had changed sides.

  "Reg didn't go near any bookstore. He went to Littlejohn's Gun Emporium downtown. He bought a .45 automatic and two thousand rounds of ammunition. He would have bought an AK-70 if Littlejohn's had been allowed to sell them. He meant to protect his Fornit, you see. From Jimmy, from Gertrude, from Jane. From them.

  "Everything went according to established routine the next morning. She remembered thinking he was wearing an awfully heavy sweater for such a warm fall day, but that was all. The sweater, of course, was because of the gun. He went out to walk the dog with the .45 stuffed into the waistband of his chinos.

  "Except the restaurant where he usually got his morning coffee was as far as he went, and he went directly there, with no lingering or conversation along the way. He took the pup around to the loading area, tied its leash to a railing, and then went back toward his house by way of backyards.

  "He knew the schedule of the young people next door very well; knew they would all be out. He knew where they kept their spare key. He let himself in, went upstairs, and watched his own house.

  "At eight-forty he saw Gertrude Rulin arrive. And Gertrude wasn't alone. There was indeed a small boy with her. Jimmy Rulin's boisterous first-grade behavior convinced the teacher and the school guidance counselor almost at once that everyone (except maybe Jimmy's mother, who could have used a rest from Jimmy) would be better off if he waited another year. Jimmy was stuck with repeating kindergarten, and he had afternoon sessions for the first half of the year. The two day-care centers in her area were full, and she couldn't change to afternoons for the Thorpes because she had another cleaning job on the other side of town from two to four.

  "The upshot of everything was Jane's reluctant agreement that Gertrude could bring Jimmy with her until she was able to make other arrangements. Or until Reg found out, as he was sure to do.

  "She thought Reg might not mind--he had been so sweetly reasonable about everything lately. On the other hand, he might have a fit. If that happened, other arrangements would have to be made. Gertrude said she understood. And for heaven's sake, Jane added, the boy was not to touch any of Reg's things. Gertrude said for sure not; the mister's study door was locked and would stay locked.

  "Thorpe must have crossed between the two yards like a sniper crossing no-man's-land. He saw Gertrude and Jane washing bed linen in the kitchen. He didn't see the boy. He moved along the side of the house. No one in the dining room. No one in the bedroom. And then, in the study, where Reg had morbidly expected to see him, there Jimmy was. The kid's face was hot with excitement, and Reg surely must have believed that here was a bona fide agent of they at last.

  "The boy was holding some sort of death-ray in his hand, it was pointed at the desk... and from inside his typewriter, Reg could hear Rackne screaming.

  "You may think I'm attributing subjective data to a man who's now dead--or, to be more blunt, making stuff up. But I
'm not. In the kitchen, both Jane and Gertrude heard the distinctive warbling sound of Jimmy's plastic space blaster ... he'd been shooting it around the house ever since he started coming with his mother, and Jane hoped daily that its batteries would go dead. There was no mistaking the sound. No mistaking the place it was coming from, either--Reg's study.

  "The kid really was Dennis the Menace material, you know--if there was a room in the house where he wasn't supposed to go, that was the one place he had to go, or die of curiosity. It didn't take him long to discover that Jane kept a key to Reg's study on the dining-room mantel, either. Had he been in there before? I think so. Jane said she remembered giving the boy an orange three or four days before, and later, when she was clearing out the house, she found orange peels under the little studio sofa in that room. Reg didn't eat oranges--claimed he was allergic to them.

  "Jane dropped the sheet she was washing back into the sink and rushed into the bedroom. She heard the loud wah-wah-wah of the space blaster, and she heard Jimmy, yelling: 'I'll getcha! You can't run! I can seeya through the GLASS!' And ... she said ... she said that she heard something screaming. A high, despairing sound, she said, so full of pain it was almost insupportable.

  " 'When I heard that,' she said, 'I knew that I would have to leave Reg no matter what happened, because all the old wives' tales were true ... madness was catching. Because it was Rackne I was hearing; somehow that rotten little kid was shooting Rackne, killing it with a two-dollar space-gun from Kresge's.

  " 'The study door was standing open, the key in it. Later on that day I saw one of the dining-room chairs standing by the mantel, with Jimmy's sneaker prints all over the seat. He was bent over Reg's typewriter table. He--Reg--had an old office model with glass inserts in the sides. Jimmy had the muzzle of his blaster pressed against one of those and was shooting it into the typewriter. Wah-wah-wah-wah, and purple pulses of light shooting out of the typewriter, and suddenly I could understand everything Reg had ever said about electricity, because although that thing ran on nothing more than harmless old C or D cells, it really did feel as if there were waves of poison coming out of that gun and rolling through my head and frying my brains.

  " ' "I seeya in there!" Jimmy was screaming, and his face was filled with a small boy's glee--it was both beautiful and somehow gruesome. "You can't run away from Captain Future! You're dead, alien!" And that screaming ... getting weaker ... smaller . . .

  " ' "Jimmy, you stop it!" I yelled.

  " 'He jumped. I'd startled him. He turned around ... looked at me ... stuck out his tongue... and then pushed the blaster against the glass panel and started shooting again. Wah-wah-wah, and that rotten purple light.

  " 'Gertrude was coming down the hall, yelling for him to stop, to get out of there, that he was going to get the whipping of his life... and then the front door burst open and Reg came up the hall, bellowing. I got one good look at him and understood that he was insane. The gun was in his hand.

  " ' "Don't you shoot my baby!" Gertrude screamed when she saw him, and reached out to grapple with him. Reg simply clubbed her aside.

  " 'Jimmy didn't even seem to realize any of this was going on--he just went on shooting the space blaster into the typewriter. I could see that purple light pulsing in the blackness between the keys, and it looked like one of those electrical arcs they tell you not to look at without a pair of special goggles because otherwise it might boil your retinas and make you blind.

  " 'Reg came in, shoving past me, knocking me over.

  " ' "RACKNE!" he screamed. "YOU'RE KILLING RACKNE!"

  " 'And even as Reg was rushing across the room, apparently planning to kill that child,' Jane told me, 'I had time to wonder just how many times he had been in that room, shooting that gun into the typewriter when his mother and I were maybe upstairs changing beds or in the backyard hanging clothes where we couldn't hear the wah-wah-wah ... where we couldn't hear that thing ... the Fornit ... inside, screaming.

  " 'Jimmy didn't stop even when Reg came bursting in--just kept shooting into the typewriter as if he knew it was his last chance, and since then I have wondered if perhaps Reg wasn't right about they, too--only maybe they just sort of float around, and every now and then they dive into a person's head like someone doing a double-gainer into a swimming pool and they get that somebody to do the dirty work and then check out again, and the guy they were in says, "Huh? Me? Did what?"

  " 'And in the second before Reg got there, the screaming from inside the typewriter turned into a brief, drilling shriek--and I saw blood splatter all over the inside of that glass insert, as if whatever was in there had finally just exploded, the way they say a live animal will explode if you put it in a microwave oven. I know how crazy it sounds, but I saw that blood--it hit the glass in a blot and then started to run.

  " ' "Got it," Jimmy said, highly satisfied. "Got--"

  " 'Then Reg threw him all the way across the room. He hit the wall. The gun was jarred out of his hand, hit the floor, and broke. It was nothing but plastic and Eveready batteries, of course.

  " 'Reg looked into the typewriter, and he screamed. Not a scream of pain or fury, although there was fury in it--mostly it was a scream of grief. He turned toward the boy then. Jimmy had fallen to the floor. and whatever he had been--if he ever was anything more than just a mischievous little boy--now he was just a six-year-old in terror. Reg pointed the gun at him, and that's all I remember.' "

  The editor finished his soda and put the can carefully aside.

  "Gertrude Rulin and Jimmy Rulin remember enough to make up for the lack," he said. "Jane called out, 'Reg, NO!' and when he looked around at her, she got to her feet and grappled with him. He shot her, shattering her left elbow, but she didn't let go. As she continued to grapple with him, Gertrude called to her son, and Jimmy ran to her.

  "Reg pushed Jane away and shot her again. This bullet tore along the left side of her skull. Even an eighth of an inch to the right and he would have killed her. There is little doubt of that, and none at all that, if not for Jane Thorpe's intervention, he would have surely killed Jimmy Rulin and quite possibly the boy's mother as well.

  "He did shoot the boy--as Jimmy ran into his mother's arms just outside the door. The bullet entered Jimmy's left buttock on a downward course. It exited from his upper-left thigh, missing the bone, and passed through Gertrude Rulin's shin. There was a lot of blood, but no major damage done to either.

  "Gertrude slammed the study door and carried her screaming, bleeding son down the hallway and out the front door."

  The editor paused again, thoughtfully.

  "Jane was either unconscious by that time or she has deliberately chosen to forget what happened next. Reg sat down in his office chair and put the muzzle of the .45 against the center of his forehead. He pulled the trigger. The bullet did not pass through his brain and leave him a living vegetable, nor did it travel in a semicircle around his skull and exit harmlessly on the far side. The fantasy was flexible, but the final bullet was as hard as it could be. He fell forward across the typewriter, dead.

  "When the police broke in, they found him that way; Jane was sitting in a far comer, semiconscious.

  "The typewriter was covered with blood, presumably filled with blood as well; head wounds are very, very messy.

  "All of the blood was Type O.

  "Reg Thorpe's type.

  "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my story; I can tell no more." Indeed, the editor's voice had been reduced to little more than a husky whisper.

  There was none of the usual post-party chatter, or even the awkwardly bright conversation people sometimes use to cover a cocktail-party indiscretion of some moment, or to at least disguise the fact that things had at some point become much more serious than a dinner-party situation usually warranted.

  But as the writer saw the editor to his car, he was unable to forbear one final question. "The story," he said. "What happened to the story?"

  "You mean Reg's--"

  " 'The Balla
d of the Flexible Bullet,' that's right. The story that caused it all. That was the real flexible bullet--for you, if not for him. What in the hell happened to this story that was so goddam great?"