His house was still there, sitting
at the end of Elm Street, at the end of town, on the
edge of the prairie. It was a very old house.
It was decorated with gingerboard, a rusted-out tin
rooster-comb running the peak of the roof and stained
glass window transoms; and the top of the house was
joined to the ground floor by lapped fishscales, as
though it was a mermaid instead of a house. The
house was a golden house. It had been painted
brown against the dust, but the keening wind, the
relentless sun, the savage rape of the thunderstorms,
they had all bleached the brown paint into a shining
pure gold.
Sam stepped inside and leaned back
against the front door, the door of full-length glass
with a border of glass emeralds and rubies. He
leaned back and breathed deep.
The house didn’t smell old.
It smelled new. It smelled like sawdust and fresh-hewn
lumber as bright and blond as a high school senior’s
crewcut.
He walked across the flowered carpet.
The carpet didn’t mind footsteps or bright sun.
It never became worn or faded. It grew brighter
with the years, the roses turning redder, the sunflowers
becoming yellower.
The parlor looked the same as it always
did, clean and waiting to be used. The cane-backed
sofa and chairs eagerly waiting to be sat upon, the
bead-shaded kerosene lamps ready to burst into light.
Sam went into his workshop. This
had once been the ground level master bedroom, but
he had had to make the change. The work table
held its share of radios, toasters, TV sets, an electric
train, a spring-wind Victrola. Sam threw the
nails onto the table and crossed the room, running
his fingers along the silent keyboard of the player
piano. He looked out the window. The bulldozers
had made the ground rectangular, level and brown,
turning it into a gigantic half-cent stamp. He
remembered the mail and raised the window and reached
down into the mailbox. It was on this side of
the house, because only this side was technically
within city limits.
As he came up with the letters, Sam
Collins saw a man sighting along a plumbline towards
his house. He shut the window.
Some of the letters didn’t have
any postage stamps, just a line of small print about
a $300 fine. Government letters. He went
over and forced them into the tightly packed coal
stove. All the trash would be burned out in the
cold weather.
Collins sat down and looked through
the rest of his mail. A new catalogue of electronic
parts. A bulky envelope with two paperback novels
by Richard S. Prather and Robert Bloch he had ordered.
A couple of letters from hams. He tossed the
mail on the table and leaned back.
He thought about what had happened in the hardware
store.
It wasn’t surprising it had
happened to him. Things like that were bound
to happen to him. He had just been lucky that
Ed Michaels hadn’t called the sheriff.
What had got into him? He had never been a sex
maniac before! But still ... it was hardly unexpected.
Might as well wait to start on those
rabbit cages until tomorrow, he decided. This
evening he felt like exploring.
The house was so big, and packed with
so many things that he never found and examined them
all. Or if he did, he forgot a lot about the things
between times, so it was like reading a favorite book
over again, always discovering new things in it.
The parlor was red in the fading light,
and the hall beyond the sliding doors was deeply shadowed.
In the sewing room, he remembered, in the drawers
of the treadle machine the radio was captured.
The rings and secret manuals of the days when radio
had been alive. He hadn’t looked over those
things in some little time.
He looked up the shadowed stairway.
He remembered the night, a few weeks before Christmas
when he had been twelve and really too old to believe,
his mother had said she was going up to see if Santa
Claus had left any packages around a bit early.
They often gave him his presents early, since they
were never quite sure he would live until Christmas.
But his mother had been playing a
trick on him. She hadn’t been going up
after packages. She had gone up those stairs to
murder his father.
She had shot him in the back of the
head with his Army Colt .45 from the first war.
Collins never quite understood why the hole in back
was so neat and the one in front where it came out
was so messy.
After he went to live with Aunt Amy
and the house had been boarded up, he heard them talking,
Aunt Amy and her boy friend, fat Uncle Ralph.
And they had said his mother had murdered his father
because he had gone ahead and made her get pregnant
again and she was afraid it would be another one like
Sam.
Sam Collins knew she must have planned
it a long time in advance. She had filled up
the bathtub with milk, real milk, and she went in after
she had done it and took a bath in the milk. Then
she slit her wrists.
When Sam Collins had run down the
stairs, screaming, and barged into the bathroom, he
had found the tub looking like a giant stick of peppermint
candy.
Aunt Amy had been good to him.
Because he didn’t talk for about
a year after he found the bodies, most people thought
he was simple-minded. But Aunt Amy had always
treated him just like a regular boy. That was
embarrassing sometimes, but still it was better than
what he got from the others.
The doctor hadn’t wanted to
perform the operation on his clubfoot. He said
it would be an unproductive waste of his time and talent,
that he owed it to the world to use them to the very
best advantage. Finally he agreed. The operation
took about thirty seconds. He stuck a knife into
Sam’s foot and went snick-snick.
A couple of weeks later, his foot was healed and it
was just like anybody else’s. Aunt Amy had
paid him $500 in payments, only he returned the money
order for the last fifty dollars and wished them Merry
Christmas.
Sam Collins could work after that.
When Aunty Amy and Uncle Ralph disappeared, he opened
up the old house and started doing odd jobs for people
who weren’t very afraid of him any more.
That first day had been quite a shock,
when he discovered that not in all these years had
anybody cleaned the bathtub.
Sometimes, when he was taking his
Saturday night soaker he still got kind of a funny
feeling. But he knew it was only rust from the
faucets.
Collins sighed. It seemed like
a long time since he had seen his mother coming down
those stairs....
He stopped, his throat aching with tightness.
Something was very strange.
His mother was coming down the stairs right now.
She was walking down the stairs, one
step, two steps, coming closer to him.
Collins ran up the stairs, prepared
to run through the phantom to prove it wasn’t
there.
The figure raised a gun and pointed it at him.
This time, she was going to shoot him.
It figured.
He always had bad luck.
“Stop!” the woman on the
stairs said. “Stop or I’ll shoot,
Mr. Collins!”
Collins stopped, catching to the bannister.
He squinted hard, and as a stereoptic slide lost its
depth when you shut one eye, the woman on the stairs
was no longer his mother. She was young, pretty,
brunette and sweet-faced, and the gun she held shrunk
from an old Army Colt to a .22 target pistol.
“Who are you?” Collins demanded.
The girl took a grip on the gun with
both hands and held it steady on him.
“I’m Nancy Comstock,”
she said. “You tried to assault my mother
a half hour ago.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’ve
never seen you before.”
“Yes, you have. I’ve
been away to school a lot, but you’ve seen me
around. I’ve had my eye on you. I know
about men like you. I know what has to be done.
I came looking for you in your house for this.”
The bore of the gun was level with
his eye as he stood a few steps below her. Probably
if she fired now, she would kill him. Or more
likely he would only be blinded or paralyzed; that
was about his luck.
“Are you going to use that gun?” he asked.
“Not unless I have to.
I only brought it along for protection. I came
to help you, Mr. Collins.”
“Help me?”
“Yes, Mr. Collins. You’re sick.
You need help.”
He looked the girl over. She
was a half-dozen years younger than he was. In
most states, she couldn’t even vote yet.
But still, maybe she could help, at that. He
didn’t know much about girls and their abilities.
“Why don’t we go into
the kitchen and have some coffee?” Collins suggested.