Дональд Уэстлейк - Collected Stories

By the next day, he was feeling the first touches of remorse. Her voice came back to him, and her face, and he remembered the happiness of their early days together. He picked over the broken bones of all of their argument, and now he could see so clearly the times when he, too, had been in the wrong. He thought back and he could see where he had treated her unfairly, where he had always thought only of himself. She, however, had wanted him to finish the book, not for her sake, but for his own. He had been short-tempered and brutal, and it had been his fault that the arguments had grown, that they had come to detest each other so much.

He thought about how readily and how happily she had agreed to go swimming with him, and he knew that she had taken it as a sign of their reconciliation.

As these thoughts came to him, he felt horrible anguish and remorse. She had been the only woman who had ever returned his love, who had ever seen more in him than a little man stooped over ledgers in a hushed office, and he had destroyed her.

He whispered her name, but she was gone, she was dead, and he had killed her. He sprawled on the sand and wept.

In the following weeks, although he missed her terribly, he grew resigned to the loss. He felt that something dramatic and of massive import had moved through his life, changing him forever. His conscience pained him for the murder, but it was a sweet pain.

Five months later, he was rescued. A small boat came to the island from a bulging gray steam t, and the sailors helped him as he climbed clumsily into the boat. They brought him to the steamer, and helped him up the Jacob’s-ladder to the deck of the boat. They fed him, and gave him a place to sleep, and when he was refreshed, he was brought before the captain.

The captain, a small gray man in faded clothing, motioned to him to sit down in the chair near his desk. He said, “How long were you on the island?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were alone?” asked the captain gently. “All the time?”

“No,” he said. “There was a woman with me. Doreen Palmer.”

The captain was surprised. “Where is she?”

“She’s dead.” All at once, he started to weep, and the whole story came out. “We fought, we got on each other’s nerves, and I murdered her. I drowned her and her body was washed out to sea.”

The captain stared at him, not knowing what to do or say, and finally decided to do nothing, but simply to turn the man over to the authorities when they reached Seattle.

The Seattle police listened first to the captain’s statement, and then they talked to Jim Kilbride. He admitted the murder at once, saying that his conscience had troubled him ever since. He spoke logically and sensibly, answering all their questions, filling in the details of his life on the island and the crime he had committed, and it never occurred to them that he might be mad. A stenographer typed his confession and he signed it.

Old office friends visited him in jail and looked at him with new interest. They had never known him, not really. He smiled and accepted their awe.

He was given a fair trial, with court-appointed counsel, and was found guilty of first-degree murder. He was calm and dignified throughout the trial, and no one could believe that he had once been an insignificant clerk. He was sentenced to die in the gas chamber, and was duly executed.

Those ghastly ghouls that have escaped the grave by feeding on a diet of blood from the living are the deadly enemies of all mankind, the unholy vampires.

He was sound asleep when the phone rang. He woke up, suddenly and completely, between the first and second rings, and lay with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling above him in the darkness, wondering why he had awakened.

The phone jangled again. Reaching out, he fumbled for the chain on the lamp beside his bed, found it, blinked at the sudden yellow light. The alarm clock said just past two thirty. By the third ring, he was sitting beside the bed, pawing with his toes for his slippers.

He left the bedroom, walked down the dark hall toward the dining room, promising himself yet again that he would definitely see about having an extension phone put in the bedroom. After all, a doctor, general practitioner — although it had been over three months since he had last been called so late. An emergency, that time. A drunken husband, a long, narrow flight of stairs — four bones broken and an hysterical wife.

He wondered what it would be this time. As the fourth ring began, he picked up the phone, said, “Doctor Lamming.”

It was a man’s voice. He didn’t sound at all excited. “Doctor, my wife is about to have a baby. There’s no time to get to the hospital. I have no car. If you could come—”

He didn’t recognize the voice, couldn’t remember any pregnancies due for two or three weeks yet. He said, “Is your wife one of my patients?”

There was a pause, then, “No,” said the voice. “We just moved in, we’re new in town. Can you come?”

“Certainly. What’s the address?”

“Four fifty two Larchmont. At the top of the hill.”

“The old estate?”

“Yes. We’ve just moved in.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour. Maybe less.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

He hung up, hurried back to the bedroom and dressed. He knew the estate, at the end of Larchmont Road. Empty for years. He hadn’t known anyone had moved in. Who would want to move in there? Artists, perhaps. Thinking the place was “quaint”. Probably planning to renovate, modernize, surprise their friends from the city. More and more commuters were moving into town, and a lot of them had strange tastes.

The office was in the front of the house. He stopped and loaded the bag, hurried out, leaving the cabinet doors open in the dark house behind him.

His car was in the garage. He climbed in, backed out to the street, left the garage open and hurried across town.

Larchmont Drive was a long, winding road, flanked by old gabled structures and new ranch-style one-story homes, the meeting of old and new, the locals and the commuters. The road wound and wiggled its way up the hill, ending at the great closed gates to the estate. If the estate had once had a name, once been associated with one particular owner, the name was now lost and forgotten. The brooding building at the top of the hill was now known only as “the estate”. Not even a capital letter. It didn’t even attract children, it didn’t even have a reputation for being haunted. It was only a lonely and empty shell, stuck away on the top of the hill. Its walls were gray-black from lack of paint, its front windows, facing west, shone orange in the late afternoon, but were dull black the rest of the time.

Doctor Lamming drove up the road, noticing that the huge wrought-iron gates were open now, for the first time in his memory. He drove through and on up the curving, pitted road to the estate.

There was no light. He got out of the car, holding his leather bag, and looked at the place, wondering if this call were only some practical joker’s impractical idea of a joke. Then he saw a light moving within the house, and the heavy front door whined open.

There was a man there, holding in his hand a kerosene lamp. He said, “Doctor Lamming?”

“Yes. Coming.” He trotted up the warped steps and across the rail-less pillared verandah to the door.

The man was short and thin and sallow. He might have been thirty, or forty, or fifty. His hair was black and straight and rather long, and his face was long and thin, with prominent cheek-bones, deep-set eyes and thin, bloodless lips. The thin lips smiled slightly and he said, “We just moved in. No electricity as yet.”