Killer, Come Back to Me Read online

  “Your business will slowly become less than good. For what reasons, who can say? A child will be born and die. A mistress will be taken and lost. A wife will become less than good. And at last, oh believe it, yes, do, very slowly, you will come to—how shall I say it—hate her living presence. There, I see I’ve upset you. I’ll shut up.”

  They rode in silence for a long while, and the old man grew old again, and the young man along with him. When he had aged just the proper amount, the young man nodded the talk to continue, not looking at the other who now said:

  “Impossible, yes, you’ve been married only a year, a great year, the best. Hard to think that a single drop of ink could color a whole pitcher of clear fresh water. But color it could and color it did. And at last the entire world changed, not just our wife, not just the beautiful woman, the fine dream.”

  “You—” Jonathan Hughes started and stopped. “You—killed her?”

  “We did. Both of us. But if I have my way, if I can convince you, neither of us will, she will live, and you will grow old to become a happier, finer me. I pray for that. I weep for that. There’s still time. Across the years, I intend to shake you up, change your blood, shape your mind. God, if people knew what murder is. So silly, so stupid, so—ugly. But there is hope, for I have somehow got here, touched you, begun the change that will save our souls. Now, listen. You do admit, do you not, that we are one and the same, that the twins of time ride this train this hour this night?”

  The train whistled ahead of them, clearing the track of an encumbrance of years.

  The young man nodded the most infinitely microscopic of nods. The old man needed no more.

  “I ran away. I ran to you. That’s all I can say. She’s been dead only a day, and I ran. Where to go? Nowhere to hide, save Time. No one to plead with, no judge, no jury, no proper witnesses save—you. Only you can wash the blood away, do you see? You drew me, then. Your youngness, your innocence, your good hours, your fine life still untouched, was the machine that seized me down the track. All of my sanity lies in you. If you turn away, great God, I’m lost, no, we are lost. We’ll share a grave and never rise and be buried forever in misery. Shall I tell you what you must do?”

  The young man rose.

  “Plandome,” a voice cried. “Plandome.”

  And they were out on the platform with the old man running after, the young man blundering into walls, into people, feeling as if his limbs might fly apart.

  “Wait!” cried the old man. “Oh, please.”

  The young man kept moving.

  “Don’t you see, we’re in this together, we must think of it together, solve it together, so you won’t become me and I won’t have to come impossibly in search of you, oh, it’s all mad, insane, I know, I know, but listen!”

  The young man stopped at the edge of the platform where cars were pulling in, with joyful cries or muted greetings, brief honkings, gunnings of motors, lights vanishing away. The old man grasped the young man’s elbow.

  “Good God, your wife, mine, will be here in a moment, there’s so much to tell, you can’t know what I know, there’s twenty years of unfound information lost between which we must trade and understand! Are you listening? God, you don’t believe!”

  Jonathan Hughes was watching the street. A long way off a final car was approaching. He said: “What happened in the attic at my grandmother’s house in the summer of nineteen fifty-eight? No one knows that but me. Well?”

  The old man’s shoulders slumped. He breathed more easily, and as if reciting from a promptboard said. “We hid ourselves there for two days, alone. No one ever knew where we hid. Everyone thought we had run away to drown in the lake or fall in the river. But all the time, crying, not feeling wanted, we hid up above and…listened to the wind and wanted to die.”

  The young man turned at last to stare fixedly at his older self, tears in his eyes. “You love me, then?”

  “I had better,” said the old man. “I’m all you have.”

  The car was pulling up at the station. A young woman smiled and waved behind the glass.

  “Quick,” said the old man, quietly. “Let me come home, watch, show you, teach you, find where things went wrong, correct them now, maybe hand you a fine life forever, let me—”

  The car horn sounded, the car stopped, the young woman leaned out.

  “Hello, lovely man!” she cried.

  Jonathan Hughes exploded a laugh and burst into a manic run. “Lovely lady, hi—”

  “Wait.”

  He stopped and turned to look at the old man with the newspaper, trembling there on the station platform. The old man raised one hand, questioningly.

  “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  Silence. At last: “You,” said Jonathan Hughes. “You.”

  * * *

  The car rounded a turn in the night. The woman, the old man, the young, swayed with the motion.

  “What did you say your name was?” the young woman said, above the rush and run of country and road.

  “He didn’t say,” said Jonathan Hughes quickly.

  “Weldon,” said the old man, blinking.

  “Why,” said Alice Hughes. “That’s my maiden name.”

  The old man gasped inaudibly, but recovered. “Well, is it? How curious!”

  “I wonder if we’re related? You—”

  “He was my teacher at Central High,” said Jonathan Hughes, quickly.

  “And still am,” said the old man. “And still am.”

  And they were home.

  He could not stop staring. All through dinner, the old man simply sat with his hands empty half the time and stared at the lovely woman across the table from him. Jonathan Hughes fidgeted, talked much too loudly to cover the silences, and ate sparsely. The old man continued to stare as if a miracle was happening every ten seconds. He watched Alice’s mouth as if it were giving forth fountains of diamonds. He watched her eyes as if all the hidden wisdoms of the world were there, and now found for the first time. By the look of his face, the old man, stunned, had forgotten why he was there.

  “Have I a crumb on my chin?” cried Alice Hughes, suddenly. “Why is everyone watching me?”

  Whereupon the old man burst into tears that shocked everyone. He could not seem to stop, until at last Alice came around the table to touch his shoulder.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s just that you’re so lovely. Please sit down. Forgive.”

  They finished off the dessert and with a great display of tossing down his fork and wiping his mouth with his napkin, Jonathan Hughes cried, “That was fabulous. Dear wife, I love you!” He kissed her on the cheek, thought better of it, and rekissed her, on the mouth. “You see?” He glanced at the old man. “I very much love my wife.”

  The old man nodded quietly and said, “Yes, yes, I remember.”

  “You remember?” said Alice, staring.

  “A toast!” said Jonathan Hughes, quickly. “To a fine wife, a grand future!”

  His wife laughed. She raised her glass.

  “Mr. Weldon,” she said, after a moment. “You’re not drinking?…”

  * * *

  It was strange seeing the old man at the door to the living room.

  “Watch this,” he said, and closed his eyes. He began to move certainly and surely about the room, eyes shut. “Over here is the pipestand, over here the books. On the fourth shelf down a copy of Eiseley’s The Star Thrower. One shelf up H. G. Wells’s Time Machine, most appropriate, and over here the special chair, and me in it.”

  He sat. He opened his eyes.

  Watching from the door, Jonathan Hughes said, “You’re not going to cry again, are you?”

  “No. No more crying.”

  There were sounds of washing up from the kitchen. The lovely woman out there hummed under her breath. Both men turned to look out of the room toward that humming.

  “Someday,” said Jonathan Hughes, “I will hate her? Someday, I will kill her?”

  “It
doesn’t seem possible, does it? I’ve watched her for an hour and found nothing, no hint, no clue, not the merest period, semicolon or exclamation point of blemish, bump, or hair out of place with her. I’ve watched you, too, to see if you were at fault, we were at fault, in all this.”

  “And?” The young man poured sherry for both of them, and handed over a glass.

  “You drink too much is about the sum. Watch it.”

  Hughes put his drink down without sipping it. “What else?”

  “I suppose I should give you a list, make you keep it, look at it every day. Advice from the old crazy to the young fool.”

  “Whatever you say, I’ll remember.”

  “Will you? For how long? A month, a year, then, like everything else, it’ll go. You’ll be busy living. You’ll be slowly turning into…me. She will slowly be turning into someone worth putting out of the world. Tell her you love her.”

  “Every day.”

  “Promise! It’s that important! Maybe that’s where I failed myself, failed us. Every day, without fail!” The old man leaned forward, his face taking fire with his words. “Every day. Every day!”

  Alice stood in the doorway, faintly alarmed.

  “Anything wrong?”

  “No, no.” Jonathan Hughes smiled. “We were trying to decide which of us likes you best.”

  She laughed, shrugged, and went away.

  “I think,” said Jonathan Hughes, and stopped and closed his eyes, forcing himself to say it, “it’s time for you to go.”

  “Yes, time.” But the old man did not move. His voice was very tired, exhausted, sad. “I’ve been sitting here feeling defeated. I can’t find anything wrong. I can’t find the flaw. I can’t advise you, my God, it’s so stupid, I shouldn’t have come to upset you, worry you, disturb your life, when I have nothing to offer but vague suggestions, inane cryings of doom. I sat here a moment ago and thought: I’ll kill her now, get rid of her now, take the blame now, as an old man, so the young man there, you, can go on into the future and be free of her. Isn’t that silly? I wonder if it would work? It’s that old time-travel paradox, isn’t it? Would I foul up the time flow, the world, the universe, what? Don’t worry, no, no, don’t look that way. No murder now. It’s all been done up ahead, twenty years in your future. The old man having done nothing whatever, having been no help, will now open the door and run away to his madness.”

  He arose and shut his eyes again.

  “Let me see if I can find my way out of my own house, in the dark.”

  He moved, the young man moved with him to find the closet by the front door and open it and take out the old man’s overcoat and slowly shrug him into it.

  “You have helped,” said Jonathan Hughes. “You have told me to tell her I love her.”

  “Yes, I did do that, didn’t I?”

  They turned to the door.

  “Is there hope for us?” the old man asked, suddenly, fiercely. “Yes. I’ll make sure of it,” said Jonathan Hughes. “Good, oh, good. I almost believe!”

  The old man put one hand out and blindly opened the front door.

  “I won’t say goodbye to her. I couldn’t stand looking at that lovely face. Tell her the old fool’s gone. Where? Up the road to wait for you. You’ll arrive someday.”

  “To become you? Not a chance,” said the young man.

  “Keep saying that. And—my God—here—” The old man fumbled in his pocket and drew forth a small object wrapped in crumpled newspaper. “You’d better keep this. I can’t be trusted, even now. I might do something wild. Here. Here.”

  He thrust the object into the young man’s hands. “Goodbye. Doesn’t that mean: God be with you? Yes. Goodbye.”

  The old man hurried down the walk into the night. A wind shook the trees. A long way off, a train moved in darkness, arriving or departing, no one could tell.

  Jonathan Hughes stood in the doorway for a long while, trying to see if there really was someone out there vanishing in the dark.

  “Darling,” his wife called.

  He began to unwrap the small object.

  She was in the parlor door behind him now, but her voice sounded as remote as the fading footsteps along the dark street.

  “Don’t stand there letting the draft in,” she said.

  He stiffened as he finished unwrapping the object. It lay in his hand, a small revolver.

  Far away the train sounded a final cry, which failed in the wind.

  “Shut the door,” said his wife.

  His face was cold. He closed his eyes.

  Her voice. Wasn’t there just the tiniest touch of petulance there?

  He turned slowly, off balance. His shoulder brushed the door. It drifted. Then:

  The wind, all by itself, slammed the door with a bang.

  The Screaming Woman

  My name is Margaret Leary and I’m ten years old and in the fifth grade at Central School. I haven’t any brothers or sisters, but I’ve got a nice father and mother except they don’t pay much attention to me. And anyway, we never thought we’d have anything to do with a murdered woman. Or almost, anyway.

  When you’re just living on a street like we live on, you don’t think awful things are going to happen, like shooting or stabbing or burying people under the ground, practically in your back yard. And when it does happen you don’t believe it. You just go on buttering your toast or baking a cake.

  I got to tell you how it happened. It was a noon in the middle of July. It was hot and Mama said to me, “Margaret, you go to the store and buy some ice cream. It’s Saturday, Dad’s home for lunch, so we’ll have a treat.”

  I ran out across the empty lot behind our house. It was a big lot, where kids had played baseball, and broken glass and stuff. And on my way back from the store with the ice cream I was just walking along, minding my own business, when all of a sudden it happened.

  I heard the Screaming Woman.

  I stopped and listened.

  It was coming up out of the ground.

  A woman was buried under the rocks and dirt and glass, and she was screaming, all wild and horrible, for someone to dig her out.

  I just stood there, afraid. She kept screaming, muffled.

  Then I started to run. I fell down, got up, and ran some more. I got in the screen door of my house and there was Mama, calm as you please, not knowing what I knew, that there was a real live woman buried out in back of our house, just a hundred yards away, screaming bloody murder.

  “Mama,” I said.

  “Don’t stand there with the ice cream,” said Mama.

  “But, Mama,” I said.

  “Put it in the icebox,” she said.

  “Listen, Mama, there’s a Screaming Woman in the empty lot.”

  “And wash your hands,” said Mama.

  “She was screaming and screaming…”

  “Let’s see, now, salt and pepper,” said Mama, far away.

  “Listen to me,” I said, loud. “We got to dig her out. She’s buried under tons and tons of dirt and if we don’t dig her out, she’ll choke up and die.”

  “I’m certain she can wait until after lunch,” said Mama.

  “Mama, don’t you believe me?”

  “Of course, dear. Now wash your hands and take this plate of meat in to your father.”

  “I don’t even know who she is or how she got there,” I said. “But we got to help her before it’s too late.”

  “Good gosh,” said Mama. “Look at this ice cream. What did you do, just stand in the sun and let it melt?”

  “Well, the empty lot…”

  “Go on, now, scoot.”

  I went into the dining room.

  “Hi, Dad, there’s a Screaming Woman in the empty lot.”

  “I never knew a woman who didn’t,” said Dad.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “You look very grave,” said Father.

  “We’ve got to get picks and shovels and excavate, like for an Egyptian mummy,” I said.

&nbs
p; “I don’t feel like an archaeologist, Margaret,” said Father. “Now, some nice cool October day, I’ll take you up on that.”

  “But we can’t wait that long,” I almost screamed. My heart was bursting in me. I was excited and scared and afraid and here was Dad, putting meat on his plate, cutting and chewing and paying me no attention.

  “Dad?” I said.

  “Mmmm?” he said, chewing.

  “Dad, you just gotta come out after lunch and help me,” I said. “Dad, Dad, I’ll give you all the money in my piggy bank!”

  “Well,” said Dad. “So it’s a business proposition, is it? It must be important for you to offer your perfectly good money. How much money will you pay, by the hour?”

  “I got five whole dollars it took me a year to save, and it’s all yours.”

  Dad touched my arm. “I’m touched. I’m really touched. You want me to play with you and you’re willing to pay for my time. Honest, Margaret, you make your old Dad feel like a piker. I don’t give you enough time. Tell you what, after lunch, I’ll come out and listen to your Screaming Woman, free of charge.”

  “Will you, oh, will you, really?”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s what I’ll do,” said Dad. “But you must promise me one thing?”

  “What?”

  “If I come out, you must eat all of your lunch first.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  Mother came in and sat down and we started to eat.

  “Not so fast,” said Mama.

  I slowed down. Then I started eating fast again.

  “You heard your mother,” said Dad.

  “The Screaming Woman,” I said. “We got to hurry.”

  “I,” said Father, “intend sitting here quietly and judiciously giving my attention first to my steak, then to my potatoes, and my salad, of course, and then to my ice cream, and after that to a long drink of iced coffee, if you don’t mind. I may be a good hour at it. And another thing, young lady, if you mention her name, this Screaming Whatsis, once more at this table during lunch, I won’t go out with you to hear her recital.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is that understood?”