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.