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.
Birth of a Monster
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.”
“Water?”
“Yes. We have our own well. My wife is upstairs.”
It was the first time Doctor Lamming had ever been inside the building. The weak kerosene lamp showed very little, but he caught glimpses, as they moved down the wide central hall to the staircase, of high- ceilinged, barren rooms, of occasional pieces of ancient, dust- covered, sheet-draped furniture, of curtainless windows and silence and emptiness.
The other man said, “Our furniture hasn’t come yet. Most of it. Just enough for the one bedroom.”
Doctor Lamming noticed, now, a faint, undecipherable accent in the other man’s speech. He couldn’t quite place it. He said, “By the way. I don’t know your name.”
The other stopped at the foot of the staircase and turned, his right hand extended. “I’m terribly sorry, Doctor. I’m not thinking straight. Cargill is my name. Anton Cargill.”
They shook hands, and Doctor Lamming was surprised at the coldness and thinness of Cargill’s hand. And, too, though Cargill claimed he wasn’t thinking straight, though he claimed his wife was upstairs, about to give birth, the man’s voice and manner and tone were completely blank, completely unemotional.
Cargill turned away and climbed the stairs to the second floor, the doctor behind him. At thirty two, with six years of general practice behind him, Doctor Lamming considered himself reasonably used to the vagaries and variety of human beings, but this complete lack of emotion from an expectant father was something new. He said, “Your first child, Mr. Cargill?”
They had reached the top of the stairs, and Cargill led the way to the left. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it came as something of a surprise. We had been under the impression that it was — impossible for us.”
“It sometimes takes a while,” said the doctor.
Cargill walked into the bedroom, and the doctor followed. There were already three kerosene lamps in the room. The furniture was old-fashioned, massive-looking, chests and dressers and chairs and, in the center of the room, a huge canopy bed. The woman lay on the bed, her eyes closed, her black hair spread out against the pillow, her face as pale and white as her husband’s in the light of the lamps. The doctor put his bag down on the table beside the bed, and the woman groaned, moving her head.
Cargill stood beside the bed, looking without expression at his wife. “Soon now, I think,” he said.