And now I lay in my room in the hot and humid night, and across the interval between houses, behind the futile beating of blades, Mrs. Willkins’ gross body stirred in her black and gasping room.
And there was something else. Something new.
A man was walking the dark and airless streets of town beneath layers of lifeless leaves.
He walked with mincing steps, and he was far away in the beginning, when I first saw him, and I lay on my bed in my room and followed his progress with cat’s eyes through light and shadow across the pattern of the town. At times he was swallowed completely by darkness, and then no eyes could see him but mine, but the people who stirred in wakefulness in the houses he passed could hear the echo of his mincing steps, and he moved with surety of purpose and a pace that never varied through the silent, dappled streets until he came at last to the corner above my house and down the street to the house itself. Without moving from my bed, I could see him standing on the sidewalk below with his face lifted into the milky light of the moon, and then he came up across the porch into the house and up the stairs into the hall and stood outside my door.
I waited in the hot stillness, and after a while he knocked softly, and I got up in the dark, and my hand, swinging out, struck the tumbler on the table by the bed and knocked it to the floor with a sound of brittle thunder that rocked the room. I waited until the reverberations had diminished and died and the soft knock was repeated, and then I crossed to the door and opened it.
The warm fog inside my skull pressed closely on my brain, and though my head didn’t ache exactly, it felt very light and queer. The man in the hall looked at me and bowed in a peculiar, old-fashioned way from the waist and smiled politely.
“Excuse me for disturbing you at this hour,” he said, “but I must talk with you about a number of people. About Mrs. Willkins first of all, I think. May I come in?”
He was a little man with a long pointed nose and a pointed chin. He wore yellow pointed shoes.
I saw Marilla from my window. He was walking in the yard below with the same man in white who comes now and then to my room, and he sat for a while on a bench under a tree, and I could see him quite clearly. The queer thing is, there was no hate, no longer any hate, and I’m thinking that perhaps I will be allowed to walk in the yard soon, and that Marilla and I may meet and sit together under the tree and talk about these things that happened. It will be pleasant to talk with someone who knows and understands....
The Killers
by John D. Macdonald
1.
We certainly got sick of John Lash. A lot of the guys stopped coming after he started to attend every meeting. It’s a skin diving club — you know, just a few guys who like to swim under water in masks and all, shoot fish with those spear guns, all that. We started originally with six guys and we called ourselves The Deep Six. Even when it got up to about fifteen, we kept the name.
When it started we just had masks and fins and crude rigs. We live and work on the Florida Keys. I work in a garage in Marathon. Dusty has a bait and boat rental business in Craig. Lew manages a motel down on Ramrod. That’s just to give you an idea of the kind of jokers we are. Just guys who got bitten by this skin diving bug. We tried to meet once a week. Dusty had an old tub that’s ideal for it. We meet and pick a spot and head for it and anchor and go down and see what’s there. You never know what you’ll find. There are holes down there that are crawling with fish.
Once the bug gets you, you’re hooked. There are a lot of little clubs like ours. Guys that get along. Guys who like to slant down through that green country, kicking yourself along with your fins, hunting those big fish right down in their own backyard.
We got better equipment as we went along. We bought snorkel tubes when those came out. But the Aqua-lungs were beyond our price range. I think it was Lew who had the idea of everybody chipping in, and of putting in the money we got from selling the catches. When we had enough we bought a lung and two tanks, and then another. In between meetings somebody would run the four tanks up and get them refilled. There was enough time on the tanks so that during a full day everybody got a crack at using one of the lungs.
It was fine there for quite a while. We’d usually get ten or twelve, and some of the wives would come along. We’d have food and beer out there in the sun on that old tub and we had some excitement, some danger, and a lot of fish.
Croy Danton was about the best. A little guy with big shoulders, who didn’t have much to say. Not a gloomy guy. He just didn’t talk much. His wife, Betty, would usually come along when she could. They’ve got some rental units at Marathon. He did a lot of the building himself, with the help of a G.I. loan. Betty is what I would call a beautiful girl. She’s a blonde and almost the same height as Croy, and you can look at her all day without finding anything wrong with her. She dives a little.
Like I said, it was fine there for a while, until Lew brought this John Lash along one day. Afterward Lew said he was sorry, that Lash had seemed like a nice guy. In all fairness to Lew, I will admit that the first time John Lash joined us he seemed okay. We let him pay his dues. He was new to the Keys. He said he was looking around, and he had a temporary job tending bar.
One thing about him, he was certainly built. One of those guys who looks as if he was fat when you see him in clothes. But in his swimming trunks he looked like one of those advertisements. He had a sort of smallish round head and round face and not much neck. He was blonde and beginning to go a little bald. The head didn’t seem to fit the rest of him, all that tough brown bulge of muscle. He looked as if a meat axe would bounce right off him. He’d come over from California and he had belonged to a couple of clubs out there and had two West Coast records. He said he had those records and we didn’t check, but I guess he did. He certainly knew his way around in the water.
This part is hard to explain. Maybe you have had it happen to you. Like at a party. You’re having a good time, a lot of laughs, and then somebody joins the party and it changes everything. You still laugh, but it isn’t the same kind of laugh. Everything is different. Like one of those days when the sun is out and then before you know it there is a little haze across the sun and everything looks sort of funny. The water looks oily and the colors are different. That is what John Lash did to The Deep Six. It makes you wonder what happened to a guy like that when he was a kid. It isn’t exactly a competitive instinct. They seem to be able to guess just how to rub everybody the wrong way. But you can’t put your finger on it. Any of us could tell Dusty his old tub needed a paint job and the bottom scraped and Dusty would say we should come around and help if we were so particular. But John Lash could say it in such a way that it would make Dusty feel ashamed and make the rest of us feel ashamed, as though we were all second rate, and John Lash was used to things being first rate.
When he kidded you he rubbed you raw. When he talked about himself it wasn’t bragging because he could always follow it up. He liked horseplay. He was always roughing somebody around, laughing to show it was all in fun, but you had the feeling he was right on the edge of going crazy mad and trying to kill you. We had been a close group, but after he joined we started to give each other a bad time, too. There were arguments and quarrels that John Lash wasn’t even in. But they happened because he was there. It was spoiling the way it used to be, and there just wasn’t anything we could do about it because it wasn’t the sort of club where you can vote people out.