Читать книгу Guilty as Charged: Fantastic Crime Stories - Philip E. High - Страница 5

GUILTY AS CHARGED

There were those, no doubt, who declared I had got away with it, that I was damn lucky. It’s a question of degree, isn’t it? Yes, it is true I could have got life and, in some parts of the world, been executed, but getting away with it, no, most certainly not.

I got five years, narrowly missing a life in an institution. Three of those years I spent in the penal section of a psychiatric hospital. It was a curious place and I am convinced I learned more about the psychs in it than they ever learned about me. My sentence in court had classified me, you see, it was fixed, none of them had the initiative or the imagination to move away from that. I found the medical profession far more open-minded. This case of influenza, could it not be yellow fever, malaria, and many other like complaints? But the psychs never showed a similar fluidity of mind. The court hearing and the subsequent sentence had put me in a fixed frame for perfect psychiatric probing.

A great deal of it, was, of course, my own fault. I had been forced to walk a tightrope in court to save my own skin. I told the truth when I thought they would believe and played the idiot when I knew they wouldn’t.

“You are telling this court, Mr. Graham, that you had never met Mr. Kemly before?”

“No I had never seen him before in my life.”

“Do you deny brutally murdering him within five hours of your first meeting?”

“No, I do not deny it.” (There must have been fifty witnesses standing around, what choice had I?)

“You can offer no reason for this unprovoked and savage attack on the life of the deceased?”

“No, I can offer no explanation whatever.” (Better a negative line than the truth—the truth would have put me in an asylum for life.)

Yes, well, in a way I suppose I did get away with it. You, too, may say, that you, Leonard Graham, got away with murder.

* * * *

It all began on a bright hot day in August, and I have often thought since, how wrong the setting was. A happy seaside town, the bay dancing with sails and windsurfers, swimmers and children splashing around near the shore. Somehow it was all wrong, even the house was wrong. Number 80 Marine Drive, a holiday home facing the sea. The sort of places we usually visited were somber places, often half in ruin and crouched behind tall trees.

“This is a bad one,” said Trench, fumbling in his pocket for the keys. “The owner was not at all keen in letting us visit the place, took a lot of persuading.”

“How much?” asked Hammond who was a realist.

“Almost as much as I was prepared to pay actually.” Trench opened the door and we filed inside.

Trench sort of ran things, he had actually founded the society although the rest of us contributed quite a bit here and there.

Trench was a big man who wore a flat cap and never seemed to discard his grubby raincoat. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and always seemed burdened with equipment. He was, despite his appearance, a clever and meticulous man who never seemed to lose his cool.

Yes, we were The Trench Society of Psychic Research and, needless to say, Trench ran it although we were a small team. There was Poole, a lugubrious sort of man, untidy sideburns, and a limp black moustache. Jumpy, always went outside for a cigarette if things got a little unnerving.

Then there was Hammond: I liked Hammond. He seldom spoke but he had a dry sort of wit when he did. A strong solid man, been around quite a lot although he never talked about it. Had a wonderful tattoo of a cobra on his left arm. It started just above the bicep and terminated at his wrist. When he was in the mood he would roll up his sleeve and flex his muscles about. It made it look as the cobra was crawling down his arm. There was only one thing wrong with it: the cobra lacked a head. Hammond claimed a motor accident was responsible, just scraped off the skin, but personally, I strongly suspected that a bullet was responsible. It looked very like a shot-burn to me and I had seen more than one.

Lastly there was Judie, painfully thin and in her early thirties. She was all long dark hair, huge dark eyes, and full brightly painted lips.

Poole said she was a bit of a nymph. I didn’t believe him, I liked Judie and I doubt very much if Poole would know what to do if he had actually met a nymph.

Judie wrote down all the details, the hard way: no recorders, a notebook, and shorthand. Incidentally, Judie was the only one who stood by me when the trouble broke.

Lastly myself, and in this I just try and say what I am, nothing more. No self-pity and no bloody claims to virtue. To make the outline brief I had been pretty lucky up to the trouble. I was in the Army, Special Services, when an old Aunt of mine died and left me quite a lot of money.

In peace time, of course, one can buy one’s way out of the services, and I saw to that damn fast because things were closing in. The Colonel’s lady was twenty years his junior and I knew, sooner or later, we’d be caught. I took the money and ran, far away, to Hobart in Australia to be precise. I stayed there until I settled down, until I had stopped yearning—two years to be precise. Then I came home and set up a business on the other side of the country, on the coastline. I had always been interested in the sea. I bought up a few dinghies, two or three sailing boats, and twenty surfboards, and started a rent-a-boat business and did quite well.

One night in a bar I met Hammond and we got talking. Needless to say I often had time to spare, particularly in the winter, and somehow I became a member of the team.

Was there anything in it? Well, yes, there was, but only one in every fifteen vigils or so ever produced anything. As a sort of side observation, you’d be amazed at the number of headless horseman that are supposed to haunt places around Europe. It does quite well on gray ladies in sixteenth-century costumes as well. Phantom monks are fairly prolific too, closely followed by heavy footsteps on the stairs.

Were there any genuine manifestations? A difficult question: things happened, crockery and kitchen utensils thrown around, the feeling of a ‘presence.’

This bring me to a point where I am compelled to ask two questions. The first, we were supposed to be engaged on research, but as far as I could make out, we never arrived at anything. Oh, yes, Trench would classify and index events. Such and such a type of phenomena, elemental, category so-and-so, but we had gained no actual knowledge whatever. What actually was an elemental and why the hell did it behave as it did?

Question two, all these appearances and hauntings, did they only occur when there was someone around to witness them? Did the headless horseman and the gray ladies only put in an appearance when there was an audience to watch them?

There was a horrible manifestation around a ruined castle in Poland. Something invisible went howling in and out of entrances and along corridors for minutes on end. I say invisible, but that description is not wholly true. It was, in truth a miniature tornado, swirling, and, as I say, howling just like an insane wind. As it swirled, it collected fragments around it, just like a tornado. There was dust, dead leaves, small stones, and anything small enough to be sucked up. The worst part to me was the bitter cold that came with it. Poland is very hot in mid-summer, but this draped some of the damp walls with ice. Just to make itself really revolting, it left a trail of foul-smelling green slime behind it that took the best part of five minutes to sort of fade away.

Our ‘research’ made no attempt to find out what it was or why it did what it did. Again I have to ask, did it put on a show like that, day in and day out, or did it just take the stage for visitors?

Just one more fact about me before continuing with events. As I have said, I was in the Special Branch of the Armed Services and I saw a fair amount of action. There was no major war, but someone seemed to be fighting someone else somewhere all the time.

In one little incident we took some mortar fire and one of our officers got blown to pieces. His personal gun, something rather special, landed beside me. It was an Antrok, not mentioned in the official lists and on test. I took it, I don’t know why—perhaps, at the time, I thought I might get quite a bit of money later. Honestly, I can’t quite recall my thoughts or feelings at the time.

The point is, no one would know I had the weapon and there would be no one to report I had ever handled it. Although I had never cared much for killing, guns in themselves had always fascinated me.

As for getting the damn thing smuggled out, that was child’s play. Anyone who has been in the armed forces soon learns that with the right contacts and the money to keep them happy almost anything is possible.

I hid the gun almost in the open; it looked like a part of a marine engine on a bench and under repair.

Anyway, to bring things up to date as it were, we trooped into this holiday place and settled in. Poole and Trench set up the equipment, cameras, things to keep a check on the temperature and various detection meters which I had never fully understood.

The place was not too bad inside, the tables and chairs were a bit dusty but that was all. There was, I admit, a sour, sort of decaying smell which I didn’t care for very much, but perhaps that would go away when we had passed in and out a few times.

Finally we finished the preparations and sat down. There was a large table in the main room and a meal appeared. Flasks of hot coffee and piles of sandwiches. Judie was responsible for the sandwiches—I think she thought she was catering for an army.

“As I told you when we came in,” said Trench. “This was a nasty one. I don’t know who marked this place down first, but whoever did attracted our predecessors. Yes, a couple of investigators were here before us, two men, Charles Landis and George Parker. According to records they came in here at seven in the evening and were never seen alive again.”

“They were killed here?” asked Poole.

“That I do not know. I only know that their bodies were found in the sea in rather gruesome circumstances. The nasty part being that neither body was complete. There was the upper torso of Landis, head and shoulders down to the waist, and the lower part of Parker from the waist down. No one has ever found the remaining halves of either man.”

Trench filled his pipe and put a lighted match to the bowl. “The point is that the police went though this place with a fine tooth comb, not to mention the pick of forensic science, but there was nothing. There seems no doubt that the butchery was undertaken elsewhere. One drop of blood and forensic would have found it.”

“It is confirmed that they were here?” asked Hammond.

“No doubts at all on that score, all their equipment was set up ready for use. As a matter of fact, two cameras, one infrared, took pictures of the police as they entered.”

“Then someone must have informed them.”

“Yes, someone anonymous rang up and said there was a lot of screaming going on in the place, which again raises a weird point. The properties on both sides were empty, waiting for holiday people who had booked weeks before, so who the hell heard screaming?”

Conversation lapsed after that. We finished coffee in silence but I was uneasy. Perhaps I am developing a psychic faculty or something but, when it works, something nasty usually turns up. That place in Poland I mentioned, for example, my scalp was sort of tight and prickly a good hour before anything happened. Again, that sour smell had not gone away; if anything, it was stronger, and more sickly than ever.

Trench rose, knocked out his pipe on an ashtray, and looked at me. “Going to take another look upstairs. I’ll take front room this time, like you to take the back.”

“Coming.” I rose and followed him. Trench always liked to do a double-check.

The back room was not much different to the front save that this one had a single bed frame—no bedclothes or mattresses, of course. There were two hard chairs, a cramped shower and toilet behind a green door, and that about covered it. The Venetian blinds on the windows looked as if they were about to fall to pieces.

I was just about to join Trench in the front room when there was a sort of choked cry from downstairs.

“Come down— Oh God!— Oh God!— Oh God!—come down!” Poole’s voice, he not only sounded hysterical but on the verge of tears.

Trench and I almost clattered down the stairs together but stopped on the last three steps. What we saw at first glance didn’t make sense, but I can see the scene vividly in my mind as if it had happened today. Poole was behind a chair, clinging to the back of it with both hands. His eyes bulged, his mouth was open, and he seemed unable to see anything but the sofa.

Judie was upright, absolutely colourless, rigid as an iron bar, her hand pressed tightly over her mouth and she was screaming. There was no sound, but I could feel what she was doing—a long anguished and silent scream.

Hammond was lying back on the sofa, apparently at ease, eyes closed as if in sleep. He was not dead, I could see his chest rising and falling and, at that moment I felt only dazed, the picture made no sense.

“What the hell’s going on?” Trench sound aggressive.

I went over to Judie and made her sit down. She seemed almost fixed to the wall against which she had been standing, as if trying to push her way through it backwards. When I got her to move, her limbs moved jerkily like those of a puppet, and she was still silently screaming, I could tell.

Poole made gurgling sounds and kept pointing jerkily with his finger. Finally he managed to put words together, unevenly but slowly making sense.

“His arm—his bloody arm—dear God!”

I looked but I could make no sense of the words. Granted, Hammond might be unconscious but he looked normal enough to me. “What are you talking about, Poole?”

He did not answer directly, it was quite clear he had lost us. “I kept my head at first, I rang for an ambulance. Granted I went to pieces after, but I rang for an ambulance.”

Trench shouted. “Blast the bloody ambulance. What’s this about his arm?”

“Look for yourself!” Poole shouted back. “Feel Hammond’s left sleeve, there’s nothing in it.”

I went forward and felt for myself. Hammond was wearing a light summer jacket, but the sleeve was absolutely empty. I felt up to the shoulder but there was nothing there whatever and I knew, with a cold feeling inside me, that there was no rational explanation.

There was no blood; if a man has an arm torn off at the shoulder, he bleeds. The thought stopped me investigating further. Suppose some accident of nature had halted the gush of blood, perhaps arteries and veins had somehow temporarily sealed themselves. I could start a fatal hemorrhage by just poking around. I decided to wait for the ambulance; perhaps Poole had done the sensible thing.

I don’t drink much, but I always carry a small flask in case of emergencies. I gave some to Judie first; she was still taut and almost colorless.

“What is it, please? I don’t usually drink.”

“Perhaps not, but you need it now, just a sip or two, it’s brandy.”

I gave Poole extra, he could barely bring the flask to his lips. I was worried about Hammond; his breathing seemed regular enough but very shallow. As I say, I was afraid to do too much in case I made things worse.

“Now tell us what bloody happened.” Trench had been waiting for some color to return to Poole’s cheeks.

“I don’t know a lot.” Poole seemed to have got a grip on himself at last. “I was standing over there, facing the sofa, and going through some of my notes when suddenly there was this awful smell. I looked up and, as I did so, the entire room was suddenly filled with a thick gray mist, really thick. I couldn’t see my own hands or the outline of the window: it was near enough darkness to be absolute. I sensed movement like someone moving around. Then there was this funny sound that upset me more than anything, it was sort of half a sob and half a scream. I’m certain it was Hammond but, of course, I can’t prove it, I don’t know.”

Trench had turned an odd color himself and took a quick gulp from my flask. “Go on, go on, what then?”

“There’s not much more to tell, the mist just vanished as if it had never been, and everything was the same except for Hammond. His eyes were closed, his face was twitching, and he seemed to be having some sort of minor fit. I went forward to help him but before I could touch him he went limp. I tried to get hold of him but it was then I found the empty sleeve and, it was then, I admit, I went to pieces.”

Before anyone could comment, the bell rang and there was a heavy knock at the door.

“Ambulance here! Open the door please.”

Two paramedics came in with a folding stretcher and the taller of the two made a quick check. “Not too good, what’s the main problem?”

“He—he’s lost an arm,” said Trench

“Good God!’” They made a swift examination then the taller one looked up. “What is this—some sort of sick joke?”

“We don’t understand.”

“Then I’ll bloody spell it out for you. It is true that this man has lost an arm but not today, not last year, but I’d say from around birth. This man looks to me like a very bad case of Thalidomide brought about by his mother taking the drug when she was pregnant. There is no sign of wounds or surgery here—look for yourself.”

“But he had an arm when we came,” said Poole in a thin high voice. “It’s true, I swear it.”

“There’s his wrist watch there within a few centimetres of your hand.”

“That’s his car in the drive,” said Poole, “he drove us here. Check it out, look at his driving license.”

Neither of the paramedics would actually look at us, but the smaller one said: “That’s as maybe, not our problem. The local authorities, the police and so on, can sort that out later. In the meantime it’s lucky you sent for us, he’s in a bad way, vital signs are deteriorating fast.”

“You mean he’s dying?” Trench’s face seemed to twitch.

“I cannot pass an opinion on that, sir, but he’s none too good. We’ll have to get him onto intensive care fast.”

We watched them carry him, numbly. All of us found it hard to take in.

“There will be an inquiry,’ said Trench. “No doubt about that.”

“With all due respect,” said Poole, “if he dies, there’ll be an inquest. Dear God, what will we say, what answers can we ever give? If we say he lost an arm, they’ll not only ask where it is but who or what took it.”

“We’d better sit down and work it out,” said Trench, “agree on one story and stick to it.”

“Agreed, but not here, for God’s sake,” said Poole. “In a nice normal hotel where I’d feel safe. Incidentally, I’m finished with this lark for good; you won’t find me investigating anything out of the normal, ever.”

“You’d better ring for a taxi,” I said. “Hammond had his car keys in his pocket.”

I went over to Judie. “I don’t think a small cramped flat is your scene at the moment, girl. I’ll book a single room for you at the hotel; you’ll feel safer there and you’ll have company.”

We decided to stay a week, then go to our homes, but we broke up before that. The police arrived to inform us that Hammond had only survived for eighteen hours; actual cause of death had yet to be determined.

They asked questions but, in complete honesty, we had little to tell them. Trench and I had been upstairs and Judie had been in the kitchen washing cups. Only Poole had been in a position to see anything, and he had enough sense to play it down. “I was looking out of the window and I heard this noise behind me—”

“This talk about the arm, sir?”

“We were all very upset at the time.”

“Yet according to paramedic George Miles, you said—”

“As I say, we were all very upset at the time.”

“No doubt, sir, but it seems to me—”

“Are we under suspicion, Inspector, are you accusing us of something?”

“Certainly not, sir, but there are still questions to be answered. We still have the body of Mr. Hammond and he is, sir, whatever your emotional state—minus his left arm.”

An inquest was opened and adjourned almost immediately for further enquiries. A period of six weeks was requested so, for a brief period, we were off the hook. Speaking for myself, I kept thinking of Judie and Hammond. He and I had become friends, and as for Judie—well, she had never shown any kind of response.

I went home, I wanted to get away from this feeling, this dark unknown and the accompanying depression.

It was not easy. I tried all the things that usually worked, without avail. I swam, I surfed a lot, I talked to different people whenever possible, and I rowed the dinghy. I had always found rowing relaxing before, but it seemed to have lost its effect now.

I was rowing back from the edge of the bay when I saw the swimmer and he seemed to be making heavy going of it. He had a strong powerful stroke but I could see he was tiring.

I rowed in close to him. “Are you O.K?”

“Fine thanks. I’m tired but, once past the jetty, I’ll make the beach easily.”

“Are you the swimmer I saw way out about forty minutes ago?”

“Could have been, I’ve just circled the old lighthouse.”

“Hell—that is some swim.” I paused, resting on my oars. “Look, tell me to mind my own business if you like, but I’m local. Before you get to the jetty there’s a natural sandbank stretching out from the shore for about a kilometre. It’s not visible at low tide, but on the high, as now, it creates the hell of an undertow. It’s not the sort of hazard you want to play around with when you’re tired.”

“Well, thanks, boatman, I really appreciate that. What do you suggest?”

“Well, I suggest you take a grip astern and I’ll tow you over the danger area.”

“Thanks a lot.”

I waited until he had a good grip then I began rowing over the danger area, which took about five minutes.

“You were right, man, I can feel the pull as you move. I owe you, I really do.”

He went on talking. He was down here on a holiday for two weeks and still had ten days left. He had hired one of the chalets that they have built recently on the South Beach. They are not much, sort of fixed caravans really, wooden or plastic, with the basic necessities pushed into the back by a hardboard wall. On the other hand, they are cheap, and six metres across the sea wall there is the sand.

I told him when we had reached the safety point. “You’ll be fine from here, sixty metres round the jetty and you’ll be on the beach, no currents at all.”

Before he let go he said: “I’d like to buy you a drink; we could have a couple or two together, share an evening.”

“Well, thanks, would suit me fine.”

“Right, Chalet Thirty-Two—seven o’clock suit you?”

* * * *

It was exactly seven when I knocked and he came to the door smiling.

I gave him no chance to speak. I pulled the trigger.

A small black hole appeared in the centre of his forehead, but the explosive bullet took out everything beyond his face, including the back of his skull.

I put three more shots into his body almost before the first one had had an effect.

His body did not fall, it looked almost like deflation it was so slow; it crumbled in on itself and became a sort of bloody heap. The shattered head lay at angle on the top of it like a carnival mask.

I turned my back on it and put down the gun.

A frightened-looking man in a bathing robe ran up and said: “What the hell’s going on?”

“I’ve just shot a man, get someone to call the police.”

I put my foot on the gun and my hands on the top of my head. “Are you deaf or something? Call the bloody police.”

The police took ten minutes to arrive, four men, two of whom turned green when they saw the remains of the body.

It took them a further twenty minutes before they could accept what I had done and place me under arrest.

* * * *

As I say, I did five hard years, and I think I would have gone insane if Judie had not kept in touch. She wrote to me regularly and, when I came out into the true free sunlight she was waiting with a taxi.

She flowed into my arms without speaking and we just clung together. Later, at her place, after a meal, I said: “I have to tell you why.”

“You don’t have to, I know you’re not a killer.”

“Oh, but Judie, I am—but not a man killer. I don’t know what it was, perhaps it came from the other end of the universe, another dimension, or perhaps it was an elemental of some kind, but I know exactly what happened. It was in that house and, in order to live in our world, it needed a human body. It took the bodies of Landis and Parker, but maybe the left arm of one of them was faulty. It had to find a better one, so it took Hammond’s.”

“You’re certain of this, my love?”

“Absolutely certain, although how I kept both self-control and normal conversation, I’ll never know. I was so dead calm and so intense at the same time. Oh, yes, I knew as soon as I saw the tattoo and the headless cobra. The bastard was swimming about in the ocean using Hammond’s arm to do it—!”