Collected Short Fiction, page 49
“Hojotoho! Hojotoho!
Heiaha! Heiaha!
Helmwige, hier!
Hieher mit dem Ross!”
But in spite of the roaring music, the station-wagon’s motor could still be heard; it was a raw note imposing itself on the Wagnerian opera. Hadley heard the slam and screech of the brakes. He stood up just as his daughter burst through the door.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Omigod! Daddy!”
Unheeded, the red beach towel dropped from her as she rushed into her father’s arms.
“Janice! Janice, what’s happened?” He held her tight as she sobbed hysterically.
“Monster!” she cried. “Big . . . ugly . . . nasty thing!” She sobbed incomprehensibly for a moment, then: “Awful! He . . . it . . . tore off my clothes . . . grabbed me . . . hairy . . . ooohhh!” And with that, she collapsed, unconscious, in her father’s arms.
Holding her tenderly, Thomas Hadley carried his daughter into her room and laid her on the bed. Then he covered her carefully with a blanket and walked to the phone in the living room, his face dark and livid with anger. He placed a call and waited impatiently while the operator connected him with the person he had called.
“Dr. Candor’s residence,” said a voice at the other end.
“Mrs. Candor, this is Tom Hadley. Let me talk to Bob.”
“Just a second, Mr. Hadley.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line, then: “Tom? This is Bob. What’s the matter?”
Tom Hadley paused for a moment. Could he expose his daughter to this? But there was nothing left to do. He took a deep breath and said: “Bob, Janice has been criminally attacked—at least, I think she has. She’s hysterical. Can you come out right away?”
There was a short silence at the other end of the line before the doctor answered. “That’s terrible, Tom. Of course I’ll do everything I can. I’ll be right out. But are you sure you need a psychiatrist? I mean, is she badly hurt?”
“I don’t think so. But, mentally, she’s in bad shape.”
“Who did it? Have you called the police?” the doctor asked.
“Not yet,” said Hadley. “I don’t know who did it, but I intend to find out. Get out here as soon as you can while I phone Sheriff Malcom.”
“Ten minutes, Tom.”
“Right,” said Hadley. He hung up and called another number.
“Sheriff Malcom here,” said the faintly British voice.
“This is Thomas Hadley, out on Oceanview Road. Get out here as quickly as you can. My daughter’s been attacked.” He paused significantly. “I’ll leave it to you, Sheriff, to see that the papers don’t hear of this.”
“They’ll get nothing from me, Mr. Hadley,” said Malcom. “I’ll be out there as soon as possible.”
“Good.” Hadley cradled the phone and lit his pipe carefully, trying to keep his hand from trembling as he held the match to the bowl. His voice was hoarse as he said softly to himself: “If it was Dan Thorne . . .” He stopped himself, but the thoughts he had were murderous.
Dan Thorne sat on the top of a rocky outcropping and rubbed his bare feet. They were beginning to hurt. He’d walked all over the beach that afternoon, and then had run all over the landscape, looking at a queer golden missile and searching for a car. Since then, he had walked over four miles—rapidly at first, then more slowly as the soles of his feet had begun to hurt more and more. He looked at the tender skin. There were rock cuts in several places, and the rough coral sand had abraded the instep and his toes raw. He was almost exhausted from the exertion he had gone through.
It had been nearly an hour and a half since he had started from the beach. He knew he was within a mile of the ranchhouse, but since the sun had set, the gray dusk didn’t afford much visibility. All he could see was the pale yellow glow of the house lights in the distance.
Why hadn’t Janice sent a car after him? What had happened?
He was still eyeing the far-off gleam of the house lights when another glimmer sprang into sight. Someone had turned on car lights. He couldn’t hear the car start, but he saw the headlights start to move. They were coming down the road toward him. Wearily, he stood up. The rough sand grated into his soles, but he started plodding on down the road toward the distant headlights.
It took the car nearly five minutes to cover the mile stretch of rocky, sandy road. As it pulled up close, Dan saw with surprise that it wasn’t the station wagon. The insignia on the side of the sedan showed the five-pointed star of the local sheriff’s office.
Standing in the glare of the headlights, Dan Thorne waved his hands. The car slowed, and a spotlight suddenly blazed out into the night, catching Dan square in the face.
He squinted against the glare and called out: “For Heaven’s sake, shut that thing off; I’m Daniel Thorne.”
“Yeah,” said a voice from behind the light. “We’ve been looking for you, Mr. Thorne. Do oblige us by getting in.” Thorne recognized the man’s voice. It was the smooth, silky, British voice of Sheriff James Malcom.
Dan met his eyes as well as he could. “You want me?” he asked hesitantly.
“Yes, please,” Malcom said. “Please don’t hold us up any further.”
Puzzled, Thorne climbed into the sedan and took a seat by the sheriff’s side. Without a word, the sheriff released the clutch and started the car. Thorne watched him for a long moment; the sheriff, a small, impeccably-groomed man, had his eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead.
“Say, Sheriff,” Thorne burst out after a while. “What’s going on?”
“We’re heading for the Hadley ranch,” Malcom told him in clipped, precise syllables. “I’d like to question you there, if it’s not much bother.”
“Hadley ranch? Questioning? Say, I’m glad you’re taking me there. I was swimming with Jan Hadley this afternoon, and she took off and ditched me here. I still can’t figure out—” suddenly Thorne’s voice fell. “Hey, what kind of questioning are you talking about, Sheriff? What’s been going on today?”
Malcom ignored the question. “You say you were swimming with Miss Hadley this afternoon?” he asked slowly.
“For a while,” Thorne said. “Until she vanished. It was a pretty lousy trick to play, believe me.” I hope that’s all it was, he thought. Just a trick.
Thorne did not intend to tell the sheriff about the torn bathing suit just yet—or about the monstrous footprints on the sand. The first might indicate some sort of assault, but he couldn’t account for the footprints at all, and he didn’t care to have Malcom think he was insane. A stunt? A crazy Hollywood gag? I hope so, Thorne thought grimly.
“She vanished, eh?” Sheriff Malcom said, as he wheeled the car down the short graded road that led up to the Hadley ranchhouse. “Damned interesting, must say. Just went—into a blue sky, what?”
Thorne turned in his seat to face Malcom. “Suppose you stop playing games, and tell me where Janice is now.”
“Very well,” Malcom said, as he parked the car. “Come inside, and perhaps we’ll all learn a few things. Janice Hadley came back earlier this afternoon—minus her bathing suit, and in a severe state of shock!”
There was a grim-faced group of men sitting in the handsome living room of Thomas Hadley. As Thorne followed Sheriff Malcom inside, he saw three familiar faces seated in the heavily-upholstered chairs—Thomas Hadley, Jan’s father; Robert Candor, a psychiatrist fairly well known in the movie colony; and Sergeant Wheeler, one of Malcom’s deputies.
Their faces stiffened as Thorne entered. Dan saw them glaring coldly at him.
“Here he is,” Sheriff Malcom said casually.
“Sit down, Thorne,” Thomas Hadley said. His voice was tight and harsh with tension.
Thorne crossed the room to the chair Hadley indicated and folded himself down into its embracing plushness, feeling very much bewildered. He looked up expectantly at Hadley.
“Would you mind telling me,” he asked slowly, “exactly why I’ve been summoned here? And where Janice is?”
“Janice is in her room,” Hadley said icily. “Perhaps you know how she happened to lose her bathing suit—and why she stumbled in here screaming hysterically that she’d been attacked!”
Thorne burst from the chair instantly. “If you think that I—”
“I made no allegations, Thorne. You were the last person known to be with her this afternoon before the attack.” Hadley turned worriedly to the psychiatrist. “Bob, what are your findings?”
Candor, a rangy, intenselooking man in his early forties, rubbed his chin reflectively. “Well, Tom, I’ve made a complete physical examination, and I tried to talk to the girl as much as her condition would allow.”
“And?”
“She hasn’t been harmed physically,” Candor said.
“You’re sure?” Hadley asked.
“I am,” said the psychiatrist. Hadley let out a sigh of relief. “Thank God for that,” he said.
“However,” Candor said, “she has had a hell of a scare. I don’t know what happened to her out there. All I could get out of her was what you told me—her swimsuit was torn off, and something too terrible to describe happened. She’s developed a sort of temporary protective amnesia to block off the memory. It must have been nasty, whatever it was. She ought to be able to talk about it in a couple of days.” He glanced meaningfully at Thorne.
“Umm,” Sheriff Malcom said. “Too terrible to describe, eh?” He squinted at Sergeant Foster. “What’s your opinion, Sergeant?”
The deputy leaned forward heavily. “Looks pretty open and shut to me,” he growled. “This actor-boy was alone with the girl, wasn’t he? And it’s not hard to guess what he must have tried to do to her.”
“You’re crazy!” Thorne snapped bitterly. “I won’t be framed into anything!” He turned in appeal to Thomas Hadley. “You’ve known me a long time, Mr. Hadley. You know I wouldn’t do a thing like that to Janice! How can you let this uniformed ox stand here and accuse me of—of—”
“That’s a point,” Hadley said, his cold anger melting a little. “It’s not the sort of thing I’d expect from you, Dan.”
“But she was assaulted by someone,” the psychiatrist interjected. “She keeps talking of a hairy monster—a beast with seven tails, or something. It’s easy to see the girl’s half out of her mind with fear.”
“Beast with seven tails?” Thorne asked.
“It was just some wild thing she started to tell me,” Dr. Candor said. “Then she burst into tears again. The way I see it, it’s a sublimated and imaginatively transferred representation of the libidinous forces unleashed by her attacker during the—”
“Very well,” Sheriff Malcom cut in. “I’m willing to accept your hypothesis—whatever it means,” he added more softly. “But we’re all talking too much, and the one man who should be talking isn’t. Mr. Thorne, suppose you tell us in your own words exactly what d take place on the beach this afternoon?”
Dan described the outing exactly as it happened, right up to the time when he left Janice on her terrycloth and headed back for the thermos jug. Then he stopped.
“Why don’t you go on?” the sheriff said gently.
“Because if I go on, Dr. Candor over here is going to make me the next candidate for his loonybin. So I won’t go on. I’m stuck either way, anyhow. If I tell you what happened, you’ll think I’m crazy and put me away—and if I don’t, I’m prime suspect in the assault case.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Thomas Hadley said.
“Look,” Thorne said patiently. “I’ll give you the whole thing, if you want it. But don’t interrupt.”
“Very well,” Hadley said.
“Okay. After I left Jan, I started back to the car. But I got sidetracked by a golden spaceship, standing on the sand a mile away. I went over to investigate, and—”
“A golden what?” Malcom asked, politely incredulous.
“Some kind of space craft,” said Thorne, determined now to be perfectly honest and devil take the consequences. “It was just a shell—some sort of drive mechanism down below, and then an empty inside. It was about thirty feet high, standing up there on its big end.”
“Tell me something,” Sergeant Wheeler demanded. “What was your last movie, Thorne?”
“The Surgeon’s Knife,” Thorne said, referring to a medical-documentary he’d made for an independent studio not long before.
“U-h-huh,” said Wheeler sarcastically. “Sure it wasn’t some space-opera thing, now?”
“Listen,” Thorne said. “I’m giving you the account as I saw it. If you’re going to interrupt me, I’ll stop right here.”
Wheeler sat back angrily. “Wiseguy,” he snorted.
“All right, Mr. Thorne,” the sheriff said. “After the golden spaceship, what?”
“I got through investigating that, and then I went back to the car. It wasn’t there. I was stranded. And I could tell from the kind of tracks that the car’d been taken out in a hurry.”
“Oh, a detective, eh?” Wheeler said.
“Let him speak,” said Sheriff Malcom.
“Then I went to the edge of the cliff and looked down—and I saw Jan was gone. I ran down to the beach, and found her bathing suit slit down the front.”
He paused, unwilling to mention the gigantic footprints. He was completely befogged by the tangled case, and seriously alarmed now at what really did happen to Janice.
Dr. Candor cleared his throat. “The suit was slit down the front, you say?”
Thorne nodded.
“Odd. Because the only sign of any physical harm done to Miss Hadley was a tiny scratch at the base of her throat—made as if by a terribly sharp knife. As if, perhaps, someone had placed the knife at her throat and ripped straight downward.”
“You haven’t checked the beach, have you?” Sheriff Malcom said to Wheeler.
“Not yet, chief.”
“You ought to recover the bathing suit.”
“And how about that spaceship?” Wheeler asked hilariously. “Exhibit B. Don’t you want me to bring that in?”
“A good idea,” commented Hadley. “It may be valuable evidence.”
“You should notify the Air Force, at least,” said Thorne. “It’s probably an experimental model that’s crashed.”
He paused, realizing the four of them were snickering, and Wheeler was close to open laughter.
“You don’t believe anything of what I’ve said, do you?” Thorne demanded hotly.
Sheriff Malcom grinned. “That was never implied, was it?”
“I’ll say it was,” said Thorne. “You think I’m crazy. Especially you,” he said, gesturing at the psychiatrist.
There was a long silence. Then, finally, the sheriff said, “There is some doubt as to the veracity of what you’ve been telling us, y’know.”
“Which means, roughly translated, that you think I raped Jan—Miss Hadley—and cooked up the wildest story imaginable, on the general grounds that the craziest alibi I had stood me the best chance of getting off, is that it?” Thorne crossed the room and faced them. “Well, here’s another clue for you, then,” he snapped. “There were some footprints down on the beach, near where Jan had been.”
“Footprints?” Malcom echoed.
“Yes, footprints. Footprints two feet long! Go do some Sherlock Holmesing about them!”
Dr. Candor cleared his throat. “I think we’ve accomplished about all we can accomplish in this inquiry,” he said. “Mr. Thorne is obviously—”
“—crazy,” Thorne concluded.
“I wish you weren’t so blunt,” Candor said. “But certainly you can’t seriously expect us to swallow a story about a golden spaceship and footprints two feet long, do you?”
“I’m not asking you to,” Thorne said. “Why in blazes don’t you go down to the beach and see for yourself?
The tide may have obliterated the prints, for all I know, but that golden shell’s still going to be there!”
“And the bathing suit,” the sheriff said. “That’s important evidence. Wheeler, take my car and go down to the beach. See what you can find. Look around for golden spaceships, particularly. It’s a lead we can’t ignore.”
The deputy sheriff grinned. “I’d prefer that you come with me, sir. Even if I found the thing, you might think I was cracked too!”
“Very well,” Malcom said. “We’ll both go.”
“I’ll tend to Miss Hadley again,” Dr. Candor said. “Perhaps I can apply some therapy that’ll bring her out of the state of shock she’s in.”
“What about me?” Thorne asked. “Are you going to leave a vicious, sadistic monster like me loose in this house unguarded?”
“Hardly,” said Malcom. “Wheeler, you stay here and keep an eye on Thorne. I’ll go down to the beach myself—and, damme, you’d better take my word if there’s anything peculiar down there.”
Thorne sat down and crossed his long legs. “Don’t rush, Sheriff. That spaceship’s not going anywhere. But I suggest you keep your gun cocked.”
TO: LLOGEL REMM, DANNISET VI FROM: MELWAR DOSS, I.O.C.C., VIBAN III
SEARCH BEAMS HAVE LOCATED SHIP 1-69. AUTOSIGNALS WILL DIRECT TAKEOFF AND GUIDE TO DANNISET VI. KRROBEK SHOULD ARRIVE AS SCHEDULED, PLUS TIME ALLOWED FOR DELAY ENROUTE. I TOLD YOU NOT TO GET IN SUCH A FUSS. I.O.C.C. ALWAYS DELIVERS, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE.
MELWAR
Dan Thorne sat in a cell of the county jail, staring angrily at the thick steel bars. Sergeant Foster stood outside the bars, an insolent smile on his face.
“Why don’t you come clean, Thorne? What did you do to the girl? What happened yesterday evening?”
Thorne took a deep breath and stood up. He walked over to the cell door and looked straight at the deputy. His eyes were dangerous. “What the hell have you got against me, Foster? Nothing’s happened to Miss Hadley. You’ve pulled me in here for questioning, and all you’ve done is harp on that one thing—something you’ve got no basis for. I don’t have to put up with that, Wheeler, and I warn you that if I have to listen to one more silly yap out of your stupid, vicious face, I’m going to put a fist right where it will do the most damage. Now, shut up.” He turned and walked back to his bunk.
