Night Freight

Hixon was up on his feet, standing with DeVries twenty feet from the entrance; he was still a little shaky but the glazed look was gone from his eyes. He said, "Bad in there?"

"As bad as it gets."

"What'd you find?" DeVries asked. He was looking at what Larrabee held between his left thumb and forefinger.

Larrabee squinted at it, holding it away from his face because of the smell. Kid's spiral-bound notebook, the covers torn and stained, the ruled paper inside almost black with filth and dried blood. But on half a dozen pages there was writing, old writing done with a pencil pressed hard and angry so that the words were still legible. Larrabee put his back to the sun so he could read it better.

. . . Believe it. Believe me. I am the proof

We look like men, We walk and talk like men, in your presence We act like men. But We are not men. Believe that too.

We are the ancient evil. . . .

Wordlessly, Larrabee handed the notebook to DeVries, who made a faint disgusted sound when he touched it. But he read what was written inside. So did Hixon.

"Man oh man," Hixon said when he was done, with a kind of awe in his voice. "Ben, you don't think . . . ?"

"It's bullshit," Larrabee said. "Ravings of a lunatic."

"Sure. Sure. Only . . ."

"Only what?"

"I don't know, it . . . I don't know."

"Come on, Charley" DeVries said. "You don't buy any of that crap, do you? Some kind of monster—a werewolf, for Christ's sake?"

"No. It's just . . . maybe we ought to take this back with us, give it to the sheriff."

Larrabee gave him a hard look. "The body too, I suppose? Lug it twenty miles in this heat, smelling the way it does, leaking blood?"

"Not that, no. But we got to report it, don't we? Tell the law what happened?"

"Hell we do. How's it going to look? He's got three bullets in him, two of mine and one of Hank's. He jumped us out of a cave, three of us with rifles and him without a weapon, and we blew him away—how's that going to sound?"

"But it was self-defense. The sheriff'll believe that . . ."

"Will he? I'm not going to take the chance."

"Ben's right," DeVries said. "Neither am I."

"What do we do then?"

"Bury him," Larrabee said. "Forget any of this ever happened."

"Bury the notebook too?"

"What notebook?" Larrabee said.

. . . You fools, you blind fools . . .

They dug the grave for the crazy sheep-killing man and his crazy legacy in the grass above the outcrop. Deep, six feet deep, so the predators couldn't get at him.

Writers are forever being asked where they get their ideas. We chafe at the question because it is really unanswerable. Ideas come from everywhere and nowhere. Some develop slowly, requiring a good deal of thought and reshaping. Others seem to fall out of the blue and smack the muse's head like the apple allegedly struck Isaac Newton's. Take this story, for instance. One day I was browsing through some old mystery magazines, and halfway through a wholly different and not very good tale of a menaced family, "The Monster" suddenly appeared. Full-born and nasty, first sentence to last, title included. I wrote it in an hour, virtually as you'll read it here—and I seldom consider any piece of writing finished without extensive revisions. Ideas? Hey, don't ask me where they come from.

The Monster

He was after the children.

Meg knew it, all at once, as soon as he was inside the house. She couldn't have said exactly how she knew. He was pleasant enough on the surface, smiling, friendly. Big and shaggy-haired in his uniform, hairy all over like a bear. But behind his smile and underneath his fur there was menace, evil. She felt it, intuited it—a mother's instinct for danger. He was after Kate and Bobby. One of those monsters who preyed on little children, hurt them, did unspeakable things to them—

"Downstairs or upstairs?" he said.

". . . What?"

"The stopped-up drain. Downstairs here or upstairs?"

A feeling of desperation was growing in her, spreading toward panic. She didn't know what to do. "I think you'd better leave." The words were out before she realized what she was saying.

"Huh? I just got here, Mrs. Thompson. Your husband said you got a stopped-up drain—that's right, isn't it?"

Why did I let him in? she thought. Just because he said Philip sent him, that doesn't make it so. And even if Philip did send him . . . Oh God, why him, of all the plumbers in this city?

"No," she said. "No, it . . . it's all right now. It's working again, there's nothing wrong with it."

He wasn't smiling anymore. "You kidding me?"

"Why would I do that?"

"Yeah, why? Over at the door you said you been expecting me, come on in and fix the drain."

"I didn't—"

"You did, lady. Look, I haven't got time to play games. And it's go

"It's all right now, I tell you."

"Okay, maybe it is. But if it was stopped-up once today, it could happen again. You never know with the pipes in these old houses. So where is it, up or down?"

"Please . . ."

"Upstairs, right? Yeah, now I think of it, your husband said it was in the upstairs bathroom."

No! The word was like a scream in her mind. The upstairs bathroom was between their room, hers and Philip's, and the nursery. Baby Kate in her crib, not even a year old, and Bobby, just two, napping in his bed . . . so i

He moved past her to the stairs, hefting his tool kit in one huge, scab-knuckled hand. "You want to show me where it is?"

"No!" She cried it aloud this time.

"Hey," he said, "you don't have to bust my eardrums." He shook his head the way Philip did sometimes when he was vexed with her. "Well, I can find it myself. Can't hide a bathroom from an old hand like me."

He started up the stairs.

She stood paralyzed, staring in horror as he climbed. She tried to shriek at him to stop, go away, don't hurt the babies, but her voice had frozen in her throat. If any harm came to Kate and Bobby, she could never forgive herself—she would shrivel up and die. So many childless years, all the doctors who'd told her and Philip that she could never conceive, and then the sudden miracle of her first pregnancy and Bobby's birth, the second miracle that was Kate. . . . If she let either of them be hurt she would be as much of a monster as the one climbing the stairs—

Stop him!

The paralysis left her as abruptly as it had come on; her legs pumped, carried her headlong into the kitchen. A knife, the big butcher knife . . . She grabbed it out of the rack, raced back to the stairs.

He was already on the second floor. She couldn't see him, but she could hear his heavy menacing tread in the hallway, going down the hallway.

Toward the nursery.

Toward Kate and Bobby.

She rushed upstairs, clutching the knife, her terror so immense now it felt as though her head would burst. She ran into the hallway, saw him again—and  her heart skipped a beat, the fear ripped inside her like an animal trying to claw its way out of a cage.