The Last Place on Earth | Page 3

called the sheriff. What had got into him? He had never been a sex maniac before! But still ... it was hardly unexpected.
Might as well wait to start on those rabbit cages until tomorrow, he decided. This evening he felt like exploring.
The house was so big, and packed with so many things that he never found and examined them all. Or if he did, he forgot a lot about the things between times, so it was like reading a favorite book over again, always discovering new things in it.
The parlor was red in the fading light, and the hall beyond the sliding doors was deeply shadowed. In the sewing room, he remembered, in the drawers of the treadle machine the radio was captured. The rings and secret manuals of the days when radio had been alive. He hadn't looked over those things in some little time.
He looked up the shadowed stairway. He remembered the night, a few weeks before Christmas when he had been twelve and really too old to believe, his mother had said she was going up to see if Santa Claus had left any packages around a bit early. They often gave him his presents early, since they were never quite sure he would live until Christmas.
But his mother had been playing a trick on him. She hadn't been going up after packages. She had gone up those stairs to murder his father.
She had shot him in the back of the head with his Army Colt .45 from the first war. Collins never quite understood why the hole in back was so neat and the one in front where it came out was so messy.
After he went to live with Aunt Amy and the house had been boarded up, he heard them talking, Aunt Amy and her boy friend, fat Uncle Ralph. And they had said his mother had murdered his father because he had gone ahead and made her get pregnant again and she was afraid it would be another one like Sam.
Sam Collins knew she must have planned it a long time in advance. She had filled up the bathtub with milk, real milk, and she went in after she had done it and took a bath in the milk. Then she slit her wrists.
When Sam Collins had run down the stairs, screaming, and barged into the bathroom, he had found the tub looking like a giant stick of peppermint candy.
* * * * *
Aunt Amy had been good to him.
Because he didn't talk for about a year after he found the bodies, most people thought he was simple-minded. But Aunt Amy had always treated him just like a regular boy. That was embarrassing sometimes, but still it was better than what he got from the others.
The doctor hadn't wanted to perform the operation on his clubfoot. He said it would be an unproductive waste of his time and talent, that he owed it to the world to use them to the very best advantage. Finally he agreed. The operation took about thirty seconds. He stuck a knife into Sam's foot and went snick-snick. A couple of weeks later, his foot was healed and it was just like anybody else's. Aunt Amy had paid him $500 in payments, only he returned the money order for the last fifty dollars and wished them Merry Christmas.
Sam Collins could work after that. When Aunty Amy and Uncle Ralph disappeared, he opened up the old house and started doing odd jobs for people who weren't very afraid of him any more.
That first day had been quite a shock, when he discovered that not in all these years had anybody cleaned the bathtub.
Sometimes, when he was taking his Saturday night soaker he still got kind of a funny feeling. But he knew it was only rust from the faucets.
Collins sighed. It seemed like a long time since he had seen his mother coming down those stairs....
He stopped, his throat aching with tightness.
Something was very strange.
His mother was coming down the stairs right now.
She was walking down the stairs, one step, two steps, coming closer to him.
Collins ran up the stairs, prepared to run through the phantom to prove it wasn't there.
The figure raised a gun and pointed it at him.
This time, she was going to shoot him.
It figured.
He always had bad luck.
"Stop!" the woman on the stairs said. "Stop or I'll shoot, Mr. Collins!"
* * * * *
Collins stopped, catching to the bannister. He squinted hard, and as a stereoptic slide lost its depth when you shut one eye, the woman on the stairs was no longer his mother. She was young, pretty, brunette and sweet-faced, and the gun she held shrunk from an old Army Colt to a .22 target pistol.
"Who are you?" Collins demanded.
The girl took a grip