Uncollected Stories 2003 Read Online Free PDF Page A

pretty. Then she went on.
"Two years ago the company he was working for as a night watchman
folded up and my uncle was out of a job. He was out of work for almost
half a year. We were getting desperate, with only unemployment checks
to feed us and college looming up for me. Then he got a job. It was a
good paying one and it brought in fabulous sums. I used to joke with
him about the banks he robbed. One night he looked at me and said,
'Not banks.'"
I felt fear and guilt tap me on the shoulder with cold fingers. Vicki
went on.
"He started to get mean. He started bringing home whiskey and
getting drunk. The times I asked him about his job he evaded me. One
night he told me point-blank to mind my own business.
"I watched him decay before my very eyes. Then one night he let a
name slip – Weinbaum, Steffen Weinbaum. A couple of weeks later he
forgot his midnight lunch. I looked up the name in the telephone book
and took it out to him. He flew into the most terrible rage I have ever
seen.
"In the weeks that followed he was away more and more at this
terrible house. One night, when he came home he beat me. I decided to
run away. To me, the Uncle David I knew was dead. He caught me –
and you came along." She fell silent.
I was shaken right down to my boots. I had a very good idea what
Vicki's uncle did for a living. The time Rankin had signed me up
coincided with the time Vicki's guardian would have been cracking up. I
almost drove away then, despite the wild shambles the lab was in,
despite the secret stairway, despite the blood trail on the floor. But then
a faraway, thin scream reached us. I thumbed the glove compartment
button, and reached in, fumbled around and got the flashlight.
Vicki's hand went to my arm "No, Danny. Please, don't. l know that
there's something terrible going on here. Drive away from it!"
The scream sounded again, this time fainter, and I made up my mind. I
grabbed the flashlight. Vicki saw my intention. "All right, I'm coming
with you."
"Uh-uh," I said. "You stay here. I've got a feeling that there's
something...loose out there. You stay here."
She unwillingly sat back. I shut the door and ran back to the lab. I
didn't pause, but went back into the garage. The flashlight illuminated
the dark hole where the wall had slid away to reveal the staircase. My
blood pounding thickly in my temples, I ventured down into it. I
counted the steps, shining the flashlight at the featureless walls, at the
impenetrable darkness below.
"Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three – "
At thirty, the stairway suddenly became a short passage. I started
cautiously along it, wishing that I had a revolver, or even a knife to
make me feel a little less naked and vulnerable.
Suddenly a scream, terrible and thick with fear soon sounded in the
darkness ahead of me. It was the sound of terror, the sound of a man
confronted with something out of the deepest pits of horror. I broke into
a run. As I ran I realized that the draft was blowing coldly against my
face. I reasoned that the tunnel must come out in the outdoors. I
stumbled over something. It was Rankin, lying in a pool of his own
blood, his eyes staring in glazed horror at the ceiling. The back of his
head was bashed in. Ahead of me I heard a pistol shot, a curse, and
another scream. I ran on and almost fell on my face as I stumbled over
more stairs. I climbed and saw stairs framed vaguely in an opening
screened with underbrush above me. I pushed it aside and came upon a
startling tableau: a tall figure silhouetted against the sky that could only
be Weinbaum, a revolver hanging in his hand, looking down at the
shadowed ground. Even the starlight was blotted out as the hanging
clouds that had parted briefly, closed together again. He heard me and
wheeled quickly, his eyes glazing like red lanterns in the dark.
"Oh, it’s you, Gerad."
"Rankin's dead," I told him.
"I know," he said, "you could have prevented it if you had come a