Killer, Come Back to Me

by Ray Bradbury

  Johnny started. His doorknob was turning. The door pushed open a few inches. Someone was standing there in the darkness, looking in. A heart is an erratic thing. Like mercury. It scurries all over a person’s insides. Johnny’s heart was like mercury.

  The door remained open. The shadow remained standing in the doorway, staring, looking in. Johnny said nothing. Then, very matter-of-factly, the shadow withdrew, and the door closed.

  Rapping the lock home hard, Johnny threw his breath out and lay trembling on the door. Pressure from outside a moment later, from that withdrawn shadow, could not force the bolt. Johnny listened. The shadow went away.

  Very weakly Johnny returned to bed, trembling. “Mom! Mom,” he said to himself, “are you mad at me for making a scene before all of society? Would you kill me, Mom? Was there something about the Trunk Lady and Dad, something you didn’t like, and did you kill her because of it? Now, when I come around, in the way, what will you do to me? Oh, Mom, it can’t be you!”

  “Dad,” he said, the same way, “you made me hang up the phone. Are you afraid it will get out too? Afraid of your business, your money, your reputation at the club, huh, Dad? Was that you standing in the door, silent and dark and thinking? You’ve been my favorite in the family. But now, today, you’re so quiet and you don’t even look at me.”

  Cousin William. He could have changed the bodies, tried to fool Johnny. He could have put one of the mannequins in the trunk instead. Was she Cousin William’s girlfriend? Was she causing trouble somehow? Or was Cousin William just afraid for his reputation? Him and his mannequins and his famous, expensive dresses for expensive women. Was it him, twisting the doorknob a moment ago?

  Maybe it was Uncle Flinny, with his bedtime stories and his quiet ways. He loved Mother so much—his sister. He’d do anything for her or Dad or Grandma or Cousin William. Would he kill for her or Dad or the others to keep this house whole, intact and untouched?

  Grandma. Played her cold game of chess day by day and drank her brandy neat. Her whole life was keeping the house moving together. Her whole life was society and position and taste. What if someone came into the house and tried to do all the ordering instead of her? What would she do to her?

  All of them! All of them!

  Johnny sank shivering back on the springs. A woman walked into a big mothballed old mansion like this and suddenly everyone was afraid. Just one woman.

  On the table beside his bed Johnny groped and found the note he’d discovered in the attic dust. He felt of it, and read it again in his mind:

  —you’ve got to make it up to me, the way I’ve been treated. It shouldn’t be difficult. I could be Johnny’s teacher. That would explain my presence in the house to everyone. ELLIE.

  Johnny turned over.

  “Ellie, my teacher, where are you now?” he asked the darkness. “Lonely and resting in Cousin William’s studio with all the other stiffened mannequins? Playing chess with Grandma, only not moving? In the cold, dark basement like the wine casks put away for all the years? Somewhere in this big house tonight. But maybe not tomorrow. Unless I find you before then.…”

  * * *

  There was a huge back yard with many acres to it, fruit trees, a flower garden, the swimming pool, the bathhouse, servants’ quarters immediately behind the big house. Sunlight caught between a row of sycamore trees and a high green fence that shielded all this from the street. There was an oak tree to dangle from in the afternoon, and a policeman who walked his beat just under that tree on the sidewalk beyond the fence. Johnny climbed up and waited.

  The policeman walked below. Johnny rattled leaves.

  “Hi, son.” The policeman looked up. “Better watch out. You’ll fall.”

  “I don’t care,” said Johnny. “We got a dead lady in our house and everybody keeps it secret.”

  The policeman made a smile. “You have, have you?”

  Johnny shifted himself. “I found her in a trunk. Somebody killed her. I tried to call the police last night, but Dad wouldn’t let me. I tipped the trunk over, and she fell downstairs but she turned out to be a wax doll. It wasn’t the lady after all.”

  “So.” The policeman chuckled, enjoying it.

  “But the other lady was real,” insisted Johnny.

  “What other lady?”

  “The first one I found. Cousin William’s a dress designer. He changed bodies. You should have seen everyone at breakfast this morning. Trying to be happy. Like in the movies. But they can’t fool me. They’re not happy. Mother looks tired, and she’s real touchy. I wonder how long they can go around like this without yelling?”

  The policeman scowled. “Honest to God, you sound just like my kid. Him and his Buck Rogers disintegrators and his comic books. Honest to God, it’s a crime what they give the younger generation to read. Ruin their minds with it. Killing. Corpses. Ah!”

  “But it’s true!”

  “See you later,” said the policeman, and walked on.

  Johnny clung there, and the tree trembled in the wind. Then he dropped down across the fence and gave chase. “You got to come look. They’ll take her away if you don’t—then nobody’ll ever find her.”

  The policeman was patient. “Look, little boy, I can’t go nowhere without no warrant. How do I know you’re not lying?” He was joking now.

  “You’ve just got to believe me—that’s all.”

  The policeman stuck out his hand. “Here.”

  Johnny took it. The policeman walked.

  “Where are we going?” asked Johnny.

  “To see your mother.”

  “No!” Johnny squirmed frantically. “That won’t help! She’ll hate me for it! She’ll lie about it!”

  The policeman firmly escorted him around front and thumbed the bell. First a maid, and then Mother was at the door, her face pale as milk, her lips a red smear against the white. Her pompadour was a little toppled over. There were blue pouches under her suddenly dull eyes.

  “Johnny!”

  “Better keep him inside, ma’am.” The policeman touched his cap. “He’ll get hurt running in the street.”

  “Thank you, officer.”

  The officer looked at her, then at Johnny. Johnny started to speak, but he could only sob. Two tears ran down his cheeks as the door closed, shutting the officer outside.

  Mother didn’t say anything to Johnny. Not a word. She just stood there, lost and white, twisting her fingers. That was all.

  * * *

  Hours later in the day, Johnny wrote it all down upon a nickel tablet of paper. Everything he knew about the Trunk Lady, everything he knew about Cousin William, Mom, Dad, Uncle Flinny, Grandma. Wetting his pencil, Johnny put it out in lines like this:

  “The Lady in the Trunk loved Dad. Dad killed her when she came to the house.” Johnny pouted over that one. “Either that or Mom killed her.” Long years of viewing motion picture murders went through Johnny’s mind. “Then, of course, Grandma or Uncle Flinny could have killed her because their authority and security was threatened.” Yeah. Johnny scribbled quick. Let’s see, now. “And Cousin William? Maybe it was his woman friend, after all.” Johnny sort of hoped it was. He wasn’t very partial to Cousin W. “Maybe, maybe there was something in Grandma’s past? Or Uncle Flinny’s?” Now, how about—

  “Johnny!”

  Grandma’s voice. Johnny put away the pad.

  Grandma came in the door and guided Johnny out through the hall and into her room, using her cane as a nervous prod. She seated him before the chessboard and nodded at the pale pieces. “Those are yours. Mine are black.” She thought it over, eyes closed.

  “Mine are always black.”

  “We can’t play,” Johnny announced. “Two of your black pieces are missing.” He pointed.

  She looked. “Uncle Flinny again. He’s always taking some of my players. Always and forever. We’ll play anyway. I’ll use what I have. Move.” She jabbed a skinny finger.

  “Where’s Uncle Flinny?”

  “Watering t
he garden. Move,” she ordered.

  Her eyes watched his fingers in their path. She leaned forward slowly over the shining pieces. “We’re all good people, Johnny. We led a good life these twenty years in this house. You’ve been in it only part of that twenty. We never asked for no trouble. Don’t make us any, Johnny.”

  He sat there. A fly buzzed against the large window. Far away, below, water ran from a faucet. “I don’t want no—trouble,” he said.

  The chessboard blurred and ran away like colored water. “Dad looked so white and funny at breakfast today. Why should he feel that way over a wax doll, Grandma? And Mom, she looks like she’s all twisted up like a spring inside a clock, ready to bust loose. That’s no way to act over a doll, is it?”

  Grandma deliberated over her bishop, withdrawn into herself like an old hermit crab in a shell of lace. “There was no body. Just your imagination. Forget it. Forget it.” She glared at the child as if he were responsible. “Walk light from now on, sonny. Keep quiet and keep out of the way and forget it. Someone’s got to tell you these things. Don’t know why it’s always me. But just forget it!”

  They played chess until twilight. Then the house got dark again too quickly, everybody hurried through supper, and it seemed that everybody went to bed early too.

  Johnny listened to the hours chiming out one by one. Someone rapped on the door. Johnny said, “Who is it?”

  “Uncle Flinny.”

  “What do you want, Uncle Flinny!”

  “Time for your bedtime story, Johnny.”

  “Oh, well—not tonight, please, Uncle Flinny.”

  “Yes. Please. This is a very special story. A very extra special bedtime story.”

  Johnny waited. Then: “I’m tired, Uncle Flinny. Some other time, huh? Not tonight, please.”

  Uncle Flinny went away and after a while the clock chimed again. It was after ten. More time. After eleven. More time. Almost twelve.

  Johnny opened the door.

  The house was completely asleep. You could tell by the quiet, untouched gleam on the long hall stairs, clear moonlight pouring through great areas of glass, and no shadow moving.

  Johnny closed the door behind him. From off somewhere in a quiet land, Grandma breathed heavily in her great four-postered bed. There was a tinkling noise, very faintly, as if bottles were being cautiously rattled behind Cousin William’s door.

  Johnny paused at the staircase. All he had to do would be return to bed and forget about it, believe that it was all a mistake, and there would be no trouble. It would be forgotten and things would take up where they’d been a few days ago.

  Mother would laugh at her parties. Dad would drive back and forth to the office with his thick briefcase. Grandma would sneak her brandy on the side. Cousin William would insert needles into mannequin flesh, and Uncle Flinny would go on forever telling his feverish bedtime stories that meant nothing.

  Yet it was not so easy as that. Things could not go back now. Only ahead. You can’t forget. Dad, his only friend, was a stranger now, since the—incident. Mother was worse than ever. Her eyes looked like they cried at night. Down under the glitter she had to live too. And Grandma, she’d drink two bottles instead of one bottle of brandy a week. And Cousin William, every time he stuck a pin into a mannequin he’d think of the Trunk Lady, blanch, cringe, and start whimpering over his cognac.

  And she—the lovely dark-haired stranger in the musty trunk —had looked so lonely up there where he’d found her. So apart. There was a bond between them. She was a stranger to the house—and was killed for it. Johnny was a stranger in the house now too. He wanted to find her again, because of that. They were almost brother and sister. She needed finding. She needed to be remembered, not to be forgotten.

  Johnny went down each step with careful footing. He clung to the banister, sliding his fingers. She would not be in the attic now, nor would she be in any of the upstairs rooms. How could they sleep with her so near them?…Downstairs perhaps. Somewhere in the accumulated night of the house. Not in the servants’ quarters.

  He had just reached the stair bottom when he heard one of the upstairs doors open very slowly and close. After that there was not a sound, but quite calmly, quietly, someone came and stood at the top of the stairs, looking down.

  Johnny froze. He leaned against the wall like a shadow. Sweat came out on his face and trickled in the small palms of his hands. He could not see who it was. They just stood there, watching, looking down, silent and waiting.

  Things had to go on. You can’t lie in bed and forget. Johnny couldn’t just forget the stranger, the Trunk Lady, in her lonely attitude of death. The murderer, too, could not forget easily— nor that there was a small boy in the house who was too curious, too incautious.

  Johnny breathed very slowly. He waited a moment. Then, when he saw that the person at the top of the stairs was not coming down, he moved quickly down the hall, into the kitchen, and out the back door into the moonlit veldt of the garden.

  The swimming pool lay flat and shining square, with a fringe of trees beyond it, stars over it, the bathhouse near it, the low garden rows to left and right. Farther down was the greenhouse and the garden toolshed. Johnny ran.

  The shadows of the toolshed offered temporary haven. Looking back, he detected no movement in the house, no light. The body would most probably be in one of these outlying houses.

  His bed would feel nice now. The lock on the door would be nice. Johnny trembled like the water in the pool. Suddenly he saw someone standing in the upstairs hall window. There was just a hint of a standing figure there. Looking down, as it had looked from the top of the stairs.…Then—it was gone.

  Now, down the gravel drive on the side of the house, footsteps sounded. Someone was coming from the front of the house, around under the sycamores. Someone moving in sycamore shadows, stealthily and unseen.

  Then, very suddenly, breaking into half-light, she was there. She! Not Mother, nor Grandmother. But emerging half into moonlight, half in flecked shadow—was the Trunk Lady.

  * * *

  She looked at Johnny, far across the garden, and said nothing.

  Johnny swallowed tightly and blinked. He held onto himself, his thighs, his knees, with clenched fingers. He crouched and squinted and stared in raw disbelief. A night wind set the sycamore leaves to shivering. From a way off an auto horn hooted like a lonely owl.

  She was not dead after all. The whole house had tried to fool him. This was some fantastic jest he could not understand. They were all against him. His teacher was alive! There was no murder, no death! She was here, for him alone! In his hour of loneliness, she was here!

  He darted out into the moonlight. Panting, not yelling, not laughing, he ran toward her across the grass, to the tiles of the swimming pool, across the tiles, around the pool and toward the sycamores.

  She stood waiting for him, arms outstretched to take him into their soft embrace, sycamore shadows stirring over her cocktail dress, setting it into dreamy motion.

  He said, “Ellie, is that you?”

  He reached the rim of stirring shadow and screamed. The universe seemed to explode. The cocktail dress whirled madly, toppling in a drunken insanity. The Trunk Lady bent and there came a hoarse panting sound. She was fainting.

  No! She was falling! A shadow hit him across the face, jarring his senses, once, twice, three times. He fell to his knees and before he could rise fingers were over his face, fingers that numbed him, gripping tight his sobbing mouth.

  Mother!

  The thought slammed him! Mother, dressed in the Trunk Lady’s cocktail dress. Decoying him out into her arms, fooling him.

  Mother, don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! he tried to cry. I’m sorry I tried to bring the police! Mother, you love Father—is that why you killed Ellie? Mother, let me go! Mother, you looked so much like her standing in the sycamore shadows!

  But the hands would not let him go. There was a rushing, a body against him. A series of shocks. The fingers were so strong
, so much thicker than they should be. Much thicker! Johnny screamed inwardly, drawing air in an awful slobbering whistle.

  The house leaned over him as if to collapse and crush him in its fall. The great old sleeping house with everyone sleeping in it, unaware that this silent struggle was happening by the flat shine of the pool.

  Suddenly he realized that it was not Mother, not the Trunk Lady. The fingers were too strong. Who is stronger than Mother, sterner, more quick and hard?

  Grandmother, perhaps?

  The body was too hard against him. He half broke free and saw the flat of moonlight, the filmy cocktail dress lying alone, sprawled—and a mannequin hand thrown out into light. The mannequin was on the ground, dead, plastic, cold. Someone else was behind Johnny, holding, fighting.

  Cousin William!

  But there was no smell of cognac. The actions were the actions of a sober man. The breath was clean and clear and quick, almost sobbing.

  Father!

  Dad he tried to yell. Don’t, don’t, please don’t!

  Then a voice was talking. Something black and small clattered on the tiles beside the swirling water, and Johnny suddenly knew. The hands were tight, the voice tighter, whispering. “You hurt your mother!”

  I didn’t mean to, Johnny screamed inwardly.

  “If it hadn’t been for you,” said the voice, whispering, “your mother would never have known about the Dark One dying!”

  I didn’t mean to find the Trunk Lady, cried Johnny silently, fighting.

  “It’ll kill her, the shock of it. If she dies, I won’t want to live. She’s all I’ve had ever since twenty years ago when it all happened!”

  The voice husked on: “Ellie came to the party. They tried to fool me, make out she was somebody else. But I guessed. She came upstairs in her cocktail gown and I gave her a glass of brandy with sleeping powder in it, and I put her to gentle sleep in the old old trunk. Nobody would have known if you hadn’t looked. Ellie would have just disappeared forever. Only Grandma and me would know! But you’re Dark, too, you’re Dark, just like Ellie!” the voice whispered. “Sometimes, when I look at you, I see her face! So, now—”