“You’re not afraid,” said Kane disjointedly. “You’re just—unbalanced. I’m going to cure you. It’s important. Don’t worry. I will cure you.”
“I know,” said Cutshaw. “I know.” He moved slowly to the bed, stripped off a blanket and draped it over Kane.
“This dream is nice,” said Kane, smiling. Then he leaned back his head and closed his eyes. “I think I’ll have my cocoa later…”
Cutshaw looked down at him for a moment, then whispered, “God! Oh, God!” He knew that Kane was mad.
Cutshaw left and closed the door. He went downstairs and walked outside, walked into the wood to be alone.
* * *
Some of the Nazi-uniformed inmates were in the dormitory, setting up an “interrogation room.” Spoor stood on a chair, adjusting a high-beamed, concentrated light fixture that now hung from the ceiling, newly rigged and ready for shining into some future victim’s eyes. Cutshaw had earlier promised that Kane would be first to be interrogated. He was scheduled for that night.
“How’s this?” asked Spoor, who had been taken back into the fold. No one else felt qualified to “direct.”
“No,” said Zook. “A little lower.”
“So?”
“Better. But where’s the victim? Can’t find Kane, can’t find Groper, can’t find Fell!”
“God will provide,” said Leslie Spoor.
At that moment a black limousine pulled up in front of the mansion door. Spoor raced to a window, saw a liveried chauffeur opening a door. Out stepped Senator Hesburgh.
“Look!” said Spoor. “What did I tell you!”
Strong hands seized the Senator.
* * *
Lastrade was on the telephone barking at General Syntax. “Didn’t I tell you about that bastard? He’s gone and done it—pulled a sneak! He’s out at the mansion right now! Just got the word from OSI! Now, trot your fanny over there immediately! I’m on my way myself!”
Syntax hung up and ordered a staff car. He was so nervous he couldn’t stammer.
Senator Hesburgh, his hands bound behind him, sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, the interrogation light in his face. His eyes were slits as he stared at Zook, who was pacing deliberately back and forth, his heavy black boots pounding the floor. Zook, affecting a German accent, said, “We haff ways of making you talk, you know!”
Dully—and for the twentieth time—Hesburgh chanted his outraged litany. “I’m the United States Senator from—”
“Silence!” shrieked Zook. “Give up this pretense! What is the point! Your friends have confessed, you idiot, confessed!” Then Zook adopted a gentler tone; syrupy, persuasive, as he reached for the cigarettes in his tunic pocket. “Let me persuade you not to be foolish. Make it easy on yourself. We can be lenient, very lenient. You have only to answer this one simple question: ‘What is the location of the newest tunnel?’” He leaned over Hesburgh, proffering the package of cigarettes; and winking broadly and conspiratorially at Spoor, who stood back of the Senator, Zook purred, “Cigarette?”
Hesburgh began it again. “I am the—”
“Silence, stubborn dog!” bawled Zook. Then at Spoor: “Sergeant Mueller!”
Spoor clicked his heels and popped to attention. “Jab, mein Colonel!”
Zook, with cold-eyed cruelty, pointed down at a tunnel opening. “Take him down to Level Eight!”
“Level Eight?” echoed Spoor with feigned horror.
“Level Eight!”
Spoor took him down into the tunnels.
* * *
Shortly afterward, Syntax arrived. At the door, Krebs eyed him with horror, for he was still in inmates’ garb. “What the hell is this, Halloween!” snapped the General. “Where in the hell is the Senator?”
Krebs had no answers. Nor did Cutshaw, as at that moment he re-entered the mansion, and became apprised of the situation. “Where in the devil is Colonel Kane!” croaked Syntax.
Krebs went after Kane while Cutshaw raced to the inmates’ dorm.
Lastrade arrived, bellowing. Then saw the dogs; the holes in the floor; Corfu’s mad ceiling; the Nazi uniforms. His thunder shook the mansion, and when he learned that Hesburgh was missing, he said not a word; which frightened Syntax more than anything.
Krebs pounded at Kane’s door. It was locked. No answer. Then he and another inmate prowled the mansion, seeking the missing commander.
Spoor had reappeared and now sat grimly in the chair formerly occupied by the Senator. His arms were folded defiantly as Cutshaw tipped the interrogation light full into his face, demanding, “What have you done with the Senator?”
Spoor said, “I told you! I repossessed him!”
“Where is he?”
“The Home Office!”
Cutshaw cuffed his neck, as General Syntax, brooding in the background, muttered, “Waves! Listen to the waves!”
Cutshaw had despatched the rest of the inmates into the tunnels and around the mansion; sent them feverishly seeking the Senator. Bemish was checking rooms, and went directly to Fell’s to explain what had happened. Fell surfaced briefly from his alcoholic daze, said “Um-hm,” and left his room. He turned a corner of the second-floor landing, walked to a dead-end in the alcove, pressed a stud and looked around furtively as the secret panel slid back. He quietly slipped into the passageway.
* * *
In the room off the secret passageway that Spoor had earlier discovered, Senator Hesburgh and Consuelo Endicott sat on a bench in front of the confined dummy of Slovik. She was saying, “We loved each other madly. Hm. But the studio wouldn’t, uh, allow it—no, wouldn’t let us marry. ‘Millions of women love Bela!’ they said, ‘and his public wants him single!’”
Hesburgh’s eyes were darting nervously. Spoor had dumped him into this chamber, and then this madwoman had entered with roses. And a story. Good Lord, what a story!
“Bela was gone most of the time,” she prattled on, “and I—uh—was sick with boredom. You see? Yes, sick. Sick with—boredom. What did I say?”
“You were sick with boredom.”
“Oh, yes. So he built this little school for me. Something to, uh, keep me busy. Meantime these passages held us together and away from prying eyes. Eyes do pry. Don’t you think?”
“Can you open that door?”
But Miss Endicott was oblivious. “Ah, Bela, darling Bela! In this shrine I keep his memory alive. You understand?”
Abruptly the effiigy sat up in its coffin, croacking “I love you!” and then sat back.
“He is alive!” yipped Hesburgh.
Again the Slovik dummy sat up. And again it said, “I love you!”
Miss Endicott smiled, and put a reassuring hand over the Senator’s as the effigy repeated its performance. “No, no, no; it’s just a clock. That and a tape of Bela’s voice. Such a comfort in my loneliness. Or, I should say, former loneliness.”
“Does anyone else know about this room?”
“Yes, Norman, darling Norman. That’s Doctor Norman Fell.” Miss Endicott’s eyes turned dreamy. “It was here that I first met him—amid the stakes and silver bullets. Oh, how terribly ironic. Poor, poor Bela, always worried about his ‘image.’ Always hated him for that. Now here I am protecting mine.”
The secret panel suddenly slid back. Hesburgh looked up at the figure now framed in the doorway. “Doctor Fell, I presume?” he said.
“Have you well in a matter of days,” said Fromme.
Cutshaw was still searching. But some of the inmates had given up, squatting despondently on the main hall floor as General Lastrade roundly laced Syntax. “While we’re waiting for the FBI,” rumbled Lastrade, “would you care to make a statement?”
No one noticed the distant crashing of shoulder against door.
“It was an honest mistake!” yipped Syntax.
“Splendid progress!” bored Lastrade. “This mansion in ruins, the Gestapo running wild and a United States senator kidnaped! Anything else, you splendid ass?!”
“Well
,” said Syntax fatuously, “I believe you left out Kane.”
“I’m coming to Colonel Kane! And so’s a court-martial! I’m going to—!”
Lastrade abruptly fell silent, staring in shock at the second-floor balcony. Manfred Cutshaw was slowly walking out of Colonel Kane’s room, stopping at the balustrade. Tears coursed down his cheeks. He was carrying Kane in his arms. “He’s killed himself,” he said.
Kane’s collar was turned around.
“… This Place”
Chapter 14
Winter melted to spring. Fragrance of flowers, of green things renewing, drifted with wonder and questioning tendrils through the empty Slovik mansion, quickly disbanded in the wake of inquiries following Colonel Kane’s suicide. An Air Force staff car pulled up and Captain Cutshaw emerged. It was April and he wore his blues. Within a month after the tragedy, he and all of the mansion’s inmates had been fully restored to duty. Cutshaw had asked for a special week’s leave.
He looked up at the mansion, the gaping gargoyles, then slowly turned and stared out at the courtyard. Voices wafted to him on the wind … “Simon says … Simon says.” He turned and walked into the mansion.
It had not been restored. Holes gaped in the floor. The ceiling was just as Corfu had left it. Cutshaw’s eyes felt at the hall, every corner, every chair. Then he slowly walked upstairs. For a moment he paused outside Kane’s old room. A sudden impulse urged him to knock. And he did, very softly. Then he gently opened the door and walked inside. He stared down at the bed. It had been stripped, but blood stained the mattress. Slashed wrists; that meant he’d died slowly with time to think; perhaps regret; perhaps forgive. Cutshaw’s fingers rubbed at his eyes. He moved to the window, looked out at the sky. A setting sun bathed the wood with glory, caressing the branches of trees with gold. What a beautiful time of day, he thought; sunset; always so beautiful.
He’d visited Fell three days before. The medic was stationed at Bolling Field now, in Washington, D.C. They’d greeted one another cheerily. Then came the pauses in conversation; the embarrassed looks at the floor. Then Cutshaw had asked bluntly if Kane had ever told him anything that might clarify what had happened.
“I know what you’re after,” Fell had answered. “You want to know who killed him; you’re afraid it was you. Sure, let’s face it. I thought it myself. I mean, about me. I thought it was me. God, any quack should have recognized the symptoms.” He paused for a while, then said quietly: “He was looking for me that night.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Cutshaw had assured him.
“I don’t know,” Fell had answered. “I don’t know; I don’t know. But he’d be the last one to think it was any of us. He blamed something else.” Then he lifted his eyes to Cutshaw. “He told me something once.”
“What?”
“He said that—‘we weren’t meant for this place.’ And that’s the reason people went crazy.”
* * *
Cutshaw stared out at the sunset, putting the jigsaw puzzle together. Then his glance turned to the bed. He’d found a book beside the body; a text on psychiatric methods. It had been opened—and heavily underlined—at a section devoted to “shock treatment.”
Cutshaw left the mansion. He drove to the church where he’d gone to Mass that day and asked to see the pastor. He had never trusted priests; they were salesmen, had something to sell. But there was something he had to know.
There had just been a benediction and he met the old priest in the sacristy. He was taking off his vestments. He recognized Cutshaw’s name. “Spoke of you often,” he said; “often. Lord, poor man; poor, poor man.”
“What did he say?”
The priest was undoing his cincture. “Said you had problems. Theology. Don’t we all, God knows, don’t we all.”
“Did you give him the answers?”
“Lord, not me. I’m a servant of God, my friend, but a poor one. Answers! Lord! There’s so much mystery.” He folded away his alb.
Cutshaw produced the letter that Kane had written the night of his death. He handed it to the priest. “How about this? This come from you?”
The priest read it slowly, cracked lips forming words. Then he looked up. “That had never occurred to me. But it’s good—I think it’s good.” He handed back the note. And smiled very thinly. “Very like him, that. Had a gift for unlikely relationships. He told you his theory of madness?”
“No.”
“Blamed it on Original Sin. Said there’s a part of us that remembers what we were like before the Fall—good, in a good world. Then something happened, he said—changed. Trying to cope with the new conditions—evil, pain and disease—earthquakes and matter gone mad—that’s what does it—drives us all mad—some more, some less. Fish out of water, he said—alive but—well—out of our minds with the pain of adjustment.” The priest eyed his shoes and tugged at his nose. “He said that evil doesn’t spring out of madness—that it’s the other way around.” The pastor looked up at Cutshaw, some faint memory tugging delicately at his eyes. “He said we were Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight and the Devil is Charles Boyer. Have you any idea what he meant?”
Cutshaw didn’t know.
They chatted in amiabilities. Then as Cutshaw was leaving, he turned again at the door. “Do you think he’s—damned?”
“What, son?”
“Damned. He took his own life, but—well, he was mad. At the end, you know, he was mad.”
“God only knows. God only knows. Leave it to Him and to His mercy.”
The old priest paused as he took off his collar, staring off into empty space. “He was a killer. Or so he said. Son, is it true? He killed eighty-two men?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. That’s what he said; whenever he saw me, that’s what he said: ‘Father, I’ve killed. I’m a killer of men.’”
Cutshaw fingered the edge of the doorjamb, fixing his eyes on a statue of Christ. “He was a lamb.”
* * *
Two months later, shod in space suit, Cutshaw waited in his capsule. Headset crackling, he started countdown.
“All systems go!” he said.
And hurtled to the stars.
PRAISE FOR TWINKLE, TWINKLE, “KILLER” KANE
“A work of extraordinary imagination.”
—Springfield News and Leader
“Spectacular.”
—San Antonio Express
“Chilling.”
—Kansas City Star
“By a gifted virtuoso.”
—The New York Times
Copyright © 1966 by William Peter Blatty
All rights reserved. For information address Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 49 West 24 Street, New York, NY 10010.
This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition published by Doubleday and Company, Inc.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
First Printing, November, 1973
eISBN 9781466834767
First eBook edition: March 2015
Twinkle, Twinkle Page 15