The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  The guy with the gun was talking now, to Mac. He said, “Come out from behind that desk, Doc. You and this other mug stand close together. Who is he?”

  What faint light came in the window fell on Mac's face when he stood up, and he was doing it well. He didn't look frightened, but he looked deadly serious, and a little pale. He kept his hands up level with his shoulders. He started to edge around the desk toward my chair. Then his face got into the shadow again.

  He said, “This is just a friend of mine, Herman. Now---when did you escape?”

  I stood up and bowed ceremoniously. If I'd been sober, by that time I'd have been suspecting my diagnosis of the situation. There was something just a little phony about it to be wrong. It was too slow an approach, it lacked the zip and tempo, the suddenness of shock described in that book. But I wasn't sober, quite.

  Anyhow, I bowed low and said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” or something equally idiotic, and started across the room toward the guy Mac had just addressed as Herman. The gun jerked up in my direction.

  I heard Mac call out sharply, “Don't shoot! I'll---” and I didn't hear the rest of it for something that must have been Mac's fist clouted me on the side of the jaw. Mac is no lightweight and that wallop had, I guessed, his whole weight behind it. I went down, groggy, but not completely out.

  Something---it must have been common sense---told me to stay there. I heard Mac say, “Whew!” and this guy Herman say coldly, “Another funny move like that from either of you---”

  “Another funny move won't happen, Herman,” said Mac, soothingly. “My friend is a little drunk, that's all. Quite a little. What can I do for you?”

  “First, you will tie up your friend so I'll not have to watch him. Who else is in the house?”

  I heard Mac say, “No one, Herman. I have one servant but he has the day off. Drove in to Wellfleet.”

  He was telling the truth, I knew. That proved nothing one way or the other, of course. Mac said, “There's rope in the kitchen, Herman. Shall I---”

  “Take off his necktie and yours, Doc. You tie his ankles with one and his wrists, behind him, with the other. Tight.”

  Mac came over and untied my cravat. He pretended to have trouble unknotting it, and bent down close and whispered. “Careful, Bryce. Homicidal maniac. Escaped. I had to sock you or---”

  He didn't have to finish that “or---” if the rest of it was true. At an order from the man with the scattergun, he stepped back. At another order, he opened a drawer in his desk in which he kept a gun and then stepped back flat against the wall while the maniac pocketed the gun.

  Then he said, “Sit down, Doc.” He kept the scattergun in his hand ready for action.

  I'd rolled over, cautiously, so I could keep an eye on what went on. Mac had tied my wrists and ankles, and had done a good job of it, probably thinking he'd be checked up on it. I saw Mac cross cautiously to the desk and sit down.

  He said, “What are you going to do, Herman?”

  Sitting at the desk, Mac was in what little light came in from the windows. The other man was now nothing but a huge dark shadow standing there. He didn't say anything for a moment, and in the silence you could hear the waves lapping on the shore outside and the far squeaky cry of a circling gull.

  He said, “I'm going back to finish. To kill the rest of them. Do you think I'm crazy?” He laughed a little, as though he had said something very funny.

  “Your father and your brother both?” Mac's voice was quiet. “Why? Your sister---well, I thought you killed her, Herman, because there was always enmity between you. But Kurt---what have you got against Kurt? Why should you want to kill your brother?”

  The madman chuckled. His voice started out soft, almost a whisper in the darkness, and got louder. “The ears, Doc. Like the rest of them. Dad, too. I never told anybody about that, but I didn't really hate Lila, except for them. Those damned ears---they---”

  Unless it was magnificent acting, he was starkly mad. His voice had risen in pitch and volume until he was shouting meaningless obscenities. I heard Mac's voice cut in quietly, calmly.

  “Herman-”

  “You can't stop me, Doc. I---I just stopped here to show you that I'm not crazy, like you said I was at the hearing. See? Why don't I kill you? This friend of yours? Because I don't have to. I'll shoot you in a minute if you try to stop me, both of you, but if what you said about me was true, why don't I do it now?”

  He went on arguing, calmer now, sometimes talking almost sensibly, sometimes with the perverted logic of paranoia. Mac egged him on, tried to reason with him from his own premises, tried to convince him without contradicting flatly any of the madman's statements.

  I started quietly to work on the knots in the cravat that held my wrists behind me. I knew Mac was stalling, trying to hold the fellow as long as he could. He wasn't stalling for help from me. I knew that from the way he'd tied those blamed knots so tightly. He figured me as a liability rather than an asset after that fool stunt I'd pulled, and I couldn't blame him for that. But I went to work on those knots just the same.

  “You won't believe me, Doc,” I heard Herman say. “All right, so you won't. But don't think I don't know why you're stalling. You think they're after me, and will trail me here.” He laughed again.

  “How did you get away, Herman?”

  “They aren't after me, Doc. Not here, I mean. They've got a swamp surrounded back ten miles from the sanitarium, and I'm supposed to be in it, armed, and they're taking their time. I've got till morning. I've got lots of time. It's just getting dark now.”

  “Herman, you won't get away with it. They'll catch you and---”

  “And what? Listen, I'm crazy; you said so and you swore to it, and other doctors, too. If they do catch me, what can they do but put me back, see? I'm going to tie you up now, Doc, so you won't go running for help. Stand up and turn around.”

  “I'm anxious to talk to you more about your father and about Kurt. Herman, you mustn't---”

  “I've talked enough, Doc. Get up. And before I tie you, I'm going to hit you on the head hard enough to knock you out, because I don't want any trouble. But I won't hit hard enough to kill you.”

  Mac's voice again, persuasively; the madman's, sharper. He took a step nearer the desk, and that put him within a yard of where I lay. Those knots hadn't budged a millimeter. But, standing where the guy was, and with Mac on hand to finish what I could start, I saw a chance.

  If I swiveled around and doubled up my legs and lashed them out right at the back of his knees, he'd go down like a ton of bricks. And Mac is no mean scrapper; he should have been able to take over from there.

  Maybe if I'd been cold sober, I wouldn't have been ready to take a chance like that. But I wasn't. And I wasn't entirely convinced that there wasn't something phony about the set-up. It seemed just a bit theatrical to be true, like a second act that needs patching.

  Anyway, I braced my wrists and heels against the floor and swiveled myself around, and I made enough noise in doing it to make the guy with the scattergun take a quick look around behind him to see what was going on. And that was the end of my little scheme.

  I suppose I was lucky he didn't pot me with the gun, but my luck didn't seem so hot at the moment, for he pulled back his foot and lashed out a kick at my head that would have killed me if it had landed squarely.

  And it missed landing squarely by a narrow margin. I jerked under it and the toe of his shoe passed safely over, the heel catching my mouth a glancing but painful blow. There was a taste of blood in my mouth---and the realization that I'd come within less than an inch of losing my front teeth. Then and there I abandoned any doubt I'd had about whether that gun was loaded and whether the man holding it was playing for keeps.

  I could hear, but not see, Mac starting across the desk, trying to close in during the diversion I'd caused. But he didn't have time. The maniac swung back, raised the barrel of that scattergun and brought it down on Mac's head with a sickening thump. Mac's momen
tum carried him on across the desk and he fell unconscious, on the floor near me.

  There didn't seem to be anything to say, so I didn't say it, and the silence was so thick you could spread it with a knife. The guy who had just slugged Mac grunted once, then he went out toward the kitchen and came back with some heavy twine, a ball of it. He kept an eye on me while he tied up Mac.

  Then he said, “You going to lie still while I put some of this on you, or---” He hefted the gun significantly, a shadowy bludgeon in the gathering darkness.

  “I'll lie still,” I told him. “Is---Mac---all right?”

  He came over and began to supplement the two neckties that held my wrists and ankles with wrappings of the twine. “Sure,” he said, “he's breathing. I should have killed him and you, too, but---”

  He was finishing my ankles now.

  I'd been thinking. Maybe I was getting sober or maybe I was just beginning to feel the effect of what I'd drunk; I don't know. Anyway, along with the taste of blood in my mouth was a taste of something strictly phony. I knew now, of course, that this wasn't any idea of Mac's, but it was still a bad second act.

  Yes, that was it---call it a playwright's instinct, but this was a second act; there'd been a first one that I didn't know about. I'd walked in during the intermission.

  “Listen,” I said, “why did you come here at all, really?”

  The moment the words were out, I knew I shouldn't have said it. He'd just stood up, and the gun was still in his pocket where he'd stuck it to tie me up. Slowly he took it out again, and, like he was thinking hard while he was doing it, he swung the muzzle around until it pointed at my head.

  At times like that, you think crazy things. The first thought that popped into my head, while that gun was swinging around was---“This tears it. It's going to be a hell of a second act curtain, with the hero getting killed!” Sure, I thought of myself as the hero. I don't know why; but who doesn't?

  That screwy notion, though, took just about as long to flash through my head as it took the gun to move an inch or two. The second thought, and I guess it was what saved me for the third act, was---“This man isn't crazy; if he's a real homicidal maniac, then I'm Bill Shakespeare.” And I'm not Bill Shakespeare, but I do have a strong sense of motivation, and that was the rub here. There was a motivation behind the visit of the chap with the scattergun who was about to use it to scatter my brains over Mac's carpet. I'd called him on it, and that was how I'd asked for trouble.

  And I saw that the reason I was going to die, if I was, concerned that very question of whether or not he was crazy. He suspected now that I suspected he wasn't. My only chance was to convince him otherwise, and darned quick.

  I started talking, and I didn't start out by accusing him of being batty---that would have been a giveaway of what I was trying to do. I talked fast, but I made my voice soft and calm and soothing, like Mac's had been when Mac was trying to talk him out of committing a couple of murders. I talked as though I were talking to a madman and was trying to calm him down.

  “Listen,” I told him, “you don't want to shoot me, Herman. I've never done anything to you, have I? Sure, I made a pass at you before, but that was because I thought you were going to kill Mac, and Mac's a friend of mine, Herman. A good friend. You can't blame me for that, can you?” Well, I went on from there, and I repeated myself with variations, and I guess I got it across. The gun stayed pointed at my head, but it didn't explode and I began to think that it wasn't going to.

  Funny, come to think of it. Here was a guy who was either a homicidal maniac or he wasn't, and I felt convinced that if he thought I thought he was crazy, I'd get by. If he thought I saw through his act, as that incautious question of mine had indicated, I was a dead duck. And the only way to convince him that I was being hoodwinked, was to pretend I thought he was mad and was humoring him. So I humored him; I talked, believe me, I talked.

  And then, abruptly, he grunted and stuck that scattergun through his belt. He took a large clasp knife from his pocket and opened a four-inch blade.

  He reached down and grabbed a handful of my coatfront and dragged me across the carpet a couple of yards to where a square of bright moonlight came in the open window behind Mac's desk, and he held me so my head was in that moonlight, and---

  I gave an involuntary yowl and began to almost wish he'd decided to use that scattergun after all. He took a handful of my hair in his left hand, and---sitting on my chest so I couldn't move---he turned my head around sidewise.

  He put the knife down a moment and took hold of my left ear, bending down as though to examine it carefully. Then he let go and picked up the knife again. And I remembered what he'd been saying to Mac ten minutes or so ago---“The ears, Doc. Those damned ears---they---”

  Was the guy crazy, or was he just trying to convince me that he was? I thought for a minute it was going to cost me an ear or two to find out. I howled, “Herman, don't---” and never knew until then just how eloquent I was.

  Whether it was my eloquence or not, he decided at last that he didn't want my ears. He grunted and put the knife back in the pocket of that capacious overcoat. He said, “No good. They're not Wunderly.”

  He got up from my chest and started toward the door. He must have guessed that I was already wondering how soon it would be safe to yell for help. He turned back a minute and took a handkerchief out of his pocket. Then he said, “The hell with it. Yell all you want. Yell to the seagulls.”

  I watched the big dark shadow of him go through the doorway and I didn't say thanks or good-bye. I was going to let well enough alone. I heard his footsteps across the porch.

  I didn't yell to the seagulls; he was right about that. Mac's place is a mile from its nearest neighbor, three miles from the coast guard station that has the only telephone on that part of the beach. And I didn't worry about trying to loosen my bonds; I'd found them too tough to handle even before he'd added to them with the heavy twine.

  Mac was my---our---only chance of getting out of there in time to make a third act curtain. I crawled across, or rather wriggled my way across, to where he lay. He was breathing heavily now, and once as I worked my way toward him he moved a bit.

  Probably he'd have snapped out of it quickly if I'd been able to give his face a few healthy slaps, but that wasn't possible. Fortunately he was lying on his side; I'd have had a devil of a job rolling him over if he'd been on his back where I couldn't get at the knots at his wrists.

  I wriggled up behind him, and began work on those knots with my teeth. It was slow tough work, about the hardest thing I ever tackled. But I plugged along at it, and in between tries, I yelled at him and nudged him in the back with my head. Finally he said, “What happened, Bryce?”

  “He's gone,” I told him. “We're tied up. That's all. Listen, Mac, I'll keep on with these knots. If you can talk okay, tell me who the guy is and what's what, while I get you loose if I can.”

  His voice gradually got stronger as he talked. “Herman Wunderly,” he told me. “Homicidal maniac killed his sister several years ago. Gruesome business; cut off her ears. He's got some mania about ears.

  “I was up here for the summer when it happened, and I helped handle him, and had to testify. The Wunderly place is a mile down the beach; nearest house here, in fact. They're year-rounders, residents, a bit eccentric. There's old man Wunderly now, and Herman's brother Kurt. He's going back to kill them unless we can---”

  I'd got the knot loosened a bit now; it wouldn't be much longer. But my bruised and cut lip hurt so badly I had to stop for a second or two. I said, “Are they all as batty as Herman? Good Lord---sorricide, patricide---”

  Then I went back to work on the knots. Mac said, “Neither. Herman and Kurt are brothers, but they were adopted. So Ethel wasn't their sister, and Old Man Wunderly isn't---”

  Then the knot gave way, and Mac sat up, got his hands braced on the edge of the desk, stood up and worked his way around it. I said, “Hey, how about me? Untie---”

  �
�Scissors,” he told me. “Quicker.” He found them in a drawer, cut the cord from his ankles, and then cut me loose. “One of those neckties,” I said, “was mine. And a new silk one at that. You owe me---”

  “Shut up, you dope. Listen, you take the coast guard station, three miles northwest. Have 'em send men quick. I'll go to the Wunderlys', and maybe I'll be in time to---”

  “Got another gun, Mac, besides the one he took?”

  He shook his head. “Tell the coast guard boys to come armed. Don't worry about me; handling nuts is my business. I can take care of---”

  I'd switched the light back on while he was talking, and I grinned at him. “So I noticed,” I cut in. “Come on, if you're going.”

  He was going, all right. He was running so fast I had to yell the last of that remark after him. I ran after, using the forethought to grab up a fairly hefty cane that was in the umbrella rack in the corner of the hallway. I wasn't leaning on Mac's persuasive abilities with a homicidal maniac---nor counting on my own to work a second time.

  I caught up with him and grabbed his arm. “You can't run a mile through sand,” I yelled. “You'll fall down before you get half way---”

  He saw the point in that and slowed down, and I panted alongside. “Our ears,” I said. “We should have taken them off and left them back where they're safe.”

  “You're still drunk. Listen, be sensible and go back to the coast guard station and let me handle this. It isn't any of your business.”

  “They wouldn't get there in time and you know it and I'm not still drunk, dammit. And that second act stank, Mac. It needs doctoring, and I'm the guy who can---”

  “Shut up, you sap. If you're going to come, save your breath for getting there.”

  It was good advice, and I took it.

  He pushed on, sometimes running, sometimes walking---mostly according to the footing---and we were both fairly winded when we rounded the dune that hid the Wunderly house.

  Mac said, “Shhh,” and grabbed my arm. We were pretty close now, and he pointed to a window that was open about ten inches. We tiptoed to it, and got it open wider without making as much noise as I thought it would make.