Pity Him Afterwards

It was true. The driver and the madman were both approximately the same age and the same size. Their hair coloring was different and facially they looked not at all alike, but in general build and chronological age they were quite similar.

The driver was a good driver, but really a very bad actor. He would never have been a famous star, even if he’d lived. He’d let the nervousness and the false jollity show in his voice, and his true meaning had been clear when he’d said, “I’m getting hungry, aren’t you? Let’s stop at the next diner for a couple hamburgers.”

Betrayers, all of them. What business was it of his, anyway? They were fellow human beings. Shouldn’t they be helping one another? Why should the driver side automatically with Doctor Chax, without even giving the madman a chance to tell his side of the story?

He had been so enraged he had forgotten himself and done a foolish thing. He should have waited till they’d come to a stop, in the darkness outside some diner. But the betrayal was so base, his anger so strong, that he couldn’t wait. He reached out his hands and clamped them on the driver’s throat, and the Plymouth spun off the road, missing the oncoming cars, and smashed into a tree.

Still, after the foolishness he had been smart. Immediately the car had stopped, even before the flames had begun to lick up, he had grabbed the dead driver’s wallet and suitcase. Then out of the car and away, into the darkness, while behind him the flames had suddenly opened like a great mouth, engulfing the car, and all at once exploding.

Some busybody must have seen him leave the car and run away up the hill. He had planned to stay there until the police had gone, and then continue on along the highway, but some busybody must have seen him run away. Another one who sided automatically with Doctor Chax.

The old man would, too. They all did.

The madman felt very sad, not wanting to do what he knew he would have to do. But wasn’t self-preservation the prime law? He couldn’t let his emotions stand in his way, shouldn’t let weakness cause him to be captured and turned back to the tortures of Doctor Chax.

Hadn’t his father told him, time and time again, the mark of a man is that he always does what is necessary, no matter what?

But it was hard, it was so hard...

Moaning softly, the madman crept back down the stoop to the suitcase, and removed one of the leather straps. The strap was an inch wide, tough black leather, with a square brass buckle. He twisted it around his left hand, and went back up on the porch.

The door was locked. The two living-room windows were locked.

Sorrow began to be displaced by irritation, and irritation by anger. Wasn’t the task difficult enough as it was? Did it have to be made even more difficult?

He circled the house like a winter wind, seeking some crack to come in through, and found it at last in a small kitchen window, the only unlocked window on the ground floor.

It was a job getting through. The window was high, and just inside was the kitchen sink, a broad deep old-fashioned sink against which he cracked his left elbow. He gritted his teeth with the pain, and crawled the rest of the way through the window and down across the sink to the floor, and huddled there on all fours, rubbing the elbow. His head kept moving back and forth in a distracted way, like the head of a snake. He’d lost his hat on the way in, and he found it and put it back on before going any farther. He thought of it as a kind of disguise.

The kitchen was in darkness. He left it, and moved through a dark hall to a semi-dark dining room, lit indirectly from the one lamp burning in the living room.

The old man was still asleep. The television set murmured — a man at a desk was interviewing a man on a leather chair, and both were laughing, and a crowd of unseen people were laughing — but other than that the house was silent.

The madman tiptoed across the living room, his sneakers silent on the faded Persian-style carpet. He moved around behind the floral armchair in which the old man slept. He held the leather strap now in both hands and he dropped it over the old man’s head and tightened it around the old man’s neck.

The old man awoke and thrashed. But the madman had the leverage, pinning the old man back against the chair, keeping the strap tight around the old man’s throat, and after a while the thrashing subsided and stopped.

The madman switched off the table lamp before moving, because he didn’t want to see the old man’s face. He’d seen the faces of people who’d been strangled, and it always made him feel sick. The television set gave wan blue light.

In the near-darkness he crossed the room. He had seen the staircase while the light was on, and he headed straight for it and felt along the wall till he found a light switch. It shouldn’t frighten anyone if the staircase light went on; those upstairs would think it was the old man, coming up to bed.