Pity Him Afterwards

He doesn’t want to refuse me in front of everyone, the madman thought. Does that mean he knows, after all?

And now Daniels was going out of the house, out of reach. The coward! He must know that he’d been seen through, that the madman was on to him. And now he must be afraid, he must be terrified, as always they grew terrified once it was too late. So he was taking the idiot girl, and he was fleeing the house.

And Sondgard was letting him! Didn’t that prove they were in league?

The madman felt confusion growing within him, like fog creeping up through a crack in a wood floor. Who were his enemies, which of these people, and how many of them? And how much did they know, and to what degree were they in league with one another?

Was Daniels really the agent, or was it someone else, someone he hadn’t even thought of?

Did Sondgard know the truth, and was he holding off to accommodate the experiment of Doctor Chax? Or was he actually at a loss, waiting for a fingerprint that might not be any good to him at all?

Were Sondgard and Daniels working together, or did Sondgard have no connection with Doctor Chax at all, or was he working in combination with an agent of Doctor Chax who was not Daniels and whom the madman had not yet uncovered?

There were too many questions, too many uncertainties. Sondgard had said nothing about the second killing; he might have discovered the wet clothing and be saying nothing about that. There was no way to guess whether the fingerprint would be a danger or not. There was no way to be sure how much Daniels/Chax had told Mary Ann McKendrick, or if he had really told her anything at all, or if he had already told other people.

Doctor Chax himself could be outside the house right now, this very minute, watching through a television set, waiting for the conclusion of the experiment. They had one-way windows at the asylum, there was no secret about that. But for here it would probably be closed-circuit television, with the tiny cameras hidden in light fixtures or inside the walls.

The madman looked up at the ceiling fixture, centered over the table, and wondered: Am I looking into the eyes of Doctor Chax? Is he looking down at me right now, and smiling?

Too many uncertainties, too many uncertainties.

Within him, that being, that creature, that thing was stirring again. The one who had taken him over and killed the man with the flashlight. The one of whom he had faint and distant earlier memories. He was moving again, right now, stirring, rising, reaching out as though to take control.

The madman fidgeted, frightened. He couldn’t lose control now, this mindless being within him would give the whole game away, would be obvious and blatant and stupid. There was no cleverness in it, no thought beyond the rage of the moment. The madman couldn’t lose control now without losing everything.

Only till three o’clock, he thought. I have to keep control until three o’clock. Then I’ll find out about the fingerprint, and I’ll know what to do next, and the being will settle back down again. But I’ve got to hold on until three o’clock, or I’m going to do something.

Something.

It was a very ugly rowboat. Old, to begin with, and then painted by someone with more paint than sense. White paint had been slopped on, inside and out, thick and lumpy, reminding Mel of the woodwork in old and run-down Manhattan apartments, with layer after layer of paint on them, all mottled and bumpy. This rowboat was like that, in white that gleamed blindingly in the sun.

And red. The nut who’d painted this boat had possessed a can of red paint, too, and this was a nut who would let nothing go to waste. So the boat had been painted white all over, in thick globs and chunks of paint, and then over the white there had been smeared two or three layers of red trim. The top edge of the boat’s sides was painted red. The seats were painted red. The oars had been dipped in red paint.

It was a very ugly rowboat. But it was the only one they had.

“It belonged to the people who used to own the house and bam,” Mary Ann explained. “We sort of inherited it.”

“I didn’t think you’d own it on purpose.”

“It floats, that’s the important part.”

They were standing on a short narrow wooden pier, jutting out over the water from the very edge of the Black Lake Lounge property. Behind them was the blacktop Lounge parking lot, extending away to the left, and some scrubby field going off to the right to meet the nearest stand of trees. Beyond parking lot and field wound the road, and across the road stood the sparkling theater and the moldering house.

A sudden idea came to Mel, and he voiced it: “They painted the boat with what they had left over from the house.”

“I did.”

“You did?”

She looked down at the boat with a fond sad smile. “It isn’t a very good job, is it?”

“You should have painted the house instead.”