Close Behind Him
John Wyndham
“You didn’t ought to of croaked him,” Smudger said resentfully. “What in hell did you want to do a fool thing like that for?”
Spotty turned to look at the house, a black spectre against the night sky. He shuddered.
“It was him or me,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t of done it if he hadn’t come for me – and I wouldn’t even then, not if he’d come ordinary ...”
“What do you mean ordinary?”
“Like anybody else. But he was queer ... He wasn’t – well, I guess he was crazy – dangerous crazy ...”
“All he needed was a tap to keep him quiet,” Smudger persisted. “There’s was no call to bash his loaf in.”
“You didn’t see him. I tell you, he didn’t act human.” Spotty shuddered again at the recollection, and bent down to rub the calf of his right leg tenderly.
The man had come into the room while Spotty was sifting rapidly through the contents of a desk. He’d made no sound. It had been just a feeling, a natural alertness, that had brought Spotty round to him standing there. In that very first glimpse Spotty had felt there was something queer about him. The expression on his face – his attitude – they were wrong. In his biscuit-coloured pyjamas, he should have looked just an ordinary citizen awakened from sleep, too anxious to have delayed with dressing-gown and slippers. But some way he didn’t. An ordinary citizen would have shown nervousness, at least wariness; he would most likely have picked up something to use as a weapon. This man stood crouching, arms a little raised, as though he were about to spring.
Moreover, any citizen whose lips curled back as this man’s did to show his tongue licking hungrily between his teeth, should have been considered sufficiently unordinary to be locked away safely. In the course of his profession Spotty had developed reliable nerves, but the look of this man rocked them. Nobody should be pleased by the discovery of a burglar at large in his house. Yet, there could be no doubt that this victim was looking at Spotty with satisfaction. An unpleasant gloating kind of satisfaction, like that which might appear on a fox’s face at the sight of a plump chicken. Spotty hadn’t liked the look of him at all, so he had pulled out the convenient piece of pipe that he carried for emergencies.
Far from showing alarm, the man took a step closer. He poised, sprung on his toes like a wrestler.
“You keep off me, mate,” said Spotty, holding up his nine inches of lead pipe as a warning.
Either the man did not hear – or the words held no interest for him. His long, bony face snarled. He shifted a little closer. Spotty backed up against the edge of the desk. “I don’t want no trouble. You just keep off me,” he said again.
The man crouched a little lower. Spotty watched him through narrowed eyes. An extra tensing of the man’s muscles gave him a fractional warning before the attack.
The man came without feinting or rushing: he simply sprang, like an animal.
In mid-leap he encountered Spotty’s boot suddenly erected like a stanchion in his way. It took him in the middle and felled him. He sprawled on the floor doubled up, with one arm hugging his belly. The other hand threatened, with fingers bent into hooks. His head turned in jerks, his jaws with their curiously sharp teeth were apart, like a dog’s about to snap.
Spotty knew just as well as Smudger that what was required was a quietening tap. He had been about to deliver it with professional skill and quality when the man, by an extraordinary wriggle, had succeeded in fastening his teeth into Spotty’s leg. It was unexpected, excruciating enough to ruin Spotty’s aim and make the blow ineffectual. So he had hit again; harder this time. Too hard. And even then he had more or less had to pry the man’s teeth out of his leg ...
But it was not so much his aching leg – nor even the fact that he had killed the man – that was the chief cause of Spotty’s concern. It was the kind of man he had killed.
“Like a bloody animal he was,” he said, and the recollection made him sweat. “Like a bloody wild animal. And the way he looked! His eyes! Christ, they wasn’t human.”
That aspect of the affair held little interest for Smudger. He’d not seen the man until he was already dead and looking like any other corpse. His present concern was that a mere matter of burglary had been abruptly transferred to the murder category – a class of work he had always kept clear of until now.
The job had looked easy enough. There shouldn’t have been any trouble. A man living alone in a large house – a pretty queer customer with a pretty queer temper. On Fridays, Sundays, and sometimes on Wednesdays, there were meetings at which about twenty people came to the house and did not leave until the small hours of the following morning. All this information was according to Smudger’s sister, who learned it third hand from the woman who cleaned the house. The woman was darkly speculative, but unspecific, about what went on at these gatherings. But from Smudger’s point of view the important thing was that on other nights the man was alone in the house.
He seemed to be a dealer of some kind. People brought odd curios to the house to sell him. Smudger had been greatly interested to hear that they were paid for – and paid for well – in cash. That was a solid, practical consideration. Beside it, the vaguely ill reputation of the place, the queerness of its furnishings, and the rumours of strange goings-on at the gatherings, were unimportant. The only thing worthy of any attention were the facts that the man live alone and had items of value in his possession.
Smudger had thought of it as a one-man job at first, and with a little more information he might have tackled it on his own. He discovered that there was a telephone, but no dog. He was fairly sure of the room in which the money must be kept, but unfortunately his sister’s source of information had its limitations. He did not know whether there were burglar alarms or similar precautions, and he was too uncertain of the cleaning woman to attempt to get into the house by a subterfuge for a preliminary investigation. So he had taken Spotty in with him on a fifty-fifty basis.
The reluctance with which he had taken that step had now become an active regret – not only because Spotty had been foolish enough to kill the man, but because the way things had been he could easily have made a hundred per cent haul on his own – and not be fool enough to kill the man had he been detected.
The attaché case which he carried now was well-filled with bundles of notes, along with an assortment of precious-looking objects in gold and silver, probably eminently traceable, but useful if melted down. It was irritating to think that the whole load, instead of merely half of it, might have been his.
The two men stood quietly in the bushes for some minutes and listened. Satisfied, they pushed through a hole in the hedge, then moved cautiously down the length of the neighbouring field in its shadow.
Spotty’s chief sensation was relief at being out of the house. He hadn’t liked the place from the moment they had entered. For one thing, the furnishings weren’t like those he was used to. Unpleasant idols or carved figures of some kind stood about in unexpected places, looming suddenly out of the darkness into his flashlight’s beam with hideous expressions on their faces. There were pictures and pieces of tapestry that were macabre and shocking to a simple burglar. Spotty was not particularly sensitive, but these seemed to him highly unsuitable to have about the home.
The same quality extended to more practical objects. The legs of a large oak table had been carved into mythical miscegenates of repulsive appearance. The two bowls which stood upon the table were either genuine or extremely good representations of polished human skulls. Spotty could not imagine why, in one room, anybody should want to mount a crucifix on the wall upside down and place on a shelf beneath it a row of sconces holding nine black candles – then flank the whole with two pictures of an indecency so revolting it almost took his breath away. All these things had somehow combined to rattle his usual hard-headedness