Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane (20 page)

“… 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.

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First Printing, November, 1973

eISBN 9781466834767

First eBook edition: March 2015