Skeleton Crew

"At eight-forty he saw Gertrude Rulin arrive. And Gertrude wasn't alone. There was indeed a small boy with her. Jimmy Rulin's boisterous first-grade behavior convinced the teacher and the school guidance counselor almost at once that everyone (except maybe Jimmy's mother, who could have used a rest from Jimmy) would be better off if he waited another year. Jimmy was stuck with repeating kindergarten, and he had afternoon sessions for the first half of the year. The two day-care centers in her area were full, and she couldn't change to afternoons for the Thorpes because she had another cleaning job on the other side of town from two to four.

"The upshot of everything was Jane's reluctant agreement that Gertrude could bring Jimmy with her until she was able to make other arrangements. Or until Reg found out, as he was sure to do.

"She thought Reg might not mind—he had been so sweetly reasonable about everything lately. On the other hand, he might have a fit. If that happened, other arrangements would have to be made. Gertrude said she understood. And for heaven's sake, Jane added, the boy was not to touch any of Reg's things. Gertrude said for sure not; the mister's study door was locked and would stay locked.

"Thorpe must have crossed between the two yards like a sniper crossing no-man's-land. He saw Gertrude and Jane washing bed linen in the kitchen. He didn't see the boy. He moved along the side of the house. No one in the dining room. No one in the bedroom. And then, in the study, where Reg had morbidly expected to see him, there Jimmy was. The kid's face was hot with excitement, and Reg surely must have believed that here was a bona fide agent of they at last.

"The boy was holding some sort of death-ray in his hand, it was pointed at the desk... and from inside his typewriter, Reg could hear Rackne screaming.

"You may think I'm attributing subjective data to a man who's now dead—or, to be more blunt, making stuff up. But I'm not. In the kitchen, both Jane and Gertrude heard the distinctive warbling sound of Jimmy's plastic space blaster... he'd been shooting it around the house ever since he started coming with his mother, and Jane hoped daily that its batteries would go dead. There was no mistaking the sound. No mistaking the place it was coming from, either—Reg's study.

"The kid really was Dennis the Menace material, you know—if there was a room in the house where he wasn't supposed to go, that was the one place he had to go, or die of curiosity. It didn't take him long to discover that Jane kept a key to Reg's study on the dining-room mantel, either. Had he been in there before? I think so. Jane said she remembered giving the boy an orange three or four days before, and later, when she was clearing out the house, she found orange peels under the little studio sofa in that room. Reg didn't eat oranges—claimed he was allergic to them.

"Jane dropped the sheet she was washing back into the sink and rushed into the bedroom. She heard the loud wah-wah-wah of the space blaster, and she heard Jimmy, yelling: Til getcha! You can't run! I can seeya through the GLASS!' And... she said... she said that she heard something screaming. A high, despairing sound, she said, so full of pain it was almost insupportable.

" 'When I heard that,' she said, 'I knew that I would have to leave Reg no matter what happened, because all the old wives' tales were true... madness was catching. Because it was Rackne I was hearing; somehow that rotten little kid was shooting Rackne, killing it with a two-dollar space-gun from Kresge's.

" 'The study door was standing open, the key in it. Later on that day I saw one of the dining-room chairs standing by the mantel, with Jimmy's sneaker prints all over the seat. He was bent over Reg's typewriter table.

He—Reg—had an old office model with glass inserts in the sides. Jimmy had the muzzle of his blaster pressed against one of those and was shooting it into the typewriter. Wah-wah-wah-wah, and purple pulses of light shooting out of the typewriter, and suddenly I could understand everything Reg had ever said about electricity, because although that thing ran on nothing more than harmless old C. or D cells, it really did feel as if there were waves of poison coming out of that gun and rolling through my head and frying my brains.

"/ seeya in there!" Jimmy was screaming, and his face was filled with a small boy's glee—it was both beautiful and somehow gruesome. "You can't run away from Captain Future! You're dead, alien!" And that screaming... getting weaker... smaller...

"Jimmy, you stop it!" I yelled.

" 'He jumped. I'd startled him. He turned around... looked at me... stuck out his tongue... and then pushed the blaster against the glass panel and started shooting again. Wah-wah-wah, and that rotten purple light.