Skeleton Crew

'Gertrude was coming down the hall, yelling for him to stop, to get out of there, that he was going to get the whipping of his life... and then the front door burst open and Reg came up the hall, bellowing. I got one good look at him and understood that he was insane. The gun was in his hand.

"Don't you shoot my baby!" Gertrude screamed when she saw him, and reached out to grapple with him.

Reg simply clubbed her aside.

'Jimmy didn't even seem to realize any of this was going on—he just went on shooting the space blaster into the typewriter. I could see that purple light pulsing in the blackness between the keys, and it looked like one of those electrical arcs they tell you not to look at without a pair of special goggles because otherwise it might boil your retinas and make you blind.

" 'Reg came in, shoving past me, knocking me over.

" ' "RACKNE!" he screamed. "YOU'RE KILLING RACKNE!" 'And even as Reg was rushing across the room, apparently planning to kill that child,' Jane told me, 'I had time to wonder just how many times he had been in that room, shooting that gun into the typewriter when his mother and I were maybe upstairs changing beds or in the backyard hanging clothes where we couldn't hear the wah-wah-wah... where we couldn't hear that thing... the Fornit... inside, screaming.

'Jimmy didn't stop even when Reg came bursting in—just kept shooting into the typewriter as if he knew it was his last chance, and since then I have wondered if perhaps Reg wasn't right about they, too—only maybe they just sort of float around, and every now and then they dive into a person's head like someone doing a double-gainer into a swimming pool and they get that somebody to do the dirty work and then check out again, and the guy they were in says, "Huh? Me? Did what?"

" 'And in the second before Reg got there, the screaming from inside the typewriter turned into a brief, drilling shriek—and I saw blood splatter all over the inside of that glass insert, as if whatever was in there had finally just exploded, the way they say a live animal will explode if you put it in a microwave oven. I know how crazy it sounds, but I saw that blood—it hit the glass in a blot and then started to run.

" ' "Got it," Jimmy said, highly satisfied. "Got—"

" 'Then Reg threw him all the way across the room. He hit the wall. The gun was jarred out of his hand, hit the floor, and broke. It was nothing but plastic and Eveready batteries, of course.

" 'Reg looked into the typewriter, and he screamed. Not a scream of pain or fury, although there was fury in it—mostly it was a scream of grief. He turned toward the boy then. Jimmy had fallen to the floor, and whatever he had been—if he ever was anything more than just a mischievous little boy—now he was just a six-year-old in terror. Reg pointed the gun at him, and that's all I remember.' " The editor finished his soda and put the can carefully aside.

"Gertrude Rulin and Jimmy Rulin remember enough to make up for the lack," he said. "Jane called out, 'Reg, NO!' and when he looked around at her, she got to her feet and grappled with him. He shot her, shattering her left elbow, but she didn't let go. As she continued to grapple with him, Gertrude called to her son, and Jimmy ran to her.

"Reg pushed Jane away and shot her again. This bullet tore along the left side of her skull. Even an eighth of an inch to the right and he would have killed her. There is little doubt of that, and none at all that, if not for Jane Thorpe's intervention, he would have surely killed Jimmy Rulin and quite possibly the boy's mother as well.

"He did shoot the boy—as Jimmy raff into his mother's arms just outside the door. The bullet entered Jimmy's left buttock on a downward course. It exited from his upper-left thigh, missing the bone, and passed through Gertrude Rulin's shin. There was a lot of blood, but no major damage done to either.

"Gertrude slammed the study door and carried her screaming, bleeding son down the hallway and out the front door." The editor paused again, thoughtfully.

"Jane was either unconscious by that time or she has deliberately chosen to forget what happened next.

Reg sat down in his office chair and put the muzzle of the.45 against the center of his forehead. He pulled the trigger. The bullet did not pass through his brain and leave him a living vegetable, nor did it travel in a semicircle around his skull and exit harmlessly on the far side. The fantasy was flexible, but the final bullet was as hard as it could be. He fell forward across the typewriter, dead.

"When the police broke in, they found him that way; Jane was sitting in a far corner, semiconscious.

"The typewriter was covered with blood, presumably filled with blood as well; head wounds are very, very messy.

"All of the blood was Type O.

"Reg Thorpe's type.