The Last Place on Earth Read online

  II

  His house was still there, sitting at the end of Elm Street, at the endof town, on the edge of the prairie. It was a very old house. It wasdecorated with gingerboard, a rusted-out tin rooster-comb running thepeak of the roof and stained glass window transoms; and the top of thehouse was joined to the ground floor by lapped fishscales, as though itwas a mermaid instead of a house. The house was a golden house. It hadbeen painted brown against the dust, but the keening wind, therelentless sun, the savage rape of the thunderstorms, they had allbleached the brown paint into a shining pure gold.

  Sam stepped inside and leaned back against the front door, the door offull-length glass with a border of glass emeralds and rubies. He leanedback and breathed deep.

  The house didn't smell old. It smelled new. It smelled like sawdust andfresh-hewn lumber as bright and blond as a high school senior'screwcut.

  He walked across the flowered carpet. The carpet didn't mind footstepsor bright sun. It never became worn or faded. It grew brighter with theyears, the roses turning redder, the sunflowers becoming yellower.

  The parlor looked the same as it always did, clean and waiting to beused. The cane-backed sofa and chairs eagerly waiting to be sat upon,the bead-shaded kerosene lamps ready to burst into light.

  Sam went into his workshop. This had once been the ground level masterbedroom, but he had had to make the change. The work table held itsshare of radios, toasters, TV sets, an electric train, a spring-windVictrola. Sam threw the nails onto the table and crossed the room,running his fingers along the silent keyboard of the player piano. Helooked out the window. The bulldozers had made the ground rectangular,level and brown, turning it into a gigantic half-cent stamp. Heremembered the mail and raised the window and reached down into themailbox. It was on this side of the house, because only this side wastechnically within city limits.

  As he came up with the letters, Sam Collins saw a man sighting along aplumbline towards his house. He shut the window.

  Some of the letters didn't have any postage stamps, just a line ofsmall print about a $300 fine. Government letters. He went over andforced them into the tightly packed coal stove. All the trash would beburned out in the cold weather.

  Collins sat down and looked through the rest of his mail. A newcatalogue of electronic parts. A bulky envelope with two paperbacknovels by Richard S. Prather and Robert Bloch he had ordered. A coupleof letters from hams. He tossed the mail on the table and leaned back.

  * * * * *

  He thought about what had happened in the hardware store.

  It wasn't surprising it had happened to him. Things like that were boundto happen to him. He had just been lucky that Ed Michaels hadn't calledthe sheriff. What had got into him? He had never been a sex maniacbefore! But still ... it was hardly unexpected.

  Might as well wait to start on those rabbit cages until tomorrow, hedecided. This evening he felt like exploring.

  The house was so big, and packed with so many things that he never foundand examined them all. Or if he did, he forgot a lot about the thingsbetween times, so it was like reading a favorite book over again, alwaysdiscovering new things in it.

  The parlor was red in the fading light, and the hall beyond the slidingdoors was deeply shadowed. In the sewing room, he remembered, in thedrawers of the treadle machine the radio was captured. The rings andsecret manuals of the days when radio had been alive. He hadn't lookedover those things in some little time.

  He looked up the shadowed stairway. He remembered the night, a few weeksbefore Christmas when he had been twelve and really too old to believe,his mother had said she was going up to see if Santa Claus had left anypackages around a bit early. They often gave him his presents early,since they were never quite sure he would live until Christmas.

  But his mother had been playing a trick on him. She hadn't been going upafter packages. She had gone up those stairs to murder his father.

  She had shot him in the back of the head with his Army Colt .45 from thefirst war. Collins never quite understood why the hole in back was soneat and the one in front where it came out was so messy.

  After he went to live with Aunt Amy and the house had been boarded up,he heard them talking, Aunt Amy and her boy friend, fat Uncle Ralph. Andthey had said his mother had murdered his father because he had goneahead and made her get pregnant again and she was afraid it would beanother one like Sam.

  Sam Collins knew she must have planned it a long time in advance. Shehad filled up the bathtub with milk, real milk, and she went in aftershe had done it and took a bath in the milk. Then she slit her wrists.

  When Sam Collins had run down the stairs, screaming, and barged into thebathroom, he had found the tub looking like a giant stick of peppermintcandy.

  * * * * *

  Aunt Amy had been good to him.

  Because he didn't talk for about a year after he found the bodies, mostpeople thought he was simple-minded. But Aunt Amy had always treated himjust like a regular boy. That was embarrassing sometimes, but still itwas better than what he got from the others.

  The doctor hadn't wanted to perform the operation on his clubfoot. Hesaid it would be an unproductive waste of his time and talent, that heowed it to the world to use them to the very best advantage. Finally heagreed. The operation took about thirty seconds. He stuck a knife intoSam's foot and went _snick-snick_. A couple of weeks later, his foot washealed and it was just like anybody else's. Aunt Amy had paid him $500in payments, only he returned the money order for the last fiftydollars and wished them Merry Christmas.

  Sam Collins could work after that. When Aunty Amy and Uncle Ralphdisappeared, he opened up the old house and started doing odd jobs forpeople who weren't very afraid of him any more.

  That first day had been quite a shock, when he discovered that not inall these years had anybody cleaned the bathtub.

  Sometimes, when he was taking his Saturday night soaker he still gotkind of a funny feeling. But he knew it was only rust from the faucets.

  Collins sighed. It seemed like a long time since he had seen his mothercoming down those stairs....

  He stopped, his throat aching with tightness.

  Something was very strange.

  His mother was coming down the stairs right now.

  She was walking down the stairs, one step, two steps, coming closer tohim.

  Collins ran up the stairs, prepared to run through the phantom to proveit wasn't there.

  The figure raised a gun and pointed it at him.

  This time, she was going to shoot _him_.

  It figured.

  He always had bad luck.

  "Stop!" the woman on the stairs said. "Stop or I'll shoot, Mr.Collins!"

  * * * * *

  Collins stopped, catching to the bannister. He squinted hard, and as astereoptic slide lost its depth when you shut one eye, the woman on thestairs was no longer his mother. She was young, pretty, brunette andsweet-faced, and the gun she held shrunk from an old Army Colt to a .22target pistol.

  "Who _are_ you?" Collins demanded.

  The girl took a grip on the gun with both hands and held it steady onhim.

  "I'm Nancy Comstock," she said. "You tried to assault my mother a halfhour ago."

  "Oh," he said. "I've never seen you before."

  "Yes, you have. I've been away to school a lot, but you've seen mearound. I've had my eye on you. I know about men like you. I know whathas to be done. I came looking for you in your house for this."

  The bore of the gun was level with his eye as he stood a few steps belowher. Probably if she fired now, she would kill him. Or more likely hewould only be blinded or paralyzed; that was about his luck.

  "Are you going to use that gun?" he asked.

  "Not unless I have to. I only brought it along for protection. I cameto help you, Mr. Collins."

  "Help me?"

  "Yes, Mr. Collins. You'
re sick. You need help."

  He looked the girl over. She was a half-dozen years younger than he was.In most states, she couldn't even vote yet. But still, maybe she couldhelp, at that. He didn't know much about girls and their abilities.

  "Why don't we go into the kitchen and have some coffee?" Collinssuggested.