Night Gallery 1 (13 page)

Dittman, Sr., looked back at his son and whispered, "You place your shot, Archie, so you kill or anchor him at once. Line up the front leg as the upright part of a 'T' and the backline is the cross part. Aim to break the shoulder just above the middle of the body. That way you'll bring him down quick."

Archie, Jr., raised his rifle, and Pierce noted with surprise that there was nothing hesitant about the boy then.

Again the Colonel's whisper. "If you shoot high, Archie, you'll break his back. And if you shoot behind, you'll get the lungs. A low shot can hit the heart, but if you're high in front, you get the neck. Make it a clean kill, Archie."

The boy nodded and started to sight down into the canyon. The deer remained stock still, frozen there. It was as if he'd already taken his bullet and was down there on display, stuffed. Dead. An item out of Disneyland.

But Pierce, incredibly enough, was not prepared for the noise. A loud explosion. A little wisp of smoke out of the breech of Archie Jr.'s gun.

And down below, the deer leaped high, then ran.

He did it, by God, Pierce thought—after his shock at the noise. The boy had actually fired at a target and hit it. He was not prepared, however, for the look on Colonel Dittman's face—the twisted, contorted, bestial look—the quivering thin lips, the suddenly bright maniacal eyes.

"You punk," the Colonel said. "You dumb, stupid punk. You got him in the Goddamned lungs. That's where you got him. I'm sure of it."

And then Archie, Jr., simply put down the rifle gently. He looked at it for a moment, then turned his head and vomited on the ground—a long, rasping, ugly noise.

Colonel Dittman reached him in one stride, grabbing him by the front of his hunting jacket. "Now, you weak son of a bitch—we're going to have to follow his tracks. We'll have to check the blood drops and find out just where you got him."

It was a moment before Pierce realized he'd let loose of his own gun and it was embedded in brush at his feet. He felt disoriented. It was as if he were watching a three-ring circus, each act demanding his attention. The boy was sick. His father looked as if he were about to kill him; and there was also some language floating about blood and tracks, and some garbled phrases that Pierce couldn't understand but wanted to. "Colonel," Pierce said, "he got the deer—"

Dittman, still clutching the boy, looked toward Pierce. "We'll have to find out where he got hit," he said. "We'll be able to tell from the blood. Blood from the body and limbs is kind of medium in color, and it usually means just a superficial wound. Lung blood is light-colored—and that means a long hunt. The Goddamned deer could be alive for hours." Then he jerked his head back toward his son. "I told you. A clean kill. You know what that means? A clean kill. That means you don't butcher him. Jesus, I could have ordered an animal for you. Tied him down and let you go at him with an ax. It's the same Goddamned thing."

Dirtman was actually screaming then. For a moment it appeared that he might put those hands of his around the boy's neck.

But it was part of the dreamlike quality of the whole scene, Pierce noted, that Archie, Jr., simply lifted his hands, pushed them gently against his father's, and broke free. Like a judo expert knowing that precise point on the opponent's body where the touch of a finger could nullify all that strength and frustrate all that rage. For Colonel Dirtman simply dropped his hands and watched his son turn and start to walk away back Up toward the top of the ridge. Slow motion, Pierce observed. That boneless walk. Shoulders hunched. Head bent. The walk of defeat. Interim salvation only. The short breather before destruction. The walk was so humble and humiliated and so accepting of what had to be failure.

"Look at him." Colonel Dittman's voice was like the rasping shriek of metal against metal. "First he butchers, then he walks away. In your life, Mr. Pierce, have you ever seen anything like it?"

"He tried. Colonel," Pierce said in a soft voice. "God but he tried." He looked up, to see Dittman staring at him.

"And that's all it takes, huh? You're not a helluva lot different than he is. You're willing to go halves on anything. You've got frigging cheap tastes, Mr. Pierce. Altogether frigging cheap tastes."

They were the last words Pierce ever heard Dittman, Sr., utter. He had vague remembrances of returning to the house by himself—a stumbling, directionless walk that almost accidentally brought him back to where he had begun. He had another vague recollection of finding himself in his bedroom, packing his overnight case, taking off his hunting clothes and putting them back on the chair. There was something distasteful about these clothes. Their feel and their touch. It was as if they'd been exposed to a plague and they crawled with living virus. If Pierce could have burned them, that would have been the first thing he would have done.

Moments later—or perhaps an hour—he remembered hearing the front door open down below and then shut with a thudding echo, like some giant footstep. He could never remember his walk down the steps or moving across the front hall toward the Hunting Room. But he would never forget opening the doors. He had heard the sound of hammering. It had been loud and persistent, and it seemed to have gone on for a long time. But the frozen moment—the one that would embed itself in his mind's eye and would repeat itself night after night when he would wake screaming, was what he saw at that moment.

There was the face of Archie, Jr., and he was smiling. He held a hammer in a bleeding hand, and there was something indistinct on his face—like a photograph out of focus. And then there was the thing on the wall. The apparition. The close-cropped white hair. The nail protruding out of the mouth on which rested the upper row of teeth. And the eyes still registering their disbelief. Colonel Dittman's eyes. Disbelief and protest. Those eyes seemed to look past his son and seek out Pierce. Mr. Pierce, they seemed to say. Wrong victor. Wrong vanquished. Wrong trophy in the wrong room. And Pierce, with the insane rationality that comes when a man's reason is being slowly chipped away, wanted to ask: How can you bleed so much? Just a head. How can it continue to bleed? How can it so redden a wall? And where could Archie, Jr., have found a nail that long—one that could reach through a mouth and then through a brain and have enough left to embed itself into a walnut wall?

"Mr. Pierce—" Archie Jr.'s voice was soft and yet prideful. "Take a look at this, Mr. Pierce. I got him about an hour ago. And I got him with his own gun. He was so surprised, he didn't even argue. I just took it from him. And when he started to run I brought him down with one shot. Right in the middle of the old 'T' zone. He flew off the ground about five feet. He was dead before he came down."

Archie, Jr., looked up at the trophy on the wall. "An altogether clean kill, Mr. Pierce. A damned clean kill. And
I
got him. Best shot I ever made. You should have been there. You should have seen him."

Then Archie, Jr., stepped back and let the hammer fall to the floor.

Pierce had some recollection that it had made a noise. He had a further recollection that a servant had suddenly appeared through the open door and screamed. And the scream persisted, as whoever it was ran through the house—a fading siren.

They stood there in the room, just the two of them. Archie, Jr., and Pierce. Both looked at the long row of trophies. Colonel Dittman had a smaller head than the lion, Pierce noted—and he had no horns like the gazelle, and his teeth weren't as sharp and pointed as the baboon's. But there was a look of intelligence in the dead eyes. A look of reason. As befitting a superior beast. And it was quite remarkable, Pierce further noted, as his own control began to crumple away around the edges. It took man to kill man. And that proved something. Superiority, perhaps. Manifest destiny—that kind of thing. His worthiness as an adversary. Oh, yes, it most certainly proved something about the preeminence of man.

Then Pierce closed his eyes. His own brain could take no more. He could fill it with only so much horror, and then it overflowed. But as it was, his eyes didn't close quickly enough. There was one more image he would carry with him: the Great Chief's son walking proudly around the room—chuckling, gurgling, and mouthing little sounds; and leaving a criss-cross pattern of bloody footprints that seemed strangely symmetrical, and in
that
room—altogether proper.

At precisely three o'clock Harvey Doane erupted from his office—his intense, hairless college-boy face crowned by the mop of Edwardian hair. He looked briefly down the long row of secretaries at their desks and listened briefly to the collective sounds of forty typewriters mixed with the monotonous voices of the two switchboard operators at the far end of the corridor who plugged in and plugged out and repeated over and over again, "Pritikin's Plastic Products."

On Harvey Doane's door the gold lettering identified him as "Assistant Sales Director," and in Harvey Doane's personal view, neither the title nor the function fitted his consummate talents.

He saw Mr. Pritikin come out of his office and pause by his secretary's desk. He noted, satisfied, the open door to Randy Lane's office next door. The room was empty, and Jane Alcott, Lane's secretary, looked nervously from Pritikin to the clock, and then over toward Doane.

Alcott was one of the few broads on the floor who had a fix on Doane and read him for the aggressive, climbing, and altogether merciless young bastard that he was.

Doane sauntered over to her, looked up toward the clock, checked briefly that Pritikin was still there, and then said, in an overloud voice, "Randy not back yet?"

Jane Alcott bit her lower lip, looked nervously toward Pritikin, and tried to keep the naked dislike she felt for Doane out of her voice. "He had several meetings outside."

Doane took another quick, surreptitious look toward Pritikin to make certain he was listening. "With several outside martinis," he said, chuckling and wiggling a finger toward the open door to Lane's empty office. He gave Miss Alcott an extravagant wink, then lowered his eyes in humble embarrassment as Mr. Pritikin approached. Beautiful, he thought, as he forced himself to look surprised that Pritikin had overheard, or that Pritikin was even there. Three o'clock, Lane's still out, establish the drinking, and let Pritikin see him there, functioning while his superior tippled away the afternoon. Beautiful.

Mr. Pritikin had a heavy, semifrog face with drooping, thick-lidded eyes, and when angry or impatient, he talked through semiclenched teeth. "When is Mr. Lane due back?" he asked Miss Alcott. "I have to talk to him about the Carstair order."

"I'm right on top of that myself, Mr. Pritikin," Doane offered, much too quickly. "I can give you any information you need, sir."

Pritikin looked at him briefly. "I thought Lane was handling that."

Miss Alcott had her mouth open to speak, but Harvey Doane had already rolled his artillery through the breach. "I've pretty much taken that over," Doane said. "Got a full report on my desk. If you'll just give me a minute, sir, I'll get it."

He turned quickly and trotted back to his office.

Jane Alcott felt her cheeks burn. She sensed Pritikin staring at her. Her hands shook, and she tried to use them to rearrange her desk—a flowerpot, six inches to the left, pencils straightened out into a line, typing paper smoothed out, and then her hands just lay there with nothing further to do.

"Where is he, Miss Alcott?" Pritikin asked in a softer tone.

"He . . . well . . . he mentioned some meetings outside, Mr. Pritikin—"

"I've no doubt," Pritkin said. "Most of his business of late seems to
be
outside." He turned away, then looked at her over his shoulder. "Tell him I want to see him when he gets back."

He started back toward his own office as Doane came dog-trotting out, a sheaf of papers in his hand, looking like a cross between a cocker spaniel and a vulture. "Mr. Pritikin—I have the Carstair material right here, sir."

Pritikin paused by his office door. "Bring it in here," he said.

And Harvey Doane, anchor man on the Olympic Back-Knifing Squad, headed toward him and into his office.

"Mr. Pritikin," Miss Alcott called.

Pritikin turned back toward her from his office door. "Yes, Miss Alcott."

Miss Alcott knew she was blushing, and could do nothing about it. "Today is Mr. Lane's twenty-fifth anniversary," she said, trying to keep her voice even.

Pritikin frowned at her. "His anniversary? That man's been a widower for twenty years—"

"Twenty-five years with the company," Miss Alcott tried to say without emotion.

"I wasn't aware of that," Pritikin said. Again he turned to enter his office, and again her voice stopped him.

"I only broached it, sir," she said, "because . . . well . . . because maybe someone in the firm took him to lunch or something. Just a little celebration."

Pritikin's nod conveyed nothing. He simply moved into his office, where the eager Doane stood in the middle of the room, and closed the door.

Miss Alcott waited for a moment, then rose and entered Randolph Lane's office. She moved hurriedly over to his phone, dialed an outside fine, waited for a moment. "Antoine," she asked, "is Mr. Lane there? Did he have lunch there? But he's not there now? Well, if he should come in—will you tell him to please get in touch with his office right away? Yes. Thank you. This is his secretary."

She cradled the phone for a moment, then let her eyes wander over Lane's desk. There was a picture of his wife, very young; a doodled calender with the day's date circled and starred, a scribbled notation on it which read "Quarter of a Century." And as her eyes quickly inventoried the desk, she saw the whiskey bottle protruding from an open side drawer. She closed the drawer quickly, tidied up the desk, then glanced toward the door to see Randolph Lane standing there.

He looked as he always looked after a wet lunch. Tie at half-mast, normally rumpled shirt collar even more rumpled, thinning hair hanging over his eyes—much-too-tight suit, buttoned in front with difficulty. And the eyes . . . the tired eyes . . . grave but good-humored.