The End of the Night

by John D. MacDonald

  I balanced the heavy stone in my hand. I touched the roundness of the back of her head with my other hand, under the softness of her hair.

  Sandy made a noise like a chicken.

  I turned in a way that partially blocked his vision, and I struck down hard with the rock. I hit the hard mud close to her head. It made a convincing noise that would turn stomachs.

  I stood up so abruptly I knocked him back against the slope. “Let get the hell out of here.”

  “Is she …”

  “Get moving!” I yelled at him. We scrambled up the bank. Sandy kicked her shoes into the brush. Shack and Nan had moved onto the back seat. They didn’t know or care whether the car was moving or standing still. We got back on the highway, and soon we were keening down around the curves of a long and dangerous hill.

  A long time later Nan asked, leaning over between us, “Is she dead?”

  “Like stone cold,” Sandy said.

  “And I’m living,” Nan said.

  “She had better legs, man,” Sandy said.

  “So where is she? Walking, running?” Nan asked.

  She leaned back. We rushed through the small hills, drifted through the silent, ugly, sleeping towns. Our headlights unraveled the patched roads.

  “Fee fie fiddly-I-oh. Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh.”

  We were with it. We rode right out there on the forward edge of it, like a dog with his nose in the wind. The square world was noplace. We were a fly, and a blind man sought to catch us in his fist.

  I have been asleep and I resent most bitterly the waste of the thin edge of time I have left. I would have told all of it, right up to the end, but I guess not much of it is pertinent, not after the time we drove away from the girl. I reached for a paper tray of hamburgers and they snapped steel around my wrists. They were large, tough pros, and when they did look at me, it was the way a doctor might look at an abscess. Cool professional curiosity, plus the innate distaste of one who prefers to look at healthy tissue. Their stare turned me from a man into a thing. Put it another way. Maybe I had turned from a man into a thing, but had not known the transition was complete. Their eyes were cruel mirrors, so I soon learned to stop looking directly at anyone.

  There is the temptation to drag this out. But I have said it all. TOMORROW has become TODAY and this is the end of me. This third day of April.

  I’ll try to get through what’s left without slamming myself. I don’t think I can. It must be a lot easier to die for something you believe in.

  THIRTEEN

  On the fifteenth day of April, twelve days after the multiple execution, Dallas Kemp took an attractive couple in their late thirties out to see the hillside lot he owned. The man had that manner and assurance of money and success. A large corporation had recently transferred him to Monroe, and as he suspected he might spend many years in Monroe, he wanted to build the first house they had ever built. The wife was poised, and she had warmth and charm. When they talked together, there was about them that special aura only good marriages have.

  They pulled the two cars over onto the shoulder of the country road and walked up and looked at the lot. Snow clung in a few low, shadowed places. The earth was moist, the first buds showing.

  The couple was pleased with the land, with the privacy and the view. Dallas Kemp left them standing where the house would be, and went down to his car and brought back the blue-print of the floor plan and turned it so that it was in the same position the house would be, so they could see what the windows would look out upon.

  The man said, “Isn’t it a little unusual? An architect owning the land and selling it to his client?”

  “It’s getting hard to find land with an contour. I picked it up myself because it’s such an attractive site. I had … a particular couple in mind, but they weren’t able to use it.”

  “Then,” the woman said, with a small frown, “if this house was designed for this site, then it was really designed for somebody else, not for us.”

  “Yes, it was. But the people I designed it for never even had a chance to see it. I like the house well enough so that … I would like to see it built. I could design one for you, but I don’t know if it would be this good. I know it wouldn’t be better.”

  “It’s a beautiful house, Mr. Kemp. As we said in your office, it would have to be larger,” the woman said. “We have four very active children.”

  “It was designed so that the new wing can go off the north side,” Kemp said.

  “This is sort of a package deal,” the man said.

  “I’ll sell the land for exactly what I paid for it,” Dallas Kemp said. “If the whole idea doesn’t appeal to you, it will probably be a long time before anybody else comes along to whom I’d be willing to show it. I want the land and the house to go together, to the right people.”

  “Is this such an artistic compulsion with you that you’ll resist any changes we may want to make before we ask for bids?” the man asked.

  “I’ll make all changes that do not disturb the basic design, the unity of the house. I do not make that sort of change for any client.”

  The woman turned to the husband and gently grasped the lapel of his tweed jacket. “I want the package deal, darling. Without ever knowing us, this very good and very honest young man made our house. I want this wonderful house and this wonderful hillside so badly my darn knees are weak and funny. If we don’t have it, to live in, to be in love in—because it’s the kind of a house that has to have love in it—I’ll be wistful all the rest of my life.”

  The man flushed slightly and grinned at Dallas Kemp. “I guess there’s only one answer to that. We’ll go ahead with it.”

  “I’m glad,” Kemp said. “I want to see the house built. It’s too good a thing to be wasted.”

  After they talked for a time of arrangements, they walked back down to the automobiles. As they stood by the cars, the woman brought up Helen Wister. Dallas Kemp was sorry she had done so, because later she would learn more about the people living in Monroe, and she would remember being unconsciously tactless and it would bother her, because there was kindness in this woman. He knew it was only a product of coincidence and idle conversation when she said, “Isn’t this the area where that terrible thing happened way last summer? Where that man was murdered and that doctor’s daughter was kidnaped?”

  “No. That happened out on the other side of the city.”

  “I read where they had electrocuted those horrors a couple of weeks ago. What was that girl’s name, anyway?”

  “Wister. Helen Wister.”

  “Did you know her, Mr. Kemp?”

  “Yes, I knew her.”

  “It must have been such a terrible shock for everybody around here. I guess you people will always remember the details of a thing like that, I mean you’d be more likely to remember it than we would, living out in Seattle and just reading about it in the papers. Did they shoot her?”

  Dallas Kemp was able to turn away from them by using the device of turning his back to the spring wind to light a cigarette. When he turned back he knew he was under control.

  “As it was reconstructed, Mrs. Dennrig, and according to Stassen’s story, she fell and hit her head when they abandoned her. The autopsy showed only minor head injuries. Death was by drowning. Apparently she came to in the night and perhaps tried to stand and fainted. You could call it murder, but they weren’t tried for that.”

  “What … what horrible irony,” the woman said. “It … almost makes it worse, somehow.”

  “Yes,” Dallas Kemp said. “She was alone and they were gone. It almost makes it worse.”

  Dallas Kemp lied to them, told them he had some more measurements to take. They drove back to the city. He walked up the hill and leaned against the trunk of an old silver birch tree, his hands in his pockets, and looked at where the house would be.

  He stood there and he wished he was old. He wished he had come back across time to look at one of the very early things he had designed, on
e of the good things. He had the feeling that when he had become old, thoughts of Helen would then have a nostalgic, drifting sweetness, like sachet and old love letters, and an old man could smile and remember the good parts.

  But it was too close. He was trapped in this bitter segment of his life, and he could move away from it only with the agonizing slowness of the minute hand on the clock. Time pressed him close to all the vivid memories of her.

  On the way back to town, during a time of inattention, he suddenly saw a brown puppy prancing out into the road directly in front of him, joyously ignoring the panic scream of children in the yard, ears flopping, too lost in his game to consider disaster.

  Kemp wrenched the wheel, yelped the tires and awaited a soft small thud. It did not come. When he was well beyond that place, moving slowly, he looked in the rear-vision mirror and saw a man pulling the craven puppy from the road by the scruff of its neck, whacking its stern with his hand.

  Kemp drove on, but within a mile he was trembling so badly he turned onto a quieter street and let the car drift to a stop by the curbing. He did not believe he could have endured killing the dog. He felt he had been spared one final, unbearable thing.

  He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the top of the steering wheel. For a moment he felt on the very edge of perceiving and understanding some cosmic equation which balanced a logic of love, innocence, accident and death. But it was gone before he saw its shape.

  Kemp straightened up, and, after a little while, he remembered how to start his car, and he drove the rest of the way back into the city.

  About the Author

  John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.