Pearson knotted his fingers, then he relaxed them and went to the couch where he picked up his coat and hat.
“Don’t you even want to know the surprise?”
“Good night, Carter.”
“Do you by any chance recall a certain Mrs. Feverell?”
Pearson paused. Gloria Feverell—yes, he remembered her. She’d been found guilty of having poisoned her husband one night. A stunning four-time widow.
“What about her?”
Carter’s eyes were fierce brightnesses. “As a result of some correspondence and a little investigation,” he said, “I am prepared to release definite proof that the unfortunate lady has been the victim of an enormous miscarriage of justice. She was at a motion picture at the time of the crime, you see. Good night, Lieutenant. You’d best hurry, or Mr. Passarelli will—”
Suddenly Amos Carter jerked his purple beak into the air and screamed.
His good hand flapped out like a pale wing.
Pearson tried to clear his mind. There had been a sound just before the scream: a sound like the popping of resin on a log.
Carter rolled his chair frantically, but as he could use only one hand, the chair came forward and then circled back again. “Help me!” the old man cried.
Pearson saw what had happened. When he’d upset the chess table, Carter had moved his chair closer to the flaming hearth. Some fire had spit out and caught on his woolen shawls.
And now Amos Carter was on fire.
“Help me, in the name of God, John!”
Pearson took a step forward.
Then he stopped.
He thought of many things, all at once. They crowded his brain and caused his head to hurt.
The wheelchair was making frantic circles, around and around; it careened, waves of flame rising in excited plumes from the loosely woven cloth. The air was full of smoke and fire and screams.
Pearson watched the drapes catch, then the tapestries; he watched, holding his hands to his ears.
At last the cries stopped and the chair stopped.
Quietly the chair burned and the thing in it burned and there was suddenly an acrid aroma in the room.
It grew.
The big red-faced man stepped quietly outside into the shadows.
He put on his hat and waited and presently he heard the footsteps and presently he saw the face that belonged to the footsteps.
A dark small face, hairy, with small wild eyes.
Lieutenant Pearson smiled and took out his revolver.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago in 1929. He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and worked at a number of jobs before selling his first story to Amazing Stories in 1950. In 1954 his “Black Country” became the first work of short fiction to appear in Playboy, and his classic tale “The Crooked Man” was featured in the same magazine the following year. Beaumont published numerous other short stories in the 1950s, both in mainstream periodicals like Playboy and Esquire and in science fiction and fantasy magazines.
His first story collection, The Hunger and Other Stories, was published in 1957 to immediate acclaim and was followed by two further collections, Yonder (1958) and Night Ride and Other Journeys (1960). He also published two novels, Run from the Hunter (1957, pseudonymously, with John E. Tomerlin), and The Intruder (1959).
Beaumont is perhaps best remembered for his work in television, particularly his screenplays for The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote several of the most famous episodes. His other screenwriting credits include the scripts for films such as The Premature Burial (1962), Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964).
When Beaumont was 34, he began to suffer from ill health and developed a baffling and still-unexplained condition that caused him to age at a greatly increased rate, such that at the time of his death at age 38 in 1967, he had the physical appearance of a 95-year-old man. Beaumont was survived by his wife Helen, two daughters, and two sons, one of whom, Christopher, is also a writer.
Beaumont’s work was much respected by his colleagues, and he counted Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and Roger Corman among his friends and admirers. His work is in the process of being rediscovered with collector’s editions of several of his works from Centipede Press, three reissues from Valancourt Books, and a new collection from Penguin Classics.
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