Legacy Of Terror

slumped half onto the floor, very cold and very stiff and very dead.
    She stepped back and closed the door.
    What now?
    That question was answered for her when someone, behind her, said, “So you found him.”
    She turned.
    Gordon stood only five feet away.
    He was holding a long, sharp knife with a serrated edge.
    “Gordon?”
    He smiled, a terrible smile, a smile that contained no humor whatsoever, cold and distant.
    “Your eyes don't decieve you,” he said.
    It was just too much. First, finding the Captain in the back of her car. Now, to learn that she had been wrong about Dennis-and wrong about Gordon as well. It was not Dennis, despite his frivolity, despite his strange moods, who had stepped from the brink of sanity into the abyss of madness, but it was, instead, Gordon. Hard-working Gordon Matherly. Serious, diligent Gordon Matherly. Gordon Matherly, whose reasonableness and sobriety she had so much admired, who would one day go so far because of his nose-to-the-grindstone attitude. Such a switch-about did not merely indicate bad judgment on her part, but struck a solid blow at the very foundations of her outlook on life. Too much, too much, too much!
    “Why?” she asked.
    “He was snooping around the house last night,” Gordon said. “I don't know why he was here. If you didn't get your call through to him, then he had no reason to suspect anything was wrong with the hitchhiker theory. But when I was outside, after you had closed your window to me and I had missed my chance to kill you with a stone, I heard him cough. He had taken up a position near the garage. He had not seen or heard our little scene, but that was only luck. I circled on him and stabbed him. He died very easily. You would be surprised how easily such a big man can die, Elaine. I think he was done for the third or fourth time I cut him. But I kept on for a while, kept stabbing him, just to be certain.”
    He smiled again, a smile that bared his teeth in an animal grimace, skinned his lips back more in hatred than in humor. His eyes were bright, like beads of polished glass. His nostrils flared unnaturally as his breathing became hurried.
    She wished he would not smile.
    She said, “That isn't what I meant.”
    Gordon stopped smiling and frowned at the knife in his hand. With the thumb of his left hand, he tested the blade to see if it were sharp. Elaine thought that a scarlet string of blood appeared on his thumb, so thorough was his test.
    “Why did you do any of it, Gordon?”
    If she talked, if she kept him occupied, perhaps he could be tricked-or perhaps someone would walk by the front of the garage and see them. She was still shocked and bewildered by the discovery that he was the killer, but some of her hard-headed reasonableness had returned, enough to let her seriously contemplate means of escape from what appeared to be imminent and certain death.
    “I don't understand what you mean,” he said.
    “Why did you want to kill Celia? You hardly knew her.”
    “She was a woman,” he said, as if that were all the answer that was required.
    The simplicity of it, the coldness with which he said it, almost made her abandon hope.
    She did not press that point but said, “But Jacob isn't a woman. And you tried to kill him without reason.”
    “I had reason!” he snapped, defensive now. He skinned his lips back, smiled, stopped smiling, smiled again, hardly able to control the flux of emotions which poured through him.
    “What reason?”
    “Oh, I have a good one,” he said.
    “Can't you tell me?”
    He held the knife toward her, pointed directly at her stomach. It was held straight out from his body, as if he were warding her off, as if he had to be frightened of a counterattack. His fingers were so tightly wrapped about the wooden grip that his knuckles were bloodless. He waved it back and forth, much the way a cobra might weave its head in order to mesmerize its victim prior to a strike.
    “You have no reason to hurt me,” Elaine said, remembering how a similar argument had made him stop picking at her lock two nights ago. “I haven't done anything to you.”
    “You don't understand,” Gordon said.
    His voice had grown thin, climbed several tones until it was high- pitched and unmasculine, partly the result of his fear-but also the result of something else, something she could not place. Perhaps it was as if he were trying to imitate someone else's voice. But whose voice?
    “Explain it to me, then,” she said.
    “I can't.”
    “Then you're mad. You're a