Legacy Of Terror

were, and I don't need to make judgments of her.”
    “Why did you kill Bobo?” she asked.
    This seemed to interest Jerry and Bess more than anything else that had been said.
    Gordon hesitated and looked confused. But, in a moment, he recovered with the help of that inner “strength” of his. He said, “At first, I thought it was only because I had come to like the sight of blood. I stabbed him over and over. He came to me to be petted. I grabbed him by the neck and plunged the knife into his back. It was marvelous!” He was lost, for a moment, in the recollection of that supreme moment. Then he said, “But later I realized that there was more to it than that. I couldn't have been consumed by a lust for blood, by a pure urge to kill something. I'm not the type for that. I am far too sensible and methodic for that. Then I saw that Bobo was not just a cat, but a familiar, possessed of the spirit of another dead woman. He planned to throw a monkey wrench into my duties to my mother, to upset what she hoped, through me, to achieve.”
    “That's only an excuse,” Elaine said. “Can't you see that? You really did kill Bobo because you liked to see the blood. But later, you couldn't live with that in your mind. So you made up another fantasy about a cat with a human spirit.”
    “It wasn't a fantasy,” he said.
    “Why did you kill Captain Rand? For the fun of it?” She was pushing him hard now. She hoped he didn't break.
    “Of course not,” he said. But from the fleeting look of strange, degenerate joy which crossed his twisted face, it was obvious to Elaine that the murder had not been without a certain thrill for him. “Rand was watching the house. Someone had evidently called him and given him a tip of some sort. I couldn't risk letting him stay alive. And it was a miracle that he had not seen me already; he was sure to catch sight of me if I tried to get back into the house.”
    Bess, roused from the odd stupor into which she had settled-but for a few short comments now and again-ever since Gordon had forced his way into the apartment, said, “Gordon, have you seen your mother's spirit yet? Has she appeared to you at all?”
    “No,” he said. “She doesn't have to. She's here, inside of me, with me all the time.”
    “And you saw no hint of her before the possession?”
    “No.”
    “I wished you had.”
    “She's inside me,” Gordon repeated.
    “I wondered what she would have looked like,” Bess said.
    “Perhaps I'll see her yet,” Gordon said.
    “You will,” Jerry said. “Oh, yes! She'll come to you like a mist, all vaporous and vaguely seen.”
    Elaine let them ramble on. Neither Jerry nor Bess held anything against Gordon. To them, he was the helpless tool of a spirit, the puppet of an unseen master. The subject and their attitude struck Elaine as being very nearly obscene in light of the much more real horror of Gordon's pyschotic madness. At least, however, this inane chatter distracted him from using his knife…
    But then even that line of conversation was finished, and they were all silent. No one could think of anything to say. It had been like a playlet, all that went before this moment, and now the last scene had been enacted. The curtain should fall, and they were all waiting for someone to pull the rope.
    Gordon hefted the knife and took a step toward Elaine.
    She started out of her chair. She was not willing to let him have her so easily. If she were to die, she would inflict some damage on him too, claw his face, go for his eyes, anything to make him know that he had put the blade to a living creature and not to some predestinated marionette-victim who had no choice but to die.
    “You should never have come to this house,” he said.
    Again, he spoke in a voice which was not his, a voice that was more feminine than masculine. Bess gasped and silenced Jerry's moaning so that she could better catch this new development, as if it had great importance.
    “You can't have my family; you can't steal them away from me,” Gordon said, his voice rising even higher, the inflection changing.
    He raised the knife and took another step.
    And the window on the front door smashed in, sending shards of glass tinkling against the furniture nearby.
    For a moment, Elaine refused to believe that it had happened. The sound of breaking glass echoed in her mind, and she held onto it in desperation, for it was hope. But she could not see past Gordon, and she could not be sure that the sound was a reality or a figment of her Imagination, a