The Beast by Hugh Fleetwood Read Free Book Online Page B

too.
    She even accepted his reasons for moving every year, though these were even more tenuous, and he could hardly explain his constant shiftings to himself. Was it because he was afraid that if he did stay put in one place the police might have been able to pin down—if they were remotely interested—the crank or madman who wrote them anonymous poems once a year? Or was it because he was afraid that even with the strongest pair of binoculars, and a choice, sometimes, of a hundred lighted windows to gaze into at night, his view of life might be restricted if he didn’t move continually? (Though, God knows, often he had to select his year’s victim out of as many as ten candidates, and could thus, presumably, have worked from that one apartment for ten years). Or was it simply that, having done his duty in one place, he felt he had exhausted that particular street or block—and couldn’t rest with the thought that the even more unspeakable might be waiting for him just around the corner, or in some other part of town; waiting for him, calling for him, crying out for his prying eyes, and his condemnation?
    He didn’t know; but to Lucy he said: ‘I get bored.’ ‘I sort of feel compelled to move.’ ‘I enjoy change.’ ‘I’m a nomad.’ ‘I’m the Wandering Jew.’
    Tonight he said with a smile, after Lucy had muttered wistfully that, since he had gotten his sleeping habits together, she guessed he’d be moving soon, ‘Yes, I think so. You know me. I’m the Flying Dutchman, New York style.’ He added ‘I’ll stop one day I expect.’
    ‘Do you think so?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ He put out a hand and touched her. ‘I should, shouldn’t I? Then we could get married.’
    Lucy squeezed his hand, and laughed. ‘Yes, I guess we could.’
    Charles said: ‘Saved by the love of a good woman.’
    *
    He moved—it wasn’t difficult for him; he had always kept his furniture and belongings to a minimum—on the 15th of December, and by the 30th was quite settled in. The new place was on the East Side, not far from Lucy’s. It was small, and rather expensive; but it was on one of the top floors, and had a wonderful view. Three hundred and eighty windows …
    The first month or so of the new year he would spend simply checking out all the various possibilities. Then he would narrow the field to two or three. Then he would—by March at the latest, he hoped—make his choice. After that, for the next two months he would study every move of his elected one to make sure that he wasn’t mistaken, and that there was no chance of pity entering his heart and misting over his spying glasses. And then, until September, apart from Sundays and those two weeks of vacation in July, he would spend every evening tightening up his case; watching, recording, asking questions of doormen and shopkeepers and neighbours; working himself up into a hard, tight, concentrated passion; until, finally, having selected his suitable report of an unsolved crimefrom one of the papers, he would strike—and find release .
    This was his plan; this had always been his plan. However , the very first night that he sat in his new darkened living room with his binoculars in his hands, feeling both excited and slightly apprehensive at the task ahead of him, something happened that threatened to upset his routine. For no sooner had he begun to sweep the expanse of available windows, some lighted, some unlit, some curtained , some not, than his glasses came to rest on the French windows of the penthouse of the building opposite—French windows that led out onto a terrace. And, extraordinarily , they stayed trained on those windows all evening.
    Even more extraordinarily, what he gazed at through the night was not a scene of unprecedented horror—the only thing he would have believed it possible to so capture him on the first of January—but, as he could only put it to himself as he sat searching for the explanation of his being not only unable but