Guilty as Charged: Fantastic Crime Stories. Philip E. High

went on talking. He was down here on a holiday for two weeks and still had ten days left. He had hired one of the chalets that they have built recently on the South Beach. They are not much, sort of fixed caravans really, wooden or plastic, with the basic necessities pushed into the back by a hardboard wall. On the other hand, they are cheap, and six metres across the sea wall there is the sand.

      I told him when we had reached the safety point. “You’ll be fine from here, sixty metres round the jetty and you’ll be on the beach, no currents at all.”

      Before he let go he said: “I’d like to buy you a drink; we could have a couple or two together, share an evening.”

      “Well, thanks, would suit me fine.”

      “Right, Chalet Thirty-Two—seven o’clock suit you?”

      * * * *

      It was exactly seven when I knocked and he came to the door smiling.

      I gave him no chance to speak. I pulled the trigger.

      A small black hole appeared in the centre of his forehead, but the explosive bullet took out everything beyond his face, including the back of his skull.

      I put three more shots into his body almost before the first one had had an effect.

      His body did not fall, it looked almost like deflation it was so slow; it crumbled in on itself and became a sort of bloody heap. The shattered head lay at angle on the top of it like a carnival mask.

      I turned my back on it and put down the gun.

      A frightened-looking man in a bathing robe ran up and said: “What the hell’s going on?”

      “I’ve just shot a man, get someone to call the police.”

      I put my foot on the gun and my hands on the top of my head. “Are you deaf or something? Call the bloody police.”

      The police took ten minutes to arrive, four men, two of whom turned green when they saw the remains of the body.

      It took them a further twenty minutes before they could accept what I had done and place me under arrest.

      * * * *

      As I say, I did five hard years, and I think I would have gone insane if Judie had not kept in touch. She wrote to me regularly and, when I came out into the true free sunlight she was waiting with a taxi.

      She flowed into my arms without speaking and we just clung together. Later, at her place, after a meal, I said: “I have to tell you why.”

      “You don’t have to, I know you’re not a killer.”

      “Oh, but Judie, I am—but not a man killer. I don’t know what it was, perhaps it came from the other end of the universe, another dimension, or perhaps it was an elemental of some kind, but I know exactly what happened. It was in that house and, in order to live in our world, it needed a human body. It took the bodies of Landis and Parker, but maybe the left arm of one of them was faulty. It had to find a better one, so it took Hammond’s.”

      “You’re certain of this, my love?”

      “Absolutely certain, although how I kept both self-control and normal conversation, I’ll never know. I was so dead calm and so intense at the same time. Oh, yes, I knew as soon as I saw the tattoo and the headless cobra. The bastard was swimming about in the ocean using Hammond’s arm to do it—!”