Fantastic Stories Presents: Science Fiction Super Pack #1 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63384-240-3
Publisher: Positronic Publishing
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

7: THEODORE STURGEON

I don’t much care for the way this story’s going.

You want to write a story, see, and you sit down in front of the mill, wait until that certain feeling comes to you, hold off a second longer just to be quite sure that you know exactly what you want to do, take a deep breath, and get up and make a pot of coffee.

This sort of thing is likely to go for days, until you are out of coffee and can’t get more until you can pay for same, which you can do by writing a story and selling it; or until you get tired of messing around and sit down and write a yarn purely by means of knowing how to do it and applying the knowledge.

But this story’s different. It’s coming out as if it were being dictated to me and I’m not used to that. It’s a haywire sort of yarn; I have no excuses for it and can think of no reasons for such a plot having unfolded itself to me. It isn’t that I can’t finish it up; far from it—all the plot factors tie themselves neatly together at the end and this with no effort on my part at all.

This can be demonstrated; it’s the last chapter that bothers me. You see, I didn’t write it. Either someone’s playing a practical joke on me, or— No. I prefer to believe someone’s playing a practical joke on me. Otherwise, this thing is just too horrible.

But about that demonstration: here’s what happened:

Flick never quite recovered from the shock of seeing that sudden corpse. The careful services of the doctor were not required to show that the young lady was dead and Flick recovered himself enough to start asking questions.

It was Daniels who belatedly identified her as the nurse he had seen at the hospital the day Mrs. Stoye killed herself. The nurse’s name was Lucille Holder; she had come from England as a girl; she had a flawless record abroad and in this country. The head doctor told the police, on later investigation, that he had always been amazed at the tremendous amount of work Miss Holder could turn out and had felt that inevitably some sort of a breakdown must come. She went all to pieces on Mrs. Stoye’s death and he sent her on an immediate vacation.

Her movements were not difficult to trace after she left the administrative office, where she ascertained Mr. Daniels’ address. She went first to his house and the only conclusion the police could come to was that she had done so on purpose to kill him. But he was not there: he, it seems, had been trying to find her at the hospital at the time! So she left. The following night she went out to Stoye’s, rang the bell and killed him.

Ronnie followed her, apparently filled with the same unaccountable impulse, and was late. Miss Holder went then to Daniels’ house and tried to kill him, but was shot by the policeman, just as Ronnie, late again, arrived.

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