Nightmares & Geezenstacks by Fredric Brown Page A

streak as it hit the ground and ran, gone in shadows before he could take a single step.
    Darker, and though he could see dimly in the woods, he could see more clearly when he came to the moonlit plain. Still driven on. There was something to his left, something small and alive sitting on haunches on a patch of barren soil. He wheeled to run toward it. It didn’t move until he was almost there; then with the suddenness of lightning it popped down a hole and vanished.
    His footsteps were slower after that, his muscles responded sluggishly.
    At dawn he came to the stream.
    It was effort for him to reach it, but he got there and lowered his great head to drink, and drank deeply. The gnawing pain in his stomach rose, a moment, to crescendo, and then dulled. He drank more.
    And slowly, ponderously, he sank down to the muddy soil. He didn’t fall, but his legs gave way gradually, and he lay there, the rising sun in his eyes, unable to move. The pain that had been in his stomach was all over him now, but dulled, more an aching weakness than an agony.
    The sun rose high overhead and sank slowly.
    He could see but dimly now, and there were winged things that circled overhead. Things that swept the sky with lazy, cowardly circles. They were food, but they wouldn’t come down and fight.
    And when it got dark enough, there were other things that came. There was a circle of eyes two feet off the ground, and an excited yapping now and then, and a howl. Little things, food that wouldn’t fight and be eaten. The kind of life that gave you the runaround.
    Circle of eyes. Wings against the moonlit sky.
    Food all about him, but fleet food that ran away on flashing legs the minute it saw or heard, and that had eyes and ears too sharp ever to fail to see or hear. The fast little things that ran and wouldn’t fight.
    He lay with his head almost at the water’s edge. At dawn when the red sun was again in his eyes, he managed to drag his mighty bulk a foot forward so he could drink again. He drank deeply, and a convulsive shudder ran through him and then he lay very quietly with his head in the water.
    And the winged things overhead circled slowly down.

MURDER IN TEN EASY LESSONS
    There isn’t anything romantic about murder. It’s a nasty business and you wouldn’t like it.
    Yes, take a murder and take it apart. You’ll find it about as pleasant to dissect as a several-weeks-dead frog. The smell is pretty much the same, and you’ll be in just as much of a hurry to rush to the incinerator with your subject.
    You can quit reading now, right here. H you don’t, remember I warned you.
    You wouldn’t have liked Morley Evans; few people did. You might, incidentally, have read about him in the paper, but not under that name. Duke Evans was the name he went by. Later, I mean; as a boy they called him Stinky.
    Sounds like a joke, that name Stinky. Usually it is, but not always. Occasionally kids show an uncanny knack of picking nicknames. Not that he smelled physically; as a boy he was required by his parents to bathe his body at reasonable intervals. As a man, he was dapper and well groomed in a greasy sort of way. Maybe I seem to be too prejudiced; he wasn’t really greasy. But he did use hair oil.
    We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. Back to Stinky Evans and the first lesson. He was fourteen then. He ran with a gang who used to raid the dime stores every Saturday afternoon, coming out with their pockets stuffed. Most of them were rather good at it and were seldom caught.
    Harry Callan was the head of the gang. He was a little older than the others and he had connections. He could take a conglomeration of twenty dollars’ worth of packaged razor blades, phonograph needles and the like, and turn it into five dollars cash. With that ability and with his fists and his advantage in size, he ruled the gang.
    You might say that Stinky Evans’ first lesson in murder came the afternoon when Harry Callan knocked the hell out of him. For no