Black Evening by David Morrell Page A

skipped several beats. "No, that can't be."
    "You mean you know this guy? This Winston Davis."
    Eric tasted dust. "I've heard of him. He was a novelist." His voice was hoarse.
    "I hope he didn't try to write his novels on that thing. It's like I told you when you bought it. I tried every way I knew to make them keep it. But the owners sold the dead guy's stuff in one big lump. They wouldn't split the package. Everything or nothing."
    "On Long Island?"
    "The address is on this paper."
    Eric grabbed it, frantically picked up the heavy typewriter, and stumbled toward the door.
    "Say, don't I know your face?" the old man asked. "Weren't you on the Carson show last night?"
***
    The sun had almost set as Eric found his destination. All the way across Long Island, he'd trembled fearfully. He realized now why so many readers had compared his work with that of Winston Davis. Davis had once owned this same machine. He'd typed his novels on it. The machine had done the actual composing. That's why Eric's work and Davis's were similar. Their novels had the same creator. Just as Eric kept the secret, so had Davis, evidently never telling even his close friends or his family. When Davis died, the family had assumed that this old typewriter was nothing more than junk, and they'd sold it with some other junk around the house. If they'd known about the secret, surely they'd have kept this golden goose, this gold mine.
    But it wasn't any gold mine now. It was a hunk of junk, a broken hulk of bolts and levers.
    "Here's the mansion, sir," the totally-confused chauffeur told Eric.
    Frightened, Eric studied the big open gates, the wide smooth lawn, the huge black road that curved up to the massive house. It's like a castle, Eric thought. Apprehensively he told the driver, "Go up to the front."
    Suppose there's no one home, he thought. Suppose they don't remember. What if someone else is living there?
    He left his burden in the car. At once both hesitant and frantic, he walked up the marble front steps toward the large oak door. His fingers shook. He pressed a button, heard the echo of a bell inside, and was surprised when someone opened the door.
    A gray-haired woman in her sixties. Kindly, well dressed, pleasant looking.
    Smiling, with a feeble voice, she asked how she could help him.
    Eric stammered, but the woman's gentle gaze encouraged him, and soon he spoke to her with ease, explaining that he knew her husband's work and admired it.
    "How good of you to remember," she said.
    "I was in the neighborhood. I hoped you wouldn't mind if I stopped by. To tell you how I felt about his novels."
    "Wouldn't mind? No, I'm delighted. So few readers take the time to care. Won't you come in?"
    The mansion seemed to Eric like a mausoleum — cold and echoing.
    "Would you like to see my husband's study? Where he worked?" the aging woman asked.
    They went along a chilly marble hall. The old woman opened an ornate door and gestured toward the sacristy, the sanctum.
    It was wonderful. A high wide spacious room with priceless paintings on the walls — and bookshelves, thick soft carpeting, big windows that faced the white-capped ocean where three sunset-tinted sailboats scudded in the evening breeze.
    But the attraction of the room was in its middle — a large gleaming teakwood desk, and like a chalice on its center, an old Smith-Corona from the fifties.
    "This is where my husband wrote his books," the old woman told him proudly. "Every morning — eight until noon. Then we'd have lunch, and we'd go shopping for our dinner, or we'd swim or use the sailboat. In the winter, we took long walks by the water. Winston loved the ocean in the winter. He… I'm babbling. Please, forgive me."
    "No, it's quite all right. I understand the way you feel. He used this Smith-Corona?"
    "Every day."
    "I ask, because I bought a clunky typewriter the other day. It looked so strange it appealed to me. The man who sold it told me your husband used to own