The murderer

By Murray Leinster
The murderer's hair lifted at the back of his neck. A crawling sensation spread down his spine. There was something moving in the room! It was pitch-dark, with vague rectangles of faint grayishness where windows opened upon the rainy night outside. The murderer had left this room half an hour before, maybe only twenty minutes before. He'd gone plunging away through the darkness, knowing that before dawn the rain would have washed away the tire-tracks of his car. And then he'd remembered something. He'd come back to pick up a thing he'd left, the only thing that could possibly throw suspicion upon him. And there was something moving in the room!
His scalp crawled horribly. He had to clench his teeth to keep them from chattering audibly.... He heard the sound again! Something alive in the room. Something furtive and horrible and—and terribly playful! It was amused, that live thing in the room. It was diverted by the one gasp of pure terror he had given at the first sound it made.
The murderer stood teetering upon his toes, with his hand outstretched and touching the wall, fighting against an unnameable fear. He was in the right house, certainly. And in the right room. He could catch the faint acrid reek of burnt smokeless powder. His senses were uncannily acute. He could even distinguish the staling scent of the cigarette he had lighted when he was here before.... This was the room in which he had killed a man. Yonder, by the wide blotch of formless gray, there was a chair, and in that chair there was an old man, huddled up, with a bullet-wound in his throat and a spurt of deepening crimson overlaying his shirt-front. The murderer who stood by the wall, sick with fear, had killed him no more than half an hour before.
And there could not be anyone else in the house. The murderer listened, stifling his breathing to deepen the silence. Nothing but the shrill and senseless singing of a canary-bird that was one of the dead man's two pets. The bird stopped, began again drowsily, and was silent. In the utter stillness that followed, the vastly muffled purring of his own motor-car reached the murderer, and the slow, drizzling sound of rain, even the curious humming of the telephone wires that led away from the house.