by Peter Straub
Instead of going down the steep stairs, Mark retraced his steps. This time, he saw the drifting tatters of the big spider webs he earlier had failed to notice. Real spider webs did not bother him.
As he had imagined, a second, matching staircase led to the ground floor on the other side of the house. He walked down in the darkness, training the flashlight on the descending steps. At the bottom of the stairs, the Maglite revealed two short corridors branching off to the front and back of the building. Each seemed to end at a door that fit flush into the wall. The monster had wanted to move invisibly around the ground floor of his house, too. What Mark had not expected to find was the yawning mouth of yet a third staircase. He and Jimbo had forgotten all about the basement. An unexpected shiver brushed his lungs with frost.
The basement—why did that sound like a colossally bad idea? You never knew what you might find in a basement, that was one reason.
In spite of these feelings, Mark began moving downstairs through veils of cobwebs. Down, down, down through layers of wickedness, layers of pain and torture, to the cloaca beneath. At the bottom of the steps, the flashlight cast a grainy yellow bull’s-eye on a black panel that looked as though it had been pried off a coffin. There seemed to be no doorknob or handle. Experimentally, Mark extended his left arm and prodded the door with his fingers. As if on a great black hinge, the door instantly flew open.
He stepped through the opening and played the flashlight along what looked like a stockade fence. Then he turned around and shone the beam close to the opening in the wall, by reflex looking for a light switch. He found one immediately to the left of the concealed staircase, and before realizing that the power had been cut off years before, flipped it up.
Somewhere near the center of the basement, a single bulb responded, impossibly, and a yellow-gray haze brightened the air. A wave of freezing shock nearly knocked him down. Someone was using this house, someone who paid the electric bills. Mark felt like flattening himself against the wall. He could hear his labored breathing, and a tingle rippled across his face like cold lightning.
The bulb itself was invisible behind the “stockade fence,” in reality a wall of halved logs, shaggy with bark, that ran the entire length of the basement. At intervals, doors had been sawed into the logs. Mark went to the first of the doors. A minute later, he was vomiting up the breakfast he had not eaten.
19
From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 24 June 2003
“So what did he find?” I asked.
Jimbo looked profoundly uncomfortable. I had more or less kidnapped him from the comforts of his living room and driven him downtown to a restaurant that had been hot stuff back in the mid-sixties. The Fireside Lounge had good memories for me, and its steaks were as perfect as any I’d ever eaten in New York. Jimbo had never been there before, and he was unsure of how to respond to its old-fashioned midwestern luxe of dark lighting, red leather booths, and big wooden tables with chairs like thrones. It was a place where you could talk without being overheard, but my plan to get Jimbo loosened up had only half-worked. He was demolishing his steak, which he’d ordered well done and slathered in ketchup, but he still thought he was being disloyal to Mark by talking to me.
“No one’s going to be mad at Mark,” I told Jimbo. “All anybody wants to do is to find out where he is and get him back, if that’s possible.”
“I wish we could get him back,” Jimbo said.
“Don’t you think we can?”
Jimbo pushed a section of overdone meat into a puddle of ketchup.
“I don’t want to rush you,” I said.
He nodded, and the slice of steak disappeared into his gullet. Like most teenage boys, Jimbo could eat like a Roman emperor three or four times a day.
“He told you he went down to the basement on this hidden staircase.”
“The third hidden staircase. They were all over that place. And . . .” He stopped talking and his face turned red.
“And what?”
“Nothing.”
I let it go, temporarily. “What did he find in the basement, Jimbo?”
“It was in the little room, the first one. There were five or six of them, I guess.” Jimbo went inward for a moment, and his forehead wrinkled into creases. He really was a decent boy. “You know what people used to put their stuff in when they went on boats? Those big boxes like suitcases, only they’re not? With padlocks?”
“Steamer trunks,” I said.
“Yeah, a steamer trunk. There was one of those trunks shoved up against a wall. And there was a lock on it, only it was busted open. So he looked inside it. That thing, that trunk, it was full of hair.”
“Hair?”
“Women’s hair, all cut off and stuck together. Blond hair, brown hair, red hair.”
“No wonder he threw up.”
Jimbo acted as though I had not spoken. “Only, he couldn’t figure out what it was at first, because it was clumped together. It looked like some kind of big dead animal. So he reached in and took out a clump. It was stuck together with brown stuff that flaked off when he touched it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“That’s when he puked,” Jimbo said. “When he realized he was holding the hair cut off a bunch of women. It was all stuck together with blood.”
“Good God.”
“The police went there, didn’t they? Why did they leave that shit behind? They must have taken a ton of crap out of that house.”
“Good question,” I said, though I thought I knew the answer. In those days, there was no DNA evidence. Maybe they had bagged some of the hair and done what they could with it. The police had almost certainly broken the lock.
“You know who used to live there, don’t you?” I asked.
Jimbo nodded. “I do now.”
“From going around the neighborhood, knocking on doors.”
“That was my job. I took the outside, Mark had the inside.”
“And you wound up talking to Mr. Hillyard.”
“He’s spooky. He wouldn’t let me come into his house until he had that accident, and then I saw why. Boo-ya! That’s some shit in there, yo.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said, having had my own glimpse into Omar Hillyard’s living room. “Let’s go back to Mark.”
“Do I have to do this? You know what that Kalendar guy did, you don’t need me to tell you about it.”
I told him that I had known nothing about all that until shortly before Mark’s disappearance, when Tom Pasmore had filled me in on some of the details.
“They were related, him and Mark. Because his mother had the same name. I found out from Old Man Hillyard! When I told Mark, he couldn’t ask his dad about it since he had hissy fits every time the subject came up. He went on the Internet. And man, was there stuff about Kalendar. These people, they, like, worship serial killers.”
“What did he find on-line about Kalendar?”
“There was a ton of stuff. Then he found a genealogy site put up by a guy in St. Louis, and he clicked on it, and he saw a family tree.”
“He was on it, I suppose.”
“His whole family. That was how he found out his mom’s dad and Joseph Kalendar’s father were brothers. So the two of them, they were cousins. So to Joseph Kalendar, Mark was . . .”
“His first cousin, once removed. Let’s get back to Mark inside the house. I don’t suppose he stopped looking around after he threw up.”
I had already learned from Omar Hillyard that Mark had gone back to the Kalendar house on every one of the days before his disappearance.
“Yeah, he kept looking. He found a lot of weird stuff in the basement, like a big metal table and this, like, chute that came down from the first floor, and all these old bloodstains. But . . .”
Jimbo stabbed the top end of a French fry into the ketchup. His eyes met mine and slid away. About a third of the red-tipped French fry went into his mouth. He looked around, as if aimlessly, at the businessmen devouring steaks and
the suburban ladies working on salads at the big polished tables. Across the room at the long bar, an old man in a wrinkled seersucker suit and a guy in a polo shirt were trying not to ogle the barmaid, who had not been born at the time of my first visits to the Fireside Lounge.
“You keep cutting yourself off at the pass,” I said.
The tip of his tongue slipped between his teeth and curled against his upper lip. His eyes went out of focus an instant before they met mine. “Do what?”
“Stop yourself from saying something.”
He stared in the general direction of my chin.
“For Mark’s sake, you should tell me everything you know. That’s why we’re here.”
Jimbo nodded, not very persuasively.
“You said he found a chute and a metal table. The Kalendar websites must have told you that he dismembered some of his victims before putting their bodies into his furnace. He ordered the operating table from a medical supply company.”
“We saw, yeah.”
“Then you started to tell me something else, and you cut yourself off at the pass.”
I watched him considering his options. He flicked a glance at me, and the skin over his cheekbones tightened, and I knew he had cleared an internal hurdle.
“Mark went into all those little rooms. There was an operating room, and another room had three or four hampers that were all empty. He thought they were where he put the women’s clothes and the cops took it all away.”
“The police didn’t search the place nearly as well as Mark did.”
“No, they never found the corridors.” Jimbo chewed the lump of steak in his mouth, swallowed, and took a deep breath. We were about to get closer to the center of what he was hiding from me.
“So he went back upstairs—the normal way. He found the top of the chute in the secret passage between the living room and the dining room. Yo, Kalendar dragged them through the walls and dumped them right onto the table. The first floor was a lot like the other one. From up there, you could take one of the stairs and get everywhere in that house. Mark said before Kalendar killed the women, he tortured them by letting them know he was there, even though they couldn’t see him.” He made a sour face. “In the living room, the opening to the secret corridor was in the coat closet under the regular stairs.” Jimbo hesitated, and now I know exactly why. He had to think about going further.
“A closet,” I said. “Like the one in the bedroom.”
“Yeah. So he looked.”
He was going to tell me, but not until he absolutely had to. I pushed him to the next square. “What did he see—another wooden box, like the one upstairs?”
He blinked. I’d gotten it right.
“What was in it? A diary?” I was looking entirely in the wrong direction.
“No, not a diary,” Jimbo mumbled.
A thought came to me. “Could he open the box up?”
Jimbo nodded. He looked away from me, and his mouth momentarily twitched into something resembling a smile.
“Come on, Jimbo. Stop dancing around. What was in the box? A lot of bones? A skull?”
“Nothing like that.” He was smiling. I was so wide of the mark, it amused him. “When he opened the box, his paper bag was in it. With the photograph album and his hammer and his crowbar. And his dumb little Wonder Bread sandwich.”
On the other side of the dining room, the barmaid burst into silvery peals of laughter. We turned our heads to see the old man, shaking violently in either humor or agitation. At our distance, he looked like a trembling old skeleton in a suit.
Timothy Underhill, if put to the test, could rattle off, in order, the entire hierarchy of military rank from private to commander in chief. Almost any former soldier could do the same, but Tim’s novels had sometimes referred to his experiences in Vietnam, and he had taken pains to get things right. His books also made reference to various police departments here and there, and although every police department in the world acknowledged itself as a paramilitary organization, the meaning of individual rankings varied from place to place. No common standard prevailed.
To take the most immediate case, Tim thought, consider Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus, the grim, authoritative figure at the head of the table around which his audience of six had placed itself. As their little party had proceeded through the station, police officers uniformed and not had visibly deferred to him. Sergeant Pohlhaus was in his early forties, and he wore his handsome blue suit like a supple variety of armor. His biceps filled his sleeves, and his collar met his neck like a tape. Tim supposed that Sergeant Pohlhaus spent a good deal of time at the gym. There were no windows in the room, and the air stank of cigarette smoke. Sergeant Pohlhaus transformed the shabby chamber into a command center.
“Let’s go around the table and make sure we know each other’s names.”
He looked at the couple nearest him on the left side of the table. A well-padded, pink-faced guy sitting next to a nervous blonde jumped as though he had been jabbed with a pin.
“Uh, we’re Flip and Marty Auslander, Shane’s parents,” he said. “Nice to meet you all.”
“Bill Wilk. Trey’s dad.”
“Hello, everybody. I’m Jennie Dell, Dewey’s mother.”
Bill Wilk’s boiled-egg eyes glared out from the close-shaven, bowling-ball head set atop his squat body. Jennie Dell hitched her chair a few more inches away from his.
“I’m Philip Underhill, Mark’s father, and this is my brother, Tim. He’s from out of town.”
“For starters, I don’t think your brother belongs here,” said Wilk, “but that’s the sergeant’s call. This was supposed to be just family members, though.”
“I am a family member,” Tim said.
Bill Wilk scowled at him for a moment, then swung his head on his nonexistent neck to glare at the Auslanders. “One question: which one’s Flip and which one’s Marty?”
The pink face broke into an embarrassed smile. “I’m Flip. Marty’s my wife.”
“You two ought to switch names, in my opinion.”
Pohlhaus slapped the table with his palm. “Mr. Wilk, cease and desist!”
“I lost my son. What more can you do to me?”
The sergeant smiled at him. It was an extremely disconcerting smile, evoking bolts of lightning and screams of pain. “Do you want to find out?”
Wilk seemed to lose an inch or two in height. “Sorry, boss.”
“I want to remind you and everyone else at this table that we are here because of your sons.” The flat blue eyes moved to Tim. “Or nephew, in your case.” Pohlhaus let everyone inhabit a moment of silence that seemed to increase his own gravity. “And what I have to tell you represents our first significant break on this case. I wanted to share it with you before it is made public.”
Even Bill Wilk remained silent. Unconsciously, Jennie Dell took in a deep breath and held it.
“You will be pleased to learn that we have a new eyewitness, a Professor Ruth Bellinger, of Madison, Wisconsin. Professor Bellinger is in the Astronomy-Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin. Three weeks ago, Professor Bellinger was in town visiting her sister, and she happened to be seated on a bench near the fountain in Sherman Park when something caught her attention.”
“She saw him?” Marty Auslander leaned past her husband to peer at Pohlhaus. “She saw the guy?”
“Three weeks ago, the guy hadn’t even started yet,” said Bill Wilk.
“This will go faster if you let me proceed without further interruption,” said Pohlhaus. “Any questions you might have, ask them when I’m done talking.”
Marty Auslander wilted back into her chair.
Pohlhaus swept his gaze around the table, including everyone. “What caught Professor Bellinger’s attention was a conversation between a teenage boy and an adult male, probably in his late thirties. According to the professor, he was an unusually large man, probably six-four or six-five, and solidly built, running to something like two hundred and thirty, two hu
ndred and fifty pounds, black hair. For personal reasons, the professor is very sensitive to the presence of sexual predators. It seemed to her that something of that sort was going on here. The man seemed a little too ingratiating. He kept, in the professor’s words, ‘moving in on the boy,’ and she thought the boy was resisting without wanting to appear rude.
“Professor Bellinger was beginning to wonder if her civic duty—again, I am quoting her—obliged her to interfere when an odd thing happened. The adult male visibly scanned the immediate area. The professor thought he was ascertaining if his actions might be observed. She said that he looked ‘feral.’ Now comes the part we really like. In the same second, Professor Bellinger stood up and the man spotted her. When she took a step forward, the man said something to the boy and walked off at a rapid rate.”
“She saw his face,” Flip said.
“So did the boy,” said Marty.
“Three weeks ago?” bellowed Bill Wilk. “Why are we just hearing about this now?”
“Wait your turn, Mr. Wilk.” Pohlhaus froze him with a stare. “Professor Bellinger asked the boy if he knew the name of the man who had been talking to him. All he knew was that his first name was Ronnie, the boy said, and he had upgraded his sound system and wanted to get rid of his old equipment, along with a lot of CDs he didn’t play anymore. His first question to the boy had been about the kind of music he liked, and after he heard the answer, he said, ‘Great! My car’s right over there, and my place is only five minutes away.’ Ronnie seemed to want to give away all that stuff a little too much, the kid told her, and he’d been trying to figure out a way to get away from the guy when Ronnie spotted her getting off her bench.”
“Lucky boy,” said Flip Auslander.
“Have you talked to this boy?” his wife asked.
“I’d love to talk to him, but we don’t know where he lives, and he never told Professor Bellinger his name.”
“Why did it take so long for her to come forward?” Philip asked.
“Astronomer-physicists don’t pay much attention to what’s on the news,” Pohlhaus said. “And the Madison paper didn’t give much space to the Sherman Park story. Professor Bellinger became aware of our situation here two days ago, and she called us instantly. The next day, she drove here from Madison. Most of yesterday afternoon, she spent working with our sketch artist. I gather that astronomers are unusually observant, on the whole. The professor remembered many, many more details than the conventional witness.”