by John Saul
Josh explored each room as he came to it, then moved on, each step taking him farther from the stairs that were the only entrance to the cellar. And with each step, and every unlocked room he came to, his hopes of finding Amy Carlson faded a little further.
Still, he kept going, kept creeping through the shadowy maze.
It was well past midnight when Hildie Kramer left her suite of rooms on the ground floor of the Academy and mounted the stairs, pausing on both the second and third floor landings to be certain that none of the children were prowling around the house. Then she went on up to the fourth floor, and the small anteroom in front of the door to George Engersol’s apartment. Knowing it was empty, she used her own key to let herself in, then relocked the door behind her.
She switched a lamp on, confident the light would cause no concern to anyone, since Engersol was notorious for the late hours he kept. She glanced around the main room of the large suite that was perched on the roof of the mansion. In one corner was Engersol’s desk, where he worked on the projects that were far too private to risk leaving in his office in the classroom wing next to the mansion. In addition to the desk, the room contained a large, worn sofa, a pair of ancient Morris chairs that Engersol steadfastly refused to have reupholstered, and a small bar, from which the two of them occasionally enjoyed a drink at the end of the day. There were several small tables scattered around the room, each of them covered with books from Engersol’s extensive library, whose shelves were built into every available wall. The curtains over the large windows that pierced the two exterior walls of the room were open, as always, and Hildie didn’t bother to close them. Despite the airiness of the apartment during the daylight hours, it was nevertheless extraordinarily private at night, for unless someone was high on the hill behind the building, there were no other points from which its interior could be viewed.
Crossing to one of the bookcases that lined the east wall, Hildie pulled out a thick volume by B. E Skinner and groped for the tiny button that was hidden in a small depression in the wood. As she pressed the button, a section of the bookcase swung open, revealing the closed doors of an elevator.
An elevator whose shaft was hidden in the wall behind the ornate brass construction whose scaffolding and cage visitors to the mansion never failed to admire, and which proved endlessly fascinating to the children of the Academy.
Neither the mansion’s visitors nor the children who lived in it were aware of this second elevator, for it was invisible to all, and while casual visitors would never have cause even to hear it, the tale of Eustace Bairington’s restless spirit accounted for whatever sounds the children might hear at night. Indeed, when George Engersol had discovered the existence of the elevator—and the hidden suite of rooms far beneath the basement to which it provided the only access—he had understood at once that there was some truth to the ancient legend about Eustace Barrington’s vanished son; understood that he had discovered the place to which the boy had “vanished.” Ever since, he had turned not only the elevator, but the rooms below and the legend itself, to his own advantage.
Hildie pressed another button that would summon the car, and waited impatiently for nearly thirty seconds before the doors slid open. Stepping into the car, she pressed the lower of the two destination buttons on its wall. Slowly, the elevator descended, inching downward to a level five stories below the cupola, deep beneath the foundation on which the mansion had been built.
To the subterranean rooms to which Eustace Barring-ton’s idiot savant son had been banished at the age of five.
Banished to be cared for—or to be held prisoner? Not that it made any difference now, a century after it had happened, Hildie reflected, though the mere thought of the silent child living out his darkness-shrouded days entombed in the deep subceliar never failed to prickle the skin at the back of her neck. Well, she reminded herself, all that was important now was that no one outside the innermost circle knew it existed at all.
Nor would they—until the time was right.
Josh was just coming to what he thought might have been a coal bin when he heard the sound.
It was faint, but he was certain he recognized it.
The elevator.
Someone was in the elevator.
He froze.
Had someone found out he wasn’t in his room, and come looking for him? Panic threatened to overwhelm him, but then he realized that just because someone was looking for him, didn’t mean they would find him.
The noise grew louder, and he listened, finally moving toward it, certain that it would stop in a moment as the car came to the main floor.
Before him was a blank concrete wall, perhaps eight feet across. Moving to its end, he found a second wall.
The sound of the elevator seemed to come from behind the concrete. He pressed his ear to the wall, listening.
The sound was louder. He went on, coming to another corner, and then the fourth.
The shaft! He’d found the bottom of the elevator shaft!
He pressed his ear to the wall again, just as the grinding of the machinery ceased. The car had come to a halt. A second later he was sure he heard the door open.
It sounded close, though he couldn’t judge exactly where it came from, whether above or below.
What if whoever was there saw light coming from under the basement door?
The thought galvanized him, and he darted back through the basement, switching off the lights as he went, coming at last to the foot of the stairs. Darting up the steep flight as silently as he could, he flipped the switch next to the door, then froze, waiting in pitch-blackness, straining to hear any movement on the other side of the door.
His pounding heart and gasping breath seemed to echo through the basement, and he was certain that anyone in the little chamber beyond the door could hear him clearly.
Seconds slipped by, each of them seeming endless. Slowly his panting eased and his heart slowed to its normal pace.
From the other side of the door he heard nothing.
At last, terror gripping his soul, Josh groped in the blackness, found the doorknob, and twisted it.
Easing the door open no more than a crack, he peered out into the faint light that barely suffused the darkness of the butler’s pantry.
Everything seemed to be exactly as it had been a few minutes earlier, when he had stolen down the stairs from the second floor. He opened the door wider, slipped through it and pushed it silently closed behind him. His slippers making no sound on the wooden floor, he crept back through the dining room, pausing once more at the door to the foyer.
He watched, and listened.
Nothing.
At last, taking a deep breath, he darted from the shelter of the dining room door, dashed across the foyer and raced up the stairs to the second floor.
Before he’d even released his breath, he was back in his room, the door safely shut behind him. As he slowly released the air from his lungs, he went to the window and peered out into the faint moonlight.
Outside, everything looked peaceful.
But something told him it was not. Somewhere, he was certain, something was happening. Either inside the house or outside of it.
He would stay awake tonight, and watch.
Watch, and listen.
When the doors of the elevator opened, Hildie stepped out into a brightly lit hallway completely lined with glistening white tile. She turned right. Three paces down the corridor she came to a door and paused to peer in through the small window that broke its otherwise blank façade.
Inside, George Engersol was hard at work, wearing a surgical mask and gown, his hair covered by a pale green cloth cap.
Quickly, Hildie moved on to the next room, where she scrubbed her hands and arms, then donned the same kind of scrub suit that George Engersol was wearing. When she was ready, she backed through the swinging door that separated the anteroom from the operating theater.
George Engersol looked up, his sharp eyes glinting with annoyanc
e. “I told you to be here by eleven,” he said.
“I’m here now,” Hildie replied. “Is everything ready?”
“Of course it’s ready. But Tm still not sure it’s the right time. I’d hoped to wait at least another week, maybe two.”
“You don’t have another week or two, not with Amy Carlson. She was going to leave.”
“You could have talked her out of it,” Engersol said tersely.
“If I could have, I would have,” Hildie replied, remembering the conversation she’d had when she found Amy exactly where she’d looked for her, hidden within the circle of trees that made up the Gazebo on the school’s front lawn. She’d tried her best to reason with Amy, to calm her down, but it had done no good.
“I’m going home,” Amy had insisted. “And if you don’t let me call my mother, I’ll run away. I won’t stay, even if you lock me in my room!”
So Hildie had given in. “All right, Amy,” she’d said. “Let’s go to my office and call your parents. If you don’t want to stay, we certainly don’t want to keep you here.”
Amy, apparently mollified by Hildie’s unexpected agreement to her demands, had allowed herself to be led to Hildie’s office. “Why don’t I get you a glass of water?” Hildie had offered. “Then, by the time you drink it, you’ll feel better, and be calm enough to talk to your mother. All right?”
Amy, still sniffling, had nodded. Hildie had given her a box of Kleenex with which to blow her nose, then disappeared for a moment. When she returned, she had a glass of water. Amy promptly gulped it down.
It had taken no more than thirty seconds for the drug to take effect and drowsiness to overcome the little girl. Hildie had carried her quickly to the ornate brass elevator, which brought them up to Engersol’s apartment, then down again to the laboratory beneath the Academy’s basement.
Amy had been there ever since.
Now, still unconscious, she lay on the operating table.
Hildie glanced dispassionately down at the girl’s sleeping face and the tangle of red hair that framed her freckled cheeks. Then she shifted her attention to all the equipment that was arranged around the table, equipment that would keep Amy alive through the next four hours.
A respirator was waiting, and a blood pump.
Nearby was a dialysis machine, along with an array of special equipment that George Engersol himself had invented.
“Shall we begin?” Hildie asked.
Nodding, George Engersol picked up a scalpel. A moment later he’d made a slit that began behind Amy’s left ear and went around the back of her head, ending at her right ear.
Working quickly, he began peeling her scalp away from her skull.
He didn’t worry too much about how carefully he treated Amy’s face, for George Engersol knew that at the end of the operation, Amy’s face wouldn’t matter anymore.
Indeed, when they finally found her, if they ever did, he doubted whether anything would remain of Amy’s face at all.
Or any of the rest of her, for that matter.
Certainly, there wouldn’t be enough left for anyone to figure out what he’d done to her.
19
George Engersol, with Hildie still at his side, finished the operation at four o’clock in the morning. “It’s done,” he sighed, stepping back from the operating table, peeling the mask from his face and wiping the perspiration from his brow with the sleeve of his scrub gown. He glanced at his watch, surprised at how late it was; the operation had taken nearly an hour longer than he’d expected. His eyes shifted to Hildie, who was already dressing Amy Carlson’s lifeless body in the clothes she had worn yesterday afternoon. “What are you going to do with her?”
Hildie’s expression hardened. All night long she’d taken orders from Engersol, silently following his every instruction. But now, as with Adam Aldrich a week ago, it was her turn. “Don’t ask,” she told Engersol. “All you need to know is that it won’t look anything like what happened to Adam. Nor will there be many questions, since everyone here already knows how depressed Amy was. When they find her, she’ll be listed as a suicide.”
“Why don’t we just put her in the incinerator?” Engersol suggested. “It’s almost light. If anyone sees you—”
“Don’t be a fool, George,” Hildie replied. “If she doesn’t turn up at all, there are going to be police all over the campus, searching for her. And sooner or later someone’s going to think of the incinerator. If they find so much as a single tooth, they’ll keep after it until they find out how she got there. And no one, no matter how unhappy he might be, is going to crawl into an incinerator and wait to be burned up, note or no note!”
Engersol seemed about to protest, but changed his mind when he saw the cold look in Hildie’s eyes, a look that told him she knew exactly what she was doing and that she wouldn’t let anything go wrong.
So far, certainly, nothing had gone wrong.
Of the four “suicides” the two of them had arranged so far, not one had been questioned. After all, they had been careful, selecting only children who had already attempted suicide at least once.
With Amy, though, it had been different. Though they had arranged for dozens of people to witness her humiliation, there was little in her records to suggest that she might become suicidal. Yet that, too, could be fixed. All it would take would be a few minor adjustments to the results of her personality inventories, and the warning signs would be in her files for anyone to see.
Indeed, he could make those adjustments while Hildie was disposing of Amy’s body. “All right,” he agreed. “Let’s get started.” He helped Hildie wrap Amy’s now-dressed body in a sheet of plastic, then lifted it into his arms and carried it to the elevator. Coming to the fourth floor, he stepped out of the car into his apartment, followed closely by Hildie. From there she led the way, Engersol following.
They left his apartment, stepping out onto the landing at the top of the narrow stairs that led down to the third floor. Signaling Engersol to stay where he was, Hildie silently moved down the flight of steps until she came to the bottom, where she checked the long corridor that ran the length of the mansion. Satisfied, she signaled Engersol to follow her.
They repeated the procedure at the second floor, and in less than a minute had reached the main floor. Leaving the building by the back door, Hildie opened the trunk of her Acura, then stood aside as Engersol deposited Amy Carlson’s shrouded body into it.
“All right,” Hildie whispered just loudly enough for Engersol to hear her. “I can take care of the rest.”
Engersol glanced anxiously at the faintly silvering sky. “If anyone sees you—”
“They won’t,” Hildie assured him. “And if they do, it’s quite logical that I’ve been out looking for Amy all night, isn’t it? Believe me,” she added, reading the next question in Engersol’s expression, “I won’t do anything that will get the car searched.”
Before Engersol could make another objection, Hildie firmly closed the trunk, then got into the car.
A moment later she was gone, and George Engersol quickly returned to the house, moving up the four flights of stairs as silently as he had come down them a few minutes earlier.
In his room, Josh MacCallum stirred in his chair, twisted uncomfortably, then sank back into the restless sleep that had overcome him despite his intention to stay awake all night long.
He neither heard nor saw any of what had taken place as dawn began to break.
Hildie left the car’s headlights off until she passed through the Academy’s gates. Using a series of winding back roads, she headed north, twisting along the flanks of the hills until she was well out of town. Every few seconds she glanced in her rearview mirror, but no headlights followed her, nor were there any lights on in the few houses she passed. Not that it would have mattered if anyone had glanced out a window, for in this part of Barrington, the lots were large and the houses set so far back from the road that most of them could barely be seen. The car would be all but invisib
le, even from the houses closest to the road. Driving carefully within the speed limits, Hildie finally turned left down a road that eventually intersected the coast highway two miles north of the village. Across the highway a viewpoint had been constructed at the end of a huge finger of rock that jutted into the sea.
When she was sure there were no cars coming from either direction, Hildie drove the Acura across the highway and along the narrow U-shaped road that ran along a ledge that had been carved out of the promontory’s bedrock. At the very end of the point there was a small parking lot, totally hidden from the highway, no matter from which direction one might be coming.
She’d chosen the spot carefully, for the cliffs of the promontory plunged straight down to a rocky shoreline that was pounded by the surf twenty-four hours a day. By the time Amy was found—if she were found at all—her body would be battered into an unrecognizable pulp.
It took no more than a few seconds to take Amy’s body from the trunk of the Acura and drop it over the edge. Hildie watched as the sea swallowed it up, then carefully folded the sheet of plastic, returning it to the trunk of the car.
Then she added the final touch.
She set a folded sweater on the ground near the edge of the cliff, a red sweater with Amy Carlson’s name neatly printed in permanent ink on a label sewed into its collar.
A sweater she’d taken from Amy’s closet yesterday afternoon.
No more than three minutes after she arrived at the viewpoint, Hildie Kramer was ready to leave.
Steve Conners rose at dawn that morning and followed his unvarying routine of washing down a bowl of cereal with fresh-squeezed orange juice and a single cup of decaffeinated coffee. He was already dressed in a nearly worn-out Amherst T-shirt and a pair of green shorts that he’d had since high school and was beginning to think he’d have for the rest of his life. He left the tiny guest house he’d managed to rent for the school year—but would have to vacate as soon as the summer season began—and trotted down the driveway past his landlady’s still-dark house. A moment later he was in his old Honda, following Solano Street down to the coast highway, then turning right to head north, where he’d park the car at the viewpoint and begin his two-mile jog along the comparatively level stretch of road north of the jutting rock.