In the Dark of the Night

by John Saul

  The three boys gazed down into the water in utter silence for almost a full minute before Eric finally spoke, his voice hollow, quavering.

  “We have to go back in there,” he said, and neither Kent nor Tad needed to be told what he meant. “We have to take all that stuff apart again.”

  “No way,” Tad said. “Something’s wrong in there, and I don’t want anything else to do with it.”

  Eric shook his head. “We have to. Every time we put something in there back together, something happens. And if we don’t take it all apart again, it’s going to keep happening.”

  “You know he’s right,” Kent said softly as he saw Tad’s resolve begin to weaken. “We need to go in there one last time.”

  “One last time?” Tad echoed. “And then we’re done?”

  “Then we’re done,” Eric agreed.

  As Kent nodded, all three boys got back to their feet.

  UNWILLING EVEN TO touch the lamp that now held the shade that Ed Gein had long ago made from the skin of one of his victims, Eric lit the lantern they’d brought in after they first began exploring the tiny chamber and its macabre contents. As the mantle flared and the lantern light brightened, the fragmentary voices that had begun whispering to them even before they’d entered the outer storeroom now blended into a gentle chorus, and Eric felt his resolve weaken.

  A glow of softer light imbued the room, and he turned to see that Ed Gein’s grisly lamp was once more glowing, its amber light seeping into every corner of the chamber, casting no shadows at all.

  On the table lay the old and rusty hacksaw, and the medical bag with its scalpels hidden inside.

  Yet instead of reaching for the bag to return its contents to the separate bundle in which he’d originally found them, Eric took an object from the deep pocket of his cargo pants.

  A heavy object.

  A heavy, rusty object.

  Hefting the axe head in his hand for a moment, he gazed at it almost as if he wasn’t certain what it was.

  Then he set it on the table.

  Then Kent, instead of taking the hacksaw apart to return the blade to the drawer in which he’d originally found it, was opening boxes, as if searching for something.

  Tad opened the ledger on the table and slowly turned the pages as if reviewing everything they’d read before. When he was near the end of the book, he stopped.

  At that same moment, Kent stopped roaming the room. He was facing an ancient wooden filing cabinet.

  As Tad gazed down at the entry in the ledger, Kent stooped down and closed his fingers on the handle of the filing cabinet’s bottom drawer.

  Eric heard the chorus of voices grow louder, taking on a note of excitement.

  He moved closer to the table and looked over Tad’s shoulder so that he, too, could read the entry Tad had found.

  5/11 acq L B axe (#114) frm Prince Bros Fall River.

  $24,550. Excellent cond.

  Kent slowly drew the file drawer open and reached inside, his fingers closing on an elongated object wrapped in newspaper. He lifted it out of the drawer, stood up, and moved to the table. Setting it down, he carefully—almost reverently—began stripping away the yellowed wrapping.

  A moment later a wooden axe handle lay before them on the old Formica-topped table.

  It glowed in the amber light, almost sparkled, as if surrounded by a force they could see.

  And a single voice—a woman’s voice—seemed to emerge from the chorus.

  The voice sounded happy.

  Happy, and excited.

  For a long time the boys gazed down at the axe head and its handle, still separated by almost a foot. The light from the lamp shimmered, and the air itself felt charged with a strange energy.

  “It’s done,” Eric finally breathed, his voice echoing softly.

  As Tad and Kent nodded, Eric reached out to the ledger, but before he touched its pages, the other two boys’ hands had joined his own and together they turned to the last page.

  Upon it was written Hector Darby’s last words:

  I pray that some day someone stronger will finish what I have begun.

  “Let’s go,” Eric breathed, backing away a step, but leaving the ledger open on the table. “We’re finished.”

  As Eric extinguished the lantern, the lamp went out as if of its own volition.

  The three boys moved through the small door.

  Eric and Kent drew the plywood back over the opening.

  And in the darkness of the once more hidden room, the axe head and its handle began to vibrate as if they felt their proximity.

  The table trembled.

  The scalpels rattled softly in their bag.

  The lamp flickered on once more.

  The voices rose in chorus.

  And slowly, forces within the tiny chamber began their work.

  As if guided by an unseen hand, the metal axe head moved toward the wooden handle.

  They aligned themselves and moved still closer.

  They touched, and the handle slid into the socket on the head.

  The axe lay complete.

  The trembling ceased.

  The light extinguished.

  All, at last, was ready.

  LOGAN HAD FELT danger in the air even before he opened his eyes that morning.

  The dog was restless in his bed, moving stiffly, shifting position, groaning and sighing.

  The crow hopped endlessly around the perimeter of the cabin as if searching for something, but whatever it sought remained eternally elusive.

  The animals, Logan knew, shared the air of imminent disaster that hung over the cabin, making it difficult even to breathe, let alone to think.

  All morning that sense of danger—of something unseen creeping closer and closer—grew and expanded and gained strength, until at last Logan could remain in the cabin no more.

  He needed to get outside, to escape the confines of the tiny structure, to elude the oppressive weight before it crushed him. As he pulled the door open, the old dog struggled to its feet, panting heavily, and followed him out the door and down the well-worn path toward the lake.

  Logan paused by the dead tree that had stood by the path for as long as he’d been here. Now and then over the years he had thought about cutting it down for firewood, but always changed his mind before even nicking its silvered limbs with the blade of an axe or saw.

  Best to respect the dead.

  He knocked three times on the ancient tree’s trunk.

  He felt a little safer then, as he always did after tapping the tree. Still, even in the morning air he felt the menace lurking just out of sight and out of hearing.

  He moved more quickly down the path, then cut away from it entirely, thrashing through the brush until he found what he was looking for.

  His breath gave out as he found his goal, and he sank low to the ground for a moment to wait for his panting to ease and for the dog to catch up.

  And as he waited, he gazed up at the tree by which he crouched. It was the tree at whose base he’d trapped his first raccoon, so long ago he’d lost track of the years that had passed. But he’d marked the tree by leaving a souvenir after he’d skinned and dressed the ’coon. He’d placed the animal’s skull in the main crotch of the tree, certain that the spirit of the raccoon would watch over him if he didn’t bury it in the cold earth, and that it would warn him of trouble before it found him.

  As the years had gone by, the skull had weathered and whitened. It had been his totem, and somehow every other creature of the forest understood that.

  Until this morning.

  This morning, the skull was gone.

  Maybe he was wrong!

  Maybe it was still there!

  Rising once more to his full height, Logan reached up to the place where the skull had rested, but his fingers touched only leaves and dirt.

  He scrabbled brush away from the base of the tree, but knew even as he searched that it was useless.

  The skull was gone.
r />   It had deserted him. It had seen the trouble coming and left.

  “Bad,” he whispered, laying his hand on the old dog’s head as it nuzzled against him. “Real bad…” His voice trailed off as he tried to think.

  Which way to go?

  What to do?

  And then he heard it.

  The sound of men coming for him.

  It was a long way off yet, coming from somewhere on the far side of the lake, but there was no mistaking it.

  A boat.

  A boat with men.

  Men coming for him.

  “He told me,” Logan whispered to the ancient dog. “Dr. Darby said the men would come. He said they’d come, but they wouldn’t understand, and they’d send me away again.”

  Now Logan peered up at the scraps of blue sky that glinted between the treetops. “What do I do?” he whispered.

  But there was no reply.

  At his feet, the dog stirred, a low growl rising in its throat, and it swung its head around so its sightless eyes fixed on the boat that was now clearly visible to Logan and drawing steadily closer.

  Abandoning the tree that no longer held his totem, Logan made his way back to the path. From behind, the drone of the approaching boat’s outboard drove him onward, and by the time he came to the cabin, he’d far outpaced the dog.

  He threw open the door and began to reach for the things he’d need.

  A blanket.

  Three stale rolls he’d found in the Dumpster behind the bakery. He broke up two of them and threw them to the floor for the crow and the dog, and the mice that he knew, by the tiny droppings they left, crept in when he was gone.

  By the time he was ready to go, the dog had made it up the path, quivering and panting at the door.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered as it sniffed the air. “It’s all gonna be all right.” But even as he whispered reassuring words to the dog, he knew they weren’t true.

  They were coming to take him, just like the time he killed that girl.

  This time would be bad. Very bad.

  And this time there would be no nice hospital, no Dr. Darby.

  Leaving the dog behind and shutting the cabin door so it couldn’t follow, Logan started up the hill toward a place he’d found a long time ago.

  A cave that was small—much smaller than his cabin—but that was so well hidden he knew no one else would ever find it.

  It was his safe spot.

  There was no path to the cave. He’d seen to that, always approaching it from a different direction, always leaving it by a different route from the one along which he’d come.

  No path meant nothing to follow.

  But Logan knew the way. Knew it in his heart and in his head and in his spirit.

  He hurried now, moving quickly, but leaving no track, no sign that he’d been there at all.

  When he reached the rocky outcropping, he carefully pushed the bushes just far enough away from the opening to the cave to let him wriggle in.

  He reached back and replaced the branches so perfectly that they appeared not to have been moved at all.

  At last he settled himself on the floor of the cave, to wait.

  Everything was going to be different now.

  He closed his eyes.

  Soon he would know what to do and how long to wait.

  Dr. Darby—or maybe even Jesus himself—would tell him.

  And when the time came and he knew exactly what he was supposed to do, he would leave the cave.

  Leave the last place of safety.

  And he would do what he was supposed to do.

  WHILE DEREK ANDERS picked up the painter from the floor of the old aluminum scow that served as Phantom Lake’s sole police boat, Rusty Ruston shifted the outboard into neutral. Then he killed the engine and tipped it up so neither the water intake nor the propeller would foul in the mud and reeds that choked this side of the lake. Inertia and the small craft’s own wake carried its nose gently into the weedy lakeshore brush, just far enough for Anders to catch a sturdy limb to pull it fully ashore.

  “We sure hit the right spot,” Anders said, pointing to a boat that was all but invisible in the tangle some thirty feet to their left. As Anders made the painter fast to a tree, Ruston gazed silently at the feature of the boat that was most visible—the weird wooden cross that for years had identified Logan to anybody who had ever seen him skulking about the lake.

  “Well, at least we know he’s here,” Ruston said, once more checking the shotgun he hoped he wasn’t going to have to use. In his entire career, Ruston had yet to shoot anyone, and right now he was praying that this wasn’t going to be the day that record was broken.

  With the boat securely tied and their shotguns cradled in their arms, Ruston and Anders began walking warily up the worn path toward the cabin in which Logan had been squatting for so many years that everyone, even Ruston, thought of it as belonging to the old recluse. “Keep an eye out for traps,” Ruston said. “If he spotted us coming, no telling what he might do.” As he made his way slowly up the hill, he ruefully remembered the fantasies he’d entertained now and then over the years, when instead of being a nearly unnecessary sheriff in a backwater town, he was the kind of fearless crime fighter upon which TV series were based. Now, faced with the reality of what might lie at the end of this walk, he decided he’d never entertain such a fantasy again.

  His gut just didn’t like it.

  Still, he plodded on, and was just beginning to find the slope a little wearing when he caught sight of the roofline of Logan’s shack. He stopped short, his hands tightening on the shotgun, and knew Anders had stopped, too, could almost feel the former high school football star’s bulk looming close behind him.

  Suddenly, everything seemed quiet.

  Too quiet?

  Even the birds seemed to have fallen silent, as if they knew something was about to happen.

  With Anders staying on his heels, Ruston moved slowly forward. Brush had been cut and trampled in front of Logan’s shack, and a few trees had been felled, probably for firewood. Some of their branches still lay strewn about, like the bare bones of an animal after the wolves have torn it to pieces and devoured every scrap of edible substance.

  He knew that crossing that field of dry branches would be a loud announcement of their approach and would let Logan slip unseen from the back of the cabin.

  Without being told, Derek split off from Ruston, going quietly to the right, keeping behind trees. Ruston waited for him to get into a position from which he could watch the two sides of the cabin that he himself could not, then shouted loudly. “Logan!” he called, cupping his left hand to his mouth while he still gripped the shotgun with his right. “It’s Sheriff Ruston! If you’re there, come out of the cabin with your hands up.” He dropped his left hand to the stock of the shotgun and waited.

  Seconds ticked by.

  Nothing happened. No sound, no flicker of movement from the shadowy interior.

  Nothing.

  Though he was already fairly sure Logan wasn’t there, Ruston called out once more. “Logan! Show yourself within ten seconds or we’re going to fire!” Then, as Anders raised his gun to his shoulder and took aim at the tiny shack, Ruston gestured frantically for him to hold his fire. Knowing Logan as long as he had, he was all but certain that if the man were in the cabin, the threat alone would be enough to flush him out.

  Once again the seconds ticked by.

  Once again nothing happened.

  “Let’s go take a look,” he said loud enough for Anders to hear, nearly certain that wherever Logan was, he wasn’t inside the cabin. “You go around the back and I’ll go in the front. And for Christ’s sake, make sure you don’t shoot me, okay?”

  Obviously disappointed that he wasn’t being allowed to open fire on the house, Anders reluctantly lowered his shotgun and disappeared around the far corner of the house as Ruston crossed the twigs and branches to the front door, which was neither latched nor even quite closed. Stand
ing to one side, he used the butt of the gun to push the door wider.

  When still nothing happened, he stepped in front of the door and pointed his shotgun at the dim interior.

  A dog growled from the corner.

  “Easy boy,” Ruston said, but the dog took a snarling step toward him.

  “I’ll take care of the dog,” Anders said, coming through the back door at the opposite end of the cabin.

  Ruston looked around. Clearly, Logan was not there. The shack was no larger than Ruston’s bedroom, and looked like it was mostly a storage place for whatever the hermit had scavenged over the years. The floor was littered with some kind of crumbs, and a crippled crow that was pecking at them only glared up at Ruston before going back to devouring the crumbs. A few ragged items of clothing hung on nails haphazardly hammered into the cabin’s rough walls.

  Then the dog’s snarling grew louder, and Ruston turned to look just as it launched itself at Derek Anders, who reflexively pulled the trigger of his shotgun in response to the attack.

  The blast almost knocked down the flimsy walls of the shack, and Ruston’s ears rang with the concussion.

  The crow screamed, leaping into the air as its one good wing flapped wildly.

  Ruston grabbed a filthy shirt from a hook, threw it over the crow, picked it up, and took it outside, where it immediately scuttled away into the brush at the edge of the small clearing.

  Back inside the cabin, Ruston found Anders looking intently at something he was clutching in his right hand, the shotgun now slung over his shoulder. “Look at this,” the deputy said, and a moment later Ruston found himself gazing at a yellowed newspaper clipping. “It was nailed to the wall over there,” Anders went on, pointing at a nasty tangle of rags on a torn mattress that must have served as Logan’s bed.

  SUSPECT ARRESTED IN HARTWELL STRANGLING

  MADISON—Riley Logan, a custodian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, was arrested yesterday in connection with the strangling death of sophomore Melissa Hartwell. Hartwell’s body was found in the Administration Building’s custodial supplies closet last Thursday. Logan has been hospitalized several times in the recent past for psychiatric reasons. He is being held without bail.