Kyle yelped, knowing all the time that he was being silly, that it was only Brady showing off, but frightened nonetheless. He fingered his silver six-shooters, wishing that they were real, that he was a real Texas Ranger and not afraid of anything.
Brady turned the light away and started moving through the kitchen.
“Hey Brade, how ’bout it? Huh? Let’s go.”
Brady swiveled and thrust the light beneath his chin again and spoke in a low whisper that almost made Kyle wet his pants. “Velcome to my castle. My name is Drrraaacuuula!”
It was the wrong line, given Brady’s choice of costume, but neither boy cared. Kyle was too frightened by the darkness and the eerie shadows and the coldness and the sense that he had better get out of there right now. Brady was just having too much fun to worry. He disappeared into the living room.
Kyle watched for a second, debating whether or not to back on out through the garage and head down Oleander toward the welcoming lights. But as the cabinets and fixtures in the kitchen disappeared and matching shadows began bobbing on the bit of the living room wall he could see through the walkway, he knew that he wouldn’t, couldn’t go back, not alone. Not without the light, puny as it was. There was that water heater, after all, that just might not really be a water heater, not any more. And the blood on the concrete that just might really be blood. He started after Brady.
By that time Brady was turning another corner into the hallway. The living room was empty, its blank walls and high, open-beam ceiling looming as vast as an aircraft hanger in the darkness.
Kyle half-ran across the room, noting vaguely the shuffling sound of his feet on unworn carpet. He caught up to Brady just as the other boy was shining the light into the first opening along the hall.
A bathroom. The toilet and sink glowed ghostly pale. The shadow line on the tub wavered and quivered, and it didn’t take much for Kyle to imagine the porcelain half full of something dark and thick and oily that wasn’t oil and that might hide…
He backed out, pulling Brady with him. The door opposite opened into a bedroom. It was empty. Kyle was relieved to see that the closet door was tightly shut. No shadows. No bogeymen hiding in there. A bit of light from the houses down the hill came through the dust-caked window, dimming the tiny penlight even more. The corner room was another bedroom. It was empty too.
Brady flashed the light along the final stretch of hallway. Three…no, four doors. Two closed, one open just enough for the difference in colors to suggest a slit of black caught between two larger surfaces. And one wide open.
“Brady,” Kyle said, not caring how much fear came through in his voice. “Come on. Let’s go!” He was whining, he knew it. He heard the childishly petulant tones he used (not always successfully) on Mom and Dad when they wanted one thing and he wanted another. And right now, he wanted another thing more than he had even thought possible. He wanted to leave.
But Brady didn’t, and Brady had the light even if it was Kyle’s light to begin with and the…the creep wouldn’t give it back.
“Just one more room,” Brady said over his shoulder, already partway down the hall. His mummy-strips trailed a foot or two behind him.
If he had thrown his weight a bit to the left or right and dragged his other foot in the lurching gait both boys knew instinctively that mummies had to use, Kyle would have broken away. He would have run for the front door, the bedroom window, anywhere to get out of this place.
But Brady didn’t. He hunched over slightly, his shoulders rounded enough for the light to reflect off the top of his bandages. But he walked straight and true toward the open door on the right at the end of the hall. He was nearly there when Kyle did finally break out of his panic and run to catch up. So they were standing nearly shoulder to shoulder when Brady thrust his arm out, penlight clenched in his fist, and arced the light through the room.
The two boys shrieked as one, a long, breathless eruption of high-pitched, squealing sound.
This time there was no question about what they saw.
The air was heavy and cold. Both of the boys caught the dank odor and, even without having smelled it before, at least not in such quantities, certainly not smeared like thick, clotting paint on the walls and doors and windows and carpets-even with their limited experience with it oozing out of nice, neat little cuts on shins and fingers or rough scrapes on elbows and knees, they recognized it.`
Blood.
Everywhere. Walls, floor, window, closet doors.
There was even a spattering of drops on the white ceiling. They looked brown, almost black, in the yellowish light.
Kyle’s mouth dropped open. Brady’s opened as well, closed, opened, closed. Finally he squeaked out a faint, “Holy shit.” He started to step into the room, but Kyle caught his arm in a vice-like grip that approximated a dead-man’s grasp.
“No,” he whispered hoarsely, as if the inside of his throat had been sliced away and then scabbed and scarred and distorted, and he would have to learn to talk all over again. “Don’t.”
“But we gotta…”
“We gotta get someone. This ain’t play. This is real,” Kyle said.
For once Brady didn’t argue, didn’t try to have the last word. He nodded. But instead of retreating down the hall, he took a long step…inside the room.
He turned the penlight to the windows. No light penetrated from the cars on the freeway only a mile or so away. No lights penetrated from the houses that dotted the valley floor. The window was painted over with crusted blood, all except for a corner of the farthest pane. There, the night lights glimmered faintly through a jagged break that might have been made by a small rock or a carelessly tossed elm branch…or a balled-up fist.
Brady dropped the beam to scan the floor beneath the break. A few shards of glass glinted back at him but nothing more. He could see no pieces large enough to fill in the hole in the pane. He moved one step closer to the glass, then turned enough to play the light on the walls. Great swathes of dark stuff spattered the smooth surfaces. They weren’t regular-no letters in blood or anything like that. Just spurts of dripping stuff.
He backed away, swallowing. Kyle wanted to call out something to remind Brady that they were going to get out of there, but before he found his voice, Brady took one step too many. His shoulder bumped the closet door. Something inside shifted with a hideous thump and the door swung open, knocking Brady to his knees just as something heavy and huge and matted and stinking struck him.
Kyle screamed as the thing erupted from the closet and enveloped his friend. Part of him wanted to run shrieking down the hall, but most of him found himself rushing forward, screaming anyway but at least trying to help Brady. Kyle slammed his fists at the unyielding shape. Underneath its monstrous bulk, he could hear Brady’s helpless whimpering-so unlike Brady, so chilling that this time nine-year-old Kyle did wet his brand-new black-and-silver cowboy suit. He felt the sudden warmness on his legs and smelled the stench of ammonia, but neither sensation penetrated his terror.
He wrenched his six-shooters from their holsters and smashed them butt-end first against the thing that was pinning Brady to the floor, again, again, again. His exposed wrist passed by the thing’s shadowed shoulders, and suddenly there was a sharpness and a bright pain and a liquid warmth that smelled coppery and thick.
Kyle screamed, his voice already hoarse but now re-animated by pain as well as fear. He dropped his six-shooters, not hearing as they thumped against the thing and fell softly to the crusted carpet. He didn’t hear Brady’s whimpering die away to hitching sobs, then to nothing more than painful breathing and unconsciousness. He only knew that if he didn’t get out now now now he would never get out at all.
7
The front door was latched but not bolted. That saved Kyle’s sanity, perhaps his life.
With fingers that felt as thick and cold as frozen hot dogs fresh from the freezer, he fumbled with the pin in the center of the round knob. Two, three, four times he tried to swivel it ju
st so. Finally, he succeeded.
The knob turned, the door swung open without so much as a creeeeak, and Kyle stumbled into the cold night. He grabbed his wrist with his good hand and stumbled down the sidewalk, blinded by tears and terror, faster and faster until he ran full-tilt into the front fender of the Lincoln. He bounced like a rag-doll, striking his shoulders and head on the rock-hard soil of the weed-choked front yard.
For a long while, he lay there, staring at the stars that whirled faster than stars had any right to. Finally, he remembered.
Brady.
He struggled to his feet, his good hand still clasped around his sliced wrist. His fingers felt stiff, as if the clotting blood had married flesh to flesh and his two arms were now one. He stumbled down Oleander, so light-headed with shock that the incline of the asphalt was enough to threaten to topple his precarious balance. He should have run for one of the porch lights on either side but he didn’t. He simply staggered down the center of the street, a small figure in silver and black that nearly disappeared into the night.
He might have run to the end of Oleander, he might have run until a careless driver crashed into him and killed him, he might have done a number of things. But what actually happened was that he slipped on a discarded candy wrapper, a bit of cellophane innocuous by itself but just enough to twist his right foot and throw him onto the asphalt. He yelped as he went down, crying out again when his cheek struck rough pavement.
Instantly-or years later, he didn’t know which-someone was pulling at him. He cringed away, trying to huddle into a corner of a darkness that wanted to consume him.
“Who is it?” one voice said.
“He’s hurt,” another said.
And then there was a babble of voices calling out and hands plucking at him and cold things pressing against his cheek and his wrist, and after a long while, red lights flashing, flashing through the darkness and a deep voice speaking to him.
“What happened?”
“His name is Kyle, Kyle Jantzen,” a shrill voice piped.
“What happened, Kyle?” This time the deep voice penetrated far enough to touch something quiescent and waiting in Kyle. He looked up, blinked.
“Brady,” Kyle finally said.
“He must mean Brady Wilton. He was out with the Wilton kid,” the shrill voice said. “I saw ‘em together not twenty minutes ago.”
“What about Brady?” The deep voice continued uninterrupted, as if the shrill voice had not spoken at all.
“Dead!” Kyle squealed without thinking. He felt his own life withdraw as he uttered the dreadful word.
“Where? Come on, Kyle, where?”
The boy looked around long enough to understand that he was lying on a thick pad, probably from someone’s chaise lounge. He was in the middle of a front yard perhaps three-fourths of the way up Oleander. He raised a shaking hand and pointed one finger at the dark outline at the top of the hill.
“There.”
8
The police found Brady only a few minutes later.
In spite of their fears, after what the Jantzen kid had cried out, he wasn’t dead. But then he wasn’t exactly alive either.
A short hospital stay would probably be enough for Kyle, already safely in the back of a County Hospital ambulance waiting for his father to arrive when the police entered the back bedroom at 1066 Oleander. It would take a longer stay-a much longer stay-to do the other boy any good.
He wasn’t hurt physically. Not much, anyway. A man’s mutilated body had toppled onto him and bruised his shoulder and his hip. But the carpet had cushioned most of the weight. If he was hurt much, it didn’t show. But when the police pulled the body away, he was staring straight ahead, as if he were examining on a microscopic level the shard of blood-encrusted glass still embedded six inches deep in the corpse’s throat, not three inches from the boy’s own throat but miraculously (it seemed then) not touching him.
He was still staring straight ahead half an hour later, an hour later. Days later.
Three weeks after Halloween night, the Wiltons put their house up for sale, and before Thanksgiving they had gone.
Kyle never saw Brady again.
9
It was easy enough for the authorities to identify the body. Ace McCall’s blood-soaked cowhide wallet was still buttoned securely inside his back pocket. Whatever had happened to him, it wasn’t a robbery. No one had disturbed the California driver’s license, the half dozen credit cards, or the five hundred dollars in cash tucked into the back flap.
The white Lincoln parked outside the house on Oleander carried additional identification in the form of a registration slip and a leather briefcase crammed with documents attesting to the identity of its owner.
It was far more difficult to determine precisely what had happened in the back bedroom of the house.
Officer Mark Riehmann’s first impression of the carnage in the back bedroom was simple: homicide. After calling for back-up on this one-a gnawing gut instinct honed by fifteen years with the County Sheriff Department told him that this case was going to be a bad one-he made sure that the Jantzen kid was going to be all right, then approached the house at the top of the hill.
He moved tentatively, slowly, alert to the sounds of sirens racing in response to his call. He was not quite to the sidewalk in front of the house when the first back-up car arrived. In spite of a sense of urgency amplified by the knowledge that there was still a kid in the house, perhaps trapped there with a homicidal maniac, he hesitated long enough to be joined by two other figures, shadowy in the darkness. He whispered instructions, then the three of them approached the house.
The front door gaped open. Other than that, there was no sign of life. Still, it took almost five minutes for them to penetrate the house and turn their flashlights onto the scene in the back bedroom.
McCall’s body lay sprawled across the floor, the feet still in the closet, the head angled toward the window opposite. The body was awash with blood, most of it crusted and brown, some still vividly scarlet and dripping. Beneath him lay another body. For an instant all three officers thought the boy must be dead, too. Then they realized that what they assumed to be a deathly pallor was actually smudged cosmetics and that the boy’s open eyes were not rigid with death but deep and dark and secret.
They pulled the body off the boy, and one of the other officers knelt to carry him outside. The boy shrieked once-long and loud and piercingly shrill. Then he lapsed into a silence so absolute that Riehmann wondered for a second time if he weren’t dead.
“Get him out of here,” Riehmann instructed softly. “Quick.” As soon as the other officer disappeared into the hall, Riehmann knelt beside McCall’s corpse. The face was distorted with pain and fury. Even after fifteen years witnessing death and destruction in all of their guises, Riehmann knew that this one was different. He trembled when his light played across the tight, drawn features
And the blood.
There couldn’t be a pint left in the guy, Riehmann thought, not with what’s spattered all over the walls and the carpet and the ceiling, not with the fact that the front of McCall’s clothing was stiff with it. Not given the fact that his chest and belly and groin and thighs were slashed and that a wickedly sharp, massive shiver of glass was still embedded in his throat.
Homicide, Riehmann decided almost immediately. And he was rarely wrong. But this time, as the evidence unraveled, he seemed to be. True, it looked impossible for it to have been suicide, for McCall to have inflicted some of the gaping wounds-at least impossible for any man in a healthy state of mind.
But the crumpled newspapers and the documents locked in the briefcase ultimately suggested that McCall might not have been quite sane. He could easily have been on the edge of desperation, seeing the company he had built on the verge of total collapse with himself the sole responsible agent for what eventually amounted to millions of dollars in alleged fraud. Beyond that, much of the money involved was linked to individuals and organizations w
hose financial dealings were at best questionable. It looked increasingly as if Ace McCall had swum too far beyond his depth, discovered that he was doomed, and instead of struggling to get back, simply took a deep breath and sank beneath the waves. Figuratively speaking, of course.
In addition, an examination of the room-especially the blood-splattered door jamb, the razor-sharp shards of glass, the small red and silver flashlight found beneath the Wilton boy-revealed three sets of finger prints…and only three. Brady Wilton’s. Kyle Jantzen’s. And Ace McCall’s.
Of course it was possible that the killer or killers might have protected themselves by wearing gloves. But as the days became weeks and the weeks turned into months, the County investigation team could not discover one shred of evidence that anyone else had been in that room for at least a month before McCall died.
Riehmann kept up with the case as much as he could. He read reports and followed up leads. But everything led to the same conclusion. There was no evidence that McCall had died at the hands of another person. And, given the at best ambiguous nature of his wounds, it was just possible that he did kill himself.
Just barely possible.
10
The house was barricaded until well past Thanksgiving, its front yard fenced off by a strip of yellow warning tape. The Lincoln remained on the front driveway. It grew dustier and dustier; an early November rainstorm transformed the grainy dust to grey-black muck, and by the time it was hauled away behind a Bingham Boulevard Shell towing truck, it no longer gleamed white. No one had bothered writing “wash me” on any of the windows so thickly caked with grime that the interior had long since become entirely obscured. Perhaps no one had dared. A large oil spot on the driveway marked where the car had been sitting.
By mid-December, the yellow tape had disappeared as well. The week after Christmas, a work crew appeared early one morning and silently disappeared into the bowels of the house. Ladders and tarps and rolls of carpeting and cans of paint and panes of glass disappeared into the house as well.
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