The Trapdoor

by Andrew Peterson

  Outside, there was lightning. No thunder, just jagged daggers of white light above the trees. I glanced at the window when I saw a flash. For an instant I could make out the slope of grass leading away from the room to the edge of the forest below. The grass and the forest leaves, and the tree branches: all of them shone silver before the night closed on them again.

  I kept typing. The page rolled upward. I could hear wood scraping in the bathroom. She was nearly done. But before she finished, there came a tapping at the window. A light tapping, as of someone hitting his fingernail against the glass.

  Startled, I turned toward the window. The lightning forked through the sky again. For the briefest second the slope went silver with light. And in that second I saw—or thought I saw—a figure standing just beyond the edge of the woods. It seemed to me to be a woman, cowled in black. But the lightning was gone so fast, I could only believe I had imagined her, created her from a shadow thrown by the trees.

  I went on typing. I had to hurry. I wanted to be finished before she was done in the bathroom. It was quiet in there. I knew I didn’t have much time.

  The tapping came at the window again.

  I turned. The lightning flashed. The cowled woman now stood nearer, halfway between the woods and the window. For a single instant I had a glimpse of her. Of her pale face.

  The dark returned, and she was gone. I cursed and got out of my chair. I went to the window. I was confused, and a little afraid. She couldn’t have come that far up from the woods in the time between the flashes. It seemed impossible. There was one loud scrape of wood in the bathroom. I ignored it and went to the window.

  I pressed my nose to the pane. I could see the vague outline of the grass, the vague shadows of the trees. I could not find her figure among them.

  The lightning flashed and she was standing directly before me, her pale face pressed to the opposite side of the glass, her dead eyes staring into mine, her sad smile almost kissing me.

  I cried out, and fell back from her. It was my daughter. It was Olivia. Slowly, she raised her hand to me. She pointed to the bathroom door.

  I turned. I rushed to the door. It was too late. I had known all along it would be too late. I grabbed the knob and pulled it. It wouldn’t budge. I pounded on the door. I screamed: “Olivia!”

  She laughed. I could hear her, in the bathroom, giggling brightly. I could hear her footsteps. She was climbing up the scaffold. She was up on it, fitting the rope around her neck. Tightening it. Placing herself within the lines of the trapdoor.

  I shrieked her name again. And I sat up on the bed, shrieking it. I woke up, panting. My face ran with sweat.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. I bowed my head into my hands and moaned softly. I waited while my heartbeat eased.

  For a few moments the broken strands of the dream hung in my mind like cobwebs. I remembered I’d lay down to rest for a while. But I was not sure when reality had eased into nightmare, or when nightmare had become all there was.

  I stood up, rubbing my eyes. I was still dressed. My clothes felt rank. I glanced at my watch. It was half past midnight. I looked around me.

  The typewriter was on the desk before the mirror. The scotch glass, the ice all melted into the pale amber, stood to its left. The ashtray to its right was filled with dead butts. The room stank of stale smoke.

  The Scofield piece sat neatly on top of the typewriter. It was done. I began to move toward it. But I paused on the way, stood in the center of the room transfixed and glanced toward the picture window.

  There was no lightning. Only mist. I’d been told there was always mist around here at night. Something to do with the large number of lakes. Tonight there was a gibbous moon, and it made the mist electric, filled it with light. I could see it snaking around the trunks of the trees at the edge of the forest. I could see it breathing—rising and falling slowly—where it lay on the slope.

  I turned away and went to the typewriter. I stood and reread my lead. It looked okay. I raised my eyes and saw myself in the mirror. I didn’t look so good.

  I’d slept in my best white shirt. It was a sorry sight. It was soaked with sweat at the chest, the armpits, and the collar. Sweat was still finding trails down the furrows of my face. It beaded on my forehead below the high hairline and in the dark circles beneath my eyes. My eyes looked very weary. And afraid.

  When I couldn’t look anymore, I went into the bathroom. I flicked on the light and went to the sink. I ran the water until it got cold. I bent to it. I caught it in my cupped hands. I splashed it over my face.

  It felt good. I stood there a moment, enjoying the cold. I took a towel from the rack and dried myself. Then I stopped and stood still. I closed my eyes tight. My heart beat fast again.

  Someone was tapping at the window.

  8 I stood there another moment. The tapping continued. I stood there, as if I were waiting to wake up again. It did no good. Softly but steadily the sound kept on. A harsh, staccato rhythm: tap-tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. I just stood there, the towel in my hand. I told myself that it was not my daughter, tapping like that. Hovering in the cold, at the window. Asking me to let her in. I was not asleep anymore. My daughter was dead. And they don’t come back, the dead. No matter what old score needs to be settled.

  But the tapping went on. I drew a breath. I tossed the towel over the edge of the sink. I came out of the bathroom.

  As I crossed the threshold, the tapping ceased. It ceased abruptly. The sudden silence startled me. Slowly, I turned to face the window. The night was out there. The white mist wafted over the surface of the night. Tendrils of the mist reached out to me, caressed the glass. Nothing else. No one.

  I went to the desk. My pack of Winstons lay next to the ashtray. I picked it up, jerked a butt into my hand. My hand was shaking. I put the cigarette between my lips and lit a match.

  I saw the match flare twice. Once before me as I raised it to the tip of the ’rette, and again—out of the corner of my eye—reflected on the dark pane of the picture window. I waved the match out. Another light flashed in the window. Again I saw it out of the corner of my eye.

  I looked up quickly. For a split second the light stayed on. It was a flashlight, I guess. It made a little globe of illumination in the mist, about fifteen yards down the slope. There was a figure floating within that globe.

  The light was gone. Like the dream lightning, it vanished in an instant. But I’d seen the figure, transparent, shifting, like the mist itself. It had been a person dressed in white—white pants, white shirt. White face. I could not tell whether it was a man or a woman.

  As I stared, the light flashed again. The figure was still there, still floating ghostly in the mist. I squinted to get a better view. It was no good. The light went out. The figure was gone.

  “All right,” I said. My heart was pounding, high up in my throat it seemed. I plucked the cigarette from my mouth, stubbed it out roughly in the ashtray. I went to the front door.

  I was on the first floor of the hotel. My room jutted out of the body of the place, forming a little corner of its own. The door opened directly onto the outside, onto a slate path under the balcony of the second story. In one direction the path led to the hotel office. In the other it curled around the corner, past other rooms and along the rim of the slope under my picture window.

  I stepped out into a clean chill. The air was damp and thick with the mist, rich with the smell of the dead autumn leaves.

  I moved toward the edge of the wooden wall. I kept close to the wall as I went, kept in the shadow of the balcony above me. After I turned the corner, I stood very still. It was quiet. The hotel was dark. The night seemed lifeless and empty. The insect voice of the woods was dim. The mist floated before me, full of shadows. The shadows grew and shrank and shifted on the bed of moonlight.

  I heard it then. A footstep on the fallen leaves on the slope below. I heard another and another. They were moving away from me. Down the slope. Toward the woods.

  I fo
llowed.

  I stepped into the open, out of the protection of the balcony. I stepped into the mist and the quiet. I moved gingerly down the slope. It wasn’t sharp, but the leaves beneath my feet felt slick and slippery.

  I was halfway between the hotel and the woods when I stopped. I couldn’t hear the footsteps anymore. I couldn’t see the hotel behind me. I couldn’t see the forest ahead. There was nothing—nothing but the mist and the low, secret hum of the insects around me.

  The light flashed again. The figure was there, standing at the edge of the forest now, just within the first row of trees, just where my daughter had been when I first saw her in the dream. The figure had paused and was gazing back at me. It was a steady gaze. I saw the light reflected in its fathomless black eyes.

  I followed. The light went out. Again I heard footsteps, moving away. I quickened my pace. I saw the vapor of my breath spiral out ahead of me, mingling with the mist. I felt my lungs working hard in my chest. I felt the cigarettes. All the cigarettes. I was nearly running.

  In another moment I was surrounded by the forest. The trees rushed past me: obscure, half-buried shapes. The angle of the slope seemed to increase under me. The leaves grew slicker. Suddenly my feet skidded. My arms pinwheeled. I reached out, touched nothing. I nearly went down. Finally, my knees bent, I found my footing, regained my balance. I stood still, breathing hard.

  And I heard a footstep just beside me.

  I swung to face it. There was the figure’s silhouette—not ten feet away.

  Neither of us moved. “What do you want?” I wondered if I could be heard over the sound of my heart.

  A light, high voice answered me. I thought it was a woman’s—then a man’s—then a boy’s.

  It said: “I want to show you, Mr. Wells … I want to show you that death is in these woods.”

  And with that the figure faded back into the mist. Just drifted away from me, losing its substance as it went. I rushed after it, reaching for it, but took hold of nothing. The thing was gone.

  Now I moved through the darkness slowly, baffled. I’d heard no footsteps, I’d seen no motion but that slight gesture of fading back. I’d been within steps of the creature, and it had slipped away from me. I reached out before me in disbelief. I reached out, moving my hand back and forth in the shifting tendrils.

  I reached out … and my fingers brushed against something. Something that was dead.

  I knew it was dead right away. I felt the bloated tautness of it. My hand sprung back. I heard a creaking noise. A twisted, grotesque body swung toward me out of the mist. It was hung from a rope. It was dangling from the branch of a tree. It swung slowly away from me until it vanished in the fog. It twisted on the rope as it swung. It swung back toward me until I could see it again.

  It was Sosh. It was the high school dog.

  9 Which is how I met Tammany Bird.

  He was an impressive figure. Somewhere between sixty and immortal; the size of a building, the shape of an egg. He was chief of the Grant County police department, and he looked like he’d been a cop since the world began. He had a long, sad face with a putty nose and eyes the color of a pane of glass. He was bald but for a fringe of yellowish hair. His hands, his arms, his fingers, his legs: everything about him was oversized; huge. Everything but his voice, which was a soft, easy drawl, nearly a whisper.

  Chief Bird arrived about twenty minutes after I called the cops. It was about 1:35 in the morning then. He pulled up in the hotel cul-de-sac in a red-and-white cruiser, its flashers whirling. He unfolded himself from the backseat like a circus trick. He brushed the wrinkles off the front of his dark suit. Two uniformed officers got out of the car’s front. They waited for Tammany Bird to lead them. He looked around leisurely once—a long, slow sweep of the eyes that took in everything. Then he led them over the slate walkway, to the corner room, to me.

  I was waiting for him in the doorway.

  “You John Wells?” he drawled.

  “That’s me.”

  “You’re the reporter up from the city.”

  I was surprised he knew me. I tried not to show it. “Yeah,” was all I said.

  He nodded his big head. He gave me one of his slow studies. I guessed he had about as much use for a reporter up from the city as he did for, say, a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. That was fine with me. I was cold. I was tired. I was shaken. Nothing puts me in a bum mood like being dragged out of my room and into the woods to find a hanging dog. It’s just the kind of thing that kills my patience for hick cops.

  I took them down into the forest to the victim.

  Bird and his men had powerful flashlights. They cut a path for us through the mist. The light etched the dead retriever sharply where it hung from a sturdy oak branch. Bird took a look at it. He sucked his lips once against his teeth. Then he drawled softly, “Okay. Cut the poor bitch down.”

  The officers glanced at each other. One was a thin blond fellow in his early twenties. The other was a burly dark-haired man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. The older guy lost.

  “Oh damn,” he said, looking away from his colleague. He stepped forward, taking a scout knife from his pocket. He was tall, but he still had to reach to get hold of the rope. As he sawed at it, the dog’s corpse twisted. Its paws brushed his chest. He curled his lip in disgust.

  When the rope frayed, the younger officer came forward. He helped his older friend lower the beast to the ground. Tammany Bird stepped closer. He had a graceful, easy stride for such a big man. He stood above the animal, peering down at it.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. It was, again, nearly a whisper. He took a deep breath. He raised his heavy face to me. “How’d you come to find this?”

  “Someone wanted me to find it,” I said. I lit a cigarette. I turned my collar up. I had my overcoat on now against the chill. “Someone tapped on my window. Led me down here with a light.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Not sure. Male, I think. Said he wanted to show me there was death in the woods.”

  He snorted. “Great. You figure it was a kid?”

  “Maybe. Strange voice. Airy. Could’ve been a kid. He knew my name.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure. Suicides have him upset. Doesn’t like you snooping around, writing about it.”

  He gave me a colorless glare. I tried to meet it. He shone his flashlight at me. I squinted, averted my gaze.

  “You can’t be surprised people know who you are, Mr. Wells,” he said, “It’s a small county.” I raised my hand to my eyes. He lowered the light. “Can’t say I’m all too thrilled about what you’re doing either.”

  “All right,” I said. “Don’t be thrilled.”

  “Thank you kindly.”

  “Not at all.”

  He nodded. He looked off into the woods. I heard him mutter, “Not at all.” Then he said to the officers: “Go get the blanket from the trunk, will you? No sense calling out E.M.S. for this.” The two cops headed back up the slope toward the hotel. Bird watched them go. “Any idea which way this kid headed?” he said after a moment.

  I shook my head. “Far as I could tell, he vanished.”

  That brought the colorless eyes of Chief Bird back around to me. “Vanished.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh. Well, I’m not surprised.”

  “You must run an entertaining county, then.”

  The eyes held me. They were like reef water: soft and clear on the surface, sharp and hard underneath. “Not usually,” Bird said. “Usually, it’s downright quiet. Nobody pays us any mind at all, then.”

  “Is that right,” I said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, that is right. Then suddenly, a little blood spills. That big tractor-trailer accident at the church last year. Triple murder a few years before that. Suddenly, why, every paper and TV station in the city wants to cover us. Interview the grieving, the way they do. ‘What was your three-month-old son like before the truck ran over him, Mr. Creely?’” He shook his head. “Fact is, I was just getting re
ady to go to bed when I heard the dispatcher say your name on the radio. So I called up the boys, told ’em to swing by and pick me up. Know why?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Wanted to see what kind of trouble you attract. I figured it’d be some kind. I just wanted to see what kind.”

  “Executed animals,” I said. “I guess I’m the type.” He kept glaring. I gave him glare for glare. “Lookit,” I said, “just where do the decent folk of Grant Valley go when they vanish into thin air after a good night of canine killing?”

  A long, long moment passed in silence. Then Bird finally ended the staring contest, looked away. “Not much of a mystery, really.” He pointed at the surrounding mist. “All these hills got limestone in ’em. All the limestone is full of caves. Whole network of caves up here. In one side of the hill, out the other, down to the bottom. Wouldn’t be surprised at all to find a sinkhole somewhere right near by.”

  He swept the beam of his flashlight over the ground. It took him about seven seconds to find the place. No more than five feet from where we were standing, the ground dipped sharply. A little brooklet ran silently down from the hill into the dip. Bird’s flashlight followed the path of the water. The light glinted off the surface, picked out the sheen of stones in the muddy bed. Then the water vanished. It went tumbling down a small round hole in the earth. The hole was just wide enough for a man to slip into.

  Bird nodded. “Yeah. Figured.”

  “Could he be hiding down there?”

  “He could be dancing down there for all I know.”

  “Think we ought to maybe drop in on him?”

  “No,” he drawled. “No thank you. No thank you at all. When I was a lad, now, I used to be able to find my way through these things like they were my own front yard. Knew just about every cave in the county. If I went down there today, the fellas’d have to call out the National Guard to find me. Some of ’em go on for miles.” He shook his head. “Morning’s soon enough. Wherever he was headed, he’s half past there by now.”

  The officers returned with a blanket. They lay it on the ground next to the dog. They shifted the dog onto it. Bird sighed as he watched. “Okay. I guess we’ll take this unfortunate creature back to the station, see what we can discover about its untimely demise.” The blank eyes swept the area again.