by Peter Straub
“What’s over here?” John followed the double trail of footprints to the place where they reversed themselves. The pistol dangled from his hand. He bent down and grunted at whatever he saw.
I came up behind him. At the end of a section of boards, a brass ring fit snugly into a disc.
“Trap door. Maybe there’s something in the basement.” He bent down and tugged at the ring. The entire three-foot section of floor folded up on a concealed hinge, revealing the top of a wooden ladder that descended straight down into darkness. I smelled blood, shook my head, and smelled only must and earth.
I had already lived through this moment, too. Nothing on earth could get me to go into that basement.
“Okay, it doesn’t seem likely,” John said, “but isn’t it worth a look?”
“Nothing’s down there but …” I could not have said what might be down there.
My tone of voice caught his attention, and he looked at me more closely. “Are you all right?”
I said I was fine. He pointed the revolver down into the darkness underneath the tavern. “You have a lighter, or matches, or anything?”
I shook my head.
He clicked off the safety on the revolver, bent over and put a foot on the second rung. With one hand flat on the floor, he got his other foot on the first rung, and then almost toppled into the basement. He let go of the pistol and used both hands to steady himself as he took another couple of steps down the ladder. When his shoulders were more or less at the level of the opening, he snatched up the pistol, glared at me, and went the rest of the way down the ladder. I heard him swear as he bumped against something at the bottom.
The ripe odor of blood swarmed out at me again. I asked him if he saw anything.
“To hell with you,” he said.
I looked at his thinning hair swept backward over pink, vulnerable-looking scalp. Below that his right hand ineffectually held out the pistol at the level of his spreading belly. Beside one of his feet was a bar stool with a green plastic seat. He had stepped on it when he came down off the ladder. “Way over at the side are a couple of windows. There’s an old coal chute and a bunch of other shit. Hold on.” He moved away from the opening.
I bent over, put my hand on the floor, and sat down and swung my legs into the abyss.
John’s voice reached me from a hundred miles away. “They kept the boxes down here for a while, anyway. I can see some kind of crap …” He kicked something that made a hollow, gonging sound, like a barrel. Then: “Tim.”
I did not want to put my feet on the rungs of the ladder. My feet put themselves on the ladder. I swung the rest of myself around and let them lead me down.
“Get the hell down here.”
As soon as my head passed beneath the level of the floor, I smelled blood again.
My foot came down on the same bar stool over which Ransom had almost fallen, and I kicked it aside before I stepped down onto the packed earth. John was standing with his back to me about thirty feet away in the darkest part of the basement. The dusty oblong of a window at the side let in a beam of light that fell onto the old coal chute. Beside it, a big wooden keg lay beached on its side. A few feet away was a mess of shredded cardboard and crumpled papers. Half of the distance between myself and John, a druidical ring of bricks marked the site where the tavern’s furnace had stood. The smell of blood was much stronger.
John looked over his shoulder to make sure I had come down the ladder.
I came toward him, and he stepped aside.
An old armchair drenched in black paint stood like a battered throne on the packed earth. Black paint darkened the ground in front of it. I held my breath. The paint glistened in the feeble light. I came up beside John, and he pointed the Colt’s barrel at three lengths of thick, bloodstained rope. Each had been cut in half.
“Somebody got shot here,” Ransom said. The whites of his eyes flared at me.
“Nobody got shot,” I said. The eerie rationality of my voice surprised me. “Whoever he was, he was probably killed with the same knife they used to cut the ropes.” This came to me, word by word, as I was saying it.
He swallowed. “April was stabbed with a knife. Grant Hoffman was killed with a knife.”
And so were Arlette Monaghan and James Treadwell and Monty Leland and Heinz Stenmitz.
“I don’t think we’d better tell the police about this, do you? We’d have to explain why we broke in.”
“We can wait until the body turns up,” I said.
“It already did. The guy in the car at the airport.”
“A guard found him because blood was dripping out of the trunk,” I said. “Whoever killed him put him in the trunk alive.”
“So this is someone else?”
I nodded.
“What the hell is going on around here?”
“I’m not sure I want to know anymore,” I said, and turned my back on the bloody throne.
“Christ, they might come back,” John said. “Why are we standing around like chumps?” He moved toward the ladder, shooting wild glances at me over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”
I was walking toward the rubble of cardboard and crumpled paper near the side of the basement.
“Are you crazy? They might come back.”
“You have a gun, don’t you?” Again, the words that came out of my mouth seemed to have no connection to what I was actually feeling.
Ransom stared at me incredulously and then went the rest of the way to the ladder and began going up. He gained the top of the ladder about the time I reached the mess of chewed paper. John sat down on the edge of the opening and raised his legs. I heard him scramble to his feet. His footsteps thudded toward the kitchen.
The impressions of two boxes, partially obscured by bits of ragged cardboard, were stamped like footprints into the basement floor. The rats searching for food or insulation had left largely untouched whatever had been inside the boxes, but a few scraps of paper lay among the bits of tattered cardboard.
I squatted to poke through the mess. Here and there a fragment of handwriting, no more than two or three letters, was visible on some of the scraps. I flattened out one of these. Part of what looked like the letter a was connected to an unmistakable letter r. ar. Harp? Scarf? Arabesque? I tried another, vu. Ovum? Ovulate? A slightly larger fragment lay a few feet away, and I stretched to reach it. John thudded toward the rear of the building. The quality of his impatience, a sweaty anxious anger, permeated the sound of his footsteps.
I flattened out the section of paper. Compared to the other scraps, it was as good as a book. I stood up and tried to make out the writing as I went toward the ladder.
At the top of the paper, in capitals, was Alle (gap) to (gap) n. I had the feeling, like the sense of the uncanny, that it meant something to me. After another missing section appeared the numerals 5,77. Beneath this legend had been written: 5-10,120. 26. Jane Wright. Near tears, brave smile in par (gap) tight jeans, cowboy boots, black tank top. Appealing white trash trying val (gap) to move up. No kids, husband (here the paper ended).
I folded the paper in half and slid it into my shirt pocket. Afraid that John might really have driven away, I went straight up the ladder without touching its sides and jumped off the final rung onto the floor.
Outside, he was walking around in circles on the cement, banging the car keys against his leg and gripping the Colt with his free hand. He tossed me the keys, too forcefully. “Do you know how close you came?” he said, and picked up the broken lock and the jack handle. He meant: how close to being left behind. A few blocks east of us, the crowd bellowed and chanted. John clipped the lock’s shackle through the metal loop.
In spite of his panic, I felt no urgency at all. Everything that was going to happen would happen. It already had. Things would turn out, all right, but whether or not they turned out well had nothing to do with John Ransom and me.
When I got into the car, John was drumming on the dashboard in frustration. I pulled around th
e corner of the tavern. John tried to look two or three directions at once, as if a dozen men carrying guns were sneaking up on us. “Will you get us out of here?”
“Do you want me to drop you at home?” I asked.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I want to go to Elm Hill to find the Sunchanas.”
He groaned, extravagantly. “What’s the point?”
I said he knew what the point was.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “That old stuff is a waste of time.”
“I’ll drop you at Ely Place.”
He collapsed back into the seat. I made the light onto Horatio Street and turned onto the bridge. John was shaking his head, but he said, “Okay, fine. Waste my gas.”
I stopped at a gas station and filled the tank before I got back on the east-west expressway.
5
PLUM BARROW LANE intersected Bayberry at a corner where a tall gray colonial that looked more like a law office than a house lorded it over the little saltbox across the street. What we had seen inside the tavern made Elm Hill ugly and threatening.
The houses with their nameplates, huge mailboxes, and neat lawns faced the narrow streets bluntly, like the tenements along Horatio Street. They might have been as empty as the tenements. The garage doors had been sealed tight to the asphalt driveways by remote control. Ours was the only car in sight. Ransom and I could have been the only people in Elm Hill.
“Do you really know where you’re going?”
This, the first sentence Ransom had spoken since inviting me to waste his gasoline, was a grudging snarl directed to the side window. His entire upper body was twisted to rest his head on his right shoulder.
“This is their street,” I said.
“Everything looks alike.” He had transferred his anger to our surroundings. Of course, he was correct: all the streets in Elm Hill did look very much alike.
“I hate these brain-dead toytowns.” A second later: “They put their names on those signs so they can come home to the right house at night.” After another pause: “You know what I object to about all this? It’s so tacky.”
“I’ll drive you home and come back by myself,” I said, and he shut up.
From the end of the block, the house looked almost undamaged. A woman in jeans and a gray sweatshirt was shoving a cardboard box into the rear of an old blue Volvo station wagon drawn up onto the rutted tracks to the garage. A tall, curved lamp ending in a round white bubble stood on the grass behind her. Her short white hair gleamed in the sun.
I pulled the Pontiac onto the tracks and parked behind the Volvo. John pushed the Colt under his seat. The woman moved away from the station wagon and glanced at the house before coming toward us. When I got out of the car, she gave me a shy, almost rueful smile. She thought we were from the fire department or the insurance company, and she gestured at her house. “Well, there it is.” A light, vaguely European accent tugged at her voice. “It wouldn’t have been so bad, except the explosion buckled the floor all the way into the bedroom.”
The prettiness her old neighbors had mentioned was still visible in her round face, clean of makeup, beneath the thick cap of white hair. A streak of black ash smudged her chin. She wiped her hands on her jeans and stepped forward to take my hand in a light, firm handshake. “The whole thing was pretty scary, but we’re doing all right.”
A thin man with an angular face and a corona of graying hair came off the porch with a heap of folded clothes in his arms. He said he’d be right with us and went to the back of the Volvo and pushed the pile of clothes in next to the box.
John came up beside me, and Mrs. Sunchana turned with us to look at what had happened to her house. The explosion had knocked in the side of the kitchen, and the roof had collapsed into the fire. Roof tiles curled like leaves, and wooden spars jutted up through the mess. Charred furniture stood against the far wall of the blackened living room. A glittering chaos of shattered glass and china covered the tilted floor of the living room. The heavy, deathlike stench of burned fabric and wet ash came breathing out of the ruin.
“I hope we can save the sections of the house left standing,” said Mr. Sunchana. He spoke with the same slight, lilting accent as his wife, but not as idiomatically. “What is your opinion?”
“I’d better explain myself,” I said, and told them my name. “I left a note yesterday, saying that I wanted to talk to you about your old landlord on South Seventh Street, Bob Bandolier. I realize that this is a terrible time for you, but I’d appreciate any time you can give me.”
Mr. Sunchana was shaking his head and walking away before I was halfway through this little speech, but his wife stayed with me to the end. “How do you know that we used to live in that house?”
“I talked to Frank and Hannah Belknap.”
“Theresa,” said her husband. He was standing in front of the ruined porch and the fire-blackened front door. He gestured at the rubble.
“I found your note when we came home, but it was after ten, and I thought it might be too late to call.”
“I’d appreciate any help you can give me,” I said. “I realize it’s an imposition.”
John was leaning against the hood of the Pontiac, staring at the destruction.
“We have so much to do,” said her husband. “This is not important, talking about that person.”
“Yesterday, someone followed me out here from Millhaven,” I told her. “I just caught a glimpse of him. When I read about your house in the paper this morning, I wondered if the explosion was really accidental.”
“What do you mean?” Mr. Sunchana came bristling back toward his wife and me. His hair looked like a wire brush, and red veins threaded the whites of his eyes. “Because you came here, someone did this terrible thing to us? It’s ridiculous. Who would do that?”
His wife did not speak for a moment. Then she turned to her husband. “You said you wanted to take a break.”
“Sir,” David said, “we haven’t seen or spoken to Mr. Bandolier in decades.” He pushed his fingers through his hair, making it stand up even more stiffly.
His wife focused on me again. “Why are you so interested in him?”
“Do you remember the Blue Rose murders?” I asked. The irises snapped in her black eyes. “I was looking for information that had to do with those killings, and his name came up in connection with the St. Alwyn Hotel.”
“You are—what? A policeman? A private detective?”
“I’m a writer,” I said. “But this is a matter of personal interest to me. And to my friend too.” I introduced John, and he moved forward to nod hello to the Sunchanas. They barely looked at him.
“Why is it personally interesting to you?”
I couldn’t tell what was going on. Theresa and David Sunchana were both standing in front of me now, David with a sort of weary nervousness that suggested an unhappy foreknowledge of everything I was going to say to him. His wife looked like a bird dog on point.
Maybe David Sunchana knew what I was going to say, but I didn’t. “A long time ago, I wrote a novel about the Blue Rose murders,” I said. David looked away toward the house, and Theresa frowned. “I followed what I thought were the basic facts of the case, so I made the detective the murderer. I don’t know if I ever really believed that, though. Then Mr. Ransom called me about a week ago, after his wife was nearly murdered by someone who wrote Blue Rose near her body.”
“Ah,” Theresa said. “I am so sorry, Mr. Ransom. I saw it in the papers. But didn’t the Dragonette boy kill her?” She glanced at her husband, and his face tightened.
I explained about Walter Dragonette.
“We can’t help you,” David said. Frowning, Theresa turned to him and then back to me again. I still didn’t know what was going on, but I knew that I had to say more.
“I had a private reason for trying to find out about the old Blue Rose murderer,” I said. “I think he was the person who killed my sister. She was murdered five days before the fi
rst acknowledged victim, and in the same place.”
John opened his mouth, then closed it, fast.
“There was a little girl,” Theresa said. “Remember, David?”
He nodded.
“April Underhill,” I said. “She was nine years old. I want to know who killed her.”
“David, the little girl was his sister.”
He muttered something that sounded like German played backward.
“Is there somewhere in Elm Hill where I could get you a cup of coffee?”
“There’s a coffee shop in the town center,” she said. “David?”
He glanced at his watch, then dropped his hand and carefully, almost fearfully, inspected my face. “We must be back in an hour to meet the men from the company,” he said. His wife touched his hand, and he gave her an almost infinitesimal nod.
“I will put my car in the garage,” David said. “Theresa, will you please bring in the good lamp?”
I moved toward the lamp behind the Volvo, but he said, “Theresa will do it.” He got into the car. Theresa smiled at me and went to pick up the lamp. He drove the station wagon into the wooden shell of the garage with excruciating slowness. She followed him in, set the lamp down in a corner, and went up beside the car. They whispered to one another before he got out of the car. As they came toward me, Theresa’s eyes never left my face.
John opened the back door of the Pontiac for them. Before they got in, David took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the smudge from his wife’s chin.
6
AS IF BY ARRANGEMENT, the Sunchanas did not mention either their former landlord or the Blue Rose murders while we were in the car. Theresa described how the policeman had miraculously walked into the smoke to carry them out through the bedroom window. “That man saved our lives, really he did, so David and I can’t be too tragic about the house. Can we, David?”
She was their public voice, and he assented. “Of course we cannot be tragic.”
“Then we’ll live in a trailer while we build a new one. We’ll put it on the front lawn, like gypsies.”
“They’ll love that, in Elm Hill,” John said.