Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dark Rivers Of The Heart(Lit)

  He could have switched on the overhead fluorescent panels. Sixteen years ago, however, he had entered in gloom, guided only by the radiance of the green letters on the security-system readout. Intuitively, he knew that his best hope of remembering what he had repressed for so long was to re-create the circumstances of that night insofar as he was able. The barn had been air-conditioned then, and now the heat was turned low, so the February chill in the air was nearly right. The harsh glare of overhead fluorescent bulbs would too drastically alter the mood. If he were striving for a roughly authentic re-creation, even a flashlight was too reassuring, but he didn't have the nerve to proceed in the same depth of darkness into which he had gone when he was fourteen.

  Rocky whined and scratched at the back door, which Ellie had closed behind them. He was shivering and miserable.

  For the most part and for reasons that Spencer would never be able to determine, Rocky's argument with darkness was limited to that in the outside world. He usually functioned well enough indoors, in the dark, although sometimes he required a night-light to banish an especially bad case of the willies.

  "Poor thing," Ellie said.

  The flashlight was brighter than any night-light. Rocky should have been sufficiently comforted by it. Instead, he quaked so hard that it seemed as if his ribs ought to make xylophone music against one another.

  "It's okay, pal," Spencer told the dog. "What you sense is something in the past, over and done with a long time ago. Nothing here and now is worth being scared of."

  The dog scratched at the door, unconvinced.

  "Should I let him out?" Ellie wondered.

  "No. He'll just realize it's night outside and start scratching to get back in."

  Again directing the flashlight at the file-room door, Spencer knew that his own inner turmoil must be the source of the dog's fear. Rocky was always acutely sensitive to his moods. Spencer strove to calm himself. After all, what he had said to the dog was true: The aura of evil that clung to these walls was the residue of a horror from the past, and there was nothing here and now to fear.

  On the other hand, what was true for the dog was not as true for Spencer. He still lived partly in the past, held fast by the dark asphalt of memory. In fact, he was gripped even more fiercely by what he could not quite remember than by what he could recall so clearly; his self-denied recollections formed the deepest tar pit of all. The events of sixteen years ago could not harm Rocky, but for Spencer, they had the real potential to snare, engulf, and destroy him.

  He began to tell Ellie about the night of the owl, the rainbow, and the knife. The sound of his own voice scared him. Each word seemed like a link in one of those chain drives by which any roller coaster was hauled inexorably up the first hill on its track and by which a gondola with a gargoyle masthead was pulled into the ghost-filled darkness of a fun house. Chain drives worked only in one direction, and once the journey had begun, even if a section of track had collapsed ahead or an all-consuming fire had broken out in the deepest chamber of the fun house, there was no backing up.

  "That summer, and for many summers before it, I slept without air-conditioning in my bedroom. The house had a hot-water, radiant-heat system that was quiet in the winter, and mat was okay. But I was bothered by the hiss and whistle of cold air being forced through the vanes in the vent grille, the hum of the compressor echoing along the ductwork. . . . No, 'bothered' isn't the word. It scared me. I was afraid that the noise of the air conditioner would mask some sound in the night . . . a sound that I'd better be able to hear and respond to ... or die."

  "What sound?" Ellie asked.

  "I didn't know. It was just a fear, a childish thing. Or so I thought at the time. I was embarrassed by it. But that's why my window was open, why I heard the cry. I tried to tell myself it was only an owl or an owl's prey, far off in the night. But . . . it was so desperate, so thin and full of fear . . . so human . . ."

  More swiftly than when he had been confessing to strangers in barrooms and to the dog, he recounted his journey on that July night: out of the silent house, across the summer lawn with its faux frost of moonlight, to the corner of the barn and the visitation of the owl, to the van where the stench of urine rose from the open back door, and into the hall where they now stood together.

  "And then I opened the door to the file room," he said.

  He opened it once more and crossed the threshold.

  Ellie followed him.

  In the dark hallway from which the two of them had come, Rocky still whined and scratched at the back door, trying to get out.

  Spencer played the beam of the flashlight around the file room. The long worktable was gone, as were the two chairs. The row of file cabinets had been removed as well.

  The knotty-pine cupboards still filled the far end of the room from floor to ceiling and corner to corner. They featured three pairs of tall, narrow doors.

  He pointed the beam of light at the center doors and said, "They were standing open, and a strange faint light was coming out of them from inside the cabinet, where there weren't any lights." He heard a new note of strain in his voice. "My heart was knocking so hard it shook my arms. I fisted my hands and held them at my sides, struggling to control myself. I wanted to run, just turn and run back to bed and forget it all."

  He was talking about how he had felt then, in the long ago, but he could as easily have been speaking of the present.

  He opened the center pair of knotty-pine doors. The unused hinges squeaked. He shone the light into the cabinet and panned it across empty shelves.

  "Four latches hold the back wall in place," he told her.

  His father had concealed the latches behind clever strips of flip-up molding. Spencer found all four: one to the left at the back of the bottom shelf, one to the right; one to the left at the back of the second-highest shelf, one to the right.

  Behind him, Rocky padded into the file room, claws ticking on the polished-pine floor.

  Ellie said, "That's right, pooch, you stay with us."

  After handing the flashlight to Ellie, Spencer pushed on the shelves. The guts of the cabinet rolled backward into darkness. Small wheels creaked along old metal tracks.

  He stepped over the base frame of the unit, into the space that had been vacated by the shelves. Standing inside the cupboard, he pushed the back wall all the way into the hidden vestibule beyond.

  His palms were damp. He blotted them on his jeans.

  Retrieving the flashlight from Ellie, he went into the six-foot-square room behind the cupboard. A chain dangled from the bare bulb in the ceiling socket. He tugged on it and was rewarded with light as sulfurous as he remembered it from that night.

  Concrete floor. Concrete-block walls. As in his dreams.

  After Ellie shut the knotty-pine doors, closing herself in the cabinet, she and Rocky followed him into the cramped room beyond.

  "That night, I stood out there in the file room, looking in through the back of the cupboard, toward this yellow light; and I wanted to run away so badly. I thought I had started to run . . . but the next thing I knew, I was in the cupboard. I said to myself, 'Run, run, get the hell out of here.' But then I was all the way through the cupboard and in this vestibule, without any awareness of having taken a step. It was like . . . like I was drawn . . . in a trance . . . couldn't go back no matter how much I wanted to."

  "It's a yellow bug light," she said, "like you use outdoors during the summer." She seemed to find that curious.

  "Sure. To keep mosquitoes away. They never work that well. And I don't know why he used it here, instead of an ordinary bulb."

  "Well, maybe it was the only one handy at the time."

  "No. Never. Not him. He must have felt there was something more aesthetic about the yellow light, more suited to his purpose. He lived a carefully considered life. Everything he did was done with the aesthetics well worked out in his mind. From the clothes he wore to the way he prepared a sandwich. That's one thing that makes what he did under this
place so horrible . . . the long and careful consideration."

  He realized that he was tracing his scar with the fingertips of his right hand while holding the flashlight in his left. He lowered his hand to the SIG 9mm pistol that was still jammed under his belt, against his belly, but he didn't draw it.

  "How could your mother not know about this place?" Ellie asked, gazing up and around at the vestibule.

  "He owned the ranch before they were married. Remodeled the barn before she saw it. This used to be part of the area that became the file room. He added those pine cabinets out there himself, to close off this space, after the contractors left, so they wouldn't know he'd concealed the access to the basement. Last of all, he brought in a guy to lay pine floors through the rest of the place."

  The Micro Uzi was equipped with a carrying strap. Ellie slung it over her shoulder, apparently so she could hug herself with both arms. "He was planning what he did ... planning it before he even married your mother, before you were born?"

  Her disgust was as heavy as the chill in the air. Spencer only hoped that she was able to absorb all the revelations that lay ahead without letting her repulsion transfer in any degree from the father to the son. He desperately prayed that he would remain clean in her eyes, untainted.

  In his own eyes he regarded himself with disgust every time he saw even an innocent aspect of his father in himself. Sometimes, meeting his reflection in a mirror, Spencer would remember his father's equally dark eyes, and he would look away, shuddering and sick to his stomach.

  He said, "Maybe he didn't know exactly why he wanted a secret place then. I hope that's true. I hope he married my mother and conceived me with her before he'd ever had any desires like . . . like those he satisfied here. However, I suspect he knew why he needed the rooms below. He just wasn't ready to use them. Like when he was struck by an idea for a painting, sometimes he'd think about it for years before the work began."

  She looked yellow in the glow of the bug light, but he sensed that she was as pale as bleached bone. She stared at the closed door that led from the vestibule to the basement stairs. Nodding at it, she said, "He considered that, down there, to be part of his work?"

  "Nobody knows for sure. That's what he seemed to imply. But he might have been playing games with the cops, the psychiatrists, just having his fun. He was an extremely intelligent man. He was able to manipulate people so easily. He enjoyed doing that. Who knows what was going through his mind . . . really?"

  "But when did he start this ... this work?"

  "Five years after they married. When I was only four years old. And it was another four years before she discovered it ... and had to die. The police figured it out by identifying the ... remains of the earliest victims."

  Rocky had slipped around them to the basement entrance. He was sniffing pensively and unhappily along the narrow crack between the door and the threshold.

  "Sometimes," Spencer said, "in the middle of the night, when I can't sleep, I think of how he held me on his lap, wrestled with me on the floor when I was five or six, smoothed my hair. . . ." His voice choked with emotion. He took a deep breath and forced himself to continue, for he had come here to continue to the end, to be finished with it at last. "Touching me . . . with those hands, those hands, after those same hands had . . . under the barn . . . doing those terrible things."

  "Oh," Ellie said softly, as if stricken by a small stab of pain.

  Spencer hoped that what he saw in her eyes was an understanding of what he'd carried with him all these years and a compassion for him—not a deepening of her revulsion.

  He said, "Makes me sick . . . that my own father ever touched me. Worse . . . I think about how he might have left a fresh corpse down in the darkness, a dead woman, how he might have come out of his catacombs with the scent of her blood still in his memory, up from that place and into the house . . . upstairs into my mother's bed . . . into her arms . . . touching her. . . ."

  "Oh, my God," Ellie said.

  She closed her eyes as though she couldn't bear to look at him.

  He knew he was part of the horror, even if he had been innocent. He was so inextricably associated with the monstrous brutality of his father that others couldn't know his name and look at him without seeing, in their mind's eye, young Michael himself standing in the corruption of the slaughterhouse. Through the chambers of his heart, despair and blood were pumped in equal measure.

  Then she opened her eyes. Tears glimmered in her lashes. She put her hand to his scar, touching him as tenderly as he had ever been touched. With five words she made clear to him that in her eyes he was free of all stain: "Oh, God, I'm so sorry."

  Even if he were to live one hundred years, Spencer knew he could never love her more than he loved her then. Her caring touch, at that moment of all moments, was the greatest act of kindness that he had ever known.

  He only wished that he was as sure of his utter innocence as Ellie was. He must recapture the missing moments of memory that he had come there again to find. But he prayed to God and to his own lost mother for mercy, because he was afraid he would discover that he was, in all ways, the son of his father.

  Ellie had given him the strength for whatever waited ahead. Before that courage could fade, he turned to the basement door.

  Rocky looked up at him and whimpered. He reached down, stroked the dog's head.

  The door was streaked with more grime than it had been when last he'd seen it. Paint had peeled off in places.

  "It was closed, but it was different from this," he said, going back to that far July. "Someone must have scrubbed away the stains, the hands."

  "Hands?"

  He raised his hand from the dog to the door. "Arcing from the knob across the upper part . . . ten or twelve overlapping prints made by a woman's hands, fingers spread . . . like the wings of birds . . . in fresh blood, still wet, so red."

  As Spencer moved his own hand across the cold wood, he saw the bloody prints reappear, glistening. They seemed as real as they had been on the long-ago night, but he knew that they were only birds of memory taking flight again in his own mind, visible to him but not to Ellie.

  "I'm hypnotized by them, can't take my eyes off them, because they convey an unbearable sense of the woman's terror . . . desperation . . . frantic resistance to being forced out of this vestibule and into the secret . . . the secret world below."

  He realized that he had placed his hand on the doorknob. It was cold against his palm.

  A tremor shook years off his voice, until he sounded younger to himself: "Staring at the blood . . . knowing that she needs help . . . needs my help . . . but I can't go forward. Can't. Jesus. Won't. I'm just a boy, for God's sake. Barefoot, unarmed, afraid, not ready for the truth. But somehow, standing here as scared as I am . . . somehow I finally open the red door. . . ."

  Ellie gasped. "Spencer."

  Her sound of surprise and the weight she gave to his name caused Spencer to pull back from the past and turn to her, alarmed, but they were still alone.

  "Last Tuesday night," she said, "when you were looking for a bar . . . why did you happen to stop in the place where I worked?"

  "It was the first one I noticed."

  "That's all?"

  "And I'd never been there before. It always has to be a new place."

  "But the name."

  He stared at her, uncomprehending.

  She said, "The Red Door."

  "Good God."

  The connection had escaped him until she made it.

  "You called this the red door," she said.

  "Because . . . all the blood, the bloody handprints."

  For sixteen years, he had been seeking the courage to return to the living nightmare beyond the red door. When he had seen the cocktail lounge on that rainy night in Santa Monica, with the red-painted entrance and the name spelled out above it in neon—THE RED DOOR—he could not possibly have driven past. The opportunity to open a symbolic door, at a time when he had not yet found the st
rength to return to Colorado and open the other—and only important—red door, had been irresistible to his subconscious mind even while he remained safely oblivious to the implications on a conscious level. And by passing through that symbolic door, he'd arrived in this vestibule behind the pine cabinet, where he must turn the cold brass knob mat remained unwarmed by his hand, open the real door, and descend into the catacombs, where he had left a part of himself more than sixteen years ago.

  His life was a speeding train on parallel rails of free choice and destiny. Though destiny seemed to have bent the rail of choice to bring him to this place at this time, he needed to believe that choice would bend the rail of destiny tonight and carry him off to a future not in a rigorous line with his past. Otherwise, he would discover that he was fundamentally the son of his father. And that was a fate with which he could not live: end of the line.

  He turned the knob.

  Rocky edged back, out of the way.

  Spencer opened the door.

  The yellow light from the vestibule revealed the first few treads of concrete stairs that led down into darkness.

  Reaching through the doorway and to the right, he found the switch and clicked on the cellar light. It was blue. He didn't know why blue had been chosen. His inability to think in harmony with his father and to understand such curious details seemed to confirm that he was not like that hateful man in any way that mattered.

  Going down the steep stairs to the cellar, he switched off the flashlight. From now on, the way would be lighted as it had been on a certain July and in all the July-spawned dreams that he had since endured.

  Rocky followed, then Ellie.

  That subterranean chamber was not the full size of the bam above, only about twelve by twenty feet. The furnace and hot-water heater were in a closet upstairs, and the room was utterly vacant. In the blue light, the concrete walls and floor looked strangely like steel.