I'm dazed and disoriented because of the perfect blackness of that room, because of the horrors in the catacombs, because of being lifted bodily and pounded against the wall. In my condition, his voice is as lulling as fearsome, strangely seductive, and I'm nearly convinced he won't harm me. Somehow I must have misunderstood the things I've seen. He continues speaking in that hypnotic way, words pouring out, giving me no chance to think, Jesus, my mind spinning, him pressing me to the wall, face like a great moon over me.
"I know why you've come. I know what you are. I know why you're here. You're my blood, my seed, my son, no different from me than my reflection in a mirror. Do you hear me, Mikey, sweet baby boy, hear me? I know what you are, why you've come, why you're here, what you need. What you need. I know, I know. You know it too. You knew it when you came through the door and saw her on the table, saw her breasts, saw between her spread legs. You knew, oh, yes, oh, you knew, you wanted it, you knew, you knew what you wanted, what you need, what you are. And it's all right, Mikey, it's all right, baby boy. It's all right what you are, what I am. It's how we were bom, each of us, it's what we were meant to be."
Then we're standing at the table, and I'm not sure how we got there, the woman lying in front of me and my father pressing against my back, pinning me to the table. He has a vicious grip on my right wrist, pushes my hand onto her breasts, slides it along her naked body. She's half conscious. Opens her eyes. I'm staring into her eyes, begging her to understand, as he forces my hand everywhere, all the time talking, talking, telling me that I can do anything to her I want, it's right, it's what I was born to do, she's only here to be what I need her to be.
I come far enough out of a daze to struggle briefly, fiercely. Too brief, not fierce enough. His arm's around my throat, choking me, jamming me against the table with his body, choking with his left arm, choking, the taste of blood in my mouth, until I'm weak again. He knows when to release the pressure, before I pass out, because he doesn't want me to pass out. He has other plans. I sag against him, crying now, tears dropping onto the bare skin of the manacled woman.
He lets go of my right hand. I hardly have strength to lift it from the woman. Clink and rattle. Down at my side. I look. One of his disembodied hands. Sorting through the silvery instruments that are floating in the void. He plucks a scalpel from the weightless array of clamps and forceps and needles and blades. Seizes my hand, presses the scalpel into it, folds his hand over mine, grinding my knuckles, forcing me to grip the blade. Below us the woman sees our hands and the shining steel, and she begs us not to hurt her.
"I know what you are," he says, "I know what you are, sweet boy, my baby boy. Just be what you are, just let go and be what you are. You think she's beautiful now? You think she's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen? Oh, just wait until we've shown her how to be more beautiful. Let Daddy show you what you are, what you need, what you like. Let me show you what fun it is to be what you are. Listen, Mikey, listen now, the same dark river runs through your heart and mine. Listen, and you can hear it, that deep dark river, roaring along, swift and powerful, roaring along. With me now, with me, just let the river carry you along. Be with me now and lift the blade high. See how it shines? Let her see it, see how she sees it, how she has eyes for nothing else. Shining and high in your hand and mine. Feel the power we have over her, over all the weak and foolish ones who can never understand. Be with me, lift it high—"
He has one arm loosely around my throat, my right hand gripped by his, so my left arm is free. Instead of reaching back for him or trying to jam my elbow into him, which won't work, I plant my hand against the stainless steel. Unendurable horror and desperation empower me. With that hand and my whole body, I shove away from the table. Then with my legs. Then my feet. Kicking against the table with both feet. Raging backward into the bastard, unbalancing him. He stumbles, still grinding the hand in which I've got the scalpel, trying to tighten the arm at my throat. But then he falls backward, me atop him. The scalpel clinks away in darkness. My falling weight drives the breath out of him. I'm free. Free. Scramble across the black floor. The door. My right hand aching. No hope of helping the woman. But I can bring help. Police. Someone. She can still be saved. Through the door, onto my feet, tottering, flailing to keep my balance, out into the catacombs, running, running past all the frozen white women, trying to shout. Throat bleeding inside. Raw and raspy. Voice a whisper. No one on the ranch to hear me anyway. Just me, him, the naked woman. But I'm running, running, screaming in a whisper when there's no one to hear.
The expression on Ellie's face cut through Spencer's heart.
He said, "I shouldn't have brought you here, shouldn't have put you through this."
She was gray in the light of the frost-white bulbs. "No, it's what you had to do. If I had any doubts, I have none now. You can't have gone on forever . . . with all of this."
"But that's what I'll have to do. Go on forever with it. And I don't know now why I thought I could find a life. I don't have any right to make you carry this weight with me."
"You can go on with it and have a life . . . as long as you remember it all. And I think now I know what it is you can't remember, where those lost minutes come in."
Spencer couldn't bear to meet her eyes. He looked at Rocky, where the dog sat in deep despondency: head lowered, ears drooping, shivering.
Then he turned his eyes to the black door. Whatever he found beyond it would decide whether he had a future with or without Ellie. He might have neither.
"I didn't try to run back to the house," he said, returning in his mind to that distant night. "He would have caught me before I'd gotten there, before I could use a telephone. Instead, I went up to the vestibule, out of the cupboard, through the file room, and turned right toward the front of the building, into the gallery. By the time I was on the stairs to his studio, I could hear him coming through the darkness behind me. I knew he kept a gun in the lower left-hand drawer of his desk. I'd seen it once when he'd sent me there to get something. Entering the studio, I hit the light switch, ran past his easels, supply cabinets, to the far corner. The desk was L-shaped. I vaulted over it, crashed into the chair, clawed at the drawer, got it open. The gun was there. I didn't know how to use it, whether it had a safety. My right hand was throbbing. I could hardly hold the damn thing, even in both hands. He was off the stairs, into the studio, coming for me, so I pointed and pulled the trigger. It was a revolver. No safety. The recoil about knocked me on my ass."
"And you shot him."
"Not yet. I must've pulled up hard on it when I squeezed the trigger, pulled off target, so the bullet took a chunk out of the ceiling. But I held on to the gun, and he stopped coming. At least he didn't come as fast, not pell-mell anymore. But he was so calm, Ellie, so calm. As if nothing had happened, just my dad, good old dad, a little perturbed with me, you know, but telling me everything was going to be all right, romancing me with that sweet talk like in the black room. So sincere. So hypnotic. And so sure that he could make it work if I only gave him time."
Ellie said, "But he didn't know that you'd seen him beat your mother and carry her back to the barn six years before. He might have thought you would put together her death and his secret rooms when you came down from your panic—but until then he thought he had time to bring you around."
Spencer stared at the black door.
"Yeah, maybe that's what he thought. I don't know. He told me that to be like him was to know what life was all about, the true fullness of life without limits or rules. He said I'd enjoy what he could show me how to do. He said I'd already started to enjoy it back in that black room, that I'd been afraid of enjoying it, but that I'd learn it was all right to have that kind of fun."
"But you didn't enjoy it. You were repulsed."
"He said that I did, that he could see I did. His genes ran through me like a river, he said again, through my heart just like a river. Our shared river of destiny, the dark river of our hearts. When he got to the desk, so close I c
ouldn't miss again, I shot him. He flew backward from the impact. The spray of blood was horrible. It seemed for sure that I'd killed him, but then I hadn't seen much blood until that night, and a little looked like a lot. He hit the floor, rolled facedown, and lay there, very still. I ran out of the studio, back down here. . . ."
The black door waited.
She didn't speak for a while. He couldn't.
Then Ellie said, "And in that room with the woman . . . those are the minutes you can't remember."
The door. He should have had the old cellars collapsed with explosives. Filled in with dirt. Sealed forever. He shouldn't have left that black door to be opened again.
"Coming back here," he said with difficulty, "I had to carry the revolver in my left hand because of how he'd clenched my right so hard in his, grinding my knuckles together. It was throbbing, full of pain. But the thing is ... it wasn't just pain I felt in it."
He looked at that hand now. He could see it smaller, younger, the hand of a fourteen-year-old boy.
"I could still feel . . . the smoothness of the woman's skin, from when he'd forced my hand over her body. Feel the roundness of her breasts. The resiliency and fullness of them. The flatness of her belly. The crispness of pubic hair . . . the heat of her. All those feelings were in my hand, still in my hand, as real as the pain."
"You were only a boy," she said without any evidence of disgust. "It was the first time you'd ever seen a woman undressed, the first time you'd ever touched a woman. My God, Spencer, in supercharged circumstances like that, not just terrifying but so emotional in every way, so confusing, such a damned primal moment—touching her was bound to reach you on every level, all at the same time. Your father knew that. He was a clever sonofabitch. He tried to use your turmoil to manipulate you. But it didn't mean anything."
She was too understanding and forgiving. In this blighted world, those who were too forgiving paid a cruel price for a Christian bent.
"So, I came back through the catacombs, with the dead all around me in the walls, with the memory of my father's blood, and still with the feel of her breasts in my hand. The vivid memory of how rubbery her nipples had felt against my palm—"
"Don't do this to yourself."
"Never lie to the dog," Spencer said, with no humor this time, but with a bitterness and rage that frightened him.
A fury welled in his heart, blacker than the door before him. He was no more able to shake it off than he had been able, that July, to shake from his hand the remembered warmth and shapes and sensuous textures of the naked woman. His rage was undirected, and that was why it had been intensifying in his deep unconscious for sixteen years. He'd never been sure if it should be turned against his father or against himself. Lacking a target, he had denied the existence of that rage, repressed it. Now, condensed into a distillate of purest wrath, it was eating through him as corrosively as any acid.
". . . with the vivid memory of how her nipples had felt against my palm," he continued, but in a voice that shook equally with anger and with fear, "I came back here. To this door. Opened it. Went into the black room. . . . And the next thing I remember is walking away from here, the door falling shut behind me. . . ."
. . . barefoot, walking back through the catacombs, with a void in my memory more perfectly black than the room behind me, not sure where I've just been, what's just happened. Passing the women in the walls. Women. Girls. Mothers. Sisters. Their silent screams. Perpetual screams. Where is God? What does God care? Why has He abandoned them all here? Why has He abandoned me? A magnified spider shadow scurries across their plaster faces, along the looping shadow of the light cord. As I'm passing the new niche in the wall, the niche prepared for the woman in the black room, my father comes out of that hole, out of the dark earth, splattered with blood, staggering, wheezing in agony, but so fast, so fast, as fast as the spider. The hot flash of steel out of shadows. Knife. He sometimes paints still lifes of knives, making them glow as if they were holy relics. Flashing steel, flashing pain across my face. Drop the gun. Hands to my face. Flap of cheek hanging off my chin. My bare teeth against my fingers, a grin of teeth exposed along the whole side of my face. Tongue leaping against my fingers in the open side of my face. And he slashes again. Misses. Falls. He's too weak to get up. Backing away from him, I pull my cheek in place, blood streaming between my fingers, running down my throat. I'm trying to hold my face together. Oh, God, trying to hold my face together and running, running. Behind me, he's too weak to get off the floor but not too weak to call after me: "Did you kill her, did you kill her, baby boy, did you like it, did you kill her?"
Spencer still could not look directly at Ellie and might never be able to look directly at her again, not eye-to-eye. He could see her peripherally, and he knew that she was crying quietly. Crying for him, eyes flooded, face glistening.
He couldn't cry for himself. He had never been able to let go and fully purge his pain, because he didn't know if he was worthy of tears, of hers or his own or anyone's tears.
All he could feel now was that rage, which was still without a target.
"The police found the woman dead in the black room," he said.
"Spencer, he killed her." Her voice trembled. "It must have been him. The police said it was him. You were the boy hero."
Staring at the black door, he shook his head. "When did he kill her, Ellie? When? He dropped the scalpel when we both fell to the floor. Then I ran, and he ran after me."
"But there were other scalpels, other sharp instruments in the drawer. You said so yourself. He grabbed one and killed her. It would only have taken seconds. Only a few seconds, Spencer. The bastard knew you couldn't get far, that he'd catch up with you. And he was so excited after his struggle with you that he couldn't wait, shaking with excitement, so he had to kill her then, hard and fast and brutally."
"Later, he's on the floor, after he slashed me, and I'm running away, and he's calling after me, asking if I tailed her, if I liked tailing her."
"Oh, he knew. He knew she was dead before you ever came back here to free her. Maybe he was insane and maybe he wasn't, but he was sure as hell the purest evil that ever walked. Don't you see? He hadn't converted you to his way, and he hadn't been able to tall you, either, so all that was left for him was to ruin your life if he could, to plant that seed of doubt in your mind. You were a boy, half blind with panic and terror, confused, and he knew your turmoil. He understood, and he used it against you, just for the sheer, sick fun of it."
For more than half his lifetime, Spencer had tried to convince himself of the scenario that she had just painted for him. But the void in his memory remained. The continued amnesia seemed to argue that the truth was different from what he desperately wished had happened.
"Go," he said thickly. "Run for the truck, drive away from here, go to Denver. I shouldn't have brought you here. I can't ask you to come any farther with me."
"I'm here. I'm not leaving."
"I mean it. Get out."
"No way."
"Get out. Take the dog."
"No."
Rocky was whining, shaking, huddling against a column of blood-dark brick, in torment as racking as any Spencer had ever seen.
'Take him. He likes you."
"I'm not going." Through tears, she said, "This is my decision, damn it, and you can't make it for me!"
He turned on her, seized handfuls of her leather jacket, all but lifted her off the floor, frantically trying to force her to understand. In his rage and fear and self-loathing, he had managed, after all, to look her in the eyes one more time. "For Christ's sake, after all you've seen and heard, don't you get it? I left part of myself in that room, that abattoir where he did his butchering, left something there I couldn't live with. What in the name of God could that be, huh? Something worse than the catacombs, worse than all the rest of it. It has to be worse because I remembered all the rest of it! If I go back in there and remember what I did to her, there'll be no forgetting ever again, no hiding fro
m it anymore. And this is a memory . . . like fire. It's going to bum through me. Whatever's left, whatever isn't burned away, it won't be me anymore, Ellie, not after I know what I did to her. And then who're you going to be down here with, down here in this godforsaken place alone with?"
She raised one hand to his face and traced the line of his scar, though he tried to flinch away from her. She said, "If I was blind, if I'd never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart."
"Oh, Ellie, don't."
"I'm not leaving."
"Ellie, please."
"No."
He couldn't direct his rage at her, either, especially not at her. He let go of her. Stood with his hands at his sides. Fourteen again. Weak with his outrage. Afraid. Lost.
She put her hand on the lever-action door handle.
"Wait." He withdrew the SIG 9mm pistol from under the waistband of his blue jeans, disengaged the safety, jacked a bullet into the chamber, and held the piece out to her. "You should have both guns." She started to object, but he cut her off. "Keep the pistol in your hand. Don't get too close to me in there."
"Spencer, whatever you remember, it's not going to turn you into your father, not in an instant, no matter how terrible it is."
"How do you know that? I've spent sixteen years picking at it, prying and poking, trying to dig it out of the darkness, but it won't come. Now if it comes . . ."
She engaged the safety on the pistol.
"Ellie—"
"I don't want it to go off accidentally."
"My father wrestled on the floor with me and tickled me and made funny faces for me when I was little. Played ball with me. And when I wanted to develop my drawing ability, he patiently taught technique to me. But before and after . . . he came down here, that same man, and he tortured women, girls, hour after hour, for days in some cases. He moved with ease between this world and the one above."
Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart Page 58