So he'd leased the house under a fake name, claiming to be a writer, and he'd been here for eight days. Nothing had happened in that time: no ghosts, no demons, no strange lights or wailings or rattling chains—and no lunatics or burglars or visitors of any kind. Nothing at all.
Until now.
Well, if he wasn't alone in the house, it was because somebody human had come in. And he sure as hell knew how to deal with a human intruder. He pushed the blankets aside, swung his feet out of bed, and eased open the nightstand drawer. His fingers groped inside, found his .38 revolver and the flashlight he kept in there with it; he took them out. Then he stood, made his way carefully across to the bedroom door, opened it a crack, and listened again.
The same heavy silence.
Roper pulled the door wide, switched on the flash, and probed the hallway with its beam. No one there. He stepped out, moving on the balls of his bare feet. There were four other doors along the hallway: two more bedrooms, a bathroom, and an upstairs sitting room. He opened each of the doors in turn, swept the rooms with the flash, then put on the overhead lights.
Empty, all of them.
He came back to the stairs. Shadows clung to them, filled the wide foyer below. He threw the light down there from the landing. Bare mahogany walls, the lumpish shapes of furniture, more shadows crouching inside the arched entrances to the parlor and the library. But that was all: no sign of anybody, still no sounds anywhere in the warm dark.
He went down the stairs, swinging the light from side to side. At the bottom he stopped next to the newel post and used the beam to slice into the blackness in the center hall. Deserted. He arced it around into the parlor, followed it with his body turned sideways to within a pace of the archway. More furniture, the big fieldstone fireplace at the far wall, the parlor windows reflecting glints of light from the flash. He glanced back at the heavy darkness inside the library, didn't see or hear any movement over that way, and reached out with his gun hand to flick the switch on the wall inside the parlor.
Nothing happened when the electric bulbs in the old-fashioned chandelier came on; there wasn't anybody lurking in there.
Roper turned and crossed to the library arch and scanned the interior with the flash. Empty bookshelves, empty furniture; He put on the chandelier. Empty room.
He swung the cone of light past the staircase, into the center hall—and then brought it back to the stairs and held it there. The area beneath them had been walled on both sides, as it was in a lot of these old houses, to form a coat or storage closet; he'd found that out when he first moved in and opened the small door that was set into the staircase on this side. But it was just an empty space now, full of dust—
The back of his scalp tingled again. And a phrase from when he was a kid playing hide-and-seek games popped into his mind.
Peekaboo, I see you. Hiding under the stair.
His finger tightened around the butt of the .38. He padded forward cautiously, stopped in front of the door. And reached out with the hand holding the flash, turned the knob, jerked the door open, and aimed the light and the gun inside.
Nothing.
Roper let out a breath, backed away to where he could look down the hall again. The house was still graveyard-quiet; he couldn't even hear the faint grumblings its old wooden joints usually made in the night. It was as if the whole place was wrapped in a breathless waiting hush. As if there was some kind of unnatural presence at work here—
Screw that, he told himself angrily. No such things as ghosts and demons. There seemed to be presence here, all right—he could feel it just as strongly as before—but it was a human presence. Maybe a burglar, maybe a tramp, maybe even a goddamn lunatic. But human.
He snapped on the hall lights and went along there to the archway that led into the downstairs sitting room. First the flash and then the electric wall lamps told him it was deserted. The dining room off the parlor next. And the kitchen. And the rear porch.
Still nothing.
Where was he, damn it? Where was he hiding?
The cellar? Roper thought.
It didn't make sense that whoever it was would have gone down there. The cellar was a huge room, walled and floored in stone, that ran under most of the house; there wasn't anything in it except spider webs and stains on the floor that he didn't like to think about, not after the real estate agent's story about Lavolle and his dark rites. But it was the only place left that he hadn't searched.
In the kitchen again, Roper crossed to the cellar door. The knob turned soundlessly under his hand. With the door open a crack, he peered into the thick darkness below and listened. Still the same heavy silence.
He started to reach inside for the light switch. But then he remembered that there wasn't any bulb in the socket above the stairs; he'd explored the cellar by flashlight before, and he hadn't bothered to buy a bulb. He widened the opening and aimed the flash downward, fanning it slowly from left to right and up and down over the stone walls and floor. Shadowy shapes appeared and disappeared in the bobbing light: furnace, storage shelves, a wooden wine rack, the blackish gleaming stains at the far end, spider webs like tattered curtains hanging from the ceiling beams.
Roper hesitated. Nobody down there either, he thought. Nobody in the house after all? The feeling that he wasn't alone kept nagging at him—but it could be nothing more than imagination. All that business about devil-worshiping and ghosts and demons and Garber being murdered and psychotic killers on the loose might have affected him more than he'd figured. Might have jumbled together in his subconscious all week and finally come out tonight, making him imagine menace where there wasn't any. Sure, maybe that was it.
But he had to make certain. He couldn't see all of the cellar from up here; he had to go down and give it a full search before he'd be satisfied that he really was alone. Otherwise he'd never be able to get back to sleep tonight.
Playing the light again, he descended the stairs in the same wary movements as before. The beam showed him nothing. Except for the faint whisper of his breathing, the creak of the risers when he put his weight on them, the stillness remained unbroken. The odors of dust and decaying wood and subterranean dampness dilated his nostrils; he began to breathe through his mouth.
When he came off the last of the steps he took a half dozen strides into the middle of the cellar. The stones were cold and clammy against the soles of his bare feet. He turned to his right, then let the beam and his body transcribe a slow circle until he was facing the stairs.
Nothing to see, nothing to hear.
But with the light on the staircase, he realized that part of the wide, dusty area beneath them was invisible from where he stood—a mass of clotted shadow. The vertical boards between the risers kept the beam from reaching all the way under there.
The phrase from when he was a kid repeated itself in his mind: Peekaboo, I see you. Hiding under the stair.
With the gun and the flash extended at arm's length, he went diagonally to his right. The light cut away some of the thick gloom under the staircase, letting him see naked stone draped with more gray webs. He moved closer to the stairs, ducked under them, and put the beam full on the far joining of the walls.
Empty.
For the first time Roper began to relax. Imagination, no doubt about it now. No ghosts or demons, no burglars or lunatics hiding under the stair. A thin smile curved the corners of his mouth. Hell, the only one hiding under the stair was himself—
"Peekaboo," a voice behind him said.
TWO WEEKS EVERY SUMMER
We found out how Webb Patterson spends his summer vacations when five of us regulars were jawing around the card table in the Cedarville firehouse one Saturday afternoon in early June.
We weren't firemen, at least not in the sense that we were on the town payroll. Cedarville was still too small to need or afford full-time civil employees, so resident volunteers had to supplement the services provided by the county. There were ten volunteer firemen and some of us always got toge
ther on Saturdays, mostly to play pinochle or just exercise our jaw muscles; there isn't much else to do in a small town on the weekends. Unless you've got a family, of course, but except for Ernie Boone, whose wife had a voice like a train whistle and a nosy-Parker for a mother, all of us regulars were either bachelors or widowers with grown kids.
This particular Saturday was a fine late-spring day, not too hot, not too breezy, with the scent of wildflowers and the first dusty hint of summer in the air. We had the main double doors open wide, and all the windows raised, so we could breathe that air and watch the townspeople passing by in the sunshine outside. We weren't doing much except talking; it was too nice a day to concentrate on card playing.
The conversation got around to vacations when Aaron Cubbage, who owns the drugstore, said something about weather like this making him itch-for-a-fishing-pole and a spot under one of the, oaks at Lake Keystone. He went up to the lake for a couple of weeks every summer with a crony of his from the county seat and spent the whole time fishing for blue gills and drinking wine coolers; he'd been doing that for thirty years and he'd keep on doing it until he died.
The rest of us varied our vacations, though. Ernie Boone said he and the missus planned to close up their hardware store on the Fourth of July and take a trip through the Ozark Mountains. If his mother-in-law insisted on going along, he said, he'd keep driving until he found somebody to trade her to for a jug of mountain dew—which got a pretty good laugh. Doc Pollard, Cedarville's only dentist, said he was thinking about taking one of those nostalgic paddlewheel steamboat trips down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. I said that if the town could get along without the Holloway Floral and Gardening Service for three weeks, I was going to pack up my camper and drive over and up into Colorado. I'd never seen the Sangre de Cristo range, or any other part of that state, and I like to visit new places every year.
Webb Patterson, who doubled as Cedarville's lawyer and notary public, was the only one who didn't volunteer any information about his vacation plans. Not that his reticence was surprising; Webb had been a quiet and sort of private fellow for as long as I'd known him, which was since he'd moved to Cedarville from downstate four years ago. Not secretive, just private. Like the rest of us, he seemed pretty much content with the kind of quiet small-town life he led; but unlike the rest of us, he never talked about getting away for a while in the summer, seeing other parts of the state or country. Yet he always left town for two weeks in July or August, and he'd admitted to a visit to Mexico last year.
It was Doc Pollard who asked him straight out what he was planning to do this summer. At first Webb didn't answer. But the rest of us were looking at him, waiting, and finally he said in a reluctant voice, "I'm going to New York."
"New York City, you mean?" Doc asked.
"Yes."
"Never had any urge to go to New York myself," Aaron said. "I don't like big cities—too much noise and hubbub. And too much crime. Why, I heard they mug you right on the downtown streets in Manhattan."
Webb smiled at that, a funny sort of smile. "I'm sure that's an exaggeration."
"Maybe so, but I'll take my vacation at Lake Keystone, thank you."
I said, "You going to stay in New York the whole two weeks, Webb?"
"Yes, probably."
"What's there to do all that time? I mean, you can visit the Empire State Building and the United Nations and take in all the other sights in three or four days—a week at the most."
"There are other things I plan to do."
"Mind saying what they are?"
He hesitated. "Well . . . walking in Central Park, for one."
"That doesn't sound like much of an interesting vacation," Ernie said, "walking around Central Park all day."
Webb hesitated again, longer this time. Then in an impulsive way, as if he had something inside him that needed to come out, he said, "Not all day, Ernie."
"Well, part of it, then."
"Not during the day at all. At night."
Ernie looked startled. "At night? Hey, you're not serious, are you? Central Park's supposed to be full of muggers at night."
"I'm sure it is," Webb said. "That's the idea."
"What idea?"
"The danger. Danger's the whole purpose of my vacation."
We were all staring at him—and in a different way now, like maybe we didn't know him as well as we thought we did. He was dead serious, you could see that; he wasn't trying to pull our legs.
"Now wait a minute," I said."You mean you're fixing to walk around Central Park at night hoping you'll meet up with a mugger?"
"No. Hoping I won't meet one."
Aaron said, "That doesn't make any sense."
"It does if you look at it a certain way," Webb said. "It's like a game, a dangerous game where you stack the odds against yourself and then try to beat them."
"Why in hell would you want to play such a game?"
"For the danger, the excitement."
"But you could get yourself killed!"
"I know. Personal risk is what the game is all about."
"This is crazy," Ernie said. He scooted his chair back a little way, as if he were afraid Webb might start foaming at the mouth and try to attack him; Ernie always did have a tendency to overreact. "This is the craziest damn thing I ever heard."
Webb sighed and seemed to stare for a time at the movement of dust motes in a shaft of sunlight. "I shouldn't have told you," he said finally. "I should have known better than to tell anyone."
"It doesn't change anything," I said. "Why should it? We're still your friends."
"But you don't understand or approve, I can see that."
"Give us a little time for it to sink in."
"And some more explanation," Doc said. "What made you all of a sudden decide on this game of yours?"
"I didn't decide all of a sudden. I decided it was how I would spend my vacations nine years ago, after my wife passed away."
"Nine years ago?" Aaron said. "My God, you mean you been going to places like New York, challenging muggers, every summer for nine years?"
"No, of course not. I choose a different kind of danger each year. Last summer I went backpacking alone in northern Mexico, in rugged country where there are supposed to be bandits. Two years ago I hunted wild boar with a bow and arrow up in Canada. Three years ago I rode a kayak down the Colorado River. Before it was shark-hunting in the Atlantic and some tamer things such as mountain climbing and motorcycle racing."
I said, "Each year, you do something a little more dangerous than the past year, is that it?"
"Yes."
Doc was incredulous. "And you survived all those things without getting hurt?"
"I survived them, yes," Webb said, "but I've been hurt a few times. A rattlesnake bit me on the leg in Mexico last summer; I almost drowned twice in the Colorado River; I broke an arm and fractured my pelvis mountain climbing in Arizona the year before I moved here."
"Crazy," Ernie muttered again. "Just plain crazy."
Webb gave him a tolerant glance. "Not from where I sit," he said. "Risking my life for two weeks every summer is what makes living worthwhile."
"I don't follow that," Aaron said.
"It's simple, really. I was born and raised in a town not much larger than Cedarville and I've never lived anywhere other than a small town; I like the quiet, slow-paced existence. But after my wife died, life didn't seem to mean much to me anymore; for the first time I was aware of how dull and unexciting it was. And that feeling got even worse when the time came for me to plan my first vacation alone in twenty years. Where was I going to go? What was I going to do?
"Well, that started me thinking about the whole idea of a vacation. Most people, particularly in the big cities, lead hectic lives—exciting lives in the sense that they're always doing rush-about things, facing little dangers and crises every day that build up a considerable pressure after a while. A vacation for them is two or three quiet and unexciting weeks, a time to relax and unwind
so they can go back to their normal lifestyle with recharged batteries. But for me, I realized, it was just the opposite. I lived fifty quiet and unexciting weeks-and-what-I—needed to recharge my batteries was two weeks of excitement and physical danger."
"So that's how it is," I said. "And it works for you, this kind of vacation?"
"Oh, yes. I've never felt more alive than I have these past nine years."
"But you keep doing more and more dangerous things every year," Aaron said. "Hell, man, the odds are bound to catch up with you sooner or later. And when they do you might not come home from one of your vacations."
Webb said quietly, "Don't you think I know that? But it doesn't matter. This is the only way I can live my life now and be happy and fulfilled. When my luck runs out and my time comes, I won't have any regrets."
None of us seemed to have anything more to say after that and there was one of those long uneasy silences where everybody is wrapped up in his own thoughts. Outside there were traffic sounds and the whoop of kids playing baseball in the park behind the firehouse; but inside the hush was so heavy the air might have been muffled in wool. You could almost hear the flies walking across the sun-streaked card table.
It was Webb who broke the silence. He scraped back his chair and stood up with a kind of rueful smile lifting the corners of his mouth. "I guess I'd best be going," he said. "I've got some law work to catch up on at home."
He didn't have any work to catch up on; he never worked on weekends, or brought business home from the office. I said, "Can't it wait, Webb? I'll walk over to Beebe's Store and buy us a six-pack—a cold beer'd go good in this weather."
"No, Roy, thanks. I'd better go."
He nodded to us, turned past old Number 4, Cedarville's lone fire engine, and went out into the sunshine. We all watched him until he was out of sight, not saying anything. But it was a different kind of silence now, no longer heavy, as if a kind of tension had been broken. At length Ernie said, "Well, what in hell do you think of that? What in hell do you think of that?"
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