by Ed Gorman
Schultz, it was.
The fat, greedy pharmacist.
Laumer took out his Luger and shot Schultz clean in the face.
Once, twice, three times.
Target practice.
Schultz looked absurd, stuck there in the window, his face streaming blood, his blubbery carcass lifeless and useless.
Well, not useless. Now it was good for blocking the last possible route for the others.
Now there was no way out for them.
The screams got even shriller.
You would think by now they would be so hoarse they couldn’t scream at all.
That’s what you’d think, anyway.
7
Sheriff Wayman sat in the alley behind the parking lot listening to the radio.
An Andrews Sisters number on the “Hit Parade” station.
The Andrews Sisters.
My God.
He had a picture of himself and his wife dancing around a floor just after WWII.
Now, everything seemed soft focus. He was in his army uniform. She wore a white dress that seemed to trap the moonlight.
It was as if there hadn’t been anybody else around, dancing there in the beautiful shadows.
A prowling dog brought him back to reality.
Given all that had happened—with the crazy Laumer taking over—he thought that now might be a time to tell the truth to Beth Daye.
She was a good woman and he had respect for her.
He sat, thinking it over.
Then he put the car in gear and slid out of the alley.
In the moonlight the graves waited for him like an old friend.
Wayman parked, got out and walked up the hill.
His feet were damp from dew.
His breath was heavy from his girth.
His head ached with the terrible burdens on his mind.
But all that aside, he knew he’d come home.
He knelt in the damp grass and leaned forward and put his hands on either side of his wife’s stone and then pushed his face forward.
He kissed the stone reverently and longingly.
He said, to the night and the wind and to the soul of his wife, “I’ve done the wrong thing all these years, honey. I thought I was helping people, but I wasn’t.”
Somewhere water trickled over stone.
Sheriff Wayman felt a sudden understanding and love of the universe and all its mysteries that made him cry.
He clutched his wife’s gravestone and held it, much as he’d held her that night on the dance floor with din of the war behind them and the sweet harmonies of the Andrews Sisters on the air.
“I understand,” he said.
And he did.
It was an ineffable sense of things—defying logic or mere words—this unity he had come to perceive in all things, this final peace that his heart bore now like an emblem of a different species.
He let the dew soak him and the wind chill him and the moonlight burnish him.
“I love you,” he said, uncertain whom he was addressing.
Maybe everybody.
Everything.
And more tears came as he reached for his holster—and his heart yearned for peace at long last as his blunt farmer fingers yielded up the silver gun—his mouth wrinkled in a smile as the revolver touched the hollow of his temple—
8
Fifteen minutes ago, Ruth Foster had descended the staircase.
Now Minerva figured it was safe to follow her, safe to see where her friend went.
Safe to find out what all the mystery was about.
Minerva had no doubt that it involved the cubicle in the basement and what appeared to be a trapdoor.
Into the hallway now, her eyes adjusting to the long, deep shadows. The rug beneath her feet cushioned most of the sound she made.
When she got to the head of the staircase, she looked down. Moonlight flooded the vestibule below. Shadows from the trees played across the light, making ominous patterns.
She moved down the staircase, a step at a time, prepared for almost anything. By the time she reached the kitchen, she had begun to have serious doubts about what she was doing.
She wanted her last years to be peaceful, good ones. Even without the comfort of the mansion, even without the comfort of a nice-sized allotment from Ruth’s will, she knew she could somehow survive.
The secret of the great house, whatever it was, was not worth dying for.
Then she heard the creaking floor.
She spun around.
Ruth stood near the basement door. She seemed to be guarding it. Not so much to keep Minerva from going down, as to guard anybody from coming up.
Or anything.
“I asked you,” Ruth said, “please not to come down. I asked you.”
No doubt about it. Ruth, her friend of these long years, had snapped.
She sounded as insane as Minerva’s aunt in Buffalo.
“Ruth. Listen to me. Let me help you.”
“He’ll get you, too. Eventually, he’ll get everybody.”
“Ruth. Please. Listen.”
A smile crossed Ruth’s face. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Of course I do, Ruth. You always tell the truth.”
“No. You don’t believe me.” The smile again. “I didn’t used to believe either.”
That was when something charged the basement door from the other side and made the animal noise that Minerva had heard so many times over the years.
Now, Minerva believed, too.
Whatever it was down there was very, very real.
Chapter Fourteen
1
Deirdre was in a semicomatose state when the rope from which she had been hanging snapped from the ceiling and allowed her to drop to the floor.
She landed with enough impact that her bones ached from the contact.
For long minutes she lay there, naked, cold, on the damp floor.
Gradually, she began to realize the implications of what had happened.
She was free.
Immediately, she changed that to a more precise definition of her present state.
She was free of the ceiling.
In no other way was she presently free.
It took only a few minutes to work her hands loose from the tattered rope. Then off came the blind.
For the first time in what seemed like months, Deirdre could see.
She almost wished she couldn’t.
All she could liken the place to were the Catacombs she had studied in Sunday school, the underground caverns where the first Christians had prayed to escape persecution from the Romans.
Here the walls were swollen and damp, and a dim electric emergency light only made the shadows deeper and more menacing.
There were no windows and only a single door, a curved wooden affair that looked like something out of seventeenth-century England.
She was starting her period.
On top of everything else—exhaustion, dislocation, utter and abject fear—she was starting her period.
She couldn’t believe it.
Periods were something she associated with her normal life, MTV, and dreams about Michael Jackson and wanting her own car.
Periods did not belong in dungeons, where you half expected a hunchback named Igor to appear.
Finally, she found the strength to undo the binds lashing her legs. The act tired her enough that she lay back on the cold damp floor, closing her eyes.
Then she remembered the rat.
She didn’t care.
She was that tired.
It was while she was lying back, trying to summon strength for her inevitable attempt at escape, that the door opened with a proper creaking sound and a man came in.
He wore a Halloween mask like Walt Disney’s “Goofy.” He carried a knife of a sort she’d never seen before.
It was as long as a human arm and shone with a kind of glow.
The man closed the door behind him.
Through the slits in the mask she could see that he was studying her.
Her breasts, her legs, the golden thatch of pubic hair.
“It’s time,” he said, muffled through the mask. “It’s time.”
He came forward, raising the knife the way he might an axe.
2
Bobby Coughlin knew better than to laugh at Dave Evans, but he couldn’t help himself. Dave had done exactly what Bobby had hoped he would do. Made an utter chickenshit fool of himself in front of Angie Fuller.
When Bobby had jumped up from the back seat, Dave had exited the car without any thought of the well-being of Angie.
He had taken clean off, leaving Angie behind to pile out of the car and not make it more than four or five feet away before she’d peed her pants.
Now Bobby was falling back against the car, pointing at the two lovebirds, sneering at them with his laughter.
Dave came over and made a swipe at Bobby, but for once Bobby was too quick for him. He got away, ran up to the gate by the mansion.
Dave started for Bobby again, but Angie put out her hand, stopping him.
“Leave him alone,” she said.
“I thought you thought he was such a creep.”
“No more than we were to him.” She looked at Bobby. “I like anybody who can put something over on me.”
Instead of being a statement of humility, it was actually a statement of arrogance.
What she was really saying was that there were very few people who could put anything over on her.
Bobby came away from the gate.
“Oh, yeah, Angie,” he said, pushing his glasses back up his nose with his finger. “You kinda dig what I did to you?”
Bobby couldn’t believe the self-confidence in his voice. The flirtatiousness. Why, if he didn’t know better he’d say that was Dave Evans himself speaking.
Angie responded with flirting of her own.
She leaned back against the car in a suggestive pose, her blond hair golden in the moonlight, and said, “I’ll bet you aren’t afraid to go into the mansion, are you?”
Bobby lied. “Hell, no, I don’t believe in spooks.” “Dave’s afraid,” she chided.
“The hell I am,” Dave said.
Angie kept her eyes on Bobby. “I’m sorry for what I said about you today, Bobby. I can see I was wrong.”
That was when Dave grabbed Bobby again, pushed him to the ground, stood over him, daring him with his fists to get up.
Angie came over.
“You may be able to knock him down, but that doesn’t mean you’re as brave as he is,” she said. “At least Bobby wouldn’t run out on me when he got scared, would you, Bobby?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Bobby said.
Dave looked from one to the other of them then spat into the dirt.
“Well, maybe you two would make real good partners. I can see you fucking right now!” Dave said and stormed to his car.
“Just where do you think you’re going?” Angie demanded.
“You can hump the wimp all night, you bitch,” Dave said as he jumped in his Trans-Am.
He squealed away, Angie running after him shaking her fists.
They might as well have been on the moors, Bobby thought, watching the Trans-Am’s taillights disappear into the gloom.
Except for the mansion, there was no sign of human life anywhere.
His cockiness waning, Bobby knew he was soon to turn back into the familiar old wimp he’d been for all of his seventeen years.
Angie came over. “The stupid bastard. I was just teasing him.”
“Great,” Bobby said, “I really like being used in games.”
She laughed. “You really think I was serious about liking you, Bobby?”
“No, no, I didn’t,” Bobby said, feeling the blood in his cheeks rise.
He looked into her taunting eyes and suddenly knew that he was going to cry.
Then he took off, running.
“Wait!” Angie called in the darkness. “Wait for me, Bobby! I’m scared!”
Angie, who spent many hours on her beauty but almost none on her conditioning, could never catch him. She stood in the moonlight, cursing and beginning to cry.
That was when Laumer, who had been watching the whole scene, stepped out from behind the tall hedges that angled out from either side of the gate.
Within seconds, he had clamped his hand over her mouth and was dragging her back into the hedges.
For the next twenty minutes Bobby ran in wider and wider circles from the scene where he’d left Laumer and Angie.
He ran in frenzy, so out of breath that twice he tripped and fell, sprawling. He cracked his head against the macadam and whimpered like a terrified animal for help.
He had no idea where to go or what to do.
Laumer knew exactly what he wanted to do.
In the moonlight that tumbled like silver water down through the trees, he pushed Angie back against an oak tree and ripped her skirt away from her legs.
A deep, blinding groan traversed his entire body when his fingers touched her hot, moist sex.
Then he ripped away her bra and her fleshy breasts fell free in the shadowy light, their pink nipples dazzling his eyes.
“I’ve seen you around town,” Laumer said, smiling.
“What are you going to do?” Angie asked.
“What do you think?” Laumer said.
“You going to rape me?”
Laumer grinned. “That’s just for starters, honey.”
She started to scream and he slapped her hard across the face.
She shut up instantly.
Laumer had his own overwhelming needs to contend with now.
He ripped open his own trousers, nearly as violently as he’d torn away her skirt.
He jerked her hand toward his body.
Put it on his throbbing erection.
“Oh God,” she said, beginning to cry, as if touching him made her circumstances real to her for the first time. “Oh please, mister, please don’t.”
Laumer raised her up and threw her on the ground. Then he was on top of her, jamming himself inside her.
He hadn’t been lying to her.
This was only for starters.
In the distance, Bobby heard Angie’s fading cries. But he was too much trapped in his own fear and confusion to understand what the cries meant.
How many minutes had passed since he’d fled from the car? How many hours? He had no way of knowing.
He lay on the edge of the mansion’s woods. Staring up at the pitiless moon.
Needing to know what to do.
Not only at this moment, but for the rest of his life.
Long minutes passed before he struggled to his feet and began running again.
This time toward the mansion.
3
Carnes had to stop, the pain in his side becoming intolerable. He had been running too hard on too little sleep. He needed to rest.
Beth came up beside him, knelt down.
To the west of them was the river. It carried both sweet and sour smells on the crisp night air. Downriver a motor boat plowed through the water. Closer by they could hear lovers giggling. Beth explained that there was a kind of lover’s lane nearby.
In the twenty minutes since they had been free of Harcourt and his shotgun, Carnes had had a chance to think things through.
He was more convinced than ever that in finding out who Kenny Foster had seen in the park that night long ago, he would find out who had taken Deirdre.
His thoughts had ranged to everybody from Sheriff Wayman to the clerk in the motel.
By now he had ruled out Harcourt. The man was only a stooge for somebody. He had learned that when Harcourt’s wife had warned him about what “they” had forbidden him to talk about.
They.
That meant there was more than one of them, or there was a conspiracy.
Or both.
He felt sure that the answers lay in the mansion where
Ruth Foster lived.
He got up from the grassy slope and said, “I’m ready.”
Beth, panting hard herself, nodded that she was, too.
They set off on the final part of their journey to the Foster place.
4
Deirdre began to crawl backwards.
The man in the “Goofy” mask carrying the knife still walked toward her.
So much for her “freedom,” she thought bitterly.
Death was as inevitable now as it had been at any time during the past twenty-four hours.
None of this should be happening to anybody whose world was filled with Clearasil and stuffed teddy bears.
As she crawled, keeping herself so that she faced the man at all times, she could feel the floor ripping the backs of her hands and legs.
She fought back tears of pain, but she kept moving.
A single glance over her shoulder told her what awaited in moments.
She was running out of space in which to crawl. Another two or three feet, she would be at the wall.
He would have her.
Again.
She was turning her head again to look for another way out when she noticed the brick.
Just a red housing brick.
She angled her body toward it.
The man in the mask began to make animal noises that slowed Deirdre down out of pure terror.
He sounded like a drooling dog.
She put out a hand to grab the brick and had just started to reach for it when he moved with surprising grace and stepped on her wrist.
She cried out in pain.
He roared with laughter, the sound eerie trapped inside the mask.
She could see that his eyes were studying her again.
Taking in every inch of her naked, torn body.
The feral sound came again.
The knife in one hand, the man bent down. He put his hand directly between her legs, feeling her warm softness.
Once more, the terrible dog noise issued from behind the mask.
She was held there by terror and a kind of submission.
She had started to cry.
His rough, tearing fingers inside her, she felt this was the final violation, that no more could be tolerated.