Nothing but the Night

by Bill Pronzini

  “Don’t you listen? She did it to herself.”

  “Where is she? If she’s dead, you’re responsible—”

  “Shut up about her! I didn’t kill her, I’m not responsible!”

  “Okay. Okay, I believe you. Why won’t you believe I’m not responsible for hurting your wife?”

  In a single convulsive movement Hendryx was out of the chair. His face was blood-dark; a tic jumped along one cheekbone, as if something beneath the skin was trying to tear loose. The gun was in his hand again. Small weapon, small caliber … Jenna’s missing .32?

  “That’s enough talk,” he said. “Get up.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Put you where you belong, where I don’t have to listen to you anymore. Get up off there.”

  “I can’t walk yet—”

  “Walk or crawl, one or the other. Now!”

  Argument was futile; it had been futile all along. You can’t reason with a madman—how many times had he heard that said? Any more resistance might provoke him into using that gun.

  It took Cam three painful tries to stand. His legs were wobbly, still tingling, but he could stay up on them, and he could walk in an awkward, shuffling gait. Hendryx kept his distance—no more help from him. Partial feeling in his left hand, enough so he could use it as a brace against the end table alongside the couch. He made it from there to the hallway arch, leaned against the jamb.

  “Upstairs,” Hendryx said.

  It was like climbing a steep wall. Each riser was a little piece of agony, even with the banister for support. Movement took all his concentration, and that was just as well—he didn’t want to think anymore right now.

  His legs felt weak and sore when he reached the second-floor landing, but the stinging sensations were gone. His left hand felt almost normal. His right had regained some feeling as well.

  Hendryx put on the upstairs hall lights. “You know where the attic door is,” he said.

  Cam’s pulse skipped; his step faltered, and he had to brace himself against the inside wall. Attic. Should’ve known that was where Hendryx would put him. The haunted place, the nightmare place.

  The attic door was shut. He was a few feet from it before he realized that a pair of heavy, new-looking iron brackets had been mounted one on either side of the frame. And that a three-foot length of two-by-four was propped against the wall.

  Hendryx stepped around in front of him, pulled the door open. Enough light penetrated the shadows within to show Cam that there was no longer even a dead bulb in the wall fixture.

  “Inside. Everything’s ready for you.”

  A draft from above gave him a whiff of the fetid smells of dust, mildew, mouse turds. It brought a tight shriveling to his groin. “Hendryx, for the love of God—”

  “Get in there.” He waited until Cam had half-dragged himself around and through the narrow opening. “This is where you belong,” he said then. “Death row cell for the next four nights and days.”

  And the door slammed shut and the two-by-four clattered into the iron brackets, trapping him once more in utter blackness.

  63

  Gray dawn, storm still blowing wild outside.

  Nick got up, got dressed, walked down the hall to listen at the barred attic door. Quiet up there. He imagined Gallagher hiding in the dark, Little Jack Horner crouched in a corner. Image put a smile on his mouth.

  He went on to the back bedroom, whistling “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” between his teeth. Tune Annalisa’d always liked. I’ll stop it, honey, he thought. Not here but where you are, inside of you. Pretty soon now. Comin’ home to you. Blue skies, nothing but blue skies from now on.

  Beads of moisture on the window. He rubbed it off, looked out. River was flooding big-time, all right. Surprised him a little to see how far over its banks it was on this side, lapping at the top of the slope, some of the grassy yard underwater already. Another foot or two, and it’d be climbing the back steps. On the far side it was up to within a few feet of the highway. Not a river anymore, a muddy brown running lake. Fast current, eddies, white scum along the edges, half-submerged trees, logs and branches and all kinds of crap swirling and dancing along. Low clouds, black-bellied, and the rain coming down so heavy it was like a silver curtain.

  He watched a high-wheeled truck with its lights on easing along the highway, plowing up spray. Some kind of rescue vehicle? He’d better get cracking.

  Went into the bathroom first to take a leak. Flipped the light switch, and nothing happened. Power must’ve gone out during the night. No wonder it was so damn cold in here. He’d turned the furnace up over seventy before he turned in.

  Downstairs he tried the lights in the hall, just to make sure. Yeah, the power was out. He shrugged into his coat, stepped out onto the porch. Front yard looked like a swamp, so much water and hillside mud on Crackerbox Road you could hardly see the asphalt. Weren’t any rescue crews around here yet, but somebody could come along before the day got too old and the flood closed all the roads.

  One thing he had to do and do quick was move the Mazda. Leave it where it was, and anybody showed up, they’d figure the house was still occupied and come banging on the door, trying to get him to leave. More important was keeping the car safe. Lane into the garage was under at least an inch of water. Wouldn’t take much more of a rise for the garage floor to be under, too. Another eight to ten feet, the Mazda’d be floating. Water would screw up the brakes, knock out the electrical system—he wouldn’t be driving it anywhere when the flood level went down.

  Down the road a ways somebody’d built a house high among the pines on the opposite side. Long driveway leading up to it. Place looked closed up for the winter—shutters over all the windows, no lights showing any of the times he’d passed it after dark. It was on ground higher than the roof of this house; river’d have to rise another forty or fifty feet to do any damage up there. No way that’d happen. Mazda’d be safe up there.

  He slogged across to the garage. Whistled “My Baby Loves Me” as he started the car, backed it out. He felt good this morning. Weather didn’t bother him, flood didn’t bother him, nothing bothered him. New day, only three left until the execution. And in less than a week he’d be with Annalisa again. Gallagher’s talk talk talk had gotten to him last night, but he’d been tired and a little stressed out. Bailey woman’s death was a freak accident, he’d already settled that. And the punishment he’d designed for Gallagher was exactly right.

  What could be more right than doing what had to be done for the woman you loved?

  64

  Cam lay shivering in the dark. The only way he’d known it was morning was by the faint, thin line of gray at the rear wall. Hendryx had closed off both small dormer windows with inch-thick boards screwed to the wall, half a dozen flathead screws to each piece to prevent them from being torn loose. The boards across the front window were fitted tightly together so no light showed through; the gap between two at the rear window, near the top, was a quarter of an inch at its widest, where the wood on one length had warped. The thread of daylight that shone there barely penetrated the thick gloom. All it was good for was as a peephole on disaster. By rising up on his knees and flattening one side of his face against the boards, he could look out and down at the river ripping madly at its banks.

  He had crawled all over the attic, front to back, side to side. Not last night—this morning, a little while ago. Last night he’d huddled at the bottom of the stairs, unable to bring himself to climb up until cold and muscle cramps forced him into it; and when he’d got up here, he’d found the mattress near the top of the stairs and been too exhausted to do anything but crawl onto it. What little sleep he’d had had been fitful: jerk awake, doze, jerk awake, doze. It was the biting cold and the thin line of morning that had started him moving again.

  Except for mice in the walls, spiders and their webs, the mattress was the only thing in the attic other than himself. The rest of the floor space and the walls were bare. Not eve
n a bucket to use as a toilet. The mattress was child-size—he understood why without letting himself think much about it—and it felt and smelled new. Hendryx had meant it literally when he called the attic a cell. A death row cell in a prison run by a lunatic.

  There was no way out of this box. His keys and penknife were gone; so were his belt with its thin-edged buckle, the few coins he’d had in his pocket. Hendryx had removed all of that in the PWS lot, after he’d finished trussing him up. Hadn’t seemed to be much sense in it at the time; now it was plain that Hendryx had been making sure there was nothing on him that could be used to work on the screws.

  The door downstairs was the only possible exit. He had no chance of breaking it down with the two-by-four securing it. And Hendryx was not going to open it between now and Friday, the eighth—not to bring him food, not for any reason. Solitary confinement. Without even bread and water for the condemned prisoner. When that door finally did open again, it would be with care and cunning, to take him on his last walk or to carry out the death sentence right here. He’d be too weak to resist by then. No food or water for four days, nothing but his damp suit and shirt to shield him from the bitter cold, his throat already parched and scratchy…. He might not even be able to crawl.

  His one hope lay in outside help. Hallie knew about Hendryx; so did Lloyd now, after yesterday’s consultation. They’d tell the authorities, may already have done it. But there was no proof that Hendryx was responsible for his sudden disappearance, any more than there’d been in Jenna’s case. The police couldn’t mount an official investigation anyway on a missing person’s report until twenty-four hours had elapsed. Worst of all, there was the storm and the flooding river. All day yesterday there’d been countywide flash-flood warnings, reports of massive evacuations under way along the Russian River, and forecasts of a string of powerful storms over the next three days. By now, or very soon, the roads in and out of the area would be closed. As long as the heavy wind and rain continued, rescue boats couldn’t operate, and helicopters couldn’t fly safely. Even if rescuers did show up here, he had no way to signal them, and Hendryx couldn’t be forced to evacuate or to let anybody inside the house without a search warrant.

  His only hope was no hope at all.

  Dead man.

  He listened to the wind rattling boards, the rain slashing against eaves and dormers, and thought about death. Not the sudden ceasing to exist, the nearness of whatever lay beyond, if anything did; he couldn’t quite deal with any of that yet. Death by murder, himself as the object of a cold-blooded, premeditated “execution.” The concept that a stranger, a madman, wanted him dead—wanted it badly enough to plot a bizarre scheme involving Caitlin and Jenna that had lasted for weeks—was as awesome as the specter of death itself. Him, Cameron Gallagher, singled out of millions of other men merely because he happened to bear a resemblance to an unknown felon, a face in a sketch. Going about his normal routine, struggling with all his other problems, not asking for much more than survival and a little peace of mind, while the madman stalked him day and night, schemed and assembled his plan, and put it into action.

  The thought plagued him that he could have saved himself by telling the authorities about Hendryx immediately after Jenna vanished. Yet he knew it wasn’t true. What could they have done except talk to Hendryx, check into his past? No grounds for a search warrant there, either—and they wouldn’t have found anything in the house even if they had gotten a warrant, just as he hadn’t found anything last week. Jenna had probably been dead since that Friday night, her body buried far away from here. The county CID wouldn’t even have had cause to keep Hendryx under surveillance. He’d have been free to do as he pleased—and what he pleased to do was take Cameron Gallagher’s life.

  The fear in him had surfaced, but only in the shadows of his mind. Mostly what he felt was a hatred for Nick Hendryx that was as powerful as any Hendryx felt for him. He, too, wanted another human being dead. Would make him dead if he could. Would strangle him, bludgeon him, shoot him, stab him, kill him if he could.

  For now the hatred was sustaining. He focused on it, nurtured it as if it were a seedling, held it and stroked it and urged it to grow. The more it grew, the greater the barrier to hold fear at bay. But for how long? Until Friday—that long? Another seventy or eighty hours trapped in endless night?

  If the fear grew faster and stronger than the hate, if it swarmed over him and began tearing at his soul, he’d be lost. He’d be ten years old again, screaming and pissing on himself. He’d beg for his life when the time came, crawl to his death with all sanity blown away. Somewhere else, anywhere else, the hatred might continue to sustain him, and he could die with rage and dignity. But not in this house where Rose and Paul had died in shame. Not in this attic where part of himself had died along with them.

  65

  Nick sat in the front room, wrapped up in his coat, no fire because he didn’t want the smoke to alert anybody that might be in the area. Eating a bag of M&Ms and drinking coffee he’d made with murky tap water. Still feeling good, thinking about Annalisa.

  And somebody came up on the porch.

  Thump, thump—he heard it plain. Then the doorknob rattled. Whoever it was trying to get in.

  He jumped up, spilling the coffee, and ran out into the hall. Got there just as the door came flying inward, wind and rain and a figure in a hooded raincoat barging right into his house. Intruder leaned back against the door to get it shut, face coming up so he could see under the hood.

  Caitlin.

  Nick stared at her, she stared at him. “You are still here,” she said. “I didn’t see your car, so I thought—”

  “What’s the idea, barging in here like that?”

  “I thought you were gone.”

  “Then why’d you come inside?”

  Her face was pinched and white, mouth tight set, eyes bright. Stressed out. Damn flood, maybe, and maybe not. Voice sharper when she said, “This is my house, Nick.”

  “Just caught me by surprise, that’s all. How long’ll the roads be open?”

  “Not much longer. I almost didn’t get through.”

  “Better leave quick, then, before you’re stranded.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me, too. Right after you.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “High ground, close by. Why’d you drive all the way up here, anyway?”

  “My brother’s missing,” she said.

  Nick put on a surprised face. “Missing?”

  “Since last night. He didn’t come home, and his wife’s frantic. She called me before dawn.”

  “Maybe he got drunk or went off with a woman. Or both.”

  Headshake. “Cameron wouldn’t do anything like that. His car’s still at Paloma Wine Systems. Hallie had an employee go and check.”

  “So he went off with somebody. He’ll turn up, don’t worry. Might even be home by now.”

  “Nick … did you see him last night?”

  “Me? No. What made you ask that?”

  “You weren’t over in the Paloma Valley?”

  “I came straight here after work. What the hell, Cat? You think I had something to do with him going missing?”

  “I don’t know. You didn’t, did you?”

  “No.”

  Kept looking at him, picking at his face with her eyes. Trying to make up her mind whether or not he was telling her the truth.

  “You think he’s here, is that it? Well, go ahead, look around, waste the time. Then neither of us’ll get out before the roads are closed.”

  “Maybe I should. Hallie asked me to.”

  Goddamn woman, making it hard for him and bad for both of them. “Rain’s coming down harder,” he said.

  No answer. Now she had her nose up and was snuffling the air like an animal.

  “What’s that smell?” she said.

  “Smell?”

  “Don’t you smell it?”

  “No. Listen, we don’t have much time—”<
br />
  She moved away before he could do anything about it, walking quick along the hall to the kitchen.

  He went after her, not as fast as he should’ve. Had to get her out of here one way or another, before she took it into her head to snoop around upstairs. Gallagher heard her, he’d start yelling. But Nick couldn’t catch hold of an idea, and by the time he was in the kitchen, she was already out of it, on her way to the back porch.

  His nose twitched. Oh man, she was right about the smell. Why hadn’t he—?

  He broke into a run to the porch.

  Too late. She was at the far wall, standing in front of the fucking thing that squatted there.

  “Rotten meat,” she said. “Nick, I told you the freezer doesn’t work right, doesn’t keep things frozen, and with the power off—”

  “Cat, don’t open it!”

  Opened it anyway. Looked inside.

  He got to her just as she started to scream.

  66

  Cam heard it. There was a momentary lull in the storm, and the cry came up thin and shrill through the old walls and floors, then cut off on a rising note. The wind … but it hadn’t sounded like the wind. Human cry. The voice of terror.

  He sat up on the mattress, still hugging himself with his chilled hands tucked into his armpits, and listened. Beat of the rain, skirl of the wind. Inside—nothing. Imagination, hallucination. A shriek out of the past, out of his nightmares.

  Fresh tremors set his teeth chattering. Time to move again. Stand up and walk hunched and shuffling like an old blind man, from one end of his cell to the other. Or crawl along the floor, with a stop to peer once more at the tiny, sodden piece of the outside world that was left to him. Keep moving as often and as long as he was able. Lie huddled too long on the hard mattress, and his joints would seize up, he’d lose all motor response, and eventually the cold would stop his heart. Not that that was such a bad way to die. Sure to be less painful than whatever Hendryx had in store for him. Later, that might be an option. Now he still had the rage, he still had the will to live.