The Shore (Leisure Fiction)

by Robert Dunbar

  The miasma of rotten meat seemed to permeate the walls of the parlor, clinging to drapes stiff with dust. She stepped farther in, feeling that she didn't walk through the subaqueous gloom so much as float. Her gaze veered about wildly--transparent vinyl encased bulky aqua loveseats grouped around a teal sofa. Sectional pieces hemmed a glass coffee table. "What makes this room so...odd? Besides the colors, I mean." Everything increased her edginess. She turned completely around, her gaze shifting across plastic flowers in a ceramic vase, across throw pillows and a framed clown print. She found herself unable to imagine people who would have chosen this combination of items for their home. "It's not...not..."

  "Convincing?"

  "Right. Why is that?"

  "Don't know," he answered softly. "But I had the same feeling in the other room. No books. No magazines. No television set. Like nobody really lives here."

  "The kitchen looks the same way." She nodded. "Like a store display." Her words trailed away. "The blue room in the photos. This must be it." She edged closer to him. The vinyl runner on the floor made a shuffling crack, and air hissed beneath it.

  She stood close enough to see a vein throb in his neck, then followed his intent gaze to the stairs. Dark matter had lumped and dribbled down two of the steps, and the same crust swirled thinly on the vinyl.

  "What is that? Barry?"

  "Did you hear something just then?"

  "What?"

  Ignoring her, he peered upward into the gloom, and a tic began to tremble his right eyelid.

  "No. I didn't hear anything. Barry? Don't do anything. Please. We need help." She moved away to pick up a baby blue phone. "Dead. Of course."

  Behind her, a stair squeaked.

  "Please, Barry," she spoke without turning. "Don't go up there." It felt like the beginning of an old, familiar nightmare. They would go upstairs, she knew. Nothing could stop them now. And nothing would ever be the same.

  Barely aware of what she was doing, she followed him. Her feet moved, and the stairs croaked sluggishly. Her damp palm squealed on the banister, a thin treble.

  "There's more of it." He gestured with the back of his hand, indicating a dark patch on the baseboard. The plastic runner ended at the top; so did the faint light. He stepped soundlessly onto thick carpeting.

  She followed, straining her eyes in the dimness. Closed doors lined the hall. She swung her service revolver around like a flashlight.

  "Stay behind me," he whispered, brandishing the crowbar.

  At the end of the hall, he swung open a door, and hinges shrilled. She followed him in, then paused, amazed.

  Skirted dolls ranged along a window seat, and ashen light soaked through the curtains, turning the whole room a deep pink that matched the ruffled bed canopy. He yanked open the closet door, then knelt to peer under the bed. "Watch your back," he told her.

  He pushed past her back into the hall and paused at the next door as though steeling himself, then jerked it open. Hanging from the ceiling, a model plane tilted in the sudden breeze. Squeezing in behind him, she saw pennants on the walls, a neat stack of baseball cards on a shelf above a small desk. Again, she watched him give the room a cursory search. "It's trying too hard," she prompted. "Same as the others. Like somebody's idea of how a boy's room should look."

  "I said, watch your back. This isn't a game."

  She gritted her teeth and followed as he returned to the hall.

  Faint illumination from the two open doorways fought back the shadows. In the huge bathroom, she glimpsed a glass-walled shower and a double sink, the floor padded with thick carpeting even here. As he checked the shower, she twisted a knob on one of the sinks, and the faucet hissed to silence. "Water's off too," she muttered. "I don't get the feeling anyone's ever planning on coming back here. Do you? Barry?" She wandered back into the hall. "Where'd you go?"

  He stood at the next door, his shoulder pressed against the wood, and he pounded with his fist against the top of the frame.

  "What is it? I can't make it out. Oh." Metal spikes angled deep into the wood. "Why would anyone nail a door shut?" In the shadows, she could barely see his face. "Barry?"

  At the end of the hall, the remaining door sank in deepening murk.

  "What time is it now?" Her voice broke. "I think we should leave." She caught his sleeve as he moved toward it. "Look." At their feet, smears on the carpet broadened and disappeared beneath the door. "You know what happened here, don't you? Answer me."

  As he twisted the doorknob, he looked down to find her hand on his arm, small but surprisingly strong.

  Fiercely, she whispered up at him. "Why won't you tell me?"

  The door swung open. Within lay madness. A dim blue glow suffused the room, but in the corners, shadows spread like mold. The massive headboard lay in splinters, strewn with hunks of mattress. A shattered bureau--drawers tilting crazily--oozed clotted garments across the carpet. Crusted palm prints splayed desperately up the speckled wallpaper, and she blinked at the brown imprints of spread fingers. A stain spread across the ceiling, and she stared up at the blur until she seemed to discern a shape.

  "Worse than I thought." His voice had become a hoarse creak.

  She kept staring upward.

  "Further along than I realized," he continued. "There'll be no collecting him. Have to be put down."

  "The shape." She kept shaking her head and pointing at the ceiling. "It must be because the light's so bad, right? I mean, nothing could throw someone to the ceiling like that, could it? Not even an ape or something, right?"

  "Don't look at it." Taking her by the shoulder, he marched her out of the room, slamming the door behind them.

  Even in the dark hallway, she could see that his face had gone terribly white. "Tell me what's going on." She held on to his jacket.

  "I want you to go outside and wait in the jeep. Do you understand?" His eyes tracked to the nailed door. "There's not much light left. I have to check that last room. If he comes back..."

  "No."

  "I want you to..."

  "No." She broke away from him. "Whatever it is, you do it while I'm here."

  He only paused a moment. "It's getting late." Now almost no light filtered through the open doors at the end of the hall.

  She watched him. The hollow blows echoed. Grunting, he struggled with the crowbar. A nail squealed out, plopped softly to the carpet, then another, and at last he hurled his weight against the frame. With a splintering crash, it burst.

  "Wait! It's too dark in there! Where are you?" Her footsteps clicked loudly as she followed him. "How can it be so black?" Gradually, she made out a mattress in the middle of a bare wooden floor. "Barry? Look--the windows are boarded up. And I think the glass is painted over."

  Across the room, a flashlight clicked on, and light rushed along the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Rafters had been crudely exposed, the wood blotched with plaster, and large hooks protruded from the beams. Near the mattress, clothing spilled out of a cardboard carton.

  By the light of the flashlight, he examined the contents of a tight closet, and she watched him paw through huge sweatshirts and pants so broad in the seat as to appear comical.

  Completely rigid, he stared at something on the back of the closet door.

  "What is it?"

  A worn-looking leather belt swayed on a nail. When she reached past him for it, he caught her wrist. She pulled her hand away but didn't try to touch the strap again. Alongside it dangled four pieces of rough cord.

  "Hold this," he said. Passing her the flashlight, he unhooked a piece of the rawhide cord and tested its strength.

  "Barry?"

  He knelt by the mattress.

  She moved the beam. Even in this dimness, she could see the stains...and the metal hook in the floor. She realized that other hooks had been screwed into the boards. The two at the bottom of the mattress had an extension cord twisted around them.

  "This is the only room in the house that's honest, isn't it?" she asked him softly. The
light played across a complicated knot.

  The piece of rawhide still dangled from his hand. Abruptly, he wrapped it around one of the hooks and yanked.

  "What are you doing?" Sudden perspiration crawled coldly at the roots of her hair.

  He tugged harder. With a groan, he strained against the cord, the muscles of his arm and neck bulging visibly.

  "Please? You're scaring me."

  When he let go of the cord, it raveled harmlessly on the floor.

  "What is it?" She trained the beam on his face. His flesh had gone a leaden gray, and moisture stood out like pellets on his forehead. "Have you been here before?" She let the light slide past him and play along the wall. On the crude shelves of raw pine, objects had been spaced evenly--a candle, oddly molded at the base, a long-necked wine bottle, smeared with something oily, a box of fireplace matches, a length of rope--the spacing and arrangement seemed strangely formal, almost ritualistic.

  "This room." His voice startled her. "I know...what it...I've seen..."

  A miserable heat suffused him, and she felt it radiate from his face, from his glittering stare. She watched him stumble away to grip the door frame, and the light flitted after him. The bones of his knuckles stood out white, and she saw a tensing shock tremble through him. After a moment, he turned to her.

  "You don't have to tell me now." She reached out, stalling his tremor with a brush of her hand. "Come on, we're leaving." She pulled him toward the door. "Here, hold the flashlight." She led him into the hall. "What?"

  His lips writhed silently.

  "Tell me later," she said. "Take it. Hold the light steady." She guided him down the creaking stairs.

  Shadows blanketed the walls now, enfolding the parlor in sliding layers that overlapped and deepened on the floor. "No, not the front," she said. "Let's go back out the way we came in." The light moved ahead of them, uselessly picking out the dust on the glass coffee table, the fur of grime on the petals of the plastic blossoms.

  "Listen," he hissed.

  They stopped moving, and the sound filtered to her--a softly grating slither. It came from beneath their feet.

  "The basement," she whispered. The damp noise rasped like broken glass against her flesh. "We never checked the basement."

  He touched her wrist. Though he moved as cautiously as a soldier in a minefield, a floorboard groaned beneath him.

  She couldn't make her feet move, and she held one hand across her mouth as he drifted away from her. The room seemed to stir, and the rustling noise drifted up from beneath her feet with a soft rush. Finally, she lurched forward.

  "Kit!" He caught at her as she pushed past him into the kitchen.

  Gloom had settled through the jagged glass, and the basement door stood in the deepest corner. She gripped the revolver with both hands now.

  He kept one hand on her shoulder. "We don't mean to hurt you."

  Her spine went rigid. For a terrible moment, she thought he spoke to her; then she realized the soft clamor below had ceased.

  "We want to help." He called through the basement door. "Do you understand? I know what you are."

  "Jesus." Suddenly, the revolver weighed too much for her to hold it steady.

  "We saw the room upstairs." In front of her now, he edged closer to the door. "Can you hear me? I know what they did to you, and I understand why." Gently, he pressed the palm of his hand to the wood. "Let me help you." His voice splintered, went ragged. "Let it be over. There's a place I can take you."

  Behind them, wind hissed through broken glass.

  "Don't open that door, Barry."

  "Can you hear me?"

  "I'm warning you. I'll shoot anything that moves."

  "Do you understand me?" As he twisted the doorknob, a scrambling noise receded. "I'm coming down now."

  "No!" Her revolver trembled wildly.

  "Don't be afraid."

  The hinge shrieked. The corrupt damp of rotting timbers seeped into the kitchen, slowly at first. Then it poured upward, a geyser of stench, unpurified by frost, issuing up from the pit.

  "This is the real house, isn't it?" Her voice became almost inaudible. "Like that room upstairs."

  "I'm coming now." He angled the flashlight downward, but the faint oblong only spilled across the first few steps, revealing corroded wood and crumbling plaster walls. At the bottom, filthy darkness writhed.

  Her face had hardened into a numb mask, and she seemed to have lost all feeling in her arms and legs. No sound reached her ears save a tiny scrabbling. It climbed, growing louder, a terrible murmur that struggled toward clarity, and she knew she'd been hearing it all along, ever since she'd entered this house, aware of it only on the edges of her consciousness.

  The steps sagged softly beneath his tread. In the beam, tiny creatures seethed and darted, soft, bloated bodies hopping off the stairs as the light found them. The boldest one stood its ground on the bottom step, its quivering snout smeared with foulness. Dainty paws dug at the feast.

  The pistol hung uselessly at her side. "Oh dear Jesus." She was conscious of making a wheezing sound, of blood circulating in the veins of her scalp.

  He pounded his fist on the wall until the squirming gray mass receded, exposing the thing they'd gorged upon.

  Over his shoulder, she glimpsed it: the snarling teeth, the blackened talons held up as though it were still trying to defend itself. Rigid darkness looped through the exposed ribs. And Kit began to scream.

  XVI

  "I always wondered how I'd handle a real crisis." Pacing into the wind, she sipped coffee through a hole in the plastic lid. "Now I know."

  Below them, a pipe cut across the narrow beach into the surf, and receding waves revealed a slime trail in the mud.

  "You did okay."

  "I froze."

  "You're not the type that freezes. You're more dangerous than that."

  "Well, I'm freezing now." Shivering in the early morning light, she tried to laugh.

  "Charging in that way. Typical rookie maneuver." He shook his head. "Trying to prove something. Good way to get killed."

  "I..."

  "Think about it. Why did you go to that house alone?"

  "Why did you?" She grinned. "Exactly. It's my job too. The difference is I don't do mine very well."

  "You did okay." By now his words had become a comforting litany, having been repeated over and over since the previous evening. After their grisly discovery in the Chandler basement, she'd seemed to go numb, calmly allowing him to lead her back outside. She'd even surprised him by insisting--in a faint monotone--that they pay a call on the closest neighboring house. He'd thought it best not to argue. After a flash of Kit's badge, an elderly woman had peered nervously into the twilight. The woman told them she'd seen no one entering or leaving the Chandler house in months but had indicated she found nothing unusual in this. "They mostly come and go at night, and, Officer, the sounds from that house, the noises." Then she'd clapped a hand over her mouth.

  Kit sipped her coffee, and the wind stung at her from across the boardwalk. "We haven't any choice now."

  "We've been all through this." He stalked around her. "You said it yourself. He's got a hostage. He'll kill her if he sees uniforms. How many more times can I say it?"

  Her voice rose sharply. "But the body..."

  "Could have been anyone, Kit. Even Ramsey himself."

  "No--he called me."

  "How much could you really tell about whoever called you?"

  "It was him. It had to be." Her fingers went to her temples, as though she could push away the headache. The previous night came back in vividly chaotic flashes: she could remember the sudden rush of cold when he'd gotten out to retrieve his own car from its hiding place off a side road; then blankness settled. She recalled nothing of the drive home, except perhaps for his headlights, icy and remote in the mirror. Reflexes alone must have guided her. By the time they'd reached the duplex, the shaking had started, and she remembered his arm around her shoulder, helping her up t
he stairs. She'd barely resisted when he made her take the last of the Xanax he found in her medicine cabinet. He'd spent the night on her sofa. Vaguely, as from a dream, she retained some impression of his making a phone call in the middle of the night. Before dawn, she'd come anxiously awake to find him sitting at her kitchen table with the cat glaring at him from the windowsill. That's when they'd decided to head out to the boardwalk. She couldn't remember why.

  "Was it you who broke into Chandler's office?" she asked. Bleak sunlight glimmered down on them, and despite the chill, she suddenly needed to walk. "Before me, I mean?"

  "Somebody broke in?" He met her stare. "No, I swear it wasn't me."

  "I don't believe you," she told him simply as she moved to the rail.

  "Kit..."

  "Look at that sky. It's going to be a pretty day. You think it might warm up a little?" She squinted toward the end of the jutting pier. "I can remember watching the old men fishing out there when I was little." Like fragments of mica, sunlight glinted from the water. She sipped more coffee, then tossed the remnants of a doughnut at the scattered pigeons. With a rapid slapping, the birds rose at her movement, then settled back, twitching along the walkway.

  He also surveyed the dock and turned his collar up against the wind. "Why does it go so far out?"

  Beyond the edge of the dock, gulls wheeled.

  "Didn't used to." Shading her eyes, she watched the birds. "It's even low tide now. The sea gains a little ground every year. I used to play right underneath here, right where the water is. Can you believe it? I remember the sand always felt cool, like a slice of winter. And the old men had to fish from the very end." She paced along the rail, the wind blowing the short curls of her hair into a bright tangle. "You've been lying to me all along."

  A tern shrieked, and the laughter of gulls echoed from the beach.

  "Kit, I..." He seemed to concentrate on getting the lid back on his coffee. "Uh...why are you looking at me like that?"

  "I was just thinking--I've never seen you out in the sun before."

  "What's the verdict?"