The rustling came again. It wasn’t subtle, not the sound of someone creeping around. Ray pulled his light from the pack, lay still waiting for the sound. When it came, he clicked it on. He flinched at the sight of movement from the corner of his eye.
Rat hole, indeed. He’d seen a rat. A cave rat.
After they’d emerged from the cave, Bodine had carefully stacked the bricks to cover the entrance. Ray asked why. “We wouldn’t want cave rats getting in The House. They’re hungry bastards with nothing to eat down there. They get in The Kitchen, who knows what kind of fit Karl will throw.”
Ray was relieved now to know that Karl was not up here stalking him. Except when he opened his pack to see if the food was still dry, he found that the little fuckers had pinched the last of his bread.
Dawn came cold and clear. Ray ate the last granola bar. It was soggy, but then they weren’t great dry either. Unless you were this hungry. The food did pleasant things to the blood flowing in his limbs.
The sun had burned halfway down The House. It wasn’t producing any heat here in the shade, but it was brilliant. That mercurial stone was back to its light mood. The swatch of road visible between the cliff and left side of the building hid in deep shadows.
Ray glimpsed something—a dark form moving across the gap towards the garage. His eyes opened wide, and he strained forward in the seconds he could see the figure, but the only detail was a hat. He’d never seen Karl wear a hat. He was too vain about that fine head of hair. Maybe he’d gone bald.
The figure had disappeared behind the cliff. Ray replayed the brief appearance, and his heart thundered. Though he hadn’t seen a face, he’d seen how that body moved: deliberate, relaxed, yet with every motion controlled. Slow, but not lazy, with great focus and purpose.
Like a big cat.
Karl. He’d come all this way to see him, not sure that he was even here. And there he’d been, if just for a few seconds. He must be in his sixties, but was still filled with vitality, which he would be. Because he was Karl.
Ray’s fevered thoughts were interrupted by the creak of the garage coming open, then a motor. A blue sedan passed through the gap, going downhill, Karl’s face just a dark blur. It was the car Ray had seen last night.
Blue. Though Karl insisted that every wall be painted white, he favored blue clothes. He wore new jeans and simple but elegant shirts. Ray couldn’t remember him wearing any other color. Being Karl, if blue was a favorite color, his car would have to be blue.
Ray had gotten what he came for. It was really time to go home now. He’d bring a six-pack over to Bodine’s, tell him all about it. Bodine would be amused. Ray would send Lou an email, saying he couldn’t finish. Karl, in turn, would intercept it, which would deliver Ray’s message to him: I’m done. Done with writing. He’d have to return the money to that publisher, find another place to live, get a job. But not today. He just had to leave.
Ray hauled the wet sleeping bag out onto the saddle and rolled it up. He hustled the pack onto his back, headed to the car and drove to the gate. He opened the pouch on the pack, afraid that the key wouldn’t be there, but it was. Good thinking not just putting it in a pocket.
He tweezed the lock through the gap like before, the key in his other hand. It had been trickier than he thought, and now the damned lock was wet from all the rain. Now that he was going, he really wanted to be gone. He impatiently tugged his shirt from his pants with his key hand and lifted it to dry the lock…and dropped the fucking key. It dinged against the metal and flew off someplace.
He looked all over the ground. It must have gone through the gap and fallen on the other side.
He stared up at the top of the fence. It was at least ten feet high.
He wasn’t climbing it. He was stumped.
Maybe it wasn’t quite time to leave. Why not? He’d seen Karl. But he didn’t know any more about his current state than he had before coming here, aside from the fact that he might be bald.
More importantly, the old doubt was back. Was Karl a living god or an asshole? Had Ray escaped by the skin of his teeth or made the biggest mistake of his life?
There was also Susan. The question of just what had happened to her had been eating at him, but now it was urgent. She’d been married with kids, had a good job. She’d walked away from the group and, according to Lorraine, never looked back. No matter how he tried, he could not picture that woman coming up to this spooky house to see Karl.
Karl might have blackmailed her, and maybe she’d sent him money. But why in the world would she come here? And why then would she crash on the way home?
Maybe there were no answers in that house. There certainly weren’t any back in Hudson.
He couldn’t live with the doubt any more. He had to know about Karl, and about Susan. The questions assumed visceral life in a tight ball of energy at his core. It radiated out into coiled muscles. Despair, dread, and certainly boredom were gone. There was just this urgency.
But what was he going to do?
He picked up his gear and headed back to the saddle.
Back in the cave, he stared at The House for hours, waiting for Karl to return. The caffeine headache was subsiding, but now he was really hungry. Thanks to the cave rat, his food was gone. The energy coursing through his body finally made sitting still holding the binoculars to his eyes unbearable. He had to move. He paced the saddle, listening for a car.
His fingers were twitching. He got the laptop out. There were only seven minutes left on the battery. But he’d forgotten something. Something important.
One day in the last months of the group, I was taking the trash out when Karl appeared. Was I holding the bags wrong? Had I missed the enlightened way to carry garbage? These were the same kind of dreary thoughts his appearance had evoked for years, but with a new edge of sarcasm. I still didn’t know consciously, but I was very close to leaving.
Karl deadpanned his face and drilled me with those eyes. In retrospect, it was his final shot at getting over on me. And it was a direct hit. “It’s time.”
My mind whirled. Time for what? Time to get your shit together. Time to get serious with the exercises—but how much more serious could anyone be in a day than five thousand attempts to follow a mantra that made no sense, a million instances of bearing down inside, pushing to reach Karl’s level?
Now, “It’s time” became my mantra. I was getting nowhere with it, grinding my mental gears until they slipped. All I could come up with was the argument: I’m not ready. I’m never going to be ready. But it no longer had me in a panic. It just made me tired.
Yet in no time, magically, it was time. Time to leave the group.
It’s time. Ray sat on the rock and looked at The House. He noticed his head nodding. His body had known the reason for staying. Now he did.
Time for what?
It was time to go in The House. Not with the writing, but for real. He needed to see just how Karl was living, if he had a group. And maybe there were clues to Susan’s last day.
Had he just made this decision, or was it made when that silhouette appeared in the window? Was it when he got in the car in Hudson, or when he first Googled Susan? Or even before? It didn’t matter.
But he didn’t want to see Karl face to face. He shuddered. He’d seen Karl leave a few hours ago. But what if he’d come back while Ray was in the quarry, preparing to leave himself? He wouldn’t have heard.
What if he did see Karl?
In the months after leaving the group, he’d often been visited by a vivid fantasy, a recurring waking dream.
Ray hides in the garden in back of The House. Karl inspects the trees—they’re growing too slowly! Ray sneaks up on Karl from behind, soundlessly, turning the tables. He slaps a hood soaked in chloroform over Karl’s big head. Karl slumps down. Ray drags him over to the well. He yanks off the heavy concrete top and lowers Karl down on a r
ope. Gets a ladder and climbs down there and sets him lying face up. Drowning would be too easy. Ray climbs out and replaces the lid.
Karl wakes in pitch black. When his seductive whisper doesn’t bring some minion to the rescue, he raises his voice and finally bellows. The sound is very undignified, very unlike Karl. He cowers in the dark, shivering in the cold and pondering his sins: wife-fucking and mind-fucking. Scamming money. Wasting years of his disciples’ precious youth in fruitless and self-destructive pursuit, all to feed his monstrous insatiable ego.
Every morning Ray throws him a sack of rotten meat and a bottle of water, to keep him alive for another day of torment.
The scenario had a fairy-tale cast to it, of kids fallen down wells, of monsters caught and punished. His face burned. Here was that volcano. It wasn’t extinct. And it had been here ever since the end of the group.
Still, he wasn’t facing Karl. Otherwise Ray could have marched up to the Front Door a couple of days ago and knocked. He wasn’t going in the Front Door, period. Karl would definitely keep it locked, and unlike Bodine, Ray was no lock-picker.
He needed to sneak in, when he was sure Karl wasn’t there.
How was he going to get in? He could come in from the cave exit out on the mountain. That would require finding it. All he knew was that it was somewhere out on the escarpment. That was an enormous area to search. Even if he found it…
The time Bodine took him into the cave, they hadn’t gotten that far, so there was no telling what the exit entailed. But what Ray had seen was bad enough. They’d turned around because he’d chickened out.
There was an easier way.
The Path.
Ray crawled to the edge of the cliff. Last night’s rain had melted more of the snow in the garden. All the stones of The Path were uncovered, except for ridges of snow at either end that had fallen from the cliff and rooftop.
He’d head into the woods like last night. Only this time, he’d slide down the rubble slope at the junction of the north and east cliffs. The east cliff was overhung at the bottom. Once he got there he should be able to work his way to the beginning of The Path, behind the ridge of snow. When he reached that grotto, he had to somehow get over the ridge and onto the stepping stones without leaving tracks. He’d deal with it when he got there. And then he’d creep into The Basement.
The Path solved the problem of crossing the garden. He could just picture Karl strolling out back, rubbing his hands together like he did, smiling up at the sun, time for the vernal equinox. It would not do for him to look down and see footprints in the snow.
Ray kicked himself. If he hadn’t been screwing around down in the quarry he’d know that Karl was still out. He could have been in and out by now. As it stood, he needed to wait until dark. If that light didn’t come on, then he was going in.
He crawled back into his lair. Five o’clock passed, then six, and Karl didn’t return. The sun flashed into the cave and was gone. It was almost dark. That light had come on last night by now, hadn’t it?
Ray scurried across the saddle and into the trees. He was using the flashlight but was starting to know the way.
He heard an engine and stopped. He couldn’t see the road from here, but he heard the screeling of the garage door. Karl had returned.
Ray scrambled back in a panic. What if he’d been halfway across The Path? There was no way he could have gotten back up here without being noticed. He could have been down there, and The House would have blocked the sound of the car. He could have come in The House, and Karl would be waiting for him, Ray, it’s been so long.
As Ray made his way across the saddle to his cave, light spilled from The Bedroom. Dumb. Karl had been out all day and come back in the evening. It was what people did.
The wind picked up, whisking away the last shreds of clouds. The stars were bright here in the country, and there were so many.
It was already chilly. It was going to be very cold tonight. The three-quarter moon glinted on the stones of The Path. He’d wait until the room went dark, then sneak across the garden and into the basement. But then what? He doubted there would be anything to see down there.
The light went out. He checked his phone. It was only just past seven-thirty, much too early for Karl to go to sleep. That light had been going out around eleven. Maybe Karl had a woman. Ray flashed on Susan in Karl’s bed. But how did this woman get in? Or was she living there?
One thing was certain. If she was there, Karl would have her cooking for him, using The Kitchen. And it had stayed dark.
He heard a faint sound. A door closing? He trained the binoculars to the left of The House. A shadow with a hat passed in the moonlight. The garage door creaked, and the engine started. A minute later, the car descended the hill. It was headed toward town. Was Karl going out to dinner?
Speaking of dinner, he could surely use some. He could have used some lunch too. He doubted Piedmont had turned into a place for fine dining. That pizza joint had been the only option back then. Karl would never eat there. Where was the nearest decent restaurant? Probably halfway to Albany. It didn’t matter. Ray couldn’t wait any longer.
He crawled out and bounded across the saddle towards the woods, which rustled in the wind. He leapt the crack. The rubble slope was steeper than it had looked. He scrambled, then half-fell down it, clutching at bushes so he wouldn’t fall on his face. He hunched over and inched along the recess in the cliff behind the snow bank. His back didn’t like it, but he soon reached the grotto and the head of The Path.
How could he get to it without leaving footprints in the snow ridge? It was too high and wide to jump over. He rolled over it on his back, landing with a foot on the first stone. He’d left an indentation in the snow, but no footprints. He hopscotched toward The House. Once he got going, he couldn’t stop. He didn’t miss any stones. He crossed the snow ridge on the other side the same way, rolling on his back. He was learning all kinds of new tricks.
Because of the cut of the old quarry, the basement lay underground on the south and west sides of The House. It was a walk-out here. The Path led to a door, which had always been locked. He tried it. It still was.
The wide eaves of the roof made it easy to walk between the snow bank and the back wall. He headed south and around the corner. The snow bank continued. What he hadn’t seen from high above was that the land sloped up here towards the west. And the gap between snow and house wall was filled with slick ice.
His goal was the casement window in its brick well, six feet away. The lip of the well protruded a foot above the slope and was free of ice. He placed one hand on the wall of The House, the other on the top of the snow bank and a foot on the ice but slipped down. If the car came back now he was screwed—he was in full sight of the road. He flopped down onto the ice, grabbed the lip of the well, and chinned himself up, and dropped into it. He lay for a moment on his stomach, panting furiously.
The well was four feet long and two wide. He peered into the window. The glass was very dusty, but a dim light flickered in there. Blood beat in his temples. Why?
Karl’s new group is meeting down there.
He knew this window because Ethan had once tasked him with cleaning it. When Ray had reached the top of the ten-foot ladder, he found that the latch was broken. He knew he should fix it, but it was a hundred years old, impossible to duplicate. So he’d left it. Who would ever know? With luck, no one had fixed it since.
The window opened in, which was good, because otherwise there’d be no room to both get it open and squeeze inside. He pushed against the glass, and it moved an inch. The latch was still broken. But as he tried to move it further it gave a loud creak. He stopped.
What the hell. He shoved it all the way in, making a screech you could hear down the valley. The window was only a foot high, but almost as wide as the well. It was overbuilt, like everything from a hundred years ago, and heavy. Ray sat up and
worked his bottom half in until he was sitting on the frame, facing The House, legs dangling into the basement, the sash resting on his thighs. He pushed himself further in. He needed to wrench himself around onto his stomach. It seemed impossible, but it was the only way to get in without ripping his face to shreds.
He did it, but not without making a great roar. He was on his stomach, panting, sweat streaming down his face. He was going to have a lot of bruises tomorrow.
He was halfway in, the window weighing on his butt, when he realized he was committed. The weight of the window had him pinned so that he could work his way in, but not out, like a finger in a Chinese puzzle.
He flinched at a sound. Where? Upstairs in The House, or was that a car going by? He listened. But there was only silence.
As he wormed further in, the sill cut into his belly and the weight of the window pressing on his back. A few inches more and gravity took over. He slid in and down, the front of his thighs scraping on the wall, the back of his head skating down the glass, and the sash giving it a good bump. Now he hung, his hands gripping the frame, the sash cutting into their backs. He was trying to figure out how to get them out without crushing his fingers when he fell.
Instinct whipped his arms down so his fingers wouldn’t get caught. A searing pain in the middle one. Instinct bent his legs so as to not break them when he hit. His knees slammed into the wall and knocked him backward. He landed on his butt.
His finger screamed. The nail was half torn off, blood steadily dripping. He’d caught it in the window. But he could move it, so it wasn’t broken. He squeezed it with his other hand to stop the bleeding. That worsened the pain and a wave of nausea convulsed his gut. He laid on the floor, on his back, and closed his eyes. The bricks were cold.
He smelled something he hadn’t in a long time, since the group. Incense. He opened his eyes and looked for the source of the light. He stood, and his head swam. It cleared, and he approached the light.
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 26