Late at Night

by William Schoell

  Now that the two young women were dead, the rats seemed to have recovered from the frenzy they’d been caught up in before. They were hungry, but there wasn’t enough left of the girls to provide a satisfactory repast—not at all. The spiders, still not satiated, turned on the worms and began to consume them. The rats, gathering by the grating in the wall, waited patiently for their turn to consume the spiders.

  And when they were done, the bats would come down from their perches above, and put an end to the mangy, fattened rodents. Human flesh had been but one link in a strange and supernatural food chain.

  The grisly bones of the two young women glistened in the flickering light of the torches.

  Finally the torches went out, leaving the whole sub-basement sheathed in a cold and impenetrable darkness.

  Chapter 28

  “I don’t think you’re funny, that’s all!”

  Ernie and Andrea walked out of the ballroom to see what the commotion was about at the end of the hall. Cynthia was kicking up a row about something. Jerry was standing next to her looking sore and disgruntled, and both of. them were addressing their verbal shouts and glowering stares at Anton. Betty stood off to one side, looking vaguely astonished. Lynn and Everson were coming down the front stairs from the second story, holding hands like school kids.

  “Something the matter?” Everson asked as he reached the bottom of the staircase.

  Cynthia looked at the lawyer impudently, both hands on her waist. “This—” she referred to Anton, “this two-bit ivory tickler played a really rotten trick on us.” She looked back at Anton. “I must have lost five years’ growth because of you.”

  “What did he do?” asked Andrea. Ernie thought it better to keep out of it. He could tell Cynthia was the type who, if you didn’t take her side, would be your enemy for life.

  “It’s all right, Cynthia,” Jerry protested.

  “Let’s not go into it.” Ernie noticed that Jerry’s zipper was open, and wondered if it had any significance.

  Cynthia ignored the beachboy and went right on explaining. “Jerry and I were upstairs.” Jerry seemed to be holding his breath. “Looking around.” Jerry exhaled. “We were on the fourth floor, the back hallway. Suddenly somebody started banging on the wall and making these spooky noises. I mean, it really freaked us. What could possibly be behind the wall, we thought, and on the fourth floor yet!”

  Anton sighed dramatically and interrupted before she could go any further. Clearly he thought he could explain things better than she could.

  “I went into the west wing on the first floor. There was an entrance to it through the ballroom. I discovered a narrow flight of winding stairs and being intrigued, followed it to the top. Apparently the wing has been walled off from the main section of the house on all but the first floor. I walked along a corridor on the fourth story until I came to a wall, a barrier. I knew the house was wider than that. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly heard these grunts and groans coming from the other side of the barrier, like two spirits in the throes—”

  “That’s enough, mister,” Jerry said. “What are you-“

  “Two spirits in the throes of what?” Ernie asked, amused by Jerry’s irritability and discomfort. He knew Cynthia could care less about their activities being uncovered, but Jerry was another matter.

  “Oh never mind that,” Cynthia snapped. “We were necking, all right?”

  “Necking,” Anton whooped. “Come now. You were much farther along than that.” Jerry lifted up a fist in Anton’s direction, but the pianist only found his actions amusing. Lynn and Everson looked uncomfortable with the subject, and started to walk out the front door, muttering something about needing some air. Betty’s face was blushing bright red. Andrea appeared to be bored with the antics.

  “Irregardless,” Anton continued. “I wondered who could be making these noises, and wondering if there there a way into the main part of the house without having to go all the way back downstairs. So I knocked. Loudly. And called out. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Bullshit!” Cynthia roared. “You knew who it was and you were trying to scare the daylights out of us. You were going whooo whooo and you know it! I could recognize your voice anywhere.”

  “Talk about coitus interruptus,” Andrea jibed. Ernie was surprised at her bluntness. She poked her friend playfully in the ribs. “That’s what you get for making love in strange houses.”

  “We were not making love!” Jerry whined, a dismayed expression on his face.

  “Oh relax, Jerry,” Cynthia said, rolling her eyes towards heaven. “No one’s going to tell the Glo-worm on you. Come on. Let’s get out of this dump.”

  “What was it like in the other wing, Anton?” Betty asked shyly. “I was worried when you disappeared like that.”

  “Now, now, my dear. Anton Suffron is one man who can take care of himself. I am not at all threatened by imposing old houses, haunted or otherwise. Anyway, the other wing is more of the same. Lots of dirt, many rooms, rotting antique furniture. Dust, dust, dust. And the overpowering, omnipresent aroma of death, doom, and decay.”

  Betty giggled, took his hand impulsively. Anton gave her a warm smile.

  Or was it a sneer? Ernie wondered.

  They gathered outside the entrance to the house, and shook off the dust and smell of the mansion like dogs expelling water. The sun was high in the sky now; it was noon or later. Everson started calling for the housekeepers, who were nowhere in sight. “Emily? Joanne? We’re going back now. Where are you?”

  “Do you think they went back to the guest house?” Ernie asked.

  Everson shrugged. “Would they have gone by themselves? Do you think they could have found their way back alone?”

  “I don’t see why not. The trail may be overgrown, but if they were observant they could have followed it easily enough.”

  Everson ran a hand through his hair, rubbed his brow with thumb and forefinger thoughtfully. “Let’s wait awhile and make sure they aren’t somewhere around here. You’re probably right. But I’d rather they didn’t have to go back alone if we left without them.”

  The others began calling out the names of the girls while Ernie went around the side of the house, past the east wing and over to the back. When Andrea had freaked out on him again in the library, somehow he had expected stranger things to happen than Anton banging on the wall while Cyn and Jerry were making out. Before he’d had a chance to ask who “Horatio” was, to tell her what she’d said, Andrea was back to normal, taking him by the hand and chattering a mile a minute as she led him around the first floor.

  The weeds were really high in the rear of the house, long green stalks the size of a small man’s body. He pushed his way in, calling for the girls, but it was clear there was no point in his investigating further. He took a look upwards at the back of the mansion. It was a sinister-looking thing, all right. Gave him the creeps when he was outdoors more than it did when he was inside.

  He heard someone call out his name and saw that Andrea had followed his lead and gone round to the back from the other side. She waved to him, her hand barely visible above the overgrowth. Then she stepped back out of view altogether, heading toward the front. Ernie was just about to do the same when he looked at the bottom of the back wall and noticed a window or opening of some kind at ground level near the corner. Then he remembered: the house must have a basement. No one had thought to look down there. Still, did it matter? No one had gone into the attic either, had even bothered to look for the entrance to it. A half an hour in the hot, musty confines of that evil breathing house was all anyone could stand. Yet for some reason he thought there was something important about the cellar.

  It kept nagging at him, a compulsion to investigate. He had the oddest feeling that the girls were down there. Ridiculous, he told himself. They were too scared to even go into the house, let alone go down into the basement. No one had seen them walk into the mansion in any case. But what if there was another entrance? Theodore Langford
had built several secret passages, and there might have been a few even before the bootlegger took possession of the house. The girls had found one of those passages, he was sure of it.

  But how could he know that?

  It came back to him in a flash.

  The book.

  There had been something about two young woman getting trapped in the basement, getting —Oh My God! No, it couldn’t be true, couldn’t be real. He had dreamt it all, that had to be it. The book. Everything. Nothing but his imagination. It simply could not have been real.

  He didn’t remember what the protagonist—his literary counterpart—had done once it was mentioned that the housekeepers in the novel were missing, but he knew that nothing had happened to “him” so early in the story. He was safe enough. A part of his mind kept shouting—are you crazy? you’re acting as if that book was for real, as if it actually was a prediction of forthcoming events in real life—but he couldn’t afford to take chances. He had to find out for sure.

  The others were gathering at the end of the house, peering around the corner to look for him. “Are you coming?” Cynthia shouted impatiently. “We’d like to go back to the house.”

  Bitch. “Look, give me a minute,” he called. “I want to check something out.” He started running towards the others. “Has anyone got a flashlight of some kind. I just have this feeling …”

  Lynn was digging in her purse. Everson flapped a hand to his forehead. “I knew I should have brought one along. Luckily there was enough light inside the mansion.”

  “Ah ha!” Lynn held up a silver sliver. “I found one. A pen light. Will that do?” It seemed she had everything but the kitchen sink in her shoulder bag.

  “Good enough.” He grabbed it and ran back around the corner, ignoring the others’ pleas for an explanation.

  The window opened with one good shove. The glass was cracked and some of it fell out as he pushed the frame up on its hinges. He gingerly slid through the opening, dropped to the ground, stood up quickly. He heard squealing sounds from the darkness. Rats. Smelled like them, too.

  He tried to concentrate, to remember exactly what he had read in—what was it called?— Late At Night, but most of it eluded him. Only three things came through clearly. Housekeepers. Basement. Death.

  This was the basement, all right. There was a stone floor and brick walls—he could make out that much in the light from Lynn’s pen—and the whole place was so cluttered with boxes and covered furniture that you could hardly take a step without walking into something.

  This was only one room, he thought. Judging from the dimensions of the place he was in, it certainly did not run the width and breadth of the mansion, or even just the house’s main section. That meant there were probably other rooms, other cellars, maybe even subcellars or crawl spaces deep underground, for him to look into. He might be able to cut down on the time if he called the girls’ names out loud. Feeling just a little bit foolish, he started yelling: “Joanne. Emily. Joanne.”

  No answer. He moved towards the right, hoping he could find a door. Might as well look around while he was down here.

  Stumbling across and around the dust- and sheet-covered bric-a-brac he finally got to the far wall and started looking for an entrance to another room or a staircase to a level below. He shined the light across the brickface, searching carefully for any seams or cracks which would indicate an opening of some kind. Ah—there it was. A narrow, not very high wooden door slightly recessed in the wall.

  He opened the door. Two rats came hurling up a staircase behind it. He jumped back, startled, then laughed at his nervousness. The rats were probably more scared than he was.

  He started down the stairwell, somehow knowing this was it, the right way to go. The odor as he descended was indescribably foul and noxious. He was halfway down when he raised the light to study the ceiling of the chamber he was entering. He saw eyes glowing back at him, saw skittish movement up in the beams supporting the cellar above. Bats. What were they doing down here? They were supposed to be up in the attic, weren’t they? Everything on this island was confused.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs. The bats shifted in their places nervously, but otherwise stayed put, for which he was grateful. This sub-basement was more like a cavern than a room; maybe that’s what had attracted the bats.

  He called out the names of the girls, but there was no answer.

  He noticed that his feet made squishy sounds with each step he took; there was some kind of grayish mush spread out in different places on the moist dirt ground. His light hit upon a grating in the wall. He assumed it was a conduit for water in case the chamber got flooded. He could hear more rats scurrying back into the darkness, and saw the wiggling rears of little worms as they burrowed back into their hiding spots. There was a pile of boxes over in one corner, tumbled this way and that in disarray as if someone had walked into them. One box, flat on the ground, seemed half-full with a squirming mass. Ernie wanted to get a closer look, but couldn’t overcome his revulsion.

  And then he saw the skeletons.

  Two of them, bones picked clean, not a scrap or shred of meat or clothing anywhere. Lying in the dirt, they looked as if they had been there for years. Ernie bent down for a closer look.

  Skeletons. Two of them.

  Ernie put his hand to his mouth, and tried to chase away the horrible thoughts revolving in his brain.

  Something told him these skeletons were not nearly as old as they looked.

  PART FOUR

  Afternoon

  Chapter 29

  “I think we’d better go out and look for them,” Everson was saying. “Mrs. Plushing is half out of her mind with worry. Frankly, I’m a little concerned myself. I’ve never thought of Joanne and Emily as the kind of flibbertigibbets who’d play a joke like this.”

  The group was gathered in the guest house living room. Everyone was there but Anton and Gloria; Hans and Eric, who were repairing something outside; Mrs. Plushing, preparing dinner unassisted; and the two missing girls. The others had eaten a hasty lunch, coffee and sandwiches, then moved into the lounge. Lynn sat on the piano bench, and Everson stood at her side, discussing the problem with the group. Though he was outwardly calm, Everson’s eyes betrayed a creeping anxiety, as if the girls’ disappearance was only the beginning of their troubles.

  Ernie sat on the sofa next to Andrea and Cynthia. He wanted to open his mouth and tell everyone that somehow he sensed he had found the girls already, but there was nothing he could say to make his story sound believable. Two skeletons picked clean were all that remained of Joanne and Emily? Preposterous, they would say. And he wouldn’t have blamed them. They’d ask him how he knew this, and he would tell them that he remembered reading it in a book the night before, although it was all a little foggy. And they would say, What book? Where is it? And he would have to stare at them blankly and admit that he didn’t know where it was, wasn’t sure it had ever even existed, or if it was just the result of a fever in his brain.

  He desperately needed to talk about this with Andrea. The whole trip back from the old house she’d been discussing the mansion with Betty and Anton, as if she didn’t want to hear any more of what he had to say. Her behavior in the library had been so strange, that odd remark about “Horatio.” That was something else he had to get to the bottom of.

  “No one remembers seeing the girls after we got out of the house?” Everson was asking. “No one heard or saw anything?”

  “Have you asked Hans and Eric?” Cynthia said, biting the nails of her right hand with dogged intensity.

  “Yes, yes.” Everson waved away the suggestion with his arm. “They were here all afternoon. Saw nothing. Same for Gloria.”

  “They must have gotten lost,” Andrea said, shivering. “Poor things. Out there alone. And it’ll be getting dark soon.”

  “That’s why I suggest we get moving while there’s still some light. The girls must have wandered off the path at some point. They’re probably all r
ight. Given enough time they’d probably make it back safely on their own. But it’s getting later and they might have lost track of the time.”

  Ernie stood up. “How many in each search party?” he asked his cousin. “Or should we all concentrate on the path to the old house?”

  “Really,” Cynthia said with impatience, “aren’t we all being a bit serious about this? I mean, the girls decided to go off and do a little exploring, so what? So they’re dawdling a little to get out of peeling the potatoes for Mrs. P. Big deal. They’ll come back. We’re all acting as if its three in the morning on Saturday night and they haven’t come home from the prom yet. Give it awhile.”

  Everson paused, although there was clearly something on his mind. Finally he sighed and said, “You may have a point, Cynthia, but my feeling is, why take chances? If we are to believe what Mrs. Plushing has told us, Joanne and Emily can be very suggestible, excitable, emotional young women, appearances to the contrary. Who knows what trouble they might have gotten into?”

  Be all right, Ernie found himself ordering the housekeepers. Be all right. Let those skeletons belong to somebody else. Come home safe and sound. And alive. Please. Please. In the sane, rational portion of his brain, he sided with Cynthia. Mystical books that foretold death and then vanished did not exist in the real world. People were not skeletonized in mere hours in the real world. But in the dark recesses of his mind a question kept forming, and though he tried to shake it away, to dispel it, it simply would not disappear. Who says that this is the real world anymore? It was beginning to be more like a nightmare. And though he told himself he was letting the place’s reputation, the eerie atmosphere of the island, get the better of him, he still couldn’t shake the spectre of dread and paranoia that he felt. The house hadn’t really breathed, he knew that. It was just an illusion, that was all. The girls were not dead; they were just lost, playing, exploring. That was all. Now if he could only convince himself of that.