by Dean Koontz
He said, “Maybe he didn’t know exactly why he wanted a secret place then. I hope that’s true. I hope he married my mother and conceived me with her before he’d ever had any desires like…like those he satisfied here. However, I suspect he knew why he needed the rooms below. He just wasn’t ready to use them. Like when he was struck by an idea for a painting, sometimes he’d think about it for years before the work began.”
She looked yellow in the glow of the bug light, but he sensed that she was as pale as bleached bone. She stared at the closed door that led from the vestibule to the basement stairs. Nodding at it, she said, “He considered that, down there, to be part of his work?”
“Nobody knows for sure. That’s what he seemed to imply. But he might have been playing games with the cops, the psychiatrists, just having his fun. He was an extremely intelligent man. He was able to manipulate people so easily. He enjoyed doing that. Who knows what was going through his mind…really?”
“But when did he start this…this work?”
“Five years after they married. When I was only four years old. And it was another four years before she discovered it…and had to die. The police figured it out by identifying the…remains of the earliest victims.”
Rocky had slipped around them to the basement entrance. He was sniffing pensively and unhappily along the narrow crack between the door and the threshold.
“Sometimes,” Spencer said, “in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep, I think of how he held me on his lap, wrestled with me on the floor when I was five or six, smoothed my hair….” His voice choked with emotion. He took a deep breath and forced himself to continue, for he had come here to continue to the end, to be finished with it at last. “Touching me…with those hands, those hands, after those same hands had…under the barn…doing those terrible things.”
“Oh,” Ellie said softly, as if stricken by a small stab of pain.
Spencer hoped that what he saw in her eyes was an understanding of what he’d carried with him all these years and a compassion for him—not a deepening of her revulsion.
He said, “Makes me sick…that my own father ever touched me. Worse…I think about how he might have left a fresh corpse down in the darkness, a dead woman, how he might have come out of his catacombs with the scent of her blood still in his memory, up from that place and into the house…upstairs into my mother’s bed…into her arms…touching her….”
“Oh, my God,” Ellie said.
She closed her eyes as though she couldn’t bear to look at him.
He knew he was part of the horror, even if he had been innocent. He was so inextricably associated with the monstrous brutality of his father that others couldn’t know his name and look at him without seeing, in their mind’s eye, young Michael himself standing in the corruption of the slaughterhouse. Through the chambers of his heart, despair and blood were pumped in equal measure.
Then she opened her eyes. Tears glimmered in her lashes. She put her hand to his scar, touching him as tenderly as he had ever been touched. With five words she made clear to him that in her eyes he was free of all stain: “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”
Even if he were to live one hundred years, Spencer knew he could never love her more than he loved her then. Her caring touch, at that moment of all moments, was the greatest act of kindness that he had ever known.
He only wished that he was as sure of his utter innocence as Ellie was. He must recapture the missing moments of memory that he had come there again to find. But he prayed to God and to his own lost mother for mercy, because he was afraid he would discover that he was, in all ways, the son of his father.
Ellie had given him the strength for whatever waited ahead. Before that courage could fade, he turned to the basement door.
Rocky looked up at him and whimpered. He reached down, stroked the dog’s head.
The door was streaked with more grime than it had been when last he’d seen it. Paint had peeled off in places.
“It was closed, but it was different from this,” he said, going back to that far July. “Someone must have scrubbed away the stains, the hands.”
“Hands?”
He raised his hand from the dog to the door. “Arcing from the knob across the upper part…ten or twelve overlapping prints made by a woman’s hands, fingers spread…like the wings of birds…in fresh blood, still wet, so red.”
As Spencer moved his own hand across the cold wood, he saw the bloody prints reappear, glistening. They seemed as real as they had been on the long-ago night, but he knew that they were only birds of memory taking flight again in his own mind, visible to him but not to Ellie.
“I’m hypnotized by them, can’t take my eyes off them, because they convey an unbearable sense of the woman’s terror…desperation…frantic resistance to being forced out of this vestibule and into the secret…the secret world below.”
He realized that he had placed his hand on the doorknob. It was cold against his palm.
A tremor shook years off his voice, until he sounded younger to himself: “Staring at the blood…knowing that she needs help…needs my help…but I can’t go forward. Can’t. Jesus. Won’t. I’m just a boy, for God’s sake. Barefoot, unarmed, afraid, not ready for the truth. But somehow, standing here as scared as I am…somehow I finally open the red door….”
Ellie gasped. “Spencer.”
Her sound of surprise and the weight she gave to his name caused Spencer to pull back from the past and turn to her, alarmed, but they were still alone.
“Last Tuesday night,” she said, “when you were looking for a bar…why did you happen to stop in the place where I worked?”
“It was the first one I noticed.”
“That’s all?”
“And I’d never been there before. It always has to be a new place.”
“But the name.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending.
She said, “The Red Door.”
“Good God.”
The connection had escaped him until she made it.
“You called this the red door,” she said.
“Because…all the blood, the bloody handprints.”
For sixteen years, he had been seeking the courage to return to the living nightmare beyond the red door. When he had seen the cocktail lounge on that rainy night in Santa Monica, with the red-painted entrance and the name spelled out above it in neon—THE RED DOOR—he could not possibly have driven past. The opportunity to open a symbolic door, at a time when he had not yet found the strength to return to Colorado and open the other—and only important—red door, had been irresistible to his subconscious mind even while he remained safely oblivious to the implications on a conscious level. And by passing through that symbolic door, he’d arrived in this vestibule behind the pine cabinet, where he must turn the cold brass knob that remained unwarmed by his hand, open the real door, and descend into the catacombs, where he had left a part of himself more than sixteen years ago.
His life was a speeding train on parallel rails of free choice and destiny. Though destiny seemed to have bent the rail of choice to bring him to this place at this time, he needed to believe that choice would bend the rail of destiny tonight and carry him off to a future not in a rigorous line with his past. Otherwise, he would discover that he was fundamentally the son of his father. And that was a fate with which he could not live: end of the line.
He turned the knob.
Rocky edged back, out of the way.
Spencer opened the door.
The yellow light from the vestibule revealed the first few treads of concrete stairs that led down into darkness.
Reaching through the doorway and to the right, he found the switch and clicked on the cellar light. It was blue. He didn’t know why blue had been chosen. His inability to think in harmony with his father and to understand such curious details seemed to confirm that he was not like that hateful man in any way that mattered.
Going down the steep stairs to the cellar,
he switched off the flashlight. From now on, the way would be lighted as it had been on a certain July and in all the July-spawned dreams that he had since endured.
Rocky followed, then Ellie.
That subterranean chamber was not the full size of the barn above, only about twelve by twenty feet. The furnace and hot-water heater were in a closet upstairs, and the room was utterly vacant. In the blue light, the concrete walls and floor looked strangely like steel.
“Here?” Ellie asked.
“No. Here he kept files of photographs and videotapes.”
“Not…”
“Yes. Of them…of the way they died. Of what he did to them, step by step.”
“Dear God.”
Spencer moved around the cellar, seeing it as he had seen it on that night of the red door. “The files and a compact photographer’s development lab were behind a black curtain at that end of the room. There was a TV set on a plain black metal stand. And a VCR. Facing the television was a single chair. Right here. Not comfortable. All straight lines, wood, painted sour-apple green, unpadded. And a small round table stood beside the chair, where he could put a glass of whatever he was drinking. Table was painted purple. The chair was a flat green, but the table was glossy, highly lacquered. The glass that he drank from was actually a piece of fine cut-crystal, and the blue light sparkled in all its bevels.”
“Where did he…” Ellie spotted the door, which was flush with the wall and painted to match. It reflected the blue light precisely as the concrete reflected it, becoming all but invisible. “There?”
“Yes.” His voice was even softer and more distant than the cry that had awakened him from July sleep.
Half a minute didn’t so much pass as crumble away like unstable ground beneath him.
Ellie came to his side. She took his right hand and held it tightly. “Let’s do what you’ve come to do, then get the hell out of this place.”
He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
He let go of her hand and opened the heavy gray door. There was no lock on their side of it, only on the far side.
That July night, when Spencer had reached this point, his father had not yet returned from chaining the woman in the abattoir, so the door had been unlocked. No doubt, once the victim had been secured, the artist would have retraced his path to the vestibule above, to close the knotty-pine doors from within the cabinet; then from the secret vestibule, he would have rolled the back of the cupboard into place; he would have locked the upper door from the cellar stairs, would have locked this gray door from inside. Then he would have returned to his captive in the abattoir, confident that no screams, regardless of how piercing, could penetrate to the barn above or to the world beyond.
Spencer crossed the raised concrete sill. An exposed switch box was fixed to the rough masonry of a brick-and-plaster wall. A length of flexible metal conduit rose from it into shadows. He snapped the switch, and a series of small lights winked on. They were suspended from a looped cord along the center of the ceiling, leading out of sight around a curved passageway.
Ellie whispered, “Spencer, wait!”
When he looked back into the first basement, he saw that Rocky had returned to the foot of the stairs. The dog trembled visibly, gazing up toward the vestibule behind the file-room cupboards. One ear drooped, as always, but the other stood straight up. His tail was not tucked between his legs, but held low to the floor, and it wasn’t wagging.
Spencer stepped back into the cellar. He pulled the pistol from under his belt.
Shrugging the Micro Uzi off her shoulder, taking a two-hand grip on the weapon, Ellie eased past the dog, onto the steep stairs. She climbed slowly, listening.
Spencer moved with equal care to Rocky’s side.
In the vestibule, the artist had stood to the side of the open door, and Roy had stood next to him, both with their backs pressed to the wall, listening to the couple in the cellar below. The stairwell added a hollow note to the voices as it funneled them upward, but the words were nonetheless clear.
Roy had hoped to hear something that would explain the man’s connection with the woman, at least a crumb of information about the suspected conspiracy against the agency and the shadowy organization that he had mentioned to Steven in the gallery a few minutes ago. But they spoke only of the famous night sixteen years in the past.
Steven seemed amused to be eavesdropping on that of all possible conversations. He turned his head twice to smile at Roy, and once he raised one finger to his lips as if warning Roy to be quiet.
There was something of an imp in the artist, a playfulness that made him a good companion. Roy wished he didn’t have to return Steven to prison. But he could think of no way, in the currently delicate political climate of the country, to free the artist either openly or clandestinely. Dr. Sabrina Palma would again have her benefactor. The best Roy could hope for was that he would find other credible reasons to visit Steven from time to time or even to obtain temporary custody again for consultation in other field operations.
When the woman had whispered urgently to Grant—“Spencer, wait!”—Roy had known that the dog must have sensed their presence. They had made no telltale noise, so it could only be the damned dog.
Roy considered easing past the artist to the edge of the open door. He could try a shot to the head of the first person who came out of the stairwell.
But it might be Grant. He didn’t want to waste Grant until he had some answers from him. And if it was the woman who was shot dead on the spot, Steven wouldn’t be as motivated to help extract information from his son as he would be if he knew that he could look forward to bringing her to a state of angelic beauty.
Peach in. Green out.
Worse: Assuming that the pair below were still armed with the submachine gun they had used to destroy the stabilizer of the chopper in Cedar City, and assuming that the first one across the threshold would be armed with that piece, the risk of a confrontation at this juncture was too great. If Roy missed with his attempted head shot, the burst of return fire from the Micro Uzi would chop him and Steven to pieces.
Discretion seemed wise.
Roy touched the artist on the shoulder and gestured for him to follow. They could not quickly reach the open back of the cupboard and then slip through the pine cabinet doors into the room beyond, because to get there they would have to cross in front of the cellar stairs. Even if neither of the pair below was far enough up the stairs to see them, their passage through the center of the room, directly under the yellow light, would ensure that their darting shadows betrayed them. Instead, staying flat against the concrete blocks to avoid casting shadows into the room, they sidled away from the door to the wall directly opposite the entrance from the cupboard. They squeezed into the narrow space behind the displaced back wall of the cupboard, which Grant or the woman had rolled into the vestibule on a set of sliding-door tracks. That movable section was seven feet high and more than four feet wide. There was an eighteen-inch-wide hiding space between it and the concrete wall. Standing at an angle between them and the cellar door, it provided just enough cover.
If Grant or the woman or both of them came into the vestibule and crept to the gaping hole in the back wall of the cupboard, Roy could lean out from concealment and shoot one or both of them in the back, disabling rather than killing them.
If they came instead to look into the narrow space behind the dislocated guts of the cabinet, he would still have to try for a head shot before they opened fire.
Peach in. Green out.
He listened intently. Pistol in his right hand. Muzzle aimed at the ceiling.
He heard the stealthy scrape of a shoe on concrete. Someone had reached the top of the stairs.
Spencer remained at the bottom of the stairs. He wished that Ellie had given him a chance to go up there in her place.
Three steps from the top, she paused for perhaps half a minute, listening, then proceeded to the landing at the head of the stairs. She stood for
a moment, silhouetted in the rectangle of yellow light from the upper room, framed in the blue light of the lower room, like a stark figure in a modernistic painting.
Spencer realized that Rocky had lost interest in the room above and had slipped away from his side. The dog was at the other side of the cellar, at the open gray door.
Above, Ellie crossed the threshold and stopped just inside the vestibule. She looked left and right, listening.
In the cellar, Spencer glanced at Rocky again. One ear pricked, head cocked, trembling, the dog peered warily into the passageway that led to the catacombs and on to the heart of the horror.
Speaking to Ellie, Spencer said, “Looks like fur face is just having a bad case of the heebie-jeebies.”
From the vestibule, she glanced down at him.
Behind him, Rocky whined.
“Now he’s at the other door, ready to make a puddle if I don’t keep looking at him.”
“Seems to be okay up here,” she said, and she descended the stairs again.
“The whole place spooks him, that’s all,” Spencer said. “My friend here is easily frightened by most new places. This time, of course, it’s with damned good reason.”
He engaged the safety on the pistol and again tucked it under the waistband of his jeans.
“He’s not the only one spooked,” Ellie said, shouldering the Uzi. “Let’s finish this.”
Spencer crossed the threshold again, from the cellar into the world beyond. With each step forward, he moved backward in time.
They left the VW Microbus on the street to which the man on the phone had directed Harris. Darius, Bonnie, and Martin walked with Harris, Jessica, and the girls across the adjacent park toward the beach a hundred and fifty yards away.
No one could be seen within the discs of light beneath the tall lampposts, but bursts of eerie laughter issued from the surrounding darkness. Above the rumble and slosh of the surf, Harris heard voices, fragmentary and strange, on all sides, near and far. A woman who sounded blitzed on something: “You’re a real catman, baby, really a catman, you are.” A man’s high-pitched laughter trilled through the night, from a place far to the north of the unseen woman. To the south, another man, old by the sound of him, sobbed with grief. Yet another unspottable man, with a pure young voice, kept repeating the same three words, as if chanting a mantra: “Eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues…” It seemed to Harris that he was shepherding his family across an openair Bedlam, through a madhouse with no roof other than palm fronds and night sky.