He grimaced, turned back to the house, saw a car hidden beneath a canvas tarp in the driveway as he chewed it over. After a moment, he grabbed the pump gun and got out. He couldn’t wait any longer. Couldn’t take the chance. It was about the girl, he told himself.
He crossed the street, shielding the Winchester beneath the long raincoat. As he approached the car in the drive, he spotted a woman pushing a stroller along the sidewalk two doors down. Teddy lifted the tarp, his eyes taking in the holes in the sheet metal, the smashed rear window. Then he noticed the sound of a telephone, ringing endlessly from inside the house. This was the place. The one with the shot-up BMW in the drive.
He stepped up onto the porch and checked the mailbox, but couldn’t find a name. Just the initials, E.T., printed in gold. Eddie Trisco. Evan Train. The extraterrestrial head case who’d landed from some black hole on the other side of Mars.
The woman passed the house with her stroller. She glanced at Teddy and seemed nervous.
“Where do you live?” he asked, following her eyes to the gun.
Her face locked up, and she wouldn’t answer.
“You need to go home,” he said. “Check your doors and call the police.”
She hurried down the sidewalk. As she passed out of view, Teddy noticed the house on the corner with the satellite dish on the roof. The bricks had been mortared and new windows installed. It looked like the family was living in the home despite the renovations. A little boy, maybe six years old, stood before a window on the first floor looking outside. After a moment, his father joined him. Teddy knew they were too far away to see the gun, yet they were staring. Maybe keeping an eye on Trisco’s house was just part of their routine. Maybe E.T. didn’t exactly blend.
Teddy turned back to the house. When he tried the door, the knob turned but the deadbolt was locked. He moved to the window and looked inside. He could see the entryway rug pushed against the wall and half turned over. What looked like a rag at first glance had been tossed on the floor. As he mulled it over, Teddy realized it wasn’t a rag at all. He was looking at the signs left behind from a struggle. The rag was a piece of someone’s dress.
Rosemary’s dress.
He slammed the butt of the rifle into the window, numb to the sound and feel of shattering glass, and climbed in. His eyes ate through the room in edgy gulps. As he walked through the dining room and kitchen and found a den, he tried to ignore the ringing phone. Still, the first floor was clear.
He raised the pump gun and headed upstairs. He went through every room in the dim light until he found Eddie’s bedroom at the end of the hall. A lamp was on. He could see a towel thrown on the bed beside the extraterrestrial’s clothing. Teddy moved into the room, lowering a hand to the towel as he eyed the closet. The cloth was damp. Eddie had recently showered and changed. Curiously, the windows had been covered with sheets of aluminum foil.
He shrugged it off and stepped into the bathroom, noting the water drops on the shower curtain. There was a hypodermic needle by the sink and an IV bag filled with an amber liquid that looked as if it had been stolen from a hospital room. He read the label.
Morphine.
He backed out of the room into the hall. Moving down to the landing, he spotted a door with an unusually heavy latch. And then the phone stopped ringing. A wave of fear blew through his body as he listened to the silence. It was an oppressive silence, the kind with voices in it that chanted
Teddy swung the door open, revealing a narrow set of steps ascending to an attic. Leading with the pump gun, he flipped the light switch, listened a moment, and started upstairs. The steps creaked, but he kept moving. He checked behind his back, to the left and right. Nothing except for the body of a woman stretched out on the floor.
Another corpse. Another victim. This one frozen all the way through.
He turned the body over with his foot and examined the face long enough to realize it wasn’t Rosemary Gibb. When he noticed the windows were open, he walked over for a lung full of fresh air. The house was clear. Yet someone had picked up the phone and hung it up again. He looked outside, then down at the backyard. There was a greenhouse attached to the house. Another floor.
He raced for the stairs, legging it down to the first floor as quietly as he could manage. He went through the rooms again, checking every door until he found the one in the kitchen.
He swung it open and peered into the basement. The lights were on, but he still couldn’t hear anything. Not even a distant siren from outside. His hands were trembling. He wiped the sweat from his brow. Then he planted his foot on the first step and started down.
Although the stone walls remained unfinished, the basement had been subdivided into a maze of various rooms. Teddy found himself standing in a narrow hallway, the doors at each end closed. He could smell mold, the scent of paints and chemical solvents wafting in the air. For a moment, it crossed his mind that he might be in the waiting room outside another version of hell.
He moved toward the door closest to the base of the stairs, thinking it would lead to the greenhouse and a possible exit to the yard out back if something went wrong. Then he turned the handle, cracked the door open and paused. When he didn’t hear anyone react, he pushed the door open and entered. He could see the greenhouse on the other side of the room. A chair and easel. He was standing in Trisco’s studio.
He crossed the room to the easel, glancing at the chair and noting the chains and handcuffs. The canvas was large, five feet by six, maybe even bigger. As his view cleared the back of the painting, he spotted the French doors opening to the backyard. Then he turned around for a quick look at the painting and stopped dead….
It was a cityscape. A young woman with blond hair stood on the corner at night waiting on a red light as men in suits openly stared at her naked body and pawed at her breasts with their hands. As Teddy looked at her face, it dawned on him that her features were a composite of the faces tacked on Nash’s wall before the jury table. The eyes were used from one victim, the chin from another, with Trisco’s memory of his mother as a young woman the standard everyone had been judged by.
Eddie was painting his mother, then killing her over and over again.
But it was the background that left Teddy dead inside. He took a step closer, eyeing the buildings carefully as the horror reached out with a cold finger and pushed his soul closer to the grave. The buildings were littered with graffiti, but hadn’t been painted with a brush. Teddy let out a deep groan as he stared at them and realized exactly what Trisco had done. He recognized the graffiti, even though he’d never seen the images sprayed on a single wall in the city. They weren’t drawn in paint, but had been inked in by another hand.
Teddy knew that he was staring at the very thing that made the void black. He was staring at Darlene Lewis’s tattoos….
The buildings were made of human skin, stretched across the canvas and sealed with a thin coat of varnish or shellac. He felt his stomach turn, thought he might be sick and stepped back. He needed distance. The canvas was huge, and there were a lot of buildings with graffiti filling out the background. More tattoos and skin than Darlene could have provided. As he thought it over, Teddy realized there had to be another list of victims no one was aware of. A list of women whose faces didn’t match, only their skin.
Someone moaned.
Teddy heard it and flinched. He looked about the room and noticed all the doors feeding into the hellish maze.
He heard it again, trying to get a grip on himself. The sound was coming from the door to his right. He inched over, listening through the wood. It was a woman.
Teddy raised the pump gun and gave the door a push.
He saw Rosemary stretched out on a worktable. When she lifted her head, her eyes rolled back, then forward again, passing over him without seeing him. He scanned the rest of the room, didn’t see anyone else, then rushed to her side. It didn’t take much to realize that she was overdosing on something. She was sweating profusely, her skin hot to the touch. Even worse, tremors rocked through her body as she tugged at the rags holding her down. She was in a continual state of involuntary motion. Teddy watched her try to get up, hit the limit of her restraints and fall back, then try to get up again. Rosemary was on automatic pilot. She couldn’t stop moving. She was circling the drain.
Someone walked across the living room floor. Teddy froze, listening to the footsteps overhead. Trisco. When
