darkness, but it won’t come. Now if it comes…”
She engaged the safety on the pistol.
“Ellie—”
“I don’t want it to go off accidentally.”
“My father wrestled on the floor with me and tickled me and made funny faces for me when I was little. Played ball with me. And when I wanted to develop my drawing ability, he patiently taught technique to me. But before and after…he came down here, that same man, and he tortured women, girls, hour after hour, for days in some cases. He moved with ease between this world and the one above.”
“I’m not going to keep a gun ready, point a gun at you, like I’m afraid you’re some kind of monster, when I know you’re not. Please, Spencer. Please don’t ask me to do that. Let’s just finish this.”
In the deep quiet at the end of the catacombs, he took a moment to prepare himself. Nothing moved anywhere in that long room. No rats, misshapen or otherwise, dwelt there anymore. The Dresmunds had been instructed to eradicate them with poison.
Spencer opened the black door.
He switched on the light.
He hesitated on the threshold, then went inside.
Miserable though the dog was, he padded into that room as well. Maybe he was afraid to be alone in the catacombs. Or maybe this time his misery was entirely a reaction to his master’s state of mind, in which case he knew that his company was needed. He stayed close to Spencer.
Ellie entered last, and the weighted door closed behind her.
The abattoir was nearly as disorienting now as it had been on that night of scalpels and knives. The stainless steel table was gone. The chamber was empty. The unrelieved blackness allowed no point of reference, so one moment the room appeared to be hardly larger than a casket, but in the next moment it seemed infinitely larger than it actually was. The only light was still the tightly focused bulb in the black ceiling fixture.
The Dresmunds had been instructed to keep all lights functional. They had not been told to clean the abattoir, yet only the thinnest film of dust veiled the walls, no doubt because the room was not ventilated and was always shut up tight.
It was a time capsule, sealed for sixteen years, containing not the memorabilia of bygone days but lost memories.
The place affected Spencer even more powerfully than he had expected. He could see the glimmer of the scalpel as if it hung in the air even now.
* * * …barefoot, carrying the revolver in my left hand, I hurry down from the studio where I shot my father, through the back of the cupboard into a world not anything like the one behind the wardrobe in those books by C. S. Lewis, through the catacombs, not daring to look left or right, because those dead women seem to be straining to break out of their plaster. I have the crazy fear that they might pull loose as if the plaster is still wet, come for me, take me into one of the walls with them. I’m my father’s son and I deserve to choke on cold wet plaster, have it squeezed into my nostrils and poured down my throat, until I’m as one with the figures in the tableaux, unbreathing, a harbor for the rats. My heart’s knocking so hard that each beat makes my vision darken slightly, briefly, as if the surges in blood pressure will burst vessels in my eyes. I feel each beat in my right hand too. The pain in my knuckles throbs, lub-dub, three small hearts in every finger. But I love the pain. I want more pain. Back in the vestibule and descending the stairs into the room of blue light, I repeatedly rapped the swollen knuckles of that hand with the revolver that I held in the other. Now I rap them hard again in the catacombs, to drive out all feeling but pain. Because…because equal to the pain, dear Jesus God Almighty, I still have it on my hand, like a stain on my hand: the smoothness of the woman’s skin. The full curves and warm resiliency of her breasts, turgid nipples rubbing my palm. The flatness of belly, the tautness of muscles as she strains against the manacles. The lubricious heat into which he forces my fingers against all my resistance, against her terrible half- dazed protest. Her eyes were locked with mine. Pleading with her eyes. The misery of her eyes. But the traitor hand has its own sense memory, unshakable, and it makes me sick. All the feelings in my hand make me sick, and some of the feelings in my heart. I have such disgust, loathing, such fear of myself. But other feelings too — unclean emotions in harmony with the excitement of the hateful hand. And at the door to the black room I stop, lean against the wall, and vomit. Sweating. Shuddering with chills. When I turn away from the mess, with only my stomach purged, I force myself to grab the lever-action handle with my injured hand, making pain shoot up my forearm as I violently jerk open the door. And then I’m inside, into the black room again.
Don’t look at her. Don’t. Don’t! Don’t look at her naked. No right to look at her naked. This can be done with my eyes averted, edging to the table, aware of her only as a flesh-colored form out of the corner of my eye, floating in the darkness over there. “It’s okay,” I tell her, my voice so hoarse from the choking, “it’s okay, lady, he’s dead, lady, I shot him. I’ll let you loose, get you out of here, don’t be afraid.” And then I realize I haven’t any idea where to find the keys to the manacles. “Lady, I don’t have a key, no key, got to go for help, call the cops. But it’s okay, he’s dead.” No sound from her there, out of the corner of my eye. She’d been dazed from the blows to her head, only half conscious, and now she’s passed out. But I don’t want her to wake up after I’ve gone and be alone and afraid. I remember the look in her eyes — was it the same look in my mother’s eyes at the very end? — and I don’t want her to be so afraid when she wakes and thinks he’s coming back for her. That’s all, that’s all. I just don’t want her to be afraid, so I’m going to have to bring her around, shake her, wake her up, make her understand that he’s dead and that I’ll be back with help. I edge to the table, trying not to look at her body, going to look only at her face. A smell hits me. Terrible. Nauseating. The blackness is dizzying again. I put one hand out. Against the table. To steady myself. It’s the right hand, still remembering the curve of her breasts, and I put it down in a warm, viscous, slippery mass that wasn’t there before. I look at her face. Mouth open. Eyes. Dead blank eyes. He’s been at her. Two slashes. Vicious. Brutal. All of his great strength behind the blade. Her throat. Her abdomen. I spin away from the table, away from the woman, collide with the wall. Wiping my right hand on the black wall, calling for Jesus and for my mother, and saying “lady please lady please,” as if she could mend herself by an act of will if only she’d listen to my pleas. Wiping wiping wiping the hand, front and back, on the wall, not only wiping off what I’ve pressed it into but wiping off the way she felt when she was alive, wiping hard, harder, angrily, furiously, until my hand seems on fire, until there’s nothing in my hand but pain. And then I stand there awhile. Not quite sure where I am any longer. I know there’s a door. I go to it. Through it. Oh, yes. The catacombs.
Spencer stood in the center of the black room, his right hand in front of his face, staring at it in the hard projected light, as though it was not at all the same hand that had been at the end of his wrist for the past sixteen years.
Almost wonderingly, he said, “I would’ve saved her.”
“I know that,” Ellie said.
“But I couldn’t save anyone.”
“And that’s not your fault, either.”
For the first time since that ancient July, he thought he might have the capacity to accept, not soon but eventually, that he had no greater weight of guilt to carry than any other man. Darker memories, a more intimate experience of the human capacity for evil, knowledge that other people would never want forced on them as it had been forced on him — all of that, yes, but not a greater weight of guilt.
Rocky barked. Twice. Loud.
Startled, Spencer said, “He never barks.”
Slipping off the safety on the SIG, Ellie swung toward the door as it flew open. She wasn’t quick enough.
The genial-looking man — the same who had broken into the Malibu cabin — burst into the black room. He had a silencer-fitted Beretta in his right hand, and he was smiling and squeezing off a shot as he came.
Ellie took the round in her right shoulder, squealed in pain. Her hand spasmed and released the pistol, and she was slammed into the wall. She sagged against the blackness, gasping with the shock of being shot, realized the Micro Uzi was sliding off her shoulder, and made a grab for it with her left hand. It slipped through her fingers, hit the floor, and spun away from her.
The pistol was gone, clattering beyond reach across the floor toward the man with the Beretta. But Spencer went for the Uzi even as it was falling.
The smiling man fired again. The bullet sparked off the stone inches from Spencer’s reaching hand, forcing
