‘What’s this mean?’ He showed her the binding.
She sounded the words out, a frown creasing her forehead. Then she shook her head. ‘Don’t know.’
He opened the book at random, and flinched. There was a picture of a naked man holding a child’s gutted body toward something you couldn’t see. He put the book down, glad to let go of it-the stretched binding felt uncomfortably familiar under his hand-and they went down the hallway toward the kitchen together. The shadows were more prominent here. The sun had gotten around to the other side of the house.
‘Do you smell it?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s worse back here, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
He was remembering the cold-pantry his mother had kept in the other house, and how one year three bushel baskets of tomatoes had gone bad down there in the dark. This smell was like that, like the smell of tomatoes decaying into putrescence.
Susan whispered: ‘God, I’m so scared.’
His hand groped out, found hers, and they locked tightly.
The kitchen linoleum was old and gritty and pocked, worn black in front of the old porcelain-tub sink. A large, scarred table stood in the middle of the floor, and on it was a yellow plate, a knife and fork, and a scrap of raw hamburger.
The cellar door was standing ajar.
‘That’s where we have to go,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said weakly.
The door was open just a crack and the light did not penetrate at all. The tongue of darkness seemed to lick hungrily at the kitchen, waiting for night to come so it could swallow it whole. That quarter inch of darkness was hideous, unspeakable in its possibilities. She stood beside Mark, helpless and moveless.
Then he stepped forward and pulled the door open and stood for a moment, looking down. She saw a muscle jump beneath his jaw.
‘I think-’ he began, and she heard something behind her and turned, suddenly feeling slow, feeling too late. It was Straker. He was grinning.
Mark turned, saw, and tried to dive around him. Straker’s fist crashed into his chin and he knew no more.
3
When Mark came to, he was being carried up a flight of stairs-not the cellar stairs, though. There was not that feeling of stone enclosure, and the air was not so fetid. He allowed his eyelids to unclose themselves a tiny fraction, letting his head still loll limply on his neck. A stair landing coming up… the second floor. He could see quite clearly. The sun was not down yet. Thin hope, then.
They gained the landing, and suddenly the arms holding him were gone. He thumped heavily onto the floor, hitting his head.
‘Do you not think I know when someone is playing the possum, young master?’ Straker asked him. From the floor he seemed easily ten feet tall. His bald head glistened with a subdued elegance in the gathering gloom. Mark saw with growing terror that there was a coil of rope around his shoulder.
He grabbed for the pocket where the pistol had been.
Straker threw back his head and laughed. ‘I have taken the liberty of removing the gun, young master. Boys should I not be allowed weapons they do not understand… any more than they should lead young ladies to houses where their commerce has not been invited.’
‘What did you do with Susan Norton?’
Straker smiled. ‘I have taken her where she wished to go, my boy. Into the cellar. Later, when the sun goes down, she will meet the man she came here to meet. You will meet him yourself, perhaps later tonight, perhaps tomorrow night. He may give you to the girl, of course… but I rather think he’ll want to deal with you himself. The girl will have friends of her own, some of them perhaps meddlers like yourself.’
Mark lashed out with both feet at Straker’s crotch, and Straker side-stepped liquidly, like a dancer. At the same moment he kicked his own foot out, connecting squarely with Mark’s kidneys.
Mark bit his lips and writhed on the floor.
Straker chuckled. ‘Come, young master. To your feet.’
‘I… I can’t.’
‘Then crawl,’ Straker said contemptuously. He kicked again, this time striking the large muscle of the thigh. The pain was dreadful, but Mark clenched his teeth together. He got to his knees, and then to his feet.
They progressed down the hall toward the door at the far end. The pain in his kidneys was subsiding to a dull ache. ‘What are you going to do with me?’
‘Truss you like a spring turkey, young master. Later, after my Master holds intercourse with you, you will be set free.’
‘Like the others?’
Straker smiled.
