a boy's room should look.'
'I said, watch your back. This isn't a game.'
She gritted her teeth and followed as he returned to the hall.
Faint illumination from the two open doorways fought back the shadows. In the huge bathroom, she glimpsed a glass-walled shower and a double sink, the floor padded with thick carpeting even here. As he checked the shower, she twisted a knob on one of the sinks, and the faucet hissed to silence. 'Water's off too,' she muttered. 'I don't get the feeling anyone's ever planning on coming back here. Do you? Barry?' She wandered back into the hall. 'Where'd you go?'
He stood at the next door, his shoulder pressed against the wood, and he pounded with his fist against the top of the frame.
'What is it? I can't make it out. Oh.' Metal spikes angled deep into the wood. 'Why would anyone nail a door shut?' In the shadows, she could barely see his face. 'Barry?'
At the end of the hall, the remaining door sank in deepening murk.
'What time is it now?' Her voice broke. 'I think we should leave.' She caught his sleeve as he moved toward it. 'Look.' At their feet, smears on the carpet broadened and disappeared beneath the door. 'You know what happened here, don't you? Answer me.'
As he twisted the doorknob, he looked down to find her hand on his arm, small but surprisingly strong.
Fiercely, she whispered up at him. 'Why won't you tell me?'
The door swung open. Within lay madness. A dim blue glow suffused the room, but in the corners, shadows spread like mold. The massive headboard lay in splinters, strewn with hunks of mattress. A shattered bureau-- drawers tilting crazily--oozed clotted garments across the carpet. Crusted palm prints splayed desperately up the speckled wallpaper, and she blinked at the brown imprints of spread fingers. A stain spread across the ceiling, and she stared up at the blur until she seemed to discern a shape.
'Worse than I thought.' His voice had become a hoarse creak.
She kept staring upward.
'Further along than I realized,' he continued. 'There'll be no collecting him. Have to be put down.'
'The shape.' She kept shaking her head and pointing at the ceiling. 'It must be because the light's so bad, right? I mean, nothing could throw someone to the ceiling like that, could it? Not even an ape or something, right?'
'Don't look at it.' Taking her by the shoulder, he marched her out of the room, slamming the door behind them.
Even in the dark hallway, she could see that his face had gone terribly white. 'Tell me what's going on.' She held on to his jacket.
'I want you to go outside and wait in the jeep. Do you understand?' His eyes tracked to the nailed door. 'There's not much light left. I have to check that last room. If he comes back...'
'No.'
'I want you to...'
'No.' She broke away from him. 'Whatever it is, you do it while I'm here.'
He only paused a moment. 'It's getting late.' Now almost no light filtered through the open doors at the end of the hall.
She watched him. The hollow blows echoed. Grunting, he struggled with the crowbar. A nail squealed out, plopped softly to the carpet, then another, and at last he hurled his weight against the frame. With a splintering crash, it burst.
'Wait! It's too dark in there! Where are you?' Her footsteps clicked loudly as she followed him. 'How can it be so black?' Gradually, she made out a mattress in the middle of a bare wooden floor. 'Barry? Look--the windows are boarded up. And I think the glass is painted over.'
Across the room, a flashlight clicked on, and light rushed along the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Rafters had been crudely exposed, the wood blotched with plaster, and large hooks protruded from the beams. Near the mattress, clothing spilled out of a cardboard carton.
By the light of the flashlight, he examined the contents of a tight closet, and she watched him paw through huge sweatshirts and pants so broad in the seat as to appear comical.
Completely rigid, he stared at something on the back of the closet door.
'What is it?'
A worn-looking leather belt swayed on a nail. When she reached past him for it, he caught her wrist. She pulled her hand away but didn't try to touch the strap again. Alongside it dangled four pieces of rough cord.
'Hold this,' he said. Passing her the flashlight, he unhooked a piece of the rawhide cord and tested its strength.
'Barry?'
He knelt by the mattress.
She moved the beam. Even in this dimness, she could see the stains...and the metal hook in the floor. She realized that other hooks had been screwed into the boards. The two at the bottom of the mattress had an extension cord twisted around them.
'This is the only room in the house that's honest, isn't it?' she asked him softly. The light played across a complicated knot.
The piece of rawhide still dangled from his hand. Abruptly, he wrapped it around one of the hooks and yanked.
'What are you doing?' Sudden perspiration crawled coldly at the roots of her hair.
He tugged harder. With a groan, he strained against the cord, the muscles of his arm and neck bulging visibly.
'Please? You're scaring me.'
When he let go of the cord, it raveled harmlessly on the floor.
'What is it?' She trained the beam on his face. His flesh had gone a leaden gray, and moisture stood out like pellets on his forehead. 'Have you been here before?' She let the light slide past him and play along the wall. On the crude shelves of raw pine, objects had been spaced evenly--a candle, oddly molded at the base, a long-necked wine bottle, smeared with something oily, a box of fireplace matches, a length of rope--the spacing and arrangement seemed strangely formal, almost ritualistic.
'This room.' His voice startled her. 'I know...what it...I've seen...'
A miserable heat suffused him, and she felt it radiate from his face, from his glittering stare. She watched him stumble away to grip the door frame, and the light flitted after him. The bones of his knuckles stood out white, and she saw a tensing shock tremble through him. After a moment, he turned to her.
'You don't have to tell me now.' She reached out, stalling his tremor with a brush of her hand. 'Come on, we're leaving.' She pulled him toward the door. 'Here, hold the flashlight.' She led him into the hall. 'What?'
His lips writhed silently.
'Tell me later,' she said. 'Take it. Hold the light steady.' She guided him down the creaking stairs.
Shadows blanketed the walls now, enfolding the parlor in sliding layers that overlapped and deepened on the floor. 'No, not the front,' she said. 'Let's go back out the way we came in.' The light moved ahead of them, uselessly picking out the dust on the glass coffee table, the fur of grime on the petals of the plastic blossoms.
'Listen,' he hissed.
They stopped moving, and the sound filtered to her--a softly grating slither. It came from beneath their feet.
'The basement,' she whispered. The damp noise rasped like broken glass against her flesh. 'We never checked the basement.'
He touched her wrist. Though he moved as cautiously as a soldier in a minefield, a floorboard groaned beneath him.
She couldn't make her feet move, and she held one hand across her mouth as he drifted away from her. The room seemed to stir, and the rustling noise drifted up from beneath her feet with a soft rush. Finally, she lurched forward.
'Kit!' He caught at her as she pushed past him into the kitchen.
Gloom had settled through the jagged glass, and the basement door stood in the deepest corner. She gripped
