Mark stepped into the space he had widened and saw that his secret theory about the house was fact. His heart climbed into his throat, and for a couple of seconds, the sheer weight of his fear made it impossible for him to move forward or back. He wished he hadn’t been right: the hiding places that had spooked Jimbo were bad enough, but this was much worse. This was a kind of demented savagery.
He was looking at another wall, separated from the back of the closet by perhaps three feet. After four or five feet, the gap between the inner and outer walls disappeared into darkness. This was a madman’s house, and it resembled the workings of his mind, being riddled with unseen, unseeable passageways. Mark would have bet his right arm and leg that this one continued all the way to the other side of the house. He went back into the bedroom for the Maglite.
Once again in the closet, he passed through the opening and turned on the Maglite to send a beam of cool yellow light, wobbling with the trembling of his hand, down a narrow, rubble-strewn corridor. He turned around, and the same thing happened on the other side. His mouth was completely dry. There it was, exactly as he had supposed. Mark was looking at the first few yards of an invented corridor. It proved him right about the nature of the carpenter’s modifications. To see if the other part of his theory was correct, he had only to make his way down the narrow passage.
Because what happened at the end of this sadistic secret hallway? Did it just run bang straight into the wall, or did it, as he hoped. . . . The narrow beam of light struck a blind wall, and disappointment squeezed his heart. The flashlight drooped in this hand, and the trembling yellow circle of light wavered down over the lifeless plaster and slipped, like a waterfall down the face of a cliff, into a space beneath the level of the floor. Mark heard himself exhale. There was no reason for his having been right to have meant anything more than that he had been clever, but he stepped forward to see the first few steps of the descending staircase with nearly a sense of gratification. The house was a honeycomb.
The man who owned this house had lived alone—he had either killed his family or sent them away. In any case, children had died on the great wooden bed and in the small single bed on the second floor. Once he had eliminated his family, the man had enticed women into this house, or he’d pounced on them in the dark, tied them up, and carried them in. The doors would have been locked, and the windows would have been boarded up. The women had found themselves alone in a house they could not leave. Soon, they would have heard him moving through the house, and they would have tried to run from him, but he would have seemed to rove invisibly from room to room, following their every move. He was like a great spider speeding across his web, and he was capable of appearing anywhere. He liked peering through his peepholes and watching the trapped women. He liked killing them, too, but he loved tormenting them.
Mark felt weak with a mixture of exhilaration, terror, and nausea. He had thrust his way into the evil heart of this poisoned house, and what he saw there sickened him.
Instead of going down the steep stairs, Mark retraced his steps. This time, he saw the drifting tatters of the big spider webs he earlier had failed to notice. Real spider webs did not bother him.
As he had imagined, a second, matching staircase led to the ground floor on the other side of the house. He walked down in the darkness, training the flashlight on the descending steps. At the bottom of the stairs, the Maglite revealed two short corridors branching off to the front and back of the building. Each seemed to end at a door that fit flush into the wall. The monster had wanted to move invisibly around the ground floor of his house, too. What Mark had not expected to find was the yawning mouth of yet a third staircase. He and Jimbo had forgotten all about the basement. An unexpected shiver brushed his lungs with frost.
The basement—why did that sound like a colossally bad idea? You never knew what you might find in a basement, that was one reason.
In spite of these feelings, Mark began moving downstairs through veils of cobwebs. Down, down, down through layers of wickedness, layers of pain and torture, to the cloaca beneath. At the bottom of the steps, the flashlight cast a grainy yellow bull’s-eye on a black panel that looked as though it had been pried off a coffin. There seemed to be no doorknob or handle. Experimentally, Mark extended his left arm and prodded the door with his fingers. As if on a great black hinge, the door instantly flew open.
He stepped through the opening and played the flashlight along what looked like a stockade fence. Then he turned around and shone the beam close to the opening in the wall, by reflex looking for a light switch. He found one immediately to the left of the concealed staircase, and before realizing that the power had been cut off years before, flipped it up.
Somewhere near the center of the basement, a single bulb responded, impossibly, and a yellow-gray haze brightened the air. A wave of freezing shock nearly knocked him down. Someone was using this house, someone who paid the electric bills. Mark felt like flattening himself against the wall. He could hear his labored breathing, and a tingle rippled across his face like cold lightning.
The bulb itself was invisible behind the “stockade fence,” in reality a wall of halved logs, shaggy with bark, that ran the entire length of the basement. At intervals, doors had been sawed into the logs. Mark went to the first of the doors. A minute later, he was vomiting up the breakfast he had not eaten.
19
“So what did he find?” I asked.
Jimbo looked profoundly uncomfortable. I had more or less kidnapped him from the comforts of his living room and driven him downtown to a restaurant that had been hot stuff back in the mid-sixties. The Fireside Lounge had good memories for me, and its steaks were as perfect as any I’d ever eaten in New York. Jimbo had never been there before, and he was unsure of how to respond to its old-fashioned midwestern luxe of dark lighting, red leather booths, and big wooden tables with chairs like thrones. It was a place where you could talk without being overheard, but my plan to get Jimbo loosened up had only half-worked. He was demolishing his steak, which he’d ordered well done and slathered in ketchup, but he still thought he was being disloyal to Mark by talking to me.
“No one’s going to be mad at Mark,” I told Jimbo. “All anybody wants to do is to find out where he is and get him back, if that’s possible.”
“I wish we
“Don’t you think we can?”
Jimbo pushed a section of overdone meat into a puddle of ketchup.
“I don’t want to rush you,” I said.
He nodded, and the slice of steak disappeared into his gullet. Like most teenage boys, Jimbo could eat like a Roman emperor three or four times a day.
“He told you he went down to the basement on this hidden staircase.”
“The third hidden staircase. They were all over that place. And . . .” He stopped talking and his face turned red.
“And what?”
“Nothing.”
I let it go, temporarily. “What did he find in the basement, Jimbo?”
“It was in the little room, the first one. There were five or six of them, I guess.” Jimbo went inward for a moment, and his forehead wrinkled into creases. He really was a decent boy. “You know what people used to put their stuff in when they went on boats? Those big boxes like suitcases, only they’re not? With padlocks?”
“Steamer trunks,” I said.
“Yeah, a steamer trunk. There was one of those trunks shoved up against a wall. And there was a lock on it, only it was busted open. So he looked inside it. That thing, that trunk, it was full of hair.”
“Hair?”
“Women’s hair, all cut off and stuck together. Blond hair, brown hair, red hair.”
“No wonder he threw up.”
Jimbo acted as though I had not spoken. “Only, he couldn’t figure out what it was at first, because it was clumped together. It looked like some kind of big dead animal. So he reached in and took out a clump. It was stuck together with brown stuff that flaked off when he touched it.”
“Oh,” I said.
