words came. “Thank you for coming.” He held out his hand. The sheriff hesitated a second, then shook it and started back to his car.
Before he got in, however, he turned back. “If I hear anything about what might have happened,” he said, “I’ll let you know.”
Eric nodded, the sheriff got into his car, and a moment later the police cruiser disappeared around the curve in the driveway.
“Tippy!” Marci wailed, but Eric barely heard her.
Adam Mosler, Eric thought. That’s who it was. It had to be. But even as he clung to the thought, he knew he wasn’t sure it had been Adam Mosler.
He wasn’t sure at all.
A strange numbness falling over him, Eric sat down on the front step next to his sobbing sister, the box on his lap, his mother flanking Marci, rocking her.
“We’ll have a nice funeral for her,” Merrill said as she smoothed back the hair from Marci’s forehead. “Eric will dig a little grave and you and I can make a headstone, okay?”
Marci nodded, her uncontrollable sobbing starting to ease a bit.
“It’s okay, Marce,” Eric said. “We can get you another cat. Okay?”
“I don’t want another cat,” Marci cried. “I want Tippy!”
Merrill wrapped her arms around her grieving daughter and looked at Eric over Marci’s head. “Will you put Tippy someplace safe, please, until we can bury her?”
“Sure.” Eric looked around, then fixed his gaze on the carriage house. “I know a place.”
ERIC STOOD AT the doorway to the storage room, Kent and Tad close behind him. He reached for the handle, but hesitated before his fingers closed on the cold brass.
Maybe he should just walk away right now, he thought. In fact, maybe he shouldn’t have called Kent and Tad at all. Maybe he should have just buried the cat this afternoon and tried to forget the whole thing. But that was impossible, for as soon as he’d seen the mangled corpse wrapped in bloody rags, the terrible nightmare of the night before last had risen out of his memory and hung before him not so much as a dream, but of something half remembered, something that, though not coherent in his mind, was nonetheless real.
As real as the cat’s body that lay behind the door.
His fingers trembled slightly, and he felt a strange excitement flow through his body, as if some kind of energy were flowing through the doorknob into his fingers. As that energy penetrated not only his body, but his soul as well, he knew he would not turn back.
He had to follow the energy.
Follow it to its source.
His fingers closed on the doorknob.
He twisted it.
The door eased open.
Eric’s fingers moved from the knob to the light switch, and a moment later the glow of the naked bulb on the ceiling drove the darkness away.
Followed by Kent and Tad, he stepped through the door. Nothing had changed: the sheet of plywood still concealed the door to the hidden room.
Everything was as they had left it the last time they were here.
Except that now a box sat on the table where before there had been only the old photograph album.
Tad eyed the box warily, his tongue running over his lower lip. “Wh-Where’d that come from?” he asked, his voice quavering just enough to betray his uncertainty as to whether he wanted the answer to his question.
“The sheriff brought it,” Eric replied. The three of them were standing at the table now, and Eric could feel the strange energy building inside him.
“You gonna tell us what’s in it?” Kent finally asked when Eric said nothing more, nor made any move to open the box.
Eric’s eyes shifted from the box to Kent Newell. “It’s Tippy,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “She’s—” His voice broke, then he took a deep breath. “Something got her,” he finally managed.
As Tad Sparks unconsciously pulled away from the table — and the box — Kent’s brows furrowed deeply. “What do you mean, ‘got her’?” he asked.
Instead of answering Kent’s question, Eric lifted the lid, and both Tad and Kent peered in.
“Oh, Jeez,” Tad whispered, turning away as his stomach contracted so violently he could taste the bile rising in his throat.
“Christ,” Kent breathed, his eyes fixing on the mutilated corpse of the cat. “What could’ve done that?” Even though his own stomach was starting to feel queasy, Kent leaned closer. “It’s like part of her’s gone. Like something ate part of her or something.”
“Except look at the cut,” Eric whispered. He reached out with a single finger, but couldn’t bring himself to touch the corpse. “It’s like it was cut open with a knife or something.”
“Or a scalpel,” Tad said in a hollow tone that made both Eric and Kent turn toward him. Tad’s face was ashen; his eyes were wide open and fixed on the grisly object in the box. “I had a dream,” he whispered so softly that neither Eric nor Kent was certain he was talking to them. “I had a scalpel,” Tad went on. “And I…” His voice trailed off, and finally his eyes shifted from the box to Eric. “Remember that movie we saw last year?” he asked. “The one about Jack the Ripper?”
Eric’s own dream suddenly exploded in his mind once more, and when he glanced at Kent, he could see that Tad’s words had touched something in him, too.
For the first time in all the years Eric had known him, Kent Newell actually looked frightened.
“It was just what we found,” Kent said, his eyes fixing on Tad, but he sounded more as if he was trying to convince himself than Tad. “The old black doctor’s bag, and all that stuff.”
The look on Kent’s face as much as his words told Eric the truth. “I had the same dream,” Eric said. Kent’s eyes widened. “And you had it, too.” When Kent said nothing, Eric asked, “You had the same dream, didn’t you?”
Kent hesitated, then tried to shrug it off. “I–I dreamed something,” he finally said, his feigned nonchalance falling flat. His eyes shifted back to the box. “And anyway, there wasn’t any cat in my dream.”
A silence fell over the room that seemed to stretch on for an eternity.
“So what do you guys think happened?” Tad Sparks finally asked.
Kent’s eyes fixed on him. “Whatever happened, it wasn’t Jack the Ripper. Jesus, Tad. All we did was have some dreams!”
“Dreams about Jack the Ripper,” Tad said. “Except in my dream, I wasn’t
“I was, too,” Eric said softly. “And when I woke up I felt like I was all covered with blood.”
Kent Newell’s piercing gaze shifted from Tad to Eric. “What?” he demanded. “You’re saying
“I don’t know!” Eric said. “I don’t think so, but—”
“But what?” Kent pressed. “So if it wasn’t you, who was it? Tad or me?” When neither Tad nor Eric replied, Kent answered his own question. “Well, it wasn’t. What’d one of us do? Sleepwalk down here, get the scalpels, go find the cat, kill her, and then go back to bed? That’s just stupid!” Yet even as he spoke, Kent’s voice once again gave the lie to the certainty expressed by the words themselves.
Once again the silence seemed to stretch into infinity.
“Okay,” Kent said when he could stand the silence no longer. “Let’s go take a look.”
“At what?” Eric asked, though he already knew the answer.
“The stuff,” Kent replied, and turning away from the table, he threaded his way through the jumble of boxes to the sheet of plywood and pushed it aside. “Let’s see if the stuff is where we left it.”
Wordlessly, Eric and Tad followed Kent into the hidden room.
The darkness seemed to Eric to be filled with whispering voices, but whatever words they might be speaking were lost on the edges of his consciousness.
He lit the lanterns.
The voices faded away.
