house door.
A chill passed through Eric as he realized that Kent’s words seemed almost a response to a question he hadn’t asked. “Yeah?” he said, consciously keeping his voice steady. “Why?” “I think maybe he thought there was something about the stuff — like maybe there was a piece of those guys caught in the stuff they used when they killed people, you know? Sort of like voodoo, where you have to have something that came from the person you want to put a hex on. It’s like maybe Darby thought if he had the stuff, he could figure out what was wrong with the people, you know?” They were inside the carriage house now, at the door to the storeroom, and already the strange humming — the barely audible noise that sounded almost human — was beginning. Had Dr. Darby heard that sound, too? And what if Kent was right? What if the voices on the edge of his consciousness really were coming from the things in the hidden room?
With the voices whispering to him again like a siren song, Eric helped Kent slide the plywood away from the hidden door. Then they went into the dark chamber and began the familiar ritual of lighting the lamps.
The voices were louder now, and Eric looked around at all the boxes, all the shelves filled with books. Where to begin? Where to start? There was too much, too many things to see, to touch….
As the babble of the voices filled their minds, Kent began opening boxes.
The first two were full of more books, and he put them aside as he searched for more interesting artifacts.
Eric, though, lifted half a dozen books from the top box and scanned their titles. All of them were about serial killers. Some were texts on abnormal psychology, some were scholarly case studies.
Some were true crime paperbacks.
And from somewhere deep inside him, a craving arose.
He wanted to read these books.
He wanted to read them all.
He wanted to know exactly what Dr. Darby had known.
And he wanted to know even more.
He opened one of the books and began to read, unconsciously sinking into Hector Darby’s own chair. The book was a case study of someone named Andrei Chikatilo, who killed fifty-five people in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s. Chikatilo had ripped pieces of his victims’ flesh from their bones with his teeth and swallowed them even before murdering them. Then, after they had died, he’d sometimes taken more, taken bloody souvenirs to eat on the way home.
It took fifteen years to catch Andrei Chikatilo, and at least one innocent man was tried, found guilty, and executed for one of Chikatilo’s murders. “This guy was really weird,” Eric said as he turned the last page on the strange case, but when he looked up, he realized Kent was no longer in the room.
“Kent?” he called out, rising abruptly from the chair and knocking it backward into a stack of boxes, which tipped over, sending something clattering to the floor.
He picked up the object.
The hacksaw.
The hacksaw they’d left on the table the last time they were here.
It had been clean then, but now—
“Give me a hand with this,” Kent said, jerking Eric’s attention away from the hacksaw as he ducked back in through the door, carrying a lightbulb and the last few loops of a worn extension cord whose length disappeared back into the outer storage room. It wasn’t until Kent began screwing the bulb into the ornate lamp they’d found a few days earlier that Eric saw the lamp shade that now sat next to it on the table.
And there was a new energy in the room — a new note in the hum of indistinct voices.
With the bulb in place, Kent plugged the lamp into the end of the extension cord. “Look up the lamp in the ledger,” he said, his voice tense as he began fitting the lamp shade to the harp on the base.
Eric opened the ledger and carefully turned the pages until he found the entry:
“Thirty-five thousand dollars,” Eric breathed.
Kent said nothing as he finished fitting the shade to the lamp and twisted the switch.
A soft amber glow filled the room.
The voices seemed to sigh with the beauty of it.
Unconsciously wiping his hands on his pants, Eric reached out and touched his fingertips to the lamp shade.
It felt warm, and almost soft, like leather.
But so thin, so fragile.
He leaned closer.
It was, indeed, leather, but not like any leather he’d ever seen before. He could actually see veining in its grain.
He laid both his hands on the shade, and one of the voices in his head seemed to rise above the others as a strange energy coursed from the lamp into his hands and up his fingers and arms to flood his body.
He listened to the voices, and though he still couldn’t understand the words, he didn’t care.
He knew that something deep inside him — some part of him he was barely aware even existed — heard the voices perfectly.
Heard them, and understood.
Chapter 20
MERRILL BREWSTER PUT down her fork and eyed her son. He looked pale, with flushed spots high on his cheeks, and as far as she could see, he hadn’t consumed even a single bite of his supper. All he’d done was merely move his meat loaf and mashed potatoes around on his plate, but none of it had actually been eaten. “Do you feel all right, honey?”
Eric nodded, then put down his fork and sat back in the chair. “I guess I’m just really tired,” he said.
Merrill cocked her head. “What were you up to all day?”
“Nothing,” Eric said, shrugging dismissively. “You know — just hung out. Poked around in the carriage house, looking at some of the old stuff that’s stored in there.”
“Those aren’t our things,” Merrill said, frowning. “I think you’d better leave them alone. If something breaks, we’re responsible.”
“I know. We’re careful.”
Merrill rose from her chair and picked up her plate, but before she took it to the kitchen she paused and felt Eric’s forehead. “I hope you haven’t picked up some bug,” she fretted. “Ashley Sparks said Tad went back to bed this morning.”
“I’m fine,” Eric insisted, ducking his head away from his mother’s touch. “I’m just tired, okay?”
Merrill pulled back almost as if she’d been stung. “You don’t have to bite my head off! I’m just worried —”
“You worry about everything!” Eric broke in, rising from his chair. “I think I’ll just go to bed, okay?”
“Fine,” Merrill said, stepping back from Eric’s outburst, and looking him over once more, noticing for the first time a stain on his pants. “What’s that?” she asked.
Eric looked down to see dark rusty finger streaks, and the memory of the hacksaw he’d picked up from the floor of the hidden room flooded back. He thought quickly. “Rust,” he said. “I found an old saw, and it was all over the blade.”
“Have you ever heard of a rag?” Merrill asked, then shook her head and answered her own question. “Of course not. Why would I think you would have? Just put those in the wash before you go to bed, okay?”
Though he was barely listening, Eric nodded. Rust? Why had he said that? It hadn’t been rust — it had been sticky. Sticky, like—
He felt the blood drain from his face, and now his mother was staring at him.
