shined it on down.”
“Into a subcellar.”
Arlo shrugged. I allowed him time to continue. He didn’t.
“And?” I prompted again.
“I’m a churchgoing man. Every Sunday and Wednesday. Never seen the devil, but I believe in him. Believe he’s in the world, working his evil amongst us.”
Arlo ran the back of a hand across his mouth.
“What I seen was Satan himself.”
Though the day was still warm, I felt a chill ripple through me.
“You reported that you saw a human skull.” All business.
“Yes’m.”
“What else?”
“Don’t want to put words to wickedness. It’s best you see with your own eyes.”
“Did you go down into the subcellar?”
“No way.”
“What did you do?”
“I hauled my butt upstairs fast as I could. Called the police.” Arlo emphasized the first syllable and gave it a very long
“The officer is downstairs?”
“Yes’m. Follow the hall, then through the kitchen.”
Arlo was right. It was best I saw with my own eyes.
“Thank you, Mr. Welton. It shouldn’t be long.”
I crossed the porch and entered the house. Behind me, the swing rattled as Arlo’s face dropped back to his hands.
The front door opened directly onto a narrow corridor. To the right was a bile green living room. A broken window had been sealed with cardboard duct-taped into place. The furnishings were sparse. A moth-eaten armchair. A sofa badly clawed by a cat.
To the left was a dining room, bare except for a knotty-pine sideboard, a mattress, and a stack of tires.
Continuing down the central hall, I turned left into a kitchen that would already have been retro in ’56. Round- top Philco fridge. Kelvinator stove. Red Formica and chrome dinette set. Speckled gray Formica countertops.
A door stood open to the left of the Kelvinator. Through it I could see wooden stairs and hear radio static drifting up from below.
Shifting my kit to my right hand, I gripped the banister and started to descend. Two treads down, small hairs began rising on the back of my neck.
Unconsciously, I switched to breathing through my mouth.
3
THOUGH FAINT, THE ODOR WAS UNMISTAKABLE. SWEET AND FETID, it heralded the presence of rotting flesh.
But this wasn’t the cloying, gut-churning smell with which I am so familiar. The reek of active putrefaction. Of innards ravaged by maggots and scavengers. Of flesh greened and bloated by water. No other stench can compete with that. It seeps into your pores, your nostrils, your lungs, your clothing, rides you home like smoke from a bar. Long after showering, it lingers in your hair, your mouth, your mind.
This was gentler. But still undeniable.
I hoped for a squirrel. Or a raccoon that had gnawed through a wall and become trapped in the basement. Recalling Larabee’s words, and Arlo’s agitation, I doubted either scenario was likely.
The temperature dropped with each downward tread. The dampness increased. By the time I reached bottom, the banister felt cool and slick to my palm.
Amber light seeped from a bulb dangling from a fuzzy overhead cord. Stepping onto hard-packed earth, I looked around.
Barely six feet high, the cellar had been divided into a number of small rooms arranged around a central open space. Plywood walls and prefab doors suggested partitioning had taken place long after the home’s construction.
Every door in my sight line was open. Through one I could see shallow shelving, the kind used to store home- canned jam and tomatoes. Washtubs were visible through another. Stacked boxes through another.
A Charlotte-Mecklenburg uniform waited at the far end of the cellar, past a furnace that looked like a Jules Verne contraption. Unlike the other three, the door at his back looked old. The oak was solid, the varnish thick and yellowed with age.
The cop stood with feet spread, thumbs hooking his belt. He was a compact man with Beau Bridges brows and Sean Penn features, not a good combination. Drawing close, I could read the plaque on his shirt.
“What have we got?” I asked, after introducing myself.
“You met the plumber?” Gleason lowered the volume on a speaker mike clipped to his left shoulder.
I nodded.
“Around sixteen hundred hours, Welton phoned in a nine-one-one. Said he’d found dead people in a crawl space. I caught the call, spotted remains which I believed to be human. Reported in. Desk told me to stay put. I told Welton to do the same.”
I liked Gleason. He was concise.
“You go belowdecks?”
“No, ma’am.” A second bulb hung in the room at Gleason’s back. The angled light falling through the door threw shadows from his brows and carved his already too chiseled features deep into his flesh.
“The ME said you suspected more than one body.”
Gleason waggled a hand. Maybe yes, maybe no.
“Anything down here I should know about?”
I was remembering a pizza parlor basement in Montreal. Detective Luc Claudel had pegged rats while I’d dug bones. I pictured him underground in his cashmere coat and Gucci gloves, almost smiled. Almost. The bones had turned out to be those of adolescent girls.
Gleason misinterpreted my question. “Appears to be some sort of voodoo thing. But that’s your call, doc.”
Right answer. Skeletons often appear sinister to the uninitiated. Even gleaming white anatomical specimens. The thought lifted my spirits. Maybe that’s what this would turn out to be. A fake skull long forgotten in a cellar.
I flashed again on the pizza parlor case. The initial concern there had been PMI. Postmortem interval. How long since death? Ten years? Fifty? A hundred and fifty?
Another hopeful scenario. Perhaps the skull would turn out to be an ancient head pilfered from an archaeological site.
“Fair enough,” I said to Gleason. “But I was wondering about rats, snakes?”
“So far, no company. I’ll watch for party crashers.”
“Much appreciated.”
I followed Gleason through the doorway into a windowless room measuring about ten by twelve. Two brick walls appeared to be exterior, part of the original foundation. Two were interior. Workbenches pressed against those walls.
I did a quick scan of the jumbled contents atop the tables. Rusty tools. Boxes of nails, screws, washers. Coiled wire. Chain linking. A vise.
Large rolls of textured gray plastic lay below the workbenches. Dirt coated the underside of each.
“What’s with the plastic?”
