by Dean Koontz
The velvet- and silk-lined box held nothing but the three fifty-pound bags of dry mortar mix that had been stolen from Avril Tannerton’s basement last weekend.
Hilary and Tony sat on one side of the cable car, and Joshua sat on the other. The attorney’s knees brushed Tony’s.
Hilary held Tony’s hand as the red gondola moved slowly, slowly up the line toward the top of the cliff. She wasn’t afraid of heights, but the tramway seemed so fragile that she could not help gritting her teeth.
Joshua saw the tension on her face and smiled. “Don’t worry. The car seems small, but it’s sturdy. And Gilbert does a fine job with maintenance.”
As it ground gradually upward, the car swung slightly in the stiff morning wind.
The view of the valley became increasingly spectacular. Hilary tried to concentrate on that and not on the creaking and clattering of the machinery.
The gondola finally reached the top of the cable. It locked in place, and Joshua opened the door.
When they walked out of the upper station of the tramway system, a fiercely-white arc of lightning and a violent peal of thunder broke open the lowering sky. Rain began to fall. It was a thin, cold, slanting rain.
Joshua, Hilary, and Tony ran for shelter. They stomped up the front steps and across the porch to the door.
“And you say there’s no heat up here?” Hilary asked.
“The furnace has been shut down for five years,” Joshua said. “That’s why I told both of you to wear sweaters under your coats. It’s not a cold day, really. But once you’ve been up here awhile in this damp, the air will cut through to your bones.”
Joshua unlocked the door, and they went inside, switching on the three flashlights they’d brought with them.
“It stinks in here,” Hilary said.
“Mildew,” Joshua said. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
They walked from the foyer into the hall, then into the big drawing room. The beams of their flashlights fell on what looked to be a warehouse full of antique furniture.
“My God,” Tony said, “it’s worse than Bruno’s house. There’s hardly room to walk.”
“She was obsessed with collecting beautiful things,” Joshua said. “Not for investment. Not just because she liked to look at them, either. A lot of things are crammed into closets, hidden away. Paintings stacked on paintings. And as you can see, even in the main rooms, there’s just too damned much stuff; it’s jammed too close together to please the eye.”
“If every room has antiques of this quality,” Hilary said, “then there’s a fortune here.”
“Yeah,” Joshua said. “If it hasn’t been eaten up by worms and termites and whatnot.” He let his flashlight beam travel from one end of the room to the other. “This mania for collecting was something I never understood about her. Until this minute. Now I wonder if. . . . As I look at all of this, and as I think about what we learned from Mrs. Yancy. . . .”
Hilary said, “You think collecting beautiful things was a reaction to all the ugliness in her life before her father died?”
“Yeah,” Joshua said. “Leo broke her. Shattered her soul, smashed her spirit flat and left her with a rotten self-image. She must have hated herself for all the years she let him use her—even though she’d had no choice but to let him. So maybe . . . feeling low and worthless, she thought she could make her soul beautiful by living among lots of beautiful things.”
They stood in silence for a moment, looking at the overfurnished drawing room.
“It’s so sad,” Tony said.
Joshua shook himself from his reverie. “Let’s get these shutters open and let in some light.”
“I can’t stand this smell,” Hilary said, cupping one hand over her nose. “But if we raise the windows, the rain will get in and ruin things.”
“Not much if we raise them only five or six inches,” Joshua said. “And a few drops of water aren’t going to hurt anything in this mold colony.”
“It’s a wonder there aren’t mushrooms growing out of the carpet,” Tony said.
They moved through the downstairs, raising windows, unbolting the inward-facing latches on the shutters, letting in the gray storm light and the fresh rain-scented air.
When most of the downstairs rooms had been opened, Joshua said, “Hilary, all that’s left down here is the dining room and the kitchen. Why don’t you take care of those windows while Tony and I tend to the upstairs.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be up in a minute to help out.”
She followed her flashlight beam into the pitch-black dining room as the men went down the hall toward the stairs.
When he and Joshua came into the upstairs hallway, Tony said, “Phew! It stinks even worse up here.”
A blast of thunder shook the old house. Windows rattled icily. Doors stuttered in their frames.
“You take the rooms on the right,” Joshua said. “I’ll take the ones on the left.”
Tony went through the first door on his side and found a sewing room. An ancient treadle-powered sewing machine stood in one corner, and a more modern electric model rested on a table in another corner; both were bearded with cobwebs. There was a work table and two dress-maker’s forms and one window.
He went to the window, put his flashlight on the floor, and tried to twist open the lock lever. It was rusted shut. He struggled with it as rain drummed noisily on the shutters beyond the glass.
Joshua shone his flashlight into the first room on the left and saw a bed, a dresser, a highboy. There were two windows in the far wall.
He crossed the threshold, took two more steps, sensed movement behind him, and he started to turn, felt a sudden cold thrill go through his back, and then it became a very hot thrill, a burning lance, a line of pain drawn through his flesh, and he knew he had been stabbed. He felt the knife being jerked out of him. He turned. His flashlight revealed Bruno Frye. The madman’s face was wild, demoniacal. The knife came up, came down, and the cold thrill shivered through Joshua again, and this time the blade tore his right shoulder, from front to back, all the way through, and Bruno had to twist and jerk the weapon savagely, several times, to get it out. Joshua raised his left arm to protect himself. The blade punctured his forearm. His legs buckled. He went down. He fell against the bed, slid to the floor, slick with his own blood, and Bruno turned away from him and went out to the second-floor hall, out of the flashlight’s glow, into the darkness. Joshua realized he hadn’t even screamed, had not warned Tony, and he tried to shout, really tried, but the first wound seemed to be very serious, for when he attempted to make any sound at all, pain blossomed in his chest, and he could do no better than hiss like a goddamned goose.
Grunting, Tony put all of his strength against the stubborn window latch, and abruptly the rusted metal gave—sweeek—and popped open. He raised the windows, and the sound of the rain swelled. A fine spray of water misted through a few narrow chinks in the shutters and dampened his face.
The inward-facing bolt on the shutters also was corroded, but Tony finally freed it, pushed the shutters open, leaned out in the rain, and fixed them in their braces so they wouldn’t bang about in the wind.
He was wet and cold. He was anxious to get on with the search of the house, hoping the activity would warm him.
As another volley of thunder cannonaded down from the Mayacamas, into the valley, over the house, Tony walked out of the sewing room and into Bruno Frye’s knife.
In the kitchen, Hilary opened the shutters on the window that looked onto the back porch. She fixed them in place and paused for a moment to stare out at the rain-swept grass and the wind-whipped trees. At the end of the lawn, twenty yards away, there were doors in the ground.
She was so surprised to see those doors that, for a moment, she thought she was imagining them. She squinted through the sheeting rain, but the doors didn’t dissolve miragelike, as she half expected.
At the end of the lawn, the land rose up in one of its last steps to the vertical ramp
arts of the mountains. The doors were set into that hillside. They were framed with timbers and mortared stones.
Hilary turned away from the window and hurried across the filthy kitchen, anxious to tell Joshua and Tony about her discovery.
Tony knew how to protect himself against a man with a knife. He was trained in self-defense, and he’d been in situations like this one on two other occasions. But this time he was caught off guard by the suddenness and total unexpectedness of the attack.
Glaring, his broad countenance split by a hideous rictus grin, Frye swung the knife at Tony’s face. Tony managed to turn partly out of the blow, but the blade still tore along the side of his head, ripping scalp, drawing blood.
The pain was like an acid burn.
Tony dropped his flashlight; it rolled away, causing the shadows to leap and sway.
Frye was fast, damned fast. He struck again as Tony was just going into a defensive posture. This time the knife scored solidly if peculiarly, coming down point-first on the top of his left shoulder, driving through jacket and sweater, through muscle and gristle, between bones, instantly taking all the strength out of that arm and forcing Tony to his knees.
Somehow Tony found the energy to swing his right fist up from the floor, into Frye’s testicles. The big man gasped and staggered backwards, pulling the knife out of Tony as he went.
Unaware of what was happening above her, Hilary called up from the foot of the stairs. “Tony! Joshua! Come down here and see what I’ve found.”
Frye whirled at the sound of Hilary’s voice. He headed for the steps, apparently forgetting that he was leaving a wounded but living man behind him.
Tony got up, but a napalm explosion of pain set fire to his arm, and he swayed dizzily. His stomach flopped over. He had to lean against the wall.
All he could do was warn her. “Hilary, run! Run! Frye’s coming!”
Hilary was about to call up to them again when she heard Tony shouting to her. For an instant, she couldn’t believe what he was saying, but then she heard heavy footsteps on the first flight, thumping down. He was still out of sight above the landing, but she knew he couldn’t be anyone but Bruno Frye.
Then Frye’s gravelly voice boomed: “Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch!”
Stunned, but not frozen with shock, Hilary backed away from the foot of the stairs, and then she ran as she saw Frye reach the landing. Too late, she realized she should have gone toward the front of the house, outside, to the cable car; but she was streaking toward the kitchen instead, and there was no turning back now.
She pushed through the swinging door, into the kitchen, as Frye jumped down the last few steps and into the hallway behind her.
She thought of searching the kitchen drawers for a knife.
Couldn’t. No time.
She ran to the outside door, unlocked it, and bolted from the kitchen as Frye entered it through the swinging door.
The only weapon she had was the flashlight she had been carrying, and that was no weapon at all.
She crossed the porch, went down the steps. Rain and wind battered her.
He was not far behind. He was still chanting, “Bitch, bitch, bitch!”
She would never be able to run around the house and all the way to the cable car before he caught her. He was much too close and gaining.
The wet grass was slick.
She was afraid of falling.
Of dying.
Tony?
She ran toward the only place that might offer protection: the doors in the ground.
Lightning flickered, and thunder followed it.
Frye wasn’t screaming behind her any more. She heard a deep, animal growl of pleasure.
Very close.
Now she was screaming.
She reached the doors in the hillside and saw that they were latched together at both the top and bottom. She reached and threw back the top bolt, then stooped and disengaged the one on the bottom, expecting a blade to be slammed down between her shoulders. The blow never came. She pulled open the doors, and there was inky blackness beyond.
She turned.
Rain stung her face.
Frye had stopped. He was standing just six feet away.
She waited in the open doors with darkness at her back, and she wondered what was behind her other than a flight of steps.
“Bitch,” Frye said.
But now there was more fear than fury in his face.
“Put the knife down,” she said, not knowing if he would obey, doubting it, but having nothing to lose. “Obey your mother, Bruno. Put the knife down.”
He took a step toward her.
Hilary stood her ground. Her heart was exploding.
Frye moved closer.
Shaking, she backed down the first step that lay beyond the doors.
Just as Tony reached the head of the stairs, supporting himself with one hand against the wall, he heard a noise behind him. He looked back.
Joshua had crawled out of the bedroom. He was splashed with blood, and his face was nearly as white as his hair. His eyes seemed out of focus.
“How bad?” Tony asked.
Joshua licked his pale lips. “I’ll live,” he said in a strange, hissing, croaking voice. “Hilary. For God’s sake . . . Hilary!”
Tony pushed away from the wall and careened down the stairs. He weaved back down the hall toward the kitchen, for he could hear Frye shouting out on the rear lawn.
In the kitchen, Tony pulled open one drawer, then another, looking for a weapon.
“Come on, dammit! Shit!”
The third drawer held knives. He chose the largest one. It was spotted with rust but still wickedly sharp.
His left arm was killing him. He wanted to cradle it in his right arm, but he needed that hand to fight Frye.
Gritting his teeth, steeling himself against the pain of his wounds, lurching like a drunkard, he went out to the porch. He saw Frye at once. The man was standing in front of two open doors. Two doors in the ground.
Hilary was nowhere in sight.
Hilary backed off the sixth step. That was the last one.
Bruno Frye stood at the head of the stairs, looking down, afraid to come any farther. He was alternately calling her a bitch and whimpering as if he were a child. He was clearly torn between two needs: the need to kill her, and the need to get away from that hated place.
Whispers.
Suddenly she heard the whispers, and her flesh seemed to turn to ice in that instant. It was a wordless hissing, a soft sound, but growing louder by the second.
And then she felt something crawling up her leg.
She cried out and moved up one step, closer to Frye. She reached down, brushed at her leg, and knocked something away.
Shuddering, she switched on the flashlight, turned, and shone the beam into the subterranean room behind her.
Roaches. Hundreds upon hundreds of huge roaches were swarming in the room—on the floor, on the walls, on the low ceiling. They were not just ordinary roaches, but enormous things, over two inches long, an inch wide, with busy legs and especially long feelers that quivered anxiously. Their shiny green-brown carapaces appeared to be sticky and wet, like blobs of dark mucus.
The whispering was the sound of their ceaseless movement, long legs and trembling antennae brushing other long legs and antennae, constantly crawling and creeping and scurrying this way and that.
Hilary screamed. She wanted to climb the steps and get out of there, but Frye was above, waiting.
The roaches shied away from her flashlight. They were evidently subterranean insects that survived only in the dark, and she prayed that her flashlight batteries would not go dead.
The whispering grew louder.
More roaches were pouring into the room. They were coming out of a crack in the floor. Coming out by tens. By scores. By hundreds. There were a couple of thousand of the disgusting things in the room already, and the chamber was no more than twenty feet on a side. They piled up two and three deep in th
e other half of the room, avoiding the light, but getting bolder by the moment.
She knew that an entomologist would probably not call them roaches. They were beetles, subterranean beetles that lived in the bowels of the earth. A scientist would have a crisp, clean, Latin name for them. But to her they were roaches.
Hilary looked up at Bruno.
“Bitch,” he said.
Leo Frye had built a cold storage cellar, a common enough convenience in 1918. But he had mistakenly built it on a flaw in the earth. She could see that he had tried many times to patch the floor, but it kept opening each time that the earth trembled. In quake country, the earth trembled often.
And the roaches came up from hell.
They were still gushing from the hole, a wriggling, kicking, squirming mass.
They mounted up on one another, five- and six- and seven-deep, covering the walls and the ceiling, moving, endlessly moving, swarming restlessly. The cold whisper of their movement was now a soft roar.
For punishment, Katherine had put Bruno in this place. In the dark. For hours at a time.
Suddenly, the roaches moved toward Hilary. The pressure of them building up in layers finally caused them to spill at her like a breaking wave, in a roiling green-brown mass. In spite of the flashlight, they surged forward, hissing.
She screamed and started up the steps, preferring Bruno’s knife to the hideous insect horde behind her.
Grinning, Frye said, “See how you like it, bitch.” And he slammed the door.
The rear lawn was no more than twenty yards long, but to Tony it appeared to be at least a mile from the porch to the place where Frye was standing. He slipped and fell in the wet grass, taking some of the fall on his wounded shoulder. A brilliant light played behind his eyes for a moment, and then an iridescent darkness, but he resisted the urge to just lay there. He got up.
He saw Frye close the doors and lock them. Hilary had to be on the other side, shut in.
Tony covered the last ten feet of the lawn with the awful certainty that Frye
