"Here?" Ellie asked.
"No. Here he kept files of photographs and videotapes."
"Not . . ."
"Yes. Of them . . . of the way they died. Of what he did to them, step by step."
"Dear God."
Spencer moved around the cellar, seeing it as he had seen it on that night of the red door. "The files and a compact photographer's development lab were behind a black curtain at that end of the room. There was a TV set on a plain black metal stand. And a VCR. Facing the television was a single chair. Right here. Not comfortable. All straight lines, wood, painted sour-apple green, unpadded. And a small round table stood beside the chair, where he could put a glass of whatever he was drinking. Table was painted purple. The chair was a flat green, but the table was glossy, highly lacquered. The glass that he drank from was actually a piece of fine cut-crystal, and the blue light sparkled in all its bevels."
"Where did he . . ." Ellie spotted the door, which was flush with the wall and painted to match. It reflected the blue light precisely as the concrete reflected it, becoming all but invisible. "There?"
"Yes." His voice was even softer and more distant than the cry that had awakened him from July sleep.
Half a minute didn't so much pass as crumble away like unstable ground beneath him.
Ellie came to his side. She took his right hand and held it tightly. "Let's do what you've come to do, then get the hell out of this place."
He nodded. He didn't trust himself to speak.
He let go of her hand and opened the heavy gray door. There was no lock on their side of it, only on the far side.
That July night, when Spencer had reached this point, his father had not yet returned from chaining the woman in the abattoir, so the door had been unlocked. No doubt, once the victim had been secured, the artist would have retraced his path to the vestibule above, to close the knotty-pine doors from within the cabinet; then from the secret vestibule, he would have rolled the back of the cupboard into place; he would have locked the upper door from the cellar stairs, would have locked this gray door from inside. Then he would have returned to his captive in the abattoir, confident that no screams, regardless of how piercing, could penetrate to the barn above or to the world beyond.
Spencer crossed the raised concrete sill. An exposed switch box was fixed to the rough masonry of a brick-and-plaster wall. A length of flexible metal conduit rose from it into shadows. He snapped the switch, and a series of small lights winked on. They were suspended from a looped cord along the center of the ceiling, leading out of sight around a curved passageway.
Ellie whispered, "Spencer, wait!"
When he looked back into the first basement, he saw that Rocky had returned to the foot of the stairs. The dog trembled visibly, gazing up toward the vestibule behind the file-room cupboards. One ear drooped, as always, but the other stood straight up. His tail was not tucked between his legs, but held low to the floor, and it wasn't wagging.
Spencer stepped back into the cellar. He pulled the pistol from under his belt.
Shrugging the Micro Uzi off her shoulder, taking a two-hand grip on the weapon, Ellie eased past the dog, onto the steep stairs. She climbed slowly, listening.
Spencer moved with equal care to Rocky's side.
* * *
In the vestibule, the artist had stood to the side of the open door, and Roy had stood next to him, both with their backs pressed to the wall, listening to the couple in the cellar below. The stairwell added a hollow note to the voices as it funneled them upward, but the words were nonetheless clear.
Roy had hoped to hear something that would explain the man's connection with the woman, at least a crumb of information about the suspected conspiracy against the agency and the shadowy organization that he had mentioned to Steven in the gallery a few minutes ago. But they spoke only of the famous night sixteen years in the past.
Steven seemed amused to be eavesdropping on that of all possible conversations. He turned his head twice to smile at Roy, and once he raised one finger to his lips as if warning Roy to be quiet.
There was something of an imp in the artist, a playfulness that made him a good companion. Roy wished he didn't have to return Steven to prison. But he could think of no way, in the currently delicate political climate of the country, to free the artist either openly or clandestinely. Dr. Sabrina Palma would again have her benefactor. The best Roy could hope for was that he would find other credible reasons to visit Steven from time to time or even to obtain temporary custody again for consultation in other field operations.
When the woman had whispered urgently to Grant— "Spencer, wait!"—Roy had known that the dog must have sensed their presence. They had made no telltale noise, so it could only be the damned dog.
Roy considered easing past the artist to the edge of the open door. He could try a shot to the head of the first person who came out of the stairwell.
But it might be Grant. He didn't want to waste Grant until he had some answers from him. And if it was the woman who was shot dead on the spot, Steven wouldn't be as motivated to help extract information from his son as he would be if he knew that he could look forward to bringing her to a state of angelic beauty.
Peach in. Green out.
Worse: Assuming that the pair below were still armed with the submachine gun they had used to destroy the stabilizer of the chopper in Cedar City, and assuming that the first one across the threshold would be armed with that piece, the risk of a confrontation at this juncture was too great. If Roy missed with his attempted head shot, the burst of return fire from the Micro Uzi would chop him and Steven to pieces.
Discretion seemed wise.
Roy touched the artist on the shoulder and gestured for him to follow. They could not quickly reach the open back of the cupboard and then slip through the pine cabinet doors into the room beyond, because to get there they would have to cross in front of the cellar stairs. Even if neither of the pair below was far enough up the stairs to see them, their passage through the center of the room, directly under the yellow light, would ensure that their darting shadows betrayed them. Instead, staying flat against the concrete blocks to avoid casting shadows into the room, they sidled away from the door to the wall directly opposite the entrance from the cupboard. They squeezed into the narrow space behind the displaced back wall of the cupboard, which Grant or the woman had rolled into the vestibule on a set of sliding-door tracks. That movable section was seven feet high and more than four feet wide. There was an eighteen-inch-wide hiding space between it and the concrete wall. Standing at an angle between them and the cellar door, it provided just enough cover.
If Grant or the woman or both of them came into the vestibule and crept to the gaping hole in the back wall of the cupboard, Roy could lean out from concealment and shoot one or both of them in the back, disabling rather than killing them.
If they came instead to look into the narrow space behind the dislocated guts of the cabinet, he would still have to try for a head shot before they opened fire.
Peach in. Green out.
He listened intently. Pistol in his right hand. Muzzle aimed at the ceiling.
He heard the stealthy scrape of a shoe on concrete. Someone had reached the top of the stairs.
* * *
Spencer remained at the bottom of the stairs. He wished that Ellie had given him a chance to go up there in her place.
Three steps from the top, she paused for perhaps half a minute, listening, then proceeded to the landing at the head of the stairs. She stood for a moment, silhouetted in the rectangle of yellow light from the upper room, framed in the blue light of the lower room, like a stark figure in a modernistic painting.
Spencer realized that Rocky had lost interest in the room above and had slipped away from his side. The dog was at the other side of the cellar, at the open gray door.
Above, Ellie crossed the threshold and stopped just inside the vestibule. She looked left and right, listening.
In the
cellar, Spencer glanced at Rocky again. One ear pricked, head cocked, trembling, the dog peered warily into the passageway that led to the catacombs and on to the heart of the horror.
Speaking to Ellie, Spencer said, "Looks like fur face is just having a bad case of the heebie-jeebies."
From the vestibule, she glanced down at him.
Behind him, Rocky whined.
"Now he's at the other door, ready to make a puddle if I don't keep looking at him."
"Seems to be okay up here," she said, and she descended the stairs again.
"The whole place spooks him, that's all," Spencer said. "My friend here is easily frightened by most new places. This time, of course, it's with damned good reason."
He engaged the safety on the pistol and again tucked it under the waistband of his jeans.
"He's not the only one spooked," Ellie said, shouldering the Uzi. "Let's finish this."
Spencer crossed the threshold again, from the cellar into the world beyond. With each step forward, he moved backward in time.
* * *
They left the VW Microbus on the street to which the man on the phone had directed Harris. Darius, Bonnie, and Martin walked with Harris, Jessica, and the girls across the adjacent park toward the beach a hundred and fifty yards away.
No one could be seen within the discs of light beneath the tall lampposts, but bursts of eerie laughter issued from the surrounding darkness. Above the rumble and slosh of the surf, Harris heard voices, fragmentary and strange, on all sides, near and far. A woman who sounded blitzed on something: "You're a real carman, baby, really a carman, you are." A man's high-pitched laughter trilled through the night, from a place far to the north of the unseen woman. To the south, another man, old by the sound of him, sobbed with grief. Yet another unspottable man, with a pure young voice, kept repeating the same three words, as if chanting a mantra: "Eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues . . ." It seemed to Harris that he was shepherding his family across an open-air Bedlam, through a madhouse with no roof other than palm fronds and night sky.
Homeless winos and crackheads lived in some of the lusher stands of shrubbery, in concealed cardboard boxes insulated with newspapers and old blankets. In the sunlight, the beach crowd moved in and the day was filled with well-tanned skaters and surfers and seekers of false dreams. Then the true residents wandered to the streets to make the rounds of trash bins, to panhandle, and to shamble on quests that only they could understand. But at night, the park belonged to them again, and the green lawns and the benches and the handball courts were as dangerous as any places on earth. In darkness, the deranged souls then ventured forth from the undergrowth to prey on one another. They were likely to prey, as well, on unwary visitors who incorrectly assumed that a park was public domain at any hour of the day.
It was no place for women and girls—unsafe for armed men, in fact—but it was the only quick route to the sand and to the foot of the old pier. At the pier stairs, they were to be met by someone who would take them on from there to the new life that they were so blindly embracing.
They had expected to wait. But even as they approached the dark structure, a man walked out of the shadows between those pilings that were still above the tide line. He joined them at the foot of the stairs.
Even with no lamppost nearby, with only the ambient light of the great city that hugged the shoreline, Harris recognized the man who had come for them. It was the Asian in the reindeer sweater, whom he had first encountered in the theater men's room in Westwood earlier in the evening.
"Pheasants and dragons," the man said, as though he was not sure that Harris could tell one Asian from another.
"Yes, I know you," Harris said.
"You were told to come alone," the contact admonished, but not angrily.
"We wanted to say good-bye," Darius told him. "And we didn't know . . . We wanted to know—how will we contact them where they're going?"
"You won't," said the man in the reindeer sweater. "Hard as it may be, you've got to accept that you will probably never see them again."
In the Microbus, both before Harris had made the phone call from the pizza parlor and after, as they had found their way to the park, they had discussed the likelihood of a permanent separation. For a moment, no one could speak. They stared at one another, in a state of denial that approached paralysis.
The man in the reindeer sweater backed off a few yards to give them privacy, but he said, "We have little time."
Although Harris had lost his house, his bank accounts, his job, and everything but the clothes on his back, those losses now seemed inconsequential. Property rights, he had learned from bitter experience, were the essence of all civil rights, but the theft of every dime of his property did not have one tenth—not one hundredth—the impact of losing these beloved people. The theft of their home and savings was a blow, but this loss was an inner wound, as if a piece of his heart had been cut out. The pain was of an immeasurably greater magnitude and of a quality inexpressible.
They said good-bye with fewer words than Harris would ever have imagined possible—because no words were adequate. They hugged one another fiercely, acknowledging that they were most likely parting until they met again on whatever shore lay beyond the grave. Their mother had believed in that far and better shore. Since childhood they had drifted away from the belief that she had instilled in them, but they were for this terrible moment, in this place, fully in the faith again. Harris held Bonnie tightly, then Martin, and came at last to his brother, who was separating tearfully from Jessica. He hugged Darius and kissed his cheek. He had not kissed his brother for more years than he could recall, because for so long they had both been too adult for that. Now he wondered at the silly rules that had constituted his sense of mature behavior, for in a single kiss, all was said that needed to be said.
The incoming waves crashed through the pier pilings behind them with a roar hardly louder than the pounding of Harris's own heart, as at last he stepped back from Darius. Wishing there were more light in the gloom, he studied his brother's face for the last time in this life, desperate to freeze it in memory, for he was leaving without even a photograph.
"Must go," said the man in the reindeer sweater.
"Maybe everything won't fall over the brink," Darius said.
"We can hope."
"Maybe the world will come to its senses."
"You be careful going back through that park," Harris said.
"We're safe," Darius said. "Nobody back there's more dangerous than me. I'm an attorney, remember?"
Harris's laugh was perilously close to a sob.
Instead of good-bye, he simply said, "Little brother."
Darius nodded. For a moment it seemed that he wouldn't be able to say anything more. But then: "Big brother."
Jessica and Bonnie turned away from each other, both of them with Kleenex pressed to their eyes.
The girls and Martin parted.
The man in the reindeer sweater led one Descoteaux family south along the beach while the other Descoteaux family stood by the foot of the pier, watching. The sward was as pale as a path in a dream. The phosphorescent foam from the breakers dissolved on the sand with a whispery sizzle like urgent voices delivering incomprehensible warnings from out of the shadows in a nightmare.
Three times, Harris glanced at the other Descoteaux family over his shoulder, but then he could not bear to look back again.
They continued south on the beach, even after they reached the end of the park. They passed a few restaurants, all closed on that Monday night, then a hotel, a few condominiums, and warmly lighted beachfront houses in which lives were still lived without awareness of the hovering darkness.
After a mile and a half, perhaps even two miles, they came to another restaurant. Lights were on in that establishment, but the big windows were too high above the beach for Harris to see any diners at the view tables. The man in the reindeer sweater led them off the sward, alongside the restaurant, into the parkin
g lot in front of the place. They went to a green-and-white motor home that dwarfed the cars around it.
"Why couldn't my brother have brought us directly here?" Harris asked.
Their escort said, "It wouldn't be a good idea for him to know this vehicle or its license number. For his own sake."
They followed the stranger into the motor home through a side door, just aft of the open cockpit, and into the kitchen. He stepped aside and directed them farther back into the vehicle.
An Asian woman in her early or middle fifties, in a black pants suit and a Chinese-red blouse, was standing at the dining table, beyond the kitchen, waiting for them. Her face was uncommonly gentle, and her smile was warm.
"So pleased that you could come," she said, as if they were paying her a social visit. "The dining nook seats seven altogether, plenty of room for the five of us. We'll be able to talk on the way, and we've so much to discuss."
They slid around the horseshoe-shaped booth, until the five of them encircled the table.
The man in the reindeer sweater had gotten behind the steering wheel. He started the engine.
"You may call me Mary," said the Asian woman, "because it's best that you don't know my name."
Harris considered keeping his silence, but he had no talent for deception. "I'm afraid that I recognize you, and I'm sure that my wife does as well."
"Yes," Jessica confirmed.
"We've eaten in your restaurant several times," Harris said, "up in West Hollywood. On most of those occasions, either you or your husband was greeting guests at the front door."
She nodded and smiled. "I'm flattered that you would recognize me out of ... shall we say, out of context."
"You and your husband are so charming," Jessica said. "Not easy to forget."
"How was dinner when you had it with us?"
"Always wonderful."
"Thank you. So kind of you to say so. We do try. But now I haven't had the pleasure of meeting your lovely daughters," said the restaurateur, "although I know their names." She reached across the table to take each girl's hand. "Ondine, Willa, my name is Mae Lee. It's a pleasure to meet you both, and I want you to be unafraid. You are in good hands now."
Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart Page 56
