Jack-in-the-Box

by William W. Johnstone

  The voice fell silent. The house actually seemed to sigh.

  Impossible, Sam thought.

  An odd chuckle reverberated through the silence.

  Sam started walking toward the stairs.

  “Wait!” the guttural voice yelled. “Where are you going?”

  “None of your business,” Sam returned the shout, feeling just a bit foolish at speaking to a bodiless voice.

  “You can’t leave. I won’t permit it!”

  “Oh, I’ll be back. Just shut up and be patient.” Dear God, Sam thought. I’m losing my mind. I’m actually holding a conversation with a jack-in-the-box.

  Sam went downstairs and found a heavy flashlight. He checked it. The beam was strong. In the kitchen he picked up a heavy butcher knife and carefully slid the blade between belt and jeans. He walked to his attaché case and opened it, taking out and checking his Colt. He jacked a round into the chamber and eased the hammer down, putting the automatic into his belt. He slowly walked back up the stairs.

  He went straight to Nora’s room and opened the door, stepping inside. There he could actually feel the evil, stronger than he’d ever experienced it. It was here. He felt he had found the source.

  Wonderful, Sam thought. So I’ve found it. Now what in hell do I do with it?

  That silent question was answered as soon as the thought entered Sam’s mind.

  “Can’t find me, can’t find me!” the voice taunted him.

  Sam slowly turned, his eyes finding a closed closet door.

  He walked across the carpet, his footsteps silent, and jerked open the door.

  The long, dirty neck uncoiled and the jack-in-the-box lunged at him, yellow teeth snapping, the powerful jaws just missing Sam’s arm. Sam ducked back, pulling the butcher knife from his belt. The heavy blade came down on the wooden neck, knocking off paint and chips of wood.

  The jack-in-the-box howled and shrieked in pain and fury. It lunged at Sam again, its mouth open. A foulness hissed from the cruel mouth, almost sickening him. He swung the heavy blade, missing the clown head. The closed door began swinging, smashing against him, knocking him to one side, numbing his arm.

  Sam stepped away from the swinging closet door and dropped the knife, picking up a chair from Nora’s vanity. He smashed the chair against the door, tearing it off one hinge.

  Sam drew back to hit the door again.

  He checked his swing, fear and abhorrence flashing across his face at the sight before him.

  Phillip was standing there, his face streaked with dirt, his hair mussed. His eyes were solid white. He held out his arms, the fingers working, reaching and beckoning for Sam to come closer. Phillip’s mouth worked up and down, a grunt passing the lips. The grave-stench was foul.

  Suppressing a scream of fear and anger, Sam swung the chair. Phillip disappeared as the chair struck the door. The door broke loose from the bottom hinge and fell to the floor. Sam turned toward the yawning darkness of the closet.

  The jack-in-the-box was gone.

  “How . . .?” Sam said.

  He dropped the chair and picked up the butcher knife. He prowled the room, his breathing ragged, his heart pounding. He was momentarily confused as something clouded his mind.

  “Can’t find me!” the voice taunted.

  Sam spun at the sound. “You’re right,” he said. He walked out of the bedroom to stand in the hall, listening.

  Then the thought came to him: I can’t win in this house. Not alone. If I continue fighting that thing alone, it will eventually kill me.

  “Awww!” the voice sprang out of the air. “Don’t you want to play with me anymore?”

  Sam tucked the blade behind his belt. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  “Coward, coward!” the voice shouted. “Feigling!”

  Sam walked back into Nora’s bedroom to repair the door.

  But the door was in place, its hinges intact. He looked on the floor for the chips of paint and wood he’d knocked from the clown’s head. He could find no traces of them. Confusion nearly overpowered reason in his mind. He steadied himself and retained control.

  He turned off the lights in the room and walked back downstairs.

  “Where are you going, puke-face?” the voice called after him.

  When Sam did not reply, the voice began cursing him. The house rang with ethnic slurs and profanity. The voice cursed and reviled Sam in several languages. Sam ignored it until he reached the bottom of the stairs. There he turned around and looked up toward the empty landing.

  “If Nora were here,” he said, “I think you could hurt me. But without her, you are nothing. You can only make me hurt myself. So to hell with you.”

  “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” the voice said. The big house once more echoed with profanity.

  “I don’t have to be afraid of you,” Sam said. “So go sit in the dark and stick your ugly head up your ass!”

  No laughter, no music, no taunting voice came after that. Sam smiled. He had won a small victory. He went into the study and gathered up what work of Phillip’s he could find. He put the folders and briefs in his attaché case and then forced himself to sit in the den for an hour, reading several magazines. He didn’t delude himself about the house. He knew it was evil; he also guessed accurately that by itself the house could do nothing except play with his mind. The catalyst was Nora.

  Then he thought of something. The basement. Had Phillip ever mentioned anything odd about the basement? Yes, Sam thought he had. But he couldn’t remember what it had been. He tried to recall what Phillip had said. It would not come to him. Sam knew the Baxters never used the basement for anything. When they had purchased the old house, they had had it completely renovated with central air and heating, the furnace unit disconnected.

  “Oh yes,” That harsh voice spoke for the first time in more than an hour. “By all means, puke-face, go down into the basement.”

  Sam did not dwell on how that . . . thing had known what he was thinking. He was accepting a great many things that only a few days back he would have laughed at.

  “Screw you, Karl,” Sam muttered. He went in search of the basement door.

  It took him ten minutes just to find the damned door. He knew there had to be a basement entrance somewhere, but what had Phillip and Jeanne done with it?

  Then he discovered it. When Jeanne had had the kitchen remodeled, she had redone the pantry, and it was there he found the door leading to the basement.

  Naturally, it was locked.

  Sam rambled around looking for the keys, finally finding them in a drawer in the kitchen. He couldn’t imagine why Phillip had put such a massive lock on the basement door. The door squeaked open on rusty protesting hinges. Sam guessed that no one had been down in the basement for years. He fumbled around for the light switch. It didn’t work. With a sigh, he went back into the kitchen looking for a flashlight. Jeanne had one of those rechargeable home lanterns hanging on the wall. Sam pulled it from the base and tested it. The beam was very powerful. He looked toward the blackness that was the basement. Taking a deep breath, he stepped into the dusty murkiness.

  As he cautiously went down the steps, a smell drifted up to him that he could not immediately identify. Suddenly he knew what it was. The smell of death. It was very faint, but very real. He thought. Sam wondered if his imagination was overcoming reality?

  He stood on the basement floor, casting the beam of light all around him. He wondered how, if Phillip had never used this place, the pest control people did whatever in the hell it was they did?

  Then he remembered what he had been struggling to recall. Phillip had shown him the house just after they’d moved in, and the tiny holes all the way around the base. That was where the termite people had stuck their . . . whatever in the hell it was they stuck in there to zap the little critters.

  It all came back to him. The day Phillip had shown off the house. He and Phillip had walked around the yard, Phillip pointing out the outside entrance to t
he basement. Phillip’s words returned to Sam.

  “Funny how Jeanne wanted this so securely blocked,” he’d said. “She has this thing about basements. Don’t ask me why. I think she had a bad experience with a basement as a kid. She told the carpenters in no uncertain terms that this entrance was to have the biggest, strongest, steel—reinforced door they could find. And then they were to chain it shut. Look,” he’d said, pointing. “The eyebolts are set in concrete. And that’s the biggest damn lock I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Sam had agreed. The lock was huge. “What’s down in the basement, Phillip?”

  “Nothing. Not a damn thing. I prowled all over the place. Nothing but . . . well, kind of a peculiar smell. I guess it was all the new materials they’d used.”

  “What new materials?”

  “Somebody remodeled the basement. Put a new floor down there. Concrete must be two or three feet thick. Maybe thicker. Smooth as glass. I wanted to make a game room out of it, but Jeanne threw a fit. I pointed out all the new paneling, all the money someone had put into the place. But she said, Hell, no.”

  Why? Sam wondered. Why would she so strongly object?

  He shone the strong halogen beam around the basement. The place was dusty. And very empty. Just one great big room. Very few cobwebs hanging about. He cast the beam upward. Jeanne—or somebody; he guessed Jeanne—had even had the carpenters close up the little windows of the basement.

  “Odd,” Sam muttered. “Very odd.”

  He shone the beam over the smooth floor. It was as Phillip had told him. A very professional job. Smooth as glass. Now why, he wondered, would somebody go to the expense of putting a new concrete floor down, and new paneling up—good paneling too—and not use the room for anything?

  Sam’s mind ran wild. Maybe the floor was put down to cover bodies? Oh, come on, Sam! Or—his next musing chilled him—to keep something down there that wanted to get out.

  “Jesus, Sam!” he said aloud, the words echoing around the barren stillness. “Now cool it, will you?”

  The old floor was probably cracked, he surmised. So to increase the value of the property, a new floor was put down.

  OK. But why the expensive paneling? Well, one way to find out.

  Using the blade of the butcher knife, Sam began prying loose the paneling, section by section. Under the third piece of paneling Sam found some printed words. Using his handerchief, Sam rubbed the years of dirt and crud from the words and put the beam of light on the wall.

  Help me . . .

  Help me . . . what? Sam couldn’t make out the last word. He spat on his handkerchief and rubbed a little bit harder, the damp linen clearing away the caked-on dirt enough for Sam to make out the word.

  It took Sam a couple of moments for the word to register on him.

  It wasn’t just a word. Not by any means. It was the Tetragrammation. The four letters, yod, he, vav, he—the Hebrew word for God. YHWH. Sam put his fingertips on the word, tracing the letters of the ineffable word; that never-spoken word. It was to be only uttered inaudibly by the high priest on Yom Kippur until the destruction of the Second Temple.

  Sam pulled his fingers away in . . . fear? Maybe, he silently admitted, as his faith returned to him, stronger than he had experienced in years. Yeah, fear. So what?

  But why had someone scrawled YHWH and not Adonai or Elohim? Or even Yahweh?

  Unanswered questions.

  Disturbing questions.

  Puzzling.

  Help me, YHWH.

  Help me, God.

  Help me . . . why?

  And had the man—if it was a man—spoken that word as he wrote it? What terrible moment of desperation or agony or . . . whatever had prompted the words? And had his plea been answered?

  Six million pleas weren’t, Sam thought, his thoughts tainted with bitterness.

  So why should this one have been?

  Sam studied the brick wall more closely He found where some sort of steel or iron bolts, thick ones, had been cut off flush with the bricks before the paneling was put up. Why would thick bolts be here? He allowed his mind to race. To hold somebody prisoner, perhaps? In chains, perhaps?

  “Come on, Sam,” he said aloud. “Don’t let it get away from you.”

  But in this dark place, full of hidden secrets and cryptic pleas to God, that was quite easy to do.

  Sam went back upstairs and searched for a box of candles. He found them in a drawer in the kitchen. He went back to the basement, placed the candles around the huge room, and lighted them. Then he began ripping down the paneling. The more he ripped, the more his suspicions became solidified into reality. He discovered a number of cut-off bolts, sunk deep into the walls. He became convinced the basement had once been used as some sort of prison.

  Or torture chamber.

  Then he tore off another piece of paneling and found that concrete had been spread over . . . something. About four feet square, the concrete seemed to be covering something.

  What, he didn’t know.

  But he intended to find out.

  Sam went back upstairs and found a hammer and thick screwdriver that would serve as a chisel. It didn’t take him long to find the rhythm and the path to follow in what was not concrete but mortar. The mortar had been poorly and probably hurriedly mixed. It was crumbly, almost soft, easy to knock out of the wall.

  With a sigh, Sam knew what it was long before he knocked out the last bit of mortar. He quietly cursed under his breath. The profanity fit the occasion.

  Sam stepped back and let the candlelight flicker over the large, grotesque, and hated symbol.

  He had uncovered a swastika. Red and black and ugly.

  Help me, God.

  The words written in pain and humiliation and despair. Sam felt sure of that. Sudden, hot, wild anger filled him.

  He turned around at a noise.

  The door to the basement slammed shut, the sudden withdrawal of air blowing out the candles, plunging the basement into darkness.

  24

  “She’s such a brave little girl,” a nurse told Nora’s doctor. “And so sweet and pretty. She never complains.”

  “Uh-huh,” the doctor said noncommittally. He had discovered something odd about this rape patient. It had bothered him from the outset, until finally he figured out what it was. There were no bruises on the girl. No marks left by strong male fingers, clutching at child flesh in hurried, perverted passion. There was not a mark on the girl. Dr. Terhune found that most odd. And for a child of Nora’s age, rape is often quite painful, yet Nora did not behave as though she were in any pain, had not asked for any painkiller. Odd. It was just odd.

  The nurse walked away, leaving Terhune with his thoughts. The doctor finished his rounds and started back to his office. He abruptly changed his mind and went to the hospital’s morgue, to look once again at Herb Peery. Something about the dead man bothered the doctor too. He pulled out the sliding drawer and flipped back the sheet that covered the remains. There it was. No bruise marks on Peery, either. He had been shot with the old lady’s own gun, so he had to have entered the house unarmed. He had parked his car right across the street, in plain view of anyone who wanted to look at it, and then had walked to the house. . . and what? Broken in? No, said the police. Been invited in? Had to be that.

  Terhune turned at a slight noise behind him. One of the detectives stood looking at him.

  “May I help you?” the doctor asked.

  The detective shrugged. “Maybe. This is your third trip down here, doc. You discover something fishy?”

  “I should imagine you’re already mulled that over in your mind, detective.”

  “Yeah, I have, doc. No marks on the girl, the old lady, or the dead man. What do you think about that?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Weird,” the cop said. He sighed and removed his hat, running fingers through his hair. “Doc, I got a telephone call from a buddy of mine. He’s a P.I. down in the city. Private investigator. Military intelligen
ce for years. ASA, CID, CIA. And others. One sharp guy. Steady, prodding, cool as hell. What I’m trying to say is this: he’s not going to go off the deep end. Doc, he says the rape victim, Nora, is possessed by the devil. That she manipulated her brother into killing the father, after manipulating her father to go wild. He told me all kinds of weird stuff, Doc.”

  Dr. Terhune did not change expression. “And what do you think, detective?”

  The cop smiled, but there was very little humor in it. “Between us, doc?”

  “There is no one else present except the dead man.”

  The detective’s eyes flicked to the body of Herb Peery, back to Terhune. “I don’t think the kid was raped. Look, doc, the girl was wearing kid boots at the house. The old lady had on shoes. Look at that guy’s shins. No kick marks. No scratches on his face or neck or arms. And Herb Peery wasn’t armed. He was a totally nonviolent guy. Didn’t even own a gun. Didn’t carry a pocket knife. There is not one black mark against him—anywhere. Now, anybody can be a child molester, doc. I probably know that better than you. But once you discover a child molester, you begin to uncover patterns. Herb Peery just doesn’t fit.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  “You going to go inside his head and look for tumors that might have caused the guy to go off his nut?”

  Dr. Terhune was accustomed to a layperson’s mangling of medical terminology and procedures. “That is not up to me. But if the police request it, we certainly will.”

  “We’ll request it, doc. ’Cause I think this thing stinks. Now you tell me, if you will, what you think about it, doc.”

  Terhune met the man’s steady gaze. “I am not a religious man, detective.” In her bed, Nora listened and smiled at that. This one would be easy. “So I absolutely reject the concept of devil possession.” Nora had to fight back wild laughter. Easy, easy, easy. “But I don’t believe the girl was raped. And you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Then what was her motive for doing this, doc? Ten-, eleven-year-old kid. What’s behind it?”

  Terhune shook his head. Damn, he suddenly felt. . . well, funny. “That’s your job to find out, not mine.”