The Killing Room

by Manning, John

  He realized he had walked to the place where the woods began intruding onto the well-manicured lawn. Just ahead lay the path that wound its way down the steep side of the hill into the village.

  An enormous black crow high in the tall oak tree in front of him let out a cry, startling Douglas. The bird flapped its wings, then took off soaring down the side of the hill. Douglas kept his eyes on it, listening to the cries it made.

  That was the moment he realized he wasn’t alone.

  He turned his head, and Beatrice stood in the brilliant sunshine not three feet away from him.

  “You’ve got to help us,” Douglas said instinctively. “You don’t want this killing to go on, do you? It’s not you doing it. I know that. So please help us!”

  She looked at him with pitiful eyes. She seemed to Douglas the manifestation of sadness, what sadness would look like if it took human form. She cocked her head at him, as if looking for something there. Then she turned and walked away, toward the path.

  “Wait!” Douglas called after her.

  But she kept walking, the breeze moving her flowing white dress. Douglas realized she was leading him somewhere.

  And he thought he knew the destination.

  Beatrice disappeared into the trees. Douglas followed, certain that he knew where he’d find her. And he was right. Rushing along the path, skillfully jumping over the protruding roots of trees, he emerged into the old Young family cemetery. And there stood Beatrice, forlornly gazing down upon a patch of tall yellow grass.

  Douglas hurried over to her. But even as he approached her, she vanished into the light, a flickering static of incandescence.

  He reached the spot where she had been standing. Why here? There was nothing here. The nearest stone was a good three yards away. This was just a stretch of empty ground, covered with grass and the occasional black-eyed Susan.

  But then he felt something underfoot.

  He bent down, pushing aside the grass.

  A sparkle of granite.

  There was a stone embedded in the earth. A flat stone overgrown with grass and weeds and moss. He scraped at the moss, peeling it back like a moldy carpet. He saw what was inscribed on the stone.

  Just the letter M.

  And above it, a carving of a small cherub.

  Douglas stared at the stone.

  “Why did Beatrice want me to see this?” he asked out loud.

  He traced the M with his finger.

  Malcolm.

  Perhaps it stood for Malcolm.

  Was that Beatrice’s last name? Was this the place where they had buried her? Here, in an unmarked grave. Forgotten by the world.

  But the cherub…

  Something about the cherub.

  It frightened him. Cherubs were little angels. Symbols of love. Cupid was kind of a cherub. With his little boy’s body and his magic arrows of love. There was nothing frightening about Cupid.

  But this little winged figure set Douglas’s heart racing.

  It had been roughly carved. A local stonecutter had most likely been hired to do a rush job. Someone had told him to carve a cherub above the M. And so he had etched a rough approximation of a human face and attached two wings in place of ears. The mouth on the face was open, perhaps in song. But it looked as if it were crying.

  Or screaming.

  Suddenly Douglas felt a terrible chill. He stood up, letting the grass obscure that terrible cherub once again.

  M.

  What was M?

  What lay buried under that stone?

  Chapter Fifteen

  It felt good to be back in New York. Carolyn took considerable comfort in the bleating of taxicabs and the rumble of the subway. She felt safe here, far away from the mysteries of Mr. Young’s house in Maine. It was good to see Andrea, to spend a little time with her, to hear her laugh. And it was ever so good to get back home, to her own apartment, and pretend for a few stolen hours that the room in Mr. Young’s basement was just a figment of her imagination—or at least something so far away that it couldn’t touch her.

  But touch her it did. Unless she could prevent the lottery, it waited to claim another life.

  A life that might be Douglas’s.

  She closed her eyes now as she waited for the green WALK sign. She was at the corner of Houston Street and Avenue A. This wasn’t her neighborhood. Carolyn lived in Hell’s Kitchen, rapidly transforming itself into one of Manhattan’s trendiest areas. Here in the East Village, bohemia still clung tenaciously to the streets. She opened her eyes and looked across the street. Somewhere in that block lived one of the most unusual people she had ever met in her entire life. And she was depending on her now to provide the solution to the problem that plagued the Young family. It was no longer just an assignment for Carolyn. It was no longer just a means for making money.

  It had become personal.

  As the light changed, Carolyn began a brisk walk across the street. She couldn’t deny the feeling that had surged up inside her the moment Douglas had moved to kiss her. She had shared so much with him. She hadn’t felt that comfortable with a man—with anyone—in a very long time. She had told him about Mom, and about Andrea. She had even told him about David. She figured she might as well: who’s to say Howard Young would not tell him at some point?

  She didn’t fully trust Mr. Young. He withheld too much. She still didn’t know if he chose to withhold—or if some power prevented him from revealing too much. But she knew that he possessed information that could help her find an answer. By not sharing such information with her, he made her job more difficult—just as he had made Kip’s job more difficult, and no doubt Dr. Fifer’s job and the jobs of all those who had tried to end the curse before her. It was as if, on some level, Mr. Young didn’t want them to succeed.

  But that’s crazy, Carolyn thought as she reached the other side of the street. His grief is very real. He has seen so much tragedy. He wants it to end. I have to believe that he wants it to end.

  On the sidewalk ahead of her, a dreadlocked young man played the xylophone. Carolyn smiled to see a trained gibbon, attached to the man’s leg by a leash, dancing to the music its master made. People had stopped to watch and laugh.

  If only I could stay here in New York, Carolyn said. Never go back to Maine.

  Maybe she should have refused the assignment. But she wasn’t able to walk away. Not then, not when she realized that someone would die and that she was their only chance. And certainly she couldn’t turn her back on the job now, not when it might be Douglas who faced death.

  I like him, Carolyn thought. I like him a great deal.

  That was why she had been distant the day she left. The emotion was too troubling. The last time she had fallen in love, she had been hurt. Badly. Now, she might fall in love only to watch the man she loved walk into that room and never walk back out. And it would be because of her. Because she never found the solution.

  “Diana must have the answer,” Carolyn said out loud, heading up the brownstone steps and ringing the doorbell. “She must.”

  “Who is it?” crackled the voice over the intercom.

  “Diana, it’s Carolyn Cartwright.”

  “Oh, yes, Carolyn. Come upstairs.”

  The door buzzed, and Carolyn pulled it open.

  The tenement was in bad repair. The plaster on the walls was cracking, and the entire building had sunk a bit, leaving the steps at an angle. Diana lived on the very top floor, the fifth. There was a rickety, early twentieth-century cage elevator, but Carolyn preferred the stairs. She had been here several times before. Once she’d gotten stuck in the elevator. She didn’t want that experience again.

  Only slightly winded, Carolyn finally made it to the fifth floor. Diana’s flat was in the rear of the building. She had lived here for more than fifty years, since she was a little girl. It had been her mother’s flophouse then, a place where she turned tricks for money. Diana had been born from one such liaison. She never knew who her father was, but she thanked him f
or one thing: the extraordinary power she had. “It had to have come from my father,” Diana told Carolyn. “Because my mother was as ordinary as she could be.”

  Yet not so ordinary, really. It took extraordinary courage to do what Diana’s mother did. Against the furious demands of the state and city welfare departments, she insisted on keeping her baby. She understood that Diana would never be like other girls, but no one else, she said, was going to raise her baby girl.

  Carolyn tapped lightly on the door. “Diana?” she called.

  As she expected, the lock in the door slid open, and the door opened inward on its specially designed spring. Carolyn’s eyes flickered instinctively to the ceiling of Diana’s flat, where a cord ran from the door across the length of the room to Diana’s custom-made chaise by the window. Diana could lie there and open the door—with her teeth.

  Carolyn smiled. Diana held the cord between her teeth, because she had no arms. Nor did she have legs. She was just a head and a small torso, thirty-three inches from top to bottom. She was wearing only an oversized white T-shirt emblazoned with a big Superman S.

  “Carolyn!” Diana called, spitting the cord from her mouth. “How wonderful to see you again.”

  Carolyn closed the door behind her, even though she knew, with a different tug of her cord, Diana was perfectly capable of doing it herself.

  “Hello, Diana,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  “Busy writing another book.” The walls were lined with Diana’s books, volumes describing the various escapades she had assisted with. There were a couple of adventures with Carolyn recounted in those pages. Of course, Diana disguised it all as fiction, changing names to protect both the innocent and the guilty. She didn’t want any more freaks coming by her door to bother her. She had enough as it was.

  Like Carolyn.

  “You’re getting rich off these books,” Carolyn said, sitting down in a chair opposite Diana’s chaise. “Why don’t you buy yourself a nicer place?”

  “I could never leave the East Village,” Diana said. “This is home. I don’t need a lot of space, as you know.” She winked.

  Carolyn smiled. “I’ve just come back from Maine. So much space up there.”

  “I’ve been up there a few times. You know, being in the country makes me nervous. All those crickets and birds.” She shuddered. “I can’t fall asleep without the sounds of the city outside my window.”

  Carolyn nodded. “I admit it’s been quite a comfort being back.”

  “It was that bad, huh?” Diana narrowed her round blue eyes. She was a blonde, and rather pretty. Her face looked far younger than her fifty-plus years. “You indicated on the phone that this was one real doozie of a case.”

  “You know, every other case I’ve investigated, there has always been that little possibility that a rational explanation could be found, that maybe the supernatural wasn’t really involved. Not this time.”

  Diana grimaced. “Why do you speak as if rational and supernatural are opposites? I would have thought the experience with George Grant would have convinced you that the supernatural is a real, provable, palpable phenomenon.”

  “Well, Diana, you know, some people say George Grant was just taking drugs, or that maybe his wife had given him drugs, and that’s why he appeared that way….”

  “He was a zombie!” Diana maneuvered herself up with the stubs that served as her shoulders, moving her face forward at Carolyn as she made her point. Her small breasts heaved against the Superman insignia. “Come on! You saw him! I was with you that day on the pier. We both saw him!”

  It was true. The image of George Grant’s face emerging from the shadows had never left Carolyn. At the time, it had been the most terrifying moment of her career. She thought it was possible that Diana saved her life that night. Hidden in a baby carriage, Diana had peered out to see Grant moving toward Carolyn. He walked with the gait of the undead, his eyes blind yet somehow seeing. It was only as he passed Diana’s carriage that he slowed down—stopped in his tracks by the words she said and the blood she spit at him. She had held the small balloon in her mouth, waiting for the moment to propel it at him with her tongue. The blood of a chicken. As the balloon popped and the blood stained the front of Grant’s shirt, Diana had uttered whatever mumbo jumbo she had been taught. Carolyn had watched in awe as the man staggered, then fell to his feet. When he awoke, hours later, he was once again himself.

  “Good thing you had me with you,” Diana reminded her now. “You thought I was just there to observe. But I knew I had to be ready.”

  “If George Grant really was a zombie, then you saved my life,” Carolyn said, smiling.

  “What do you mean if?” Diana sighed.

  Carolyn just went on smiling. “Did you ever want to be anything other than a witch doctor?”

  “Yeah,” Diana cracked. “A ballerina.” She hooted a laugh. “Weren’t too many options open to me. But when I saw that I had a certain knack—” She hesitated, as if something had just occurred to her. “Okay, what’s his name? No, wait, don’t tell me.”

  It was Carolyn’s turn to sigh. “There you go, reading my mind again.”

  “It used to drive Mama crazy, my ‘knack,’” Diana said. “I’d know everything she was going to say to me two and half minutes before she actually got it out of her mouth.”

  “You told me you don’t pry,” Carolyn chided gently.

  Diana frowned. “Sometimes it just pops into my head without me trying. Oh, I know his name. It’s Douglas.”

  Carolyn nodded.

  Diana’s face turned sympathetic. “And he’s one of the ones in danger, isn’t he?”

  Carolyn nodded again.

  “From what you told me on the phone, this is something I don’t have a lot of experience with.” Diana rested her head back against the pillow of the chaise. “I mean, when Mama learned of my abilities she brought in lots of teachers for me. Haitian witch doctors and psychics and Wiccan shamans, all sorts of people. I learned all the arcane arts about zombies and voodoo and witchcraft, but I don’t know all that much about your run-of-the-mill ghosts.”

  “Oh, these aren’t run-of-the-mill, let me assure you,” Carolyn said dryly.

  “What I mean is, if this Beatrice person had been a gypsy or something, and had cast a gypsy curse on the family, I might know how to reverse it. There are books on that. Spells you can memorize. Incantations and charms.” She closed her eyes, as if thinking. “But Beatrice was just a girl, right?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Then I’m not sure what I can do. Ghosts are just people, you know. They’re people freed from their physical bodies. That means they can act out by levitating things or appearing and disappearing or traveling far distances in a nanosecond.” She seemed to consider this, and a wry smile crossed her face. “Gee, can’t wait until I’m a ghost.”

  “Diana, you have to help me,” Carolyn said. “Or point me to someone who can.”

  “Sweetie, I know this is personal for you. Believe me, your thoughts are coming through loud and clear on that.” She rested her head back against the chaise and closed her eyes. “The trick is to make contact with the spirit who’s causing all this destruction. She’s pissed off, and there’s no spell to counteract that. You’ve got to convince her to stop, to end the cycle of death.”

  “But Kip tried that,” Carolyn argued. “He actually was able to walk Beatrice out of the room. It was as if they set her free.”

  “And then she came back?” Diana smirked. “That’s one pissed-off, determined ghost.”

  “That’s just it,” Carolyn said. “In every contact with Beatrice, she hasn’t manifested as angry. She’s sad. She has never been a threatening presence. The word she kept repeating when Kip was able to record her was ‘love.’”

  “All you need is love, bum da da da dum,” Diana sang, a snippet of an old Beatles tune. “Then I don’t get how she could be killing people.”

  “Douglas thinks it’s the other spiri
t who’s doing the killing.”

  “The guy with the pitchfork.”

  Carolyn nodded. “Clem. And there’s definitely a case to be made for that. Douglas’s cousin Ryan was nearly killed by the ghost of Clem a week or so ago.”

  Diana made a face of confusion. “But that would go against all precedent, wouldn’t it? The killings only happen in the room. If they take place elsewhere, it’s because procedures weren’t followed in regard to the room. In this case, it’s not even time yet to send anyone in there. Why would Clem attempt to kill someone so soon?”

  “I don’t think Ryan was actually in any danger. I think it was a scare tactic. According to the notes kept by other investigators, it’s not uncommon in the weeks before the lottery for family members to have terrifying brushes with the spirits. I think it’s just a way to keep the family on its toes, and to make sure they go through with the lottery.”

  “Well, then it’s simple. We contact Clem. Get him to back off.”

  Carolyn nodded. “I agree we need to try to reach him. And Beatrice, too. At least to gain more information, if possible.”

  “But you don’t think Clem is the one doing the killings?”

  “Oh, he may well be. It would seem his energy is far more aggressive and destructive than Beatrice’s. He certainly seems capable of doing it. But Ryan said a curious thing.” Carolyn paused, wanting to get the words right. “He felt as if Clem was being led. In life, Clem was a slow, rather stupid man. I think his brute energy is being manipulated, used for someone else’s advantage. Someone else’s revenge. Ryan said that as Clem came after him, another voice was heard, urging him on. ‘Kill him,’ the voice said.”

  “Whose voice?”

  “Ryan didn’t know. But it was not a man’s voice.”

  “So Beatrice.”

  Carolyn sighed. “I suppose.”

  “It makes sense. You said that Clem was in love with her. Now she wants revenge on the family, so she’s using the spirit of a man who, even now, would still do anything for her.”