“Well, if I’m going to help you, Clem, then you will need to help me.”
The poor simple man was nodding absurdly. “Yes, yes, sure, anything!”
“I want you to break the baby’s neck.”
Clem’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head.
“You want me to…?”
“You heard me.” Howard was surprised at how easy it was to ask such a thing. But in truth, it was that baby that had caused his terrible dilemma. That baby who stood between him and the kind of life he deserved. To ask for its removal was not so difficult. “I want you to kill Beatrice’s baby.”
“But…”
“Don’t argue with me, Clem,” Howard said. “I’ll just turn around and go call the sheriff. You’ll be hanged, and your mother will die a terrible death in the poorhouse.”
Clem was crying again. “But why?”
“Really, Clem, you ask the most inane questions. Do you want that child to grow up motherless? We’d have to put it in the poorhouse, too. And babies fare even worse in the poorhouse than do old ladies.”
“Oh…” Clem said, hanging his head.
“You would be doing the child a great service, Clem. Snapping its neck means its death will be quick and painless. It’s the least you can do for killing its mother.”
“Really?” Clem asked, his simple eyes wide.
“Yes, Clem. It’s quite easy. Just go over to the crib and snap its little neck.”
The dumb brute took a step toward the crib.
“Then remain here once it’s done,” Howard instructed him. “Remain standing there with the child in your arms. I’ll be right back to take care of everything.”
“Yes, Mr. Howard.”
Howard hurried out of the room. His heart had hardened considerably in the last hour, and yet still he could not bear to see what Clem was about to do. The child was his own flesh and blood, after all. He contented himself that death would be quick. Whether it was painless or not as he’d assured Clem, he wasn’t so sure. But there was logic in what he had told the simpleton. The bastard child was indeed better off dead.
Whether Clem would actually do the deed or not, Howard wasn’t so sure. He was simple, easily swayed, but he had a conscience. In the end, it didn’t really matter, Howard thought. Yes, it would be better to have the child out of the way. But if it lived, he’d deal with that. They’d find a home for it somewhere far away, where its resemblance to Howard would never be noticed. In the end, all that really mattered was Clem. And for this part of the plot, Howard needed a witness.
Upstairs in the foyer, he found one. His sister Margaret.
“The rest of them haven’t come back yet,” she reported, wringing her hands. “They haven’t found Clem.”
“Well, I have,” Howard said. “I just saw him sneak into the basement.”
“Oh!” Margaret held a lace handkerchief up to her face. “He’s returning to the scene of the crime! All the mystery magazines say murderers always do that.”
“Did Papa take his gun?” Howard asked.
“He and Douglas took the rifles from the parlor,” Margaret replied.
Howard nodded. “So his revolver is still in his desk in the study.”
“Oh, yes, it must be, Howard! Get it! Or Clem could come up here and kill us all!”
It was all working perfectly. Fetching his father’s revolver, Howard returned to the basement. Margaret tagged along, terrified but also feverishly excited. She followed a few feet behind, uttering little sounds every few feet. Howard was glad she was with him. He wanted her to witness the little scene he was about to act out.
There, in Beatrice’s doorway, stood Clem with little Malcolm in his arms. Margaret screamed.
“Put the child down!” Howard shouted. “Do not harm him!”
“But I did as you—”
Howard pulled the trigger of the revolver. The bullet ripped through Clem’s chest. Blood spurted from the bullet hole, and the big, lumbering man staggered once, then fell backward like a great oak. Beatrice’s blood on the floor splashed as he made contact.
Margaret screamed again.
Howard stood over Clem’s dead body. “I was too late,” he announced. “He had already broken the baby’s neck.”
“Oh,” Margaret cried. “We must call the sheriff.”
“No,” came a voice.
They looked up. Their father had come in from the servants’ entrance. He looked down at the three dead bodies on the floor.
“I have never allowed scandal to touch this family, and I am not about to begin now.” He looked over at Howard with cold, hard eyes. “The sheriff will not be called until this room is cleaned up, and Clem and the baby are buried on the estate.”
The other sons came back into the house at that point, each of them gasping in new horror when they saw the latest atrocities.
“Douglas, Samuel,” Desmond Young commanded, “you take the bodies out for burial. Make sure there is no evidence of your work. Leave Beatrice’s body here. Remove her from the wall.” Again his eyes found Howard. “She should be brought to the barn and placed there with the pitchfork. She fell from the loft and impaled herself. The sheriff will be told it was a terrible accident.”
Howard recoiled from the idea of touching Beatrice’s body, of having to clean up her blood. “Can’t we simply tell the sheriff that she went away? Does he need to know she died?”
“Too many questions will be asked if we don’t report her death,” Desmond explained. “We can get away with saying that Clem took off, but the other servants would know Beatrice would never go with him. We can say Clem was distraught because of her death, and if suspicions arise that he killed her, so be it. But we cannot make the claim ourselves, because I do not want the sheriff here on the estate nosing around in an investigation.”
Howard was now certain that his father knew he had committed the crime. He was protecting him by keeping the authorities away.
“The sheriff has always done what I have told him,” the elder Mr. Young said. “He appreciates the donations I make to his office four times a year. He wouldn’t want to jeopardize that.”
Margaret was crying. “But what of the baby?”
“We will say that we gave the baby to a good home,” Desmond explained. “Beatrice has no family who will come wanting to claim him. So we say that we found a good home for the child in Boston. No one will question what I say.”
So they got to work. The brothers carried the corpses of Clem and Malcolm out the back entrance, burying them in unmarked graves in the private family cemetery. It was left to Howard, as his father intended, to take down Beatrice’s body from the wall, and to carry it out to the barn. He did this stoically, without any feeling or conscious thought. It was simply a chore to be completed. Never once did he look down at her face.
But when he returned to the room and began the grisly task of mopping up her blood, he suddenly broke down. He turned to his sister Margaret, standing in the doorway, and gestured pitifully. Beatrice’s blood was literally on his hands.
“What have I done?” he cried. “Oh, what have I done?”
Her eyes widened as she realized the truth.
“I was frightened,” Howard said. “Mad with fear and desperation. How is it possible that I could do something so terrible?”
“I’d advise you to say no more, Howard,” his sister said icily. “No more. Never again. After tonight, none of this exists.”
The sheriff came an hour later. As Desmond had predicted, he accepted the story that she had fallen. The official report of her death said she had died of an accident. Nothing more was recorded. Desmond even saw to it that no death certificate was ever signed. After all, Beatrice Swan was just a servant girl.
But Margaret’s assertion that the night would put an end to the horror was wrong. No one slept that night. At the breakfast table the next morning the family was solemn. The day passed without anything being spoken. But that night, as they fell into exhausted, restless sleep, the horro
rs that had taken place twenty-four hours earlier came roaring back to vivid, terrible life.
Howard sat bolt upright in his bed, sweat dripping from his face. And without even needing to wonder, he knew why his father was banging on his door in the middle of the night.
“You had the dream, too,” Howard said, getting out of bed and letting his father into his room.
“She will have revenge on us,” Desmond said.
“Yes,” Howard said, trembling. “That is what she said in the dream.”
Beatrice was not gone. She had vowed she would not leave. And so she had come back, appearing in a dream shared by both Howard and his father, a dream that told them their own chance to avoid her full wrath was to sacrifice one of their own every ten years. The exact particulars of the dream were vague and inchoate, fading as both men awoke. But the terms remained clear. A lottery was to be held the next night consisting of every blood family member aged sixteen and over. Whoever was chosen would spend a night in the room where Beatrice, Clem, and Malcolm had died. If this was not done, the entire family would be killed.
“That is absurd,” Douglas proclaimed when his father announced the plan.
Samuel echoed his brother’s disbelief. “You’re both just unnerved by the horror of it all,” he said.
Desmond slammed his fist down on the table. “Then tell me how both of us could have had the same exact dream! The lottery must be held!”
“Well, I want no part of it,” Douglas said.
“Neither do I,” Samuel agreed.
Margaret stood up. “We had best heed the dream. There is more here than we know.”
Her eyes shot accusation at Howard. He simply looked down at the floor.
And so the lottery was held that night. The brothers went along grudgingly, not really believing in the need for it, or in their father’s crazy dream. But no one could overrule a direct command from Desmond. When sixteen-year-old Jacob’s name was chosen, his father decreed he would enter the room in his place. Howard protested that they shouldn’t tamper with the results of the lottery. But Desmond simply could not bear the thought of sending his son into that room.
Witnessing such a display of paternal solicitude, Howard felt a deep, burning shame for what he had done to his own son.
My own son, he thought to himself, the full dismay of the night before hitting him. I killed my own son.
Desmond kissed his wife and made his way down to the basement. Once more, sleep eluded the family. Howard fretted. He was downstairs at daybreak. He and Douglas opened the door. There was the family patriarch, his body spread out on the floor, arms and legs extended in an X. All except one part of his body: his head, which lay on the other side of the room. The pitchfork that they thought had been replaced in the barn was stuck through his neck and into the floor, standing straight above him like an exclamation point. Clem walked the earth once more, doing Beatrice’s bidding. Once again, the floor of the room was covered in blood.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Douglas’s wife was screaming from upstairs. Rushing back, they discovered Douglas’s infant daughter Cynthia dead in her crib, her neck broken just like baby Malcolm’s. Down the hall, more horror awaited. Throwing open the doors to his brothers’ rooms, Howard found thirteen-year-old Timothy and sixteen-year-old Jacob smothered in their beds. Letting out a long wail, he fell to his knees.
He knew then that his curse was never to be selected in the lottery. Instead, he would live out his days watching his family die, one by one. And he knew he deserved such a fate. Rocking back and forth on the floor, keening like a madman, he knew he deserved all of this and much worse.
For the next eighty years, much worse was to come.
THE PRESENT
Chapter Thirty-eight
“It never stopped,” the old man said through his tears. “The horror just continued. All of us were ruined. My mother took her own life a few years later. My sister turned into a bitter recluse. One by one, the rest of my brothers died in that room, and then their sons, too. And I watched it all.”
Carolyn looked down at Howard Young with a mixture of revulsion and pity. But for Douglas, there was nothing but contempt in his voice.
“You killed her! You killed your own son!” he shouted. “And all for what?”
The old man looked up at him pathetically. “She gave me what I thought I wanted. She removed my brothers for me. Beatrice ensured that it would be me who became master of this house.”
Douglas turned away in utter disgust.
It was Jeanette’s turn to speak. “Uncle Howard, your actions that night…they cost my father and my brothers their lives. And consigned me to forty years of a silent, terrible prison.”
The old man just sat there sobbing, his frail frame convulsing.
“You are beneath contempt,” Jeanette said, turning away.
“I tried to end it,” he protested. “For eighty years I looked for a way. I hired so many to come here and try to cast Beatrice out of that room….”
“You hoped that the curse could be ended without ever implicating you in your part in it all,” Carolyn said. “That’s why you withheld so many details. That’s why you fired Dr. Fifer.”
The old man nodded. “The birth records had been opened finally, and he found the entry for Malcolm. Unbeknownst to us, Beatrice had told the midwife the name of her baby’s father, and the midwife included it on the certificate. It was Beatrice’s way of holding power over me. We never knew, because the birth records were sealed. But when they were opened, and Fifer got a copy and confronted me, I had to let him go. I couldn’t risk the family blaming me. Their love and respect was all I had.”
“But you could risk my father going into that room ten years later!” Douglas shouted.
“Oh, my little hoodlum. Fifer had discovered the identity of Malcolm, but had uncovered no strategy to end the curse of that room. Even if I had allowed him to stay on, he wouldn’t have been able to end the lottery.”
“But you can’t really know that,” Carolyn objected, “since you terminated him before he could finish his investigation.”
Howard Young looked at her, his yellow eyes imploring her to understand. “All I had left was the love and respect of my family!” he cried. “Can’t you see that, Carolyn? You must understand. Beatrice’s revenge was not just in taking away my brothers and their children. It ensured that I would be alone all my life. Never again was I to know the love of a woman. Never would I have the chance again to have children. I was destined to live my life alone here in this lonely house.”
“And become a fabulously wealthy man,” Douglas interjected, “while everyone else around you was killed off.”
“Beatrice’s punishment was giving me exactly what I said I wanted,” Howard Young said. “Believe me, if I could have exchanged that wealth for the life of just one of my family members, I would have.”
“How easily you can say that now,” Jeanette said. Michael put his arm around her shoulder, casting a glance filled with contempt at the old man.
“But my role in all this doesn’t help solve the problem!” Howard insisted. “I tell you now because I am old, and I can no longer keep it inside. But still the killings go on.”
Carolyn considered this. “Mr. Young, you believe that it was Beatrice who controlled that room in the beginning, who orchestrated the deaths. You called it her revenge.”
“As it was,” he said.
“So when Kip Hobart freed her spirit, allowed her to finally rest in peace, it was her son who took up the cause, so to speak,” Carolyn said.
The old man nodded. “Malcolm had seventy years to watch his mother at work. Now he is alone in that room.”
“And like any baby, frightened without his mother,” Jeanette added.
Carolyn was nodding. “We even took Clem away,” she said. “He’s all alone. And having a tantrum.”
“So how can we possibly reason with that?” Howard Young asked.
Carolyn looked at him. “We don’t need to reason with him. We just need to give him what he wants.”
“And what’s that?” Douglas asks.
“His mother,” Carolyn said plainly.
“Beatrice,” Howard said, his eyes flickering up to look at Carolyn with what she thought was perhaps a glimmer of hope. “But would she…help us?”
“She already has been helping us,” Carolyn said. “Mr. Young, even after all that has happened, she still loves you. That was clear from the recording Kip made. Yes, she sought revenge on you, but like all lovers scorned, the passion she felt was fueled by her love.”
“So now that she’s found peace,” Douglas asked, “she wants to help us? To end the vendetta she carried on so long against us?”
Carolyn nodded. “Yes, but it’s more simple than that. She’s helping us because she wants us to help her.”
“How can we help her?” Jeanette asked.
“By giving her back her baby,” Carolyn said. “Beatrice and Malcolm both want the same thing. They’re just going about it in different ways.”
“But how can we possibly do what she wants?” Howard asked.
“We can’t,” Carolyn said, looking directly at him. “But you can.”
He had no time to respond. Outside the room, Ryan’s screams had grown only louder. Now there came a terrifying crash. The young man was begging someone to stay away from him.
“David’s back,” Carolyn said. “And he’ll kill Ryan and then come for us.”
“I’ll go out there,” Douglas volunteered. “If I can get in some shots at him, it will at least slow him down and give us more time.”
Carolyn held his gaze for a moment. She knew it was likely that the killings weren’t over yet, that probably more of them would still die before they had a chance to reunite Beatrice and Malcolm. And in her gut she felt a terrible sensation that one of those who would die would be Douglas.
“Be careful!” she cried as Douglas turned and left the room. “Please be careful!”
She was momentarily overcome, convinced that would be the last time she’d ever see him. Jeanette moved closer to her, touching her shoulder in support.
The Killing Room Page 29
