The Killing Room

by John Manning

  The second slaughter came twenty years later, when the family decided to abandon the house and the lottery altogether. On three successive nights, in cities spread across the country, a Young family member died suddenly. Carolyn looked over their certificates now. Howard Young had assembled them all, providing a full record of his family’s enduring tragedy. The most recent slaughter had been in 1980. Ernest Young had skipped out on the lottery, breaking with his family and taking his wife and daughters to an undisclosed location. They’d even changed their names. But on the night that one of his cousins died in the basement room, Ernest and his immediate family were also wiped out, murdered savagely in their home. Carolyn felt as if she might cry looking at the death certificates of the little girls. Ann Marie was ten. Susie was seven.

  She stood, overcome by all this death. Mr. Young had given her all the particulars. The family reunions every ten years. The lottery. The requirement that one member of the family be chosen to spend a night in the room-a room that had once been a servant’s quarters. The inevitable death that occurred during that night. The slaughters that took place if the ritual was not followed exactly, and by everyone.

  She walked to the window and stared out at the cliffs and the whitecapped waves of the sea beyond. He had given her all of the particulars but one.

  How the whole thing had started. And why.

  “Who imposed this horrible thing on you?” Carolyn had asked, but the old man had just shook his head, seeming unable to tell her.

  She had looked at him in disbelief.

  “You mean to tell me,” she asked, “that this is the part you expect me to find out on my own?”

  Howard Young had simply nodded, then headed to his room to lie down.

  “It can’t be that he doesn’t know,” Carolyn said out loud to herself, still staring out over the cliffs. “He was here when it began. He would have been eighteen years old. He must know how this curse began. Either he isn’t telling me for some reason-or he can’t tell me. Perhaps he is somehow prevented from telling me.”

  She turned around and looked up at a portrait that hung over the mantel. It was a young man in Edwardian-era clothing, with a high stiff collar and high-buttoned waistcoat. Carolyn suspected it might be Desmond, the father of Howard, who had gone into the room in an effort to save his son Jacob and died in the process.

  “Was it you?” Carolyn asked the portrait. “Did you somehow bring this curse upon your family?”

  But the portrait was of a young man. Probably not much more than twenty. Desmond Young was fifty years old at the time of his death in that room. Carolyn knew that from his death certificate. The face she was looking at was a face unmarked by future tragedies. Whatever had happened to cause this terrible thing occurred around 1930. The world was mired in the Depression; the movies had just learned to talk; Europe was still holding together in the calm before the storm. So much history between then and now, and yet still, every ten years, the Young family sent one of its own into that room to die.

  Why?

  Carolyn was not a psychic. She was not even an expert on the paranormal. She was an investigator. She was more Dana Scully than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She had learned a great deal, of course, investigating the supernatural, but nothing-not even the case with the so-called zombie-had ever definitely proved without a question the existence of things beyond what one could see or hear or logically quantify. It wasn’t that Carolyn was a disbeliever. To call her a skeptic would also be wrong. She had seen enough to become convinced that the supernatural could be a real, definable force-but she had also never seen anything that might change that “could be” into a definite belief.

  That’s what made her a good investigator. She retained an open mind, but a critical one. It was why her first task was to find proof that all this wasn’t some terrible hoax, either one set up by Howard Young for some twisted reason or one perpetrated upon him by unknown persons. Yet the deaths-so many of them-couldn’t be denied. The deaths were real. What Carolyn had to determine was if they were being caused by normal or paranormal forces. A rather daunting assignment.

  She sat back down in front of the papers and books Mr. Young had set out for her. How the hell was she supposed to figure it out? He’d told her to study the results of others’ investigations. Several people had tried to end the curse before her, starting in 1930 and continuing up through the years. The latest was Kip Hobart, who’d tried to uncover the mystery of that room a decade earlier. But like all who’d come before him, he’d had no success.

  Carolyn knew Kip; they’d worked together on a couple of cases. He was well respected in the paranormal world. If Kip Hobart had been unable to find out and prevent what was going on in this house, how possibly could she? Kip was an expert on the supernatural. He had studied with the most esteemed names in the field. She was just a gumshoe.

  If not for the million dollars dangling over her head, Carolyn would have walked away from this assignment. It was too big. Too many unknowns. But a million dollars…

  She’d never had a lot of money. Her father had been a postal clerk who’d died of prostate cancer when Carolyn was eleven. Her mother had soldiered on, trying as best she could to provide her two daughters with a comfortable life. Carolyn’s younger sister Andrea had severe Down syndrome, and Mom was insistent she never be sent away and that she attend only the very best special schools. To enable this, Carolyn’s mother worked several jobs in their town of Rye, New York, juggling her commissions as a real estate agent with the tips she earned as a waitress at a local diner. When the diner was robbed at gunpoint, forcing Mom to hand over all the cash in the register as well as her diamond engagement ring, Carolyn, just fourteen at the time, had felt a profound sense of violation. At that tender age she decided she wanted to be a police officer, and Mom had scrimped and saved in order to send her to college to major in criminal justice.

  But still, on campus, Carolyn had needed a side job to offset expenses. A professor recommended her for a spot as a paid intern to the local district attorney. So impressed was the D.A. with her astute skills at observation and deduction that, upon graduation, he provided a glowing reference to the New York field office of the FBI. Securing a position there, she impressed her superiors almost immediately by solving a homicide case that had perplexed them for years. Carolyn had detected a strong resemblance between a photo of one suspect and the victim’s ex-husband. Turned out it was the same man, just made over with thousands of dollars of plastic surgery. “The eyes were the same,” she said simply. “They can change the eyelids but not the eyes.” The man was arrested, and Carolyn got promoted to Washington.

  From there, her rise was swift, with a series of “unusual” cases leading to Carolyn’s reputation as the “go-to” person for the paranormal. It was all quite ironic. Carolyn had never even believed in Santa Claus. Neither of her parents were religious. It was simply a coincidence that these cases were assigned to her, but as she proved herself with one, she was given another. Maybe it was because she was so clear, so neutral on the subject. Neither a believer nor a disbeliever, she had exactly the right stuff to be a successful investigator.

  Yet her salary never reflected her success or the esteem in which she was held by her superiors. Part of it was the glass ceiling, of course, and she was very aware of that: male agents were always paid better than female agents. Part of it was also the fact that rank-and-file government employees made a lot less money than their critics in the media thought. But perhaps the biggest part of it was the cash she sent back to Rye every month. Mom had developed Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. She’d never had good health insurance, and now her medical bills were exploding through the roof. Carolyn did not want her mother placed in a nursing home, not after all the long years she had labored so that Carolyn could have a better life. So she paid for round-the-clock nursing care to keep Mom at home. Of course, Andrea still needed money for her care as well, living in a beautiful, very expensive assisted-living facility in Dutch
ess County. So there was very little money left over for Carolyn at the end of each month.

  It made sense, then, that Carolyn would leave the Bureau and move to New York. She told colleagues it was time that she opened her own agency, but in truth it was mostly so she could be closer to her mother and sister. Rye was just a short train ride away from Grand Central Station, and Carolyn went home as often as she could, sitting at the side of Mom’s bed, regaling her with stories of strange cases, like the so-called haunted houses and the guy who thought he was a zombie-and maybe was. Finally, after three difficult years, Mom passed away. Carolyn had spent a small fortune taking care of her mother. But she never regretted one penny.

  What she did regret was David Cooke. When she’d arrived in New York, she was single and alone. For the last several years she’d been immersed in her work and taking care of her family. She’d never had time for a real boyfriend. Now she found herself alone in the Big City, knowing very few people and susceptible to the charms of a smooth-talking man. That man was David Cooke. For all of Carolyn’s shrewd powers of observation on the job, she failed to see through David’s shiny, happy façade. They’d met when she was hired by the family of nineteen-year-old Lisa Freeman, a student from NYU who had gone missing. David Cooke had dated Lisa briefly, and the girl’s parents thought he knew more than he was saying. But after a half hour of questioning, Carolyn concluded that David had nothing to do with Lisa’s disappearance. He was sweet and harmless. David was able to make her laugh like no man had ever done before, teasing her about her pug nose and freckles. She found herself surprisingly attracted to him. She’d even found the scar on his face strangely erotic. It was a pink, jagged line that extended from his left temple down to his cheek. A boating accident when he was a boy, David explained.

  When she got up to leave after the interview, Carolyn was stunned when David asked her to dinner. She hesitated a moment, then accepted. Eating sushi and strolling through Central Park, they had a delightful time, and as he walked her home, he asked if he could see her again. On the second date, Carolyn slept with him; he was her first lover since college. On the third date, David told her that he loved her. Carolyn was over the moon.

  After that, their relationship proceeded quickly. David was being evicted from his apartment; he told Carolyn that the owner was selling the place, so she let him move in with her. Along with David came his instruments: he was a musician who played the guitar and the sax and the drums. Many a night Carolyn was unable to sleep because David was out in the kitchen practicing his music. But she’d stumble groggily to work with a grin on her face the next morning, pausing to kiss the forehead of her sleeping lover before she left. David didn’t have a regular job. He’d take the ferry out to Staten Island and play gigs there on the weekend. He never had much money. If only he could finish enough songs to cut his own album, he was certain he could hit it big-and Carolyn was certain, too. She thought she had never heard a more beautiful singer. No one could play the sax like David. But he needed money to buy new mixing equipment, so she put him on her credit cards and authorized him to withdraw money from her account. It only made sense: they were going to get married, after all. This was what committed couples did for each other. This was how they lived.

  One night, Carolyn sat transfixed at a music club, her chin in her hands, her eyes trained on the man she loved. David singing for the beer-drinking crowd, pouring his heart into his words. A couple of guys she didn’t know sat down next to her. They watched David as intently as she did. Finally Carolyn heard one of them say, “Such stirring words about love and devotion from a guy who killed his girlfriend.”

  She spun on them. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  The man beside her crooked a grin at her. “Come on, everyone knows he killed Lisa Freeman.”

  “Watch it,” Carolyn snarled, “or we’ll hit you with a defamation suit.”

  “Oh,” the other man said, smiling himself now. “I take it you’re the latest squeeze. Well, honey, I’d keep looking over my shoulder if I were you.”

  The nightmares began after that. Lisa Freeman would be standing in her closet, staring at Carolyn when she opened the door. Or she’d be drowned in the bathtub. After each horrifying dream, Carolyn would awake with a start-and discover David was awake, looking over at her, his eyes seeming to glow in the dark. “You’ve been talking in your sleep,” he told her one morning. He wouldn’t reveal what she had been saying.

  She tried to push the idea out of her head. David couldn’t be a murderer; it was just idle, cruel gossip. But more and more she began to notice a darker side to the man she lived with. He could be so heartfelt and emotional when he sang his songs, but he was easily roused to anger, once upsetting the entire table when a waitress brought him the wrong order. Another time he’d snapped at a cabdriver who’d taken the wrong route, threatening to break the guy’s neck. Carolyn had been horrified, and fearful the cabbie would call the police. That night she couldn’t sleep. She just lay there beside David, listening to him breathe, unsure if he was asleep or awake. The scar on his face was no longer erotic. It now seemed like evidence of some terrible encounter. The last scratch of a dying woman. Carolyn no longer believed his stories of a boating accident.

  Then one night David didn’t come home from a gig. Carolyn called his cell phone; it just went to voice mail. She phoned the club where he was supposed to play, and they said he had left hours ago. Checking his closet, Carolyn noticed several shirts and pairs of pants were gone. His drums were still in the apartment, but he had his guitar and his sax with him. Carolyn pulled open the top drawer in his bureau and realized he had taken his passport. She knew then that he wasn’t coming back. She was heartbroken, but after the way she’d been feeling the last few weeks, a part of her was also relieved.

  Relief turned to horror the next morning, when she received a notice from her bank that her entire account had been withdrawn and closed out. Her entire savings plus her portfolio of investments. Hundreds of thousands of dollars-gone! Immediately she phoned her credit card companies. Every one of her cards had been maxed out. Her debt nearly equaled the money she had lost. Carolyn stumbled into the bathroom and got sick.

  Suddenly she knew without a doubt that David had killed Lisa Freeman. Her suspicions were confirmed when she got a call two weeks later. David’s old landlord, renovating the apartment he’d lived in, made a gruesome discovery. A hole had been cut into one of the walls, then expertly plastered over and repainted, but not before something had been placed inside. The landlord had found an industrial-strength plastic bag in the wall. Unzipping it, he was assaulted by a terrible, toxic odor. He called police, who discovered inside the decomposed body of Lisa Freeman. A warrant for David’s arrest for murder was immediately issued.

  Of course, David was long gone. He had disappeared without a trace. Carolyn-who knew how to track people down-had been absolutely stymied. He must have changed his name, probably even left the country. With his passport he’d gone over the border to Canada or Mexico, and who knew where he headed from there? Carolyn told police he might be traveling with a guitar or a saxophone, but he could have stashed them somewhere. Returning to her apartment, Carolyn had all her locks changed and double bolts installed. She cried then for the first time, really let loose with heaving sobs. How had she not seen? How had she fallen for his sweet talk? She was too good, too shrewd for that. But for a year she had slept beside a murderer. Drying her tears, she began the slow process of digging herself out of debt and getting her life back.

  So Mr. Young’s offer of a million dollars was like a gift from heaven. She didn’t need a million, of course, but after living with such financial stress for the last six months, the idea of never again having to worry about money was a blissful fantasy. Making everything worse was that Andrea’s health had taken a turn for the worse. She’d developed diabetes and a rare skin condition that meant more treatments and more medication. Her disability payments from the government covered so
me of it, but not everything, and the fees at her home had increased. Carolyn had been seriously thinking of returning to the FBI, even in a lower post since she knew her old job had been filled. Theoretically, working on her own might promise greater rewards, but it also could never afford the kind of security she so desperately craved now. But then one day, out of the blue, Howard Young had walked into her office and offered her a million dollars.

  That was, if she could do what he wanted.

  Carolyn pushed thoughts of David out of her mind and returned her focus to the matter at hand. She had to figure out how this had all begun. Then perhaps she could understand what was going on down in that basement room. But everyone who might possibly tell her what she needed to know was dead. Except Howard Young, and he was holding back for now, for his own curious reasons. But there was one other person…

  Carolyn looked again at the list she had made of those who had spent the night in that room over the years. The names all had several things in common. They were all Youngs, first of all, and had been selected by lottery. But of the eight names, there was one that differed from the rest. Only one was a woman.

  And that was not her only distinction.

  She was also the only one who hadn’t died.

  Though from what the old man had told her, Carolyn didn’t think “alive” was a suitable way to describe poor Jeanette Young.

  She would need to speak with Jeanette. That much was clear. As best she could, Carolyn needed to discover just what had happened to her in that room.