Not only the beds and other furniture had been removed, but also whatever instruments or monstrous devices enhanced Jessup’s pleasure when using his captives. For that, David was grateful.
According to Jessup, the five cells in which prisoners had been kept plus the mummy chamber had been fitted with doors, though the five “playrooms” had been accessed through open arches. Even if the doors had brought Ulrich a handsome price, he’d sold only five of the six, for David came to one still on its hinges.
The space beyond the threshold was about seventeen feet square and more detailed than other rooms. Sconces provided white light. The walls met at radiused corners rather than ninety-degree angles. In the center of the domed ten-foot ceiling, Jessup had embedded a ceramic tile on which was painted an eye with a bright-blue pupil.
The radiuses and the shallow dome created acoustics different from those of the other rooms. David’s footfalls made a hollow sound and echoed along the curved surfaces.
Three walls were painted concrete block, but the back wall appeared to be made of railroad ties from floor to ceiling. Along that entire expanse were three rows of platforms, three platforms per row, the first row a foot off the floor. They were like nine bunk beds, embedded in the wood wall, made of lumber but laminated with white Formica.
He puzzled over them for a moment before realizing that they were catafalques. Here, the nine mummified women had been stored in their windings to await some magical Egyptian reanimation, courtesy of a heretofore unknown resurrecting power of electricity.
There were stains and thin crusts of some unthinkable material on the Formica, though only here and there, not as many as he would have expected. The floor was clean. No mold grew in this room, as though the eye in the dome had the power to forbid its cultivation.
For years he had avoided this man-made hell. He had come today only after ginning up the expectation that he’d recognize a subtle clue to the whereabouts of the additional fourteen mummified victims Jessup claimed to have hidden at some second site separate from this property. I need to have my fourteen hidden, Mr. Thorne, to keep from having to steal new girls when I’m free again. If Emily was among those fourteen, and if her remains could be identified, she could be laid to rest at last under a stone that bore her name. But there was no clue. If there had been, it would have been found by the platoons of law enforcement that had scoured these chambers for evidence. He had harried himself here to stave off despair, but had opened his heart to it instead.
| 18 |
The quiet calm at the center of David’s mind gave way to a chilling uneasiness. His ability to set aside his profound personal interest—the consideration of Emily’s fate—and explore this hideous place as if it were a scene in a novel began to desert him.
When a character like Ronny Lee Jessup had been at work here, such a scene in fiction would not have unfolded in silence, but would have been furnished with grievous sounds. David was a writer of considerable imaginative power, and now he heard the cries of the enslaved women as they cowered behind their cell doors and listened to Jessup chase down and violently rape or murder one of their own.
In a sudden sweat, he exited the mummification room and moved along a narrow passage, anxious to exit this rose-colored realm. He thought he was near the receiving room at the foot of the stairs, but he didn’t come to it as quickly as expected. The killer’s modest playground seemed to metastasize into a vast and baffling labyrinth of tentacular corridors, undulant and ever changing, torn bits of dollar bills fluttering around his feet, too little treasure for him to buy his Gretel from the ranks of the swaddled dead. It would not have surprised him if he turned a corner and came face-to-face with the hulking form of Ronny Lee Jessup, the past having become the present, the imagined screams now as piercing as if they were real.
He was so relieved when he burst into the receiving room that he let out a cry of his own. He threw open the steel gate, climbed the stairs, and pushed through the upper door into the kitchen.
He leaned against a cabinet, striving to wring from himself a shrinking, anxious fear that anticipated imminent evil. He was in no danger. He had been overwhelmed by the claustrophobic nature of the cellar and by his ability to empathize with the women who’d suffered in those depths. He inhaled deeply through his nose, exhaled through his mouth, and used rhythmic breathing to restore a sense that the world was an orderly place and that he could hold chaos at bay.
According to his wristwatch, he’d been in the basement thirty-five minutes. He remained in the kitchen for ten, until he was calm enough to leave the house and speak with Stuart Ulrich.