He stepped onto the landing and hesitated.
Maybe he would find Emily’s body in its Egyptian windings, among the fourteen stolen girls, and would know beyond all doubt that she was long dead. But that would not explain Maddison.
Maybe Emily’s remains wouldn’t be found here. In that case, nothing whatsoever would be resolved.
In any event, mysteries would remain.
But what else was there to do but descend and see? Nothing else. This maze had brought him to a turn where, for once, there were no other paths to take.
He went down the stairs, carrying the folded stepladder. The steel-bar gate at the bottom stood open as before. He proceeded into what Ronny Jessup called the “receiving room.”
He withdrew his fingers from the lens, providing more light, although not enough to warm his chilled blood.
| 73 |
The maze of Ronny Jessup’s dark erotic dreams of absolute power was also the labyrinth of David Thorne’s nightmares. In this cochlea of eerie silence, the narrow serpentine passageways, with their low ceilings and walls patterned by creeping mold, testified to the seed of evil in the human heart—dormant in some, flourishing in others. Where it flourished, there was the narcissistic certainty of being superior and the associated insatiable lust for power from which all other wickedness grew. The need to control others and use them, to intimidate and abuse them, forcing them to submit until eventually they submitted with self-negating eagerness. In the twisting warrens of Jessup’s mind, which were here made manifest, all the varied gods of human history were dead and catacombed and powerless, leaving the new god, Ronny, whose one commandment was Do as I tell you, whose love was insatiable lust, whose grace was terror, whose promise was death everlasting.
Here and there, the flashlight beam played over a fragment of the dollar bill that, on his first tour, David had torn into pieces and used to mark the route that he had followed, so that he would not waste time revisiting places he had already explored.
On the previous visit, his understanding of what had occurred here over two decades had filled him with excruciating anguish that grew into physical terror, moral panic. He thought that experience had inoculated him against the dread this place could inspire; but it had not. A shrinking fear, in expectation of impending violence, caused him to hesitate at every turn and fork in the passageways before he finally came to the mummification room.
He opened the door, crossed the threshold, and probed with the flashlight. Cleaner than the rest of this hateful playground, almost immaculate. No mold. No spiderwebs. The nine white catafalques in three rows along the entire back wall, stacked like bunk beds. The radiused corners of the room. The domed ten-foot ceiling.
He placed the stepladder below the white ceramic tile with the blue ever-staring eye. He put the flashlight on the pail rest.
After taking off his backpack, he retrieved two Bell and Howell Tac Lights from it, switched them on, twisted them to spread their beams as wide as possible, and stood them on end. The light splashed the ceiling and washed down the walls. Some of it would leak across the threshold and into the passageway, although not as far as the receiving room and certainly not all the way up to the ground floor.
With the flashlight he’d left on the pail rest, he went to the catafalques and studied how they were cantilevered from the railroad ties. Even now that he knew what to look for, he couldn’t see any evidence of what Jessup described. Either the design was devilishly clever and the workmanship exceptional—or the killer lied to him.
One way to find out.
He climbed the four steps of the short ladder, reached high, and felt the edges of the round ceramic tile. The four-inch-diameter disc did not set flush to the ceiling, but offered a recess around its entire perimeter into which fingers could be inserted to get a workable grip. It was a knob meant to be turned.
At first, he couldn’t twist it, and he worried that during the seven years since Jessup was arrested, the mechanism had corroded and seized up. But he strained harder, and abruptly the knob moved, grudgingly at first and then more easily.
Noise arose in the ceiling: gears turning, cams rotating, rods sliding, whatever. Jessup hadn’t explained the mechanics, and David lacked the knowledge to imagine how such a mechanism might work.
The more that he twisted the ceramic knob, with the blue eye blinkless against his palm, the easier the task became and the faster he was able to turn it. The noises in the ceiling moved across the room.
A grinding sound drew his attention to the catafalques. The three in the center were receding with the section of wall from which they were cantilevered. The entire mass slid backward into a heretofore secret space.