When the ceramic knob reached a stop and would turn no more, David got down from the ladder and crossed to the opening that the retreating catafalques had revealed. A flight of wood stairs, about five feet wide, led to a lower chamber.
Jessup’s voice rose in memory: They’ll find her in that secret room. Your peace is near, Dave.
There would be no peace. He realized that now, as he stared at the steps dwindling into darkness. There might be answers, a degree of resolution, but there would be no peace. Resignation, acceptance at last, but no peace. Maybe a way forward, a life to be lived, with less anguish, even with good times, but always that underlying sense of fault and the sorrow of an enduring loss.
Your peace is near, Dave. You don’t got to keep tearing at yourself no more.
Shaking, David stood transfixed, unable to proceed. The crisp white beam of the flashlight shuddered across the landing and the top step, and at the periphery of the light, the darkness jittered. These were not tremors of fear as much as they were born of grief, the raw grief that he had thought long behind him, that seemed to have been diluted by the passage of time, but that now surged back in its full power, as devastating as it had been when Emily had gone missing and he’d first admitted that she was lost to him forever.
His vision blurred.
His face was hot and wet.
He tasted salt.
He turned away from the stairs and returned to the center of the room and stood gazing up at the blue eye. Never speaking aloud, he confessed his fault and failures, as he had often done before, revealed the depth of his sorrow, pled also to the truth of his undying love for her, and begged her forgiveness.
From mere mania into madness. Coming here, surely he’d crossed the line of sanity that he’d been walking with the fear of losing his balance.
Once here, however, he could not go back until he explored the chamber below. This horror he had earned, this and more, and he was still man enough not to flee from the consequences of his deceit.
He put down the flashlight, retrieved one of the more powerful Tac Lights, took a screwdriver from the backpack, and went once more to the head of the secret stairs.
He knelt on the landing and studied the first step and saw that it was held in place by four screws, as Ronny Jessup had described. David removed the screws and put them aside. He lifted the loose tread, revealing a hollow space.
Tucked in that niche were two one-kilogram bricks of a plastic explosive. The second was plugged into the first, and the first was plugged into a standard electrical outlet that featured a hot slot and a neutral slot parallel to each other, separated by a smaller ground slot.
According to Jessup, the green grounding wire and the white neutral wire were active, but an interrupter switch prevented the black hot wire from powering the outlet. Each of the first two stair treads was designed with sufficient give so that, when stepped on, it would trigger the interrupter switch, power the outlet, and detonate the plastic explosive.
If crazy Ronny couldn’t have his secret stash of fourteen pretty girls, he was determined that no one else would wake them and be pleasured by them. The two bricks, composed of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin, would not only obliterate any intruder, but would also destroy the entire house and the warren under it.
David extracted the wires from the first one-kilogram charge and then pulled the plug from the outlet. He took the two bricks into the mummification room and put them on the floor beside his backpack.
The plastic explosive might have deteriorated over the past seven years, might even be unstable. But Ronny Jessup was sure that it could still get the job done.
David returned to the secret stairs and knelt on the landing and replaced the wooden tread and reattached it with four screws. This was unnecessary. He could have stepped over the open first step. Restoring it was nothing but an excuse to delay going down among the dead girls and taking inventory.
You’re a torn man, Dave. You’re all torn up and hurting, and I sorrow to see it. You and me had self-control problems, we sure did, best to fess up to it. Make no excuses. That’s the way.
Following the beam of the Tac Light, David descended into the lower crypt.
| 74 |
The air here was not damp, as he expected, but as dry as that in an oven, and yet colder than in the room above. Instead of the anticipated stench of corruption, a pungent chemical smell burned his nasal passages, though under it lay a ripe and more organic scent that might have been offensive if it had not been masked.
Equipped with a backhoe and other construction equipment, Ronny Jessup had labored with little rest during the two years between his mother’s death and the abduction of his first victim, adding the seven higher rooms and this one to the existing basement. I had a dream, he’d once told David, and a man can do just about any damn thing if his dream is big and he wants it bad enough. This chamber was smaller than the one above, maybe fourteen feet on a side, with seamless plasterboard ceiling and walls that were painted white and pale blue in geometric designs like those in some peculiar two-tone kaleidoscope. The ceramic tile floor had been laid on a concrete base, not in orderly squares but in thousands of little pieces of many sizes and shapes, forming white-and-blue patterns; David was reminded of photographs he had seen of voodoo veves made with flour and powdered chalk and blue cornmeal, and he wondered if this was part of the magic that Jessup had fantasized.