If there were footsteps or other noises upstairs, he couldn’t hear them. No surprise. To isolate his stolen girls for all those years, Jessup had no doubt worked considerable sound insulation into the ceiling of this lower realm.
In the room where David stood, the sconces abruptly bloomed with white light. In the passageway before him, in the doorless room across the passageway—and everywhere else—the lights came on, the rose-colored lampglow by which Ronny had played his cruel games.
| 76 |
David could assume only that Stuart Ulrich had arrived for whatever purpose, perhaps because the house was equipped with a silent alarm, after all.
With no time to remove evidence of his intrusion, he stepped into the passageway, eased the door shut, pocketed the Tac Light. He turned right, away from the receiving room and the stairs down which Ulrich might even now be descending. He went deeper into the maze.
His recollection of the basement layout was spotty. During his first visit, abhorrence had overwhelmed him, and he’d bolted through the labyrinth’s twisting intricacies in a frantic attempt to escape its oppressive atmosphere and lurid history. As had been reported in the press, like the creepiest of fun houses, this maze made clever use of its space, so that it seemed, if not infinite, at least three times its actual size.
And Ronny Jessup’s excavations were impressive to begin with, much larger than a carnival spook show. There were apparent dead ends that on close inspection offered, to either the left or right, an eighteen-inch-wide tunnel that must be navigated sidewise in a severe test of the claustrophobic reflex. Recesses were fitted with ascending steps that inspired hope of a way out but curved up only to a blank wall. Full-length shatterproof mirrors were strategically placed to allow the harried prey to see themselves in their naked vulnerability and terror and true helplessness.
In spite of his seeming dull-wittedness and genuine madness, Jessup possessed a certain dark genius, evident in the passageway design, which seemed like one nautilus inserted crosswise into another nautilus, the spirals of the two shells intersecting at unpredictable angles. Any runner of this maze quickly became—and remained—disoriented, but was also overcome by a terrifying sense of having fallen through some dimensional door into an alternate reality where neither the laws of physics nor the truth of nature were what they had been in the previous world.
Moving quickly, quietly along the quirking passageways, relying on what little he recalled from the previous week, David hoped to find the receiving room, which provided two entrances to—or exits from—the maze. To avoid whoever had entered in his wake, he needed to return to that initial chamber by the second route.
He passed empty rooms revealed by soft rose light. Two were among the five that Jessup called his playrooms, once furnished with beds and whatever else a sadist felt he needed to fully express his cruel nature; each had always been doorless, accessible from more than one passageway, thus becoming part of the maze. Two other rooms were former cells, the doors missing because Stuart Ulrich had sold them for serious money to freaks whose reasons for wanting them did not bear contemplation.
Passing a fifth doorway, a former playroom, David glimpsed something from the corner of his eye that didn’t compute until he proceeded a few steps past it. Stunned, he halted, then froze.
He told himself that what he’d seen was an illusion born of fright and stress, a grim figment of his novelist’s imagination. It might make sense in a world that existed between the gathered pages of a story meant to rattle the reader’s comfortable assumption of a benign universe, but it was too extreme a twist to be credible in the real world. Besides, what he thought he’d seen hadn’t been there on his previous tour only six days earlier.
He turned. He stepped to the doorless playroom, which last Saturday had been empty of all that it had once contained.
Inside lay a cheap area carpet. On it stood a leather armchair. Box spring and mattress on a bed frame, with a headboard. Fitted bottom sheet. Pillows. A television with a DVD player atop it. A small refrigerator, one of those that in a kitchen would be set under the counter.
David did not want to believe the purpose of the tableau before him. He stood for a long moment in denial.
In the grip of mesmerizing horror, he turned from the furnished room and continued a short distance along the passageway, until he arrived at a door where a door had not been before. This was one of five cells in which Ronny Jessup had kept his stolen girls. Ulrich had sold all those doors. All of them. This door was solid, hinged on the outside, with a shiny new steel escutcheon and knob. Above the knob were the cylinder, core, and keyway of a deadbolt.