Like a sleepwalker with no control of his actions, David tried the knob. The lock wasn’t engaged. The door swung inward.
As in the other cells, an open toilet and sink stood to one side. But whereas the other four had been unfurnished when he had been here Saturday and remained unfurnished now, this cell contained a mattress. No bed frame. No box spring. No headboard. No sheets or blanket. A pillow without a pillowcase.
Here she would be kept to wait, perhaps in darkness, to dwell upon her fate, to dread his return when he was ready for another session in the playroom.
In the conference room at Folsom, eye to eye with Jessup, David had felt as if the killer might be able to transmit some essence of himself across a psychic wire and contaminate the mind of a visitor. Not possible. More easily believed, however, was that during his many years in this place, Jessup daily imbued it with his cruelty and wickedness, until the old house was pregnant with evil, either itself having been possessed by a demonic consciousness or serving as a magnet to draw to it others who had the capacity to become another Ronny Lee Jessup.
Stuart Ulrich had heard the call, the siren song of the house, and he had answered it.
The truth about the fate of Emily had seemed to be within David’s grasp. Not now. He might die here, where she had not.
| 77 |
Ulrich couldn’t know of David’s presence, but if he opened the door to the mummification room, he would discover the stepladder and the miraculously revealed entrance to the lower crypt. Then he would be on the hunt.
Maybe Ulrich had returned this evening to continue furnishing the cellar for his future crimes. He might want to do that in the dark rather than be seen moving items into the infamous house during the day. In that case, he might be following the route that David had taken, heading for the furnished playroom or this cell, to add some finishing touches.
Fearing that Ulrich might appear at any moment, David pressed forward along the passageway, toward a turn that would take him out of sight of someone approaching from behind. He didn’t run. He was acutely aware of the need for silence. At each turn and fork of the maze, he paused and eased his head around the corner and scoped the way ahead.
During the past week, events had unfolded like the petals of a strange, intricate work of origami, a deeply structured fanfold of mysteries that followed one another in dreamlike succession. Now his long-repeating nightmare and the waking world had intersected, and a greater darkness threatened. The maze branched out around him as if it were an organic construct that could grow new passages with frightening speed, defeating all efforts to map it. He alternated between the conviction that he was moving toward the receiving room and the fear that he had already become lost, must be circling back on himself. The ceiling seemed to loom lower, the walls to draw closer, and when he passed one of the shatterproof mirrors, he saw a desperate man, owl-eyed and grimacing.
A sudden, measured series of sounds brought him to a halt: Thud . . . thud . . . thud . . .
Like rhythmic hammer blows. Thud . . . Like a giant’s footsteps on a wood floor, though there were neither wood floors nor headroom for giants down here. Thud . . . Like the measured beating of some leviathan’s heart. The pounding echoed through the labyrinth, a solemn tolling. David couldn’t discern from which direction it originated. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, thumping through the corridors, a menacing pulse.
Thud . . . thud . . . thud . . .
After perhaps a dozen repetitions, the noise ceased, and David began moving again, but with even greater caution. Claustrophobia draped its mantle over him, and a primitive sense of the unknown welled up from whatever level of consciousness usually constrained it. He felt as if he were venturing through the waxways of a hive where a hideous horde would be revealed around the next turn or the one after that. He might not have been surprised if, on trading one passageway for another, he had come upon fourteen of the walking dead, trailing their unraveling graveclothes, seeking someone on whom to take revenge, with him the only man present and, according to their view, a justifiable target by virtue of his gender.
To his relief, he reached the end of the maze and came through the back entrance to the receiving room, where he found no one. A hand truck stood in the middle of the space, its restraining straps dangling. Stuart Ulrich must have used it to bring some heavy item into the cellar. The loud thumps would have been the solid rubber tires, bearing the weight of the cargo, crashing from one stair tread to another. If Ulrich had wheeled the item away and placed it in one room or another, he’d evidently already come back here with the hand truck.