Where was he then?
Had he gone upstairs?
Was it better to go up there, hope to elude him, slip out of the house? Alert the police that he appeared to be planning to take up where Ronny Jessup had left off seven years earlier?
Or wait here until he returned, and take him by surprise?
Opting for the police seemed to be the wiser course.
As he went to the stainless-steel gate, David realized that it was closed. It had been standing open when he’d come down here. Not only closed—also locked. The combination padlock no longer hung from it; Ulrich had installed a deadbolt package.
David looked through the gate, up the steep stairs. The door at the top was closed, as well.
Claustrophobia didn’t just mantle him now, but encased him. He found it more difficult to breathe, harder to think. A new fear—of burning to death—crept over him. There would be no way to escape and no means with which to quench the flames if a fire broke out.
He remembered advising Ulrich to destroy the house.
It’s a wretched, vicious place. You should pour gasoline down there and torch it all.
In retrospect, it seemed as if he had foreseen his death.
His smartphone was in the car, maybe a mile and a half from here. In this hole, far from a town, there wasn’t likely to be cell service, anyway.
What if Ulrich didn’t come back for a week? Okay, there were the sinks in the cells. He had water. He wouldn’t die of thirst.
But what if Ulrich didn’t come back for a month, two months? How long did it take a man to starve to death?
On the way here, David had wondered about his sanity. This turn of events seemed to confirm that, like some ill-fated character in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, he had slipped loose from the anchor of sanity and was adrift in alien latitudes.
Then he realized that Ulrich had left the lights on. Maybe the heir of Ronny Jessup would be returning soon. Maybe he had forgotten to switch the lights off. Or maybe . . . he was still down here.
From elsewhere in the labyrinth came a muffled cry of distress, of terror. A woman’s cry.
Ulrich had not brought a piece of furniture down the stairs on the hand truck. A woman had been strapped to it, perhaps unconscious after being sprayed with chloroform, a technique borrowed from Ronny Jessup’s playbook.
The world turns and the world changes, but one thing does not change . . . The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
| 78 |
David put his back to the locked gate and looked from one maze entrance to the other, struggling to clear his fear-fogged mind and think.
The confrontation before him would inevitably be violent. There would be no way out of here except by the spilling of blood.
David wasn’t a violent man. He had honed a razor’s edge to the knives that depended from his belt, but in doing so, he hadn’t also sharpened whatever predatory instinct he might have.
The cry came again. It wasn’t Emily’s cry, wasn’t Maddison’s. In the end, however, all such cries were one, his responsibility the same in every case.
On that night of hard rain, Emily had encountered Ronny Jessup. They had struggled. He had at some point taken her locket. She had hurt him. Maybe he stabbed her and left her for dead, or that might be a lie. Her body had never been found. Maybe Emily survived. Maybe Emily was Maddison and by some miracle hadn’t aged in ten years.
David didn’t believe in miracles, at least not for himself. Maybe others experienced them, but he hadn’t earned a miracle.
The answer to that mystery wasn’t supernatural. A logical explanation existed.
Whether she was Emily or Maddison, whether she would be the death of him or his salvation, he wanted desperately to be with her for whatever time he might have left in this world. And almost as much as the desire to love her and be loved by her, he needed to know how she could exist as she was, why she had said the things she’d said, why she’d done the things she’d done, whether there could be forgiveness for one such as he, and not just forgiveness but perhaps exoneration, absolution, and peace.
But first this woman.
The miserable cry came again, louder and attenuated—but was cut off abruptly, as if by a slap.
He had to kill Ulrich not merely to get the keys and escape this dungeon, but also to save whomever the man had abducted. This was a step in his redemption.
David moved to the maze entrance that he had entered when he had first arrived. From its sheath, he drew the knife. The big one.
| 79 |
This was not merely the cellar maze crafted by Ronny Jessup, but also the labyrinth below Crete, where the Minotaur prowled and ate the flesh of those who dared enter its realm, but also Grendel’s far northern lair where Beowulf ventured, also the huge catacombs beneath the Mountains of Madness, where the Old Ones of Lovecraft’s story still waited to be called out of the depths of time or from another dimension, and this was as well the tunnel system under the terraforming atmosphere factories where brave Ripley had gone with a team of high-tech colonial marines on a bug hunt, to learn what happened to the colonists on the planet called LV-426. This was both reality and myth, concrete and symbol, the maze of homicidal desires and lust and hunger for power that spiraled to infinity within the deepest darkness of the human heart, male and female alike, here given dimension and immediacy. It was inhabited by a Grendel named Ulrich and a would-be hero who knew himself to be no hero at all, but only an imperfect man with something to prove to himself.