Chain of Souls (Salem VI) (12 page)

Giving into his growing compulsion, he walked across the street and headed into the compound. The sign said that the House of the Seven Gables opened at ten a.m. for tours, and when he checked his watch, he saw that it was just a few minutes past and that two busses had already pulled in, one full of school children and the other full of retirees. Both busses were in the parking lot disgorging their passengers. The children whooped and tried to run around while teachers tried to corral them. The old people moved much more slowly.

John went into the front building, bought a ticket for a guided tour, and watched as the teachers bought tickets for the kids and the bus driver bought tickets for the retirees. He waited around for several minutes, trying to mask his impatience, until a tour guide finally came out and addressed the group. The first thing the tour guide did was to apologize for the overly large size of the day's first tour, saying that two of the other guides who were usually there at that time had both called in sick.

After a quick history lesson, the guide cautioned the group not to touch anything in the house or go beyond the ropes the tour set out. The school children jostled and shoved their way into the lead, while the retirees strung out behind. John went last, trailing the stragglers of the older group and found himself far behind the tour guide from the very beginning.

Ahead of him the slowest of the oldsters hobbled on walkers and moved like snails through the door of the House of the Seven Gables, and as they did John let himself drop even farther behind. His eyes carefully roamed each room as he walked inside the house, seeing the period furnishings, the low ceilings, the large fireplaces, the floors grooved from hundreds of years of foot traffic. He took in all of it, but looked hard for other, less obvious things.

As he lagged behind the rest of the tour through the first floor, he saw nothing that made his pulse kick. There were several sitting rooms, a dining room, and a good-sized kitchen with a large hearth with iron kettles on iron hangers and a bread oven built into the side.

On the far side of the kitchen, a decorative rope barrier stood in front of a small door set into the wall. John waited for a time, but a group of five or six of the retirees remained in the kitchen, fascinated by the cooking utensils and the baking oven.

He finally moved out of the kitchen and caught another group of retirees as they were heading up the stairs to the second floor. They went up slowly and milled around, going through the rooms. John had the same sense of disappointment when he got up there as he'd had on the first floor, and he went through the bedrooms quickly, seeing nothing of interest.

By the time he came back downstairs, the school kids were all back in the dining room where the tour guide was showing them the famous hidden staircase, made immortal in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel,
The House of the Seven Gables.
The kids were taking turns going up and coming back down in groups of five, and many of the retirees were showing the same interest in the secret staircase as the children.

Slowly, the rest of the stragglers made their way into the dining room as people went up the secret staircase that wound around the chimney to a small room in the attic and then came back down. Realizing this was probably his only chance, John moved out of the dining room and back into the kitchen, glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one else had come after him, and then he went over to the guard rope and tried the latch on the door that stood behind it.

To his delight, the latch clicked softly, and the door opened. John ducked under the rope, went quickly through the door, and quietly shut it behind. Finding himself in complete darkness, he reached into his pocket for his cell phone, went to the flashlight app, and flicked it on. He played the light around and saw that he was standing on a narrow landing and a steep set of stairs led down to what looked like a large cellar.

The air here was musty and damp, smelling of great age and mildew, as if the cellar door was seldom opened. The steps were nearly as steep as the rungs of a ladder, and John descended carefully, keeping one hand against the side of the wall for balance. At the bottom he shined his small light into the darkness, seeing that the space was low and cavernous and largely empty, broken only by brick columns that no doubt helped bear the weight of the beams above and several huge brick supports that helped bear the weight of the fireplaces and chimneys overhead.

Above his head John could hear the footsteps clomping around on the wooden floorboards, and he realized the tour was starting to go outside the house. Wishing he had a candle or larger flashlight, he started moving around the cellar, trying to see whether there could be anything here that might shed more light on all his questions. For some reason the sensation he'd first experienced outside, the feeling as if something was pulling him into the house, had become even stronger since he'd come into the cellar.

Shining the light on the dirt floor, John could see where the dirt seemed to have been well trodden in a sort of line, as if over the years many people had come in the same direction across the cellar floor and made a sort of flat area in the otherwise lumpy dirt. The dirt path went from the bottom of the steps toward the far end of the cellar, and not having any better idea, John started to follow it to where it ended in a massive brick support for the line of fireplaces and chimneys that ran up the far side of the house.

He stopped at the brick support and shined his light around. The cell phone was becoming hot to the touch, and he knew he couldn't keep the light on too much longer. He looked up and down the support, but he could see no reason for the path to end right here. The phone got hotter and hotter in his hand, and he was about to give up and head back when something occurred to him.

He patted his pockets, but because he was dressed in his running clothes and not street clothes, he did not have his pocketknife in his pocket as he usually would. Casting his eyes around the brick support one more time, he looked for some other instrument he could use, and after a second his gaze fastened on something that glinted, reflecting the light from his beam. He reached for the thing, and his fingers closed around a thin nail that was resting on a line of bricks. He took the nail, and without giving any more than a momentary thought to the risk of tetanus, he jabbed the tip of the nail into the first finger of his left hand.

Immediately a thick dot of blood welled to the surface, and then he looked around for the right place to put it. Spotting a place where the bricks appeared cleaner, as if people had inadvertently wiped up against them and cleaned off the dust of centuries that clung to the other bricks, he ran his other hand up along the higher rows of bricks until he felt it, something smooth and cool like a very shallow and very small bowl.

Placing the first finger of his left hand into the indentation, he felt the surface soften instantly, as if the metal or whatever he was touching had become porous and his blood was being absorbed into whatever was there. A second later he heard a
thunk
as if some heavy object had shifted, and then part of the brick support swung outward as if on perfectly smooth hinges to reveal another staircase.

The cell phone was nearly burning the fingers of his right hand now, but he ignored the pain and started climbing, taking care to be as silent as possible. Just like the other secret staircase, this one was very narrow and very steep, running around what must have been the fireplace chimney on the far end of the house. John went up and up, high enough that he knew he had to be coming up to the third floor of the house, and he finally spotted a narrow landing with a doorway ahead of him.

As he came to the doorway he noticed something else, a heavy and terrible smell, as if some creature much larger than a mouse, maybe a cat or possum or even a raccoon, had somehow gotten inside the walls and died. He listened for a few seconds, his mind fighting against the image that was trying to form, trying to reject the possibility that the smell could be coming from something that had once been human. Finally, with a trembling hand he lifted the latch and pulled the door open. Light flooded into the area where he was standing.

The smell really hit him. It was horrible, so disgusting and powerful it nearly drove him to his knees. He breathed through his mouth and swallowed hard several times until he was somewhat confident he wouldn't vomit. The stench was so overwhelming his mind tried to grasp how it was possible that he hadn't smelled it before now? How could the rest of the house not reek? The question left his mind as quickly as it had come because in the next second his eyes focused on the interior of the room, and he saw the chair and the body tied to it.

His mind seized because his first thought was that it had to be Sarah and he nearly let out a blood-curdling scream. He leaned against the wall and sucked down several shuddering gulps of air and after a second he managed to get a modicum of self-control. After another second the small corner of his brain that was still capable of rational thought told him that this dead person could not possibly have been Sarah because it was a man.

What came next was a feeling of almost insane relief. John felt a sense of hilarity he recognized as both pathetic and dangerous, but he couldn't help wanting to dance a jig to celebrate that someone else had died and not his daughter. He shook his head to try and dislodge those thoughts. As he crept forward, he tried to get a better look at the dead body in the chair.

At first he noticed the skin, which was paste white with a greenish tinge. He assumed it meant the person in front of him had probably been dead for at least several days. Whoever they were, they had died a horrible death because he could see that the person's fingers had each been snipped off at the second knuckle. Had it been done to prevent fingerprint identification, he wondered, or just to maximize pain? A moment later he realized it must have been pain because he looked down and saw that the man's toes had been cut in a similar manner. Also, from the bruises and deep contusions, it looked like the bones of the feet had been broken with a hammer.

The dead man's head sagged forward at an angle that made it impossible to see his face, but when John squatted down to see if he recognized the features, he nearly screamed all over again. The man's nose had been cut out, his eyes gouged and his lips cut away while he had presumably still been alive.

However, worst of all was that in spite of the massive damage, John recognized the face and a chill rocketed down his back. The dead man in the chair was the person he had known as Captain Andrew Card.

JOHN REELED BACK SEVERAL STEPS, HIS MIND
empty of everything but shock until he felt his heel go over the edge and he nearly fell down the steep staircase. He quickly reached out and grabbed the doorframe to steady himself. Then he bent over and tried to slow his pounding heart before he took several unwilling steps back into the room and the body.

When he looked at Andrew Card a second time he saw the ropes that held his legs to the chair and the way his arms had been cruelly tied at the elbows so they were pulled behind his back. John realized that whoever had done this had not wanted Card to die quickly, and the gruesome sight took him back to the night in the underground chamber when he'd found the two young people savagely eviscerated, their entrails spilling down across their legs.

John shuddered again, telling himself that Cabby Corwin was dead. He was absolutely and totally dead, John knew, because he was the one who'd killed him. So if it hadn't been Cabby, who had done this? And why?

John had been so certain Andrew Card had been part of the Coven, especially when it turned out that he'd lied about being on the police force. Had the Coven turned on one of its own? If this was the case, what had Card done to incur their wrath?

And even more, why had they left him here? This was clearly a room used by the Coven for some terrible purpose, but the House of the Seven Gables
was
a major tourist attraction. Wouldn't someone notice the stench of a rotting body? But if that was true, why hadn't they noticed already? John could feel the wind coming up the staircase from the cellar, rising like smoke in a chimney, and he thought maybe a natural draft took the air outside through some kind of vent.

He thought for a moment about going through Card's pockets to see what he might find, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Card's skin was already a horrible shade of green, and it looked like it was starting to slough off his body. Besides, John guessed that whoever had committed such a savage murder must have taken care to empty Card's pockets.

After another moment of indecision, he backed out of the room, pushed the door closed, turned his cell phone flashlight app back on, and made his way quickly down to the cellar where he closed the hidden door in the bricks. Making his way back across the cellar, he climbed the steps to the kitchen and then paused to listen for sounds that would indicate that a second tour group was someplace nearby.