House Haunted (35 page)

—but now he was in Chambers House. He was alone, and it was night, and the house was locked tight and dark around him. Off in the distance he heard something break. There was laughter.

A door opened in front of him. The cellar. He saw light, saw a shape move across the light, occluding it.

“Come down, Ricky,” he heard someone say.

He found himself moving toward the cellar door, descending the stairs.

“Come down, Ricky. Come down.”

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, darkness descended on him again. Then he saw a light on at the back of the cellar. Again, someone walked in front of it, blocking it out.

“Come here, Ricky,” a voice said.

He began to walk.

“Come . . .”

His legs kept moving, but he found it difficult to walk. He looked down. The floor was covered with blood, rising like a red tide over his shoes to his ankles.

“Come on, Ricky. Come on.”

He tried to walk, but his feet could not move. Then suddenly he was moving, his feet pulled by the wash of blood like a sucking tide.

“Come . . .”

The tide of blood pulled him around into the cleared area the cellar. Bright light blinded him. Then he could see. Spook stood propped against the back wall of the cellar, holding his own head. The tide of blood washed away from Ricky over the floor and up Spook's body, pulled back into g open neck cavity.

Spook's head, the mouth smiling, said, “Time to go now, Ricky.” One of his hands rose up, holding a hammer, which suddenly grew very large, the flat front expanding, filling Ricky's entire field of vision.

“Time to dance,” Spook said

—and Ricky opened his eyes as the hammer came down at his face. He cried out, trying to deflect the blow, but the flat of the hammer hit him square, and his cry turned to a dull gasp. His vision began to blur as the hammer rose away from him, and again he saw the face of the young Polish man above him. Such a terrible dream. The Polish man raised the hammer high, and then it came down quickly, and now the head of the hammer filled his whole vision again, and he barely felt the blow, and—

—suddenly he was dancing, on Broadway, at a real theater, not the horrible dream theater with people sleeping on the street outside, but a theater like in a Busby Berkeley movie, and there was wild applause, and there in the audience, in the front row, was his mother and Reesa and Charlie, and Spook cradling his head in his arms and applauding, they were all applauding, and somewhere above he felt another dull blow from the hammer again, but he danced, and when he looked to his right there was Ben Vereen, dancing with him, and to his left was Tommy Tune, and the audience was cheering as the three of them danced into abrupt hard blackness—

Jan raised the hammer, brought it down again, raised it up, brought it down. On the floor of the cellar, the hammer struck into the inert bony flesh of Ricky's head as if striking a wet sponge. And still Jan raised the hammer, brought it down—

“Mind if I have a try?”

The calm voice behind Jan startled him. Panting, dull-eyed, the thick, mindless hum of the house filling his mind, he turned to see a figure standing quietly behind him. A cold breeze moved over Jan's face. Behind the figure, a cellar window was broken open, the floor littered with shards of glass.

“Here,” the smiling figure said, taking the hammer from Jan's limp hand, edging Jan gently back.

The figure turned to Ricky's body and shouted, “Yes, you fucker!” bringing the hammer up and down in quick short jerks, moving up and down the body. He began to laugh. The body moved dully with each strike of the hammer. The man moved to the head, the hammer came up high, rushed down.

“You see?” the man said to Jan, examining his work. He pulled the hammer from the body and turned, striking Jan square in the face with it.

Jan cried out and threw his hands up. The man hit him again, bringing the hammer around in a wide arc to strike at his ribs.

The hammer struck again, and Jan fell. Gary Gaimes howled. He kicked the body down flat, then jumped onto it, pulling the trembling hands away from Jan's face to hit a direct blow. Blood came up at him. Gaimes howled louder. He felt the hammer like a fist, a tire iron, an extension of his hand, his soul. He brought it down again and again until the thing under him was an unrecognizable mass.

“All right!” he screamed. All right!”

Gary Gaimes stood. He raised his voice to a wolf-like howl. His eyes behind his glasses were like two saucers in his face. Around him, deep red light began to pulse like a huge living heartbeat. The hum of the house became a throbbing roar.

Gaimes whirled and struck a final time at the lifeless body of Jan on the floor, then held the hammer up, muscles tight in triumph.

“ALL RIGHT, BRIDGET,” he screamed, laughing. “LET'S PLAY!”

“I hardly know what to say, Lieutenant Falconi. A murderer, you said? To think that something like this could happen just down the street.... Well, I suppose it could happen anywhere these days, anywhere at all. Why, just in the Times the other day there was a story about a man who cannibalized his family. Killed them and ate them. Down in Georgia, I believe. Years ago, you would never have seen anything like that in the
Times
. . .”

The voice, gentle, slight, was a susurrus to Ted Brennan's ears. As he rose from unconsciousness, the voice sought to press him back down to it. For a moment he thought it was the voice of Beauvaque, and that he might rise to consciousness in the big bed in the big dark bedroom, with a cat on his lap and the landlord sitting in his dark corner. Then he thought it might be his mother, her face rising like the silver moon in the night over him as he strained to see her, before she was gone and blindness descended on him...

He forced open his eyes, saw the wide, lighted furnishings of a country living room, homely clutter, a pink brocade chair, mahogany side table, thick velvet curtains over a wide front window, a wide shade drawn down over it. He edged up in his seat: a secretary to the right, open to a scatter of lavender writing paper, a stamp dispenser, an elegant pen laid aside. Dark oriental rug on the floor, an ottoman beneath his feet, his arms on a dark green chair, the left side of his jacket cut away, his side and hand taped with new bandage. There were rope marks where the bindings had been removed.

He groaned, sat up, turned his head to see Falconi, and a perfectly dressed petite woman with short gray hair who looked to be about seventy-five regarding him with her hands in her lap from a couch beside his chair. There was a tea service on the coffee table before her.

“Feel okay?” Falconi asked.

“I'm alive,” Brennan answered.

The woman immediately rose, pouring and bringing him a cup of tea. He hated tea. He drank it down with wonderment at how good its heat tasted in his mouth. He had a difficult time raising his left arm without a burn of pain rushing through his side.

“Would you like something to eat?” the woman asked. She looked like someone you wanted to be your grandmother.

He started to shake his head, stopped, said, “Yes, please.”

There were sandwich halves on the tea service. She arranged three of them, along with a cluster of Pepperidge Farm cookies, handing the plate to him. She poured him more tea.

Before he realized it, he had eaten and drunk everything.

The elderly woman stood, efficiently gathered the dishes and cups onto the tea service, and went into the kitchen.

“How did you get here?” Brennan asked Falconi.

“Minkowski thought Gaimes might fixate on you, because of your interest in Bridget. And you were dumb enough to tell him where you live. I drove up to your place just as he was hauling you off in the car. The son of a bitch almost lost me when he started driving like a madman.”

“You have him?” Brennan said.

“He's in the house. There are ten cops, my own and locals, watching the place.”

Brennan eyed Falconi levelly. “Why haven't you gone in?”

Falconi was about to answer when the woman returned. “Is there anything else you gentlemen need?”

“I don't think so, Mrs. Williams,” Falconi said. He made as if to get up. “Thank you—”

“Mrs. Williams,” Ted Brennan said, “do you know anything about the house down the street?”

“Oh, yes. I've lived here for almost fifty years.” She sat petitely on the edge of the couch and folded her hands in her lap.

“Who lived there last?”

“Oh,” she said, “no one's lived there for almost forty years. The last was the Simmons family. They were there for . . . six months. They said they heard noises and such. No one seemed to want to move in after them. The children around here call it the Haunted House, of course.”

“Have you ever seen anything strange around the house?”

“I can't say I have. But the house is well off the road and there's a lot of space between houses around here. And I never was one for snooping. Others around here have claimed noises and lights, but it's hard to know how much of that is just spook stories.”

“Who lived there before the Simmons family?”

“The Fitzgeralds. Very nice family. Two boys and a girl. Before them, the Rileys. They had eleven children. They were there when Carl and I moved here, in the early forties. No one heard noises then. He was a marine. I think two of the boys became marines . . .”

“Mrs. Williams, did anyone ever die in the house?”

She concentrated. “The Rileys, no . . . The Simmons's, no . . . The Fitzgeralds . . .” A flush of memory reddened her face. “Oh, yes.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

Mrs. Williams closed her eyes. Brennan thought she was concentrating, but a tear had traced her cheek. She produced a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes, demurely blew her nose.

She rose, walked to her writing desk and took something from the shelf above it. She returned to Brennan, handed it to him, and sat back down on the couch.

“The Fitzgerald's daughter gave me that music box the year before she died,” Mrs. Williams said. “She was a wonderful girl. I'm embarrassed to say it's been too long since I've thought of her . . .”

Again she used the handkerchief. “She was a beautiful young thing. She went with my boy Carl awhile in high school. That was when she gave me the music box. She loved the music it played.”

On the cover of the box was painted a night scene: a church in the foreground, tiny village houses on hills rolling down away from it. Dark blue night with pinpoint stars.

When Brennan opened the box, nothing happened. He turned it over, found a metal key on the bottom, and wound it. He turned the box over and opened it again.

The mechanism, visible beneath a thin pane of glass, began to play a plaintive lullaby. On the inside cover were lyrics, painted black on a white background:

Why do you weep?

The bells are not ringing,

The town is asleep.

The night at your window

Is nestled in deep.

The stars in the heavens

Are gently singing—

Why do you weep?

Brennan felt a strange stirring; felt himself on the edge of a precipice with revelation at the bottom. But he did not go over. When the lullaby ended, he closed the box, and saw that Mrs. Williams was snuffling again.

“Excuse me,” she said. “She was a lovely girl.”

“What happened to her?”

Mrs. Williams had folded her hands properly on her lap again. “She and Carl broke up just before she went to college. It was a mutual thing. They had been more friends than anything, and they were heading to different schools. She was eighteen, I believe. That would have been . . . 1951.

“My Carl told me later that she had begun to act strangely just before she went away to school, as if something was bothering her. The only thing she ever said to him about it was that a voice was calling to her. Carl admitted that that was part of the reason they drifted apart.

“At Christmas that year, she came home from college for vacation. She didn't go back to school again. There were rumors, of course, that she was failing her grades, or had gotten in trouble with a boy. Carl even tried to see her, but the Fitzgeralds became very protective of her and wouldn't let anyone in. And then, in the following autumn, she apparently . . . killed herself. The Fitzgeralds moved away soon after, and then the stories began. I believe they even said in the beginning that that poor girl was haunting the house, keeping people away from it.” Mrs. Williams's hands opened, sadly. “People can be so uncaring.”

“You said she was a nice girl?”

“A lovely girl. Carl used to say she was too nice. A quiet, lovely girl.”

“Was her name Bridget, Mrs. Williams?”

Mrs. Williams blinked in surprise. “Why, yes, it was.”

“We have to go,” Falconi said to Brennan. He stood, and so did Brennan, smarting at the pain in his side.