In the Dark of the Night (12 page)

“Needs a new rope,” Tad said.

“Which we don’t have,” Kent responded.

“I saw an extra one in the boathouse,” Eric said. “It’s hanging on a nail in the closet with all the old life jackets.”

As Tad went to get the new rope, Eric grabbed a couple of tools from the box and went to work. Fifteen minutes later the old rope was gone, the new one—which was almost as rotten as the old one—was on the pulley, and the final screw was tightened. “All I need is one pull,” Eric said as he put the tools back in the kit. “If it starts, let’s go to the marina and get a new rope. This one won’t last until tomorrow.”

He crossed his fingers, gave the rope a pull, and the motor instantly surged to life. As Kent replaced the cowling, Tad cast off the lines.

“Let’s go,” Tad said as he threw the last line off its cleat.

Eric pulled the boat away from the dock and turned toward town.

The sun was now shining brightly in a cloudless sky, and the only reminder of this morning’s squall was the leftover chop on the lake. Even that died out as they rounded the point that separated The Pines from the town itself. As the boat settled down to skim across the now glassy water, Kent finally began talking about the subject all three of them had been thinking about.

Whatever it was that lay behind the bricked-up doorway.

“If we just stack the bricks inside that back room, nobody would ever know the door had been bricked up.”

Eric’s brows knit uncertainly.

“The photo shows the door,” Tad said. “And if we slide that plywood back over it after we see what’s there, nobody would even know we went inside.”

“So what do you guys think is in there?” Eric asked, realizing even as he spoke that whatever they finally decided to do with the bricks and the plywood, the decision to find out what was behind them had already been made.

“Stuff that somebody doesn’t want us to see,” Tad said.

Kent nodded.

And despite the sun shining overhead, a shiver crept up Eric’s back. Tightening his grip on the control, he held the boat on a steady course.

As he eased the boat up to the dinghy tie-up on the fuel dock at the marina, Tad tossed a line around a cleat, used it to pull the skiff snug to the dock, then waited for Kent to make the stern fast before dropping the fenders over the side and hitching the bow line. It took them no more than ten minutes to find what they were looking for, but ten more to pay for it, and in the twenty minutes they were gone, something had changed at the marina.

A familiar figure was standing on the fuel dock, filling the tank of his family’s boat. And the dinghy tie-up was at the far end of the fuel dock.

“Crap,” Eric said quietly. “There’s Adam Mosler.”

“And Ellis Langstrom,” Kent said.

“Ignore them,” Tad said. “We’ll just walk by.”

But Adam wouldn’t be ignored, and as the three of them approached, he centered himself squarely in the middle of the dock, feet spread, arms crossed over his chest.

“What are you dickheads—oops, I mean
cone
heads—doing on our dock?”

“Just leaving,” Tad said.

“And it’s not your dock,” Kent added.

“In your little girlie boat?” Adam asked, ignoring Kent. “Better hurry or you won’t make it all the way home before dark.” His lips twisted into a sneering grin. “Bad things can happen to coneheads after dark.”

Doing his best to ignore Adam, Eric moved quickly around the other boy, walked to the end of the dock, and tossed the new rope into the Pinecrest boat. As he was climbing in, Kent and Tad caught up with him, untied the boat, and shoved it away from the dock before Adam had a chance to try to pick a fight.

Eric offered a silent prayer to the god of little outboard motors and pulled the rope.

Miraculously, it started.

He gave the engine a little gas and the boat moved away from the dock, leaving Adam glowering after them.

“Why does he want to be such a jerk?” Tad asked, neither expecting nor getting an answer to his question.

Eric guided the boat out of the marina and away from town, and as they pulled out into the open lake, he finally began to relax. Only a moment later, though, he heard the roar of a powerful outboard, and his guts told him what it was even before he glanced back over his shoulder. Sure enough, Adam Mosler was steering his father’s runabout straight toward them, racing at full speed. Ellis Langstrom was standing behind Adam, hanging onto Adam’s seat with one hand, clutching the boat’s rail with the other. Only at the last possible moment did Mosler throttle back and let the runabout’s bow drop into the water, bringing the boat to a stop alongside their little dingy.

“Going fishing, girls?” Adam mocked, then eyed the bait bucket on the floor of the dinghy. “Eeewww, worms!” he said in an exaggeratedly girlish voice. “Who’s going to bait your hooks?”

Eric held his course steady, silently praying that Kent wouldn’t try to pick a fight out here in the middle of the lake.

Once again his prayers were answered.

“Okay,” Adam said, finally deciding that neither Eric nor his friends were going to rise to his taunts. “We’ll leave you to your summer fun.” He shoved the throttle forward; the motor roared, the boat surged, and Adam flipped the wheel and cut sharply away from Eric’s boat, executing the maneuver so quickly that Ellis Langstrom nearly lost his balance.

The spewing rooster tail built so quickly that Eric had no time to escape it, and as Adam’s boat shot away, a cascade of water poured into the dinghy. Tad Sparks instinctively tried to dodge away from the deluge, but succeeded only in slipping off the seat and banging his shoulder against the side of the boat as he fell. Soaked to the skin once more, the three of them could hear Adam laughing as he sped back toward town.

“Bastard,” Kent said. “I’d like to kill that guy.”

“Forget him,” Eric said.

“I don’t want to forget him,” Kent said. “You okay?” he asked Tad.

Tad scrambled back onto the seat, rubbing his shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “I shouldn’t have tried to duck.”

“It’s not your fault,” Kent said. “What a jerk. Maybe we should go back to town, find him, and teach him a lesson.”

“Or maybe,” Eric countered as he turned the boat back on course toward Pinecrest, “we should just go home and forget about Adam Mosler.” As Kent opened his mouth to argue, Eric grinned. “My folks are off playing golf, and Marci’s going to that Summer Fun thing at the school. Which means we’ll have plenty of time to unbrick that door and see what’s behind it.”

Kent looked once more at Adam Mosler’s boat. “Okay,” he said. “Besides, who knows? Maybe there’ll be something in there I can use to get that loser.”

Eric twisted the throttle and the boat picked up speed. A moment later they rounded the point, and Adam Mosler’s boat disappeared.

But, though Adam Mosler and Ellis Langstrom were no longer visible, they were not forgotten.

R
ITA HENDERSON SAW
the sheriff’s car pull up and silently rehearsed what she was going to say to the two boys who were sitting in the backseat. She didn’t care much for Adam Mosler, and was fairly sure that sooner or later he’d take a wrong turn on the road of his life and wind up in prison, if not worse. But Ellis Langstrom was another matter, and when she’d recognized him in the boat with Adam, she called Floyd Ruston, who had been the sheriff as long as Rita could remember and was every bit as eager as she herself that nothing happen to dent the tourist trade that was all that kept the town alive. It had taken her no more than a minute to convince Ruston to throw a scare into the two boys, and no more than ten to bring them to her. Now Rita swiveled in her chair and made a few notes on her pad as she heard three car doors slam and footsteps come up the wooden porch steps to her office door.

She looked up when the door opened, then stood and held her hand out to Sheriff Ruston. “Thank you, Rusty,” she said, deliberately using his nickname to make it clear to the boys just how close her relationship with the sheriff was.

“If you hadn’t called, I’d have impounded that boat and arrested these boys,” Ruston replied, sticking perfectly to the script they’d worked out on the phone.

Rita set her mouth in a grim line and inspected the two who stood before her.

Adam Mosler was on the verge of a smirk—no surprise—but Ellis Langstrom looked positively terrified.

Good.

“Reckless endangerment,” the sheriff went on, starting to tick off the boys’ various offenses on his fingers. “Exceeding the five mile per hour speed limit in the marina. Ignoring the no wake rule.”

Rita nodded.

“If it were up to me, they’d both spend the rest of the summer attending Power Squadron classes and doing a whole lot of community service. Not to mention the six hundred and twenty dollars Adam’s father would have to pay to get his boat out of impoundment.”

Rita noticed Adam’s smirk fading. “Sounds like they both owe you a debt of gratitude for not doing all that,” she said pointedly.

Ellis got the message in an instant and turned to face the sheriff. “Thank you,” he said, clearly on the verge of tears. “It won’t happen again. Really—I promise.”

Adam mumbled his apology, and Rita wanted to shake him, but she was prepared to settle for what little she could get, especially since Ruston hadn’t actually seen any of what the boys had done himself, and wouldn’t have wanted to risk Cleve Mosler’s wrath anyway. Not with an election coming up in the fall.

A moment later the sheriff was gone, and it was Rita’s turn.

“It isn’t just the recklessness,” she said, feeling her blood pressure rise as a smirk began to curl around the corners of Adam’s mouth again. “I saw what you did—you were hassling summer people from The Pines.”

Ellis looked at the floor, but Adam merely gave her an insolent glance.

“I’m so disgusted with both of you that I can barely stand to look at you,” she went on. “Especially you, Ellis. How much do you think the local residents spend in your mother’s store?” She barely gave Ellis a chance to speak before answering her own question. “Not much! Not much at all. It’s the summer people and the tourists who put money in our bank accounts and food on our tables. They give you summer jobs.” She moved directly in front of Adam to make her point. “Actually,
I
give you summer jobs on their behalf. Is that clear?”

She waited for a response.

An apology, maybe.

Or a thank-you for saving them from the possibility of criminal prosecution and juvenile court.

Anything.

But there was no response from either of them.

“Are you listening to me?” Rita finally demanded.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ellis said.

Adam nodded.

“I saved your butts this time because I think you deserve a break. Once.
Once.
Next time, I’ll let Sheriff Ruston haul you off and take your father’s boat.” Adam glowered at her, his face twisted with fury. “So you’d both better grow up and do something constructive with your time.” She stared at Adam, who met her gaze unflinchingly. “Get it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ellis said.

“Adam?” Rita demanded, her gaze unwavering.

After what seemed an eternity, Adam’s eyes shifted to the floor. “I hear you,” he said.

“Good,” Rita said. “Now get out of here, both of you.”

A
S SOON AS
they were outside, Adam pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his jeans pocket and took his time lighting one. He glanced back through the window at Rita Henderson, who was back at her desk but watching them. “Bastards,” he said softly. “Maybe we should just kill ’em. All of ’em.”

“Will you shut up?” Ellis said. “What if she hears you?” He walked down the steps to the sidewalk. “I’m going over to my mom’s shop.”

“You workin’ today?”

Ellis shrugged, glancing at Rita Henderson, who was still watching them. “I think I’ll just go help her out. It’s summer—she’ll be busy.”

“So go,” Adam said, his voice taking on a sarcastic edge as he sauntered down the steps, deliberately flicking the ash of his cigarette on the real estate office porch. “Go do what that Henderson bitch wants, and I’ll think of a way to get even with those pricks.”

“Why don’t you just give it up, Adam?” Ellis started down the sidewalk, walking faster to put some distance between them. “It’s not like they ever actually did anything to you.”

“Who cares?” Adam countered as Ellis moved away. When Ellis disappeared around the corner, he tossed his half-smoked cigarette into some bushes and spoke again, more to himself than to anyone who might be listening. “What they did isn’t the point—it’s what they are. And I say they’re a bunch of snotty pricks, and I’m going to teach them a lesson they’ll never forget.”

E
RIC BREWSTER WATCHED
nervously as Kent Newell pried the first brick loose from the wall. His parents had barely disappeared around the curve in the driveway before he’d led Kent and Tad back down to the carriage house, where Tad had insisted on keeping a lookout at the door while Eric and Kent set to work on the wall. Within five minutes, though, Tad’s curiosity had overcome his fear that Eric’s folks might come back and catch them, and now he was hovering just behind Eric, seeming even more nervous than Eric himself.

The brick suddenly slid out. Kent handed it to Eric, who set it carefully on the floor, cradling it as gingerly as if it were a piece of crystal that might shatter in his hands, dust from the rotting mortar sticking to his moist palms.

Tad Sparks took the next brick, and within minutes Kent had removed enough of them to make a hole they could look through.

“Hand me the flashlight,” Kent whispered, lowering his voice as if something that lay beyond the bricks might hear him.

Eric passed him the broad-beam flashlight they’d brought from the house, then crowded close to Kent for a first glimpse of what was behind the bricked-up doorway as Tad Sparks tried to see over Kent’s other shoulder.

The musty odor of mold and dust wafted through the opening, and for a second Eric felt oddly dizzy.

“More boxes,” Tad said as Kent played the beam of light around the small room.

“And a bunch more old furniture,” Kent added, clearly disappointed that the contents of the hidden room seemed to be more of the same stuff that filled the room in which they were standing.

“There has to be something different about that stuff, though,” Eric said. “I mean, why is it in there instead of out here? There’s got to be a reason why someone bricked up the doorway.” Reaching over Kent’s shoulder, he grabbed a brick and tugged hard.

It came away in his hand, loosening a dozen others, which tumbled to the floor in a cascade of clatter and dust.

The boys moved back, and Kent passed the flashlight to Eric. “Jeez, Eric—be careful!” he said.

Elbowing Eric aside, Kent moved forward again, and working as swiftly and as silently as he could, dismantled the rest of the doorway. When the hole was big enough to step through, Kent straightened up and handed the last brick to Tad. But then, realizing there was no longer any barrier between himself and the hidden room, he stepped back.

“You want to go in first?” he asked Eric.

As Eric gazed at the gaping hole where a brick wall had stood, his heart began pounding so hard that his breath caught in his chest. Even so, he gripped the flashlight tight and stepped over the few remaining rows of bricks into the dark room.

A feeling of utter isolation instantly fell over him. It was as if he were totally alone in a dark and cavernous place—a dangerous place—where unseen evil lurked in every shadowy corner. Turning away from the blackness, he ran into a veil of cobwebs that covered his face and nearly dropped the flashlight in panic as he clawed them away.

“This is so weird,” Tad whispered, stepping through the doorway and moving close to Eric. Eric reached out, closed his fingers on Tad’s arm, and immediately regained his equilibrium.

Despite the cool of the chamber, perspiration burst from his forehead.

“It’s bigger than I thought,” Kent said as he, too, stepped through to join them.

Eric slowly moved the flashlight beam around the room, his heart still hammering, his hand trembling as he wiped bits of cobweb from his eyelashes and hair. The room was, indeed, much larger than they’d expected—it seemed almost the size of his bedroom up in the main house. Yet from the dimensions of the carriage house, he’d expected it to be only a few feet wide and deep, no more than a large closet.

And now that they were inside the room, they began to see that in fact it was different from the storeroom behind which it was hidden. This chamber was well organized, with a desk, a long table, and bookshelves, as well as stacks of boxes, some of which were beginning to slump with age.

And it was filled with a heavy odor that made Eric think of death and decay.

Tad’s voice broke the silence that had fallen over them as Eric played the light around the walls. “This box is open,” he said. “Give me some light.”

Eric turned the light toward Tad, who lifted an old black leather valise out of a box and set it on the table.

“What is it?” Kent asked.

Tad gazed at the object for a second, then recognized it from something he’d seen in one of the antiques stores his mother had taken him to a couple of years ago. “It’s an old medical bag. Maybe it was Dr. Darby’s.”

“What’s in it?” Eric asked.

Tad unlatched the tarnished catch and stretched the bag’s hinged mouth wide.

Eric shone the light inside.

Empty.

Turning away from the bag, Tad opened more of the boxes while Kent began exploring the drawers of the desk.

Eric went to the bookshelves and played the light over the titles, but many of the books were so old and worn that the printing on the spines was all but illegible. Still, he had a feeling that whatever the reason this room had been sealed up, the books were part of it.

“Look at this old lamp,” Tad said, breaking Eric’s reverie as he pulled a heavy, ornate lamp base from a box that was all but invisible in the dim light from the single bulb in the storeroom. He set the lamp on the table, which wobbled under its weight.

“Table’s missing a leg,” Kent said, pointing to the two small boxes that were all that supported one corner of the table.

Eric ran his finger along the dusty spines of the books, brushing them just clean enough to make out their titles. Most of them appeared to be old medical texts.

A row of jars with black screw tops and murky contents lined the top shelf, but in the darkness that was broken only by the flashlight and the spillover from the storeroom next door, he couldn’t tell what was inside them.

Then his finger passed over a different kind of book, and he felt a strange sensation—almost like electricity. He pulled the volume from the shelf and laid it on the table. A single word was stamped on the front in ornate gold script:
Ledger.

Eric looked up from the book to see that Tad had become fixated on the lamp base, turning it around and around as he studied the intricate scrollwork, and that Kent was lost in tracing the pattern of the cracked Formica on the tabletop with his forefinger.

“Look what I found,” Eric said, and both their heads snapped up as if his words had startled them out of a deep sleep. As they moved closer, Eric opened the ledger to the first page.

Written in a fine, old-fashioned copperplate script were a variety of notes:

10/8 acq ladder fm M. Heuser. $17.

10/10 Saw R. Squireson .75 hr

10/11 Chimney swept. Hired F. MacIntosh gardener.

Eric turned the page.

11/3 acq painting for dng rm fm H.H.$9.

11/5 acq chaise fm J. Sanders $6

11/7 weigh 177. Must stop dairy

He flipped to the middle of the book.

7/6 sld washbasin $4, acq 3/6 $47. No energy. Suspect fraud

8/1 Saw R. Logan 1.5 hr.

8/5 Brkn window in boathouse fx’d.

Tad reached out and touched the second entry with his forefinger. “Logan,” he breathed.

“And what’s that mean?” Kent asked, pointing to the entry above the one that mentioned Logan. “Fraud on a forty-seven dollar washbasin?”

But Eric was eager to continue and kept turning pages, his eyes scanning each of them in turn, the whole process taking on the same almost automatic, oddly hypnotic rhythm they’d experienced with the photo album in the other room.

Page after page contained strangely cryptic notes—words that didn’t quite mean anything, or seemed oddly out of place—all written in the same fine hand.

At the end of the thick tome were half a dozen blank pages, but only when he was gazing at the inside of the back cover did Eric turn to the final entry.

I’ve acquired the final piece, but if I fit it to its mate I know my strength will fail. The power overwhelms me now—it is far stronger than I.

I shall therefore close this room, leaving all but one of the pieces inside.

Perhaps I should never have begun this venture, but I have the strength neither to continue the research, nor destroy what I have taken such pains to amass.

I pray that some day someone stronger will finish what I have begun.

May God have mercy on my wretched soul.

—H.D.

Kent whistled softly as he finished reading the entry, and Tad looked up to gaze straight at Eric. “H.D.,” he said. “Hector Darby. And that sounds like a suicide note, doesn’t it?”

Instead of answering Tad’s question, Eric played the beam of the flashlight around the room. “What is all this stuff?” he asked. His heart was beating faster again, and as the now fading beam of the flashlight hit each object, he felt a strange sense of excitement. Suddenly, he wanted to touch everything—to feel the objects—to experience them. It was almost as if the contents of the room had found voices and were whispering to him, calling to him.

But it was more than that, more than merely a need to look at the strange amalgam of seeming junk that filled the room.

No, it was much, much more. Eric—indeed, all three of the boys—were feeling an almost electric eagerness to absorb and understand everything in the room.

As the flashlight beam faded to a dull yellow, Eric hit it onto the palm of his hand. It flickered strong for a moment, then faded again. “What’s the matter with this?” he muttered.

“What time is it?” Tad asked.

Eric glanced at his watch, then looked again. Disbelieving what his eyes were telling him, he tapped its face, then held it up to his ear.

Its ticking was faint, but definitely there. “Five minutes to five?” he breathed, making it more a question than a statement. He looked first at Tad, then at Kent. “How could that be? We’ve only been in here—what—a half hour?”

“We got here at one,” Kent said. “I know—I looked at my watch.”

“Crap,” Eric said. “My folks’ll be back any minute.” Turning away from the room and its contents, he led the way back through the broken brick wall, leaving everything as it was, and together the three of them pulled the sheet of plywood back across the opening.

Eric put the flashlight back in the tack room, and they walked out of the carriage house into the bright afternoon sunshine. He felt strangely disoriented, as if the daylight was wrong, as if the outdoors was too big. He quickened his step as he headed up the lawn toward the house.

The message light was blinking on the phone when they came through the back door into the kitchen, and he pressed the button to play back the message.

“Hi, honey,” his mother said through the tinny speaker. “The six of us had a great round of golf and your dad picked up Marci from Summer Fun. We all decided to have dinner here at the club, and if you and the boys want to join us, Tad’s mother says there’s a taxi you can call. Or you can all go into town for a pizza if you want to. Just behave yourselves, and be careful, and be home by ten-thirty, okay? Eleven at the latest. Love you.”

Eric looked at his friends, and could read the decision in their faces as clearly as it was in his own mind. If they went into town for pizza, they could be back in less than an hour.

And that would give them at least two more hours in Hector Darby’s secret room.

“Let’s go now so we can get back sooner,” Tad said, voicing Eric’s thought almost exactly.

E
RIC TOOK A
bite of pizza, even though he wasn’t hungry. All he could think about was the secret room, and the stuff in it, and the ledger.

And the way he’d felt when he was in that room, every nerve in his body seeming to tingle.

Time vanishing away, leaving him feeling…how?

He wasn’t sure. It was a strange feeling, but not bad. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t remember everything that had happened, but somehow hours slipped away in what felt like minutes.

And then, at the end, just before they’d all left, there had been that strange sensation of hearing voices, but not really hearing them at all.

Now that he was sitting in the bright lights of the pizza parlor, it all seemed even stranger. Strange, but not really frightening. But shouldn’t he be frightened? Shouldn’t all of them be? Hours had passed, and none of them had been aware of it.

Maybe they should just brick up the doorway again.

Maybe—

“Know what I think?” Kent Newell said, breaking Eric’s thoughts as he pushed his own uneaten slice of pizza away. “I think we should stop pretending to be hungry and go buy a couple of lanterns so we can get some decent light in there—you know, those Coleman ones that are almost as good as electric lights.”

Tad nodded. “At least we’d be able to see what we’re doing.” He hesitated, then spoke again, avoiding his friends’ gazes. “I mean, if we’re really gonna do it.”