In the Dark of the Night

Chapter 16

THE STRANGE TINGLING sensation began the moment Eric stepped into the storeroom. It started in his fingertips, but spread quickly through his whole body as he and Kent pulled the heavy plywood away from the doorway to the hidden room. As he crossed the threshold, his mind as well as his body was suddenly filled with unfamiliar stimuli. Every one of his senses seemed sharpened, and he felt imbued with an energy he’d never experienced outside this tiny room.

An energy that filled him not only with excitement, but with disorientation as well.

Disorientation, and dread.

It was as if a force had gripped him, gripped him so tightly that he could not only feel it, but hear it, too. From somewhere far away, vague voices were again whispering darkly at the edges of his consciousness.

As the force tightened its grip on him, one small part of his mind told him to resist it, to back away before it was too late. Yet even as this small inner voice spoke to him, the voice of the force whispered its siren song, and instead of turning to escape back into the bright light of the summer morning, he moved deeper into the darkness of the room.

He and Kent lit the lanterns and peered around the chamber almost as if expecting the answers to Phantom Lake’s mysteries to be spread before them on parchment scrolls or etched on the walls like some modern Rosetta stone. Eric had known they’d be back in the room the moment he awoke that morning; he’d felt its pull like some sort of fate or predestination, and after breakfast, when his mother left for a crafts fair with Marci, Tad and Kent had arrived.

With no need of a single word being spoken, they had gone directly to the carriage house to find some answers.

“Darby specialized in serial killers,” Kent said, gazing around the room at all the dusty boxes and strange half-broken objects. “So if he really managed to buy Jack the Ripper’s scalpels—”

All their eyes turned to the medical bag that still sat on top of the three-legged Formica table, and Eric could feel the strange energy that suffused the room increase as they focused on the dark object with its macabre contents.

“I’m not touching that thing,” Tad breathed, his voice sounding oddly strangled.

Eric, though, moved forward and gently — almost reverently — picked it up and set it on a bookshelf.

“So if that really was Jack the Ripper’s bag,” Kent went on, “maybe the rest of the stuff in here belonged to serial killers, too.” He moved to an old wooden lateral filing cabinet and tugged on one of its long, warped drawers. It didn’t budge, held fast either by the warping of the wood or the lock.

“Maybe that’s the difference between the stuff in this hidden room and the stuff out there in the storeroom,” Eric mused.

“This room wasn’t just hidden,” Tad said, his hands drawn almost against his will to the ornate scrollwork on the lamp base that still sat on the broken table. “The doorway was bricked up, so Darby must not have wanted anybody to know about this stuff.”

Kent shook his head. “If he really didn’t want anyone to find it, why didn’t he destroy it?” He grasped the handles of the stuck drawer again, preparing for a final assault. “I have this weird feeling he left all this for someone to find. And we found it.”

“Fate,” Eric breathed, not even conscious that he’d spoken the word aloud.

Kent put his weight into a massive tug on the drawer. It held for a second or two, then the front panel split as the lock gave way. Kent staggered, then regained his balance and looked inside the now gaping drawer. “Okay,” he said, reaching inside and pulling out a long, thin object wrapped in bubble wrap. “What do you suppose this is?” Before anyone could reply, he peeled away the tape, then unwound the bubble wrap. He held the object up, and all three of the boys recognized it immediately.

“The missing table leg,” Eric said. “Weird! Why wrap it up like that?”

“And why lock it in a file drawer?” Tad Sparks added.

“Maybe he just never had a chance to finish putting it together,” Kent said. “Here. Hold the table up while I move these boxes.”

Eric took hold of the table, and instantly the flow of energy increased, as if the table itself were vibrating with some kind of excitement.

Kent slid away the two crates that held up the corner of the table and crouched low to fit the leg. “It just screws into a bracket,” he said. “Hold the table up a little higher.”

With Eric lifting the corner, Tad steadied the heavy lamp base so it wouldn’t fall.

A moment later the leg was attached and the table stood whole.

Eric felt a tingle in his scalp as the dark energy in the room — and in his mind and body — rose higher. As if guided by some unseen hand, he opened the ledger and flipped its pages back to the entry for the table.

He turned the book so Tad and Kent could again read the entry.

7/11 acq table (#36) frm JD est. sale Milwaukee. $10,350. Bargain.

As the words penetrated, Tad leaned against the table, his palms pressed against the Formica surface.

It felt oddly warm to his touch, as if some kind of energy were flowing directly from it into his hands. The energy seemed to heighten his senses, and suddenly he felt as if he could almost make out exactly what the voices that had been murmuring on the fringes of his consciousness were saying.

Almost, but not quite.

Tad’s gaze shifted to the two crates that Kent had moved out from under the table, and as it did, the voices seemed to encourage him.

It was as if they wanted him to open those crates.

But something inside Tad didn’t want to open them. Indeed, he didn’t want to know anything more about what else might be in this room.

He didn’t want to have anything more to do with it.

Most of all, he didn’t want to have any more nightmares.

Yet despite his instincts, Tad found himself moving toward the crates, following the pull of the energy, obeying the urging of the voices.

The voices murmured their approval.

He lifted the lid on the top crate.

Nothing but Styrofoam peanuts.

He scooped them away, reluctant to plunge his hand into the depths of the crate. But slowly, almost against his own will, his hand disappeared into the pool of packing material, and he felt himself groping carefully around inside.

His fingers touched something smooth and cylindrical. He pulled it out, shedding packing peanuts all over the floor. “Look at this,” he said, gazing at the object as if his eyes must be deceiving him. “It’s just a roll of trash bags.”

“Trash bags?” Eric looked at the roll of black bags in Tad’s hand, then stepped over to the ledger, which was still open on the table. “Is there anything else in there?”

Tad put his hand into the box again, feeling all the way to the bottom, then felt something almost like an electrical shock as his fingers touched something else.

Something metal.

Warm metal.

“Wait,” he breathed. “Yes.” He pulled out an old rusty hacksaw, its blade missing.

“This is so weird,” Eric said, slowly turning the pages of the ledger.

“Look at this,” Kent said from the other side of the room, where he stood by a rack of metal shelving. He held up a rusty hacksaw blade. “It was just lying here. Not even wrapped or anything.”

“And here’s the entry,” Eric murmured a moment later, after turning more pages in Hector Darby’s ledger:

3/6 Acq. saw and bags from K. Wharton, LAPD evid rm. w/K&H docs. $4600.

“Are you kidding me?” Kent said, taking the saw frame from Tad and fitting the blade into it. “You could buy this thing brand new at a hardware store for less than twenty bucks.” He tightened the wing nut that locked the blade into place, and shivered as a peculiar stream of something almost like electricity flowed out of the tool and into his body.

His body, and his mind…

…and his soul…

He held up the completed saw, and suddenly its rusty spots were glowing red in the lamplight.

Bloodred.

“All the pieces fit together,” Eric said slowly, his gaze wandering over the room. “The table. The saw. The bag and the scalpels.” His eyes came to rest on Tad Sparks. “It’s almost like this room is a giant puzzle.”

“If it’s a puzzle,” Tad replied, his own gaze fixing once more on the shadeless lamp, “it sure is a creepy one.”

A silence fell over all three boys, broken seconds — or perhaps minutes — later as Moxie began to bark outside the carriage house.

“Crap!” Eric said, the strange spell he’d fallen under shattered by the dog’s racket. “Mom’s home. What time is it?”

“Four-thirty,” Tad said, his eyes widening as he stared at his watch. “Jeez, how could it be that late already?”

Kent was already dousing one of the lanterns. “How come you sound so surprised? Isn’t that what always happens in here?”

Leaving everything as it was, the boys pulled the plywood back over the opening and went out through the carriage house door. Then, though no words had been spoken, they turned away from the house and slipped unseen into the woods.

AFTER SUPPER THAT night, Eric went up to his room and turned on the computer.

With a few keystrokes he Googled “serial killers,” and a moment later found himself staring at something called the Crime Library.

The images from Hector Darby’s ledger were burned into his mind: JD…Milwaukee…K and H in Los Angeles.

A few seconds later he found it.

All of it.

JD in Milwaukee: Jeffrey Dahmer, who had killed young boys.

Killed them, and sat at his cracked Formica kitchen table, eating them.

Eric forced down the wave of nausea that rose in his gut, and kept reading.

K and H in Los Angeles: Patrick Kearney and Douglas Hill, the Trash Bag Murderers. They had killed young hitchhikers, dismembered their corpses with a hacksaw, packed their body parts into trash bags, and left them strewn about the Los Angeles area.

His hand trembling, Eric picked up the phone and began dialing, first Tad, then Kent.

His voice low, he began telling them what he’d found.