In the Dark of the Night

Chapter 19

AS SOON AS his mother left with Marci, Eric began loading breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. Meanwhile, Kent, who had gotten there just after Merrill and Marci left, picked up the telephone and dialed Tad’s cell number. “Hey, you okay?” he asked when Tad answered on the first ring.

There was a moment’s hesitation before Tad said, “I guess,” and an even longer one after Kent told him to come back to Pinecrest. “If you guys want to go into that room again, go ahead,” he said just as Kent was about to start the “Can you hear me now?” routine. “But every time I go in there, I have nightmares, and after the last one, I’m not sure I want to know anything more about what’s in there.” “Don’t you even want to find out why we’re having nightmares?” Kent asked, but Tad didn’t take the bait.

“No,” he said, his voice taking on a desperate tone. “I just want them to stop. Call me when you want to do something else,” he finished, and hung up before Kent could argue with him.

Kent clicked off the phone and set it back in its cradle. “He’s scared.” Eric shrugged as he rinsed the last plate and put it in its slot in the dishwasher. “Maybe he’s right — maybe we ought to leave all that stuff alone.” Kent’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? We don’t know the half of what’s in there.” “Yeah, but—”

“But nothing!” Kent broke in. “So Tad’s scared. Does that mean you have to be, too?” He paused, looked straight at Eric, and played his trump card: “C’mon, Eric — you turning into your mother?” Kent knew he’d ended the argument even before Eric spoke.

“Okay,” Eric said, “but if it gets weird—”

“It’s already weird,” Kent shot back. “That’s what’s so great about it.” Eric added soap to the dishwasher, set it running, then followed Kent across the lawn toward the carriage house. But as he walked, his eyes kept moving back to the spot where they’d gone into the woods.

The spot where the bloody cudgel still lay in the brush.

He tried to tell himself that it didn’t mean anything — that they didn’t even know what the heavy stick might have been used for. Maybe it hadn’t been used to hit a human being at all — maybe someone had clubbed a rabbit, or a beaver or something. Yet even as he tried to reassure himself, he knew that it was something else, that however the bloody weapon had come to be there, it had some connection to their dreams.

And some connection to the hidden room in the carriage house.

First, the scalpels.

Then someone had left Tippy’s mutilated body at the sheriff’s door.

Now the bloody club…

But it didn’t have anything to do with them — it couldn’t have anything to do with them.

They’d been asleep.

Or had they?

Now he was remembering the time they all lost whenever they went into the hidden room. The time that had passed as quickly as if they’d been asleep. Yet they hadn’t been asleep.

What if last night—

He put the thought out of his mind, unwilling even to think about what it might mean. They’d all been at home, in their beds, asleep. Whatever had happened in the woods had nothing to do with them.

And besides, the stuff in the hidden room was just that — stuff! Old stuff that Hector Darby had probably collected because he was as crazy as his patients.

“I think I’m starting to figure out why Darby collected all this stuff,” Kent said as they came to the carriage house door.

A chill passed through Eric as he realized that Kent’s words seemed almost a response to a question he hadn’t asked. “Yeah?” he said, consciously keeping his voice steady. “Why?” “I think maybe he thought there was something about the stuff — like maybe there was a piece of those guys caught in the stuff they used when they killed people, you know? Sort of like voodoo, where you have to have something that came from the person you want to put a hex on. It’s like maybe Darby thought if he had the stuff, he could figure out what was wrong with the people, you know?” They were inside the carriage house now, at the door to the storeroom, and already the strange humming — the barely audible noise that sounded almost human — was beginning. Had Dr. Darby heard that sound, too? And what if Kent was right? What if the voices on the edge of his consciousness really were coming from the things in the hidden room?

With the voices whispering to him again like a siren song, Eric helped Kent slide the plywood away from the hidden door. Then they went into the dark chamber and began the familiar ritual of lighting the lamps.

The voices were louder now, and Eric looked around at all the boxes, all the shelves filled with books. Where to begin? Where to start? There was too much, too many things to see, to touch….

As the babble of the voices filled their minds, Kent began opening boxes.

The first two were full of more books, and he put them aside as he searched for more interesting artifacts.

Eric, though, lifted half a dozen books from the top box and scanned their titles. All of them were about serial killers. Some were texts on abnormal psychology, some were scholarly case studies.

Some were true crime paperbacks.

And from somewhere deep inside him, a craving arose.

He wanted to read these books.

He wanted to read them all.

He wanted to know exactly what Dr. Darby had known.

And he wanted to know even more.

He opened one of the books and began to read, unconsciously sinking into Hector Darby’s own chair. The book was a case study of someone named Andrei Chikatilo, who killed fifty-five people in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s. Chikatilo had ripped pieces of his victims’ flesh from their bones with his teeth and swallowed them even before murdering them. Then, after they had died, he’d sometimes taken more, taken bloody souvenirs to eat on the way home.

It took fifteen years to catch Andrei Chikatilo, and at least one innocent man was tried, found guilty, and executed for one of Chikatilo’s murders. “This guy was really weird,” Eric said as he turned the last page on the strange case, but when he looked up, he realized Kent was no longer in the room.

“Kent?” he called out, rising abruptly from the chair and knocking it backward into a stack of boxes, which tipped over, sending something clattering to the floor.

He picked up the object.

The hacksaw.

The hacksaw they’d left on the table the last time they were here.

It had been clean then, but now—

“Give me a hand with this,” Kent said, jerking Eric’s attention away from the hacksaw as he ducked back in through the door, carrying a lightbulb and the last few loops of a worn extension cord whose length disappeared back into the outer storage room. It wasn’t until Kent began screwing the bulb into the ornate lamp they’d found a few days earlier that Eric saw the lamp shade that now sat next to it on the table.

And there was a new energy in the room — a new note in the hum of indistinct voices.

With the bulb in place, Kent plugged the lamp into the end of the extension cord. “Look up the lamp in the ledger,” he said, his voice tense as he began fitting the lamp shade to the harp on the base.

Eric opened the ledger and carefully turned the pages until he found the entry: 2/25 acq. lamp (#63) frm E.G. est. sale Plainfield, WI. $35,250.

“Thirty-five thousand dollars,” Eric breathed.

Kent said nothing as he finished fitting the shade to the lamp and twisted the switch.

A soft amber glow filled the room.

The voices seemed to sigh with the beauty of it.

Unconsciously wiping his hands on his pants, Eric reached out and touched his fingertips to the lamp shade.

It felt warm, and almost soft, like leather.

But so thin, so fragile.

He leaned closer.

It was, indeed, leather, but not like any leather he’d ever seen before. He could actually see veining in its grain.

He laid both his hands on the shade, and one of the voices in his head seemed to rise above the others as a strange energy coursed from the lamp into his hands and up his fingers and arms to flood his body.

He listened to the voices, and though he still couldn’t understand the words, he didn’t care.

He knew that something deep inside him — some part of him he was barely aware even existed — heard the voices perfectly.

Heard them, and understood.