In the Dark of the Night

Chapter 24

ERIC CAST THE spinner out from the dock, watched it arc through the air and splash into the water, and slowly reeled it in. Yet when a big bass rose out of the depths to nibble at the lure, he barely even noticed it, let alone tried to jig it into snapping at the hook. Instead he merely sat down on the dock, let his bare feet dangle in the water, and reeled in the rest of the line. Next to him, Tad was still rummaging through the tackle box, supposedly looking for just the right lure that would bring a nice walleye home for dinner, but in reality paying no more attention to the fishing gear than Eric was to the fish that had nearly taken his hook. For his part, Kent Newell was sprawled out on the dock, staring silently up at the cloudless sky.

No one who happened to look down at them from the house would suspect that there was anything on their minds other than fishing and lying in the sun. But Eric’s stomach was still faintly queasy from the nightmare he’d had, and out of the corner of his eye he could see that Tad’s face was still pale from the violent nausea his own version of the dream evoked. And though Kent hadn’t actually said anything, his very silence this morning had told Eric that he had something on his mind.

Then, as the spoon on Eric’s line came out of the water, Kent said: “I had a dream last night.”

As Tad’s head snapped up and their eyes met, a cold knot formed in Eric’s stomach.

Kent sat up, pulled his knees up against his chest, and wrapped his arms around them. When he spoke again, his voice was little more than a whisper. “I dreamed that Ellis Langstrom’s arm was in that box.” He looked first at Tad, then at Eric, knowing he didn’t need to tell either of them he was talking about the white box they’d found in the hidden room yesterday.

“S-So?” Tad stammered, refusing even to meet Kent’s gaze now.

“So have you guys ever wondered how come Dr. Darby took all that stuff apart?”

It was the last thing Tad had been expecting Kent to say, and now he finally looked at him. “Took it apart?” he repeated. “What are you talking about?”

“All of it,” Kent said. “The table that was missing a leg. The hacksaw frame with no blade.”

“M-Maybe they weren’t even together when he bought them,” Tad suggested, but even as he spoke the words, he knew they rang hollow, and even though he was looking at Kent, he could see out of the corner of his eye that Eric was shaking his head.

“They wouldn’t ship the table with only three legs, would they?” Kent asked. “I mean, if they were going to take the legs off, they’d have taken all of them off, right?”

Tad said nothing.

“And what about the scalpels?” Kent pressed. “Who’d put them in another box if you were going to send the doctor’s bag anyway?”

Tad shrugged, though his skin was starting to feel cold and clammy despite the warmth of the day. “Okay, so let’s say he took them apart. So what?”

Kent’s eyes flickered between Tad and Eric. “Haven’t you guys noticed that ever since we started putting that stuff back together, things started to happen?”

There was a silence as the full meaning of Kent’s words sank in.

“Tippy and the scalpels,” Eric finally breathed. “And the hacksaw — we put the blade in the hacksaw, and Langstrom’s body was missing an arm.”

A fresh wave of nausea broke over Tad as the still fresh memory of last night’s nightmare leaped up in his mind.

He’d been sitting at a table.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s table.

And he’d been eating—

Tad’s stomach heaved, but he’d eaten so little for breakfast that nothing came up but the foul taste of bile.

“And I keep thinking about the lamp,” Kent said. “We put it back together, too.”

“You think maybe something else is going to happen?”

Kent shrugged. “How should I know? But doesn’t it seem like we should at least figure out who Darby got it from?” When neither Eric nor Tad responded, Kent went on. “Maybe if we can figure out what’s gonna happen, we can figure out how—” His voice faltered, then he looked away.

“You mean maybe we can figure out how to keep ourselves from doing it?” Tad finally said, his voice shaking.

“We didn’t do anything,” Kent said. “All we did was have a bunch of dreams!”

“The same dreams,” Tad argued. “And if we didn’t have anything to do with Tippy or Ellis Langstrom, how come we all dreamed about it?”

“I don’t know!” Kent flared. “And neither do you. All I’m saying is we should find out.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?” Tad demanded. “Just go online and Google lamps and murders?”

“No,” Kent shot back. “We go back in that room and look in the ledger. We find out where the lamp came from, then start looking in those books Darby put in there.” His gaze shifted from Tad to Eric, then back to Tad. “We have to go back in there and find out who owned the lamp. And I have to find out what’s in that white box.”

“No way,” Tad said.

“We have to,” Kent repeated. “Besides, what if that box is empty? What if my dream didn’t mean anything at all?”

Tad’s jaw clenched — the last thing he wanted to do was go back in that room. Not today — not ever! But what if Kent was right? What if the box was empty?

“Come on, Tad,” Kent said, sensing the other boy wavering. “We have to go.”

“You can go back in if you want, but Eric and I aren’t,” Tad said, but his voice was hollow. “Right, Eric?”

Eric shook his head. “I think Kent’s right,” he said softly. “We all have to go. We can just go in there, find out those two things, and come right back out.”

Kent stood up. “C’mon,” he said to Tad. “Nothing’s going to happen. It’s just a room.”

FIVE MINUTES LATER they stood in the secret room, bathed in the amber glow of the lamp. As the now familiar voices began to whisper at the edges of their consciousness, a serene calm fell over all three boys.

The white box sat quietly waiting on the tabletop, exactly as they had left it, but none of the three made the slightest move to lift its lid.

It was still not time.

Eric drew the journal closer to him and slowly turned the pages until at last he found the entry he was looking for.

The entry that identified the lamp.

“E.G.,” he whispered, reading from the ledger. “The lamp came from Plainfield, Wisconsin, from the estate of someone with the initials E.G.” He closed the ledger and looked at the stack of books on the floor. Surely one of them had an index.

Eric picked up the first book on the stack, then the second.

With the third one, he finally found what he was looking for, and as he began to scan the pages at the back of the thick volume, names seemed to leap out at him.

Names he’d already found on the Internet.

Jeffrey Dahmer, who had once owned the table on which both the ledger and the white box now sat.

Patrick Kearney, who had cut up boys Eric’s age with the hacksaw.

Jack the Ripper, who had kept his surgical instruments in pristine condition.

And listed under G, in type that seemed almost to leap off the page, he found the name he was looking for.

Gein, Edward, p. 72.

Eric turned the pages back until he came to the right one, and found himself gazing first at a photograph of what looked like nothing more than an old farmer.

Then he began to read: “‘Edward Theodore Gein,’” he said softly as both Tad and Kent listened in utter silence, “‘also known as the Plainfield Ghoul, was a serial killer and a grave robber who made unspeakable items out of his victims’ body parts. When he was arrested in 1957, police found a disemboweled and beheaded woman strung up and dressed like a deer, hanging in his kitchen. They also found bowls made of human craniums, a box full of noses, a belt made of women’s nipples, female genitalia in a shoe box, the carefully stuffed and mounted faces of nine women on his wall, and furniture and lamp shades made from human skin.’”

“Lamp shades,” Tad echoed.

“Made from human skin,” Kent breathed.

Involuntarily, Eric’s eyes went to the lamp shade that was glowing with an ethereal light in the shadowy room, then to the other object that sat on Jeffrey Dahmer’s table. “Open the box,” he said.

It seemed to shimmer with an energy of its own as Kent’s hands reached for it with the same involuntary movement that had taken Eric’s eyes from the book to Ed Gein’s lamp a moment before.

His fingers hesitated when they touched the cover, which seemed to vibrate with an oddly electrical charge.

He ran his fingers over it again.

Finally, he lifted the lid.

Nestled deep in the box, barely visible in the dim glow of the lamp, lay what must once have been Ellis Langstrom’s arm. Now, though, it was nothing but an elongated object, dark brown with dried blood, chunks of flesh missing, as if they’d been torn away by the teeth of some kind of carnivore.

The arm had no skin; every shred of it had been peeled down to the muscle and tendons — even the fingers had been carefully skinned, though the fingernails remained, their roots exposed to the light and air in a manner that was oddly obscene.

“Jesus,” Kent whispered.

Tad gagged and turned away.

But Eric Brewster stared silently at the grisly object, a series of thoughts even more horrifying than the contents of the box reeling through his mind:

It’s all of them…the killers are all here…they’re here, and they’re alive, and somehow we’ve turned them loose.

And there’s no way to stop them….