In the Dark of the Night

Chapter 29

ERIC GAZED DOLEFULLY down through the shallow lake water at the wreck of the Pinecrest skiff. Sometime during the night, it had filled with water and sunk to the bottom, where schools of minnows had claimed it. Now, with Kent Newell standing beside him on the dock, the minnows seemed almost to be mocking them while he tried to figure out some way to haul the ruined hull back to the surface. Kent, though, appeared to be thinking about something else altogether.

“What do you think is the big deal Tad wants to tell us?” Kent asked, confirming Eric’s suspicion.

Eric shrugged, then turned to look up the lawn and saw Tad himself emerging from the mouth of the path that led through the woods to his house, a large bandage covering what looked like at least half his head. “Here he comes,” Eric said, nudging Kent. “And it looks like they must have sewed up half his scalp.”

“You okay?” Kent called out.

Tad shrugged. “It’s not as bad as it looks.” He reached up to touch the bandage, wincing at the pressure. “Okay, so it’s not quite as bad as it looks,” he temporized as he joined his friends on the dock. “Still hurts, anyway.”

Kent cocked his head quizzically. “Well? What’s the big deal you called about?”

Tad took a deep breath, glanced up toward the house as if looking for someone who might be listening, and dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “You aren’t gonna believe what my mom found on the back porch of Mrs. Langstrom’s antiques shop this morning.”

An image rose in Kent’s mind of a square brown cardboard box, dirty and stained. Despite the heat of the morning, a chill ran through his body. But the box wasn’t on the back porch of an antiques shop.

It was in his hands.

It was in his hands, and he was carrying it.

Tad’s voice began to fade, and the images in his head became more vivid.

He was walking through the woods, and though it was night and he could barely see at all, he was following some kind of invisible path, moving quickly through the trees, never stumbling, never uncertain which way to turn.

Then, in the way things happen in a dream, he was suddenly in town, and setting the box down.

Setting it down on a porch!

With Tad’s voice droning softly and indistinctly far away, Kent slipped deeper into the strange scene unfolding in his mind. Now he knew what was in the box — knew it without even having to unfold the flaps at the top and peer inside.

Knew it because he’d made the object himself.

Now he could feel the stickiness of blood on his hands as he stretched the skin of Ellis Langstrom’s upper arm over the bent and rusty lamp shade frame. His fingers twitched as he watched himself pierce the skin with some kind of thick needle, then pull through the twine that would bind the bloody tissue to the wire.

Suddenly, Eric Brewster’s voice jerked him out of his reverie, and he saw Eric staring at Tad Sparks, his face almost as ashen as Tad’s after Adam Mosler’s boat had rammed them.

“How did they know it was the skin from Ellis’s arm?” Eric whispered, and Kent felt his skin crawl once more.

What was happening? Was it possible that what he’d just been remembering wasn’t a dream at all?

Was it possible it had actually happened?

His knees suddenly weak, Kent sank down on the dock.

How would he know everything Tad was saying? How could he?

“He had a tattoo on his shoulder,” Tad whispered. “It was stretched out on the lamp shade.”

“Oh, God,” Kent said, something almost like a sob choking his throat. He caught his breath, then looked up at Eric and Tad. “I dreamed it. I dreamed I made that thing, and I was carrying it through the woods, and…” His voice trailed off at the memory of depositing the box on the back porch of the shop. Now he could see all the details — everything in the tiny parking lot. He fixed his eyes on Tad Sparks. “I remember setting it on the back step of her shop. Right by the Dumpster.”

“Jesus,” Tad breathed as he and Eric also dropped down onto the dock on either side of Kent.

Kent looked at each of them, searching their faces for something, anything, that would tell him they had shared the dream, too. “Didn’t either of you have it? The same dream, like we all had last time, and the time before?”

Tad shook his head. “I couldn’t go to sleep, so finally Mom gave me a pill. And I had a headache, too,” he added, once again touching the bandage covering the stitches in the back of his head. “I don’t remember dreaming anything.”

Kent turned to Eric, but Eric only shook his head. “I don’t remember dreaming anything last night, either,” he said.

Now Kent stared down at his hands, half expecting them to still be covered with blood. “It was so real,” he whispered. “And the weird thing is, I didn’t even remember it until you started talking about it. But as soon as you said your mom found something on the porch, I knew what it was. I could see it! It was like it was real.”

The three boys gazed down into the water in utter silence for almost a full minute before Eric finally spoke, his voice hollow, quavering.

“We have to go back in there,” he said, and neither Kent nor Tad needed to be told what he meant. “We have to take all that stuff apart again.”

“No way,” Tad said. “Something’s wrong in there, and I don’t want anything else to do with it.”

Eric shook his head. “We have to. Every time we put something in there back together, something happens. And if we don’t take it all apart again, it’s going to keep happening.”

“You know he’s right,” Kent said softly as he saw Tad’s resolve begin to weaken. “We need to go in there one last time.”

“One last time?” Tad echoed. “And then we’re done?”

“Then we’re done,” Eric agreed.

As Kent nodded, all three boys got back to their feet.

UNWILLING EVEN TO touch the lamp that now held the shade that Ed Gein had long ago made from the skin of one of his victims, Eric lit the lantern they’d brought in after they first began exploring the tiny chamber and its macabre contents. As the mantle flared and the lantern light brightened, the fragmentary voices that had begun whispering to them even before they’d entered the outer storeroom now blended into a gentle chorus, and Eric felt his resolve weaken.

A glow of softer light imbued the room, and he turned to see that Ed Gein’s grisly lamp was once more glowing, its amber light seeping into every corner of the chamber, casting no shadows at all.

On the table lay the old and rusty hacksaw, and the medical bag with its scalpels hidden inside.

Yet instead of reaching for the bag to return its contents to the separate bundle in which he’d originally found them, Eric took an object from the deep pocket of his cargo pants.

A heavy object.

A heavy, rusty object.

Hefting the axe head in his hand for a moment, he gazed at it almost as if he wasn’t certain what it was.

Then he set it on the table.

Then Kent, instead of taking the hacksaw apart to return the blade to the drawer in which he’d originally found it, was opening boxes, as if searching for something.

Tad opened the ledger on the table and slowly turned the pages as if reviewing everything they’d read before. When he was near the end of the book, he stopped.

At that same moment, Kent stopped roaming the room. He was facing an ancient wooden filing cabinet.

As Tad gazed down at the entry in the ledger, Kent stooped down and closed his fingers on the handle of the filing cabinet’s bottom drawer.

Eric heard the chorus of voices grow louder, taking on a note of excitement.

He moved closer to the table and looked over Tad’s shoulder so that he, too, could read the entry Tad had found.

5/11 acq L B axe (#114) frm Prince Bros Fall River.

$24,550. Excellent cond.

Kent slowly drew the file drawer open and reached inside, his fingers closing on an elongated object wrapped in newspaper. He lifted it out of the drawer, stood up, and moved to the table. Setting it down, he carefully — almost reverently — began stripping away the yellowed wrapping.

A moment later a wooden axe handle lay before them on the old Formica-topped table.

It glowed in the amber light, almost sparkled, as if surrounded by a force they could see.

And a single voice — a woman’s voice — seemed to emerge from the chorus.

The voice sounded happy.

Happy, and excited.

For a long time the boys gazed down at the axe head and its handle, still separated by almost a foot. The light from the lamp shimmered, and the air itself felt charged with a strange energy.

“It’s done,” Eric finally breathed, his voice echoing softly.

As Tad and Kent nodded, Eric reached out to the ledger, but before he touched its pages, the other two boys’ hands had joined his own and together they turned to the last page.

Upon it was written Hector Darby’s last words:

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

“Let’s go,” Eric breathed, backing away a step, but leaving the ledger open on the table. “We’re finished.”

As Eric extinguished the lantern, the lamp went out as if of its own volition.

The three boys moved through the small door.

Eric and Kent drew the plywood back over the opening.

And in the darkness of the once more hidden room, the axe head and its handle began to vibrate as if they felt their proximity.

The table trembled.

The scalpels rattled softly in their bag.

The lamp flickered on once more.

The voices rose in chorus.

And slowly, forces within the tiny chamber began their work.

As if guided by an unseen hand, the metal axe head moved toward the wooden handle.

They aligned themselves and moved still closer.

They touched, and the handle slid into the socket on the head.

The axe lay complete.

The trembling ceased.

The light extinguished.

All, at last, was ready.