The Messenger

36

Daniel put the broom away and took out the mop and bucket. He filled the bucket with a pine-scented cleaner and hot water, and went to work on the kitchen floor he had just swept. He repeated the process three times before he felt there was a slim possibility that he might eat in this room again.

The night after the small beetles arrived, it had been cockroaches. They were bigger than the other beetles-and faster. They had made a rattling sound, like a thousand castanets, as they surged together toward the cellar door.

Last night, he would have welcomed the cockroaches back. Crickets had been called to the house. Multiplied thousands of times over, their high-pitched chirps maddened Daniel and Evan. Cleaning up a big load of cricket frass was not the worst thing he had ever been assigned, but he wished his lordship would stop bringing insects into the house.

Daniel thought nearly constantly of escape, without being able to bring himself to make the attempt. Still, as each night went by, he knew “Mr. Adrian” was growing stronger. If he didn’t leave now, would he ever be able to evade his lordship?

He thought of Eduardo, who had been destroyed by the dog. Many times, Daniel wondered if Eduardo had intended it to happen.

The day of the attack, Eduardo had told Daniel a story, confided in him as never before. He spoke of being hired on to the dive crew of a ship that worked mostly in the Caribbean. Treasure hunters.

He told him what had been discovered in the wreckage of the Morgan Bray, that the voice in the chest he’d recovered had ordered him to travel to the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The voice continued to speak to him, a voice he knew only he could hear. It said it was the spirit of a man who had been a pirate for a time, and sailed those seas. It guided him to a place on one of the Caicos and told him to dig. Just as the voice had said, he found a cache of jewelry and gold coins.

His discovery made him a wealthy man, and the voice led him to even greater wealth. But soon he began to realize that leaving was not an option. Any attempt to leave “his lordship” resulted in a crippling pain that ran down his spine like a rod of fire. If he was foolish enough to attempt further resistance, within seconds his testicles would feel as if they were being crushed by an iron hand, a vicelike pressure would be felt at his temples, and his throat would constrict. In less than half a minute, his lordship would easily have Eduardo on his knees, begging forgiveness.

So Eduardo did all he could to make his own life comfortable. He learned that if he was complacent and obedient, he could live in luxury. Although the tuition was often painful, his lordship taught him how to behave in a way that made him an acceptable guest in any household. In effect, he became a jet-setter.

For nearly a decade, his lordship urged him to travel, seeking a certain man who might or might not be calling himself “Tyler Hawthorne.” They began in England, researching old records, and then moved on to the United States. Eduardo spent a great deal of time describing the world around him, as if to a blind man, a blind man who had slept for two hundred years.

They searched for any mention of anyone named Tyler Hawthorne, and found many persons with that name, but none was the one his lordship sought. Eduardo found several graves bearing such a name, but his lordship insisted this man would be alive.

In the ninth year of their searches, they learned of a Tyler Hawthorne who had bought an expensive property in Los Angeles.

His lordship commanded that they move nearby. “Not too close, mind you-he may be able to sense my presence, and I want this to be something of a surprise.”

His lordship also required a basement, so it took Eduardo even more time to find a home that would suit his needs, because not many homes in Los Angeles had rooms belowground. Finally, though, they had found this house.

His lordship then told Eduardo to recruit two helpers, and described to him his necessities. These must be men who were strong in body but weak in integrity. They must be both desperate and greedy. They must be utterly unattached to family or friends. They must be able to fight, but also be capable of living peaceably in close quarters with others. They should be ignorant, but not stupid. They would, in fact, be much like Eduardo, he said, with one exception. They should have skills as burglars.

When Eduardo told him this part of his story, Daniel had felt angry. But by that time, all the fight had gone out of Eduardo; he took no offense at being called such names. A decade in his lordship’s company had left Eduardo as little more than a smiling, obedient husk.

A handsome husk, though, and able by then to make himself at home among the wealthiest in Los Angeles. He was still in his twenties and welcomed at parties. He befriended a young man who was visiting the house nearest Tyler Hawthorne’s. He could easily see that Bradley Clarke was insecure and troubled. He soon learned that Bradley had gambling problems. Nothing could be better. Eduardo quickly freed him from financial debt by putting him into another kind of debt entirely.

Daniel and Evan had been easy to recruit. Both were eager to live the promised life of ease in exchange for a small amount of dirty work. If it seemed strange at first, comfort and enormous wages made them willing to overlook the odd requirements of their bizarre employer, a man who took them down to the basement, leading them by candlelight, telling them he was getting messages from an iron box.

Those misunderstandings were soon cleared up.

They learned from Eduardo that his lordship was not pleased with them, since he could not enter their minds as completely as he did Eduardo’s-it seemed that only a very few individuals would be subject to that particular horror. However, a new chapter in his lordship’s existence was about to begin. After a decade out of the sea, he had found a place where he could, as he phrased it, “begin regeneration.” Evan and Daniel were put to work removing the locks.

“Go to the stairs,” Eduardo said when the locks were off. “Take the candle with you.”

In the far corner, in the darkness, Eduardo opened the iron chest.

The stench was immediate and overpowering, so sharp that it made their eyes water.

“Leave me!” a voice shouted.

It didn’t have to ask twice.

Back then, Daniel was never sure what it was that Eduardo brought into the cellar every few nights, but the stench worsened. He mentioned to Eduardo that he was sure someone would call the cops about it.

“He’s shielding the house,” Eduardo answered dully. “Don’t you realize that you only smell it if you open the basement door? It’s the same with the screams. No one hears them outside the house.”

Daniel knew all about the screams. His, Evan’s, Eduardo’s.

Now that his lordship could address them directly, he had more power over them, it seemed. Daniel had tried once, when he had been sent miles away on an errand, to go even farther away, to make a run for it. He had not gone far before he felt a kind of craving unlike anything else he had ever known. It was as if his cells had become magnetized, and his lordship was exerting a pull on them. He could think of nothing else, do nothing else, but return.

He had paid an awful price for that experiment. He had not been able to leave his bed for three days.

He thought of that experiment now, of how this bargain had cost him his freedom in a way prison never had. Eduardo had taken the only escape route.

He would never forget the night Eduardo had been killed by the dog. That dog had surprised Daniel and Evan, but now Daniel wondered if Eduardo had known about the dog all along.

His lordship had been displeased with them when they came back and reported what had happened, although what they could have done differently, Daniel did not know.

Just as now, he did not know what he could do-short of sacrificing himself to the dog-to leave his lordship’s employ.

No human could help him, although he found himself wishing one could. Earlier, he thought he saw a man standing at the top of the drive, smoking a cigarette, and he found himself wishing someone-anyone-would notice the smell of the basement or hear the sounds coming from it, or see all the damned bugs running toward it.

But in the next moment the smoker was gone, and he began to wonder if he had imagined him being there in the first place.

Late that night, the voice from the basement called to him, telling him to open the back door.

The spiders wanted in.