He looked at that hand now. He could see it smaller, younger, the hand of a fourteen-year-old boy.
“I could still feel…the smoothness of the woman’s skin, from when he’d forced my hand over her body. Feel the roundness of her breasts. The resiliency and fullness of them. The flatness of her belly. The crispness of pubic hair…the heat of her. All those feelings were in my hand, still in my hand, as real as the pain.”
“You were only a boy,” she said without any evidence of disgust. “It was the first time you’d ever seen a woman undressed, the first time you’d ever touched a woman. My God, Spencer, in supercharged circumstances like that, not just terrifying but so emotional in every way, so confusing, such a damned primal moment—touching her was bound to reach you on every level, all at the same time. Your father knew that. He was a clever sonofabitch. He tried to use your turmoil to manipulate you. But it didn’t mean anything.”
She was too understanding and forgiving. In this blighted world, those who were too forgiving paid a cruel price for a Christian bent.
“So, I came back through the catacombs, with the dead all around me in the walls, with the memory of my father’s blood, and still with the feel of her breasts in my hand. The vivid memory of how rubbery her nipples had felt against my palm—”
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
“Never lie to the dog,” Spencer said, with no humor this time, but with a bitterness and rage that frightened him.
A fury welled in his heart, blacker than the door before him. He was no more able to shake it off than he had been able, that July, to shake from his hand the remembered warmth and shapes and sensuous textures of the naked woman. His rage was undirected, and that was why it had been intensifying in his deep unconscious for sixteen years. He’d never been sure if it should be turned against his father or against himself. Lacking a target, he had denied the existence of that rage, repressed it. Now, condensed into a distillate of purest wrath, it was eating through him as corrosively as any acid.
“…with the vivid memory of how her nipples had felt against my palm,” he continued, but in a voice that shook equally with anger and with fear, “I came back here. To this door. Opened it. Went into the black room…. And the next thing I remember is walking away from here, the door falling shut behind me….”
…barefoot, walking back through the catacombs, with a void in my memory more perfectly black than the room behind me, not sure where I’ve just been, what’s just happened. Passing the women in the walls. Women. Girls. Mothers. Sisters. Their silent screams. Perpetual screams. Where is God? What does God care? Why has He abandoned them all here? Why has He abandoned me? A magnified spider shadow scurries across their plaster faces, along the looping shadow of the light cord. As I’m passing the new niche in the wall, the niche prepared for the woman in the black room, my father comes out of that hole, out of the dark earth, splattered with blood, staggering, wheezing in agony, but so fast, so fast, as fast as the spider. The hot flash of steel out of shadows. Knife. He sometimes paints still lifes of knives, making them glow as if they were holy relics. Flashing steel, flashing pain across my face. Drop the gun. Hands to my face. Flap of cheek hanging off my chin. My bare teeth against my fingers, a grin of teeth exposed along the whole side of my face. Tongue leaping against my fingers in the open side of my face. And he slashes again. Misses. Falls. He’s too weak to get up. Backing away from him, I pull my cheek in place, blood streaming between my fingers, running down my throat. I’m trying to hold my face together. Oh, God, trying to hold my face together and running, running. Behind me, he’s too weak to get off the floor but not too weak to call after me: “Did you kill her, did you kill her, baby boy, did you like it, did you kill her?”
Spencer still could not look directly at Ellie and might never be able to look directly at her again, not eye-to-eye. He could see her peripherally, and he knew that she was crying quietly. Crying for him, eyes flooded, face glistening.
He couldn’t cry for himself. He had never been able to let go and fully purge his pain, because he didn’t know if he was worthy of tears, of hers or his own or anyone’s tears.
All he could feel now was that rage, which was still without a target.
“The police found the woman dead in the black room,” he said.
“Spencer, he killed her.” Her voice trembled. “It must have been him. The police said it was him. You were the boy hero.”
Staring at the black door, he shook his head. “When did he kill her, Ellie? When? He dropped the scalpel when we both fell to the floor. Then I ran, and he ran after me.”
“But there were other scalpels, other sharp instruments in the drawer. You said so yourself. He grabbed one and killed her. It would only have taken seconds. Only a few seconds, Spencer. The bastard knew you couldn’t get far, that he’d catch up with you. And he was so excited after his struggle with you that he couldn’t wait, shaking with excitement, so he had to kill her then, hard and fast and brutally.”
“Later, he’s on the floor, after he slashed me, and I’m running away, and he’s calling after me, asking if I killed her, if I liked killing her.”
“Oh, he knew. He knew she was dead before you ever came back here to free her. Maybe he was insane and maybe he wasn’t, but he was sure as hell the purest evil that ever walked. Don’t you see? He hadn’t converted you to his way, and he hadn’t been able to kill you, either, so all that was left for him was to ruin your life if he could, to plant that seed of doubt in your mind. You were a boy, half blind with panic and terror, confused, and he knew your turmoil. He understood, and he used it against you, just for the sheer, sick fun of it.”
For more than half his lifetime, Spencer had tried to convince himself of the scenario that she had just painted for him. But the void in his memory remained. The continued amnesia seemed to argue that the truth was different from what he desperately wished had happened.
“Go,” he said thickly. “Run for the truck, drive away from here, go to Denver. I shouldn’t have brought you here. I can’t ask you to come any farther with me.”
“I’m here. I’m not leaving.”
“I mean it. Get out.”
“No way.”
“Get out. Take the dog.”
“No.”
Rocky was whining, shaking, huddling against a column of blood-dark brick, in torment as racking as any Spencer had ever seen.
“Take him. He likes you.”
“I’m not going.” Through tears, she said, “This is my decision, damn it, and you can’t make it for me!”
He turned on her, seized handfuls of her leather jacket, all but lifted her off the floor, frantically trying to force her to understand. In his rage and fear and self-loathing, he had managed, after all, to look her in the eyes one more time. “For Christ’s sake, after all you’ve seen and heard, don’t you get it? I left part of myself in that room, that abattoir where he did his butchering, left something there I couldn’t live with. What in the name of God could that be, huh? Something worse than the catacombs, worse than all the rest of it. It has to be worse because I remembered all the rest of it! If I go back in there and remember what I did to her, there’ll be no forgetting ever again, no hiding from it anymore. And this is a memory…like fire. It’s going to burn through me. Whatever’s left, whatever isn’t burned away, it won’t be me anymore, Ellie, not after I know what I did to her. And then who’re you going to be down here with, down here in this godforsaken place alone with?”
She raised one hand to his face and traced the line of his scar, though he tried to flinch away from her. She said, “If I was blind, if I’d never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.”
“Oh, Ellie, don’t.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Ellie, please.”
“No.”
He couldn’t direct his rage at her, either, especially not at her. He let go of her. Stood with his hands at his sides. Fourte
en again. Weak with his outrage. Afraid. Lost.
She put her hand on the lever-action door handle.
“Wait.” He withdrew the SIG 9mm pistol from under the waistband of his blue jeans, disengaged the safety, jacked a bullet into the chamber, and held the piece out to her. “You should have both guns.” She started to object, but he cut her off. “Keep the pistol in your hand. Don’t get too close to me in there.”
“Spencer, whatever you remember, it’s not going to turn you into your father, not in an instant, no matter how terrible it is.”
“How do you know that? I’ve spent sixteen years picking at it, prying and poking, trying to dig it out of the darkness, but it won’t come. Now if it comes…”
She engaged the safety on the pistol.
“Ellie—”
“I don’t want it to go off accidentally.”
“My father wrestled on the floor with me and tickled me and made funny faces for me when I was little. Played ball with me. And when I wanted to develop my drawing ability, he patiently taught technique to me. But before and after…he came down here, that same man, and he tortured women, girls, hour after hour, for days in some cases. He moved with ease between this world and the one above.”
“I’m not going to keep a gun ready, point a gun at you, like I’m afraid you’re some kind of monster, when I know you’re not. Please, Spencer. Please don’t ask me to do that. Let’s just finish this.”
In the deep quiet at the end of the catacombs, he took a moment to prepare himself. Nothing moved anywhere in that long room. No rats, misshapen or otherwise, dwelt there anymore. The Dresmunds had been instructed to eradicate them with poison.
Spencer opened the black door.
He switched on the light.
He hesitated on the threshold, then went inside.
Miserable though the dog was, he padded into that room as well. Maybe he was afraid to be alone in the catacombs. Or maybe this time his misery was entirely a reaction to his master’s state of mind, in which case he knew that his company was needed. He stayed close to Spencer.
Ellie entered last, and the weighted door closed behind her.
The abattoir was nearly as disorienting now as it had been on that night of scalpels and knives. The stainless steel table was gone. The chamber was empty. The unrelieved blackness allowed no point of reference, so one moment the room appeared to be hardly larger than a casket, but in the next moment it seemed infinitely larger than it actually was. The only light was still the tightly focused bulb in the black ceiling fixture.
The Dresmunds had been instructed to keep all lights functional. They had not been told to clean the abattoir, yet only the thinnest film of dust veiled the walls, no doubt because the room was not ventilated and was always shut up tight.
It was a time capsule, sealed for sixteen years, containing not the memorabilia of bygone days but lost memories.
The place affected Spencer even more powerfully than he had expected. He could see the glimmer of the scalpel as if it hung in the air even now.
…barefoot, carrying the revolver in my left hand, I hurry down from the studio where I shot my father, through the back of the cupboard into a world not anything like the one behind the wardrobe in those books by C. S. Lewis, through the catacombs, not daring to look left or right, because those dead women seem to be straining to break out of their plaster. I have the crazy fear that they might pull loose as if the plaster is still wet, come for me, take me into one of the walls with them. I’m my father’s son and I deserve to choke on cold wet plaster, have it squeezed into my nostrils and poured down my throat, until I’m as one with the figures in the tableaux, unbreathing, a harbor for the rats. My heart’s knocking so hard that each beat makes my vision darken slightly, briefly, as if the surges in blood pressure will burst vessels in my eyes. I feel each beat in my right hand too. The pain in my knuckles throbs, lub-dub, three small hearts in every finger. But I love the pain. I want more pain. Back in the vestibule and descending the stairs into the room of blue light, I repeatedly rapped the swollen knuckles of that hand with the revolver that I held in the other. Now I rap them hard again in the catacombs, to drive out all feeling but pain. Because…because equal to the pain, dear Jesus God Almighty, I still have it on my hand, like a stain on my hand: the smoothness of the woman’s skin. The full curves and warm resiliency of her breasts, turgid nipples rubbing my palm. The flatness of belly, the tautness of muscles as she strains against the manacles. The lubricious heat into which he forces my fingers against all my resistance, against her terrible half-dazed protest. Her eyes were locked with mine. Pleading with her eyes. The misery of her eyes. But the traitor hand has its own sense memory, unshakable, and it makes me sick. All the feelings in my hand make me sick, and some of the feelings in my heart. I have such disgust, loathing, such fear of myself. But other feelings too—unclean emotions in harmony with the excitement of the hateful hand. And at the door to the black room I stop, lean against the wall, and vomit. Sweating. Shuddering with chills. When I turn away from the mess, with only my stomach purged, I force myself to grab the lever-action handle with my injured hand, making pain shoot up my forearm as I violently jerk open the door. And then I’m inside, into the black room again.
Don’t look at her. Don’t. Don’t! Don’t look at her naked. No right to look at her naked. This can be done with my eyes averted, edging to the table, aware of her only as a flesh-colored form out of the corner of my eye, floating in the darkness over there. “It’s okay,” I tell her, my voice so hoarse from the choking, “it’s okay, lady, he’s dead, lady, I shot him. I’ll let you loose, get you out of here, don’t be afraid.” And then I realize I haven’t any idea where to find the keys to the manacles. “Lady, I don’t have a key, no key, got to go for help, call the cops. But it’s okay, he’s dead.” No sound from her there, out of the corner of my eye. She’d been dazed from the blows to her head, only half conscious, and now she’s passed out. But I don’t want her to wake up after I’ve gone and be alone and afraid. I remember the look in her eyes—was it the same look in my mother’s eyes at the very end?—and I don’t want her to be so afraid when she wakes and thinks he’s coming back for her. That’s all, that’s all. I just don’t want her to be afraid, so I’m going to have to bring her around, shake her, wake her up, make her understand that he’s dead and that I’ll be back with help. I edge to the table, trying not to look at her body, going to look only at her face. A smell hits me. Terrible. Nauseating. The blackness is dizzying again. I put one hand out. Against the table. To steady myself. It’s the right hand, still remembering the curve of her breasts, and I put it down in a warm, viscous, slippery mass that wasn’t there before. I look at her face. Mouth open. Eyes. Dead blank eyes. He’s been at her. Two slashes. Vicious. Brutal. All of his great strength behind the blade. Her throat. Her abdomen. I spin away from the table, away from the woman, collide with the wall. Wiping my right hand on the black wall, calling for Jesus and for my mother, and saying “lady please lady please,” as if she could mend herself by an act of will if only she’d listen to my pleas. Wiping wiping wiping the hand, front and back, on the wall, not only wiping off what I’ve pressed it into but wiping off the way she felt when she was alive, wiping hard, harder, angrily, furiously, until my hand seems on fire, until there’s nothing in my hand but pain. And then I stand there awhile. Not quite sure where I am any longer. I know there’s a door. I go to it. Through it. Oh, yes. The catacombs.
Spencer stood in the center of the black room, his right hand in front of his face, staring at it in the hard projected light, as though it was not at all the same hand that had been at the end of his wrist for the past sixteen years.
Almost wonderingly, he said, “I would’ve saved her.”
“I know that,” Ellie said.
“But I couldn’t save anyone.”
“And that’s not your fault, either.”
For the first time since that ancient July, he thought he might have the c
apacity to accept, not soon but eventually, that he had no greater weight of guilt to carry than any other man. Darker memories, a more intimate experience of the human capacity for evil, knowledge that other people would never want forced on them as it had been forced on him—all of that, yes, but not a greater weight of guilt.
Rocky barked. Twice. Loud.
Startled, Spencer said, “He never barks.”
Slipping off the safety on the SIG, Ellie swung toward the door as it flew open. She wasn’t quick enough.
The genial-looking man—the same who had broken into the Malibu cabin—burst into the black room. He had a silencer-fitted Beretta in his right hand, and he was smiling and squeezing off a shot as he came.
Ellie took the round in her right shoulder, squealed in pain. Her hand spasmed and released the pistol, and she was slammed into the wall. She sagged against the blackness, gasping with the shock of being shot, realized the Micro Uzi was sliding off her shoulder, and made a grab for it with her left hand. It slipped through her fingers, hit the floor, and spun away from her.
The pistol was gone, clattering beyond reach across the floor toward the man with the Beretta. But Spencer went for the Uzi even as it was falling.
The smiling man fired again. The bullet sparked off the stone inches from Spencer’s reaching hand, forcing him to pull back, and it ricocheted around the room.
The shooter seemed unfazed by the whine of the bouncing slug, as if he led such a charmed life that his safety was a foregone conclusion.
“I’d prefer not to shoot you,” he said. “I didn’t want to shoot Ellie, either. I’ve other plans for both of you. But one more wrong move—and you’ll take away all my choices. Now kick the Uzi over here.”
Instead of doing what he had been told, Spencer went to Ellie. He touched her face and looked at her shoulder. “How bad?”