I heard Chris Thomas start to cry again. I heard him whisper: “I don’t want to die, Mr. Wells. I want to live, man, I don’t want to die.”
Then I heard a footstep sound in the chapel above.
I took the phone away from my ear and handed it to Chandler. She waved her hand and shook her head, but I pressed it on her. She put her hand over the transmitter.
“You can’t,” she hissed. “We’ll lose him.”
I smiled a little. “I have to. I have nothing else to say.”
I left her there. I moved to the door, opened it. I walked across the dark hall to the stair and felt for the banister.
I heard another footstep and another, moving tentatively among the pews.
Death was up there.
I went after him.
38 Long climb, up those stairs. There was no way to do it quietly, with the wooden boards complaining beneath my feet. There was no way to do it quickly. By the time I reached the landing, I figured my old friend in the skull mask knew where I was. But I knew that the police were on their way. It was all just a question of time.
I crested the stairs. I moved down the dark hallway. I pushed aside the curtain, and heard Death’s footstep stop as I stepped into the blackness of the decaying chapel. He was somewhere in the center of the room, navigating his way slowly through the pews, looking for me. I squinted. I couldn’t make him out. I moved away from the sound of him.
Trying not to smash into anything, I slowly went toward the altar. I didn’t want the gray light from the stained-glass windows to give me away. My foot touched the altar step. I rose onto it. I kept moving. I figured I was standing directly in front of him now, that he was down the central aisle about twenty steps away.
From far to my right, then, came a low, animal growl: “Wells.”
I turned swiftly, surprised by his location. As I turned, the clouds must have parted outside, the moon must have appeared. Suddenly the scarlet angel of the last trump was gleaming on the right wall. And branded into the lower folds of the angel’s robe was the silhouette of Death’s head.
“I can’t say I’m surprised to see you in church, Michael,” I said. “I know you’re a religious man. At least I know you worship your father.”
The angel vanished. The silhouette was gone. The clouds must have covered the moon.
Having spoken, I backpedaled rapidly, hoping he’d lose me again. I had to keep this going until I heard the sirens sound.
I was now under the altarpiece: a huge wood carving, askew, in disrepair. I felt the grim and twisted faces of the saints hanging over my shoulder. Staring down at me as if already prepared to mourn.
“Wells.”
For a second, I couldn’t place the sound of him in the dark. He’d moved away from the wall. Toward the center aisle again, I thought, and forward, closer to me.
“I guess it’s tough when the gods fall down,” I said, continuing to move. “How long have you known that your old man was crooked?”
He bumped into a pew. I heard it scrape against the floor. I thought I made out his half shadow on a wooden post near the room’s center, but it was gone before I was sure.
I moved to the left, came slowly down the altar stairs again.
“You were an impressive keeper of the flame, Mike,” I said. “You had me going a long time. That first time I met you, I was all ready to write about your father, about how he moved your brother to suicide. And you turned me around. Did it again at the board meeting … turned my attention from your dad’s Capstandard speech.…”
Michael Summers growled inarticulately this time: the sound of pure rage. But it was too close a sound. Like me, he was on the altar stairs, though across the room. I stepped down to the floor and moved away from him, toward the wall to the left.
“But your brother, now … Fred … he wasn’t a true believer like you, was he? When he found out that he’d spent his life trying to live up to the image of a crook, he lost his faith. He called the suicide hotline, talked to Michelle, told her everything. He told you that day out by the pond, the day he blew his brains out. I wonder what you said to him out there to make sure he punished himself for falling away from the great god Walter Summers.…”
“Wells!”
It was a scream this time, and I lost it completely in its own echoes. As I moved beneath the dull, faceless windows on the wall, I had no idea where he was.
“And then you went after Michelle,” I said, as coolly as I could. “You made it just another teen suicide. Well, hell, it wasn’t really murder, was it? You’re Walter Summers’s angel of death, aren’t you? Your old man, he could’ve withstood the scandal, but not you … it would’ve made you face up to what he was … to the kind of man—”
And then I made a mistake. I stopped. In the distance, though I couldn’t be sure, I thought I heard the scream of an oncoming siren. So I stopped, and I listened.
And in the deep, hollow groan of an opening coffin, I heard him say, “Wells.” And he was right beside me.
I spun. Outside, the moon came out. St. Andrew’s agonized face hung from the crucifix on the window above me. I saw it at the same moment I saw the skull of death rise out of the darkness, as I saw his jagged dagger flash up and into the air above my head. And then the knife came plunging down at me.
I raised my hands, crossed at the wrists. His forearm was caught in the crux. It pushed down. The edge of the knife slit my brow and blood splashed over the right side of my face.
I swung his captive arm to the side, hurling him away from me. He flew into the wall. But before I could move, he recovered. He rushed at me. For a terrifying instant I lost him in the dark between us.
Then all at once my vision was filled with the sight of the skull. I jabbed wildly at the death’s head before me, striking with the stiffened fingers of my hand. Michael let out a high-pitched scream as my fingertips dug into his eye. I felt the whisper of the blade pass by my left side. Then he was reeling away from me.
I was sure I heard the sirens now. They were racing over the road beneath the hill, heading for the driveway that would lead them up here.
Michael heard it too. He had fallen to one knee. He was gripping the edge of a pew. But now he lifted his head to the sound. He clambered to his feet. He tore the mask from his head. And with a single glance at me, bounded for the door.
I didn’t go after him. I couldn’t have if I’d wanted to. I was just too beat. The flow of blood from my head had already slowed, but my left eye was glued shut with it. I was wheezing. My legs felt weak.
So I stood there, slumped and aching. And in another second or so the church door squeaked open. And there was Michael Summers, his arms flung wide, his head flung back, his mouth opened, and his wild voice baying his despair … framed in a frozen instant by the red fire of the police flashers as they came screaming up the hill.
I turned away. I pulled myself to my feet. I stumbled to the hallway, to the stairs.
“Chris,” I mumbled to myself. “Chris … left him … God, not again … not again.”
I went down, clutching the banister with one hand, trying to wipe the blood off my face with the other. I reached the bottom. I staggered toward the closed door of the hotline phone room.
I listened for Chandler’s voice. I didn’t hear it. I knew before I opened the door that she’d lost him: that I’d lost him, and she’d listened to him go.
My hand found the knob and turned it. In my mind, I heard that other door, the trapdoor, open once again.
I stepped in and saw Chandler. She was seated where I’d left her on the edge of the desk. The phone was still clutched in her hand, held to her ear. A single tear was rolling down her cheek, but her voice was warm and calm.
“It’s all right, Chris,” she kept saying, over and over. “It’s all right now. It’s going to be all right.”
39 Good story. A murder hidden in a spate of teen suicides. It was a damn good story, and it was all mine. STAR ACE CRACKS KILLING. Cambridge we
nt nuts with it. Even I couldn’t blame him. We had it a day before the pack, and they were still calling us for interviews two days later. It was damn good stuff.
I finished most of the work on the thing. I tracked down the garage where Michael Summers kept his secret car. I found the place that sold the death mask, and Cambridge ordered me to do an entire feature on it. I even got an exclusive interview with Alice Summers the day after she left her husband, swearing she’d file for divorce.
The peak of it came about four weeks after the arrest. That was when the psychiatrists trooped into the county courthouse to tell the judge that Michael Summers wasn’t fit to stand trial. Behind that perfectly controlled exterior, the judge was told, the boy was crazier than hell. Michael’s confession, presented in open court, seemed to clinch it. He sat in the witness stand, staring blindly into space, reciting his crimes in a monotone: How he’d seduced Michelle into the woods. How he’d strangled her with the rope. How he’d strung up the body. He seemed to think it had happened to someone else. That, too, was good stuff.
Taken all in all, the testimony painted a picture of a young man obsessed with his father. In fact, it seemed Walter Summers had been an obsession for both his sons. He was larger than life to them. He held sway over their imaginations. And when they discovered he was corrupt, it had shattered their worlds. To Michael, who had a cool, sophisticated mind, the discovery came slowly, over the years. And over the years, he made adjustments to accommodate the information. Slowly, step-by-step, he adjusted himself right over the edge. Fred was luckier in a way. He was more of an innocent. He found out the truth about his dad in the course of one overheard phone conversation. He seemed, somehow, to feel responsible for what Walter was. He seemed to blame himself. Maybe that was the key to it: the difference in the personalities of the two brothers. Both Fred and Michael were willing to commit murder to protect their father—or to protect themselves from their sense of betrayal, their feelings of rage. But Fred murdered himself, while Michael murdered Michelle Thayer.
Michael had learned to wear a mask—but it was not the mask of Death. It was that smiling mask of maturity and self-possession, the mask of the controlled young man of the world. Death—Death, the avenger—that was the real Michael, all right, the only Michael who existed inside his head. So, when he was done with Michelle, when he knew he had evaded the law, he found himself at loose ends. What’s an avenger, after all, without a victim? Then, luckily for him, I showed up.
I became his reason for being: the one, so he thought, who would turn up the truth about Michelle and, through Michelle, about Walter Summers. Michael was after me from the start. Virtually every action he took was designed both to get rid of me and to confess to me. The hanging dog was not only a threat, but a confession as well. The same with his ghostly appearance at Janet Thayer’s house. When I found Chandler, when I started moving in on the truth, he knew he had to act. But even then—when he tried to kill me on the road, when he planned to lie in wait for me in my hotel room—he was pleading guilty. If he’d kept to himself, I might never have found him.
But he didn’t. When I realized—by elimination more than anything—that Michelle had been killed to protect Walter Summers, I knew it wasn’t Summers who’d done it, but his son. The old man wasn’t afraid of me, he’d taken no special pains to cover up or avoid me. He felt pretty sure that he’d covered his tracks. It was Michael who was always there to protect his father’s reputation. And I guessed that if I confronted the father, the son would show his hand. When Michael didn’t react immediately, I thought I’d blown it. But he had more patience than I did.
Anyway, like I said, the confession was the high point of the story. After that, the whole thing faded away. A single murder, far from the city, over a month old. Even I was tired of it. Even Cambridge was ready to be pried loose. We let it fall to the metro section, and it was gone completely within the week.
But Cambridge had had his first warm blast of praise from the people upstairs, and his good feelings toward me continued to turn my stomach for months afterward. I’d cemented his position in the organization, God help me. He kept calling me “old friend,” and “Wellsy.” He was a regular guy, Cambridge was.
After a while I took a couple of days off. Chandler Burke came down from the county and stayed with me. We had a lot to talk about, twenty years worth. We didn’t talk about it. We went to bed and made love, and then kept making love to one another again and again. It felt good. It felt like living.
She was still with me on Sunday, the day before I went back to work. The next day I was scheduled to pick up the Dellacroce trial. The key witnesses were still to come. I was looking forward to it.
That evening, I remember, Chandler was in the kitchen, making coffee. The plan was to go out to dinner: We were trying to get our bodies accustomed to being vertical again.
I was standing at the window with a cigarette in my hand, staring down at the movie marquee on Eighty-sixth street. The room was unlit around me. The bright white light of the marquee made me squint. It made my eyes water. My eyes were watering anyway. The marquee blurred.
Chandler came in and put the coffee mugs on my desk. She glanced at me, but didn’t say anything. She came and stood next to me, looking out at the marquee.
After a while she just said: “How is it?”
I swallowed hard. “It’s better,” I said. “It’s better.”
“It’ll get better,” she whispered.
“Yeah. Yeah, sure it will.”
She moved closer to me. The side of her touched me in the evening dark.
“Yeah,” I said. I nodded. I kept nodding for a long time as the marquee blurred and shifted outside the window. The smoke from my cigarette drifted up before my eyes in a wavering line.
“My God,” I said then. I put my arm around Chandler’s shoulder. I shook my head. “My God, but I loved her.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1988 by Andrew Klavan
cover design by Jason Gabbert
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Andrew Klavan, The Trapdoor
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