There were no lights burning in the house. While Louis and I waited, Angel scouted the perimeter to look for night-lights that might be activated by movement. He found none. He circled the house before signaling Louis and me to join him, using his Maglite, his fist wrapped tightly around it so that it was visible only to us.
“There’s no alarm,” he said, “not that I could see.”
It made sense. Whoever was using this place, whether it was Merrick or the person who was funding him, wouldn’t want to give the cops an excuse to drop by while the place was unoccupied. Anyway, you could probably have counted the number of burglaries around here on the thumbs of one hand.
We drew closer to the house. I could see that slates on the roof had been repaired at some point over the last year or two, but the exterior paintwork was cracked and damaged in places. Weeds had colonized most of the yard, but the driveway had been sown with fresh gravel, and there was a weed-free space for one or two cars. The garage to one side of the house had a new lock on its door. The building itself had not been repainted, but neither did it seem in urgent need of any repair. In other words, all that was necessary to keep the property ready for use had been done, but no more. There was nothing to draw attention to it, nothing to attract a second glance. It was nondescript in the way that only the most purposeful self-effacement could be.
We checked the house one more time, avoiding the gravel and sticking to the grass in order to muffle our footsteps, but there was no sign of anyone inside. It took Angel a few minutes’ work with a rake and a pick to open the back door, allowing us to enter a small kitchen with empty shelves and closets and a refrigerator that appeared to serve no purpose other than to add a comforting hum to the otherwise silent house. A trash can revealed the carcass of a roasted chicken and an empty plastic water bottle. The smell suggested that the chicken had been there for some time. There was also a crumpled pack of American Spirit cigarettes, Merrick’s brand of choice.
We moved into the main hallway. Before us was the front door. To the left was a small bedroom furnished only with a worn sofa bed and a small table. The edge of an off-white sheet protruded from the innards of the sofa, the only splash of brightness visible in the gloom. Next to the bedroom was the main living area, but it had no furniture at all. Sets of fitted bookshelves occupied the alcoves at either side of the cold fireplace, but the only book that troubled them was a battered leather-bound Bible. I picked it up and leafed through it, but there were no markings or notes that I could see, and no name on the frontispiece to indicate the identity of its owner.
Angel and Louis had moved on to the rooms to the right: a bathroom, what might once have been a second bedroom, now also empty apart from the husks of insects trapped in the remains of last summer’s webs like Christmas tree decorations left up past their time, and a dining room that bore traces of its past in the form of the marks of a table and chairs in the dust, as though the furniture had been spirited away without the intervention of any human agency, vanishing into the air like smoke.
“Here,” said Angel. He was in the hallway, pointing his Mag at a square door in the floor close by the side wall of the house. The door was padlocked, but not for long. Angel disposed of the lock, then raised the door using a brass ring set into the wood. A flight of stairs was revealed disappearing into the darkness below. Angel looked up at me as if I was to blame.
“Why is everything always underground?” he whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” I replied.
“Shit,” said Angel loudly. “I hate it when I do that.”
Louis and I knelt beside him.
“You smell that?” asked Louis.
I sniffed. The air below smelled a little like the chicken carcass in the kitchen trash, but the stink was very faint, as though something had once rotted down there and had since been removed, leaving only the memory of its decay trapped in the stillness.
I went down first, Angel behind me. Louis remained above, in case anyone approached the house. At first sight, the cellar appeared to be even emptier than the rest of the rooms. There were no tools on the walls, no benches at which to work, no boxes stored, no discarded relics of old lives resting forgotten beneath the main house. Instead, there was only a broom standing against one wall and a hole in the dirt floor before us, perhaps five feet in diameter and six feet deep. Its sides were lined with brick and its base was littered with shards of broken slate.
“Looks like an old well,” said Angel.
“Who builds a house on a well?”
He sniffed the air.
“Smell’s coming from down there. Could be something buried beneath the stones.”
I got the broom and handed it to him. He leaned in and poked at the slates below, but it was clear that they were only inches deep. Beneath them was solid concrete.
“Huh,” he said. “That’s weird.”
But I was no longer listening, for I had noticed that the cellar was not as empty as it had first appeared. In a corner behind the stairs, almost invisible in the shadows, was a huge oak closet, the wood so dark and old that it looked almost black. I shined my flashlight on it and saw that it had been ornately carved, filigreed with leaves and creeping vines, less a piece of furniture carved by man than a part of nature itself that had become petrified in its present form. The doorknobs were made from cut glass, and a small brass key gleamed in the keyhole. I shined the light around the basement, trying to figure out how someone had managed to get the closet down here to begin with. The door and stairs were too narrow. At some point in the past, there might have been outer doors to the cellar from the yard, but I couldn’t see where they might have been situated. It created the unsettling impression that the cellar had somehow been constructed around this old piece of dark oak for the sole purpose of giving it a quiet, dark place in which to rest.
I reached out and took hold of the key. It seemed to vibrate slightly between my fingers. I touched my hand to the wood. It too was trembling. The sensation appeared to come both from the closet itself and the ground beneath my feet, as though deep below the house some great machinery was grinding and throbbing to an unknown end.
“Do you feel that?” I said, but now Angel was both at once nearby and also a speck in the distance, as though space and time had momentarily warped. I could see him examining the hole in the cellar floor, still testing the slates for some clue as to the source of the smell, but when I spoke he didn’t seem to hear, and my voice sounded faint even to myself. I turned the key. It clicked loudly in the lock, too loudly for such a small mechanism. I took a handle in each hand and pulled, the doors opening silently and easily to reveal what lay within.
There was movement inside. I lurched backward in shock, almost tripping over my own feet. I raised my gun, the flashlight held high and away from the weapon, and was blinded momentarily by the reflection of the beam.
I was staring at my own image, distorted and shaded with black. A small gilded mirror hung against the back of the closet. Beneath it were spaces for shoes and underwear, all built into the body of the closet and all empty, the two sections divided by a horizontal plane of wood that was almost entirely obscured by a seemingly random assemblage of objects: a pair of silver earrings, inset with red stones; a gold wedding ring, a date engraved upon the interior—“May 18, 1969”; a battered toy car, probably dating back to the fifties, its red paint almost entirely worn away; a faded photograph of a woman set in a cheap locket; a small bowling trophy unmarked by a date or its winner’s name; a clothbound book of child’s verses opened to its title page, upon which the words “For Emily, with Love from Mom and Dad, Christmas 1955” had been written in a crude, halting script; a tie pin; an old Carl Perkins ’45, signed by the man himself across the label; a gold necklace, the chain broken as though it had been yanked from the wearer’s neck; and a wallet, empty apart from a photograph of a young woman wearing the cap and gown of the newly graduated.
But these items were merely distractions, a
lthough everything about them suggested that they had been treasured at some time by their owners. Instead, my attention was drawn to the mirror. Its reflective surface had been severely damaged, seemingly by fire or some other great heat, so that the wooden backing was visible at its heart. The glass had warped, the edges stained with brown and black, and yet it had not cracked and the wood behind was not charred. The heat that had been applied to cause such damage was so intense that the mirror had simply melted beneath it, yet the backboard had been left unmarked.
I reached out to touch it, then stopped. I had seen this mirror before, and suddenly I knew who it was that was manipulating Frank Merrick. Something twisted in my stomach, and I felt a surge of nausea. I might even have spoken, but the words would have made no sense. Images flashed through my mind, memories of a house—
“This is not a house. This is a home.”
Symbols on a wall in a dwelling long abandoned, revealed only when the paper began to come away and loll in the hallway like a series of great tongues. A man in a threadbare coat, with stains on his trousers and the sole coming away from the base of one of his shoes, demanding payment of a debt owed by another long believed dead.
“This is an old and wicked world.”
And a small, gilded mirror, held in this man’s nicotine-stained fingers, an image reflected in it of a howling figure that might have been myself or might have been another.
“He was damned, and his soul is forfeit . . .”
Angel appeared beside me, looking blankly at the items in the closet.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a collection,” I said.
He moved closer, and seemed on the verge of picking up the toy car. I raised my hand.
“Don’t touch it. Don’t touch any of it. We need to get out of here. Now.”
And then he saw the mirror. “What happened to—”
“It’s from the Grady house,” I said.
He backed away in disgust, then looked over his shoulder in expectation of seeing the man who had brought the mirror to this place suddenly emerge from his hiding place, like one of the hibernating spiders in the rooms above alerted by the coming of spring’s first insects.
“Aw, you got to be fucking kidding,” said Angel. “Why is nothing ever normal?”
I closed the closet doors, the key still vibrating in the lock as I turned it, sealing away the collection once again. We climbed up from the cellar, slid the bolt across, and restored the padlock. Then we departed from that place. We left no signs of our trespass, and as Angel locked the back door behind us the house seemed just as it did when we had arrived.
But I felt it was to no avail.
He would know we had been there.
The Collector would know, and he would come.
21
The journey back to Scarborough was conducted in near silence. Both Angel and Louis had been in the Grady house. They knew what had taken place there, and they knew how it had ended.
John Grady was a child killer in Maine, and his house had been unoccupied for many years after his death. Thinking about it now, perhaps “unoccupied” was the wrong word. “Dormant” might have been more appropriate, for something had remained in the Grady house, some trace of the man who had given to it his name. At least, that is how it seemed to me, although it might just as easily have been shadows and fumes, the miasma of its history, and the remembrance of the lives lost there mingling to create phantasms in my brain.
But I was not the only one who suspected that something had secured itself in the Grady house. The Collector had appeared, a raggedy man with yellow nails, asking only that he be given permission to take a souvenir from the house: a mirror, and nothing more. He did not seem willing, or able, to enter the house himself, and I believed that at least one man, a minor thug named Chris Tierney, had died at the Collector’s hands after he had dared to get in this strange, sinister man’s way. But the permission that the Collector sought had not been mine to grant, and when he saw that he would not be given what he wanted, he had taken it anyway, leaving me bleeding on the ground.
And the last thing that I saw as I lay there, my skull blazing with pain from the force of the Collector’s blow, was the image of John Grady trapped behind the glass of the mirror that the Collector had taken, screaming impotently as justice came for him at last.
Now that same mirror, charred and warped, lay beneath a deserted house, reflecting an assemblage of unrelated objects, tokens of other lives, of justice meted out by that emaciated figure. In the past, he had signed his name at least once as “Kushiel”: a black joke, the name stolen from hell’s jailer, but nevertheless a hint as to his nature, or what he believed to be his nature. I felt certain that each of the items in that old closet represented a life taken, a debt paid in some way. I recalled the stink that hung over the pit in the cellar. I should make the call, I thought. I should bring the cops down on him. But what could I say? That I smelled blood, yet there was no blood to be seen? That there was a closet of trinkets in the cellar, but with only a first name here, a date there, to connect them to their original owners?
And what were you doing down in the cellar, sir? You do know that breaking and entering is a crime, don’t you?
And there was another matter to be considered. I had encountered individuals in the past who were as dangerous as the Collector. Their natures, only some of which I could begin to explain or understand, had been corrupted, and they were capable of great evil. But the Collector was different. He was motivated by something other than a desire to inflict pain. He appeared to occupy a space beyond conventional morality, engaged in work that had no time for concepts of due process, of law or mercy. In his mind, those he sought had already been judged. He was merely executing the sentence. He was like a surgeon removing cancerous growths from the body, excising them with precision and casting the diseased parts into the fire.
Now he was manipulating Merrick, using him to draw unknown individuals from the shadows so that they might reveal themselves to him. Merrick had been in the house, if only for a time: the discarded pack and the rotting chicken told me as much. The Collector also smoked, but his tastes were a little more exotic than American Spirit. Through Eldritch, he had provided Merrick with a car, probably funds too, and also a place in which to stay, a base from which to operate but almost certainly with an injunction attached stipulating that he was not to enter any locked part of the house. And even if Merrick had disobeyed and made his way down to the cellar, would those items in the closet have meant anything to him? They would merely have appeared to be a random jumble, an eccentric amalgam of disparate items held in an old closet that vibrated to the touch, tucked into a corner of a cellar that reeked faintly of old, rotting things.
It was clear now that the Collector was looking for someone connected to Daniel Clay although, if Eldritch was to be believed, not Clay himself. There could be only one answer: he wanted those who had preyed on Clay’s patients, the men who, if I was right, were responsible for whatever had happened to Lucy Merrick. So Eldritch had been engaged to ensure that Frank Merrick was freed and pointed in the right direction, but Merrick was not the kind of man to report his every move back to an ancient lawyer in a paper-filled office. He wanted revenge, and the Collector must have known that, at some point, Merrick would move entirely beyond his control. He would have to be shadowed, his movements revealed, so that any information he gleaned would automatically be shared with the one who had freed him to conduct his search. And when the men he sought at last made their move, then the Collector would be waiting, for there was a debt to be paid.
But who was shadowing Merrick? Again, there seemed to be only one possible answer.
Hollow Men.
Angel seemed to be following some of my thoughts.
“We know where he is,” he said. “If he’s tied in with this, then we can find him if we need to.”
I shook my head.
“It’s a storehouse, nothing more.
Merrick was probably allowed to use it for a while, but I’ll bet he never made it down to the cellar, and I’ll lay you another ten he never met anyone connected with the house apart from the lawyer.”
“The lock on the back door was new,” said Angel. “I could smell it. It had been changed recently, probably in the last day or two.”
“Merrick’s key privileges might have been taken away. I don’t think Merrick will care. It didn’t look like he’d been there in a while, and he’s the suspicious kind anyway. My guess is that he cut himself loose as soon as he could. He wouldn’t want the lawyer to be able to keep tabs on him, but he had no idea who was bankrolling his search. If he did, he’d never have gone anywhere near that house.”
“But we’re still ahead of this guy, right? We left that place just like we found it. We know he’s involved, but he doesn’t know that we know.”
“The fuck are you?” said Louis. “Nancy Drew? Let him come. He’s a freak. We had our share of freaks before. One more ain’t goin’ to capsize our boat.”
“This one’s not like the rest,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because he doesn’t take sides. He doesn’t care. He just wants what he wants.”
“Which is?”
“To add to his collection.”
“You think he wants Daniel Clay?” asked Angel.
“I think he wants the men who abused Clay’s patients. Either way, Clay is the key. The Collector is using Merrick to try to smoke them out.”
Louis shifted in his seat. “What are the options on Clay?”
“Same as on everyone else: he’s alive, or he’s dead. If he’s dead, then either he killed himself, like his daughter suspects, in which case the question is, why did he do it, or someone helped him along to the same end. If he was murdered, then it’s possible that he had some idea of the identities of the men who were abusing those children, and they killed him to keep him quiet.