Maggie closed the curtains. She limped around the cordon, and led the group out of the parlor. Gorman stayed close to her. In a loud voice he said, ‘May I ask how you can be certain of the order of events? As you mentioned earlier, there were no witnesses.’
‘Police reports and photos,’ she explained, starting up the stairway. ‘Newspaper stories. It was pretty clear the way it all happened. The cops just followed the blood.’
‘Had the beast been injured?’
She cast Gorman an amused glance. ‘Ethel’s blood,’ she said. ‘It dripped off the beast all the way up here to Lilly’s room.’ At the top of the stairs, she turned to the left.
Tyler, reaching the top, looked to the right. Red curtains surrounded an area in the center of the corridor near its far end, leaving only a narrow passageway on either side. Another exhibit. How many are there? she wondered. And how many could she stomach?
Abe gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, and they entered the bedroom of Lilly Thorn. Again, the group spread out facing a cordon and a wall of red curtains. Maggie, at the far end, tugged the pullcord. The curtains flew apart. A wax figure in a pink nightgown was sitting upright on the bed, a hand to its open mouth, frightened eyes gazing past the brass scrollwork at her feet.
‘We’re right above the parlor, now,’ Maggie said. ‘When all the commotion woke Lilly up, she dragged that dressing table over to the door for a barricade, and climbed out her window. She dropped to the roof of the bay window just a ways down, and jumped from there to the ground.’
Gorman made a disdainful snort.
Maggie glanced at him sharply. ‘Something wrong with you?’
‘No, no.’ He shook his head. ‘My mind just wandered there for . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘Please continue.’
‘I’ve always found it curious,’ she said, ‘that Lilly didn’t try to save her children.’
‘Panic,’ suggested a man beside the redhead.
‘Maybe that’s it.’ Maggie shut the curtains. The group followed her into the corridor. ‘When the beast couldn’t get into Lilly’s room, he went down the hall.’
He, Tyler thought. Suddenly the beast had become a he instead of an it.
They passed the top of the stairway. As they neared the curtained enclosure, the group formed a single file line. Tyler let go of Abe’s hand. He gestured her forward, and she walked ahead of him into the gap between the curtains and the wall. Her forearm brushed one of the folds. She flinched away from its touch, and felt goosebumps scurry up her skin. Then the corridor was clear, bright from a window at its end.
‘The beast,’ Maggie said, ‘found this door open.’ She entered a room on the left. They followed her inside, and Tyler was careful not to stand behind the girl who’d stepped on her. ‘This is where the children slept, though I ’spect they were awake when the beast came – maybe hiding under their covers, froze up with fear. Earl was ten, his brother Sam just eight.’
The curtains slid open.
The two wax bodies lay facedown between the brass beds. Their bloody nightshirts were ripped to shreds, and so was their skin. Tyler looked away. A rocking horse with faded paint rested beside a washstand. In one corner was an Indian tom-tom. A baseball bat was propped against the wall behind it. Suddenly, the boys seemed real to Tyler. She imagined them at play, laughing and chasing each other. She gnawed her lower lip and turned her gaze to the window. She heard Maggie’s voice, but didn’t listen. On the lawn below, she saw a weathered, lattice-work gazebo. Beyond it, the fence. Then the hillside, golden brown in the sunlight, with a few patches of green bush, clumps of rock here and there, a scattering of trees. It looked so peaceful. As she watched, a seagull swooped down, perched on the fence between a couple of the spikes, and pecked at something, apparently finding a snack. She wished she was outside, not trapped inside this mausoleum. Maybe Gorman felt the same way, for she saw that he, too, was staring out of the window.
Maggie finished, and they followed her into the corridor. This time, passing the curtained area, Tyler walked closer to the wall and kept her arms tight against her sides. As they approached the top of the stairs, Maggie said, ‘Sixteen nights we lived in this house before the beast came. My husband, Joseph, he couldn’t abide sleeping in one of the murder rooms, so we settled ourselves in the guest room. Our daughters, Cynthia and Diana, they weren’t so squeamish and took the boys’ room we just left.’
She led them through a doorway on the right, directly across the corridor from the entrance to Lilly’s room. A cordon was stretched from wall to wall, but the room beyond it was open. Except for one corner. There, a set of red curtains hung from a curved bar, enclosing a wedge of floor.
Maggie pointed her cane at a canopy bed. ‘On May seventh, 1931, Joseph and I were sleeping here. It was close to fifty years back, but I remember it all like it was last night. There’d been a good bit of rain that day, and it was still coming down when we retired. We had the windows open, and I laid there listening to the rainfall. The girls were tucked in down the hall and my baby, Theodore, was snug in the nursery. I fell asleep, feeling peaceful and safe.
‘Long about midnight, there come a sound of breaking glass from downstairs. Joseph got up quiet out of bed, and tiptoed over here.’ She limped to a bureau, pulled open a drawer, and lifted out a pistol. ‘He got this. It’s an army model Colt .45 automatic.’
‘Neat,’ said the kid in the cowboy suit.
‘Joseph cocked it, and I can still hear the noise of it.’ Cane clamped under one arm, she clutched the black hood of the weapon and jerked it back and forward with a metallic snick-snack.
‘Hope that’s not loaded,’ said the father of the girl.
‘Couldn’t hurt if it was,’ Maggie told him. ‘We plugged up the barrel with lead, this past year.’ Aiming at the floor, she pulled the trigger. There was a clack. She returned the pistol to the drawer.
‘Joseph took it with him,’ she said, ‘and left me alone in the room. I waited till I heard him on the stairs, then I crept out to the hall. I had to get to my children, you see.’
Leaving the curtains untouched, she stepped around the cordon. The group followed her into the corridor. She stopped at the head of the stairway. ‘I was just here when I heard gunshots. Then come an awful scream from Joseph. I heard sounds of a scuffle, and I wanted to run, but I stood here frozen stiff, staring down through the darkness.’
She gazed down the stairs as if transfixed by the memory of it.
‘Up the stairway come the beast,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I couldn’t see too good, but his skin was white like a fish’s belly, so white it seemed to almost glow. He walked upright like a man, only hunched over some. I knew I had to run and get to the children, but I couldn’t stir a muscle. I could only just stare. Then he made a soft kind of laugh, and threw me to the floor. He tore at me with claws and teeth. I tried my best to fight him off but he was stronger than any ten men, and I was preparing to meet the Lord when Theodore started up crying way off in the nursery. Well, the beast heard it and climbed off me and went scampering down the hall.
‘I was hurt bad, but I went chasing after him. I couldn’t let him get my baby.’
She started hobbling down the corridor. Once again, Tyler pressed herself close to the wall to avoid contact with the curtains. There must be bodies inside, she thought. Mutilated corpses of wax.
Just across from the boys’ room, Maggie stopped. She tapped her cane on a closed door to the right. ‘This stood open,’ she said. ‘I peered inside. There, in the dark . . .’
‘Aren’t we going in?’ asked the redhead.
Maggie glared at her. ‘I never show the nursery.’ Then she looked at the door as if she could see through it. ‘There, in the dark, I saw the pale beast lift my infant from his cradle and tear him asunder. I was watching, numb with horror, when something gave my nightdress a yank. I found Cynthia and Diana behind me. Well, I took a hand of each, and we rushed off. We went this way.’
They followed M
aggie through the gap on the other side of the curtains. She stopped at a closed door across the stairway. The group formed a half-circle around her.
‘We got this far,’ she said, ‘before the beast leapt into the hall and came after us.’ She pulled the door open. Peering into the dim recess, Tyler saw a staircase. The stairs led upward until the darkness consumed them. ‘We ducked inside here, and I pulled the door shut. It was dark as a pit. I threw open the attic door at the top, and bolted it after us. Then we huddled in the musty blackness.
‘We knew the beast was coming. We heard the creaking stairs, and he made quiet hissing sounds like he was laughing. Then he was sniffing at the door. We waited. The girls were sobbing. I can still feel how they both trembled in my arms. Suddenly, the door burst open and the beast fell upon us.’
Maggie eased the door shut. She leaned a shoulder against it, and let out a deep sigh.
‘The screams,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget the screams, the snarls of the beast, the wet ripping sounds as he tore up my two little girls. I fought him until the screams stopped and he had me down. I don’t know why he didn’t kill me, and there’s many a time I wished he had, but he just pinned me to the floor. I was too weak to fight him anymore, and I begged him to end it for me. After a minute, he scampered down the stairs leaving me alone up there with the bodies of my daughters. I never saw him again after that night. But others have.’
16
Janice lay motionless, staring at the mirrored ceiling. Sprawled on top of the pillows, she looked blue and dead like a corpse discarded on a rubbish pile. She was thinking about ways to commit suicide.
So far, she’d come up with a couple of possibilities. The light fixture in the center of the ceiling was about three feet beyond her reach. By stacking pillows, she could get to it. Unscrew the blue bulb. Stick in a finger. Electrocute herself. That would probably work. An easier method, the one she thought she might prefer, was to remove all her bandages and let herself bleed to death. Exploring her wounds, however, she’d found most of them to be superficial, little more than scratches and bites. They weren’t bleeding much. She would have to work them open, or maybe take down that bulb and break it and use its glass like a knife to open her wrists or throat. She could do that.
There was one problem.
She didn’t want to die.
They couldn’t let her go, she was sure of that, but they had bandaged her wounds so they must want her to recover. Why? She could think of only one reason, and it sickened her: they wanted her alive as a plaything for the beast. Last time, she must have been unconscious. But if it came to her now, she would see it, feel its teeth and claws ripping her, its penis battering into her.
No, don’t think about it. Maybe it won’t happen.
It’ll happen.
She pressed a hand tight against the pad between her legs.
I can’t let it happen, she thought.
I’ve got to escape.
Sure. No sweat. Just break down the door and run like hell.
Little Joni, last summer, had escaped easily enough from that maniac who had them prisoners in the cabin. And Joni’d been tied to a bed. At least I’m not tied up, Janice thought. But the cabin door hadn’t been locked from the outside, either.
They’ll open the door, she realized. They’ll have to. Someone, sooner or later, will come in to check on me, maybe to feed me, or – and the thought chilled her – to let in the beast.
When that door opened, she would get her chance.
But she had to be ready.
She rolled herself off the pillows, groaning as the movement awakened streaks and waves of pain. Crawling on her knees, she dragged several of the large pillows to the center of the room. She stacked them. As she pushed herself up to climb atop them, she realized that the bulb would be searing hot. She limped over to where she had been resting, and picked up another pillow. Its case felt like satin. She yanked, splitting one of the seams, and shook out the foam rubber stuffing. With her right hand wrapped in the slick fabric, she returned to the waist-high stack. She stepped onto the top. Her foot sank in, mashing deep. Arms out for balance, she leaned in, brought up her other foot, and straightened herself. The pillows wobbled under her. She teetered for a moment, then was steady.
With her covered hand, she reached up and gripped the blue bulb. She felt its warmth through the layers of satin. She twisted it. The bulb turned easily, and went out.
Not a shred of light entered the room to relieve the total blackness. Janice kept unscrewing the bulb, but the dark disoriented her. Though she tried to stand motionless, the pillows seemed to be shifting slowly under her feet. She swayed. Only her gentle hold on the bulb kept her from losing all sense of direction and falling.
It came loose in her hand.
Quickly, she took a blind leap forward. She seemed to drop for a very long time as if plunging into an abyss. Finally, the floor pounded her feet. Windmilling, she fell backwards. The floor slammed her rump. The back of her head and shoulders toppled the pillows. She writhed against them as pain surged through her body.
Good one, she thought. You probably opened up everything with that stunt.
But she felt proud. There was a ripple of excitement under the pain. She’d done it! She pressed the bulb to her chest, and flinched at its fiery touch.
Smart move.
Smart, all right. Now you’ve got a weapon.
She waited until the pain subsided a little, then crawled on her knees through the dark. After a long while, she bumped a wall. The door, she thought, should be over that way – somewhere to the left.
She didn’t want broken glass where she would be waiting. Carefully, she unwrapped the bulb. It was still warm, but not too hot to handle. Gripping the base, she rapped its glass gently against the wall. Then harder. It burst with a pop that sounded very loud in the silence. Sliding her fingers up the neck, she felt a jagged rim.
She eased sideways. One hand on the wall, she made her way slowly through the darkness until she found the door. She sat down beside it. She leaned her back against the wall, drew up her knees, and waited.
From somewhere not far away came a sound like the cry of a baby. Maybe a cat, she thought. What does the beast sound like? No, it sounded too much like a human baby to be anything else. After a few moments, it stopped. The house returned to silence.
Janice frowned. A baby? Maggie Kutch was far too old to be its mother. Could it be, she wondered, that she was not the only prisoner in the house?
17
‘Twenty years went by,’ Maggie said, ‘before the beast struck again.’
They were back inside the bedroom Maggie had shared with her husband. She was standing beside the red curtains that blocked one corner, a hand on the pullcord.
‘This was 1951. Tom Bagley and Larry Maywood, a couple of youngsters twelve years old, broke into the house after dark. They should’ve known better, both of them. They’d come on the tour plenty of times, and heard me warn more than once that at night the beast prowls the house. I ’spect curiosity got the best of them. Curiosity killed the cat.’
‘Satisfaction brought it back,’ mumbled the girl who’d stepped on Tyler’s foot.
Maggie heard the comment, and smirked. ‘Didn’t bring back Tom Bagley,’ she said. The curtains slid apart.
The girl gasped and took a quick step away. Jack, behind her, protected himself with a raised forearm, gently nudging her to a stop.
The cowboy said, ‘Oh, wow.’
The wax body on the floor was mangled, its clothes torn open, a tatter of underpants draping its buttocks. The skin of its back was scored with scratches. Its neck was a pulpy stub. Its head lay nearby, eyes wide, mouth contorted in agony.
The other boy, about to raise the window, was peering over a shoulder at his dismembered friend. His face, oddly mashed and cracked, was somehow more unnerving to Tyler than the grisly remains on the floor.
‘These two,’ Maggie said, ‘were in the house for a long spell
, nosing around. They’d tried to pry open the nursery door. They’d gone up to the attic. But they were snooping here in this room when the beast found them. He struck down Tom, and Larry ran for the window. While the beast was tearing up his friend, Larry got away by jumping. ’Cept for me, Larry was the only soul ever to see the beast and live.’
Maggie smiled strangely. ‘Now there’s only just me. I hear Larry got himself killed in an accident last year.’
‘What’s wrong with his face?’ Nora asked.
‘Took a spill,’ Maggie said. ‘We tried as best we could to patch it up. Didn’t do too well, did we? We got us a whole new head on order, but it ain’t come in yet.’
She closed the curtains, and the group followed her out of the room. Hobbling past the top of the stairs, she stopped in front of the curtains that blocked the corridor. ‘Here’s our last exhibit of the tour,’ she said. ‘We just got it in this past spring. It’s in a mighty inconvenient spot, but here’s where it happened so here’s where the display had to go or it just wouldn’t be right.
‘It happened just last year, back in the spring of ’78. We had us a family name of Ziegler on the tour – husband, wife, and their boy about ten. Well, the boy, he got spooked on the tour. Started crying and carrying on, so his folks took him off before we finished up. From what the mother said later, the father was mighty annoyed with the boy. Thought he hadn’t acted manly. The last thing he wanted was a sissy for a son, so he dragged the youngster back here after dark.’ A corner of Maggie’s mouth curled up. ‘Wanted to show him there weren’t nothing to be afraid of. Only he was wrong and the boy was right. They broke in the back door, and they got just to here before the beast got them both.’
She yanked the pullcord. The front section of curtains flew open.
The boy was facedown, shirt torn from his back, his neck mauled.