House (13 page)

“Then where?”

“Probably through the cellar. For all we know they're at the top of the stairs now, trying to figure out how to get back out.”

“No way past that lock,” Betty said. “The halls down here will drive them nuts. They'll never make it out.”

Stewart had trapped them in the basement?

Stewart grunted. “I say we hunt them ourselves. We got them trapped like rats now.”

“That wasn't the deal,” Betty said. “You want to live through the night, we open that door for him.”

“You open the door. He's not gonna let this slide. I swear he's gonna fillet us like fish. He's gonna slaughter everyone in this basement like he's done a hundred times before. You know how it works.”

Pause.

“You think they'll find her?” Betty asked.

“Pete'll find—”

“Not her. The other one.”

Stewart paused, breathing loudly through his nose. “Not before we do. And if they do, no doubt she'll use 'em. She's a sneaky little piece of trash.”

For a while neither spoke. Then Stewart clacked toward the far corner and Betty followed. Keys rattled. A door squealed. The door closed. They were gone.

Or were they? What if they had seen him and faked their conversation and exit for his benefit? He'd pull back the curtain and face a loaded shotgun.

Randy waited until he couldn't bear not knowing any longer. He inched his head around the curtain, eyes peeled.

The room was empty.

He ran to each door, testing the knobs. Locked. The one to the room with couches, the one to the root cellar, the one Jack had been sucked through. That left the door Stewart and Betty had used, and he had no intention of following them.

Randy put his ear against the door, heard nothing, and tested the handle. Unlocked. His intentions hardly mattered any longer.

He paced for ten seconds, nerves dicey. If he waited here, they might sneak back and shoot him like a rat in a cage. No options, not a single one, other than going through this door.

He put a trembling hand on the knob, twisted it slowly, and cracked the door. Dim light. No sound. He eased the door wider.

The hall on the other side of the door was made of wood beams supported by thick posts. Stone floor. A bulb in a beam scattered light to the far end where some steps met an old wooden door.

No sign of Betty or Stewart. They must have gone through one of three passages cutting into the hall's left wall.

Staring at the passage, Randy was struck by the scope of what he'd seen in the basement thus far. Clearly the house didn't sit on a square foundation, but on a maze of rooms and halls. Which meant chances were good the basement had another exit. If he was right, he was staring at one right now. That door at the end of the hall sat at the top of three steps. The bottom half was visible to Randy; the top half seemed to be set above ground.

You want to live through the night, we open that door for him,
Betty had said
.

Meaning what? That door was the door that would let
him
in.

White in.

Or Randy out.

He stepped into the passage and walked on his toes. The first of the three passages cut into the left wall ended at a door five feet in. But Randy wasn't interested in another door. He only wanted one thing now, and it lay at the end of the hall.

He could now see that a large padlock had been opened and the door's latch was sprung free.

His heart knocked in his chest. White could be on the other side of the door; he knew that; he did. Knew it and hated it.

If the killer had come in, he'd have locked the door behind him, right? Sure he would have. Of course he would have. Randy repeated that a dozen times as he eased over the stone floor toward the wooden door.

They'd unlocked the door and left, as White had requested. Demanded. A request and a demand were one and the same now, because now they were all playing his game.

When you played White's game, either you did it White's way or you did it the dead way. Everyone learned that sooner or later.

Of course that meant he had to follow the rules as well. His rules.

House rules.

The time had now come to enforce those rules. A little discipline to guide them down the crooked lanes.

He descended the stairs evenly. He straightened his trench coat, took a deep breath, and pushed the door open.

Then White, who was really black, stepped into his house.

Randy was adjacent to the second passage when the door swung in and the boots stepped out of pouring rain, over the threshold, and onto the concrete landing.

There wasn't a shred of confusion in Randy's mind about the identity of this person. The shape of those black boots, the length of the trench coat—these were all emblazoned in Randy's memory with enough clarity to test a thousand hours of therapy. This was the killer they'd all seen on the path leading to the house.

Two things saved him in those first few moments. The first was that the killer didn't have a direct line of sight down the hall as he descended the steps on this side of the landing. The ceiling cut off his vision.

The second was that Randy reacted without thought, before he fully realized the danger that he was in. He jumped to his left. Into the passage.

Against a wall.

And there he froze. He could have tried to sneak farther in, through the door, away from the killer, but he froze.

And this, too, may have saved his life. He had no illusions that White was some ordinary lumberjack with a penchant for killing strangers. He struck Randy as a mastermind of sorts. The slightest sound would undoubtedly alert him.

Randy was breathing heavily again.

He clamped his hand over his mouth and strained to keep his lungs in check. His heart he couldn't control, but he doubted the man was that good.

White reengaged the latch and squeezed the padlock shut, making no attempt at stealth.

He stepped down to the stone floor, then stopped. Randy didn't need eyes to see what was happening. White was staring down the hall, thinking he'd heard something out of place. The patter of a heart. The rush of breath. The seeping of sweat.

For a long time, silence. Then White's boots moved, twelve or fifteen paces. They stopped again.

Water was trickling somewhere. In that moment, Randy felt his last reservoirs of strength fall away. He actually began to relax.

And when he did, a strange kind of resignation—no, peace—began to lap at his mind. A silent resolve not to care. No use fighting White. No use running. He didn't have the strength to run. Or resist at all, for that matter. A small corner of his mind wondered if it might be better to step out and cut a deal with White.

For seconds that stretched into an eternity, nothing happened. He couldn't hear White breathing, so maybe White couldn't hear him.

The boots headed toward the study. A door opened and closed.

Randy slid to the cold stone floor. Okay, so maybe he did care a little. He ground his molars and muttered under his breath, “Take that, you sick vampire.”

He was shaking. But he was alive.

Leslie had vanished into these halls. At least, he was pretty sure of it. Was
she
alive? The thought surprised him, more because it was the first time he'd given the matter head-space than because he worried for her safety. Amazing how quickly a little stress can reorganize your priorities.

He hated himself. In reality, he always had. If he managed to survive this night, he might work on that.

The exit was now locked. The room he'd come from was locked.

Randy turned down the passage he was in and tried the door at the end. It led to a small utility room. There was a closet door on his right. Every room in the house seemed to have a closet. He scanned the walls. Shovels, buckets, a pitchfork, rakes. Several rakes.

A shotgun.

Randy blinked at the gun leaning in the corner, not sure his eyes were seeing correctly. Yet there it was, a single-barrel job that looked as old as the house. The question was, did it work? He cocked the barrel open at its hinge. Two rounds. He looked around. Rifled through jars of nails and lightbulb boxes on a shelf. Nothing that looked like ammo. Two would have to do.

A door slammed and footsteps sounded in the hall he'd just come from.
Clack, clack
.

Betty's
clack, clack
? Or Stewart's? Or White's?

Randy picked up the gun as quietly as possible and moved cat-like toward the closet. But even as he moved he realized he was no longer panicking.

“Stewart?” Betty called out.

He yanked the closet open, saw the floor inside was a foot or so lower than the one in the utility room, and stepped down.

Was he afraid? Sure. But he'd made it this far. He closed the door, thinking that he might not have entered a closet after all.

Randy turned around in the space. Not a closet. Not even close. He was in a shadowy concrete tunnel of some kind. It ran from the door to both right and left.

You think they made it to the tunnel?
Maybe he should reconsider. A thin crack of light marked the utility-room door's outline. Then again, Betty was somewhere on the other side.

He faced the tunnel again. Maybe, just maybe, it had an exit. He'd seen the pouring rain when White came into the basement—if he found rainwater, he just might find a hatch or something.

He looked both ways, and seeing no reason why he should go either direction, he turned to his left and walked, shotgun in hand.

He had a gun; that was the main thing.

It hit him then that what faint light there was had come from the crack below the door. The tunnel was dark ahead. And behind.

He'd taken maybe twenty steps when a loud
clang
rang down the tunnel. Like a hatch opening. Back, way back. He turned. Too far back to see anything.

Something dropped into the tunnel. Something heavy. And something that could run.
Thump, thump, thump, thump.
Headed right for him. A steady but heavy breathing chased the echoing footfalls.

Randy whirled and ran for his life.

12

THERE WERE TWO WAYS FOR LESLIE TO LOOK at her predicament: she had escaped the beast, or she had simply taken a long and terrible dive over the lip of the frying pan and into the fire.

Or into hell. Honestly, she didn't know which.

In the terror of her escape from Pete, the open door to the basement had at first struck her as her only escape. The fact that they'd been told earlier not to enter barely registered. It was the odor that sharpened her recollection of Betty's warning. The smell of rotten eggs assaulted her the moment she landed on the concrete floor. But by then, it was too late. She heard Pete's grunts upstairs and knew that he was following. With a glance back, Leslie ran forward, down the hall, and past three doors before veering into another hall on her left. She tried to regulate her breathing.

She couldn't shake the feeling that she'd entered far more than any ordinary basement. The rooms, for one thing—there were far too many, and if these halls were any indication, the space reached way beyond what she thought reasonable for the size of house above her.

But at the moment, the compulsion to escape the man crashing down the stairs behind her pushed caution from her mind. It hardly mattered that the concrete passageway she'd entered was dripping with water and lit only by a naked bulb here and there; it hardly computed that there were too many doors. The suggestion that she was already lost whispered through her mind only once.

She sped forward on her tiptoes, around a corner, through a doorway, into a smaller hall, to the end, and confronted by a door on her left and another on her right, Leslie chose the one on the right.

Into the room without taking stock. She closed the door behind her and locked it, quite sure that the lock couldn't be disengaged from the other side. But she was too unnerved to open the door to make sure.

Leslie turned around and stared at the room she'd entered. Her breathing stopped almost immediately.