The Dark Door (12 page)

“That’s what it means to be insane,” Constance said. “It means being irrational, doing things that defy explanation. Turning on people without warning. Many of them simply withdraw, become empty, catatonic. They aren’t evil. They’re just very ill.”

“You don’t know,” he said miserably. “I’ve seen them. One minute happy, loving, giving, trusting, then demonic. In a flash they’re possessed and get the gun and shoot his mother and father. In the face. He shot her in the face, I saw him, possessed, demonic…”

He talked in an undertone, not looking at Constance. She had been as bewildered about who he was as Charlie. Not Loesser. She had studied that photograph, and he was not Loesser. As he talked, she remembered the report the police had filed about the attack on Loesser, the deaths of the Danvers family, their disappearance. She felt a stab of pity for this man.

“Mr. Danvers,” she said gently, “the boy loved his parents, both of them. Everyone said so. Something affected his brain. He couldn’t help himself; he didn’t know what he was doing. He became extremely ill, not possessed, not invaded by evil. He was to be pitied, Mr. Danvers.”

He raised his face, haggard and pale and very tired. “You know?”

She nodded. “We know.”

He began to sob and somehow she got him to the side of the bed where she put her arms around him and held him as he wept.

“Why’d you lie about who you are?” the sheriff demanded as soon as Charlie led him into the den.

“Now, Sheriff, I didn’t, if you’ll recall. I introduced Constance and said I was her husband. God’s truth. You want a liverwurst with onions?” He poked at the sandwich with a look of distaste. ‘
She
thinks organs are edible, God help her.”

“I don’t want no sandwich. Look, Meiklejohn, I want some answers. What are you doing here? Who hired you? To do what? How did you know about the motors down at the old town?”

He stood with his hands low on his hips, like a gunslinger, Charlie thought with interest. He wondered if they still practiced quick draws. He looked at the sheriff with candor and said, “I’m here for the ride. Constance is a psychologist, reviewing the records of the various problems here. I came along because I didn’t have anything better to do. And I figured it out about the engines from reading the reports. Every single instance of madness came about only when things were all turned off over there. It seemed to add up. Worth a shot, anyway.” He picked up a ham and cheese sandwich.

Sheriff Maschi drew in a deep breath and reached past him for a liverwurst. “We got our guy out of there without any more trouble. How’d you know about him?”

“No secrets hereabouts,” Charlie said, chewing. “If I were you, I’d sure have some barricades put on every road going over there.”

“Yeah, yeah. We are. And a guard on each one.”

Charlie stopped chewing. “How far away from the town?”

“Far enough.” He reached for another sandwich. “Goddamnit! I’ve been over everything down there half a dozen times! Nothing’s in there!”

Charlie nodded with genuine sympathy.

“You really retired? Pretty young to be retired.”

“From the New York Police Department? Never too young to retire.”

“Yeah, I guess. I’ve been sheriff for twenty nine years. Feuds, fights, brawls, shootouts, vandalism, survivalists and environmentalists mixing it up, you name it, we’ve had it here. But this! Last year it was wetbacks and air loads of dope being dropped. Bad news. I’d take back
all of it in exchange for what we’ve got now. All
of it, doubled. Wish to hell I was retired, reared back on my porch watching the paint peel on my house.”

“You thought about calling in the Feds?”

“Yeah, more and more. Maybe I’ll do that. After the reports come in, maybe I’ll do that.” He finished the last bite of his sandwich and nodded at the platter. “Good. Thanks. Look, Meiklejohn, you get any more ideas, give me a call. Right?”

Charlie walked out to the porch with the sheriff and watched him out of sight, then turned grimly back to the house. Now, he thought, he wanted some damn answers of his own. No more games, Lawes, or whoever the hell you are, he muttered to himself as he strode down the hall to the bedroom. He hoped Constance hadn’t hurt him too much, not enough to keep him from talking anyway. He pushed the door open and stopped, completely nonplussed and helpless. The man who had splashed gas on their house, the man he wanted to sock was sitting on the bed in his wife’s arms, crying like a baby.

Constance glanced up at him and raised an eyebrow. “We’ll be out in a minute or two.”

Chapter 12

Charlie stalked to
the kitchen, to the den,
the living room, back to the kitchen. Constance finally appeared.

“He’s in the bathroom, be right out.”

“He’d better.”

She passed him, poured coffee and sipped it. When the man entered the kitchen, Charlie stood with his hand clenched.

“Charlie,” Constance said from across the room, “this is Carson Danvers. My husband, Charles Meiklejohn.”

Carson turned bewildered eyes toward her. “I thought you said you knew.”

And Charlie found himself speechless. After a moment he muttered, “I’ll be damned!” His anger flared again. “You son of a bitch, why’d you douse my place with gas? I’m going to beat the crap out of you for that!”

Carson Danvers spread his hands helplessly. “I don’t know you, anything about you. She said you knew who I am, and even that’s a lie. What’s going on?”

Charlie turned to regard Constance with suspicion. She tilted her head and sent the message: he’s telling the truth, and he felt his hands relax, his shoulders sag a little. “I wish to hell I knew,” he snarled.

“You’ll have to be John Loesser,” Charlie decided two hours later; they had sat in the den talking all that time. Danvers, Loesser, whatever he chose to call himself, was still pale and red-eyed, but he was calm. He had been able to talk about that first attack, what he had done, what he had seen. He had not been able to eat anything. “We have to call you something,” Charlie added aggrievedly.

The other man nodded. “I have identification in the glove compartment of my car. John Loesser.”

“Okay. So I hired you to assist me in this investigation. That’s covered. But damned if I know what you’ll do, or what I’ll do either, as far as that goes.”

Something about Loesser nagged at him, and suddenly he realized what it was: he had the glinty eyes of a fanatic. Religious fanatics, political fanatics, sports fanatics, they all seemed to share that one common trait; their eyes glittered. John Loesser’s eyes glittered. And Charlie knew precisely what John Loesser would do as soon as he had the chance. The glittery eyes, the scar on his cheek that flamed now and then, even his gauntness added up to a picture of a man driven by forces he could not resist. He wondered if Loesser ate or slept when he knew the thing was loose in a hotel again.

John Loesser drank coffee and put the cup down. “The same pattern will hold as before. They’ll look for radiation, chemicals, gas, anything. And they won’t find a thing. Eventually they’ll go away. I go in and burn the building down and everything stops. Pretty soon people don’t remember much about it.”

“To start somewhere else,” Charlie muttered.

“Next week. A month. Three or four months. It starts again somewhere else.” He shook his head. “I’ve tried to help them. Two different times I sent letters, made calls, told them everything I could think of, and it was the same. They go in and get samples, or look around. If they turn off the lights, or engines, whatever, they go mad—many of them go mad—and they hurt each other. They go back with others, and try to find something again, more men, armed men, same thing. Over and over. I tell them to keep motors running, and if they do, they don’t find anything. If they don’t they go mad. Same over and over.” He grinned a crooked grimace. “One of
them
burned the hotel once. Beat me to it. They knew, and called it unsolved, another arson fire.”

Constance had been writing. Now she looked up from the table. “Were all the buildings wooden—frame buildings?”

“Yes.”

She made another note and frowned at the paper before her. “Why just here? Why not in Asia, Africa, Europe?”

“We don’t know that it isn’t happening in other places,” John said. “No one but the three of us knows there’s cause to link the incidents in this country.”

“Well, we have to tell them that,” she said almost absently, gazing again at the notes she had written. She did not see the way John Loesser’s jaw became rigid, how the scar flared, the way his hands clenched. Charlie did and became more wary than before.

“What I have,” Constance said in her practical manner, “is a list of similarities. One, the hotels are always isolated, at least a mile from other buildings where there are activities going on. Two, they all were wooden. Three, they don’t have electricity, or it isn’t working. Four, not everyone is susceptible to whatever happens. Five, the madness has no particular pattern. Six, people who are affected seem to have a compulsion to return to the hotel. Seven, neither time, distance, nor treatment seems to alleviate the psychological condition. I’ll have to look into that one to make sure,” she murmured, and wrote.

“You forget a couple of things,” John said savagely. “The dead people get up and walk through the doorway to hell. Their bones turn up later.”

Constance turned her pencil over and over and shook her head. “We don’t know that.”

“You’re just like the others,” he said with great bitterness. “There’s a line you can’t cross, isn’t there?”

Constance studied him and finally nodded. “Yes. Of course. That’s true of everyone, including you. How hard did you try to get help? Did you go in person to the police? Of course not. You sent anonymous letters, made anonymous phone calls. You knew as well as I that you would be ignored; you would be free to carry on your own private vendetta, and when they did look into
the
situation, without the links between all the
hotels,
without your personal testimony, they would be stymied. You dealt with your own guilt by ignoring
the
implications, hiding behind superstition about the thing you burned out again and again. What drove you to that, Mr.
Danvers? Fear?
Afraid of crossing the
line
to examine what might really be in those hotels? This is much bigger than a personal
vendetta,
and you know it. It’s going
to
break wide open, possibly right
here
in Old West, in Grayling, and then how will you manage your fear and guilt?”

He looked as if he were ready to leap from his chair and start running, perhaps never stop. Before he could move, Charlie murmured, “That’s a funny thing about it always being a hotel. Why? Why not abandoned farmhouses, or barns, or warehouses, or anything else you can name? In this country most of them are made of wood, if that’s the deciding factor.”

John leaned back in his chair. “I couldn’t find a reason.”

“Me neither, not yet anyway. Let’s brainstorm. What do hotels have in common besides many rooms?”

“Lobbies,” Constance said.

“Long halls,” John added after a moment.

“Did they all have more than one floor?” Charlie asked. John nodded. “More than two?”

John Loesser frowned, remembering. “The ones I had anything to do with all had at least three. Two of them had four floors.”

Constance wrote:
three or more stories
.

“Why did you always start your fires on the second floor, near the center of the building?” Charlie asked.

“I wanted to get as near the door as I could.”

“The door. You’ve mentioned it before, but why those particular doors, not just any door?”

“
His
door,” John Loesser said. Constance snorted, and he went on almost desperately, “The door the devil comes through.”

Charlie remembered one of the rumors he had heard, that some footprints had gone to a door that connected two rooms and stopped there. “You said it was like a shadow that filled the doorway.”

“Not really. Like a void. Emptiness. I turned my flashlight on it and the light just stopped there, not like shining a light into the dark of a room.”

“Did you ever try to go through it?”

John looked as if Charlie had gone mad. “I tossed a rock in once. It just vanished. I went to the other side, out through the hall into the next room. No rock. Just the blackness, the void. All the way to the top, side to side, down to the floor. No doorway, just the void, the entrance to hell.”

“How high are those doors in the old hotels? A standard door is six eight.”

“Higher. Eight feet, three and a half feet wide. Over my head a good bit. At least eight feet.”

“Another similarity,” Charlie muttered, wishing he knew what to do with the similar items.

Soon after that Byron and Beatrice came back. They were both showing the strain of interviewing shocked survivors all day. Beatrice looked near tears when she sat down with a large drink.

“The same thing over and over. How could it happen to Mary, or Ralph, or Tommy? What’s wrong with Susan? Why did so and so turn on me that way? I loved him, her, whoever.” She held up her glass in a mock salute. “Cheers.”

“What do you tell them?” John asked, watching her.

She and Byron had accepted him as Charlie’s assistant without question. Beatrice shrugged and said wearily, “There’s not a lot to say, now is there?”

Byron tossed a couple of tapes to the table. “We’re mostly trying to keep them talking for now,” he said. “We’re encouraging people to say everything that comes to mind dealing with this… phenomenon, so that it won’t sink below consciousness and return to cripple them at a future date. The therapy is a bit difficult.” He was as tired as Beatrice, as frustrated and helpless as Charlie. He looked at John Loesser, then at Constance and Charlie. “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing, that’s the problem. We don’t know why those people went mad, why Carlos turned on Luisa, why Mike tried to kill Polly, why…” He stopped abruptly as his voice started to get shrill. “Sorry,” he said and went to the bar to pour himself bourbon.

Constance had been listening distantly, thinking of the list of similarities she had jotted down. That was part of it, she thought, but all along they had been ignoring the other part, the people who actually went mad.

“Byron,” she said, “we need to look into those cases. Maria Eglin, the Dworkin sisters, the others. Who was it, Carlos? As many as we can.”

“Not my field,” he said.

“Mine neither, but we have to. Look, if there are lesions, physical damage of any sort from chemicals, from anything, that’s one thing, but if the primary maladaptive functions are endogenic in nature without any immediate activating agent, it’s a different avenue of approach. Have there been autopsies yet of any of the affected people? I want to know if there have been lesions found. Not in the cortex, or neocortex, obviously, but perhaps the hypothalamus? Who would know?”

Byron’s look had changed from impatience to interest. “A hallucinogenic? Something like that? It could be. A chromosomal examination…”

Charlie turned to John Loesser. “Didn’t you say you could cook? It’s that or Jodie’s restaurant, or my scrambled eggs. There they go.” He watched Constance, Byron, and Beatrice seat themselves at the kitchen table and start to make sketches, diagrams, God alone knew what, he thought. “Let’s go shopping.”

John Loesser was watching Constance with near fascination. She was too many people, he decided, too complex to comprehend. He found his gaze moving on to Beatrice, so dark against the fairness of Constance, and for the first time in over six years, regarding this young woman who looked like an Indian, he felt the pangs of longing for a woman other than Elinor. When Charlie touched his arm, he was startled from a great distance away. “I’d like to cook,” he said.

“We’ll need to know if they’ve done CAT scans, EEG’s, what drugs they’ve tried, what effects…”

Charlie and John left without drawing the attention of anyone at the table. And that was Constance in her working persona, Charlie thought happily. He admired her more than he could express.

Outside, Charlie said, “If I had a can of gas in my trunk, I’d be scared to death the sun on it would set it off. Gets cold as any pole here at night, but that old sun heats up real fast real early.”

John Loesser stood without motion for a few seconds. “I won’t bolt,” he said. “Why didn’t you turn me in when the sheriff was here?”

“I didn’t think you would,” Charlie said. “Let’s walk. It’s only a couple of blocks to the store they call a supermarket. Only a couple of blocks to the motel, too.”

“Let’s get my car then.” He laughed shortly. “I’ll move my spare gas into the shade somewhere. You didn’t answer. Why didn’t you turn me in?”

“You’re the only person I know who can walk into that place and walk out again. Seemed a shame to lock you away somewhere.”

John Loesser stopped again. His voice was strained now when he spoke. “I told you what I know. It’s the devil in there. They won’t find anything, and your wife won’t.” She would want to reason with it, he thought with bitterness. Devise tests for it, find out what made it work, how it operated, why. But no reasoning was possible with evil. It was its own excuse, and Constance did not, maybe could not, understand that one basic truth about it. “I’m going to torch it, Charlie. I have to.”

“Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. May
be I’ll help you when the time comes. I know a few tricks you haven’t thought of. Let’s get your car and shop before the store closes.”

Jodie’s parking lot was jammed full; two California state police cars were there, and an ABC television van. Charlie steered John across the street, and approached the motel from the opposite direction. When they drew near the small lobby, they could see a nattily dressed woman and a man in jeans with a camera slung over his shoulder, talking to the desk clerk.

“You want to move in with us?” Charlie asked.

“Yes. The damn fools will get into the hotel somehow. The new thrill of the week in thirty seconds, after this little message.”

“Right. Let’s get your gear and your car and beat it before someone spots us and wants an eyewitness account of the strange happenings in that sleepy little town on the edge of the great California desert. Come on.”

Carson Danvers had been a master chef; taking an alias did not change that. He had bought an ordinary piece of pork, Charlie knew, and common things like tarragon and cream and wine, potatoes, carrots, and salad makings. Yet he transformed them into a gourmet meal, and in under an hour. It just wasn’t fair, Charlie thought, that he verged on gauntness.