The Pigman's Legacy (The Sequel to The Pigman) (8 page)

The rain had stopped and the street was covered with a smoking mist rising from the asphalt. It made me feel I was driving through an old movie. I was the romantic detective with a cigarette butt hanging from my lip, and Lorraine was my nosy girl Friday who was along for the ride. If only we had helped the Pigman this way, maybe the terrible things that happened to him wouldn't have happened.

“
Brakes!
” the old guy yelled. “Brakes!”

I slid to a perfect stop in front of 107 Stuyvesant Place. There was the town house, five stories of dark stone that looked like a private sanatorium for indigent berserk persons.

“Oh, my God, look what they did to her,” Gus said sadly.

There were boards and “Condemned” signs covering everything, and it took a while to get used to the sight. To tell the truth I was expecting the old guy to break down crying. But the three of us got out and he just leaned against the car shaking a mean fist at the house. Lorraine and I didn't know what to say. We thought it was best to let Gus have his little reverie, and then we could be on our way again.

“Come on,” he said, “we're going in.”

He reached out his hands to us, and once again we became his crutches. We walked down the steps that led to the basement. It was one of those jobs where, beneath a set of stairs going up to the main floor, there are steps that lead down to the basement. There was an iron gate protecting that area, and Gus shoved a key in my hand. “Open it,” he ordered.

I hesitated because I didn't want to let go of him.

“Don't worry about me,” he blurted. “I can handle myself from here on in. Get that gate open and throw a garbage can through the window.”

“
Gus
,” Lorraine said, “don't you have a key for the door?”

“I lost it,” Gus yelled, “but my whole life is in this house, and nobody's going to take it away from me without a fight!”

I took the key and opened the gate. A shot of energy ran through the old man and he broke away from Lorraine. Before we could stop him he actually lifted a garbage can and hurled it at the window. The can bounced off the middle frame but shattered two huge panes of glass. The glass and the garbage can crashed onto the cement patio like an explosion.

“Somebody will call the police,” Lorraine cried out.

“Ha,” Gus said. “My neighbors wouldn't call the police if maniacs were setting me on fire!”

A car honked on the street several times just then. The three of us froze. We heard steps on the pavement. I peeked around from under the steps and all I could see was a woman across the street getting into some car. Somebody was double-parked and a few cars had come to a stop behind them. They started honking, and after some loud verbal exchanges they all drove off.

“Climb in and unlock the basement door,” Gus ordered.

“We'll be shot for trespassing,” Lorraine moaned.

“Did they really lock your trunk up inside?” I asked Gus.

“Yes,” he said. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he wasn't lying.

“Then you're going to get it back,” I said, and I knocked away the glass and climbed in.

The front room of the basement was dark with stabs of light flying through from the boarded windows. I took one breath of the dark, cold air and hurried to the door. I fumbled with the locks, waiting for a rat to run over my feet, but managed to get it open before anything bit me.

“Now we're in business,” Gus cheered as he rushed in. Lorraine stepped gingerly behind him.

“Did they board the place up right after the Colonel died?” I asked, but the old guy ignored me and kept saying, “We'll show them. We'll show them.” He went straight to a workbench in the far left corner of the basement.

“This feels like a
real
haunted house,” Lorraine said. But then I could see she regretted it, because Gus obviously loved the house. She mumbled an apology immediately, but Gus paid no attention to us for the next few moments while he was testing flashlights with various degrees of battery strength. I moved in to get a closer look at what was the best collection of flashlights and lanterns I'd ever seen. He must have had seventeen regular flashlights and two or three bigger contraptions. I started testing them along with him, and when I found a couple that were pretty good I gave one to Lorraine. The old guy took a big lantern for himself.

“I built this area of the house myself,” Gus said, pointing to built-in filing cabinets. He pulled out this long drawer that resembled a refrigerated compartment in a morgue. “These are the designs for some of the subways I did,” he babbled. His voice sounded stronger as he grasped a cluster of long vinyl tubes and slipped out some blueprints. There were so many arcs and lines and angles and notations it gave me a headache to look at them with only the illumination of a couple of flashlights.

“How long does it take to draw something like that?” I asked.

“Almost a year,” Gus answered solemnly.

“That long?” Lorraine asked incredulously.

“The Colonel wasn't a hack,” Gus bellowed.

“I'm sure he wasn't,” Lorraine agreed.

Gus dumped the whole mess of plans back in the drawer and slammed it shut. He turned his lantern and followed the light beam, with us straight behind him. We proceeded down a dark narrow hallway, made a sharp right turn, then a sharp left, and found ourselves in a rectangular-shaped room with cushiony sofas and lots of pillows on them. Then a little farther down another hall was a kitchenette off to the right, but we didn't go in there. Instead we kept going straight until we reached these dusty old drapes. Gus pulled a string and the drapes parted, to reveal sliding glass doors and a rear patio beyond.

“That was the garden,” Gus pointed out.

Lorraine and I pressed our faces to the window. The garden outside was very eerie-looking, or maybe it was just the darkness of the rain clouds hovering above. There were these long vines hanging all over the place that looked like mutated octopuses. They covered the white wrought-iron furniture that wasn't so white anymore. And on both sides of the garden there were these strange statues. One had the body of a horse and the head of a man, and the other one had this voluptuous woman who the old guy said was Venus. I was expecting a whole bunch of violinists to show up and start playing the first act of
The Nutcracker
. Gus was really getting very freaky, I thought. He not only did not need us as crutches, he could have used roller skates at the rate he was traveling. He led us back down the hallway into the kitchenette. Beyond that was a dark archway where I could glimpse some stairs heading up into the house. We went through the arch and Lorraine let out a big scream. I mean what greeted us on the other side wasn't what you'd ordinarily expect to find at the foot of a staircase. And I was surprised to hear Gus chuckle. We had come face to face with a giant plaque on the wall that was a full-color, three-dimensional, four-foot dinosaur. It had a little gold plate underneath it that said it was a STEGOSAURUS. But it looked like a plain old spiky lizard to me. “The Philadelphia museum gave that to the Colonel,” Gus said, “because he was putting in a subway down there and found the hipbone to that thing.”

Gus started up the stairs. Lorraine and I hurried to his side just in case he decided to go to sleep and fall backward. It was a weird sensation walking up partially carpeted marble, and when we got to the top Lorraine and I had to rest against the banister. Lorraine let out another shriek. This time there was a PLESIOSAURUS on the wall.

Gus laughed. “The Colonel really loved the dinosaurs.
He really loved them
.” Then he took off and we had to practically trot to keep up with him. He went into a large room at the front of the house. We all spun our flashlights in different directions, and I couldn't believe my eyes. The walls were made of crocodile skin. There was even a guest book made with a crocodile-skin cover, stationed on a podium near the front of the room. It looked like the Colonel must have really been loaded, and maybe a little nuts too.

“This room was imported from Tanganyika,” Gus bragged. “It was the Colonel's favorite room.”

Bam!
Gus was off again. We rushed after him this way and that way. Sometimes running into closets or dead ends in bathrooms. It felt like we were journeying through tunnels. On the next floor Gus pointed out the Colonel's office in the back of the house, red- and blue- and green-colored glass covering the entire back wall. The slivers of glass sparkled like rubies and amethysts and emeralds; either that or a lot of cut-up old soda bottles. The room was flooded with intricately designed woodwork—the kind my mother would have adored spraying Johnson's wax on.

“This room was imported from England,” Gus stated. “You can't get mahogany like this anymore.”

“Gus,” Lorraine said soberly, “I think we'd better get your trunk and get out of here. Someone may have heard us breaking in.”

“Well, I'm tired,” Gus complained, plopping down into a big swivel chair behind the desk.

“We'll get it for you,” I said. “Where is it?”

“Just keep going up the stairs to the top floor,” Gus said. “You can't miss it. The
black
one.”

“What if there's an alarm system or something Gus doesn't know about?” Lorraine whined.

“Don't worry about it,” I said, grabbing her hand and dragging her to the stairs. I held on to her and had to practically yank her all the way up the next flight. There was a little hall and it seemed like this floor had been divided only into two rooms. The rear room was huge. I flashed my light around and saw that it was a bedroom. A huge four-poster bed was sitting smack in the middle of the floor. A semicircular window was set in one wall, and it was made up of at least forty little framed windows. There was an old-fashioned telescope planted right at the foot of the window. Lorraine and I went over to try the thing out immediately, but there wasn't a crack wide enough in the shutters, which had been nailed shut from outside.

“This room is creepy,” Lorraine said.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she said. “I think it's because I get the feeling no woman ever lived here. I get the feeling there was never a woman in any part of the house.”

“Did some ghost tell you?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “The house is too rugged. There's nothing feminine. Nothing soft and delicate. There's something frightening about it. I just don't think a woman would put up with all the wood and dinosaurs.”

“If you plan on having an anxiety attack,” I told her, “I wish you'd save it awhile.”

Lorraine let go of my hand and walked closer to the bed. She touched one of the huge posts, which practically stabbed its way through the ceiling. “I feel like I'm standing in a mausoleum,” Lorraine said. “That's what this is.”

“Come on.”

“I mean it, John. This place is some kind of shrine to all the Colonel's achievements. There's nothing really
lovely
here.” She moved the flashlight to a corner of the room. A glass cabinet sparkled and we hurried to it. It was a store display case with several medals of honor lying on black-velvet backgrounds. It looked like a ten-year supply of graduation honors, tons of awards from all over the world honoring Colonel Parker Glenville. I opened a huge wooden thing that must have been a closet of some sort because it was filled with old uniforms.

“The Colonel must have been a tall, thin man,” Lorraine said, her eyes sizing up the clothes. “Look at the jackets. They could fit you.”

I grunted and took her hand to get her out of there. We moved back into the hall and were just about to enter the front section when Lorraine let out another scream. This time it was a full-blown model of the IGUANODON, according to the plaque hanging right beneath its open mouth. It looked like a cross between a turtle and a lizard. Its glassy stare was the kind of thing nightmares are made of.

We moved forward into the front room. It was filled with a lot of packed boxes and several trunks of varying shapes and sizes. I kicked a few of the trunks lightly with my foot, but they each gave back a hollow ring. Then Lorraine flashed her light onto a black one with leatherette covering. I gave it a kick, and there was no doubt that this one was packed full. I stooped down and started to flip open the locks. Lifting the top, I was sure it was the trunk Gus wanted. I started rummaging through it.

“John, what are you doing?”

“Just checking.”

“John, we have no right.”

Right on top was a long yellow tassel, the type an officer would wear on his shoulder. It looked like Gus wanted to take a memento of the Colonel with him, which was nice, I figured. There was a big pile of clothes underneath that looked like they could use a few years in a General Electric washing machine. Then there was a box of weird-looking tools—points and curves and angles. I figured they must have been some of the tools of the Colonel's trade, and I supposed there was no harm in Gus sucking them up too. After all, the Colonel was no longer going to use them, and it was probably better that an old friend got them. Next to them was a ratty wooden cigar box that contained a bunch of old silver dollars. They all had dates like 1883 and 1867 on them. I think that about this point I had to admit that Gus was getting into the area of what could be called theft.

“John, you can't let Gus take some of those things. Those are the kinds of things that belong in the Colonel's estate, and I'm sure courts and lawyers and all kinds of people like that would put us in reform school if we helped Gus steal them!”