The Throat (59 page)

John
staggered forward, and I almost fell on my backside. He dropped the
rod, yanked the broken lock away from the clip and set it on the
concrete beside the jack handle. "What are you waiting for?" he said.

I pushed the
door aside and walked into the Green Woman Taproom.

We stood in a
nearly empty room about ten feet square. On the far wall, a staircase
with a handrail led up to the room above. A brown plastic davenport
with a slashed seat cover stood against the far wall, and a desk faced
out from the wall to my left. A tattered green carpet covered the
floor. Another door faced us from the far wall. John closed the door,
and most of the light in the old office disappeared.

"Was this
where you saw Writzmann taking stuff out of his car?" John asked me.

"His car was
pulled up alongside the place, and the front door was open."

Something
rustled overhead, and both of us looked up at the pockmarked ceiling
tiles.

"You want to
look in front, and I'll check up there?" I nodded, and Ransom moved
toward the stairs. Then he stopped and turned around. I knew what was
on his mind. I tugged the Colt out of my waistband and passed it to
him, handle first.

He carried
the pistol toward the staircase. When he set his foot on the first
tread, he waved me into the next rooms, and I went across the empty
office and opened the door to the intermediate section of the building.

A long wooden
counter took up the middle of the room. Battered tin sinks and a ridged
metal counter took up the far wall. Once, cabinets had been attached to
thick wooden posts on the rough plaster walls. Broken pipes jutting up
from the floor had fed gas to the ovens. A beam of buttery light pooled
on the far wall. Upstairs, Ransom opened a creaking door.

An open hatch
led into the barroom. Thick wads of dust separated around my feet.

I stood in
the hatch and looked around at the old barroom. The tinted window
across the room darkened the day to an overcast afternoon in November.
Directly before me was the curved end of the long bar, With a wide
opening below a hinge so the bartender could swing up a section of the
wood. Tall, ornate taps ending in the heads of animals and birds stood
along the bar.

Empty booths
incongruously like seventeenth-century pews lined the wall to my right.
A thick mat of dust covered the floor. As distinct as tracks in snow, a
double set of footprints led up to and away from a three-foot-square
section of the floor near the booths. I stepped through the hatch. When
I looked down, I saw tiny, long-toed prints in the dust.

The sense
came to me of having faced precisely this emptiness at some earlier
stage of my life. I took another step forward, and the feeling
intensified, as if time were breaking apart around me. Some dim music,
music I had once known well but could no longer place, sounded faintly
in my head.

A chill
passed through my entire body. Then I saw that someone else was in the
empty room, and I went stiff with terror. A child stood before me on
the dusty floor, looking at me with a terrible, speaking urgency. Water
rushed beneath Livermore Avenue's doomed elms and coursed over dying
men screaming in the midst of dead men dismembered in a stinking green
wilderness. I had seen him once before, long ago. And then it seemed to
me that another boy, another child, stood behind him, and that if this
child should reach out for me, I myself would instantly be one of the
dismembered dead.

The Paradise
Garden, the Kingdom of Heaven.

I took
another step forward, and the child was gone.

Another step
took me closer to the window. Two square outlines had been stamped into
the cushion of felt near the window. Brown pellets like raisins lay
strewn over the streaky floor.

Heavy
footsteps came through the old kitchen. Ransom said, "Something chewed
a hole the size of Nebraska in the wall up there. Find the boxes?"

"They're
gone," I said. I felt light-headed. "Shit." He came up beside me.
"Well, that's where they were, all right." He sighed. "The rats went to
work on those boxes—maybe that's why Writzmann moved them."

"Maybe—" I
didn't finish the sentence, and it sounded as if I were agreeing with
him. I didn't want to say that the boxes might have been moved because
of his wife.

"What's over
here?" John followed the double trail of footprints to the place where
they reversed themselves. The pistol dangled from his hand. He bent
down and grunted at whatever he saw.

I came up
behind him. At the end of a section of boards, a brass ring fit snugly
into a disc.

"Trap door.
Maybe there's something in the basement." He bent down and tugged at
the ring. The entire three-foot section of floor folded up on a
concealed hinge, revealing the top of a wooden ladder that descended
straight down into darkness. I smelled blood, shook my head, and
smelled only must and earth.

I had already
lived through this moment, too. Nothing on earth could get me to go
into that basement.

"Okay, it
doesn't seem likely," John said, "but isn't it worth a look?"

"Nothing's
down there but…" I could not have said what might be down there.

My tone of
voice caught his attention, and he looked at me more closely. "Are you
all right?"

I said I was
fine. He pointed the revolver down into the darkness underneath the
tavern. "You have a lighter, or matches, or anything?"

I shook my
head.

He clicked
off the safety on the revolver, bent over and put a foot on the second
rung. With one hand flat on the floor, he got his other foot on the
first rung, and then almost toppled into the basement. He let go of the
pistol and used both hands to steady himself as he took another couple
of steps down the ladder. When his shoulders were more or less at the
level of the opening, he snatched up the pistol, glared at me, and went
the rest of the way down the ladder. I heard him swear as he bumped
against something at the bottom.

The ripe odor
of blood swarmed out at me again. I asked him if he saw anything.

"To hell with
you," he said.

I looked at
his thinning hair swept backward over pink, vulnerable-looking scalp.
Below that his right hand ineffectually held out the pistol at the
level of his spreading belly. Beside one of his feet was a bar stool
with a green plastic seat. He had stepped on it when he came down off
the ladder. "Way over at the side are a couple of windows. There's an
old coal chute and a bunch of other shit. Hold on." He moved away from
the opening.

I bent over,
put my hand on the floor, and sat down and swung my legs into the abyss.

John's voice
reached me from a hundred miles away. "They kept the boxes down here
for a while, anyway. I can see some kind of crap…" He kicked something
that made a hollow, gonging sound, like a barrel. Then: "Tim."

I did not
want to put my feet on the rungs of the ladder. My feet put themselves
on the ladder. I swung the rest of myself around and let them lead me
down.

"Get the hell
down here."

As soon as my
head passed beneath the level of the floor, I smelled blood again.

My foot came
down on the same bar stool over which Ransom had almost fallen, and I
kicked it aside before I stepped down onto the packed earth. John was
standing with his back to me about thirty feet away in the darkest part
of the basement. The dusty oblong of a window at the side let in a beam
of light that fell onto the old coal chute. Beside it, a big wooden keg
lay beached on its side. A few feet away was a mess of shredded
cardboard and crumpled papers. Half of the distance between myself and
John, a druidical ring of bricks marked the site where the tavern's
furnace had stood. The smell of blood was much stronger.

John looked
over his shoulder to make sure I had come down the ladder.

I came toward
him, and he stepped aside.

An old
armchair drenched in black paint stood like a battered throne on the
packed earth. Black paint darkened the ground in front of it. I held my
breath. The paint glistened in the feeble light. I came up beside John,
and he pointed the Colt's barrel at three lengths of thick,
bloodstained rope. Each had been cut in half.

"Somebody got
shot here," Ransom said. The whites of his eyes flared at me.

"Nobody got
shot," I said. The eerie rationality of my voice surprised me. "Whoever
he was, he was probably killed with the same knife they used to cut the
ropes." This came to me, word by word, as I was saying it.

He swallowed.
"April was stabbed with a knife. Grant Hoffman was killed with a knife."

And so were
Arlette Monaghan and James Treadwell and Monty Leland and Heinz
Stenmitz.

"I don't
think we'd better tell the police about this, do you? We'd have to
explain why we broke in."

"We can wait
until the body turns up," I said.

"It already
did. The guy in the car at the airport."

"A guard
found him because blood was dripping out of the trunk," I said.
"Whoever killed him put him in the trunk alive."

"So this is
someone else?"

I nodded.

"What the
hell is going on around here?"

"I'm not sure
I want to know anymore," I said, and turned my back on the bloody
throne.

"Christ, they
might come back," John said. "Why are we standing around like chumps?"
He moved toward the ladder, shooting wild glances at me over his
shoulder. "What are you doing?"

I was walking
toward the rubble of cardboard and crumpled paper near the side of the
basement.

"Are you
crazy? They might come
back
."

"You have a
gun, don't you?" Again, the words that came out of my mouth seemed to
have no connection to what I was actually feeling.

Ransom stared
at me incredulously and then went the rest of the way to the ladder and
began going up. He gained the top of the ladder about the time I
reached the mess of chewed paper. John sat down on the edge of the
opening and raised his legs. I heard him scramble to his feet. His
footsteps thudded toward the kitchen.

The
impressions of two boxes, partially obscured by bits of ragged
cardboard, were stamped like footprints into the basement floor. The
rats searching for food or insulation had left largely untouched
whatever had been inside the boxes, but a few scraps of paper lay among
the bits of tattered cardboard.

I squatted to
poke through the mess. Here and there a fragment of handwriting, no
more than two or three letters, was visible on some of the scraps. I
flattened out one of these. Part of what looked like the letter
a
was
connected to an unmistakable letter
r.
ar
. Harp? Scarf? Arabesque? I
tried another,
vu
. Ovum?
Ovulate? A slightly larger fragment lay a few
feet away, and I stretched to reach it. John thudded toward the rear of
the building. The quality of his impatience, a sweaty anxious anger,
permeated the sound of his footsteps.

I flattened
out the section of paper. Compared to the other scraps, it was as good
as a book. I stood up and tried to make out the writing as I went
toward the ladder.

At the top of
the paper, in capitals, was
Alle
(gap)
to
(gap)
n
. I had the feeling,
like the sense of the uncanny, that it meant something to me. After
another missing section appeared the numerals
5,77.
Beneath this legend
had been written:
5-10, 120. 26.
Jane Wright. Near tears, brave smile
in par
(gap)
tight jeans,
cowboy boots, black tank top. Appealing white
trash trying val
(gap)
to
move up. No kids, husband
(here the paper
ended).

I folded the
paper in half and slid it into my shirt pocket. Afraid that John might
really have driven away, I went straight up the ladder without touching
its sides and jumped off the final rung onto the floor.

Outside, he
was walking around in circles on the cement, banging the car keys
against his leg and gripping the Colt with his free hand. He tossed me
the keys, too forcefully. "Do you know how close you came?" he said,
and picked up the broken lock and the jack handle. He meant: how close
to being left behind. A few blocks east of us, the crowd bellowed and
chanted. John clipped the lock's shackle through the metal loop.

In spite of
his panic, I felt no urgency at all. Everything that was going to
happen would happen. It already had. Things would turn out, all right,
but whether or not they turned out well had nothing to do with John
Ransom and me.

When I got
into the car, John was drumming on the dashboard in frustration. I
pulled around the corner of the tavern. John tried to look two or three
directions at once, as if a dozen men carrying guns were sneaking up on
us. "Will you get us out of here?"

"Do you want
me to drop you at home?" I asked.

"What the
hell are you talking about?"

"I want to go
to Elm Hill to find the Sunchanas."

He groaned,
extravagantly. "What's the point?"

I said he
knew what the point was.

"No, I
don't," he said. "That old stuff is a waste of time."

"I'll drop
you at Ely Place."

He collapsed
back into the seat. I made the light onto Horatio Street and turned
onto the bridge. John was shaking his head, but he said, "Okay, fine.
Waste my gas."

I stopped at
a gas station and filled the tank before I got back on the east-west
expressway.

Plum Barrow
Lane intersected Bayberry at a corner where a tall gray colonial that
looked more like a law office than a house lorded it over the little
saltbox across the street. What we had seen inside the tavern made Elm
Hill ugly and threatening.