The Throat (74 page)

"There," I
said, and bent down to get my hands on it. Wisps and tatters of old
spiderwebs hung from the box. It had been moved recently. I braced my
muscles and jerked the box off the ground. It was nearly weightless.
Whatever it contained was not hundreds of handwritten pages. I carried
the box around the furnace toward the foot of the stairs and heard John
walking across the kitchen floor.

I set the box
down and opened the four flaps on its top. There was another box inside
it. "Damn it," I said, and jumped up to go to the front of the furnace.

"Find
anything?" John was at the top of the stairs.

"I don't
know," I said. I pulled down the handle and swung open the door.

"There's
nothing upstairs. Just bare rooms." Every other stair groaned beneath
his weight. "What are you doing?"

"Checking the
furnace," I said. "I just found two empty boxes."

The interior
of the furnace was about the size of a baby carriage. Fine white ash
lay across the bottom of the furnace, and black soot coated the grate.
John came up beside me.

"I think we
lost them," I said.

"Hold on,"
John said. "He didn't burn anything here. See that stuff?" He pointed
at a nearly invisible area on the furnace wall, a section slightly
lighter in color than the rest of the interior that I had taken for
some kind of stain. John reached into the furnace and dragged it down
with his fingers—the ancient spiderweb pulled toward him, then broke
and collapsed into a single dirty gray rope.

The boxes lay
where I had left them, the flaps of the outer box open on the smooth
side of the one inside it. When I shook them, something rattled. "Let's
pull them a," I said.

John came
forward and flattened his hands on the box. I thrust my fingers inside
and tugged. The inner box slid smoothly out. The brown tape across its
top flaps had been slit down the middle. I bent up the flaps. Another,
smaller box was inside it. I pulled out the third box. About the size
of a toaster, it too had been cut open before being inserted into the
nest. When I shook it, a papery, slithery sound came from inside the
box.

"Guess you
found the easter egg," John said.

I righted the
box on the floor and opened it. A square white envelope lay in the
bottom of the carton. I picked it up. The envelope was thicker and
heavier than I expected. I carried it to the light at the head of the
stairs. John watched me open the flap.

"Pictures,"
he said.

The old
square, white-bordered photographs looked tiny by contemporary
standards. I took them out of the envelope and stared at the first one.
Some Dumky child had scribbled over its surface. Beneath the crazy
lines, the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn was still visible. I moved the
photograph to the bottom of the pile and looked at the next. At first,
it looked like a copy of the photograph I had just seen. There were
fewer scribbles on this one. Then I saw that the photographer had moved
a few feet nearer the opening of the tunnel, and the fan of vertical
bricks at the top of the arch showed more clearly through the overlay
of scribbles. The next one showed a neatly made bed beneath a framed
painting invisible behind the mirrored explosion of the flash. Beside
the bed, half of a door filled the frame. A little Dumky had scratched
XXXXXXXXXXX across the door and the wall. He had run out of patience
before he got to the bed, and the X's broke down into scrawls and
loops. "What's that?" John asked.

The next
photograph was of the same bed and door taken from an angle that
included the corner of a dressing table. The details of the room lay
buried under a lot more scribbled ink.

"A picture of
room 218 at the St. Alwyn," I said, and looked up at Ransom's face.
"Bob Bandolier took pictures of the sites before he did the murders."

I uncovered
the next image, scarcely touched by the little Dumkys. Here, rendered
in soft brown tones, was the Livermore Avenue side of the Idle Hour,
where Monty Leland had been murdered. The photograph beneath had been
taken from a spot nearer the corner of South Sixth and showed more of
the tavern's side. A zigzag of ink ran across the wooden boards like a
bolt of lightning.

"The guy was
an obsessive's obsessive. It was planned out, like a campaign."

I moved the
photograph to the bottom of the pile and found myself looking at a
photograph almost unreadable beneath inky loops and scratches. I lifted
it nearer my face. It had to be a picture of Heinz Stenmitz's butcher
shop, but something about the size or shape of the building buried
beneath the ink bothered me.

The next was
nearly as bad. The edge of a building that might equally have been the
Taj Mahal, the White House, or the place where I lived on Grand Street
dove beneath a hedge of scribbles.

"They worked
that one over," John said.

I peered down
at the picture, trying to figure out what troubled me about it. I could
only barely remember the front of Stenmitz's shop. One side of the sign
that projected out in a big V above the window read
HOME-MADE
SAUSAGES
; the other side,
QUALITY MEATS
.
Something like that seemed visible underneath the scrawls, but the
proportions of the building seemed wrong.

"It must be
the butcher shop, right?"

"I guess," I
said.

"How come
they're squirreled away in these boxes?"

"Fee must
have found them in a drawer—wherever his father kept them. He put them
down here to protect them—he must have thought that no one would ever
find them."

"What do we
do with them?"

I already had
an idea about that.

I sorted
through the photographs and chose the clearest of each pair. John took
the envelope, and I passed him the others. He slid them into the
envelope and tucked in the flap. Then he turned over the envelope and
held it up close to his face, as I had done with the last photograph.
"Well, well."

"What?"

"Take a
look." He pointed to faint, spidery pencil marks on its top left-hand
corner.

In faint,
almost ladylike thin gray letters, the words blue rose appeared on the
yellowing paper.

"Let's leave
these here," I said, and put the envelope in the smallest box, folded
the top shut, and slid the box into the next, and then inserted this
one into the largest box, folded its flaps shut, and pushed if back
behind the furnace.

"Why?" John
asked.

"Because we
know they're here." He frowned and pushed his eyebrows together, trying
to figure it out. I said, "Someday, we might want to show that Bob
Bandolier was Blue Rose. So we leave the envelope here."

"Okay, but
where are the notes?"

I raised my
shoulders. "They have to be somewhere."

"Great." John
walked to the end of the basement, as if trying to make the boxes of
notes materialize out of the shadows and concrete blocks. After he
passed out of sight behind the furnace, I heard him coming up on the
far side of the basement. "Maybe he hid them under the furnace grate."

We went back
around to the front of the furnace. John opened the door and stuck his
head inside. "Ugh." He reached inside and tried to pick up the grate.
"Stuck." He withdrew his hand, which was streaked with gray and black
on the back and completely blackened on the palm. The sleeve of the
blue silk jacket had a vertical black stripe just below the elbow. John
grimaced at the mess on his hand. "Well, I don't think they're in here."

"No," I said.
"They're probably still in the boxes. He doesn't know that we know they
exist."

I took
another, pointless look around the basement.

John said,
"What the hell, let's go home."

We went
upstairs and back out into the fog. John locked the door behind us.

I got lost
somewhere north of the valley and nearly ran into a car backing out of
a driveway. It took me nearly two hours to get back to Ely Place, and
when we pulled up in front of his house, John said, "Got any other
great ideas?"

I didn't
remind him that the idea had been his.

"What do we
do now?" John asked. We were in the kitchen, eating a big salad I had
made out of a tired head of lettuce, half of an onion, some old
Monterey jack cheese, and cut-up slices of the remaining luncheon meat.

"We have to
do some shopping," I said.

"You know
what I mean."

I chewed for
a little while, thinking. "We have to work out a way to get him to take
us to those notes. And I've been running a few lines of research. I
want to continue with those."

"What kind of
research?"

"I'll tell
you when I have some results." I didn't want to tell him about Tom
Pasmore.

"Does that
mean that you want to use the car again?"

"A little
later, if that's all right," I said.

"Okay. I
really do have to get down to the college to take care of my syllabus
and a few other things. Maybe you could drive me there and pick me up
later?"

"Are you
going to set up Alan's courses, too?"

"I don't have
any choice. April's estate is still locked up, until it gets out of
probate."

I didn't want
to ask him about the size of April's estate.

"It'll be a
couple of million," he said. "Two something, according to the lawyers.
Plus about half a million from her life insurance. Taxes will eat up a
lot of it."

"There'll be
a lot left over," I said.

"Not enough."

"Enough for
what?"

"To be
comfortable, I mean, really comfortable, for the rest of my life," he
said. "Maybe I'll want to travel for a while. You know what?" He leaned
back and looked at me frankly. "I have gone through an amazing amount
of shit in my life, and I don't want any more. I just want the money to
be there."

"While you
travel," I said.

"That's
right. Maybe I'll write a book. You know what this is about, don't you?
I've been locked up inside Millhaven and Arkham College for a long
time, and I have to find a new direction."

He looked at
me, hard, and I nodded. This sounded almost like the old John Ransom,
the one for whose sake I had come to Millhaven.

"After all,
I've been Alan Brookner's constant companion for about ten years. I
could bring his ideas to the popular audience. People are always ready
for real insights packaged in an accessible way. Think about Joseph
Campbell. Think about Bill Moyers. I'm ready to move on to the next
level."

"So let's see
if I get this right," I said. "First you're going to travel around the
world, and then you're going to popularize Alan's ideas, and after that
you're going to be on television."

"Come off it,
I'm serious," he said. "I want to take time off to rethink my own
experience and see if I can write a book that would do some good. Then
I could take it from there."

"I like a man
with a great dream," I said.

"I think it
is
a great dream." John looked
at me for a couple of beats, trying to
figure out if I was making fun of him and ready to feel injured.

"When you do
the book, I could help you find the right agent."

He nodded.
"Great, thanks, Tim. By the way."

I looked
attentively at him, wondering what was next.

"If the fog
lets up by tomorrow, I'm going to take the car out of Purdum and drive
it to Chicago. You know, like I said? Feel like coming along?"

He wanted me
to drive him to Purdum—he probably wanted me to drive the Mercedes to
Chicago, too. "I have lots of things to do tomorrow," I said, not
knowing how true that statement was. "We'll see what happens."

John seemed
inclined to stay downstairs with the television. Jimbo was telling us
that police had reported half a dozen cases of vandalism and looting in
stores along Messmer Avenue, the main shopping street in Millhaven's
black ghetto. Merlin Waterford had refused to acknowledge the existence
of the Committee for a Just Millhaven, claiming that "the capture of
one lunatic does not justify tinkering with our superb system of local
government."

I picked up
365 Days, a book by a doctor named Ronald Glasser who had treated
servicemen wounded in Vietnam, and took it upstairs with me.

I laid the
four photographs on the bed and stretched out beside them. In soft
brown-gray tones, visible to various degrees beneath the ballpoint
scribbles, the brick passage behind the St. Alwyn, room 218, the flank
of the Idle Hour, and what had to be Heinz Stenmitz's butcher shop
looked back at me. A powerful sense of time past—of
difference
—came
from them. The arched passage and the exterior of the Idle Hour had not
changed in forty years, but everything around them had been through
wars, recessions, and the long disillusionment that followed the
narcotic Reagan years.

I looked at
the photograph of the hotel room where James Treadwell had died, set it
aside and held the fourth photograph under the bedside lamp. It had to
be the butcher shop, but something still troubled me—then I remembered
the stench of blood and Mr. Stenmitz bending his great blond beast-head
toward me. I dropped the photo onto the bed and picked up
365 Days.

Around
three-thirty, John began hollering up the stairs that we'd better get
going if we wanted to get to Arkham by four. I got into a jacket and
put the four photographs in the pocket.

John was
standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding a black briefcase. His
other hand was balled into a pocket of the silk jacket. "Where will you
be going, anyhow?" he asked me.

"I'll
probably hit the computers at the university library," I said.

"Ah," he
said, as if now he had everything finally figured out.