Authors: John Saul
“Ms. Nelson.”
“And your position is—?”
“Reception.”
Oberholzer took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, but the air in his lungs did nothing to soothe the fire in his stomach. Now he could feel the acid boiling up into his trachea. On television, the receptionists always cooperated with the cops—you never saw anybody but the guy at the very top stonewalling. “And is it the responsibility of the receptionist to decide what’s possible and what isn’t?”
The Nelson woman didn’t so much as flinch, but one of the inner doors opened and a man of about the same age as Ms. Nelson appeared, wearing a suit every bit as conservatively cut as the receptionist’s, but in a shade of blue so dark it was almost black. “I’m Harold Caseman,” he said, advancing toward Oberholzer with his right hand extended. “How may I help you?”
A buzzer, Oberholzer thought as he produced his badge one more time.
Ms.
Nelson keeps a bland face and a firm foot on the buzzer. “I’d like to see one of your patients,” he said aloud. “Caroline Fleming.”
Caseman’s brows knit into a worried frown. “First, we don’t refer to our clients as patients; and as for visiting, I’m afraid we have a policy—”
“The NYPD has a policy, too, Mr. Caseman.”
“
Doc
tor Caseman,” the other man corrected.
“But one who has no patients,” Oberholzer reminded him. “And I guess if she’s not a patient, then doctor–patient confidentiality wouldn’t apply, would it?”
“Semantics, Sergeant Oberholz.”
“Oberholz
er
,” the detective corrected, giving exactly the same amount of weight to the last syllable of his name as Caseman had given to the first syllable of his title. “So what you’re saying is that she is a patient, but you just don’t call her one?”
Caseman sighed as if he were trying to educate a recalcitrant six-year-old. “The word ‘patient’ implies illness,” he began, but Oberholzer had finally had enough.
“So does the title ‘doctor,’ ” he interrupted. “So what do you say we cut the crap, okay? Is Caroline Fleming here, or not?”
“She is,” Caseman admitted, after a hesitation in which Oberholzer could see him calculating the chances of winning this particular battle. “Very well, if you insist.” He held the inner door open for Oberholzer, followed him through, and led him to an elevator that took them to the third floor. Stepping out of the tiny oak-paneled car, Oberholzer found himself in a corridor that ran the full length of the building. Like the reception area, it resembled a small and elegant hotel far more than a hospital, and another conservatively dressed middle-aged woman sat at a desk in an alcove very much like that of a floor concierge. “The key to Mrs. Fleming’s suite, please, Mrs. Archer.”
Opening a glass-fronted case, Mrs. Archer lifted what looked like an old-fashioned hotel key—from long before the days of computerized cardkeys—off a hook.
Less than a minute later, Oberholzer was facing Caroline Evans Fleming. She lay in bed, propped up against three pillows. Her hair hung limply around her ashen face, and there was a glazed look in her eyes. “Mrs. E—” Oberholzer began, but caught himself before he’d completed even the first syllable. “Mrs. Fleming?” he asked, but Caroline Fleming stared straight ahead, as if she neither heard nor saw him.
“She’s exhausted, and she’s had some sedation,” Caseman explained.
Oberholzer moved closer to the bed, and bent closer. “Mrs. Evans?” he said, this time deliberately using the name he’d known her by when he first met her months ago. “It’s Detective Oberholzer.”
For a moment there was no reaction at all, but then Caroline’s head slowly swung around until she was looking at him. Something flickered in her eyes, and she lifted a hand as if to reach out to him.
“Dead,” she whispered. “Every one of them. They’re all dead.”
Oberholzer took her hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’re going to find out what happened to your friend.”
Caroline’s lips worked for a moment, and her eyes darted around the room as if she were searching for some unseen enemy. “You don’t understand,” she breathed. “All of them—they’re dead.” Her voice began to rise as she repeated the word again and again. “Dead! Dead! Oh, God, why doesn’t anyone believe me? They’re all dead!” Her voice dissolving into a broken wail, her eyes flooded with tears, and a moment later she was sobbing.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Fleming,” Harold Caseman said, stepping closer to the bed and at the same time opening a cellphone, tapping a key, then speaking a few words so rapidly that Oberholzer couldn’t follow them. Almost as soon as he’d returned the phone to his pocket, a nurse appeared with a hypodermic needle.
A few seconds after that, Caroline Fleming went to sleep. But just before they closed, she fixed her eyes on Frank Oberholzer and reached out to him. “Help them,” she whispered. “Help—”
But before she could finish her words, the drugs silenced her, and her hand fell away to the bed.
“Mom?” the word drifted from Laurie’s lips like a wisp of mist, evaporating as quickly as fog in the morning sun. Except that there was no sun—indeed, there was almost no light at all; only a grayish half-light, just bright enough to let Laurie know she was no longer in her room, but not bright enough for her to identify where she might be.
She tried to sit up, but couldn’t. Despite the fact that she’d been asleep, she felt more tired now than she ever had before in her life. Her body felt as if all the energy had been drained out of it, as if someone had pulled a plug and all her strength had leaked away.
Once again she tried to call out to her mother; once again all that emerged from her throat was a faint murmur that even she could barely hear. And the simple act of trying to call out left her so exhausted she almost drifted back into unconsciousness. But then, just as she was about to surrender herself to the gentle arms of sleep, she heard something.
A sound, even fainter than the one she herself had just made, so faint she wasn’t really sure she’d heard it at all. Yet something about it gripped what little consciousness she still possessed, and she turned away from the comfort of sleep.
Twisting her head, she peered into the grayness to her right.
And saw something.
Indistinct in the dim light, she had to strain to make it out, and at first all she knew was that it looked vaguely familiar. Then it came to her—one of those tables they use to roll people around in hospitals. She’d seen them on TV hundreds of times. But what was it called? She groped in her mind, which felt as worn out as her body, then found the word.
A stretcher—no, there was another word.
Gurney.
That was it. Exhausted by the effort to find the right word, she lay still, gasping for breath as if she’d just finished running a foot race rather than searching her mind for a word. And as she lay in the twilight recovering her breath, her fingers began to explore the surface on which she lay.
A hard surface, covered by a sheet, but feeling cold through the thin material.
Another gurney.
Was she in a hospital?
She began searching her memory again, but she was so tired that simply putting together the pieces of yesterday seemed more difficult than a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. But slowly they began to fall into place. She hadn’t been sick last night—she’d felt fine. It had been her mom who was sick. When she’d come home from school, her mom had been sick in bed, and she’d gone in to visit her. Had she caught the flu then? But she didn’t feel like she had the flu—with the flu, she always threw up a lot, and her bones hurt, and she got a fever. All she felt now was exhausted—more tired than she’d ever felt in her life.
But not sick.
She reached into her memory again, and found more pieces. Going to bed. Staying awake as long as she could for fear the voices would come.
The voices and the dreams.
They
had
come last night—if it really was last night: the way she felt, it seemed like it must be days since she’d rested at all. But the dreams had come, worse than ever. There had been people all around her, lifting her up, putting her on—
On the gurney! The gurney she was still on? But how? It was a dream!
More pieces fell into place. She remembered tubes being put through her nose and her mouth and—
She whimpered at the memory, then flinched as she felt the pain of the needles that had jabbed into her arms and her legs and her belly and her chest and—
The whimper grew into a cry of pain and horror.
A second later she heard an answering sound—the same sound that had drawn her away from the beckoning arms of sleep. She twisted her head again, and now, through the gray twilight, she could just make out a shape lying on the gurney that stood a few yards from her own.
“I-is anyone—” she began, but her strength failed her before she could finish the question. She thought she saw a movement, but it was so slight and so nearly invisible in the dim light that an instant later she was no longer sure she’d seen it at all. Her breath escaping in a silent sigh, she let her head roll back so she was looking straight up.
And went back to her memories.
There were people all around her—faces she recognized, but that didn’t look quite right. They all looked younger than she remembered them, and they were smiling at her, clucking over her like hens over a wounded chick.
Hens . . . That was it—the faces had all been women.
Except Tony had been there, and Dr. Humphries, and—
“Lauuurrrie!”
The howl of anguish came boiling up out of her memory, and even though her name itself was barely recognizable in the chaos of the scream, she recognized the voice at once. Her mother! Her mother had been there too, and tried to rescue her, to save her from—
From what?
She didn’t know.
But one thing she did know: it was not a dream.
It had never been a dream.
It had all been real. The voices behind the wall of her room, the figures around her bed, the fingers prodding and poking at her—all of it had been real.
A sob welled up in her, but even as it began to constrict her throat, something changed. It was so subtle that at first she thought she was wrong. But then it happened again—a faint draft wafting over her cheek, as if someone had opened a door somewhere. She choked back the sob, forced herself to be completely silent—even held her breath and willed her heart to stop beating—and listened.
Footsteps.
Then the dim light brightened, and she could at last see the space around her. Above her, heavy beams supporting wide, rough-hewn boards.
Around her, brick walls, blackened with age.
Pipes and wires and ducts running everywhere, slung between the beams and running up the walls.
The basement—it had to be the basement of The Rockwell. And now, as the footsteps drew nearer, she twisted her head to look once more at the other gurney. Now the shape that lay on it was clear—a boy, his body so thin it was almost lost under the sheet that covered it. His head was twisted so he was looking toward her, and she could see his eyes, sunken deep into their sockets, and looking huge in his emaciated face. He lay so still that for a moment Laurie had a terrible feeling that he must be dead, but then, as the light brightened still more, he blinked.
Blinked, and moaned, and seemed to Laurie to shrink even smaller than he already was. A moment later she heard a rattling sound as if someone were pushing some kind of cart toward her, and then she heard a voice, one that she recognized, but couldn’t quite place. But when a shadow fell over her, and she looked up, she recognized who it was in an instant.
Rodney. Next to him was an old-fashioned tea-cart, like the ones they sold in the shop where her mother worked, and on it stood two glasses filled with something Laurie couldn’t identify.
The doorman was peering down at her, and when he spoke, the stench of his breath made her turn her head away.
“Don’t do that,” Rodney said, his fingers closing on her chin and forcing her face back so she was facing him once more. “I like to look at you. Don’t turn away when I look at you.”
Laurie tried to cry out, but her voice failed her, and all she could do was stare up into the doorman’s eyes.
“Time to eat,” he said, his grip on her jaw relaxing. Then he uttered a strange sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Can’t have you dying on us, can we?” he asked. “Oh, no—can’t have that. Not yet, anyway.”
Then Rodney slid an arm under her shoulders, his touch cold and clammy against her skin, and raised up, almost causing the sheet to fall away. Supporting her with his arm, he picked up one of the glasses with his free hand and held it to her lips.
Too weak to resist, Laurie let her lips open and a moment later her mouth filled with a foul-tasting slime that made her stomach convulse in rebellion.
“Swallow it,” Rodney instructed, holding her mouth closed to prevent her from spitting the stuff out. His head bent closer, and his foul breath washed over her as he spoke into her ear. “Go ahead and swallow it. Or would you rather die right now?”
Her stomach knotting with nausea, her throat constricting against the disgusting concoction, Laurie forced the mouthful down.
It was followed by a second mouthful, then a third.
By the fourth, Laurie was sobbing, and by the fifth she was certain she would die if she had to drink any more of it.
Then she began to be afraid of something even worse.
She began to fear she might not die.
CHAPTER 36
“I want to know where Laurie is!” Ryan demanded. His fists on his hips, he glowered furiously at Melanie Shackleforth.
“I’ve already told you,” Melanie replied, putting far more patience in her voice than she felt. “She’s spending the night with one of her friends.”
“Who?” Ryan challenged.
Melanie’s eyes narrowed and her lips compressed. There was a time—a time she still remembered very clearly—when children were to be seen and not heard, and children like Ryan Evans were given a sound thrashing until they learned to mind their manners. But that was a different time, and Anthony Fleming had given her strict instructions that she was not to strike the boy, no matter how offensive he became. But if the boy kept this up much longer—
“You don’t know, do you?” Ryan taunted, seeing the anger in her eyes. “You don’t know because you’re lying!” He moved closer, and raised his voice. “Liar! Liar! Liar!”
Melanie’s fury, which she’d carefully held in check all through the long afternoon she’d stayed with Ryan, was on the verge of boiling over. She should have left him locked in his room—as Anton had instructed—but when he’d begged to be allowed to go to the bathroom, she’d decided that Anton could be overruled. And until a few minutes ago, he’d behaved himself. But now it was becoming apparent that Anton was right—she should have left him locked in his room to sulk all afternoon. That’s what Virginia Estherbrook would have done. But Virginia was gone, never to return, and Melanie Shackleforth—a name she was starting to like even better than ‘Virginia Estherbrook’—intended to be much more modern. But Ryan Evans was making it very difficult.
“Liar, liar, liar!” Ryan chanted now, his voice taking on a mocking lilt that pushed Melanie’s rage past the boundaries Anton had set. Before she could even think, her arm rose up then arced downward, her hand slashing across Ryan’s face so hard it stung her own hand.
With a howl of rage, Ryan threw himself at her, his nails gouging into her skin before his fingers grabbed her hair and began tearing at it. Melanie screamed as bits of hair tore loose from her scalp, but a second later her own fingers found his, and with far more strength than she’d felt in years, she began peeling his fingers loose from her hair. “How dare you,” she hissed. Her hand closing on his wrist, she dragged Ryan upstairs and down the hall, shoved him through the door to his room, pulled it shut, and locked it. “You’ll come out when you’ve learned some manners, young man!” she said through the thick mahogany door. “Your stepfather was right!” Not waiting for a response, she went back downstairs, then into the powder room next to the library. Turning on the lights, she stared at herself in the mirror.
Her cheeks—the bone structure looking more perfect than ever under the young supple skin that had been her share of Rebecca Mayhew—showed deep scratches where Ryan’s nails had sunk into them. For a moment she felt a flash of panic, but then reminded herself that this was fresh, young skin that would quickly heal. It would be decades before her face once more began to show the ravages of time. But when she shifted her attention to her hair—the wonderful, thick hair she hadn’t had in twenty years—her eyes glistened with tears. The boy had torn at it, and now her scalp was bleeding.
But I’m young again,
she reminded herself.
It will heal. It will all heal.
And when the boy was ripe—as ripe as his sister—all the men would regain their youth, too, not just Anton.
But next time, she would choose the children herself. She’d known these two were a mistake—she’d told Lavinia and Alicia as much when they’d first arrived. They, and their mother.
That had been the real mistake—using children with a mother. How long did Anton think they could get away with that? Last time, when he’d been so happy to find twin boys so close to being ripe that neither he nor any of the other men had been able to resist the promise of a feast, it might have been worth the risk. But this time it had been a mistake. Even though Caroline was locked away, Melanie was certain the police would be back, and though Anton could probably handle it, every decade it was getting harder and harder. But as she gazed in the mirror, Melanie knew that no matter how hard it became to find the children, it was worth it.
Even with the scratches in her skin and the bits of hair missing from her bleeding scalp, she looked better today than she had in decades.
Perhaps even centuries. . . .
Ryan listened to the lock click into place, then looked at the clock on the table next to his bed. Just a little after three-thirty. Tony Fleming had said he wouldn’t be back until five-thirty or maybe six, which meant that Ryan had two hours to explore the maze of secret passages, since he was pretty sure he’d made Melanie Whatever-She-Said-Her-Name-Was mad enough that she wouldn’t come near his room until his stepfather came home.
Which was exactly what he’d planned ever since she’d arrived to watch him while his stepfather went out to do whatever it was he did. He’d known right away that she wasn’t there to stay with him at all—she was there to make sure he didn’t get away. But it hadn’t been hard to sweet talk her into letting him go to the bathroom, and be nice enough that she let him stay out of his room long enough to find what he needed. That had been easy—he’d found a whole stash of batteries in the bottom drawer in the kitchen, and taken enough so that he shouldn’t run out if he was careful.
The second thing he’d decided to take was the ring of keys that his mother had swiped from the store yesterday. That had been a little harder, since his mother’s purse hadn’t been on the table in the front hall where she usually left it. He’d been afraid she might have taken it with her to the hospital, but then he’d decided to try to find it anyway. That had taken almost an hour, and finally he’d had to sneak into the dressing room off the big bedroom and go through most of her drawers before he finally found it. Melanie—or whatever her name really was—had almost caught him that time, but he’d gotten back to his room just as she’d come to the top of the stairs, and by the time she asked him what he was doing, he was sprawled out on his bed reading a book and the keys were hidden between the mattress and the box springs where she’d never find them even if she was looking. He’d swiped a laundry marker, too, so he wouldn’t have to waste time carving marks in the corners to keep from getting lost.
Now, safely locked in the room with her mad enough after the fight that she wouldn’t let him out again, he checked his pockets one last time. The knife, the laundry marker, and the keys were in the front pocket of his jeans, and the pockets of his jacket were stuffed with extra batteries. He was ready.
Half an hour later he’d found his way down through the maze of passages until he was pretty sure he was in the basement of the building. Most of the passages had been pretty narrow, except for a big room that he thought was right behind Tony’s study. There’d been some things in that room that looked like hospital equipment—racks of bottles and tubes and stuff like that—and a bunch of other passages that had led away from it. He’d explored a couple of them and found peepholes along every one of them. He hadn’t been able to see anything through most of the peepholes, but whenever he found one where he could see the room on the other side of the wall, it always looked like a kid’s bedroom.
But except for him and Laurie and Rebecca, there weren’t any kids in the building.
And now Rebecca was gone.
And Laurie—
He’d almost started crying then. No matter what Tony said, he was certain Laurie hadn’t gone to school, and he’d known for sure that Melanie had been lying about her going somewhere after school.
And if they’d done something to Laurie, and his mother didn’t come home—
That was when he’d made himself stop thinking about it, because if he started crying he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to stop, and then somebody might hear him, or he might get lost, or—
He’d decided he’d better not think about that, either, so just to keep himself from thinking about all the bad things that could happen, he’d concentrated on making sure he didn’t make any mistakes at all on marking the path he took. At every intersection he put enough arrows that he couldn’t possibly make a mistake, and he’d even put numbers that would tell him how many floors he was from where he’d started.
Which was why he was now pretty sure he was in the basement, since he’d come down seven levels since he’d started from the ceiling of his bedroom, which was on the sixth floor. But the passages had changed on this level, too. There was only one, and it was wider than the ones upstairs, and the floor was made out of cement, and there weren’t any turns.
And it smelled funny—musty and kind of rotten.
There was a door at the far end, and he was halfway to it when he saw another door in the side wall.
He paused, uncertain which door to try first, and in the end decided on the one he was closest to.
Locked.
He shined the flashlight on it. It was just a big panel of wood, with none of the fancy carved moldings most of the doors in the building had. But under the brass knob was the same kind of keyhole as the door to his room—and every other door he’d seen so far—had.
He pulled out the key ring, and began testing the keys.
The twelfth one fit.
The lock clicked open.
Screwing up his courage, Ryan switched the flashlight off, then twisted the knob.
The door swung open, and a terrible odor flowed out, strong enough to make Ryan take an involuntary step backward and put his hand over his nose. But after a few moments his curiosity overcame his revulsion, and he moved close enough to the door to peer inside.
Behind the door was a large room roofed by the main beams that supported the floor above. It wasn’t quite pitch black in the room—in fact, after the total blackness of the maze of passageways, it seemed almost light by comparison. It took Ryan only a moment to determine the source of the light—in the far wall, high up, there were a few narrow windows opening into the drainage channel that ran around the building, tiny openings that let in just enough light so that the room wasn’t totally dark.
But it wasn’t light enough for him to see much of anything, either.
He switched the flashlight back on.
And instantly heard a faint moan.
He switched the light back off.
There was a long silence, and as it stretched onward, Ryan’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. When the sound wasn’t repeated, he began edging forward, pausing to listen after each step. After about ten paces he came to one of those rolling tables they used to move people around in hospitals. But why would they have one of those in the basement of The Rockwell?
Then, a dozen steps further on, he came to another one. Except that this one wasn’t empty.
A sheet lay over it, and there was something under the sheet.
Something that was the source of the stink that filled the room. Ryan stood staring at the table—and the still form under the sheet—for several minutes, fighting an almost irresistible urge to turn around and slip back into the darkness. But even as he took the first step backward, a voice whispered inside his head:
’What if it’s Laurie?’
But it couldn’t be Laurie.
Could it?
He hesitated.
His terror grew, but even as his skin turned clammy with fear, the voice in his head grew more insistent, and finally he reached out, his fingers shaking, and lifted the sheet just far enough to see what was under it.
A body, its skin dull gray in the dim light.
Laurie!
The thought crashed into Ryan’s mind, and once again he felt an urge to turn away and flee into the darkness. But once again, the other side of him—the side that had to
know
—won out. Peeling the sheet all the way back, he turned on the flashlight and shined it on the corpse.
Or, at least, what was left of the corpse.
The belly had been laid open, and in the empty cavity that had once contained the vital organs, maggots were already doing their work, their fat white bodies wriggling and burrowing through the rotting flesh, abandoning their feast in a frantic effort to escape the glaring beam of light. His gorge rising, Ryan shifted the light to the face, and found himself staring into a pair of empty eye sockets.
But the rest of the face was familiar—even with her eyes gone, Rebecca Mayhew was still easily recognized.
His eyes flooding with tears—but the pounding of his heart easing slightly as he realized that at least it was not his sister, he dropped the sheet back over Rebecca’s ruined corpse, and moved on.
He came to another gurney.
On this one, the shape wasn’t quite covered—the head was still exposed, and when Ryan shined his light on the face—the face of a boy only a little older than he himself—the eyes, wide and deeply sunken in their sockets—blinked.
Ryan jumped, then froze.
The boy’s lips moved, but no sound came out.
Uncertainly, Ryan reached out and laid his hand on the boy’s forehead, so gently that he barely touched it. “It’s gonna be okay,” Ryan whispered. “I-I’m gonna get you out of here.”
But even as he spoke the words, he could hear their hollowness, and he was sure the boy, whoever he was, didn’t believe them any more than Ryan did himself.
Then, out of the gray twilight, he heard another sound. It was a little louder than the one he’d heard when he first turned on his light, and now he knew what it was: a voice, but so faint and weak that he was almost afraid he’d imagined it. But then it came again.
“M-mom?”
His heart suddenly pounding, Ryan swept the room with his flashlight. On the second sweep, he saw it.
Yet another gurney, yet another shape all but concealed beneath a sheet. But there was someone on the gurney, and even though the single word he’d heard had been barely audible, he was almost certain he recognized the voice.
His heart racing now, he hurried toward the next gurney and a moment later was shining the light on the face of the person lying on it.
Laurie.
“N-no—” she stammered, trying to twist her eyes away from the glare of the light. “Don’t—”