Roy began to walk along the path again.
After several more steps, Colin said, “Wait.”
Roy looked back and grinned. “Scared?”
“No.”
“Ha!”
“I just have some questions.”
“So hurry up and ask them.”
“You said a lot of people were killed here.”
“Seven,” Roy said. “Six murders, one suicide.”
“Tell me about it.”
During the past twenty years, the very real tragedy of the Kingman murders had evolved into a highly embellished tale, a grisly Santa Leona legend, recalled most often at Halloween, composed of myth and truth, perhaps more of the former than the latter, depending on who was telling it. But the basic facts of the case were simple, and Roy stuck close to them when he told the story.
The Kingmans had been wealthy. Robert Kingman was the only child of Judith and Big Jim Kingman; but Robert’s mother died of massive hemorrhaging while delivering him. Big Jim was even then a rich man, and he grew continually richer over the years. He made millions from California real estate, farming, oil, and water rights. He was a tall, barrel-chested man, as was his son, and Big Jim liked to boast that there was no one west of the Mississippi who could eat more steak, drink more whiskey, or make more money than he could. Shortly before Robert’s twenty-second birthday, he inherited the entire estate when Big Jim, having drunk too much whiskey, choked to death on a large, inadequately chewed chunk of filet mignon. He lost that eating contest to a man who had yet to make a million dollars in plumbing supplies, but who could at least boast of having lived through the feast. Robert had not developed his father’s competitive attitude toward food and beverage, but he had acquired the old man’s business sense, and although he was quite young, he made even more money with the funds that had been left to him.
When he was twenty-five, Robert married a woman named Alana Lee, built the Victorian house on Hawk Hill, just for her, and began fathering a new generation of Kingmans. Alana was not from a wealthy family, but she was said to be the most beautiful girl in the county, with the sweetest temper in the state. The children came fast, five of them in eight years—three boys and two girls. Theirs was the most respected family in town, envied, but also liked and admired. The Kingmans were churchgoers, friendly, graced with the common touch in spite of their high station, charitable, involved in their community. Robert obviously loved Alana, and everyone could see that she adored him; and the children returned the affection their parents lavished upon them.
On a night in August, a few days before the Kingmans’ twelfth wedding anniversary, Robert secretly ground up two dozen sleeping tablets that a physician had prescribed for Alana’s periodic insomnia, and sprinkled the powder in drink and food that his family shared for a bedtime snack, as well as in various items consumed by the live-in maid, cook, and butler. He neither ate nor drank anything he had contaminated. When his wife, children, and servants were soundly asleep, he went out to the garage and fetched an ax that was used to chop wood for the mansion’s nine fireplaces. He spared the maid, cook, and butler, but no one else. He killed Alana first, then his two young daughters, then his three sons. Every member of the family was dispatched in the same hideously brutal, gory fashion: with two sharp and powerful blows of the ax blade, one vertical and one horizontal, in the form of a cross, either on the back or on the chest, depending on the position in which each was sleeping when attacked. That done, Robert visited his victims a second time and crudely decapitated all of them. He carried their dripping heads downstairs and lined them up on the long mantel above the fireplace in the drawing room. It was a shockingly gruesome tableau: six lifeless, blood-splashed faces observing him as if they were a jury or judges in the court of Hell. With his beloved dead watching him, Robert Kingman wrote a brief note to those who would find him and his maniacal handiwork the following morning: “My father always said that I entered the world in a river of blood, my dying mother’s blood. And now I will shortly leave on another such river.” When he had written that curious good-bye, he loaded a .38-caliber Colt revolver, put the barrel in his mouth, turned toward the death-shocked faces of his family, and blew his brains out.
As Roy finished the story, Colin grew cold all the way through to his bones. He hugged himself and shivered violently.
“The cook was the first to wake up,” Roy said. “She found blood all over the hallway and stairs, followed the trail to the drawing room, and saw the heads on the mantel. She ran out of the house, down the hill, screaming at the top of her lungs. Went almost a mile before anyone stopped her. They say she nearly lost her mind over it.”
The night seemed darker than it had been when Roy had begun the story. The moon appeared to be smaller, farther away than it had been earlier.
On a distant highway a big truck shifted gears and accelerated. It sounded like the cry of a prehistoric animal.
Colin’s mouth was as dry as ashes. He worked up enough saliva to speak, but his voice was thin. “For God’s sake,
why?
Why did he kill them?”
Roy shrugged. “No reason.”
“There
had
to be a reason.”
“If there was, nobody ever figured it out.”
“Maybe he made some bad investments and lost all of his money.”
“Nah. He left a fortune.”
“Maybe his wife was going to leave him.”
“All of her friends said she was, very happy with her marriage.”
A dog barking.
A train whistling.
Wind whispering in the trees.
The stealthy movement of unseen things.
The night was speaking all around him.
“A brain tumor,” Colin said.
“A lot of people thought the same thing.”
“I’ll bet that’s it. I’ll bet Kingman had a brain tumor, something like that, something that made him act crazy.”
“At the time it was the most popular theory. But the autopsy didn’t turn up any signs of a brain disease.”
Colin frowned. “You seem to have filed away every single fact about the case.”
“I know it almost as well as if it had happened to me.”
“But how do you know what the autopsy uncovered?”
“I read about it.”
“Where?”
“The library has all the back issues of the Santa Leona
News Register
on microfilm,” Roy said.
“You researched the case?”
“Yeah. It’s exactly the kind of thing that interests me. Remember? Death. I’m fascinated by death. As soon as I heard the Kingman story, I wanted to know more. A whole lot more. I wanted to know every last bit and piece of it. You understand? I mean, wouldn’t it have been terrific to be in that house on that night, the night it happened, just sort of observing, just hiding in a corner, on
that
night, hiding and watching him do it, watching him do it to all of them and then to himself? Think of it! Blood everywhere. You’ve never seen so much goddamned blood in your life! Blood on the walls, soaked and clotted in the bedclothes, slick puddles of blood on the floor, blood on the stairs, and blood splashed over the furniture.... And those six heads on the mantel! Jesus, what a popper! What a terrific popper!”
“You’re being weird again,” Colin said.
“Would you like to have been there?”
“No thanks. And neither would you.”
“I sure as hell would!”
“If you saw all that blood, you’d puke.”
“Not me.”
“You’re just trying to gross me out.”
“Wrong again.”
Roy started toward the house.
“Wait a minute,” Colin said.
Roy didn’t turn back this time. He climbed the sagging steps and walked onto the porch.
Rather than stand alone, Colin joined him. “Tell me about the ghosts.”
“Some nights there are strange lights in the house. And people who live farther down the hill say that sometimes they hear the Kingman children screaming in terror and crying for help.”
“They hear the
dead kids?”
“Moaning and carrying on something fierce.”
Colin suddenly realized he had his back to one of the broken first-floor windows. He shifted away from it.
Roy continued somberly: “Some people say they’ve seen spirits that glow in the dark, crazy things, headless children who come out on this porch and run back and forth as if they’re being chased by someone ... or something.”
“Wow!”
Roy laughed. “What they’ve probably seen is a bunch of kids trying to hoax everybody.”
“Maybe not.”
“What else?”
“Maybe they’ve seen just what they say they have.”
“You really do believe in ghosts.”
“I keep an open mind,” Colin said.
“Yeah? Well, you better be more careful about what kind of junk falls into it, or you’ll wind up with an open sewer.”
“Aren’t you clever.”
“Everyone says so.”
“And modest.”
“Everyone says that, too.”
“Jeez.”
Roy went to the shattered window and peered inside.
“What do you see?” Colin asked.
“Come look.”
Colin moved beside him and stared into the house.
A stale, extremely unpleasant odor wafted through the broken window.
“It’s the drawing room,” Roy said.
“I can’t see anything.”
“It’s the room where he lined up their heads on the mantel.”
“What mantel? It’s pitch dark in there.”
“In a couple of minutes our eyes will adjust.”
In the drawing room something moved. There was a soft rustling, a sudden clatter, and the sound of something rushing toward the window.
Colin leaped back. He stumbled over his own feet and fell with a crash.
Roy looked at him and burst out laughing.
“Roy, there’s something in there!”
“Rats.”
“Huh?”
“Just rats.”
“The house has rats?”
“Of course it does, a rotten old place like this. Or maybe we heard a stray cat. Probably both—a cat chasing a rat. One thing I guarantee: It wasn’t any ghoul or ghost. Will you relax, for God’s sake?”
Roy faced the window again, leaned into it, head cocked, listening, watching.
Having sustained much greater injury to his pride than to his flesh, Colin got up quickly and nimbly, but he didn’t return to the window. He stood at the rickety railing and looked west toward town, then south along Hawk Drive.
After a while he said, “Why haven’t they torn this place down? Why haven’t they built new houses up here? This must be valuable land.”
Without looking away from the window, Roy said, “The entire Kingman fortune, including the land, went to the state.”
“Why?”
“There weren’t any living relatives on either side of the family, nobody to inherit.”
“What’s the state going to do with the place?”
“In twenty years they’ve managed to do absolutely zilch, nothing at all, big zero,” Roy said. “For a while there was talk of selling the land and the house at public auction. Then they said they were going to make a pocket park out of it. You still hear the park rumor every once in a while, but nothing ever gets done. Now will you please shut up for a minute? I think my eyes are finally beginning to adjust. I have to concentrate on this.”
“Why? What’s so important in there?”
“I’m trying to see the mantel.”
“You’ve been here before,” Colin said. “You’ve already seen it.”
“I’m trying to pretend it’s that night. The night Kingman went berserk. I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like. The sound of the ax... I can almost hear it...
whooooosh-chunk, whooooosh-chunk
... and maybe a couple of short screams... his footsteps coming down the stairs... heavy footsteps ... the blood... all that blood ...”
Roy’s voice gradually trailed away as if he had mesmerized himself.
Colin walked to the far end of the porch. The boards squeaked underfoot. He leaned against the shaky railing and craned his neck so that he could look around the side of the house. He could see only the overgrown garden in shades of gray and black and moonlight-silver: knee-high grass; shaggy hedges; orange and lemon trees pulled to the ground by the weight of their own untrimmed boughs; sprawling rose bushes, some with pale flowers, white or yellow, that looked like puffs of smoke in the darkness; and a hundred other plants that were woven into a single, tangled entity by the loom of the night.
He had the feeling something was watching him from the depths of the garden. Something less than human.
Don’t be childish, he thought. There’s nothing out there. This isn’t a horror movie. This is
life.
He tried to stand his ground, but the possibility that he was being observed became a certainty, at least in his own mind. He knew that if he stood there much longer, he would surely be seized by a creature with huge claws and dragged into the dense shrubbery, there to be gnawed upon at the beast’s leisure. He turned away from the garden and went back to Roy.
“You ready to go?” Colin asked.
“I can see the whole room.”
“In the dark?”
“I can see a lot of it.”
“Yeah?”
“I can see the mantel.”
“Yeah?”
“Where he lined up the heads.”
As if he were drawn by a magnet stronger than his will, Colin stepped up beside Roy and bent forward and peered into the Kingman house. It was extremely dark in there, but he could see a bit more than he had seen a while ago: strange shapes, perhaps piles of broken furniture and other rubble; shadows that seemed to be moving but, of course, were not; and the white-marble mantel above the enormous fireplace, the sacrificial altar upon which Robert Kingman had offered up his family.
Suddenly Colin felt that this was a place he must get away from at once, a place he must stay away from forever. He knew it instinctively, on a deep animal level; and as if he were an animal, the hairs rose on the back of his neck, and he hissed softly, involuntarily, through bared teeth.