Page 110 of The Furies

Which was when the light in the hallway went out.

* * *

FROM HIS APARTMENT, BOBBY heard someone come down the stairs and pass by the front desk. There was the sound of a key being deposited in the slot, and the main door opening and closing. He didn’t bother going to his window to see who it was. They’d left the key, which was the important thing. After that, they could do whatever the hell they liked.

Bobby sat on the edge of his bed. His hands were shaking and he was trying very hard not to throw up. He’d left part of himself in that basement, and he wasn’t sure that he was ever going to get it back.

* * *

SO THERE HE WAS, as good as marooned in the dark, with only the beam of the flashlight for comfort, while someone intent on causing him harm lurked amid dead folks’ furniture. Bobby could call for help, but it wouldn’t bring anyone running, not unless they were on the first floor and listening hard. For the present, he was on his own.

His right foot found the rung it was looking for, and the left shifted position to join it. A scuffling noise came from nearby. Bobby twisted, squinting into the shadows, and in the beam of the flashlight he caught movement, small and pale; a rat or mouse, perhaps, except it was the wrong shape, and pink, not gray. Bobby stayed where he was and peered more closely.

It was a foot, the toes poking from holes in what looked like white stockings, although the limb was too slight to belong to an adult. This was a child’s foot, but the nails were long, almost like claws, and the surrounding skin was filthy and wrinkled. Bobby saw that it had receded from the beds, which was making the nails appear elongated, because no child naturally had toes that ended in talons. The one from the big toe was missing, and the exposed bed was rotten and black.

That was when Bobby understood, and he wondered how one went about reasoning with the dead.

“Don’t hurt me,” he said. “I don’t mean you no harm.”

The foot was withdrawn from the light as its owner realized that it had been spotted.

“I just came down here to fix the light,” Bobby continued, “but if you prefer the dark, that’s okay, too. I can leave it be.”

The foot appeared again. Bobby reacted, and once more it was pulled back into the dark.

Jesus, he thought, it’s playing a game.

He had little experience of children, and hadn’t joshed with one since he was a child himself. Neither was he a sensitive man, because he had no interest in people beyond their ability to pay for rooms in his hotel, and the relative levels of convenience or inconvenience he might incur as a result. But here, in a basement that was just a couple of batteries away from total blackness, he instinctively felt that this presence, although it might not mean him harm, could still cause it. It was fooling with him for its amusement, but its grin had sharp teeth. That joke with the ladder could have broken his neck if he’d landed badly, and he thought old Esther Vogt might have made the acquaintance of this same visitor shortly before her heart exploded. Bobby didn’t want to die with the specter of a child hovering over him. He didn’t want to die, period, but he very much did not want it to happen under the current conditions.

The ladder was trembling, but the child had nothing to do with it. It was trembling because Bobby Wadlin was trembling also. Somehow, he made the effort to smile.

“Peek-a-boo,” he said. “I see you.”

The foot briefly stabbed the light, and he heard laughter. He moved a rung farther down the ladder, and the laughter stopped. Bobby closed his eyes and prayed.

“I have to go,” he said. “I got things to do, a hotel to take care of. But you can stay down here, if you like. Most nobody comes into the basement, except me.”

And Esther Vogt, of course, but Esther wasn’t likely to be rummaging for buried treasure again, not unless she was so attached to the Braycott that she decided to try a postmortem spell of holing up in it. Bobby had an image of a storage room filled with ghosts, a subterranean vault of phantasms who couldn’t afford to haunt anywhere more refined. He was forced to stifle a giggle.

I have embraced madness.

In the dark, the child ceased its playacting. They’d come to it now, Bobby knew: blackness or light, and the former, if the cards fell that way, would be perpetual for him, just as it was for Esther. He negotiated the final rungs, and his legs were unsteady as he set both feet on the floor. He kept his eye on the beam, trying to memorize the obstacles illuminated by it, because if it went out, he was going to run. If the child wanted him, he’d make the little shit fight for the pleasure.

In the hallway the bulb came back on, its glare reaching out like a hand to swallow up the finger of brightness from the flashlight. The shapes of the movables in the basement came into focus, but where the child had been Bobby could now see only a reading chair with the stuffing bleeding from one arm. He thought the child might even have been sitting in that chair, because it was low enough for its feet to reach the floor.

He picked up the flashlight, but resisted the temptation to shine it around, just in case it should land on something he did not wish to see.

“Thank you,” he said, as loudly as he could. “I’ll be on my way.”

He packed up the ladder and carried it with him to the hallway. The basement bulb still hadn’t been replaced, but he wasn’t going to worry about that. It would be a while before he chose to venture back down here again, at least unaccompanied. He’d been considering hiring a handyman on a part-time basis anyway, because he wasn’t as young as he used to be, and he had to admit that the Braycott was starting to look frayed around the edges. He knew a couple of do-it-yourselfers who’d be glad of the work, cash on the barrelhead, and one of them could start in a day or two. Bobby would add installing a new bulb in the basement to the list of tasks, but a clearing out of some of this old stuff wouldn’t hurt either. The Lord alone knew what might be hiding among it, he would tell the guy: rodents, cockroaches, anything.

Anything at all.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

Donnie Packard was leaning against the jamb of the bedroom door, his stare sometimes following Melissa, monitoring her movements, before turning inward to traverse another landscape. He’d been smoking Spice earlier in the afternoon, and the fishy smell drifted to her from where he stood, but he was coming down from it, his heart rate almost back to normal, the blinding headache that had left him screaming reduced to a dull throb. She’d locked herself in the bathroom to get away from him. Had the pain in his head not been so bad he might have tried to bust the door from its hinges, but he’d resorted only to kicking it halfheartedly a couple of times before sinking to the floor and mumbling to himself for an hour. He terrified her when he was like that, but she felt a different fear of him now. Somehow, Donnie was scarier when he was in control of himself.

“What are you doing?” he said. It was the first time he’d spoken since appearing.

---