I stopped on the pathway in front of the barnlike building’s front door, figuring this must be where the kid had ended up. I looked around carefully, but couldn’t see anything that was going to stop someone’s heart. The front door was locked, but the pockets of my coat were full of remedies for a problem like that, and a few moments later I was inside, swinging a flashlight around.
If this Thursday guy and his family had hung on to the house for a while, it looked like it was mainly to keep their old junk. It was like some weird flea market, with the stuffed heads of deer and other wild animals on the wall, with dozens of other examples of the taxidermist’s art in glass cases or stands all over the huge front room, even a stuffed Kodiak bear looming almost ten feet high on its hind legs. The shelves were piled with books and curios, an old pipe organ stood against one wall, and a grandfather clock the size of a phone booth stood against another. Some of the junk actually looked kind of interesting and I strolled around picking things up at random — a model sailing ship, a conch shell the size of a tuba, some giant South American beetles that had been preserved and posed and dressed like a mariachi band. Three quarters of an hour or so passed as I wandered in and out of the various rooms, some of which seemed to have been dormitory rooms for the monastery, all of which seemed to have the same kitschy decorator as downstairs, as though the place had been planned as a museum but never opened. I even walked up the winding stairs of the lighthouse itself, which was as bare as the rest of the place was cluttered. It didn’t look like the beacon had been lit in recorded memory — the wires had been torn out, the big lamp removed. I took the long walk back down.
I looked at my watch. A little after eleven. I sat on an overstuffed chair that didn’t cramp my tail too badly, switched off my flashlight, and settled in to wait.
I may have dozed off. The first thing I noticed was a glow in the high windows, a sickly, pale gleam, pulsing slowly. It took me a moment to realize what it was — above my head the lighthouse had smoldered into a sort of weird half-life. I started across the room, but before I got to the foot of the stairs I heard a strange, rustling sound, as though a flock of birds was nesting in the high rafters. I stopped. The noises were getting louder, not just rustles but creaks, crackles, pops and snaps, as if the room was a bowl full of cereal and someone had just poured the milk.
I swung my flashlight around. A stuffed seagull on a stand meant to look like a dock piling was stretching its wings, glaring at me. The deer-head on the wall behind it was straining to get loose, rattling and bumping its wooden plaque against the wall. Something moved beside me and I snatched my hand back. It was a replica of a Spanish galleon, its sails inflating and deflating like an agitated blowfish.
“Oh, this is just CRAP!” I said.
Outside the windows the green light was still dim but the pulses were becoming more rapid and the whole room was growing more wrong by the moment — the air had gone icy cold and smelled harsh and strange, scents I had no name for. I took a few steps back and something broke on the other side of the room with a splintering crash, then a huge shape came thumping and stumbling out of the shadows. It was the stuffed bear, walking like a stiff-legged drunk, swinging its clawed arms as it went.
“You must be kidding me,” I said, but the thing wasn’t answering. It wasn’t even alive, just moving. One of its glass eyes had popped out, leaving behind a hole full of dangling straw. I stared at this for a half a second too long and the thing caught me on the side of the head with one of those swinging paws. It might have been stuffed, but it felt like it was poured full of wet cement. It knocked me halfway across the room and I’m no feather. Something other than the latest improvements in taxidermy were definitely going on, but I didn’t really have time to think about it too much, since the giant bear was on top of me and trying to rip my head off my neck. It felt like it weighed about twice as much as a real bear, and trying to throw it off was already making me tired. I dragged out my pistol and shoved it up against the furry belly.
I emptied the gun into it. “No picnic basket for YOU, Yogi!” I shouted. BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! No soap. The thing just kept bashing me. Trying to shoot a stuffed bear — stupid, stupid, stupid.
Eventually I rammed the thing through the wall and got its head stuck deep enough that I could finally pull myself loose. No sooner had I got rid of the bear than a tiger rug wrapped itself around my ankles and started trying to gnaw off my feet. The whole place was nuts — the paintings on the wall with their eyeballs bulging, trying to talk, the stuffed animals jerking around like they’d been electrified. I’d had enough of this crap. I kicked the rug up into the rafters where it hung, gnashing its teeth and swiping at me with its claws, then I made a run for the front door. I couldn’t help but notice as I ran past that the grandfather clock was lit up from within like a jukebox, glowing and, well, sort of pulsing. And the air around it was murky with strange, colored shadows which were streaming into the clock like salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Every one that went past me burned icy cold and made my skin tingle. It didn’t take much to know that this was the center of the haunting or whatever it was. It was pulling on me, too, a strong, steady suction like a whirlpool in dark, cold water. I had to struggle against it to reach the door.
I was happy enough to get outside at first.
The sickly glow from the top of the lighthouse was barely strong enough to light the long grass waving on the hilltop, but it was enough to illuminate the thin shape standing at the bottom of the path, swaying a little, head hanging down as though in some kind of hypnotic trance. Whoever it was, they didn’t have a prayer against that stuff behind me.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Get out of here!” I hurried down the path. If I had to, I’d just throw whoever it was over my shoulder and carry him…
The first thing weird I noticed was that the Y-shaped pattern on the guy’s chest wasn’t a design on a shirt. I realized that because of the second weird thing — he was naked. The third thing was that the shape on his chest was made of stitches. Big ones. In fact, it wasn’t a guy in any normal sense at all — it was Rufino Gentle’s body, fresh off the autopsy table, standing just about where it must have been found in the first place.
I’ve seen a lot of creepy stuff in my time, but that doesn’t mean you get used to it, you know.
I grabbed at his hair as I got close and lifted his head so I could look into his eyes. No resistance at all. Nothing in his eyes, either. Dead — I’m telling you, dead. Not like you say it about someone who doesn’t care any more, I mean dead as in “not alive.” There was nothing like a soul or a sensibility in that corpse, but it was still standing there, swaying a little in the wind, long dark hair flipping around, a livid new autopsy scar stretching up past his navel and forking to both collarbones. When the wind caught his hair again I couldn’t help noticing that the top of his skull was gone, too, his brain sitting right there like a soft-boiled egg in a cup. He was holding the rest of his skull in his dead hand, clutching it like it was an ashtray he’d made at summer camp.
I’d had a rough night. I don’t think anyone will blame me for not bringing Rufino Gentle’s body back with me. He looked pretty comfortable standing there, anyway, so I left him there and hurried down to the fence and Albie Bayless waiting in his car.