He’d been sitting at a table.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s table.
And he’d been eating—
Tad’s stomach heaved, but he’d eaten so little for breakfast that nothing came up but the foul taste of bile.
“And I keep thinking about the lamp,” Kent said. “We put it back together, too.”
“You think maybe something else is going to happen?”
Kent shrugged. “How should I know? But doesn’t it seem like we should at least figure out who Darby got it from?” When neither Eric nor Tad responded, Kent went on. “Maybe if we can figure out what’s gonna happen, we can figure out how—” His voice faltered, then he looked away.
“You mean maybe we can figure out how to keep ourselves from doing it?” Tad finally said, his voice shaking.
“We didn’t do anything,” Kent said. “All we did was have a bunch of dreams!”
“The same dreams,” Tad argued. “And if we didn’t have anything to do with Tippy or Ellis Langstrom, how come we all dreamed about it?”
“I don’t know!” Kent flared. “And neither do you. All I’m saying is we should find out.”
“And how are we supposed to do that?” Tad demanded. “Just go online and Google lamps and murders?”
“No,” Kent shot back. “We go back in that room and look in the ledger. We find out where the lamp came from, then start looking in those books Darby put in there.” His gaze shifted from Tad to Eric, then back to Tad. “We have to go back in there and find out who owned the lamp. And I have to find out what’s in that white box.”
“No way,” Tad said.
“We have to,” Kent repeated. “Besides, what if that box is empty? What if my dream didn’t mean anything at all?”
Tad’s jaw clenched — the last thing he wanted to do was go back in that room. Not today — not ever! But what if Kent was right? What if the box was empty?
“Come on, Tad,” Kent said, sensing the other boy wavering. “We have to go.”
“You can go back in if you want, but Eric and I aren’t,” Tad said, but his voice was hollow. “Right, Eric?”
Eric shook his head. “I think Kent’s right,” he said softly. “We all have to go. We can just go in there, find out those two things, and come right back out.”
Kent stood up. “C’mon,” he said to Tad. “Nothing’s going to happen. It’s just a room.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER they stood in the secret room, bathed in the amber glow of the lamp. As the now familiar voices began to whisper at the edges of their consciousness, a serene calm fell over all three boys.
The white box sat quietly waiting on the tabletop, exactly as they had left it, but none of the three made the slightest move to lift its lid.
It was still not time.
Eric drew the journal closer to him and slowly turned the pages until at last he found the entry he was looking for.
The entry that identified the lamp.
“E.G.,” he whispered, reading from the ledger. “The lamp came from Plainfield, Wisconsin, from the estate of someone with the initials E.G.” He closed the ledger and looked at the stack of books on the floor. Surely one of them had an index.
Eric picked up the first book on the stack, then the second.
With the third one, he finally found what he was looking for, and as he began to scan the pages at the back of the thick volume, names seemed to leap out at him.
Names he’d already found on the Internet.
Jeffrey Dahmer, who had once owned the table on which both the ledger and the white box now sat.
Patrick Kearney, who had cut up boys Eric’s age with the hacksaw.
Jack the Ripper, who had kept his surgical instruments in pristine condition.
And listed under G, in type that seemed almost to leap off the page, he found the name he was looking for.
Gein, Edward, p. 72.
Eric turned the pages back until he came to the right one, and found himself gazing first at a photograph of what looked like nothing more than an old farmer.
Then he began to read: “‘Edward Theodore Gein,’” he said softly as both Tad and Kent listened in utter silence, “‘also known as the Plainfield Ghoul, was a serial killer and a grave robber who made unspeakable items out of his victims’ body parts. When he was arrested in 1957, police found a disemboweled and beheaded woman strung up and dressed like a deer, hanging in his kitchen. They also found bowls made of human craniums, a box full of noses, a belt made of women’s nipples, female genitalia in a shoe box, the carefully stuffed and mounted faces of nine women on his wall, and furniture and lamp shades made from human skin.’”
“Lamp shades,” Tad echoed.
“Made from human skin,” Kent breathed.
Involuntarily, Eric’s eyes went to the lamp shade that was glowing with an ethereal light in the shadowy room, then to the other object that sat on Jeffrey Dahmer’s table. “Open the box,” he said.
It seemed to shimmer with an energy of its own as Kent’s hands reached for it with the same involuntary movement that had taken Eric’s eyes from the book to Ed Gein’s lamp a moment before.
His fingers hesitated when they touched the cover, which seemed to vibrate with an oddly electrical charge.
He ran his fingers over it again.
Finally, he lifted the lid.
Nestled deep in the box, barely visible in the dim glow of the lamp, lay what must once have been Ellis Langstrom’s arm. Now, though, it was nothing but an elongated object, dark brown with dried blood, chunks of flesh missing, as if they’d been torn away by the teeth of some kind of carnivore.
The arm had no skin; every shred of it had been peeled down to the muscle and tendons — even the fingers had been carefully skinned, though the fingernails remained, their roots exposed to the light and air in a manner that was oddly obscene.
“Jesus,” Kent whispered.
Tad gagged and turned away.
But Eric Brewster stared silently at the grisly object, a series of thoughts even more horrifying than the contents of the box reeling through his mind:
It’s all of them…the killers are all here…they’re here, and they’re alive, and somehow we’ve turned them loose.
And there’s no way to stop them….
Chapter 25
DAN BREWSTER LINGERED over his coffee, gazing out at the overcast sky and the dead-gray surface of the lake, both of which felt like an exact match of the mood that had hung over the house since he’d arrived on Saturday morning. Even though it had been only two days ago, it felt like at least a week.
A gray and overcast week.
And now there was a storm forecast for this morning, which he hoped wouldn’t actually occur when he and his family showed up at Ellis Langstrom’s funeral this afternoon.
He glanced at Eric, who was sitting to his right, reading the front page of the morning paper. As silent this morning as he’d been all weekend, Eric looked as if he hadn’t been sleeping much, and most of his breakfast was still untouched. “There anything you want to talk about?” Dan asked when Eric, sensing his father looking at him, finally glanced up from the paper. Dan thought he saw something flicker in Eric’s eyes for a fraction of a second, but then the boy shook his head and went back to studying the paper.
On the other side of the table, Merrill — still in her robe — was staring out at the gray morning, her chin in her hand, as silent as her son. In the strange quiet of the house, the sound of Marci’s fork on her plate as she finished her sausage seemed preternaturally loud, and he saw Merrill startle as the clock in the hall began to strike.
“Nine,” Dan said as the clock finished striking. “The funeral’s at eleven.” Merrill looked at him blankly, as if the words had no meaning. “The Langstrom boy,” he said softly. “Ellis.”