The curtains slid open.
The two wax bodies lay facedown between the brass beds. Their bloody nightshirts were ripped to shreds, and so was their skin. Tyler looked away. A rocking horse with faded paint rested beside a washstand. In one corner was an Indian tom-tom. A baseball bat was propped against the wall behind it. Suddenly, the boys seemed real to Tyler. She imagined them at play, laughing and chasing each other. She gnawed her lower lip and turned her gaze to the window. She heard Maggie’s voice, but didn’t listen. On the lawn below, she saw a weathered, lattice-work gazebo. Beyond it, the fence. Then the hillside, golden brown in the sunlight, with a few patches of green bush, clumps of rock here and there, a scattering of trees. It looked so peaceful. As she watched, a seagull swooped down, perched on the fence between a couple of the spikes, and pecked at something, apparently finding a snack. She wished she was outside, not trapped inside this mausoleum. Maybe Gorman felt the same way, for she saw that he, too, was staring out of the window.
Maggie finished, and they followed her into the corridor. This time, passing the curtained area, Tyler walked closer to the wall and kept her arms tight against her sides. As they approached the top of the stairs, Maggie said, “Sixteen nights we lived in this house before the beast came. My husband, Joseph, he couldn’t abide sleeping in one of the murder rooms, so we settled ourselves in the guest room. Our daughters, Cynthia and Diana, they weren’t so squeamish and took the boys’ room we just left.”
She led them through a doorway on the right, directly across the corridor from the entrance to Lilly’s room. A cordon was stretched from wall to wall, but the room beyond it was open. Except for one corner. There, a set of red curtains hung from a curved bar, enclosing a wedge of floor.
Maggie pointed her cane at a canopy bed. “On May seventh, 1931, Joseph and I were sleeping here. It was close to fifty years back, but I remember it all like it was last night. There’d been a good bit of rain that day, and it was still coming down when we retired. We had the windows open, and I laid there listening to the rainfall. The girls were tucked in down the hall and my baby, Theodore, was snug in the nursery. I fell asleep, feeling peaceful and safe.
“Long about midnight, there come a sound of breaking glass from downstairs. Joseph got up quiet out of bed, and tiptoed over here.” She limped to a bureau, pulled open a drawer, and lifted out a pistol. “He got this. It’s an army model Colt .45 automatic.”
“Neat,” said the kid in the cowboy suit.
“Joseph cocked it, and I can still hear the noise of it.” Cane clamped under one arm, she clutched the black hood of the weapon and jerked it back and forward with a metallic snick-snack.
“Hope that’s not loaded,” said the father of the girl.
“Couldn’t hurt if it was,” Maggie told him. “We plugged up the barrel with lead, this past year.” Aiming at the floor, she pulled the trigger. There was a clack. She returned the pistol to the drawer.
“Joseph took it with him,” she said, “and left me alone in the room. I waited till I heard him on the stairs, then I crept out to the hall. I had to get to my children, you see.”
Leaving the curtains untouched, she stepped around the cordon. The group followed her into the corridor. She stopped at the head of the stairway. “I was just here when I heard gunshots. Then come an awful scream from Joseph. I heard sounds of a scuffle, and I wanted to run, but I stood here frozen stiff, staring down through the darkness.”
She gazed down the stairs as if transfixed by the memory of it.
“Up the stairway come the beast,” she said in a low voice. “I couldn’t see too good, but his skin was white like a fish’s belly, so white it seemed to almost glow. He walked upright like a man, only hunched over some. I knew I had to run and get to the children, but I couldn’t stir a muscle. I could only just stare. Then he made a soft kind of laugh, and threw me to the floor. He tore at me with claws and teeth. I tried my best to fight him off but he was stronger than any ten men, and I was preparing to meet the Lord when Theodore started up crying way off in the nursery. Well, the beast heard it and climbed off me and went scampering down the hall.
“I was hurt bad, but I went chasing after him. I couldn’t let him get my baby.”
She started hobbling down the corridor. Once again, Tyler pressed herself close to the wall to avoid contact with the curtains. There must be bodies inside, she thought. Mutilated corpses of wax.
Just across from the boys’ room, Maggie stopped. She tapped her cane on a closed door to the right. “This stood open,” she said. “I peered inside. There, in the dark…”
“Aren’t we going in?” asked the redhead.
Maggie glared at her. “I never show the nursery.” Then she looked at the door as if she could see through it. “There, in the dark, I saw the pale beast lift my infant from his cradle and tear him asunder. I was watching, numb with horror, when something gave my nightdress a yank. I found Cynthia and Diana behind me. Well, I took a hand of each, and we rushed off. We went this way.”
They followed Maggie through the gap on the other side of the curtains. She stopped at a closed door across the stairway. The group formed a half-circle around her.
“We got this far,” she said, “before the beast leapt into the hall and came after us.” She pulled the door open. Peering into the dim recess, Tyler saw a staircase. The stairs led upward until the darkness consumed them. “We ducked inside here, and I pulled the door shut. It was dark as a pit. I threw open the attic door at the top, and bolted it after us. Then we huddled in the musty blackness.
“We knew the beast was coming. We heard the creaking stairs, and he made quiet hissing sounds like he was laughing. Then he was sniffing at the door. We waited. The girls were sobbing. I can still feel how they both trembled in my arms. Suddenly, the door burst open and the beast fell upon us.”
Maggie eased the door shut. She leaned a shoulder against it, and let out a deep sigh.
“The screams,” she said. “I’ll never forget the screams, the snarls of the beast, the wet ripping sounds as he tore up my two little girls. I fought him until the screams stopped and he had me down. I don’t know why he didn’t kill me, and there’s many a time I wished he had, but he just pinned me to the floor. I was too weak to fight him anymore, and I begged him to end it for me. After a minute, he scampered down the stairs leaving me alone up there with the bodies of my daughters. I never saw him again after that night. But others have.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Janice lay motionless, staring at the mirrored ceiling. Sprawled on top of the pillows, she looked blue and dead like a corpse discarded on a rubbish pile. She was thinking about ways to commit suicide.
So far, she’d come up with a couple of possibilities. The light fixture in the center of the ceiling was about three feet beyond her reach. By stacking pillows, she could get to it. Unscrew the blue bulb. Stick in a finger. Electrocute herself. That would probably work. An easier method, the one she thought she might prefer, was to remove all her bandages and let herself bleed to death. Exploring her wounds, however, she’d found most of them to be superficial, little more than scratches and bites. They weren’t bleeding much. She would have to work them open, or maybe take down that bulb and break it and use its glass like a knife to open her wrists or throat. She could do that.
There was one problem.
She didn’t want to die.
They couldn’t let her go, she was sure of that, but they had bandaged her wounds so they must want her to recover. Why? She could think of only one reason, and it sickened her: they wanted her alive as a plaything for the beast.