John Manning - The Killing Room

“I…I came to visit,” Douglas said.

“But the reunion is next month.”

Douglas tried to smile. Something about seeing Uncle Howie stretched out like this gave him the creeps. The old man still had not unfolded his hands from his chest. He looked like a talking corpse. “I came early,” Douglas said. “To spend some time with you.”

Howard Young’s tongue snaked out to wet his lips. “Look at you. You are a mess. Why are you so dirty?”

“I had a little accident with my bike.”

Finally the old man raised himself with difficulty on one brittle elbow. “I have always feared that motorcycle would bring you to a bad end.”

“It was just a little spill. I wasn’t hurt.”

Uncle Howard was sitting now. “Are you certain?”

Douglas nodded. “I just need a good hot shower.”

Uncle Howie grunted. “Well, anyway, I’m glad to see you, Douglas.” He smiled. Now that he was sitting up, he seemed warm. Back to life. He was once again the uncle that Douglas knew. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“You okay, Uncle Howie?” Douglas asked. “The pretty young lady downstairs said you got kind of shook up.”

The old man’s eyes twinkled. “Oh, so you’ve met her? Yes, indeed, she’s quite pretty.” He frowned. “But I wasn’t shook up. I just get tired more easily these days.”

“Well, don’t work too hard. Whatever these projects are, don’t let them stress you out.”

Uncle Howard sighed. “Would that they would simply go away.” He managed a weary smile at his nephew. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said again.

“So tell me,” Douglas said, grinning. “Is this Carolyn married?”

“No.”

“Boyfriend?”

“I don’t know,” Uncle Howie told him. “But I don’t think so. Not anymore.”

“Good.”

“Now, hold on a moment, you hoodlum.” Uncle Howie was smiling. “Carolyn is here on a very important matter. I don’t want you hassling her.”

“Me? Hassle a pretty woman?”

His uncle just gave him a look.

“All right,” Douglas said. “I’ll go easy on her. But she sure is hot.”

Uncle Howard nodded. “Yes, she is lovely. But what she is working on…it’s going to need her full attention. Which brings me to the reason why I am so pleased you came early to visit me, Douglas…”

The old man was struggling to get off the bed and stand. Douglas allowed him to lean on his arm. Once standing, Uncle Howard got quite close to his nephew and looked him directly in the eyes.

“We need to have an important conversation,” Uncle Howie said. “In the next day or two. There are many things I need to tell you before the others arrive.”

Douglas smiled. He’s going to give me something and doesn’t want my cousins knowing about it. I knew I was his favorite.

“Sure thing, Uncle Howie,” Douglas said, walking beside the old man as he shuffled across the floor of his room toward the door. “Anytime you want. We’ll sit down and catch up.”

“Mm,” Howard Young said. “Catch up. I suppose you could call it that.”

Douglas escorted his uncle into the foyer, then turned and gave him a jaunty salute. They’d have some dinner once Douglas was cleaned up, Uncle Howard said. Douglas smiled, then hurried up the stairs to the room that he’d always considered his own.

It was the same room where he’d slept the night his father died in this house ten years ago.

He’d come down these very stairs to be met by his cousin Paula. She was crying. “Oh, Douglas,” she’d said, turning away.

And he’d known.

Known that his father had died during the night. He’d been trying to play a prank on his cousins, they said. A funny practical joke. And he had suffocated. It was a terrible accident, they told the sheriff.

Except that Dad didn’t play pranks. He wasn’t that kind of guy.

Douglas pushed the memory out of his mind as he rounded the top of the staircase. He passed a large plate-glass window on the top landing that looked out over the grounds toward the cliffs. Suddenly he was certain if he looked out he would see the woman in the white dress out there again. He hesitated, then turned to look. He peered outside into the bright sunshine.

She wasn’t there.

Of course she wasn’t. The woman wasn’t real. She was an illusion. A figment of Douglas’s imagination.

He headed down the hall to his room.

Carolyn sat in the parlor with a mountain of books and papers spread out on the table in front of her.

He does not look like David, she thought to herself. Douglas Young did not look anything like the man she had loved so much, who had betrayed her so horribly. Douglas was blond; David was dark. Douglas’s skin was smooth and unlined; David had had a pink scar running down the side of his face. Douglas was her age or possibly even younger; David had been in his late thirties. But something had reminded her of David…

The dimples. It had been the dimples.

And the eyes. The way he flirted with her. The confidence in his appeal. The devil-may-care toss of his head…

Damn it, she said to herself, shaking her head. Thinking about David was the last thing she could afford to do at the moment.

Because the case at hand was like nothing she had encountered before.

The blood on the wall had been real. She had seen it, touched it. It had simply appeared-and during the time it took her run up the stairs to fetch her camera to take a picture of it, it had disappeared.

Now, of course, it could have been some kind of ingenious trick. For whatever purpose, maybe Mr. Young was making all of this up. Or someone else was playing a hideous game with him. That’s what Carolyn needed to determine first. She’d need to inspect that wall to see if there was some kind of device embedded in it. A screen perhaps. Or maybe the message in blood had been a hologram of some sort.

Except, as she reminded herself, holograms aren’t wet and sticky to the touch.

She had walked over to the wall and placed her finger directly into the blood. It was real. And so was the abject terror on Mr. Young’s face and the distress he’d felt afterward, which caused him to retreat to his room.

Carolyn sighed as she flipped through the death certificates in front of her. The blood on the wall might conceivably have been a trick, but there was no way that these documents weren’t real. To verify them, all Carolyn needed to do was troop over to the clerk’s office at the Youngsport town hall-which she certainly planned on doing. Still, every certificate was stamped with the clerk’s official seal. Her trained researcher’s eye told her these weren’t fakes. There were more than a dozen certificates, each from the first year of a decade, with the earliest dating back to 1930. The deaths came in ten-year intervals after that, one to a decade, except in those instances Mr. Young had called “slaughters”: when the family had defied the curse and either not sent anyone into the room or sent the wrong person.

The first such slaughter had been at the very beginning. Sixteen-year-old Jacob Young’s name had been drawn in the lottery. He had steeled himself to spend the night in the room. But his father-and Howard Young’s father as well-Desmond Young had insisted he take his son’s place. The result was even greater tragedy. Instead of one death, there had been four. Desmond died, but so did poor Jacob, as well as the two youngest and most innocent members of the family, thirteen-year-old Timothy and the infant Cynthia. Carolyn stared down at their death certificates now. On every one the cause of death was listed as “seizure.” Only the wealth and privilege of the Youngs could have staved off the kind of investigation four deaths in the same house on the same night would have prompted otherwise. Even, somehow, the grisly manner of Desmond’s death never made it to the official record. That could happen, Carolyn supposed, when a family had its own private graveyard.