John Manning - The Killing Room

The second slaughter came twenty years later, when the family decided to abandon the house and the lottery altogether. On three successive nights, in cities spread across the country, a Young family member died suddenly. Carolyn looked over their certificates now. Howard Young had assembled them all, providing a full record of his family’s enduring tragedy. The most recent slaughter had been in 1980. Ernest Young had skipped out on the lottery, breaking with his family and taking his wife and daughters to an undisclosed location. They’d even changed their names. But on the night that one of his cousins died in the basement room, Ernest and his immediate family were also wiped out, murdered savagely in their home. Carolyn felt as if she might cry looking at the death certificates of the little girls. Ann Marie was ten. Susie was seven.

She stood, overcome by all this death. Mr. Young had given her all the particulars. The family reunions every ten years. The lottery. The requirement that one member of the family be chosen to spend a night in the room-a room that had once been a servant’s quarters. The inevitable death that occurred during that night. The slaughters that took place if the ritual was not followed exactly, and by everyone.

She walked to the window and stared out at the cliffs and the whitecapped waves of the sea beyond. He had given her all of the particulars but one.

How the whole thing had started. And why.

“Who imposed this horrible thing on you?” Carolyn had asked, but the old man had just shook his head, seeming unable to tell her.

She had looked at him in disbelief.

“You mean to tell me,” she asked, “that this is the part you expect me to find out on my own?”

Howard Young had simply nodded, then headed to his room to lie down.

“It can’t be that he doesn’t know,” Carolyn said out loud to herself, still staring out over the cliffs. “He was here when it began. He would have been eighteen years old. He must know how this curse began. Either he isn’t telling me for some reason-or he can’t tell me. Perhaps he is somehow prevented from telling me.”

She turned around and looked up at a portrait that hung over the mantel. It was a young man in Edwardian-era clothing, with a high stiff collar and high-buttoned waistcoat. Carolyn suspected it might be Desmond, the father of Howard, who had gone into the room in an effort to save his son Jacob and died in the process.

“Was it you?” Carolyn asked the portrait. “Did you somehow bring this curse upon your family?”

But the portrait was of a young man. Probably not much more than twenty. Desmond Young was fifty years old at the time of his death in that room. Carolyn knew that from his death certificate. The face she was looking at was a face unmarked by future tragedies. Whatever had happened to cause this terrible thing occurred around 1930. The world was mired in the Depression; the movies had just learned to talk; Europe was still holding together in the calm before the storm. So much history between then and now, and yet still, every ten years, the Young family sent one of its own into that room to die.

Why?

Carolyn was not a psychic. She was not even an expert on the paranormal. She was an investigator. She was more Dana Scully than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She had learned a great deal, of course, investigating the supernatural, but nothing-not even the case with the so-called zombie-had ever definitely proved without a question the existence of things beyond what one could see or hear or logically quantify. It wasn’t that Carolyn was a disbeliever. To call her a skeptic would also be wrong. She had seen enough to become convinced that the supernatural could be a real, definable force-but she had also never seen anything that might change that “could be” into a definite belief.

That’s what made her a good investigator. She retained an open mind, but a critical one. It was why her first task was to find proof that all this wasn’t some terrible hoax, either one set up by Howard Young for some twisted reason or one perpetrated upon him by unknown persons. Yet the deaths-so many of them-couldn’t be denied. The deaths were real. What Carolyn had to determine was if they were being caused by normal or paranormal forces. A rather daunting assignment.

She sat back down in front of the papers and books Mr. Young had set out for her. How the hell was she supposed to figure it out? He’d told her to study the results of others’ investigations. Several people had tried to end the curse before her, starting in 1930 and continuing up through the years. The latest was Kip Hobart, who’d tried to uncover the mystery of that room a decade earlier. But like all who’d come before him, he’d had no success.

Carolyn knew Kip; they’d worked together on a couple of cases. He was well respected in the paranormal world. If Kip Hobart had been unable to find out and prevent what was going on in this house, how possibly could she? Kip was an expert on the supernatural. He had studied with the most esteemed names in the field. She was just a gumshoe.

If not for the million dollars dangling over her head, Carolyn would have walked away from this assignment. It was too big. Too many unknowns. But a million dollars…

She’d never had a lot of money. Her father had been a postal clerk who’d died of prostate cancer when Carolyn was eleven. Her mother had soldiered on, trying as best she could to provide her two daughters with a comfortable life. Carolyn’s younger sister Andrea had severe Down syndrome, and Mom was insistent she never be sent away and that she attend only the very best special schools. To enable this, Carolyn’s mother worked several jobs in their town of Rye, New York, juggling her commissions as a real estate agent with the tips she earned as a waitress at a local diner. When the diner was robbed at gunpoint, forcing Mom to hand over all the cash in the register as well as her diamond engagement ring, Carolyn, just fourteen at the time, had felt a profound sense of violation. At that tender age she decided she wanted to be a police officer, and Mom had scrimped and saved in order to send her to college to major in criminal justice.

But still, on campus, Carolyn had needed a side job to offset expenses. A professor recommended her for a spot as a paid intern to the local district attorney. So impressed was the D.A. with her astute skills at observation and deduction that, upon graduation, he provided a glowing reference to the New York field office of the FBI. Securing a position there, she impressed her superiors almost immediately by solving a homicide case that had perplexed them for years. Carolyn had detected a strong resemblance between a photo of one suspect and the victim’s ex-husband. Turned out it was the same man, just made over with thousands of dollars of plastic surgery. “The eyes were the same,” she said simply. “They can change the eyelids but not the eyes.” The man was arrested, and Carolyn got promoted to Washington.

From there, her rise was swift, with a series of “unusual” cases leading to Carolyn’s reputation as the “go-to” person for the paranormal. It was all quite ironic. Carolyn had never even believed in Santa Claus. Neither of her parents were religious. It was simply a coincidence that these cases were assigned to her, but as she proved herself with one, she was given another. Maybe it was because she was so clear, so neutral on the subject. Neither a believer nor a disbeliever, she had exactly the right stuff to be a successful investigator.

Yet her salary never reflected her success or the esteem in which she was held by her superiors. Part of it was the glass ceiling, of course, and she was very aware of that: male agents were always paid better than female agents. Part of it was also the fact that rank-and-file government employees made a lot less money than their critics in the media thought. But perhaps the biggest part of it was the cash she sent back to Rye every month. Mom had developed Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. She’d never had good health insurance, and now her medical bills were exploding through the roof. Carolyn did not want her mother placed in a nursing home, not after all the long years she had labored so that Carolyn could have a better life. So she paid for round-the-clock nursing care to keep Mom at home. Of course, Andrea still needed money for her care as well, living in a beautiful, very expensive assisted-living facility in Dutchess County. So there was very little money left over for Carolyn at the end of each month.