John Manning - The Killing Room

“I’m sorry,” Uncle Howard replied. “I know I’ve been keeping to my room of late. But you see, all of this, as I’m sure you understand, is very upsetting for me.”

“Mr. Young,” Carolyn said. “You hired me to try to find a way to put an end to ‘all of this,’ as you describe it. And I can’t do that without your full cooperation.”

All of this? What were they talking about?

“I can only tell you so much,” Uncle Howard said. “I expect that whatever else you need to know, you will find out.”

“Mr. Young,” Carolyn retorted, her voice growing sharp, “we only have a couple of weeks!”

A couple of weeks. Chelsea knew what she was referencing. The family reunion was in two weeks. Less than that, in fact. And apparently Uncle Howard expected to have the will ready by then. He’s probably going to announce who’s getting what, Chelsea thought. But what information was he withholding from Carolyn?

“There are some things we need to ask you about, now that we’ve seen Jeanette,” Douglas said.

“What kind of things?” Uncle Howard asked.

There was the sound of paper rustling. Was Carolyn passing out drafts of the will?

“I’ve gone through the various reports filed by those who have worked for you previously,” Carolyn said. Previous lawyers? Were they looking at old wills? Documents that maybe included Chelsea and her family, which Douglas was now aiming to invalidate? “And I can find none by a certain Dr. Fifer.”

“Fifer?” Uncle Howard asked. “Why are you interested in him?”

“Because Jeanette’s companion, Michael O’Toole, mentioned he’d visited Jeanette some time ago.”

“Indeed, he did,” Uncle Howard said. “It was probably 1978 or 1979.”

“Why didn’t he fill out a final report like the rest of them did?”

“I don’t know.”

More papers were being shuffled. “It’s just curious. I’d like to speak with him. Do you still have a contact number?”

“He’s dead.”

Carolyn sighed.

“It was a long time ago,” Uncle Howard said. “Why are you so interested in Fifer? He came no closer than any of the others to ending this terrible thing.”

Terrible thing? Chelsea thought. What are they talking about?

“He seems to have come across a name that none of the others did,” Carolyn said. “A name I can find nowhere in any of these files. A name that upset Jeanette.”

“What name is that?”

“Malcolm.”

There was a pause. Chelsea waited, but the seconds ticked by with no response. In her mind’s eye, she saw Uncle Howard hesitating. She saw him…uncomfortable. She had the sense that the name upset him.

“I don’t know that name,” Uncle Howard said at last, and even a floor away, even without seeing his face, Chelsea knew he was lying. She suspected the others knew it as well.

“Michael O’Toole said the name upset Jeanette when Dr. Fifer mentioned it to her,” Douglas said.

“I suppose poor O’Toole has gone a little stir-crazy all those years watching after Jeanette,” Uncle Howard said. “His memory is faulty. That name means nothing to me.”

“Mr. Young,” Carolyn asked, “are you certain?”

But whatever the old man said in response, it was drowned out by another sound, this one much closer to Chelsea.

Directly behind her, in fact.

The sound of sobbing.

She lifted her head from the floor with a start. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a woman sitting on the other side of the bed, her back to Chelsea. A woman with long dark hair, wearing a white dress.

She was holding her face in her hands and crying.

“Excuse me?” Chelsea said, getting to her feet. “Excuse me, what are you doing here? This is my room.”

Immediately she deduced the woman to be one of Uncle Howard’s servants, one of the nameless revolving cast of nobodies he hired and then let go after a few months. She placed her hands on her hips and scowled. The woman was clearly upset, but that didn’t give her the right to walk into a private room. Chelsea looked over at the door. It was still shut. Had the woman come in and closed it behind her again without Chelsea hearing? Not likely. She must have been in the room the whole time.

“Look here,” Chelsea said, walking around to confront the woman face-to-face. “You’re going to have to leave. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but-”

The woman simply continued to sob into her hands. Chelsea couldn’t see her face. But she noticed she was barefoot. What kind of servant walked around her uncle’s house barefoot?

“Hey, listen,” she said, raising her voice. “You need to get out of here!”

The woman sobbed harder.

“Stop your crying! I can’t take it! I’m going to call my uncle!”

Still nothing but tears.

Chelsea reached down, angry now, grabbing the woman by the shoulders. Immediately the woman’s hands fell away from her face and she looked up at Chelsea.

Her eyes were red with blood.

Chelsea screamed, staggering backward.

Now she could see the woman’s body. Across her chest were five gaping holes, each gushing blood. The blood was staining the sheets of the bed and dripping into puddles on the floor.

Chelsea screamed at the top of her lungs, then screamed again. She covered her own face with her hands.

She was still screaming when Ryan rushed into the room, shaking her, asking her what was wrong.

“That woman!” Chelsea cried. “On the bed!”

But of course there was no woman on the bed.

And no blood either.

Ryan and Chelsea exchanged looks.

They had been in this position before, only reversed. They said nothing to each other, just continued staring in dumb horror.

In moments, Douglas and Carolyn were at the door, clearly having heard Chelsea’s screams. That heating vent worked both ways.

“What’s wrong?” Douglas asked.

“What the fuck is going on in this house?” Chelsea demanded. She saw Carolyn’s face go white.

They heard a shuffling from the hallway, and within a few seconds, Uncle Howard had made his way into the room.

All he had to do was to take one look at Chelsea’s face, and he seemed to surmise what she had seen.

“Perhaps,” he said, in a weary voice, “what I have to tell you cannot wait for your father to get here.”

Dean Young wasn’t getting any work done today. In front of him, spread all over his desk, were the plans for a major new high-rise development set for Boston’s Copley Square. Construction was slated to begin in less than a month, and all sorts of decisions had still to be made. Final dimensions, work orders, schedules. As chief architect, he had to approve all of the minutiae his associates had planned. But he simply couldn’t keep his mind on his work. All he could think of was that a month from now, when this project got under way, he might not be alive.

It may be me who’s chosen this time, Dean thought, for the thousandth time. It may be my turn to spend a night in that room.

Of course it terrified him. What went on in there? What horrible events took place? He remembered his father the morning after his name had been chosen in the lottery. He’d been found sitting on the couch in the room, his eyes bugged out, his hair white. His heart had stopped, and he was cold as ice. Dean would live with that image for the rest of his life.

Would that be how I’d die as well? Terrified beyond all reason? Or would it be even more gruesome, the way cousin Douglas had died, with a plastic bag secured over his head by some unknown creature? Or would there be gore, like so many of the others?

But for all his terror, the manner of his own death was not the worst of it for Dean. It would be leaving Zac and Callie fatherless. He’d made sure to buy all sorts of life insurance policies, with them and Linda as beneficiaries. He was able to get some terrific plans, because, according to everything the insurance companies could see, he was in good health, and was still a relatively young man. Every indicator pointed to Dean living a long life. But Aetna and Travelers didn’t know about the room in the basement of Uncle Howard’s house.