John Saul - Nightshade

“In the basement…” he said, summoning the last of his strength. “In the root cellar!” He tried to sit up, but the pain in his shoulder tore through him, draining the last of his resources, and he collapsed back down onto the stretcher.

“Okay,” Dan Pullman barked to the medics. “Take him to the clinic. Tony, come with me.” As the EMTs wheeled Matt to the ambulance, Joan Hapgood started to follow the stretcher, but Pullman stopped her. “Not yet,” he said. “First I want you to show me the root cellar he was talking about.”

Joan’s face paled. “I don’t go into the cellar.” The fear in her eyes was almost palpable. “I’m afraid of it — it’s so dark and feels so closed in, and — ”

“Show us,” Dan Pullman cut in, signaling Tony Petrocelli to follow him as he took Joan’s elbow and began steering her toward the house. When Gerry Conroe started after him, Pullman almost ordered him back, then changed his mind. Depending on what they found, it might be better to have Gerry Conroe with them.

* * *

SOMETHING ABOUT THE house had changed since Pullman had been here earlier in the day. At first he wasn’t sure what it was; perhaps it was only in his imagination, given what Matt had said a few moments before. But then he decided it was more than that. There was a dark aura about the house, and from the moment he followed Joan Hapgood inside, with Gerry Conroe and Tony Petrocelli behind him, he had a feeling of terrible foreboding.

As they moved through the mud room into the kitchen, Conroe paused and reached out to touch his shoulder. “What’s that smell?” he asked.

The tremor in Conroe’s voice told the police chief that the other man already had a pretty good idea of what the odor must be.

It was the scent of death.

Instead of answering Conroe’s question, Pullman grimly scanned the kitchen, his gaze drawn to an open door next to the refrigerator. “That lead to the basement?” he asked.

Joan stopped short. “Don’t make me go down there. Please don’t make me.”

There was a pleading, almost childish note in her voice that surprised Pullman. Now, looking at her in the bright kitchen instead of the glow of headlights that had been the only illumination in the driveway, he saw that it wasn’t only the house that had changed.

Joan Hapgood had too.

Her hair was arranged differently, pulled back from her face in a tight twist he didn’t remember seeing before. And instead of the pale lipstick that was all Joan usually wore, tonight her face was made up as if she’d been preparing to go out. The colors she’d chosen — the turquoise eye shadow and bright lip gloss — made her look as if she were wearing a mask. Something was wrong with the clothes too. They didn’t quite seem to fit her, and they looked dated, and in a style that might have appeared right on a girl in her teens, but made Joan look as if she’d dressed for a costume party.

“Jesus,” Gerry Conroe whispered, speaking softly, as if to himself. His eyes were fixed on Joan Hapgood as if he were seeing a ghost. “What the hell is going on?”

Pullman and Tony Petrocelli exchanged a glance, and the police chief made a quick decision. “Stay up here with Joan,” he told the deputy. “I’ll go down and take a look.”

“I’m coming with you,” Conroe said. When Pullman hesitated, Conroe pushed harder. “My daughter might be down there, Dan.”

Pullman reluctantly nodded. “Okay. But you do exactly as I say. And you touch nothing.”

A moment later the two men started down the stairs, moving slowly as Pullman searched for signs of blood. Wherever there were reddish smears, he alerted Conroe to avoid them. At the bottom of the stairs the smell of rotting flesh was stronger, overpowering the musty scent of mildew that they would have recognized from their own basements. Pullman paused, then saw an opening in the floor, almost hidden behind the furnace at the far end of the room. Moving closer, he saw the open trapdoor, and the ladder protruding from the three-foot-square hole. There was a large bloodstain on the floor near the ladder, and as Conroe moved toward it, Pullman held out an arm to stop him. “Stay here,” he said, his voice low but carrying a note of authority. “Let me take a look first.”

Reluctantly, Gerry complied, and Pullman stepped forward and gazed down into the dark pit beneath the basement floor.

For a moment he saw nothing, but then, protruding out of the darkness surrounding the shaft of light coming through the trapdoor, he saw a leg. Flicking on his flashlight, he probed with the beam, moving from the leg up to a white shirt.

A white shirt that was soaked with blood.

His stomach knotting, he climbed down the ladder, careful to touch as little of it as possible. At the bottom, he crouched over the crumpled body that was clad in the bloody white shirt and jeans. Though the face was badly slashed and covered with blood, he recognized Becky Adams. He reached out and touched her neck, searching for a pulse.

There was none.

Struggling against the nausea that was threatening to overwhelm him, Pullman turned the light away from Becky Adams, and a moment later was staring into the face of Emily Moore.

Or, more accurately, at what had once been her face. Her skin was torn and bruised, and dried blood was crusted around her mouth and nostrils. Pullman’s pulse quickened when he saw a movement, and then he realized that it wasn’t a movement at all, but a mass of ants that were already feeding off the old woman’s corpse.

He moved the beam again, and saw Kelly Conroe.

She too was lying still, her face bruised and bloodied, but when he reached out to feel for a pulse, she jerked away from his touch.

“No…” she whispered. “Please… no more.”

“Kelly?” Gerry Conroe cried out from above. “Oh, God! Kelly!” A moment later, ignoring Pullman’s orders, he was at the bottom of the ladder, kneeling over his daughter, reaching out to touch her, but hesitating at the last second, as if afraid he might hurt her.

Kelly was silent for a moment, and then, with a soft moan, opened one of her swollen eyes. “Daddy?” she whispered, reaching out to him.

As Conroe gathered his daughter into his arms, he looked up at Dan Pullman, his eyes glittering with rage. “I’ll kill that son of a bitch. I swear, I’ll kill him for what he did!”

Kelly’s hand closed on her father’s in a weak squeeze. “No!” she whimpered. “N-not Matt! His mother! It was his mother… ” Then, the realization that she was finally safe sinking in, she began to sob quietly.

As Gerry Conroe tried to soothe his daughter, stroking her hair and cradling her as if she were a baby, Dan Pullman used his radio to issue orders. “We’ve got a real mess out here,” he said after telling the dispatcher to get a second ambulance out to Hapgood Farm. “Make sure someone gets on the gate right away — the last thing we need is a bunch of rubberneckers up here.” Putting the radio back in its holster, his gaze shifted to Gerry Conroe. “What was that all about up there?” he asked. “When we were with Joan.”

Conroe’s eyes stayed on his daughter. “It was her clothes — her hair — everything,” he replied softly, his glance flicking toward Pullman before returning to his daughter’s bloodstained face. “When I first saw her in the light, I thought I was looking at her sister. I mean, I could swear that dress was Cynthia’s, and the way she’s got her hair and her makeup…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “I just don’t know,” he finished. “It was almost like seeing a ghost.”

Pullman was silent for a few seconds, then rose to his feet. “Will you be okay if I leave you alone down here?”

Conroe nodded, and a moment later the police chief climbed back up out of the root cellar.