They’d left the electricity on.
He didn’t know why that seemed important to him, but it did.
The next room was much larger, with a king-sized bed covered with candlewick as blindingly white as the spread in his folks’ room had been before his mother died. The sight of it brought on the shivers and low-grade nausea he’d felt in the master bedroom in Sawyerville and he had to force himself to go in and search. He found a bottle of aspirin in an old-fashioned tin medicine cabinet, more hangers, and a lone, lint-covered man’s sock in the back of a bureau drawer.
The next room was neutral, a den with built-in book shelves, with a few tattered copies of Reader’s Digest condensed novels, an ancient cribbage board, and a phone and phone book.
He opened the phone book and ran his finger down the K’s without much hope. No Klein, S. or otherwise, and he put the book back and went out into the hall.
It was a small house. There was nothing left to look at except a room behind a swinging door with a brass handplate that must be the kitchen. He pushed open the door to an old-fashioned room as spare and spotless as the O.R.s at Glenvale General. The counters and sink, cabinets and walls were white; the floor was green-streaked white linoleum and there was a white porcelain table with rust-colored nicks around the edge, one of those solid old tables that had probably been there for a half a century. Across the room was a black rotary-dial wall phone with a pad under it. The pad looked blank from here, but if he ran a pencil lightly across it the way they did in spy movies, her last message might appear with a better clue than the receipt. It was a long shot, but worth trying. He started to enter the kitchen and couldn’t get his foot to cross the threshold.
He couldn’t believe that had happened and he tried again by sliding his foot up the doorsill to the middle, and there it froze solid no matter how hard he tried to push it across.
He tried again, then again, but some connection between his brain and lower limbs seemed to have snapped, and he couldn’t perform the simple task of getting his foot to cross the threshold of the nice, old-fashioned kitchen.
It was absurd. There was nothing more automatic than putting one foot in front of the other except for breathing and blinking. You could always do it, unless you’d had some central-nervous-system injury.
He took another tack and raised one foot straight up in the air like a stork, then tried to swing it over the sill. It got halfway and stopped as if an invisible wall or forcefield filled the doorway. He tried the other foot with the same result. Then he decided to jump across.
He tensed, his muscles tightened the way they should, but his body wouldn’t move.
He was covered with sweat by now; it ran down his face and back, his shirt clung to him, the Python he’d meant to use on her felt like a block of wet ice in his belt. He slackened his body, trying to fool whatever it was into thinking he’d given up, then he tensed quickly to jump and couldn’t.
He sagged against the door jamb and looked at the room, trying to see what about it was doing this to him. He saw plain cabinets with glass knobs, old drawers with painted cup-pulls, then his eyes came to the sturdy porcelain table and his mother’s voice chanted, “Dirty, dirty, dirty.”
That was madder than not being able to enter the room. His mother had been dead over thirty years, he wasn’t hearing her voice... but he was. It was slow, sly, insinuating, in the sing-song rhythm of ire know where you’re going like a nasty kid. It came at him, closed around him, and he backed out of the doorway, then looked up and saw a largeish, lumpy mass in the ceiling covered with layers of white enamel. It had been painted over so many times the details were lost, but he knew it was a pulley, and what felt like a solid wall of burning vomit filled his throat.
He was going to puke all over the clean waxed floor, and the thought horrified him.
Horrified him!
He’d sliced open five women and shot Bunny in the face with equanimity’, and throwing up on a clean floor horrified him! He’d have laughed until he cried if he weren’t so sick.
He clapped his hand over his mouth to keep it back and looked wildly around. He’d never make it to one of the bathrooms, racing across the kitchen to the sink was obviously out of the question, and he ran for the front door.
He tore it open, lunged across the porch, and hung over the rail, vomiting wildly until his middle felt as if it had collapsed against his spine and nothing came up but long strands of clear bile. The door was open behind him and the ghost of her voice came down the hall and out into the damp, cold air. “Dirty, dirty, dirty.”
Adam huddled against the porch railing with the Colt digging into his side and his mouth sour and slimy. At least he’d done it on the grass and a good rain would get rid of it.
He pulled the Colt out of his belt and laid it on the porch floor, then looked back through the open door at the hall to the kitchen.
“What happened?” he mumbled. “What the fuck happened?”
You know, Sport, Bunner would say, It’s down there... dig for it.
He did.
“Dirty, dirty, dirty,” his mother had chanted, so something had been dirty, obviously the kitchen. They’d arrived here that long-ago summer and found a dirty kitchen, worst kind of dirt too, grease from food she’d never cooked, old food she’d never bought moldering in a filthy refrigerator. No cleaning crews in those days, she’d had to do it herself, and she’d been furious and screamed at him and...
Horseshit.
That kitchen could have been filthier than an outhouse in Calcutta with the floor and walls covered with inches of grease with hair thick as a pelt stuck in it. She could’ve screamed and ranted, crowned him with a frying pan, and it still didn’t explain the sick mindless dread that had attacked him like a rabid wolf.
Something else had happened in that room, something seminal.
Good word... seminal... spectacular word, like genesis... in the beginning.
In the beginning was the kitchen, the porcelain table, the pulley, and most of all, the scars. They were the key piece in a jigsaw he’d been trying to put together ever since he could remember and that was ever since his mother died, because everything before that night when the troopers came...
“Mr. Fuller, I think you better sit down,” said the big blond one with white lashes and eyes like washed sapphires.
They’d all sat, except Adam. He didn’t remember not sitting because his sentient life began when the big blond said, “She is dead, sir. I’m sorry... that intersection out on six by the dairy... should be a stoplight there. Guess there will be after this. Mr. Fuller, I think you better sit down.”
And Adam came to like Snow White coughing up the chunk of poisoned apple and found himself at the living room window looking out on Barracks Lane at the troopers’ cruiser. It was lit up like a spaceship on wheels with radio static coming out in bursts. It was a spectacular sight and he hoped Tommy Van Damm across the street could see it parked in front of his house.
“It was instantaneous,” the trooper was saying over Mike’s sobbing. “She didn’t know what hit her.”
Everything before that night was a soft, gray, impenetrable haze. He had come to at the word, dead, at the age of nine, with a belly full of scars he didn’t know how he’d gotten and emotions that ran the gamut from fear to fear. Until he’d looked up at that pulley and felt sheer, devouring, murderous horror. So the pulley was one more piece he couldn’t fit... but she could.