But she rejected the cautious course. While it would be safer for her and Harry, it could be riskier for everyone else in downtown Laguna Beach. The attic might not be a dead end. A service door to the roof would give the creep a way out.
Evidently Harry had the same thought. He hesitated a fraction of a second less than she did, and started up the ladder first.
She didn’t object to his leading the way because he was not acting out of some misguided protective urge, not trying to spare the lady cop from danger. She’d come through the previous doorway first, so he led this time. They intuitively shared the risk, which was one thing that made them a good team in spite of their differences.
Of course, though her heart was pounding and her gut was clenched, she would have preferred to go first. Crossing a solid bridge was never as satisfying as walking on a high wire.
She followed him up the ladder, and he hesitated at the top only briefly before disappearing into the gloom above. No shot rang out, no explosion shook the building, so Connie went into the attic, too.
Harry had moved out of the gray light that came up through the trap. He crouched a few feet away, beside a naked dead woman.
On second glance, it proved to be a mannequin with permanently staring, dust-coated eyes and an eerily serene smile. She was bald, and her plaster skull was marred by a water stain.
The attic was dark but not impenetrable. Pale daylight sifted through a series of screened ventilation cut-outs in the eaves and through larger vane-capped vents in the end walls, revealing cobweb-festooned rafters under a peaked roof. The center offered enough headroom for even a tall man to stand erect, though nearer the wide walls it was necessary to crouch. Shadows loomed everywhere, while piles of storage trunks and crates offered numerous hiding places.
A congregation seemed to have gathered in that high place to conduct a secret Satanic ceremony. Throughout the long, wide chamber were the partial silhouettes of men and women, sometimes lit from the side, sometimes backlit, more often barely visible, standing or leaning or lying, all silent and motionless.
They were mannequins similar to the one on the floor beside Harry Nevertheless, Connie felt their stares, and her skin grew pebbly with gooseflesh.
One of them actually might be able to see her, one who was made not of plaster but of blood, flesh, and bone.
6
Time seemed suspended in the high redoubt of the mannequins. The humid air was tainted with dust, the crisp aroma of age-yellowed newspapers, moldering cardboard, and pungent mildew that had sprung up in some dark corner and would perish with the end of the rainy season. The plaster figures watched, breathless.
Harry tried to remember what businesses shared the building with the restaurant, but he couldn’t recall to whom the mannequins might belong.
From the east end of the long chamber came a frantic hammering, metal on metal. The perp must be pounding on the larger vent in the end wall, trying to break out, willing to risk a drop to the alley, serviceway, or street below.
Half a dozen frightened bats erupted from their roosts and swooped back and forth through the long garret, seeking safety but reluctant to trade the gloom for bright daylight. Their small voices were shrill enough to be heard over the rising shriek of the sirens. When they passed close enough, the leathery flap of their wings and an air-cutting whoosh made Harry flinch.
He wanted to wait for backup.
The perp hammered harder than before.
Metal screeched as if giving way.
They couldn’t wait, didn’t dare.
Remaining in a crouch, Harry crept between piles of boxes toward the south wall, and Connie slipped away in the opposite direction. They would take the perp in a pincer move. When Harry went as far to the south side of the room as the sloping ceiling allowed, he turned toward the east end, where the heavy hammering originated.
On all sides, mannequins struck eternal poses. Their smooth, round limbs seemed to absorb and amplify the meager light that passed through the narrow vents in the eaves; where not clothed by shadows, their hard flesh had a supernatural alabaster glow.
The hammering stopped. No clang or pop or final wrenching noise indicated that the vent had been knocked loose.
Harry halted, waited. He could hear only the sirens a block away and the squealing of the bats when they swooped near.
He inched forward. Twenty feet ahead, at the terminus of the musty passageway, dim ash-gray light issued from an unseen source to the left. Probably the big vent on which the perp had been hammering. Which meant it was still firmly in place. If the vent had been knocked out of its frame, daylight would have flooded that end of the attic.
One by one, the sirens expired down in the street. Six of them.
As Harry crept forward, he saw a pile of severed limbs in one of the shadowy niches in the eaves between two rafters, spectrally illuminated. He flinched and almost cried out. Arms cut off at the elbows. Hands amputated at the wrists. Fingers spread as if reaching for help, pleading, seeking. Even as he gasped in shock, he realized the macabre collection was only a heap of mannequin parts.
He proceeded in a duckwalk, less than ten feet from the end of the narrow passageway, acutely aware of the soft but betraying scrape of his shoes on the dusty floorboards. Like the sirens, the agitated bats had fallen silent. A few shouts and the crackling transmissions of police-band radios rose from the street outside, but those sounds were distant and unreal, as if they were the voices in a nightmare from which he was just waking or into which he was slipping. Harry paused every couple of feet, listening for whatever revealing noises the perp might be making, but the guy was ghost-quiet.
When he reached the end of the aisle, about five feet from the east wall of the attic, he stopped again. The vent on which the perp had been hammering must be just around the last stack of boxes.
Harry held his breath and listened for the breathing of his prey. Nothing.
He eased forward, looked around the boxes, past the end of the passageway into the clear area in front of the east wall. The perp was gone.
He had not left by the yard-square attic vent. It was damaged but still in place, emitting a vague draft and thin, uneven lines of daylight that striped the floor where the perp’s footprints marred the carpet of dust.
Movement at the north end of the attic caught Harry’s attention, and his trigger finger tensed. Connie peered around the corner of the boxes piled on that side of the garret.
Across the wide gap, they stared at each other.
The perp had circled behind them.
Though Connie was mostly in shadows, Harry knew her well enough to be certain of what she was mouthing silently: shit, shit, shit.
She came out of the northern eaves and crept across the open space at the east end, moving toward Harry. She peered warily into the mouths of other aisles between rows of boxes and mannequins.
Harry started toward her, squinting into the gloomy aisles on his side. The garret was so wide, so packed with goods, that it was a maze. And it harbored a monster to rival any in mythology.
From elsewhere in the high room came the now-familiar voice: “All Shook Up, I Feel So Bad, Steamroller Blues!”
Harry squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe in the kingdom of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” with its twelve gorgeous young heirs to the throne, subterranean castles of light, trees with leaves of gold, others with leaves of diamonds, enchanted ballrooms filled with beautiful music…. Yeah, that would be all right. It was one of the Grimm Brothers’ gentler tales. Nobody in it got eaten alive or hacked to death by a troll.