Roper hesitated. Nobody down there either, he thought. Nobody in the house after all? The feeling that he wasn’t alone kept nagging at him — but it could be nothing more than imagination. All that business about devil worshiping and ghosts and demons and Garber being murdered and psychotic killers on the loose might have affected him more than he’d figured. Might have jumbled together in his subconscious all week and finally come out tonight, making him imagine menace where there wasn’t any. Sure, maybe that was it.
But he had to make certain. He couldn’t see all of the cellar from up here; he had to go down and give it a full search before he’d be satisfied that he really was alone. Otherwise he’d never be able to get back to sleep tonight.
Playing the light again, he descended the stairs in the same wary movements as before. The beam showed him nothing. Except for the faint whisper of his breathing, the creak of the risers when he put his weight on them, the stillness remained unbroken. The odors of dust and decaying wood and subterranean dampness dilated his nostrils; he began to breathe through his mouth.
When he came off the last of the steps he took a half-dozen strides into the middle of the cellar. The stones were cold and clammy against the soles of his bare feet. He turned to his right, then let the beam and his body transcribe a slow circle until he was facing the stairs.
Nothing to see, nothing to hear.
But with the light on the staircase, he realized that part of the wide, dusty area beneath them was invisible from where he stood — a mass of clotted shadow. The vertical boards between the risers kept the beam from reaching all the way under there.
The phrase from when he was a kid repeated itself in his mind: Peekaboo, I see you. Hiding under the stair.
With the gun and the flash extended at arm’s length, he went diagonally to his right. The light cut away some of the thick gloom under the staircase, letting him see naked stone draped with more gray webs. He moved closer to the stairs, ducked under them, and put the beam full on the far joining of the walls.
Empty.
For the first time Roper began to relax. Imagination, no doubt about it now. No ghosts or demons, no burglars or lunatics hiding under the stair. A thin smile curved the corners of his mouth. Hell, the only one hiding under the stair was himself—
“Peekaboo,” a voice behind him said.
Two Weeks Every Summer
We found out how Webb Patterson spends his summer vacations when five of us regulars were jawing around the card table in the Cedarville firehouse one Saturday afternoon in early June.
We weren’t firemen, at least not in the sense that we were on the town payroll. Cedarville was still too small to need or afford full-time civil employees, so resident volunteers had to supplement the services provided by the county. There were ten volunteer firemen and some of us always got together on Saturdays, mostly to play pinochle or just exercise our jaw muscles; there isn’t much else to do in a small town on the weekends. Unless you’ve got a family, of course, but except for Ernie Boone, whose wife had a voice like a train whistle and a nosy-Parker for a mother, all of us regulars were either bachelors or widowers with grown kids.
This particular Saturday was a fine late-spring day, not too hot, not too breezy, with the scent of wildflowers and the first dusty hint of summer in the air. We had the main double doors open wide, and all the windows raised, so we could breathe that air and watch the townspeople passing by in the sunshine outside. We weren’t doing much except talking; it was too nice a day to concentrate on card-playing.
The conversation got around to vacations when Aaron Cubbage, who owns the drugstore, said something about weather like this making him itch for a fishing pole and a spot under one of the oaks at Lake Keystone. He went up to the lake for a couple of weeks every summer with a crony of his from the county seat and spent the whole time fishing for blue gills and drinking wine coolers; he’d been doing that for thirty years and he’d keep on doing it until he died.
The rest of us varied our vacations, though. Ernie Boone said he and the missus planned to close up their hardware store on the Fourth of July and take a trip through the Ozark Mountains. If his mother-in-law insisted on going along, he said, he’d keep driving until he found somebody to trade her to for a jug of mountain dew — which got a pretty good laugh. Doc Pollard, Cedarville’s only dentist, said he was thinking about taking one of those nostalgic paddlewheel steamboat trips down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. I said that if the town could get along without the Holloway Floral and Gardening Service for three weeks, I was going to pack up my camper and drive over and up into Colorado. I’d never seen the Sangre de Cristo range, or any other part of that state, and I like to visit new places every year.
Webb Patterson, who doubled as Cedarville’s lawyer and notary public, was the only one who didn’t volunteer any information about his vacation plans. Not that his reticence was surprising; Webb had been a quiet and sort of private fellow for as long as I’d known him, which was since he’d moved to Cedarville from downstate four years ago. Not secretive, just private. Like the rest of us, he seemed pretty much content with the kind of quiet small-town life he led; but unlike the rest of us, he never talked about getting away for a while in the summer, seeing other parts of the state or country. Yet he always left town for two weeks in July or August, and he’d admitted to a visit to Mexico last year.
It was Doc Pollard who asked him straight out what he was planning to do this summer. At first Webb didn’t answer. But the rest of us were looking at him, waiting, and finally he said in a reluctant voice, “I’m going to New York.”
“New York City, you mean?” Doc asked.
“Yes.”
“Never had any urge to go to New York myself,” Aaron said. “I don’t like big cities — too much noise and hubbub. And too much crime. Why, I heard they mug you right on the downtown streets in Manhattan.”
Webb smiled at that, a funny sort of smile. “I’m sure that’s an exaggeration.”
“Maybe so, but I’ll take my vacation at Lake Keystone, thank you.”
I said, “You going to stay in New York the whole two weeks, Webb?”
“Yes, probably.”
“What’s there to do all that time? I mean, you can visit the Empire State Building and the United Nations and take in all the other sights in three or four days — a week at the most.”
“There are other things I plan to do.”
“Mind saying what they are?”
He hesitated. “Well... walking in Central Park, for one.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of an interesting vacation,” Ernie said, “walking around Central Park all day.”
Webb hesitated again, longer this time. Then in an impulsive way, as if he had something inside him that needed to come out, he said, “Not all day, Ernie.”
“Well, part of it, then.”
“Not during the day at all. At night.”
Ernie looked startled. “At night? Hey, you’re not serious, are you? Central Park’s supposed to be full of muggers at night.”
“I’m sure it is,” Webb said. “That’s the idea.”
“What idea?”
“The danger. Danger’s the whole purpose of my vacation.”
We were all staring at him — and in a different way now, like maybe we didn’t know him as well as we thought we did. He was dead-serious, you could see that; he wasn’t trying to pull our legs.
“Now wait a minute,” I said. “You mean you’re fixing to walk around Central Park at night hoping you’ll meet up with a mugger?”