“Ten days after you were born, Karl Dengler met Rosita Orosco on the riverbank. It was the middle of winter. He stabbed her, and then he undressed her body and left her there. Did he rape her body, after he killed her? Or just before he killed her? Then he came into your bedroom, when you were a little boy, and did to you what he had done to her. Night after night.”
“What’s going on?” came Murphy’s distorted, amplified voice.
“Night after night,” Poole repeated. “Tim knew it all in some way—without really knowing anything about what had actually happened, he felt it, he felt everything. Your whole life was about the stuff that Underhill knew just by looking at you.”
“Underhill goes out first,” Koko whispered from behind Poole. A knife slid under Poole’s ear, and the children wailed and begged for life. “First Underhill. Then you. Then Linklater. I’ll come out last.”
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Poole said. His voice was shaking, and he knew that Koko would not answer him—because he did not have to answer. “Underhill is coming out first!” he yelled.
And a second later he heard Murphy’s voice come crackling to him from the other side of the great rushing river. Murphy did not know about the river that surrounded the no-place and cut it off from every human place.
“Send him out,” Murphy called.
Harry Beevers made a noise like a trapped animal, and creaked against his straps.
If Underhill were alive, Poole thought, Dengler was sending him out because he wanted Poole to go on with his excellent story. Maggie Lah was on the other side of the river, and he would never see her again, for on this side of the river was the bleak little island of the dead.
“Go, Underhill,” Poole said. “Get up those stairs.” His voice sounded stranger than ever.
The door opened a crack and an amazed Poole saw Tim Underhill’s back slipping out onto the landing. The door slowly closed behind him. Slow footsteps went up the stairs.
“Hallelujah,” Poole said. “Now who?”
He heard only the creaking and moaning that sounded like the cries of faraway dead children.
“It was whatever happened in the cave, wasn’t it?” he said. “God help Harry Beevers.”
“Send the next man,” crackled Murphy’s voice.
“Who’s next?” Poole asked.
“It’s different in here now,” Conor whispered.
As soon as Conor spoke, Poole felt the truth of what he had said. The sense of prowling movement no longer surrounded him: the cold air seemed very empty. Poole stood in a lightless basement room—there were no faraway children and there was no river. “Let’s go out together,” he said.
“You first,” Conor said. “Right, Dengler?”
Beevers protested with squeals and grunts.
“I’ll be right behind you,” Conor said. “Dengler, we’re going.”
Poole began moving toward the dim outline of the door. It was as if he had to unlock his arms and legs. Every step made the wound in his side screech. He could feel the blood sliding out of his body, and the floor seemed to be covered with blood.
Then Poole knew what had happened—Dengler had slit his own throat. That was why the voices had stopped. Dengler had killed himself, and his corpse was lying on the floor of his little cell in the dark.
“Someone will be down very soon to help you, Harry,” he said. “I’m sorry I ever listened to anything you ever said.”
Creaks and moans.
Poole attained the door. He pulled it toward him and a lesser degree of darkness enveloped him. He stepped out onto the landing. This had seemed like darkness when they had come down the stairs. He looked up toward the hazy nimbus at the top of the stairs and saw two uniformed policemen staring down at him. He thought of poor crazy Dengler, lying dead or dying back inside the room, and of Harry Beevers. He never wanted to see Harry Beevers again.
“We’re coming,” he said, but his voice was feeble, not his.
Michael pulled himself up the stairs. As soon as he was far enough up into the light to be able to see clearly, he looked at his side. He had to force himself to remain standing—an instant later he realized that there had been a deceptive amount of blood. Koko had meant to hurt him seriously, though not to kill him, but his heavy winter coat had lessened the degree of his injury. “Dengler killed himself,” he said.
“Yep,” Conor said behind him.
Poole looked over his shoulder and saw Conor coming up after him. Conor’s eyes were the size of dinner plates. Michael turned back around and kept going up the stairs.
When he reached the top one of the officers asked him if he was all right.
“I’m not too bad, but I’ll need that ambulance too.”
Dalton poked his head into the entry and said, “Help that man out.”
One of the officers put his arm around Poole’s shoulders and assisted him out into the courtyard. It seemed warmer out in the air, and the gritty brick courtyard seemed very beautiful to him. Maggie cried out, and he turned toward the sound, barely taking in Tim’s form slumped into his coat, his head bowed. Maggie and Ellen Woyzak stood in the far corner of the beautiful little courtyard, framed as formally as by a great photographer. Both women were beautiful too—overflowingly beautiful, in their different ways. Poole felt as though his death sentence had been commuted just as the blindfold had been tied around his head. Ellen’s face ignited as Conor came through the door behind him.
“Get him to the ambulance,” Murphy growled, lowering the bullhorn. “Beevers and Dengler are still down there?”
Poole nodded. With a little cry, Maggie jumped forward and threw her arms around his neck. She was speaking very quickly, and he could not make out the words—they seemed barely to be in English—but he did not have to know what she was saying to understand her. He kissed the side of her head.
“What happened?” Maggie asked. “Where’s Dengler?”
“I think he killed himself, I think he’s dead,” he said.
“Get him in the ambulance,” Murphy said. “Put him in the hospital and stay there with him. Ryan, Peebles, get down there and see what’s left of the other two.”
“Harry?” Maggie asked.
Ellen Woyzak had put her arms around Conor, who stood as motionless as a statue.
“Still alive.”
The thick-necked young officer moved up to Poole with an expression of great stupid satisfaction on his face, and began to urge him toward the arch that led out onto Elizabeth Street. Poole glanced at Underhill, who was still slouched against the wall beside the policeman who must have led him away from the tenement. Underhill did not look right, differently from the way Conor did not look right. His hat was pulled down over his forehead, his neck was bent, his collar was turned up.
“Tim?” Poole said.
Underhill moved an inch or two away from the policeman beside him but did not look up at Poole.
He was small, Poole finally saw. He was a little, a pocket-sized Underhill. Of course people did not shrink. A second before he realized what had happened, Poole saw the flash of teeth in an almost unearthly smile hidden in the folds of Underhill’s turned-up collar.
His body froze. He wanted to yell, to scream. The wide black river cut him off, and the dead children wailed.
“Michael?” Maggie asked.
Michael pointed at the figure in Underhill’s hat and coat. “Koko!” he could finally shout. “Right there! He’s wearing—”
In the hand of the grinning man in Underhill’s coat there had materialized a long knife, and while Poole shouted, the man sidled around the policeman beside him, clamped his hand on his arm, and shoved the knife deep into his back.
Poole stopped shouting.