'Yes. This is her room.'
'Not any more.'
'Did you know her? You one of her friends? Classmates?'
'Don't think so. They told me some woman from the last class left for a condition. Medical purposes, whatever.'
'Medical purposes? What the fuck does that mean?
'I don't know.'
'She's gone? She left training?'
'Look, I didn't get a name. I just started the new round of classes. And I have to be up in three hours, so good luck, ace.'
The phone sounded like the guy was trying to bury it under the mattress.
'Wait!' Conrad said.
'Yeah?'
'You see her leave? She leave anything behind? Come on, I'm her husband. Help me out here.'
'They just said this woman had to leave training early. It happens. '
'Who said that? What's this medical shit?'
'Davidson, the training instructor. There's a few of them, so I don't know if she was in the same group. Hey, it could have been a rumor. I don't know. I asked if she got fired or couldn't take the pressure or what. They said no, she had a medical thing. Hey, you think they were just saying that? You get that with a lot of these sales things. Fucking corporate. I really don't wanna do eight weeks if the program is shit. I'm here to make money, you know what I'm saying.'
It wasn't really a question, and Conrad wasn't really paying attention. He was too busy imagining bad things. Jo in a hospital somewhere, for Christ knows what. Or she's on her way home. Or already here. Watching.
'Fuck. Oh, fuck.'
'Hey, take it easy, bro. You want me to call someone, have the company get in touch with you?'
'Yeah, you think?' Conrad hung up.
He dialed her cell. Her voice crisp and professional, asking him to leave a message.
'Jo? Sweetie? It's me. Where are you? I'm sorry I yelled. Why won't you pick up? Some guy answered in your room. Please, please call me as soon as you get this. I'll keep trying. Why haven't you called me back? I love you.'
He clicked off and lunged out of his chair to check the windows--
He never made it.
Before he had taken two steps, he noticed that the door to the basement was ajar, a faint glow emanating from below. He knew damn well he had closed the door and turned off the overhead shop lights after finding Luther down there.
'Conrad!' Nadia said, startling him from upstairs. 'Who are you talking to?'
'No one. Stay there. I'll be right up!'
He grabbed a flashlight from the junk drawer and tromped down the stairs. By the time he remembered this was the sort of expedition you'd want to take with two dogs by your side, it was too late.
In the basement he found what he was looking for all along.
The air was moist with the scents of lime and mold. The basement was something between a crawlspace and a real basement. And yet there were signs the space had not been written off as uninhabitable. If one used one's imagination, as Conrad did now, wagging the flashlight around, one could see where a man (doctor) with a load of guests (patients) might find the cooler, peaceful depths of the house suitable for short periods of recuperation (torture).
It might have been a place to heal.
Or a temporary morgue.
The non-perimeter walls were covered with cheap walnut paneling, most of it bulging with moisture and splitting at the seams. The carpet was newer, but the cement beneath it might have been easier to clean, to disinfect. And what of this, the trough-like groove in the cement floor running out of the south-east room into the center drain? Was that routine flood protection, a gutter for water from a burst pipe or heavy rain? Or was it something else? Like, say, a place to wash the really bad ones down?
Conrad pulled the chain on the bulb hanging in the basement's main 'room', and turned three hundred and sixty-five degrees, wiping cobwebs real and imagined from his face as he went.
He tried the shop first. This room had the newer electrics and a wall switch and the fluorescent bulbs were on. He felt better having the extra light behind him while he worked up the courage to check the last room, the place where he'd found Luther sliced up and cowering. The shop was empty.
He aimed the flashlight at the boiler room, swinging it in wide arcs over the stone walls and the sloping dirt mound under his front porch. The flashlight's beam narrowed with each step, leaving more darkness in its wake. One of those dull whumping boiler noises would have been enough to send him running in a blind panic, but all was quiet.
Had the dog been interested in this spot on the floor, or the wall? Enough to cut himself to ribbons trying to get in? Conrad looked for blood or teeth marks - anything that would confirm a dog's persistent interest. The image of Luther gnashing his teeth on solid rock conjured the same kind of eerie screech you hear when the class asshole rakes his fingernails across the chalkboard, and Conrad cringed, stepping away.
The thought wasn't out of his head for two seconds when he heard another sound, equally electrifying.
'Aaayyy-ay-ay-aaaaack!' Just as before, the baby's cry wormed its way into his head and fried his nerves. It paused, hitching in fits and starts, and then rose again in that same choking, raspy cry. The shop lights went out, leaving him with only the flashlight to illuminate his way.
Oh Baby, oh Baby, what the fuck is happening in this place?
It was an awful sound, but something in the urgency took hold of him and this time he heard it for what it had been all along - a cry for help.
'Okay, okay, it's okay,' he babbled, moving out of the corner. 'You want help? Okay, are you hungry? Are you hurt?'
His hand shot out and flipped the switch. The lights flickered once and fell dark. In this half-second that lit the room like a distant lightning flash and left retinal echoes even as the room was plunged back into pitch-blackness, he saw a shape darting from the corner of his eye. He tried to track its movement, but it was gone. Two steps later his kneecap rammed into one of the workbench's legs and he bit down on his lip to keep from shouting.
The anger came back with the pain and he brought the flashlight up quickly. But now the infant's wail had been muted, perhaps by his clumsy and clattering response. His breath became ragged, the beam moving in erratic swaths before it slowed and fell at last on the swaddled bundle resting on the workbench. A tremor ran the length of the beam even as it shrank, the diameter of its spotlight closing down until it was shining from less than eighteen inches above this tiny package. He held the beam still and everything under its cone became the world.
He was aware that something larger than his own fear was at work here, and that he was powerless to stop himself, forced to watch the rest happen as if to someone else.
Under the beam a dirty hand appeared and patted the soft fabric grayed with the indifferent passage of time. The beam swept from one end to the other until it found an opening and the dirty hand peeled back the layers with the grace of a florist stripping petals from a dried rose. With nothing left to stop its progress, the beam shone deeper, revealing the face of a doll burnished and painted with all the color and detail of a proud toy-maker whose principal calling is to animate what can never be. All the maker's love was evident in the way the thin strands of hair had been combed and made glossy over the tiny painted brows and suggestion of a nose. The beam stilled over this creation and for a lingering moment the illusion achieved its goal; its beholder regarded the doll with some reluctant swell of his heart and returned the smile. And then his heart broke. The only hope for a lasting art vanished as all life's likeness fell away, revealing black holes where once were eyes, tiny blackened nubs of teeth, and the decaying, bird-like ribs, spine and pelvis of a newborn.