John staggered forward, and I almost fell on my backside. He dropped the rod, yanked the broken lock away from the clip and set it on the concrete beside the jack handle. "What are you waiting for?" he said.
I pushed the door aside and walked into the Green Woman Taproom.
4
We stood in a nearly empty room about ten feet square. On the far wall, a staircase with a handrail led up to the room above. A brown plastic davenport with a slashed seat cover stood against the far wall, and a desk faced out from the wall to my left. A tattered green carpet covered the floor. Another door faced us from the far wall. John closed the door, and most of the light in the old office disappeared.
"Was this where you saw Writzmann taking stuff out of his car?" John asked me.
"His car was pulled up alongside the place, and the front door was open."
Something rustled overhead, and both of us looked up at the pockmarked ceiling tiles.
"You want to look in front, and I'll check up there?" I nodded, and Ransom moved toward the stairs. Then he stopped and turned around. I knew what was on his mind. I tugged the Colt out of my waistband and passed it to him, handle first.
He carried the pistol toward the staircase. When he set his foot on the first tread, he waved me into the next rooms, and I went across the empty office and opened the door to the intermediate section of the building.
A long wooden counter took up the middle of the room. Battered tin sinks and a ridged metal counter took up the far wall. Once, cabinets had been attached to thick wooden posts on the rough plaster walls. Broken pipes jutting up from the floor had fed gas to the ovens. A beam of buttery light pooled on the far wall. Upstairs, Ransom opened a creaking door.
An open hatch led into the barroom. Thick wads of dust separated around my feet.
I stood in the hatch and looked around at the old barroom. The tinted window across the room darkened the day to an overcast afternoon in November. Directly before me was the curved end of the long bar, With a wide opening below a hinge so the bartender could swing up a section of the wood. Tall, ornate taps ending in the heads of animals and birds stood along the bar.
Empty booths incongruously like seventeenth-century pews lined the wall to my right. A thick mat of dust covered the floor. As distinct as tracks in snow, a double set of footprints led up to and away from a three-foot-square section of the floor near the booths. I stepped through the hatch. When I looked down, I saw tiny, long-toed prints in the dust.
The sense came to me of having faced precisely this emptiness at some earlier stage of my life. I took another step forward, and the feeling intensified, as if time were breaking apart around me. Some dim music, music I had once known well but could no longer place, sounded faintly in my head.
A chill passed through my entire body. Then I saw that someone else was in the empty room, and I went stiff with terror. A child stood before me on the dusty floor, looking at me with a terrible, speaking urgency. Water rushed beneath Livermore Avenue's doomed elms and coursed over dying men screaming in the midst of dead men dismembered in a stinking green wilderness. I had seen him once before, long ago. And then it seemed to me that another boy, another child, stood behind him, and that if this child should reach out for me, I myself would instantly be one of the dismembered dead.
The Paradise Garden, the Kingdom of Heaven.
I took another step forward, and the child was gone.
Another step took me closer to the window. Two square outlines had been stamped into the cushion of felt near the window. Brown pellets like raisins lay strewn over the streaky floor.
Heavy footsteps came through the old kitchen. Ransom said, "Something chewed a hole the size of Nebraska in the wall up there. Find the boxes?"
"They're gone," I said. I felt light-headed. "Shit." He came up beside me. "Well, that's where they were, all right." He sighed. "The rats went to work on those boxes—maybe that's why Writzmann moved them."
"Maybe—" I didn't finish the sentence, and it sounded as if I were agreeing with him. I didn't want to say that the boxes might have been moved because of his wife.
"What's over here?" John followed the double trail of footprints to the place where they reversed themselves. The pistol dangled from his hand. He bent down and grunted at whatever he saw.
I came up behind him. At the end of a section of boards, a brass ring fit snugly into a disc.
"Trap door. Maybe there's something in the basement." He bent down and tugged at the ring. The entire three-foot section of floor folded up on a concealed hinge, revealing the top of a wooden ladder that descended straight down into darkness. I smelled blood, shook my head, and smelled only must and earth.
I had already lived through this moment, too. Nothing on earth could get me to go into that basement.
"Okay, it doesn't seem likely," John said, "but isn't it worth a look?"
"Nothing's down there but…" I could not have said what might be down there.
My tone of voice caught his attention, and he looked at me more closely. "Are you all right?"
I said I was fine. He pointed the revolver down into the darkness underneath the tavern. "You have a lighter, or matches, or anything?"
I shook my head.
He clicked off the safety on the revolver, bent over and put a foot on the second rung. With one hand flat on the floor, he got his other foot on the first rung, and then almost toppled into the basement. He let go of the pistol and used both hands to steady himself as he took another couple of steps down the ladder. When his shoulders were more or less at the level of the opening, he snatched up the pistol, glared at me, and went the rest of the way down the ladder. I heard him swear as he bumped against something at the bottom.
The ripe odor of blood swarmed out at me again. I asked him if he saw anything.
"To hell with you," he said.
I looked at his thinning hair swept backward over pink, vulnerable-looking scalp. Below that his right hand ineffectually held out the pistol at the level of his spreading belly. Beside one of his feet was a bar stool with a green plastic seat. He had stepped on it when he came down off the ladder. "Way over at the side are a couple of windows. There's an old coal chute and a bunch of other shit. Hold on." He moved away from the opening.
I bent over, put my hand on the floor, and sat down and swung my legs into the abyss.
John's voice reached me from a hundred miles away. "They kept the boxes down here for a while, anyway. I can see some kind of crap…" He kicked something that made a hollow, gonging sound, like a barrel. Then: "Tim."
I did not want to put my feet on the rungs of the ladder. My feet put themselves on the ladder. I swung the rest of myself around and let them lead me down.
"Get the hell down here."
As soon as my head passed beneath the level of the floor, I smelled blood again.
My foot came down on the same bar stool over which Ransom had almost fallen, and I kicked it aside before I stepped down onto the packed earth. John was standing with his back to me about thirty feet away in the darkest part of the basement. The dusty oblong of a window at the side let in a beam of light that fell onto the old coal chute. Beside it, a big wooden keg lay beached on its side. A few feet away was a mess of shredded cardboard and crumpled papers. Half of the distance between myself and John, a druidical ring of bricks marked the site where the tavern's furnace had stood. The smell of blood was much stronger.