Aunt Polly, Grandma Phibbs and my great-uncle Charlie. They were all healthy as far as I knew. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I picked up the telephone and heard Rankin's voice.
He spoke rapidly and a raw note of fear was in his voice. "Get out here, right now! We need – "
There were sounds of a scuffle, a muffled scream, then a click and the empty dial tone.
I hung, up and hurried back for Vicki. "Come on," I said.
20
She followed without questioning me. At first I wanted to drive her back to the motel but the muffled scream made me decide that this was an emergency. I didn't like either Rankin or Weinbaum, but I knew I would have to help them.
We took off.
"What is it?" Vicki asked anxiously as I stamped on the go-pedal and let the car unwind.
"Look," I said, "something tells me that you've got your secrets about your guardian. I've got some of my own. Please, don't ask."
She didn't say another word.
I took possession of the passing lane. The speedometer climbed from seventy-five to eighty-five, kept rising and trembled on the verge of ninety. I pulled into the turnoff on two wheels and the car bounced, clung and exploded up the road. Grim and gaunt against the overcast sky, I could see the house. I pulled the car to a stop and was out in a second.
"Wait here," I cried over my shoulder to Vicki. There was a light on in the laboratory and I flung the door open. It was empty but ransacked.
The place was a mess of broken test tubes, smashed apparatus, and, yes, bloodstains that trailed through the half-open door that led to the darkened garage. Then I noticed the green liquid that was flowing over the floor in sticky rivulets. For the first time I noticed that one of the several sheeted tanks had been broken. I walked over to the other three.
The lights inside them were off and the sheets that draped them let by no hint of what might have been under them – or, for that matter, what was still under them. I had no time to see. I didn't like the looks of blood, still fresh and uncoagulated, that led out of the front door into the garage. I swung open the door and entered the garage. It was dark and I didn't know where the light switch was. I cursed myself for not bringing the flashlight that was in the glove compartment. I advanced a few steps and realized that there was a cold draft blowing against my face. I advanced toward it. The light from the lab threw a golden shaft of light along the garage floor, but it was next to nothing in the Stygian blackness of the garage. All my childish fears of the dark returned. Once again I entered the realms of terror that only a child can know. I realized that the shadow that leered at me from out of the dark might not be dispelled by bright light.
Suddenly, my right foot went down. I realized that the draft was coming from a stairway I had almost fallen down. For a moment I debated, then turned and hurried back through the lab and out to the car.
21
Chapter Six
Vicki pounced on me as soon as I opened the door. "Danny, what are you doing here?"
Her tone of voice made me look at her. In the sickly yellow glow of the light her face was terrified.
"I'm working here," I said shortly.
' At first I didn't realize where we were," she said softly. “I was only here once before.”
"You've been here?" I exclaimed. "When? Why?"
"One night," she said quietly "I brought Uncle David his lunch. He forgot it."
The name rang a bell. She saw me grasping for it. "My guardian," she said. "Perhaps I'd better tell you the whole story. Probably, you know that people don't get appointed guardians when they drink. Well, Uncle David didn't always do those things. When my mother and father were killed in a train-wreck four years ago, my Uncle David was the kindest person you could imagine. The court appointed him my guardian until I came of age, with my complete support."
For a moment she was quiet, living in memories and the expression that flitted rapidly through her eyes was not pretty. Then she went on.
"Two years ago the company he was working for as a night watchman folded up and my uncle was out of a job. He was out of work for almost half a year. We were getting desperate, with only unemployment checks to feed us and college looming up for me. Then he got a job. It was a good paying one and it brought in fabulous sums. I used to joke with him about the banks he robbed. One night he looked at me and said,
'Not banks.'"
I felt fear and guilt tap me on the shoulder with cold fingers. Vicki went on.
"He started to get mean. He started bringing home whiskey and getting drunk. The times I asked him about his job he evaded me. One night he told me point-blank to mind my own business.
"I watched him decay before my very eyes. Then one night he let a name slip – Weinbaum, Steffen Weinbaum. A couple of weeks later he forgot his midnight lunch. I looked up the name in the telephone book and took it out to him. He flew into the most terrible rage I have ever seen.
"In the weeks that followed he was away more and more at this terrible house. One night, when he came home he beat me. I decided to run away. To me, the Uncle David I knew was dead. He caught me –
and you came along." She fell silent.
22
I was shaken right down to my boots. I had a very good idea what Vicki's uncle did for a living. The time Rankin had signed me up coincided with the time Vicki's guardian would have been cracking up. I almost drove away then, despite the wild shambles the lab was in, despite the secret stairway, despite the blood trail on the floor. But then a faraway, thin scream reached us. I thumbed the glove compartment button, and reached in, fumbled around and got the flashlight.
Vicki's hand went to my arm "No, Danny. Please, don't. l know that there's something terrible going on here. Drive away from it!"
The scream sounded again, this time fainter, and I made up my mind. I grabbed the flashlight. Vicki saw my intention. "All right, I'm coming with you."
"Uh-uh," I said. "You stay here. I've got a feeling that there's something...loose out there. You stay here."
She unwillingly sat back. I shut the door and ran back to the lab. I didn't pause, but went back into the garage. The flashlight illuminated the dark hole where the wall had slid away to reveal the staircase. My blood pounding thickly in my temples, I ventured down into it. I counted the steps, shining the flashlight at the featureless walls, at the impenetrable darkness below.
"Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three – "
At thirty, the stairway suddenly became a short passage. I started cautiously along it, wishing that I had a revolver, or even a knife to make me feel a little less naked and vulnerable.
Suddenly a scream, terrible and thick with fear soon sounded in the darkness ahead of me. It was the sound of terror, the sound of a man confronted with something out of the deepest pits of horror. I broke into a run. As I ran I realized that the draft was blowing coldly against my face. I reasoned that the tunnel must come out in the outdoors. I stumbled over something. It was Rankin, lying in a pool of his own blood, his eyes staring in glazed horror at the ceiling. The back of his head was bashed in. Ahead of me I heard a pistol shot, a curse, and another scream. I ran on and almost fell on my face as I stumbled over more stairs. I climbed and saw stairs framed vaguely in an opening screened with underbrush above me. I pushed it aside and came upon a startling tableau: a tall figure silhouetted against the sky that could only be Weinbaum, a revolver hanging in his hand, looking down at the shadowed ground. Even the starlight was blotted out as the hanging clouds that had parted briefly, closed together again. He heard me and wheeled quickly, his eyes glazing like red lanterns in the dark.
"Oh, it’s you, Gerad."
"Rankin's dead," I told him.
23