Copyright

Published by

DSP PUBLICATIONS

5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886  USA

http://www.dsppublications.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Boys on the Mountain

© 2015 John Inman.

Cover Art

© 2015 Reese Dante.

http://www.reesedante.com

Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact DSP Publications, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dsppublications.com/.

ISBN: 978-1-63216-795-8

Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-796-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014953888

First Edition May 2015

Printed in the United States of America

This paper meets the requirements of

ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For John B., Michael K., and Marsha D.

For being friends, for staying close,

for making me remember how to love.

Chapter 1

THE DISTURBANCE began with a rattle of curtain hooks tapping the rods on the bedroom window above my head, a sound one might hear during the course of a small earth tremor. But this was no seismic event. My heart would not have leapt into my throat had this been a mere earthquake. I have lived in Southern California for most of my adult life, and nothing the earth might do beneath my feet, short of an eight on the Richter scale, could frighten me any longer.

What this house managed to come up with to frazzle my nerves night after night, however, scared the bejesus out of me.

And I loved it.

The sound above my pillow that jerked me from my sleep was not something I had been expecting. The disturbances did not usually occur so nearby. They were always somewhere in the house but far off. Out of sight and barely within hearing. They were several rooms away or in one of the many walk-in closets, out back in the carriage house or up on the roof. Tonight’s disturbance, coming as it did within inches of my head, had me wide awake and sitting up in bed in less than a second, as stiff as a statue, wildly blinking the sleep from my eyes.

My bedroom was pitch-black and silent but for those clattering curtain hooks above my head. When the drapes were suddenly flung open by invisible hands and moonlight flooded across my bed like a spotlight, I gasped, but still I felt more exhilaration than fear. I may even have allowed a small grin to creep across my face.

When cold, damp flesh touched the side of my neck, however, I flew out from under those blankets like I was shot from a cannon. In my imagination I was out of the house, down the mountainside, and halfway to Los Angeles before my feet hit the floor. It took a moment for me to realize the eerie touch had not come from some sort of slavering, hungry creature fresh from the grave. It came from Rex, my Irish setter, who had just crawled from beneath the covers to see what all the hubbub was about and calmly pressed his damp nose to my neck by way of greeting. He had not intended to stop my heart or send me flying across the room and halfway down the hall before my brain caught up with my imagination. It had not been his intention to give me reason to wonder if I might need to change my boxer shorts.

I could hear Rex following me down the hall, his toenails clicking across the hardwood floor. Now I had done it. He would insist on a potty break, and he would insist I accompany him. I sometimes wondered if maybe Rex was afraid of the dark. At night he would go nowhere inside the house, or out of it, without me trailing along behind him.

When we first moved into this house on a picturesque mountain overlooking San Diego, I thought Rex had taken it into his head to stay at my side for protection. Faithful dog guarding beloved master. That sort of thing. It had taken me a few days to realize this was not quite the case. The protection he was insuring was for him rather than me. Rex was a coward of the first magnitude. I just never realized it until we came here.

I dropped to my knees in the hallway, and Rex walked into my waiting arms like a big red fuzzy car pulling into a garage. If I could have maintained the position, I knew, he would have been content to stand there, wrapped in my arms, until morning.

I pressed my face into his soft neck. “Coward,” I mumbled, my heart still clog dancing.

I reached up to the wall switch beside me and flipped on the hallway light. Rex and I both looked around to assure ourselves that we were alone, and in this dimension, we were. I listened for more noises from the bedroom, but all I could hear was the ticking of an old-school clock that hung on the wall above the flagstone fireplace in the music room. Whatever it was that had woken me and rattled the curtain hooks over my head was gone now, or if not gone, at least silent.

My galloping heart gradually slowed to a canter as I led Rex through the dining room and across the wide living room to the front door, where I grabbed his leash off the doorknob.

We stepped outside, crossed the veranda, and at the broad steps leading down to the driveway, Rex stopped. He would go no farther until his leash was securely snapped to his collar. This was not a matter of training on my part. Rex had picked up the habit on his own, flatly refusing to leave the house without a lifeline between the two of us. We had been separated once. He was not about to let it happen again.

Poor Rex. He really was a most profound coward. The incident with the mountain lion was the beginning of his slide to disgrace. Not that it was a real mountain lion, of course. The house had conjured it up for our amusement. Or at least, I think it had. I hoped it had. The thought of a real mountain lion roaming through the house frightened me much more than the idea of a spectral one.

Spectral, after all, was what I had come here to this mountaintop to experience, not that I truly expected to experience anything more spectral than my own imagination. But the house had surprised me. Surprised the hell out of poor Rex too. Were it not for his inability to dial a phone or leaf through the Yellow Pages, lacking opposable thumbs as he was, or even the most rudimentary of reading skills for that matter, I suspected Rex would have called for a taxi long before this and been back in Los Angeles renting an apartment before the next sunset. I seriously doubted it was his devotion to me that kept him at my side. After all, what other choice did he have? Even the most pampered pets are chained. Whither we goeth, they goeth, whether they like it or not.

His umbilicus firmly in place, Rex tugged me, still clad in boxers and nothing else, down the veranda steps to the drive.

The house was perched high in the stark San Diego Mountains. There was not another structure within three miles of the place and not another inhabited structure within five. Looking at the house now in the moonlight made me recall the first time I had seen it. I knew it was haunted, of course, or purported to be. Everyone said it was. And even though I made my living writing books that scared the hell out of people, or so I hoped, I had about as much faith in the house actually being haunted as I had in my agent giving up his percentage and opting to work on a friend-to-friend basis rather than siphoning off my hard-earned money. Like that’s ever going to happen. And neither, I suspected, would the house turn out to be truly haunted.

In that, happily, I was wrong. Happily for me. Not Rex.

DRIVING UP the long lane that wound around the side of the mountain to the house on the day of my arrival, I had expected the type of house one anticipates when seeking out ghosts. Victorian. Two-story. Towering gables and long, swooping rooflines all cast eerily in shadow, with maybe a hint of thunder and lightning booming and flashing in the background to help set the scene.

The Letters House did not resemble my mental image of a haunted house in any respect. It was not Victorian. It was not two stories, and there wasn’t a gable to be seen. It looked more like an eighteenth-century Mexican hacienda. It sprawled across the side of the mountain, tucked in among the boulders, its plastered arches and balustrades overhung with bougainvillea that brought a riot of color to the otherwise drab and sepia-toned landscape. The air, hot on the summer afternoon of my arrival, was redolent with the cloying scent of sage and desert emptiness. There were no shadows, only a scorching Southern California sun beating down on my head through the sunroof of my Toyota and shimmering off the heat-soft macadam of the driveway.

When I turned off the car, the only sound I heard was Rex, panting in the seat beside me, an insipid grin on his face. No thunder. No lightning. I closed my eyes for a moment, letting the isolation sweep over me, and when I opened them again, I was smiling. Eager as kids, Rex and I sprang from the car and set out to explore our new domain.

I loved the house from the moment I saw it.

That had been a week ago. I had learned a lot in the seven days since. First and foremost, I learned to no longer doubt the house was haunted. It was indeed. And this was a revelation to me. I had spent most of my life writing stories about the supernatural, but deep down I had never truly believed in its existence. This was no longer the case. Stick a translating device down Rex’s throat and listen to him agree with me. He would probably talk for days about the Letters House and the moronic master who dragged him here.

NIGEL LETTERS was a cornball, ham-handed actor in the nineteen twenties and thirties who never advanced beyond the B-horror-movie slot but did, amazingly enough, enjoy a modicum of success in that genre. Don’t ask me how. God knows he was about as talented as a stick of butter and just as slick. He oiled his way across the screen in a string of low-budget schlock fests, usually wearing more makeup than his leading lady and delivering his monotonal lines with all the passion of a near-comatose Kevin Costner, who in my view has never been known to stretch beyond the monotone either.

While I waited for Rex to do his business—and for a dog of very little bravery, he was certainly taking his sweet time about it—I gazed up at the heavens. The night sky seemed so close I felt I could reach up and pluck the stars from it as easily as picking raisins from a scone. Smog did not exist here. Only clear mountain air. And silence. Blessed, blessed silence.

After twenty years as a working writer, Los Angeles was finally wearing me down. Too many people. Too many bars. Too much sickness. I had had my fill of Starbucks’s latte. I was ready to get back to basics. Suddenly, Sanka sounded pretty good.

The silence on this mountain was as alien to me as unprotected sex, which was something else I would like to get back to, but that didn’t seem likely. AIDS is just as prevalent as ever. Of course, the meds are better, so now it takes you longer to die, but die you still do. Not much of a perk.

AIDS aside, I wondered if seventy years ago Nigel Letters might not have felt the same way I did. Why else would he remove himself from the klieg lights and story conferences of Hollywood and build himself a secluded castle way the hell up on the side of this beautiful, stark mountain?

Nigel Letters had died in this house. He died in the very bedroom where I now slept. His death had been just as cornball as any of his movies, the only difference being at the time of his death he was wearing more makeup than usual. He died in high drag, with a red silk scarf wrapped around his throat and tied to a hook on the wall, which slowly choked the breath from his body as he happily masturbated beneath the lovely taffeta evening gown he was wearing at the time. His body was going to fat by then, and his movie career was on the skids. Hollywood had moved beyond schlocky horror movies, and poor Nigel found himself without work.

All he had left was a sizable fortune and his hobbies, the favorite of which was apparently autoerotic asphyxiation, which by all accounts can make for some pretty impressive ejaculations, but precautions need to be taken when practicing it. On the night of his death, Nigel must have been a little careless about the precautions. His housekeeper found him hanging on the wall like a piece of art, pecker still in hand, when she came to deliver his breakfast tray.

Rumor has it the housekeeper laughed so hard upon discovering the body that she dropped the breakfast tray and broke two toes on her left foot when the coffee pot landed on them. But according to legend, even that didn’t wipe the happy grin from her face. She was still giggling like a schoolgirl when she limped to the phone to call the press. Only later would she remember to notify the police as well.

Nigel, it would seem, was not a well-loved employer.

The hook from which he was dangling when the housekeeper found him was still on the bedroom wall. Upon my arrival at the house, I used it to hang an old studio publicity shot of the man taken in his heyday, so even now, more than half a century after his ridiculous exit, the poor guy still hung from that goddamn hook, this time in top hat and cloak from an old Jack the Ripper film he starred in at about the same time Hitler rose to power. I didn’t have a snapshot of Nigel in taffeta or a Rita Hayworth wig, or I would have used that instead.

Nigel Letters may have been an unlikable putz in real life, but I had to give him credit for one outstanding accomplishment. He built this house. I was not ridiculing the man when I hung his 8x10 glossy on the bedroom wall from the very hook on which he died. I thought of it more as a tongue-in-cheek shrine. Nigel and I, after all, had a few things in common. We both plied our trade in Hollywood. We were both gay. We both loved this house. And we both, in our day, owned Irish setters. Nigel’s Irish setter, although male, was named Nancy. Somehow that didn’t surprise me, coming as it did from a man who enjoyed masturbating in taffeta.

I have always been a videophile, even as a child growing up in Indiana and before my first novel led me to Hollywood, where it was made into one of the worst movies ever put on celluloid. I have a Raspberry Award for the Worst Adapted Screenplay to prove it. None of my later novels were put on film, thank God, but by then California had its hooks in me, and I never left. But my love for movies continued. Especially bad movies. The worse they were, the better I liked them. Theoretically, my own movie should have been one of my favorites (yes, it was that bad), but perhaps I was too close to it to appreciate the reek.

So, being a lover of film, all film but my own, that is, the name Nigel Letters was not unknown to me. I had seen most of his earlier work, when he was still handsome, and I had seen many of his later films, when his jowls were more pronounced on screen than his heavily made-up eyes. And I had enjoyed them all, not for the artistry of them, but for their complete lack of artistry. Spooky pulp, I called them, but at the time of their release, that was what the audiences wanted. Stuffy British actors in creepy black-and-white period pieces was the big thing then. The scripts must have been cranked out in a matter of minutes, and not much more time spent filming them, but the popcorn-chomping populace ate them up. Today those films seem absurd, pretentious, and totally inane, but Nigel got rich making them, and by all accounts, in his youth, before his beauty had faded, the popularity of his films made Nigel Letters quite a draw with the male contingent of aspiring actors, street hustlers, gigolos, and starstruck fans that populated Sunset Boulevard during those years. Apparently when not in front of the camera, Nigel’s face spent most of its time stuck in the lap of any good-looking male he could entice into a dark corner. And he enticed quite a few, if half the stories are true.

When my agent told me that Nigel’s house in the San Diego Mountains had been put on the market, I leapt at it. When I heard the house was haunted, I leapt even higher.

And now, after only a few days of living on the property, I knew I would buy it. Rex would not be happy about my decision, but he wasn’t the one writing the checks. And like I said before, whither the master goeth….

After a decade or more of enduring the screaming pulse of Los Angeles, with its crowded streets and blaring traffic, the solitude to be found on this silent mountainside was almost breathtaking. Even nature lent very few notes to the music. Perhaps an occasional night bird could be heard, or the rustle of palm fronds from the trees beside the house when the wind whipped up the side of the mountain before a rain, but that was all. There were no people sounds. No car horns. No boom boxes. No strident voices yelling obscenities at strangers.

The only noise came from myself, from Rex, or from the house itself, or whatever it was that resided in the house with us. For I knew from the first night, as I lay in the unfamiliar bed and savored the newfound silence, that I was not alone here.

On that first night, and for many days and nights afterward, I neither saw nor heard anything to make me think that mine were not the only thoughts at play within these walls. It was just a feeling. A sense of being near something you can’t quite see. A sense that there were sounds to be heard if they were just a little louder. A sense that this house was not quite at rest. But it didn’t frighten me. There was no feeling of malevolence about it. I didn’t feel surrounded by evil. I didn’t feel like a character in one of my books.

Even later, when the disturbances began, I didn’t fear for my life. My heart might leap into my throat at a sudden sound, coming as it did from a seemingly empty room, but I felt no terror. It would startle me, and my heart would begin hammering, but not from any sense of life-threatening horror. I think the heart hammering came as much from exhilaration as anything else. I had spent my life scaring people with words on a page. Now it was my turn to be afraid, and there was nothing fictional about it. Perhaps I had been writing truths all along and simply never knew it.

For a writer of horror, the house was perfect. By the end of the first week, I could not imagine living anywhere else. I phoned my agent and set the wheels of purchase in motion. Then I phoned my friends and invited them up.

NOW, AS I stood in the moonlight in my boxer shorts and waited interminably for Rex to make the earth-shattering decision as to when and where to poop, I thought of my friends and wondered what they would think of the house and my decision to move here permanently. I suspected they would approve of the first and despair at the second, loving the house as much as I did but unable to comprehend how I could ever dream of leaving Los Angeles.

My friends. We had been an entity for more years than I cared to admit. Michael. Lyle. Frank. Stu. From various parts of the country, we had descended on LA in 1997, and somehow we had come together, drawn to each other like shreds of metal to a magnet. Everyone had slept with everyone else at one time or another. That was perhaps what first drew us together, but sex did not keep us together. Friendship did that. Friendship and love and an understanding of each other that allowed us to bare our faults, or flaunt our talents, without resentment or jealousy getting in the way.

We commiserated with each other during the low times, times we all had at one point or another as we were carving our way in the world, and we praised each other for our successes. Michael’s graduation from veterinary school and the subsequent hanging of his shingle on a small pet hospital in Van Nuys. Lyle and Frank’s marriage on a beach in Santa Monica, the only members of our little band who stayed together as lovers, now into their twelfth year and seemingly as happy as the day they swapped vows in the sand. Stu’s first hair salon with his name in neon, and a few years later, a second and third salon, all making money hand over fist. Money was never a problem for Stu. Relationships were. But he made up for it by replacing quality with quantity. There was a different man in his bed every night of the week, and like a kid in a candy store, he just couldn’t decide on the one he liked best, so he tried them all, chewing them up and spitting them out like gumballs.

My friends were there for me during the publication of my first novel, which if not for them would probably not have sold a single copy, and they were there for me during the subsequent disaster of a movie it spawned. My success only came with the release of my second novel, but I will always remember how my friends supported and praised me for the first. We were our own little fan club, adoring each other and making sure each of us knew it.

Now, with time dragging us reluctantly toward forty, the youthful blush in our cheeks has perhaps faded, our faces appearing a bit wiser and less eager in the bathroom mirror in the mornings when we shave, but our zest for life has not diminished. Nor has our devotion to each other. I have very little patience for anyone else in the world, but for my friends there is always an opening in my mental appointment book. We offer little to anyone else, but to each other, we offer everything.

By leaving Los Angeles, I was forming the first breach in our communal front on the world, and I knew my friends were not happy about it. No longer would we all be minutes away from each other. By taking up residence more than a hundred miles away, I would undoubtedly be viewed as the first rat to abandon the ship. I could only hope that after inspecting this house and learning to love it as much as I did, they would come to understand why I chose to live here. Friends, after all, are chained to us as securely as our pets, or should be if they are truly friends. A little distance shouldn’t make a difference.

As I stood in the moonlight with the warm evening breeze blowing across my body and watched Rex finally squat to do his business, all I could do was hope that my friends would see my desertion in the same light as I did. Perhaps the house would convince them. It wanted me to stay. At least, I thought it did. At any rate, it hadn’t tried to kill me yet. Not really.

Looking up at the house from where Rex had led me down the sloping driveway, I saw a curtain move. I had left the front door open when Rex and I stepped outside, so it might have been the night breeze that fluttered the fabric. But I knew instinctively it was not. The house watched us constantly. It was something I had grown accustomed to in the time I had been there. From that very first day, when the house was still new and exciting to me, I had sensed a welcoming presence as I moved from room to room and explored my new domain.

It was a large house, containing fifteen rooms, beautifully constructed with rounded ceilings and wide stone fireplaces scattered around. The teak flooring was polished to a lovely deep brown, almost black. It gleamed underfoot like dark, still water. The sound of my footsteps echoed through the house on that first day, and I could imagine the house soaking up the sounds of life, which had so long been absent, and I immediately felt at home, as if my entire life had been leading me to this one destination.

I felt welcome.

Even later, when I came to realize that I was not the only resident, that sense of welcome did not diminish.

From the first moment I stepped inside the door, the house seemed to envelope me in its arms, making me feel at home. Making me feel needed. But it was a dangerous need, for there was a threat inside this house as well, although I did not consider the threat to be directed at me. Rex would probably argue that point. He had been uncomfortable and wary of the house from the beginning.

But all this I would only come to realize later, after I had spent a few days and nights inside the walls of this splendid house tucked against this barren, magnificent mountain. In fact, it happened only after I had determined to buy the place, which in retrospect occurred about two minutes after I set foot inside the front door.

The house was still furnished with Nigel Letters’s old belongings. Clunky art deco furniture, recently uncovered and cleaned. Cherrywood cabinets, buffed to their highest sheen. Windows and french doors rendered spotless, allowing the Southern California sun to pierce the house like rays of blessed light penetrating a cathedral. The dark teak flooring shone beneath my feet like obsidian. The Realtor had been true to her word when she told my agent the house would be ready for me. It was indeed. It looked as new as the day it was built, over seventy years earlier.

I could almost hear it breathing.

A circular breakfast room, lined with leaded windows and boasting a high cupola ceiling, jutted off the southeast corner of the house. On my arrival it was the only room unfurnished. Built-in bookshelves lined the walls beneath the windows, freshly painted but empty of books. Ornate art deco wall sconces and a brass chandelier supplied the lighting after the sun went down, but during the day the sunlight streamed in from every angle. To me, it was the most beautiful room in the house. Here I would write. Here, with my books filling the shelves and my computer humming to life on a broad cherrywood desk I found tucked away in a corner of one of the bedrooms, I would spend most of my time.

I should have known it was more than coincidence that the only room completely empty was the one I would most need and most love. It was as if the house already knew me, knew what I would require, knew what would make me happiest. This room was a housewarming gift from the house itself, and I immediately went to work preparing it.

Even before my clothes were unpacked, I had scooted a couple of Indian-print throw rugs under the legs of the massive desk and tugged it down the long hallway, across the dining room, and into the breakfast room, placing it at an angle in the center of the room directly beneath the brass chandelier. I found a red armchair in one of the other bedrooms and placed it behind the desk. Then I unloaded my computer from the trunk of my car, situated it on the desk, and hooked it up. With a stack of fresh, white paper placed neatly beside it, I had everything I wanted.

All I needed to do was send for my books. My own furniture, sitting unused back in LA in my tiny one-bedroom condo, I would either sell or put in storage. I needed nothing more than what the house already offered.

I pulled out the red chair, tucked my legs beneath the wide desk, and stared at the desert landscape outside the breakfast-room windows. I could see for miles down the slope of the foothills, with nothing man-made to mar the view. No buildings, no automobiles, nothing. Nothing but pure unblemished landscape.

Now I felt at home. For the first time in years, I was uncrowded, free. With the house for protection and Rex for companionship, I would be content. I could write here without interruption, for hours on end. Day after day.

My fingers itched for the keyboard.

From some far-off corner of the house, I heard the tinkle of broken glass. A fragile sound. Rex, standing beside my chair, perked up his ears and tensed. A soft whimper emanated from his throat as he gazed at my face with his big brown eyes.

I pushed myself away from the desk and with Rex at my heels, set off in search of the source. Something must have fallen. Perhaps we had mice.

We roamed from room to room, searching for the cause of the sound, but we never found it. Soon the incident was forgotten in the bustle of moving in.

The clothes I had brought with me were neatly hung in the deep walk-in closet in the master bedroom. Nigel’s room. I knew it the moment I saw it. Sturdy mahogany furniture filled every corner. Brass fittings sparkled in the sunlight pouring through the bedroom windows. A four-poster bed stood at attention against the wall, cradling the thickest feather mattress I had ever seen. When I laid my hand on it to test the softness, it all but disappeared in the folds of the chintz bedspread that covered the bed.

The feather mattress would have to go. Allergies. I measured the bed and, digging out my cell phone, ordered a firmer mattress to be delivered the following day—after a five-minute discussion with the clerk as to how to find the house. The feather mattress I rolled into an awkward bundle and hauled off to a distant closet. I doubted I would be getting much sleep tonight anyway. I was too excited. If I had to, I would crash in one of the other bedrooms for the night. Sleep and I were infrequent companions anyway. I did most of my writing at night. How else should horror stories be written?

I admired the heavy, dark bedroom furniture for a long time, standing in the center of the floor, the mattressless bed beside me. The room was large. Massive by LA condo standards. A door to the left led to a walk-in closet. Another door to the right led to the master bath, with sunken tub and tall art deco statuettes standing in every corner like sentinels, slim male figures, nude, their right hands reaching upward to cradle crystal globes. I flicked the light switch on the wall, and the globes came to life, emitting soft, velvety light throughout the room. A flattering light. The sort of light an aging movie star would relish. I glanced at myself in one of the full-length mirrors that ranged across the wall and realized I was rather partial to that light myself. I looked pretty darn good in that fuzzy light. Nigel might have been a first-class asshole, but he had taste. I had to give him that.

On that first day, as I left the bathroom, my eyes were drawn to the one thing in Nigel’s bedroom that seemed out of place: a large hook, like a hay hook, attached to the wall facing another full-length mirror on the opposite wall. With a sharp intake of breath, I realized that this was where Nigel had met his less than illustrious end. He had been hanging from that hook when the housekeeper found him, still draped in taffeta, with his cock in his hand. I found myself wondering if, after the life was choked from his body and the blood no longer churning through his system, settled, he might have maintained his erection even after death, like King Tut, whose royal penis was embalmed for all eternity in a happily erect state. Of course, unlike Nigel Letters, young King Tutankhamen wasn’t pounding his pud at the moment of his death, or not that we know of.

I spun on my heel and stalked off to one of the other rooms in the house I had explored earlier. In my mind I had dubbed it the ego room. Here I had found dozens of framed photos of Nigel Letters from his heyday. Publicity snapshots and stills from his many movies adorned the walls. There were no other decorations in the room, only Nigel’s handsome face peering out from photo after photo. And they were all pictures from his younger years. There were no sagging jowls or puffy eyelids anywhere in evidence.

I plucked one from the wall, a still from the Jack the Ripper film I mentioned earlier, and carried it back to the bedroom, where I carefully hung it from the hay hook on the wall, taking a moment to position it squarely. Nigel was back in the place where he had apparently spent so many happy hours whacking off, until the night he got careless and suddenly found himself whacking off in the afterlife.

It seemed a fitting memorial to the man who’d had the bad taste to die the way he had but still possessed the good taste in life to build this marvelous house.

With Nigel back where he belonged, I went back to the mundane tasks of preparing the house for life.

The kitchen was roomy and well-appointed, right down to an ultramodern microwave oven that looked like it belonged on the space shuttle and would probably take me weeks to figure out.

According to the Realtor, there had been a string of tenants inhabiting the house over the years but few prospective buyers, which seemed odd to me considering the beauty of the place. Perhaps the price tag was the main deterrent. The place didn’t come cheap. But my last book had sold well, and I had made some sound investments over the years, so I figured I could afford it. I had another novel due out in a few months. My publisher had received the final rewrites only days before and had assured me it would do well. Since he had never been wrong before, I tended to take him at his word.

Well-appointed the kitchen may have been, but the cupboards were as bare as the day they were built. The only food in the house was the box of Milk-Bones I had brought along for Rex and a dusty tin of tomato paste I found tucked away on a shelf above the refrigerator. Even Emeril would be hard-pressed to concoct a meal from that. I set about jotting down a shopping list, whistled for Rex, who had found a block of sunlight on the living room floor to take a snooze in, and headed out the door to a supermarket I had noticed a few miles away on the outskirts of San Diego.

Rex waited in the car, his nose pressed to the side window, as I spent an hour in the market, roaming the aisles, buying everything from condiments to veggies to meats to booze. Then I remembered Rex and snagged a fifty-pound bag of Alpo to top off the cart. Two-hundred dollars later, I was back on the road.

As I left the city and the car began climbing the foothills of my little mountain, with Rex’s tongue and ears flapping in the wind outside the passenger window, I found myself humming.

For the first time in my life, I felt myself heading toward a place that I truly thought of as home. I didn’t know I would be sharing that home with the others who already resided there, who had, in fact, been residing there for many years. The ones who could not leave.

That knowledge would come later. And it would alter my perception of the world forever.

MY CELL phone rang as I unbagged groceries in the kitchen on my first day inside the house.

Without preamble, a female voice asked, “Are you staying?”

“Squeeze me?” I said in a bad Mike Myers impersonation before I could stop myself. It was a habit I had long been trying to break. Movie lovers sometimes tend to pluck dialogue from their favorite films and plop them down in everyday life, with occasionally disastrous results.

The woman on the phone sounded suddenly confused, not that I could blame her. “I’m sorry? What did you say?”

“I said ‘excuse me,’” I lied.

“Oh.”

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I asked if you were staying.”

“In the house, you mean?”

“Yes.” Her voice, whoever she was, sounded more amused now than confused. “I’m asking if you intend to stay in the house. This is Caroline.”

“Caroline?”

“The housekeeper. I prepared the house for your arrival. I hope everything was satisfactory.”

I did a mental forehead slap. “Oh! The housekeeper. Yes. The house is wonderful. Spotless.”

“You didn’t find my note, did you?”

“Note?”

“I left you a note on the mantle.”

“I’m sorry, Caroline. I didn’t see it. I’m James Brandon, by the way. And in answer to your question, yes, I am intending to stay in the house. In fact, I intend to buy the house.”

“Really?”

“Well… I think so. It’s a beautiful house. I fell in love with it the minute I walked in the door.”

“Did you just arrive?”

I laughed. “I got here bright and early this morning.”

“And you’ve already decided to buy?”

“Yep.”

There was a silence on the line for a couple of ticks before she said, “Haven’t you ever read any of those books you write?”

“Squee… I mean, excuse me?”

“If I were you,” she said, “I wouldn’t transfer any funds into escrow until you spend a couple of nights in the house. The place may seem a little different in the dark.”

“Have you ever spent a night here?”

“As a matter of fact, no. But my family has had a connection to that house for many years. My mother worked there as a housekeeper off and on over the years, and before that my grandmother worked for Mr. Letters. She was his live-in.”

“Good Lord, don’t tell me your grandmother was the woman who found him on the day he died!”

“No, but she found him the following morning.”

I had to ask. “Did she really laugh so hard that she dropped a coffee pot on her foot and broke two toes?”

Caroline’s laugh came over the line like a tinkle of bells. I could envision her now. A pretty slip of a girl, weighing in at under a hundred pounds, with pale skin and a no-nonsense outlook on life.

“I’ve heard that story before, Mr. Brandon, but I’m afraid it isn’t true.”

“She didn’t laugh?” I asked.

Caroline groaned. “Oh, she laughed all right. And she did indeed drop the tray with the coffee pot on it. But she didn’t break any toes. Only the pot.”

“Well, that’s disappointing.”

I could sense the woman smiling now. “The story of the broken toes rather appealed to your sense of the dramatic, didn’t it? I’ll let you in on a little secret, Mr. Brandon—”

“James. Jim, actually.”

“Jim. That story appealed to my grandmother as well. Even today, when she tells of that morning, she’ll point to the arthritis in her toes and swear it came about because of that falling coffee pot. But I’m afraid it really is just a story. It never happened.”

“Your grandmother is still alive?”

“Yes. She’s ninety-six, and her mind is as sharp as ever. Her body isn’t. She’s in a nursing home in the city. Has been there for more years than I care to remember. She could tell you things about that house….”

“Could she?”

“She could, yes. But that’s not to say she would.”

“Well, perhaps I’ll meet her someday.”

“Perhaps.” The way she said it made me think that she was humoring me now. She got back to the purpose of the call. “When you read the note I left you, you’ll find that the reason for the note was to offer my services to you if you need someone to clean for you. Just a couple of days a week, mind you. I won’t be spending any nights there.”

Teasingly, I asked, “Are you afraid?”

“Yes, Jim, I am,” she said bluntly. “But that’s not the reason. I have a husband and child at home, and I don’t wish to spend that much time away from them. So if you need help with the house, and I should think you would, then I would be happy to help you. My rates are more than reasonable, I think.”

“I’m sure they are,” I said, roaming around the house with my cell phone to my ear, thinking of all the things that would need to be done on a regular basis if I planned to keep the house as beautiful as it was now. Without a housekeeper I would spend all my time cleaning, not writing. An unpleasant thought. I enjoyed housecleaning probably about as much as I would enjoy rectal surgery.

“And,” she added, “if there is any repair work to be done, my husband is quite handy.”

I was about as handy as Rex.

“Well, that’s wonderful,” I said. “Two days a week it is.”

“I would even be willing to cook for you on occasion, if you wish. But I won’t spend any nights there. Are we agreed on that?”

“Absolutely. No nights.”

“And I must insist that when I’m there, you or someone else will always be there with me. I don’t want to be in the house alone. It may sound silly to you, but those are the rules.”

“And your rules are accepted. I spend most of my time writing, so I will always be here. If for any reason I need to be away, we’ll simply change your day. Is that agreeable to you?”

“More than agreeable. Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

We spent a few minutes discussing wages and what hours she would be willing to work, finally settling on Tuesdays and Fridays from nine to six.

With matters of business no longer hanging over our heads, the conversation took on a friendlier tone.

“When I heard it was you moving into the house I went out and bought a couple of your books.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll need the money.”

She laughed.

“So… did you like them?” I asked, with that familiar trepidation creeping into my voice that I had come to expect every time I asked that question of a stranger.

I breathed a sigh of relief when she said, “Very much. I can’t wait to read your next one.”

“Then you’re in luck. There’s one coming out in the fall.”

“That’s wonderful, but I don’t mean that one.”

“I’m sorry. You lost me.”

“I’m talking about the next one. The one you write inside that house.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t have a clue what that one will be about. I haven’t really thought about it yet.”

“It will be about the house, James.”

“Will it?”

“Oh yeah.”

I began to wonder if Caroline, my new housekeeper, wasn’t perhaps a bit flakier than I originally thought.

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Haven’t you wondered why no one has bought the house over the years?”

Miss Caroline, as I had already begun to think of her, seemed to be a fairly perceptive flake. I had indeed wondered about that.

“Well,” I said, “I assumed it was the price tag. And perhaps the remoteness of the location.”

“No, James. It’s the house itself. All those rumors about it being haunted aren’t just rumors, you know.”

“Do you know this for a fact, or are you…?”

“That appeals to you, doesn’t it, the fact that maybe the place might be haunted? Judging by the books you write, I should think that would appeal to you very much.”

Perceptive indeed. “As a matter of fact, it does. But I don’t really believe the stories, if that’s what you’re wondering. The house has a past, certainly, but all old houses do. I’ve been here for a couple of hours now, and a ghost hasn’t popped out of the armoire yet.”

“You haven’t heard any odd noises?”

“Well, I did hear the sound of glass breaking, but I racked it up to an errant mouse.”

She giggled like a schoolgirl being offered her first corsage. “Then it’s started already.”

“What has started?”

“The house. It’s testing you. Feeling you out.”

“Oh, come now. Maybe I should clean the house and you should write the books.”

Her laugh was interrupted by what sounded like a tower of pots and pans crashing to the floor.

“I have to go,” she said. “My son is rearranging the kitchen cupboards.”

“A handful, huh?”

“Several handfuls, actually.”

“You’re more than welcome to bring him with you when you work, if you wish. I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“I would mind, Mr. Brandon. I mean, James. I mean, Jim. I’ll never bring my little boy into that house.”

The intensity in her voice surprised me. “Does it really frighten you that much?”

There was a long silence before she finally answered. “Children are not safe in that house. Please remember that. Children have never been safe in that house.”

Softly, she hung up the phone, and I was left with a dial tone in my ear. The sudden silence of the house engulfed me as I clicked my cell phone shut and went about the task of putting away the rest of my groceries.

“Bit melodramatic,” I muttered to Rex, who looked supremely uninterested. “But she cleans well. That’s what counts.”

I MADE two tuna sandwiches, tossing one to Rex, who wolfed it down in less time than it takes to tell about it, and nibbled on the other one myself as I set out to really explore the property.

Miss Caroline, flake or not, had done her job well. The house, all fifteen rooms of it, was immaculate. The skillful workmanship that went into building the house was an amazement to someone who had spent most of his adult life in formula condos, erected with nothing more than speed and economy of space in mind.

Here I found fragrant cedar-lined closets, all walk-ins, each and every one of them as large or larger than my bathroom back in LA. French doors with hazy leaded windows sealed off the rooms. Built-in cupboards and bookshelves and drawers were everywhere. A grand piano stood proudly in a wedge of sunlight in the music room, the keys polished and shimmering, waiting for nimble fingers to bring them to life. After studying the photographs in the ego room, which was just an archway away from the music room, I learned that the ancient Baldwin was there for more than decoration. There were several pictures of Nigel Letters, in topcoat and tails, his dark hair slicked back from his regal forehead, with his fingers at the keys. In one, his eyes were closed, and I could imagine the music swelling around him.

I plopped myself down on the piano bench and laboriously pecked out “Chopsticks.” The acoustics in the room were good. My playing was not. I gently lowered the fallboard to cover the ivory keys to protect them from the harsh sunlight streaming through the window, and continued my exploration, Rex still following along at my heels.

The two guest bedrooms were as different as night and day. Literally. One was decorated in whites and creams and the other in dark grays and black. I began to wonder what sort of mind would think up something like that. Nigel Letters was becoming more fascinating to me by the minute.

Beside the bathroom situated next to the black bedroom, I found the practical part of the house, a laundry room with massive washer and dryer and a water heater banded to the wall, a concession enforced by state law due to the unstable tectonic plates Southern California rested on. Here I found shelves and cupboards well stocked with cleaning supplies, all the unexciting items required to keep a house livable.

The furnace was here as well, a monstrous beast with cast-iron doors like jaws, huddled in the corner, obviously placed there when the house was first built. I wondered if it still worked, then decided it must, considering all the renters the house had entertained over the years.

I left the laundry/furnace room, stepped through the kitchen and dining areas, and entered the living room. It was huge, with varnished wooden beams spanning the ceiling and a fireplace on one wall that was big enough to land a plane in. The art deco furniture, well tended over the years, still looked new. I would later learn that the furniture had spent much of its time in storage since many renters preferred their own more modern pieces to lounge around in on a daily basis rather than this overstuffed and rather pretentious art deco stuff. Personally, I liked it. It suited the house.

It took me back to that bygone era when movie stars were lords and ladies, always regal—at least in their public lives—impeccably dressed every time they stepped foot outside their royal mansions, hair coiffed, makeup perfectly applied, graceful as swans. Movie stars today are just people. When Nigel Letters reigned, they were gods. Hollywood was Mount Olympus, not a Babel of overpriced shops and drug-infested nightclubs where actors and actresses can be seen frequently falling on their faces and making asses of themselves for the paparazzi. Of course, stars in the thirties did all the ridiculous and self-destructive things that stars of the present do, but there were publicity people back then to keep it quiet.

Stars were a commodity, well protected, their foibles shielded from the movie-going public, who expected nothing less than perfection from these twenty-foot titans they watched every Saturday on the giant movie screens. Today, reality has destroyed the dream that once was Hollywood. Everyone now knows that movie stars are nothing more than regular people. Regular people who oftentimes are not smart enough to realize how lucky they are. We might still be in awe of them, but they are no longer worshipped. Not by anyone with a lick of sense at any rate.

The artwork I found scattered around the house consisted mostly of Erte´ prints and some fairly well-done paintings in a Southwestern motif, most of which displayed cowpokes and Indians in various stages of undress. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Nigel Letters was more than a little enamored of the male body. Not that I minded. I have always been rather partial to it myself.

I had a few decent pieces of art of my own hanging on the walls of my condo back in LA, and I spotted places for each and every one of them here. I would have the paintings shipped up with my books and a few other personal items that I had come to love and did not intend to live without. Other than those few well-loved possessions, I would leave the house the way it was.

I knew I was indulging myself. I spent almost every waking hour sitting in front of my computer. What use did I have for a fifteen-room mansion? I could survive quite happily with a ream of paper, an electrical outlet, and a toilet. I supposed it was my love of movies that made this house so appealing to me. And, of course, the ghosts, if that was what they were. That was a definite draw.

I intended to pick Miss Caroline’s mind the first time I had her under my roof. There were secrets in this house she seemed to know something about. It suddenly seemed likely that she might be right when she said that my next book would be about this house. Ideas were creeping into my head already, and that was always a relief. After one book is finished and another yet to be started, I am always filled with the fear that my well of imagination will suddenly dry up, leaving me a basically unemployed and unemployable middle-aged male with no discernible talents other than writing. I probably couldn’t hold down a real job if my life depended on it. Writing is all I know or care about. Without it, I might as well follow in Nigel Letters’s footsteps and hang myself from that hook in the bedroom, although I can’t see myself doing it in heels and an evening gown or whacking off in the process.

I found Miss Caroline’s note on the mantle in the living room, right where she’d said it was. When I unfolded the note, a key fell to the floor. I picked it up and read the note. After offering her services as housekeeper, Miss Caroline had added a postscript explaining that the key was to the carriage house out back. Since the house was not built in the era of horse-drawn carriages, I assumed the term carriage house was just a euphemism for garage. Nigel Letters seemed like the sort of grand personage with an overly inflated ego who would call a garage a carriage house. And I had to admit, it sort of appealed to me too. Gay men can be pretty darn pretentious at times. Far be it from me to buck the trend.

Rex was snoring like a lumberjack on the living room floor, exhausted, I supposed, from all the excitement of moving, although he hadn’t lifted a single article, so I left him there and quietly left the house.

The veranda spanned the entire side of the house, from back to front. Adirondack chairs and lounges were placed at intervals along it as one might have seen on the deck of an ocean liner back in the days of the Titanic. They too, like everything else in the house, must have been taken out of storage and returned to their original positions. They had been recently restored with fresh coats of white paint. Miss Caroline’s husband’s work, I presumed, being handy as his wife had promised.

At the back of the veranda, toward the rear of the house, a small flight of steps led down to a flagstone walk that led directly to the carriage house.

There was no lawn to speak of. Keeping grass alive on this barren mountainside would have been more trouble than it was worth. Still the area along this side of the house was beautifully landscaped with cactus and jade plants, the only plants, presumably, that could thrive in such a dry environment. The sandy soil had been recently raked into circular patterns like those seen in Japanese gardens. Large stones rested here and there to break the monotony, making the area between the main house and the carriage house a pleasant place for quiet contemplation on a day when one didn’t have anything better to do. There was even a little stone bench tucked up against the side of the house, and I wondered if Nigel Letters ever sat out here pondering the demise of his movie career or perhaps deciding what dress to wear for that evening’s autoerotic asphyxiation party.

It must have been a lonely existence for someone who was used to the fawning attention he had reaped in his youth—to suddenly find himself aging and alone so far from the Hollywood that had once looked upon him as a god. Or did he have friends who made pilgrimages here, visiting him in his seclusion? Was the house once alive with the sound of cocktail parties and laughter? Was the Letters house like a teeny version of Hearst’s mansion in San Simeon, where stars of the day came to play far from the watchful eyes of the Hollywood press, where they could let themselves go without their antics finding their way onto the front page of the trade papers, where they could unleash their baser instincts and not have to worry about some studio mogul eating their contract in front of their faces for embarrassing the glorious institution of moviemaking?

Or did Nigel Letters relish this newfound solitude? It had been his decision, after all, to move here. He must have had a reason for turning his back on Hollywood, although by all accounts, it was Hollywood that first turned its back on him. Had he come here for the same reasons I had? For simple serenity and silence? Was this house he built the fortress he needed to sequester himself from a world that, in his eyes, seemed to no longer require his presence?

Was he happy here, or did he reside within these walls in sadness? It seemed of paramount importance to me that I learn the truth. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps because I had followed many of the same paths he had taken so many years ago. I wondered, suddenly, whether I too would die inside this house. Preferably after many long years of residence, of course. I had no intention of doing it this week. After all, I had just invited friends up. It would be the epitome of rudeness to die before they got here. They had only just received their invitations, for God’s sake, and knowing them, they would be highly offended by such slipshod planning. In the gay world, everything has to be just so. Especially where a party is concerned. Death is no excuse. Yes, I definitely had to stay alive at least until my guests arrived. After that, I could politely drop dead if I felt the urge to do so.

I began to wonder if perhaps the next time I rolled down the mountainside and into town, a brain scan might not be in order, or had my thinking always taken such odd twists and turns?

I decided the latter was probably the case, so I pushed everything from my mind and slipped the key into the little door at the side of the carriage house.

It became quickly apparent that Miss Caroline, in her zealous cleaning, had not wandered this far south. The air inside the carriage house was heavy with must, the earthy stench of mushrooms in dank ground. Dead air. As if the building had not been opened to the outside for a very, very long time.

The place was as dark as the inside of a pyramid, and I groped around for a light switch, finally finding one on the wall beside the door. A ceiling light blinked on and dispelled the shadows, but it did nothing for the smell.

Except for a few dusty odds and ends and several packing crates arranged along one wall, the carriage house was empty.

There were no windows. The walls were red brick. All four of them. I stepped outside and walked around to the front of the carriage house, where I saw two sets of double doors, each entryway large enough to accommodate two vehicles. Four vehicles in all. Then I returned to the little side door, stepped inside, and once again studied those four unbroken brick walls. I went back outside, mumbling to myself, and tried one of the front doors. It wasn’t locked. When I pulled it open, I was faced with the same brick wall I had seen on the inside. The small door at the side was the only access to the building. Had Nigel Letters, for whatever reason, added the inside walls after the carriage house was built? I walked around three sides of the carriage house and counted two wide double doors in the front and four windows, two to each side. Only the side door I had entered through had not been bricked up.

The back of the building rested snugly against a sheer cliff wall that protruded straight up at the back of the property to a height of perhaps eighty feet. It gleamed red in the setting sunlight. Sandstone, I thought. It was a natural wall of rock, carved by nature, not by man.

I reentered the carriage house and stood in the center of the room with my hands on my hips and simply stared at those four brick walls. This was a mystery of mythic proportions. Had Nigel Letters been insane? Moving closer to one of the walls, I realized the masonry was not professionally done. It looked like a homemade job. Did Nigel stack and mortar these bricks himself? And if he did, what the hell was the purpose of it? I gave my head a little shake, walked out of the carriage house, flicking off the light as I went, and closed the door behind me. I couldn’t wait to hear what Miss Caroline had to say about this. I also intended to bring the matter up with the Realtor. I might get a few thousand dollars knocked off the price of the property. After all, if I intended to use the carriage house as a garage, I would need to remove the brick walls, and not being handy like Miss Caroline’s husband, I would have to pay someone to do it.

But those were side issues. My main question was why did Nigel Letters erect those walls in the first place? I sincerely hoped I would not go to my grave never learning the answer to that question.

As I climbed the back steps to the veranda, I heard Rex raising holy hell inside the house. He barked for a few moments, then let out an eerie howl that sent the hair bristling up the back of my neck. I ran to the front door and hurled myself inside. Down the hall, I saw Rex standing in the doorway to the music room. The fur was poking straight up along the ridge of his back. He took one look at me, then turned his gaze back into the music room. His lips rose, exposing every tooth in his head. A menacing growl emanated from his throat. As I drew nearer, I saw that he was trembling.

Trying not to wet myself, I peeked around the edge of the music room door and saw—nothing. The room was exactly as I had left it a few minutes earlier. I followed Rex’s gaze, trying to figure out what he was growling at. He seemed to be focused on the piano. Then I saw it.

The keyboard lid, which I had closed earlier, was pushed back against the front of the piano, the keys once again exposed.

As I stood there staring at the keys that now looked like teeth in the wide mouth of some weird wooden beast, I heard the clear tinkle of a single high note as a velvet hammer struck a string inside the piano. The note was pure and in tune. It seemed to echo through the house, then fade away to silence.

A chill swept through me as Rex plopped his ass down on the hallway floor and looked up to see what I was going to do. So I did what any intelligent person would do. I gently slid the leaded glass door to the music room closed and patted Rex on the head.

“Let’s forget that ever happened, shall we?” Did I detect a tremor in my voice? Hell yes, I did.

Rex thumped his tail on the floor a couple of times and pushed his muzzle into my hand, as if to say ignoring what had just happened sounded like an excellent idea to him.

I motioned for Rex to follow, and he obediently trailed along at my heels as I walked to the kitchen, pulled a Milk-Bone out of the box for him, and got a beer out of the fridge for me. We stood there, each in our separate ways—him chewing, me slurping up beer—soothing our jangled nerves. The beer was gone almost as quickly as the Milk-Bone.

I thought, fuck it, and repeated the whole process again. Another beer. Another Milk-Bone. This beer went down a little slower, although the Milk-Bone disappeared just as quickly as the first, and when the second beer was gone, I dropped into the red chair in the breakfast room with Rex at my feet and clicked on the computer.

I wrote until the sun went down and Rex coaxed me outside for a walk. After Rex relieved himself in the middle of the driveway and I cleaned up the mess with a handful of Kleenex, I returned to the computer and continued to write.

The next thing I knew it was morning, and I found myself with my head on the desk, slumped and drooling, with a stiff neck and a sore back and my face stuck to a sheet of paper. Rex was nowhere in sight. I discovered him in the living room, sacked out on the sofa, with his head tucked under a throw pillow as if to say, “If this house has any more surprises for me, I’d just rather not see them, thank you very much.”

Bleary-eyed and achy, with my hair doing God knows what on the top of my head, I just stared at him in disgust. He really was a most profound coward.

I plucked the paper from my cheek with an audible pop and headed for the shower, groaning all the way, dropping my clothes like litter along the hallway as I went. Naked, I peered into the music room through the open door as I passed. The piano was silent.

It wasn’t until later, while the hot shower massaged the aches from my body, that I realized the music room door should not have been open at all.

Chapter 2

SO, AS you see, the disturbances at the Letters House began from the very first day. Perhaps Miss Caroline was right when she said the house was feeling me out. A tinkle of broken glass. A single high note from the piano. A door that should have been closed but was not. I had come to this mountain in search of a haunted house, and damned if I didn’t seem to have found one. To quote an Indiana colloquialism I had heard a bazillion times in my youth, I was in hog heaven. In truth, nothing truly horrifying had happened, nothing that couldn’t be explained away as an overactive imagination. Perhaps I hadn’t actually closed that piano lid. Or the door either. Perhaps a string had broken inside the piano, causing that single high note to echo through the music room. Perhaps it was all just wishful thinking on my part.

I have always been fascinated by the macabre, the occult, and all the other weird stuff that writers of horror fiction write about. Imagination is a powerful thing. No one knows that better than a writer. Was it just my imagination at work here? Was I so intent in my hope that the house would be haunted that I simply talked myself into believing it?

The events I had witnessed in the first twenty-four hours I spent inside the house were small things really. Mysterious, but small. And they were nothing compared to the mystery of the bricked-up carriage house, the thought of which led me back there many times in the ensuing days. Every time I tried to imagine a reason for it, my mind went blank.

I eagerly awaited the first visit from my new housekeeper.

She arrived on Tuesday morning at nine o’clock on the dot, just as she promised, pulling up the driveway in a battered Volvo station wagon that looked like it might have been on the road longer than I had been on the planet.

I expected a tiny slip of a woman. That was the image her voice on the telephone had conveyed to me. I had even wondered a few times if she might not be too fragile to handle the workload that the maintenance of this house would require. But the first sight of her dispelled those worries as quickly as they dispelled any thoughts of my being psychic. The sweet voice of the hundred-pound woman I had envisioned over the phone came from the body of a woman who weighed twice what I expected. A big girl. Big bones, big hair, big everything. But I was right about one thing. She was pretty. Perched atop that mountainous body that could easily have picked me up and tossed me off the veranda, was the face of an angel, with a gentle sweet smile and laughing eyes that made me love her the moment I saw her grinning at me as she stepped from the car. She carried a gigantic canister vacuum cleaner in one hand and a tote sack packed with cleaning supplies I probably would have been hard-pressed to lift off the ground in the other. She had a head of bleached blonde hair that was pulled back from her face in barrettes and cascaded down her back like a hillside of wheat. For a large woman, she moved with the grace of a ballerina on dainty little feet that tapped their way up the veranda steps like some overgrown Ziegfeld girl ascending a flight of stairs on stage at the Follies.

She eyed me up and down. “You’re not what I expected,” she said in that soft telephone voice that had led me to think of her in all the wrong directions.

I grinned, mostly because she had voiced the very same thought I was thinking. “And what exactly were you expecting?”

She ignored my tacit offer of help with the load she was carrying but did allow me to hold the door open for her as she entered the house.

“I was expecting someone who looked like a writer. You know. Glasses. Stoop shouldered. Washed-out. Geeky. You look like my cable guy.”

I laughed. “Is that a good thing?”

“It’s a good thing for his wife.”

I decided to take that as a compliment.

She lowered the heavy Hoover gently to the floor, dropped the bag of cleaning supplies on the dining room table, and turned to study me up and down. “You’re not spooky at all.”

I blinked. “You expected me to be spooky?”

“Well, yeah. Anybody who writes books like you write should be spooky as hell.”

“Maybe my mind is spooky, but the rest of me is just along for the ride.”

She laughed at herself and laughed, too, at what must have been the surprised expression on my face. “You’re probably right. I’ll reserve my opinion of you until I get to know you better.”

She jumped into the air and yelped, “Ooh!” when Rex pushed his snout between her legs.

I was mortified. “Jesus Christ, Rex! Get over here.” I yanked him back by his collar,

“Friendly dog,” she said. “Reminds me of my husband.”

“The handy one?”

She nodded. “Handy in a lot of ways.”

I figured we had delved into that subject as far as I ever wanted to go.

She bent down and rubbed Rex’s ears, sending him into paroxysms of joy. His back leg thumped, and his tail flailed around so fast that had he been double-jointed back there and capable of spinning it in a complete circle, he would have lifted himself off the ground like a helicopter.

She kissed him on the forehead, muttered, “Love bug,” and traipsed off to the kitchen with her hundred-pound bag of cleaning supplies.

I called after her. “I’ve got about nine million questions for you.”

She began unpacking supplies by the kitchen sink. “I don’t imagine these questions concern tips on cleaning, do they?”

“No,” I said, leaning in the kitchen doorway. “I want to know about the house.”

She tore open a new package of sponges. “I figured. Well, I suppose I can multitask. You ask, I’ll clean. What do you want to know?”

“Why is the carriage house bricked up?”

“I don’t know.”

This wasn’t the answer I expected. “You don’t know?”

She liberally sprinkled Comet over the double sinks and began scrubbing. “Nobody knows.”

“Did your grandmother ever mention it?”

“She talked about it. Mr. Letters laid those bricks himself. He wasn’t handy like my John. He didn’t do a very good job of it. Grandmother said she took iced tea out to him a couple of times while he was doing it, but he never told her the reason for it.”

“She didn’t ask?”

“Oh, she asked all right. Mr. Letters told her to mind her own business. He wasn’t what you’d call a friendly person. Especially to people who worked for him.”

“When was this?”

Caroline thought a moment, wiping sweat from her forehead with a dish towel. “Must have been about 1940. In the summer. The war hadn’t started yet. Not for us, anyway.”

“When was the house built?”

“The year before. Mr. Letters had it built to his own specifications. I guess bricking up the carriage house was an afterthought. Those few times that she served him tea while he was laying the bricks was the last time she was ever in there. He kept it locked when he was finished. She never saw the inside of the carriage house again.”

“Was your grandmother a live-in?”

“She was for the first few years. After that, he told her he didn’t need her full-time anymore, and she moved back into the city. She hated him for that. She hated the long drive up and down the mountain every day, but she needed the money. The Depression was long over, but jobs were still scarce, especially for women.”

“Was the house haunted even then?”

Caroline rinsed out the sink and moved to the stove, once again peppering it with Comet. “No. My grandmother said the only thing strange about the house at that time was Mr. Letters himself. She called him an odd duck. Odd in a lot of ways. After a while, she was glad she didn’t sleep in the house anymore. It made her life a lot harder, paying rent in town, but she was happy to get away from him for a few hours every day. She said she always felt a sense of relief when she drove down the mountain in the evening. She cleaned and cooked for him, and he paid her well enough for it, but she never again spent a night inside this house.”

I watched her pull the racks from the oven and peek inside.

“You don’t cook much, do you?” she asked, replacing the racks.

“No more than I have to to stay alive.”

“Well, good, that makes my job easier.”

“Did Mr. Letters have a lot of visitors? Did the Hollywood crowd come up for wild weekends of unbridled debauchery?”

She slammed the oven door closed with her hip. “Nope. He didn’t have any visitors from his old life at all. Not from the day he moved in. When his movie career failed, he turned his back on Hollywood completely. He wasn’t well liked, you know. Most assholes aren’t.”

She opened the refrigerator and peered inside. “Are you on one of those faddish diets or something? You don’t have enough food in this house to keep your dog alive, let alone yourself. No wonder you’re so damned skinny.”

“Skinny’s in, haven’t you heard?”

I regretted saying it the minute the words popped out of my mouth. References to the advantages of being skinny aren’t a subject best put forth to a woman who weighed over two hundred pounds. Wars had been started in such a way.

But Caroline only laughed. “I’ll fatten you up. You’ll live longer. Every time I come up, I’ll leave a pot of something on the stove for you. You like chicken and dumplings?”

I didn’t even want to think about the calories in a pot of dumplings.

I tried to get the conversation off nutrition and back to the house. “So Nigel Letters was a sad and lonely man, huh? No visitors. No social life.”

Caroline grunted. “No morals. No redeeming qualities.” She suddenly giggled. “My grandmother never understood the closet full of women’s clothing she found one day. Not until she discovered Mr. Letters dressed up in a ball gown and hanging from that hook in the bedroom.” She gave me a sidelong glance, more teasing than serious. “You don’t have any ball gowns lying around, do you, Jim?”

“Nary a one.”

“And you don’t feel the need to choke yourself silly just to get your rocks off?”

“Never tried it.”

“Good. I’d hate to continue a family tradition and find you hanging on a hook somewhere.”

“Autoerotic asphyxiation,” I said. “That’s the clinical name for it.”

She nodded. “So I’ve read. Seems to me there are easier and less drastic ways to get the job done, even if you’re working alone.” Her eyes locked into mine. “My grandmother found other things, too, you know.”

“What other things?”

“Things that bothered her a whole lot more than a closet full of dresses.”

“Like what?”

“She found blood one morning when she came to work. Blood on the veranda.”

“From what?”

“Mr. Letters said he killed a rattlesnake that crawled up the front steps.”

“Sounds feasible,” I said.

Caroline shook her head. “Too much blood. When my grandmother asked to see the snake, he told her he had tossed it down the hillside. He looked insane that morning, she said. Wild-eyed and crazylike.”

“Was he?” I asked. “Crazy?”

“My grandmother thought so.”

“Was he a drinker?” I asked.

“No. He hardly ever drank. A throwback from Hollywood, I guess. He was too concerned about his looks, although they were pretty much gone by then. He ate the right foods, jogged even before jogging was fashionable, and slept flat on his back without a pillow because he thought it would slow down the ravages of gravity on his face. Can’t say any of that helped much, though. Did you ever see any of his later movies?”

“A couple,” I said.

“Didn’t look too good, did he?”

“Can’t say he did.”

Caroline smiled. “No matter what we do, old age gets us all if we’re lucky enough to reach it.”

“Nigel Letters was only fifty-six when he died,” I said.

She nodded. “I know. But his years in Hollywood took its toll. At the top of his game, when he was young, when his movies were popular and he was grinding them out one right after the other, he didn’t exactly lead a saintly life. He was a gorgeous man back then, a real stud muffin, but all his beauty was on the outside. By all accounts he was mean, vindictive, and not at all well-liked by his fellow actors. I have a theory about people. I believe that whatever they have on the inside eventually works its way to the surface. At a certain age, you can read a person’s personality just by looking at them. The bad stuff comes through.”

I resisted the urge to go find a mirror and look at myself.

She studied me standing in the doorway. “You knew he was gay, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Everyone knew it.”

“Are you gay, James?”

“Well….” I felt a familiar resentment well up inside me. Not a resentment of my own lifestyle, which I had come to grips with long ago, but a resentment of others who thought they had the right to pry into it.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she quickly said. “I’m not judging you. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I know how the world works. I have gay friends, and each and every one of them is a wonderful person. They wouldn’t be friends if they weren’t.”

“Then why do you ask?”

“The bio on the dust covers of your books all say the same thing. ‘Lives in Los Angeles with his Irish setter, Rex.’ No mention of a wife or kids. Sounds like a gay bio to me.”

I had to admit it did. “I’ll have to remember to speak to my editor about that. In answer to your question, yes, I’m gay. But I don’t see what that has to do with….”

“No lover?”

“Not anymore, no.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

I didn’t want to be rude, but I didn’t want to spill my guts to a woman I had only met ten minutes earlier, either. I tried to diffuse the question with humor.

“Gee, Caroline, I think you’d be a much happier person if you tried to tear down these walls of shyness that you’ve built around yourself. It’s a sweet quality, but it inhibits you.”

She barked out a laugh that sent Rex’s tail spinning again. He loved happy people.

“Is that your way of telling me to mind my own business, James?”

“Jim,” I said. “My friends call me Jim.”

“Want to tell me about it, Jim?”

She was relentless, but I liked her. She was the type of person who could learn more about someone in five minutes than I could learn in a month. It was a quality I had always admired. It would be a good trait for a writer to be able to acquire. Unfortunately, I have never learned how to accomplish it. With Caroline it came naturally. Perhaps that’s the only way it does come.

“I don’t like to talk about it,” I said. “I talked about it enough when it happened.”

She watched my lips as I spoke, the sponge forgotten in her hand. “It ended badly, didn’t it?”

“Not in the way you think, but yes, it ended badly. He died.”

“AIDS?”

“No,” I said, wondering yet again why people always assume the only reason a young gay man dies is because of AIDS. There are a million ways for the world to snuff the life from a person. Any person. Gay or straight, male or female, young or old. AIDS is just one item on the menu. There are many other unsavory entrees to choose from. Cancer, for one.

“Cancer,” I said. “And it was not AIDS related.”

Caroline nodded sagely. “My mother died of cancer. I watched her waste away to a little pile of sticks in the bed. All bone and skin and not much else. Except for the misery. There was always plenty of that.”

When I thought of Terry now, Terry whom I had spent seven years of my life with, I thought of two separate people. The handsome young man who laughed and loved with equal ferocity, and the other one. The one I helped nurse through repeated bouts of chemo. The one whose face was burned black by continual doses of radiation. The one who could no longer swallow even water. Who could not stand. Who could not speak. The one who pleaded for death with every glance of his pain-addled eyes. The Terry I loved, and who loved me, was no longer the person who lay in that bed. When I watched his eyes close for the very last time, it was the most welcome event of my life.

He was thirty-two. It was Michael who brought me back from the misery of Terry’s death. We embarked on a breathless love affair that was astounding to us both in its intensity, but a few months after it started, we decided to take a step back and revert to being simply friends, like we had always been. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps in the long run, it was our friendship that we treasured most, even over love. I still missed him as a lover. If he missed me, he never mentioned it. Perhaps for him our friendship really was enough.

Caroline must have seen the memories she had dredged up. “I’m sorry, Jim. My mouth gets away from me sometimes. I ask far too many questions.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You went through it with your mother. You know what it’s like. I just find it hard to talk about.”

“Then we won’t,” she said.

And as long as I knew her, she never mentioned it again.

I RETREATED to the breakfast room, pulling the sliding doors closed behind me. I flicked on the computer and stared at the blank monitor for long minutes. Finally the words began to come. The rays of sunlight that streamed through the window had moved from one side of the floor to the other by the time I finally stopped. For those hours I had been lost to everything around me.

Caroline, perhaps no longer hearing the tap of my fingers on the keyboard and the whine of the printer as it poured out the pages, decided it was safe to interrupt.

She slid the door open far enough to poke her head in. “I fixed you something to eat. Come on into the dining room.”

I suddenly realized how hungry I was.

I was embarrassed by the way I had pulled back from her when she started asking questions about Terry, but I still had no intention of talking to her about it, if that was her plan.

Apparently, it wasn’t. The dining room table was set for one, not two. She had a plate of steak and fried potatoes waiting for me, and as I sat down to eat, she sauntered off to pull bedding from the dryer and carried it down the hall, where she commenced making up the beds for me and the company that would soon be arriving.

While I had been locked away in the breakfast room, she had not been idle. The house was spotless and smelled of wildflowers, which she had apparently gone off and plucked from the hillside, then arranged in vases and placed about the house. I had to laugh when Rex walked up to me with a wounded expression on his face, wet from a bath. My God, she had even washed the dog. Not Rex’s favorite pastime.

As I was sopping up the last drops of grease from my plate with a wad of bread, Caroline came and pulled up a chair beside me. It seemed ours was to be a casual boss/employee relationship. I was glad. I wasn’t used to servants.

She eyed the empty plate. “How was it?”

I burped. “Excellent. Thank you. And the house looks great. The flowers are a nice touch.”

She reached out and did a bit of rearranging to the vase of wildflowers on the dining room table. “They are beautiful, aren’t they? There are tons of them all up and down this mountain. I bagged some up to take home too. I love fresh flowers.”

Caroline’s face glistened from the heat and the hours of housework she had done, but she looked happy.

I watched her fiddling with the flowers for a moment, then said, “You talk about being afraid of this house, but I think maybe deep down you love it just as much as I do.”

She sighed, relaxing back in her chair. “It is a wonderful house. It was built with the best that money could buy at the time. Fine woods. Excellent craftsmanship. They honestly don’t build houses like this anymore. Nobody seems to have the time to do things right nowadays. Everything’s a rush job. Nigel Letters spent a fortune building this place, and he hired the finest people he could find to do it. It’s just a shame that….”

“That what?”

“That he was never happy here. But it wasn’t the house’s fault. I don’t think Nigel Letters could have been happy anywhere. I don’t believe this house has ever heard the sounds of laughter or love. Mr. Letters used it as a fortress to lock himself away from the world. It wasn’t a home to him. It was Elba. A place of exile. The house deserved more than that.”

“Others have lived here,” I said. “Surely they brought happiness into the house. It’s been rented time and again over the years, or so I understand.”

Caroline flicked a speck of dust from the tabletop. “No one has stayed long enough to make this place a home. Many have tried.”

“What stopped them?” I asked.

“The house. The house stopped them.”

I studied her face, wondering if she was serious. “Surely you don’t believe that. It’s just a house. Basically four walls and a roof. It isn’t a living entity. It can’t think. It can’t act.”

“No,” she said. “But houses feel. Houses absorb the lives around them. They hold onto the secrets that are brought into them. This house especially. Something happened inside this house that changed it forever. I can feel it every time I walk through the door.”

“Something bad?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Something bad. Something that left a sadness behind. And an anger.”

“Termites?”

She eyed me with her eyes at half-mast. “Would you fire me if I called you an asshole?”

I laughed. “Probably not.”

She laughed too. “You think I’m being silly, don’t you?”

I had to admit I did. “Maybe a little,” I said. “Overly dramatic, really. Not silly.”

“You’ve been here almost a week, Jim. Are you telling me you’ve felt nothing in all that time?”

“I’m not telling you that at all. I’ve had the pee scared out of me more than once. But I don’t think it’s the house. I think it’s a… well, I think it’s a ghost.”

“Just one?” she asked.

“What do you mean by that?”

“It’s just a feeling, really. I can’t help thinking there are many presences in this house.”

“Gads, Caroline, you aren’t psychic, are you?”

“Not in the least.”

“Neither am I,” I said. “But there is someone here with me at times. I can feel it. Mostly at night.”

“And you think it’s Nigel Letters?”

“Well… yes. Who else could it be? No one else has died in this house, have they?”

“Not that I know of for a fact, no.”

“I thought your family knew the history of this house. Knew everything there was to know about it.”

“No one knows everything about anything.”

“You want to explain that?”

“My grandmother suspected things about this house she would never tell us. She would only… hint.”

“What sort of hints?”

“Things she saw?”

“Like the blood on the veranda?”

“There was that. But there were other things as well.”

“Like what?”

“Like things she… heard.”

“What did she hear?”

Caroline pulled the barrettes from the sides of her head, clamped them in her teeth, and combed her long blonde hair away from her face with her fingers. She didn’t speak until the barrettes were neatly back in place.

“She heard crying. Boys. Crying.”

“Boys?”

“Yes.”

I remembered our first conversation over the phone. “That’s why you said children are not safe here. That’s why you said you would never bring your son here.”

“That’s right.”

“And you believed her?”

“I know you think I’m being silly, Jim. Hell, you said as much. But you don’t know my grandmother. There’s nothing silly about her. She’s the most down-to-earth woman I’ve ever met. She immigrated here from Ireland as a young girl, alone, and made her way in the world without any help from anyone. She worked like a dog her entire life, raised her children all alone after her husband died, and continued to work until old age put her in the nursing home where she now waits to die. She’s a serious woman, Jim, and she has about as much imagination as a bag of screwdrivers. As far as I know, the only time she ever really laughed was the day she found Nigel Letters hanging on that goddamn hook in the bedroom, where, by the way, I see you’ve hung him again.”

“Seemed appropriate.”

She ignored me. “So when my grandmother says she heard the sound of crying inside this house, I tend to believe her. Even now, as sick as she is, she can be a pretty scary woman. Serious, unimaginative women always are. I’m the poster girl for Prozac compared to my grandmother.”

“Didn’t she look around for the source of the crying? Didn’t she try to find out who it was? Where it came from?”

Caroline snatched up my dirty plates and silverware and carried them off to the kitchen. She spoke as she walked away from me. “She knew where the crying came from.”

“Where?” I called out after her.

Over the sound of running water, she said, “The carriage house. Grandmother said the crying came from inside the carriage house.”

“I thought you said the house wasn’t haunted back then.”

Caroline reappeared in the doorway, drying her hands. “It wasn’t. Those weren’t ghosts my grandmother heard that day.”

“Why didn’t she tell someone?”

“She did. She told Mr. Letters.”

“What did he say?”

“He told her he was playing his old movies in the carriage house. That’s why he bricked it up. To keep the light out.”

“And she believed that?”

Caroline was finally beginning to look a bit impatient at my incessant questions. “She had no choice but to believe it. She needed that job, Jim. And for all she knew, it may have been the truth. She almost lost her job over it, anyway. That was the day he told her she could no longer live in the house. That was the day she packed up her stuff and moved into town. But Mr. Letters wasn’t a complete ass about it. He helped her find a place. He even bought her a car so she could commute back and forth to continue working for him.”

“So she never learned who was crying in the carriage house?”

“No. But months later, she heard it again. This time she ignored it. I think she was afraid of him by then. And she was still afraid of losing her job. Mr. Letters was paying her more to commute to work than he did when she lived in. My grandmother was making good money for the times. She wasn’t about to jeopardize that. Still, she had no illusions about it. Mr. Letters wasn’t paying her more money out of the goodness of his heart. There was never any goodness in his heart to begin with. He was paying her to keep her mouth shut, and she knew it. He valued his privacy over everything else, and he was paying her to help him keep it.”

Rex walked up to Caroline and plopped his ass down on her foot, apparently the episode of the unwanted bath was either forgotten or forgiven. She absentmindedly reached down and scratched his head.

“My mother heard the crying too,” she said. “Years later.”

“What?”

“Years after Mr. Letters’s death, my mother heard someone crying in the carriage house. She was doing for a family that had rented the house for the summer. One day the children who lived here came to her and told her someone was crying out back. She thought they were playing a game with her, but she followed them outside to investigate, anyway. Through the carriage house door, she heard crying. It sounded like a boy, she said. A young boy. You have to understand that the carriage house was never part of the rental property. When the house was rented, the carriage house was always excluded. Mr. Letters had insisted on it in his will. The property was held in a trust fund, and after Mr. Letters’s death, the proceeds accrued by renting the property were donated to an orphanage in the city. That was one reason the house has never been sold until now, although I think the bank would have sold it if a buyer could have been found.”

“Nigel donated the income from the house to an orphanage?”

Caroline laughed. “That surprised everyone, let me tell you. No one thought the man had a charitable bone in his miserable little body. But apparently he did.”

“What sort of orphanage?”

“A boy’s home. Mr. Letters built the place just a few months before his death. There was a big to-do about it at the time. The papers wrote Mr. Letters up, proclaiming what an outstanding citizen he was and how this was his way of giving back to the community he had taken for his own after his movie career ended. It was all horseshit, of course. My mother always thought it was Mr. Letters’s way of screwing the IRS. Putting everything he owned into a charitable organization pretty well exempted him from ever paying taxes again.”

I began to see the sense of it. “So after Mr. Letters died, the orphanage held the deed to the house.”

“That’s right. My mother and I have both been on the payroll of the orphanage for years, although it’s not called an orphanage anymore. Politically incorrect, that. Now it’s a placement service for adoptees. Anyway, my mother and I were paid to keep the house in order, even when it was vacant. That’s why Nigel’s belongings are still here. And that’s why the carriage house has never been part of the rental property. It was stipulated that way in the will.”

“Couldn’t the orphanage have sold the house at some point during that time?” I asked.

“They could have,” Caroline said, “but they never found a buyer. There were a few nibbles over the years, but the people always backed down at the last minute.”

“Why was that, do you think?”

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

I grinned. “You think they were scared away.”

She grinned back. “That’s exactly what I think. Not until you came along, someone who was actually looking for a haunted house, was a buyer found. And I’m not convinced that you won’t be scared off before it’s over.”

“I may surprise you,” I said.

“Yes, maybe you will.”

She pulled out a chair and rejoined me at the table. After a moment, she asked, “What are you thinking?”

I reached over and patted her hand. “I’m thinking there are a couple of holes in your story.”

“Like what?”

“You said your grandmother never believed the house was haunted.”

“That’s right.”

“So when she heard the crying coming from the carriage house, she believed it came from a living person. Someone crying inside.”

“Yes.”

“But years later, presumably long after Nigel Letters was dead, your mother also heard crying coming from the carriage house.”

“That’s right.”

“Have you ever heard it?”

“Nope. Never have. But it’s not surprising. I never go back there. And if you’ll take my advice, Jim, you’ll never go back there anymore either. Not yet. Once you buy the property and it belongs to you fair and square, and if you have an ounce of sense in your head, you’ll take a bulldozer to the carriage house and be done with it forever. Until then, just stay away from it. All right?”

“But don’t you see,” I said. “If both your grandmother and your mother heard a boy crying in the carriage house so many years apart, it proves that it’s haunted.”

“You’re the one looking for proof, Jim. Not me. I already believe it. Which is all the more reason to stay away from the place. Promise me you’ll do that.”

I felt a sly grin creep across my face as a sudden thought entered my head. I wondered if I possessed enough courage to carry it out.

“Sure,” I said, my mind running a mile a minute. “I won’t go near the place. I promise.”

Caroline just shook her head before stalking back to the kitchen. “You’re one piss-poor liar, Jim. You’ll be in there before I’m halfway down the mountain.”

She was wrong about that. I waited until dark.

I HAVE typed the life out of several computers during my years of writing, so I always keep a cheap, manual typewriter handy on the off chance that another computer bites the dust. There is nothing worse for a writer than being stuck without a means to write. My penmanship is so bad even I can’t read it, so I always carry the little portable in the trunk of my car wherever I go. Just in case.

I’ve owned the portable Underwood since I was eighteen years old. I typed my first novel on it, the one that was made into the worst movie in history. The Underwood cost twenty-three dollars brand spanking new, and I haven’t had a lick of trouble with it since the day I bought it. My last computer cost twenty-three hundred dollars and lasted only four years before it flipped over on its back, heels in the air, and came to a sudden catastrophic demise with a puff of smoke and a pathetic little electronic beep. So much for high tech.

Computers have their advantages, but longevity isn’t one of them.

I dug out the portable from beneath the flotsam in my trunk, grabbed a dining room chair and a small card table I found propped in a corner of one of the walk-in closets, and lugged it all out to the carriage house. I went back to the house for the feather mattress I had pulled off the bed in the master bedroom (one night of sneezing wouldn’t kill me), a couple of pillows, a fistful of typing paper, a bottle of scotch, Rex’s water dish, Rex’s bowl of Alpo, and of course, Rex.

It was dark outside by the time I had everything arranged to my satisfaction, so with the overhead light burning cheerily, I closed the carriage house door behind me and settled in for the evening. The darkness outside seemed to lie over the carriage house like an actual weight, and the four poorly laid brick walls pressed in on me from all sides.

Rex staked out his claim on the feather mattress, resting there with his chin on his forepaws, staring at me. He didn’t seem too happy with the arrangements. He kept casting worried glances back at the side door, wondering perhaps how he was supposed to get the hell out of here if the circumstances should warrant a sudden egress from the premises.

“Don’t be a coward,” I told him. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

I thumped my chest a couple of times and did a little Tarzan yodel, but Rex didn’t look particularly reassured by my display of manliness.

After my pathetic Tarzan yell died away, the room grew perfectly silent, and every sound I made seemed to fall to the floor with a thud. I cranked a sheet of paper into the tiny typewriter and poised my fingers over the keys. After a couple of minutes, when nothing Pulitzer worthy came to mind, I gave it up and set about rummaging through the cardboard boxes stored along the back wall.

There were several. The first one I opened contained an assortment of pots and pans and casserole dishes, all dusty with age. Nothing interesting there. The second box I opened held a broken table lamp and sundry items such as ashtrays and drinking glasses, none of which matched, and a terra cotta bowl with NANCY written on the side in script.

Jesus Christ! I felt like Howard Carter unearthing King Tut. Here was Nigel Letters’s dog’s actual drinking dish. I wondered idly what it would fetch on eBay, then thought the heck with that, maybe I’d put a plant in it—a cactus, perhaps—and put it on the veranda. I set it aside and rummaged deeper into the box but came up with nothing more of interest.

I pushed the box out of the way so I could reach another behind it. As I did so, a large slab of plywood that had been propped up behind the boxes came crashing down with a resounding whump, which made Rex jump straight up into the air and gave me heart palpitations for about thirty seconds. I started to slide it out of the way, but then I gave it a closer look. The board measured about four feet by seven, with rings screwed into the four corners. From one of the rings hung a pair of handcuffs.

“Christ, Rex, would you look at this!”

And much to my surprise, he did. Crouching low, he wormed his way toward the board like he might have wormed his way toward a nest of tarantulas. His hackles went up the moment he sniffed at it. With a soft whimper, he retreated, scooting backward, until he was once again on the feather mattress. There, he lay back down with his chin on his paws and trembled.

There were stains on the unfinished wood. Deep stains. They were almost colorless now with age, but still they looked vile. I wondered what had caused them. Perhaps Nigel Letters had a few other pastimes, aside from autoerotic asphyxiation, he practiced upon occasion. If so, I suspected that whatever game he used this board for would not be a game for one. If handcuffs were clipped to all four corners, it would take two to play this game. What the stains might have been from, I didn’t even want to think about.

I pushed the board aside and opened another box.

There I found all manner of strange items. In a long, narrow wooden box I found dozens of glass pipettes, the kind a laboratory worker might use to stir chemicals. They were perhaps ten inches long and as narrow as a pencil with a tiny glass bulb on the end of each one. The other end tapered to a dull point. In the box were also several rolls of duct tape, a leather hood with holes for the eyes and mouth, and in a folding leather satchel, a set of knives and clamps and large sewing needles that looked like they might be made for use in saddlery or some other sort of leatherwork. At the bottom of the box, I found a pair of tennis shoes, black Keds, which were quite small and had obviously belonged to a child of no more than twelve or thirteen. They were scuffed and worn at the heels, ready for the trash bin even at the time they were stored. I wondered why Nigel kept them. Beneath the shoes were two items of apparel. A lone argyle sock and a white T-shirt torn at the neck. At the very bottom of the box, I found a wallet that held three one-dollar bills, all silver certificate, a ticket stub from some unnamed movie theater, and a condom, unwrapped but unused. No social security card. No driver’s license. No pictures.

The leather hood was disconcerting, to be sure, but it was the torn T-shirt that my eyes kept going back to. On the bottom hem of what had once been white cotton fabric but was now gray with grime and age, was a brown stain that I had little doubt was blood. The T-shirt was small. A child’s shirt. The ribbed fabric at the neck had been torn with such violence that the rip extended halfway down the back.

I couldn’t help wondering if the boy was in it at the time the shirt was torn.

“I need a drink,” I said to Rex. I had failed to bring a drinking glass with me, and the glasses I found in the other box were so filthy I probably wouldn’t have drunk from them even if they had been washed and gassed and sterilized and dipped in bleach. So I drank straight from the bottle. I damn near choked to death on the first swallow of scotch, but the second went down considerably easier. The third I hardly tasted at all.

By then, my hands had pretty much stopped shaking. I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the boxes and thought about the crying boy that Caroline’s mother and grandmother had heard and wondered if that same boy had been in the habit of going to movies and carrying condoms with him. Did he wear Keds? Why did his belongings end up way the hell up the side of this lonely mountain in this bricked-up carriage house, and were his small wrists and ankles ever secured to the four corners of that goddamn slab of plywood?

I hoped to hell not.

I was beginning to harbor some pretty unsettling thoughts about Nigel Letters. What exactly had he been doing up on this mountain? Why did he send his housekeeper away? Was he doing something up here at night that he didn’t want her, or anyone else, to know about? Did it involve children? Was that why the carriage house was bricked up? Not to keep sunlight out, but to keep secrets in? I had a feeling that my writer’s imagination was once again getting the better of my common sense. The darkness. The eerie silence. The Scotch. They were all feeding my imagination. Instead of thinking, I should be writing.

Never one to learn from past mistakes, I took another sip of scotch, and as I set the bottle down beside me, Rex perked up his ears and slowly, like a stalking lion, rose to his feet. He leaned forward, his nostrils flaring, and began a slow approach to the wall at the back of the carriage house. The wall that abutted the mountainside.

His eyes roamed across the wall from one side to the other. His tail was down, tucked between his back legs. It was in his “sad” position, the position reserved for days of sickness and times when my patience wore thin and I chewed him out for some infraction or other, hurting his feelings and usually causing me to dig out a Milk-Bone by way of apology and give him a five-minute belly rub to atone for my actions.

He crept up to the wall and began sniffing at a spot where the wall met the floor. He stepped back and gave a long, low-pitched howl that sent shivers up my arms and made my scalp crawl. I felt a sudden urge to look behind me, but when I did, I saw nothing.

Rex began clawing at the edge of the floor, his claws making scrabbling noises that sent creepy-crawlies sliding up my back and made me reach for the scotch bottle again.

“What is it, boy?”

My voice seemed to echo in the silent room. Too loud. Way too loud. But Rex ignored it. He dug harder at the floor, moving from side to side in a three-foot area along the wall that seemed to be the focus of every attentive nerve ending in his body. He whimpered, then stepped back again, his eyes roving up the wall. Another howl, this one longer and louder, made me jump to my feet. I went to him and, gripping his collar, pulled him away from the wall. He growled at me, then seemed to realize what he had done and wagged his tail in apology.

“Come away from there,” I said, pulling him back to the feather mattress and coaxing him into a sitting position where I joined him, my arm around his side. I could feel him trembling beneath my hands. His eyes never left the wall.

At that moment, the overhead light went out, and we were plunged into the blackest darkness I had ever experienced. Coffin darkness. I gasped, and Rex began barking like he did when the mailman was near, a total release of doggy energy that always frightened me a little by its intensity, like if he didn’t calm down, he would just keel over dead with an exploded heart. Between barks, he wailed. I took a step toward the side door and, in the darkness, kicked the scotch bottle. I heard it roll across the floor until it clinked to a stop against the far wall.

The sound of the bottle rolling across the floor brought me back to my senses, like a touch of reality had been injected into the proceedings.

I rushed to the door, but instead of opening it, I stretched out my hand in the darkness and found the light switch. When I flicked it, the light came back on, and I all but fainted with relief.

Rex immediately stopped barking and looked over at me. We stared at each other for a couple of ticks, and then I laughed a nervous little laugh. Rex grinned, or I imagined he did, and we both let our hearts pound down to a normal pace while I strode across the floor, picked up the scotch bottle from where it rested against the wall, unscrewed the cap, and took such a long pull of the burning liquid that tears began coursing down my cheeks, even as I giggled at myself for being such a coward.

Jesus! That was intense. I studied the bare light bulb that hung from the ceiling and wondered just what the hell had caused it to go out.

I glanced at my watch. It wasn’t eleven yet. I felt the usual guilt when I should be writing but wasn’t. But somehow I didn’t think I would be getting much writing done tonight, even if I could have typed with my trembling hands, which was doubtful.

I had seen nothing to be afraid of. No ghost had entered the empty carriage house to place a dank hand at the back of my neck. No alien voice had echoed in the darkness. No cold chill in the air had told me a presence from another dimension was standing before me. Nothing had happened at all, except perhaps a faulty wire in this seventy-year-old building had slipped a cog and sent the place plummeting into darkness for a few minutes. A few poorly timed minutes, to be sure, but that was the extent of it.

And yet I felt that something had indeed happened. Something I couldn’t explain. It was more a feeling than an actual experience. During those few moments of darkness, I knew that Rex and I had not been alone in this strange building with the goddamn crappily laid bricks and the weird boxes of junk stacked against the wall. I thought for about five seconds of returning to the house, then decided I wouldn’t. The night was young. Perhaps the excitement wasn’t over yet. And if something was going to happen, I wanted to be there to witness it. I had to be. This was my house, or would be soon, and if there were secrets to be learned here, then I intended to learn them. I lay down on the feather mattress, too drunk to worry about allergies. With Rex’s head resting on my chest, the two of us were soon sleeping like we didn’t have a care in the world.

A couple of hours later, I was pulled awake by the sound of scratching at the side door.

“Rex! Knock it off!”

I opened my eyes to find Rex still beside me, his teeth bared in warning, staring intently at the door. A threatening growl rumbled in his throat.

I spun around.

The sound was coming from outside. Something large and determined was digging at the base of the door. I grabbed the only weapon within reach, the half-empty scotch bottle, and clambered to my feet, trying to ignore the bursts of pain shooting through my head from all the Dewar’s I drank earlier.

The scrabbling at the door became more insistent. Sharp sounds. Like claws digging frantically at the concrete step outside. Suddenly a heavy weight slammed against the door, and it rattled on the hinges. My heart lurched when I remembered the door was merely latched, not locked. I stared at the knob, waiting to see it turn, waiting to see whatever was outside come rushing into the carriage house to tear us both to shreds, but the doorknob never moved.

I heard another rumbling growl, but this one did not come from Rex. It came from outside the door. Rex whimpered. I moved unsteadily to the door, my knees quaking beneath me, every nerve ending in my body on high alert. I could hear breathing now—heavy breathing—as the claws outside began once again scraping at the concrete step. My hand shook as I reached out and slid the bolt into place at the side of the door, securing us inside.

The second the bolt slid home, the sounds stopped. The breathing. The scratching. Everything. The sudden silence was almost as unnerving as the rattling door.

“What the fuck was that?”

I looked at Rex. He had crawled under the feather mattress. Only his nose and eyes were visible as he stared back at me. He looked like a gopher peeking out of its hole.

I felt a grin creep across my face. “Geez,” I said, my voice a weak tremor, “I feel so much safer knowing you’re here to protect me.”

I could see movement under the mattress. Rex was wagging his tail. I collapsed onto the mattress beside him and stared up at the ceiling, willing my heart to slow down and wishing I hadn’t drunk so much. Glancing at my wristwatch, I saw that it was almost two o’clock in the morning. Earlier in the evening, I had considered returning to the house, but I wasn’t about to do that now. I was stuck here until morning. No way did I intend to step outside in the darkness. I doubted if I could have dragged Rex out there either. Whatever it was that had been trying to dig its way under the door must still be outside, be it spectral or real. Either way I didn’t want to face it.

Was this another trick of the house? An angry demon with four-inch claws thirsting for blood? Or was there a more commonplace explanation for what had just happened? A wild dog, perhaps. If so, I thought, it must have been a damned big one.

Whichever it was, demon or dog, I had no inclination to step outside the safety of the carriage house and introduce myself. I much preferred the thought of its being out there and Rex and I being in here. At least until the sun came up. With daylight, I imagined I could put up a slightly braver front than I could in pitch darkness with nothing but a cowardly Irish setter at my side.

With his tail still thumping beneath the mattress, Rex rolled his brown eyes up at me, and we just stared at each other for a moment. I tugged at his nose, and he gave my hand a proprietary lick. With the excitement over, he crawled from beneath the mattress, looking a bit sheepish, I thought, and began licking my face in earnest. I flipped him over onto his back and gave him a long belly rub, which I suspected did as much for my own peace of mind as it did for his.

There did not seem to be reason any longer to dispute whether or not the property was haunted. I couldn’t imagine there to be even the teensiest cause for doubt in the matter. And that made me a happy man. Rattled, but happy.

At the moment, my happiness was tempered by a near-desperate need to empty my bladder, but I was not about to leave the safety of the carriage house to do it. I dug around in the first cardboard box I had searched earlier and pulled out a rusty saucepan, which I placed on the floor in a corner and, taking careful aim with trembling fingers, proceeded to fill to a respectable level.

Rex watched me with a look of envy.

“Just sprinkle the wall,” I told him. “We’ll tear the bricks down one day anyway.”

He understood the intent of my words if not the actual phrasing. This was made clear when he lifted his leg and peed on my foot. I racked it up to the emotional pressures of the evening, so I simply kicked off my shoes, peeled off my reeking, wet sock, and spent the rest of the night barefoot. Irish setters do not handle nuance well. They need to be given explicit instructions or none at all.

I patted his head, not unlike a father soothing a rather dim-witted child. “My fault, Rex. My fault.”

There was no sense antagonizing the only ally I had in this little adventure. Without Rex at my side to commiserate with, I doubted if I would have taken the evening’s occurrences in quite so breezy a manner. I was, after all, the lord of the manor, so to speak. Might as well act like one.

Barefoot, I padded over to the side door and pressed my ear to it, listening for any sounds of our previous visitor. I could hear nothing but a cricket somewhere out in the yard, cricketing his little cricket heart out. In the movies that usually meant the beast had gone and the coast was once again clear. I wondered if it meant the same thing in real life. I certainly hoped so. Still, I had no intention of stepping outside to find out. All I could do now was wait for the dawn.

With nothing better to occupy my time, I sat down at the card table and attempted to write. My mind was fuzzy from all the scotch, but that had never stopped me in the past. Before I could lay my fingers to the keys, Rex once again began digging at the back wall of the carriage house.

What now, I wondered.

I turned in my chair to watch him. His movements were just as frantic as they were before, but this time he didn’t seem to be afraid. He seemed merely eager, as if there were a Milk-Bone out there somewhere, and he was determined to get his paws on it.

As he scrabbled away at the bricks with his claws, his tail did its happy thing, waving back and forth from his ass like a parade carrier’s flag. He gave a little yip and then took off running from one side of the carriage house to the other, always returning to the same spot to give another yip before taking off again.

He was playing.

When the lights went out again and the keys of my typewriter began clacking away without me touching them, I flew to my feet, overturning the chair. I stood there in the dark, my heart pounding away like a blacksmith’s hammer banging an anvil, and wondered what the hell was happening now.

The lights flashed on again. Then off. Then on again and stayed on.

Rex slid to a stop, and the two us stood frozen in the sudden light like a couple of deer mesmerized by the headlight of an approaching car. But for the thudding of my pulse in my ears, the carriage house was utterly silent.

I took a tentative step toward the card table, bypassing the overturned chair. On the previously pristine sheet of paper scrolled into the typewriter, four letters had been typed.

pai n

I STARED at the four letters for a long time, finally looking down at Rex when he pressed his head against my leg. I idly reached down and cupped his face in my hand. His presence calmed me just as, I presume, my presence calmed him.

But still, that one word, pai n, seemed to shriek through the carriage house like a scream. Who had typed it? It certainly wasn’t me. My hands were nowhere near the typewriter when the keys hit the page.

pai n

I looked over at the boxes stacked against the wall, some still open after I had rummaged through them earlier. I thought of the leather satchel with the knives and sewing needles. The glass pipettes. The leather hood. The slab of plywood with the rings attached to the four corners, a pair of handcuffs dangling from one of them. I had an uneasy feeling that these items were not props from one of Nigel Letters’s old horror movies. They were not mementos he had picked up from an abandoned set in some Hollywood backlot.

But it was the other items that bothered me more. The battered Keds and lone sock. The torn T-shirt with the stain at the hem that looked like blood. Old blood. Blood from half a century ago. The blood, perhaps, of a child.

I slowly turned in a circle, studying the brick walls around me. Bricks that Nigel Letters had laid himself. The mortar that held the bricks together had crumbled in places, leaving tiny explosions of white here and there on the floor at the base of the walls, where clumps of it had fallen over the years. The bricks were misaligned. The corners, where the walls met, were awkwardly spliced together. But if the purpose of the brick walls was to capture sound, to prevent it from reaching the outside, then the bricks probably served their purpose very well. But still not well enough. Caroline’s grandmother had heard sounds coming from the carriage house. So had her mother, years later.

What had happened here?

My voice was hushed when I spoke. A church voice. A funeral voice. I spoke to the walls. To the ceiling above my head.

“Are you still here?”

Only silence answered me.

“Can you hear me?”

Nothing.

Rex pulled his head from beneath my hand, once again directing his attention to the back wall. The wall that abutted the mountain. I followed his gaze but saw nothing.

I waited, barely breathing. The room was so silent I could hear the blood sluicing through my arteries, the beating of my heart like a distant echo in my head.

I closed my eyes, concentrating on the silence. The air was utterly dead and noiseless, but I did not feel alone.

pai n

Rex tensed beneath my hand when I spoke again to the empty room.

“Are you in pain? Are you hurt?”

The light flickered above my head but did not go out.

“Did he hurt you?”

From the back wall, from the spot where Rex was staring, I heard a rustle of sound. Like tiny wings. Then a ratchet of metal, like a key twisting in a lock. Or perhaps a… handcuff.

“Let me help you,” I said. “What can I do?”

I heard a crackle of glass, like a window shard snapped in two. And then a scream filled the room. A scream of such pain and desperation that I clapped my hands to my ears and collapsed to my knees on the floor. Every nerve ending in my body told me to run, to get out. But I couldn’t move. The wailing scream held me in place like chains. The air was filled with it. Rex and I both hunkered down from the sound of it tearing through the room around us.

The scream ended as quickly as it came, leaving me breathless and drained. Dead silence once again fell over me. I felt a trickle of sweat course down my forehead and into my eye, burning me. I impatiently wiped it away.

Rex and I were once again alone. I could feel it. Whatever had been in the carriage house with us was no longer there. Only echoes of the scream remained.

The scream of a boy. A teenage boy, I thought, judging by the timbre of his voice.

A boy in torment.

THE REST of the night, Rex and I sat huddled together on the feather mattress in the middle of the carriage house. I needed sleep, but I knew I would never again sleep inside that room. So we simply sat there, waiting for the dawn.

I was glad for Rex’s company. It would have been a lonely night without him.

I thought of the boy and wondered what his name was. I wondered, too, how he came to be here, forever trapped inside these four brick walls. How had he come to die here? Wasn’t that what ghosts did? Haunt the places where they died? What circumstances had led the boy to this house on the mountain? Did he have parents who never knew what happened to him? If he did, then they might be long gone from the face of the earth by now as well, dying, perhaps, without ever learning the truth of what had happened to their son.

Something had happened here. That much was certain. Something evil. It took me a while to put a commonplace name to it. It was a word we hear every day of our lives but never really think about it unless it happens to someone close to us. We read this word in the newspapers, and we hear it spoken on the television, but until it invades our own private world, until it touches someone we love, until it steals from us the people we cherish and snatches them away forever, we think of it as just another word.

Now, suddenly, this word had entered my world. It had come to me with a scream in the night. A scream of anguish and torment. A scream from half a century ago that had sent chills up my spine, freezing my heart and filling me with a newfound purpose.

The word was murder, and I intended to get to the bottom of this one. I sensed that the boy would never rest until I did. And neither would I. If I intended to live in this house I loved so much, I would have to uncover the truth of what had happened here.

I ran my hand along Rex’s broad back as he lay sleeping. He too seemed to know that the excitement was over. I suspected we would hear no further sounds that night. What had happened here had climaxed with the crescendo of that blood-curdling scream. I could still hear it echoing inside my head, but the carriage house was silent.

I was exhausted. My back ached as I sat there on the feather mattress, waiting for the sun to come up. When at last I saw a glimmer of daylight beneath the sill of the door, I groaned my way to my feet, slid back the lock, and stepped cautiously outside.

The gray dawn was cool, but when the sun crested the mountain, it would be another hot desert day, just like yesterday and all the days before that. Already the hummingbirds were hovering over the Bird of Paradise at the side of the house, sipping nectar from the yellow dew-laden blossoms.

Far above my head, a jetliner made its approach to San Diego’s Lindbergh Field, reportedly one of the least favorite airports for pilots because of the need to cross my mountain and then duck down quickly to line up for landings.

There were people up there, a mile above my head. People with lives of their own, unaware of this one little speck of humanity standing down here watching them. I wondered if any of them suspected that all the horror stories they had heard and read since they were children might very well be true. Stories that I myself had spent a lifetime writing but never actually believed to be possible. Not until tonight.

Rex followed me outside, as eager as I to escape the confines of the carriage house. He looked around, inhaling the morning air with what I suspected to be a sigh of gratitude. He yipped once in delight and took off down the flagstone steps toward the house, snapping playfully at one of the hummingbirds that came venturing too close to his head.

He squatted at the edge of the driveway to do his business, then parked himself on the bottom step leading up to the veranda and waited for me to follow.

Side by side, we entered the house and headed straight for the bedroom, where we crashed onto the bed as if we hadn’t slept in weeks. My body shut down immediately into sleep, and I didn’t wake until early afternoon, when the heat of the California sun blasting through the window drove me from my bed and into the shower, where I began preparing myself for the day.

I had things to do.

As I stood beneath the cool shower, letting the water pound the kinks from my body, I thought I heard a sound coming through the bathroom window. I turned off the water and leaned closer to the window, closing my eyes to listen. The sound was coming from the carriage house just outside.

The boy was crying.

Chapter 3

WINDSOR MANOR was grandly named, but as I parked the car and looked at the place, I suspected the grandness ended there. It was a seedy, sprawling one-story building perched atop a hillside in one of the less elegant sections of San Diego. The houses around it looked to have been built during the construction rush that followed World War II. For all its architectural banality and neglect, the neighborhood seemed a cheerful enough place to live, however. Judging by the children playing along the street on this summer afternoon, the population was predominantly Hispanic.

A young boy, his skin the color of old pennies, zoomed by me on a skateboard. A couple of houses down, two girls who looked like twins and were no more than eight were squeezed into an old tire dangling from a tree limb in the front yard of a clapboard house sorely in need of a coat of paint. They were yelling at the boy on the skateboard in Spanish, their brother maybe. The boy, as boys will do, ignored them with an air of regal indifference. When he tried to jump the curb, the skateboard slid out from under him with an ungodly clatter, and the boy landed on his ass in the gutter, causing the girls to howl with laughter. The boy was unfazed by the fall. He picked himself up and hopped back on the board as if nothing had happened. Had he been an adult, he would still be lying there in the gutter waiting for a team of paramedics to scrape him up and carry him off to surgery, followed by six weeks in rehab.

I wondered if the happy sounds of summer and children carried through the windows of Windsor Manor. Did the clatter of the skateboard and the laughter of the children cheer the ones inside, or was it an annoyance to those who lay in their beds or sat strapped to their wheelchairs in the hallways waiting for death to finally overtake them?

After all, Windsor Manor was what one might call the last stop. A place where people came to die. Though I had yet to set a foot inside this one, I knew what nursing homes were like. I had watched my father waste away in one, never knowing where he was after the stroke turned his brain into a disconnected mass of sensory input and little else. He never spoke again, but the desire to die could be read plainly in his eyes. At the end he knew no one, not even me, but I suspected he knew where he was. He had, after all, once tended my mother just as the nurses were now tending him, but with a greater degree of compassion. He did not tend my mother by rote. He tended her with love. Caregivers in places such as this had little time for love. These people were, after all, strangers to them. They smiled and tried to cheer, industriously keeping the patients clean and comfortable, but love did not enter into it. They were just too busy. I often wondered on the days I visited my father if the nurses ever made emotional attachments at all with the people they tended. Perhaps it was wiser if they did not. People were dying all around them every day of the week. If love had entered into it, how could they survive?

An hour earlier, the sound of the sobbing boy in the carriage house had spurred me to action. My mind still raced with the memory of everything that had occurred during the night.

The scream, especially. That god-awful agonizing scream of pain and despair that had filled the old carriage house and driven me to my knees with the cold searing anguish of it blasting through the darkness. It was a death scream. I knew that now. I had heard the final moments of a young man’s life. A young man, no more than a boy really, who had met his death in that room long before I was even born. I knew nothing about him, but I wanted to. I wanted to know everything there was to know.

Still wet from the shower, I had padded naked through the house in search of my cell phone. I found it in the kitchen and punched in Caroline’s number. She answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi. It’s me. Jim.”

“Oh. Hi.” She sounded wary, as if thinking I might be calling to complain about something. I could hear the sound of cartoons in the background.

“Caroline,” I said, “I have a favor to ask of you. I hope you won’t think I’m being presumptuous in asking it.”

“I guess that depends on what the favor is.”

Right to the point.

“I would like to speak to your grandmother,” I said. “I would like to ask her a few questions about the house. Do you think that would be all right?”

There were a couple of beats of silence before she said, “Well… sure, it would be all right. But I doubt if there is anything about the house that she knows that I don’t.”

Yes, I thought, but there might be some things to learn about Nigel Letters. Things she never told you. Things she wouldn’t dream of telling you.

“Do you think she would speak to me?”

Caroline laughed. “That depends.”

“On what?”

“On what sort of mood she’s in when you go to see her. Sometimes she won’t even speak to me. At other times she never shuts up.”

“Umm… what is wrong with her, exactly. Alzheimer’s? Is she senile?”

I could hear the smile in Caroline’s voice when she spoke. “I think the term for my grandmother’s condition is ‘irascible.’ She hates where she is. She hates me for putting her there, although I really didn’t have much choice in the matter. When my son came along, I just couldn’t care for her anymore. I didn’t have the time or the energy. I love my grandmother very much, but sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do, and putting her in that nursing home was one of them. But she’s not senile. She’s sharp as a tack. It’s just her body that’s withered. Not her mind.”

“So you think she’ll see me?”

“Oh, she’ll see you. She doesn’t have much choice. She’s practically bedridden. If you walk into her room, she’ll have to see you. That doesn’t mean she’ll talk to you.”

“Well, I’d like to try.”

“This is about the carriage house, isn’t it? Were you out there? Did you hear something?”

“I spent the night there,” I said.

This time the silence on the other end of the line lasted longer than a couple of beats. It lasted a good ten seconds.

“You spent the night there,” she finally said.

“Yep.”

“The whole night.”

“From dusk ’til dawn.”

She sighed. “I told my husband that anybody who writes the kind of books you write would have to be a little crazy. Now I know it for a fact. What happened?”

This time the silence on the line came from my end. So much had happened during the night that I couldn’t think where to begin. Finally, I decided not to begin at all. Explanations were beyond me at the moment. But I did have a question for her.

“Have you ever seen wild dogs on the mountain?”

“Why? Did you see one?”

“I’m not sure. I think so. Heard it, at least, outside the carriage house door.”

“What was it doing?”

I gave her a nervous laugh. “Trying to get in, I think.”

“Was Rex with you?”

“Yes.”

“Did he hear it, too?”

“Well, of course he heard it. I’m not that crazy.”

It was her turn to laugh. “I may need some convincing on that matter.”

So might I, I thought. “So have you? Seen any wild dogs around?”

“No,” she said. “But I suppose there are coyotes. They even come into town sometimes. I saw one walking down the middle of the street one night right in front of my house. I live beside a canyon, and there are a hundred canyons in San Diego. I imagine they use the canyons to move around. They steal pets from people’s yards. Maybe one was after Rex.”

I had always thought of coyotes as scrawny little creatures, constantly underfed and lurking in the shadows. What I had heard outside the carriage house door didn’t fit that description at all, but I supposed it was possible. Possible, but doubtful. Rex might be a coward, but he was a big coward. Too big for a coyote to tangle with.

“That’s probably what it was,” I lied. “So how about it? May I see her? I promise not to upset her.”

“Oh, Jim, you don’t know much about the women in my family. Trust me. You won’t upset her.” She giggled. “My grandmother doesn’t get upset. She upsets upon. Got a pencil? I’ll give you directions. There are no scheduled visiting hours. You can go anytime you like.”

I jotted down what she told me, and I held the slip of paper in my hand now as I sat in my car, wondering if this was such a good idea.

The place had not been easy to find. There were indeed a lot of canyons in San Diego, and they were continually bisecting streets to leave a new arrival such as myself lost at every turn in the road. I had come upon four Dead End signs on my way there, causing me to be forever backtracking and searching for another route. I had finally stumbled on Windsor Manor by sheer dumb luck, and now that I was here, I felt a bit foolish about what I was about to do.

I would probably come across to this poor dying woman as a snooping, prying asshole who had nothing better to do with his time than try to dig up dirt about the past. Writers are always a pain in the butt anyway, thinking they have to learn everything about everything, as if we can never write about a subject until we first shoot it and skin it and pare it down to bare bones like a hunter field dressing some poor gut-shot squirrel he has just blasted off the side of a tree. We have to tear out every artery and sinew and analyze them to within an inch of their lives before we are satisfied that we have sufficient grasp on a subject to be able to put it down on paper.

Caroline’s grandmother would see through me like a cheap shirt. Old people have a way of doing that. I suspected I was about to make a complete fool of myself, but so be it. If I was to learn about the house, I would have to start somewhere, and this was it.

I climbed from the car, miniature tape recorder in hand, because I am too lazy to make notes, and my handwriting is illegible even to me, and headed for the entrance.

A harried but pleasant-looking black woman of sixty or so sat at a desk in the lobby typing at a computer, apparently transferring data from a pile of forms at her side onto the screen. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. She looked like she had been at it for hours. A wisp of Jheri-curled hair dangled in front of her eyes, and she blew it out of the way as she stopped typing long enough to acknowledge my presence. Her eyes had the same glazed look that I had seen in my own eyes after an all-night session with my Gateway.

She didn’t wait for me to speak, but was out of the chute first, like a Brahma bull. “They aren’t ready yet,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“The records. They aren’t ready.”

“Uhh—”

She rested a hand on the pile of papers beside her. “Medi-Cal forms. Medicare forms. Medicaid forms. County forms. City forms. State forms. These things don’t type up themselves. You’ll just have to wait.”

“Oh. Well—”

“Maybe if you people gave us a little more notice.”

“I’m sorry, I think you’re confusing me with….”

She stared at the tiny tape recorder in my hand. “What’s that?”

I dangled it in front of me between thumb and forefinger like a dead hamster.

“Tape recorder.”

She looked instantly suspicious. “You taping me?”

“No, I….”

She leaned across the desk to look at my shoes, then let her eyes range slowly upward until they reached the top of my head. “You don’t look like a lawyer.”

“I’m not a lawyer.”

“You’re not with Jovanovich and Crumm?”

“Never heard of them.”

“You’re not here about the lawsuit?”

“No, I’m…”

I thought I detected a blush creeping up through her ebony skin, but I couldn’t be sure.

“…here to see a patient. Clarice O’Donnell.”

She tucked the wayward strand of hair up out of the way and smiled at me in a self-deprecatory way, like Rex does after I catch him piddling in a corner.

“Lord, honey, why didn’t you say so?”

I smiled back. “You didn’t give me a chance.”

She was flustered now. “Forget what I said about the lawsuit, okay? We get ’em all the time. Every time a patient slips away, there’s always some relative who wants to blame us for the passing.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, casting a glance at the pile of papers still resting beneath her hand. “Makes for a lot of paperwork, I’ll bet.”

She apparently felt a sudden need to defend the institution for which she worked. After everything she had told me, I couldn’t say I really blamed her.

“We take good care of the people here. We surely do. We do the best anybody can do. I hope I haven’t given you the wrong impression.”

“Not at all. I’m sure it’s a fine—”

“Some of them get treated better than they deserve to be treated, if you take my meaning. They can get downright mean sometimes.”

“I’m sure they—”

“Practically everybody here is on Medicare, you know. Not a cash customer on the premises. I should know. I’m the one what does all the billing. And that Medicare money is slow a-coming. Every month we have to practically beg to be paid. It ain’t right. Damned government. You’d think the patients would take that into account. But no, they just go right ahead being mean. Demanding this. Demanding that.”

“Yes, well—”

“Some are sweet as pie, mind you. But I can’t think of more than a couple of those, more’s the pity. Of course, they’re only sweet ’cause they don’t know where the hell they are. Anyway, who was it you said you wanted to see?”

“Clarice O’Donnell. Room 203.”

“Oh, her.” The woman behind the desk glanced at a clock on the wall, causing me for some reason to glance at my own watch. “She’ll probably be in the TV room about now. Never misses her soaps. Is she expecting you?”

“Nope.”

“Then God help you. She don’t like her soaps interrupted. Raised holy hell one day when poor old Mr. Atkins keeled over in the TV room with a cardiac episode and died just like somebody had shot him in the head right in the middle of All My Children. Miss O’Donnell like to threw a fit, what with all the paramedics and nurses running around trying to revive the poor man while the show was still running on that damned television set. Wanted those paramedics to either just cover him up until the commercial came on or else drag the poor man out into the hall while they put the paddles to him.”

Thinking maybe her mouth had run away from her again, as indeed it had, she got that guilty, piddle-in-the-corner look once more. “Not a relative of yours, is she?”

“No, no. Nothing like that.”

I was beginning to think that if I were in charge of personnel here at Windsor Manor, I would have given some serious thought to relocating this good woman a little farther from the reception desk and a bit deeper into the bowels of the operation. Somewhere out of the public eye. Stoking the furnace, maybe, or mowing the lawn.

The five minutes I had spent with her had left me with a fervent desire to die like Mr. Atkins. Just fall down dead and be done with it all. But not here, Lord. Please not here. Not after first lingering within these walls for eight or nine years. Anything but that, Lord. Just kill me dead and get it over with. I don’t care how much it hurts, just so it’s quick. Just so I’m nowhere near this woman or the establishment she works for.

She gave me a sweet smile that didn’t fool me in the least and pointed to the door. “Just follow the hall all the way around to the other side of the building. That’s where the TV room is. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks for your help,” I said, taking off in the direction indicated, so glad to get away from her that I was practically jogging.

“That’s what I’m here for!” she called out after me. The sound of her computer keys once again clacking away followed me down the hall.

The hushed sounds and unnerving smells of the nursing home took me back to memories of my father, but I quickly pushed those thoughts away. They still hurt too much.

From what I could see, Windsor Manor was laid out in a big square, with rooms surrounding an inner courtyard where I could see patients in wheelchairs and employees in scrubs, puffing on cigarettes and chatting beneath a latticework arbor. Somewhere off in the distance, a woman called out for Jeb to close that damned door before he let the dogs in. I suspected that Jeb as well as the dogs were a fragment of memory that had come to the surface for a repeat performance. No one seemed to pay the woman any mind. Perhaps she screamed at Jeb all day long, from morning to night.

There were several patients parked along the hallway, some registering my presence as I walked past them and others seeing nothing through vacant, expressionless eyes.

A tiny lady with white frazzled hair reached out from her wheelchair and patted my hand as I passed. “Hi, honey. You look lost.”

“No,” I said, “just heading for the TV room.”

“Me, too,” she said happily. “Mind giving me a tow?”

I looked around for an orderly but didn’t see one, so I gripped the handles of her wheelchair, and we set off down the hall.

It caused her considerable effort to do so, but she twisted around in the chair to look at me as I pushed her along.

“You’re a handsome young man. Look a little like my grandson. He was supposed to visit me today, but he never showed up. I guess he had to work.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You were probably looking forward to seeing him.”

“It’s all right,” she cooed. “I got you instead.”

I laughed, and she laughed with me. It seemed I had met one of the two nice patients the receptionist had told me about.

“TV room’s just around the corner,” she said. “I’m not too heavy for you, am I?”

“Not at all,” I replied. It was like pushing air. She weighed hardly anything.

She aimed an arthritic finger at a doorway up ahead. “Right through there, honey. Park me by the window. I like to look out.”

I situated her chair by the windows along the far wall, and she instantly forgot about me, craning forward to peer through the dusty window at the rooftops flowing down the hillside outside. A smile crept across her weathered face as she gazed at the sky.

“Such a beautiful day,” she muttered to herself.

I said good-bye to her, but she didn’t hear me. Her mind was elsewhere. I gave her shoulder a gentle pat and turned away to survey the room.

A few patients, both men and women, all in a state of considerable decay, were ranged in a semicircle in front of a monstrous big-screen TV that was airing an interview with ex-President Bush. George W. Most of the patients were asleep. Couldn’t say I blamed them.

One old lady was wide-awake, however, staring directly at me. Her snow-white hair was cut into a short bob. Black bobby pins held it back from her face with no pretense at style. The pins were there for utilitarian purposes, nothing else. A lap robe covered spindly legs, and a pair of battered house slippers peeked out from beneath it. She wore a fuzzy pink bed jacket draped around her shoulders, and she was gnawing at a Snickers bar with persistent little nips of her teeth, like a beaver felling a tree.

When a pretty young woman in colorful scrubs came into the room, the old woman slipped the remains of her candy bar under the lap robe, but her eyes never left my face.

The young woman, either an orderly or a nurse, wheeled an elderly gentleman away after telling him it was time for his haircut, playfully ruffling his hair as she did so.

After the two had gone, the old woman beckoned me over.

“Are you the writer?” she asked. Her voice was harsh and crackly, like gravel dribbling down a rain gutter. It seemed to cause her pain when she spoke. There was the faintest remnant of an Irish brogue in her words. “My granddaughter said you’d be coming to see me.”

“Jim Brandon,” I said, holding out my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

She ignored my hand, pointing to the TV screen instead. “Did you vote for that fool?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“Then I’ll talk to you,” she said. “They’ve preempted my shows anyway. What the hell is he talking about, do you know?”

I listened to the ex-President for a moment, trying to gather some meaning from his rambling monologue. “Terrorism, I think. Or the heartbreak of raising twins. Or maybe the best way to screw up eight years in the White House and never take the blame for anything.”

“That’s what I figured.” Mrs. O’Donnell gurgled in what apparently passed for a laugh. “Let’s go to my room. We can’t talk here. Everybody’s snoring.”

She reached for the wheels of her chair.

“No need for that,” I said, pushing her toward the door. “You have me for propulsion.”

“You even talk like a writer,” she stated in a tone that implied she didn’t think much of writers.

Time for a bit of bribery, I thought, pulling two Baby Ruths from my shirt pocket and dropping them in her lap. “Caroline said you might like these.”

She quickly slipped them under the lap robe with the remains of her Snickers bar. “Thanks, honey. Maybe we’ll get along after all.”

Room 203 was at the end of the hall. After I rolled her inside, she said, “Close the door and open the drapes.”

I did as she asked. Sunlight streamed through the sliding glass doors that led out into the inner courtyard. I started to slide open one of the patio doors to dispel some of the stuffiness of the room, but she stopped me.

“Cigarette smoke,” she said. “Those idiots puff away out there from morning to night, as if they’re not dying fast enough as it is, and all that smoke comes rolling in here if you open that door. I’m cold anyway.”

It was eighty-six degrees outside and about ten degrees hotter in here, but I left the doors closed.

I looked about the room. It wasn’t at all what I expected. Apparently Mrs. O’Donnell had brought her own furniture with her. An antique oak bed and dresser filled one wall. A spindle rocker with padded seat and back rested in the corner. A partially finished afghan was draped across the arm, a tendril of blue leading from it to a basket of yarn on the floor beside the chair. A couple of greeting cards were tucked into the edge of the mirror on the dresser, their corners curled with age. They looked like they had been hanging there a long time.

While I surveyed the room, she pulled the Snickers bar from beneath the lap robe and began once again nibbling at it with little rabbity nips. The two Baby Ruths she dropped into a dresser drawer, where I caught a glimpse of more sweets stashed away for further consumption. A dozen other candy bars, a package of cinnamon rolls, and a large chocolate rabbit with its ears already gnawed away. I wondered if the rabbit had been lying there since Easter, three months past, but decided not to ask.

“Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Sit down.”

I parked myself in the rocker after carefully folding the afghan and placing it on the basket of yarn beside the chair. Unobtrusively, I reached into my shirt pocket and switched on the tiny tape recorder. I had no idea if she would object to having our interview recorded, but I could see no sense in antagonizing the woman if it wasn’t necessary. We seemed to be off to a good start. I didn’t want to blow it now.

With her Snickers bar nibbled down to the size of a thumbnail, she popped the remainder in her mouth and spoke around it.

“Caroline tells me you plan to buy the house. Is that true?”

“It is indeed. It should be mine within the month.”

“Then you’re paying cash.”

I squirmed a little under her gaze and her matter-of-fact statement. I guess she noticed my discomfort because she quickly added, “It’s no crime to be rich. Don’t look so guilty.”

I laughed, but it was a halfhearted attempt, and she knew it.

“Or do you think I’m prying?” she asked, one eyebrow coyly arched.

That was exactly what I thought. “Maybe a little.” I grinned.

“Like I said, Mr. Brandon, it isn’t a crime to be rich. But it is a crime, or should be, to be stupid. How long have you been in the house?”

This wasn’t how I had envisioned the interview going. I had hoped to pry information out of her, not the other way around. I was still uneasy with the questioning, but I was on the defensive now. “Long enough to know I love it.”

She picked up one of my novels from atop the dresser. I hadn’t noticed it lying there. Caroline must have brought it to her. It was a paperback edition of my second book. I had published four others since then, but my second book was always my favorite, and I felt, my best.

“I like the way you write,” she said, weighing the book in her hand. “You write like people talk. The subject matter is a little silly, though, or some people might think so.”

I shrugged. “People like to be scared. I try to give them what they want.”

She nodded. “Yes, you do. And I suspect it’s what you want as well. To be scared. That’s what attracts you to the Letters house, I imagine. Be honest. Is it the house you love or the mystery surrounding it?”

My answer came without hesitation or thought. “Both.”

She tossed the book back on the dresser. “Do you plan on writing about the house, Mr. Brandon?”

“No,” I said. “Well… maybe. I’m not sure.”

She cleared her throat, and a flash of pain crossed her face. She closed her eyes until it passed. When she spoke again, her voice was raspier than before. Rawer. I wondered what was wrong with her. I suspected something other than old age was at work inside her body. Something… ravaging.

“Are you ill?” I asked. “Can I get you anything?”

She rested a fragile hand to the base of her throat. There was no palsy in that hand, but it was spotted and sere with age, like an autumn leaf lying dead on the ground. It fluttered at her throat, as if touched by a cold wind. There was chocolate under her thumbnail. At least I hoped it was chocolate.

She ignored my offer of help. “Why exactly did you want to speak to me, Mr. Brandon? You must have better things to do with your time than watch an old lady fall apart in front of your eyes.”

I suddenly realized she was embarrassed by her frailty. Her pain was not something she wished to share with me or anyone else. I imagined that was how she had lived her life, stoically taking whatever came her way and keeping it to herself. I could only respect her for that. Age and sickness had not weakened the woman inside even one iota. The packaging might be damaged, but the contents were still intact. As Caroline had said, she was indeed a formidable woman, and I would not embarrass her by pretending otherwise.

“Someone died in that house,” I said. “Someone other than Mr. Letters. I’d like to find out who he was and….”

She stopped me with a snort. “I suspect a great many people died in that house, Mr. Brandon. You suspect it too, don’t you? That’s why you’re here. They spoke to you, didn’t they?”

I leaned forward in the rocker. The woman had my undivided attention. “No. No one has spoken to me. But I’ve heard things. I heard crying in the carriage house. The same crying you heard many years ago. The same crying your daughter heard as well. He sounded young, the one crying. No more than a boy. Who was he? Do you know?”

Mrs. O’Donnell closed her eyes. For a moment I thought she had fallen asleep. But then she spoke.

“He’s still unhappy, then. I had hoped he would find peace by now. I heard him many times when I worked there. Him and… others.”

“Others?”

“Mr. Brandon, I want you to understand something. Times were hard back then. I desperately needed that job. And there were things back then, when I was a young woman, that I couldn’t bring myself to believe. I didn’t want to believe them, I suppose. And yet I know now that I did believe them just the same. There was no getting around believing them. Not really. I’ve spent my whole life thinking about what happened inside that house. You see, I was blinded then. Blinded by my needs. I needed to work. It was the only way I could survive. I needed the money Mr. Letters paid me every week. I grew up in poverty, Mr. Brandon. I know what it’s like. I’ve experienced hunger. When I was a child in Ireland, there were many nights when my brothers and sisters and I went to bed hungry. I saw it tear my parents apart. That’s why I came to America. To escape all that. And I did escape it. But I’m still paying for the food I put in my mouth seventy years ago.”

I watched tears well up in her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“No,” she sighed. “I don’t suppose you do. It took me a long time to understand it myself. But being here, being in this place, has given me a lot of time to think things over. Too much time. All I do here is think. And I remember everything that ever happened to me inside that house. Things I tried to ignore at the time because my livelihood depended on my ignoring them. Think of a woman living in a small cottage in Poland many years ago. She lives by the railroad tracks. She sees the cattle trains go by every day. She hears the whimper of people inside those cattle cars. In the distance she sees the smoke from a munitions factory, or so she is told, that darkens the sky from morning to sunset. That smoke is sometimes so thick it blocks out the sun. She sees empty train cars pull away from the factory, only to return days later, once again full. Where do the people go? What becomes of them? They are never seen by her or any of her neighbors. And yet she doesn’t think about it. She’s too busy trying to survive. She has herself and her family to worry about. There isn’t room for anything else. Later, when a war that she never really sees draws to a close and the truth comes out about what really took place there at that munitions factory, she is stunned. Her neighbors are stunned. But the truth was in front of their faces all the time, if they had just chosen to see it. Maybe the truth was just too much. Totally incomprehensible to them. Who would ever believe that such things could actually happen? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded. “We see what we want to see.”

“No,” she said. “We see what our minds allow us to see. That’s what happened to me, Mr. Brandon. I could have stopped what happened in that house. I could have stopped it with nothing more than a phone call. But I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. I’ve been too ashamed to even talk about it. Until now.”

“Why now?”

“Because the house has obviously accepted you. For the first time in all these years, it is allowing someone to stay. There must be a reason for it. And I think I know what the reason is.”

“I’m afraid I—”

“The boy in the carriage house is just the tip of the iceberg, you know. When you’ve stayed in the house a while longer, you’ll come to understand that. There are other souls there, and they’ve apparently chosen you to be their voice. It’s time the truth came out. They can never rest until it does. They want you to speak for them. I don’t know why. Maybe they’ve connected with you in some way. I failed them when they were alive, Mr. Brandon. Don’t you fail them now that they’re dead.”

“Who?” I asked. “Fail who?”

A shudder shook her frail body, but there was no sob. Or any more tears. Just a great sadness that seemed to well out of her. It was all she had left to offer me. She was tired. Physically tired. I could see it in her eyes.

“The boys,” she said. “All those sweet boys. They were just trying to live too, you know. Just like me. There was no wickedness in them. They were only trying to survive. That’s what led them to the house. And to him.”

“Mr. Letters?”

The old woman’s eyes narrowed. A pall of hatred washed over her face. “Yes,” she said. “Mr. Letters. The devil himself.”

A hush settled around us as I studied this amazing woman before me. Her hands were once again in her lap, clasped tightly together. She fingered a wedding ring on her left hand, a plain gold band worn thin from years of wear. I wondered if it had ever been off her hand since the day it was put there. Faintly, I could hear the miniature tape recorder whirring inside my shirt pocket.

“He killed them, didn’t he.” It was not a question. It was a statement of fact. I supposed I had known it all along.

She turned away from me, focusing her eyes through the window instead as if cowering beneath my gaze.

“Yes,” she said. “I think he killed them all.”

Slowly, her eyes returned to mine. “Take me there, Mr. Brandon. Take me back to the house. I have to see it one more time before I die. I have to see them. I have to tell them I’m—I’m sorry.”

And finally, she wept, silently as old people always do. I looked away, respecting her grief.

A small chrome table stood beside the bed, the only concession to a hospital atmosphere that was present in the room. On it rested a plastic pitcher and glass. I glanced inside the pitcher to assure myself the water was fresh, then poured some. I placed the glass in Mrs. O’Donnell’s hand.

“Drink this,” I said.

She gratefully accepted the glass and sipped at it as she calmed herself. “I’m sorry, Mr. Brandon. Old people get emotional sometimes. It’s kind of funny. Everything else in the body dries up with age, but not tears. Maybe that’s what they mean by ‘second childhood.’ Children cry at the drop of a hat, and so do people like me who live well beyond their expiration date. We can’t do anything else properly, but by God we can cry with the best of them.”

She offered me a feeble smile. “Thank you for the water. You’re very kind. Caroline said you were.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and took the glass from her hand. I wasn’t feeling particularly kind. I had dredged up memories in this woman that perhaps would have been better left untouched, peeling the scab from an old wound, once again making it bleed. But maybe this was the only way the wound would ever heal. Maybe by tearing it open, the poison would drain, the poison that had eaten away at her for seventy years. I hoped she was strong enough to survive the cleansing. Atonement could be a wearying endeavor, even for the young.

“If you really want to see the house again,” I said, “I’ll arrange it. If you’re sure you’re up to it.”

She brushed a tear from her cheek with a swipe of her thumb.

“It’s something I have to do. I’ve known it for a long time, but until you came along, I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I trust you, Mr. Brandon. I trust you to help me do the right thing. And I’ll help you too. I’ll help you understand what happened in that house. Maybe the truth will finally come out. I don’t know much, really. Only suspicions. But maybe the boys will help us. They’ve reached out to you. They obviously want your help.”

“Mrs. O’Donnell, no one has reached out to me. I heard crying. I heard a scream. Someone typed the word pai n on my portable typewriter. That’s all. But I found things in the carriage house that need explaining. Disturbing things.”

She nodded. “That’s where the pain is centered, Mr. Brandon. But it’s in other parts of the house as well. And it isn’t just the boys who roam that house. There’s evil there too. It roams the house with them. Perhaps you haven’t felt it yet, but you will. Sooner or later, you will.”

I remembered the scrabbling claws frantically digging at the carriage house door, trying to get in. What would have happened if the door had opened? What would I have seen? Was that the evil she spoke of? It had certainly seemed evil enough. I was frightened and half-drunk at the time, but still it had not been my imagination. I would stake my life on it. And perhaps by deciding to spend the night in that damned carriage house, I actually had staked my life on it.

Mrs. O’Donnell’s rasping voice pulled me from my thoughts. “There’s a box in the bottom drawer of my dresser there.” She pointed. “That one. The drawer on the right. Take it out.”

I pulled open the dresser drawer, and from beneath an untidy mess of old cards and letters, I pulled out a red satin candy box, heart shaped, obviously from some long-ago Valentine’s Day. A tattered silk rose hung precariously from the cover.

“Open it,” she said. “There are things in there that will help you understand.”

I tugged off the lid and laid it aside. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I placed the box in my lap and sorted through the papers inside. Newspaper clippings, mostly. A scrap of paper with the letters T and J written on it in a childish scrawl. There were photographs as well, half a dozen bound in red ribbon. I slipped away the knot that held them and splayed the photos out across the bed beside me. They were yellow with age. One had been torn and mended with tape. It had been mended a long time ago. The tape, too, was yellow and cracked.

In the torn photograph was the face of a boy. A boy of fifteen, sixteen at the most. His hair was pale in the black-and-white photo. Blond. A towhead. It was in need of cutting by the standards of the day it was taken, which was in November of 1942, according to the hand-printed date on the back. Today the boy’s hair would seem quite short. Back then, in the forties, it would have been considered Bohemian. The boy’s eyes, peering through the hair that almost hid them, were pale as well, light against the color of his skin.

His gaze, as the boy from so long ago stared into the camera, held me transfixed, as if he were staring directly at me.

The boy was handsome, his smile angelic. But there was little innocence in his eyes. I suspected he had seen a lot in his fifteen or sixteen years. He seemed happy on the day this picture was taken. His arm was draped around the neck of a heavyset woman with long, dangling earrings, too much makeup, and hair piled high atop her head in intricate rolls and curls. The snapshot was obviously taken inside a restaurant. On the wall in the background, I could see a portion of a posted menu. None of the prices listed were higher than ninety cents.

“Is he…?”

Mrs. O’Donnell nodded. “Yes. He’s one of the boys.”

“How do you know? Where did you get this photograph?”

She reached over and plucked the slip of paper with the letters T and J on it from the box. She handled it carefully, lovingly, as if it might disintegrate in her hand. “His name was Timmy Johnson, but everyone called him TJ. He was a male prostitute from Reno, Nevada.”

“A prostitute! How do you know this?”

She smiled, obviously pleased by my reaction, but not so pleased as to answer my question. “The woman’s name is Julene Maddox. She took the boy in when he ran away from a foster home in Nevada. She gave him a job working there.” She tapped the photograph. “In her diner. He disappeared shortly after that picture was taken. Julene never saw him again. It broke her heart. She kept that photograph with her until she died at the age of 97.”

“When did she die? Where?”

Mrs. O’Donnell smiled sadly. “She died right here, Mr. Brandon. In this very room. A little over a year ago. We were having tea. God took her quickly. She was lucky.” She touched her throat. “Luckier than some, at least.”

“She was a patient here?”

“Yes. Much longer than me. She lived here almost fifteen years before she died. Her legs were gone, you see. Amputated at the hip. Diabetes, I imagine, although she never talked about it. She was a fine woman in her way and certainly a brave one. In all my long years, she was the dearest friend I ever had.”

“How did you meet?” I asked. “How did you find each other?”

She pulled a bobby pin from her hair and repositioned it more snugly to her scalp. It seemed to take a lot of energy to do so. Her hands dropped back to her lap when she finished, trembling and spent from the exertion.

“Just as you might imagine,” she said. “Nigel Letters brought us together. It was late at night. This was the first year I lived here. We were in the TV room. They were broadcasting one of his old movies. One thing led to another. Julene was an easy woman to talk to. I told her everything that night. Everything I suspected about the man I had once worked for. She latched onto every word I spoke, Mr. Brandon, like I was burning those words right into her skin. I couldn’t understand why my story affected her so much until she took me back to her room and showed me that box. Those are her photographs. Her clippings. All except for this.” She held up the paper with only two letters on it. TJ. “This was mine. Julene wept for days when I showed it to her. When I told her where I got it.”

“Where did you get it?”

“TJ gave it to me. He came to me as I slept. I was working alone that day. Mr. Letters was ill, or said he was. He had locked himself in his bedroom. He did that a lot toward the end. My work was caught up, so I sat down in the dining room to write a letter to my family in Ireland. I dozed off. When I woke up, that was in front of me. And there were two drops of blood on the tabletop beside it. Not mine. Later that day, toward evening, I heard crying through the kitchen window, coming from the carriage house. It was a boy, Mr. Brandon. That boy. I knew it in my heart then, and I know it now. He was already dead, of course. There was nothing I could do to help him. It was too late. Too late for all of them. I never really knew the murders were taking place when they happened, you know. I guess I blocked the telltale signs of it all from my mind at the time. I did so desperately need that job that I just turned away from the truth. The truth of it would have been too horrible to believe anyway.” She glanced at the letters on the scrap of paper. “I think the killings had stopped by then. They did, you know. Stop. Don’t ask me how I know that. I just do.”

“You mean they stopped while Mr. Letters was still alive?”

“Oh yes. He lived in seclusion the last two years of his life. As far as I know, no one saw him during that time other than myself. I think he was quite mad by then. It was the guilt, you see. The guilt over what he’d done.”

“Perhaps his death was a suicide, after all,” I said. “Perhaps it wasn’t an accident like everyone thought.”

Mrs. O’Donnell pooh-poohed me like a mother admonishing a wayward child. “It wasn’t an accident. And it wasn’t suicide either. I knew it the moment I saw him. They killed him. The boys, I mean. Payback, they call it nowadays. Can’t say I ever blamed them. How the hell could I?”

The old woman eyed me with a merry twinkle in her eye. “Oh, no, Mr. Brandon. Don’t fool yourself. Mr. Letters didn’t kill himself. He was murdered, plain and simple.”

I HAD just returned from fetching a couple of Cokes from the vending machine down the hall. Mrs. O’Donnell was sipping hers through a straw she had pulled from beneath her lap robe. There seemed to be all manner of treasures hidden under there.

“Lord, how I laughed that day! They took his dignity, you see, leaving him like that. They took his dignity, and they took his life. They did everything to him that he had done to them. Nothing could have been fairer. Of course, it took me years to figure it all out. I was an old woman by the time the truth finally settled into my mind about that house. By then, I no longer worked there. But my daughter did. One day she told me about hearing a boy weeping in the carriage house. Mr. Letters was long dead by then. Evelyn was working for a family who rented the house for the summer. If I remember correctly, they only lasted a month before the house drove them away. Evelyn had a key to the carriage house. Something I would never have been allowed when Mr. Letters was alive. Naturally, when she went inside, there was no one there. I had told Evelyn years earlier that the house was haunted, but she never believed me. Well, she damn well believed me now. She paid more attention after that day. Started keeping a journal of everything that happened to her in that house.”

This grabbed my attention. “Who has the journal now? You or Caroline? I’d like to read it if I may.”

“So would I, Mr. Brandon. Caroline’s father and I searched and searched for that journal after Evelyn passed away. We never found it.”

“Was she still working at the house when she died?”

“Yes, but she didn’t die in the house. She died at home. My daughter was a heavy woman. Just like her daughter, Caroline. I don’t know where they got those fat genes, Mr. Brandon. I’ve never been obese, and my husband wasn’t much bigger than a minute. All that fat must have skipped a generation or two. Must be one or two pudgy ancestors perched back in the family tree somewhere. Anyway, my daughter died of cancer. Between you and me and the lamppost, it wasn’t just the cancer that killed her. My daughter ate like a horse. People should be careful about what they put in their mouths.”

The Baby Ruth had been whittled down to about half its original size by now. She saw me staring at it.

“You’re thinking it’s the pot calling the kettle black,” she said.

I grinned. “Something like that.”

“Well, you can stop thinking it. Look at me, Mr. Brandon. Your shoes probably weigh more than I do. There’s a cancer eating me up from the inside out. I can barely walk. A decent bowel movement comes about as often as Christmas, and still I managed to outlive both my husband and my daughter. I’m on the last lap. A little candy isn’t going to hurt me now. It’s the only pleasure I get in this place. Remember that next time you visit. Peanut brittle would be nice.”

Caroline had called her grandmother an irascible woman. I found her sweet and earthy. And maybe just a little bit scary. Soft on the outside with a nut of hardness buried somewhere in her center, just like the candy bar she was nibbling on. Still, she had opened herself up to me completely, telling me things she had never spoken of to anyone. Perhaps a close proximity to death brings out truths most commonly kept hidden.

I lifted one of the newspaper clippings from the satin box. Like the photographs, it too was yellow with age. The print was a different font from what is found in newspapers today. More delicate. Less easy to read. The clipping was taken from the editorial page of what I presumed to be the San Diego Union. It was undated and unsigned.

POLICE IGNORE DISAPPEARANCES

A string of disappearances of young men and boys from the downtown area of this city has left residents stunned by the cavalier attitude of the San Diego Police Department in their handling of the matter. They have, many contest, done nothing. A spokesman for the police went on record yesterday as saying there was no evidence of foul play involved in the rash of missing persons that has plagued the city since February. The dozen or so missing men, all under the age of eighteen, are simply runaways, or so the police contend. Residents disagree. The fact that many of the victims are known to traffic in prostitution has led many to believe that the police are simply uninterested in learning the truth. One cannot help but wonder if they would be so uncaring had the victims been plucked from a higher spectrum of society, rather than from the mean streets of the downtown area. Men of the Police Department call themselves “America’s Finest,” but below Market Street, where most of the disappearances have occurred, they are being called by other, less complimentary names. And the outrage is growing. It is obvious to many outside the Police Department that there is a predator stalking the streets of San Diego, and something must be done about it. How many more young men must disappear without a trace before “America’s Finest” take action? In a perfect world, even the lowly would deserve their protection.

ANOTHER NEWS clipping, this one torn from the upper corner of a newspaper, carried the date, September 6, 1942, and the San Diego Union’s logo. It included the school photograph of a boy with crew-cut hair and a grinning, cherubic face.

The San Diego Police Department is asking the public for information concerning the whereabouts of Allen Earl Crisp, a sixth grade student at Cedars Elementary School. He was last seen at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday at a bus stop on the corner of Park Boulevard and B Street in the downtown area. He was wearing black-and-white sneakers, denim Levi’s, and a white T-shirt and carrying a green knapsack at the time of his disappearance.

This newspaper and a group of concerned citizens are offering a $1000 reward for information leading to his safe return to his family.

The boy’s disappearance is the latest reported incident in a string of disappearances that have parents up in arms over the inability of the San Diego Police Department to locate any of the missing youngsters, ranging from twelve to nineteen years of age. The police have gone on record as claiming the youths to be runaways, a position the public has grown increasingly skeptical of.

If you have any information concerning Master Crisp or any of the other missing boys, please contact this newspaper or the San Diego Police Department.

AND YET another clipping, this one taken from the Letters To The Editor section, was dated September 14, 1942.

Our twelve-year-old son disappeared a week ago from a bus stop in downtown San Diego while returning home from school. Allen was a good student and a fine young man. The police insist he ran away from home, but we know this is not the case. We are begging the public for any information they can give us that will bring our son home to us safe and sound. If, as we suspect, Allen was taken forcibly, we plead with the person responsible not to harm him. He is our only son and we love him very much. Set him free and we will do nothing to retaliate for his kidnapping. Please send our son home. Allen deserves to live.

George and Esther Crisp

I WENT back to the previous article and studied the photograph of the Crisp boy. It was impossible to judge his size by the head-and-shoulders snapshot, but he appeared small for his age, as if he were just at the brink of that moment when a boy’s body begins to lengthen and the childish features start to slough away, remolding themselves into the face of the man he would soon become, the man Allen Earl Crisp would never live to be. Had fate not intervened, snatching him into oblivion from that bus stop so long ago, he would be an old man by now. Well into his eighties. He would have a lifetime of memories to look back on. Children of his own to cherish. Grandchildren, perhaps, to spoil and brag about. As it was, the book of his life would never be fully written. It would end with the first chapter. I wondered how the story might have unfolded had it been allowed to do so. What wonders would the man have seen? To what heights might he have ascended if his life had not been stripped away at the age of twelve?

Was this the boy I heard weeping in the carriage house? Was it his sneaker and blood-soaked T-shirt I had found moldering in the bottom of that box? Was he the boy whose pain found its way back into this world through the keys of my typewriter? Why was he still here? Why has he been reaching out to us for all these long years? First, to this woman sitting before me, then to her daughter, and finally to me. What did he want us to do for him? What could we do?

The room had grown silent as I sat lost in these thoughts. I looked up to see Caroline’s grandmother watching me.

“You understand now, don’t you?” she said. “This isn’t one of your silly novels where everything turns out all right in the end. Not for the Crisp boy. Not for any of them. He’s still there, Mr. Brandon. They all are. The house is still holding them captive.”

“Last night,” I said, “in the carriage house, I heard this boy, I think.”

“You heard him crying.”

“No,” I said. “I heard him screaming.”

I ran my thumb across the yellowed photograph. In my imagination, I felt the smoothness of the boy’s cheek. The warmth of his skin against my own. I felt his mouth open wide in a bellow of torment and pain. And slowly, I felt his eyes close forever, the tears and the suffering at last extinguished. He grew still beneath my touch. “I heard him die,” I said, and I closed my eyes….

HE AWOKE in a darkness so intense that at first he could not believe his eyes were actually open. He could still taste the chemical-soaked rag the man had pressed against his face when he first stepped into the car.

A lost dog, the man had said. He would pay the boy five dollars to watch for him as he drove. Allen almost turned the man down. His bus was coming. He could see it lumbering around the bend on Park Boulevard, where it had just pulled away from the bus stop in front of the zoo. But five dollars was more money than the boy had ever had in his life.

So he swung the knapsack off his shoulder and hopped inside the car. He was just about to ask the man what sort of dog he should be looking for when the man’s hand came across the seat and pressed the cloth over his nose and mouth, and Allen watched the world swim away from him in a cloud of ether.

And now he was here, lying in a darkness so deep that it almost pulled the air from his lungs.

His shoulders ached. He tried to move, to ease the pain, but he could not. He realized there were cold bands of metal clinched tightly about his wrists and ankles. They felt like handcuffs, or how he imagined handcuffs would feel. The tinkle of metal chains when he pulled at them told him he was right. His body was stretched spread-eagle on a wide slab of wood. The wood was rough. Unsanded. It bit into his buttocks, and he realized his trousers and undershorts were gone. Only his T-shirt remained. The air felt cold against his skin. Night air. He must have been here for hours. Before he could stop it, the urine pulsed from his fear-shrunken penis, splattering across his chest and face. He gasped at the heat of it. Something moved along his arm. The faintest touch of skittering legs. Allen hated spiders, or any sort of bug for that matter. He cried out, twisting his arm away from the awful crawling creature that he could only imagine in his mind, and felt it skitter across his wrist and away. A sob escaped his throat.

His head throbbed with the tempo of his pounding heart, arrows of pain left over from the chemical the man had used to subdue him. He could feel it behind his eyes, sharp darts of it shooting through his brain. Gradually, that pain eased, but the discomfort of being chained down with his arms and legs stretched wide grew. The muscles of his thighs trembled. He tried to relax the tautness of his body, to pretend that he was simply lying in his bed and waiting for sleep to overtake him at the end of an ordinary day, but the fear that the darkness and the chains and the hard splintering wood beneath him brought to his mind kept his body as tense and unbending as stone.

Allen’s mind, still woozy from the ether, pulled him away from the darkness, the darkness that was like a living thing angrily gnawing at his bare skin with sharp, piercing teeth. Bat teeth. Tiny incisors stripping away the flesh, leaving him exposed and bleeding. Helpless. A living entity, this darkness, cold and cruel and suffocating, touching every inch of him, not only on the outside but inside as well. Deep inside where nothing before had ever reached. It drenched him with such fear that he found himself floating away from it, far away, where the awful darkness could no longer find him. His mind took him to a safer place. A place with light and laughter and the warm scent of his mother’s body, redolent with love and talc and tenderness. The gnawing shadows receded as he felt his mother’s soft, heavy arms wrap around him, shielding him from pain, from fear, from—darkness.

And shielding him from whatever it was that resided in this darkness with him.

For he was not alone. He had known it from the moment he awoke. At first it was only a hint of something out there, out beyond where his eyesight could reach. A flutter of sound so faint that it might have been his imagination, but he knew somehow it was not. A stirring of air, like breath escaping silent lips. He could almost feel the thunder of another heart beating with his own among the shadows of this blinding darkness. And he sensed that this heart, unlike his own, did not hammer with fear. It hammered with—anticipation.

Allen could no longer see his mother’s face in his imagination. He could no longer feel the warm safety of her arms or smell the sweet scent of her. Fear reclaimed him with a rush. A tear coursed down his cheek as he pulled as hard as he could against the chains that bound his wrists. Sharp metal tore into his flesh, and a whimper of pain filled the darkness around him. He knew the sound came from him, but it did not sound like him. His body twisted frantically against all four bonds at once, and pain of such exquisite intensity and sharpness left him breathless and shivering. But he did not whimper this time. He did not cry out. He did not want to hear that voice again, even though he knew it was his own. He felt a warm flow of blood trickle across his ankle where the sharp metal had cut the deepest. The pain gave him clarity. The feel of his own blood flowing across his skin gave him purpose. But they were illusions. For in reality there was nothing he could do, and he knew it. He could not free himself. He could barely move at all.

All he could do was wait.

Once again his mind turned inward, away from the darkness. Anger filled him. Thoughts of retribution. What he would do when his bonds were removed. How he would strike out at the person who had done this to him. The man. The man in the car. That man brought him here to this dark place and chained him like a dog.

He had removed Allen’s pants and the boy began to wonder about that. He had heard stories of men who did things to children. Sexual things. His parents had warned him time and again to be wary of strangers. At twelve, sex was no longer simply a vague concept to Allen. He understood the mechanics of it, or thought he did. But what he understood were the mechanics dealing with a man and a woman. His parents made love. Often at night, as he lay alone in his bed, he could hear their movements in the bedroom next to his. Sometimes he could hear more than just movements. Sometimes he could hear his mother cry out softly, but he knew she was not crying out in pain. Those night sounds always made Allen feel safe and loved. He might sometimes wonder exactly what was going on beyond his bedroom wall, but he never thought about it much. It was enough to know his parents loved each other and made each other happy at night, for if they loved each other, then it meant they were happy with him as well. They loved him too.

Allen suddenly wondered where his parents were now. Were they searching for him? They must be. He had been gone for hours. Maybe someone had seen him climb into the car with the man. Maybe someone jotted down the license number on the car.

Together, he and his dad read Dick Tracy in the funny papers every single day. It was one of the things Allen most looked forward to every morning of his life. He knew Dick Tracy wasn’t real, but maybe there was some other cop just like Dick Tracy, out there right now, this very minute, tracking the man down. If they had the man’s license number, they would have his address as well. They might be coming this very minute to set him free. He hoped there would be a shoot-out, just like in the funnies. He hoped the cop that was looking for him could shoot a gun as well as Tracy, because Tracy never missed. He hoped the man would take about six bullets to the chest. Allen wondered if his parents would be with them when the cops arrived. He pictured his mother rushing to him, throwing her sweater over his nakedness and smothering his face with eager, relieved kisses, perhaps cooing sadly at the blood on his wrists and ankles.

Allen almost smiled there in the darkness at the pictures he conjured up, but a sudden sound from behind him brought him crashing back to reality.

It was a small sound, really. Just a gentle expulsion of air. Chuff!

Allen froze. His breathing stopped. Had there been light enough to see, one might have witnessed his eyes open wide in the sudden panic that gripped his body, one might have seen the tremor of corded muscles beneath the pale skin of his young legs pulled wide by his bonds. Those legs, lightly coated with the soft down that comes as a prelude to burgeoning puberty, ached with a pain he had never felt before, had never imagined, but the pain was almost forgotten as his mind took in the meaning of that sound. He turned his face to the side, trying to see through the impenetrable darkness, pressing his nose into the warmth of his upper arm, an arm pulled taut by the band of metal at his wrist.

He could smell the fear on his skin. He licked his lips and tasted the urine he had sprayed himself with earlier. Tasted the tears, too, that again were leaking from his eyes. Had there been light, one might have seen the hopeless pleading in his face, the pleading for release from this awful terror that the sound had unleashed inside him.

For it was not a human sound he had heard. That soft chuff of expelled air had not come from human lips. He knew that sound. He had heard it once before, weeks ago, on an outing with his parents, an outing celebrating his twelfth birthday. His cousins were there as well. The twins. Two ten-year-old girls that Allen could barely stand to be around for more than five minutes at a stretch, but they were there that day. And for once in his life, Allen enjoyed having them there. They were having fun. His parents were off somewhere doing whatever parents do on an outing to the San Diego Zoo, and he and the twins were in the section of the zoo that held the big cats.

They had just passed the snow leopard, an animal that might have been stuffed and hanging in the gift shop for all the entertainment it provided. Disappointed, they moved on to the next exhibit, a large area on the hillside completely enclosed in wire mesh. They were alone on the path. It was late, and the zoo would be closing soon. Most of the people had already begun the pilgrimage back to their cars, happy and sunburned and worn out from the miles of walking they had done. So it was only the three of them, Allen and the twins, who approached the fenced-in hillside. The twins were giggling about something. They were always giggling. Allen was feeling very adult, leading them along the path, when suddenly, from deep in the recesses of the panther cage, a furious ball of black fur, all claws and teeth and angry eyes, hurled itself at the wire mesh just inches from where they stood. The twins screamed, and Allen dropped the bucket of popcorn he was carrying, scattering the popcorn over the path.

All three of them leapt away from the cage as the panther once again hurled itself against the mesh, rattling the wire all the way up to the top, twenty feet above their heads.

Then it retreated, slinking back up the hillside of its cage, where it sprawled along the length of a log and continued to stare at them with hateful yellow eyes. Its mouth opened wide, baring long fans that gleamed white against its black face, as the animal chuffed its frustration at them.

The sound the black panther had made that day at the zoo was the same sound Allen had just heard coming from behind him in the darkness. A jungle sound. A sound of predator stalking prey. And Allen had no illusions about which of the two he was.

Again he felt the urine stream from his body, this time puddling beneath his buttocks. The acrid stench of it filled the blackness. When he finally breathed again, it was a ragged intake of air. A sob.

He had more to fear now than just the darkness. Suddenly he longed for the man in the car. He longed for the man to come to him. Whatever the man had in store for him was better than what stalked him here in the darkness. The man would not tear him apart with teeth and claws. The man would not pull him to pieces until he was nothing more than a quivering pile of bones and organs. The man would not hurt him like this beast lurking in the shadows could hurt him. The man was not an animal.

Soon, Allen would understand how wrong he was about that.

HOURS PASSED. How many, he had no way of knowing. Allen’s body was one long ache from the crown of his head out to his fingertips, and down the length of his legs to the tips of his toes. Thirst, too, had now added a whole new dimension to his torment. He tried to think of other things, to take his mind off his cramping muscles and the dryness in his throat, but the pain kept dragging him back.

His mind began playing tricks on him. He was beginning to think now that the darkness surrounding him was not merely darkness. Perhaps he was truly blind. Perhaps the drug the man had subdued him with had done something to his eyes, some weird chemical reaction that had robbed him forever of his sight. Surely, if his eyes were healthy, they would have adjusted to the darkness by now. Could any darkness of the real world ever be as deep as the darkness he was in at this moment? He might be lying in a room as bright as a surgeon’s operating theater and not even know it.

But even this dawning fear of blindness seemed but a small matter to him, compared to the reality of the animal that shared this dark place with him. For the animal was no figment of his imagination. It was real enough, all right. He had heard it several times during the hours he had been chained to this goddamn board. His mind had run down the list of all the big cats he had ever seen or read about in his short lifetime, but the one that returned to him always was the black panther that had charged the fence that summer day. That day when he and his twin cousins were innocently walking the path at the zoo, laughing and having a good time, until that panther came shooting out of the weeds and flung itself at them with all the fury it could muster. If not for the fence, Allen knew, it would have torn them apart that day. It wanted to. You could see it in those yellow eyes. The anger, perhaps, that the cat felt after years of captivity, anger at what man had done to it, had suddenly centered itself on the three of them. That cat would have ripped their hearts from their bodies had it been given the chance.

And now the cat was back. Allen knew it without a shred of doubt. No other beast could live in this darkness unless it was made of darkness itself. How it came to be here did not trouble the boy. A frightened twelve-year-old does not consider such mundane things as how and why. A parent might have sat the boy down and explained the ridiculousness of what his mind had convinced him was fact. But there was no parent here. There was no one here but him. And the darkness. And the black creature God had sewn together from scraps of night.

Why it had not lashed out at him with claw and tooth was simple enough to figure out. The animal was manacled just as he was. Or perhaps caged. But it was here, and sooner or later, it would free itself and come for him. Allen figured it was just a matter of time.

He could hear it now. Pacing. Back and forth. The soft tread of its feet on concrete. There was no rattle of chains, and this led Allen to believe that the animal was indeed caged, rather than bound in metal as he was. There were no restraints on the creature’s body. It was free to move, but not so free as to reach him.

Not yet.

That would come later, Allen knew. There was no escaping it. The police were not coming for him as he had envisioned earlier. No one was coming. He was here, and the animal was here, and soon, he suspected, the man would be here as well.

He did not want to see the man again. The man now scared him more than the darkness. It was the man who put him here.

The man would kill him. Or try to. Allen knew that now. It was toward the man that Allen must focus his attention. He was a greater threat than the cat. The cat could not reach him, but the man could. The man could do anything he wanted as long as Allen was chained down the way he was. But the minute the man released him from his bonds, Allen would go for him like the panther had gone for him and the twins. He would rush the man and strike out at him with all the fury that had been building up in him since he awoke in this awful darkness so many hours ago. He would strike the man down somehow, and then he would run like a rabbit until he was so far away from this place that the man would never find him.

“But first I’ll kill him,” Allen spat into the darkness.

And at the sound of his voice, the cat went wild, hurling its heavy body against what sounded like metal bars. There was a scrape of metal across concrete, as if the cat had jarred its cage so hard that the cage actually slid across the floor. A faint metallic twang filled the air as the metal cage that held the beast reverberated from the impact.

And then the animal screamed. It wasn’t a roar. It was a scream, high-pitched and eerie, a scream of pure anguish and frustration. Allen heard the scrape of claws over concrete, and the sound was nearer than any other sound the boy had heard from the beast. It was reaching for him. Allen could imagine the great cat stretching its paw out through the bars of its cage, scrabbling in the darkness, trying to snag him with its claws, to sink their sharpness into his flesh and drag him toward the cage. To pull him close, and once there, once Allen’s body was wrenched across the floor and up against the cage, the animal would tear him apart, pulling him piece by bloody piece through the bars where it would open its great jaws and consume him. Allen could almost feel the long teeth tearing into him, ripping the life from him bit by bit.

The animal screamed again. And this time Allen screamed with it. The dark place echoed with the wails of their combined anger and fear, the beast furious that it could not reach him, and the boy terrified that it actually might.

A wide slash of moonlight suddenly stabbed through the darkness as a door was flung open. A door to the outside. A door to freedom. A wave of cool air swept across the boy’s naked body. In the open doorway, Allen saw the black silhouette of a man. The man in the car.

When the man spoke, he sounded amused.

“I see we’re getting to know each other. Perhaps it’s time for formal introductions.”

With that, he flipped a light switch at the side of the door, and the darkness exploded into a light so bright Allen gasped as the pain of it tore into his eyes. He turned his face away from that piercing light as the man stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

Eyes closed, Allen heard the man’s footsteps walk past him, as if his interest in the boy was but a meager thing compared to his interest in the beast behind him. Squinting against the painful light, Allen twisted his head around, trying to see what the man was doing, but he could see nothing but an expanse of concrete floor and brick wall. The man was directly behind him, where Allen’s eyes could not reach, where the stiffness in the boy’s body and in his neck did not allow him to turn. He almost cried out with the pain of trying to, and he knew immediately that there would be no furious rush at the man once his bonds were removed. He doubted if he would be able to stand at all.

At that moment, Allen gave up hope. Whatever the man intended to do to him, whatever he and the cat had in store for him, was something he would simply have to endure. He hadn’t the strength to fight, and his body was too weak to run. He was naked and alone, and no one was coming to help him. Allen was only twelve, but he was mature enough and wise enough to know that Death had just stepped into the room with him. He closed his eyes once again against the painful bright light and felt the tears squeeze out onto his cheeks as he waited for it. A great sadness welled up inside him, knowing he would never again see his mom and dad or his friends or the twins, and they would never again see him. He wondered, vaguely, if they would ever learn the truth about what had happened to him. He gritted his teeth against the spasm of pain that suddenly shot through his outstretched limbs and waited for the end.

Allen understood the concept of death. He understood it far better than he understood the concept of sex. But the concept Allen was weakest on was the concept of pain. True pain. Before the night was over, he would understand it completely. By dawn, when the morning sun brought a new day to the world outside these brick walls that surrounded him, Allen would no longer fear death. By the dawn of that new day, the day Allen would never see, he would long for death to release him from his newfound understanding of pain.

His release would be a long time coming, for Allen had many lessons to learn about pain before the night was over. And his lessons were about to begin….

The man did not speak words behind him. He made only soothing noises with his tongue, calming the beast that Allen had not yet seen with gentle clicks and hums, as one might soothe a baby. Allen could feel the tension in the air dissipate as the animal grew quiet, responding to the calming sounds.

“Later, Tania,” the man finally said. “Later.”

And then the man was there, kneeling beside him, reaching out to run a warm hand along the length of the boy’s naked thigh. Allen tried to pull away from the man’s touch, but the bonds restrained him. Allen squinted against the glare of the bare bulb that shone from the ceiling above his head and watched the man, his heart racing.

The man was naked but for a leather mask that covered his head and face, but the holes cut into the mask for the eyes and mouth were large, and Allen could see the man smiling behind the leather.

Allen tried to speak, to ask the man what he was going to do to him, but the words would not come. His throat ached with thirst, and this was the first word Allen whispered to the man.

“Water,” he said.

The man did not answer. His hand brushed over the boy’s genitals and slid beneath the T-shirt that covered his chest. There it rested above the boy’s heart, sensing the pounding of fear inside, and the man closed his eyes as if relishing the feel of it. A smile played across the lips inside the mask.

After a long moment, the man opened his eyes and withdrew his hand from beneath the T-shirt. He took a tiny key from the floor beside him and inserted it into the handcuff that bound the boy’s ankle. When the boy’s leg was free, he leaned across Allen and released the other leg.

Allen immediately tried to twist away from him, but the man held his legs flat to the board. When he gripped the boy’s ankles and lifted the legs high, Allen cried out with the pain of movement where he had been without movement for so long. He could feel the blood rushing through his legs, bringing needles of pain with it.

Allen screamed.

And as his legs were lifted higher, both ankles clasped by one strong fist, Allen tried to scream again. But the man clapped his hand over the boy’s mouth and held him silent. Tears streamed from Allen’s face. The pain of the blood surging into his legs was unlike anything Allen had ever known. The man’s hand was cutting off his air, so in desperation Allen bit down hard on the man’s palm. The hand jerked away, and the man’s fist crashed into Allen’s face with such force that the boy felt teeth loosen before darkness took him and he knew no more.

NIGEL WAITED, studying the unconscious boy beneath him. The boy was beautiful but unfinished. A work in progress. Simply put, the lad was too young. He preferred them well into puberty. The genitals of the boy, though delectable nestled there between the upturned legs, were small and almost hairless.

He had taken the boy on a whim, of course. Something about that angelic face as he stood there at the bus stop drew him to the boy. Looking at him now, that sweet face bloodied and swelling from the blow, the man felt the briefest pang of guilt. Not from what he had done, but from what he should have done. One day the lad would have been beautiful. Ripe. He should have taken him then. But he couldn’t be thrown back like a trout. Not now. It was much too late for that.

Nigel raised his eyes at a sound across the carriage house floor. Tania. She was watching him. She knew the routine by now. There was a treat coming her way, and her tail was lashing in anticipation of it.

Sweet Tania. She had come to him as a cub. A gift from a producer who was trying to lure him back to the business. The role of a lifetime, the man had said. Bullshit. Nigel would have been playing a parody of himself, making a mockery of all the fine film work he had done in his youth. The pay offered was good, but Nigel did not need the money. He would rather have died a pauper than let his beloved public see how age had bloated him. How his once clean jawline had sagged with time. How the crystal eyes of his youth had dimmed with the passing years. He owned mirrors. He knew what he looked like. For a decent dramatic part, he might have returned to Hollywood to take his stand with all the other fine actors who had aged, some more shockingly than others, but who were still deemed talented enough to pack a movie house. But he had not been offered a fine dramatic part. He had been offered crap.

The gift the producer presented him with, however, was stellar. Tania. Three pounds of spitting fury when he first met her. And just as furious now.

He had never tamed her. Never wanted to. He had, in fact, kept her fury at its peak through all the years he had possessed her. This was done with deliberation and joy. Bouts of hunger and thirst, then a jet of cold water to enrage her further. The burnings. Tiny pinpricks of hot wire pushed through the cage and into her tender skin. The smell of her tawny hair sizzling from the heat of the red-hot wire. Days and nights of sleeplessness, when he kept her nervously balanced on the edge of a knife, never daring to take her eyes off him, always unsure of what he would do if she closed her eyes in weariness even for a second. Oh, they had had some grand times together. She would kill him now in a heartbeat, he knew, if his attention flagged and the opportunity presented itself. Their relationship was one of mutual fear and respect. And from Tania, pure undiluted hatred.

At this very moment, as Nigel loomed over his young guest on the carriage house floor, Tania had not tasted food for almost a week. She watched him, as she always did when he played, with hatred of the man who tormented her so. But there was eagerness there, too, in those yellow eyes. She knew she would soon be feeding. Already she smelled the blood.

The eyes of the man and the eyes of the beast locked onto each other. Nigel smiled at her. “Soon, my love,” he said, then turned his attention back to the boy.

With a flutter of eyelids, the boy came awake, and at that moment Nigel drove himself into the depths of the body beneath him, causing both of them to cry out, one in agony, the other with delicious abandon. A whimper of anguish was expelled from the boy’s throat before he turned his face away from the man and slipped once more into unconsciousness.

The man’s anger soared. He had expected more from this child. More fear. More—fun. Furious, he pulled his manhood free from the limp body beneath him and wiped the filth and blood from himself with the boy’s underpants, still lying there on the floor where the man had tossed them hours ago.

He let the boy’s legs fall to the board and once again clamped the handcuffs around the pale ankles. A small pool of blood was forming at the junction of the thin legs as the man stood back and stared through the leather mask at this disappointingly unconscious child. Even with one eye swollen shut and the angelic lips burst open from the blow he had administered earlier, the boy was beautiful. So innocent lying there. Well, perhaps not as innocent as he was a few minutes ago. But still angelic. Pure. Untouched.

Almost.

He went down to his knees beside the boy and lifted a glass pipette from a box on the floor. A smile played at the corners of the mouth inside the mask. If one source of fun was to be denied him, he would simply find another way to amuse himself.

WHEN ALLEN opened his eyes, he awoke to such pain that his mind tried to reel away from it, but the pain held him fast. He saw the man standing naked beside him and tried to reach out to him, to plead with him for help, but then he remembered it was the man who had done this to him, and he recoiled away as far as the shackles would allow. At his movement, he felt something hard and cold slide across his stomach. Looking down at himself through blinding tears he saw a glass rod protruding from his penis. His mouth came open in a silent scream, and then he felt the pain of it, stabbing into him, just as the man had stabbed into him before. But this pain was sharper, more piercing. The glass pipette seemed to burn its way through him.

Allen forced himself to look at the man, to look into the eyes behind the mask.

“Please,” he said. “I want to go home.”

The man smiled and gripped the pipette with one hand while the other caressed the boy’s cheek.

“But you are home,” the man said, and snapped the pipette in two. Allen thrashed and screamed in agony. And from her cage in the corner, Tania screamed too, a wail of hunger and lust that filled the cavernous room with layer upon layer of sound that made the brick walls seem to tremble around them.

The first scream had come easily to Allen. The ensuing screams were torn from his body like organs stripped from the splintered carcass of a slaughtered calf. As the torture continued for what seemed an eternity, the pain grew to such monstrous proportions that it no longer became pain, but something more. Something so all-encompassing, Allen could no longer think of it as merely pain.

When the man released him, Allen all but collapsed in upon himself with relief. When Allen, still gasping, saw the man pick up a knife from the floor and press it to his stomach he willed the man not to stop. He longed for the stab of that knife like he had never longed for anything before. The knife was his salvation from pain. He willed the knife into him, and the man obeyed, sliding the blade, almost gently, into the soft skin of the boy’s stomach where Allen felt the sharp metal travel deep inside him, ever upward, the pain of it an excruciating caress. When the tip of the blade pricked his heart, Allen felt it, and then he felt no more.

He did not feel the knife pull out of him. He did not feel the shackles fall away from his wrists and ankles, nor did he feel the man lift his limp, torn body from the floor and carry it to the cage in the corner.

He did not feel Tania finally feed.

Chapter 4

MRS. O’DONNELL’S rasping voice pulled me back into Room 203, Windsor Manor.

“What did you see?” she asked.

I dumbly stared at her, then glanced through the patio door and saw that the day was almost over. Twilight shadows filled the courtyard outside. At that moment, exterior lights came on, illuminating the area once again like daytime, as it had been the last time I saw it.

“What happened? Did I fall asleep?”

“No,” she said. “You have the sight, Mr. Brandon.”

“The sight?”

She smiled at me. “That’s what we call it in Ireland. You can see things, can’t you?”

“No, I….”

“Mr. Brandon, you’ve been sitting on the edge of my bed for over an hour, fingering that newspaper clipping. You were here, but your mind was a million miles away. Tell me. What did you see?”

I looked down at the clipping I still held. The clipping with the Crisp boy’s photograph. The paper was damp from the heat of my hand.

“You saw him, didn’t you?”

The vision suddenly flooded back to me. Flooded over me. Flooded through me. The boy. The man. Everything. I was stunned by the clarity of the images that still lingered in my mind. Terrible images. I noticed my palms were sweaty.

“A dream,” I said. “It must have been a dream.”

“What did you see?” she asked again.

I cringed at the recollection of the boy’s pain when the man violated him so cruelly. I could almost feel the man’s hands clamped around the slim ankles.

“He was raped. Nigel Letters raped him. And then…”

I remembered the pipette. The glass pipette. Just like the ones I had found in a box in the carriage house. I saw it sliding through the boy’s penis, sliding deeper and deeper until it could go no further. Then I heard the snap of broken glass and the scream of pain as the shards of glass tore into the boy. It was the same scream I had heard the night before in the darkness.

“…he was tortured,” I lamely finished up, not wanting to go into details, not wanting to speak any more at all. Too wearied and appalled by what I had just seen to make any sense of it at all.

Last night the boy had relived his torture for me as I lay on the feather mattress with Rex at my side. His screams had echoed through the empty room from out of the past, from half a century ago. Last night I had heard the boy. Today I saw him. But there was a part of the vision that I could not see. Something off in the shadows. Another scream. A scream that blended its anguish with the boy’s. Something waiting. Something hungry. But I couldn’t see it.

Again, the old lady’s voice pulled me back. “Did the torture kill him? Is that how he died?”

I saw the knife. The knife in Nigel’s hand. I saw it almost tenderly pierce the boy’s abdomen, sliding deep inside him. It was the third piercing the boy had endured. Three rapes. By flesh, by glass, and at last, by metal. The final piercing the boy had accepted gratefully. He wanted to die. It was as if his will had pulled the knife upward through his body toward the heart, and there it had finished the job. The boy no longer suffered.

Thank God.

“No,” I said. “He was stabbed. The stabbing killed him. He wanted to die. He willed it to happen. It was the only decent thing that happened to the boy that night. A blessing.”

Mrs. O’Donnell handed me a Kleenex, and only then did I realize I was crying. She watched me dry my eyes.

“This explains why the boys have turned to you for help, Mr. Brandon. Having the sight, you can see and hear their stories better than anyone else. You can let the world know exactly what happened to them. That’s what they want from you. That’s why they’ve welcomed you into the house. They know you won’t fear them as everyone else has. You’re the only person to come along in all these years that might actually be able to free them.”

“But I do fear them,” I said. “I don’t want to see any more images like I just saw. This all started out as sort of a lark. A game. I’ve spent my life writing novels of the supernatural, and suddenly I find myself living it. I thought it was exciting at first. But no more. I’ve seen enough. Too much. I don’t want to relive every one of those boy’s deaths. I don’t think I could stand it. If you had seen what I saw, what Nigel Letters did to that boy, you wouldn’t want to see any more either.”

“But I can’t see it. Only you can. Write their story, Mr. Brandon. That’s what the boys expect of you. I’m sure it is. They’re turning to you for help. All these long years they’ve suffered, reliving their fates over and over, night after night inside that house. Reliving their pain. Their fear. But you can make it all end. You have to reach inside yourself to find the strength to do that for them. Please, Mr. Brandon. They’ve suffered long enough.”

“But what can I do? They don’t need a writer. They need an exorcist.”

“No,” she said. “They need you. Tell their story as they tell it to you. Be their ghostwriter.”

I almost laughed. Almost. “A ghostwriter for ghosts. There’s a twist.”

Mrs. O’Donnell’s wrinkled face writhed itself around until it formed a cagey little smile. She picked up my paperback from off the dresser and tossed it on the bed beside me. “There’s a twist in every one of your books. What makes this any different?”

“But this isn’t a novel,” I all but whined. “This isn’t fiction. These things really happened. This is truth!”

She was undeterred. “Then write it as truth. Tell the boys’ stories exactly as they happened. Tell the truth about Nigel Letters. Let the world know what he was. Maybe then the boys can rest. You saw everything today, didn’t you? Everything about the Crisp boy. How he was taken. How he died. Everything. Didn’t you?”

I nodded. “From the moment he stood on the bus stop.”

“Then write it. Perhaps the other boys will come to you with their stories as well. Maybe you’ll learn everything, or maybe you’ll just get bits and pieces. But you’ll get enough to let the truth be known. I’m sure of it. Give the boys a voice, Mr. Brandon. They deserve that much.”

Again, she eyed me craftily. “How many writers get this opportunity? You can tell the story from the victims’ very mouths.” She pointed to the slip of paper with the two letters, T and J, scrawled on it. “TJ tried to tell me his story, but I was too dumb to hear it. He came to me that day in the dining room. That paper proves it. He’ll come to you too. Julene said he was a good boy who made a few bad decisions, but he really had no other choice. He had been dumped on the world’s doorstep, and he pursued a course of action that allowed him to exist without hunger. Who can blame anyone for that? Morals are one thing, Mr. Brandon. But hunger is quite another. I know. I’ve experienced it. TJ did what he had to do to keep himself alive.”

“I’m not judging these boys,” I said. “Perhaps they were all prostitutes, as you’ve said. Or almost all. The Crisp boy certainly was not. Maybe some of the others weren’t either. But where’s the proof? I can’t just write a book about a famous person and proclaim him to all the world to be a serial killer without proof. They’ll crucify me. Long forgotten relatives of Nigel Letters will come crawling out of the woodwork to sue me for every penny they can get their hands on. Defamation of character. Slander. Libel. There’s all sorts of words for it. My publisher wouldn’t touch a manuscript like that with a ten-foot pole.”

“Not without proof, no,” she said, still smiling. “But you have proof. You said so yourself. You have articles of clothing in a box in the carriage house. You have bloodstains on a T-shirt.”

“I said I thought they were bloodstains.” But even as I said it, I remembered the leather wallet I had also found. A leather wallet with a ticket stub and a library card. The library card would have a name on it. I could go back in the records and see if the name on the library card corresponded with the name of any of the missing boys. It was a place to start. And I had never truly searched the house. There might be more evidence lying about. Perhaps the boys would lead me to it somehow.

I studied the old lady in front of me. She was looking cagey as hell at the moment, as if understanding the thoughts that had just bounced around inside my head.

She pulled the two Baby Ruths I had brought her out of the dresser drawer, tossed one in my lap, and began unwrapping the other for herself.

“Where do we start?” she asked as her teeth began rabbit-nibbling the nub of candy protruding from the torn paper. In her mind the matter was settled. “What do we do first?”

Her enthusiasm carried me along. I grinned at her as I unwrapped my own candy and tore off a sizable chunk with my teeth. “We’ll start with what we have,” I said. “The Crisp boy. I’ll write down everything I’ve just seen.”

“Maybe you should do it now,” she said, “before it goes out of your head. I have pen and paper in the….”

“No,” I said. “I’ll do it at home.”

I hauled myself up from the bed and, bending over the old woman in the wheelchair, gave her a polite kiss on the cheek. She smelled of lilac and chocolate and sickness.

She seemed pleased by my attentions, but not so pleased as to forget what we were trying to do, what silent pact we had just mutually signed. “You should write it all down while it’s fresh in your mind.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, staring at the darkening sky outside her window. “It will be fresh in my mind until the day I die. I’ll never forget it. The boy told me his story too well. Only time will tell if the others can do the same.”

She patted my hand as I bent over her. “Don’t worry, Mr. Brandon. They will. You should have the same faith in them as they have in you. This is a good thing you’re doing. You’re a good man.”

“And you’re a hell of a woman.”

“Don’t forget me,” she said.

I laughed. “Never.”

“And you’ll take me to the house?”

“Yes. As soon as it can be arranged.”

“I’ll take you at your word, then,” she said. “Relax, Mr. Brandon. You’re about to write a book that means something. Take that satin box with you. It may come in handy.”

I heard a raspy cough and the crinkling of a candy wrapper as I left the room. The worn satin box, properly heart shaped as it carried nothing but heartaches inside, was tucked snugly beneath my arm.

The last moments in the life of Allen Earl Crisp, a sixth grade student from Cedars Elementary School, with parents named George and Esther, filled my mind. I prayed that the first twelve years of Allen’s life were drenched with enough happiness to carry him through eternity, to perhaps overshadow what happened to him at the end. The old lady had convinced me to help him try. Him and the others. All of them. The boys on the mountain. The boys in my house. I felt the same resolve wash over me that I felt each time I began a new book. The resolve to finish what I’d started. I understood now, or thought I did, what was expected of me. I suddenly knew, beyond any doubt, that the old lady was right. The boys were reaching out to me. And she was right about something else.

I could not let them down.

DRIVING HOME, I thought it all over.

Mrs. O’Donnell’s twaddle about me having the “sight” was less than convincing and more than rubbed elbows with the realm of the ridiculous, but I couldn’t doubt what had happened to me back there in that furnace-hot room where the old lady spent her days waiting to die. I had seen everything the boy endured in horrible stark detail. I had felt it. I could still smell the blood and the feces and the acrid stench of excitement that rolled off Nigel Letters’s body. I could feel his hot hands gripping the boy’s ankles as if they were gripping my own. I could feel him pushing his way inside the boy as if he were pushing himself into me. The calculated brutality of that first savage thrust still took my breath away. I shuddered at the memory of it. For the first time in my life, I understood the true horror of rape. The experience of it had passed from the boy’s mind into my own across a wide span of years. Yet I had felt his pain. I still felt it. Every heartwrenching moment.

A child I had never met, who had, in fact, been born into this world thirty years before me, had opened his mind to me, told me everything I needed to know, baring the horror and the shame of his death for me so that the truth of it would come out, through me, to people who had long since ceased looking for him. People who were, in fact, most certainly dead themselves. There was only one conceivable reason for the boy to have done so. He wanted his story told, and he came to me, the storyteller, to do it.

A pretty smart move for the spirit of a twelve-year-old child.

Would the other boy, the boy with blond hair, come to me as well? Years ago he had tried to communicate with Caroline’s grandmother, leaving her his name and two drops of blood. Was the blood his own? The final offering of his body to the world that had so cruelly abandoned him and then had gone one step further and delivered him into the hands of a killer? Was it all he had of himself to give her? Was it all he had left? Were his initials and his blood all that remained of him as proof that he had once lived in this world? Did Nigel Letters leave him nothing else to barter?

Another thought struck me. Could the boy named TJ have known somehow that the woman sitting at the dining room table that day so long ago would one day come to know the person who had helped him more than anyone else? The person Mrs. O’Donnell had called Julene. Could he foresee that these two women would eventually come together in friendship inside the place where they had both come to die? Was that why he chose to speak to her? To get his message to Julene, perhaps the one person who had truly befriended him when all others had not?

According to Mrs. O’Donnell, many other boys had died inside the house. Would they each come to me, one by one? Would I learn their names? Would I be forced to relive their deaths as I had done with the Crisp boy? Was that the only way they could be freed? Not by the sharing of their lives with me, but by the sharing of their deaths?

And what of the other scream I had heard in my vision? My… daydream. It was not the spirit of a boy clawing at the doorstep of the carriage house last night. It was something evil. Had it been trying to stop the boy from telling his story? Is that why the boy came to me today, when I was far away from the house on the mountain? When it was safe for him to speak to me, to share his story with me, far away from the creature at the door?

Or was my writer’s imagination taking broad strides of fantasy?

Time would tell, I supposed. But one stride at a time. First I would write of the Crisp boy. Put down on paper all that he had shown me.

That familiar itch in my fingertips told of my longing for the keyboard.

I parked the car by the veranda steps and entered the house.

Before the front door was fully open, Rex threw himself at me like a linebacker sacking the quarterback, very nearly bowling me over in his enthusiasm. This was the first time he had been left alone in the house, and judging by his reaction upon my return, the experience had not been to his liking. With paws on my chest, he gave my face a thorough licking, then dropped to the floor and gave my shin a gentle nip to let me know he was not only glad I was back but also considerably pissed that I had left him in the first place.

I laughed at his antics, but the laugh died in my throat when I saw blood on his flank. I parted the hair on his hip and saw a long scratch running across his back, and another reaching halfway down his back leg, ending with what looked like bite marks where a tuft of his coat had been pulled out just above the knee. The scratches were not particularly deep but they were deep enough to bleed. Rex winced away from me as I gently prodded the wounds.

I cupped his face in my hands and stared into his warm, loving eyes. “What the hell have you been doing while I was gone?”

He slathered dog spit across my nose by way of an answer, and I led him into the bathroom, where I gently washed his wounds before applying disinfectant to them. He winced again at the sting of the disinfectant, but he didn’t try to pull away. Then, with Rex at my heels, I searched the house from one end to the other, expecting to find evidence of what had happened to him somewhere. But there was nothing out of the ordinary in any of the rooms I inspected. Nothing broken. No signs that Rex had tried to climb onto something and injured himself falling. Nothing. The house was pristine and spotless, just the way Caroline had left it after her last cleaning.

I racked it up to an unsolvable mystery and left it at that.

Pouring two shots of bourbon down my throat in quick succession, and handing Rex a dog biscuit like a doctor giving his young patient a lollipop, I retired to the breakfast room and cranked up the computer. In darkness lit only by the light of the monitor, and with Rex sleeping the sleep of the guiltless at my feet, I watched the words of Allen Crisp make their way from my fingertips to the screen. It was the easiest writing I had ever done. There were no long pauses as my mind groped for perfect words, no inclination to pull myself away from the computer and do a myriad of minor chores such as dusting the light bulbs or sharpening all the pencils, which I rarely use anyway. All the little things a writer does when he really doesn’t want to write.

Everything the boy had let me see, everything he had experienced on that night so long ago, all the suffering and anguish and fear he had felt in the hours leading up to his death, clattered their way across the keyboard with little or no help from me. I was merely a conduit through which his story passed.

As I typed, as my fingers flew over the keys, I felt a growing presence around me, as if a blessed light engulfed me though I sat in darkness. Twice I spun in my chair, thinking someone stood behind me, but of course, there was no one there.

I didn’t plan the words that appeared on the screen. I didn’t rewrite as I went along, as I usually do. I didn’t think. I merely typed. The words came of their own accord, with little or no direction from me. They were Allen’s words, and through me, Allen wrote them. He had waited a long time to tell his story, and now that he finally could, he did not hesitate in the telling. The words gushed from him, through me, and onto the screen.

When I finished, when the final key had been hit, I sat back and watched the printer spit out the pages we had written. But for the whirring of the printer, the house was totally silent around me. Totally silent and totally dark. There was not a light on in the place, but I felt no fear. The house seemed to feel the same satisfaction I did at the telling of the boy’s story. The only sounds around me were the printer’s mechanical clicks and hums and Rex’s soft snoring. His chin rested on my bare toes as he continued sawing logs at my feet.

As the printer coughed up the final page, I rubbed my aching neck and sat there in the darkness, enjoying the silence. I glanced at the clock. It was 2:00 a.m. I waited for the disturbance that always came at that time, but the clock kept clicking away the minutes, one after the other, and nothing happened. Nothing at all. The house was sleeping as soundly as Rex.

Until the shaking began.

THE FIRST tremor was little more than that. A tremor. I heard Rex’s snoring cease, but he didn’t lift his head from my foot until I stood to flip the light switch on the wall, an old habit of mine—perhaps of all Californians—at the first sign of a nighttime earthquake. Movement cannot be judged in darkness. I stared at my own private seismometer, the brass chandelier hanging over the desk, another California habit, and saw it swaying in a gentle arc.

The tremor stopped, leaving nothing in its wake but the creaking of the brass chain from which the chandelier hung suspended, still rocking lazily back and forth above my head. I breathed a sigh of relief. Somewhere, miles beneath my feet, the earth had hiccupped. Nothing more.

Then the bulbs encircling the chandelier exploded, one by one, flinging shards of delicate glass tinkling across the room like crystal rain. Rex yelped. I jumped about three feet straight up into the air as the house was once again swallowed up in darkness.

An all-encompassing silence descended around me that spoke of power outage. All background noise died. The hum of the refrigerator. The almost undetectable whir of the computer. The click and whine of electric clocks. Time and sound both seemed to stop as Rex and I stood there in the dark, waiting for what would come next.

It came so suddenly that at first I didn’t realize what had happened. The house lurched to the side, hurling me against the breakfast room wall. I heard the thump of Rex’s body hitting the floor at my feet, his equilibrium lost in that unexpected upheaval, followed by the sound of his toenails scrabbling and scraping at the floor as he regained his footing, recalling memories of other toenails, other claws, scrabbling at the carriage house door the night before. Somewhere in the darkness, a picture crashed to the floor.

Clutching the door frame, I stepped out into the dining room. The house was alive with sound now. The sound of running footsteps. They were everywhere. I could feel the house tremble with the vibration of them. They came from every direction. Down the hallway. Through the living room. Across the kitchen. I leapt back against the wall as a rush of footsteps tore past me and clomped away into the distance.

Rex growled, and I heard the snap of his teeth as he tried to close them around whatever it was that passed within inches of us. The air moved. I could actually feel the passing of a body next to me, but I saw nothing. I was, in fact, blind, either from fear or darkness. I didn’t know which. I could see moonlight through the dining room window, but the light of it did not seem to enter into the house. Around me there was nothing but ebony shadow. And invisible movement.

The sound of running footsteps ended so quickly that the sudden silence seemed to hit me like a fist. And then another growl filled the void, but this growl did not come from Rex, who still stood beside me, trembling. This growl came from another part of the house, or all over the house, from a place I couldn’t pinpoint. The sound of it flowed around me like water, coming from every direction at once. My skin shriveled at the eeriness of that unearthly growl. I groped for another light switch, the one on the dining room wall, but when I flipped it, nothing happened. The power was still out.

I grabbed an umbrella from the coat rack in the corner, the only weapon I could lay my hands on at the moment. The feel of it in my hands did nothing to waylay my fears, so I flung it aside and raced into the kitchen and, in the numbing darkness, rummaged across the countertop until I found the wooden block containing all the kitchen knives. I grabbed the largest one and spun around, waiting for the attack I felt sure was coming.

Through the kitchen door, in the direction from which I had just come, I heard the soft pad of feet on the dining room floor.

The growl had become a low rumble of sound. Angry. Persistent. Stalking. The light of two eyes, like green embers, appeared in the darkness of the doorway.

I felt more than saw Rex hurl himself through the kitchen door toward those two glimmering eyes, and at that moment the dining room light came on.

Where the eyes had been, there was now nothing. Rex slid to a stop in midattack and stood there looking both furious and foolish, the hair on his back standing straight up like a punk rocker on his way to a concert that was suddenly canceled.

When he turned to look at me, confusion was written so plainly across his astounded face that I could barely refrain from laughing. But my laughter turned into a gurgle and died somewhere deep in my throat when I saw the deep scratches across his snout. He shook his head, and drops of blood splattered onto the kitchen floor.

What the fuck!

I grabbed a dish towel from the sink, dropped to my knees in front of him, and gently blotted the blood from his face. He watched me wide-eyed as I ministered to his injuries. Then, at a sound from the dining room, he pulled away from me and padded fearlessly into the other room.

I took a moment to wipe up the blood from the floor, then followed him. I found him on his back on the dining room floor, his tail going a mile a minute, his eyes squeezed shut in bliss, and his front paws poking straight up into the air, just the way he did when I gave him a belly rub. Judging by the idiotic grin on his face, I could see that his injuries were already forgotten, although blood still seeped from the wounds.

The hair on his stomach rolled and undulated as if invisible hands were stroking his coat.

“Allen,” I asked softly, “are you there?”

The sound of Rex’s tail thumping against the floor was my only answer.

Exhausted and totally confused, I watched Rex writhe around in ecstasy beneath the invisible hands that seemed to be rewarding him for his valor in the face of the enemy.

I still did not have the vaguest idea who the enemy was, or understand the implication of those green slits of light that had stared at me through the kitchen doorway, but I suspected Rex knew. I also suspected he had met those eyes before. How else could he have gotten those injuries along his flank earlier in the day?

Without any input from me, battle lines had been drawn, and Rex was holding down his end of the front with honor and a bravery I had never known he possessed.

I left him to his belly rub and set off in search of a Milk-Bone for him and another shot of bourbon for myself.

The musical tinkle of a child’s laughter followed me into the kitchen. And a happy yip from Rex.

THE NEXT day, with two Band-Aids plastered across his nose, Rex followed me out to the carriage house. He moved with a wounded dignity. The Band-Aids were not to his liking at all. Periodically he would try to dislodge them with a paw until I held up an admonishing finger and told him to stop. Then he would admonish me in return with a sorrowful gaze from those big solemn eyes.

Once inside the carriage house, Rex forgot the bandages and headed straight for the wall that abutted the mountainside. There he again began pawing at the floor, just as he had on the night of our first adventure together.

I left him to it as I commenced searching through the packing crates ranged around the perimeter of the room. The bloodstained T-shirt, the sneakers, the leather mask, and the wallet I quickly relocated and set aside. Then I began opening the boxes that had not yet been searched. As I did so, my eyes kept returning to the sheet of plywood that still stood against the wall where I had left it the first time I was here. I understood its purpose now. Nigel Letters had used it to restrain his victims. I knew this because a twelve-year-old boy had told me. Allen Crisp had died on that board, shackled and bloodied. If what Mrs. O’Donnell said was true, so had many others. I believed it now. After what had happened last night, I had no choice but to believe it. I no longer harbored doubts.

The old lady was right. The boys were still here. All of them. Last night I had heard their footsteps in the darkness, fleeing from whatever it was that had confronted Rex and me in the kitchen doorway, fleeing from whatever it was that had been so angered by the telling of Allen’s story that it came for me.

I didn’t want to think about what might have happened if Rex had not been there. If the malevolent eyes that glimmered in the darkness were spectral, as I knew they had to be, there was also a physical presence about them. I only had to look at the two Band-Aids on Rex’s nose to understand the truth of that. Whatever it was that stalked me through the house last night was entirely capable, and apparently eager, to inflict real damage on human flesh. Last night, the flesh had been Rex’s. The next time it might be my own.

I was, in truth, beginning to wonder what I had gotten myself into. I suspected that anyone with a lick of common sense, anyone who plied a trade that involved anything other than writing horror stories, would have run screaming from this house a long time ago. And many families had. Were they smarter than me or just more cowardly? Was I so intent on proving the existence of what I had been writing about for so many years that I was willing to risk my life to do it?

Or had it gone beyond that now? Had it gone beyond anything having to do with me? This, I knew instantly, was nearer to the truth. I had been inside the Crisp boy’s mind. I had seen and felt him die. I had been there with him, all but holding his hand, as the life left his body. I knew what he had suffered before the real darkness took him, and I had felt his joy at finally being able to share his story—his relief at being able to tell his story after all these long years. Mrs. O’Donnell had thrown a gauntlet at my feet, and I had accepted it. But not for reasons of my own. I had accepted it for her reasons. To help the boys. To release them from the chains that still held them to this place. To set them free, and in doing so, give them peace. I could only hope that once the boys were freed, the evil that resided in the house with them would be freed as well. I doubted if I could long survive in the house if it was not. I could not be spending the rest of my life looking back over my shoulder and wondering what would be coming out of the shadows to strike me down.

There was evil in the house, but there was goodness there too. I had heard it in a child’s laughter. Rex had felt it in a child’s hands.

And now, as I rummaged through the boxes on the carriage house floor, I suddenly stopped. Rex, too, ceased his infernal digging at the back wall and looked at me as I felt a small hand caress my cheek. Just one gentle touch of cool fingertips, and then it was gone. I quickly laid my own hand to my face and tried to grasp it, but I was too late.

Allen had said good-bye.

For long minutes I sat on the carriage house floor, stunned, still feeling the gentle touch of the boy’s hand on my face. I was torn by so many emotions that I didn’t know where to begin to sort them out. I felt sadness and elation all at the same time. Sadness that, if what I suspected was true, the boy had gone, and yet elated that I was able to help him do so. The boy was no longer a fragment of the past to me. Through his eyes and thoughts, I had come to know him. I had formed a strange bond with this boy who had died so horribly in this very room so many years ago. He had come to me for help, and I had given it, but in doing so, I had assured that he would never come to me again. He didn’t need to. I had accomplished what I set out to do. The youngest of the victims had been set free. I should be happy about that, and I was, but there was a tinge of regret as well.

It was almost like writing a book. You struggle with it, doing everything you can to help it along its way to completion, but once it is truly finished, it leaves you, going out into the world to either find success or gather dust in a discount book bin in some seedy bookstore in the wrong part of town, where no one ever buys it. Its fate is out of your hands. All you can do is wish it well.

But Allen’s was not the only story in this house I had to write. There were others waiting for my help as well, and I was determined now more than ever to see that they, too, could one day leave this place and find rest from their torments. Allen had proven to me that it could be done. I no longer had any doubt whatsoever that what I was doing was real. Real and important. The gentle touch of that small hand on my cheek had convinced me. There had been gratitude in that touch. And maybe even love. Both from a child whom I had never known. Not until yesterday when he came to me in the old lady’s room. I could still see the grainy newsprint photo of him in my mind, and I suspected the image would be there for many years to come, ready to be plucked from my memory whenever I felt the need to see him again.

We were friends now, the boy and I. He had taught me truths about this world that I never knew existed, and I missed him already.

MY OTHER friends, the ones who actually lived in this world, I had all but forgotten until the blast of a car horn and a happy bark from Rex tore me from my thoughts about death and brought me thudding back to the realities of life.

Jesus! They weren’t supposed to be here until next week!

I scrambled to my feet and followed Rex through the carriage house door, where I saw my friends, chortling like magpies, spewing forth from a canary yellow Hummer with enough luggage strapped to the roof to accommodate the Queen of England and her entourage on a round-the-world cruise.

My invitation for the weekend, next weekend, had turned into an all-out siege today. Judging by the amount of luggage, the “weekend” part of my invitation had been ignored altogether. They hadn’t just dropped in for a visit. This was an incursion of conquest. They were storming the castle, so to speak, and they obviously meant to stay a while. Such were my friends. I had expected no less. And after the initial shock wore off, I was glad they were there.

I wondered what they would make of recent events. As I watched them pour out of the Hummer, all grins and ribald camaraderie, greeting a jubilant Rex with all the phony effusion of a bunch of half-assed actors while they studiously ignored me completely, I decided not to tell them of recent events at all. After one or two nights inside the house, they would assuredly find out for themselves.

Lyle’s voice, as usual, clawed its way skyward to a range several decibels above the others. It was somewhat of a thing with him. No matter what the circumstances, he had to be heard.

“Rex! Red fur is so cheapening, my love, but on you it works! But what’s with the Band-Aids? Have you had your nose somewhere it doesn’t belong? Come here, you big git!”

Rex slobbered all over himself with delight as Lyle scooped him up in his arms like a Chihuahua, flipped him over on his back, and made blubbering sounds against his stomach.

Rex writhed and wriggled and finally cast his eyes on me in mute apology before barfing up his breakfast all over Lyle’s six-dollar Mervyn’s T-shirt and three-hundred-dollar Neiman-Marcus jeans. The man had always been an inconsistent dresser. Even Rex knew that, so he tried to aim most of the vomit at the shirt. He was such a good dog.

Lyle didn’t see it that way. He dropped Rex like a fifty-pound bag of potatoes and looked down at himself in dismay while everyone else howled with laughter.

Finally my presence was acknowledged. While Frank pulled Lyle’s filthy shirt over his lover’s head and tossed it to the ground, Michael and Stu stared at me in mock severity.

“Traitorous bastard,” Michael said.

“Deserter,” Stu added.

I nodded a greeting to each of them in turn. “Moron,” I said. “Pea brain.”

Michael stuck his fists on his hips and turned to stare at the house. “So this is what you left us for. This… shack!”

“Shanty,” Stu corrected.

“Hovel,” Frank amended.

“Mansion,” Lyle crooned. “My God, it’s beautiful! Is it really ours?”

I laughed. “It will be. Escrow should be closing any day now. Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”

It took all five of us to gather up the suitcases, valises, sports bags, and boxes of food and liquor they had brought with them. The only thing they hadn’t packed was major appliances.

“You were invited up for the weekend, not the month of August,” I commented.

Stu grinned. “Yeah, we got a good chuckle over that. Weekend, indeed. Of course, we knew you didn’t mean it.”

“Of course,” I said.

“We’re here to help you whip the place into shape,” Lyle said, ebullient as ever. “We know your decorating skills are minimal. Your idea of ambiance is paper lanterns and three-dollar movie posters thumbtacked to every wall.”

“Beaded curtains,” Frank added.

Then everyone spoke at once.

“Lava lamps.”

“Rag throw rugs.”

“Daisied bedspreads.”

“Doilies.”

“Sorry, Jim,” Lyle finished up. “We refuse to live like that any longer. We’re homeowners now, and we insist it be done with style. All you have to do is pay for the house. Leave everything else to us.”

As we bumped and trundled all the boxes, bags, and bodies through the front door, there was a sudden, collective intake of breath as they surveyed the interior for the first time.

“Art deco!” Lyle squealed. “It’s gorgeous!”

“The house must have come this way,” Frank commented. “You’re tasteless, Jim. You know it. We all know it. Tell me it came this way.”

I nodded. “It came this way.”

“And you were clever enough not to change it,” Michael said. “I’m stunned.”

“Thank you,” I groaned, once again rolling my eyes, but their enthusiastic praise of the house pleased me. They dropped all their cargo in the middle of the living room floor and set out in different directions to explore. I could hear them oohing and aahing as they went from room to room, fingering the furniture, touching the pictures, flushing the toilets. Someone ran their fingers over the keys of the piano in the music room, and someone else, Lyle no doubt, exclaimed over the photographs in the ego room. “Look at this! Myrna Loy! Oh, and there’s Bogart! Jesus, Nigel Letters is wearing more makeup than Bacall. Look at this, Frank.”

There was a tinkle of glassware and ice cubes coming from the kitchen, and I heard Stu call out, “Happy hour! Who needs a drink?”

We all did. After tossing the luggage in the various bedrooms, we settled around the fireplace in the living room, drinks in hand, sinking up to our necks in the overstuffed chairs and sofas.

Rex, his embarrassing earlier fall from grace now forgotten, climbed onto the sofa and settled himself between Michael and me. The two of us had been an item for a couple of years, back when Michael was just beginning his veterinary practice and I was working on my second novel. We had never quite mustered the courage to move in together, but while the relationship lasted, it had been a good one. We had parted friends, of course. We would always be friends. But seeing him now, being next to him again, I realized I still thought of him as much more than a friend. I suspected I always would.

And as always when I was with him, I felt the unease that comes from knowing something potentially wonderful has been lost, an opportunity missed. It took every ounce of my willpower not to reach out and touch him like I did when we were together. Even after so much time had passed, I was a bit disconcerted to once again realize that my craving for the feel of the man had not diminished even one iota.

As Frank and Lyle exclaimed over the beauty of the tilework surrounding the gigantic fireplace and Stu sat on the floor at my feet nursing his drink with his chin on my knee, Michael took a peek under the Band-Aids on Rex’s nose. He ran a hand along Rex’s flank and discovered the scratches there as well.

“What the hell have you done to your dog, Jim? He looks like he’s been in a brawl.”

Rex looked over at me as if he understood the comment.

I gave him a fond pat on the head. “He has. Last night.”

Rex’s eyes narrowed in contentment as I continued to scratch his head, but Michael’s widened in consternation.

“With what?” he asked. “A tiger? These are claw marks. And they didn’t come from another dog. These claws were sharp. Like a cat’s. A big cat’s.”

“Yes, well, we had a visitor last night.”

“You’re joking. What was it?”

“Don’t know. The lights were out.”

Michael didn’t seem to be buying it. “Are you telling me that whatever did this to Rex was inside the house?”

“Yep. It came for me in the kitchen. Rex protected me from it at considerable risk to himself, as you can see. Would anyone like another drink?”

They were all staring at me now. Even Lyle was silent.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Michael asked.

I studied the anxious faces of my friends. Stu, with his dark hair buzzed so short that it cast only the vaguest shadow of brown across his scalp, a concession, he told me once, to the fact that he worked with other people’s hair every day of his life, so he had little time or inclination to fuss with his own. To counterbalance the severe haircut, he sported a tiny gold ring in his left earlobe, making him look more like a corsair than a hairstylist, which I presumed was the point of the thing.

Frank and Lyle, huddled together in the overgrown armchair in the corner, looked enough alike to have passed for brothers rather than lovers. They both had wind-tossed brown hair, streaked from the sun from the long hours they spent at the beach pursuing their favorite pastime, surfing. They were brown as nuts and as trim as teenagers although they were both, like all of us, quickly approaching forty. Frank practiced corporate law, and Lyle had done pretty well in the real estate game since he had the one attribute so important to every salesman: he never, ever shut up. Frank swore Lyle even talked in his sleep, and it didn’t surprise me. They looked like beach bums, but they must have been hauling in a yearly income of six figures apiece.

Michael had done well for himself too, although age seemed to be creeping up on him the quickest. His curly black hair had thinned considerably over the years, and most of the time he hid the fact by wearing a knit stocking cap on his head like Michael Nesmith of the Monkees. Stu was forever telling him that his scalp needed to breathe, dammit! and the stocking cap was only exacerbating the problem, but Michael said he liked it, and that was that. Sitting now in the sunlight streaming through the picture window at our backs, I noticed a few gray hairs under the brim of his cap, but Michael was still the handsomest of the lot as far as I was concerned. So far age had done nothing but improve his appearance. When he smiled, which he did a lot, he could have passed for ten years younger.

But he wasn’t smiling now.

“I’m going to give Rex a shot of antibiotics, just in case. Wouldn’t want those scratches to get infected.”

“My God,” Lyle said, “the man brought antibiotics with him. He must have been expecting a hell of a weekend.”

Michael ignored the comment and went off in search of his medical bag, which accompanied him everywhere he went. After a few minutes, he returned with a hypodermic in his hand and gave Rex the shot even before Rex knew it was coming. Afterward, he bent down and gave Rex a kiss between the eyes, and Rex gave him a kiss in return with a gentle swipe of his tongue.

“He’ll bill you later,” Frank said to me.

“Or take it out in trade,” Lyle added with his customary smirk whenever referring to Michael and me in any sort of sexual context. It was Lyle’s greatest ambition to see us back together again, and he continually bombarded us with innuendoes and double entendres concerning that fact whenever the opportunity arose. But Michael seemed to be doing perfectly well on his own, as was I, or so I constantly told myself. And of course, any possible resumption of our relationship that might have been hanging in limbo had pretty well been dealt a death blow by the fact that I was in the process of buying a home more than a hundred miles from his pet hospital in Van Nuys. Quite a commute.

Michael ignored Lyle and focused his attention on me.

“So what the hell is going on?” he asked. “Are you getting all gothic on us like you always do when you’re plotting out a new novel, or do you honestly expect us to believe that some sort of creature is stalking this house and tearing chunks out of my favorite dog?

I turned to Stu. “Well, I’m ready for another drink.”

“Me too,” Stu said.

“Me too,” Frank echoed.

“Me three,” Lyle chirped.

Michael gazed at each of us in turn with a pitying expression, and then he grinned knowingly at me.

“Fine, you drunken sots—”

“Booze hounds.”

“Winos.”

“Troglodytes.”

“Good one, Lyle.”

Michael ignored them all. “—just keep on drinking. Especially you, Jim. You never could hold your liquor. Two more drinks and you’ll be spilling your guts like a schoolgirl, telling me everything I want to know. I could always have my way with you when you were besotted.”

Frank giggled. “Besotted? My God, Michael, have you been reading Jane Austin?”

“You could always have your way with me when I was stone-cold sober,” I observed. It was true, and everyone in the room knew it.

Lyle elbowed Frank. “Still could, I’ll wager.”

“Sexual tension makes me thirsty,” Stu declared, heaving himself off the floor and gathering up the empty glasses. “Since the help seems to be off today, I’ll do the honors myself.”

“Make mine weak.”

“Make mine strong.”

“Make mine twice.”

Three rounds later, shadows were gathering, the house was growing dark, and Rex was snoring like a lumberjack. The antibiotics had knocked him out cold. Just as Michael predicted, the alcohol had loosened my tongue, and I was telling them everything I knew about the house and everything I suspected about Nigel Letters.

When I finished, Stu summed it up nicely. “So you’re saying the house is haunted.” He did not sound particularly convinced.

“Haunted by kids.” Frank.

“Dead kids.” Lyle.

“Dead murdered kids.” Michael.

I set my drink aside. I had consumed enough. “Well, one kid, actually, as far as I know. The rest were hustlers. Gay hustlers. They were older. Teenagers.”

“Hmm. Intriguing,” Lyle said, twiddling an imaginary moustache.

“And you are determined to set them free,” Michael added. He did not sound particularly convinced either.

Frank sadly shook his head. “And you honestly believe all this?”

Stu came to my defense. “Hey. Hauntings happen. They say the orgy room at the Vulcan Bathhouse on La Cienaga is haunted.”

“Only by you,” Lyle said.

“I don’t haunt. I frequent.”

“Yeah. ‘Frequent’ being the key word in that sentence.”

Michael ignored the others, focusing all his attention on me. “Show me what you wrote,” he said. “I want to read what you say you saw in this vision of yours.”

Frank agreed. “Yes, I think we had all better read it so we’ll know what to tell the men in little white coats who come to pick you up later.”

“You don’t believe me,” I stated, not surprised.

“We don’t disbelieve you,” Michael said. “Not yet. But you have to admit it’s a lot to swallow. No sexual pun intended. Just show us what you wrote, and let us decide for ourselves.”

“I don’t usually let anyone read my unfinished manuscripts.”

“Is that all this is?” Lyle asked. “An unfinished manuscript? You are plotting another novel. Why don’t you just let us wait and buy it off the shelf like we always do, since we’ve never yet seen a complimentary copy of any of your books such as might be passed out to friends.”

Frank nudged Lyle to silence. “Shut up,” he said. To me, he added, “I for one am inclined to believe you, Jim, since I’ve never known you to go ratshit weird before. But I’ll need a little more convincing. Fetch the paperwork.”

“Go on,” Michael prodded. “Then we’ll know what we’re talking about.”

“All right,” I said. “But it’s a first draft. There are probably all sorts of grammatical errors and….”

“Just go fetch the fucking thing!” they all yelled at once. So I went.

As I headed for the breakfast room to retrieve the manuscript, I could hear them talking among themselves.

“He’s flipped.”

“He’s a writer. They are all flipped.”

“Yeah, but he’s our writer. He’s never flipped before.”

“His ass looks a little big in those jeans. I think he’s gained weight.”

“Shut up, Lyle!” I yelled back at him, eliciting laughter from everyone else and a muttered, insincere apology from Lyle.

I returned with the sheaf of papers and handed them solemnly to Michael, who passed the pages on to the others as he went along.

As they each in turn read the pages I had written concerning Allen Earl Crisp, the pages I swore to them the boy had dictated to me, I lit a fire to dispel the shadows and bring some cheer back into the room.

Apparently the fire was not dispelling the shadows quickly enough for Lyle. “I love a good ghost story,” he announced, “but not when I’m in it,” and he proceeded to walk through the house turning on every light as he went.

Michael held the pages in his hand long after everyone had finished reading them. He stared into the fire while Frank and Lyle headed into the kitchen to prepare dinner, after stating rather pointedly in my direction that they were houseguests, for Christ’s sake, and somebody should be feeding them.

Stu poked at the fire with the poker as Michael reached across Rex to lay a hand on my shoulder.

“You don’t really believe all this, do you?”

“Empirical, as always,” I said. “You want proof? Come with me.”

I took him by the hand and led him through the front door, across the veranda, and out along the driveway to the carriage house. As we passed the kitchen windows, we could hear Lyle and Frank arguing over what to prepare for dinner. In all the years of our acquaintance, I had never seen either of them prepare anything requiring more than one ingredient, so I figured our options were few.

I switched on the carriage house light, and the stunned expression on Michael’s face when he first spotted the bricked-in walls was everything I could have hoped for.

“What is this?” he asked. “Some sort of panic room?”

I gave him a shrug. “You tell me.”

The card table was still set up in the middle of the room, along with my portable typewriter and the red chair I had borrowed from the house. The sheet of paper scrolled into the machine still displayed the one word: pai n. But it was the objects I had found in the packing crates that interested Michael the most.

The leather mask, especially, seemed to fascinate him.

“Nigel Letters must have been one twisted individual,” he said, fingering the mask reluctantly, as if he found the mere feel of it repulsive. Unclean. The other items were laid out on the floor where I had left them earlier.

Michael eyed the torn T-shirt. “That does look like blood. Old blood.”

“Seventy years old,” I said, “if my calculations are correct.”

The heart-shaped box Mrs. O’Donnell had given me the day before was on the card table beside the typewriter. Michael laid aside the mask and sorted through the clippings inside. He stared mutely at the photograph of the Crisp boy.

“And this is the boy you saw?”

“Yes.”

“The boy you heard crying?”

“And screaming. I think so, yes. In fact, I’m sure of it. I saw everything that happened to him, Michael. I felt everything that happened to him. He shared it all with me. Why would he do that if he didn’t want my help? And it did help him. I swear to you, Michael, he said good-bye to me in this room not five minutes before you arrived. He laid his hand on my cheek.”

Still holding the clipping in his hand, Michael came to me and folded me in his arms. I rested my head against his chest and felt the warmth of him comfort me, just as it always had.

“I believe you,” he said. “This will make a hell of a book.”

I started to pull away. “That’s not why I’m doing it.”

He drew me tighter. “I know.”

I could feel his heart thudding against my chest. Or was it my own?

“And now the boy is gone?” he asked.

“I… I think so.”

“And you want to free the rest of them.”

“Yes. If I can.”

Michael’s lips brushed my hair as he spoke. “Why do you think he came to you? You said yourself that a lot of people have lived in this house over the years. Why do you think he chose you, out of all the others, to be the one to help him?”

“I think it’s because I… write. I’m a writer. Who better to tell his story?”

“Their story. And you think the others will come to you too.”

“I’m sure of it. Don’t ask me how I know that. I just do. They want the world to know what happened to them.”

My hands rested lightly on Michael’s hips as he held me. The scent of his shirt against my face brought back a thousand happy memories of times we had spent together. Michael stood six foot four. I stood five eleven. As always, I felt safe and comforted and rather childlike when wrapped up in his arms as I was right now. The stirring in my groin, however, was anything but childlike.

Our thoughts were apparently taking divergent paths.

“If they are so eager for your help,” he asked, “why did they attack Rex?”

“I don’t believe they did. It wasn’t the boys stalking me through the house last night. It was… something else.”

“You’re afraid to say it, aren’t you? It sounds too ridiculous even to you.”

I looked into his face. He needed a shave. His beard had always been so heavy that he was forced to shave twice a day, except on weekends, when he gave his face a rest. This must have been one of his rest periods. I ran my finger along his jaw line and felt the stubble.

“You need a shave.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“That it was Tania. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? It was Tania that attacked Rex.”

I didn’t answer.

“Nigel Letters’s pet. The one the Crisp boy told you about in your vision. The one that was given to him as a gift. The one Letters tortured until it grew up to be one mean, pissed-off big cat. The one he used to dispose of the bodies.”

I still didn’t answer.

“There’s something you haven’t mentioned, Jim. You didn’t just get into the boy’s mind when you had your little vision. You got into Nigel Letters’s mind as well. I find it hard to believe that he wants his story told. It was only for a few minutes, but he did let you in. Why do you think he did that?”

“I don’t think he did. Not intentionally. I think it just happened. It was like I was actually there. The night Allen was murdered. I saw everything. I felt everything. And I saw it through both their eyes. I can’t explain it. Everything just opened up to me. The boy. The man. All of it. And I think it angered him. Letters, I mean. He came for me as soon as I finished typing it all up last night. Or rather, Tania came for me. It isn’t just the boys who haunt this house, Michael. Letters and the cat are here too. And they’re the ones we have to watch out for. I think they are more powerful than the boys. Or just… more evil. I think they’re going to try to stop what is happening.”

Michael pressed his lips to my forehead, then drew back and looked into my face. He smiled. “There are new condos for sale just up the street from my pet hospital. Maybe you should look into them. I doubt if there’s an evil presence in any of them.”

I pulled him closer. “Ah, but where’s the challenge in that?”

“You have a strange mind, James Brandon.”

“Stranger than you’ll ever know,” I said, throwing caution to the wind and pressing my lips to his.

I felt his body respond to my kiss just before all hell broke loose inside the house. Suddenly Rex was barking and Lyle was yelling and Frank came tearing down the flagstone path beside the driveway, hurling himself through the carriage house door.

“Get inside! Both of you! Stu’s been barbecued!”

He was gone before we could ask any questions, so Michael and I chased him back up the driveway, across the veranda, and into the house.

Stu was sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace with a dishtowel pressed to his face while Lyle was scurrying around, extinguishing bits of smoldering embers that had been scattered across the room.

“It just exploded,” Lyle said, frantically scraping a hot ember from the sofa. “The fucking fireplace exploded!”

Michael and I rushed to Stu and gently pulled the cloth from his hands and away from his face. He looked at us with a sheepish grin, but there was stunned fear in his eyes. He tried to downplay it by saying “Just one of those things,” but we weren’t fooled. He had to be in pain. The left side of his face was cherry red.

“Get some water,” Michael said to me. “Cold water. Bring a clean cloth.” He tossed aside the dishtowel Stu had been using to cover his wounds. “This thing is filthy.”

Before I could move, Frank took off at a run for the kitchen to get him what he’d asked for. I helped Michael lay Stu back on the floor so he could examine the burns.

“Jesus,” I muttered.

For some reason, Stu was still acting merely embarrassed by the situation. “My leg,” he said.

I looked down and saw a smoldering ember burning through the fabric of his pant leg. I slapped it away. Another wisp of smoke was issuing from his shirt collar, and I slapped that away as well.

“Stop him, Michael,” Stu moaned. “The fucker’s beating me to death.”

Michael tried to laugh, but it was a pretty feeble attempt. He was rattled. “He’s trying to put you out. Don’t want to go up in flames, do you?”

“I think I already did,” Stu said.

Frank returned with a bowl of ice water and a clean dishtowel. Michael soaked the cloth and held it lightly against the burns on the side of Stu’s face, rewetting it from time to time. Stu tried to pull away, but Michael held him in place like an uncooperative Schnauzer.

“Stop wiggling,” he ordered.

“It hurts.”

“I know. Sorry.”

Lyle scanned the room for more burning embers but apparently didn’t see any. “Christ, we almost burned down the house before the check cleared.”

“Should I call an ambulance?” Frank asked.

“No,” Michael said. “He’ll be all right. Stop fidgeting!”

“Thank God it didn’t hit his eyes,” I said.

Stu was calming down. “Will there be scars? Is my beauty marred?”

Michael grinned. “No, I think your beauty was left intact, what little there was to begin with. How do you feel?”

“Like a hot dog that somebody left on the grill.”

He looked past us toward the doorway leading into the dining room. “Who’s that?” he asked.

Everyone turned in the direction Stu was staring.

There was no one there.

Chapter 5

“HE WAS standing right there, dammit!”

Stu was not only apoplectic at our obtuseness in not having seen the same apparition he had, but also in considerable pain and slathered from hairline to neck with sap from an aloe vera plant Michael had spotted earlier in the yard.

Lyle did not help matters when he said, “All oiled up and purple like that, with his big bald head and skinny neck, he rather resembles a greasy dick, don’t you think?”

I did indeed, but I was not about to say so. Stu wasn’t in the mood. He gave Lyle a withering look from beneath his swollen eyelids, muttered a wry “sympathetic bastards” to himself, and took another long pull from the sixteen-ounce tumbler of straight malt whiskey Frank had poured him to help calm his nerves. Half of the whiskey was gone already. Anyone else would have been in an alcoholic coma by now, but not Stu. He was so unnerved by everything that had happened he actually appeared more sober than the rest of us.

“I still think we should take him to an emergency room,” Frank said. “His burns are making my sphincter contract.”

“What a lovely image,” Michael said. “But the burns are fairly superficial. I doubt if a doctor could do much more for him than I’ve already done, except possibly slap him into detox.”

With that, he pried the half-empty glass of whiskey from Stu’s grasp and handed it to Lyle. “Drink that,” he told Lyle. “Maybe it will knock you out. I could use the quiet.”

“Well, aren’t we a peevish lot.”

“Let me set fire to him,” Stu said.

Michael shook his head. “No, Stu. Lyle’s your friend.”

“Just his head.”

“No. And stop wheedling. How’s the pain?”

Stu thought about it for a moment. “Better. What were those pills you gave me?”

“The white ones were 800 milligram Motrin, and the yellow one I gave you for dessert was a Vicodin in the proper dosage for a carbon-based creature approximately the size of a Saint Bernard.”

“Hmm.” Stu studied his face in Nigel Letters’s very own antique hand mirror, which I had retrieved from the master bedroom. “Do you think my eyebrows will grow back? I would hate to look like an alien for the rest of my life.”

Michael patted his shoulder. “They’ll grow back. You’ll be in considerable pain tomorrow, you know. But don’t worry. I have more pills.”

“Good.”

“And I have more booze,” I interjected.

“Good again,” Stu said.

“After tomorrow,” Michael added, “I should imagine your discomfort will ease up. But I’ll drive you back to LA right now if you want to go home.”

Stu tried to laugh without wrinkling the skin on his face, a bizarre thing to watch. “And miss all the excitement?” He glanced at me. “And all the free booze? And illicit drugs?”

Frank. “And murderous spooks.”

Myself. “And exploding fireplaces.”

Lyle. “And clever repartee between a group of aging homosexuals who, if the truth were known, would probably rather be hitchhiking unarmed through Trenton, New Jersey, right now rather than spending another minute inside this deathtrap of a house, lovely though it may be, with one charbroiled friend, three drunken louts, and a guard dog who seems to have fallen asleep again.”

We all looked at Rex. He was indeed out like a light once more, snoring softly with his head beneath his paw as if nothing odd had happened all evening.

“Intrepid beast,” Frank said.

“Must be the antibiotics,” Michael sighed. “Perhaps I gave him the wrong dosage.”

“Okay,” Stu said. “Now I’m scared!”

Michael laughed. “Don’t worry. The pills I gave you are safe enough. I think. Just don’t drink any more tonight.”

Stu gave a gingerly pat to the side of his face where a streak of red skin had now spread from his temple to his jaw line. Then he looked back, for the twentieth time, at the archway leading into the dining room.

Either from the pills or the liquor or the questionable solicitations of loving friends, Stu appeared calm enough now to talk to. Even his hands were steady, I noticed, as he applied more aloe vera sap to the side of his face.

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“It wasn’t a ‘he,’” he said. “It was a ‘they.’ There were two of them. Two young men. Boys, really. Teenagers. One was standing behind the other. The one in back had a bloody rag pressed to the side of his head. The one in front was… beautiful. A handsome kid. Blond hair. He looked sad. He was wearing blue jeans. No shirt. His feet were bare. There were marks on his chest. Bruises, I think. And blood. Something was twisted around his neck.”

“Like rope?”

“No. Like wire. Like… piano wire. It glistened in the light.” Stu turned from the doorway and focused his eyes on mine. “That’s where the blood came from. The wire had cut into his neck. That… that’s what killed him.”

Lyle had dropped a straw in the glass of whiskey and was now sipping at it like he would a coke. “I think it’s time we reconsidered the advisability of purchasing this particular property. We could go house hunting tomorrow. Perhaps we could find a small bungalow in town that doesn’t want to kill us.”

Frank wrapped a comforting arm around his lover’s shoulder. “But look at the workmanship. The location. This place is to die for!”

“Yeah. Literally. Built by a dead serial killer who is still in residence and ninety miles from the nearest police officer with a gun. What’s not to like?”

“It could have been an accident, you know,” Stu said, his mouth tight with pain. “I was poking at the fire when it blew up in my face. Nothing supernatural about it, really. What do they put in those store-bought fireplace logs, anyway? Kerosene? Gunpowder? Plutonium?”

“Paper, Stu. They’re made of paper. They’re meant to burn, not explode.”

“Hold on,” I said. I ran out to the carriage house and returned with the velvet box containing the newspaper clippings and photographs. I sorted through them until I found the picture taken in the diner.

I handed it to Stu. “Is that who you saw?”

Stu studied the snapshot with his one good eye, the other was now swollen completely shut.

“My God,” he exclaimed. “It is! That’s the kid I saw in the doorway. The one with the wire around his neck.”

The others looked over Stu’s shoulder at the photograph.

“He’s gorgeous,” Lyle said. “Look at him! Who is he?”

I gazed again at the boy’s smiling face in the picture taken so long ago. “His name was TJ. He was a street hustler back in the forties. Up until the time he crossed paths with Nigel Letters, that is. He’s one of the boys who died in this house. The woman’s name is Julene. He worked for her in that diner on Market Street during the war.”

“How do you know all this?”

I tried to pare the complicated story down to a few sentences. “At the end of her life Julene became friends with the woman who cared for this house when Nigel Letters was alive. That woman is the grandmother of the housekeeper I have now.”

“She’s still alive?”

“The housekeeper is, yes. She lives in a nursing home in the city. I spoke with her yesterday. She knew about the killings. Suspected, anyway. The woman in the photograph passed away last year.”

I took the photograph from Stu’s hand and for the umpteenth time studied the boy’s smiling face, comparing it in my mind to what Stu said he had seen. The wire. The bruises.

“He died here, and he’s still here,” I said. “Just like all the others.”

“Jesus,” Frank groaned. “I must be nuts. I’m starting to believe you.”

I flipped the photograph over to check the date once again, and my heart lurched inside my chest. I quickly slipped the picture into my shirt pocket before the others could see what I had seen.

Later that night, after we had dined on broiled pork chops and baked potatoes—two items, I noted, that contained only one ingredient each—and after I had settled my friends into their respective bedrooms to sleep off the liquor and excitement of the evening, I slunk into the breakfast room and closed the door behind me. As I booted up the computer, I pulled the photograph from my pocket and looked again at the writing on the back.

Above the lettering of the date, November, 1942, written so long ago that the ink had faded to sepia, was new writing, the ink of which was blue and fresh. The letters seemed to be laboriously printed out, as if the writer had been poorly schooled.

It said, “Help Us.”

Beside the writing was a bloody thumbprint.

I propped the photograph against the side of the computer so I could look at the boy’s smiling face, the boy I knew only as TJ. I situated my fingertips over the keyboard.

Once again the words came to me from a place other than my own mind. They were not my words, but they were not TJ’s words either. They were the telling of TJ, neither through his eyes or through my own, but from another plane entirely. I was omniscient. I saw everything.

With the darkened house looming over me like a living presence, I felt my mind travel back to another time. To another life. To 1942, a year when the world was being torn apart by war. And in a house perched high on the side of a mountain just east of San Diego, California, other lives were being lost, being… taken, even more cruelly than in the battles in Africa and Europe and the western Pacific, because these lives were being extinguished without purpose, not for the good of all, but for the pleasure of one. Adolf Hitler was not the only madman on the planet in 1942. There were others. There were always others.

I braced myself for the pain I knew was coming as I watched the words begin to flow.

Page after page, the words spread across the screen, pulling me in…

AUGUST 1942

THE BOY was small for fifteen, delicately boned but strong for his size. His pale blond hair was overgrown now. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a haircut. Sometime in the spring, he thought, when his foster mother had set him down on the cap of the well behind the farmhouse he lived in with her, his foster father, and three other boys, all from different parts of Nevada, and sheared him close with her sewing scissors. She had nicked him twice, and each time, when he flinched away from those damn scissors, she boxed his ears. His foster mother was not a gentle woman. But she was a saint compared to the man she married.

The boy’s name was Tommy Johnson. His foster brothers called him TJ. His foster father’s name was Oscar James. He was a sheep farmer with mean little eyes and a hard hand that came out of nowhere with alarming frequency to slap sense into the four boys he was paid by the state of Nevada to nurture into adulthood.

Not much nurturing went on at the James ranch.

Oscar James liked to brag that he was a descendant of one of the James brothers, but he wasn’t sure which one. Sometimes when he told the story it was Jesse, at other times Frank. TJ didn’t doubt the story. He figured meanness was in the blood, and if anybody was kin to murderers and thieves, then it had to be Oscar James. The man was like a rattlesnake on a hot day, curled up and ready to strike at the slightest provocation. And his mouth was just as cruel as his hands. He cursed the boys from sunrise to bedtime. Nothing they did was right.

TJ came to the James ranch in December of ’41, after his parents were killed in a car wreck just outside Reno. Since the boy had no other living relatives, he became a ward of the state of Nevada and was placed in a foster home. Oscar and Louella James received sixty-three dollars a month for every ward they took in. It was a good deal for them—they got free labor and some extra whiskey money and someone to beat on other than each other, and they took the utmost advantage of their good fortune. Most days they spent high as a kite while the boys kept the ranch going. And the more Oscar and Louella drank, the meaner they got.

TJ put up with it for six months until one night, when he was so sore from work and beatings that he could barely move, he packed up what few belongings he had and stuffed everything into a cotton bag that chicken feed had come in, the kind of bag they sold in prints for poor people to make clothes out of. After a whispered and tearful good-bye to his foster brothers, TJ took off for parts unknown. He didn’t much care where he ended up as long as it was somewhere else.

He walked for miles that night along Route 66, with the desert sky hanging over his head like a blanket, hoping to hitch a ride to anywhere. But traffic was sparse. Gas had recently been rationed due to the war in Europe, and people weren’t driving much. Finally, just before dawn, a man in a shiny new Nash came along, pulled over to the side of the highway, and beckoned the boy inside.

“Where you headed, son?”

“Depends. Where’re you headed?”

The man aimed a finger west. “San Diego.”

TJ shrugged. “Good enough.”

He hopped into the front seat, grateful at last to be off his feet, and settled in for the ride.

The man behind the wheel was about thirty, TJ figured. His hair was thinning on top, but other than that he was a pleasant enough looking guy. He had a smile on his face that looked like it was a permanent fixture. He was tall and lanky and gripped the wheel with one big hand while the other one flexed and unflexed outside the car window like the man was enjoying the feel of the cool night air. TJ didn’t think he looked like the kind of person who would suddenly pull an axe out from under the car seat and try to chop him up for fodder. Maybe his luck was changing.

TJ groped around for conversation. He thought he should at least be sociable.

“So how come you’re not in the war? You sick or something? You got flat feet?”

“It’ll take more than flat feet to keep you out of this war, son. Nah. I got a busted eardrum. I couldn’t hear an elephant honking at me if he came up on my left side.”

“How’d that happen?” TJ asked.

The man laughed. “Poked a catalpa bean in my ear when I was a kid.”

TJ grinned. “That was smart.”

“Yeah,” the man said. “Turned out to be the smartest thing I ever done. Kept me out of the war, didn’t it?”

TJ had to admit the man had a point.

The man gave a knowing look at the cotton bag resting on the floorboard at TJ’s feet and the faded green and purple remnants of what had been a pretty good shiner on his face.

“Traveling on a shoestring, I see.”

TJ shrugged. “Everything I do is on a shoestring.”

“Don’t feel bad, son. Everybody’s pretty much in the same boat these days.”

Everybody but you, TJ thought, looking around the interior of the new car the man was driving. But he kept that thought to himself.

“Don’t worry, kid. With any luck the future you’re heading off to will be a darn sight better than the past you’re leaving behind.”

“I reckon it’s bound to be,” TJ said. He couldn’t imagine it being any worse.

A comfortable silence settled around the two travelers as the highway slid along beneath their wheels.

They hadn’t gone more than five miles when, just as the sun began climbing over the mountains in the distance, the man’s hand wormed its way across the bench seat and rested itself on TJ’s thigh.

TJ looked at it in surprise but said nothing. Neither did the man, who was whistling as he drove, steering now with the other hand.

TJ looked around the car, and in the backseat he saw boxes of Bibles and hymnbooks.

“You a preacher?” TJ asked.

The driver stopped his infernal whistling for a minute and answered. “Nope. Salesman. Church stuff. Make a pretty good living at it.”

“You got a nice car.”

“Thanks. Top of the line Nash. Nothing better on the road.”

The man’s hand began kneading the boy’s leg in a leisurely way. Still TJ ignored it.

“How long before we get to San Diego?” TJ asked.

“Maybe ten or eleven hours. Maybe a little more. Why? You in a hurry?”

“No, sir. Just asking.”

The man took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at him. “You’re a good-looking kid.” His hand came off TJ’s leg just long enough to tousle his hair. Then the eyes went back to the road and the hand to TJ’s thigh.

“You plan on chipping in with the gas money?” the man asked.

TJ’s heart sank. He didn’t have a penny in his pocket. Well, if he had to walk, he’d just walk.

“No, sir. I’m flat busted. I couldn’t give you anything even if I wanted to.”

The man smiled. “Oh, I think you can.”

The hand slid up to rest in the crotch of TJ’s dirty jeans. TJ stared at it so long that the man laughed.

“You ever had a blow job, son?”

“No, sir.”

“You know what it is?”

“Yes sir, I know what it is.”

Jimmy, one of the other boys on the sheep farm, had constantly bragged about an afternoon he spent in the company of a bona fide prostitute, a woman his mother sent him to stay with on the days when drink took over and she was unable, or unwilling, to care for the boy herself. On one of those days, the prostitute had consumed a few drinks herself and was feeling generous. When the woman peeled his pants down around his ankles and wrapped her painted lips around his pecker, Jimmy said he felt like he’d just slipped into heaven.

TJ figured a hooker was one thing. A Bible salesman another.

“Reckon not,” he said. “You can just let me out here. Maybe another ride will come along.”

The man’s hand began massaging him down there, and TJ had to admit it felt pretty good.

“You sure, boy? You know, you could make a shitpot full of money in California. Farm boys are a rare commodity out there. With your looks people’d be lining up to get a taste of you.”

“You mean men?”

“You don’t have to look so disgusted about it, son. The men are the ones with the money, aren’t they?”

“You mean they’d pay me?”

“Hell yes, they’d pay you.”

TJ pondered that. He also began to reconsider the man’s offer. Hell, it beat walking. But TJ figured he could make a better deal for himself than the one that was on the table.

“Then how come right now it seems like I’ll be the one paying you?”

“Say what?”

“You want to suck my dick instead of me paying you gas money, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Then who’s paying? I am, that’s who.”

“Jesus, son, you got a screwy-ass way of looking at things. How about I’m the one paying you with a ride to San Diego? Or would you rather stand out there on the highway for another day and a half and wait for the next car to come along?”

This put the matter in a new light.

“And you promise to take me all the way to San Diego?”

The man nodded like he was clenching a deal for six dozen Bibles. “Smack in the middle of town.”

“And all you want to do is suck my dick?”

“Till you cum. That’s right.”

“And you’ll give me five dollars to eat on when we get there?”

“Christ, son, you sure learn fast. Okay. Five bucks. In return for two blowjobs. You’re young. You can probably cum five times before we get out of the state of Nevada.”

“If I do,” TJ said, “it’ll cost you more. Five bucks a pop. First one’s for the ride. Second one’s for the eating money.”

The man shook his head in disbelief. “I’ve created a money-grabbing monster, I surely have. Trust me, son, you’ll like it so much you’ll never want me to stop.”

TJ shrugged. “Then I reckon you’ll be running a tab.”

The man howled with laughter at that as he steered the car off the road and bounced to a stop behind a little sage-covered hill.

He switched off the ignition and twisted around in his seat to face the boy. “Let’s get them clothes off, son. I’d like to see what I’m paying so dearly for.”

Much to TJ’s own amazement, he felt no shame at all as he stripped himself down to nothing but a pair of socks. By the time he was naked, his pecker was as hard as one of those rocks lying out there in the desert sun.

The man, his eyes bright with eagerness, reached out and slid his hand down TJ’s stomach. It was the first gentle touch TJ had felt from another human being since the day his parents died.

“Soft as silk…,” the man muttered.

When the man bent down and took the boy’s hardness into his mouth, TJ lay back and closed his eyes. The man played him like a harmonica, and TJ enjoyed every minute of it. When he came he damn near took the back of the man’s head off.

The salesman looked up into TJ’s face and grinned. “Damn, boy, you go off like a shotgun.”

TJ cupped the man’s face in his hands. “You like it?”

“Yeah, son. Damn near as much as you do.”

TJ tugged the man’s shirt out of his pants, pulled it over his head, and tossed it in the backseat. “Then do it again,” he said. “Slower this time.”

“On the job training, huh?”

“Yeah,” TJ said, “I’ve got me a whole new line of work when I get to California.”

The man started to say something, but TJ didn’t give him a chance. TJ filled his mouth up again with hard young meat.

The Bible salesman went at it as vigorously as if he were savoring a prime steak. And TJ knew now that he enjoyed being savored. He truly did. He was also more turned on than he had ever been in his life. Suddenly as eager and hungry as the man he was with, TJ twisted around and pulled the man’s stiffened penis from his pants. He tasted it tentatively at first like it was a new kind of candy, and the man groaned. When TJ took him into his mouth all the way down to the roots, the man looked like he was going to die of happiness.

TJ DISEMBARKED in San Diego with forty dollars in his pocket. It was more money than he’d ever had in his life. More money than he ever expected to have. Twenty he had earned at five bucks a pop from the randy Bible salesman, and twenty he had swiped from the man’s wallet while he coaxed the man to yet another orgasm with his mouth. It was with a certain amount of disappointment that he watched the Nash pull away up Broadway in heavy downtown traffic. The man had been kind to him, and even during the sexually heated moments, the man had always been gentle. TJ felt a little guilty about stealing the extra twenty, but he didn’t figure the man would really mind that much.

TJ had learned some things on his trip to San Diego. First and foremost he learned that his body was a commodity that could command a certain price. His youth and fresh farm-boy looks were an asset. A saleable asset. As long as he kept himself clean and presentable, he didn’t think he would ever want for money. He had no illusions about getting rich at it, but it would keep him alive and fed until he could find a real job.

More surprising still was what he learned about himself at the hands of the lonely Bible salesman. He began to understand the odd longings he had felt since puberty kicked in. Longings centered mostly around Jimmy, the oldest of the foster boys who shared his bedroom on the ranch, the boy who once told him of slipping into heaven with a prostitute. Often he had watched the boy, stripped to the waist, sluicing water over himself at the well behind the ranch house after a long, hard day of working in the fields or toiling with the sheep in the barn. Many nights he had lain awake, Jimmy’s naked body in the bed beside him, the bed they were forced to share, wondering what it would be like to reach out and touch the boy, maybe even do to the boy what the prostitute had once done. But his fear kept him rigid in the bed. Fear of what Jimmy might do. Fear of what the other boys might say if they found out about it. So TJ had never taken the risk.

Now, knowing what he did, he would always regret that decision.

The things he learned beneath the hands and lips of the Bible salesman had pushed him to accept the truth about himself. He was queer. The man in the Nash had been right about one thing. TJ had enjoyed the man just as much as the man enjoyed him.

IT WAS a revelation that would change TJ’s life, and in less than six months, end it.

As he stood among the throng of people on Broadway on this Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t only his future that awaited him. It was his death as well. TJ just didn’t know it yet.

SAN DIEGO in the early forties was a bustling hive of humanity, and the heart of all that humanity was the Navy ships tied to their moorings on the piers that poked out into the bay down at the end of 32nd Street. Sailors in their crisp white uniforms were everywhere. Young boys mostly, away from home for the first time and, depending on the boy, either scared to death or having the time of his life. Broadway, the main thoroughfare that cut a path through the center of the city, was a warren of massage parlors, cheap hotels, and locker clubs where the sailors kept their civilian clothes off ship. No matter where you landed, a person could generally find a drinking establishment within fifty feet of the spot they were standing. Half-naked girls danced for tips before bleary-eyed drinkers, and half-naked boys hung around the streets, tucked into doorways or insolently propped up on light poles, selling themselves to anyone with money jangling in their pockets.

This was the milieu TJ suddenly found himself in, and it didn’t take him long to find a niche for himself. He parlayed the forty dollars he had earned or stolen from the Bible salesman into a new pair of Levi’s, new shoes, and a couple of shirts, and he paid cash for a room for a week at the YMCA at the foot of Broadway.

That night, he was out on the street in his new clothes, his body clean and fragrant after a long hot shower in the community bath just down the hall from his tiny room, and before the morning sun began to peep over the skyline from the east, he had earned enough money to eat, frugally, for a week. Two men, older but not bad looking, had propositioned him as he stood on the steps of the Y. They were brothers, they said, but TJ didn’t believe it. And he didn’t much care. They took him to a house in an area they called Mission Hills, and there, in a home more beautiful than any TJ had ever stepped foot in, they did things to each other and to him that he seriously doubted real brothers would be doing with each other.

Afterward, on a huge bed with soft warm sheets, they ate pizza and drank beer, still naked from their lovemaking. Neither man could keep his hands off TJ’s body, constantly reaching out to stroke his skin. They called him handsome, and TJ began to believe it. TJ told them he would like to stay, but he needed to earn money for his rent, so the men offered him more, and TJ spent the night. He led the men to orgasm more than once, and they did the same for him. In the morning, as the two men slept, their arms about each other, TJ sneaked from the house, once again lifting an extra twenty from one of the men’s wallets. They were rich. They could afford it. And just like the Bible salesman, TJ didn’t think the men would really mind. He had earned the money. And he felt sure they would be the first to agree with that.

Nibbling cold pizza, he walked the streets at dawn. Palm trees swayed high above his head in the clear morning air. It was hot here, but not as hot as Nevada. A gentle breeze always seemed to be wafting up from the bay, and TJ relished the feel of it on his skin. He felt free for the first time in his life.

After losing his way and popping into a liquor store to ask directions, his feet finally led him back to Broadway and his tiny room at the YMCA, where he slept for a few hours, then cleaned up again and, redonning the same clothes, set out to look for work.

In a little diner on Market Street, where he stopped for a hamburger and a coke, he saw a sign behind the counter offering work as a dishwasher. He waved the owner over, a heavy-set woman with bright red hair piled up to a height of about two feet over her head, and pointed to the sign.

“I can wash dishes,” he said.

There was a sprinkling of sweat on the woman’s forehead, dampening her bangs. She looked like she had just worked four shifts in a row. She leaned her elbows on the counter and studied him. Her eyebrows looked like two slashes of black paint, but her face was kind.

“Hell, boy, anybody can wash dishes.”

She reached out her pudgy hand and gently touched the discoloration at the corner of TJ’s eye, the last vestige of Oscar James and his ugly wife that the boy still carried with him.

“Looks like someone poked you a good one,” the woman said. “Must have been a beauty when it was new. You got a home, boy?”

He swallowed the last bite of his hamburger and said, “I live at the Y. Over on Broadway.”

“How old are you?”

TJ smiled. “How old does a person have to be to wash dishes?”

“Eighteen.”

“Then I’m eighteen.”

The woman laughed, showing big long teeth like a horse. There was a lipstick smudge on one of them.

“You’re about as eighteen as I am.”

TJ figured she was forty if she was a day. He pushed the blond hair out of his eyes and tried to sit up straighter on the stool. “I really need the work,” he said. “And I can work hard. I’ve been working hard my whole life.” This wasn’t exactly the truth, but six months on the James ranch had felt like a lifetime.

The woman seemed to find that amusing. Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “I can’t pay you more than eighty cents an hour.”

“Sounds fair,” the boy said.

“And I’ll expect you to be on time.”

“Never been late in my life.”

She seemed to find amusement in that as well. She snuggled her fists into her broad hips and stared at him for a minute.

“I’m damn near worn out,” she said. “And seeing as how you’re the first person to do anything more than just look at that goddamn sign, I’m going to give you a chance. When can you start?”

TJ picked up his empty glass and plate and wiped the counter clean with his napkin. “I can start right now. Just lead me to the sink.”

In the back of the diner, in a kitchen hot enough to bake a cake in, TJ was confronted with a stack of greasy dishes almost as tall as he was.

The woman saw the surprised look on the boy’s face.

“Still interested?” she asked.

TJ just rolled up his sleeves and said, “Where’s the soap?”

UNTIL THE day he disappeared, TJ worked for Julene at the diner seven days a week, never missing a single day. Julene had a pretty good idea what the boy did with his time at night, but she never said anything to him about it. She figured that was his business. Julene had done a little hustling in her younger days as well, so she wasn’t about to be casting any stones.

Besides, she liked the boy. It hadn’t taken her long to worm his real age out of him, and once she learned the truth, she kept an eye out for him, buying him small gifts, when she could afford it, or dropping an extra buck or two in his pay envelope on Saturday afternoon if business had been good that week. The boy was always appreciative, and Julene began to think of him as the son she never had.

On her birthday in October, TJ handed her a tiny box wrapped in newsprint with a bow made out of a shoelace. Inside the box was a pair of dangly earrings, the kind she liked. She slipped them through her pierced ears after giving the boy a wet peck on the cheek, leaving a smudge of lipstick on the kid’s face for the rest of the day, and she wore the earrings every day for more than a week after that, just so the boy would know how much she liked them.

When Julene came down with the flu in the first week of November, TJ manned the counter and the grill and didn’t make too big of a mess of it since Julene’s regular customers weren’t exactly accustomed to haute cuisine anyway. At the end of the third day, when Julene returned to work in the afternoon looking pale and drawn, with her red hair twisted up in rollers, TJ handed over to her every penny he had taken in while she was sick. Julene expected to return to one holy hell of a mess, but the diner was cleaner than the day she left it. Even the dirty dishes hadn’t caught up with the boy, and she knew he must have stayed late every night cleaning up the dishes that were dirtied during the day. He had even gone around the corner to the market and picked up a new mop. When she saw it standing in the corner and commented on it, TJ told her that her old mop had had about three strings left on it, and it would have been easier to swab up the diner with a wet cat with a broom handle stuck up its ass than with that goddamn stick with three hairs on it that she called a mop.

Julene laughed like a hyena at that, the first decent laugh she’d had since the flu bug landed her flat on her back.

She sat herself down at the counter and told TJ to fry her up some eggs and bacon and hash brown potatoes because she hadn’t hardly eaten anything since the day she got sick, and also because she wanted to watch the boy work the grill. Her eggs came out just fine, and her bacon and potatoes were nice and crunchy just the way she liked them. As she ate, she counted out the money in the envelope TJ had given her and split it evenly into two piles. There was a hundred and fourteen dollars in each pile. The first free moment TJ had from waiting on the customers, he came over and stood in front of her, watching her eat.

When she pushed one of the piles of money in his direction, he asked, “What’s that for?”

“It’s for you. What do you think it’s for? War bonds?”

TJ looked at the money but didn’t touch it.

“You can’t give me that. Business wasn’t that good these past three days.”

Julene pushed the money a little closer to him. “Take it,” she said. “If you hadn’t been around, there wouldn’t have been any money coming in at all.”

TJ grinned. “You don’t even know how many customers I might have given the ptomaine to while you were gone.”

Julene looked around the diner. “As long as they didn’t die on the premises, I don’t much give a shit. Do you?”

“Not really,” TJ said, and they both howled with laughter, causing a couple of customers to look in their direction like maybe they were nuts or something.

“Go on, now,” she said. “Take the money. Buy yourself some new clothes. And for Christ’s sake, get a decent haircut. You look like a hillbilly.”

TJ scooped the money off the counter and stuck it in his pocket without counting it. He knew how much it was. He had known exactly how much money was in that envelope he handed her with the three days’ proceeds in it. He had been hiding it in a bag of flour in the kitchen, every nickel he took in, scared to death that someone would steal it and Julene would think he was ripping her off. The thought had never crossed Julene’s mind even once during the time she was laid up with the flu that TJ might rip her off. And if it had crossed her mind, she would have flogged herself for thinking it. To Julene, TJ was family, and to her way of thinking, anybody who thinks bad thoughts about family is a sniveling little asshole who doesn’t deserve to have a family to begin with. She had trusted the boy with her livelihood, and the boy hadn’t let her down, just as she’d known he wouldn’t.

UNFAMILIAR WITH banks, TJ stashed the money he earned on the street in a locker at the Y. He carried the key around his neck. He lived on the money he made at the diner and took most of his meals there as well. Julene didn’t seem to mind, never charging him for anything. The money he took in hustling, he was saving for the future. Exactly what that future would be he had no idea, but whatever it was, he knew that money would be an important part of making it a reality. All he had to do for now was stay under wraps, away from the eyes of the law, doing what he had to do to stay alive until he was old enough to get his own apartment, or maybe even enlist in the Navy. He had no intention of being returned to a foster home, either here or in Nevada, and be forced to work like an abused slave for some son of a bitch who only cared about the sixty-three dollars a month he was being paid for the right to slap TJ around every time he had a few drinks. TJ swore he would never again allow himself to be beaten by anyone. He might be only fifteen years old, but in his own eyes, he was a free man. He intended to do everything in his power to keep it that way. Thanks to Julene, he figured his chances were pretty good. In a crunch he knew he could count on her for help. She might even be willing to hide him if things got bad. But so far they hadn’t. So far things had gone along just fine.

There were probably people in Nevada looking for him, but he knew the chances of them finding him here, hundreds of miles away, were slim to none so long as he kept a low profile. He also knew that bureaucracy was slow to cross state lines. And with the war in full swing, the powers that be had more important matters to worry about than a fifteen-year-old runaway orphan named Tommy Johnson.

With the money Julene gave him for working the diner while she was out sick, locker 3217 at the YMCA now held over five hundred dollars. It was probably more money than that miserable fuck, Oscar James, ever held in his hand at one time in his life. Sometimes, TJ would open the locker and just look at the money for minutes on end, recounting it, ironing out the folds and wrinkles with his fingers.

He had done some pretty strange things for this money. There were some real sick puppies out there on the street. But TJ seemed to be able to handle them instinctively, keeping the mood cool no matter how twisted the johns’ minds were or how much they had been drinking. So far, no one had hurt him. Most of them were just guys. Guys leading normal straight lives. Guys who could only give rein to their real needs by paying for it with someone like TJ. Many of them, like the Bible salesman, had wives at home. Children, even. Only occasionally would they let their true selves emerge from the lives they were living, and at times like that, they would find themselves out on the street, cruising Broadway, looking for someone like TJ to feed the cravings they spent most of the time burying even from themselves. TJ understood them. In the era of TJ’s youth, homosexuality was not acceptable. Jobs were lost over it. Marriages, and lives, ruined because of it. TJ accepted the homosexuality in himself since he had nothing to lose because of it. Julene wouldn’t give a shit. In fact, she probably already knew. She was a big part of the street life of San Diego in 1942. There wasn’t much she didn’t know.

Other hustlers, many of the ones TJ knew by first names only, came into the diner to eat. Julene treated them all like long-lost relatives. She had no patience for people with attitudes—snotty twerps, she called them—but for the young hustlers and hookers and older drunks and winos who slept in doorways up and down Market Street and Broadway, she always had a kind word if they had one for her, and even a free plate of food if their money was gone and they had nowhere else to turn. On Market Street, Julene was almost an institution. And she had accepted TJ into her fold just as readily as she accepted all the others, maybe closer to her heart than most, TJ sometimes thought.

And she warned TJ when rumors began to surface about boys gone missing off the street. Hustlers for the most part, young boys of TJ’s age, or maybe a little older, who suddenly disappeared without a trace.

TJ had heard the rumors too. But TJ, unlike Julene, knew the stories were a matter of fact, not rumor. He knew one of the boys who’d disappeared.

Kenny was a kid of seventeen, skinny as a rail, who had been strutting his stuff in downtown San Diego for a couple of years now. He had a chip on his shoulder a mile wide, but he was likeable enough if you weren’t doing business with him. Kenny treated the johns like crap, but that’s what some of them liked.

For a kid who weighed in at under 140 pounds, he was as tough as leather and, in a bad mood, could be just about as palatable. TJ had learned a few tricks from Kenny. The most important lesson being get the money first. Don’t even loosen a button until the loot was in your hot little hand. Kenny bragged about the rich johns he serviced, but Kenny, among his other faults, was notoriously full of shit. So on the last day that TJ saw him, when Kenny bragged about a rich john he had a date with that night, TJ just let the story roll over his head. Kenny said the guy was a movie star, and this more than anything else led TJ to believe that it was just another of Kenny’s fabrications. He figured Kenny had about as much chance of screwing a movie star as TJ had of blowing Roosevelt in the Oval Office.

After the night of Kenny’s supposed rendezvous with what he claimed to be a star of the silver screen, Kenny was never seen again. By anyone.

At first, TJ thought that maybe Kenny had lucked into a longtime trick, maybe even picked himself up a permanent lover. But TJ knew if that were the case, Kenny would have found a way to get back to the street if for no other reason than to brag about it.

Weeks went by without a word. No detectives came around asking questions about the boy. People like TJ and Kenny weren’t worth that much effort. Probably the cops didn’t even know the boy was missing.

When a month went by without a word, TJ knew Kenny was gone for good. The boy with the big, wide chip on his shoulder had fallen into one of the cracks people like them danced around every day of their lives. You step into the wrong car with the wrong person, and the world swallowed you up. TJ guessed that Kenny was now moldering somewhere under six inches of desert sand or maybe feeding the sharks somewhere off the coast of California where he had been dumped after the crazy john had finished playing with him. He wondered how many others had met a similar fate. The rumors had been going on for months. Everyone seemed to know someone who had been yanked from the street and pulled a Houdini.

After Kenny, TJ cooled the hustling. He stayed later at the diner helping Julene, even talked her into repainting the place, which TJ did mostly himself at night after the diner was closed.

With his own money, he surprised her one morning by paying a man five dollars to scrape away and repaint the faded and peeling sign on the front window that said Julene’s Diner. They added a couple more tables along the back wall and hung some decent pictures to replace the drooping, food-splattered posters Julene had hung on the walls God knows how long ago, and suddenly the place looked like a respectable eatery. Business improved.

For TJ’s sixteenth birthday, Julene had a few of their friends in after closing, and they sat around chomping on cake she had baked herself and ice cream she bought from the A&P up the street.

That night was one of the happiest times of TJ’s new life. He had people who seemed to care about him and weren’t afraid to show it. Julene called herself the mother superior to this ragtag bunch of gay boys and street hustlers that pounded down the cake that night like it was the last meal they were ever going to have. The boys pounding down the cake just called her mother. Except for TJ. To him she would always be Julene, the woman who looked out for him and maybe even loved him a little bit. TJ would have taken a bullet for her any day of the week because he suspected, correctly, that she would have done the same for him.

AS THE boys laughed and told ribald stories of their encounters with some of the less than gallant characters who made up their roster of clients, sometimes eliciting groans from Julene and at other times making her laugh that hyena laugh of hers, another event was taking place that would take TJ one step closer to the fate that awaited him. With a penknife, while Julene and the boys sat around swapping stories in the diner, someone forced open the door to locker 3217 and took every penny TJ had been socking away for the past six months.

The boy awoke the next morning to find himself once again penniless. But the thief took more than just TJ’s savings that night. He took away the comfort that that money afforded TJ. The sense of purpose. The sense of accomplishment. The sense of future. But even more important than all of that, he took away TJ’s sense of caution.

TJ began hustling again with a vengeance. And this would, in turn, lead him straight to the house on the mountain.

TJ WAS tired that night. He had worked ten long hours at the diner, and business had been nonstop from the time they opened to the time they closed. There was a convention of government workers in town, something to do with the war effort, and every hotel in the downtown area was packed with conventioneers. Still, TJ hit the street after showering and changing clothes at the Y. He figured business would be just as good for hustling as it was for eating. There were thousands of men in town, all far from wives and children, and they would all be looking for entertainment that they weren’t allowed at home. And TJ was in the entertainment business.

He looked good that night, and he knew it. He was sixteen now, and Julene’s good food had filled him out. He was no longer the skinny towhead, small for his age, who had fled from Nevada that night so long ago. He was taller now and his muscles better defined. His skin, naturally light, had taken on the hue of ripened wheat from long hours in the California sun. He was packed into denims tight enough to display the merchandise, and he wore his shirt unbuttoned, flapping in the breeze, showing a smooth expanse of golden skin from neck to belly button. Men’s eyes were pulled to him as he walked up Broadway, and TJ looked right back every time he felt someone’s gaze fall on him.

Inside, he still seethed with anger at the thought of his money disappearing. All that money he had worked so hard to acquire. This time he wouldn’t be so stupid. He’d open a bank account. Or maybe give the money to Julene to hold for him. He didn’t doubt for a minute that she would guard it with her life. She was his only anchor in this new world he found himself in, and he sometimes wondered what would have become of him if he hadn’t met her on that second day in San Diego, the day that seemed so long ago but really wasn’t, when his new life began.

But for the stolen money, he had to admit he was happy enough. He knew his life would have been completely different from what it was if his parents hadn’t died on that empty road outside Reno. But they had died, and he was playing the best game he could with the cards he held.

He still thought of Jimmy at times. Thought of the bed they shared back on the ranch. Sometimes, when TJ lay in the arms of a man who smelled like cheap booze and tobacco smoke and was trying to act interested enough to give the man his money’s worth, TJ imagined what it could have been like if he hadn’t left the ranch the way he did. He knew now that he should have tried to talk Jimmy into coming with him. He supposed Jimmy’s sexual preferences would have led the boy down a different path from the one TJ had taken, but still they could have been friends. They could have looked out for each other.

TJ even toyed with the idea of going back to Nevada and fetching Jimmy, but deep down he knew he never would. He had no intention of putting himself in striking distance of the welfare people who had been stupid enough to place him on a sheep ranch with someone like Oscar James. If he went back, they would catch him. TJ just knew it. But his greatest fear was that Jimmy would simply turn his back on him when he found out what sort of life TJ was living in San Diego. And that was a hurt that TJ didn’t think he could stand. It was better to just leave matters the way they were.

As TJ strolled the bustling street, the night air cooler now than when he had arrived months before, he thought these private thoughts as he always did when he worked the streets, but his eyes were constantly moving, seeking out the people that were drawn to him like bees were drawn to nectar.

The sailors TJ ignored. Their lean young frames squeezed deliciously into crisp uniforms appealed to him, but there was no money to be had there. TJ sought out the other men. The lonely men. The men with hunger in their eyes. The men with money, money they didn’t mind handing over in exchange for what the Bible salesman had once called “a taste of him.” And those men were everywhere. Some were fairly good-looking, and these were the ones TJ preferred. It made his job a lot easier if there was a little attraction there for him. But it wasn’t a necessity. He was on the street first and foremost for the money. Still, he had certain standards. There were hustlers out there who would fuck a warthog if the offer was good enough. Kenny was one, before he disappeared. For all the boy’s boasting of movie stars and big money, TJ had seen him on occasion with men that TJ wouldn’t have brought his dick within twenty feet of, and he suspected that being indiscriminate was what finally tore Kenny from the street and sent him hurtling into oblivion. TJ didn’t intend to meet the same fate. There were things he wanted to do with his life. Places he wanted to go. His parents’ death might have given him a rocky start, but he would overcome it. He would not fall into any of the traps that so many other boys on the street had fallen into. Drugs, for one. And desperation, for another. He would not be selling himself until sickness and time took everything away from him that men were now so eager to pay him for—his youth, his looks, his aura of innocence. This was a passing phase in his life, not a career choice. In a year or so, when he once again had a bit of money set aside, he would put this life behind him forever.

TJ was so deep into thoughts of his future that he at first didn’t see the man standing beneath the marquee of the California Theater. TJ had left Broadway and was strolling up Fourth Avenue, just behind the U.S. Grant Hotel, when the man caught his attention. TJ smelled money right away. The man was clad in dark tailored slacks and a tweed sport coat pulled over a blue sweater. Patent-leather shoes peeked out from beneath crisp cuffed trousers and glistened in the shimmering lights of the theater sign. The man looked as if he might have been a stunner in his youth, but the face that had once been handsome now sagged a bit at the corners and beneath the eyes. Still, when the man smiled at him and the light of hunger entered his eyes at the sight of TJ, the boy stopped dead in his tracks.

The man was holding a fifty-dollar bill in his hand. He slowly raised his arm and dangled it between thumb and forefinger.

TJ gazed at that fifty dollars just as hungrily as the man gazed at him.

It was late. Well past midnight. As TJ stared at the man, his eyes moved a little to the left, and he saw the movie posters framing the entrance to the theater. The man’s face was on all of them. The faces on the posters were younger, but it was the same man. TJ glanced up at the marquee. The sign read War Bond Drive—Meet Nigel Letters—Live And In Person.

TJ remembered a night in another life when he sat huddled in the front seat of the old station wagon his father drove, the same car his parents would later die in, sandwiched between his mom and dad as they munched popcorn and watched a movie on the towering screen of a drive-in theater on the outskirts of Reno. TJ was maybe ten years old then, and the movie was scary as hell. His parents giggled at the shenanigans on the screen, and TJ giggled with them even though the movie actually scared the pants off him. The man he and his parents watched that night on the big screen was the same man standing in front of him now. He was painfully older, gone a little to fat, but it was definitely the same man.

TJ was still innocent enough in the ways of California to be awed by the sight of a real-live movie star, but he was not so innocent as to think the man was anything other than just another john looking for a few hours of pleasure with a boy young enough to be his grandson. The hunger in the man’s eyes told TJ everything he needed to know, and the fifty-dollar bill the man held out in front of him was enough to spur TJ into action.

TJ hooked a thumb in the waistband of his Levi’s, dragging them a little lower, and stared right back into those devouring eyes.

“How’d the bond drive go?” he asked.

The man smiled, showing snowy teeth. TJ had never seen teeth so white.

“Not bad. We raised a couple of grand.”

TJ glanced again at the fifty-dollar bill in the man’s hand.

“Is that your commission?” TJ asked.

The man laughed. “No, son,” he said. “This is your commission.”

TJ cocked his head to the side. “And exactly what would a guy have to do for a commission such as that? I don’t imagine you want your limo waxed.”

Nigel Letters stepped forward and tucked the bill into TJ’s waistband. His fingers lingered for a moment on the skin beneath the boy’s navel. TJ felt his cock shift beneath the denim. He wasn’t sure if it was from the feel of the man’s fingers or the feel of the fifty-dollar bill.

“I saw one of your movies once.”

The man took a step back, leaving the money where he had placed it. “Just one?”

TJ shrugged. “I don’t go to the movies much.”

Nigel looked around at his old movie posters on the wall. “Yeah, well, they weren’t that good to begin with.”

“I liked the one I saw,” TJ said.

The aging actor seemed pleased. “Did you?”

TJ decided a little exaggeration wouldn’t hurt. “Yeah. I almost peed my pants I was so scared. But I was younger then.”

The man gave a small theatrical groan. “So was I.” Then he flashed his snowy teeth again and just stared at the boy.

TJ stood comfortably under the older man’s gaze. He was used to those gazes by now. He casually pulled the money from his waistband, looked at it, and tucked it into his pocket.

“Does that mean we have a deal, son?”

“Depends on what the deal is,” TJ answered.

NIGEL LETTERS cast his eyes up and down the street, assuring himself that he and the boy was alone. He had not intended to seek out company tonight. He had intended to merely attend the fundraiser—it was, after all, a good cause—and maybe bask a bit in the glory of his younger days. Days long gone from him now. It had been several years since he stood upon a stage and felt the warmth of an audience sweep over him. His beauty, he knew, was a thing of the past. His talents were no longer in demand except for the occasional benefit such as this one, but he still had money, and money could buy anything. Even this beautiful animal standing before him. He could still have youth at his fingertips, if just for a little while. He could make it his own as he had done so many times before. In the end, he knew, there would be nothing left of this boy to worship. But for a little while, it could be his. He would take his time with this one. The boy standing before him was exceptionally beautiful.

“All night,” he said. “My place. I’ll bring you back in the morning.”

“Back from where?” TJ asked.

“My house.”

“In Hollywood?”

“No. I live here. In the foothills just outside of town.”

TJ considered this. “Why would a movie star live here?”

Nigel had heard this question before. His answer was well rehearsed and truthful. “Privacy.”

TJ considered this as well. “Why would a movie star want privacy?”

Nigel smiled a secret smile

“I’ll show you when we get there,” he said.

NOT UNTIL hours later, when the pain began to tear him apart, did TJ remember those words.

Chapter 6

A TOUCH at the side of my neck brought me crashing back to the present, my connection to the past lost in the space of a second.

Michael stood over me, smiling down. His hair, freed of the stocking cap and considerably thinner now than when we were an item, poked up around his face in a dozen different directions. Bed hair. Crumpled, baggy pajama bottoms hung precariously from his slim hips, and he sported a nicotine patch on his upper arm. He was trying to quit smoking again, a quest he had pursued off and on and with a constant lack of success since the day I met him.

But for the smoking, and a few too many drinks occasionally (especially when the five of us got together), Michael was something of a health nut, popping God knows how many vitamins every day, jogging or racewalking every morning, working out at his gym four evenings a week. Compared to him, the rest of us were slugs. We basically kept ourselves trim with periodic bouts of starvation. Michael did it with hard, steady exercise. His devotion to it was mirrored in the clean, trim lines of his body.

I snaked an arm around his waist and pulled him into my space, pushing my face into the sprinkling of hair on his firm, rippled stomach. His skin felt sleep-warm and heavenly.

He rested a hand against the back of my neck. “This may come as a surprise to you, Jim, but most life forms require sleep to survive.”

I grinned and kissed his stomach. He not only lived a healthy lifestyle, he had also taken it upon himself to constantly lecture the rest of us on the advantages of one. For my part, his lectures usually oozed in one ear and dribbled out the other without making any long-lasting impressions anywhere in between.

“Nag. What time is it?”

“About an hour before dawn. The sky is just beginning to lighten.”

“Is that what woke you?”

“No,” he said, chuckling. “A warm fuzzy body crawling into my bed is what woke me. I was hoping it was you.”

“Hmm. Who was it?”

“Rex.”

“He misses you.”

“Anybody else around here miss me?”

“Yeah. I do. All the time.”

He ran his fingers through my hair. “Right. That’s why you moved to practically another country. We’re twenty miles from the Mexican border, for Christ’s sake. When the wind is right, you can probably smell the salsa.”

“Right now I can smell only you,” I whispered, breathing in the familiar fragrance of his warm skin.

I felt a stirring beneath the fabric of his pajama bottoms before he gently took a step backward. “Let’s not complicate matters,” he said, but there was a smile in his voice. “We have other things we should be concentrating on.”

“Like what?” I asked innocently.

“Well, gee, let me think. Judging by all the paperwork scattered around you, you’ve just been mysteriously channeling the story of another boy who was murdered in this house more than fifty years ago. Our friend is lying in the back bedroom with first-degree burns over most of his face and so strung out on pills and booze that he doesn’t realize he should be in pain. And, oh yes, you’re in the process of buying a home that is crawling with ghosts and goblins and demons, and we need to be checking the yellow pages for a good exorcist before one or all of the spooks living here decide to set fire to the rest of us. Did I miss anything?”

“Well, there is the small matter of the beast who attacked my dog, but I suppose that would fall under the general demon category, unless you’d prefer to sublist it. Organization is, after all, your middle name.”

“And chaos, my friend, is yours. It follows you wherever you go.”

I studied his face. “Is that why you left?”

He smiled. “Who said I left? Maybe I’m on hiatus.”

“If that’s what it is, it’s been a long one,” I said, but I could feel my heart doing a happy little patter. Maybe there was hope for us yet.

Michael apparently was harboring the same thought. At least I hoped he was. “Complications aren’t necessarily bad things,” he said, moving closer.

“Not bad at all,” I agreed.

“And the other stuff we can work around. Ghosts. Goblins.”

“Demons. Absolutely.”

I slid my lips across his stomach.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s go to bed.”

“If you insist.”

He laughed. “You’re so easy.”

I pulled the drawstring on his pajama bottoms and watched them slide to the floor.

“And you’re so hard.”

“Nice segue,” he said.

“Thanks. I’m a writer. We’re good at things like that.”

“What else are you good at?”

“Let me refresh your memory,” I said.

And I did.

I WOKE up with a luxurious yawn and a satisfied smirk on my face, not unlike Scarlett O’Hara after Rhett Butler lugged her reluctant Southern ass up that carpeted staircase and had his boyish way with her.

It took me a minute to realize that Michael was gone. I threw on a robe and headed for the kitchen, where I heard the rattle of pots and pans. Lyle, Frank, and Stu were huddled around the big butcher-block breakfast nook, utensils in hand, waiting to be served, while Michael stood at the stove flipping burgers and frying a skillet full of potatoes. He was wearing an apron that read Kiss The Cock.

Michael laid the spatula aside when he saw me standing in the doorway. There was a fairly satisfied smirk on his face, as well, when he crossed the kitchen and gave me a hug. Then he stepped back and eyed me up and down like he might eye some pathetic animal on his examination table.

“If you’d looked like this last night,” he said, “the evening might have had a different outcome.”

“That bad, huh?”

Lyle cleared his throat and simpered from the other side of the kitchen. “And what was last night’s outcome, if you don’t mind us asking?”

Michael gave me a secretive smile, his back to the others. “Tasty,” he whispered, for my benefit alone. “Last night’s outcome was tasty.”

I peeked over his shoulder. Everyone was watching us like we were a particularly interesting program on the Discovery Channel or something. Lyle had a wicked grin on his face. Frank had the pleased look of a man accepting a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing two warring countries together, and Stu had the vacant expression and cherry red complexion of a lobster that had just crawled desperately from a boiling pot. He looked considerably worse than he had the day before, but in a way he looked better too. But not much better.

I narrowed my eyes as I tried to improve my appearance by tugging at my hair and drawing the robe tighter around myself. “No lascivious comments, please.”

Lyle gave Frank an incredulous look. “Writers certainly use big words, don’t they?”

Frank gave him a gentle poke with his fork. “Hush up. Love is in the air. Can’t you smell it?”

“I smell something.”

“Shit!” Michael spat. “My potatoes are burning!”

I shooed Stu aside and plopped myself down beside him, pulling the robe primly over my knees, while Michael stirred the smoking spuds.

“Hamburgers for breakfast?” I asked no one in particular.

Lyle shook his head in doe-eyed wonder. “You must have screwed your way into a coma, Jim. It’s lunchtime. We had breakfast hours ago.”

“Oh.”

I turned to Stu and studied his face more closely. “You look better,” I said, lying through my teeth.

“So do you,” he answered back. “Why do you ask?”

“Uh….”

“Ignore him,” Frank said to me. “Michael has him so doped up that he’s not making a lot of sense. Tried to eat a napkin at breakfast, then wiped his mouth with a fucking fried egg.”

Lyle hooted with laughter, then gazed at me, chin in hand. “And how was your night?”

I ignored the question. “Where’s Rex?”

At the mention of his name, Rex came padding into the kitchen with his favorite toy, a big stuffed elephant, clamped between his teeth. He dropped the elephant in my lap and hopped up to place his front paws on my shoulders, giving me a good-morning kiss. His Band-Aids were gone, and the scratches across his nose seemed to be healing well. Apparently Michael’s drugs hadn’t killed him either. Another medical miracle.

“We had a visitor last night,” Frank said conversationally.

“Who did?”

“Lyle and I.”

I watched Rex walk over to Michael and sit obediently at his feet. I wasn’t fooled by the look of devotion on his doggy face. His interests were more self-serving than that. He was merely hoping for something tasty to fall off the stove and hit the floor. Michael absently patted Rex’s head while he adjusted the flame under the burgers.

Then Frank’s words soaked in.

“What do you mean, you had a visitor? You mean one of the….”

“Boys. Yes. I hate to be the one to tell you, Jim, but I think your house is haunted.”

I lowered my eyelids. “No kidding.”

“Our boy wasn’t as cute as Stu’s,” Lyle said. “Pissed me off.”

Frank wiped his face like Jackie Gleason on The Honeymooners. “Lyle, shut the hell up.”

“Ooh,” Lyle said. “Testy.” But then he had the good sense to do as his lover suggested and did indeed shut the hell up. I noted, not for the first time, that Lyle looked a whole lot different with his mouth closed. One didn’t have the opportunity to see him that way very often. It was a rather astounding realization, along the lines of a religious epiphany.

“What did he look like?” I asked.

Lyle started to answer, then glanced at Frank and flipped his mouth shut like an oven door.

Frank nodded in gratitude. “Skinny,” he said. “Dark hair. He looked hard, Jim. He’d been around the block a few times, and the block had pretty well sapped the life out of him already. His name was Kenny.”

My God, I thought. Kenny.

“He—he spoke to you?”

“That he did. He stood at the foot of our bed and told us in no uncertain terms to get the hell out while we still could.”

“He said the house would kill us,” Lyle interjected, and this time Frank didn’t try to stop him. “He said as long as we stay here our lives are in danger.”

“I suppose we already knew that, though, didn’t we?” Frank asked.

I looked at the screaming-red skin on Stu’s cheek. “I suppose we did.”

“And you’ve moved in for life, haven’t you?”

“What?”

“You’ve put a deposit down on the gates of hell, Jim. What kind of a moron would do that?”

I shrugged. “A moron like me, I guess.”

“Guess so,” they both said.

“And here you are dropping by with twelve suitcases, joining the party,” I observed. “What exactly do you think that says about you?”

“That we’re idiots,” Frank said.

“Lunkheads,” Lyle suggested.

Michael turned to look at us, spatula in hand. “Nincompoops.”

Stu chimed in with the first sensible word he had spoken since I sat down. “Friends,” he said.

We all stared at him with blank expressions.

A sly smile crept across Lyle’s face. “Uh-oh. He’s making sense now. The drugs must be wearing off.”

“Who did?” Stu asked, staring up at the ceiling.

Lyle groaned. “Never mind. False alarm.”

Michael scooped up the hamburger patties and slid them onto a plate, did the same with the potatoes, and dumped everything unceremoniously on the table before us.

He squeezed in beside me and slipped an arm across my shoulder. “Stu’s right. We’re friends. Friends on a mission. We said we’d whip this house into shape, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Lyle gazed at each of us in turn. “I was thinking more along the lines of Martha Stewart sheets and decent stemware. I didn’t know we’d be battling the netherworld.”

“Good one, Lyle,” Stu said.

We all laughed.

Michael tucked a finger under my chin and pulled my face in his direction. “I don’t mind moving to the foothills,” he said, “but I’d prefer our houseguests to be among the living.”

“Really?” I asked.

Michael smiled at the look of shock on my face. “Really.”

“You’d actually move here? Into this house?”

“To be with you? Sure. My hiatus has gone on long enough.”

“What about the pet hospital? Your condo?”

“I’ll sell them and open a hospital here. They have pets in San Diego.”

Rex furtively snatched a hamburger off the platter and wolfed it down. Michael watched him fondly. “Case in point. But I can’t live in this house the way it is, and neither can you.”

“We need the midget lady in Poltergeist,” Stu said. “Or Father Karras. Or Buffy.”

Everyone ignored him. I was staring at Michael. Frank and Lyle were staring at us.

I was stunned. “So… you’re moving in?”

“We love each other, don’t we?”

“Well… yeah.”

“You want me to move in, don’t you?”

“You know I do.”

While Michael and I gazed like saps at each other, our food all but forgotten, Lyle egged us on to ever further sappiness. “Tell him why you love him, Michael.”

Michael didn’t seem to mind at all being spurred into making a complete and utter ass of himself in front of his friends. Without hesitation, he said, “I love you, Jim, because you’re sweet and smart and kind and because you could probably suck a bowling ball through a garden hose with that talented mouth of yours.”

“Hmm. How romantic,” Lyle droned, still staring at us with his chin in his hand, happy as a clam. “Your turn, Jim. Tell Michael why you love him.”

I didn’t hesitate either. “Because you make me want to be a better person,” I said.

Michael jumped. “Wait a minute! That sounds familiar! Is that…?”

Frank laughed. “Jack Nicholson. As Good as It Gets.”

Michael groaned. “Fucking movie dialogue. I spill my guts out, and you give me movie dialogue.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Couldn’t help myself. Besides, it’s true.”

“It is?”

“Yes, my love, you really do make me want to….”

“Oh, shut up!”

Michael gave me a friendly chuck under the chin, obviously making a concerted effort to not go ballistic over what he considered to be my most annoying character trait. His friendly chuck was not quite hard enough to loosen fillings, but it came close. “Then it’s settled,” he said.

“Jeez,” I said. “You really are easy.”

“Don’t believe it,” Frank interrupted. “He made up his mind before we even arrived here. He talked to Lyle and me about it weeks ago. He’s been pining for you, Jim.”

Lyle turned to Frank. “Which reminds me. Pay up.”

With a groan, Frank pulled his wallet from his back pocket and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, handing it to Lyle, who accepted it with a smug expression on his face before neatly folding it and tucking it away.

I did not need to ask what that was all about.

At the look of wondering confusion on Michael’s face, Frank said happily, “Best bet I ever lost.”

“You actually bet against us?”

Frank did a palms up. “I didn’t think Jim was that easy.”

“Easy as pie,” Stu said, dropping his sandwich in his lap. His fingers didn’t seem to be working properly. Rex wriggled under the table and deftly scooped the hamburger from between his legs before Stu even knew it was gone. Two minutes later he was still looking for it. Thrilled by the recent turn of events, I happily began building him another one.

“So what is the game plan?” Lyle asked, watching me. “Love is boring. Let’s get down to the really important stuff, such as how do five guys without a religious bone among them set about exorcising demons from a house? Should we swallow our pride and agnosticism and contact a priest?” Then his face brightened. “I know! We’ll hold a séance!”

“Typical gay response,” Michael groaned.

Stu gingerly patted his wounded cheek, causing a slice of pickle from his new sandwich to fall into his shirt pocket. I fished it out while he said, “Why don’t we just buy some TNT and blow the place to matchsticks and build another house. Something with a pool. It’s hotter than hell in here.”

Lyle reached across the table to give Stu a consoling pat on the arm, jarring it just enough to cause the rest of his sandwich to disintegrate. “You’re only hot because your face is fried, and I don’t think Jim would be very receptive to your idea of blowing up his new house. Not that it’s a bad idea.”

Frank agreed. “Not bad at all.”

“No priests,” I said. “And no explosives. The matter is being taken care of. We just have to ride out the storm. But there are things we can be doing in the meantime. Someone needs to go to the library and check out old newspaper stories on the missing boys. They should have everything on microfilm. The more we know about what happened in this house, the better off we’ll be in trying to undo it. And we need to learn everything we can about Nigel Letters. He’s the bastard who started it all, and he’s the one, I think, who is keeping the boys here.”

“He’s the one we have to be afraid of,” Michael said. “Not the boys. He’s the one who is going to try to stop us. And he’s strong. Look at Stu.”

“That could have been an accident,” Frank said.

“Do you really believe that?” Michael asked.

“Well, I suppose not.”

“Rex got a taste of his power, too,” I said. “Dear old Nigel is strong enough to reach out from another dimension and inflict damage on the living. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that’s enough to scare the poop out of me. But I love the house more than I fear him. And I want to help the boys even more than I love the house. I can do it with or without your help, but I’m going to do it.”

Lyle looked offended. “Who said we wouldn’t help?”

Michael drummed his fingers on the tabletop, lost in thought. “Actually,” he said, “maybe a séance isn’t such a bad idea.”

It was Frank’s turn to groan. “Oh, please.”

Like a ninety-year-old man trying to diffuse a bomb, Stu was in the process of trying to put the major components of his sandwich back together. His tongue poked though his swollen lips in concentration. My fingers itched to take it away from him and do it myself.

“Let’s kill the fucker,” he said. “I hate bad actors. They demean the whole profession.”

“He’s already dead,” Lyle noted.

Stu gazed around the table. “Then we’ll kill him again. Maybe the second time it will take.”

“The drugs are really wearing off now,” Frank said. “That’s the first decent suggestion I’ve heard all day.”

It was indeed.

“I was told that the first time he was killed, the boys did it,” I noted.

“You must admit they had an unimpeachable motive,” Michael said. “If it’s true.”

“Yes,” I said. “If it’s true.”

Stu gave up on the hamburger altogether and concentrated on the potatoes instead. Apparently they were easier to control.

“Perhaps,” I said, watching him, “that’s why Letters is keeping them here. Revenge.”

Stu looked at me with his one unswollen eye. There was pain on his face now. Real pain. I suspected the drugs truly were wearing off.

“Who told you that?” he asked.

“Mrs. O’Donnell. Nigel’s housekeeper. She wants to come here. I think she blames herself for the things that happened inside this house.”

“Is she able?” Michael asked.

“Yes. I think so. She’s in a wheelchair most of the time, but that wouldn’t be a problem. And she knows things, guys. Things that might help us.”

“Then I think you should bring her here,” Michael said.

“Me, too,” Lyle said. “I love old ladies.”

“You are an old lady,” Frank said.

“One suggestion,” Stu added.

We all turned to him. “What’s that?” I asked.

He dropped a potato into his lap. While searching for it, he muttered, “Don’t light the fireplace.”

AFTER LUNCH, Lyle and Frank took off in the Hummer to, in Lyle’s words, run a few errands. The errands included researching a series of seventy-year-old disappearances in the public library, restocking the bar, which we had pretty well depleted the night before, and most importantly, picking up bleach and peroxide and a further list of hair products that Stu had dictated. Lyle had decided to lighten his hair.

“Jesus,” Frank said when he heard the last item on their agenda of things to do. “Here we are about to battle Satan and maybe get our asses killed in the process, and all you can think about is doing it as a blond.”

Lyle shrugged. “It’ll be fun.”

“Which part?” Frank asked.

After they were gone, I found Stu at the bathroom mirror, hissing and ouching as he spread more aloe vera sap over the side of his face.

“Maybe you should leave that alone,” I said, peering over his shoulder.

“No way,” he said. “I can’t have Jesse seeing me like this. I look… diseased.”

“Jesse? You invited Jesse?”

“I’m the only one without a bedmate, in case you hadn’t noticed. I feel like a nun in a whorehouse.”

“But, Jesse? My God, he’s so flitty you have to catch him with a net just to carry on a conversation. His wrists flap around so much he practically levitates when he gets excited.”

“Well, he’s coming, and I expect you to be nice to him. Aside from the fact that he screws like a bunny, he’s into all this occult business in a big way. Reads about it all the time. He could be a big help to us.”

“Yes,” I said, “if we need our gowns rehemmed. He makes dresses for a living, for Christ’s sake. And not even real dresses. He makes dresses for drag queens!”

Stu stepped back and studied his greasy reflection in the mirror.

“And he makes a damn fine living at it,” he said. “There are more drag queens in LA than honest-to-God women.”

I accepted the inevitable. “Just so he isn’t wearing one of his creations when he arrives.”

“Not to worry,” Stu said. “He promised he would dress appropriately for a weekend in the boonies.”

I had never seen Jesse dress appropriately for anything. He would probably show up in jodhpurs and riding boots with a whip under his arm. And that’s if we were lucky.

Michael was less thrilled with the news than me. He enjoyed Jesse’s company about as much as he enjoyed feline tuberculosis, except there wasn’t a cure for Jesse. We loved Stu, but his taste in men bordered on the bizarre. Aside from his usual string of conquests of cops, gardeners, pool boys, and one bronco rider (Stu had transformed himself into Jose´ Eber during that relationship, twirling and curling hair behind his salon chair in a Stetson and Tony Llama boots until we convinced him he looked like a fool), we had also known him to become romantically involved with a mud wrestler, a Jesuit priest, a lobbyist for the Christian Coalition (a beautiful man with all the morals of a goat), and a professional bowler who Stu said had the biggest balls he had ever seen. Presumably, he was joking, but with Stu you could never be sure.

“At least he gave us warning this time,” Michael sighed, scooping me in his arms. “When is the seamstress arriving?”

“In about twenty minutes.”

“Great. And what about the old lady?”

“Caroline is driving her up tomorrow. I’ll give her your bedroom since you won’t be needing it anymore.”

We held each other silently for a moment.

“I’m glad I’m back,” Michael finally said.

“So am I.” I looked into his eyes. “Are you really willing to sell everything and move here just to be with me?”

“Absolutely.”

“How is Gregory?”

“He’s fine. He sends his regards.”

“I’ll bet.”

Gregory was a box tortoise who, in a fit of whimsy one day, tried to cross the Santa Monica Freeway. He was three feet into the fast lane when a motorist clipped him with his front tire and sent him skittering across four lanes of traffic like a Tiddlywink. The motorist then risked his own life by scraping Gregory off the freeway and rushing him to Michael’s pet hospital in a fit of guilt. Gregory survived. The guilt apparently did not, since the driver never returned to pay the bill or do so much as phone for a medical update on his victim. Michael not only cured the beast’s broken shell with a mixture of modern medical savvy and a tube of Crazy Glue, but had adopted the creature as well, and now Gregory roamed about Michael’s condo like one of those robotic vacuum cleaners that never stops, only slower. He was the perfect pet, Michael said. He would eat anything, and one never heard a peep out of him.

“I miss him,” I said.

Michael laughed. “I’m sure you do. He’s a powerhouse of personality.”

“You, me, Rex, and Gregory,” I said. “The four of us are going to be very happy together.”

“Only if the house doesn’t kill us first.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “The boys will protect us.”

“You honestly believe that, don’t you?”

“Well… sure. Don’t you?”

Michael gave me an unreadable gaze. “I don’t know. I keep thinking I tripped over an apostrophe and fell into one of your books. The Boys in the Band from Hell or The Ghost and Mr. Chicken Hawk, or something along those lines. You do realize how unreal this all is, don’t you? I mean, you haven’t written horror novels so long that all of this just seems normal, have you?”

“No, Michael. I’m not that crazy. Besides, the unreal part hasn’t commenced yet. Wait until Jesse arrives, then talk to me about unreal. The next few days should be very interesting.”

“What should we do first?” he asked.

I hooked my finger into his belt and tugged him toward the bedroom. “Come with me,” I said, “and I’ll show you.”

FASHIONABLY LATE, as always, Jesse arrived three hours past the time he was expected. Stu, eager to see his latest paramour, had worried himself into a frenzy over the condition of his face. In an attempt to camouflage the damage, he had dabbed on so much greasepaint, or whatever the hell it was, to cover the redness that now his face looked like it had been stuccoed. Since he had continued to pop pain pills and sip bourbon during the renovation, he thought he looked pretty good. Neither Michael nor I had the heart to tell him otherwise.

Jesse, aside from sewing dresses for drag queens, was also, as far as I knew, the only man in Mary Kay’s stable of cosmetics saleswomen. He was so successful at it—he was acquainted with every drag queen in Los Angeles, and a drag queen can go through a gallon of makeup in one sitting—that he was awarded a pink Cadillac a few years earlier, and the pink Cadillac is what he arrived in. I sent up a prayer of thanks to the real estate gods who had seen fit to put my house out of eyeshot to any other piece of residential property on the mountain. Explaining Jesse to nosy new neighbors would have been an ordeal I was happy to avoid.

He gave a gay little finger wiggle at the three of us standing on the veranda and flounced from the car wearing Alpine lederhosen, sturdy hiking boots, and a cocky little hat with a feather perched on top of his head. He flung his arms wide and did a dainty pirouette like Maria in the opening shot of The Sound Of Music, and it took all my willpower not to scan the skies for a helicopter with a camera zooming in for a close-up.

“My God,” Michael whispered in my ear, “it’s Friedrich Von Trapp.”

“Only older and nellier,” I whispered back.

In all fairness, with a different set of hormones, Jesse would have been a good-looking man. Somewhere on his family tree, Stu told me once, there perched a Filipino ancestor who threw his or her genes into the otherwise predominantly Scotch-Irish lineage, giving Jesse a burnished skin tone that most white people would have killed for. He was built like a dancer, with long graceful legs, a trim body, and a dancer’s bubble butt that looked quite fetching even in lederhosen. Unfortunately, one could spend days trying to discern a trace of masculinity anywhere in that beautiful body. Jesse was about as masculine as Sally Field. Michael hated him. I found him both charming and disconcerting, not unlike a two-headed chicken on display at a county fair. Stu thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Like Fred Astaire, or more appropriately, Ginger Rogers, Jesse toe danced his way up the veranda steps and flung his arms around the three of us, gathering us into one big clump like a bouquet of mums, all but bonking our heads together in the process.

Jesse was a transplanted Southerner from Biloxi. He had to leave Mississippi, of course. He would have been stomped to death by the locals the first time he swished into the Piggly Wiggly. He was also the only person I had ever met who could make natural exuberance an annoying character trait. Like Lyle, he never ever stopped talking. But to make matters worse, he drawled while he did it.

“My God, girls, you all look yummy enough to eat, standing out here like a bunch of Peruvian vaqueros on the edge of the Pampas. Where the hell are we, anyway, Machu Picchu? Here I am, all dressed up for The Sound of Music—this is a mountain, isn’t it?—and I find myself in The Legend of Zorro instead. Do you have any idea how impossible it is to buy lederhosen in Los Angeles? Finally had to make them myself. I thought about coming as one of the nuns from Maria’s abbey, but I figured a nun in a pink Cadillac would be a bit much for the suburbs. But hell, we aren’t even in the suburbs, are we? We’re in the middle of nowhere, for God’s sake! And how hot is it here? A hundred and thirty in the shade? I thought mountains were cool. I should have dressed for Dante’s Peak. An erupting volcano would be cooler than this. But I love your house, Jim. It’s stunning! The outside, at least. I haven’t seen the inside yet. Good God, Stuart! Are you wearing makeup? What did you put it on with? A trowel? You’re in the beauty business, just like I am. You should know how to apply makeup by now. You did Heather Locklear’s hair once, for God’s sake! Now that woman knows how to put on makeup. She’s been around for like, eighty years, and she looks younger than I do. The bitch.”

Jesse finally took a breath.

I was just about to ask Michael to be a dear and run fetch the shotgun and shoot me in the head, when Jesse started up again after first squealing like a piglet.

“Stuart, you’ve been parboiled! You shouldn’t put makeup over that. Burns need to breathe! Burns need oxygen! Thank God I’m here. How did you get burned, precious? Oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter. The damage is already done. Mary Kay has a lotion that should help. I have some in the trunk of my car, I think. I’m almost sure I do. You can clean suede with it too. Wonderful stuff! I picked up dinner on the way. Forty tacos and a gallon of tequila. I hate an empty-handed houseguest, don’t you? Who’s the boy I saw at the living room window when I was driving up? Jim, you sly dog, did you go shopping in Tijuana with a few pesos and a counterfeit green card and import yourself a sweet young native houseboy to warm your sheets and polish your… knobs?”

“I’m the knob polisher around here,” Michael said, looking like he, too, might be thinking about fetching the shotgun, but with a different target in mind.

“And a damned good one,” I said consolingly.

Jesse made a little O with his mouth. “Did you two boys get back together? Well, that’s just dandy! I was telling Stuart just the other day that you two should—”

I interrupted with the international hand sign for “time out.” “Wait a minute. What the hell are you talking about, Jesse? What boy?”

He extended his arm, limp-wristed and palm down, in the general direction of the front door. “The Mexican kid. At the window. In there.”

“Jesus,” Stu groaned. “We’ve got ourselves another one.”

Jesse wasn’t listening. No surprise there. He patted his cheeks and fanned himself like Madame Butterfly. “He was just standing there stark naked in the picture window. I didn’t know if you had taken up chicken farming or what. I almost ran into a cactus, ogling him as I drove up the hill. A little young for my taste, but hell. Itty-bitty crawdads. Big, macho lobsters. It’s all seafood, isn’t it?”

An awkward silence descended. Jesse stood there gawking at us while we gawked at him.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “My ass just puckered. Was that…?”

I glanced back at the doorway, where I saw Rex sitting at attention on the welcome mat, grinning, with his tongue hanging off the side of his jaw. He probably smelled the scent of tacos wafting from the car. Behind him, I could see most of the living room through the open door, and there was no one standing at the huge picture window that faced the driveway.

Jesse followed my gaze. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“Actually, he was never there,” Stu said.

“The hell he wasn’t.”

“I mean in real life.”

“Oh.”

Suddenly Jesse was hopping up and down, knees together like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, clapping happy little claps and going, “Ooh-ooh-ooh! An apparition! An actual apparition. And a naked one at that. This is so-o-o-o exciting. I’ve waited for this my whole life. I can help. I know exactly what to do.”

“Good,” I said. “What? And stop bouncing.”

Jesse was so excited he was all but peeing in his lederhosen, but as usual Jesse’s train of thought had left the tracks a couple of sidings early. “Let’s see now, with a gallon of tequila I can make two gallons of Margaritas. I brought the mix too. Tell me you have a blender, James. Of course, you do. We’ll drink our Margaritas, eat our tacos, and then ladies and germs, we’ll wait for dark and hold a séance!”

“We’ll have to wait for Frank and Lyle too,” I said. “They’ll want to be a part of it.”

“Of course they will,” Jesse exclaimed. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God! This is so exciting!”

Michael did a slow Jack Benny turn in my direction and said with a bland expression, “I think he’s excited. Let’s get him inside before he pops an artery.”

“I’d rather he popped it out here,” I said. “Less mess.”

Jesse reached out both hands and gave each of us a pat on the cheek. “Oh, you kidders. Come on. Help me unpack the car. Stuart, you’re wounded. You get inside out of this awful sunshine while we three men do all the work. I’ll tend to you later. You didn’t burn anything else, did you? Nothing below the belt? No? Thank God for that.”

Stu tried to give his friend a lopsided grin, but with all the makeup on his face, it was like trying to bend tile, so he just toddled back into the house while Michael and I set about the considerable task of unloading everything Jesse had brought with him.

I wondered idly if Michael had any Valium in his medical bag.

AS THE sun dipped behind the other side of the mountain and shadows gathered in the corners, we sat at the dining room table, surrounded by the detritus of our evening meal, each and every one of us pleasantly stuffed with fast-food tacos. Even Rex had scored a couple. Our insides were well marinated with tequila, and none of us were feeling any pain, except possibly for Stu, whose face still looked like the backside of a turkey, freshly pulled from the oven.

Lyle, his hair newly bleached and toned to albino white, was getting a razor cut by Stu, who was just as fried medically as Lyle’s hair was fried chemically. I couldn’t tell if the look of concentration on Stu’s face came from trying to give a decent haircut or trying to stay on his feet long enough to finish it. I wouldn’t have let him within twenty feet of my head with a sharp implement or a chemical, but Lyle seemed unconcerned, watching his new look unfold in the hand mirror he held in front of his nose. To my amazement, he seemed pleased.

Frank, between dubious glances at his lover’s new hairstyle, was in the process of explaining to the rest of us what he and Lyle had learned at the public library. I quickly realized it wasn’t much.

“Most of what was printed up about the murders you already have in that little red box of yours, Jim. Aside from the Crisp boy, who was taken from the bus stop, Nigel Letters seemed to have had the good sense to pull the rest of his victims from a strata of society where they wouldn’t be missed. If there are as many victims as you seem to think there are, they must have been without family, or even friends, who were concerned enough to report them missing. Certainly the papers never mentioned them. This is a military city, Jim. The newspaper’s focus was on the war. As for the police, who knows? Maybe they didn’t care about a bunch of street hustlers. That’s assuming they knew about the disappearances to begin with.”

“TJ’s disappearance was reported,” I said. “Mrs. O’Donnell told me so. The woman named Julene phoned the police many times, but nothing ever came of it. Not one detective came to the diner to speak with her about it. They just let him go, making no attempts at all to find out what happened to him.”

“What about Letters?” Michael asked. “Did you learn anything about him in the papers?”

Frank nodded. “There were several blurbs mentioning him. San Diego seemed rather proud of their newly adopted son. His movies might have sucked, but he was still a well-known celebrity back then. There was mention of him attending parties in La Jolla after he first moved here. War bond drives, mostly. He was definitely on the A-list for the rich and famous. But even those blurbs quickly petered out. After January of 1942, the only mention of him in the Tribune was an obituary the day after his death, sometime in ’46. Of course, the story was watered down to plain old suicide. No juicy tidbits about how he did it or the fact that he was playing with himself in drag at the time. After that, Nigel Letters disappeared from the face of the earth just as thoroughly as his victims had. Nothing about any of them was ever mentioned again. End of story.”

“According to Mrs. O’Donnell,” I said, “the beginning of 1942 was about the time he went into seclusion. That’s also when the killings started.”

Ever the conscientious beauty consultant, Jesse kept a close and critical eye on Stu’s technique as the rest of us discussed the murders. A time or two he seemed about to say something but didn’t. Finally, he reached out and gave a sharp tug to a strand of Lyle’s hair and watched it come away in his hand, causing Lyle’s eyes to widen considerably.

“How long did the murders go on?” Jesse asked, twirling the hair between his fingertips and watching it disintegrate, settling to the tabletop like pixie dust.

“A couple of years,” I said, watching him.

Frank followed Jesse’s suit, and he too reached over and pinched a strand of Lyle’s hair and pulled it from Lyle’s head as easily as plucking candles from a birthday cake.

Stu stopped cutting long enough to say, “Hmm. We may need to condition.”

Finally everyone around the table, including myself, reached over and plucked a little piece of Lyle’s hair off his head. Lyle didn’t feel a thing, obviously, but he certainly looked surprised. Even Rex cocked his head to the side in wonder.

“Deep condition,” Stu amended.

At last, Lyle himself ran a hand through his own hair and watched all the fallout of a nuclear winter rain down in front of his face.

“I didn’t know hair could do that,” he said.

“Hair doesn’t,” Frank said, “but that’s no longer hair. It’s… ashes. You’ve been incinerated.” He was trying very hard not to laugh.

The humor of the situation seemed to be lost on Lyle. “I wanted to be blond, Stu! Not bald! What the hell did you do?”

Stu blinked twice, then keeled over backward in a dead faint, narrowly missing Rex, who flew straight up into the air with a yelp as if someone had lit a firecracker under his ass. Jesse gave a scream that was two octaves above high C while Michael dropped his forehead to the table with a clunk and giggled. I drained my Margarita glass, then reached over and drained Frank’s. Rex took the opportunity to snatch another taco off the table and gulp it down, wrapper and all, before Jesse flew across the room with a squeal of anguish to fling himself across Stu’s prostrate body like Ingrid Bergman on a really bad acting day. He slapped Stu’s unburned cheek with enough force to cause a brain hemorrhage, and Stu’s eyes popped open like a doll’s.

“What happened?” Stu asked.

“This!” Lyle bellowed, bending over Stu and giving himself a Dutch rub. In the space of three seconds, he had snapped off every hair from the top of his head, and we all watched in amazement as it cascaded over Stu like snow falling on the Rockies.

“I don’t think Mary Kay has anything for that,” Jesse said, brushing Stu off like a lampshade and helping him to his feet.

Lyle was not happy. “Well, no shit, Jessica!”

Jesse took umbrage. “Now just a minute, Lyla!”

As host, I felt it my duty to diffuse the situation before my guests started bitch-slapping the crap out of each other. I seemed to remember reading something about that in Emily Post’s Guide to Successful Hostessing.

“Stu,” I said. “Get your electric clippers and give Lyle a nice fashionable buzz cut. Jesse, take your hands off your hips and go fix another pitcher of Margaritas. Frank, stop laughing. And you two,” I said to Stu and Lyle, “shake hands and make up. Michael, give me a hug!”

“What will that do?” Michael asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just like it.”

“Oh. Okay.” So he did.

“Are you sure you like our living houseguests better than the dead ones?” I asked him. “The dead ones are less trouble.”

Michael kissed the top of my head. “Quieter, too.”

Twenty minutes later we were all sipping fresh drinks, and Lyle was sporting a blond buzz cut that actually looked pretty good. Frank kept running his hand over it, as if for luck, as Jesse applied Mary Kay’s suede cleaner to the burns on Stu’s face. Michael and I, grateful for the lull in animosity, just stared at our friends in wonder. It was quite an evening, all around. And it was just beginning.

Chapter 7

“DONNER. PARTY of six. Your table’s ready.”

It was Lyle’s voice, coming from my left.

The hour was late. The dining room table had been cleared of the mess we made earlier (even Lyle’s disintegrated hair had been Dustbustered up), and we were sitting around the table now in total darkness. Not one light burned anywhere inside the house. Once again I noticed that the moonlight outside did not permeate through the windows, as if the house were on a different plane than the outside world. I held my hand up to my face and saw… nothing. The blackness was absolute.

“Well, this is creepy,” Frank said. “Look at the windows.”

There was a moment of silence in which I presumed everyone did as Frank suggested.

“What windows?” Lyle asked.

“Exactly.”

“How can that be?” Lyle whispered.

“The spirits are focusing our attention,” Jesse said. “Everything that exists inside this house right now is centered in this one room.”

“And all the weirdness in this one room is centered in you,” Lyle answered.

“Shut up, Lyle. Give him a chance.” It was Michael. I jumped when his hand came out of nowhere and stroked the back of my neck.

“Jesus! Don’t do that!” I yelped.

“Sorry.”

“What?” Frank asked, nervous as a cat. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Michael touched me.”

Lyle giggled. “Inappropriately, I hope.”

“Shut up, Lyle.”

“Jim loves the fact that we’re in spook central. Don’t you Jim?” It was Stu. He had sobered up considerably after the unnerving experience of dissolving Lyle’s hair, although Lyle had since forgiven him.

“Hee-hee,” I said. “I do.”

“It’s just like one of your books, isn’t it?”

“Hee-hee. It is.”

“Funny thing,” Stu said. “I don’t remember any of your books having happy endings.”

“Hmm,” I said. “You have a point.”

“If you girls want to chat,” Jesse said, “go online. This is serious. Let’s show a little respect for the medium, shall we? That’s me, by the way. I’m the medium.”

“I respect you,” Lyle said. “I just don’t like you very much.”

“So what are we supposed to be doing?” Michael asked.

“Nothing,” Jesse said, ignoring Lyle. Always the best thing to do. “Just be silent and let the spirits become comfortable with our presence. Let them feel welcome.”

Jesse did not know the spirits in the house as well as I did. It was my experience that they could pop up anytime, anywhere, whether they felt welcome or not. But it was Jesse’s show. I would let him run it any way he saw fit.

A silence descended over us as we did as Jesse suggested. Minutes passed.

“My face hurts,” Stu whispered.

“Poor baby,” Jesse cooed.

Several more minutes of totally dark silence ensued. Then we heard a soft moan.

I leaned forward into the blackness, listening. Michael’s hand was gripping mine. I could feel it tense.

The table moved beneath my arms. Then it moved again. A chair creaked. Something struck the table from underneath. A sharp jolt.

“What was that?” Michael breathed. “Rapping?”

Lyle laughed. “Rapping, my ass. It was Jesse’s head.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Who’s getting a blowjob?”

“That would be me,” Stu said.

I could hear Michael chuckling beside me.

Lyle banged down hard on the table directly in front of Stu.

“I hope you took your dentures out, Jessica!” To the rest of us he said, “It could mean the difference between a non-pain-inducing hum job or a sushi chef shredding an eel.”

“Stu doesn’t seem to be in pain,” someone noted.

“Stu’s on 800 milligrams of Motrin, 500 milligrams of Vicodin, and he’s consumed about a quart of tequila. The eel might already be shredded for all he would know.” It was Michael, giving his medical analysis. A sound one, as usual.

From somewhere around the vicinity of my knees I heard Jesse mutter, “Stuart, you’re not concentrating.”

“Sorry,” Stu said. “It’s too dark. There’s too many people. And I have a question.”

“What might that be?” Lyle asked conversationally, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to conduct a chat with someone in a pitch-black room while he was being serviced by a friend under the dining room table in the middle of what was supposed to be a séance.

“I’ve been wondering,” Stu said, slurring most of his consonants, “do you think Gilligan ever boffed Maryanne?”

“I think everyone boffed Maryanne,” Lyle said. “Even Ginger.”

Stu seemed pleased with the answer. “That’s what I think too. What about the professor?”

“Yes,” Lyle said patiently, as if speaking to a child. “I’m sure Gilligan boffed the professor. If he didn’t, he should have. I would.”

“So would I,” Frank added.

“Me too.” It was Michael. “I’ve always been attracted to smart men.”

“Why, thank you,” I said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Jesse sputtered under the table. “I might as well be chewing on a dishrag!”

“Lovely image,” Frank said.

With a loud bonk and an “ouch!” Jesse extricated himself from beneath the table and plopped his ass back in the chair. Even in the darkness, I could tell he was not pleased. To Michael, he said, “The next time you prescribe drugs to Stuart, make it Viagra.”

Lyle simpered. “Don’t sulk. I’m sure if it had been the professor down on his knees in front of him, Stu would have risen to the occasion. It’s probably just your technique.”

“My technique is impeccable!”

“Well, apparently not.”

Suddenly Michael’s hand gripped mine so tightly that I heard a knuckle pop.

“Michael, ow—”

“Listen,” he said. “What’s that noise?”

Then I heard it. A sound like tiny pebbles being shaken in a jar. Slowly the sound crescendoed until it was everywhere. The room vibrated with it. Everyone froze, trying to place the sound.

“It’s coming from the floor,” Michael breathed.

Something big flew across my shoulder and landed on the table in front of me. It was Rex, his toenails scrambling at the wood as he tried to stop his forward momentum. He slid all the way across the table and landed in Jesse’s lap. Jesse grunted from the impact. “Easy boy,” he said. There was a tremor in his voice.

Rex whimpered. There was a tremor in his voice too.

“What the hell is happening?” Frank whispered.

With a whoosh, the unburned wood in the dining room fireplace ignited, casting a reddish glow over the walls, illuminating the faces at the table. Startled faces. Shadows flickered across the room. I could see movement on the floor around us. Something heavy slid across my foot.

“Everyone freeze!” I said. “Don’t move your feet.”

The floor was a writhing mass of snakes. They were falling from the fireplace chimney, landing with a plop in the newly lit fire, and slithering away from the flames with angry hisses. Rattlesnakes. Dozens of them. I could hear their bodies scraping over each other with a raspy, sandpapery sound. The thrum of their rattles filled the air.

“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Lyle said. “Look at all the snakes!”

Jesse was doing Lamaze breathing. “Hooh haah hooh haah,” with an occasional “Oh crap,” thrown in for good measure. He was clutching Rex like a lifeline, and both he and the dog kept casting horrified glances at the floor.

“Screw the snakes,” Frank said. “Look at Stu!”

In the dim, flickering light, I could just make out Stu’s face. His eyes were closed. At first I could see nothing wrong, but then I saw the features of his face dissolve into another’s. As if underwater, the two faces wavered from one to the other, finally settling into the face in the photograph. The photograph taken in the diner more than fifty years ago.

It was TJ.

When he spoke, the voice was Stu’s, yet different. The cadence was wrong. I could see the wire glistening around his throat in the firelight.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “The snakes are not real. He sent them to frighten you.”

“He succeeded,” Lyle stammered, trembling in his chair with his knees up under his chin.

I felt the body of another fat snake crawl across my toes.

“You’re TJ,” I said, forcing myself to ignore it.

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

The wavering face gazed at me through pain-filled eyes. When he spoke, there was strain in the voice, as if the wire still cut, still strangled. “No one is ever alone here.”

“What about Allen?” I asked. “What about the little boy?”

“Allen is safe. You freed him. It is good that you did. He should never have been one of us.”

“Why?” I asked. “Because he was young?”

“Because he was innocent.”

“I thought I had freed you too,” I said.

“No. My story was not finished. You were… interrupted.”

“Sorry,” Michael mumbled. His grip on my hand was now so tight he was cutting off the circulation. I gently pulled free of his grasp.

Slowly, as if it pained him, the young man turned his face to look at each of us in turn. “We watch you,” he said. “All of you. You do not sell yourselves to each other. You give yourselves freely. You love each other, we think.”

“How many of you are here?” I asked.

The faces of Stu and TJ continued to morph from one to the other. Stu’s eyes were closed when he appeared, but TJ’s were open, catching the firelight. He stared directly at me now. The eyes were kind.

“Too many. But not all of us walk. Some lie moldering in the mountain with her.”

“Her?”

“She gnaws their bones at night, but they no longer suffer. They left long ago. Some on the day they died. Others later. Only their skeletons remain. We don’t know where their thoughts went, but they are no longer here. The bones are lifeless. It is one of the things that angers him.”

“Him? You mean…?”

TJ’s hand came up and touched the wire that encircled his neck. “The man in the mask. The man who tortured us. You know who I mean. Allen showed him to you.”

“He had a name…,” I began.

“His name is not important now. What is important is that you do not fear him. He is angered by that. You threaten him in some way that the rest of us do not understand. You must be careful. He will harm you if he can. He rules this place. He will do to you what he did to us. He still has ways.”

“Does he keep you here?”

“No one keeps us here. We just are.”

“We want to set you free,” I said.

“Why? Where would we go? This is our home. This is where we live.”

“No,” I said. “This is where you died.”

He smiled. Once more his was the face in the photograph. He looked at me with gentle patience, but he did not speak.

“Who is the Mexican boy?” I asked. “The one Jesse saw in the window.”

TJ tugged at the wire as if it pained him. A trickle of blood dripped from his fingers onto his bare chest. He ignored it. “His name is Arturo. He said you were going to talk to us tonight, and here you are. Arturo knows things. He sees them before they happen. He suffered more than any of us after the man took him. He still feels the pain sometimes.”

“Do you?”

“No. My pain was forgotten long ago. Only Arturo relives it night after night. It is for him that I’ve come. You must free him. He has suffered long enough. Help him follow the child. Away from the house. He is unhappy.”

“Are you not unhappy, as well?”

“The rest of us are here for a reason. Happiness is beyond us now. I think it was always beyond us, even when we were like you. Living. Your happiness is another of the things that angers him. He will take it away from you if he can.”

“Can he hurt us?” It was Frank. There were tears on his cheek. Tears of pity, not fear.

TJ turned his head to look at him.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “He can hurt all of you. But it’s the old woman he will kill first. Arturo told him she was coming. He’s waiting for her. You must not allow her to reenter this house. It will mean her death if you do.”

“It is her choice,” I said.

“Then she will die.”

TJ twisted his head to the side, as if listening. I noticed the sudden silence and, looking down at the floor, realized the snakes were gone.

“It’s him!” Jesse gasped, Rex still trembling in his lap.

I followed the direction of his gaze and saw a young Mexican boy standing naked in the doorway. He looked no more than seventeen. His skin shone like copper in the firelight. His legs were strong, his torso beautifully formed. He stared at us briefly, then turned away. Just before he disappeared down the darkness of the long hallway, I saw a wide swath of skin dangling from his back, torn away from his body from shoulder to buttocks. Blood still seeped from the wound, splattering the floor at his heels.

“My God,” I said, after the boy was swallowed up in shadow. “He was skinned!”

“Like an animal,” Michael muttered. There was infinite sadness in his voice. And outrage. “Like a fucking animal.”

Stunned by what I had seen, I turned back to TJ. He was watching me with an air of clinical interest, like a doctor studying a patient.

“Was he…?” I began.

“Alive?” TJ smiled a cold smile. “Yes. He was alive when the man in the mask did that to him. But he suffered many torments before that. He was tortured for three days and nights. Most of his injuries you cannot see. They are internal. He was a handsome young man, as you can see. He appealed to the man. He still does. Arturo is going to him now.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why is he going to him?”

Again, TJ fingered the loops of piano wire cutting into his throat, like a woman idly touching a strand of pearls that graced her neck.

“We belong to him,” he said. “He uses us. All of us. We go to him when he calls. Everyone but me.”

“Why not you?”

TJ dropped his hands from his throat and rested them on the tabletop before him, leaving smears of blood from his fingertips on the polished wood. “We go to him now so that he can relive the pleasures he had with us. Murder was an act of intimacy to him. An act of love. He enjoyed it then as he enjoys it now. He does not call for me because I was not enjoyable to him.”

I stared at TJ’s perfect face, his blond hair almost white in the firelight, the slope of his strong golden shoulders. He was one of the most beautiful young men I had ever seen. How could Nigel Letters not have savored every inch of him?

“Why is that?” I asked, my voice breathless with pity.

“Because I fought back.”

“Did you hurt him?”

A wicked grin twisted the boy’s face. “Yes. I hurt him.”

“Good for you,” Michael said.

TJ turned to him, a cold glint still in his eyes. “You are the one most in danger here. He will come for you if you stay.”

Michael blinked. “Why me?” he asked, surprised.

“Because there is no fear in you. Not yet. And because you are closest to Jim. By hurting you, he will hurt Jim. Jim threatens to expose him for what he was, and he will not allow that to happen. You are all in danger as long as you remain within these walls, but at the moment, his anger is centered on you, Michael. He will see fear in your eyes yet. He is looking forward to it.”

There was no fear in Michael’s eyes now, but I did detect a dawning anger. “If I’m the one he wants, then I’m the one he should have come for. Why did he injure Stu?”

TJ smiled that haunting, angelic smile, the smile that I was beginning to suspect was not a smile at all. It was a taunt.

“He didn’t,” he said. “I did.”

“You! But why?” I asked, the anger rising in me now as well. “You could have blinded him!”

TJ pushed the blond hair back from his forehead. “I still can, if you like.”

He pressed his thumbs to his eyes. To Stu’s eyes.

Jesse screamed, “No!”

“He’s asleep, you know. He won’t feel a thing. Not until he wakes. But then, of course, the pain would be considerable I would imagine. Let’s just see, shall we?”

I reached across the table to pull Stu’s hands away from his face. Before I could touch him, before I understood what was happening, my index finger was pushed back by an unseen force. The bone snapped with a loud crack that stunned everyone to silence but me. I cried out in pain.

TJ grinned. “That should slow your typing.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” I yelled, clutching my injured hand to my chest. The pain was unlike anything I had ever felt, but my anger was worse. “I’m trying to help you!”

Before I knew what Michael was about to do, he grasped my hand firmly in his and snapped the bone back in place.

Everyone at the table jumped when I screamed like a banshee, cursing TJ, cursing Michael, cursing the house, cursing Rex, cursing my Toyota.

“Don’t forget me,” TJ said.

I was about to say, “I didn’t, you vicious fuck!” when his face morphed once again, not back to Stu this time, but to Nigel Letters. In the flesh, so to speak.

And then Letters was gone.

As I gasped with pain, I saw Stu open his eyes. His own eyes. He looked around the table, confused, finally settling his gaze on Jesse.

“I must have dozed off,” he said. “Did I miss anything?”

We stared at him speechless for a moment before the fire in the fireplace went out with a pop and we found ourselves once again in darkness.

ACCORDING TO Jesse, the evening’s séance could not have gone more swimmingly. My shattered finger and I disagreed with that assessment, but of course, Jesse wasn’t listening. He had soared far beyond his usual state of annoying exuberance, climbing all the way up to an emotional strata somewhere between Ethel Merman (“Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better”) exhilaration, and Mary Martin (“I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair”) whimsical ebullience. If I had checked my thesaurus under rapture, I would not have been surprised to see Jesse’s picture as a reference. He was a happy, happy man.

And he was annoying as hell to be around.

While Michael splinted my broken finger with two Popsicle sticks and medical tape, I sipped a glass of neat bourbon to ease the pain and waited, no prayed, for Jesse to wind down. I was deeply upset about my shattered index finger because I knew it would be weeks before I could comfortably strangle the bastard.

Wrists flapping, he prattled on for what seemed like hours.

“Outside of that weekend in Cancun with that gorgeous hunk from Days of Our Lives—good Lord, I’ve forgotten his name already—this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me. Well, it actually happened to all of us, of course, except for you, Stuart. You were the conduit, so naturally you missed it completely. You were out like a light, weren’t you? I don’t suppose you remember a thing, do you? No, of course you don’t, poor baby. You came this close, this close, to being blinded, you know. If I hadn’t screamed when I did, he would have gouged out your eyeballs like peach pits. It surpassed everything I’ve ever read about séances. And this was a gay séance, to boot. Just think of it. Gay participants. Gay ghosts. My God, everything about it was gay! I feel so empowered. I feel so validated. You realize what this means, don’t you? It means our gayness transcends even the boundaries of life and death. Who would have thought such a thing could be? We aren’t just gay now, we’ll be gay for the rest of eternity. I love it! Poor James took the brunt of it, of course. His poor finger. Did you see it bend backward? There was nothing touching it. Nothing at all. And yet it just folded back to the top of his hand and popped like a candy cane. I’m so glad I came up for the weekend. And to think, I actually considered spending it at the spa instead. What the hell is a mud bath compared to this? Of course, there’s the sauna. That’s always good for a bit of sexual canoodling, what with towels dropping all over the place and….”

Here he stopped and patted Stu’s cheek. The unburned one. “Of course, I have you for that now, dearest. No more trashing around for me.” But even romance couldn’t keep his mouth away from the séance for long. “And what about the Mexican boy? Did you see his back? My God, I can’t imagine the horrors that poor child must have suffered before he crossed over. He was peeled like a banana! I get goose bumps just thinking about it. And the snakes! I almost passed out when I saw them crawling across the floor. One actually touched my foot. If they had been real, we would all be dead now. As dead as those poor boys. As dead as….”

Michael finally just turned away from Jesse as if Jesse had stopped talking, which of course he hadn’t and never would as long as he had an audience.

“It wasn’t TJ at all, was it?” he said to me. “It never was.”

“No,” I said. “It was Letters all along.”

I examined my new splint as Michael tossed implements back into his medical bag. “This is going to make our job much more difficult, I’m afraid. How are we to know when the boys are actually trying to help us, or when Letters is leading us down some rosy path while pretending to be them?” Michael studied my face. “Are you sure the boys have ever actually spoken to you? Perhaps Letters has orchestrated everything that’s happened. Hell, maybe the house is haunted by him alone. Maybe the boys don’t even exist.”

“No,” I said, remembering the crying from the carriage house, the word pai n pecked out on my typewriter, the other words that had come to me as I typed into the night sitting at my computer in the breakfast room. TJ and Allen Crisp had dictated every word I wrote, somehow giving their stories to me as I sat there, trancelike, not even thinking as my fingers struck the keys hour after hour. Their stories were real, and they were channeled directly from the boys to me. I knew it.

“The boys are here,” I said. “Letters may be able to pose as them, but he can’t control them. He was lying to us, Michael. Trying to confuse us. To scare us off. He wants us to leave the house, and he’ll do anything to get us out of here.”

Frank, too, had tuned out Jesse, who was still jabbering away on the other side of the living room to Stu. He was listening to us instead.

“Well, he’s nailing us one by one,” Frank said. “First Stu, now you, Jim. He has some power behind him. More power than the boys, I think. He’s inflicting some real damage here, and as far as I can tell, we haven’t done a thing to him except piss him off. If this is a battle, we’re losing. This might have been a lark in the beginning, but it isn’t a lark anymore. We’re in danger here. What are we going to do about it?”

“Is the house really that important to you?” Lyle asked, taking Frank’s hand. Pressing it to his lips.

To my surprise, Michael answered before I could. “Yes. The house is that important. And so are the boys. We aren’t leaving, if that’s what you are about to suggest. If you guys want to leave, there’s no one holding you here. Jim and I will understand. But we stay. We’ll see this through alone if we have to.”

Lyle blinked. “Who said anything about leaving? Did I say anything about leaving?”

Even Stu finally tuned out Jesse, who, for lack of an audience, at last wound down like an old clock.

“And what about the housekeeper?” Frank asked. “Letters said he would kill her if she came here. We can’t let that happen. Don’t bring her here, Jim. She’s safe where she is. Leave her there.”

“I’ll warn her,” I said. “But if she still wants to come, I won’t stop her. What happened inside this house has torn her apart for years, and now she doesn’t have much time left. It’s unfinished business with her. Almost a… dying wish. She may be old and sick, but she’s strong willed. If she wants to be a part of this, to erase some of her own guilt, I won’t stand in her way. She may not have caused any of the things that happened here, but she had more than one opportunity to stop them and didn’t. She’s earned the right to atone for that. I doubt if she much cares if it kills her or not. Her days are numbered anyway.”

Lyle agreed. “Pretty cold, Jim. But if she can help, I’m with you. Bring her on. Old ladies are tougher than people think they are. Nigel Letters was an actor, for God’s sake. And not a very good one. How hard can it be to send his ass packing?”

“Maybe harder than you think,” Stu said in a hushed tone that made everyone stop what they were doing and turn to look at him.

He was staring at the ceiling above our heads. Every light in the house was on again. Lyle had seen to that. There was not a shadow in the room, which made what happened next even more unnerving.

One by one, we followed Stu’s eyes upward. Protruding from the ceiling were more than a dozen faces peeking through the plaster as if peering down through the surface of a lake to see what lay beneath. Their eyes numbed with pain, their mouths stretched wide in silent screams, the faces of the young men who had died here more than six decades earlier looked down at us in mute horror. They were seamless faces, unlined but for their agony.

I spotted TJ, his teeth bloodied inside that silently screaming mouth. Arturo, too, was there, a look of such intense pain on his beautiful copper face that it froze my heart. There were other faces, too. Faces I did not know. All young. All suffering. I wondered if I must learn their stories as well before I could finish what I had set out to do.

Then, in the midst of that sea of misery, Nigel Letters appeared. His face was old and haggard, bloated, a testimony to what, in life, all those young faces around him would never become. Unlike the others, Nigel’s arms, too, protruded from the ceiling. He reached out, touching the faces surrounding him. A look of quiet peace shone in his eyes. A proud father caressing his children. His boys. He seemed to revel in their fear as they shrank from his touch. It was his creation, that fear, that pain. That revulsion. He had given birth to it, as a father’s seed gives birth to a child. They were his. He owned them, as he owned their misery.

Slowly, the moans began. Hushed at first, then louder, until finally one of the boys screamed. It was Arturo. The unleashing of his pain caused the others to writhe in agony until their screams joined his. The room was suddenly so filled with wails of torment that I clapped my hands to my ears and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out those awful sounds that were tearing through me like knives. I could feel the thrum of those screaming voices throbbing in my skin, like the sensation of vertigo that tingles the fingertips when you stand at a great height, teetering, waiting for the fall that will take you to your death. Or to madness.

Then, among the screams, I heard a booming laugh, and within his laughter, Nigel Letters cried out, jubilant, “Sing, my children! Sing!”

I opened my eyes to see Nigel Letters close his. Like some fanatical gospel minister, he swayed to the unearthly music of those tortured voices, relishing the wails of pain and suffering that filled the air around him. A smile of wonder and joy spread across his depraved face as his hands continued to reach out, caressing the faces of the screaming, weeping boys around him.

One by one, those faces receded, pulled back into their endless torment inside the walls of this house that had held them prisoner for so long. As they disappeared their screams faded away, dwindling into the distance, until only Nigel’s face, Nigel’s laughter, remained.

He opened his eyes as the room grew silent. His laughter died. He stared down at me with outstretched arms, reaching for me in the sudden silence, his fingers bloody from the faces of his victims. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then turned away before a word was spoken. Gradually, his face withdrew back through the plaster ceiling, until only his arms remained. Then they too pulled away.

As his hand disappeared, a single drop of blood, squeezed from his fingertip, glistened in the light. It fell from the ceiling with a gentle plop at my feet.

The six of us stood in hushed silence, barely breathing, staring mutely at that single drop of blood on the living room floor. Rex, his body slung low, crept toward it, his lips pulled back in a silent growl, before I shooed him away.

Then everyone spoke at once.

“What is this? Disneyland?”

“My God, did you see their faces?”

“I need a drink.”

“I need several.”

“What just happened here?”

“They were all so young!”

“He was playing with them.”

“He was playing with us.”

Finally, Michael said something intelligent. “I think the battle lines have just been drawn. He’s not going to give up without a fight.”

“Faggots don’t fight! Faggots reason!” It was Jesse. His eyes were as big as saucers. He didn’t seem quite as exhilarated as he had before.

“He’s afraid of us,” I said.

“Oh yes,” Jesse countered, rolling his eyes around in his head like marbles in a bucket. “He looked terrified.”

“You look terrified too,” Stu said. “Calm down. Do some yoga or something.”

Frank studied his empty glass. “Anyone up for elevenses?”

“Hell yes!” Lyle all but yelled. “Make ’em strong and make ’em quick!” He raised his voice to the ceiling. “Anyone else? Nigel? How about you, you miserable bastard? Care for a drink?”

The lights flickered. I held my breath, waiting for them to go out, but they didn’t. In the distance, somewhere far away in another part of the house, I heard a malicious chuckle. We all heard it.

“Guess that means no,” Frank whispered.

“THE FIRST thing tomorrow morning I’m taking you to an emergency room. That finger needs to be looked at by a real doctor.”

Michael and I were lying side by side on Nigel’s bed. My head was spinning from all the alcohol I had consumed, and my finger ached with a dull throb that set my teeth on edge. I had refused Michael’s offer of pain medication. I had seen what it did to Stu.

“You’re a real doctor,” I said.

“I’m a dog doctor, Jim. That’s not a paw. It’s a human hand. And it needs to be X-rayed. If I misaligned it when I popped it back in place, you could have trouble with it for the rest of your life.”

“All right,” I said. “First thing in the morning.”

“Thank you.”

His arm lay across my chest, his bristly chin tucked snugly against my shoulder.

“You need a shave,” I said.

“I know. Sorry.”

I turned my head to smell his hair. “I’m glad you’re here, Michael. I’ve missed you.”

“Have you honestly?”

“Yes. Honestly.”

In one of the other bedrooms, we heard the creak of bedsprings. A lot of creaks. I could feel Michael’s lips form a smile against my skin.

“Stu’s room,” he muttered.

“Uh-huh. Stu said Jesse screwed like a bunny.”

I heard a headboard bang against a wall.

“A big bunny,” Michael said.

“A big nellie bunny.”

We laughed. At the sound of our laughter, Rex squirmed his way to the head of the bed and gave us both wet kisses. I could feel his tail thumping against my leg.

“I would imagine most of Jesse’s orifices are big,” Michael added, giving Rex a kiss in return.

“Be nice,” I said. “Jesse’s part of the family now.”

We both knew of Stu’s proclivity for short-term relationships. “He’s part of the family this week,” Michael said. “Next week it’ll be an astronaut or a tamale stuffer from Taco Bell.”

I grinned. “Stu’s a free spirit.”

“Stu’s a slut.”

“That too.”

“Do you think he’ll be scarred?” I asked.

“You mean by Jesse?”

“No, moron. I mean by the burns.”

“Oh. No, I wouldn’t think so. They seem to be healing well. I think my drugs did more damage to him than the burns. The patients I treat don’t generally consume vast amounts of booze with their medication. I should have taken that into consideration before I dosed him to the gills.”

A comfortable silence settled over us as we lay in each other’s arms. But for the rattle and squeak of Stu’s headboard doing a tap dance in the other room, I would have slept. The noise was less annoying to Michael, apparently, for soon his breathing slowed and his body settled more heavily against my own as he drifted off.

I waited a few minutes before gently extracting myself from his embrace and slipping from the bed. I pulled on pajama bottoms and tiptoed from the room. The activity in Stu and Jesse’s room was heading for a denouement, I suspected, judging by the groans I heard as I passed their door. With the banging bed and the oofs! and ows! they sounded like two cowpokes brawling in a saloon. Their idea of satisfying sex and my own seemed to be two entirely different things. I could never remember working at it quite as hard as they did, even in my youth. It was all the more surprising since Stu had been a zombie for most of the day. I wondered where he found the energy.

Only the sound of snoring greeted me at Lyle and Frank’s door, a sad commentary, perhaps, on the many years they had been together sharing the same bed. Or a happy one. Of the two relationships, I envied Lyle’s and Frank’s more. Since the day they traded vows on that beach in Santa Monica, theirs had been as strong a marriage as that of any two heterosexuals I ever encountered. They respected each other, they loved each other, and they were the closest of friends. In my mind, there was very little about that not to envy.

I headed for the breakfast room, where I pulled the sliding door closed behind me and flicked on the computer. As it hummed its way to life, I settled myself at the desk and waited for the words I knew would come.

With my index finger poking straight out from my hand in splints, typing would be a chore, but I was determined to hear the rest of TJ’s story.

As the words began to come, and as my fingers began awkwardly punching keys, seemingly with minds of their own, I was surprised to see they were not TJ’s words scrolling across the screen in front of me at all. They were the words of someone else. Someone I had not met before.

I let them come, laboriously typing the words with my injured hand…

JANUARY 1943

AS CHARLIE Simms toweled himself off, he studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror of his tiny studio apartment on Euclid Avenue. Behind him he could see the peeling paint on the wall above the shower stall. A big chunk of plaster looked like it was about to collapse into the tub at any second, but it had looked that way since he moved in over six months ago, and it hadn’t fallen yet. He didn’t know what the hell was keeping it up there unless maybe there was enough mildew and soap scum and crud on the wall to hold it in place.

From the other room, the only other room, Charlie could hear the guy on the radio blathering on about casualties in Europe. Umpteen dead. Umpteen wounded. Umpteen missing in action, which to Charlie only meant that they had been blown into such tiny pieces that they couldn’t be identified properly, so in actuality the “umpteen missing in action” should simply fall under the “umpteen dead” category. No sense piddling around about it.

The way Charlie saw it, old Adolf had certainly thrown a monkey wrench into the works, invading Poland the way he had. He supposed he should be upset about the whole thing like everybody else seemed to be, but in truth it didn’t hold much interest for him. To Charlie, the fact that Polish Jews had been rounded up like cattle and now the Nazis had moved on to bigger and greener pastures, rounding up more Jews as they went along—spreading themselves across Europe like some deadly mold, as one newscaster had put it—didn’t hold as much interest for him as the fact that he had sixteen dollars to his name, and he was already three weeks late with his rent. The fat bastard who owned this pigsty had already threatened to throw him out in the street if he didn’t come up with the money by Monday, two days away.

Aside from the rent problem, Charlie had something else to worry about. Two months ago he had turned eighteen. Now every day when he checked his mail, he did so with mounting fear. People were being drafted left and right, the ones who weren’t dumb enough to actually enlist, that is, and Charlie didn’t doubt for a second that his name would be popping up on a goddamn list of prospective casualties somewhere in Washington D.C. one of these days. The last thing he wanted to do was have his head blown off in some crappy little village in France for a bunch of people he didn’t give three hoots about. Adolf could take it all as far as Charlie was concerned. It had nothing to do with him. Already he was toying with the idea of pleading homosexuality as an excuse to avoid the draft. It wasn’t true, of course, but even if it was, what difference would it make to anyone but him? If it saved his life, he figured it would be worth a few minutes of embarrassment with some peckerhead, beer-bellied lifer in the draft office, who himself was probably too chickenshit to be fighting an actual war, or why the hell wasn’t he over there?

But at the moment, the rent was a more pressing problem, and Charlie had already taken the first step in resolving the issue.

The night before, he had done what he swore he would never do. He had taken his place beside the faggot rabble that prowled the downtown streets and sold himself to the first man that offered cash for the privilege of spending a little quality time with Charlie’s dick in the backseat of a car that smelled like shitty diapers and bubblegum. It wasn’t the first time Charlie had felt a man’s lips on his cock, but it was the first time he had done it for money.

When Charlie squirted, the man drank his juice like he was gulping a milk shake, savoring every drop, and then he dissolved into tears, apologizing for what he’d done, explaining to Charlie that his wife and kids were visiting a relative in Cincinnati, and he was lonely without them. The guy didn’t fool Charlie, though. He just wanted a wienie down his throat. He probably shipped the wife and kids off to visit Aunt Esther, or whoever, just to give himself the opportunity to fulfill that wish.

Charlie had no intention of reciprocating, and the man did not ask him to. He might have fooled around with guys before, but he was no queer. Charlie had even gone down on them, when the mood was right and he had consumed more booze than he probably should have, but he didn’t make a habit of it. Getting off was getting off. When the need arose, he didn’t much care how he did it or who he did it with as long as they weren’t diseased or uglier than a mud fence.

He had to admit, he was attracted to guys his own age, but that didn’t necessarily make him a faggot. Faggots were prissy little guys with greased-up pompadours and too much cologne who threw their legs in the air every time some guy wanted to drill for oil, which Charlie had done himself a few times, but only on the giving end, not the receiving.

He had been told time and again he should sell what he had, but until his financial situation took a nosedive after he lost his job at the warehouse, he had never really considered doing it. Not until last night.

Studying his naked reflection now in the steamed-up mirror, Charlie realized what he had was a salable commodity, and he would be a fool not to capitalize on it. He had a runner’s body. Trim. Almost hairless. Brown all over from long hours at Black’s Beach, the only swimsuit-optional beach in San Diego. He had seen guys ogling him as he strolled that beach, his perfect body naked in the sun, his cock slapping against his thigh as he ran through the surf or resting heavily between his legs as he pretended to sleep in the sand. He enjoyed the effect his body had on people.

Once, he remembered, on a day when the beach was almost empty, a young man of perhaps nineteen or twenty had plopped himself down in the sand beside him and without speaking a word, bent over to take Charlie’s cock into his mouth as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Charlie had raised himself up on his elbows and let the guy make love to him while a man and woman, also nude, watched from only a few feet away. The man’s cock, too, had risen while he watched Charlie and the guy, and when the woman noticed it, she giggled and took it in her hand. Then they had, very decently, Charlie thought, turned away. The young man’s hot mouth coaxed Charlie to such an explosive orgasm there in the sand, with the ocean and the sky stretching for miles in every direction, that Charlie had never forgotten it. When he finished, the man looked up into his face and smiled, then rolled over onto his stomach and slept.

Charlie took the young man home that day to his seedy little apartment with the peeling plaster, and in the course of a day and night, they learned more about each other’s bodies than many married couples learn after a lifetime.

Charlie never saw the guy again.

But he had to admit he had been left with a hunger he was never fully able to quench.

He ran his hand over his close-cropped hair, cut now in a flat top, and simply stared at himself in the mirror.

Tonight he would once again hit the streets with the rabble. Somehow he would make enough money to cover his rent, and if it meant sticking his dick in the ugliest face in town, he would do it. He just had to back his mind away from the experience and let his dick take over. It knew what to do, even if he didn’t.

He looked down at himself in the mirror to where his cock rested atop the cool porcelain at the edge of the sink. Slowly, he slid the foreskin back to expose the beauty underneath. He watched his cock grow beneath the gentle prodding of his fingers until it stood ramrod straight. Then he turned away from the mirror and switched off the bathroom light. He went into the other room, the only other room of his shitty little apartment on Euclid Avenue, and dressed for work.

Tonight he would get it done.

Or die trying.

AS ALWAYS on Saturday night, Broadway was jumping. People were as thick as stalks of corn in a cornfield, something Charlie had never actually seen firsthand, nor had he any desire to. He was city bred, city raised, and city acclimated. He felt more at home here on this busy street with the jostling, screaming crowds than he did in his dinky apartment on Euclid Avenue.

Though city bred, it was not this city Charlie hailed from, but San Francisco, the homo capital of the world as he used to tell people until the insult began to hit a little too close to home, considering some of the things he had done since puberty kicked in.

But it was not the homos that drove him from that city a year ago at the age of seventeen, penniless but full of hope. That honor went to Jackson Tilly, the man his mother married in a last-ditch grab for happiness, which backfired in her face when Jackson turned out to be even lower on the sleaze-o-meter than Charlie’s father had been. A drunkard, a bully, a wife beater, and a child molester, or so Charlie came to suspect after about the fifth time Jackson grabbed his ass and ran a hand down the front of Charlie’s trousers to, as he put it, “see what you got going on down there, boy.”

If Charlie had any latent desires for homosexual sex, which seemed to be a pretty safe bet considering the way things eventually turned out, those desires did not include being pawed at by Jackson Tilly, whose hairy beer gut and stinking cigar breath would have made a hog puke. How his mother stood the man rutting over her Charlie didn’t know. But the fact that she actually offered up her body to the fat bastard in her bed every single night of the goddamn week, as attested to by the sounds coming through his bedroom wall, was enough to cause Charlie to cast a more deeply appraising eye at his mother as well, and he didn’t like what he saw. The love he’d felt for her when he was a child, and the respect he should have felt for her as he blossomed into adulthood, went right out the window like a chicken bone being flung to the dogs. The moment he came to the inevitable conclusion that maybe they actually deserved each other, he packed up what few belongings he owned and headed south without a word of farewell to either of them.

Sometimes late at night, when he lay alone in his bed in his crappy little apartment, the thought would cross his mind that maybe by now his mother was dead. Maybe the fat bastard had poured one too many beers down his scruffy throat and beat her to death in one of his drunken rages, but Charlie couldn’t work up too much worry over it. In his opinion it would be about what she deserved for taking up with a man like that.

Charlie would rather have cut his dick off than see either one of them again. He was on his own now, and even with money problems, was happy to be so. He no longer had to put up with his mother’s weaknesses or the hungry leers when his stepfather came home drunk and continually reached out to paw at Charlie with those fat, sweaty hands.

Charlie was his own master now, and any hands that stroked his body were there at his request. He enjoyed offering himself to men almost as much as he had enjoyed withholding those favors from Jackson Tilly. If they drank from him now, they drank at his bidding. He loved holding their heads between his strong brown hands and pouring his juices through those worshipping lips. When their eyes opened wide as he exploded into them, it gave him a sense of power that nothing else ever had. Ever would.

It had been tough going for a while. No work. No income. But from now on things would be better. Tonight he would see to it personally. He was young. He was handsome. And he had an infinite supply of something that many men craved from other men. If he had any reservations about the course of action he had decided upon, he kept them buried, hidden away even from himself.

Money was the only thing he would think about tonight. Money was the only thing that really mattered.

But Charlie knew he would be enjoying that sense of power almost as much as the money it would bring to him. Tonight his seed would fly, and there were a lot of hungry mouths out there eager for a taste. And he had every intention of giving it to them. For a price.

Charlie bought a churro from a vender on the corner of Broadway and Third and munched it as he worked the crowds. He caught his reflection time and again in storefront windows. In work boots, tight denims, and a white T-shirt with a pack of Camels rolled into the sleeve, he saw many heads turn in his direction as he strode along, his long legs eating up the blocks. Many of the heads that turned his way were women’s. Hookers, mostly. Some of which, with their scabby legs and empty, drug-addled eyes, Charlie wouldn’t have fucked with armor on.

But it was the coolly appraising glances from men that pleased him most. His cocksure attitude (no pun intended, he chuckled to himself) drew them to him. He met every gaze that came his way with a tiny smile playing at his lips, letting the men know he harbored the same thoughts they did. He eyed them appreciatively, just as they eyed him. Sometimes he would run a casual hand down the front of his Levi’s as he stared into those lusting eyes, and he would see the reaction on their faces as they followed the movement of his hand, hungry for a glimpse, or a taste, of what lay sleeping beneath that denim. Sometimes Charlie would let them know, with a wink, that they could have it all. All it took was the cost of admission.

Many were so taken aback by the bluntness of his offer that they would turn away. They wanted Charlie all the more for it, he knew, but they were too embarrassed or too ashamed to make the first move. Others were not embarrassed at all, and these were the ones Charlie catered to. They were not intimidated by his youth or his brazen attitude. They found it exciting. And Charlie figured they should be willing to pay for a little of that excitement.

The first man to approach him was almost a mirror image of Charlie himself. In denims and T-shirt, he stood as tall as Charlie, and when he stepped in front of him, stopping Charlie dead in the street, their eyes were at the same level. The man appeared to be about twenty-five, and he filled out his jeans, Charlie noticed, almost as well as Charlie filled out his own. The guy had short-cropped hair and a handsome face, with sleepy-looking bedroom eyes that Charlie would have found appealing even on a day when he wasn’t conducting business.

Charlie couldn’t believe his luck. He had geared himself up to accept anything that came along, even a troll, and out of the crowd pops this guy.

“What’s on your mind,” Charlie asked, praying to God this gorgeous guy wasn’t hustling as well.

The guy held out his hand. “I’m Bobby.”

Charlie took the hand. He didn’t have much choice. The guy had practically stuck it in his face. “Charlie.”

“Come up to my place, Charlie. I’d like to talk to you.”

With a wry smile, Charlie said, “Talk? Okay. What did you want to talk about, Bobby?”

Bobby reached out and stroked Charlie’s cheek with his fingertip. He seemed just as unconcerned by the looks of the people crowding past them as Charlie was.

“Your body,” he said.

Charlie grinned. “My favorite subject. And exactly where would you like to hold this conversation?” he asked, praying the guy had a loft nearby. He wasn’t about to drag him all the way up to Euclid and show him the dump he lived in.

“I’m staying at the Grant,” Bobby said. “Right there.” He pointed to a hotel across the street from where they stood.

“Nice,” Charlie said. The Grant was one of the better hotels in town. The guy must have some money. “You live there?”

Bobby ignored the question. “Shall we?” he asked.

Charlie nodded. What the hell. “Lead on,” he said.

Bobby took his arm like he would an old lady’s and steered Charlie across the bustling street and into the crowded hotel lobby. There they entered an elevator with a bunch of laughing women, one of whom gave Charlie one of those appraising glances he was so used to receiving. The women were decked out in expensive-looking clothes, and Charlie felt a little out of place in his Levi’s and T-shirt. Bobby continued to hold his arm as they stood there waiting for the elevator doors to close. He didn’t seem to feel out of place at all.

Giggling, the women exited the elevator on the third floor.

The woman who had eyed him earlier gave him a brief backward glance as she walked away with the others. Charlie winked at her, and he was amused to see a pretty blush rise in her face before she turned away.

“You have a fan,” Bobby said.

They were alone in the elevator now. The doors closed, and it continued to rise.

“How about you?” Charlie asked. “Are you a fan?”

Again, Bobby ignored the question. Still clutching Charlie’s arm, he stared impassively at the ascending numbers on the board beside the doors.

When 9 lit up, the doors opened, and Bobby led him out into the hallway. At the door to Room 926, Charlie waited while the guy dug around in his pocket for the room key before slipping it into the lock and ushering him inside.

Once in the room, Bobby took his hand and led him to the edge of the bed. “Kneel with me,” he said.

“What?”

“Kneel down,” Bobby said, dropping to his knees beside the bed.

Charlie watched in amazement as the guy rested his elbows on the edge of the mattress and folded his hands in front of his face like a fucking choirboy.

“What the hell are you doing?” Charlie asked.

Bobby looked up into Charlie’s face, and Charlie was stunned to see tears in his eyes. Bobby reached out and tugged at Charlie’s shirtfront, trying to pull him down.

“Pray with me,” he said as the tears streamed down his cheeks. “Let me gather you into God’s army. It’s not too late, Charlie. Kneel down. Ask his forgiveness.”

Charlie slapped the hand away. “Forgiveness for what?” He had geared himself up to accept practically anything tonight, but having his soul saved by some religious fruitcake wasn’t one of them. “Forgiveness for what, you miserable little shit?”

“Your sins, Charlie. Sins of the flesh.” Bobby wrapped his arms around Charlie’s leg, rooting him to the floor. He pressed his tear-streaked face into Charlie’s crotch, and Charlie almost laughed. Now we’re getting to it, he thought.

He ground his hips into that weeping face and felt his cock shift inside his jeans. “Who’s sins are we talking about, Bobby? Mine or yours?”

Bobby sobbed, his lips pressed tight against the growing bulge behind the denim. “We have to pray,” he whispered.

“Pray to this,” Charlie said. Gripping Bobby’s hair, he pulled his head back and popped the button on his Levi’s before sliding the zipper down. Roughly, he pushed the pants down past his hips and pulled Bobby’s face into him. He was not surprised to feel that weeping mouth open wide and take him in. He was not surprised to feel hands slide behind him and pull him even closer. And he was not surprised, a few minutes later, to feel that hot mouth hungrily accept every drop of what Charlie bestowed upon it.

A trickle of sweat slid down Charlie’s face as he looked at the man at his feet, still clutching him close, still drinking him in. At last, Bobby released him and slumped to the floor at Charlie’s feet. His shoulders heaved with silent sobs as he rested his face atop Charlie’s boot top. Tears were still streaming down that handsome face, but Charlie was not moved by them. He never had been.

Charlie studied the man with a mixture of disgust and amusement but no pity. The guy was beyond pity. Hell, he was beyond fruitcake. He was a fucking dessert cart.

He pulled his boot away and heard a satisfying clunk when Bobby’s head hit the floor.

“You got what you wanted, Bobby. And you did a damn fine job of doing what you brought me here to do. You get a little too emotional in your work, but your technique is first rate. Now it’s time to pay up.”

Bobby was bent over like a Moslem on a prayer rug. “I brought you here to save your soul,” he finally managed to say between sobs. “You—you misconstrued the situation. You forced yourself on me.”

Charlie pressed his boot down on the side of Bobby’s head with just enough pressure to silence the guy. The sobbing suddenly stopped.

Charlie applied a bit more pressure with his foot. Perhaps a little more than he intended, he thought, when he saw Bobby’s eyes bug out and a stream of cum-laced saliva dribble to the floor.

“Have I seen you spit, Bobby? That taste in your mouth isn’t Juicy Fruit, you know. You gobbled me down like gravy, and you loved every delicious squirt. Now pay me what you owe me—twenty bucks sounds fair—and let me get the hell out of here. Your sniveling is beginning to get on my nerves.”

He gave his boot a little twist like he was putting out a cigarette, and Bobby began flailing around like a fish on a hook.

“My face! Stop. Stop!” His words were muffled because most of his mouth was being squashed into the floor. Charlie saw a dawning of real fear in Bobby’s eyes now, and that fear spurred him on. This was a feeling of power he had never experienced before, and Charlie found himself enjoying it, maybe more that he should.

“Are you going to pay up, Bobby? Are you going to do what’s right, or are you going to keep screwing around until your head is as flat as your personality?”

Bobby reached behind him with a trembling hand and pulled his wallet from a back pocket. Charlie grabbed it out of his hand and flipped it open. In the bill pocket, he found three one-dollar bills and a folded religious tract that read “Jesus Saves.”

Charlie plucked out the money, stared at it for a moment in angry disbelief, then flung the wallet across the room.

“Three bucks? If this is all the money you’ve got, Bobby, the maid is going to be scooping your brains off the floor in the morning with a dustpan after I squeeze them out your ears with my boot. Now pay me, dammit!”

“I don’t have any more. I swear!”

Charlie looked around the room. His eyes fell on a cheap suitcase beside the door. He pushed Bobby away with his foot and went to it, picking it up and tossing it on the bed. While Bobby cried and massaged his aching face, Charlie rummaged through the suitcase, finding nothing but old clothing and a Gideon Bible that was so tattered and dog-eared it fell apart when Charlie threw it against the wall.

Roughly, Charlie bent down and flipped Bobby over onto his back. He was furious now. Bobby didn’t protest as Charlie dug into every pocket of Bobby’s pants, coming up with nothing but some loose change and a pocket watch that wasn’t even running.

Bobby stared up at him with such fear that it angered Charlie further. Before he could stop himself, Charlie brought his heavy work boot crashing down on that sniveling face. He heard the crunch of bone as Bobby’s nose collapsed, and a bloody tooth went skittering across the floor and came to rest against the wall.

Bobby screamed, and it was the scream that brought Charlie to his senses. He stared down at the bloody face, the wide frightened eyes, and backed away, appalled both by what he had done and by the fact he was itching to do it again.

“You shouldn’t have cheated me, Bobby! You shouldn’t have done it.”

Charlie straightened his clothes, slid his boot along the carpet to wipe off the blood splattered on it, and moved to the door.

He looked back at the sobbing body on the floor one last time before leaving.

“You won’t be pretty for a while,” he said, “but you’ll live. If you call the cops, I’ll tell them you’re just another twisted faggot that made improper advances, and I put you in your place. Being a cocksucker isn’t such a bad thing, Bobby. I suggest you learn to live with it. Jesus doesn’t really care, you know. Nobody really cares.”

With that, he stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him with a click.

BACK ON the street, the night air and the noisy throngs of people helped calm him enough to think rationally about what had just happened. He figured Bobby got what he deserved. Nobody likes a piker. But Charlie also figured he was lucky to have gotten away with what he did. And lucky he hadn’t gone any farther. He could have killed the bastard. He would have killed the bastard if that little voice inside him hadn’t told him to stop when it did. If he hadn’t reined in his anger, he knew he would be worrying about more than just back rent right now. He would be worrying about how to insulate his sorry ass when the cops strapped him into that electric chair up in Vacaville. Murder one, they called it.

As he strolled the street, he thought about that.

Where had the anger come from? You read about some Joe who commits murder over a measly twenty bucks and you think, what kind of moron would do that? The guy must be nuts. But for that tiny inner voice, Charlie knew, he would have been that moron tonight. Something about the whining little rat had stirred up a violence inside him he hadn’t even known he possessed. One more good stomp with his boot would probably have finished the guy off, and it had taken all his willpower not to deliver it. He supposed the sight of the bloody tooth shooting across the floor had startled him enough to make him stop, and thank God it had.

Music and laughter coming through the door of a bar on Broadway made him hunger for a beer, but he wasn’t twenty-one. He had to settle for a Coke from a sandwich shop a couple of doors farther along. He sipped at it as he resumed his stroll along the crowded street, soaking up the sounds and smells, letting the cacophony of a Saturday night lull him back to a place where he could once again concentrate on the job at hand. The thought of those three lousy bucks in his pocket still angered him, but they had taught him something as well. He would get the money up front next time. He was doing business here. He needed to run it like a business. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if someone else tried to cheat him. The next time he might not be able to hold the violence in, the violence that, until twenty minutes ago, he hadn’t even known was a part of him.

Gradually, Charlie again began to notice eyes following him down the street. Lighting up a Camel, he leaned against the window of a clothing store on the corner of Third and studied the faces going past. Charlie’s heart gave a little lurch when a man came up to him and asked the time, but the man moved on after Charlie told him. False alarm. A moment later, one of the crazies that populated the streets of downtown San Diego rolled up in a wheelchair and began talking war talk to Charlie as if he were a long-lost cousin or something. The guy smelled like a piss pot, and most of his front teeth were missing, making Charlie wonder if someone had kicked them out. Maybe Bobby would look like this a few years down the road. Charlie smiled at the thought and told the guy to leave him alone. Much to his surprise, the guy did, rolling on down the sidewalk, trolling for another set of ears to expound his opinions to.

At a distance, Charlie spotted a man watching him. An older man. In his fifties, Charlie figured. He was a decent enough looking guy for his age, Charlie supposed, but it wasn’t his looks that had caught Charlie’s eye. It was the spiffy suit the guy wore, baggy, as was the fashion, but well cut. Not off the rack. Even from three storefronts away, Charlie could see the sparkle of well-shined shoes peeking from beneath crisp trouser cuffs, mirroring the streetlights overhead. Oddly, the man wore sunglasses. Not something you would expect to see so late at night.

The man just stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing people to step around him as he eyed Charlie with a look that said he knew exactly what Charlie was thinking.

What Charlie was thinking was this guy looks like money. And if he played his cards right, maybe he could walk away with some of it. He might not even have to stomp the guy into the floor to get it. Charlie knew his powers of rejuvenation were as good as, or better than, any other eighteen-year-old’s. He could deliver the goods right now, if he was called upon to do so. And judging by the glint in the old guy’s eyes, which Charlie could only imagine since the dude was wearing sunglasses, he thought the chances were pretty good that he would soon be called upon to do exactly that.

The man didn’t make him wait long to find out.

Slipping off his shades and tucking them into the inside pocket of his jacket, the man approached Charlie with a feline grace that reminded Charlie of Fred Astaire. Just like good old Fred, there was an elegance in the way this man did nothing more than put one foot in front of the other and walk. Charlie suspected that elegance, that calm surety of purpose, had a lot to do with having a healthy bank account. Nothing gave a person more confidence than money. Not that Charlie knew this from firsthand experience, of course. Including the money from the bleeding faggot with the new gap in his teeth up in Room 926, Charlie guessed he was worth about nineteen dollars at the moment. But watching the man head straight for him, he figured that number was about to change. And he was right.

Between manicured fingertips, the man held up a fifty-dollar bill and waved it back and forth in front of his face as he approached. The man sported a big grin behind the fifty-dollar bill, and Charlie knew the old guy was having a real good time. And all of a sudden, eyeing that fifty bucks, which would soon be his for the taking, Charlie was having a real good time as well. Things were definitely looking up.

The man didn’t stop until their toes were almost touching and their faces were only inches apart.

“You look cogitative,” the guy said.

“Nope,” Charlie answered. “Scotch-Irish.”

Charlie’s new friend gaped for a second at the boy’s response. Then he let out a blast of laughter that caused heads to turn half a block away. The man’s teeth were as white as Chiclets, and for a moment Charlie thought of that other tooth skittering across the hotel room floor. Charlie pushed the thought away as quickly as it came.

“Just kidding,” he said, suddenly realizing that the man might think he was serious. No sense getting off on the wrong foot, with the guy thinking he was an idiot. “Actually, you’re right. I’ve been standing here cogitating like Gandhi. It’s wartime, you know. Those who don’t fight, cogitate. Or whine. Me, I’d rather cogitate.”

“Very wise,” the man said, still grinning. “I met him once, you know.”

“Met who?”

“Gandhi.”

“No shit?” Charlie said, impressed.

“No shit.”

Charlie slid his eyes from the man’s face and focused on the fifty-dollar bill. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, what exactly do you intend to do with that?”

The man smiled his easy smile and tucked the bill into Charlie’s trouser pocket. “I intend to give it to you.”

“Why would you do something like that?” Charlie asked, realizing he had just tripled his finances without having to do so much as untuck his shirt. For a brief moment, he considered just taking off down the street with the money in his pocket, running like a fucking jackrabbit until he lost the guy in the crowds. But no, he thought. If the guy could part with fifty bucks this casually, he might be persuaded to part with even more before the night was over. Charlie could see him eyeing his body now. He knew what the guy wanted, and Charlie felt a stirring in his loins even now at the possibilities that lay ahead. Money was a mighty aphrodisiac.

“You are a prostitute, are you not?” the man asked, reaching into his pocket and slipping the sunglasses back over his eyes. He waited patiently for an answer.

Charlie supposed he was, tonight at least, but somehow he didn’t really like the sound of it when it was spoken right out. He was only trying to get some rent money here. It wasn’t like he was a bona fide hooker or anything.

“Well,” he said, deciding to ignore the question. “I’m not averse to making a little money now and then. I guess the big question is what I would have to do to earn that money.”

Again the man smiled that easy smile and rested a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “Just be yourself,” he said. “Spend the night with me at my house on the mountain. It’s only a forty-minute drive away. As soon as you’re tired of me, I’ll bring you back. Just let me spend a few hours with you. To revel in your company and suck some of the youth out of you.”

Is that what they’re calling it these days? Charlie asked himself. He grinned. “I’ve always enjoyed having my youth sucked.”

The man laughed. “Then it’s a deal.”

“Not quite,” Charlie said, detecting a note of relief in the man’s voice that bordered on desperation. If the man wanted him as badly as he seemed to, Charlie figured he wouldn’t be offended by a bit of haggling over the price for that privilege. “Fifty’s enough to get me there,” he said, “but it will take another fifty to keep me there all night. For that you can do anything with my youth that takes your fancy. Until you get tired of me.”

“Oh, I think it would take more than one night to grow tired of you. I should think even an eternity wouldn’t be enough. But I don’t mind paying for what I want. I suspect you’ll be well worth the money.”

He pulled a wad of bills folded into a money clip from his trouser pocket and peeled off another fifty. As he did so, Charlie saw several other fifties underneath it. It was more money than he had ever seen at one time in his life. Charlie began to wonder how far he would go to get his hands on a wad of money like that. Judging by what the guy said, they would be secluded on a mountaintop. Just him and the man. And the money. Perhaps an opportunity would present itself for him to actually find out how far he would go. He had inflicted considerable damage on one faggot already tonight, for a measly three bucks. The payoff with this one would be considerably better. And he was old. How much fight could he have in him?

When the man tucked the second fifty-dollar bill into Charlie’s trouser pocket alongside the first, Charlie said, “I’ll give you a night you’ll never forget.”

The man’s smile died. His face grew suddenly serious. Cogitative. “And I’ll do the same for you,” he said.

But Charlie wasn’t listening. His mind was on the money.

WEARING ONLY a towel, Charlie stepped from the bathroom, which was bigger than his bedroom back on Euclid, and began exploring the house. The man had excused himself earlier, saying he had some things to attend to in the carriage house out back and instructing Charlie to make himself at home.

The house on the mountain was as elegant as the man himself. Charlie was awed by the stark beauty of wide polished floors and acres of gleaming glass. The art deco furniture was the kind that Charlie had only seen in movies. Broad sofas. Tall teak cabinets filled with elaborate figurines of pewter and crystal. Artwork on the walls, much of it in a Southwestern motif, that even to Charlie’s untrained eye looked to be worth a bundle. The place was like a museum. Everything priceless. Everything spotless.

Sipping a beer he had plucked from the refrigerator in the kitchen, Charlie roamed from room to room, drinking in the richness around him. It was in a room full of photographs that Charlie came to realize who his host really was. Nigel Letters. The actor. Charlie had even seen some of his old movies. He was older now, of course. Gone a little to pot. But he was still an actor, and Charlie was properly impressed.

Still in his towel, with the warm night air-drying his body, he went from photograph to photograph, studying all the famous faces that stared back at him. Here was Nigel on a movie set with Carole Lombard. In another he saw a very young Clark Gable perusing a script with Nigel at his side in top hat and tails. Nigel was handsome back then, his features as crisp as if they had been carved from ice, his body trim and tall. The features had faded considerably over the years, Charlie thought, as if the ice had melted a bit, softening the lines of the jaw, dimming the sharp clarity of the cheekbones. Only the elegance remained. And the money. Mr. Letters had obviously managed to hold on to that as well.

Given the time to search, Charlie wondered if he might not be able to find a bit of it stashed away somewhere. It stood to reason that anyone who carried as much cash with him as Nigel Letters did would have more of it tucked away inside his house.

Charlie knew he could overpower the man. That was not the problem. The problem was identification. Nigel knew what Charlie looked like. If he tied the man up and robbed him, Nigel would have the police on his tail the moment he was freed. If he was not freed, if Letters should somehow… die, then that problem would be solved. But Charlie wasn’t sure he had the nerve to go that far. Knocking a tooth out of someone’s head in a fit of anger was one thing. Murder was something else entirely. And he would have to live with the knowledge of what he had done for the rest of his life. He would be, until the day he died, a murderer. A cold-blooded killer.

Charlie stepped to the window that overlooked the moonlit mountain, and seeing his reflection in the glass, stared at himself for a long moment as if staring at a stranger. The smooth skin of his chest. The bulge of his genitals beneath the white towel tucked around his waist. The strong legs, brown from the sun, below. At that moment he felt little more than a boy. A boy who wanted something he couldn’t have. Something he could never have. He watched a smile creep across his face in the glass and knew he had been deceiving himself all along. Just like a boy, he had almost fooled himself into thinking he could be something he could never be. A killer. The hundred dollars he already had was more than he had ever hoped for when the evening began. It was enough to pay his back rent and maybe buy some groceries besides. It would keep him going a little while longer as he searched for a real job. Tonight had, after all, been nothing more than an act of desperation. No matter what the old guy had said back on the street, Charlie knew he was not a prostitute. Or even a faggot. Not really. For the money, he would go through the motions tonight, and he would give the man what he had already paid for, but that would be the end of it. He had demeaned himself enough already. He would not stoop to murder as well.

Charlie was about to heave a literal sigh of relief, thankful for the revelation, when he heard a voice behind him.

“Cogitating again?”

He turned to see Nigel Letters standing in the doorway, watching him. He was dressed in a red dressing gown of some light fabric that glistened in the light. There was a gently appraising smile on the man’s face as he studied the almost-naked boy before him.

“You’re beautiful,” Nigel said in an almost breathless whisper.

Charlie was surprised to feel a blush creep into his face. “Your house is beautiful.”

Nigel looked about the room as if he had seen it all before and it held very little interest for him any longer. “It’s just a house,” he said. “Like any house, it’s only as valuable as the people in it. With you standing there, the value has gone up considerably. What were you thinking about while you were staring out the window? If you don’t mind my asking.”

Charlie almost laughed. If he told Nigel what he had really been thinking, the guy would probably go screaming down the mountainside with his red dressing gown flapping in the breeze.

“I was just waiting for you,” he finally said. Charlie glanced at the bottle in his hand. “I hope you don’t mind. I helped myself to a beer.”

Nigel grinned. “Are you old enough to drink that?”

“I’m old enough to drink it,” Charlie said. “I’m just not old enough to buy it.”

Nigel laughed. “What else are you old enough to do?”

“This,” Charlie said, unhooking the towel at his waist and letting it slide to the floor. He ran a hand across his chest and watched the light of passion flicker in the older man’s eyes as he took in every inch of the young, strong body before him.

Again, Charlie felt the stirring in his loins. His cock shifted as it grew heavier with the rush of blood streaming into it. The thought of what would come, of the man’s lips surrounding him, worshipping him, made him rigid in seconds. He brought the bottle to his lips and took another sip of beer as he waited for the man to come to him.

Charlie watched, secretly amused, as the older man’s hand slid beneath his dressing gown. From across the room, he stared at Charlie with wide, hungry eyes as his hand began moving beneath the fabric. The dressing gown fell open, and Charlie saw a glimpse of dark hair sprouting from a chest that was no longer firm, no longer strong. At the thickening waist, Charlie saw a slim appendectomy scar, still pink and angry looking as if it hadn’t been there very long. The man’s legs were strong and lightly brushed with dark hair. They were his best feature now, as if the ravages of age had started at the top and were in the process of working their way down. Charlie was surprised to see that the man was well hung, larger down there even than himself. The man stroked the long, thick shaft of his cock as he continued to stare at the boy, and Charlie saw a bead of moisture glistening on the bulbous tip where it protruded from the man’s hand.

Charlie set the beer bottle aside and, much to his own surprise, found himself moving toward the older man, clutching his own manhood now, stroking it gently as he stepped across the room. The man took a shuddering breath as Charlie knelt before him, releasing his grip on himself to run his hands up the length of those strong handsome legs. Charlie closed his eyes and brushed his cheek across the man’s thigh, feeling the warmth of it, smelling the scent of hot skin, enjoying the sensation of the dark hair scraping his face. He pushed the man’s hand aside and took hold of the heavy flesh between those legs, stroking it as the man had done, tasting that drop of moisture with the tip of his tongue before taking it all into his mouth. The man gasped, and Charlie could feel him tremble as he thrust forward to bury himself between Charlie’s soft lips. The man’s orgasm came like a flood, quickly and without warning. Charlie pulled back to let it spray across his face, the heat of it so intense that it seemed to burn against his skin. The musky odor of sperm filled his nostrils as the man clutched Charlie’s head between his hands and held the boy close, emptying himself onto him. When he was finished, Charlie encircled the man again with his lips, but with a gasp of both pleasure and pain, the man quickly pulled away.

NIGEL LETTERS stared down at the naked boy at his feet, then gently, with the hem of his dressing down, wiped the boy’s face clean of his passion. He couldn’t speak. The boy’s innocent expression of pleasure and contentment stunned him to silence. Not since the days of his own youth had anyone found such joy in his body, and to see it now in the eyes of a common street hustler, a boy so beautiful that it made his heart ache to look at him, was more than the man could comprehend.

For the first time since this journey of his began, a seed of pity took root inside his mind. And a seed of doubt. For the first time, those feelings would make what he was about to do a hurt more than a joy. Nigel Letters wondered, in fact, if he would be able to do it at all. Time and again he had been brought to orgasm by each of the others he had brought into this house, but it was the thrill of their pain, their suffering, that effected it. This boy alone had come to him, reaching out to him with a hunger that he usually saw only in his own eyes, and accepted him, flaws and all, as a person to be desired. Through that desire, that lustful innocence, the boy had given him more pleasure than all the others combined. What was it the boy had seen in him? What was it that made the boy accept him, age and all, so completely and with such apparent hunger?

ONLY CHARLIE knew. Only Charlie understood what it was that had brought him to his knees before this man who was old enough to be his father, this man who, through time, had lost all the beauty of his youth. It was not lust that made Charlie do what he had done, although lust had played a part in it. It was a mixture of other things. Other feelings. But mostly it was—relief. Relief in knowing he had looked inside himself and found a better person hiding there than the one he thought he knew. A person who could never take another’s life, and in making that discovery, found compassion for the life he had considered taking. This man would live on now because of the discoveries Charlie had made about himself, and Charlie wanted a share of that continued life. He wanted to be a part of this man, to touch him, taste him, to know that he was alive and well and unharmed, even if it was just for this one night. To Charlie, his lust was as much for himself as for the man standing before him. By sparing the man’s life, Charlie had spared his own. By giving the man a few moments of pleasure, he had secretly begged forgiveness for what he had considered doing.

And looking up into the man’s face now, he saw gratitude for what he had done.

Nigel looked down at the boy almost with love as he tucked a finger beneath his chin and coaxed him to his feet. Silently, he took the boy’s hand and led him from the room, down the hallway, and into the bedroom, where he gently pushed him down onto the bed. Lying between the boy’s outstretched legs, he took his iron hardness into his mouth and slowly, very slowly, brought him to orgasm. As he savored the boy’s juices, while the boy arched and bucked beneath the movement of his lips, emptying himself into Nigel as if sharing something blessed, Nigel knew he could never cause this one pain. This one was too special.

Later, as the boy slept naked on the bed and the moonlight filtered through the bedroom windows, Nigel kissed him softly on the lips, so as not to awaken him, and eased himself from the bed. Naked himself, he sat in the armchair by the bed and pleasured himself as his eyes roamed over the beautiful body before him. As his sperm shot from him for the second time that night, he thought of the boy’s mouth surrounding him, and of his own mouth surrounding the boy. It had been a night of wonders, and they had shared something exceptional, the two of them. But now the sharing time was over.

Quietly, the man raised himself from the chair and slipped from the room. He walked to the kitchen, feeling the semen drying against his stomach even as he did so, and pulled an ice pick from a drawer by the sink.

Back in the bedroom, he listened to the soft sounds of the boy sleeping beneath him as he stood by the bed, and with the gentleness of a caress, he slipped the ice pick deep beneath the boy’s chest bone until it pierced the slowly throbbing heart. The boy’s eyes flew open in pain, but the life went out of them just as quickly. He had suffered but for a moment, and the man was pleased by that.

Leaving the ice pick where it was, he returned to the armchair by the bed and remained there, silently watching the boy’s lifeless body, until the light of dawn began to creep through the window above his head.

Only then did he scoop the boy into his arms and carry him to the carriage house, where Tania waited, eager as always, for her share of the bounty.

Chapter 8

…HER SHARE of the bounty.

As I stared at those final words, I sensed a sudden emptiness in the room, as if the air had somehow gone out of it.

Charlie was gone.

Glancing at the clock, I saw it was almost five in the morning. Hours had passed. There was a glass of iced tea on the desk beside the computer that I had not put there. Michael must have come into the room at some point during the night, bringing me a cold drink, and I had not even known he was there.

But for the ticking of the clock and the whir of the computer, the house was silent. Daylight had not appeared yet in the sky outside the breakfast room windows, but the birds were already stirring. I could hear them fluttering about the eaves of the veranda, where I had noticed them nesting on the day I first arrived at the house. Caroline had once offered to shoo them away because they made a mess in the flowerpots that surrounded the porch, but I liked them where they were. The mountainside was always so silent that the sound of the birds, singing and chirping among the tiles, made me feel less alone, more a part of this new world that I found myself living in. Even though I did not miss the noises of the city, I had found utter silence to be a bit unnerving when I first arrived here. Now, knowing the house as I did, silence had become a welcome but infrequent diversion. I longed for a solid day of it. Or night.

My broken finger ached like an impacted tooth. The tape holding the splint had loosened on one side, causing the splint to slip. With my left hand, I awkwardly tried to put the thing back together, but I’m not ambidextrous—my left hand is as useless as a dorsal fin—so I finally gave it up as a lost cause.

I had not thought once of the finger during all the long hours of sitting at the keyboard, but now the finger was paying me back for ignoring it. I pulled a bottle of Advil from the desk drawer and swallowed two down with the tepid tea. I harbored no illusion that they would do any good, but I thought it a wise alternative to the pharmaceuticals Michael offered. The last thing I wanted was to find myself, like Stu, so doped up I couldn’t type or think straight. Or defend myself. Who knew what the house might decide to throw at us in the coming hours or days? I had even begun to consider sending everyone away, even Michael, whether they wanted to go or not. But I could imagine the reaction that would cause. My hands were already full battling the dead. I didn’t want to battle the living as well. Especially the gay living. They have a nasty habit of battling unfairly, bringing such unlikely weapons as loyalty and crushed feelings into play.

I pulled the pages I had written from the printer basket and ruffled through them, reading phrases here and there, refreshing my mind as to what I had written. They were not my words, of course. They were the words of a young man named Charlie Simms. Like the others, he had come to me to tell me about himself, to tell me what had led him to this house, to this place where he would find only death and an eternity of torment.

As I reread the words, I found that like the others, there was much to pity in Charlie. And like the others, with the exception of twelve-year-old Allen Crisp, it was poverty that had brought him here. The only assets these boys possessed were their youth and their beauty. I could not find it in myself to blame them for using those assets in their struggle to survive. I might have done the same if the circumstances of my young life had been different.

There but for the grace of God….

Once again, in the midst of Charlie’s telling of his story, I had caught glimpses into the mind of Nigel Letters as well. I did not understand how this could happen, but there was no denying it had. I had seen his thoughts just as clearly as I had seen Charlie’s. And this time I had glimpsed a touch of humanity in Letters, something I had never expected to find. I had sensed compassion and gratitude in his actions toward Charlie, the young man who had accepted his aging body as a lover might, eagerly and without reservation. But those good feelings had not held sway over Nigel Letters very long before the madness and the cruelty once again took over.

Anger surged up in me when I thought how Letters had murdered Charlie as he slept. Charlie had not been a danger to him. Charlie didn’t know about the other killings. Letters wasn’t lost in his madness for torture. He had spared the boy that but taken his life anyway.

I wondered which of the anguished faces we had seen hovering over our heads the night before had belonged to this young man. This Charlie. And I wondered, too, why Letters chose to torture Charlie now when he had not done so when the young man was alive.

Again I stared at the last words written.

…her share of the bounty.

Tania. I had seen her this time! Tania. Felis Concolor. A creature that went by many names. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. And hand-raised by a killer, a creature as cruel as her master. Always in the stories of these unfortunate boys, it was her presence that hovered in the background. So far the only boy who had even suspected she existed was the youngest. Allen. He had heard her as he lay manacled in the carriage house. What fears must those sounds have struck in his young heart? Even as he lay brutally beaten and raped, he had heard her footsteps behind him. Waiting. Waiting for him.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what the boy had felt, but I could not see it. The misery and torment he had suffered was far beyond anything I had ever experienced. I could never know how Allen felt on that night so long ago as he waited for the death that he must have known was coming.

And that Tania knew was coming too.

Nigel Letters, I realized, had been very good at what he did. He had capitalized on his victims’ needs, used those needs to acquire them, and once he had them in his grasp, he had, as he put it, sucked every ounce of their youth and beauty from their bodies before tossing them aside. But it was not their beauty that drew him to them. It was their pain. Nigel Letters had been a serial killer before the phrase was popularly known, and the anguish his victims suffered as they lay tortured and raped fed his hunger just as surely as the bodies of those victims fed his beloved Tania. They were two animals, he and Tania. Two animals with a single purpose.

A theory began to form in my mind as I sat in the breakfast room, listening to the birds fluttering and singing in the eaves outside. A theory as to why Nigel Letters had chosen the path he had. Was it truly madness, or was it a more basic emotion that led him to torment and murder these young men? Could it have been jealousy alone that motivated him to do what he had done? In his youth he had been beautiful himself. On the outside, at least. His inner beauty, I suspected, was in question even then. But for his outer beauty, he had been adored by millions. They watched his chiseled face on the silver screen in thousands of movie houses across the country, across the world, and they envied him his beauty, his success, longing to be him, longing to live the life he lived. There wasn’t a woman or gay man alive who wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to get their hands on that perfect body, that exquisite face, and possibly for a moment absorb some of the wonder of the man and, in doing so, make it a part of themselves.

When his star began to wane and his physical beauty began to collapse in upon itself through the ravages of time, which everyone must endure if they live long enough, what did he have left? I suspected that Nigel Letters’s outer beauty was really all he ever had. On the inside, even in his heyday, there was very little to admire about the man. By all accounts, he was cold, heartless, and unforgiving in his private life. He had not been loved, even by the masses of mindless moviegoers; he had been simply envied. And Nigel himself must have known that.

If the stories were true, he had used his beauty to draw other beauty to him, seducing a long line of handsome young men and then tossing them aside, just as he later did his victims.

How many hearts did he break in the process? How many hopes did he crush by giving just enough of himself to those young men to give them a taste of the dream and then, pulling away, leaving them once again in the banal world of reality they were doomed to languish in for the rest of their lives? Simply seeing the man in person must have been like gaining a glimpse of heaven back then. To actually sleep with him, have sex with him, to feel his strong body next to theirs, to have him hunger for them as they hungered for him, if only for a few minutes, must have been like an infusion of narcotics into their dreary lives. The Depression was on then. Poverty was as rampant as lust. To find that this man, this star, could want their bodies as badly as they wanted his must have been an astonishing thing to the young men he bedded. And then to see him walk away when he was finished with them, never so much as looking back, must have dashed their hopes like so much garbage trampled into the mud.

It was exactly how Nigel Letters must have felt on the day he woke up to find his beauty was gone and the world’s desire for him with it. No longer did young men melt at a mere glance from his smoldering eyes. No longer did they offer their bodies to him for the simple privilege of spending a few lustful minutes with this man who had stepped down from that huge silver screen and plucked them from the darkened audience, choosing them as someone worthy to share his body, his aura, his magic.

Did Nigel Letters suddenly find himself being looked upon with pity? Even disdain? What was he now, now that the years had consumed him? Nothing more than an aging queer, and the world was full of them. Undesired, unloved, and… unmagical. But however undesired they may be, they still have desires of their own. Their beauty may be gone, but their hearts are the same. Their feelings and their needs still survive in that husk of a body they are now trapped in. That body that no one wants. That no one craves.

Ordinary people accept age as gracefully as they can. They understand that it is the natural progression of life. But someone like Nigel Letters, someone who traded on his youth and beauty and nothing else for many years, someone who was desired not by one special person, but by mindless millions, would have found the transition to mediocrity unbearable.

Had it angered him to find himself suddenly pushed from the pedestal that he had stood upon so long? How many years did he stew and fret over all he had lost when his beauty abandoned him before the idea to strike back took hold in his mind? Did the sight of beauty now enrage him so that he could not bear to see it, could not bear to let it exist around him? Did every handsome, unlined face he encountered, faces that no longer looked his way, faces that ignored him as if he were invisible, or worse yet, sneered down at him in what he perceived to be his ugliness, make him want to scream out in anger? Make him want to kill?

And who was the first? Which boy had finally, through his beauty, pushed the man beyond any hopes of self-restraint and unleashed his fury? Which boy had made him finally act upon his anger and, with the lure of money, bring him to this house and bleed him and torture and tear at him until the beauty was gone and it was no longer an offense for Letters to gaze upon?

As that first boy lay dead beneath his hands, naked and lifeless, his beauty shattered beyond all recognition, never again to be desired by anything but the scavengers of nature, did Nigel Letters find peace within himself? Did the snuffing out of that young life give any sort of meaning to his old one, or did he see the dead boy as just one less face, one less body, that would not now affront him by the beauty that he himself would never again wield.

Had he found pleasure in the killing? Did it give him a sense of power like the one he once held over the lives of others in his youth? Or was it more visceral? Did he find, perhaps to his own amazement, that he enjoyed the sheer brutality of what he had done? Enjoyed it so much that he itched to do it again, time after time, until the spirits of his dead boys filled every corner of the lovely house he had built on the side of this lonely mountain. The house where he had come to hide his ugliness from the world. The house where he would find the solitude to do what he had eventually set out to do. Had he planned the house as a killing field all along, knowing what it would become even as he dealt with the minutia of actually having it built? Architects. Carpenters. Realtors. Were they just trivial matters that had to be waded through before the house could fulfill its actual purpose? Or was it the seclusion of the house after it was finished that gave him the thought that he might actually be able to get away with what he planned to do? There were no neighbors for miles. A scream would be heard by no one. No one but him and Tania. And by choosing as his victims the unwanted, the whores, beautiful though they may be—and it was beauty, after all, that he needed to destroy above all else—who would care? There would be no public outcry. The scum of the earth, when wiped away, would not be missed by anyone. They never were.

Yet for a little while, as they suffered beneath his hands, as their beauty disintegrated beneath his touch, he could enjoy them. He could know that they would never again look at him with pity or disdain or ridicule. They would never again be admired by anyone. And their beauty would never again be an affront to his sagging body, his age-fouled face.

I was surprised to hear my own voice in the silent room.

“The fucker!” I mumbled before I knew I had spoken.

And immediately, the glass of tea at my side began to tremble on the desktop, the glass rattling and shimmying against the wood and splashing tea all over the place as I watched it slowly slide and bounce to the edge of the desk and finally topple to the floor with a crash.

A grin crept across my face as I stared at the shattered glass and spilled tea at my feet. What a mess.

I gazed about the empty room.

“Puh-leeze,” I said. “Surely you can do better than that!”

Only silence answered me. Even the birds were hushed.

“Must have hit a nerve,” I muttered, pushing myself away from the desk and heading to the kitchen for a towel and a broom.

Nigel was beginning to get on my nerves. That was very expensive glassware.

AFTER THREE hours in a hospital emergency room being coughed at and sneezed at and stared at by the other patients and pretty much ignored by everyone who worked there, including a janitor who painstakingly swept the entire facility, except for a three-foot area around the very chair where I was sitting, while I waited. And after having a six-year-old girl with greasy pigtails and a serious overbite (which would one day cost her parents a fortune to correct if she aspired to anything other than a career in logging or a position on the faculty of Beaver State University) vomit up enough pennies onto my shoe to open an offshore bank account. And finally after seeing a doctor named Hymie Something, who assured me I would live a long and productive life after he X-rayed and rewrapped my broken finger and charged me nine hundred dollars for the privilege of doing so, I got the hell out of there, and with Michael at my side, headed back to the house.

Michael glanced over at my shoe as he drove. “You know,” he said, “I could actually hear the coins hitting that kid’s overbite as they came out. She was like a slot machine spitting out quarters. All she needed was bells and a red light flashing on top her head.”

“Her eyeballs were cherries,” I said. “I saw them spinning.”

We laughed so hard we had to stop at a Mobil station and avail ourselves of the men’s room, after which we got a grip and arrived home by noon to find everyone waiting for us on the veranda.

“Oh God,” Michael said. “Letters has driven them out of the house.”

“No,” I said. “They’re smiling.”

And they were. As we stepped from the car, I saw Frank and Lyle, arm in arm, gazing down at us from the top step, all but trembling in their excitement like a couple of tuning forks. Below them, on the next step, stood Stu, his smiling face glimmering in the sunlight from all the lotion he had applied to it, and below him, with Stu’s arms draped around his shoulders, stood Jesse. Wearing tiny white hot pants that left nothing to the imagination, except possibly his food being digested, and a blue dress shirt tied at the waist to expose his midriff, he looked like Hank Azaria in The Birdcage, only not as butch. He was waving a sheet of paper in his hand like the Queen of England flapping a hanky at her adoring peons. And last but not least, at Jesse’s feet, sat Rex, his tail sweeping the step behind him as his tongue lolled out of the insipid grin spread across his face.

All together they looked like an ad campaign for mental health that had somehow gone terribly awry. Once again I thanked God my nearest neighbors were five miles away. I found myself talking to God a lot, it seemed, whenever my friends were around. I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

“The check cleared,” Jesse squealed, jumping up into the air in his excitement and bonking Stu on the chin with the top of his head. “The house is ours! I mean, yours!”

I snatched the paper from Jesse’s hand. It was a fax from my agent, who handled all my business matters for me, informing me that escrow had closed, and as of today, the house was indeed mine, paid in full, no other fees or payments or liens outstanding. It had taken almost every nickel I owned, but now I was the proud owner of, as Lyle once put it, The Little House on the Prairie of the Dead.

Jesus. What had I been thinking? I was broke!

Michael read the stunned expression on my face as clearly as a page of newsprint. “Don’t worry, kid. I’ll support you until your next royalty check comes in.” He turned me toward him. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? This house? It’s a gorgeous house, Jim. A great investment. The furniture alone is worth a fortune.”

I wondered how much money I still had in the bank. Three dollars? Four? “It’s possessed, Michael! There are demons popping out of the ceiling, for Christ’s sake. I just paid a million five for a place where people come to die, and then they never leave.”

“I’m sure the Realtor is thrilled,” Frank said. “She can retire now.”

“The bitch,” Lyle said. He was after all, a real estate agent himself, but not, unfortunately, the one who made the sale.

“Great,” I said.

Michael folded me into his arms. I could see him fighting the impulse to laugh. “You’ve just got cold feet. Come on, let’s go have a drink and toast our new home.”

“Yeah,” Lyle said, “and don’t think of them as demons. Think of them as supernatural cockroaches. They just need to be exterminated like any other pest.”

Michael and I both turned to look at Jesse, the biggest pest of all, and then we looked at each other and burst out laughing. My new book was coming out in the fall. My old books were still selling fairly well. Royalty checks were coming in on a regular basis. I wouldn’t starve. And I had Michael, something I would never have thought possible a few weeks ago. And the house was gorgeous. I had fallen in love with it the first moment I walked through the door. It was pointless to have cold feet now. The sale was final.

I looked up at the birds chattering in the eaves above our heads. I could hear the delicate cheeps of fledglings hidden away somewhere up there in the adobe tiles that overhung the roof. The birds were mine now as well, I supposed. And inside, permeating the house like the scent of desert sage, in the walls, in the floors, in the very air, were the boys. They still needed my help. They were not demons. They were only boys. Boys and young men. Only one demon lived here, and one way or another I would rid the house of him. With my friends at my side, we could do it. And with Michael there as well, to help me and love me, I knew that everything would work out fine in the end. Michael and I would spend the rest of our lives in this house, but we would not be spending it with the ghost of Nigel Letters hounding us at every turn. If we were going to stay here, and I had every intention of doing exactly that, then Letters would simply have to go.

“Uh-oh,” Lyle said. “Look at Jim’s face. He’s having an epiphany.”

“No,” I said. “Just a reavowal of purpose.”

Michael nodded, his hand, as always, finding its way to the nape of my neck. “It’s Letters, isn’t it? You want the bastard out of here.”

“More than ever.”

“Another séance,” Jesse said, looking wise and thoughtful, not an easy pose to carry off considering the outfit he was wearing. “Maybe we can reason with the old queen this time.”

Frank groaned. “I’d say that’s highly unlikely,” He turned to me. “We all read what you wrote last night, Jim.”

“Why the hell are you reading my private—”

He didn’t bother pooh-poohing my objection. He simply ignored it altogether. “And we have a theory.”

Jesse turned to Stu like Joan Rivers on the red carpet. “Poor Charlie. Such a handsome young man. So full of promise. So full of life.”

Stu agreed. “So hunkalicious. And not a prostitute at all. Just a victim of circumstances.”

Jesse nodded. “As gay as a maypole, of course. He just didn’t know it yet. He even made the supreme sacrifice of going down on the old fart, and the old fart killed him anyway.”

“True. But he didn’t torture him.”

Jesse stuck a fist on his hip. “Oh, well, gee whiz, Stu. Let’s give the man an Oscar for Most Compassionate Serial Killer of 1943. God knows he never got one for his acting.”

“How could he? The man was a robot on the screen.”

“And that makeup!”

“Displayed every emotion from A to B.”

“He used so much pancake he looked like a walking IHOP.”

“The only gay man ever born who didn’t know how to emote.”

“Or use a blush brush.”

I sighed, took Michael by the hand and Frank by the arm, and pulled them through the front door away from Jesse and Stu, who didn’t even notice we had left. Lyle and Rex came along for the ride, looking immensely relieved to leave Jesse and Stu behind.

Once inside, I said to Frank, “You mentioned you have a theory. What is it?”

Lyle answered for him. “We think you’ve been right all along, Jim. The boys are obviously using you to tell their stories. They want the world to know what happened to them. Once they do that, they’ll go away. They’ll rest in peace. The Crisp boy is gone already. At least we think he is. Once all the boys are gone, we think Letters will depart as well. There won’t be anything here to hold him. The only reason he has stayed this long is because he has his little tormented harem to keep himself amused. What will he have when they are gone?”

“Only us,” Michael said. “Once he’s alone, what makes you think he won’t direct all his anger at us?” He waggled my splinted finger in both their faces, causing me to wince in pain. He didn’t notice. “And he’s fully capable of inflicting damage to the living. Look at Jim. Look at Stu. Who’s he going to go after next, Lyle? You? Me? Frank?”

Frank gave Michael a pitying look. “Actually, Michael, he said he would come after you next. Doesn’t like your attitude, it seems. And through you he can best get to Jim. Let’s not forget how devious faggots can be. Even dead ones.”

“All of you are missing the point,” I said, gently extracting my aching hand from Michael’s grasp. “Our primary goal here is to free the boys. That Letters will try to stop us is a given. And who knows? Maybe he will go away once the boys are gone. I certainly hope so. If not, we’ll deal with that when the time comes. Right now all we can do is concentrate on the victims. They’ve suffered enough. I feel like I know these kids. These young men. I’m determined to help them.”

“We all are,” Michael said. “This is your house now, Jim.”

“Our house.”

“We want you to be happy here.”

“Us to be happy here.”

Michael smiled and pulled me into his arms. “Okay,” he said. “Us.”

Lyle leaned into Frank and rested his head on his shoulder. “Isn’t love grand?” he sighed.

“Better than ice cream,” Frank said.

Wrapped comfortably in Michael’s arms, I looked over his shoulder through the dining room window, our dining room window now, and wondered where Stu and Jesse had gone. They were nowhere in sight.

The four of us jumped when we heard a piercing scream from somewhere out back behind the house. Rex’s ears perked up, and he took off running through the open front door, across the veranda, and out onto the driveway, with the four of us hot on his heels.

I heard Lyle panting behind me. “Oh, Jesus, what is it now?”

Jesse and Stu were standing by the side door leading into the carriage house, peering in. Both sets of eyes were as wide as dinner plates, and Jesse had his hands to his cheeks like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.

The four of us slid to a stop beside them.

“We heard crying,” Stu said.

“So we came to investigate.” It was Jesse, his voice four octaves higher than usual, which put it somewhere just below the range of a dog whistle. His trembling hand snaked out, and he pointed into the dark interior of the carriage house. “Look.”

I looked inside but couldn’t see anything, so I stepped across the threshold, everyone following along behind me.

“Oh, shit,” Frank whispered.

“What?” I said. “I don’t see anything.”

“The walls,” Michael said, his voice hushed. “Look at the walls, Jim.”

Then I saw it.

Rivulets of blood were streaming down the uneven bricks on every side, pooling on the floor, creeping out into the middle of the carriage house like a crimson flood. Something splattered my shoulder, and I looked up to see the blood dripping from the ceiling as well. In a dozen places, it fell into the room like red rain. I could hear it plopping into puddles, trickling down the walls. I took a step backward and felt my feet slip in the growing pool beneath me. I left footprints in the liquid that quickly filled up again as the blood continued to seep across the floor. I could smell it now. A dusky, coppery, feral smell. The stench of blood. The stench of battlefields and traffic accidents. The stench of torn bodies and splintered veins and sudden, violent death.

“My God,” someone said. “Where’s it coming from?”

I heard either Jesse or Stu retching on the carriage house steps outside. Two blood-spattered hands gripped my shoulders and pulled me back. It was Michael. “Come on, Jim. Let’s go.”

“Wait,” I said.

“No. Come now.”

He pulled me toward the door. I slipped and almost fell, but Michael braced me before I could tumble down into the blood that was everywhere now. The floor was awash in it from one side of the carriage house to the other. As I watched, the trickling along the walls became a torrent, spurting from between the bricks like blood gushing from severed arteries. A red mist shot across the room, spraying us all. Someone gasped. Suddenly the stench became overpowering. Unbearable. I gagged, swallowing hard, biting back bile, as Michael continued to pull me toward the door until I found myself standing in the sunshine on the outer step. By some unseen force, the carriage house door slammed shut, closing us out. I heard the lock click.

Inside, a pained voice cried out in agony. A young voice. One of the boys. “No! Please no!”

And then silence.

Dripping with blood and stunned beyond any sensible reaction, I stared at the carriage house door. I heard Jesse sobbing as he sat in the sand at the edge of the step. His shirt was drenched with vomit, and Stu was trying to wipe it off with his own filthy shirt, which he had peeled over his head like raw, bloody skin. I reached out for the door, but Michael grabbed my arm and pulled me away.

“No,” he said. “Don’t go in there.”

I could feel hot tears mixing with the blood on my face, that anguished cry echoing over and over inside my head. “But he needs help! Whoever it is, he needs help.”

“No,” Michael said. “He’s already dead. He’s long past any help we can give him. It’s only echoes, Jim. All of it. The blood. The voice. Echoes.”

I fought him, trying to pull away from his grasp. “It’s Arturo. We have to do something!”

“We don’t know who it is,” he all but screamed at me. “And there’s nothing we could do even if we did!”

The emotion in Michael’s voice stunned me to silence. He was right. There was nothing I could do to help the boy. What had been done to him had already been done a thousand times over. Every day maybe. Every day for seventy years.

Jesse was almost delirious with fear and shock. He stared down at himself in horror, at his bloody arms and legs, at the stinking, blood-drenched shorts he had on.

“Oh my God,” he sobbed. “AIDS!”

He ripped the once-blue dress shirt from his chest, popping buttons like popcorn and flinging it away. With trembling hands he tried to unhook the waistband of his shorts, finally succeeding. Crying, he pushed them down his long legs and kicked them off. They were so soaked in blood that they landed on the driveway with a solid splat. Stark naked, still sitting in the dirt, he wiped frantically at his body with Stu’s bloody shirt, smearing more blood across his skin than he removed.

Michael bent down and shook his shoulders. “Jesse! There was no AIDS back then. And the blood isn’t even real. Calm down.”

Michael tore the filthy shirt from Jesse’s hand and flung it into the bushes at the edge of the drive. Gripping Jesse’s face, he forced him to look at him. “Jesse, Calm down, Wait, I’ll help you.”

Michael grabbed the garden hose that snaked along the sidewalk and strode to the spigot at the side of the house, twisted it until the hose stiffened in his hand, then squeezed the lever on the hose nozzle and began spraying Jesse down. Jesse gasped when the cold water hit him, but he pulled himself to his feet and did a slow, grateful turn in front of the spray as Michael washed the blood from his shivering body. Soon we were all pulling the bloody clothes from our bodies until each of us was as naked as the day we were born, standing side by side in the hot Southern California sun as Michael played the hose from one of us to the other. Our faces were somber, although the water felt good. Cold and numbing. When we were clean, Michael handed me the hose, and I washed him down as he peeled the stinking, bloody clothes from his own body.

We must have looked a sight, six grown men, all of us slightly past our prime, standing there naked, as sober as judges and as wet as fish, with the stream of pink water at our feet flowing downhill across the driveway toward the cars. At least the look of panic had left Jesse’s face—it, too, seemingly washed away in the icy spray.

“Somebody say something funny,” Frank said. I noticed a slight tremor in his voice, even as he tried to make light of the situation. “There’s a wealth of possibilities here for cutting and witty remarks from someone.”

“Old gay nudists on parade?” Lyle ventured.

No one laughed. Stu was holding Jesse’s naked body next to his own, rubbing his hands soothingly up and down along Jesse’s back, whispering something I couldn’t hear into his ear. Jesse had stopped sobbing. He no longer trembled. He seemed merely… exhausted.

As the sun dried the water from my bare skin, I tentatively reached out to the carriage house door. Everyone froze, watching my hand approach the knob. Michael looked as if he was about to protest, then didn’t. Without giving myself time to think about what I was doing, I grabbed the knob and gave it a shake.

“Is it locked?” It was Frank. He sounded like a hostage with a bomb strapped to his chest, asking the demolitions expert if the damn thing was defused yet.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Before I could check, we heard a scratching at the other side of the door. It sounded like the creature that had startled Rex and me on the night we slept here.

Then I turned. Where was Rex?

“Oh my God,” I said. “We locked him in.”

“Who?”

“Rex, dammit!”

“Well, let him out!”

“No! Don’t open that door!” It was Jesse, his voice rising again in panic.

“I have to,” I said, gripping the knob and giving it a vicious twist with my uninjured hand. I immediately stepped back as the door slowly swung inward. It hadn’t been locked at all.

The voice we heard earlier was silent now.

Cautiously, we peered into the darkness from several feet away, waiting for God knows what to happen. Then Michael gave a nervous laugh.

Rex was sitting on the carriage house floor, smiling up at us and whapping his tail on the concrete floor in greeting, his coat shiny and clean, reflecting the light from the doorway.

The floor and walls were dry. As dry and dusty as they had been the first time I saw them. The blood in the room, every drop of it, was gone.

“BY THE time this house is despooked we’ll all be at Alcoholics Anonymous memorizing the steps and waiting for our liver cells to rejuvenate.”

Frank had a point. I had consumed more liquor in the past three days than I had in the last six months. Even Michael, never much of a drinker, had been tossing the stuff down like water since his arrival at the house. The property was simply not conducive to sobriety. I was beginning to wonder if it ever would be.

After long hot showers to erase the last vestiges of blood from our bodies, we were sitting around the living room in pajamas and bathrobes as the late afternoon sun slowly dipped behind the mountain, cooling the house. Each of us had a drink in our hand, and it wasn’t the first since the episode in the carriage house had scared the holy hell out of us.

Jesse, with the help of a Valium and several Tequila Sunrises was looking back on what had happened with an air of indifference that didn’t fool anyone. I thought I still detected a trace of his former panic buried somewhere behind his big brown eyes (now lightly brushed with mascara, which no one commented on), but I couldn’t be sure. And if a bit of makeup made him feel more capable of dealing with everything that was being thrust at us, who were we to say he was being silly?

Stu had not left his side since we returned to the house, but when he looked at Jesse now, I thought I detected a slight cooling of the ardor with which he had regarded Jesse before. I didn’t blame Jesse for panicking back at the carriage house, but I suspected Stu did. Or if not blamed him, at least found it rather embarrassing. Stu had never been one to accept weakness in others, especially others he was dating, but he could overlook weakness in himself as easily as the rest of us. Unbeknownst to Jesse, I suspected his days in our little group were numbered, and I felt rather sad about that. Someday Stu’s heart would be trashed like he had trashed so many others, and when he came to us to help him pick up the pieces, I wondered what we would say. Tit for tat?

Then, as if to put the lie to everything I had been thinking, I watched in amazement as Stu silently mouthed the words “I love you” to Jesse when he thought no one was looking.

Prior to that moment, I had never heard Stu say “I love you” to anything but a stack of hundreds or a plate of Kung Pao chicken. Perhaps Jesse’s membership into our little club wasn’t as doomed as I thought it was.

Lyle and Frank, in good times or bad, always brought out the best in each other. Their devotion to one another was so blatant it might as well have been stenciled across their foreheads. At the moment, they were cuddling and giggling as if they had just spent the last few hours surfing, the thing they most dearly loved to do in all the world, rather than being blasted by a spray of blood in their weirdo friend’s carriage house, where a demented, long-dead serial killer had taken up residence.

I sneaked a peek at Michael watching everyone. There was a tiny smile playing at the corners of his mouth as he sat beside me on the sofa, his hand, as always, gently stroking the nape of my neck. Michael was a physical person, and he needed physical contact with the person he loved. Everything that had happened to us inside this house seemed little more than a slight deviation from the norm in comparison to the happiness it gave me to finally know for sure that I was that person. My hand rested lightly on his leg as I closed my eyes and enjoyed the sensation of his warm hand caressing my neck, feeling his love flow into me like tiny jolts of electricity. I felt safe with Michael beside me. Safe and still amazed that he would uproot his life in LA to be with me. There was incredible evil in the world, but there was love and happiness in it as well. Funny they should all come together within the walls of this house.

We had thrown away our blood-soaked clothing. Even if the stains could have been washed away, none of us would have felt comfortable donning them again. How the blood could so completely disappear from the carriage house and Rex while remaining so steadfastly on the clothing, none of us understood and probably never would. It was pointless trying to make sense of a situation that was senseless to begin with. I refused to even try.

Frank drummed his fingers across the top of Lyle’s head as he stared at Michael staring at him. Lyle didn’t seem to mind having his head used as a tabletop; in fact, he hardly seemed to notice. He, in turn, was staring at me.

“I assume you’re still averse to the use of explosives, huh, Jim? The house belongs to you now, you know. You can blow it all the way into Mexico if you want. It would be perfectly legal. Well. Probably.”

“Tell you what, Lyle,” I said. “You and Frank write me a check for a million five, and I’ll turn the property over to you, and you blow the fucker into outer space. Sound good?”

He and Frank looked at each other. Frank dipped his eyes and shook his head no.

“Darn,” Lyle said.

Stu sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the unlit fireplace, while Jesse, flat on his back with his head in Stu’s lap, sipped at a massive cocktail through one of those novelty drinking straws that was probably three feet long, and which he had wrapped around his head like a tiara. He was the only person I knew who could be obviously gay even in a supine position. I could see his drink winding its way through the transparent straw as it made its weary way around his head twice before reaching his mouth.

“I hope you’re insured,” he said between sips. He twisted his head around to look at me. “You are, aren’t you?”

“What do you think, Jesse? Escrow closed all of two hours ago. Have you seen me consult an insurance agent?”

Michael’s hand tightened on my neck. “He has a point. If Nigel decides to burn the place down around our ears, you’re going to be out a lot of money. Since you sprang for the house, the least I can do is pay for the insurance. I’ll call my agent first thing in the morning.”

I was in no position to argue. Until a royalty check came in or my condo in LA sold, and it wasn’t even on the market yet, I would be lucky to find the funds to keep us all in liquor and hair spray. It was humbling to think that only yesterday I had had over one and a half million accessible dollars in the bank, and today I couldn’t afford a bucket of the Colonel’s Extra Crispy chicken. Thank God for plastic.

I turned back to Lyle. “What kind of explosives were you thinking of?”

Michael jumped as if I had just plucked a fistful of hair from his balding head. “What the hell are you talking about? Don’t tell me you’re actually considering that idiotic idea!”

I smiled and gave him a consoling pat on the cheek. “Don’t look so worried. The last thing I would do is destroy this house. I love this house. You love this house. We’re going to live here for the rest of our lives, remember?”

“Then why ask about the…?”

“It’s the carriage house I could live without. It’s the center of most of the haunting. It might weaken Letters considerably if we did away with it.”

“Or just really, really piss him off,” Stu said.

I ignored the comment. “It’s like the evil is held captive inside those damnable brick walls. There’s no way for it to escape. No way for the boys to escape. And maybe the constant darkness feeds Letters’s spirit somehow, keeping him as strong and as cruel as he was when he was alive.”

Michael looked at me as if I had just sprouted another head. “You don’t know anything of the kind. It’s all pure conjecture. And even if you did want to tear down the carriage house, there must be easier and less noisy ways to do it. Hell, just get in there with a sledgehammer and knock the brick walls down and let in the light. If it’s the darkness he uses, that would pretty well solve the problem, wouldn’t it?”

“My God, Michael, that’s a brilliant idea!”

“It is?” Michael said.

“It is?” Lyle echoed.

Frank just shook his head.

“Yes!” I said. “The brick walls are inside the original carriage house walls. Letters built them himself, and he didn’t do a very good job of it. A good kick would probably bring them down. We could remove the walls and still maintain the integrity of the building. Heck, then we’d have a garage!”

“Hmm,” Michael said.

“Hmm,” Lyle echoed.

Frank still shook his head. In fact, he had never stopped shaking it.

Stu took a long pull from his drink. “I don’t do construction work. I’m an artiste.”

“What’s a sledgehammer?” Jesse asked.

MICHAEL AND Frank, both reasonably sober compared to the rest of us, offered to make a tool run. They returned from a Home Depot two hours later with three sledgehammers, two shovels, a miner’s pickax, six pairs of work gloves, a pretty red wheelbarrow, and a pot of tulips they had snagged from the nursery on the way out.

Frank handed the tulips to me. “For your dining room table,” he said. “It’s a housewarming gift.”

“But you used my credit card!” I bellowed.

Frank grabbed them back. “Fine. If you don’t want them.” He turned to Michael and handed him the tulips. “For your dining room table,” he said. “It’s a housewarming gift.”

Michael sniffed them very politely and placed them on the table. “Thank you, Frank. They’re lovely.”

I rolled my eyes so far back into my head that I almost toppled over backward.

“Let’s just get to work, shall we?”

Everyone spoke at once.

“You mean now?”

“It’s nighttime, for Christ’s sake!”

“What about dinner?”

“I have first-degree burns on my face, and I’m drunk as a skunk. I can’t be expected to work!”

“What should I wear?” Jesse asked, still sporting his straw tiara. “Khaki?”

Lyle patted him on the head as he would a rather dim-witted child. “Denim might be more appropriate, my love. Think Village People.”

“I don’t have a hard hat,” Jesse pouted, as if he couldn’t believe he had forgotten to pack one.

“Your straw tiara will do nicely.”

“Oh. Okay.”

It was with a certain amount of trepidation (two drinks later) that we opened the carriage house door and peeked inside. Seeing no blood or ghosts or slavering creatures waiting to pounce on us, we trundled the wheelbarrow containing all our tools inside. Jesse, as Lyle suggested, had changed into skin-tight, faded denim jeans and a blue work shirt. The fact that both the jeans and the shirt had tiny yellow daisies appliquéd on them in a rather haphazard, but fetching, manner lessened any sort of resemblance he might have had to an actual construction worker, but we were used to Jesse by now. His dress sense might be a bit bizarre, but his common sense was unimpeachable, as proven by the two-gallon thermos of Margaritas he carried in his right hand like a purse. In his left he held the glasses and cocktail napkins. He might be as effeminate as a pink poodle, but the man knew how to pack a lunch box. Happily, he had dispensed with the tiara.

On closer inspection, the brick walls Nigel Letters had erected inside the carriage house were not as shabbily laid as I had previously supposed. The murderous old queer had done a far better job of laying the bricks than any of us could have done, a fact which irked me considerably for some reason. He may not have known how to align them perfectly but he apparently understood the need for good strong mortar, which he had used in abundance. It would take some work to tear them down.

With hands on hips, Jesse eyed the four brick walls like he might have eyed a three-hundred-pound Appalachian hog farmer who had stumbled into his presence and asked to be fitted like Jackie O in a Dior suit and pillbox hat. He didn’t know where the hell to begin. So choosing more familiar territory, he pulled on the work gloves, and after languorously stroking each bulky finger until it lay snug against his skin, not unlike a woman smoothing out her evening gloves, he began pouring drinks from the thermos and passing them around à la Martha Stewart doing a Dickies commercial.

The last thing this construction crew needed was another drink, but the possibility that the walls would once again begin spouting blood was enough incentive for anyone to keep drinking.

And so we did. In hindsight, it was a poor decision.

None of us, neither the writer, the hairdresser, the veterinary surgeon, the real estate agent, the lawyer, or the seamstress/cosmetic consultant, and all of us as gay as we were inebriated, knew what the hell we were doing. Only I was familiar with hard work, not because I had ever actually done any, but because I had written about it. In my imagination, it seemed rather stimulating and all-American, but in reality I was as unaccustomed to the concept of actual physical labor as Jesse or any of the others. Being a writer, I was prone to having words pop into my head that best described certain situations I found myself in. At the moment, the word “clusterfuck” came to mind. It seemed vastly appropriate.

This would not be pretty.

After pouring another drink down our throats, each of us grabbed a tool.

“Where should we start?” Michael asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just knock ’em down.”

“Thus began our longest journey together,” Lyle muttered, quoting To Kill a Mockingbird before swinging the heavy sledgehammer against the bricks with a grunt. I could see the reverberation of the blow travel up his arms like an earthquake rattling and rolling across the countryside. He gasped with the pain of it and dropped the sledgehammer on his foot. A portion of brick the size of a toenail fell with a clink to the floor. He studied it in disbelief as he massaged his aching foot. “This might take a while,” he said.

Soon the carriage house echoed with the sound of demolition and cursing. I managed to make a tiny hole with the pickax after fifteen minutes or so, but all I saw through the hole was more bricks. “My God,” I said, wiping sweat from my eyes. “It’s a double wall.” The news was not pleasing to anyone, but the work continued.

When the carriage house became so filled with dust and heat that I could neither see nor breathe, I called a halt to the proceedings.

“We need a better plan,” I gasped.

“And another cocktail,” Lyle added.

As the dust settled, and Jesse began once again sloshing Margaritas out of the thermos and passing them around, this time with trembling hands from all the exertion, I realized what the problem was. We were tackling all four walls at once when we should be concentrating our efforts in a specific area, preferably in the front of the building where the big garage doors were. Once we made it through the brick wall there, we could open those doors and let in light and air.

“Look at this,” Frank said. “Rex is helping.”

At the back of the building, where the carriage house abutted the side of the mountain, we saw Rex clawing and scratching at the base of the wall, just as he had when he and I spent the night here.

“There must be something back there,” Lyle said.

I shook my head. “The only thing behind that wall is a mountain.”

“Are you sure?” Michael asked.

“Well….”

Michael gently nudged Rex aside, and after first spitting into his gloves like he actually knew what he was doing, he hauled off and crashed the sledgehammer into the bricks. He didn’t make much of a dent, but the sound of the blow was promising.

“Sounds different,” Stu said. “Sounds hollow.”

The bare light bulb in the carriage house ceiling flickered, but I was the only one who noticed it.

“Give me the pick,” Michael said.

I handed it to him.

He tossed the sledgehammer out of the way and, with the pick, began chipping away in earnest at the bricks. He had removed his shirt earlier, and I could see the muscles cording across his shoulders. The sweat pouring down his back had discolored the seat of his jeans, and I thought he had never looked more handsome.

As Michael worked and the rest of us lolled around sipping Margaritas, it took all my effort to keep Rex away from the wall. He was snapping and growling at every piece of loose brick that bounced across the floor. Finally, after several minutes when I thought Michael must surely be ready to give up, a large portion of the wall crumbled in on itself. A big hole had opened up about four feet from the floor, and we all surged forward to peer inside. I expected to see another wall in there, just like the one I had seen on the other side of the building, but nothing could be seen through the hole but darkness. I reached my hand in as far as it would go and felt… nothing. A surge of foul, fetid air flowed through the opening and caused me to back away.

“Oh Jesus,” I said, squinting against the smell. “What’s in there?”

Everyone smelled it now. There was a stench of rot or corruption, and an unhealthy, crypt-like mustiness that set my teeth on edge. It reminded me of sweaty, unwashed sheets and fouled carpets and rank bodies long unbathed.

“This can’t be good,” Stu whined. “Brick it back up.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Michael said.

He dropped the pickax and, hoisting the sledgehammer again, gave the wall one good whap, and we watched as a whole shitload of bricks went crashing into the darkness beyond. We could hear the bricks rolling and tumbling away in the shadows like an avalanche.

When the dust cleared, we stared, slack-jawed, at the stinking hole, then at each other, then back at the hole.

Rex stood at the edge of the opening and growled, but he seemed as disinclined to go through the opening as we did.

“Smells like a sickroom,” Frank finally said.

I agreed. “It’s been closed up a long time. The air is dead. I wonder how far back it goes.”

“Don’t know,” Michael said. “And we’re not going to know until we rig up some lighting. There could be pitfalls. Bottomless holes. Snakes. Who the hell knows what’s in there?”

“So you think it’s a natural cavern?”

He grunted. “Has to be. This is solid rock. Letters couldn’t have dug this out in a million years. He must have found it, though.”

“Yeah. Found it and bricked it up. I wonder why.”

“Whatever the reason,” Michael said, “we’re not going in there without light, and we’re not going in there drunk. It’s probably been here for a thousand years, or even ten thousand years. One more night isn’t going to make any difference.”

Stu leaned in for a moment to scope it out, then quickly stepped back. “We’re going to need ropes too. Look how steep that is. Goes almost straight down, looks like. Can’t really tell, it’s so dark. But I think it levels off farther in. We’ll need the ropes to get back out.”

Jesse slapped him on the arm. “What do you mean, ‘we’? You aren’t seriously considering going down there, are you?”

Stu blinked in surprise. “Absolutely. There could be anything in there. Gold or silver, maybe. Or Paleolithic cave art.”

I laughed. “Pirate treasure?”

Stu looked slightly offended by my doubting attitude. “It’s possible,” he said. “We’re less than ten miles from the ocean. Next month we might all be on the cover of National Geographic.”

“More likely the six o’clock news,” Lyle said. “Listed under ‘Victims of Gay Spelunking Debacle.’ Anyone who goes down there is a frigging fool.”

“I’m going,” Frank said.

Lyle looked at him for a couple of beats. “You are? Okay, then I’ll go, too. Sounds like fun.”

Frank grinned. “Knew you’d think so.”

Lyle grinned back. “Always wanted to be on the six o’clock news.”

“I was on it once,” Jesse said, apropos of nothing. “Cops raided the Vulcan Bathhouse one Saturday night, and when they marched everyone outside, most of us still wearing only towels or Trojans, the reporters were waiting for us. Caught it all on tape. They did a weeklong special titled Sex in LA and ran that film clip every night as an intro. I should have got residuals. The cheap bastards.”

“What were you charged with?” Lyle asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

“Being a slut. On the criminal chain of offenses, it’s just below misdemeanor and slightly above reckless stupidity.” He nodded at the cave. “Going down there would be reckless stupidity.”

“So you’re going, then?”

Jesse patted his hair and a piece of brick fell out. “Sure. Why not? Stupid and I are old friends.”

I figured when the rest of us climbed through this hole with him in the morning, the same could be said for us.

I never dreamed that one of us would be in there before the night was over, naked and bruised and trussed up like a Christmas goose, waiting to be carved.

Life is full of surprises, isn’t it?

IT WAS not yet eleven o’clock when we traipsed our weary asses back into the house, and after a quick dinner of fruit and cheese and an excellent loaf of sourdough bread I had picked up the day before, Michael and I filled the huge bathtub in the master bathroom to the brink, poured in enough bubble bath to eradicate our stink, and eased ourselves into it to soak, face-to-face. I closed my eyes, relishing the feel of our bodies touching beneath the foam. Michael leaned forward and ran his hands across my chest, soaping me down.

“The evil isn’t centered in the carriage house,” he said. “It’s centered in that fucking hole.”

Reluctantly, I opened my eyes. “How do you know?”

“Just a feeling.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t go in there,” I said.

“I don’t think we have much choice. Letters wants us to go in.”

“You don’t know that.”

I closed my eyes again when Michael’s hands brushed my groin as they slid down to stroke my legs beneath the water.

“He didn’t try to stop us, did he? With him, that’s as good as an invitation.”

He lifted my foot from the water and pressed his lips to my instep. I could feel the bristles on his face against my tender skin. He needed to shave again.

I heard water running in other parts of the house as our friends, too, prepared for bed. Someone laughed. It sounded like Frank. Rex padded into the bathroom and rested his chin on the edge of the tub, watching us. He had his favorite toy in his mouth.

I smiled. “Someone is ready for bed.”

Michael absentmindedly pulled his hand from the water and gave Rex a gentle tweak on the nose. Rex’s eyes closed at his touch, just as mine had.

“Are we crazy?” I asked.

Michael ignored the question. “You have to write a book about this, Jim. It’s important that people know what happened here. And you have to write it as fact, not fiction. The boys deserve that.”

I sighed. “The boys….”

Were we fooling ourselves? And them? Would they ever really be able to rest in peace? Could we release them from the evil that held them here? TJ seemed to think so. He had said as much. According to him, the Crisp boy had already been freed. But how could we really know that? How could we know for sure that any of them would be released from their suffering when this was over? And where would they go? Would their spirits rise up into the sky like doves or would they just become… nothing? Nothing but memory. I supposed even nothing was better than torment. They wanted us to help them. That much was clear. Maybe they knew what awaited them, even if we did not.

“I’m not sure my publisher would touch it,” I said. “Not written as fact. We would be opening ourselves up to all sorts of litigation. Letters probably has relatives around somewhere. They might not take kindly to having their famous family member raked through the coals and accused of kidnapping and torture and murder and mayhem and God knows what else without proof to back up the allegations. And proof is something we’re not exactly abounding in. We can’t drag one of the boys to a press conference to testify against him. Spirits don’t do media blitz.”

“We have some proof,” Michael said. “We have the things you found boxed away in the carriage house. Items of clothing. Instruments of torture. Maybe we’ll find what we need in the cavern tomorrow. Maybe there are bodies down there, Jim. Bones. Human remains.”

“God, I hope not.”

Michael smiled as he nibbled my toe. “Do you really? Come on, Jim. Admit it. You’re having the time of your life. This is like a validation of your life’s work. All those creepy, empirically impossible stories of yours. All the blood, the guts, the gore. All the supernatural crap you write about so well. Now is your chance to show the world it isn’t all just a bunch of hooey. You’d be a fool not to write about it. And I imagine your publisher would tell you the same.”

“My agent already thinks I’m insane, buying this house the way I did. I’d hate for my publisher to think it too. And then there are my readers to consider. In fictional form, they’ll accept pretty much anything I write. I don’t mind them thinking I’m strange. Anyone who writes the sort of books I write would have to be a little strange. But I really don’t want them thinking I’m certifiably nuts. If I tried to sell them this story as truth, they might think exactly that.”

“But it is truth.”

“Yes, Michael. I know. But try proving it.”

“Writing this story as anything but truth would be a lie, Jim. A cop-out. You have the stories from the victims’ very mouths. You even get glimpses into the killer’s mind at times. The story is practically writing itself. All you have to do is type, for Christ’s sake!”

I groaned. Years ago, a writing teacher had critiqued one of my short stories by saying the typing was excellent, implying, of course, that the writing sucked. And it had, I realized later. It had sucked big time.

“I’ll tell you what, Michael. When this is all over, when the house is cleared of all the beasties and when the most annoying thing that happens here is that our friends come to visit, and when we don’t have to worry about conjured-up rattlesnakes or floating heads or all the other things that go bump in the night, then we’ll have this conversation again. When that happens, and when we have proof of what took place here seventy years ago, then I’ll write the book you want me to write. Like you said, it will have practically written itself, anyway. But without proof, there will be no book unless it’s written as a novel. Okay? Can you live with that?”

I was barely able to finish my train of thought because as I was speaking, his hands had traveled along the length of my legs and his fingers were now massaging a part of my anatomy that did not lend itself to coherent thought. He had a sly look in his eyes as he watched my face, gauging my reaction to his touch.

He pulled me toward him, and soapy water sloshed across the edge of the tub, causing Rex to scramble backward. Cupping my face in his hands, Michael brushed his wet lips lightly across mine before saying, “We’ll find the proof, Jim. It’s here. I know it is.”

As always, I let the touch of his hands, the closeness of his body, the smell and feel of him, transport me to that amazing place only he had ever made me see. I slid my hands over the soapy hair on his chest and down across his flat stomach beneath the water until I gripped the core of him, just as he was gripping me. His hard flesh pulsed in my hand, and once again his lips covered mine.

“We have to be careful tomorrow,” I whispered, my lips brushing his.

“I know.”

Between the heat of his body and the warmth of the water, I could feel my blood rush to every inch of my skin.

“However,” I said, “tonight you don’t have to be careful at all.”

He smiled wickedly and pulled me so roughly into his arms that suds flew everywhere, spattering the floor, the walls, the dog.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t.”

Later, as we lay together in my bed—our bed—slaked and contented, our limbs wrapped around each other as Michael snored softly beside me and I was drifting into sleep myself, I heard, coming from the direction of the carriage house, a boy’s crying through my bedroom window. It was a mournful, hopeless sound, so filled with pain and anguish that my heart ached to hear it.

I was suddenly consumed with guilt. Guilt that I should feel such happiness while that lonely voice cried so miserably out there in the darkness. It seemed immensely unfair that I should experience a love that this boy would never, could never, know for himself. His chances for love and happiness had been snatched away from him years ago by the hands of a killer. Pulling Michael closer, I eventually let the guilt carry me into an uneasy sleep.

Hours later, I awoke in tears of my own and crept from the bed and the safety of Michael’s arms to fumble through the darkness of the silent house to the breakfast room, where voices were calling me.

Two voices. So alike that they sounded like echoes of each other…

MARCH 1943

JEREMIAH DID not come from poverty. Not true poverty. He was born to a minister and his wife in a little house on Upas Street in the North Park section of San Diego, a middle-class neighborhood of wide sun-drenched avenues and friendly mom-and-pop businesses, where men doffed hats to women on the sidewalk and children played baseball in the street.

His was not an easy delivery.

There was a midwife in attendance because the religion of the household eschewed the practice of medicine in any form. God was the only doctor the family needed, the minister was fond of saying. So while his wife lay panting and screaming, and the midwife tried desperately to bring the man’s child into the world without killing both infant and mother, the minister knelt at the foot of the bed, lost in prayer, offering neither help nor consolation to the suffering woman who had shared his bed for so many years or to the midwife who was trying to save her.

After many hours, the midwife, furious by now at the useless man kneeling in her way, finally pulled a child from the woman’s womb. At first, she thought the child was stillborn. But after a resounding slap across the buttocks, the child drew a ragged breath, and the man raised his eyes to the ceiling to thank God for answering his prayers.

The minister’s prayer of thanks turned out to be a wee bit premature, however. He had forgotten the one basic fact that ruled all religion. And that rule was this—the Lord he prayed so fervently to twenty times a day was not a particularly generous God. Never was, never had been. He offered, in truth, very little to the hordes who worshipped Him. Nothing, in fact, but a vague unproven promise of everlasting glory after their earthly lives were ended. And his wife’s life ended five minutes after the birth, even before she could open her eyes to look upon the small bloody face that had killed her.

Whether or not she ascended to an eternity of bliss on the golden streets of heaven is anybody’s guess, but Jeremiah remained on Upas Street, where he grew into adolescence under the thumb of a man who he learned to hate more and more with every passing year.

While he had been given a biblical name, it didn’t stay biblical very long. Over the years, and at the boy’s insistence, his name was truncated to Jerry. And Jerry it remained from that day forth.

Like many children of ministers, Jerry was hell on wheels from the very beginning. At the age of fifteen, after a long string of more minor offenses, the boy was sent to a Youthful Offenders Camp in Yuma, Arizona, for two years for robbing a liquor store and beating the owner senseless with the butt of a gun he had stolen weeks earlier from a gun shop on University Avenue, just blocks from the house he grew up in.

During the two years of Jerry’s confinement, his father did not visit him once. Nor did he call or write. At the hearing that landed his son in Yuma, he had told Jerry straight out he was washing his hands of him forever, and he was as good as his word. Jerry never heard from his father again. To Jerry’s way of thinking, it was the first good thing that ever happened to him.

The second best thing to ever happen to him occurred on his first night in Yuma. He met another boy of fifteen from San Diego, also serving a two-year sentence at YOC for robbery. This boy, too, had been christened with a biblical name, which didn’t stick any better than Jerry’s had. Joshua was now Josh. And strangely enough, Josh was the spitting image of Jerry. Every one of the boys incarcerated with them said they could pass for twins. And it was true. Jerry and Josh looked so much alike, it was almost as if their friendship had been constructed at the molecular level.

They were drawn to each other immediately. And in truth, how could they not be?

By fifteen, when the robberies occurred, they had already grown into handsome young men as alike as two peas in a pod, both physically and mentally. The boys’ first experiment with sex came at the hands and mouths of each other. Soon their sexual horizons broadened to encompass every young male that caught their eye. In fairness to them, they were not the only young men in the facility for youthful offenders who chose this path. Many did. The place was packed with teenagers, and the teenagers were all packed with burgeoning desires that had no other outlet than the bodies around them. Consensual sex was an everyday occurrence between the boys caged there. And often, if the sex was not consensual, rape came into play. Many new arrivals at the facility spent their first nights weeping into their bunks on bloody sheets after they were held down and torn open by one or more of the boys who found them appealing.

But Jerry and Josh did not rape. If their overtures were ignored, they simply shrugged and turned to each other for sexual release. And they were not raped either, for they were always together, and anyone who tried to harm either of them found himself being beaten within an inch of his life before he could do so much as loosen a zipper.

At the age of seventeen, grown now to the very brink of manhood, the boys were released. They thumbed a ride from a trucker back to the only place on earth with which they were familiar. San Diego. While each boy had a parent in the city—Jerry, his father, and Josh, a mother who was so drunk most of the time she barely remembered she had a son—neither boy sought them out. Nor did either mother or father seek them out.

Since Josh was perfectly content to let his mother drink herself to death without any interference from him, the only concession the two boys made to honor their pasts, was an excursion to Upas Street to the house where Jerry was born. On a cool night in January of that year, they took a city bus from the halfway house downtown where they were staying while they looked for work, and while Jerry’s father was away at a prayer meeting, praying for things that had nothing to do with the son he had all but forgotten, the boys lit a fire beneath the back porch of the minister’s house, and by the time firemen were called, the entire place was consumed in flames.

With Jerry’s one and only debt repaid, the boys set about the formidable task of simply surviving. They found work at many things and always together. Moving furniture. Cutting brush. Cleaning fishing vessels on the bay. But none of the jobs lasted long. Not because the boys were unreliable, but because the war had sapped the strength from the economy, and the only jobs available were temporary to begin with.

Soon they gravitated to work they understood. Work they enjoyed. Still bearing an uncanny resemblance to each other, they quickly caught on to the idea of selling themselves on the street as twins. And it was a profitable decision from the very beginning.

They were approached one day by a man who said he had heard about the unique services they provided and who offered them, in turn, a business deal. The twins thought about the man’s proposition for all of fifteen seconds before accepting. At three hundred bucks a pop, they made a series of porno films for the man who never once tried to bed them himself. Sometimes, while the cameras rolled and technicians swarmed around them adjusting the lights and whispering directions, the boys would find themselves enjoying the bodies of some of the most handsome young men they had ever seen. At other times the cameras rolled on them alone, and these were the times the boys enjoyed the most. Even the pornographers would stop what they were doing when the boys took each other into their mouths, or when one would climb onto the back of the other and bury himself to the hilt in that beautiful mirror image of himself. And the enjoyment they took in each other’s bodies was not an act. They didn’t need to feign passion as so many of the others did. They relished every minute of it. And that passion between the brothers, or so everyone thought them to be, when caught on film, was something few had ever witnessed.

The films made the pornographer rich and kept the boys employed for almost six months, until the pornographer was found one day beaten to death by the father of a fourteen-year-old boy he had hired to work on one of his films. A forgiving and sympathetic jury, parents every one, gave the father time served, and he walked out of court that very day, but the pornographer was dead forever.

And the twins were once again unemployed.

After that, another setback gave the twins their first taste of desperation. They were evicted from the halfway house on Market Street where they had stayed since their return from Yuma when the supervisor of the facility caught them in an act of moral turpitude, as he called it, after walking unannounced into their room one evening and finding one boy in the process of inserting a large dildo into the eager anus of the other boy. Josh and Jerry, unembarrassed, only laughed at the shocked expression on the supervisor’s face because they also detected a glimmer of lust there as well, but their laughter turned the man’s lust to anger. Enraged, and far more ashamed than the boys, he told them to pack their things and leave. Twenty minutes later they were out on the street.

The money they had earned in front of the camera doing things that it never occurred to them to think were wrong—things, in fact, that they had now done with each other for two years without being paid to do them—that money was gone. It had flowed through their fingers like water the moment it came to them.

And now, with no roof or food and no money to acquire either, their minds again turned to robbery. They could sell themselves on the street as they had done often enough in the past, but that took time, and they were hungry now. They stood beneath a streetlight and emptied their pockets to find they had all of six dollars between them. Needing a place to sit and talk about what they should do, the lights of a diner on Market Street, which they had frequented before, drew them inside. There they ordered burgers and chili, and as they ate, they saw the woman behind the counter eyeing them as if she thought they might try leaving without paying their bill.

Jerry pulled the six one-dollar bills from his pocket and laid them at the edge of the table. He tapped the bills with a fingertip, gave her a palms-up gesture, and resumed eating.

The woman’s name, they knew, was Julene. Hell, it was painted on the window. How could they forget? The boys eyed the cash register on the counter more hungrily than they eyed the food on their plates, but they knew they would never rob this woman. She might not know their names, but she had seen them before, and after all, how hard would they be to identify? How many (supposed) twins did one see on the street?

To their surprise, Julene approached their table a few minutes later. She placed a serving of cherry pie in front of each of them and tucked herself into the booth beside Josh.

“Have a seat,” Jerry said, sounding more sarcastic than friendly.

Josh studied the pie. “We didn’t order those.”

Julene smiled at each of them in turn. “It’s on the house.”

The boys didn’t thank her, and she didn’t seem to expect them to.

JULENE SAT back and silently watched them eat. She had noticed the boys in here before. Not often, but occasionally. It was hard not to notice them. They were both as handsome as gods, and as far as she could tell, almost identical. But even as she admired their beauty, something about the two made her uncomfortable. She knew they hustled for a living. She could spot hustlers a mile away, but that didn’t bother her. After a moment to consider the question, she realized it was the air of completeness they generated, as if they needed nothing from the world other than the company of each other. On the face of it, that seemed like a good way for twins to be, but with these two, there was something unhealthy about it.

It was almost closing time, and Julene was tired. She plucked one of the dangly earrings from her ear lobe and stared at it. It was from the pair TJ had given her before he disappeared. She wore them every day. They were beginning to tarnish now, from the steam of the grill and the sweat of her body as she worked the diner day after day. They were cheap things after all. And always as she worked, her eyes were drawn to the front window, where she looked out on Market Street, never expecting but always hoping to see TJ there, waving at her through the glass as he used to do.

She sighed and returned the earring to her ear. Pulling a battered photograph from the pocket of her apron, she laid it on the table and slid it between the boys. It was the snapshot of her and TJ taken on the night of the party celebrating the boy’s sixteenth birthday. This was not the first time she had shown the picture to customers. She had done it hundreds of times, and always with the same result. She had scant hope that tonight would be any different, and it wasn’t.

The twins looked at the photograph with little interest. Julene fought back her anger at their obvious indifference.

“Have either of your seen this boy?” she asked. “His name was… is TJ.”

“Which is it?” Jerry asked. “Was or is?”

The not knowing was what hurt the most. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Sorry,” Josh said. “Never seen the kid. Your son?” he asked, looking like he didn’t believe it for a second.

Julene hesitated for the briefest of moments before answering. “Yes,” she said. “He’s my son.”

“What happened to him?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Try the cops.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice empty of all inflection. “I’ll do that.”

She slipped the photograph back into her apron pocket and pushed herself to her feet, disappointment alive and growing inside her. Like a metastasized cancer, it had spread everywhere now. She couldn’t move without feeling it eat away at her.

“You boys be careful,” she said. “It’s dangerous out there.”

She pushed their six dollars back to the center of the table. “And keep your money. Dinner’s on me.”

The twins’ eyes met, and they grinned at each other at their good fortune before looking back at the woman all innocent and doe-eyed.

“Thanks, lady,” Josh said. “And hey, we hope you find your son.”

Jerry giggled. His brother didn’t give a shit about the woman’s kid any more than he did. If it was her kid.

Julene ruffled Josh’s hair while giving Jerry a stern look through her horn-rimmed glasses and headed back to the counter.

“Me too,” she said, but they didn’t hear her.

After that night, she never saw the two again, but not once did the realization, when it finally came, strike her as odd. People come and go all the time, she thought. Only loved ones are missed when they never return.

Loved ones like TJ—leaving nothing in their wake but memories and a hole in the heart their love used to fill.

WHEN NIGEL Letters spotted the seventeen-year-olds leaving the diner, he didn’t know he had taken the boy named TJ who once worked there, and if he had known, he would not have cared. His mind was centered solely on the living. His eye was as skilled at spotting a prostitute as the woman’s inside, although his talent was derived from being a stalker of prostitutes rather than a former practitioner. But even if the two had not been for sale, he would have gone for them anyway. They were that delectable.

The two did not dress alike as many twins insipidly did, but the likeness of their faces and the similar way they carried themselves were uncanny in their sameness. Their beauty and youth, mirrored as it was in each other, made him ache to touch them and, in touching them, to slowly drain them of that beauty.

They were so alike in life, he wondered if at the moment of death, they might finally separate. Would one plead for salvation while the other struck out in anger? Would one weep as the other cursed? Might they not even turn on each other if they knew their lives depended on it?

That was a fascinating question indeed.

Since bringing death to his house on the mountain, Nigel Letters had never taken two boys at once. And now, staring at these two beauties, he wondered why. It would make the possibilities for gaming boundless.

He approached his prey without further thought.

THE BOYS saw the man immediately. In his expensive suit and air of grandness, he stood out on the crowded downtown street as readily as they did.

Josh and Jerry both knew what the man wanted even before he opened his mouth. He wanted them. And by the looks of the guy, he was more than capable of paying dearly for the privilege.

The man was not young, but that did not disturb the boys. If they grew bored with his pasty, sagging body and eager, fumbling caresses, they could always turn to each other for enjoyment. The man could join in or simply sit back and watch. Either way was fine with them. And whichever path they chose, they knew the man would figure his money well spent. And his money was all that mattered.

Fearless, as was their way, they waited for the man to come to them.

NIGEL LETTERS sat in a wingback chair in the music room as the boys pleasured each other on the floor at his feet. He directed every movement of their bodies in his deep, cultured voice until the boys simultaneously arched their backs and cried out in orgasm.

Only then did Nigel touch them, bending down to wipe the semen from their stomachs and chests with gentle strokes of his cool fingers, which caused the boys to shudder with the erotic intimacy of that simple act. Then, bringing his hands to his face, he inhaled the scent of the boys’ sweet juices as they watched him, amused.

Nigel rested his arms along the sides of the chair and left the semen to dry on his hands. He enjoyed the feel of it crisping on his skin.

He smiled down at them. “You boys love each other, I think.”

Naked, the boys lay in each other’s arms, their bodies sparkling with sweat. Idly, Josh still stroked the other’s cock as it softened in his grasp.

“Every chance we get,” he said, his voice still husky in the aftermath of lust.

“Shed the suit,” Jerry said, “and join us. You paid enough. You might as well get your money’s worth.”

Nigel watched new desire stir the boy even as the spent desire waned, and his laughter echoed through the silent house. “Don’t worry, son. I’ll get my money’s worth before the evening is over.”

Nigel rose, stepping over the boys, and walked to the french doors leading out into the desert garden, which in the daytime gave the music room much of its beauty. It was nighttime now, and he could see nothing through the glass but his own reflection and the reflection of the boys behind him as they still lay together in each other’s arms. He could see them watching him for a moment, but soon they turned back to each other, and when they did, he struck.

Taking a telescoping metal rod, which stood propped behind the curtain, he popped it open to its full length, spun, and delivered a blow to the back of each boy’s head with enough force to disable but not to kill. The killing would come later.

As they lay stunned from the blow, he quickly slipped a pair of handcuffs onto each of the boys’ wrists, binding them together. He pulled another pair of handcuffs from his trouser pocket and fastened their ankles, again binding them together, one leg to the other, so they lay constrained, side by side. Groggy from the blows, they didn’t fight, nor did they seem to understand what was happening. With a third pair of handcuffs, Nigel fastened one ring to the leg of the piano and the other around Jerry’s remaining unbound wrist.

When the boys were securely hobbled, he returned to the chair and waited for them to wake.

Josh was the first to come around. As soon as he seemed cognizant of what was taking place, Nigel said, “You have one unbound arm, son. If you try to fight me with it, I’ll break it like a matchstick. Do you understand?”

JOSH NODDED, and the motion of his head made him wince in pain. There was a smear of blood on the floor beneath him where the metal rod had cut his scalp. It took him a minute to realize what the man was talking about. Only when he tried to move his left hand and found it manacled to Jerry’s right, did he fully understand.

He studied Jerry’s face. “Is he dead?” he asked, tears of both pain and fear welling in his eyes.

“I hope not,” the man said. “That would spoil everything.”

Josh looked down along his naked body and saw that his left ankle was manacled as well. He tried to pull himself to a sitting position but couldn’t.

“What are you going to do with us? Why did you bring us here?”

The man pulled a pocket watch from his vest pocket and checked the time as he answered in an off-handed manner. “Because you sold yourselves to me, remember?”

“Not for this, you crazy old fuck!”

Letters ignored the boy’s outburst. “And at a fairly exorbitant price, I might add, but let’s not quibble over details.” He tucked the watch back into his pocket. “As soon as your brother wakes up, we’ll begin.”

“Begin what?”

Letters turned away and started removing items from a small leather valise and laying them on a tabletop. It was too high for Josh to see what the items were.

“Begin what?”

When the items were neatly laid out to the man’s apparent satisfaction, he left the room without looking back at either Josh or his brother, who was still out like a light. As the man’s footsteps receded down the long hallway outside, Josh gripped Jerry’s bare shoulder with his one unbound hand and shook him.

“Jerry,” he whispered. “Wake up. Come on, damn you. Wake up!”

Slowly, Jerry’s eyes fluttered open, and a low moan escaped his lips.

Josh shook him harder. “Jerry, wake up!”

Jerry’s eyes began to focus. He saw Josh’s face hovering over him just as the pain at the back of his head blossomed into a burst of stars before his eyes. He tried to raise his hand to touch the pain and only then did he realize he was restrained. He stared dumbly from one handcuff to the other that bound his wrists and his eyes popped open wide.

“What the—?”

Josh fought back a cry of relief at hearing Jerry’s voice, even as he clapped his free hand over Jerry’s mouth to silence him. “He knocked us out, Jerry. The crazy bastard knocked us out, and now he’s got us chained up like a couple of animals.”

“Why?” Jerry asked, trying to ignore the pounding pain in his head. “What does he want with us?” Fear was growing in his eyes.

“I think it’s him, Jerry.”

“Who?”

“Come on, dammit! Wake up and think! All those stories about people like us disappearing off the streets. This is the guy who’s doing it. It has to be. And now he’s got us.”

“Oh Jesus. We have to get out of here.”

Josh rattled the handcuffs binding their wrists. “How?”

Jerry looked around the room, panic beginning to set in. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He left.”

Jerry’s arms were spread wide, one cuffed to Josh, the other to the leg of the piano. Josh, with one arm free, leaned across his brother and tried to free the cuff from the piano leg, but it was hopeless. Even if he could have lifted the piano, which he couldn’t, the claw foot at the base of the leg would have prevented the cuff from slipping free.

“Motherfucker!” Josh spat, tugging so hard at the cuff that both boys cried out in pain.

Jerry heard the terror and fury in Josh’s voice and fought back a sob. “Stop it, Josh. Stop! Calm down. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

Josh was crying now, snot and tears streaming down his face, more from anger than anything else, but full-blown panic was setting in as well, and that frightened Jerry enough to make him force back the panic that was gripping him, too.

“Look around, Josh. Is there anything you can reach that can be used as a weapon? Something you can defend us with?”

Josh wiped the tears from his eyes with his free hand and looked around in desperation. There was nothing. The metal rod the man had struck them with was leaning against the wingback chair where the man had been sitting earlier, but it was well beyond his reach. He tried to scoot across the floor and reach it with his foot, but the other foot, cuffed to Jerry’s ankle stopped him.

Both boys froze when a shadow fell across their bodies. They looked up to see the man, naked now, standing over them. He had crept back into the room so silently on his bare feet that neither boy knew he was coming until he was already there.

Even in his panic, Josh almost laughed at the man’s appearance. His body was just as he had expected it to be. His torso was pale and bloated. Not obese, but out of shape. Untoned with age. Only the legs, firm and well-muscled, finely coated with dark hair, gave a hint of the beauty the man’s body must once have wielded. There was a red appendix scar just below the point where the stomach muscles began to sag. A recent acquisition, the boy figured, since it didn’t look completely healed yet. The man’s penis was large and semierect, uncircumcised, the head of it only partially exposed. In other circumstances, Josh might have reached up to expose that head completely. Taking his time about it. Coaxing it gently out of its bed of foreskin and slipping it into his mouth to see the man writhe beneath the motion of his lips and tongue. Josh’s sexual nature made him think these thoughts even as he found himself drawing away from the man.

It was not the man’s body, really, that had tempted Josh to laugh at first seeing him. It was the hood he wore over his head. A leather contraption with a large circular hole for the mouth and wide slits that exposed the eyes beneath. The leather looked soft. Pliable. When the man spoke, it moved to conform with his face, and Josh could see a smile behind the mask as the man scrutinize their bound, naked bodies.

“You are both so lovely,” he said.

Jerry, too, saw the man smiling as he stood over them. He swallowed his fear and tried to put a brave face on the situation. “Look, mister. If this is a sexual thing, you don’t have to worry. We’ll play along. Just don’t hurt us any more, okay?”

The man dropped slowly to his knees and ran his hands lovingly along the length of Jerry’s body, from his feet all the way up to his face, where they lingered for a moment before pulling away.

“Don’t fret,” Letters said. “Jerry, is it?” The boy nodded. “I won’t hurt you any more.”

Josh almost peed himself with relief. “Thank God,” he said. “You had us kind of worried there for a while.”

When Letters turned to Josh, the smile died behind the mask and the eyes turned cold.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said. Reaching across Jerry, he took a grip on Josh’s hair with his fist and yanked at the boy’s scalp while Josh screamed and thrashed and tried to pull away, and Jerry pleaded with the man to stop.

Finally the man did, but not before a large tuft of strawberry blond hair was torn from the Josh’s head, along with a goodly amount of skin that the hair had once been attached to. Letters let the loose hair drift through his fingers onto Josh’s chest as the boy whimpered in pain. He had crawled so far away from Letters that his brother’s right arm and leg were now almost perpendicular to his body.

Letters grabbed Josh’s leg and roughly pulled him closer. He grinned at Jerry. “More comfortable?”

Jerry gave the man only a questioning glance before turning his face toward Josh. “You okay?”

Josh just stared at him through wide, frightened eyes.

“What do you think?” His voice was hoarse with shock. A fist-sized area at the side of his head, below the part, was pink and torn. A trickle of blood had seeped down the front of his ear. He wiped at it with his free hand, and when his fingers came away bloody, his face grew bright red, and he lunged at Letters like a cat.

Jerry gasped in pain when the handcuffs tore into his wrist and ankle as Josh flung himself across his body, trying to reach Letters with his one free hand.

“I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!”

Letters leaned backward, still on his knees, easily eluding the boy’s grasp. As Josh still fought to reach him, Letters smiled at Jerry. “Your brother’s distraught. I’d better calm him down.”

He pulled himself to his feet, took two strides toward the wingback chair, and picked up the telescoping metal baton. Popping it out to its full length, he swiftly turned and rapped Josh across the mouth with it. It wasn’t a hard blow, but it was perfectly placed. The boy’s front teeth shattered like glass. Blood and bits of tooth flew away from him, spattering the floor and his brother’s face. Josh screamed and crumpled onto Jerry, all the fight knocked out of him in that one instant of mind-numbing pain. But a few seconds later, as he sobbed against his brother’s chest, the pain of the blow became as nothing when the nerve endings of his shattered teeth awoke screaming.

A pain he could never have imagined shot through him like fire. And along with the pain came renewed anger. His face soaked with blood, he lunged again at Letters who, smiling still, struck at the boy’s injured mouth once more with the metal rod. Josh’s upper gum split open as the stubs of his broken teeth were torn completely away by the second blow. This time, when Josh went down, he stayed down, sobbing uncontrollably as his brother tried to pull his arms free to comfort him.

Choking back sobs of his own, Jerry pleaded with the man. “Leave him alone.”

“I’m sorry,” Letters said. “You’re frightened.” He picked up a cloth from the tabletop and wiped Josh’s blood from Jerry’s face.

As Josh sobbed beside him, Jerry began trembling and couldn’t stop. The kindness and concern he saw in the older man’s face for him through the mask frightened Jerry more than anything that had happened so far.

He saw madness in those eyes that could look at him so sweetly and then turn so cruel when they gazed upon Josh. It was like the man was disconnected, one person one moment, another person the next. Jerry could see that the cruelty buried inside the man’s madness was centered solely on his friend, and he truly began to fear the man would kill Josh. Already, he had inflicted terrible injuries on Josh, and Jerry figured it was only a matter of time before the bastard turned that cruelty onto him as well.

But Jerry was wrong. Nigel Letters had other plans for him.

Josh, through pain-riddled eyes, watched the man tenderly minister to Jerry, wiping the blood from Jerry’s face, stroking his hair, running his hands caressingly along the length of his body, just as he himself used to do.

It didn’t take him long to reach the same conclusion as Jerry had. The man was going to kill him. Why Jerry still lay uninjured beside him, he couldn’t begin to understand. Aside from the first blow, which had allowed the man to subdue them, he had done nothing but cater to Jerry, fondling him, complimenting him, even as Josh lay bleeding and suffering on the floor beside him. Anger began to grow in Josh. And not all of it was directed at the man.

LETTERS SAW that burgeoning anger rising in the battered twin, and he knew the fury was not just for him now. He could see it in the boy’s eyes when he gazed upon his brother, still unharmed, lying beside him. He sensed the realization dawning in Josh’s eyes that his brother’s beauty, still unmarred, was something he himself would never again possess after this night was over. Letters grinned to himself. The kid’s smile was certainly shot to shit. There was no two ways around that.

Jealousy was rising in the boy as well as hatred, and Letters rejoiced at the sight of it. With another little push, he thought, with another dose of pain, he would see the true nature of the boy emerge. What would Josh be willing to forfeit to ease himself from the misery he was suffering? We shall see, Letters thought. We shall see.

AS JOSH, in his pain and growing hatred, curled himself into as close to a fetal position as he could get, hindered as he was by the bonds holding him to Jerry, the man stood and returned to the table, where he picked up a knife.

Both boys’ eyes flared open when they saw what he was holding, but it was Josh’s heart that sank the deepest. He knew the knife was meant for him, and Jerry knew it too. Josh could tell by the way his friend looked at him in pity. But behind the pity, behind the horror, Josh thought he detected a note of relief in Jerry’s face as well, relief that the knife was meant for Josh and not for him, and that relief enraged Josh further.

With his front teeth gone and his gums shredded inside his mouth, the sibilant sound of his own voice astonished Josh even as his fear brought the words pouring out of him. Blood gushed from his lips as he pleaded with the man to stop.

“Leave me alone. Please! Don’t hurt me anymore. I’ll do anything you want. I swear I will!”

Letters dropped to his knees on the boy’s free arm, grinding it into the floor. Flat on his back, Josh gagged on the blood slipping down his throat. He had to turn his head to the side to spit it out so he could breathe, and when he did, Letters gripped his ear and with a hard sawing motion of the knife, sliced it neatly from his head. Josh screamed as he felt the ear being torn away, and he continued to scream as Letters dangled the ear in front of his face before flinging it across the room.

Still trembling uncontrollably, Jerry watched the butchering of his lover in silence and mounting terror. As the man flung the severed ear away, Jerry turned his head and closed his eyes, trying to block out the sound of Josh’s screaming. Josh was lost to him. He knew that now without a doubt. Even as his heart ached at the loss, he began to wonder what he could do to save himself. There was no small amount of guilt accompanying that thought, but hell, it was every man for himself in this world. Why should he be any different just because it was Josh who was being thrown to the wolves? Or wolf. The wolf in the mask. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Josh would have been thinking the same thoughts if the tables were turned and through some horrible stroke of misfortune, the man had come after him instead. He loved Josh. They had had some great times together. But when push came to shove, Jerry knew he loved himself more.

He would do anything he could to get out of this room alive.

Josh was howling now with pain, sobbing and screaming all at the same time. Jerry wished for nothing more than that his hands were free—so he could clap them over his ears, his two ears, and shut out those horrible sounds. For the first time, he found himself wishing Josh would just die and get it over with.

The silence would be worth the loss.

Josh’s bloody hand clutched Jerry’s shoulder and pulled him close. Josh’s face was covered in blood. Tiny rivers of tears swept through the blood from eyes so stunned with pain and fear that Jerry could not see his friend in them anywhere. They were a stranger’s eyes. A wounded animal’s eyes.

“Help me, Jerry. Please help me. I don’t want to die like this.”

Jerry recoiled from the ravaged face that had once filled him with such desire, the desire that his father’s God had probably condemned him to hell for years ago. He knew every inch of Josh’s face and body as well as he knew his own. No. Better. But what spoke to him now was not Josh. Desire had been replaced by revulsion, and Josh saw it in Jerry’s eyes as clearly as he saw his own death looming in front of him.

Once again Josh turned to the anger that had been born into him—born into him just as surely as the lust that had driven him since the day he first understood lust at all.

He knew how he must look now, what he had become after the last few minutes at the hands of the fucking animal in the mask, and he cried for the loss of himself, but the fact that Jerry still lay untouched beside him, still beautiful, still intact, was more than he could bear. Or understand.

“You little fucker,” he spat through torn lips, spraying Jerry with blood. “You miserable, conniving, stupid fucker! You think you’re going to get out of this alive, don’t you? Don’t you!”

The words that came from Josh’s shattered mouth were almost indistinguishable, but the hatred Jerry saw on Josh’s face was crystal clear, and Jerry cringed away from it.

“Look at the bastard!” Josh screamed. “Just look at him!”

And Jerry did, turning his face toward the man sitting complacently in the wingback chair and watching them with all the rapt attention of a tabby cat studying two mice who had wandered carelessly into his domain. His bare legs were comfortably crossed, concealing his nudity, but the mask still covering his face did nothing to hide his enjoyment at the drama unfolding before him. His hands were bloody, and the knife still dangled from his fingers. He tapped it against his leg like a CPA might casually tap a pencil against the side of his cheek. Waiting. Waiting.

“Do you really think he’s going to let you live, Jerry?” Josh shook him so hard that Jerry’s teeth rattled. “Do you think he’s so hot for your sweet ass that he’s willing to let you walk out of here and tell everybody what you saw? How many guys do you think this fucker has killed already? A dozen? Two dozen?”

“Nine, I believe,” Letters said, smiling.

“Nine, Jerry! And if I’m ten, then you can damn well bet that you’ll be number eleven!”

“Actually,” Letters said conversationally, “you may have misinterpreted the sequence.”

Josh turned his fury away from Jerry, aiming it once again at the man in the mask. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, you crazy old bastard?”

But Jerry understood what it meant all too clearly. His mind was not splintered by pain like his brother’s. The man’s words tore into him like lightning. Icy fear flooded through him.

“You can’t!” Jerry cried. “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me!”

“And I won’t,” Letters laughed.

He rose from the chair and laid the bloody knife in Josh’s hand. “Kill him,” he said. “Kill your brother, and I’ll let you live. A little dental work and you’ll be as good as new. Of course, there’s the matter of the ear. I don’t know what we’ll do about that. Perhaps a longer hairstyle, what do you think?”

Josh stared at the knife in his hand. His first thought was to strike out at the man with it, but the man had already stepped out of reach. Josh turned to Jerry instead. He could barely think with the pain tearing through his head, but he understood what the man was asking him to do. He saw a dawning terror creep into Jerry’s face, that perfect face that so resembled his own, or once had. He watched as Jerry stared at the knife in Josh’s hand.

“Josh, no—”

A horrible toothless smile spread the torn, bloody lips as Josh pressed the knife to Jerry’s throat. He held it there as he laid his throbbing head on Jerry’s chest and listened to the thudding of the terrified heart inside. For the last time, Josh gloried in the silken skin against his face. He thought of the many times they had shown their love for each other, the love they both knew would one day damn them to hell, but reveling in each other, they had accepted the risk. And even now, when hell was finally upon them, Josh had no regrets. No one had ever filled him with such desire as this body lying beneath him now. His lover. His friend. They were one. They always had been.

Josh kissed the heaving chest and raised his head to look into Jerry’s eyes. They must look like my own, he thought. So filled with fear. But there was no pain there. Not yet. And he didn’t want to see it come.

“I love you,” Josh sputtered through bleeding lips. And turning to the man with the mask, he said, “We’re not brothers, you stupid fuck. We never were.” And lifting the blade from Jerry’s throat, he plunged it into his own.

Jerry screamed as Josh collapsed on top of him, a fountain of hot blood gushing over him. Tremors shook Josh’s body as the blood flowed from him, but he made no sound. He did not try to speak again. In a moment, he lay still and heavy on Jerry’s chest. Jerry pressed his face into the bloody neck and wept.

LETTERS SAT speechless. Realizing immediately that only truths could have spilled from that ruined mouth, an anger like he had never felt before surged up in him until finally a roar of outrage tore through the silent house. It echoed from room to room like some awful thunder. He sprang from the chair, overturning it behind him. Roughly pulling the lifeless body aside, flipping it onto its back, he stared at the knife protruding from the dead boy’s throat. There was blood everywhere.

Letters tore off the mask and flung it against the wall. The madness in the man’s face was so intense it pulled Jerry from the shock of what Josh had done and made him gasp at the sight of it.

His gasp was the last sound he ever made.

Letters grabbed the metal baton and began beating Jerry with it. The first blow rendered the boy unconscious and this spurred the man’s anger to even greater heights. He struck and struck again at Jerry’s face, Jerry’s body, snapping ribs, tearing flesh, until there was nothing left of the boy but a bloody pool of waste.

Trembling and spent, Letters finally stopped. Dropping the baton at his feet, he turned and walked away.

The two boys lay side by side as they always had, still now, as alike in death as they had ever been in life. Silent, until this night, when they had both reached out…

…TO ME.

I came back to myself with a long, shuddering breath, stunned by all I had seen. There were tears on my cheeks. Impatiently, I wiped them away. Rex lay asleep beneath the red chair, his chin soft and warm against my bare foot. The house was so quiet I could hear his faint snore.

With my mind still reeling from everything the boys had shown me, I waited for the final page to print out, then switched off the computer and, flexing the kinks from my neck, stood to leave the room. Rex yawned and hauled himself to his feet to follow.

Still half asleep, he bumped into the back of my legs when I froze in midstride, staring at the sliding door that sealed off the room from the rest of the house. I stepped backward, horrified by what I saw, and stumbling over Rex, landed flat on my back on the breakfast room floor.

Disoriented by the fall, which had knocked the breath out of me, I looked up and stifled a gasp as I stared at the human ear, still oozing blood, that had been nailed to the wooden door.

I closed my eyes, willing the ear to disappear, but when I reopened them, it was still there.

A cry from beyond the door got me back on my feet. I slid the door open enough to slip through without dislodging the ear and stumbled out into the dining room, where I found Stu standing in the center of the floor in nothing but a pair of briefs. He was holding his hands out in front of him and turning them over and over, as if wondering whose they were. They were covered in blood.

I tore the tablecloth off the dining room table, sending the pot of tulips crashing to the floor, and wrapped the cloth around his hands.

“What happened?” I yelled. “How did you cut yourself?”

He looked at me through dazed eyes. “I—I didn’t. It’s not my blood. It—it must be Jesse’s.”

“What do you mean? Where is he?”

“He’s gone,” Stu said. “There’s blood all over the bed. I think….”

“Think what, dammit? Talk to me!”

Stu cocked his head to the side, listening to something only he could hear.

I shook him until his eyes focused on my face. “Where is he, Stu? What happened to him?”

Stu blinked back tears. “I think Letters took him.”

Chapter 9

“WHAT DO you mean, Letters took him? How can Letters take anybody? He’s not even alive!”

Michael was furious. I suspected it had more to do with the feeling he was being outwitted by a dead man than the fact that Jesse was the one who had turned up missing.

Frank seemed skeptical as well. “How do we know he didn’t just leave? Has anyone checked to see if the pink fruitmobile is still parked out front? Maybe he ran out of mascara and flitted off to Sav-On to pick some up.”

Stu appeared to be weeping into his hands, so I answered for him. “Of course we checked! What about the blood on the bed? Doesn’t that tell you anything?”

Lyle chimed in, looking two-toned with his newly blond hair on top and his black morning stubble below. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him yet that he was standing there stark naked. Or perhaps he didn’t care. “How do we know it’s blood? Maybe he forgot to clean off his makeup and moisturize before he went to bed. Maybe what you saw was yesterday’s rouge and lip gloss. God knows he was wearing enough of it.”

“It’s blood,” Michael said with teeth-grinding patience. “I’m a doctor. Sort of. I know blood when I see it.”

Lyle did a little teeth grinding of his own. “Well, then maybe it’s that time of the month, and Jesse has a particularly heavy flow. I think that’s what they call it. Women can be so damned confusing sometimes, the way they talk about their plumbing. In parables. Like Jesus.”

Stu had heard enough. He dropped his hands from his face, and I was rather surprised to see his eyes were dry. He looked, in fact, as if he might have been laughing. Like Michael, maybe he was more upset by the circumstances than the identity of the actual victim.

“If you guys are finished skewering the poor man, maybe we can start looking for him. I’d hate to see him popping out of the ceiling some night with his skin peeled down to his ass like Arturo, or whatever the hell his name was.”

“Maybe we should call the police,” Frank said.

“And tell them what?” Michael asked. “The mean old ghost that lives in our house crawled through from the other side and absconded with one of our fruitloop friends? They would probably arrest us before they even started searching. And I don’t want some strutting macho cop looking down his nose at us while he laughs behind his hat and scratches his hairy rear end. Jesse has to be here somewhere. We’ll find him ourselves.”

Lyle innocently batted his eyes. “But the police are our friends.”

“Shut up, Lyle.”

“And what if he’s dead?” I asked. “What do we do then?”

“He’s not dead,” Stu snapped. “Don’t talk like that!”

“And the blood?”

“My God,” I cried. “The blood! In all the excitement I—”

“You what?” everyone asked at once. “In all the excitement you what?”

“The ear! On the breakfast room door.”

Lyle dug a pound of imaginary earwax out of his own ear before saying, “I’m sorry, Jim. I could have sworn you said ‘the ear on the breakfast room door.’ What the hell does a statement like that mean, exactly? Break it down for me. Subject, predicate, dangling particip—”

I did a finger flip to the end of his nose that made him howl in pain for about two seconds, but at least it shut him up.

“Someone attached a fucking ear to the fucking breakfast room door with a fucking nail. If you don’t believe me, go see for your fucking selves!”

Single file, they traipsed into the breakfast room, and by the sudden silence and then the jabbering of everyone at once, I knew the ear was still there, hanging on the door like some obscene piece of pop art.

It was Stu’s voice that rose above the others. “My God, he’s been mutilated!” And just as he’d done when he’d fried Lyle’s hair, Stu crashed to the floor with a bone-jarring thump that rattled the dishes thirty feet away in the kitchen cabinets.

Still single file, everyone but Stu traipsed back out of the breakfast room, with Michael in the lead. He had the ear on a sheet of typing paper and was examining it closely.

He stopped in front of me. “Weren’t Jesse’s ears pierced?”

“Hell,” Frank said. “He probably had everything from his eyebrows to his nuts pierced. I didn’t think to count the holes. Did you, Lyle?”

“Why, no, Frank, I didn’t. You, Jim?”

I sighed. “Ask Stu when he wakes up. I’m sure I don’t know. Why? Is that ear pierced?”

“Except for where the nail went through, no.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe it’s Josh’s.”

“Who the hell is Josh?”

“One of the boys passing as twins.”

“What boys passing as twins?”

“The boys passing as twins who died here in 1943.”

“I don’t know,” Michael said, studying the ear more closely. “Looks pretty fresh for 1943.”

Lyle flapped a finger in my face. “Someone’s been channeling again. That’s why all this stuff keeps happening. You keep stirring it up.”

I slapped his hand away. “We’re here to help the boys, in case you’ve forgotten. That’s the only way I know how to do it.”

Stu suddenly appeared in the doorway, rubbing the back of his head. “I think we’d better forget about the dead for a while and concentrate on finding the living. Okay? Jesse’s hurt, and we’re wasting time.”

“He’s right,” Michael said. “You two check the house. Jim and I will check the grounds. And Lyle, go put some pants on. I’m getting a hard-on.”

“Ooh,” Lyle said. “I’m intrigued.”

Frank rolled his eyes and stalked off, tugging his naked lover along behind him.

Michael went to the kitchen and placed the ear carefully in a tiny Tupperware container that was the perfect size for a human ear. Imagine the Tupperware company having the foresight to plan for such an eventuality. I made a mental note to write them a letter of praise and also to throw the container away later since I didn’t think I would ever want to eat out of it again. After Michael stashed it in the fridge, we headed outside.

The sun had not yet peeked over the crest of the mountain, but it was on its way, and it gave us enough light to search by. Except for the small, enclosed patio outside the music room, the side of the house farthest from the driveway was mostly untended scrub and chaparral. I pussyfooted through it with one eye peeled for rattlesnakes, real ones, while the other eye searched for clues, not that I would have recognized a clue if I had seen one.

“Good grief,” Michael said. “You look like Tiny Tim tiptoeing through the tulips! Search, dammit!”

I mumbled something about the fact that macho pricks didn’t always have to be policemen, sometimes they were veterinarians, and Michael came and nuzzled his face into my neck. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “Got caught up in the moment.”

I nuzzled him back. “Once an eagle scout, always an eagle scout.”

“Too true.”

“Look, Michael, Jesse’s not out here. But I think we both know where he is.”

“In the cave?”

“In the cave. Let’s just go down there and get it over with. I’m honestly starting to worry now. Stu was right. It’s time to stop the jokes and find the guy. I don’t intend to let anyone else die in this house. Letters bagged his limit a long time ago. We can’t let him open a whole new hunting season with our friends as the quarry.”

“Jesse’s a friend?”

“Stop it.”

“Sorry. You’re right. Let’s do it.”

We hopped the low stucco wall encircling the patio and entered the music room through the french doors.

I could hear Lyle in some far-off part of the house calling, “Yoo-hoo! Jesse! Where a-a-are you?” Apparently the seriousness of the situation hadn’t struck him yet as it had us.

Michael rushed off to prepare things for our trek into the cave while I stood rooted to the floor, staring about the room where Jerry and his lover Josh were long ago handcuffed and murdered. I wondered if police chemicals would find traces even now of human blood wedged between the floorboards, or did it have an expiration date? Like cheese? Had Letters cleaned up the mess himself? He must have. What thoughts had run through his head as he did it? Did he carry the bodies out to the carriage house? Was it the twins’ blood that Caroline’s mother saw on the veranda when she came to work that day so many years ago? Did Tania feed well that night, and did Letters watch as she consumed only the choicest morsels from each of the twins? And what of the bones? Were they buried somewhere on the property, or were they simply thrown into the brush like trash to be disposed of by scavengers?

A lot of questions. No answers.

I stood there thinking these thoughts, and for the first time in many years, I prayed. Prayed that after the telling of their story, the two boys had finally managed to escape from this house and from the man who butchered them. I prayed they were still together, and I even prayed they still found solace in each other’s arms. I could not bring myself to blame them for some of the things they had done. Who was I to throw stones? We play the hand we are dealt, and Josh and Jerry were dealt each other and little else. They played their hands to the best of their abilities. And it was love, after all, that made Josh do what he did at the end. It was a brave and selfless act, and any God worth his salt should be able to recognize that fact and forgive the boys for any other mistakes they may have made during the course of their short, tragic lives.

I certainly did.

Forgiving Nigel Letters was another matter altogether.

After a minute, and feeling fairly guilty about reducing the poor man to a postscript, I remembered to pray for Jesse as well.

LEAVING REX in the house, we set off with nothing but flashlights and a twenty-foot length of rope that Frank and Lyle dug from the trunk of the Hummer. What had looked like a perilous drop into the depths of hell turned out, under the beams of our flashlights, to be a steep but navigable incline leading down from the carriage house into a natural cavern about as large as a one-car garage. Uneven steps had been cut into the rocky slope, but not, I suspected, by Nigel Letters. They were worn and rounded from many years of use, perhaps by generations of some long-forgotten Indian tribe that had used the cave for shelter. Aside from avoiding the scattered bricks from the wall we had pushed through at the top of the steps, they made our descent as easy as walking down a flight of stairs.

The cavern was cool and dry, with a sandy floor, but there was an unhealthy odor to the place.

“Stinks down here,” Frank said. “Smells old.”

Lyle agreed. “Like Michael.”

“Shut up, Lyle.”

“Look!” said Stu. “Footprints.”

We followed his gaze, and sure enough there were footprints in the sand. Hundreds of them. Perfectly preserved, but so numerous they told us nothing. They could have been made in the last twenty minutes or a hundred years ago. If Jesse came this way, it was beyond our powers of observation to decipher.

We played our flashlights around. The ceiling was low, no more than two feet above our heads. It slanted upward on one side. The cavern had obviously not been cut into the rock by human hands; it was a natural fissure. Not being a geologist, I had no idea what sort of stone the mountain was made of, but it had a reddish cast to it. Like sandstone, but harder than what I imagined sandstone to be. The sand beneath our feet, too, had the same reddish tint and was as fine as beach sand, as soft as powder beneath our feet.

But for ourselves, the cave was empty.

“What the hell is this place?” Lyle asked, his voice hushed. He seemed to be imagining, as was I, the tons of rock hanging over our heads. It was not a pleasant sensation.

“Looks like we’re back in the Stone Age,” Frank said.

“Not quite.” It was Michael. He was aiming his light along the ceiling. “Look there.”

I followed the beam of his light, adding mine to it. There we saw a thick electrical cord, cracked with age, hanging from the ceiling, stretching from the doorway above our heads that led to the carriage house and all the way across to the opposite side of the cave. Midway, there was an empty socket where a light bulb must once have hung.

“Letters wired the place for light,” I said. “I wonder why he did that.”

“I feel a breeze,” Stu said. “And it’s not coming from the doorway. There must be a break in the wall somewhere leading to the outside.”

We stood in a pool of darkness in the center of the cave and shot beams of light outward, searching for the source of the breeze.

“There!” Lyle cried. “A passageway!”

Through a fold of rock along one wall that was almost an optical illusion when looked at head on, we saw a slash of shadow where the room opened up. We trained our lights through the crevice but could see nothing.

Stu yelled into the void. “Jesse! Are you alive?”

His words echoed eerily into the distance, but there was no answering call. If Jesse was in there, he was in no condition to respond, otherwise I had no doubt he would be screaming like a banshee.

“Christ!” Lyle whispered. “Don’t do any more yelling. Those echoes give me the creeps.”

Frank laid a hand on his shoulder. “They’re just echoes, babe. Don’t let it get to you.”

Lyle grunted. “Hmmph! Easy for you to say. You’re a lawyer.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

I pushed my way past them and stepped through the crevice. Even in the darkness, I could feel the room open up around me. It was obviously much larger than the room preceding it. There was movement of air, but it was unclean, the stench of it much stronger than before. The room was colder too. I felt a shiver tingle the nerve endings at the back of my neck. Looking back to make sure my friends were following, I stepped farther inside.

“A light switch!” Michael said, and suddenly the cavern became a blaze of light as a string of light bulbs flared up along the perimeter of the stone walls.

“Holy shit,” Lyle cried. “It’s a fucking dungeon!”

He was right. In a room as large or larger than the entire house outside, we suddenly found ourselves staring at what appeared to be a centuries-old torture chamber. An iron maiden stood against one wall, spread open to expose the lethal spikes inside. On another wall hung pairs of heavy iron manacles, attached to the rough stone walls by thick chains. On a long wooden table, scarred from years of ill use, rested two small iron cages—such as I had seen in countless horror movies in my youth—meant to encase living human heads. Beside them, rested vicious-looking axes with curved blades and long metal pokers, rusted now with neglect, that had been used for God knows what. Nothing pleasant, I felt sure.

There were other implements of torture and murder scattered about. A tall guillotine, supposedly one of the most humane means of execution ever devised. Stocks, where the unfortunate criminal was forced to stand for hours on end in a stooped position with head and hands clamped in wood. A hangman’s noose with thirteen loops. Steel headbands with tiny metal spikes and a thumbscrew at the back for tightening them.

The centerpiece in this macabre collection was a large cage, perhaps five feet high and eight feet square, which stood in the center of the sandy floor. It drew us to it like the Madonna draws the devout. Hushed, not knowing what to expect but hoping we wouldn’t find Jesse lying inside, we approached the infernal thing, and there, atop a tangle of mildewed rags and shredded articles of clothing, lay a skeleton.

Lyle’s voice was barely audible. “Is that—human?”

“No,” Michael said, bending down to get a better look. “It’s a cat skeleton. One of the big cats. By the size of it—”

“It’s a mountain lion,” I said. “It’s Tania. Nigel’s pet.”

“His pet? Isn’t that illegal? Endangered species and all that?”

“Not back then,” Michael said. “Besides, the man was a serial killer. Do you really think he would worry about something as mundane as animal rights when he was slaughtering humans left and right?”

“Hmm. Good point.”

“How do you know all this?” Stu asked me.

I stooped down beside Michael to look closer at the rotted clothing in the bottom of the cage. “The boys told me. Letters fed the corpses to her when he was finished playing his little games with them.”

“You’re joking,” Frank said.

“See for yourself. Those aren’t just rags. Look there, that’s a T-shirt. That over there is—was—a pair of briefs.”

“I see a sock,” Lyle said. “Jesus. Those poor kids.” Then as an afterthought, he added, “Fucking cat.”

“Don’t blame the cat,” I said. “She was just doing what big cats do. Letters was the animal here. Not Tania. She suffered as much at his hands as the boys did, and she suffered longer. He owned her for years. Since she was a cub. He tortured her from the beginning.”

“So she wasn’t a pet,” Michael said sadly. “She was just another victim.”

“Yes,” I said, looking into Michael’s eyes. Michael was a veterinarian, after all. And a fine one. He, more than any of us, understood how animals could suffer at the hands of humans.

I echoed his words. “She was just another victim.”

I jumped when Stu poked me in the back. “This is all very touching. Really. My heart bleeds for the damn dead cat. But where the hell is Jesse?”

“You’re right,” I said. “Everybody fan out. Keep looking. He must be here somewhere.”

“If he is,” Frank said, “he’s being awfully quiet.”

“I know. That’s what scares me.”

There were large wooden crates stacked in a corner, obviously undisturbed for years, but since they were a size capable of holding a human body, we tore them open anyway. Inside one we found a dismantled rack, where the victim was strapped in and his joints slowly pulled apart by the turning of a wheel. In another, an electric chair lay on its back as if the last person executed had tipped it over in his death throes. And in yet another, various electrical gadgets with dials and little lights that didn’t look like they really did much of anything.

“My God,” Michael said, digging through another crate. “These are movie props. None of this stuff is real.”

“What?”

“Look.” He abandoned the crate and went from article to article scattered around the room. “These head cages are made of balsa wood and painted black to look like iron. This iron maiden is made of tin or something. The spikes are papier-mâche´. This executioner’s axe is as light as a feather. This is all just Hollywood silliness. It must be stuff Letters gleaned from the movie sets he worked on. Everything here is fake!”

“Except Tania’s cage,” I said, testing the bars. “It’s real enough.”

“Yes,” Michael agreed. “But it’s the only thing here that’s real. That and the skeleton. She must have starved to death when he sealed up the cave. You know, if Letters wasn’t dead already I would really enjoy killing the bastard.”

Stu was all but jumping up and down with impatience. “But where the hell is Jesse!”

“Keep looking,” I said.

Everyone wandered off in various directions, searching under tables, behind boxes. I moved to a corner of the cave where the electric lights did not fully reach. There, by the light of my flashlight, I found a pile of clothing. Shoes, belts, trousers, shirts, all reeking with mildew and much of it stained with what looked like blood. The stench was stronger here, but not, I thought, from the discarded clothing alone. Looking closer I found, hidden in the shadows, another opening in the wall.

This time I did not check to see if my friends were following, but stepped boldly inside.

There were no electric lights strung here, or if there were, they were no longer working. I played my light along a fissure approximately twenty feet wide. It was colder here, and the stench was almost overpowering. Looking up, I saw that the roof slanted upward at a steep angle, narrowing to a point so high above my head, I couldn’t see the end of it.

Something white caught my eye up ahead. I walked slowly toward it until I was able to make out, of all things, an old porcelain bathtub, the kind with claw feet and rounded bottom. It was stained with some foul matter that had dripped along the sides of it, staining the porcelain brown. As I approached, I knew that this was the source of the fetid odor that had permeated through every room of the cavern.

The smell was caustic, like acid, and as I walked up to the tub, I held my breath. I tried to mentally short-circuit the olfactory nerve endings leading from my nose to the scent center in my brain, but both my nose and my brain refused to cooperate, so I simply breathed in the stench, leaned over the tub, and followed the beam of my flashlight to see what I would see. Big mistake. The tub was filled to about three inches from the brim with some sort of solidified gunk that reeked of lye or ammonia, and from the stinking, petrified sludge protruded the fleshless bones of one hand, one knee, and from the cheekbones up, the top half of a human skull. I jerked my head back so fast that my vision blurred while I struggled to regain my balance.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out the caustic substance, whatever it was, was meant to dissolve meat from bone, and from what I could see, it had done a damn fine job of it.

I wondered which boy this was lying in front of me. TJ? Allen? Charlie? Arturo? One of the two boys who’d passed themselves off as twins? Or was it someone I had yet to meet? The only person I felt certain it was not was Nigel Letters. His remains, according to everything I had read, rested peacefully in a vault stuck in a wall at Glen Abbey Memorial Park, a few miles this side of the Mexican border and less than twenty miles from this hole in the mountain where I was now standing and holding my breath. By all accounts, the brass placard on Letters’s crypt did not read Serial Killer, an oversight I, at that moment, would have dearly loved to remedy.

I blinked back tears from the reek, and as I did, a hand clutched mine. Not the skeletonized hand in front of me, but a warm hand consisting of flesh and blood and, apparently, memory.

It was TJ.

I swayed from the shock of turning and seeing his face only inches from my own, and for one horrible moment, I thought I might mimic Stu and keel over in a dead faint. TJ was still in blood-soaked jeans and still shirtless, and the loops of piano wire still encircled his throat. Above a streak of blood at the side of his neck, I noticed for the first time that his ear had been mutilated, the lobe of it gone, giving his head an odd symmetry when looked at from the front. Only his face was pristine. Undamaged. He looked like he must have looked in life. Beautiful.

“You’re real,” I said.

He brushed a lock of blond hair from his eyes and smiled a gentle smile. “Yeah. So are you. Come with me. We don’t have much time.”

I felt no fear. I knew instinctively this was not Letters posing as the boy. It was the boy himself.

“Wait,” I said, gazing back at the bones in the tub. “Who is this?”

“It’s no one,” he said, trying to pull me deeper into the cave. “Who it was in life is not who it is now. Those are just remnants. Waste. Like ashes from a cigarette that no longer burns.”

“But who was it in life? I need to know. Please. I want a name.”

TJ stopped tugging at me and regarded the remains in the tub with a quizzical expression on his face that told me he was wondering what I found so interesting about them.

“That was Allen. The youngest of us. You met him the other night.” TJ cocked his head to the side and studied, as if for the first time, what could be seen of the young boy’s skull. “That wasn’t a very good time for him. He was much prettier before—you know.”

I did know. “Is he gone now?” I asked.

Again, TJ smiled at me, even as his free hand fingered the wire at his throat. “Gone? No one is ever gone. Death is just an illusion, you know. Like one of the man’s movie props. The dying is real enough. But not death. If you’re asking if Allen is still here with us, then the answer is yes. He is still here, but the man cannot harm him. You freed him from that. He can leave whenever he chooses.”

“Then it worked. What I did. It worked.”

The boy gave me a look of infinite patience, like a teacher regarding a piteously slow but well thought of student.

“Yes,” he said. “It worked.”

“Then why doesn’t he go?” I asked. “What is he waiting for?”

“He’s afraid,” TJ said. “He’s only a little kid. He’s afraid to go alone.”

“But where? Where will he go when he leaves this place?”

This time uncertainty crept into the boy’s face. He gazed upward into the darkness of the fissure that loomed over us. He raised his hand and pointed at the shadows above our heads. “Allen will fly away,” he said. “Up there. And when he does, he will be everywhere. Everywhere but here. In the sunlight. In the rain. In the trees. He’ll be the mist that hangs over the mountain in winter. The dew on the grass at sunrise. He’ll be the thought that suddenly pops into your head out of nowhere. The breeze that cools your brow or the heat that makes it burn. Poetic enough for you?”

“What?”

“I haven’t been there yet. I don’t know where he will go. Do you?”

I hazarded a guess. “Heaven?”

TJ considered the word for a long moment as he continued to stare into the darkness that hung over us. Finally, he lowered his eyes and looked into mine. “Heaven to us would be anywhere else.”

“Yes. I suppose it would.”

“Then I answered your question,” he said. “Are all writers as annoying as you are?”

I laughed. “Probably.”

He nodded as if I had finally said something that made sense. “I figured. Come on.”

“Where are we going? My friends are with me.”

“No,” he said. “Only you were allowed to see the opening that led you to this room. Right now your friends are trying to figure out where you went.”

“They’ll be worried,” I said, looking back.

TJ grinned. “Scared shitless is more like it. Come on.”

Still clutching my hand, he pulled me along the narrow fissure. In the darkness it seemed endless.

“There are many dead ones here,” he said as we walked. “Not just us, but… others.”

“Others?”

“People from long ago. Their bones are buried in the sand.”

“You mean Indians?”

“Perhaps. They don’t speak to us. I don’t think they can. They floated away long before we came. Only their bones are here now, and many of those have turned to dust.”

“TJ,” I said, “you look and feel like flesh and blood, but I know you aren’t. Where are your bones?”

“There,” he said, pointing to a glimmer of white I could see at a distance, at the very edge of the beam from my flashlight. TJ released my hand as I approached it.

“My God,” I breathed as the light finally illuminated what I was seeing. It was a pyramid of skulls, perhaps fifteen in all. Nonexistent eyes seemed to follow me as the shadow from my light played in the empty sockets. Either through time or chemicals, all vestiges of flesh had been removed from the bones long ago. They were as smooth as porcelain, and in the light I aimed at them, as luminescent as opal. They were, in a strange way, lovely.

“Is this all of you?” I asked.

“All of me?”

“No. All of the murdered boys.”

“Except for Allen, yes. And perhaps one other. But not all of us are still here. Some flew away at the moment of their deaths. They left their bones behind but their souls are gone. The man was unable to hold them. Even so, there are many of us still here.”

I remembered the stampede of footsteps through the darkened house. When was it? Yesterday? The day before?

“The man is very angry with you,” TJ said, reaching out to stroke my cheek, forcing me to look away from the skulls and back to him. “You took the child from him, and now he’s afraid you will take the rest of us.”

I felt a sense of accomplishment wash over me that was stronger than anything I had ever felt before. “Let me go, then. Let me go back to the house. When the rest of you tell me your stories, you’ll be free as well.”

“No. You need our help. You can’t defeat the man alone. Even with us, maybe you won’t defeat him. He is very strong.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He’s with Arturo. This time Arturo called to him. Arturo is the closest thing to love the man has ever known. He was the most beautiful of us all. And he suffered the most. He’s still suffering. He’s suffering now. Even as we speak, the man is peeling the skin from his body. I can hear his screams, even if you cannot. Arturo gave himself to the man for the first time today. Always before, the pain was forced upon him. Today he offered it.”

“Why? Why would he do that?”

“So we could return what belongs to you. Your friend is down here. You need to take him away, or the man will kill him.”

“Jesse? Where is he?”

TJ pointed ahead. “He’s there. Among the bones.”

“His ear. Is he… cut?”

“No. The blood on the bed was mine.”

“You took Jesse?”

“Yes. The man told me to.” He closed his eyes as he again fingered the wire at his neck.

“You feel it, don’t you?” I asked. “The wire. It still hurts you.”

“Always,” he said. He opened his eyes, like a child awakening in pain. “Do you think when I fly away, I can leave this wire behind?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think you can.”

“That would be good.”

“I’m sure it would,” I said kindly. “I’m sorry this happened to you, TJ. Julene never stopped looking for you, you know. She never stopped loving you. She missed you until the day she died.”

He smiled sadly at old memories. “We never know who’s going to love us, do we? We pick and choose who we love, but what comes back to us is sometimes a mystery.”

The depth of feeling in his words touched me. “Were you always this wise?”

He smiled shyly. “If I had been, I would never have come into this house, would I?”

I stifled a chuckle, thinking the circumstances a bit too heartbreaking for that. “Probably not.”

He looked around at the darkness. “That’s what I think too. Now take your friend and go while you still can.”

He moved to turn away, but I gently grasped his arm. “Wait,” I said. “What about Jerry and Josh? And Charlie. Charlie Simms. Are they beyond the man’s reach now?”

“Yes, they are beyond his reach. The man can’t hurt them anymore. But there are things for them to do before they go. They will leave when they are ready. And they will take Allen with them when they go. We all will. We are his family now. We will take care of him.”

Again, he turned away from me. “TJ, wait. Please. I don’t understand. What is it they hope to do before they leave this place?”

“Important things,” he said.

He began to fade before my eyes. A glow of transparency seemed to open his body, as with a light from inside. Before he disappeared completely, I blurted out the question I had been longing to ask since he first made his presence known.

“Did you kill him, TJ? On the night that Letters died, was it you and the other boys that made it happen?”

A mischievous smirk spread across the handsome, boyish face, now all but melded into the darkness before me. His words came to me as from a distance. Already he was entering that other dimension where death had landed him.

I had to lean forward to hear his words. There was a taunt of laughter in them, like a child admitting just a soupc¸on of guilt.

“We might have helped,” he said.

And with that, he was gone, as if swallowed by the shadows. For a brief moment, I heard an anguished scream in the distance. Arturo. Then that too was gone, and as if the hidden portal, which TJ had shown only to me, leading from the room we called the dungeon, had suddenly opened up, I heard the voices of my friends calling my name. Four beams of light stabbed through the passageway, shooting this way and that, until one of them found me. Then I was blinded by them all.

I heard the pounding echo of running footsteps before Michael’s arms came out of the darkness and scooped me up. They were quickly followed by three pairs of others. Soon I was gasping for breath, being pawed by everyone.

“Christ, Jim, you scared us to death!”

“Yeah, we thought maybe old Nigel had you strapped to a board somewhere!”

“Stark naked!”

“Legs in the air!”

“Heels up!”

“Toes out!”

“Having his way with you! Over and over and over and….”

“Everybody shut up!” Michael yelled. “I’m getting a boner again!”

He was joking, of course, at least I think he was, but I could hear the relief in his voice at finding me in one piece, unbloodied, unskinned, and undead.

“Save it for later,” I said. “Jesse’s here somewhere. Help me find him.”

They had been in such a rush running along the narrow fissure to get to me, they must have overlooked the bathtub holding Allen’s remains and the pile of skulls of Nigel’s other victims stacked against the wall like Legos. And it was just as well they had. I wasn’t in the mood to explain it all to them. I remembered TJ’s warning to get my friend and go, and it was suddenly beginning to sound like excellent advice. Letters would be coming for Jesse soon, and I didn’t think it wise for any of us to be here when he did. I felt on safer ground inside the house than here in this hole beneath the mountain, surrounded by the bones of Nigel’s murdered boys. We were at a disadvantage here in the darkness. This was his realm, not ours. If I had to fight the man, I would feel a whole lot braver doing it in the light.

But first things first. Where the hell was Jesse? On the bones, TJ said. But where were the bones?

We moved deeper into the fissure, following our lights.

“Jesse!” Stu yelled into the darkness. “If you expect our relationship to last, you’ll need to be a little more accessible and stop sneaking off with actors!”

“Brilliant,” Lyle muttered. “Jesse is kidnapped by a deceased thespian serial killer, and Stu is comparing it to a weekend the man spent two years ago in Cancún with a talking head and swinging dick from All My Children.”

“Oh, shut up, Lyle. I love Jesse!”

Lyle turned and stared at him. “You do? Really? Why?”

It was the last question Stu seemed to take exception to.

“Love is blind,” he said. Rather cavalierly, I thought.

“Yes,” Lyle agreed, “but I didn’t know it was that blind.”

“Very funny, Lyle. It might also interest you to know….” Here Stu lowered his voice conspiratorially and stopped our progress down the fissure dead in its tracks by holding his arms out like a traffic cop. “I’m going to be blunt. We’re all businessmen here, except for Jim of course, who just paid a million five for a house that wants to kill him, and it might interest you to know; you, Lyla, in particular, that Jesse’s mother, an unwell woman who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with two poodles and a tankful of tropical fish, is worth an estimated fourteen million dollars, and Jesse’s her only son.”

“Fourteen million?”

“Fourteen million. Not counting property.”

“And you say she’s unwell?”

“Sick as a dog.”

Lyle blinked, looked over at me, at Michael, at Frank, then back to Stu, who he blessed with such an expression of fawning duplicity that I practically had to stick my finger in my eye to keep from laughing out loud. “I knew you two were meant for each other the first time I saw you together,” Lyle said.

Stu wasn’t fooled either. “I thought you did. Now help me find the bastard before Letters wraps him up in piano wire and the poodles get the money.”

Michael whispered in my ear. “That’s the most despicable conversation I ever heard in my life.”

The conversation had sounded reasonable enough to me. I had three dollars in the bank.

“Disgusting,” I said, because I didn’t want anyone to know what I was really thinking. “Poor Jesse.”

“Yeah, right,” Michael said with a grin, eyeballing me like he wasn’t fooled in the least.

Seeming to think he had more reason to find Jesse than all the rest of us, fourteen million reasons to be exact, Stu took the lead, and we proceeded through the fissure that sliced its way into the mountain. Along its entire length, the fissure remained no more than twenty feet wide at the floor line, but the ceiling was never in sight, always stretching upward to a height that the beams of our flashlights could never quite reach.

Here and there we stumbled over loose stones on the sandy floor. Then I almost fell flat on my face when my feet became tangled in a discarded pair of trousers that lay in my path. I kicked them out of the way and felt something solid in one of the pockets. Dropping to my knees in the sand, I dug around until I extracted a moldy wallet from the hip pocket. Inside the wallet I found a battered and faded photograph, twelve dollars in cash, and a folded sheet of paper. The photo was of an old Mexican woman who smiled toothlessly into the camera, her hair covered in lace. A grandmother, perhaps. I unfolded the crumpled paper to find an official-looking letter from the War Department informing Arturo E. Mendoza that his application for enlistment in the United States Navy must regrettably be denied because of Mr. Mendoza’s lack of American citizenship. The letter was signed, “Sincerely, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America.”

Michael read the letter over my shoulder.

“Jesus,” he said. “The poor kid wanted to fight, and they turned him down. And that led him here, where he died anyway. For nothing.”

I refolded the letter, returned everything to the wallet, and slipped it into my pocket.

Stu made everyone jump when he cried out from the darkness ahead. “Hey, guys! Check it out. I was right.”

We trained our lights to where Stu was pointing to see roughly drawn images on the stone wall, painted apparently by some long-forgotten people who had once upon a time sheltered inside this cave. There were dozens of rudimentary drawings of lizards, rattlesnakes, deer, horses, bears, and high above our head, drawn in ocher pigment with broad, crude strokes, was our old friend Felis concolor. The mountain lion.

“Tania,” I whispered, staring at the snarling face staring out at us from the stone. In the wavering beams of our flashlights, it seemed to come to life, trembling in anticipation, preparing to pounce down on us from its rocky perch. It was only imagination, of course, but somehow it filled my mind with dread. Suddenly this cold, black cavern seemed a really unhealthy place to be.

“We have to find Jesse and get the hell out of here,” I said. “Now!”

Michael aimed his light at my face. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

Lyle groaned. “Don’t get psychic on us, Jim. We have enough supernatural crap going on without….” He spun around. “Hey! Where’s Frank?”

“Over here!” Frank yelled. We saw his light in the distance. “I found our boy, and he’s alive. He’s looking really pissed off, though!”

“Jesse! Thank God!” Stu squealed, running toward Frank’s light with the rest of us on his heels.

We found Frank leaning over the edge of a dark pit that had been cut into the floor of the cavern by natural forces, perhaps during some long-ago seismic episode that had also carved the fissure in which we were now standing. The pit wasn’t deep. Only eight feet or so. At the bottom, as we all directed our lights downward, we saw Jesse lying on a bed of human bones that had been dumped there, and not prehistorically. This was Letters’s slag heap. The place where he discarded the headless skeletons of his young victims after he was finished with them.

Jesse’s arms and legs were bound in rags gleaned from the bodies, and he had a bloody piece of cloth, perhaps a torn-away shirtsleeve, binding his mouth. Aside from the rags he was tied up in, he was naked and shivering from the cold. All the heat in his body seemed to be centered in his eyes. He stared up at us with such fury that I almost wished he had been unconscious instead.

“Thank God,” Stu muttered, staring down into the pit. “He still has his ears.”

Looking back, Jesse narrowed his eyes in anger above the rag tied across his mouth. He tried to speak. What he said was, “Hmpph ee ogh ohumth gmmz shho heeght!”

“I think that means ‘get me the fuck out of here,’” Lyle translated unnecessarily.

Michael and I scrambled over the edge of the pit and dropped onto the pile of bones, which crunched and rattled sickeningly beneath our feet. We stumbled and tripped our way across the slag heap to Jesse’s side. Michael tore the rag from Jesse’s face and began working at the bonds around his legs and hands.

From that point on, Jesse never shut up.

WEARING ONLY Stu’s surrendered T-shirt to help warm him, Jesse looked more naked than if he hadn’t worn anything. He was coated in grime, and his mouth was chafed raw by the rag that had been tied around his face. But as desperate as I was to get us all out of the cavern and back to the house as soon as possible, the minute Michael and I hauled him out of the bone pit, Jesse plopped his naked ass down in the sand and refused to budge.

The first thing he did was grab Stu’s flashlight and cradle it in his lap like a baby. The time he had spent in complete darkness with nothing but his imagination for company had rattled him severely. I could see it in his eyes.

Stu dropped down beside him and wrapped his arms around Jesse to warm him. Despite what Stu had said earlier about dating Jesse only for his upcoming inheritance, I could see real affection in the way Stu cooed and comforted him. That kind of devotion did not come with a price tag. I began to suspect Stu really did love the guy, even if he couldn’t admit it to us, or maybe even to himself.

Whether Jesse heard Stu’s words of comfort was doubtful. He was too busy talking to hear anyone but himself. Since this was a man obviously on the edge of shock, we let him talk. Only rewrapping the rag around his mouth would have stopped him anyway.

“What the hell happened? One minute I’m floating off to dreamland after Stu here screwed me six ways to Sunday and the next thing I know I’m starkass naked lying in a hole in the ground full of bones and it’s so dark I can’t feel if my eyes are open or shut and my arms and legs are hogtied and a stinking rag is wrapped around my mouth and I think I’m going to puke but I know if I do I’ll probably choke to death so I don’t and I’m colder than the balls on a brass monkey and the bones are so goddamn uncomfortable to lay on ’cause they’re poking me everywhere and they stink and I start feeling around with my toes and my fingers which are the only things I can really move and the bones start feeling like maybe they might be human and then I really freak out and start to cry but there’s no one to wipe the tears off my face and they are starting to itch so I give up on that and then I hear you guys coming to rescue me but you’re certainly taking your sweet time about it admiring the artwork on the wall and acting like you’re on a Boy Scout day trip instead of a rescue mission and I can see your lights but I can’t yell ’cause that goddamn stinking rag is choking me to death and I start to think maybe I’ll just go ahead and die there on the bones ’cause I’m just too tired and sore and cold to wait for you slowass morons any longer and I’ve been laying there for days and days and days and days and….”

I checked my watch. “You’ve been down here an hour and a half.”

Jesse clapped his mouth shut. I think he was running out of steam anyway. “Really?” he said. “Seemed longer.”

Stu whispered a few more words of comfort to him, but he may as well have been talking to a tree. Jesse had found me in the beam of his flashlight, and he was glaring at me like a man with a grudge, ignoring Stu altogether.

“Jim, God knows I hate a party pooper as much as the next person, but spending a weekend with you on this godforsaken mountain is more than a girl can take. I’ve been bombarded with snakes, sprayed with blood, kidnapped and dumped in a hole full of bones while poor Stu here gets an unscheduled face peel and Lyle gets his hair fried to a frazzle—”

“Wait a minute!” I yelled right back at him. “That was Stu’s fault, not mine!”

“—and I’m forced to sleep in a bedroom that’s painted black, for Christ’s sake, although I must admit it’s the only room in the house where I haven’t seen a ghost or a goblin or an old actor popping out of the ceiling, and now I come to within inches of death and I’m still sitting here in the dark in the cold in a cave in my birthday suit freezing to death and I really need a bath and no one has even offered me a drink! I could really use a drink, Jim. Trust me on that one.”

Thank God, I thought. A reason to leave.

I held out a hand and helped him stand.

Once again on his feet, Jesse gazed sorrowfully down at himself. “Martha Stewart would be appalled.” He barely managed to squeak out the words before tears started coursing down his cheeks in earnest.

I slipped my arm around his waist and gave him an awkward, consoling pat on the back. “Come on, then, kid. If it’s a drink you want, then a drink you shall have. You’ve earned it. And from now on, I’ll try to be a more congenial host. I promise.”

Between sobs, he said in a little-boy voice. “I stink, don’t I?”

I tut-tutted him. “No, no, of course not. Well—maybe a little.”

WE GOT about three steps from the bone pit when all hell broke loose. It started with Frank stopping dead in his tracks and the rest of us plowing into him in the dark—bonk, bonk, bonk, like the Three Stooges in one of their old skits.

Frank shook us off, regained his footing, and aimed his light up ahead.

“Who the hell is that?”

Four other lights followed his, including mine, finally converging in one spot. What we saw there was not designed to slow a person’s pulse.

It was Allen. I knew it the moment I saw him. But it was not the twelve-year-old Allen Crisp I had always imagined in my mind. There was no innocence about the boy who stood before us, no clean lines of youth in his face, no childish posturing, no angelic smile crinkling his wide, sinless eyes. What stood before us was a creature with hatred seeping from every pore, malignant anger rolling off him like desert heat, and a face torn apart by acid and cruel intent.

There was flesh over his skull now, but it hung in shreds, partially eaten or rotted away. A sliver of bone jutted from his cheek, and I remembered the blow Nigel Letters had inflicted on the boy on that long-ago night as he lay raped and bleeding on the carriage house floor. A manacle still hung from one fleshless wrist, just as it had on the night of his death, the hand beneath it clenched tightly as if in pain or fury.

His voice, however, was just as clear and untempered by time as a twelve-year-old child’s should be. Only his words were rancorous and seething with spite. Through lips split by decay, he spoke words that no twelve-year-old boy should ever utter or comprehend. The malice in them pierced the cool darkness like a knife, and like a knife they tore into us and froze us where we stood.

“So the faggots have come exploring! Rescuing the one they care least about.”

Jesse started, popping awake like a jack-in-the-box. “Say what?”

“They hate you,” the creature said, stepping closer to our lights. “You embarrass them. And the one you share your bed and your body with laughs behind your back even as he stabs you with his diseased cock.”

It was Stu’s turn to be offended. “Hey! Wait just a goddamn minute!”

“The world is full of disease now, for your kind and each and every one of you has the filth of it coursing through your veins. Quite true, I’m afraid. The murdering virus is in you already. All of you. It sleeps snugly behind your stinking ballsacks, multiplying, biding its time, waiting to fight its way into your sperm, eager to spill out into the mouths and assholes of the people you profess to love even as you kill them.”

All of us stood in stunned silence, almost as shocked by the cruel words spat at us as by the horrible appearance and stench of the creature that spoke them.

“You’re a liar!” Michael said. “And you’re not the boy!”

I suddenly realized Michael was right. This was not Allen Crisp standing before us, taunting us. It was Nigel Letters.

“I can be anyone I choose to be,” the creature said, the skin of its face tearing along one cheek as it spread its lips in a wide, leering grin. Still taunting. Enjoying the shock of its words on our faces. On our hearts.

“Soon,” it said, “I can be all of you. All I have to do is kill you first. It would be a blessing for you, really, unless you would rather just rot away like little Allen here, letting the disease destroy you piece by piece, eating away at you year after year until even the people who love you turn their backs in disgust.”

I laid my hand on Michael’s arm. “We need to get out of here,” I said, softly.

Michael rolled his eyes. “Oh, you think?”

Lyle stepped forward, shrugging Frank’s hand away as he did. I could see his anger in the stiffness of his back, the angle of his head. “Aren’t we a little old for you, you twisted old coot? Don’t you prefer murdering children instead?”

The creature in Allen’s body lifted its rotted fingers to its face and began clawing skin from bone. Blood gushed over its hands as clumps of flesh were torn away, exposing teeth, an eye, the workings of the throat.

I swept my light to the old porcelain bathtub where I saw the bones of Allen Crisp still lying embedded in the hardened, reeking gunk. So, Letters did not need the bones of the murdered boys to transform himself into them. It was all illusion, just like everything else in this evil place.

But how does one go about killing an illusion?

Frank finally managed to pull Lyle back. The six of us stood in a tight group, our flashlights aimed at the grisly mockery of Allen Crisp continuing to rip the flesh from its face. Gobs of bloody skin were oozing down the creature’s chest as the skeletal fingers dug and scratched and gouged at what was once the face of a twelve-year-old boy but now resembled nothing less than Death itself.

The fissure in which we stood grew colder. A misty haze swept across the sandy floor, rising up from the bone pit behind us to work its way around our legs. I could feel the touch of it on my skin, like the wave of cold air that envelopes one on a hot day when the refrigerator door is opened. But this air did not refresh the skin. It was fish cold. Clammy. And there was the smell of death in it.

The mist passed through us and approached the caricature of Allen Crisp standing before us. Once there, it swirled about the creature’s legs, slowly rising until it covered the beast in ever-thickening wisps of fog that eventually hid it from our sight completely beneath a spinning maelstrom of white vapor. The wind from the swirling mass grew stronger and stronger until it lifted the sand at the boy’s feet, pulling it over him like a shroud. Still spinning, climbing higher as it spun faster and faster, it sucked the sand into a vortex that reached from the floor to the highest shadows of the vaulted ceiling over our heads. There the vortex shattered against the rocks. Sharp, stinging sand was flung in every direction. It peppered us like shotgun pellets, forcing us to cower to the floor, eyes closed to the blinding sand, our faces buried beneath our arms to escape the painful blast of it against our skin. I heard Jesse cry out as the swirling sand struck his naked legs like biting insects. Stu, too, screeched in pain as the sand tore into his bare back. He had given his shirt to Jesse.

And suddenly it all stopped. The stinging pellets. The rushing wind. Everything. Sand, undriven now by the swirling wind, settled over us like a gentle rain as gravity pulled it back to earth. I could hear it sprinkling to the ground at my feet. With the ceasing of the wind, the silence left behind was almost as deafening as the wind itself.

Shaking ourselves off, we opened our eyes and blinked into the darkness ahead. Allen was gone. Only remnants of tattered flesh remained on the ground, the blood of it seeping into the sand where the creature had once stood, tearing itself to pieces. Then that, too, was swallowed up, slowly sinking out of sight until nothing of it remained.

The only sound to be heard in the blackness of the cavern was the gasping of our breaths.

“I really don’t like this guy,” Frank murmured.

Lyle stood and brushed himself off. I was surprised to see a smile on his face. “What’s not to like? He’s an actor. He’s been dead for sixty years, and he’s still trying for an Academy Award. The special effects are pretty good, I have to admit, but I’m beginning to think this old queen is more bluster than threat.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked. In my mind, what we had just witnessed landed squarely and resoundingly in the realm of threat, not bluster. The stinging of my sandblasted skin seemed to corroborate the fact.

“Because Lyle’s an idiot!” Jesse screamed. “And because he didn’t spend the last six days tied up naked on a pile of moldering bones. Can we please get the hell out of here now?”

“Hour and a half,” Lyle muttered.

“Jesse’s right,” Michael said.

Lyle turned on him. “About which part?”

“All of it! If you think Letters can’t hurt us, then you are an idiot. Is it going to take a fresh dead body to convince you otherwise?”

“Arguing among ourselves isn’t going to get us anywhere,” Stu said. “We’ve got Jesse now, so let’s just get back to the house and figure out what we’re going to do. I’ve had enough for one day, and there’s a bottle of vodka on the kitchen counter screaming my name.”

“It’s screaming mine too,” Jesse said. “Let’s go.”

I was about to agree with them wholeheartedly when a sound in the rocks above our heads made us all look upward. I instinctively flinched, expecting a cascade of stones to come raining down to bury us all, but when none did, I raised my flashlight into the darkness. High up on the cavern wall, I spotted movement.

“More light!” I yelled. Everyone trained their lights in the same direction mine was pointing. Perhaps thirty feet up, on an outcropping of stone, stood Tania, but this was no skeleton. She was in perfect health. Her tawny coat shimmered in the lights, rippling to the fluid movement of muscles beneath her skin. Her eyes glowed green as she crouched over something on the ledge that we could not see. A low rumble emanated from her throat and quickly became a predator’s scream of anger as she blinked her eyes at the lights that disturbed her.

She ducked her head beneath the rim of rock, and when she raised it again, she held in her great jaws the body of a young man, her razor-sharp fangs buried in the back of his limp neck.

Like all of Nigel’s “conquests,” the boy’s body was pale as snow, as if every drop of his lifeblood had been drained away. I wondered if his death came quickly. By the tortured grimace on his young face, I doubted it. The boy was thin almost to the point of emaciation, as if the full onset of manhood had not yet filled him out. Nor would it ever. I wondered if this was the boy TJ spoke of when he was telling his story. The boy he didn’t like very much. I tried to pull the name from my memory, and then it came. Kenny.

Kenny had the remnants of a T-shirt around his throat and covering one shoulder. The rest had been torn away, and nothing else covered his body but blood. Tania held him with her teeth, but her long claws steadied the body beneath her, piercing his ribs and one leg. The boy seemed to weigh nothing in her jaws, as with the strength and grace of all big cats, she leaped from one ledge to the other, ever downward until she landed in a cloud of sand before us, poor Kenny flopping around like a rag doll at her feet. With teeth still sunk into the boy’s neck, she snarled at us and began stalking back and forth across the sandy cavern floor, her eyes never leaving our faces, dragging the boy’s lifeless body along with her as if daring us to pass or to disturb her feeding.

A chill crept over me when I saw a thin glass rod protruding from the young man’s penis. He had been tortured just like Allen. What other monstrous acts had Letters performed on the boy before death blessedly took him? Was this another of Letters’s illusions? Was his spirit hiding inside the boy at this very moment? And what of Tania? Could Letters control them both at the same time?

“No, Jim,” a voice said from behind us. “I control nothing. They come because they love me.”

All of us spun around to see Nigel Letters, as he was in his youth, climbing up from the bone pit behind us. No longer was his body bloated and pale as it had been at the time of his death, as it was when the boys came to this house under the pretense of sex and money when all they would really find was agony and death. This was the Nigel Letters I remembered from his old movies. In his youth, as we saw him now, he was as beautiful as any of his victims. He was dressed, strangely enough, in white tennis clothes, a pale cream-colored sweater draped rakishly across his wide shoulders, the sleeves tied casually beneath his chin. The legs beneath the tennis shorts were strong and brown. It was easy to see why he had made a success of himself in Hollywood despite the fact that his acting talents were minimal. He was a stunning specimen of manhood.

But the eyes gave him away. There was nothing of beauty about them at all. If eyes are the windows of the soul, then his looked into an empty room. They stared at us now with cold, condescending hatred.

I unconsciously took a cue from Lyle’s game book and said the first thing that came to mind.

“Lose your racket?”

Letters gave me a movie-set smile that came nowhere close to reaching his eyes. “How droll you are, James. If I had known you in your youth, I might have made it a point to bring you into my circle of friends.”

“Circle of victims, you mean.”

“Oh no. At the risk of sounding blunt, I’m afraid you were never quite up to those standards. Besides, they were simply the acts of a sick and lonely old man. No, I’m speaking of me as I am now. Do you not find me attractive, James? I had it all, you know. Money, looks, fame. I bedded more men than you have even spoken to in your miserable lifetime.”

It was my turn to flash an insincere smile. “Oh, my life hasn’t been as miserable as all that. In fact, I have one thing that you never seemed to acquire. Two, actually. For one thing, at the risk of sounding boastful, I’m actually good at what I do.”

Letters scoffed. “Putting words down on paper, you mean? Come now, James, it is said that if you stick a monkey in front of a typewriter, he will eventually, by sheer accident, peck out the entire works of Shakespeare. And your opinion of my work as an actor means less to me than you could ever possibly imagine. Acting was a means to an end. Nothing more. The money it brought me gave me the opportunity to live the life I wanted. And I lived every day of it to the fullest.” He cocked his head to the side, his cold eyes still boring into mine as he pointedly ignored everyone else. “But what is this other thing you speak of that you seem to think I lacked?”

I reached for Michael’s hand and pulled him closer. “I was speaking of love,” I said. “Who did you ever love, Nigel? Who ever loved you?”

Letters spread his arms wide, like Jesus on the cross. “Look around you. My boys have chosen to spend eternity with me. What greater show of love could there be?”

Michael stepped forward, still holding my hand. “You arrogant prick! Have you really deluded yourself into thinking they are here because they love you? They are here because you robbed them of anywhere else to go. You stole their lives, and now you’ve even stolen their deaths. We’re here to set things right!”

Letters laughed a booming laugh that echoed through the cavern. “Are you really? If I may be so bold as to ask, how do you intend to do that?”

“I guess you’ll find out when it’s done!” Michael roared, probably hoping an increase in volume would detract Letters from the knowledge that we really didn’t have much of a plan at all.

If that was Michael’s intent, it didn’t work.

“Oh, please! None of you have the least idea how to destroy me, whereas I, on the other hand, could destroy you all in a heartbeat. I could stop your pulses with a whisper, if I chose. I could turn the blood in your veins to dust with a wave of my hand. Or I could have Tania rip your lying tongues from your mouths. Would you like a demonstration? Give me the one you stole from me. After I’ve had my way with him, you can have him back. Although there won’t be much left to take.”

“No!” Jesse cried out.

“No?” Nigel mocked. “You have a lovely, succulent ass, my dear, but your voice is that of a fishwife. I could fill the one with my cock as I tear the other from your throat with my teeth. Would you like that? Perhaps not. Modern gay men can be so selfish when it comes to lovemaking. In my day, you took what you could get and made the best of what you had, hopefully satisfying both parties by the time you were finished.”

“And then you walked away,” I said. “Leaving them to die in a pool of blood and semen.”

“James. James. You’re always so negative. How does Michael stand being around you?”

“Because I love him,” Michael said.

Nigel threw back his head and groaned dramatically, emoting like crazy. Apparently death had not improved his talent any. “Let’s put some life back into the party, shall we? An infusion of new blood, so to speak, if you’ll pardon the pun. Tania! Let him go!”

We spun to see the great cat give one last vicious shake to Kenny’s limp body, fling it to the ground, and leap away to the wall where she gracefully sprang from ledge to ledge, higher and higher, until she was once again only two specks of green light where our flashlights caught the reflection in her eyes. She lowered herself down onto the outcropping of stone high above our heads, and with front paws dangling casually over the edge, stared down at us as a low growl rumbled in her chest.

I turned to see what Letters was up to, and he was gone, spiffy little tennis outfit and all.

Michael nudged me. “Now’s our chance. Let’s run like bunnies.” And we did. All of us. Even Jesse, still trembling in his nakedness from either fear or cold, seemed finally in the mood to skedaddle instead of talk.

The only thing between us and the entrance to the fissure was Kenny’s pale body lying in the sand in front of us. The others skirted it with little more than a glance, intent on nothing more than getting the hell out of this damn cave, but as I approached the body and was about to leap across it and follow them, I glimpsed a movement at my feet and slid to a halt. In the beam of my flashlight, I stared down in horror at the boy. At Kenny. He was weeping silently, gripping the glass rod that had pierced his penis. With a moan of agony, he pulled it free and flung it into the darkness where I heard it shatter against the rocks. He slowly raised his face to look at me, his neck torn but bloodless where Tania’s fangs had gripped his throat. He stretched his hand out to me, and when I drew back from it in horror, his fingers clawed their way across the sand and gripped my ankle like cold, iron talons.

“Help me,” he pleaded. “Let me go.”

I watched my hand, as if with a mind of its own, reach down to touch the boy’s cheek. He closed his eyes and pressed his cold face into the warmth of my hand like a drowning man might rest his face against the beam of wood that at the last moment saves him from a watery grave. He turned his face into my palm and pressed his icy lips against my skin. After a long moment, Kenny opened his eyes and gazed up into my face.

His eyes were colorless with death, opaque pools of pain. Behind the pain, there was also sorrow. When he spoke again, his teeth appeared yellow against the whiteness of his lips, and a foul odor, the odor of decay, flowed from his mouth like a fume.

“Tell my mother I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant to hurt her.”

“I will,” I said, knowing it was a lie, just as he must have known it as well. Kenny’s lips twisted into a grimace of a smile, and he released his grip on my ankle.

He was still smiling that horrible smile as his face dropped to the sand and he once again took on the stillness of death. The sad life he had given me a glimpse of was no longer there. I once more reached down to touch him, to caress his dark hair, the only part of him that still felt alive, and then I fled.

I caught up with the others at the entrance to the dungeon, where they were standing in a tight knot, uncomfortably shuffling their feet and mumbling to each other, like they were waiting for an express bus to Tucson or something.

I tried pushing my way through. “Come on, guys. We’re supposed to be fleeing for our lives. Remember? What the hell’s the holdup?”

No one turned to look at me or acknowledge what I said. They were too busy talking among themselves.

“My goose bumps have goose bumps. I can’t go in there.”

“Fine. We’ll just peck our way through the wall. Got a hammer?”

“When he said the party needed some new blood, I thought he was speaking metaphorically.”

“I’m going to puke as soon as I recover from my heart attack.”

“Mine was more like a stroke. I’ll probably be drooling and stuttering for the rest of my life while I’m picking up tricks in rehab.”

“What the hell are you morons jabbering about!” I bawled. “Let’s go!”

“Can’t do it, Jim,” Lyle said. “The dungeon is occupado.”

“What?”

Michael cupped the back of my neck and eased me through to the far edge of the narrow passage, scooting our friends aside as he went.

“Brace yourself, Jim,” he said in my ear. “This isn’t pretty.”

Lyle was the last one blocking our path, and Michael finally had to yank him out of the way by his ear since he no longer had enough hair to grab onto, thanks to Stu’s botched bleach job.

The lights were still on in the dungeon the way we had left them, but there all resemblance to the room we explored less than twenty minutes ago ended.

The silence of the huge, high cavern had been replaced by a rumbling, dronelike wail of sound that took me a moment to compartmentalize into a dozen individual voices.

No longer did Nigel’s souvenirs from Hollywood appear to be nothing more than harmless movie props. They were real enough now to restrain the boys flailing in their grasp. And all the boys were here. Each of Letters’s victims.

TJ hung chained at the wrists, arms outstretched, to manacles bolted into the wall. The piano wire around his neck was now looped over one of the bolts so that each time he tried to twist away from the pain, it tore deeper into the soft skin of his throat. His golden chest was awash with blood.

Arturo, too, was manacled to the wall, face inward, his arms pulled so high above his head that his feet barely reached the ground. I noticed for the first time that the toenails on the boy’s bare feet had been torn away. Another of Nigel’s games? The wide swath of peeled-away skin on his back, which we had only glimpsed in the darkness on the night of the séance, was now all too visible. Torn from his body from shoulder to buttock, it hung like a flap of fabric to dangle about his legs, the blood oozing from it and dripping into the sand below. Arturo’s head was thrown back in a rictus of pain as he screamed his agony into the uncaring shadows above.

I turned away from the sight of him.

The iron maiden was closed now, exposing the face of an Egyptian pharaoh, molded severely in gunmetal, colorless and with a cruel countenance. Where the eyes opened in the metal, blood had seeped through like red tears. I wondered which boy stood inside, held upright by the dozens of iron spikes piercing his body. We had examined the contraption earlier and knew it was made of only tin and plaster. No boy had actually died inside her seventy years ago. What we were seeing now was a theatrical scenario directed by Nigel Letters himself for our benefit and amusement, but that knowledge did not lessen the horror of what we were seeing. I knew now that the spirits of the boys were still inside this cave and inside the house. They did still suffer. They had not been freed as I was led to believe, and this I could not understand.

Michael stood close behind me, his arms around my waist, his chin on my shoulders. He was trembling.

“They’re all here, aren’t they?” he said, his voice solemn. “Even Kenny.” So he too had recognized the boy after reading the words TJ had spoken to me.

And he was right. Kenny who we had seen dead in the jaws of Tania, and who had then spoken to me only minutes later in the fissure behind us, now lay bleeding on a long wooden table. The noose with thirteen loops had been slip-knotted snug around his throat and then the rope tightly stretched from the back of his neck to his ankles, which were drawn up almost to his thighs. His lips were blue in his pale face, his eyes wide with terror, as he strove to draw breath into his lungs through passages that were blocked by the tension of the rope. As I stared at him in horror, his frightened eyes rolled toward me, and an agonized scream erupted from behind the corded muscles of his throat.

On the sand below lay another boy, one I had not seen before. As with all the young men in this house of carnage, he was nude. A coil of barbed wire had been wrapped around him from ankles to neck by cruel hands. The barbs had pierced him in a hundred places, and as he writhed in agony, they tore at him more, embedding themselves deeper into his skin, tearing at his flesh, skittering across bone. A keening unending shriek issued from a mouth agape in pain, a sound so horrifying that I shrank away from it and buried my face in Michael’s chest, clapping my hands over my ears in an attempt to block it out.

Michael cupped my face in his hands and forced me to look at him. “We have to go through, Jim. It’s the only way out.”

“I know.”

“It isn’t real. Just keep remembering that. None of it is real.”

“I—I know.”

Frank laid an arm across both Michael and I, gathering us to him. I looked into his face to see tears sparkling his cheeks. They were tears of pity. Neither he nor Lyle seemed afraid.

“Just follow us,” Frank said. “Lyle and I will lead.”

“Lead where?” Jesse asked, his voice rising once again in panic. “Lead where?”

“Outside,” Stu said to him, gripping his shoulders and shaking him so he would listen. “We have to get outside.” To me, he said. “Don’t worry. Just stay close.”

Jesse jerked his head around like a man suddenly assailed by dangers from every direction. “Where’s Letters? Where did he go?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Stu said, forcing a smile to his lips. “When we give the word just run like your skirts are on fire.”

“I’m naked here!” Jesse screeched. “I don’t have any skirts!”

Stu patted his cheek. “Figure of speech, love. Figure of speech.”

I looked proudly around at my friends and saw all the courage I needed to gather up some of my own in them.

“Fine,” I said. “Fuck it. Just run!”

“And ignore the bodies!” Michael yelled like a rallying cry as we tore out of the dark passageway and into the bright lights of the dungeon. We flew across the sand like the devil himself was after us, which he probably was, and as we ran a dozen bloody hands reached out to us for help, a dozen pleading voices cried out to us to free them, to make the pain stop. Looking neither left or right, we ignored them all.

Halfway through, I heard Stu behind me encouraging Jesse on. “Run, Mary! Run. Don’t stop!”

Jesse responded with “Don’t call me Mary!” as his long bare legs fairly flew beneath him, kicking up sand, carrying him past Michael and me as if we were standing still. As he overtook Frank and Lyle, he cried out, “Where’s Stu?” to no one in particular.

Panting, Stu screamed an answer from somewhere in my wake. “Right behind you, love. Keep going. Your naked ass looks great!”

“I know!” Jesse cried out in a voice on the verge of falsetto as he zipped past Frank and Lyle to take the lead. “Thank God for Tae Bo!”

Finally, after what seemed like hours but was really only seconds, we flew up the steps to the carriage house, raced through the hole in the wall and across the concrete floor, and burst through the outside door into the blessed California sunshine, where we collapsed to the ground like six puppets who had suddenly had their strings cut.

As the fear cleared from my eyes and my heart began hammering down to a reasonable gait, I looked up to see Caroline, with her grandmother in a wheelchair at her side, gawking at us in bemusement from the driveway, obviously wondering what the hell was going on.

After a couple of ticks of stunned silence by everyone involved, Mrs. O’Donnell cast a disapproving glance at Jesse, then looked up at her granddaughter and said, “That man isn’t wearing any pants.”

Chapter 10

REX WELCOMED us back to the house like conquering heroes, and with the help of long, hot showers, a couple of Valium apiece, several shots of vodka, and for Jesse, the extra therapeutic value of an energetic hour in the rack with Stu, we all eventually pulled ourselves together sufficiently to play host to Caroline’s grandmother.

I was less than thrilled to have Mrs. O’Donnell in my new home, even though after the many years she had worked here, she undoubtedly knew the place better than I did. Putting her life at risk seemed a poor way of thanking her for the help she had already given. After all, Letters had told us in no uncertain terms he would kill her if she set a foot inside the door.

But when I tried to explain this to her, it became all too apparent that arguing with a ninety-six-year-old Irish woman with an axe to grind is somewhat akin to dancing with a fencepost. You can lead all you want, but in the end they are both immovable objects, and they both have about the same amount of give, which is none whatsoever.

Turning to Caroline for backup was equally frustrating. She seemed to think her grandmother had every right in the world to do anything she could to erase some of the guilt she had felt these many years about the goings-on inside this house. Goings-on, as she called them, which she could have put a stop to a thousand times but hadn’t.

When Mrs. O’Donnell rolled her wheelchair into the living room and set the brakes on the thing, she did it with the finality of a traveler leaving a car in long-term parking. She was obviously here for the duration, and since she was here with her granddaughter’s blessing, I accepted her presence as best I could, silently vowing to protect her from whatever Letters might decide to throw her way. She was determined to be a help. I knew it from the stubborn set of her jaw as she gazed about the room. This was a woman on a mission.

Neither Michael nor I was surprised to find the ear in the refrigerator was gone. It was just another of Nigel’s illusions, and it had gone up in smoke like the rest of them, but I still dropped the little Tupperware container in the trash at the first opportunity. Yuck.

Jesse, much to my surprise, was turning out to be just as resilient as he was, at times, annoying. And I was rather surprised to realize that I was growing quite fond of him. Even Michael seemed to look at him with a bit more respect when Jesse, his recent experiences in the cave apparently forgotten, swooped down on Caroline, a big girl but really quite beautiful in a leviathan sort of way, with cases of cosmetics and a box of hot rollers and began giving her a complete makeover. Stu looked on with pride and forbearance as Jesse oohed and aahed over Caroline’s flawless skin and luxuriant hair, which she refused to let him recolor but did allow him to sweep up to the top of her head, with Stu’s help, into an ornate hairstyle I had previously only seen on drag queens and heroines on gothic book covers. Caroline loved the attention, was amused by the results, and obviously took a great liking to Jesse. When he began applying makeup to her, I left them and Stu in the dining room, laughing and swilling down vodka tonics (even Caroline had finally accepted a drink and was pouring it down like well water) as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

While Frank and Lyle set about preparing lunch for eight, God help us, Michael and I plopped ourselves down in the living room with Mrs. O’Donnell, who wanted to know everything that had happened to us in the cave. Much to my surprise, she already knew of its existence.

She nursed a glass of orange juice as we told her our story, and when we were finished, she told us hers.

“Mr. Letters found that cave on a movie shoot he did years before. They were filming some sort of desert horror movie. On his day off, Mr. Letters took off on a hiking trip up the side of the mountain, and that’s when he stumbled across it. He never spoke of it much. It didn’t seem to make a very big impression on him, especially after he bought the property and built the carriage house smack in front of the entrance to it. I always supposed he liked the property for the seclusion, not the cave. But maybe I was wrong. If what you boys tell me is true, he certainly must have taken a liking to it later.

“He was a brooder, Mr. Letters was. The darkness of a cave would have appealed to him, I think. But after the carriage house was built, I never heard him speak of that cave again. What he did for all those days and nights that he locked himself in there, heaven only knows.”

“Or hell only knows,” Michael said.

Mrs. O’Donnell sipped her juice and gave him a long sober look. Finally she dipped her head in agreement. “I reckon hell is more likely.”

As they gazed at each other, I sensed a connection being made between the old woman in the wheelchair and my soon-to-move-in, long-hoped-for, long-overdue, sorely missed lover.

Leaning forward in the chair, Mrs. O’Donnell cocked her gray head to the side and stared at Michael more closely. “You look like my husband,” she said.

Michael blinked. “Really?”

“No.”

He blinked again. “I’m sorry. I—”

She laughed. “You look like I wish my husband had looked but didn’t. Actually he was built somewhat like a turnip.” She glanced into the dining room at her granddaughter, who was now so heavily made up that all she needed was a star on her head and presents at her feet to look like a big fat Christmas tree. Mrs. O’Donnell tsked. “Caroline got his genes, I’m afraid.” She gazed back at Michael. “Don’t get me wrong. I loved my husband. And since I looked more like Thelma Ritter than Myrna Loy, I suppose I got what I deserved. But you, young man, look the way I wish he had looked.”

I grinned at Michael’s discomfort. “He is somewhat of a dish, isn’t he?” I said proudly.

“He certainly is,” Mrs. O’Donnell agreed, not quite sighing. Then she looked over at me as if I was the waiter who had been ignoring her table for the past six hours. “Alcohol is forbidden at the Manor, but I’m not at the Manor now, am I? Everyone has a cocktail but me. Being ninety-six years old doesn’t make me dead quite yet. I’d like a drink.”

I jumped. “Oh! I’m sorry. What would you—?”

“Three fingers of Irish whiskey. Straight up.”

“Uh… what about your medica—?”

“Now please. And I’d like a straw.”

“Gotcha,” I said, heading for the kitchen while she turned her attention back to Michael. Like I said. Dancing with a fencepost….

I poured her four fingers just to be contrary, and five minutes later, I was pouring her another.

Sometime later, as I was heavy-handedly dumping the last of the whiskey in the old woman’s glass, Caroline peeked over my shoulder, and when I turned to look at her, I did one of those cinematic double takes that only Jim Carrey can really pull off. Caroline was now so layered with pancake and rouge and lip gloss and sparkles, and her hair was so intricately coiffed in curls piled high atop her head with what looked like a couple of chopsticks poking out the side, that all I could think of was Divine eating poodle poop off the ground.

“You look lovely,” I said, trying not to gawk.

She batted two-inch eyelashes at me as she shyly smiled and said, “Thank you. Where’s the vodka?”

The day went downhill from there.

Frank and Lyle, sensing they were missing a party, left lunch to burn in the oven and joined us. It wasn’t yet two o’clock in the afternoon, and by two-thirty, we were all, including the old lady, as drunk as skunks.

Between sips of the last of my Irish whiskey, Mrs. O’Donnell munched on a Snickers bar, rabbitlike as always, and relived her impressions of Nigel Letters, while the rest of us hung on her every word like she was Jimmy Swaggart tearfully expounding on the subject of hookers. Except Mrs. O’Donnell’s oratory was more hateful than tearful. And far more interesting.

“Not once in all the years I worked for him did Mr. Letters give me a kind word. He wasn’t cruel, at least not to me, but he certainly wasn’t warm. And he was cheap with his money. He was richer than God, but aside from building this wonderful house, I never saw him spend any of it. Oh, he entertained a bit after he first moved here, mostly to show off the house to some of his old Hollywood acquaintances, I think, rather than for any need to socialize. But that soon stopped, and for several years after that, there was only him and me rattling around the place. His business advisors might drop by occasionally to talk business—accountants, people like that—but he preferred to handle those meetings over the phone if he could. He withdrew from everyone.

“Finally he couldn’t even stand to have me around on a full-time basis. He set me up in an apartment in town, a cheap one, and he bought me a car, also cheap, to get myself back and forth to work. Made my life a lot more difficult, but it was a relief, too, not hearing him roam about the house every night. I used to hear his footsteps for hours, pacing back and forth. I snuck down the hall one night to see what he was up to, and I saw him standing in front of that big mirror over the fireplace, just staring at himself. His looks were gone by then, of course, and he hated it. He eventually stopped coming out of his room in the daytime altogether. I could work for days on end and never see him. I would clean his house, prepare his food, and leave. Once a week he would put an envelope on the mantel with my pay in it, and sometimes I would find little notes there as well, giving me instructions on things he wanted done, groceries he wanted me to buy. But I rarely saw him during that period.”

When Caroline and Jesse and Stu joined us in the living room, Mrs. O’Donnell stopped narrating long enough to sputter, “My God!” at the sight of her granddaughter in high drag, but then she just went right back to her story as if nothing had happened.

“It was about that time, 1942 or ’43, that I began to notice things. Furniture out of place. Rooms locked. More than once I heard crying in the carriage house. At first I thought it was Nancy, Mr. Letters’s dog, but I soon realized it wasn’t. The crying frightened me, and I broke the hard and fast rule of not disturbing him one day by pounding on his bedroom door to tell him about it. He refused to come out and told me through the closed door that he had set up a screening room in the carriage house to watch old movies, and that was what I had heard. It was a ridiculous explanation, of course, but I accepted it. I needed that job.

“I don’t suppose you’d know it to look at me now, but I was a strong woman back then.” She glanced at Caroline and gave a wry smile. “Strong and ruthless, according to my granddaughter.”

Caroline returned her grandmother’s smile with one of her own, although it must have been almost unrecognizable to the old woman through the pounds of makeup Jesse had applied to her granddaughter.

“You’re still strong,” Caroline said. “Only your body is weak.” Then she laughed. “And you’ll be ruthless to the day you die. In a sweet sort of way.”

“I am anything but sweet,” Mrs. O’Donnell said. “But that is neither here nor there. I was speaking of Mr. Letters. Like I said, I began to notice things. I knew, of course, that he was… like all of you. Drawn to men, I mean. I never held it against him. It was none of my business. I knew, too, that he was no longer keeping himself as secluded as before. Many times when I came to work, his car, a lovely Packard with leather interior, would be parked in a different place than it had been when I left the night before. He had few social engagements, and aside from an occasional war bond drive, which he seemed to look forward to since he once again was being treated like a celebrity, I knew he must have finally become lonely and was seeking out others of his kind for… companionship.”

“Good word for it,” Stu muttered.

Mrs. O’Donnell ignored the comment, if she heard it at all. And due to the whiskey she had consumed, her narrative was rambling all over the place, but I let her talk. She seemed to have a need to let the words out. Perhaps she had held them in long enough.

A tear glistened in her eye when she told of seeing the Mexican boy. As she spoke, I knew it had to be Arturo.

“He was the prettiest boy I’d ever seen. Couldn’t have been more than eighteen, with the face of an angel. An angel! He was sitting on the veranda when I drove in for work. Just sitting there. He had a bruise on the side of his face, but he didn’t seem frightened or act like he wanted to get away. He just sat there, watching me, as I walked past him with my bags of groceries. Didn’t offer to help with the door or with the bags or anything, like he was in a daze. But his eyes never left me until I walked inside the house, leaving him behind.

“Letters was frantic that day for me to go away. He finally just told me to leave. I hadn’t been in the house more than five minutes, and he told me to get the hell out and take the day off. I told him I couldn’t afford a day off, and there were things I needed to do. He said whatever needed to be done would still need to be done tomorrow and not to worry about losing wages, he would pay me for the lost day. I couldn’t believe it. He’d never done anything like that before, I can tell you. Like I said, tight with a dollar was Mr. Letters. But I took him at his word and left as soon as the groceries were put away.”

Here the old lady glanced at her empty whiskey glass, seemed about to ask for more, then changed her mind, simply setting the glass aside.

“When I left, the boy was still on the veranda. I asked him if he was wanting to leave and if so, then I could give him a ride into town. He seemed so lost sitting there. So… confused.

“He didn’t answer me. Maybe he couldn’t speak English. I’m not sure. But when Mr. Letters heard me talking to the boy, he stormed out of the house and told me to be on my way. Got downright snippy about it. Said he could take care of his own guests, thank you very much. I caught a glimpse of fear in the boy’s face then, but I didn’t think much about it until later. Something else I noticed, but it didn’t soak in until that night when I was lying in bed. I had never seen the boy’s hands. They had been behind his back as he sat in that old wooden chair on the veranda when I came to work, and they were still behind his back when I left.”

“He was handcuffed,” I said.

When the old lady turned to look at me, a tear spilled onto her cheek, and she impatiently brushed it away with a trembling hand.

“We found handcuffs in the carriage house,” I explained. “That’s how he restrained his victims.”

“But why didn’t the boy try to run?” she asked. “Why didn’t he scream to high heaven and let me know that something was wrong? Why did he just sit there and watch me drive away?”

“Maybe he was drugged,” Michael said. “Maybe the blow to the head that caused the bruise had stunned him so that he couldn’t speak.”

Mrs. O’Donnell sighed. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. And I never saw the boy again. But when I went to work the next day, I noticed a puddle of blood beneath the chair the boy was sitting in. I washed it away with soap and water and tried not to think about it anymore.” She looked down at her withered hands. “I could have saved him, but I didn’t. I wonder if God will ever forgive me for that.”

“If you had tried to interfere,” Frank said, “Letters might have killed you too. Did you ever think of that?”

She gave him a sad smile. “I would rather it had been me than that beautiful young man. He looked so… innocent.”

I remembered the wallet I had found in the cavern and went to fetch it. Returning to the living room, I emptied the contents of it onto the coffee table. Then, in a hidden compartment behind the one-dollar bills, I found another photograph. It was a snapshot of Arturo. He was sitting astride a dappled pony and holding a child in his lap. Both he and the young Mexican child were laughing uproariously at something as the pony looked back over his shoulder at them with a curious stare. Everyone who had spoken of this boy had spoken of his beauty, and now, looking at his face for the first time, I understood why. “Beautiful” was the only word that came close to describing him. His sweet, handsome face smiling into the camera, those strong arms holding the child securely in his lap, his long jean-clad legs encircling the horse—everything about him was perfection. But more appealing even than his looks was, as Mrs. O’Donnell said, his innocence. If it shone through in this faded photograph as it did in life, it must have been breathtaking to look upon. No wonder Letters favored him above all the others. And no wonder the boy was forced to die so slowly at his hands. Destroying so much innocence and beauty would have meant the world to Nigel Letters. This boy was everything he was not. How could he allow such a perfect being to live?

Mrs. O’Donnell held the photograph close to her face, staring at it through her weak old eyes for long minutes as Michael once again read the letter from the war department refusing Arturo’s enlistment. “This is the boy who wanted to fight for his adopted country, and they turned him down.” He gazed up at Mrs. O’Donnell. “You aren’t the only one with this boy’s blood on his hands.”

“Michael,” Frank said, appalled. “It wasn’t her fault!”

The old lady raised a hand to silence Frank, and at the same time, she looked at Michael. There was grief in her eyes for the past, but there also seemed to be a good deal of humor concerning the present. “Michael’s right,” she said. “I like a man who says what he thinks. And if I thought I was guilt free I wouldn’t be here, would I?” She turned to me. “Take care of this man,” she said. “He’ll either make you very happy or very crazy. Strong men do that. They can’t help it.”

And then she closed her eyes and dozed off, for all the world like someone had suddenly pulled her plug.

“IS SHE dead?” Stu asked, looking worried.

I rolled my eyes while Caroline chuckled. “No, Stu,” I said, “she’s not dead. She’s ninety-six years old, and she just drank half a bottle of my best malt whiskey. She’s asleep. Or passed out. Or both.”

“Let her rest,” Caroline said. “She’ll wake up when she gets around to it. She used to be quite a drinker in her day.”

“Still is,” Lyle grinned.

“Good to know it doesn’t shorten your life span,” Frank said, matching Lyle’s grin with one of his own. “There’s hope for us yet.”

Jesse, who like many gay people I’m acquainted with never knows when to stop decorating, made himself busy readjusting one of Caroline’s curls. “You know, hon, with several dozen yards of cherry red satin and an industrial sewing machine, I could whip you up a gorgeous new frock to match your newly gorgeous head. What are you? About a double X?”

“Triple. On a thin day.”

“Perfect. Lots of room for sequins!”

“My God,” Michael said, watching them. “Here we are doing battle with the minions of Satan, and all we have on our side are Sergeant Bilko, Colonel Klink, Gomer Pyle, and a six-foot seamstress, all just as queer as we are, and all so drunk they couldn’t find each other’s asses with glow-in-the-dark dildos and a topographical map!”

“Yes,” I said. “But we have the white wizard. That has to count for something.”

Michael groaned. “Billy Boyd? Lord of the Rings? Jesus, Jim! Are you physically incapable of not spouting movie dialogue?”

“It helps me think.”

“You’re kidding. Well, it annoys the hell out of me. We’re in some serious shit here.”

“Bill Paxton. Alien II.”

Michael slapped his forehead. For a moment I thought he was going to slap mine as well. “That wasn’t a dialogue quiz. It slipped out!”

“Sorry.”

He took a deep breath to calm himself. “Look, Jim. Letters knows everything we’re doing, and we don’t have the vaguest idea what he’s up to. He’s been ahead of us every step of the way. This is a smart guy, Jim. I don’t care how long he’s been dead, he’s still a smart guy.”

I gave Michael my best nasal drawl. “If he’s so smart, how come he’s so fucking dead?”

Michael tossed his napkin in the air and stalked from the room.

“Jack Nicholson,” I yelled after him. “Prizzi’s Honor!”

“I know,” he yelled back, stomping down the hall. “And fuck off! Natalie Wood. Gypsy.”

“Natalie Wood never, ever said that!” I shot back.

“Your boyfriend’s a little cranky,” Caroline commiserated, joining me on the sofa and giving my knee a motherly pat. “He’s afraid for you, that’s all. It’s hard not to be afraid for the people you love. Every time my son goes off to preschool, I think up all these catastrophic things that might conceivably happen to him, but then every day he always comes home safe and sound. Next day I go through it all again. That’s what loving someone is all about. That and knowing how to really drive them nuts once in a while, as you just demonstrated.”

“It is fun, isn’t it?”

Her eyes were a little too bright behind the ropes of mascara Jesse had applied to her lashes. God alone knew how many drinks she had downed, but I didn’t doubt for a second that she was speaking from the heart. There was no subterfuge in the woman.

“My grandmother is worried about you too.”

That surprised me. “Why?”

“Why? You of all people must know what you’re trying to do here.”

“Well, sure, I—”

“It won’t be easy,” she said. “But you know that already, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact. “Letters has ruled over this house for more than half a century. You’re not the first to try to get him out. You are the first to try to get the boys out, though. I commend you for that.”

“Why did no one else…?”

“Try to help them? Because no one else ever knew the boys existed.”

“But your family has worked here for years. Didn’t you try to help the other tenants who wanted to clear the house? Didn’t you tell them about the boys?”

Caroline shrugged. “I never knew. Not really. I don’t think my mother knew either.”

“But your grandmother. She knew.”

“Yes. She knew. And she kept it to herself until the day you walked up to her in the nursing home and introduced yourself. In you, I think she found a kindred spirit. And a common purpose. You seemed to know as much about the house after living in it for a week as she knew after all her years of working here. You were also the first person who really wanted to own the house. The others were just passing through, but you intended to stay. You loved the house as much as she did. As she does. It isn’t because of her own guilt that she’s helping you, Jim, although I’m sure that’s a big part of it. She’s also doing it for the house. She watched it being built. She loves it as much as Letters did. As much as you do. It has never known happiness, this house. She thinks it’s time it did.”

“And the boys?”

“Until you came along I’m not really sure she knew they were still here. Trapped in these walls. Under Letters’s control. Now that she does know, she blames herself for it. As much as I love her, I have to admit it is sort of her fault so many boys died inside this house. She should have spoken up the first time she suspected something was going on. She should have gone to the police. It would have been the right thing to do, even if she lost her precious job over it.” Again, Caroline patted my knee. “In you, she has found hope of finding forgiveness for herself. And she’s willing to die to get it.”

“She told you that?”

“Yes. In no uncertain terms. She’s ready to die, Jim. The cancer will take her soon, so she hasn’t much time left no matter what happens. She has nothing to lose and everything to gain. She might even be able to die with a clear conscience, something she hasn’t had for a very long time.”

I gazed at the old woman snoring softly in the wheelchair.

“She’s quite a woman, isn’t she?” I said.

Caroline looked fondly at her grandmother. “Yes, she is. And this will bring her full circle. No matter what happens. She’s not afraid, Jim. After ninety-six years on this planet, there is no fear left in her, if there ever was any.”

Caroline planted a warm kiss on my cheek. “Thank you for letting her help the boys, Jim. And thank you for helping her rid herself of the guilt that’s eating her up just as fast as the cancer.”

“I have a feeling she’ll be helping me more than I’ll be helping her.”

Caroline smiled a knowing smile. “You may be right.”

I glanced over and was surprised to see the old woman’s eyes on me. Her hands were at her throat as if she had awoken to the pain of the cancer eating at her. There was fear on her face as well, but the fear was not for herself. It took her a moment to speak, but when she did, the words came out firm and strong yet almost tender. Like a proclamation of love.

“He’s coming,” she said. “Right now. He’s coming for Michael. Help him.”

“What do you—”

“Go!” she bellowed. The sleepy tenderness in her voice was gone in a second, replaced by desperation and near anger.

I did not know that ninety-six-year-old vocal cords could produce such volume. Everyone in the room jumped, and that one single word sent me flying off the sofa and down the hallway toward the master bedroom, my heart pounding as hard as my feet, where I could hear Michael now, we could all hear him, screaming in anger at whatever it was that was with him inside that room.

The bedroom door was locked.

I yelled out in frustration, kicked at it, cursed it, tried barreling through it using my shoulder as a battering ram, and the door resisted my efforts like an extension of the wall. It didn’t even rattle on its hinges.

Frank backed up three steps and flung himself against the door with such force that he almost knocked himself out, sliding to the floor with a groan.

The door did not budge.

Lyle tested the door with his fingertips, then helped Frank to his feet. “This ain’t right,” he said. “It’s like it’s nailed shut.” He turned to me. “Where’s the key?”

“I don’t have a key!”

Jesse plucked a hairpin from Caroline’s head and stuck it into the lock. With a tiny metallic whoosh, it was sucked from his grasp and disappeared through the keyhole.

Jesse’s mouth fell open. “Jesus! It ate it!”

“Letters is controlling it,” I cried. “He’s keeping us out!”

There was an ominous silence coming from the bedroom now, a silence that frightened me more than Michael’s screaming. I fought against a rising panic.

Rex clawed frantically at the base of the door, as desperate as the rest of us to get inside.

“Michael,” I yelled. “Try to open the door. Michael!”

No answer.

“Shit!”

“You’ll have to find another way in!” It was Caroline. “Go around, Jim. Go around the house and go through the window.”

“Yes!”

I retraced my steps down the hall and cut through the music room, where I flung open the french doors and hurled myself outside. I vaulted the low stucco wall surrounding the patio and tore through the brambles and chaparral at the side of the house until I reached a bedroom window. The drapes were closed, just as I had left them the night before. I looked around for something to break the glass with, but Lyle beat me to it. Picking up a large stone from the ground, he flung it through the window. The glass shattered, raining down around us. He peeled off his shirt, wrapped it around his hand, and punched out the shards that hadn’t fallen.

With a boost from Stu and Frank, I tumbled through the opening, landing with a thud on the floor inside. The drapery tore from the rod and wrapped itself around me like a shroud, blinding me. I desperately ripped it away and looked about the room.

It was empty.

“Michael!”

The room was a shambles. Mattress half-off the bed. Chairs overturned. The dresser mirror splintered. I heard the sound of running water.

As Frank and Lyle and Stu all tumbled through the window behind me, I headed across the room to the master bath, the only other place Michael could be. I found him there, draped across the edge of the tub, his head and torso under the water that filled the tub to the very brim, sluicing out onto the floor. His arms floated out to either side on the water, like a man drowned in the surf, and I screamed, “No!” before grabbing his belt and yanking him out of the tub.

Frank roughly pushed me aside and fell on Michael’s still body. “Fuck,” he screamed. “His heart’s not beating!”

Flipping Michael onto his stomach, Frank began trying to press the water from his lungs. For long, horrible moments nothing happened, and then I watched as a spout of water burst from Michael’s mouth. Frank immediately flipped him back over onto his back, and positioning Michael’s head, he covered Michael’s lips with his own and began breathing into him.

Lyle stepped around them and turned off the faucet while I paced in the corner, my hands in my hair, praying for Michael to breathe. As Frank continued mouth-to-mouth, I dropped to my knees beside them, and blinded by tears, I laid my hands over Michael’s chest and waited.

“Now,” Frank said.

I pressed firmly. One, two, three times.

“Wait,” Frank said, and again he laid his lips over Michael’s and breathed air into his silent lungs.

“Now,” he said again.

With trembling hands, I tried once more. One, two, three, and suddenly Michael took a long ragged breath. I felt his heart begin beating beneath my hands as his eyes flew open, and he turned his head to the side and vomited on the floor.

I cupped his face in my hands, and lying in the water and vomit beside him, I pulled him to me and began covering his face with kisses until Frank pulled me away.

“Jeez, kid. Let him breathe.”

Michael’s eyes focused on my face. When he spoke, his voice was raw and weak. “You smell like puke,” he said.

I tried to smile. “I know. I’m sorry.” And then I was sobbing. Once again I pulled Michael into my arms, holding him close, afraid to let him go. This time Frank ushered everyone from the bathroom and left us to it. I could hear Lyle crying in the other room, and then I heard Frank cooing and comforting him and telling him Michael would be all right. Only then did I really believe it.

Michael wrapped his arms around me. I could feel his lips make a smile against my skin. His voice was still weak, but it was his voice, and I reveled in the sound of it.

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry, Jim. Ali McGraw. Love Story.”

I sobbed even harder. “Oh, shut up.”

TWO MINUTES later Jesse and Caroline, with Rex bounding along behind them, walked into the room with a simple twist of the knob on the bedroom door. Still cradling Michael, I listened as the bunch of them reclosed and opened and reclosed the door half a dozen times trying to figure out how it had been so securely locked before when now they couldn’t get it to latch at all.

While Rex gave Michael a friendly tongue bath, I hauled my soaked and vomit-spattered body off the floor and shooed everyone out of the bathroom after giving Frank a tearful and heartfelt hug of thanks. When everyone was gone, I flipped the drain on the tub and waited for the cold water to drain away, then refilled it with warm and pulled Michael to his feet. He was still shaken but tried not to show it. I peeled off my wet clothes and helped Michael out of his.

“Bath time,” I said.

Michael cast a leery glance at the tub. “I’m not so sure I want to get back in there.”

“Sorry,” I said. “You stink. Get in.”

We lowered ourselves into the water facing each other. I poured bubble bath over a washcloth, and while Michael closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall, I soaped myself down and then did the same for him, making sure I hit all my favorite spots on his luscious furry body.

As my hands did a little magic beneath the water in the vicinity of his crotch, Michael smiled a lazy smile and said, “Rub that part a little slower.”

Grinning, I did as he asked. Five minutes ago he was clinically dead, and now he had a very impressive boner. What a guy.

“Tell me what happened, Michael.”

He raised a soapy leg and rested it on my shoulder. His hips were beginning to move, meeting the movement of my hand on his cock. He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“You saved my life, didn’t you?”

“Frank saved your life. He gave you mouth-to-mouth. All I did was pound on you a little bit. Your heart wasn’t beating.”

“My God.”

“We almost lost you. I almost lost you.” I fought against another round of sobbing. “How do you feel now?”

He pressed his wet foot against the side of my face, languidly tugging at my hair with his toes. Some of the water had drained away, and I made a mental note to check the seal on the tub at some point in time when I had nothing more important to do, which certainly wasn’t now. While I continued to stroke him with one hand, I ran the cloth over his chest and legs with the other. The concentrated bubble bath was soaping up nicely. He was beginning to look like the Pillsbury Doughboy, except Michael wasn’t fat and squishy, and the Pillsbury Doughboy didn’t usually have a big soapy erection poking up from between his doughy, fat legs. Not in any of the commercials I had seen, anyway.

“I think I’ll live,” Michael said with a sexy grin.

“Good.”

His hips gave a tiny lurch. “Don’t stop,” he pleaded.

“I won’t.”

As my hand continued to slide slowly up and down, lingering occasionally at the tip of his penis, which made him shudder every time, he closed his eyes and began to talk.

“They were waiting for me.”

“They?”

“Yes. Letters and one of the boys.”

“TJ?”

“No. The skinny one. Kenny. It was like they knew I would come into the room. Hell, I didn’t even know I would be going into the room until you ticked me off with your stupid dialogue game and I stormed off to get away from you. The moment I stepped inside the bedroom, the door slammed shut behind me. The boy didn’t want to be there, Jim. I could see it in his face. He was frightened, and he was in pain. His neck was torn open.”

“From the cat,” I said.

Michael nodded. “From the cat. There was nothing ghostly about either of them. They looked as real as you do. But one look at the boy, and you knew he was dead. Those injuries.”

Michael shuddered, but apparently not from the memory. His hips rose to meet my hand. “Oh God, Jim. Slow down,” he breathed.

I slowed my hand, but refused to release him. He shuddered again. I was as rigid as he was. With my free hand, I commenced stroking myself.

He watched me for a moment, smiling. “You’re doing all the work.”

“I like doing all the work. Keep talking.”

I could see him trying to focus his mind away from what I was doing. After a time, he seemed to succeed.

“I’m not sure I can explain what happened next. Letters held his hands out to me, sort of like a phony magician conjuring magic, and a darkness flew out from his fingertips. It was real, Jim. Like an inky ectoplasm. It flowed out of him and across the room and sort of swirled around me, and the next thing I knew I couldn’t move. I could hear furniture and stuff banging around the room, but I just stood there, unable to move at all, like a statue inside a cyclone. I could barely breathe. It was like being tied with a rope that you can’t feel. At first, I screamed at him, but then I couldn’t say anything. I was wide-awake but helpless. The boy was crying. I don’t know if it was for me or for himself. Letters, of course, was enjoying himself immensely.”

I was so wrapped up in what Michael was saying that I forgot to carry on with business. Even my own. Michael touched my hand. “Don’t stop, baby.”

Once again, I stroked him gently while I recommenced rubbing myself. His ears were turning red, a physical reaction of his I had seen a thousand times before and one that I loved every time I saw it. It meant he was getting close to orgasm. But he went on with his story, his voice huskier now.

“I couldn’t move,” he said again. “Letters ran his hands over my body as he leaned in close to my ear and told me all the things he was going to do to you, Jim. Terrible things. The tortures he would inflict on you and the tortures he would force me to inflict on you when I was dead and under his control. I would be the one to kill you, he said. That appealed to him. He said it over and over. But first, he said, I had to die. The next thing I knew, I was drowning. Strong hands were holding me underwater, and I knew then that everything he had told me was true. I was dying, and I was helpless to stop it. I was so angry, Jim, so… sorry, but there was nothing I could do. Then I felt the water tear into my lungs, and that was it. Out for the count. Oh God!”

Before I knew what was happening, Michael took a deep intake of breath, arched his back, clenched my hand even tighter around himself, and with a long shuddering gasp, shot his sperm with such force it spattered the wall above his head. Then I, too, crying out with both agony and ecstasy, filled my own hand with hot semen and collapsed over him, my own form of darkness swallowing me up as well.

We lay comfortably in each other’s arms until the remaining water began to turn cold around us.

“Wow,” I finally said, opening my eyes to study the come-spattered wall. “That was impressive.”

“No kidding,” he answered, his breath still ragged, his heart still thumping double time inside his chest.

When I raised my head from his stomach to look into his face, Michael said. “That was great. Now back to reality. We have to leave this house, Jim, or he’s going to kill us all. I don’t think we can win this fight.”

“You’re wrong.”

He gazed deeply and sorrowfully into my eyes before saying, “I hope you know what the hell you’re talking about.”

I ran my hand across his chest, kissed his stomach, stroked his face, and just as I had hoped they would, his arms encircled me, pulling me close and tight. As I lay happily cocooned in the arms of the person I loved most and the person I most needed to love me, the person I had almost lost, I said, “I hope so, too.”

And for the first time since this crazy adventure began, I found myself wondering if the house was worth everything that was being put in jeopardy to attain it. The people I cared about. The future I could have with this person I loved so deeply. Everything. Was Michael right? Was I being a fool to think this was a battle we could really win?

Except for the muted voices of our friends in the distance, the house stood silent now around us. But how long would it remain that way? How long before Letters unleashed his fury on us once again? And when he did, would there be anything we could do to stop it?

And even if we did find a way to defeat the evil that permeated this house, at what price would we gain our victory? Was it really worth risking the lives of the people I loved?

I burrowed my face into the warmth of Michael’s hairy chest and waited for answers that were a long time coming, but when they did, they came with crystal clarity. It was the boys who mattered most. It was all about them, the boys who had suffered under the hands of a madman on this mountain I had chosen to call my home. Freeing them from torment was all that mattered.

I knew deep in my heart they were worth the risk, and somehow I would see it done no matter what Letters chose to throw at us.

I would free the boys, our friends would remain safe, and Michael and I would live happily ever after. Period.

I was a writer, after all. It was simply a matter of plotting. Hopefully.

“You’re looking optimistic,” Michael said with a mocking glower. “I hate it when you look that way.”

BY THE time Michael and I dressed in shorts and tees and joined the others, we were ravenous. As we left the bedroom, I noticed someone had covered the broken window with a slab of plywood, thank God, leaving me one less thing to worry about. It had been a long, eventful day, containing everything from slavering pumas to bone pits to naked kidnapped seamstresses, culminating in a near drowning and rather enjoyable two-handed sex, and it wasn’t even dark yet. But since we hadn’t eaten since yesterday, the events of the day, as remarkable as they had been, were forced to take a backseat to the simple fact that we were hungry as hell.

Caroline must have taken pity on us all, or perhaps she simply decided that her grandmother deserved a decent meal on her first night away from the rest home. I found her in the kitchen happily cooking up a storm while the pan that Frank and Lyle had started to fix lunch in hours ago sat soaking in the sink. God knows what had once been in it, and who cared since, unlike Frank and Lyle, Caroline actually seemed to know how to cook. And like I said, hunger was the major motivating factor here.

That and the exorcism of a murderous, psychotic demon. But we could get back to that after dinner.

While Caroline slaved away in the kitchen and Jesse followed her around with a tape measure for reasons I didn’t want to know, Michael and I joined the rest of our merry band in the living room.

Oddly enough there wasn’t a cocktail glass in sight. Everyone was looking rather subdued until Michael and I stepped into the room, and then our friends converged on Michael en masse, hugging him, patting him on the back, and ruffling his thinning hair until finally Michael pushed them away in embarrassment.

Mrs. O’Donnell watched all this with a certain amount of forbearance, but as soon as Michael had extricated himself from the fawning crowd, she reached out from her wheelchair and took his hand, drawing him down to where she could plant a kiss on his forehead.

“Thank God you’re all right,” she said. “It was him, wasn’t it? It was Mr. Letters.”

“Yes, ma’am, it was.”

Michael gently pulled himself away from her as well. He collapsed wearily onto the sofa, where he was probably hoping to relax. Instead, he was forced to recount everything that had happened to him in that sealed room. While he spoke, I sought out Frank and sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, holding his hand and mumbling my thanks to him for saving Michael’s life.

After Michael had finished telling his story, the room grew silent while everyone thought about everything that had transpired that day.

At last, Frank once again broached the subject of telephoning the police. “We have the skeletons of a dozen murdered teenagers out there in that goddamn cave. The authorities are going to want to know about it. They may not believe anything else that’s going on around here, but they can’t just laugh those bones away.”

“Yes,” I said. “And then there’ll be a shitstorm of forensics people and cops and news crews descending on the place, and everything we’re trying to do here will come to a grinding halt while they piddle around for weeks on end, tearing the floor-boards out of the house and confiscating everything in sight in a search for evidence, and by the time they’re finished, I won’t have a house left that’s fit to live in. And in the meantime, Letters and the boys will still be here.”

“James is right,” the old lady said. “What needs to be done here has nothing to do with the police. The law didn’t care about the boys when they disappeared all those years ago, and they won’t care about them now. All they’ll concern themselves with is the fact that one-time Hollywood star Nigel Letters was the person who committed the killings. The legitimate press will love it, the tabloids will eat it up, and the boys will be lost in the shuffle. Just like they always were.”

“There’s probably no way now to trace who the victims were, anyway,” Lyle said. “It’s so long ago.”

“But I know,” I said. “I know their names. I know how they died. I know everything. About some of them, at least. And we have physical evidence as well. Arturo’s wallet. A library card in another wallet I found in the carriage house. And that’s only the stuff I’ve run across. I haven’t really searched at all. Who knows what else is stashed away in various parts of the house?”

“Yeah,” Stu said, “and it’s just like you said. They’ll rip this place to shreds looking for whatever else they can find. Remember the poor sap security guard at the Atlanta Olympics back in ’96? The FBI was determined to nail the guy for the bombing even though he was innocent as hell, and since he lived with his mother, they tore the old lady’s apartment to pieces searching for anything they could find to back up their case. Tore out walls. Ripped up floors. Even confiscated the old lady’s Tupperware searching for traces of explosives. Don’t imagine she ever got any of it back, either. Not in usable condition. Is that what you want to see happen to your million-five mountain retreat, Jim? I don’t think so. Ba-a-ad idea calling the cops!”

I turned to the old woman. “But the boys want their stories told. You said so yourself!”

“I know I did,” Mrs. O’Donnell said. “But maybe I was wrong. Maybe they just want to be freed.”

“Well, of course they—”

“James,” she said, leaning forward and tilting her head back to look at me through her bifocals. “The people who loved these boys are most likely gone now, dead and buried years ago. For all we know, Julene was the last of the lot. The urge to tell the boys’ stories came from you, not them. Isn’t that right? You’re a storyteller. That’s what you do. Being a writer, you see everything in print. You probably spend hours thinking about the proper wording to describe it when you pull your jockey shorts down in the morning to take a poop.”

Everyone laughed, including me. There was more truth to what she said than I cared to admit.

“They’ve got no one left to tell their stories to,” she finished up. “Only you. All they care about, it seems to me, is that somebody knows what happened to them. But I’m sure even the boys would admit their freedom is more important than their stories. Don’t doubt that for a minute, sir. These boys have suffered enough.”

In the space of a second, my laughter morphed into anger. “Don’t you think I know that? I watched him, watched him, rape a twelve-year-old boy and drive a glass cylinder into his penis, then snap it in two just to hear the kid scream! I watched him stab Charlie through the heart with an ice pick as the boy lay sleeping peacefully in the fucker’s bed. I watched him mutilate one young man, driving him to suicide, then beat the other to death with a metal rod. And I’ve seen other stuff that you don’t even want to know about and that maybe you wouldn’t believe even if you did know about it!”

In my anger, I lashed out at the woman in front of me. “What the hell were you doing all those years ago when these kids were being slaughtered like cattle under your very nose? Polishing the fucking silver? Couldn’t you have just forgotten about your precious job for two seconds and picked up a goddamn phone? Who knows how many lives you might have saved? Who knows how many boys you let die just to keep that paycheck coming in!”

Mrs. O’Donnell looked as if I had slapped her.

“Jimmy…,” Michael muttered in shock.

I felt the floor tremble beneath me as Caroline suddenly stomped into the living room. She headed straight for me and, without missing a beat, bopped me on the head with a big wooden spoon. Hard. Gravy splattered everywhere. It was such an incongruous act that everyone, including the old lady, froze for about five seconds before bursting into laughter.

Michael laughed so hard he rolled off the sofa and almost flattened Rex, who had been sleeping peacefully on the floor at his feet until he suddenly found a 170-pound veterinarian sprawled across him. Rex yelped once and took off like a shot.

Without a word, Caroline turned her bulk around, not unlike the Titanic regally changing course, and stomped back into the kitchen, where she started rattling pots and pans and banging things on top the stove.

Still sitting cross-legged on the floor, I wiped a dribble of gravy off my forehead, then reached up and took the old woman’s hand.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, thoroughly chastened, ashamed of what I’d said to the woman and the cold way I’d said it. “I didn’t mean that.”

She patted my hand. “Don’t worry, honey. You didn’t say anything I haven’t said to myself a thousand times over. But it’s a little late for recriminations, don’t you think? They can come later, if they have to come at all. Right now we have more important things to do. You almost lost your boyfriend today. And unless I’m mistaken, Mr. Letters won’t be happy that Michael was snatched away from his grasp. He may try again. Or he may try for someone else. Me, I hope. I’ve wanted to face him for a long time. I have things to say to him he might not be happy to hear.”

If my words had hurt her, which they must have, she hid it admirably. At the moment she was looking more cagey than hurt.

“You know something, don’t you?” I said, studying the expression on her face.

She smiled down at me and patted my cheek. Her hand felt like old linen against my skin.

“I know a lot of things,” she said.

“Like what?” I asked.

She gave me a wicked smile that crinkled her old face in a hundred places. There was still laughter in her eyes.

“Like maybe how to get rid of your unwanted houseguest.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but Caroline beat me to it.

“Dinner,” she bellowed from across the house. “And I mean now!”

Apparently she was still a bit upset about the way I had spoken to her grandmother. Since there were knives in the kitchen as well as wooden spoons, and who knew when she might decide to bring one into play, we all jumped to our feet and headed for the dining room before the echo of her voice had faded into the walls. I was first to arrive, leaving Michael to wheel in Mrs. O’Donnell.

Caroline once told me her grandmother was a formidable woman. It would seem that those formidable genes had filtered down to Caroline as well.

Not for the first time, I sent a word of thanks to the wayward chromosome that had decided I was to be the one out of ten who would be destined to spend his life as a gay human being. I obviously wasn’t man enough, and would never be man enough, to face formidable women on a daily basis. And so far in my thirty-eight years, I had yet to meet a woman who wasn’t formidable in one way or another.

Scary creatures, every single one of them.

LYLE SPOKE around the pound and a half of meat loaf he had stuffed inside his mouth. “This is the first decent meal we’ve had since Jim invited us up.”

He was right, of course, but I wasn’t about to agree with him.

“Thanks,” I said. “Nice to be impugned.”

While we concentrated on devouring the delicious mountain of food Caroline had placed before us, I wondered what the old lady had meant when she said she might know a way to get rid of our unwanted houseguest. I started to broach the subject once between mouthfuls, but she silenced me with a stern look and went back to her meal. She seemed to enjoy the food, although it was obvious that swallowing caused her discomfort. She gamely tried to ignore the pain as she pecked away at her dinner, all the while casting fond glances around the room, like a traveler finally home after a long absence.

While the old woman stoically ignored her pain, Stu stupidly took it into his head to ignore the fact that there were two actual women at the table, not just the usual crowd of gay friends.

He stuck his elbows on the table, tucked his chin in his hands, and batted innocent eyes at Michael and me. “So what were you two boys doing in the bathroom all that time? Flossing? And if so, what exactly were you flossing with?”

“Stu,” I said, “I don’t think this is the time to—”

Stu steamrolled right over my objection as an awkward silence suddenly descended over the dinner table like a big gaudy hanging billiard lamp.

“Near-death experiences certainly rev up the old libido, huh, Jim? Huh, Michael? I know this from firsthand knowledge, you see. I’m not just making it up. After we rescued Jesse from the bone pit and delivered him from the arms of certain death, he took a quick shower, then threw his legs in the air, and they stayed there like his toes were nailed to the ceiling until I filled the void, so to speak. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Bam! Open for business.”

Jesse looked appalled as his fork stopped halfway to his mouth.

Stu didn’t notice.

I did. “My God, Stu, there are women here!”

Stu shrugged, smiling sweetly. “Oh, screw ’em. I’ve been thinking maybe Letters knew what he was doing all those times he wrapped a taffeta scarf around his throat and hung himself from that hook in the bedroom while he pounded away at his pud. The threat of death is a mighty aphrodisiac. I mean, prior to the time the death actually takes place, of course.”

The silence had become deafening as everyone stared at Stu as if he were some sort of alien life form that had just beamed itself into the room from another galaxy.

Stu didn’t notice our shocked expressions, or if he did, he chose to ignore them. “I figure it’s like how a lot of men are known to get hard-ons during earthquakes. Strange but true. Or maybe not so strange. The threat of death makes men want to procreate. It’s a simply biological reaction. Like farting. And it makes perfect sense. Continuance of the species and all that. Don’t get me wrong. We know you two weren’t procreating in there. Biological impossibility, I’m afraid. You were just bonking. So tell me the truth, Michael. Surviving death is boner city, am I right?”

A pea fell out of Michael’s mouth and rolled across the table. He cast an embarrassed glance at Mrs. O’Donnell, who looked back at him as if she was expecting an answer just like everyone else at the table except for me. I already knew the answer.

Caroline was laughing behind her napkin while the rest of our dinner party, including the old lady, sat waiting for Michael’s response.

Michael dropped his fork on his plate and gave Stu a long, piercing stare. I could almost see the wheels of enlightenment slowly turn inside his head. Then his eyes popped open wide.

“I know why you’re talking like this,” Michael said through tight lips. “You’ve been in my medicine bag. What the hell did you take?”

Stu was spared answering when Frank and Lyle, eating shoulder to shoulder at the other end of the long dining room table, suddenly sprang to their feet, overturning their chairs and sending them flying halfway across the room, narrowly missing poor Rex, who seemed to be the intended target for all manner of inbound missiles today, from falling veterinarians to antique mahogany dinner chairs.

Frank and Lyle slowly backed away from the table with horrified expressions on their faces. Lyle’s fork fell from his hand and clattered to the floor. He reached out and plucked at Frank’s sleeve as his eyes, as big as baseballs, stared at the plate he had been eating from.

“Time to go back to LA,” he said.

Frank stared with horrid fascination at his own plate.

“Be right with you, honeybunch,” he said. “Let me just pack and puke first.”

I finally tore my eyes away from their shocked faces and looked at the table in front of them.

What had once been two platefuls of half-eaten meat loaf with sides of mashed potatoes, peas, and asparagus spears, had turned into two plates filled with items that might have been dustpanned up from an autopsy room floor. Frank’s plate contained human fingers, raggedly sawn from the hand, a tongue that looked suspiciously human, a bloody hazel eye with optic nerve dangling alongside, and a sprig of parsley, which, if meant to be decorative, failed miserably to serve its purpose.

In Lyle’s plate lay the pièce de re´sistance: the withered, bloody stump of a penis, uncircumcised and jaggedly sawn away from whatever body it had once been attached to. Nothing else. Even the parsley was absent. The penis looked like some sort of grotesque leech, and as I stared at it, it began to squirm its way across the plate until it fell heavily off the edge onto the tablecloth with a solid little thump.

No one made a sound as they stared in horrified fascination at what was now slowly creeping across the table. In its wake, the severed penis left a bloody trail, like snail tracks, on the damask tablecloth. As I gaped at it, frozen stupidly silent by the absurdity of what was happening, I saw the foreskin suddenly peel back to expose a human eye.

The first person to find her voice was Caroline, who made a statement of such profound inanity I actually tore my eyes away from the horror and gawked at her in amazement.

“What happened to my meat loaf?” she asked.

Jesse managed to break the spell of horrified silence that followed Caroline’s ridiculous remark by quipping, “Wherever did you get it, dear? eBay?”

Caroline blinked. “Get what?”

“Jeffrey Dahmer’s cookbook.”

I happened to glance down at my own plate to see a bed of maggots swarming across a large piece of skin, obviously sliced from a human chest, since there was still a male’s nipple embedded in it. With my stomach doing flip-flops, I quickly tossed my napkin over it, blocking it from view. Then I upended an empty bowl and trapped the creeping eyeballed penis under that as well.

I turned to Michael who had also covered his plate with his napkin and asked, rather nonchalantly, I thought, considering the circumstances, “What have you got?” I asked.

Michael was looking a little green around the gills. “You don’t want to know.”

I took him at his word and casually, starting from my left, studied the contents of the remaining plates. Stu had sweetbreads and another ear. Jesse had a bloody rack of ribs, undoubtedly human. Caroline had a sprinkling of human teeth scattered across her plate. They were swimming in a sea of blood like some ungodly soup. One of the teeth was gold. And Mrs. O’Donnell had something that took me a moment to identify. When I did, I could only sit there in wonder at the cool audacity of Nigel Letters. On the old woman’s plate was a pile of putrefied tissue that was obviously cancerous. There was a tiny flag attached to a toothpick stuck in what looked like a mound of tumorous flesh, surrounded by a mass of pus and slime. On the little flag, was written, “This Is Your Throat. Have A Nice Day.”

I was even more amazed to see Mrs. O’Donnell stare at it and chuckle. “Theatrical bastard,” she muttered.

Stu casually stood and extended his wine glass. “My good friends,” he stated with pompous good humor. “Dinner is over. Resoundingly. Shall we retire to the sitting room for brandy? Lots and lots of brandy.”

“Bet your sweet ass,” Jesse said.

“Love to.”

“I was full anyway.”

“Me too.”

“Couldn’t eat another bite.”

“Lovely. Just lovely. My compliments to the chef.”

“Superb presentation, although the dick was a little underdone.”

That last comment came from Stu, who was clearly higher than a kite and enjoying himself to no end.

As everyone stalked rather stiffly but nonchalantly from the dining room, I lagged behind just long enough to sneak a peek under the napkin covering Michael’s plate, an impetuous act that I would regret for days to come.

There, centered perfectly on the china, was my own face as it might look after being peeled from my skull. Limp and bloody, like a rubber mask, it lay there, folded in upon itself, staring up at me through empty eye sockets.

With hands that I willed not to tremble, I very methodically re-covered it with Michael’s napkin and unhurriedly strolled away to join the others in the living room.

Mr. Mayer always said, “Never let ’em see you ache.” Or was it ass? “Never let ’em see your ass.” Shirley MacLaine. Postcards from the Edge.

God love her. What a truly formidable woman.

And an inspiration to stressed-out queens everywhere.

MRS. O’DONNELL motioned me to a corner of the living room away from the rest of the crowd, who after dinner and not surprisingly, had descended on the booze like a pack of starving condors swooping down on a helpless little bunny rabbit in the Andes foothills. The booze, like the rabbit, didn’t stand a chance, and neither did I. Mrs. O’Donnell was relentless in the way she pulled me to her. Needing a drink badly, I snagged Michael’s in passing and made it my own. “You’re welcome, I’m sure,” he said, before huffing off to pour himself another.

I noticed that as he headed for the liquor cabinet he also flicked off the dining room light, as if darkness could eradicate what we had just seen. I wondered if morning would once again find the remnants of meat loaf and mashed potatoes on the dining room table, rather than sundry dead body parts and one creepy-crawly penis still roaming around among the cutlery. I certainly hoped so.

Caroline settled in with the guys, matching them drink for drink, apparently deciding to break her own golden rule and spend the night. Fine by me, I thought. The more the merrier. I only hoped we wouldn’t end up with testicles and toenails for breakfast.

Mrs. O’Donnell was not happy with the corner of the living room we had ensconced her in, so at her bidding, I wheeled her out to the veranda, where she sat enjoying the silence and the cool night breeze for a few moments before speaking.

“Now I understand what you’ve been up against,” she finally said, referring to the dinner debacle. “I guess Mr. Letters still enjoys entertaining his guests.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s a real card.”

I watched her pluck a blossom from one of the bougainvillea plants and gently hold it to her nose, breathing in the scent.

“What do you know about Tania?” I asked.

“Tania?”

“Yes. The mountain lion a producer gave Mr. Letters as a gift in an attempt to lure him back to the movies. It came to him as a cub. Just a little thing. You never saw it?”

She shook her head. “No. I think I would have noticed something like that running around the house. Why do you ask?”

I couldn’t bring myself to explain to Mrs. O’Donnell the part Tania played in the murders. Letters must have kept the cub well hidden from her. Perhaps it spent its whole life tucked away in the carriage house or in the cave, never seeing daylight, never breathing clean air. I began to wonder if, after the unfortunate creature was grown, it ever fed on anything other than human flesh. Was that possible?

“Never mind,” I said. “It’s not important.”

She studied my face for a moment before finally saying what I assumed she had been wanting to say all day.

“You know, James, it isn’t only Mr. Letters’s spirit that is inside this house.”

“What do you mean?”

“You never knew my daughter,” she said. “Evelyn was one of the biggest fools to ever walk this planet.”

“You mean Caroline’s mother?”

“Yes. Caroline’s mother. My only daughter.”

“Your only child?”

She hesitated for a second. “No. I have a son.”

She looked away from me and let her eyes take in the night sky that arced across the mountain. I followed her gaze and saw, as if directed by Spielberg himself, a falling star shoot across the heavens. It disappeared below the crest of the mountain like a tossed cigarette sailing behind a hedge.

She sighed, looking away from the sky and away from me.

“My son,” she said softly, as if the memory surprised her. “I don’t know what happened to him, James. He ran off when he was little more than a boy. My love wasn’t enough to hold him, I guess. He always wanted more than I was able to give him. From the day he could stand, it seemed like he always wanted more.”

I didn’t know what to say, but I began to understand why she had made such a strong connection with Julene. They were kindred spirits, both mourning the loss of their young men.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She waved my sentiment away like she might shoo away a gnat. “He would be almost seventy now. More than three decades older than you. I never knew what happened to him, but I hope he found happiness. He was so handsome. He was born for happiness, but I wasn’t the one meant to give it to him.”

Again I said, “I’m sorry.”

She took my hand in hers. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I haven’t spoken of him to anyone for thirty years.”

“Not even Julene?” I asked.

She seemed surprised by the question but finally said, “No, not even her.”

Anger seemed to suddenly swell into her like the tide.

“He was ashamed of having a housemaid for a mother. Ashamed of what I did for a living. Nothing ever seemed to be good enough for Joey. Joseph. His name was Joseph.”

Behind the anger I could see the longing in her eyes in the light that spilled out from the open front door, and I played to it like an actor reaching out across the footlights. It seemed the proper thing to do. She had given me so much, opened herself up to me so completely, that I wanted to give her something back.

I took her hand in mine, feeling the weightlessness of it, the papery smoothness, what was once so strong now so fragile. “I’m sure he loved you. People grow up and find their own paths to take. Sometimes, when they take those paths, they have to leave loved ones behind.”

She gave me a sad smile and pulled her hand away.

“You’re talking in platitudes, James, but I appreciate your motives. However, I didn’t bring you out here to talk about my son. We were speaking of Evelyn. My daughter.”

“Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”

She gazed again at the sky, groping for words. “She fulfilled a final wish for Mr. Letters. For a sum of three hundred dollars, she brought him back here after his death, just as he instructed her to do.”

“You’ve lost me,” I said.

Mrs. O’Donnell sighed, digging back into her story to help me understand. “In the spring of 1945, I became ill. Female problems. I needed an operation. My daughter had turned sixteen that year, and she was looking for work just like everyone else back then. She took my place and did for Mr. Letters during the month I took off to recuperate. Evelyn told me years later about the deal she had made with him. The deal she, in fact, honored after his death. He begged her to do it, she said. And three hundred dollars was a lot of money back then, so she brought him back to this house. To this mountain.”

“You mean—?”

“Yes. His ashes. His soul. It’s buried somewhere inside this house or inside the cave behind the carriage house. He wanted to spend eternity here. He told her it was the only place he ever felt he truly belonged. He told her these things during the last months of his life, as if perhaps he knew his death was drawing near, although I don’t see how he could have. Not considering the way he died.”

“Where did she put them?” I asked. “And who is buried in his crypt?”

“No one is in the crypt. The crypt is empty. And I have no idea where she put the urn. Even if I did, it’s possible that Mr. Letters has moved it a hundred times since it was brought here. He is obviously powerful enough to do that, even if he is dead. If he can hold Michael under water long enough to almost drown him, he can certainly move an urn that can’t weigh more than a couple of pounds. We have to find it, James. Perhaps if we destroy it, we can destroy him as well.”

It seemed unlikely, but I was willing to try anything.

“We’ll search for it first thing in the morning. We’ll tear the place apart.”

“He’ll fight you,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose he will.”

I wondered if she had just signed her own death warrant by telling me about the urn.

She gave me a somber look, as if surmising my thoughts.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Just find the ashes.”

She reached out to take my hand once again. This time there was true fear in her eyes as she said, “Whatever you do, don’t let that Jesse fellow get within six feet of me with his makeup case.”

I grinned. “I’ll guard you with my life.”

Chapter 11

LATER THAT night, I awoke yet again to the sound of crying in the carriage house. It drifted to me through the bedroom window, louder than ever since Lyle had punched the window out with a rock. The crying was not only louder, it was also more disturbing than it had been when the house was new to me because now I knew who the wailing, tearful voice belonged to.

It was Allen. Twelve-year-old Allen Crisp. Taken from a bus stop one September day in 1942. Thanks to the newspaper photo and clippings given to me by Mrs. O’Donnell, I even knew what the boy looked like. I knew he had not been a runaway, had not been a prostitute. I knew he had once had parents who tried to find him and who probably went to their graves never learning the truth about their son’s disappearance. I knew all there was to know about the boy. Even how he spent the last hours of his life. His big send-off party had consisted of torture and fear and brutal rape. And pain. Lots of pain. His body had then been disposed of by tooth and claw like some sort of bloodied, slaughtered prey on the Serengeti.

I knew all those things, and as I lay safe and snug in my bed next to the person I loved, I realized that knowing those facts made the sound of that awful crying much harder to bear than when I hadn’t.

As was becoming a habit, I crept from the bed, leaving Michael snoring softly behind me in the darkness, and headed down the hall with Rex, as always, padding along at my heels.

I paused for a moment outside Frank and Lyle’s bedroom door, praying I wouldn’t hear the sounds of an orgy taking place inside, since Stu and Jesse were doubling with them after surrendering their own bedroom, the black one, to Caroline and her grandmother. Thank God, the room was silent. New sleeping arrangements would have to be made in the morning because truthfully I couldn’t see a second night of celibacy in Stu’s and Jesse’s future. They weren’t built for it. Perhaps I would send someone into town for an inflatable mattress and park the lovebirds in the music room where they could bang away to their heart’s content without disturbing the rest of my guests.

Or the ghosts.

Or me.

Stu and Jesse were an item now. I didn’t doubt it for a second. In Jesse, Stu had finally met his match. I could see it in both their faces every time they looked at each other, and it was a good thing. From now on, our friendly get-togethers would be couples only, with no awkward unattached singles among the lot of us to unbalance the seating arrangements at dinner parties. For that alone, Lyle would be tickled pink.

Assuming, of course, that Letters didn’t kill one of us before we drove him from the house, plummeting us back to odd numbers.

I was surprised to find the dining room cleared away and spotless after the travesty at dinner. Caroline must have done it after everyone went to bed. I hung a note on the bulletin board inside my head to remind myself to give the woman a raise in wages just as soon as I had more than four dollars in the bank. She deserved it. Anyone else would have run screaming from the house at the sight of an uncircumcised eyeball dragging a dick across the good china.

I closed the breakfast room door behind me, and as I had done so many times before, I flicked on the computer and waited for the words to come. But as I watched the computer screen scroll to life, I realized that this time I feared to let them in. Things were drawing to a head here. I could feel it in the silent tension of the house around me. These weren’t just walls of plaster and wood and stucco and tile. They were a living presence that had swallowed me, consumed me, from the very first moment I stepped through the front door. My life was now intertwined with the life of this house. We were one. And if danger could be sensed like fear, then I felt it now.

But I tried to ignore the fear, just as I tried to ignore the ache in my broken finger. And as I positioned my injured hand over the keyboard, I opened the door in my mind for whichever boy was out there waiting to walk through it.

He came so quickly my mind registered the shock of it even as my fingers began pecking awkwardly over the keys.

Once again, I found myself lost in a world I had never known. A world of ducktails and saddle shoes and Rosie the Riveter and global war.

And murder.

TJ’s world.

On the last day TJ would ever live in it.

AUGUST 1942

THE MAN in the expensive suit didn’t waste any time. The minute TJ followed him into what in TJ’s mind was nothing less than a mansion, the man turned to him, dropped to his knees, worked TJ’s Levi’s down around his ankles, and began working on him like a kid with a lollipop. Soon, the man had something fairly substantial to devote his talents to. He was good at what he did, and it wasn’t long before TJ spray-painted the man’s eager face with spouts of thick white semen. Gallons of it, it seemed to TJ. As it exploded from his body, the boy almost buckled on his trembling legs.

The man lovingly ran his hands along the boy’s lean hips, pressed his face into him one last time, drawing in the scent of him, then excused himself and strode from the room. Minutes later he returned, naked now, TJ’s juices still splattered across his face.

Figuring he was about to be called on to reciprocate and earn some of that fifty bucks, TJ kicked off his shoes, peeled off his shirt, and stepped out of the denims, which were still bunched around his feet.

Naked now as well, he smiled at the man with his best keep-the-customer-happy smile and approached him, still weak from his orgasm but determined to do whatever the man expected of him. If the man was pleased with him, maybe he could get a few return engagements at fifty bucks a pop, far better pay than the five bucks he had earned under the tutelage of the Bible salesman or with any other trick he’d had in the past six months of selling his body on the street.

When TJ reached out to him, he was surprised to see the man flinch away and take a step backward, putting himself out of reach.

TJ took a step backward himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought—”

The man’s voice was cold. “If I want you to touch me, I’ll tell you.”

TJ tried to laugh it off. “All right,” he said. “you’re the boss.” But in truth, he was a little hurt. He supposed he hadn’t been in the business long enough to take rejection well, and in fact, looking the way he did, rejection was not something he ran across very often.

Two seconds later, rejection was the least of his worries.

He watched in confusion when the old trick fiddled with something behind his back, and when he pulled out a pair of handcuffs, the boy’s confusion quickly turned to alarm. TJ didn’t like the looks of them, and he wasn’t about to let the old bastard put them on him, not for any amount of money. Especially now that he saw the strange glint that had suddenly appeared in the old guy’s eyes. TJ thought maybe a hyena’s eyes might have that same glint just before he crept up on a sleeping native and tore his jaw off in the light of a campfire.

“What do you think you’re going to do with those?” TJ asked.

The man’s smile was feral. “We’re going to play a little game.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Think again,” the man said, pouncing on the boy even as he spoke. TJ had youth and fear on his side, but the man was bigger, and his madness gave him a strength TJ didn’t expect. A solid blow to the boy’s face brought TJ to his knees in shock, and as he tried to shake away the numbing pain, he felt cold metal clamp around his wrist and heard the ratchet of the lock as the cuffs bit into him. His face was roughly pushed into the hard floor, and with the man’s knees in the small of his back holding him in place, he felt his arms being pulled behind him.

TJ tasted blood where his teeth had cut his lip at the moment of impact with the floor, and this infuriated him. Before the man could bring both arms to his back and clamp them together, TJ twisted from beneath him, knocking the man to the floor. The old fucker landed with a grunt. TJ stomped down hard on the man’s chest with his bare foot, then took off running down the length of a long hallway, looking for a weapon, looking for a way out, still shaking the dizziness from his eyes. Panic gave him wings, but the darkness that clouded his eyes from the blow to his head made him stumble, and as he hit the floor, hard, the man was on him again. He flung himself across the TJ’s body, and twisting his hair in his hands, he repeatedly smashed TJ’s face into the floor until finally TJ’s senses fled.

LETTERS COLLAPSED onto his ass against the wall, breathing heavily, gingerly laying a finger to his quickly swelling eye where the boy had nailed him with his elbow during the scuffle in the living room. He winced at the pain in his chest, almost sure the kid had cracked a rib.

The little bastard had some fight in him. Letters kicked out with his foot, catching the boy in the face. TJ moaned but didn’t wake.

Letters hauled himself to his feet and limped to the laundry room, where he yanked the junk drawer completely out of the cabinet that held it, scattering stuff everywhere. He scrambled around on his knees for a minute and finally grabbed a small reel of piano wire he used for hanging pictures. He kicked open a tool chest that sat against the wall, extracted a pair of wire cutters, and headed back to the hall where the boy still lay facedown, moaning louder now, like maybe he was trying to wake up.

There was a bruise coming up on the boy’s perfect ass. Letters bent over and kissed the bruise tenderly before bringing the hand with the cuff attached to it around to the small of the kid’s back and cuffing it to the kid’s other hand. He took the reel of piano wire, wrapped it several times around TJ’s neck, pulling it tight, then unspooled the wire down to the cuffs and made a few turns around the connecting chain that held the boy’s hands together, snipping away the leftover wire with the pliers.

He flung both the extra wire and the pliers down the hall, where they skated away across the floor, and once again collapsed with his back to the wall to wait for the boy to wake up. As he waited, trying to ignore his own pain, he stroked the back of the boy’s legs, admiring their symmetry, the brush of blond hair on TJ’s strong thighs, the beauty of the boy’s broad, smooth back. Letters figured he had spent a few hours at the nude beach, this one, or maybe his skin was just naturally golden since there was no expanse of white skin, pale and anemic, across his buttocks, no tan line to mar the perfection of what lay beneath the man’s hands.

Letters slid his tongue along the boy’s spine, tasting him, feeling the life beneath the unflawed skin, smelling the fear the boy exuded even as he slept, listening to the labored breathing in the boy’s chest. Maybe the wire was too tight. Letters lifted the boy’s arms to make a little leeway in the wire, but still he couldn’t work his fingers under it where he had wrapped the wire around the boy’s neck. Oh, well, he thought, the kid was young. It would take more than a little piano wire to kill him. Letters hoped so anyway. He wasn’t finished with him yet.

Letters moistened his finger with saliva and worked it into the boy’s anus, then he inserted a second finger, and a third, pushing them deep, feeling the core of the boy as he lay impaled upon his hand.

TJ MOANED, turned his head to the side in an attempt to draw a breath, then moaned again. As he slowly opened his eyes to see the man smiling down at him, as he felt the man’s fingers sliding deep inside him, that final moan quickly became a gasp as the pain of those probing fingers brought him fully awake.

TJ tried to scream, but the wire silenced him. He tried to twist away from the man, but at his first movement, the piano wire cut into his neck, tearing the tender skin, cutting off his breath completely. TJ tried to will himself to ignore the fingers and sharp fingernails burrowing their way inside him, stabbing at him over and over, digging deeper with every thrust. He forced his body to relax, to ease the tension of the wire, to let the blessed air into his aching lungs. The pain of what the man was doing to him was as nothing compared to the boy’s fight for air. Finally, his throat opened up, and he took a great gulping breath of it.

At that moment, as the life-giving air gave TJ a glimmer of hope that things might still turn out all right, Letters pressed his lips to the TJ’s ear, pushed his fingers even deeper inside him, and whispered, “You like it, don’t you?”

TJ gathered up what little moisture there was inside his mouth and spat in the man’s face.

Letters licked the saliva from his lips, then he licked away TJ’s tears. “Delicious,” he said. “Thank you. What other body fluids do you have for me tonight? I can think of only one, can’t you?”

TJ screamed again as the man bit into his ear lobe, gnawing at the lump of flesh until he tore it away. He held it in his mouth for a moment as if savoring the taste of it, the rubbery consistency of it, then spat it out.

The wire cut into TJ’s throat as he again tried to pull away from the man. Racked with pain, TJ rolled over onto his side, trapping his arm beneath his body, causing the wire to slice deep into his throat. He could feel the heat of his own blood pooling around the side of his face.

Letters pulled his fingers from the boy. TJ closed his eyes for a moment at the release from this one pain, but when he opened them again, he saw that the man’s hand was covered in blood, and TJ knew something had been torn deep inside him.

As his vision blurred and coldness began to settle over him, through him, he tried to focus on the man’s face while he sat there watching the life flow out of TJ like a scientist studying the death throes of a lab rat.

Before his vision faded to blackness, before the coldness took him completely, TJ saw the man pull himself to his feet and walk away without looking back.

Alone now, with the piano wire still gnawing at his throat, cutting off his air, spilling the blood from his body, TJ waited for his own death.

It came more quickly than even he expected.

I WAS brought back to the present by the feel of Rex’s tail thumping against my leg. I turned in my chair to see who he was greeting, but there was no one there. The breakfast room was dark, lit only by the monitor in front of me, and aside from Rex and me, the room was empty.

I waited for the pages to finish spitting out of the printer, then clicked off the computer and moved stiffly to the sliding door, easing it open.

There was a fire burning in the living room fireplace, casting orange shadows across the dark floor. In their light, I saw a figure standing. A figure in white. I took a step closer to see who it was, to see who had lit the fire, to see who else was out of bed at this ungodly hour just before dawn, and then I pulled up short.

“Mrs. O’Donnell?”

Backlit by the fire, I could see the outline of her frail, bent body through the pale nightgown she wore as she stared at something deeper in the room that I could not see, something off to the side, around the bend in the wall.

She ignored the sound of my voice, or perhaps she didn’t hear it at all. Her attention was focused entirely on whatever it was that was hidden from me.

Slowly, she raised her arms, reaching out. I could hear a fragile sob escape her lips, see the tremble in her body beneath the fabric that was made almost transparent by the flames behind her.

“Joey,” she said, with such longing in her voice my breath caught to hear it.

I eased myself forward on silent feet, afraid to startle her but equally afraid to leave her alone in the firelit room with whomever it was she saw, or thought she was seeing. Who the hell was Joey, I asked myself. Then I remembered. Joey was her son. Joseph. The one who ran away from her when he was in his teens. Just like most of the boys who ended up in this house, he had set a path for himself in the world that excluded such mundane things as security and family and a mother’s love. But what was he doing here, if that was truly who she was speaking to?

Then the truth hit me like a speeding truck.

Oh Jesus, no. It couldn’t be.

Was it possible that her son, like all the others, had fallen prey to Nigel Letters under her very nose, in the very house where she worked from morning to night without ever suspecting the truth? Had she turned a blind eye to her own son’s murder just as she had turned a blind eye to the others? Looking now at the shock on her time-ravaged face as the firelight flickered across it, I knew she hadn’t known at all. Had never even suspected. Her face was a litany of outrage, fear, and a horrible dawning truth. And disgust.

Rex passed me in the dining room, tail wagging high, as he approached the old woman who he accepted as a friend, now that she had spent time with me. I tried to grab him, but I was too late. The moment he entered the living room, however, before he ever reached Mrs. O’Donnell, he stopped and turned his head to face the same way the old woman was facing. The hackles immediately rose across his back, and a low growl stuttered from his throat as he bared his teeth and placed himself directly in front of her in a protective stance.

Mrs. O’Donnell ignored the dog, just as she had ignored me when I stepped into the room. I followed the direction they were both facing and stared dumbly at what I saw in front of the big picture window that overlooked the mountain outside.

They were both there. Mr. Letters and the young man who could only be Mrs. O’Donnell’s son. They were both nude, and the boy was on his knees in front of the older man, obviously relishing the cock that had been thrust between his lips. The boy’s hands traveled over the man’s body as he drew the man deep inside himself. Letters, eyes closed in pleasure, stroked the side of the boy’s head, ruffling his hair, pulling him ever closer as he buried himself to the hilt between those eager lips that hungrily and willingly devoured him, until finally the man gave a great gasp of delight and pushed his hips forward, delivering his juices to the eagerly waiting mouth. The boy sighed in ecstasy, accepting everything that was offered to him, hungrily pleading for more. More.

At the moment of his ejaculation, as the boy savored every drop of what the man was giving him, Nigel Letters opened his eyes and gazed tauntingly at the old woman across the room.

“He came to me,” he said with a cold smile. “Your son came to me. He opened his ass and mouth to me, and I plowed them a thousand times, just like he begged me to do.” Letters laughed. “He couldn’t get enough.” He gazed mockingly down at the boy who was now stroking himself as he pressed his face to the man’s genitals. “He still can’t get enough. Can you, my sweet?”

Mrs. O’Donnell’s voice was barely a whisper. “No.”

“Look at him!” Letters mocked. “Look at how he loves my body. Look at how he pleads for more come to fill that luscious young mouth.” Letters laughed again, this time throwing his head back and letting go completely. “My God, woman, you raised a hell of a boy here! A hell of a boy!”

Letters slid his fingers idly through the boy’s hair as he once again studied the old woman’s face in the firelight, his eyes burning from the shadows as he relished her pain. Her horror. “Mine was the only flesh he ever tasted in life. I was his first, you see. Oh, the hours we spent together exploring each other! He was the one who brought me back from the exile I had imposed upon myself. He gave himself to me completely. And he was so handsome, your young man. He made me realize I was still desirable. Still sexual. He saw past my aging body, saw past all the flaws that time had inflicted on me. And oh, how he worshipped my cock!”

Once more he looked down at the boy before him. “But there was a dark side to your young man, I’m afraid. He seemed to enjoy pain as well. Our games became rougher. And the more pain I inflicted on his strong, young body, the more he wanted. He would climax at the mere insertion of my fist in his ass. It was a sight to see—it truly was—this angelic young child screaming in ecstasy as I plowed my fist into him, stretching his sweet ass to limits one would not expect it could endure. One day as you worked away at your menial little tasks in the kitchen, as your son and I played our little games behind my locked bedroom door, he begged for my hands around his throat. ‘Take me to the brink,’ he said. ‘Let me come at the very edge of death,’ he pleaded. I watched as he stroked his beautiful young cock while my hands encircled his throat, as I slowly began to squeeze the life from him, and not once did he fight back. I felt his come splatter across my chest just as the light dimmed from his eyes, and when he lay unmoving beneath me, I drank from him in death just as he so enjoyed drinking from me in life.”

Letters sighed at the memory. “He was my first, too, you see. The first to share that utter intimacy with me. The intimacy of death. And, oh my God, how it left me craving more!”

An anguished sob tore out of the old woman’s throat as tears rained down across her withered cheeks.

“Oops.” Letters giggled. “It’s his turn. Okay, son, let me have it.” And with a groan, the boy shot his sperm onto the man’s leg, grinding his face into Letter’s crotch as the torrent gushed out of him.

“You,” the boy muttered. “Again. Please.”

Letters cackled. “Just like Oliver Twist, isn’t he? Jeez, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. This is life, isn’t it? Well, perhaps not.”

His face turned mockingly serious as he studied the woman’s horrified expression. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Aren’t you proud of your sweet son? He knew what he wanted, and he damned well went out and got it. Isn’t that an Irish trait? Persistence, I mean. Not sucking dicks. Although I’m sure it isn’t unheard of in your homeland. Anyway, he’s a chip off the old block, as far as I can tell. Joey told me your husband used to suck him off occasionally, when he got tired of your sagging ass.”

“Satan,” Mrs. O’Donnell screamed, finding her voice at last. “You’re a liar and a murderer. You killed my son.”

Letters shrugged. “Well, I suppose. If you want to get technical. Although he begged me to do it. He really did. He wanted to suck cocks in eternity, I think. He services all the boys here.” Again he patted the boy’s cheek as Joey caressingly rubbed his semen along the length of the man’s leg. “Don’t you, my dear? But I’m your favorite, aren’t I? Go on. Admit it. Your mother will understand.”

The boy turned his innocent young face, now ravaged by lust, toward the woman who gave him birth. He muttered a single word. “Yes.”

As I stared in horror at the young man still stroking himself at Letters’s feet, the skin began to slough from his face, from his body. It fell away like paper, exposing the meat, the muscle underneath, then that too began to peel away. Gobbets of flesh fell to the floor. A great rush of organs, unfettered now, spilled from the boy’s abdomen to pool at his knees, sliding away from each other, settling to the floor like sacks of blood. When there was nothing left of the boy but bones, they collapsed in upon themselves like a house of sticks, crumbling away to dust, covering the bloody mass at Letters’s feet like a sprinkling of lime.

Letters chuckled fondly. “He does that when he gets embarrassed, which is damned seldom, I don’t mind telling you. Bit disgusting, really, but we all have our little quirks.”

A cry of sheer animal hatred erupted from Mrs. O’Donnell’s cancerous throat as she rushed forward on feeble legs, staggering toward the man. Her tiny hands, so frail, so crippled with arthritis and years of toil, clenched themselves into knobby fists as she wailed out her fury. She crossed the room so quickly I barely had time to even think about stopping her before she flung herself at the man who she now knew had murdered her son, at the man who debased the boy even in death, and just as she reached him, just as her gnarled fingers reached out to maim, to kill, Nigel Letters disappeared with a pop of displaced air, and Mrs. O’Donnell went hurtling through the arched picture window with a piercing scream. She landed on the stones outside with a sickening thud as heavy shards of glass rained down upon her, piercing her body and smashing into the rocks.

With a last tinkle of glass, the room fell silent. Rex cowered at my feet as I felt the night air sweep into the room through the shattered window. I could smell the bougainvillea that bordered the house.

Stunned, my heart pounding away inside my chest, I took a faltering step toward the window. Then another. And at last the reality of what had happened burrowed itself into my consciousness as I heard the sound of running feet and slamming doors. I ran then, too, making a hurdler’s jump across the low, empty windowsill and landing clumsily on the rocky ground outside.

Mrs. O’Donnell lay facedown like a broken doll, the white gown she had been wearing splayed out around her, peppered with pieces of broken glass that reflected the light from the waning moon that hung above my head.

Someone turned on the living room lamps, and the light spilled out onto the ground around me, illuminating everything.

I dropped to my knees at the old woman’s side and laid my hand against her bloodied neck. I felt the faintest glimmer of a pulse beneath her skin, but then it stopped. In the space of moments, the woman I had sworn to protect was gone.

Death, at last, had finally reached us.

Nigel Letters had kept his promise, even if I had not.

IT WAS a somber group of friends who sat huddled at the dining room table while Caroline and I, in the living room, answered questions posed by a man from the coroner’s office. He brusquely scribbled our statements on a form on a clipboard. Two police officers stood out on the veranda while a fourth man, also from the coroner’s office, knelt beside the body, jotting things down on another clipboard. His hand shook as he scribbled, and I suspected he was suffering from a hangover like the rest of us.

After the phone call alerting the authorities of Mrs. O’Donnell’s death, the seven of us, myself, my friends, and Caroline, had held a hurried conference as to what we should and should not tell them when they arrived.

Caroline and I were practicing our deception on the man now, and he seemed to be buying it hook, line, and sinker. And why shouldn’t he? It made a hell of a lot more sense than the truth.

Caroline was answering most of the questions since she knew the dead woman considerably better than I did.

The man had an annoying habit of digging into his ear with a forefinger between questions. I wondered what he was digging for—potatoes, gold, dinosaur bones—but I never quite found the nerve or opportunity to ask. The man was bored silly, that much was clear. Death to him was just another day on the job. I wondered if he would be so lackadaisical about his own.

“I saw a wheelchair in the hall. Was that—” He checked his notes. “—Mrs. O’Donnell’s?”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “Yes, it was.”

She had managed to bury most of her grief behind a veneer of cool efficiency since the authorities arrived, but I could see glimpses of it now and then as she cast doleful glances at the shattered window.

“Was she ambulatory?”

Caroline wasn’t listening. “What?”

The man sighed and dug around in his ear some more. By the look of concentration on his face, he seemed to be getting close to the mother lode. “Could she walk?”

“Oh, sure. But not well and not far. She was ninety-six years old, after all. Still, she could get around fairly well if she had to. She also had throat cancer,” Caroline added. “That weakened her a lot the last few months.”

The man gave an artificial cluck of sympathy. “Hmm. Was she being treated for it? Were they giving her chemo? Radiation? Anything like that?”

Caroline planted her fist in her hip and glared. “Like I said, sir, she was ninety-six. What would have been the point? To make her more miserable than she already was? The doctors would have bombarded her with everything they had, of course, but she wouldn’t let them. She refused treatment, and rightly so.”

“Yes, well, I suppose that’s true. Was she depressed about her illness?”

“Wouldn’t you be? But she wasn’t suicidal, if that’s what you’re getting at. And even if she was, she wasn’t senile. I doubt if she would have tried to kill herself by jumping out of a first-floor window.”

The man giggled like a schoolgirl, and for the first time, I began to wonder about his sexual orientation, not that it mattered. I was not attracted to men who constantly panned for gold inside their ear canal while interviewing the recently bereaved. Plus he looked like a weasel. If he was gay, I doubted if he was very good at it.

The weasel checked his notes once again. “So you and your grandmother were visiting Mr. Brandon here for the weekend. Friends, are you?”

“Yes. Friends.”

“And the—ahem—men in the other room?”

“Yes. We’re all friends.”

“Gay, aren’t they?”

Caroline narrowed her eyes. “Yeah. You want a date?”

The weasel turned cherry red and dug even deeper. I checked the other side of his head to see if his finger had come all the way through yet.

“Sorry,” he said. “Just asking. Umm… you and your grandmother were sleeping together, right?”

“Yes,” Caroline said, “but we’re straight.”

The man jumped like she had stuck him with a pin. “I didn’t mean—”

“Just kidding,” Caroline said. “What’s your question?”

“You didn’t hear her get out of bed?”

“No. I was asleep. We had a few too many drinks last night.”

“Your grandmother too?”

“No. Not so much.”

I sincerely hoped they wouldn’t be checking for alcohol in the old woman’s blood. She had drank enough to fell an ox, although it hadn’t seemed to affect her much.

“Why do you think she came out to the living room?”

Caroline shrugged. “I haven’t the vaguest idea. Maybe her throat was bothering her. She was always in a lot of pain from the cancer. She might have gone to the window to look outside and lost her balance. Old people do it all the time. She must have fallen through the window.”

Here, Caroline had the good grace to dissolve into tears, and there was nothing deceptive about them. They were real.

“I know this is hard,” the man said.

Caroline wiped her eyes with a soggy Kleenex. “Yes, it is.”

The weasel turned to me. “You said you were the first to find her. Why?”

“I was closest,” I said. “I was in the breakfast room, writing.”

“Writing what?”

I stared at the man. “Just writing.”

“But you didn’t see her fall?”

“No,” I lied. “I heard the window break and came running in. I saw the woman lying on the ground outside, so I jumped through the window to help her, but there was nothing I could do. I felt her pulse, and her heart was still beating, but she died seconds later. There was nothing I could do,” I said again.

“No, of course not. What time was this?”

I looked at Caroline. “God, I don’t know exactly.”

“Four forty-five,” Caroline said. “Give or take.”

The man checked his watch, so I checked mine. It was now 7:30. He flipped his clipboard shut. To Caroline, he said, “If I have any more questions, can I contact you here?”

“No,” she said, glancing at me but speaking to him. “I’m going back into the city as soon as you take her away. Arrangements have to be made, and my husband and son are expecting me.”

The weasel tapped his clipboard against his leg with one hand while the other hand drilled for oil. “Guess that about wraps it up. Just so you know, my office will be filing this as an accidental death. She obviously tripped or lost her balance and crashed through the window accidentally. Her neck is broken. It wasn’t much of a fall, like you said, but at ninety-six the bones are brittle. Doesn’t take much to break them.”

He stuck out his hand, first to Caroline, then to me.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to Caroline. To me, he said, “I’m sorry for your… window.”

Caroline shook his hand, but since it was the one with the drilling apparatus, I ignored it. “Thanks,” she said. “You’ve been a brick.”

He jumped again. “A prick?”

Caroline laughed through her tears. “No, a brick. It’s a compliment.”

“Oh… good. Thank you.”

And with that, he weaseled his way out the door, off to the assay office, I presumed, to analyze whatever it was he had been digging out of his ear.

“Little twit,” Caroline said when he was gone.

Arm in arm, we walked to the broken window and stared down at the lifeless body of her grandmother one last time. She was on her back now, arms folded primly across her breast, the bloodstained nightgown neatly folded across her legs. But for the odd tilt of her head and the eyes staring straight up at nothing, she might have been asleep. The blood had been cleaned from her face, presumably when they checked her injuries.

“She was a tough lady,” Caroline said, blowing her nose. “But the cancer was wearing her down. I’m almost glad she went like this. Quickly, I mean.”

I put a comforting arm across Caroline’s shoulder as she shed a few more tears, then she composed herself and turned to me, all expressions of grief gone from her face in that one single heartbeat.

“I want you to get him, Jim. I don’t care how you do it. Just get the bastard out of here. I’ll never have a moment’s peace until you do.”

“I think your grandmother was right,” I said. “We have to find his ashes. The urn is here somewhere. Maybe that’s the key to all his strength.”

She laid a gentle hand across my cheek. “I hope you’re right.” Then her eyes widened at the sight of something outside the window. “Oh Lord. They aren’t going to put her in that, are they?”

I turned to see the two police officers spreading a large black vinyl bag next to the old lady’s body. They unzipped it like a sleeping bag, and the weasel and his partner lifted Mrs. O’Donnell onto it and zipped it back up. It was the first time in my life I had seen a body bag that wasn’t on a movie screen.

Caroline swallowed a sob. “She looks so small wrapped up like that. Like a child hiding under the covers.”

“Caroline,” I said, “I’m sorry about all this. I never should have let your grandmother come here.”

A feeble smile lit her face. “You didn’t have much choice, Jim. She was doing what she wanted to do, just like she’s done her whole life. It would have taken a better man than you to keep her away.”

“I suppose.”

She chuckled. “No supposing about it.” Then her face grew serious. “The only thing for us to be sorry about is Joey. My grandmother spent the better part of her life wondering whatever happened to him, imagining the life he’d built for himself in a place where she was not allowed to go. She cooked up all sorts of scenarios over the years, convincing herself that he was alive and well. And in the last moments of living, she finds out he was here all along. Dead. I wonder if he really came to Letters on his own. It’s possible, I suppose. That he was murdered in this house can’t be doubted, at any rate. I’m just sorry she saw what she did before she died. That little dog and pony show Letters put on for her benefit. It must have broken her heart.”

“And her neck” I wanted to say, but didn’t.

Each grabbing a corner, the four men carried the body bag over the rough ground to a coroner’s hearse parked in the driveway. Moments later the hearse was gone, winding its way down the side of the mountain, the police car trailing along behind.

Since Caroline was taller than I, she had to bend a little to kiss me on the cheek. “Do what you have to do, Jim. I’m not coming back to this house until it’s finished.”

I girded my proverbial loins and said with more confidence than I felt, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

“And be careful,” she said. “Don’t forget you’re dealing with a killer.”

“I know,” I said. “I will. I won’t.”

She grinned, even as she wiped away another spout of tears. “You sound confused already. Just rip the soul out of the bastard. That’s all I ask.”

“Gotcha.”

With that, she walked away, said good-bye to the others, and soon her old car was thundering down the mountainside in the wake of her grandmother’s body.

As I stared through the empty window frame, watching her drive away, Michael came up behind me and folded me in his arms.

“It’s time to finish this, Jim. We might as well get started.”

I leaned into him, drawing him closer. “I’m ready.”

“So are we,” a chorus of voices said behind us.

I turned to see our friends, looking a little worse for their hangovers, but each and every one studiously wearing expressions of grim determination, like troops psyching themselves up for the big battle. They were decked out in uniforms of faded blue jeans, white T-shirts and sneakers, like an aging gang of Jets from West Side Story.

Jesse alone stood out from the crowd. Dubious fashion icon, as always, he was wearing a pith helmet, hot pants, and a magenta pullover with the words “The Fruit Never Falls Far From The Tree” emblazoned across his chest.

Jesus.

Seeing me gawk, he looked down at himself. “What? Is whimsy out this year?”

I gave him a little wink and a smile. “No,” I said. “Whimsy is just what we need. I’m glad you’re with us.”

Jesse actually blushed while Stu, standing beside him, proudly said, “That’s my man.”

He was indeed. And anyone who could strive for whimsy in the midst of war was a man in my book, too.

“WHAT ABOUT the picture window, Jim?” Michael asked. “We can’t leave it like that.”

“We’ll call a glass man later. We have more important things to do right now.”

“Yeah,” Lyle said. “Leave it. It makes a good escape hatch the way it is.”

Frank took a long hard look at the darkening morning sky overhead and a bank of what looked like storm clouds moving in from the south.

Stu saw what Frank was staring at and said, “Don’t worry, Frank. It never rains in Southern California. I think it’s a law.”

Frank didn’t seem convinced. “I think that law’s about to be broken.”

Lyle chimed in like he actually knew what he was talking about, which was highly doubtful. “Smoke is what that is. Tijuana smoke. Floating up from a brushfire or something.”

“Don’t be silly,” Jesse said, tipping his pith helmet to the back of his head and scanning the skies as well. “That isn’t smoke. And it isn’t rain clouds either. It’s just a marine layer. A really, really thick marine layer. We get them all the time, but they never amount to anything. Trust me. It is not going to rain.”

Twenty minutes later it was raining buckets and blowing a monsoon, and we were scrambling around like startled chickens trying to find a way to seal up this broken window, which was five times bigger than the broken window in the bedroom.

“You don’t suppose Letters did this, do you?” Stu asked, triumphantly waving a vinyl tablecloth he had found in one of the kitchen cabinets.

“Don’t be an ass,” I said, snatching it out of his hands. “Letters can’t control the weather!” At least I hoped he couldn’t.

Jesse produced a roll of duct tape from a suitcase filled with sex toys, lubricants, and an uninflated, life-size, anatomically correct, inflatable male dummy (God knows what he used the duct tape for, and I didn’t ask because frankly I was afraid he would tell me), and soon the window was closed off, and the rain was being kept outside where it belonged, at least for the moment.

I hoped my friends proved to be better at fighting demons than they were at forecasting the weather. I gazed at their dripping, expectant faces. “It’s time to go to work, girls. We’re looking for a funeral urn containing the ashes of our good friend Nigel Letters. It’s here somewhere. It has to be. We’re going to tear the place apart until we find it.”

Michael added a caveat. “Uhh… when Jim says ‘tear the place apart,’ he doesn’t mean it literally. We would like to have a house left to live in when we’re finished.”

“Darn,” Lyle said, sounding more disappointed than I thought he had a right to be. After all, it wasn’t his house. Then he laughed. “Don’t look so hurt, Jim. I was kidding. Where do we start?”

Michael, the ex-Eagle Scout, went into command mode. “We’ll check the house first, because I don’t think any of us are too eager to go back inside the cave quite yet. Everybody pick a room and search it thoroughly. Keep an eye out for evidence of the killings too. We may need all the proof we can find if the police end up here again.”

Stu’s voice was somber when he said, “You mean if somebody else gets killed.”

“No, I….”

I patted Michael’s shoulder. “That’s exactly what he meant. And he’s right. Let’s just make sure it doesn’t happen. We’ll team up in pairs. I don’t want anyone being alone even for a minute. And stay close. Don’t wander off.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Jesse said. “I don’t plan on getting more than a pecker’s length away from somebody.”

“Preferably me,” Stu said.

“You bet.” Jesse hooked his fingers under Stu’s belt and purred like Eartha Kitt, something I had never seen a man in a pith helmet do before.

“A pecker’s length should do just fine,” I said dryly. I already had a hunch where the urn might be. “Michael and I will take the music and ego rooms. The rest of you guys can decide on which rooms you want to search.”

“Great,” Lyle said. “Frank and I will check out our bedroom in LA.”

Jesse grinned. “Stu and I will search the Rembrandt Bar at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.”

“The tea room under Grauman’s Chinese is always interesting this time of the morning,” Frank mentioned in passing.

“I meant rooms here!”

“Oh, of course.”

“Makes more sense.”

“When did you cruise the tea room under Grauman’s Chinese?”

“Oh, long before I met you, dearest.”

“But we’ve been together forever! What were you, twelve?”

“I love the Bellagio!” Jesse squealed.

“Maybe another day,” Stu said under his breath, saving Frank from what seemed to be an embarrassing explanation. “You know how Jim gets when things don’t go his way.”

I rolled my eyes so far back into my head I could see the last three weeks of my life trailing along behind me, and it was not a pretty sight.

Much to everyone’s delight, Michael pulled me down the hall before I could say something clever and cutting. Sometimes friends can be such a trial. Gay friends, on the other hand, are always a trial.

I could hear the storm building outside. The sound of thunder grew progressively closer as the wind buffeted the windows, and sheets of rain streamed across the glass on the french doors in the music room. A gust of wind overturned a pot on the tiny patio, and Michael and I both jumped. As my old Uncle Ned used to say back in Indiana, it was tuning up to be a regular frog strangler out there.

“Never rains in Southern California, my ass,” Michael muttered.

“We’re on top of a mountain,” I said. “Perhaps the weather is a bit more severe up here than it would be down on the coast.”

“Everything is more severe up here,” he groused. “Weather. Ghosts. Murdering actors.”

My heart dropped about six inches inside my chest. “Are you having second thoughts about moving in?”

“No,” he said. “I just feel like complaining. I can’t erase the picture of that poor old woman lying dead on the ground. She came here to help us, and look what it got her.”

“All the more reason to finish the job she came here to do, and I’ll finish it with or without your help. If you want to leave, I’ll understand.”

“Who said I wanted to leave? Can’t a person complain without being labeled a deserter? I like to complain. You know that!”

“Fine,” I said. “You complain. I’ll search.”

“What? You think I can’t multitask?”

“You can certainly piss and moan at the same time.”

“I like to piss and moan.”

“I know you do.”

“I do it a lot.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Griping is in my blood.”

“It certainly is.”

“My God,” he said, taking a breath. “I feel a sudden urge to procreate.”

“So do I.”

Michael and I stared at each other for a full five seconds, then broke out laughing. It was encouraging to know we were both comfortably stocked with readily available testosterone, and the simple act of arguing between ourselves was enough to bring it to a boil, but this wasn’t the time to take advantage of the fact.

“Back to work,” I said.

“Right.”

I headed straight for the smaller ego room. I left the larger music room for Michael to search. During my first walk-through of the house, I had envisioned the tiny ego room as the place to store my collection of almost three thousand films. Hollywood’s best. And worst. Several of which, in the “worst” category, starred Nigel Letters himself. Idly, I wondered if I would ever be able to watch them again. The outer room, where the grand piano sat, I would make a screening room, since there wasn’t a musical bone between the six of us anyway.

But right now, all I could think about was getting every vestige of Nigel Letters out from under my roof. I tore the framed pictures from the wall under the pretense of thinking there might be a hidden niche or wall safe behind one of them where he might conceivably store a funeral urn, but in reality all I really wanted was to get them off my walls. I scraped them to the floor like a madman, shattering glass all over the place.

Michael ducked his head through the door to see if I had gone berserk, took one look at my face, and ducked back out again, probably deciding I had.

When every standing and hanging photograph of Nigel Letters had been swept to the floor and I couldn’t take a step in any direction without crunching their frames underfoot, I flung open the built-in cabinets that lined the room. Many were empty. Others were packed almost to exploding with old scripts, letters, books, restaurant menus, ornate invitations to dinner parties and movie premiers, and album after album of additional photographs. But there was nothing that even remotely resembled a funeral urn. I tapped the inside framework of the cabinets, listening for hollow spaces, but they were all solidly built, no secret compartments anywhere.

Michael poked his head through the door again, hesitantly, like he didn’t know what the hell to expect, and scanned the destruction around me.

“Jesus, Jim, I thought we were going to leave the house standing.”

I shrugged, maybe a little sheepishly, feeling my anger slowly ebb away. “Sorry. I had a hunch.”

He seemed to understand. “There’s nothing out here either. The storm’s getting worse, though. Can you hear it?”

As if in answer to his question, the sky rumbled overhead with the sound of several tons of boulders tumbling down a hillside. It was nine in the morning, and the day was as dark as dusk. I could hear the sweeping rain pummel the adobe tiles on the roof as another flowerpot crashed to the flagstones on the patio.

“I hear it,” I said.

“Where the heck did this storm come from?”

My anger was gone now, having left as quickly as it came.

“’Tis a puzzlement,” I said.

Michael groaned. “Oh, Christ, Jim, this is no time for your stupid movie quo—” He froze in midsentence, staring at the floor. “My God.”

I followed his gaze and felt my pulse quicken. All the photographs of Letters schmoozing with the beautiful Hollywood elite of the thirties—Mae West, Clara Bow, Mary Astor, and dozens of others—had been replaced by death shots of all the young victims who had died inside this house. Letters smiled over each of them, just as he had smiled and simpered with the celebrities in his heyday, only now the faces staring back at him in the photographs were vacantly lifeless and bloodied with injuries. I stared at one in particular. In it was the ghastly death mask of the Mexican boy, Arturo, the boy who had wanted to fight for his adopted country but was coolly denied the privilege. Beside Arturo, alive behind the shattered glass, Letters turned an evil grin to me and winked a leering wink. Eyes still on me and smiling lewdly, Letters bent to the dead boy beside him and slid his tongue along Arturo’s cheek. Unmoving, the boy’s lifeless eyes, still filled with pain even in death, stared at nothing.

Michael gripped my arm so fiercely that I yelped. He pointed with his other hand to a different photo on the floor.

“Ow!” I cried.

“Look there, Jim.”

One of the larger wall photos, the glass now broken like all the others, rested against the wall where I had thrown it. Again, Letters stared back at me, smiling, leering. He held a bloody face against his, like two lovers posing for a snapshot. I looked closer. The face beside his was mine. As dead as Arturo. As dead as all of them. I felt myself shudder as I stared at the gash across my forehead, at the ear torn almost off the side of my head, hanging only by a bloody rope of skin, at the bicycle chain that was wrapped so tightly about my throat that parts of it were buried in my skin. My eyes, swollen in death, were just as blank and unseeing as all the other eyes in the photos around me.

Letters’s hand, damp with blood, reached out of the photograph, going from sepia to color as it did so, and plucked a shard of glass from the broken frame. He pulled it into the photo with him, his hand this time going from color back to sepia, and with his eyes still on me, dragged the broken glass across my throat. I watched in horror as my own blood gushed from the wound to spill out of the picture onto the floor on which I stood.

Michael cried out in fury and brought his foot crashing down on the photograph. Blood squirted from beneath his shoe as he ground the picture beneath his heel.

“Slime ball,” he screamed. “Douche bag! Scum bucket!”

He pulled me roughly from the room and slammed the door behind us.

“The urn is in the cave, Jim! Just like everything else that’s evil in this place, it’s in that filthy shithole of a cave. You know it and I know it, so let’s just go get the damn thing and stop screwing around!”

“Michael—”

He stuck his face in mine and ranted on. “I switched from medical school to veterinary school because I couldn’t handle chopping up the damn cadavers. And now I’m surrounded by them again, and I really, really hate it!”

“Jesus,” I said, striving for levity to calm him down. “You really do like to complain.”

If it calmed him any, I couldn’t see it. “How can you cope with this crap, Jim? All these horrific images we’re continually bombarded with don’t seem to affect you at all. This isn’t one of your books, you know. You can’t just plot your way into a happy ending here!”

I pulled him to me, holding him close, feeling him vibrate inside my arms. “You’re my happy ending, Michael. Letters is just a bump in the road that needs to be bulldozed away. So calm down. He’s playing with us. Trying to scare us off. Don’t let him do it. He’s just a deceased actor, for God’s sake.”

“He’s a murderer!”

“No. He’s an illusion. Just like all that junk in the cave.”

Michael tried to pull away, but I held him firmly in my grasp. “He killed Mrs. O’Donnell. There was nothing illusory about that!” he said, still trembling with anger.

“Actually, he didn’t,” I said, pressing my face into his neck, cupping the back of his head with my hand just as he always did to me. “She fell through the window, Michael. Just like I told the cops. Letters tricked her into it, yes. But in the end, she only fell. He’s not as strong as he wants us to think. You have to believe that, or we’ll never get through this in one piece.”

He took a deep quivering breath. “You’re sure about that?”

I grinned. “Pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure? Great.”

Lightning flashed through the windows of the patio door, and a spasm suddenly gripped my body, my teeth clenching and grinding with the intensity of it. I felt someone’s pain. Someone’s fear. It tore through me like a premonition of death, but the death was not my own.

Michael pushed me to arm’s length to look into my face. He shook me, steel fingers gripping my shoulders. “Jim! What is it?”

And then I saw him. Another boy, lying dead and battered on the patio outside, naked, the blood from his body pooling around him, washing away across the flagstones in the sweep of wind and rain. It was a boy I had never seen before, just another of the nameless victims Letters had claimed so many years ago. Another flash of lightning made me blink, and when I opened my eyes, the boy was gone.

“It was—Nothing,” I said. “Someone just walked across my grave is all.” I stared once more through the patio doors. What had been a boy’s lifeless body was now nothing more than a shattered flowerpot with the broken stems of a jade plant scattered around it in the rain.

Michael strode to the doors and jerked them open. Wind and rain whipped into the music room. A painting fell from the wall and crashed to the floor behind me.

“Michael, close the doors!”

He yelled into the wind, squinting against the driving rain that pelted his face. “What did you see out there, Jim? What were you looking at?”

I pushed him aside and tried to close the doors myself, struggling against the gale that held them open. Finally, Michael helped me, and together we managed to get them shut again. By the time we did, we were both drenched.

I rounded on him. “Are you nuts?”

Michael glared back at me, stubborn, soaking wet, and extremely ticked off. “I want to know what you saw, Jim. Was it Letters?”

“No! If you must know, it was one of the boys. One I’ve never seen before.”

“What was he doing?”

“He wasn’t doing anything. He was dead.”

“Do you see him now?”

“What are you saying? That I’m crazy? Jesus, Michael, calm down! Letters is playing games with us, that’s all it is. I was just trying to spare you some of the gore. Cadavers and all that, remember?”

He narrowed his eyes into two angry slits. “Don’t spare me anything, Jim. I have to know what’s going on. All right?”

I nodded. “All right. I’m sorry.”

“Good,” he said, visibly trying to swallow his anger. “Thank you. Now what about—”

The french doors suddenly exploded inward. Spears of glass and splintered wood shot across the room like shrapnel. The lid on the grand piano, propped open since the day I moved in, slammed shut with what sounded like a shotgun blast. Michael and I clutched each other in shock, and a moment later we were diving under the piano to escape a fusillade of flowerpots and chunks of masonry sailing through the opening where the french doors used to be.

Crouching on hands and knees, our heads buried under our arms to protect ourselves, we waited for the attack to stop.

Michael yelled out a long string of profanity as the pottery and debris crashed around us, destroying furniture and punching holes in the walls. There was nothing we could do but stay out of the line of fire. The room suddenly reeked with the earthy stench of butchered vegetation and old mildewed potting soil. I was almost deafened by the noise, by the reckless fury of the assault.

Slowly, the din diminished as everything that was not nailed down on the patio could now be found in bits and pieces on the music-room floor. Michael and I were both bleeding from a dozen minor scrapes and contusions, but the greatest relief came from the sudden cessation of sound. Once again we could hear only the earthly storm raging outside, not the Letters-induced storm we had experienced a few moments earlier.

Michael peeked out from under his arms. “I think you pissed him off, Jim, tearing up his trophy room like that.”

I shrugged. “Screw him.”

I watched in amazement that quickly turned to alarm as the piano leg beside me suddenly bent outward. Then the others did the same. I barely had time to scream, “Michael, move!” when the half-ton Baldwin crashed to the floor with a discordant, earsplitting explosion, like violas and kettle drums and fourteen harpsichords tumbling down a flight of stairs. The floor shook beneath us from the impact.

When the twanging echoes of it faded, Michael and I looked at each other over the wreckage of what had once been a gorgeous piece of workmanship but was now just a pile of very expensive junk.

Wide-eyed, Michael gazed about the room, clucking his tongue. There was mud and foliage and glass and chunks of stone everywhere. Not one part of the room looked the same as it had five minutes ago, and I couldn’t see a single item that appeared even remotely salvageable.

With a trembling finger, I innocently pointed to the far wall, now punctured and potholed and smeared with crud. “The movie screen goes over there,” I said matter-of-factly.

Michael eyed me with considerable doubt. “Uh-huh. Okay. You might want to 409 and spackle first.”

We turned at a sound behind us and saw our friends peering around the hallway door. Everyone looked impressively awed except for Lyle, who was wagging an admonitory finger at us.

“Just look at this mess! How many times have I told you kids to play outside?”

Beside him, Frank took a long sad look at the destruction and then another long sad look at our stunned, bleeding faces. He rolled his eyes and said, “Another day in paradise. I’ll go fetch the Band-Aids.”

“And the suede cleaner,” Jesse added, leaning in and squinting at our injuries. “Kills germs. Promotes healing. Wonderful stuff. Really.”

SINCE THERE was no way to repair the french doors leading to the patio, we simply closed the hallway door behind us and left the music room to the mercy of the storm. The room was already totaled, so there was no further damage to be done anyway.

We were all standing in the kitchen while Jesse did his Mary Kay magic to the abrasions on my face and arms. Michael had already been treated, and he was not looking very happy about it. After cleaning the wounds with Mary Kay’s secret sauce, Jesse had dabbed Michael liberally with Mercurochrome, but the urge to be creative got the better of him, and before Michael knew what Jesse was up to, he had painted a very pretty red flower on Michael’s cheek with the Mercurochrome wand.

When Jesse began applying the medicine to me, I took a fistful of his T-shirt, dragged his face to within an inch of my own, and growled, “No illustrations, dipwad!”

Jesse’s eyes grew to the size of golf balls. “Geez, okay. Just trying to lighten the mood.” Then his face brightened. “If you don’t like flowers, how about a kitty cat? I can do kitty cats.”

“No.”

“A rainbow? Symbol of gay solidarity? Very chic. Very PC. But wait, I can’t do a rainbow. I’m monochromatic here. I’ve only got one color.”

“Jesse, please—”

“Do war paint,” Stu said.

Jesse and I stared at him. “What?”

“War paint. You know, like in the old Westerns. And hell, do all of us. We’re on the warpath, aren’t we? Clearing our mountain of squatters and all that. If we’re going to war, we might as well look like it.”

Michael gave him a sidelong glance. “What did you take this time? Percodan?”

Stu looked hurt, crossing his heart like a kid. “Nothing. I swear.”

Suddenly the idea appealed to me. “Do it, Jesse. War paint it is.”

“Oh, goody!” He clapped his hands and did a little gay bunny hop, then began painting broad strokes across my face in Mercurochrome. “I feel like a shaman!”

“Now do Frank,” I said, when he was done. “Do everybody.”

So he did. When he was finished, we looked like the cast of a really piss-poor remake of Broken Arrow, except, of course, for Michael, who still sported that ridiculous flower on his cheek like maybe he was the only fruity brave in the tribe.

“Now we’re united,” I said.

“Weren’t we always?” Michael grumbled.

“Yes,” I said. “But now it’s official.”

Lyle was staring at his reflection in a hand mirror. “God, don’t let me die like this.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Stu said, draping his arm across Lyle’s shoulder and squeezing his reflection into the mirror as well. “If Letters kills anybody, he’ll probably skin them, too. The war paint will have been expunged, so to speak. You’ll have nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“That’s comforting.”

“We need headdresses,” Jesse said, still caught up in the moment. “I’m all out of eagle feathers, but I have some exquisite ostrich plumes I was saving for a special occ—”

“No!” everyone screamed in unison.

In a tiny crushed voice, he said, “I suppose loincloths are out of the question. Very sexy, loincloths.”

We ignored him.

Lyle dumped a pile of stuff on the kitchen counter. “We found all this on the service porch while you two were rearranging the music room. That foldout ironing board that’s built into the wall had a fake back to it. Letters used it to stash things.” Lyle looked rather proud of himself when he added, “I think this is all the evidence we’re ever going to need.”

I sifted through the items. Wallets. Photographs. Cheap jewelry. And in a tiny drawstring pouch, human teeth, along with one removable piece of bridgework, the kind with little metal clamps attached to it.

“My God,” I breathed, flipping open the wallets, one after the other, and reading the names inside. There were six of them, and none of the names were familiar to me. But they were familiar to somebody. Somewhere in the world, if they were still alive, there were people who had once wondered whatever happened to these boys. People who loved them. People who had searched for them, just like Allen Crisp’s parents had searched for him. People who, undoubtedly, had gone to their graves never learning the truth.

But the truth was here before me now in this pile of refuse left over from these six young men who came to this house and never left. If the police were called in again, we had all the proof we would ever need of the atrocities that had taken place here. Even if they didn’t believe the supernatural aspects of the case, the physical evidence was undeniable.

I felt empowered, now more than ever, to do what I had convinced myself needed to be done since the first moment Letters made his presence known to me.

We had to drive the fucker from the house.

And somewhere on this property rested the funeral urn that was the key to doing exactly that. I hoped.

Somehow, Jesse’s childish striping of our faces, each differently patterned but uniform in color—red, bright red, as red as human blood—gave us a unity we might otherwise not have had. Unity in appearance. Unity as a cohesive whole. Unity of purpose and commitment. It made us an entity. More than friends, it made us an army. An army of innocents, perhaps, but an army nevertheless. And somewhere out there the enemy was waiting.

So, like children painted for imaginary war, we headed to the carriage house and the cave beyond, where I knew the final battle would have to be fought.

And there would be nothing imaginary about it.

Chapter 12

WE SPLASHED our way along the driveway to the carriage house, cowering beneath the ferocity of the storm that raged about our heads. Was this a storm of the world, or had Letters summoned it for our amusement? I fought back the urge to let myself believe he had that much power. Storms might be rare in Southern California, but they did occur. I kept telling myself this was just one of them. Besides, I figured if Nigel Letters had evoked this particular storm (since subtlety did not appear to be one of his major attributes), then there would have been bloody bodies raining down around us rather than raindrops, and a stench of rotten meat on the wind instead of the crisp, clean smell of ozone.

A streak of lightning crashed into the rocks on the hillside above our heads, followed by an immediate blast of thunder that all but drove us to our knees in shock. We dove through the carriage house door to escape it, bonking into each other and ricocheting back and forth like a pack of Keystone Kops as we all tried to get through the narrow doorway at the same time.

Once inside, Lyle shook himself off, just as Rex was doing at his feet, and with a nervous giggle said, “Jesus! That was awe-inspiringly manly of us. Letters must be shaking in his ghostly boots.”

Dripping, Frank grimaced. “Last time I saw Letters, he wasn’t wearing boots, or anything else for that matter. The sick bastard.”

The door slammed shut behind us, blocking out the storm but more unnervingly, blocking out the light. We found ourselves suddenly swallowed in darkness.

“Oh, crap, not again,” someone muttered as I groped around for the light switch on the wall. There was a communal sigh of relief and a couple of uneasy chuckles when I finally found it and flipped it on, driving back the shadows.

Heads turned toward the jagged entrance to the cave, where the day before we had hammered our way through the bricks. As we stared in disbelief, a roiling wave of fog began pouring through the hole in the wall and creeping toward us across the carriage house floor. It quickly encircled our legs, undulating around us like ocean swells. I could feel the cold of it against my skin, as if I stood knee-deep in invisible snow, and looking down, I saw faces, agonized faces, swirling through the mist, mouths gaping in silent screams. I presumed they were the faces of our young men, Letters’s victims, but they were so stretched and contorted by the waving fog that none were recognizable to me.

Wisps and curls of fog reached upward from the mist like fingers of smoke, slowly taking the shape of human hands. They pawed at us, but we felt nothing as they broke apart on contact with our bodies into shapeless shreds of vapor that then drifted back down into the roiling sea of mist swirling about our legs. I saw Frank frantically brushing the hands away from him, sending them scooting across the air in hazy whorls and eddies. Then, like spider webs, they gently settled in shreds to the mist below.

The wave of fog crept past us as it continued to pour from the entrance to the cave. When it reached the brick walls, it climbed upward with the slow billowy motion of lava. Still moving, still creeping, it left the walls to flow across the carriage house ceiling and hang above our heads. Soon it enveloped us completely. But for the cold and the torn faces still writhing and twisting in that ungodly fog, it would have been beautiful, like a painting by Maxfield Parrish come to life. I felt disconnected from the earth, as if I soared high above the world, suffused in silvery light, adrift inside a cloud.

I glanced at Michael and saw the same expression on his face I imagined was on mine. He too was seeing the beauty of what was happening, but the serenity of it seemed to be lost on everyone else.

Clad only in tiny shorts and a T-shirt, Jesse was visibly trembling from the cold, which was so intense now that I could see his breath popping out of him in nervous little gasps. Something touched my leg, and I jumped. Looking down, I saw Rex lift his head through the mist and stare up into my face, wondering, perhaps, what the hell was going on. I gave him a reassuring pat, and the moment I did, a harsh, howling icy wind suddenly blasted from the cave entrance, swirling and dispersing the mist around us until it disappeared completely, leaving us once again surrounded by nothing but four brick walls. The wind died as quickly as it came, and once again I could vaguely hear the sound of the storm beating against the walls outside, the distant echo of rattling thunder rumbling over our heads.

The temperature in the room gradually returned to normal, and everyone breathed a grateful sigh of relief.

Jesse brushed the goose bumps from his legs as he asked no one in particular, “What the hell was that?”

“Welcoming committee,” Frank said. “Letters knows we’re here.”

I didn’t doubt that Frank was right, but I couldn’t help wondering if Letters knew why we were here. I suspected had he known we were searching for the urn that held the remains of his earthly body, then our reception might have been a wee bit more disturbing than it actually was. He was playing with us now. I figured the playing would stop quickly enough when he learned what we were really after.

A movement caught my eye. In a shadowy corner of the carriage house, where the dim overhead light did not fully reach, among the rubble of half-opened storage crates where I had once searched for evidence of Letters’s crimes, stood a figure in white. Michael saw it too. He clutched my arm as if to hold me back when I took a step closer to better see.

Rex gave a happy yip, and a moment later I understood why.

The figure in white was Mrs. O’Donnell.

Her old head still rested at a contorted angle upon her shoulders, thanks to the broken neck she had suffered when she tumbled through my window. When I turned on my flashlight and aimed it at her, the many slivers of glass that had pierced her skin in the fall, and were still there now, sparkled in the darkness like fireflies as they caught the light.

Behind her, cowering against his mother’s back, stood Joey, still naked, his face still smeared with the evidence of Letters’s lust. But the boy did not look corrupted now with desire as he had when I saw him on his knees in front of his killer. Now he looked merely frightened, a young man in his midteens, handsome and strapping, grateful for his mother’s presence, relying on her now to protect him from the evil misery he had, perhaps, brought upon himself.

In death, the old woman had finally found her son and, like a mother always would, drew him to her. She held a protective arm behind her, sheltering the boy, keeping him close, using her body as a wall to shield him from any further harm.

There were dark bruises across the boy’s pale throat, where Letters had strangled him on that long-ago day when the two had played their sex game together, the game that apparently started the avalanche of murders that eventually buried this house in horror.

Joey’s mother stood a head shorter than the boy now, shrunken as she was from age and sickness and death, but it was still her strength the boy sheltered behind, her love, which had survived the decades, and her forgiveness, as well, that brought him perhaps the only comfort he had known in all the years since he’d left her.

As he peered over his mother’s shoulder, watching us, I saw a tiny smile touch his lips, as if he knew we were there to help him. Him and the others. Then he turned his gaze back to the woman who bore him and stroked her gray head, smiling all the more as he did so, just as she smiled to feel her son’s loving hand caress her hair as it had perhaps done when he was a child. She leaned her head into his hand, savoring the feel of it after all the years of loneliness, of wondering. With her eyes burning into mine, she raised her hand and pointed to the cave.

Then, like the mist that had been swept away earlier, her image, along with Joey’s, dissolved into tatters and wafted away to nothing.

“There’s our guidepost,” Michael said when they were gone. “As if we really needed one.”

“Why is she still here?” Lyle asked. “Her body was taken away. How can she haunt one place if her remains are somewhere else?”

Stu did an uncomfortable little foot shuffle. “Just think of this place as a big roach motel where people check in, but they don’t check out, even when they, you know… check out. Of course, they don’t just check out on their own. You-know-who helps with that part.”

Frank grunted. “He kills them, you mean.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Then say it! I’m tired of pussyfooting around this creep!”

“Fine,” I said. “I couldn’t agree more. If everyone’s ready, let’s finish it now.”

“I’m not ready.”

“Me neither.”

“I’ll never be ready.”

“Define ready.”

“Glad we’re in accord.” Michael grinned. “Let’s go.”

Stu pulled a pint of bourbon from his hip pocket. “Uh… before we start, I’d like to propose a toast.”

“Good idea!” Lyle said, obviously stalling for time. “What are we toasting to?”

“To friends. What else?” Stu took a long pull from the bottle and passed it on to Jesse who drank from it and handed it to Frank. When the bottle made two complete laps between us and the bourbon was finally gone, Stu threw it against the bricks, where it shattered into a thousand pieces.

“To friends,” we all said in unison, and single file—with myself in the lead and not feeling very good about it, but determined to finish what we came here to do—we entered the cave for the second and last time in our lives.

FLASHLIGHTS IN hand, we descended the roughhewn steps leading down to the first room of the cavern. I wasn’t sure how the rest of my friends were feeling about reentering this hole in the mountain that was little more than a crypt for the murdered boys, but my heart was in my throat as I once again felt the sand beneath my feet, as I once again breathed in the acrid stench of the chemicals Letters had used to dissolve flesh, to clean bones.

Michael stayed close to my side, but this did nothing to ease my fears. In fact, it compounded them. Letters had almost taken him from me once. I didn’t want it to happen again. I had lost one lover to cancer. I didn’t want to lose another at the hands of a madman, dead or otherwise.

Rex, too, never ventured more than six inches from my side, matching me step for step like a seeing-eye dog protecting and comforting his blind master.

The air was just as fetid as the first time we were here. Knocking out the wall and opening it up to the carriage house had done nothing to clear the cave of the miasma of death and filth that wafted through it. The stench was as strong and loathsome as ever.

But something was different. There was a distant, subtle scream in the air, a sound like far-off wind rattling tin, a metal sound, unending, uninterrupted. The screech of metal scraping metal. It took me a moment to realize what it was. It was the sound of the storm, whistling through a crevice in the rock someplace high above our heads. Somewhere in this cavern, in this graveyard of lost souls, there was an opening to the world outside, perhaps only a splinter in the stone mountain that let in just a taste of the beauty to be found beyond. A breath of clean wind on a balmy day. One ray of light from a morning sun as sharp and sparkling as the blade of a knife piercing the mountain’s heart. Or, as now, a hint of the storm that pummeled the mountain’s surface.

It was an eerie sound, like the long drawn-out wail of the mountain itself, railing against the horrors it held inside.

“Creepy,” Lyle whispered.

“It’s just the wind,” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”

Lyle seemed highly offended by my response. “Worried? Who’s worried? Do I look worried?”

“Yep,” I answered. Then everybody chimed in.

“Sure do.”

“Indeedy.”

“Fretful. Very fretful.”

Frank gazed back up the stone stairway we had just descended. “My God,” he murmured.

“What?” we all asked.

He looked at each of us in turn and shook his head in wonder before finally settling his eyes on me. “I suddenly realized I just saw the ghost of a woman who died a horrible death less than an hour ago inside your house alongside the ghost of a boy who died a horrible death there more than seventy years ago, and it didn’t even make an impression on me. Christ, Jim! Your weirdass spin on life, and all the supernatural crap you expound on in your books, is rubbing off on me!”

I gave him a lopsided grin. “You’re seeing dead people. That’s all it is.”

Frank scratched his head while staring at me in disbelief. “That’s all it is? I’m sorry, Jim, but I think it’s time you started writing children’s books. Tommy Finds a Grasshopper. Shit like that because, frankly, I think your horror stuff has dribbled off the page and splattered all over me, and I can’t say I’m real happy about it.”

Lyle gave him a quick hug. “Calm down, Frank. All we have to do is destroy the dead serial killer, free the dead boys, try not to get killed in the process, and then we’ll be out of here. I’ll give you a back rub when it’s over.”

Frank stared at his lover of twelve years as if he had never seen him before in his life. “Great. Jim’s infected you too.”

Jesse turned to Stu. “Does this pith helmet make me look fat?”

“No, love. You look yummy. Very butch.”

“Oh, goody.”

Frank cast his eyes around at each of us, wondering, perhaps, when he had lost the ability and the common sense to seek out normal friendships.

“Ready to proceed?” Michael asked, as if the last two minutes had never happened.

Frank shrugged. “Sure. Why not? Far be it from me to stem the tide of lunacy.” He turned to Lyle. “I expect a long back rub.”

“You got it. With a little anal tongue tickling thrown in for good measure. How’s that?”

“Sounds good. Sounds fair.”

“Sure does,” Jesse said, looking like he meant it.

Stu giggled.

Michael offered me a wink as if to say the mutinous crew had been brought back into line so on to business.

In single file, we moved deeper into the cavern.

Slipping through the hidden opening in the wall of rock, we warily peeked into the dungeon room to see what was waiting for us this time. The lights strung along the walls were still burning, just as we had left them, but there were fewer than before, illuminating the vast room less clearly. Not surprising, I told myself. The bulbs were decades old. It was a miracle they were working at all.

I checked my flashlight to be sure it was functioning. If the storm took out the power, I didn’t want to be left with nothing but my imagination to guide me through this hellhole. The same thought must have struck the others. They, too, switched on their flashlights before quickly turning them off again, conserving the batteries for when we would need them most, namely in the room beyond this one. The death room, as I suddenly thought of it, the long narrow unlit fissure where the skulls of Nigel’s victims had been collected and stacked like toys in a playroom, and where the rest of their bones had been tossed into a hole like so much garbage.

But first, the dungeon.

The horrific scene we had witnessed the last time we entered this room, like one of Nigel Letters’s old movies on VHS, had been rewound to an empty set, the actors waiting somewhere in the wings for their cue to pop back to their places and scare the pee out of us when Letters decided the time was right for maximum effect. I had no doubt he would orchestrate it admirably. His acting may have sucked, but his sense of theatrical timing was impeccable.

“Okay, let’s get to it. Search everywhere for the freak’s urn,” I said. “Check the boxes. Check the props. Check it all. Tear the place apart right down to bedrock. This isn’t the house. I don’t care if it’s left standing or not. In fact, ‘not standing’ sounds pretty good.”

“Hallelujah,” Michael said.

We tore into the place like a pack of hungry dogs digging through a city dump. Frank and Lyle, side by side as always, began tossing stuff around like maniacs. Jesse, in his pith helmet and hot pants, sifted prissily through the boxes along the wall, occasionally checking to see if he had broken a nail, while Stu, nearby, upended one of the long wooden tables and scattered a pile of junk that lay beneath it. Michael opened the iron maiden to peer inside and then stepped back to play his light high along the walls, looking for God knows what. Even Rex got into the act, digging frantically at the base of Tania’s cage, ignoring the skeleton inside as he tried to reach something underneath. I watched the sand flying out from between his back legs and finally dropped to my knees beside him to give him a hand. Together we dug through the dry sand. Rex stopped long enough to give me a friendly lick, and I thought, this is stupid, so I called Michael over. Together we flipped the cage onto its side. We ignored the rattle of Tania’s skeleton as it landed in a heap against the bars.

Stunned by what we had found, we simply stood there like idiots, staring down at the ground before us.

In a shallow uncovered grave, sealed over by the solid metal floor of the cage for the past sixty years, lay a body. Not a skeleton. A body. Tania must have been denied access to this one, for the flesh was undamaged. Undamaged by her, at least. More than half a century spent in the arid sand of the cavern floor had leached the moisture from it years ago. What stared up at us now from the grave, which was really little more than an indentation in the sand, was what can only be described as a mummy. Without the wrappings, of course. The boy—for what else could it once have been?—was fully dressed in jeans and Keds and a Levi’s jacket. Only the face and hands were exposed to view, and they were as hard and brown as driftwood. The leaching process had pulled the boy’s lips back in a silent, drawn-out scream. His eyes were open, but nothing could be seen in the vacant holes beneath the hardened brow but cartilage and waste. I wondered what the boy had seen through those eyes before death took him. Did he see Letters hovering over him, smiling his evil smile, as the boy’s life slipped away? Was this one of the children whose spirits had flown off at the moment of death, freed, at least, from the continuing torment the others were forced to endure? Or was his spirit still here? Was he one of the nameless, tortured souls who still suffered day after day and year after year at the hands of the man who murdered him?

Looking closer at the mummified hands, I saw that the fingernails had been broken back or torn away completely. There were scratches on the rusted underbelly of the metal cage floor where the boy had tried to claw his way out. What had happened here? Had the boy awoken to find himself buried alive in a grave of metal and sand? As he cried out in his dark tomb and tried to scratch his way to freedom, did he hear Tania above him, scratching too, trying to get at the fresh meat lying beneath her? Did he hear her footsteps pacing over him, hear her anguished cries, as she tried to reach the food that was begging for release only inches away? Did the boy suffocate here in the darkness, fighting to the last for one more breath of the ever-dwindling air, or had his heart finally exploded from terror?

What had he looked like in life? What was his name? I reached out to the body, thinking I might find some sort of identification still on him, but Michael pulled my hand away.

“No,” he said. “Not now. Later.”

And I knew he was right. We had other things to do. More important things. The boy would still be here after we succeeded, or failed, in doing what we had come here to do.

I began to turn away from the boy, and as I did, I caught the slightest tick of motion in that withered body, the faintest shifting of the head. Had I imagined it? Apparently not, for suddenly, with a groan of pain that caused the nerve endings on the back of my neck to do a little jig, the corpse in the makeshift grave turned his face to me completely.

The cordage of that face, so wooden and seemingly unhuman before, now moved with a horrible parody of life. Tiny puffs of dust exploded on the cheeks where the dried skin tore from the underlying bone. The boy’s lips, as dead and lifeless as parchment only a moment ago, now bent and twisted, crackling like twigs, in an effort to form words.

When he spoke, the voice was as dry and grating as sun-seared cornhusks rattling and scraping in a hot summer breeze. With those vacant, shadowy eye sockets aimed at me, he said, “We’ll bring you back.”

I didn’t understand. “What? I don’t….”

With a whispering rustle of sound, the eyelids closed and opened again, still revealing nothing but desiccated flesh and cartilage down among the shadows. The boy strove to tear words once again from his wasted throat.

“We’ll bring you back,” he said, more clearly this time.

And then he settled again into that awful deathly stillness in which we found him.

The sudden silence in the cave made me look up to see everyone frozen in place, staring at the carcass in the sand.

Michael was the first to speak. “What did he mean? Bring us back from where?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I did not bother correcting Michael in thinking the boy had been speaking to all of us. I knew, somehow, he was speaking to me alone. And that pretty much scared the pants off me—don’t think it didn’t.

I continued to stare at the boy, still now and silent, as he lay in his makeshift grave, again as dead and unmoving as he was the first time we saw him.

Was this truly a victim who had spoken to me, or was it Nigel Letters playing another of his fucking head games, trying to confuse us, trying to lower our defenses in preparation for another attack?

Frank cleared his throat, awkward in the silence that followed the boy’s words. “Jim, there—there’s nothing here. I think we should move farther in. Into the fissure.”

“I’d rather go to Disneyland instead,” Stu said.

“I’d rather go anywhere instead.” It was Jesse, moving to Stu’s side and resting his head on Stu’s shoulder as he stared sadly at the wasted body in the sand.

I ignored them both and spoke to Frank. “You’re right. Let’s go on.”

“But what was he talking about?” Lyle asked, gazing pityingly at the remains of the boy at our feet.

“I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” I said.

“I surely don’t like the sound of that,” Michael muttered to himself. But he pulled me to my feet from where I knelt beside the makeshift grave. After one last look at the long-dead boy in it, we headed for the crack in the wall that led to the deeper recesses of the cavern. We still did not know how far back the fissure sliced into the mountain, but I had a sneaking suspicion we were about to find out.

The boy’s words kept bouncing around inside my head. We’ll bring you back. What had he meant? Did this cave open up farther on into a labyrinth of passageways where without the boy’s help we would lose ourselves completely? Was the boy in the sand promising to lead us out again? Or was he, as I still suspected, speaking only to me?

I reached up to stroke Michael’s strong back in front of me. He turned and gave me a wink before stepping through the final portal.

Once inside, as we left the lights of the dungeon behind us, we switched on our flashlights, one after the other, to push back the sudden darkness that engulfed us. Lyle was chanting a hushed litany to himself over and over. “Fucking cats. Fucking cats. Hate bloody fucking cats.” But if Tania was present, she was hiding in the shadows.

The reek of death and chemicals was just as mind-numbing as the last time we were here. But now, unlike before, that whining scream from the storm outside added a new dimension to the horrible eeriness of the place—the dimension of sound. And somewhere in the chilling darkness ahead rested the urn containing the ashes of Nigel Letters. It had to be. But was it the core of his strength as Mrs. O’Donnell suggested? I certainly hoped so, for how else did one go about killing a dead man?

My initial plan to free the boys one by one in the hope that Letters would simply leave once his victims were gone had failed. The boys were still here. Not to mention Letters himself, angrier now and even more dangerous than before. He had burned Stu, taken Jesse, led the old lady to her death, broken my stupid finger, and only by the smallest margin of luck had Michael survived the attack in the bedroom. It was time to finish this once and for all. I could only pray that with all of us combined, and with the help of the boys themselves, we would be able to accomplish what we came here to do.

It was Letters or us. No other options were open. The house was mine now. Mine and Michael’s. All other tenants had to go. The boys deserved their freedom and Letters deserved—nothing. Not even this festering hole we were all standing in.

But for the nerve-rattling screech of the storm whistling through the unseen crevice somewhere in the shadows above our heads, the long fissure beyond the dungeon was just as it was the last time we were here. Pitch-black, bone-chillingly cold, and reeking with evil smells.

The old claw-footed bathtub still sat against the wall with Allen’s bones embedded in the hardened gunk of putrefied flesh and chemicals inside. The skeleton didn’t rise up to greet us as I half feared it would, so we moved quickly past it, racing away from the noxious fumes that rose out of it even now, after all the ensuing years. I could not begin to imagine what the reek must have been like when the chemicals were newly poured, when it bubbled and frothed around the fresh young body Letters had unceremoniously dumped into it

“Gawd, what a stench!” Lyle hissed. I glanced his way and saw he had hooked the neck of his T-shirt over the bridge of his nose to filter out the smell. By the stunned look in his eyes, it didn’t seem to help much.

I played my flashlight along the walls as we moved deeper into the fissure, searching for a niche in the rocks where Letters might have stashed the urn, but found nothing.

It occurred to me suddenly that if the urn was buried in the sand, we might dig around for months and never find it, and I seriously doubted if my friends were willing to invest that much time in the search. By the wary looks on their faces, I doubted if I would be able to coax them into this cavern again, no matter what happened. I was fairly amazed, and proud, that they were willing to enter it twice, considering all that had happened the last time we were here.

Someone gasped as one flashlight beam, quickly followed by five others, came to rest on the pyramid of skulls. I was right in assuming they had missed it before.

“Is that…?”

“The boys,” I said. “Most of them anyway. All but Allen in the tub and the boy under the cage. Their skulls are obviously elsewhere.”

Frank took a step toward the pyramid, then changed his mind and stepped back again. “It’s a shrine,” he said, his voice hushed.

But Lyle went closer to the truth. “More like a stamp collection, I think. A hobby. He played with them. Maybe he still does.”

I watched Michael’s eyes scan back and forth across the pile. “Fifteen skulls,” he said. “Add the other two and the total comes to seventeen. Seventeen young men slaughtered like cattle. Jesus. I had no idea there were so many.”

“And there could be more,” Lyle said. “These are only the ones we’ve found.”

“My head could have been there too,” Jesse said with an uneasy laugh. “Yours too, Michael.”

Michael answered with a grunt. “Well, it isn’t there yet.”

To everyone’s shock, he stepped forward and kicked away one of the bottom skulls, causing the whole stack to collapse onto the sand. One skull rolled to a stop at Jesse’s feet, making him shriek and leap backward.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Michael was on his hands and knees now, flinging the skulls aside one by one. “Isn’t there always a treasure buried beneath a pyramid? Say, for instance, the pharaoh’s remains?”

He was right! It was the perfect place for Letters to store his urn, under the bones of his prey, but after a minute of scattering skulls and digging through the sand, Michael pulled himself to his feet, cursing.

“It isn’t here.”

“Didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” Frank asked.

Michael shrugged, trying to hide his disappointment. “A man can hope.” Suddenly, Michael’s eyes popped open wide in what looked like fear. He was staring at my feet at the time, still holding one of the skulls forgotten in his hand, which was disconcerting to say the least.

Then I glanced down and saw what he was seeing. A swirl of dark shadow that even the flashlight beams could not penetrate was winding itself around my legs. Gradually moving up to my waist, it spun around me, higher and higher, creepy-ass trails of what looked like black smoke. I could feel it against the skin of my arms like cold silk as it rose to wrap around my chest. I tried to step out of the smoke but found I couldn’t move. With dawning horror, I realized this was the same stuff that had held Michael captive in the bedroom, that inky ectoplasm he had told me about. I saw the recognition of it now in Michael’s eyes as he stared at me in the darkness. And at that moment, we both knew immediately the danger I was in.

I gasped, feeling my stomach roil. Taking great gulps of air, I forced myself to stay calm. Slowly, the rush of adrenaline leaked from my system. I decided I wasn’t going to puke after all, but my fear was alive and screaming inside me like a racing locomotive.

“Michael,” I gasped. “Help me.”

As the cold ropes of shadow spun across my throat, I felt them tighten, blocking the air from my lungs. I caught a glimpse of Michael and the others frantically reaching out to me before the rising bands of darkness swept across my face. Blinded now to everything outside the cocoon of shadow that held me tight with icy tentacles of black mist, I could neither move nor speak nor breathe.

I felt the shadow enter into me, through my eyes, through my mouth, filling me as a drowning man feels the dark water rushing in, becoming part of him, just before it takes him completely.

All pretense of composure gone now, I tried to cry out, to fight, but there was nothing I could do, no sound or movement I could make.

When icy black fingers suddenly clenched my heart in a cold steely grip, I felt it stop pounding. Inside me, an unearthly silence descended.

The shadow was everywhere now, flowing around me, flowing through me, but I was not there. I was standing off to the side, away from myself, watching with a strange sense of detachment as I saw my body, shrouded in that horrible black fog, keel over stiffly and land with a shuddering thud at Michael’s feet.

As if from a long distance, I heard Michael scream, “No!” He dropped to his knees in the sand beside me, frantically peeling the mist away from my body, away from my face, tearing at it, flinging it aside like the web of some vast spider that had snared me and left me to feed on another day.

I could see and hear everything with crystal clarity. Michael, with tears streaming down his cheeks, pressing his ear to my chest, listening for a heartbeat that I knew he would not hear. Frank, dropping to the sand beside him, covering my mouth with his, breathing air into lungs that wouldn’t accept it. Lyle, weeping like a child and doing a strange dance in the sand as he hopped back and forth, willing me to breathe. Jesse and Stu, simply squatting there, aiming their flashlights at my still body, their faces awash in shock. Stu was clutching Rex, holding him to him, as a plaintive whimper issued from Rex’s trembling body.

And behind me, a voice said, “Come with us.”

It was TJ. Oddly, I was not surprised to find him there.

“No,” I said. “I can’t leave them like this.”

“We haven’t much time,” he said, clutching my arm, pulling me into the darkness, away from the flashlight beams that were aimed at the unmoving body in the sand. My body. “Come with us, Jim. Come with us now!”

Then I saw that he was not alone. They were all with him. All the boys. Kenny, Allen, Arturo, the twins, and others I didn’t recognize, all sweeping me farther into the fissure, past the bone pit, into recesses of the mountain that I had never explored, had not even known existed.

“He’s waiting for you,” TJ whispered in my ear.

I stopped and stared into the beauty of his eyes, so blue in life, and just as blue now in death. Innocent eyes. Innocent face.

I began to understand the truth of what had just happened.

“It was you,” I said. “You… killed me.”

He smiled and said simply, “Yes.”

Then once again, I was being led into the dark heart of the mountain, the boys whispering around me. I could feel their excitement building as we moved farther into the shadows, which my eyes seemed suddenly able to pierce. The boys were undamaged now, as handsome and whole as the day they were taken, their naked bodies aglow with health. Even the wire was gone from TJ’s neck.

I reached out and touched his untorn skin.

“You’re free,” I said. “Then… why? Why did you kill—”

He pressed a finger to his lips, motioning me to silence.

“Not yet,” he said.

Up ahead I saw the faintest glimmer of light. The noise of the storm’s wind, where it tore through a crevice in the mountaintop, was louder here, an unearthly wailing scream that seemed to resonate into my very fingertips. The sound of it reminded me of the outside world and everything in that world that I held dear, and I looked longingly back through the darkness, hoping to catch a last glimpse of Michael’s face. But he was lost to me now, along with the others I loved, lost in the shadows, lost in a life that I would never see again.

Anger surged through me, and I pulled my arm from TJ’s grasp. “Why have you done this? I was trying to help you!”

With a secretive smile, he once again pressed a finger to his lips. “We know.” A dozen hands reached out to me, caressing my face, stroking my body. Cool fingers began pulling the clothes from my body until I stood among them, as naked as they were. I could no longer feel the cavern’s chill, only those warm hands roaming over me, touching me everywhere. To my own amazement, I felt myself stir. There were lips on me now, sliding over my skin, tasting my chest, my back, my legs. One of the boys, Arturo, knelt before me and gently took my growing erection into his mouth. I shuddered and cupped his face in my hands, blocking out the memory of Michael, of everything, centering all my awareness on the sensuous feel of the many lips brushing across my skin. The one warm mouth encircling me.

With his lips surrounding my hard flesh, Arturo gazed up into my eyes. He truly was the most beautiful young man I had ever seen. I released his face and bent to run my hands down the length of his strong brown back, unmarred now, untorn, just as it was when he first came to this mountain so many long years ago.

Arturo released me then, and he smiled up at TJ. “He’s ready now.”

I certainly was. But ready for what?

TJ laughed out loud at the bewildered look on my face, at the burgeoning lust in my eyes (and other parts of my body), surrounded as I was by fifteen stunning young men, all caressing me, petting me, pressing their nude bodies against me, performing unnatural acts on me that in my life were not only natural but enjoyable as hell, and thank God Michael wasn’t there to see them.

“You’re thinking being dead isn’t so bad,” TJ said.

I tried not to think of the lips on my neck, of the hands at the back of my thighs, of how I ached to feel Arturo’s velvet mouth around me again. “Something like that,” I stammered, embarrassed.

TJ glanced behind him at the glimmer of light in the distance. “Think again,” he said, looking suddenly sad.

“I was afraid you’d say that.” I ignored the throbbing weight of my cock and followed his gaze to the light. “What is that?”

“It’s where the master sleeps,” he said. “He’s waiting for you. It’s also where you’ll find what it is you’re looking for. We’re going to help you get it.”

Get what? What was I looking for? I couldn’t seem to remember. I glanced down and saw the boys writhing in the sand at my feet, stroking each other now, tasting each other just as Arturo had tasted me. Allen alone, so small compared to the others, stood by himself in the shadows away from the moaning tangle of flesh surrounding me.

“Only the master partakes of him,” TJ said. “Allen does not understand desire yet. Only pain. He understands that very well. The master taught it to him.”

I turned back to TJ. “You’re taking me to him? Why?”

“Why?”

“Yes. Why are you doing this?”

TJ reached out and slid cool fingers down my stomach. “He wants you, I think. You—interest him.”

I was tempted to return TJ’s touch, but I forced myself not to move, to ignore my desire for the feel of him. This was the boy who had taken me from Michael, taken me from the life Michael and I were about to share. My desires had never controlled me when I was alive. I would not allow them to do so now, no matter how beautiful this boy was before me. And his treachery still angered me to the bone.

“He told you to take me, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

His fingers moved lower, brushing my pubic hair, making me tremble. My cock still stood like iron between my legs.

“But why?” I asked, no longer embarrassed by the evidence of my lust, only angered by it. “How can he control you like this?”

TJ let his hand fall away from me. He laid it instead upon his own chest. “You don’t understand,” he said, smiling a sad smile. “Pain is a great motivator.”

“I know he tortures you. But torture should not buy loyalty. Especially to the man who stole your life.”

“He forces us to replay our deaths. That is, as you will soon find out, the greatest torture of all. He is coming. He can hear us now. Be careful what you say.”

I looked around me. “Why? Where is he?”

“He is everywhere.”

“He isn’t God,” I said, anger again welling up in me.

“No,” TJ said with that same knowing smile. “He isn’t God.”

A groan of both pain and pleasure erupted at my feet. I looked down and saw either Josh or Jerry, atop the back of the other, hips grinding against buttocks, lips pressed into hair, both gasping, two bodies, one penetrating the other, writhing in the sand, welded into one entity by lust and love and uncontrollable desire—a desire that had spanned the decades, surviving even death itself. I sighed with both awe and wonder at the love they blatantly offered each other, the total lack of shame that drove them together even now. If there was sin there, I couldn’t see it. One had taken his own life in a futile attempt to protect the other. They didn’t need to cower behind convention for me, as indeed they were not. I understood them perfectly the way they were.

So, apparently, did TJ. “They love each other, just as you love Michael,” he said, watching them with the same wonder in his eyes that was still in mine. “I’ve never known a love like that. Neither has anyone else here.” He cocked his head to the side. “Michael is weeping for you now. Can you hear him?”

And I realized suddenly I could. My unbeating heart did not lurch inside my chest at that anguished wail of grief in the distance, and this, more than anything, brought me to a crescendo of anger and outrage.

“Letters,” I screamed into the shadows. “You miserable fucking murdering faggot! Face me like a man.”

At my elbow, a crooning voice answered. “I’m here, James. Right where I’ve always been.” Then he giggled. “Welcome to my harem. Your meat is a bit more aged than I prefer, but still it’s quite lovely, isn’t it?”

And suddenly he was there, standing before me. He had once again taken the form of his youth, and he was now wearing an amused grin on his stunningly handsome face. He still wore the spiffy little tennis outfit, right down to the pastel sweater tied rakishly around his shoulders. White tennies were on his feet, and snow white socks were pulled neatly up to his muscular, tanned calves.

Even in my hatred of the man, I could still appreciate his beauty. But his eyes, as always, told the truth of what he was. A killer. A fiend. And, as I was soon to learn, a fool.

I closed my eyes, trembling with disgust as his fingers tweaked the hair at my navel, then slid down to cup my balls before sliding up the length of my cock and pushing the foreskin back to expose me completely.

“You are mine now,” he said. “Mine forever.”

He knelt in the sand before me, and as I felt his tongue reach out to taste me, my gaze skimmed away from Letters’s face and settled into the depths of TJ’s eyes. He gave me a wink as he nodded to someone behind me.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the youngest boy, the only true child here, Allen, creep along the shadows at the edge of the fissure, moving toward the light where TJ had told me Letters was waiting. TJ stepped to Letters’s side, blocking his view of the boy, and only then did I begin to understand what was happening. When the other boys crawled across the sand toward us, once again reaching up to stroke my skin and hover around the man kneeling in front of me as they stroked him, too, lovingly peeling the clothes from his body just as they had done to me, I overcame my revulsion and laid my hands to either side of Letters’s face as I forced my cock between his lips and held him impaled in my grasp.

“My children,” he muttered around me, pulling me deep inside his throat

My cock was as hard as it had ever been in life, and I plowed it into the eager mouth, over and over, as the boys slid their lips across both our bodies. I felt a finger gently enter my anus, and I rocked on my heels at the rush of desire that threatened to send me into orgasm at that very moment, but I held it back, watching Allen, concentrating on Allen.

He had moved through a doorway at the end of the fissure, the doorway from which the light shone dimly in the distance, and a moment later he returned, holding something in his small hands. Something heavy.

Letters tried to pull away from me, but I took his hair in my hands and forced his head down onto me, choking him, stabbing into him with a fury that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with hatred. His eyes opened wide in sudden alarm as TJ moved behind him and grasped his shoulders, holding him in place.

Letters began to struggle, tried to pull away, but my hands and the hands of all the boys, no longer fondling, no longer gentle, gripped his body in a dozen places, keeping him there on his knees in the sand. His eyes were wide with anger now. I felt his fingernails tear at the skin on my thighs as he tried to push me away. I cried out in pain as his teeth bit into me, but still I held his mouth around me.

Allen was beside us now, and through my pain, through my jubilant anger at seeing Letters suffer as his victims had once suffered, I finally saw what it was the child was holding in his pale, small hands.

As the others continued to grip Letters’s struggling body, keeping him on his knees in front of me, Allen stretched out his hand and gently pushed me away. My cock slid from between those lips that were no longer young, no longer eager, but were twisted now with malevolence and fury and growing panic. Letters’s face had sagged into old age as I drove myself into him. He took a great gasp of air into his hungry lungs, and at that moment Allen stroked Letters’s face, almost gently, and tilted it upward to meet his own. Letters’s eyes flared wide as he saw what the boy held cradled to his body with his other hand. He bellowed in rage and dawning apprehension as he fought with all his weakened strength against the many hands still holding him on his knees. As Letters tried futilely to free himself, Allen withdrew his hand from his killer’s cheek and smiled a gloating smile—innocent, beautiful, deadly. With a tiny laugh, Allen lifted the lid of the pewter urn, and poured the ashes onto Letters’s horror-stricken face.

I watched as the ashes sifted over Letters’s features. All lust now gone from his eyes, he raised his hands and stared in mute helplessness as the ashes poured through his fingers, sprinkling onto the ground beneath him, disappearing into the sand on which he knelt. He screamed, “No-o-o!” and finally wrenched himself free from the many hands still holding him.

When the urn was empty, Allen dropped it at his feet as if it was suddenly hot to the touch.

Letters fell to the ground on all fours, scrabbling at the sand, trying to retrieve what the boy had spilled from the urn. Letters was weeping, just as young Allen had once wept at the hands of his killer. As he stared down at the man, that gloating smile spread wider across his face. The tinkle of a child’s innocent laughter erupted from Allen’s pale lips. The other boys, too, watched as Letters scrambled in vain to retrieve the irretrievable from the sand. Every one of them was smiling at the gentle, childish sound of Allen’s laughter.

Letters lifted the urn and stared dumbly at the emptiness inside. Frantically, while ignoring Allen’s mocking laughter above him, he began scooping sand into it with trembling hands. He seemed to realize the futility of what he was doing, and with tears of anger and growing fear streaming down his evil face, he emptied it out and filled it again. Once more, he poured the sand away and as his age-ravaged face twisted in fury, he flung the urn against the rocks that lined the fissure.

He looked down at his body, so strong and firm only moments before. Even as he watched, it wilted to a thing of sagging flesh and putrid sores. His face became a death mask, decaying already because of that one simple act of Allen pouring his ashes into the sand. Fingers, gnarled and knobby, grabbed at the boy in fury, but Allen stepped nimbly away as a dozen hands clamped down on Letters’s bloated, unholy body again and roughly drove it to the ground.

Letters twisted his face away from the hands that held him and stared furiously at me. When he cried out to me, the reeking breath that poured from his mouth filled the chamber with the stench of rot and evil. “You fool!” he screamed. “The boys will be dust without me! You’ve sentenced them to an eternity of nothing!”

TJ spoke for me. “Better nothing than pain,” he quietly said, then stepped around the boys holding Letters to the sand and draped his arm across Allen’s shoulder. The boy, so small next to TJ, turned away from the man who had murdered him and pressed his face into TJ’s chest. As TJ put his arms around Allen to embrace him as a father embraces a son, Allen melted snugly into the comfort being offered. He looked back, only once, for a final glimpse of the rotting horror at his feet.

Desperate now and raging in fury against the boys who held him, Letters twisted his arm free and reached out to grab my ankle. As I kicked it away in disgust, the boys fell upon Letters, and a scream of such pain and torment tore through the cavern, echoing against the walls and ripping through the darkness, that it took me a moment to realize the sound was coming from Letters himself.

Wincing away from both the touch of those groping fingers and that awful cry of unimaginable pain, I too reached out to Allen, scooping both him and TJ into my arms as I stared down at the tangle of boys in the sand while they gnawed and tore at Letters’s vile flesh, their teeth ripping into him, stripping skin from muscle, spitting it away, then biting again. Fingernails scraped at the flesh of Letters’s face, gouging, digging. An eye was torn from its socket, and Letters’s scream became an unending siren of sound that tore at me almost as painfully as the boys were tearing at him.

In a haze of spattering blood, the boys covered Letters’s body completely with theirs, burying the carnage beneath a blanket of young flesh. One aged hand reached skyward from the snarling mass of slashing teeth and pummeling fists, and then it fell motionless to the sand. Letters’s life-force sifted out of him just as his ashes had sifted from the urn, the urn that had somehow protected that force through all the long years since his true death occurred. I did not understand the power behind it, but I knew now that it was gone. And so did the boys.

Nigel Letters was finally, truly dead. He could harm them no more.

Slowly, one by one, they untangled themselves from the writhing mass, their faces smeared with blood, their eyes wild with triumph, until they stood side by side in a hushed circle around the pile of raw, torn flesh and bone that was now all that remained of their murderer.

I watched them, these boys I had come to know, as they stared down in silence at the aftermath of the carnage, at the long-overdue destruction of the one who had brought such endless agony to them all. I watched them stretch out their arms to one another. They took one another’s hands and glanced into one another’s faces, one by one, as the realization gradually dawned on them that their ordeal was finally over.

Then all of us watched in wonder as other hands, black hands, rose up through the ground where Letters’s savaged remains lay. Those hands clamped onto him and slowly pulled him downward into the sand. Just before his face disappeared beneath the earth forever, with his one remaining eye opened wide, I saw at last true terror where before there had always been only mocking hatred or cruel, unquenchable lust. Long black fingers splayed across that agonized face just as the torn lips spread wide in a silent scream, and then it was gone, sucked into the earth, leaving nothing for us to see but spatters of blood and a tiny dimple in the sand where the last of Nigel Letters had disappeared.

“Go to hell,” TJ whispered.

Peering through the arms that held him, Allen grinned, childlike. “I think he did,” he said.

TJ smiled sweetly down at the boy and ruffled his hair. “You did good, kid,” he crooned, causing Allen’s innocent young face to turn a bright, crimson red.

“Now what?” Kenny asked. His skinny body was drenched with gore, his face dripping with blood. And through it all shone a gleam of pure happiness.

As if in answer to his question, that sliver of light deep inside the fissure that pierced the mountain from the outside world suddenly flared into a pillar of flame. It lit the cavern from one end to the other, illuminating our faces, driving back every shadow. Stunned by the beauty of that flaming tower of light, we moved toward it. Hesitant at first but feeling the warmth of it spread across our bodies with a welcoming heat, we let our hesitation fall away and gave ourselves up to it completely.

Beside me, TJ rested his hands on Allen’s shoulders as the boy stared, slack-jawed, at the light still beckoning us toward it. Leaning forward, he whispered into Allen’s ear, “Go ahead. I’ll be with you in a minute.” And with a gentle push, he sent Allen forward, now flanked by Arturo and Kenny, who took the boy’s hands at either side and led him safely toward his and their final journey.

Pulled by the beauty of that pillar of light, I too stepped toward it, but TJ gripped my arm, holding me back.

“No,” he said. “You cannot go.”

I tried to wrench myself away, but his grip was firm. He would not release me.

TJ whispered to me, as he had whispered to Allen earlier. “You have things to do, Jim. You promised to tell our story. Let people know what happened to us. Expose Letters for what he was.”

My eyes could focus only on the beauty of that heavenly light. I tried to twist away, to shut out the boy’s words, but he would not let me. “You have a life to live. Michael is there waiting for you. He loves you. Your friends love you.” He pulled my face away from the light and forced me to look at him. “We made a promise too. We promised we would bring you back. Don’t let the last thing we do in this world be a lie, Jim. Now come with me. There’s no time left. If the life is gone from your body too long, then even I can’t bring you back.”

He tugged me back the way we had come. I felt the beckoning heat of the light behind me fade from my skin as TJ drew me through the shadows of the cavern, back toward the world, back toward the life I had thought was gone from me forever. And as the coolness of the cave once again played against my skin, I felt the draw of that life pull me onward. Michael was there. He was waiting for me. And Rex. Good old Rex. And just as TJ had kept his promise to bring me back, I vowed to keep my promise as well. The boys had trusted me to tell their stories, and I would do it. But not under the guise of fiction. I would tell the truth of what had happened on this lonely mountain so many years ago. I had to tell it. The boys were counting on me.

I turned one last time toward the light that was now far behind me, still blazing like a blade of fire into the heart of the mountain, and I saw that the other boys were gone. The mountain was once again nothing but a mountain. Empty of pain. Even the screech of the storm blowing through the crevice was silent now, but the light still burned there in the distance, waiting for one final soul to join the others. TJ. It waited for TJ.

“Go,” TJ said, “Your friends need you.”

And then I saw them, sitting in the sand around my still body. Michael held his face in his hands, weeping silently. The others were trying to comfort him. Frank, alone, still worked at bringing me back. Even now, he poured his breath into me, over and over, stopping now and then to pound on my chest with clenched fists as the force of his blows caused the tears to fly from his face onto mine. Lyle knelt beside Frank, gently trying to pull him away from me, pleading with him to let me be, but Frank thrust his lover’s hands away and knelt once again to breathe his sobbing breath into my cooling lungs, anger taking over where before there had been only desperation.

TJ’s voice crooned softly in my ear. “Enjoy your life,” he said, brushing a gentle kiss across my cheek.

And then I felt the splatter of tears on my skin, the touch of Frank’s warm lips, trembling with exertion, breathing air into me yet again. My heart, silent for so long, lurched to life with such force inside my chest that I gasped from the pain of it. My eyes flew open to see the shock of a dwindling hope suddenly fall from Frank’s face. It quickly blossomed into stunned jubilation as he watched the light of awareness, of life, suddenly return to mine.

“My God,” he said, tears and sweat shining across his face. “You’re back. You’re actually back. It’s been so long, Jim. Are you—are you brain-dead? I mean, more than usual?”

My voice felt like fishhooks tearing at my throat. “I—I don’t think so. And fuck you.”

He peered deep into my eyes, his tears still dripping on my face as he hovered over me. “No sense of appreciation. Mouth like a sailor. Beady little eyes. Good Lord, Jim, you’re back to normal! Or as normal as you ever were.” He raised his hands to the heavens and bellowed, “It’s alive!”

“Gene Wilder,” I croaked. “Young Frankenstein.”

Michael pushed Frank aside so hard Frank toppled over in the sand. Michael ignored him. He laid his head on my chest and wept, but not before muttering, “I can’t believe it. Back from the dead, and you’re still spouting fucking movie dialogue.”

I held him close against me, stroking my trembling hand across the velvet nape of his neck, feeling the life in his body replenish the awakening life in my own. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll never do it again.”

“Yeah, right.”

Michael’s voice was so fractured by emotion I could barely understand him. “And Letters?”

I wiped a tear from his cheek, stunned as always by how handsome Michael was. “He’s burning in hell, where he belongs,” I said. “Right where he belongs.”

“Good,” Michael answered, dropping his head back to my chest. Only then did I realize I was once again fully clothed, just as I had been before TJ stole me away.

I felt silent sobs tear out of Michael as I breathed in the smell of his hair and relished the feel of his strong arms wrapped around me, clutching me just as desperately as I was clutching him. Before I could utter words to tell him how happy I was to be back among the living, back to him, I drifted into a weary, dreamless sleep.

I did not feel him scoop me up like a child and carry me outside, and I did not feel him slide me between the covers of our bed and lie with me, awake and with one arm draped protectively over me, as he listened to the storm move away from the mountain.

With Michael beside me, I slept until sunset.

I never entered the cave again.

Chapter 13

One Year Later

IT WAS twilight, my favorite time on the mountain. Evening shadows were just beginning to darken the house. A freshening breeze, crisp and cool, swept up from the ocean to dispel the heat of another Southern California desert day.

While Caroline prepared dinner in the kitchen, I waited for Michael to return home from work. I roamed from room to room searching for the shortest member of the household, who seemed to be missing in action yet again.

I unearthed Gregory from his tangled grave of sofa cushions and lap throws where Rex had interred him for the third time that day. Apologizing profusely, I placed the box tortoise gently on the living room floor. He immediately trundled off in search of sanctuary and a nap, no doubt shaking his little tortoisey head in exasperation.

From the day Michael moved in, Rex seemed to consider Gregory his very own doggie toy, rather than an actual housemate, and nothing we tried in the ensuing twelve months had altered that perception for Rex in the slightest. Short of actually eating Gregory, I did not think Rex could be any more annoying to the poor beast if he wanted to be.

Michael assured me it was only a battle for alpha-male supremacy, not unlike our own infrequent battles fought in this new enclosed ecosystem we thought of as family. But deep down I suspected there was a far more sinister motive at work. Such as, quite possibly, the fact that Rex simply enjoyed bugging the bejesus out of the damned turtle.

I put the sofa back in order, and when I turned around, I was faced with Rex grinning up at me with the unfortunate Gregory clamped between his jaws. Gregory, perhaps deciding it was time to take a stand against his tormentor, twisted his head around on that long neck of his and bit Rex on the nose. Rex yelped, flung his head to the side, and Gregory went sailing across the room like a Frisbee, landing in a potted plant, where he calmly proceeded to eat the foliage. Comfort food, I assumed.

I banished Rex to the veranda with a heated lecture on interspecies relationships and the promise of more suffering to come if he didn’t stop torturing his stepbrother and how nobody likes anybody who picks on others smaller than themselves.

Rex glared back at me, unrepentant, as if to say the turtle had it coming. Then he piddled on the doormat. I slammed the door in his face.

I was about to extract Gregory from the rhododendron, when the gut-wrenching sound of several tons of scrap metal crashing off the ass end of a dump truck sent me racing to the kitchen, where I found Rory, Caroline’s three-year-old son, dragging pots and pans from the cabinets and tossing them into the middle of the floor while his mother peeled potatoes at the sink, apparently deaf to the racket around her.

“Cute kid,” I said, spotting a tiny dent in my new crepe pan.

Never one to pick up on nuance, Caroling smiled sweetly. “Thanks, Jim. Not disturbing you, is he?”

“Oh Lord, no.” I watched as Rory and his filthy size three Barney the Dinosaur sneakers stepped into the huge sixteen-quart aluminum pot I used for spaghetti and pulled the lid down over his head. Stricken with guilt, I tried to ignore the vision that suddenly popped into my head of myself twiddling a villain’s moustache and filling the pot with water, and after poking the kid down a little farther with a big wooden spoon and adding a dash of salt, setting it on the stove to simmer.

“Only if they’re cooked properly,” W.C. Fields once said when asked if he liked children. I was beginning to understand what he meant. It wasn’t so much a matter of diet as a matter of quiet. I also began to understand why Mother Nature saw to it that two gay men could fool around with each other until the cows came home, but no matter where they put whatever, they would never produce a child. Most of us are far too childishly selfish ourselves to share our space with children and far too concerned with things like crepe pans and noise to put up with them on a daily basis.

We do, however, make excellent and forgiving surrogate uncles. “He’s adorable,” I said. “I could just eat him up.”

Caroline tossed a potato into the sink and gave me a half-masted stare that told me I wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all her.

But that wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. “The book is wonderful, Jim.”

I turned to look at it. Perfectly typed, and as skillfully written as my meager talents allowed, the manuscript sat in a box on the dining room table, waiting to be delivered to my publisher in Los Angeles, who had sworn to publish it no matter what sort of shitstorm the revelations in it stirred up. The Boys on the Mountain would undoubtedly make money, he told me, and if it ripped the pedestal out from under a cinematic icon, then what the hell. Icons were meant to be knocked off pedestals. It was the American way, my publisher assured me.

It was the easiest book I had ever written—and the hardest. Easy because the story had been plotted for me by actual events, and hard because the characters did not come from my imagination. They were people as real as myself. I knew them. I had spoken to them, touched them, seen them suffer, and the telling of their stories caused me suffering as well. But I had also seen them freed from their torment, and that made the telling easier. Ultimately, it was the most satisfying writing experience of my life, just as the freeing of TJ and Kenny and Allen and Arturo and all the others was the most satisfying accomplishment of my life. I was proud of what my friends and I had succeeded in doing inside this house. And succeed we had. Short of Rex’s continuing torture of poor Gregory, there had been no disturbances in the house since the day of the storm.

Michael and I had settled comfortably into a loving and nurturing relationship that seemed to grow stronger with every passing week. He had purchased an old Victorian house on a hill overlooking San Diego Bay, one with an actual widow’s walk perched high atop the roof. With a shitload of money and endless patience, he had transformed it into a modern, state-of-the-art pet hospital, and his business, like our relationship, was getting better all the time.

Frank and Lyle visited us almost every weekend and were now in the process of shopping around for a house in the city, not only to be nearer to us, but because they had discovered surfing off the beaches of San Diego was infinitely more exciting, and less crowded, than surfing off the coast of LA.

Stu and Jesse, too, seemed to be considering a move to San Diego. Stu had decided the time might be right to expand his small chain of beauty salons out of LA County, and Jesse prattled on incessantly about opening a dress shop downtown after attending a drag ball in one of the gay clubs there and deciding the drag queens in San Diego were so abysmally lacking in style that only he could successfully correct the problem—and more than likely turn a handsome profit doing it.

In March, the four of us, Michael, Frank, Lyle, and I, along with Caroline and her husband, John, all climbed the winding staircase to the widow’s walk over Michael’s new hospital and stood witness to Stu and Jesse’s marriage vows. John, a man every bit as big as his wife and uncomfortable as hell wearing the rented tux she had decked him out in, was equally uncomfortable to find himself surrounded by a group of honest-to-God homosexuals, but he hid it well enough that no one took offense.

After much pleading by everyone involved, Jesse had finally agreed to wear a simple tuxedo, albeit pink, rather than a Princess Diana wedding gown with six hundred yards of silk, a twenty-foot train, and a veil as large as a car cover. The ceremony, amazingly, went off without a hitch. Afterward, true to form, everyone had gotten as drunk as sailors on shore leave, and even John eventually found himself having a good time, although most of the gay repartee ricocheted off the top of his head like stones skipping across the surface of a pond. Just before he passed out cold with a margarita in one hand and a bottle of Mary Kay’s cellulite obliterator in the other—Jesse had foisted it on him as a sort of bass-ackward wedding gift—I secured John’s promise to tear down the brick walls inside the carriage house and seal off the cavern forever.

The police had finished with it weeks before. Just as the boys’ disappearances had barely made a ripple sixty years ago, the discovery of their skeletons barely made a ripple now. It was old news, the police said, not much more than an interesting side dish compared to the main entrée of murder investigations they were conducting at the moment, especially since the perpetrator of our crimes was just as dead as the victims and had been that way for over half a century. They carted off the bones, rather reluctantly, I thought, after Michael and I pointed them to the cave (both he and I refused to ever enter it again) and that, as far as the police were concerned, was pretty much the end of it.

Even the papers barely mentioned what my friends and I had discovered in the depths of my mountain. The supernatural aspect of the case was discarded by both the police and the press as a figment of a horror writer’s overly zealous imagination and received nothing more than a couple of chuckles from the investigating officers, which infuriated Michael but was rather a relief to me. My reputation as a stable human being was left intact a while longer, at least until the release of my book. God alone knew what would happen to my reputation then, for I had written the book as fact rather than fiction, just as I had promised Mrs. O’Donnell I would do. I figured what would come, would come. I refused to worry about it. As far as I was concerned, the publication of my book would be the end of it all. The boys’ stories would be told, and my promises would be kept. Finis.

Now that two of the three couples in our little group had seen fit to legalize their relationships with wedding vows, the four of them had taken it upon themselves to nag Michael and me into doing the same. Michael and I talked about it for all of two minutes, decided we would do it sometime in the future but not now, and never gave it another thought, which didn’t slow the nagging one iota, not that we’d expected it to. Our friends could be just as persistent as Rex when it came to annoying their fellow creatures, but Michael and I could be just as stoic as Gregory when it came to ignoring them. Nothing nags at a nagger more than a naggee who ignores the nagging, and Michael and I ignored it with unbridled glee. After our excursion into the horrors of the afterlife, it was nice to get back to the simple pleasures, one of which is being able to drive your friends crazy.

Not for the first time, I let the perfect normalcy of my new life settle over me like a well-loved quilt. The wonder of Michael’s love and the simple perfection of our time together, with a few new friends and all new surroundings, was like nothing I had ever experienced before. The calm contentment of it, a contentment I had previously only known with my hands on a keyboard, was now mine to relish through every hour of every long day. Writing was no longer my only outlet for happiness.

I was about to close my eyes and savor this new contentment for about the millionth time, when Caroline snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Jim?”

“Huh?”

She gave me a patient smile, with just a hint of worry around the corners. “You aren’t channeling again, are you?”

“What?”

“I was talking about your book.”

“Oh. Wonderful. Yes. Thank you.”

She laughed and gave me a gentle chuck under the chin. “You wandered off there for a minute. I thought maybe one of the boys had returned and was beckoning you back to the Beyond for another round of intrigue.”

Once again I heard kitchen sounds. The clatter of Rory tossing the lid aside and climbing from the pot, the sound of running water in the sink, the bubble and perk of the coffee pot on the counter by the stove. “No,” I said. “Just thinking.”

“Well, thank God for that.”

I looked again at the manuscript on the table.

Caroline did the same. “It’s the best thing you’ve ever written, Jim. You kept your promise.”

“My promise?”

“To the boys. To my grandmother. You did everything you set out to do. You’re a good man, James Brandon.” And she wrapped her arms around me, squeezing most of the air from my lungs in the process, before returning to her potatoes.

I heard the rattle of the front door, and a moment later Rex came tearing into the kitchen, slobberingly happy to be paroled early from his exile to the veranda, and equally happy to have Michael clomping along at his heels.

After kissing me primly on the cheek, Michael waggled his fingers at Caroline in greeting, then scooped Rory into his arms and flung him into the air, causing the kid to squeal with delight—as if he wasn’t making enough noise already.

Tucking Rory under his arm like a football, Michael turned to Caroline and said, “Your husband looks like he just dug his way here from China. Dirtiest human being I ever saw in my life.”

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Hauling bricks out of the carriage house.” Michael turned a critical eye on me. “Why aren’t you helping him, Jim?”

I jumped. “Me? I’m a writer. I don’t do bricks.”

It had taken John a couple of months to arrange the time in his schedule, but today he had finally gotten around to starting the job. He had been out back swinging a sledgehammer since the crack of dawn, and not once in all that time had I even considered maybe I should be out there helping him.

Nor did I consider it now.

Michael gripped Rory by the ankles and dangled the kid upside down for a while. Rory laughed and screamed like a hyena as a rope of snot dribbled up his forehead and disappeared into his hairline. It dawned on me that Michael wasn’t exactly rushing outside to grab a sledgehammer either.

“Cocktail?” I asked sweetly.

Michael smiled back at me, as innocent as a fawn. “Yes, please. Rough day at the office. Declawed a Siamese with eleven front toes today. Charged extra, of course.”

“Ten percent extra?”

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact.”

Caroline dumped the potatoes into a pan, placed the pan on the stove, and adjusted the flame beneath it. “Don’t look so guilty, guys. Aside from certain evening activities, my husband prefers to work alone.”

Thank God, I thought.

“Thank God,” Michael said aloud, always more forthright than I.

Caroline laughed. “Thought you’d see it that way. Just let him be. I’m sure he’ll finish the job a lot quicker without your help. You gay boys are pretty much worthless anyway when it comes to manly work.”

“Thanks.”

She shrugged. “Just calling it as I see it.” Glancing at her son, she casually said to Michael, “You might want to flip him upright pretty soon. I think he’s about to either puke or pass out. Or both.”

“Oops.”

I heard Rex growling at something in the dining room, no doubt pestering poor Gregory again. Before I could stomp off to investigate, Michael set the boy on the floor, and we all watched him teeter around for a minute, too dizzy to stand upright, trying to regain his balance.

Still giggling and dribbling snot, Rory’s eyes suddenly popped open wide, and he raised his little hand to point to the doorway behind us.

“Big kitty,” he said, just as the setting sun dipped below the crest of the mountain, casting the kitchen in shadow.

And in a blur of claws and teeth, culminating in one horrible spray of blood, Tania pounced.

Caroline’s scream echoed across the mountain.

But the child was gone.

Chapter 14

IN THE HOME BUYING GUIDE of the San Diego Union, dated Sunday, June 30th:

FOR SALE—Fabulous Spanish style custom-built three bedroom home appointed with elegant art deco furnishings, sweeping mountain view, sunset veranda, flagstone fireplaces, teak flooring, music room, breakfast room, and spacious four-car carriage house on 3.4 acres perched high atop the scenic San Diego Mountains. A must-see for those with privacy in mind. Recently vacated.

About the Author

JOHN INMAN grew up on a tiny 60-acre farm in Indiana. His childhood was a happy one. He spent most of it barefoot with a cane pole over his shoulder, fishing and roaming the countryside and dragging home every wild creature he could get his hands on hoping to make it a pet, much to his mother’s horror.

Longing to see the world (what kid doesn’t?), he joined the Navy two minutes after graduating from high school. The Navy carried him all across the Orient before finally landing him in San Diego, California, a city he fell in love with at first sight. He lives there to this day with his husband John (yep, John and John), and an assortment of pets they’ve happened to adopt along the way, (Yep, he’s still doing that too.)

The one great longing that has stayed with John his entire life, from his childhood on the farm, to his years in the Navy, and all the way up to retirement from the working world, was the need he felt to write fiction. And he did. He wrote every chance he got, from elementary school all the way through to Social Security.

John calls this passion of his a wonderful addiction, and he thanks God every day that he suffers from it. Since he can’t think of a happier way to spend his remaining years on this marvelous planet, you can now find John, seven days a week, merrily slogging along on his computer, doing what he most dearly loves to do.

Writing. (And there’s usually a pet on his lap while he’s doing it.)

MY SITE:

http://www.johninmanauthor.com/

THE BLOG:

http://www.johninmanauthor.com/John_Inmans_Site/Johns_Blog/Johns_Blog.html

ON FACEBOOK:

https://www.facebook.com/john.inman.79

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Willow Man

By John Inman

Woody Stiles has sung his country songs in every city on the map. His life is one long road trip in a never-ending quest for fame and fortune. But when his agent books him into a club in his hometown, a place he swore he would never set foot again, Woody comes face-to-face with a few old demons. One in particular.

With memories of his childhood bombarding him from every angle, Woody must accept the fact that his old enemy, Willow Man, was not just a figment of childish imagination.

With his friends at his side, now all grown up just like he is, Woody goes to battle with the killer that stole his childhood lover. Woody also learns Willow Man has been busy while he was away, destroying even more of Woody’s past. And in the midst of all this drama, Woody is stunned to find himself falling in love—something he never thought he would do again.

As kids, Woody and his friends could not stop the killer who lived in the canyon where they played. As adults, they might just have a chance.

Or will they?

http://www.dsppublications.com

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Third Eye

By Rick R. Reed

Who knew that a summer thunderstorm and his lost little boy would conspire to change single dad Cayce D’Amico’s life in an instant? With Luke missing, Cayce ventures into the woods near their house to find his son, only to have lightning strike a tree near him, sending a branch down on his head. When he awakens the next day in the hospital, he discovers he has been blessed or cursed—he isn't sure which—with psychic ability. Along with unfathomable glimpses into the lives of those around him, he’s getting visions of a missing teenage girl.

When a second girl disappears soon after the first, Cayce realizes his visions are leading him to their grisly fates. Cayce wants to help, but no one believes him. The police are suspicious. The press wants to exploit him. And the girls' parents have mixed feelings about the young man with the "third eye."

Cayce turns to local reporter Dave Newton and, while searching for clues to the string of disappearances and possible murders, a spark ignites between the two. Little do they know that nearby, another couple—dark and murderous—are plotting more crimes and wondering how to silence the man who knows too much about them.

http://www.dsppublications.com

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Infected: Prey

By Andrea Speed

In a world where a werecat virus has changed society, Roan McKichan, a born infected and ex-cop, works as a private detective trying to solve crimes involving other infecteds.

The murder of a former cop draws Roan into an odd case where an unidentifiable species of cat appears to be showing an unusual level of intelligence. He juggles that with trying to find a missing teenage boy, who, unbeknownst to his parents, was “cat” obsessed. And when someone is brutally murdering infecteds, Eli Winters, leader of the Church of the Divine Transformation, hires Roan to find the killer before he closes in on Eli.

Working the crimes will lead Roan through a maze of hate, personal grudges, and mortal danger. With help from his tiger-strain infected partner, Paris Lehane, he does his best to survive in a world that hates and fears their kind… and occasionally worships them.

http://www.dsppublications.com

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Erasing Shame

By Yeyu

The son of a Han traitor who had let the Xianbei Mongols invade the borders, Jiang Shicai swears to restore his family’s honor, hoping to better the Hans’ lives through peaceful means. He believes violence is never the answer, but to gain respect, he finds himself fighting for the Xianbei.

Ten years later, an annoying but handsome playboy, Dugu Xuechi, arrives as the incompetent new military inspector of Shicai’s region. Shameless, irresponsible, and obnoxious, Xuechi tests Shicai's patience almost every second. Despite their mutual dislike, Shicai finds himself drawn to the capricious man, especially when he sees the resemblance between Xuechi and his deceased best friend. Yet Xuechi's self-destructive behavior and refusal to accept help require attention that distracts Shicai from his goal for peace--and it doesn't help that Xuechi is Shicai's strongest political opposition. Haunted by a childhood promise he never had the chance to fulfill, Shicai must choose between his feelings and his values.

http://www.dsppublications.com

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Greenwode

By J Tullos Hennig

The Hooded One. The one to breathe the dark and light and dusk between...

When an old druid foresees this harbinger of chaos, he also glimpses its future. A peasant from Loxley will wear the Hood and, with his sister, command a last, desperate bastion of Old Religion against New. Yet a devout nobleman’s son could well be their destruction—Gamelyn Boundys, whom Rob and Marion have befriended. Such acquaintance challenges both duty and destiny. The old druid warns that Rob and Gamelyn will be cast as sworn enemies, locked in timeless and symbolic struggle for the greenwode’s Maiden.

Instead, a defiant Rob dares his Horned God to reinterpret the ancient rites, allow Rob to take Gamelyn as lover instead of rival. But in the eyes of Gamelyn’s Church, sodomy is unthinkable… and the old pagan magics are an evil that must be vanquished.

http://www.dsppublications.com

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Eagle’s Blood

By A.J. Marcus

Brock Summers is a Colorado Parks and Wildlife Officer who loves his job and takes it very seriously. When he discovers a video of golden eagles being shot and learns of a nest in trouble, not even a blizzard can stop him from trekking up the mountain in an attempt to rescue them.

When Brock returns with the one eaglet he manages to save, Landon Weir, the local wildlife rehabilitator, patches up the bird and the injury Brock suffered during the rescue. Though they have been friends and colleagues for years, they discover a shared passion for protecting wildlife and vow to work together to protect the majestic birds from the criminals preying on them. It isn’t long before another video of eagles being killed comes to their attention. They must face inclement weather, a dangerous mountain, and armed poachers if they want to ensure the eagles’—and their own—survival.

http://www.dsppublications.com

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Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

About the Author

Also from DSP Publications

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

About the Author

Also from DSP Publications