The house lay some way back from the road so that it remained invisible until we had almost passed it. I caught sight of it in the rearview: a simple, single-story dwelling, with a central door and two windows at either side of it. It was neither excessively run-down nor unusually well kept. It was simply…there.
We drove on for a time, following the upward slope of the road until I was certain that the sound of the engine would have faded from the hearing of anyone in the house. We stopped and waited. No other cars passed us on the road. Finally, I made a U-turn and allowed the car to coast back down the hill, then braked while the house was still out of sight. I pulled in to the side of the road, and we covered the rest of the distance on foot.
There were no lights burning in the house. While Louis and I waited, Angel scouted the perimeter to look for night-lights that might be activated by movement. He found none. He circled the house before signaling Louis and me to join him using his Maglite, his fist wrapped tightly around it so that it was visible only to us.
“There’s no alarm,” he said, “not that I could see.”
It made sense. Whoever was using this place, whether it was Merrick or the person who was funding him, wouldn’t want to give the cops an excuse to drop by while the place was unoccupied. Anyway, you could probably have counted the number of burglaries around here on the thumbs of one hand.
We drew closer to the house. I could see that slates on the roof had been repaired at some point over the last year or two, but the exterior paintwork was cracked and damaged in places. Weeds had colonized most of the yard, but the driveway had been sown with fresh gravel, and there was a weed-free space for one or two cars. The garage to one side of the house had a new lock on its door. The building itself had not been repainted, but neither did it seem in urgent need of any repair. In other words, all that was necessary to keep the property ready for use had been done, but no more. There was nothing to draw attention to it, nothing to attract a second glance. It was nondescript in the way that only the most purposeful self-effacement could be. We checked the house one more time, avoiding the gravel and sticking to the grass in order to muffle our footsteps, but there was no sign of anyone inside. It took Angel a few minutes’ work with a rake and a pick to open the back door, allowing us to enter a small kitchen with empty shelves and closets and a refrigerator that appeared to serve no purpose other than to add a comforting hum to the otherwise silent house. A trash can revealed the carcass of a roasted chicken and an empty plastic water bottle. The smell suggested that the chicken had been there for some time. There was also a crumpled pack of American Spirit cigarettes, Merrick’s brand of choice.
We moved into the main hallway. Before us was the front door. To the left was a small bedroom furnished only with a worn sofa bed and a small table. The edge of an off-white sheet protruded from the innards of the sofa, the only splash of brightness visible in the gloom. Next to the bedroom was the main living area, but it had no furniture at all. Sets of fitted bookshelves occupied the alcoves at either side of the cold fireplace, but the only book that gave them purpose was a battered leather-bound Bible. I picked it up and leafed through it, but there were no markings or notes that I could see, and no name on the frontispiece to indicate the identity of its owner.
Angel and Louis had moved on to the rooms to the right: a bathroom, what might once have been a second bedroom, now also empty apart from the husks of insects trapped in the remains of last summer’s webs like Christmas tree decorations left up past their time, and a dining room that bore traces of its past in the form of the marks of a table and chairs in the dust, as though the furniture had been spirited away without the intervention of any human agency, vanishing into the air like smoke.
“Here,” said Angel. He was in the hallway, pointing his Mag at a square door in the floor close by the side wall of the house. The door was padlocked, but not for long. Angel disposed of the lock, then raised the door using a brass ring set into the wood. A set of stairs was revealed disappearing into the darkness below. Angel looked up at me as if I was to blame.
“Why is everything always underground?” he whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” I replied.
“Shit,” said Angel loudly. “I hate it when I do that.”
Louis and I knelt beside him.
“You smell that?” asked Louis.
I sniffed. The air below smelled a little like the chicken carcass in the kitchen trash, but the stink was very faint, as though something had once rotted down there and had since been removed, leaving only the memory of its decay trapped in the stillness.
I went down first, Angel behind me. Louis remained above, in case anyone approached the house. At first sight, the cellar appeared to be even emptier than the rest of the rooms. There were no tools on the walls, no benches at which to work, no boxes stored, no discarded relics of old lives resting forgotten beneath the main house. Instead, there was only a broom standing upright against a wall and a hole in the dirt floor before us, perhaps five feet in diameter and six feet deep. Its sides were lined with brick, and its base was littered with shards of broken slate.
“Looks like an old well,” said Angel.
“Who builds a house on a well?”
He sniffed the air.
“Smell’s coming from down there. Could be something buried beneath the stones.”
I got the broom and handed it to him. He leaned in and poked at the slates below, but it was clear that they were only inches deep. Beneath them was solid concrete.
“Huh,” he said. “That’s weird.”
But I was no longer listening, for I had noticed that the cellar was not as empty as it had first appeared. In a corner behind the stairs, almost invisible in the shadows, was a huge oak closet, the wood so dark and old that it looked almost black. I shined my flashlight on it and saw that it had been ornately carved, filigreed with leaves and creeping vines, less a piece of furniture carved by man than a part of nature itself that had become frozen in its present form. The doorknobs were made from cut glass, and a small brass key gleamed in the keyhole. I shined the light around the basement, trying to figure out how someone had managed to get the closet down here to begin with. The door and stairs were too narrow. At some point in the past, there might have been outer doors to the cellar from the yard, but I couldn’t see where they must have been situated. It created the unsettling impression that the cellar had somehow been constructed around this old piece of dark oak for the sole purpose of giving it a quiet place in which to rest. I reached out and took hold of the key. It seemed to vibrate slightly between my fingers. I touched my hand to the wood. It too was trembling. The sensation appeared to come both from the closet itself and the ground beneath my feet, as though deep below the house some great machinery was grinding and throbbing to an unknown end.
“Do you feel that?” I said, but now Angel was both at once nearby and also a speck in the distance, as though space and time had momentarily warped. I could see him examining the hole in the cellar floor, still testing the slates for some clue as to the source of the smell, but when I spoke he didn’t seem to hear, and my voice sounded faint even to myself. I turned the key. It clicked loudly in the lock, too loudly for such a small mechanism. I took a handle in each hand and pulled, the doors opening silently and easily to reveal what lay within. There was movement inside. I lurched backward in shock, almost tripping over my own feet. I raised my gun, the flashlight held high and away from the weapon, and was blinded momentarily by the reflection of the beam.
I was staring at my own image, distorted and shaded with black. A small gilded mirror hung against the back of the closet. Beneath it were spaces for shoes and underwear, all built into the body of the closet and all empty, the two sections divided by a horizontal plane of wood that was almost entirely obscured by a seemingly random assemblage of objects: a pair of silver earrings, inset with red stones; a gold wedding ring, a date engraved upon the interior: “May 18, 1969”; a battered toy car, probably dating back to the fifties, its red paint almost entirely worn away; a faded photograph of a woman set in a cheap locket; a small bowling trophy unmarked by a date or its winner’s name; a clothbound book of child’s verses opened to its title page, upon which the words “For Emily, with Love from Mom and Dad, Christmas 1955” had been written in a crude, halting script; a tie pin; an old Carl Perkins ’45, signed by the man himself across the label; a gold necklace, the chain broken as though it had been yanked from the wearer’s neck; and a wallet, empty apart from a photograph of a young woman wearing the cap and gown of the newly graduated.
But these items were merely distractions, although everything about them suggested that they had been treasured at some time by their owners. Instead, my attention was drawn to the mirror. Its reflective surface had been severely damaged, seemingly by fire or some other great heat, so that the wooden backing was visible at the heart. The glass had warped, the edges stained with brown and black, and yet it had not cracked and the wood behind was not charred. The heat that had been applied to cause such damage was so intense that the mirror had simply melted beneath it, yet the backboard had been left unmarked.
I reached out to touch it, then stopped. I had seen this mirror before, and suddenly I knew who it was that was manipulating Frank Merrick. Something twisted in my stomach, and I felt a surge of nausea. I might even have spoken, but the words would have made no sense. Images flashed through my mind, memories of a house—
“This is not a house. This is a home.”
Symbols on a wall in a dwelling long abandoned, revealed only when the paper began to come away and loll in the hallway like a series of great tongues. A man in a threadbare coat, with stains on his trousers and the sole coming away from the base of one of his shoes, demanding payment of a debt owed by another long believed dead.
“This is an old and wicked world.”
And a small, gilded mirror, held in this man’s nicotine-stained fingers, an image reflected in it of a howling figure that might have been myself or might have been another.
“He was damned, and his soul is forfeit…”
Angel appeared beside me, looking blankly at the items in the closet.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a collection,” I said.
He moved closer and seemed on the verge of picking up the toy car. I raised my hand.
“Don’t touch it. Don’t touch any of it. We need to get out of here. Now.”
And then he saw the mirror. “What happened to—”
“It’s from the Grady house,” I said.
He backed away in disgust, then looked over his shoulder in expectation of seeing the man who had brought the mirror to this place suddenly emerge from his hiding place, like one of the hibernating spiders in the rooms above alerted by the coming of spring’s first insects.
“Aw, you got to be fucking kidding,” said Angel. “Why is nothing ever normal?”
I closed the closet doors, the key still vibrating in the lock as I turned it, sealing away the collection once again. We climbed up from the cellar, slid the bolt across, and restored the padlock. Then we departed from that place. We left no signs of our trespass, and as Angel locked the back door behind us the house seemed just as it did when we had arrived. But I felt it was to no avail.
He would know we had been there.
The Collector would know, and he would come.