Night Terror (35 page)

58

AS THEY RACED THROUGH THE NIGHT
on the eighty-mile run to Augusta, Virgil filled Audrey in on what had happened in town and what he knew for sure about Tara. The radio buzzed with traffic about the two fires and Virgil spoke to the troopers, who were already searching Tara’s house and grounds. Tara’s car was gone and so far they’d found nothing suspicious. Audrey told them to keep looking in the basement.

“We’ve been over it twice,” said the trooper’s scratchy voice.

“Go over it again!” she screamed.

Virgil rested his hand on her shoulder and squeezed, hard. She took long deep breaths and stared out through the headlights into the darkness ahead. Now she sat silently, staring into the dregs of the night. It was almost four o’clock. How could so much time have passed?

They had been trapped in the basement for hours. And all that time Tara had had Zach. Audrey closed her eyes and tried to sense him. Tried to find the place where he had contacted her before. But he wasn’t there. She wondered if sometime, in all the years that Tara had known Zach, whether she had secretly hypnotized him, implanted a command in him the way she had in Audrey. But surely Tara would have used the command in the basement to subdue him, and Audrey couldn’t imagine when Tara might have
had an opportunity to work with Zach. Audrey had always been instinctively protective around Zach when Tara was around, never leaving the two alone together. Her maternal instincts and her subconscious must have been conspiring to protect her son even then.

“North of town,” said Audrey, pointing to the turnoff. “Tara lives about ten miles outside the city.”

“I know how to get there,” said Virgil, nodding.

“I seen bad things, Virg,” said Cooder, from the backseat.

Audrey glanced back at Cooder and her breath caught in her throat. She peered into his soft brown eyes and suddenly she
knew
where Zach was. She turned to stare out her window and realized immediately where they were. When she and Richard were dating they must have passed this way a thousand times, hardly giving the old run-down complex a passing glance. But now the place drew her like a magnet, pulling with a dark loathsome force so unsettling that she
knew
she was right.

“She’s in there,” she whispered, pointing through the window.

“Where?” said Virgil, slowing the car.

“There!” she said, slapping at the windshield as a pair of cracked brick pillars supporting a heavy wrought-iron arch appeared just ahead. A black iron gate was secured with chain and a padlock. Long-dead ivy embraced the square columns, reaching upward toward the sign with bony brown fingers.

“He’s in there,” she whispered, pointing through the gate.

“Are you sure?” asked Virgil, staring at the heavy chain.

“Yes,” whispered Audrey, unable to take her eyes off the sign.

“Have you ever been here before?” asked Virgil, turning to study her face.

Audrey’s brow furrowed. “I think so.”

Cooder nodded vigorously to himself. “Bad things,” he muttered, slapping his thigh over and over. “Bad things.”

Just then the trooper came back on the radio. “You’re
right! There is something here. One of my men just found a hidden door down into another basement!”

Virgil stared at Audrey, waiting. She shook her head.

“Zach’s in there,” she said. But she wasn’t
quite
as certain as before. It felt right, but what if she was wrong? What if she was searching an empty building while Zach needed her somewhere else? She closed her eyes and reached out for him. A faint tingling at the base of her skull caused her to jerk and then she
did
sense him. Just the tiniest tug. But he was close. Real close.

She nodded at Virgil.

Virgil glanced in the mirror at Cooder and sighed. “Good enough for me,” he said, picking up the mike. “Pete, this is Virgil. I’m investigating over at Perkins.”

“Perkins Mental Health?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I got a hunch she might be here.”

“Just a hunch?”

“Yep.”

“You got any backup?”

Virgil glanced at Audrey and Cooder. “No.”

“All right. I’ll send a car over as soon as I can break somebody loose here. But it’s going to be a little while, so hang tight.”

“Right,” said Virgil, knowing that he’d never keep Audrey in the car that long.

“I seen bad things, Virg.” Cooder’s voice was shaky and he kept slapping his legs as though still trying to put out a fire there.

“It’s all right, Cooder,” said Virgil. “Stop saying that, now. Okay?”

Cooder nodded, clamping his jaw.

Audrey glanced over her shoulder. Cooder’s face was twisted and his eyes had a hunted look as he stared through the gate and up the pitted drive. The building itself was obscured in shadow and gloom, but the dark windows reflected the moon and stars, peering out into the night like the glittering multiple eyes of some alien creature of prey.

“I have to find my son, Cooder,” said Audrey. “I have to go in there. But there’s no reason for you to go.”

“I’ll go,” he said at last.

Virgil eased the cruiser up against the gates and gave it just enough gas to slowly rend the old iron from its hinges. As it clattered noisily to the pavement, he rolled right over it. The drive wound through widely spaced oaks surrounded by grass that had once been manicured but now grew in tufts like a radiation victim’s hair. The asphalt was covered with dry leaves and scarred with potholes.

Apparently no one had considered that maybe a building that looked like a prison might be bad for patients. The windows were tall and heavily barred. The walls were built of massive limestone blocks, and the front doors were faded green metal with thick, wire-webbed glass. Up close, the hulking monstrosity glared down at them like a giant square-sided troll.

Audrey jumped out of the car and ran toward the entrance. Virgil shouted at her, but he had to open the rear door for Cooder, and he took the time to open the trunk and grab his shotgun. On second thought, he reached back into the car and snatched his phone out of its holder. By the time he caught up with Audrey and Cooder, Audrey was shaking the heavy doors furiously.

“I can’t get in!” she shrieked.

Virgil pulled her aside. But he and Cooder had no more luck against the heavy deadbolts.

“How did Tara get in?” asked Virgil. “Assuming she’s here.”

“She’d have a key,” said Audrey.

Virgil nodded thoughtfully. “But where’s her car?”

He took off around the front of the building and Cooder and Audrey fell in behind him, moving at a slow trot. As they passed each pitch-black window, Audrey felt her stomach tighten. Although she knew it was only their own starlit reflections passing in the dusty glass, she seemed to be glimpsing faded specters from another horrific time. The faces were hard, brows furrowed, mouths down-turned, eyes deep-set and empty. The building seemed to inhale the present and exhale the past.

Dry grass crackled beneath their feet, and in the distance a siren wailed. It wasn’t that far to Tara’s and Audrey wondered if that was one of the cops, the backup Virgil had requested.
Virgil twisted his head in that direction, then shook it as the wail drew farther and farther away. At the corner of the building Virgil stopped and peeked around, waving back to them to halt, but then he disappeared and they hurried after.

Tara’s car wasn’t in the side parking area either.

Over the distant trees the lights of Augusta were clearly visible, and Perkins’ three stories of stone and glass and iron were lit in their feeble glow. Audrey pressed close against the cold limestone, the sheer sides of the building reaching toward the veil of night overhead. She had the sudden fear that Tara was on the parapet high above, about to drop boulders or boiling oil.

She glanced over her shoulder at Cooder. He looked for all the world like a small boy about to cry. As Virgil continued on to the far corner, she stopped and turned to face Cooder.

“Don’t do this,” she said. “I don’t want you to go in there.”

“Got to,” said Cooder.

“Why?”

Hardly any hesitation this time. “To get your boy.”

“We can do it,” she said, nodding toward Virgil.

Cooder shook his head ever so slowly and, when he spoke, the certainty in his voice terrified Audrey. “You’d get in. But you wouldn’t get out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I been remembering things.”

“Like what?”

He leaned down close to her face and she ignored his heavy odor. “They used to let me play with birds.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand, Cooder.”

“But it wasn’t just birds. I used to play with mice too. And dogs.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Dogs know a lot, but they’re harder than birds.” He kept nodding as though reassuring himself that he
knew
what he thought he knew. “Dogs are hard. But when you can do them, you learn a lot that way.” When he focused on her again, there was more confidence in his face.

“Come on, then,” she said, still not understanding. She couldn’t leave him here in the dark alone, and she didn’t have time to walk him back to the car.

Just ahead she spotted another paved drive—the service entrance—as the rear of the building came into view. An attached two-story brick unit had two raised garage doors— evidently for unloading delivery trucks—and a set of concrete stairs led to a cement walkway with a painted iron rail. Virgil was already climbing the stairs as Cooder and Audrey raced to catch up. They all stopped in front of another wide metal door with wire mesh reinforcing its one window. When the door wouldn’t open, Virgil kicked it. The sound echoed inside the large structure like a penny on a snare drum.

“Damn!” he said, slapping the glass. “I guess I’ll have to shoot through the glass and open the lock.”

“Do it!” said Audrey.

“I didn’t want her to know we were here,” said Virgil. “But I guess my hysterics already took care of that.”

“Trust me, she knows,” said Audrey, and Cooder nodded.

Virgil racked the shotgun and aimed it at the lower corner of the window. When he pulled the trigger the roar of the big gun slapped against the cold bricks like a giant hand. A hole the size of a fist appeared in the corner of the pane and spiderweb cracks radiated outward. Virgil smashed at the glass with the butt of the shotgun and the pane bowed inward but held. Another hard elbow strike and he was able to push his hand through and unbolt the lock.

“Well,” he said, muscling the door aside and aiming his flashlight down the long corridor. “Everyone and his brother knows we’re here now.”

59

ZACH FOLLOWED ALONG
down the endless corridors, meekly holding Tara’s hand, as though accepting his fate. But
inside
, his ten-year-old mind raced.

This is just another basement. I almost got out of the other one. I can get out of this one too. If I have enough time.

The thought of time sent a sinking feeling through his tummy down into his crotch. He had only begun to become accustomed to being separated from his mom and dad the first time when it looked as though he was going to be rescued, and now he was lost again. It had taken so long before anyone found him and he was absolutely sure he didn’t have that kind of time now.

I will get away. I will!

Every now and then a picture of Tara aiming the gun at his dad and pulling the trigger would flash in front of Zach’s mind and the sinking feeling would be worse than ever. He’d done everything he could, but it had happened so fast! He wasn’t sure if his dad was dead or alive. He
thought
he was alive. It
felt
like he was alive. But he just wasn’t sure, and the not knowing ate at him. But he couldn’t think about that right now. He had to think about getting away somehow.

But Tara stopped in front of an open door into a darkened room and as the lights flicked on and he followed her
into her lab, the last of his self-confidence melted. This wasn’t a cellar that was made to look like anyone’s house. There was no bedroom for him here with its hard iron bunk. No wide-open old barn in which to ride a bicycle. This looked more like a doctor’s office, and like most ten-year-old boys, Zach had a healthy fear of such places. Doctors’ offices were filled with antiseptic and bright lights and shiny steel instruments designed for unknown and frightful purposes. But at least his mother had always accompanied him to the doctor, and he’d had a sense that, no matter how terrible the place might
appear
, the doctor had his best interest at heart.

Here there was no such reassurance and the shiny instruments and odd devices in glass jars filled him with apprehension. He tried to stare blankly ahead but his eyes betrayed him, searching the cabinets, exploring the strange machines with their dark displays and endless switches and buttons. The far end of the room was unlighted, hidden in gloom, and he instinctively shied away from it, knowing without being told that that was where they were headed.

Tara gave Zach and the dog a meaningful glance, warning the boy not to move. Waiting until Zach nodded, she strode purposefully about, plugging in equipment, rolling out an oddly constructed wheelchair, chattering to herself. She looked like an elf, gaily preparing the workshop for Santa’s arrival. Her eyes were alight with anticipation and that, more than anything, gave Zach an even worse case of the creeps.

He had no idea what all the equipment did, but he knew that it was all there for him. And he knew Tara wasn’t going to give him the time he needed to figure out how to escape. In desperation he closed his eyes and reached out again.