The Night in the Cellar

My telephone buzzed as we crossed the yard.

I let it ring twice. I was walking behind Leo, over the dead grass, toward the car, and the sun had gone down behind the roof of the old house and left a long red stain along the bottom of the sky. The gravel crunched under our feet. Behind us the porch of the outbuilding stood empty now, and the wicker chair rocked a little, once, in the wind, and was still.

I took out the phone.

Vera Castellano: 1 attachment.

It was a file, nothing more. No message. I thumbed it open and watched the pages come up, one by one, pale gray, slightly crooked, as they do when a photocopy of a photocopy has been fed through a machine in a hurry. A heading. A date. A block of typescript, double-spaced, with a ragged left margin.

PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPARTMENT. INCIDENT REPORT. SUNFLOWER HOUSE, 114 WAYNE AVENUE.

I stopped walking.

"Doc?" said Leo.

"In a moment."

I went and stood in the middle of the yard, where the gravel gave way to a patch of old brick paving, laid in a herringbone pattern by some Quaker mason a century ago and gone green with moss. I held the phone in front of me. I read the report through once, slowly, with the cold falling about my shoulders. Then I put the phone in my pocket, and shut my eyes, and let the old woman's voice come back into my head.

I do this sometimes. I do not recommend it. It is a method for the building of a room out of nothing but words, and when one has finished building it, one is left standing inside.

…

It was the twenty-third of October.

It had been raining for three days, a cold gray northern rain that never fell but only hung, so that the whole yard smelled of wet bricks and rotting leaves. It was a Friday. The children had had their supper at five, a stew, with bread and a dish of stewed apples. By half past seven they were all in the day room, around the stove, waiting for the guests.

They came at seven forty, in two cars.

There were six of them: five students from Aldridge Academy, in blazers, and a tall sandy man in a tweed jacket who stayed in the doorway. They had brought boxes. There were two boxes of clothes, secondhand, from a garage sale, and a box of toys, cheap plastic things, a drum, a doll, a set of building blocks with half the pieces missing. They put them down on the floor of the day room and they smiled. Somebody took photographs. The tall fair boy in the middle, the one with the lovely face, shook hands with the matron. He said it was a privilege. He said it was the least they could do.

Dominic Hargrove was eighteen. He had never been in a place like it. He moved among the children with the beautiful easy graciousness of a young prince among peasants, patting heads, handing out sweets, and all the while his eyes slid sideways toward the door, and the clock, and his watch.

He did not want to be there.

None of them did.

They were there because Mr. Hensley had told them it would look good.

…

Arlo was not in the day room.

He had been ill for two days. It had begun on the Wednesday, with a headache, then a fever, then a cough that shook his whole thin body like a rag. The matron had put him in the infirmary at the top of the house, in a narrow white bed beside the window, with a hot water bottle and a cup of barley water. He lay there with his eyes half shut. He could hear, from below, the faint thump of the visitors' feet. He thought: Stella will be down there. He thought: someone should tell her I'm all right.

Then the fever took him, and he slept.

Stella was not in the day room either.

She had gone looking for him.

That was how it began. She was nine years old, and blind, and she knew the house by heart. She knew that the infirmary was at the top of the third staircase. She knew that the matron had forbidden the children to go up. She knew that her friend had been lying in that bed for two days without being read to, and that nobody had come to tell her whether he was better. And so, at about eight, while the visitors were handing out sweets, she slipped away from the stove and found the passage by touch, and put her hand on the rail.

She never reached the stair.

She had mistaken a door. It happens, in a house with many doors. She went along the back corridor, trailing her fingers on the wall, and she turned left where she should have turned right, and found herself at the side door that led into the yard. It was ajar. She felt the cold on her face. She stepped out.

And in the shadow of the shed, in the dark, a match flared.

…

They were drinking.

They had slipped out of the day room as soon as the cameras were put away. There were four of them: Dominic, and the scarred boy, and the girl with the painted mouth, and the girl with the long curls. They sat in a ring on upturned crates behind the coal shed, out of sight of the house, with a bottle of something expensive, pilfered from the cabinet in Dominic's father's study, passed from hand to hand.

They were laughing.

It was the loud, silly, tight laughter of young people who have been good for an hour and who feel they have earned a reward. Kaylee was doing an impression of the matron. Arnold had a cigarette. Daisy, who was a little drunk, was lying on her back with her feet on a crate, singing.

Then somebody said, "Hey. Who's that?"

And they all turned, and saw a little girl in the doorway.

She was standing quite still. She was small and thin, in a gray wool dress, with a yellow plastic clip in her hair. She had her head tilted to one side. Her eyes, wide open and a clear pale gray, were fixed on a point somewhere over their shoulders. She was listening.

"Hello?" she said. "Is somebody there?"

"It's a blind kid," whispered Daisy.

"Is it?" said Kaylee. "Is she really?"

"Shh," said Dominic.

He was looking at the child. He was looking at her with an odd, bright, vacant expression, and I do not think that at that moment he knew what he was going to do. I think it came to him as such things do, from nowhere, in an instant, all at once. It was the drink. It was the boredom. It was a boy of eighteen, with everything in the world, standing at the edge of an empty night, and wishing to see what would happen.

"Hey," he said softly, to the others. "You want to see something?"

"What?"

"You want to see what a blind kid looks like when she's scared?"

…

I will not tell you everything they did.

I will tell you only what the report did not say, and what I knew, in that cold yard with my eyes shut, as well as if I had been there.

At the back of the coal shed, under the old kitchen wing, a flight of stone steps ran down into the earth. At the bottom was a door: a heavy iron door, painted black, with a rusted bolt. It had been the coal cellar once, in the days when the house was heated by furnace. It had been shut for thirty years. But the caretaker, a drunk named Ferris who lived in the lodge, kept three dogs there at night. They were big brutes, part rottweiler, part something heavier, half-starved and half-mad, and he kept them in the cellar behind the iron door because the roof of the shed was low and the iron kept the sound in. In the mornings he let them out to patrol the yard.

They were not savage dogs. Not really. They had never bitten anyone. But they were dogs of the kind that growl in the dark, and bark, and scratch, and if you had not been told that they would not hurt you, they would have been the most frightening thing in the world.

"Down here," said Dominic.

They took her by the arms.

She did not scream. That was what Daisy said later, at the inquiry, in a thin high voice, with her father's lawyer at her elbow: "She didn't scream. She just kept asking who we were." They took her down the steps. They could hear her breathing. They drew the bolt. The door groaned open on a darkness thick as wool, and a smell came out of it, a hot rank animal smell, wet fur and old straw and ammonia, and from the heart of the dark came a low, slow, rumbling growl.

"Please," said Stella. "I don't want to."

"It's just a game," said Dominic.

"I want Arlo."

"It's a survival game. See if you can find your way out."

They pushed her.

It was a small push, in the end. It was the push you give a door that is sticking. She stumbled over the sill, and caught herself, and stood there in the blackness, with her arms out; and Dominic Hargrove, with the lovely smile still on his face, swung the iron door shut and shot the bolt.

…

She stood in the dark.

Do you understand? For her it was not dark. She had never seen light. The dark was only the absence of nothing, and it did not frighten her at all. What frightened her was the sound.

She heard the growl begin. It rose from three places at once, low and wet, and she heard the clicking of claws on the cold floor, and the scrape of a heavy body turning, and a sudden short hoarse bark that went through her like a nail. She heard the panting come near. She smelled it on the air, the hot meat-smell, the animal fear. She had never in her life been so completely alone. Every sense she had was awake. Every nerve in her small body was singing.

She knocked on the door.

Three times, slowly, with her small fist. Tap. Tap. Tap.

I'm here.

She waited.

She heard laughter, muffled by iron. Somebody was kicking the door. A voice said, "Look at her. She's praying." The dogs barked, a sudden furious chorus, and the whole cellar seemed to shake.

She knocked again.

Three. Slowly. Slowly.

I'm here. I'm here.

And in the dark, in a bed at the top of the house, with a fever of a hundred and three, a little boy turned over in his sleep and heard it. He heard it as one hears a sound in a dream. A knock, a long way off. Three slow ones. He lay with his eyes closed and his heart beating, and he thought, in the muddled sweet confusion of the fever, that it was only the pipes.

And he did not answer.

…

It took fifteen minutes.

I know the science. I have taught it. I have stood in front of a hundred students and described it with a pointer, in a pleasant dry voice. A human being, subjected to terror of a certain intensity, floods her own body with the chemicals of alarm. The heart races. The pupils open. The blood pours into the great muscles, ready to run or fight. But a child of nine in a locked cellar cannot run, and cannot fight. There is nowhere for the fear to go. It piles up in the blood like water behind a dam, and the muscle of the heart, taken beyond its strength, stops being a pump and becomes a fist.

She fell.

She did not know she was falling. She only knew that the floor had come up very gently and was cold against her cheek, and that a great weight was pressing on her chest, and that somewhere, a long way away, the dogs had stopped barking. They had gone quiet. One of them was lying beside her. She felt its warm breath on her hair.

She thought: Arlo.

She thought: I'm here.

They opened the door at a quarter to nine. Dominic held up a lantern. For a long moment nobody moved.

"She's asleep," said Kaylee.

"She's not asleep."

"Get up," said Arnold. "Hey. Get up."

"Oh, God," said Daisy. "Oh, my God."

It was Dominic who spoke last, and he spoke in a high, cold, curiously flat voice, the voice of a child pretending to be a man. "We didn't touch her," he said. "You hear me? Nobody touched her. She went in there by herself. She got scared. She's got a bad heart, or something. She's—it's not our fault."

"Dom—"

"It's not our fault." He backed away. "Get Mr. Hensley."

…

I opened my eyes.

The yard was dark. The red had gone out of the sky. The wind had risen, and the old house stood against the stars with its blind plywood windows, and somewhere behind it a dog was barking, and had been barking, I think, for some time.

My face was wet.

I wiped it. I did it quickly and without comment, with the back of my hand, and I put the hand in my pocket. Beside me Leo stood with his back to the car and his head down. He had lit a cigarette. His lighter shook in his fingers, and the flame jumped and jumped before it caught.

"Mr. Hensley came out," I said. "From the day room. And he saw. And he did what a man like that does. He took charge. He took them back to the house and washed their faces and told them what to say. He rang their fathers. And in the morning the ambulance came, and the police, and the Chief Medical Examiner's office, and the money."

"The money," said Leo.

"I don't know how much. A great deal. Enough to pay a man to write four words on a form." I looked at the dark house. "Natural. Cardiac. Congenital. Closed."

"Christ," said Leo.

I reached into my pocket and took out the telephone again. I looked at the scan. I read through it a second time, slowly, line by line, with the dead glow of the screen in my eyes. Then I read it a third.

There was something wrong with it.

…

I did not at first know what. I had the sense of a fly in the ointment, a tiny, nagging irregularity. The report was short. It consisted of a page and a half of typescript, signed by an investigating detective, with an attachment from the Medical Examiner and a one-line disposition. It gave the name of the child, the time of the call, the place of discovery. It listed the persons present. It described the body: female, age 9, 52 inches, 61 pounds, found supine on the floor of the old coal cellar, rear of premises. No visible signs of trauma. Clothing intact. No evidence of foul play.

Personal effects: one gray wool dress. One pair of black shoes. One undergarment.

I stopped.

I read the line again.

Personal effects: one gray wool dress. One pair of black shoes.

No hair clip.

I stood perfectly still. I thought of an old woman on a porch with a rosary in her hands. I found her little clip next morning, in the gravel by the cellar door. A bit of yellow plastic, with a flower on it. I thought of a nine-year-old girl in a gray dress with her head on one side. She had worn it every day. It would have been on her head when they took her. It would have been in her hair when she died.

Unless it had fallen.

Unless it had come out in the struggle on the steps, and lain in the gravel in the rain, outside the iron door, while the police were taking their notes inside. Unless no one had looked outside. Unless no one had been asked.

Unless somebody had been very careful not to say.

I put the phone away.

I said nothing to Leo. I did not know, yet, what I had found, and I have learned not to speak until I do. But I put the thought away carefully, in the place where I keep such things, and I felt it settle there, small and bright and hard, like a coin dropped in a well.

…

"Fifteen years," said Leo.

His voice was rough. He took a long drag on the cigarette, and held it, and let it out in a plume that the wind took away.

"That kid. The boy. He was eleven years old. He lost his best friend, and everybody knew what had happened, and nobody did a damned thing. Nobody even said sorry." He shook his head. "How does a person live through that? How does he get up the next day and brush his teeth?"

"I don't think he does," I said.

"No?"

"I think he dies," I said. "That night, or the next day. I think a boy named Arlo Wren stands on the steps of the courthouse in the rain, with something in his hand, and watches the case be closed. And he goes quietly out of the world. And what comes back, years later, with a different name and a different voice, is not a boy at all."

Leo stared at me.

"Arlo Wren," he said slowly. "That's him. You think that's White Night."

"I do not think. I know."

"How?"

"The pipe," I said. "The knocks. The Thursday groceries. The power on in a dead building." I took off my spectacles and rubbed my eyes. "And a man who fixes radios at eleven and builds machines at twenty-six. It is all there. It was there from the moment the old woman said his name." I put the spectacles on. "He is not a lunatic, Leo. He is not a monster. He is a child with a very large grief, and a very large mind, and a conviction that the world owes him a hearing."

"He killed four people."

"Yes."

"He's gonna kill a fifth."

"Yes." I looked at the sky. "And if we do not stop him, then the whole story will be told in his words. Not as the death of a little girl, which it was, nor as the failure of a system, which it also was. It will be told as the tale of a madman who murdered four citizens and a philanthropist in the dark. And Stella Marsh will vanish, and the men who closed her file will go on lunching at the Union League."

I was shaking.

I noticed it with distant surprise. I clenched my hands into fists, and drew a long breath, and the shaking stopped.

"We must stop him," I said. "And before we do, we must find out who closed that file."