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“Works for me. ”
The cellar was a thirty-by-eighty-foot oblong with a seven-foot-high unfinished ceiling and a badly poured concrete floor. Five doors were set into the walls, ostensibly leading to storerooms. A set of rickety wooden stairs bisected the basement, but they ignored them—upstairs held nothing but traps and frustration.
“The cellar door has to be behind one of these,” Crow said.
“Shit. ”
The awareness of what could be behind any one of those doors was daunting and they were both sweating badly despite the deep cold of the room. The fact that there was no sound other than what they made and no movement other than their own was no comfort. The basement had a sneaky, crouching, waiting feel to it.
None of the cellar doors had locks, though they were all closed. Three of the doors were hinged to open out; the others opened in. Before they approached them they shone the light on the ceiling and all around the frames, looking for trip wires, but they could see nothing.
“Vince…I’ll grab the handle and pull, you get ready to shoot anything that so much as twitches, okay?”
LaMastra wiped sweat from his face on a hunched shoulder and nodded. He set himself and aimed the shotgun at the center of the first door. Licking his lips, Crow reached out for the handle, took a breath, and then turned the knob and pulled the handle as he stepped back to yank the door open.
LaMastra almost fired just from sheer nerves, but Crow shined the light inside and they were looking at a filthy but empty toilet stall.
Neither sighed in relief; there were still four to go. They moved eight feet to their right and stopped before one of the two doors that opened inward.
“I’ll kick it,” LaMastra said and gave it such a massive stamp that the door crashed inward and off its hinges and fell flat, sending up clouds of dust. They sprang into the room and instantly LaMastra saw a figure lunging at him with the same speed and aggression. He fired without thinking and there was a boom and the sharp crash of shattering glass.
“Nice shooting, Tex,” Crow said. “You just killed a mirror. ”
“Shit. ”
The room was cluttered with old chairs, wardrobes, tables, and boxes of bric-a-brac. “Nothing,” Crow concluded. “Just Griswold’s old junk. ”
They exited and crossed the cellar to the far end where the last three small rooms were.
“Your turn,” LaMastra said, shifting to a flanking position, gun ready. Crow nodded and braced himself for the kick, but just as he raised his leg the door was whipped open and children poured out of the shadows, laughing insanely and reaching for them with black-taloned hands.
2
Vic saw the three ATVs and immediately jammed on his brakes, bringing the pickup to a screeching stop. Dust plumed up from his tires and panic leapt up in his chest.
The Man’s in danger! The thought was like a hot wire in his brain.
He was out of the truck and running, low and fast, making maximum use of the tall grass, toward the house, his Luger in his hand, eyes cutting back and forth across the field for signs of movement. He couldn’t see anyone, but just one glance at the house told him there was trouble. One of the plywood sheets was down, exposing the red brick he’d laid.
As he drew closer he could see that the front door was open.
“Shit!” he hissed, then changed his angle of approach so that he came at the house obliquely. It had to be Crow—they used ATVs at that stupid Hayride—but who was with him?
Crow being here could be very bad or very damn good, especially if he was actually inside. Vic had rigged the place pretty well last time he was here. He crabbed sideways from where he was squatting and tried to get a clearer look at the front of the house. The pile of debris from the fallen porch roof hid most of his view of the door.
He heard a sound and froze, listened. Heard it again. A kind of moan. Definitely human. By now he knew the sounds the De
ad Heads made and the Fangers didn’t moan. Vic rose to three-quarters of his height, just enough to see over the pile of debris. What he saw made him smile.
There was a man lying on the porch at the top of the steps. Even from where Vic stood he could see that the man was covered in blood. Vic felt a flush of pride at knowing that at least one of his little booby traps had worked. Still cautious, he moved closer, though he knew that if a man that badly injured had been left to lie there and bleed, then his companions were in no position to help.
Vic didn’t understand what he was seeing at first, because the wounded man had a landscaper’s insecticide sprayer on his back, but then he got a whiff of gasoline and he understood. His smile faded slightly. The presence of the gas confirmed the fact that these intruders understood something of the nature of the problem. Not good, he thought, but at least the problem appeared to be contained for the moment.
He stood over the bloody man and admired the effects of his little booby trap. The nails of the trapdoor had caught him good; one had even punched right through his skull. Vic nodded in satisfaction at that. It had taken a lot of hard work to rig that trap; nice to know it had worked as planned.
He climbed onto the porch and pushed on the front door, but the panel was as solid as a rock. Good. Crow and whoever else came with him were probably trapped inside.
He turned looked down again at the corpse. The man had obviously crawled out of the vestibule, trailing blood and piss and gasoline all the way, leaving a slimy trail like a slug. Blood was still mostly wet. Vic figured the guy hadn’t been dead long.
