mesmeric attraction of the darkness lost its hold on me, and I turned and ran up to the bright kitchen, my footsteps booming in the narrow stairwell.
Sun streamed through the big windows.
I pulled the two-by-four out of the way, slammed the cellar door. I willed it to vanish, but it remained.
“I’m nuts,” I said aloud. “Stark raving crazy.”
But I knew that I was sane.
It was the world that had gone mad, not I.
Twenty minutes later, Nguyen Quang Phu arrived, as scheduled, to explain all the peculiarities of the house that we had bought from him. I met him at the front door, and the moment that I saw him, I knew why the impossible cellar had appeared and what purpose it was meant to serve.
“Mr. Gonzalez?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I am Nguyen Quang Phu.”
He was not merely Nguyen Quang Phu. He was also the torture master.
In Vietnam, he had ordered me strapped to a bench and had, for more than an hour, beaten the soles of my feet with a wooden baton until each blow jarred through the bones of my legs and hips, through my rib cage, up my spine, to the top of my skull, which felt as if it might explode. He had ordered me bound hand and foot and submerged me in a tank of water fouled with urine from other prisoners who had been subjected to the ordeal before me; just when I thought I could hold my breath no longer, when my lungs were burning, when my ears were ringing, when my heart was thundering, when every fiber of my being strained toward death, I was hoisted into the air and allowed a few breaths before being plunged beneath the surface again. He had ordered that wires be attached to my genitals, and he had given me countless jolts of electricity. Helpless, I had watched him beat a friend of mine to death, and I’d seen him tear out another friend’s eye with a stiletto merely for cursing the soldier who had served him yet another bowl of weevil-infested rice.
I had absolutely no doubt of his identity. The memory of the torture master’s face was branded forever in my mind, burned into the very tissue of my brain by the worst heat of all—hatred. And he had aged much better than I had. He looked only two or three years older than when I’d last seen him.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said.
“Likewise,” he said as I ushered him into the house.
His voice was as memorable as his face: soft, low, and somehow cold—the voice a snake might have if serpents could speak.
We shook hands.
He was five ten, tall for a Vietnamese. He had a long face with
prominent cheekbones, a sharp nose, a thin mouth, and a delicate jaw. His eyes were deeply set—and as strange as they had been in Nam.
In that prison camp, I had not known his name. Perhaps it had been Nguyen Quang Phu. Or perhaps that was a false identity that he had assumed when he sought asylum in the United States.
“You have bought a wonderful house,” he said.
“We like it very much,” I said.
“I was happy here,” he said, smiling, nodding, looking around at the empty living room. “Very happy.”
Why had he left Nam? He had been on the winning side. Well, maybe he’d fallen out with some of his comrades. Or perhaps the state had assigned him to hard farm labor or to the mines or to some other task that he knew would destroy his health and kill him before his time. Perhaps he had gone to sea in a small boat when the state no longer chose to give him a position of high authority.
The reason for his emigration was of no importance to me. All that mattered was that he was here.
The moment I saw him and realized who he was, I knew that he would not leave the house alive. I would never permit his escape.
“There’s not much to point out,” he said. “There’s one drawer in the master-bathroom cabinets that runs off the track now and then. And the pull-down attic stairs in the closet have a small problem sometimes, but that’s easily remedied. I’ll show you.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
He did not recognize me.
I suppose he’d tortured too many men to be able to recall any single victim of his sadistic urges. All prisoners who suffered and died at his hands had probably blurred into one faceless target. The torturer had cared nothing about the individual to whom he’d given an advance taste of Hell. To Nguyen Quang Phu, each man on the rack was the same as the one before, prized not for his unique qualities but for his ability to scream and bleed, for his eagerness to grovel at the feet of his tormentor.
As he led me through the house, he also gave me the names of reliable plumbers and electricians and air-conditioner repairmen in the neighborhood, plus the name of the artisan who had created the stained-glass windows in two rooms. “If one should be badly damaged, you’ll want it repaired by the man who made it.”
I will never know how I restrained myself from attacking him with my bare hands. More incredible still: Neither my face nor my voice revealed my inner tension. He was utterly unaware of the danger into which he had stepped.
In the kitchen, after he had shown me the unusual placement of the restart switch on the garbage disposal beneath the sink, I asked him if, during rainstorms, there was a problem with seepage in the cellar.
He blinked at me. His soft, cold voice rose slightly: “Cellar? Oh, but there is no cellar.”
Pretending surprise, I said, “Well, there sure enough is. Right over there’s the door.”
He stared in disbelief.
He saw it too.
I interpreted his ability to see the door as a sign that destiny was being served here and that I would be doing nothing wrong if I simply assisted fate.
Retrieving the flashlight from the counter, I opened the door.
Protesting that no such door had existed while he had lived in the house, the torture master moved past me in a state of high astonishment and curiosity. He went through the door, onto the upper landing.
“Light switch doesn’t work,” I said, crowding in behind him, pointing the flashlight down past him. “But we’ll see well enough with this.”
“But … where … how … ?”
“You don’t really mean you never noticed the cellar?” I said, forcing a laugh. “Come now. Are you joking with me or what?”
As if weightless with amazement, he drifted downward from one step to the next.
I followed close behind.
Soon, he knew that something was terribly wrong, for the steps went on too far without any sign of the cellar floor. He stopped, began to turn, and said, “This is strange. What’s going on here? What on earth are you-“
“Go on,” I said harshly. “Down. Go down, you bastard.”
He tried to push past me toward the open door above.
I knocked him backward down the stairs. Screaming, he tumbled all the way to the first landing and the flanking archways. When I reached him, I saw that he was dazed and suffering considerable pain. He keened in misery. His lower lip had split; blood trickled down his chin. He’d skinned the palm of his right hand. I think his arm was broken.
Weeping, cradling his arm, he looked up at me—pain racked, afraid, confused.
I hated myself for what I was doing.
But I hated him more.
“In the camp,” I said, “we called you The Snake. I know you. Oh, yes, I know you. You were the torture master.”
“Oh, God,” he said.
He neither asked what I was talking about nor attempted to deny it. He knew who he was, what he was, and he knew what would become of him.
“Those eyes,” I said, shaking with fury now. “That voice. The Snake. A repulsive, belly-crawling snake. Contemptible. But very, very dangerous.”
Briefly we were silent. In my case, at least, I was temporarily speechless, because I stood in awe of the profound machinery of fate which, in its slow-working and laborious fashion, had brought us together at this time and place.
From down in the darkness, a noise arose: sibilant whispers, a wet oozing sound that made me shudder. Millennial d
arkness was on the move, surging upward, the embodiment of endless night, cold and deep—and hungry.
The torture master, reduced to the role of victim, gazed around in fear and bewilderment, through one archway and the other, then down the stairs that continued from the landing on which he sprawled. His anxiety was so great that it drove out his pain; he no longer wept or made the keening noise. “What … what is this place?”
“It’s where you belong,” I said.
I turned from him and climbed the steps. I did not stop or look back. I left the flashlight with him because I wanted him to see the thing that came for him.
(Darkness dwells within us all.)
“Wait!” he called after me.
I did not pause.
“What’s that sound?” he asked.
I kept climbing.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “But whatever it is … it’ll be what you deserve.”
Anger finally stirred in him. “You’re not my judge!”
“Oh yes I am.”
At the top, I stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind me. It had no lock. I leaned against it, trembling.
Apparently Phu saw something ascending from the stairwell below him, for he wailed in terror and clambered up the steps.
Hearing him approach, I leaned hard against the door.
He pounded on the other side. “Please. Please, no. Please, for God’s sake, no, for God’s sake, please!”
I had heard my army buddies begging with that same desperation when the merciless torture master had forced rusty needles under their fingernails. I dwelt on those images of horror, which once I had thought I’d put behind me, and they gave me the will to resist Phu’s pathetic pleas.
In addition to his voice, I heard the sludge-thick darkness rising behind him, cold lava flowing uphill: wet sounds, and that sinister; whispering.
The torture master stopped pounding on the door and let out a scream that told me the darkness had seized him.
A great weight fell against the door for a moment, then was withdrawn.
The torture master’s shrill cries rose and fell and rose again, and with each bloodcurdling cycle of screams, his terror was more acute. From the sound of his voice, from the hollow booming of his feet striking the steps and kicking the walls, I could tell that he was being dragged down.
I had broken into a sweat.
I could not get my breath.
Suddenly I tore open the door and plunged across the threshold; onto the landing. I think that I genuinely intended to pull him into the kitchen and save him after all. I can’t say for sure. What I saw in the stairwell, only a few steps below, was so shocking that I froze—and did nothing.
The torture master hadn’t been seized by the darkness itself but by two skeletally thin men who reached out of that ceaselessly churning mass of blackness. Dead men. I recognized them. They were American . soldiers who had died in the camp at the hands of the torture master while I had been there. Neither of them had been friends of mine, and in fact they had both been hard cases themselves, bad men who had enjoyed the war before they had been captured and imprisoned by the Vietcong, the rare and hateful kind who liked killing and who engaged in black-market profiteering during their off-duty hours. Their eyes were icy, opaque. When they opened their mouths to speak to me, no words came forth, only a soft hissing and a faraway whimpering that led me to believe that those noises were coming not from their bodies but from their souls—souls chained in the cellar far below. They were straining out of the oozing distillate of darkness, unable to escape it entirely, revealed only to the extent required to grasp Nguyen Quang Phu by both arms and legs.
As I watched, they drew him screaming into that thick decoction of night that had become their eternal home. When the three of them vanished into the throbbing gloom, that rippling tarry mass flowed backward, away from me. Steps came into sight like swards of a beach appearing as the tide withdraws.
I stumbled out of the stairwell, across the kitchen to the sink. I hung my head and vomited. Ran the water. Splashed my face. Rinsed my mouth. Leaned against the counter, gasping.
When at last I turned, I saw that the cellar door had vanished. The darkness had wanted the torture master. That’s why the door had appeared, why a way had opened into … into the place below. It had wanted the torture master so badly that it couldn’t wait to claim him in the natural course of events, upon his predestined death, so it had opened a door into this world and had swallowed him. Now it had him, and my encounter with the supernatural was surely at an end.
That’s what I thought.
I simply did not understand.
God help me, I did not understand.
4
NGUYEN QUANG PHU’S CAR—A NEW WHITE MERCEDES—WAS PARKED in the driveway, which is rather secluded. I got in without being observed and drove the car away, abandoning it in a parking lot that served a public beach. I walked the few miles back to the house, and later, when Phu’s disappearance became a matter for the police, I claimed that he had never kept our appointment. I was believed. They were not suspicious of me, for I am a leading citizen, a man of some accomplishment, and in possession of a fine reputation.
During the next three weeks, the cellar door did not reappear. I didn’t expect ever to be entirely comfortable in our new dream house, but gradually the worst of my dread faded and I no longer avoided entering the kitchen.
I’d had a head-on collision with the supernatural, but there was little or no chance of another encounter. A lot of people see one ghost sometime in their lives, are caught up in one paranormal event that leaves them shaken and in doubt about the true nature of reality, but they have no further occult experiences. I was sure that I would never see the cellar door again.
Then, Horace Dalcoe, holder of our restaurant’s lease and loud complainer about albondigas soup, discovered that I was negotiating secretly to buy the property that he had leased for his shopping center, and he struck back. Hard. He has political connections. I suppose he encountered little difficulty getting the health inspector to slap us with citations for nonexistent violations of the public code. We have always run an immaculate restaurant; our own standards for food handling and cleanliness have always exceeded those of the health department. Therefore, Carmen and I decided to take the matter to court rather than pay the fines—which was when we got hit with a citation for fire-code violations. And when we announced our intention of seeking a retraction of those unjust charges, someone broke in to the restaurant at three o’clock on a Thursday morning and vandalized the place, doing over fifty thousand dollars worth of damage.
I realized that I might win one or all of these battles but still lose the war. If I had been able to adopt Horace Dalcoe’s scurrilous tactics, if I had been able to resort to bribing public officials and hiring thugs, I could have fought back in a way that he would have understood, and he might have called a truce. Though I wasn’t without the stain of sin on my soul, I was nonetheless unable to lower myself to Dalcoe’s level.
Maybe my reluctance to play rough and dirty was more a matter of pride than of genuine honesty or honor, though I would prefer to believe better of myself.
Yesterday morning (as I write this in the diary of damnation that I have begun to keep), I went to see Dalcoe at his plush office. I humbled myself before him and agreed to abandon my efforts to buy the leased property on which his small shopping center stands. I also agreed to pay him three thousand in cash, under the table, for being permitted to erect a larger, more attractive sign for the restaurant.
He was smug, condescending, infuriating. He kept me there for more than an hour, though our business could have been concluded in ten minutes, because he relished my humiliation.
Last night, I could not sleep. The bed was comfortable, and the house was silent, and the air was pleasantly cool—all conditions for easy, deep sleep—but I could not stop brooding about Horace Dalcoe. The tho
ught of being under his thumb for the foreseeable future was more than I could bear. I repeatedly turned the situation over in my mind, searching for a handle, for a way to obtain an advantage over him before he realized what I was doing, but no brilliant ploys occurred to me.
Finally, I slipped out of bed without waking Carmen, and I went downstairs to get a glass of milk, hopeful that a calcium fix would sedate me. When I entered the kitchen, still thinking of Dalcoe, the cellar door was there again.
Staring at it, I was very afraid, for I knew what its timely reappearance meant. I needed to deal with Horace Dalcoe, and I was being provided with a final solution to the problem. Invite Dalcoe to the house on one pretext or another. Show him the cellar. And let the darkness have him.
I opened the door.
I peered down the steps at the blackness below.
Long-dead prisoners, victims of torture, had been waiting for Nguyen Quang Phu. What would be waiting down there to seize Dalcoe?
I shuddered.
Not for Dalcoe.
I shuddered for me.
Suddenly I understood that the darkness below wanted me more than it wanted Phu the torture master or Horace Dalcoe. Neither of those men was much of a prize. They were destined for Hell anyway. If I had not escorted Phu into the cellar, the darkness would have had him sooner or later, when at last death visited him. Likewise, Dalcoe would wind up in the depths of Gehenna upon his own death. But by hurrying them along to their ultimate destination, I would be surrendering to the dark impulses within me and would, thereby, by putting my own soul in jeopardy.
Staring down the cellar stairs, I heard the darkness calling my name, welcoming me, offering me eternal communion. Its whispery voice was seductive. Its promises were sweet. The fate of my soul was still undecided, and the darkness saw the possibility of a small triumph in claiming me.
I sensed that I was not yet sufficiently corrupted to belong down in the darkness. What I had done to Phu might be seen as the mere enactment of long-overdue justice, for he was a man who deserved no rewards in either this world or the next. And allowing Dalcoe to proceed to his predestined doom ahead of schedule would probably not condemn me to Perdition.
But whom might I be tempted to lure to the cellar after Horace Dalcoe? How many and how often? Each time, the option would get easier to take. Sooner or later, I would find myself using the cellar to rid myself of people who were only minor nuisances. Some of them a might be borderline cases, people deserving of Hell but with a chance of salvation, and by hurrying them along, I would be denying them the opportunity to mend their ways and remake their lives. Their damnation would be partly my responsibility. Then I too would be lost … and the darkness would rise up the stairs and come into the house and take me when it wished.
Below, that sludge-thick distillation of a billion moonless nights whispered to me, whispered.
I stepped back and closed the door.
It did not vanish.
Dalcoe, I thought desperately, why have you been such a bastard? Why have you made me hate you?
Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reigns.
I am a good man. A hard worker. A loving and faithful husband. A stern but doting father. A good man.
Yet I have human failings—not the least of which is a taste for vengeance. Part of the price that I have paid is the death of my innocence in Vietnam. There, I learned that great evil exists in the world, not in the abstract but in the flesh, and when evil men tortured me, I was contaminated by the contact. I developed a thirst for vengeance.
I tell myself that I dare not succumb to the easy solutions offered by the cellar. Where would it stop? Someday, after sending a score of men and women into the lightless chamber below, I would be so thoroughly corrupted that it would be easy to use the cellar for what had previously seemed unthinkable. For instance, what if Carmen and I had an argument? Would I devolve to the point where I could ask her to explore those lower regions with me? What if my children displeased me as, God knows, children frequently do? Where would I draw the line? And would the line be constantly redrawn?
I am a good man.
Although occasionally providing darkness with a habitat, I have never provided it with a kingdom.
I am a good man.
But the temptation is great.
I have begun to prepare a list of people who have, at one time or another, made my life difficult. I don’t intend to do anything about them, of course. The