The Night Visitors(47)

“Oren?” I call. “Come out of there right now!”

“Did you see him in there?” Mattie asks, adding her flashlight beam to mine. “There’s a crawl space back there where Caleb got stuck once.”

The last thing I want to hear about right now is Mattie’s dead brother—or anything called a crawl space—but that would be mean to say. I can see Mattie measuring the distance between the wall and the furnace, but the truth is she’s too wide in the beam to clear the narrow space.

“I’ll go,” I say, pushing past her. I flatten myself against the stone wall, imagining centipedes and spiders crawling into my hair, and inch my way past the hulking machine. It’s not really that hot; it must have turned off when the electricity went out. Still, I find I don’t want to touch it. It’s greasy and dirty and somehow just . . . bad.

“Thanks a lot, Oren,” I mutter. I hear a muffled sound that could be giggling—or sobbing. Damn. If Oren’s really gotten himself stuck in here he must be scared shitless. “It’s okay, sweetie,” I say, backtracking. “It’s just a smelly old basement. I’m coming to get you out.”

Once I’m past the furnace I can lift my arm and aim the flashlight into the back of the cave. Past the pipes and wires, toward the bottom of the wall, there’s an opening maybe two feet high. The crawl space Mattie mentioned, only you’d have to be a midget to crawl in there. I shine the flashlight into it and the beam catches the glint of eyes. Big, wide, scared little-boy eyes.

“Oh, baby,” I say, crouching down, “how’d you get yourself into such a mess? Here, give me your hand.”

He sobs. Shit. Oren never cries. I put down the flashlight and flatten myself on the cold, wet ground, reaching into the dark. “Take my hand, baby.”

His hand clasps mine. It’s so cold it scares me. How long has he been lying here?

“I’m so sorry, baby,” I say. “I’m sorry I yelled, I’m sorry I didn’t get you away sooner. I promise it will be better from now on. I’m gonna take care of you.”

He squeezes my hand and I feel something cold and hard press into my palm. And then his hand is gone. It’s not like he’s let go; it’s like his flesh just melted away.

“Oren?” I scrabble closer to the hole and sweep my hands inside. There’s nothing there. Could he have crawled in even deeper? I inch back, find the flashlight, and aim it into the hole. The light shines onto a stone wall two or three feet in. I crawl farther in, feeling every inch of the wall for an opening Oren could have slipped through, but there’s no way out of this hole.

In fact, I’m not 100 percent sure I can get out.

Fighting off rising panic, I push my way back. Then I search the rest of the alcove for Oren, but he’s not here.

Maybe I imagined him.

Or maybe that wasn’t Oren.

Suddenly I can’t stand another minute here. I squeeze myself past the furnace and into the basement.

“Did you find him?” Mattie asks. “Is he stuck back there?”

I don’t know what to tell her. Instead I hold out my hand and open it, palm up. Mattie shines her flashlight on my hand and plucks up the cold hard thing he—it?—pressed into my grasp. I had been holding it so tightly that it’s left a pattern imprinted on my flesh, some kind of complicated seal like you see on old buildings and stamped on official papers. It looks kind of familiar. It must be to Mattie too. She’s looking at it like it’s a puzzle piece.

“Where’d you get . . . ,” she begins, but her words are drowned out by a loud grating noise coming from the slanted doors on the other side of the basement. We both turn our flashlights on them in time to see the doors fly open. Snow comes pouring in, then a man’s booted legs appear.

Mattie grabs my hand, pushes me to the side of the stairs, and turns off her flashlight. I turn off mine too, but not before I see Mattie take a gun out of her sweater pocket. As the man comes down the stairs, shining his own flashlight in front of him, Mattie raises the gun over her head. She waits until he reaches the bottom step, then brings the gun down on his head with an audible crunch.

The man falls to his knees, arms flailing, flashlight flying. I hear a thump and a groan, and I thumb on my own flashlight to see Mattie sitting on top of the man, one knee pinning down his right shoulder while she struggles to pull his left arm behind his back.

“There’s a roll of electrical tape on that shelf over there,” she shouts at me.

I find the tape and try to unpeel it, but my hands are shaking too hard. The man is moaning and bucking under Mattie’s weight. Any second now he could get free and come at me. And then what? When Davis hit me I froze. I’d crawl into a ball and pray for it to be over. But here’s middle-aged soft-hearted Mattie fighting like a hellcat.

I force my hands to work and unpeel the dusty end and hand it to Mattie. She wrenches the intruder’s hand back and uses, like, half the roll of tape to wrap both wrists together, then pulls out a knife from her sweater pocket to cut off the tape.

“Do you have an Uzi in there too?” I ask like a smart-ass, trying to sound less scared than I really am.

She barks a laugh and then eases her weight off the man. “Help me roll him over.”

We shove him over like a sack of potatoes. His face is smeared with blood, but I see to my surprise that it’s not Davis. “I could’ve sworn it was Davis in the study,” I say.