Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(71)
Whatever that reverend is, whatever he claims to be, whatever he once was. Whatever his connection, you can bet he’s the monster behind this. Somehow. Whatever. There are no words true enough to describe him. I know that now. I know that he will destroy the world with his books, formulas, and figures. He thinks of them as scriptures, that’s one thing I’ve gathered from the silk that drapes itself in currents and waves throughout the room. He has scriptures, and they’re no scriptures for the likes of us. Setting eyes on them would be a horror. Reading them would be madness.
? ? ?
Here is what I think, Ruthie.
Read this note, and don’t bring it down to the room, lest the room eat it up and then no one will ever see it except for you—and that’s a burden I won’t wish upon you, not for any reward. You should share this with those you trust. (Hell, you can share it with the world, for all I care.) But here is what I think. I need to convey it somehow, before I’m absorbed into the room as well, as surely as the notes and the pictures and the scraps of evidence, unraveled in front of my eyes.
Here is what I think.
It’s one part police work of the old-fashioned sort, one part conjecture, and one part the whispered voices made of silk, spinning a web in that room. (And nothing escapes the web. Nothing ever has, and nothing ever will except for you, if you go. You are the lynchpin, dear. The keystone.)
I think the axe killer is one of the Chapelwood men, either by will or by compulsion. I think he hunts at the reverend’s behest, or command, or direction—I don’t know which. But he is one of theirs, I’d bet my life on it.
And why would Chapelwood seek to kill so many of our citizens, in such a specific and strange manner? I don’t know, but there is strange geometry involved in their efforts—they view the world through maps made of numbers, and via instructions relayed through formulas and sums. I’m not sure how, and I don’t know exactly why, but the fellow whose death made the papers last week, Leonard Kincaid, he had something to do with it.
I spoke with his former employers, at an accountant’s firm here in town. Kincaid was a good worker and a sane man, helping balance the city’s budget and manage its tax rolls until about eighteen months ago. His secretary (a Miss Josephine Engle, for the record) informed me that he’d attended some kind of religious camp meeting outside the city—she didn’t know which one, and she didn’t know what they were preaching that piqued his interest so strongly; but afterward, he’d become preoccupied with the prospect of communicating with God through math.
I told her that sounded unlikely, and she agreed with me—but she also said that Kincaid was quite insistent on the point, and he’d always struck her as an eminently sane man. He’d declared that numbers were the language of the universe, and if God created the universe, then that’s how He would speak.
As Miss Engle noted, the idea is so insidious because it tiptoes so close to logic.
Shortly after catching a case of religion, as the young secretary put it, Kincaid quit the firm and vanished. Miss Engle attempted to visit him at home, in order to return some of the personal effects he’d left at the office . . . but she found the house empty, and for sale. She was never able to procure a forwarding address, and never able to return his belongings.
I have those belongings now. I’m adding them to Storage Room Six, though I can’t say why. I ought to know better. I ought to bury them in a hole in the ground, for that would be more secure, wouldn’t it? Undoubtedly. But something compels me to stash them there, and so I carry the strange box with its strange contents and I deliver it to the basement, to the strange and hungry room.
At this point, I feel like I’m feeding the place.
Does that make sense? No, I’m sure it doesn’t. But, Ruthie, have you ever by any chance fed a stray cat? Some scraggly thing that roams around the block, darting in and out of yards, dodging dogs and horses and (these days) cars . . . if you have ever spotted such a thing, and offered it a scrap of supper, then you might know how I feel about the storage room.
You only have to feed it once, and it will never leave you alone again. It will beg and beg and beg, and you will give and give and give, because it seems like there isn’t any choice. You know the thing now, and it needs you, and you can’t let it starve.
? ? ?
(Dare I pen something even crazier? I might as well. I tried “feeding” the storage room useless things, like old phone books, out-of-date newspapers, and Sears catalogs from a decade ago. Do you want to know what happened to them? Nothing, that’s what happened. They held no interest for Storage Room Six. It only wants material that matters. Specifically, it wants material that matters to the axe murders and to what Chapelwood members we’ve been able to identify. It positively hungers for it.)
? ? ?
Somehow, Leonard Kincaid, crucified to the flophouse wall, was part of Chapelwood and part of the axe killings, too. You can see it in the box, in the things he left behind. You can see it in the stars, if you look hard enough. You can hear it in Storage Room Six, when you close your eyes and open your ears and hold very still, and are willing to listen to voices that come from nowhere, everywhere, and all around you at once.
I’m not strictly suggesting that you should.
Or maybe I am. No doubt, I could use a measure of context or perspective on the matter. Some ordinary soul might step inside the storage room and conclude that it’s an ordinary place, stuffed with the ordinary detritus of civic workings, abandoned after a regime change. That inspector fellow, Wolf, he came down there—he saw the place. I don’t know precisely what he thought of it. Maybe he heard the whispers, maybe he did not. I should’ve asked.