CHAPTER 28

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT TO THE REDEEMER’S LAW PROJECT, YOU ARE COMING INTO THE STORY ALREADY IN PROGRESS. YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE WILL BE FAR LESS CONFUSING IF YOU USE THE CHAPTER INDEX ON THE RIGHT TO GO BACK TO THE INTRODUCTION. OR AT LEAST TO THE PROLOGUE.

CHAPTER 28

While Greg Thatcher and Darius Clay traded verbal punches, Diedra stood outside Matt’s door in the hallway, her back pressed to the wall, a pass-key held tightly in one hand.

“This is insane,” she said quietly. “By standing here, I am proving myself to be a lost cause. A basket case. Oh, boy.” She shifted the key to the other hand and looked at the one she’d been holding it in. Its imprint was very clear in the pale skin of her palm, which trembled slightly. She dropped the hand to her side, went to the door and knocked loudly.

“Matt? Matt, are you in there?”

No answer. She wasn’t surprised, but she still got a peculiar sinking feeling.

She’d watched the building’s entry hall until very late last night, and since very early this morning. Both the elevator and the staircase let out onto it, and Matt would have had to pass in front of her if he’d left the building. And he hadn’t come into the hall—unless he did it between three and six in the morning.

And that wouldn’t have mattered, because between three and six, in massive violation of several laws, codes, and ordinances, Diedra had locked the front door of the LaCroix while she grabbed some sleep herself.

And now Matt wasn’t answering his phone.

Diedra pressed her ear to the door, listened intently, and heard nothing.

She sighed, annoyed at herself.

Logically, Matt Sinclair was one of two things: one, he was indisposed, asleep or in the shower or something, maybe with the ringer off, so that he couldn’t hear the phone. Two...he was hurt, and couldn’t come to the door or answer the phone.

“This is stupid, Diedra,” she said in a quiet voice. “What are you doing? Why are you here?”

She knocked again, louder this time, and waited. Still no answer. “Matt? Hey Matt! Open the door!”

Nothing.

“Fine. He’s not in there.” She jammed the pass-key into the lock and turned it, popped the door open.

The apartment was mostly dark, lit only by the shaft of light coming in from over her shoulder and a weak yellow glow from a lamp on one end of the kitchen counter. Diedra closed the door, and immediately missed the light from the outside hallway; the small lamp lit the apartment’s interior well enough for her to get around, but seemed to create more shadows than it got rid of. It was the same apartment she’d seen the first time, but now it seemed unrelentingly weird.

She tried to think of the right word. The painting of the cabin by the woods came back to her, and she resisted the impulse to jump back out into the hallway and slam the door.

Sinister. That’s the word. Just like that freaky painting. Only now it’s the whole place. She flicked on the nearest wall switch, and an overhead fixture came on. Three high-wattage bulbs scattered the darkness. “That’s better,” she whispered.

There was something hugely strange about Matt Sinclair. She hadn’t quite added it up into a cogent picture, but the details were there, and they nagged at her, even if she couldn’t name them off. There were things about him that he wasn’t telling her, and while at least one of those she thought she already had figured out, she got the feeling that the others were very big things.

“Hello? Are you here? Asleep? In the tub? Hello?”

The walls soaked her voice in and gave nothing back. She took a few hesitant steps to the middle of the living room, near the couch. The apartment had the stillness of the abandoned, and Diedra forced herself to look through it, room to room.

In just under two minutes she determined that Matt Sinclair was indeed not in the apartment.

“Okay,” she said, in a normal voice. “So you’re not here, but you’re still in the building. Fine. That’s normal. You could be visiting friends on the next floor up. Kicking back, watching the game, drinking beer. That’d be perfectly normal. At eight-thirty in the morning.”

She didn’t believe that for a second. Diedra went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, then sat down on Matt’s couch and turned on the TV. His reception was bad, but not unwatchable. The Love Boat had just come on, and she settled back into the cushions, content to wait.

Minutes stretched into hours. When she glanced at a clock, it read 2:52. Diedra still sat alone in Matt’s apartment, reading Robert McCammon’s Gone South, a novel she’d found in a small bookcase in the corner of the living room.

She knew she should be down in the office. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have enough paperwork to do. But her pager number was on the door, and any maintenance emergencies would get to her that way. So she sat and read.

She’d turned off the TV shortly after turning it on, since she didn’t want Matt to hear it before he came in. Every so often, when she could force herself to pull her eyes away from the book, she glanced up at the apartment door. She tried not to think about what she’d say when Matt came home from wherever he was. Maybe, “Hi, I couldn’t figure out where you went, so I thought I’d break in and wait here to ask you.”

Something like that.

Sure.

She closed her eyes and went over the building’s blueprints in her head, trying to remember...what? A blank space? Somewhere for a secret passageway to go? When the door opened and he stepped inside, probably holding a bag of groceries, she knew she’d be left looking like an idiot. But she had to know. Had to stay and find out.

But—what if he’d left right after he got back yesterday? ...What if he was staying at some other woman’s place?

That was a thought she refused to accept. She went back to reading, and almost jumped out of the chair entirely when two loud thumps sounded from her left.

Diedra’s heart immediately kicked into an adrenaline high.

She tried to think of some reason why she shouldn’t bolt out of the apartment, and couldn’t come up with anything good, but she stood up anyway and moved hesitantly toward the source of the noise. There’d been two, each very distinct. Thump, and then less than a second later, thump, just like the first one. She thought they’d come from the coat closet.

Diedra had searched that closet when she first got there, just as she’d searched the rest of the place. It was empty, with the light bulb missing. Just a perfectly ordinary closet, vaguely coffin-like, with a single shelf at about head height, nothing on it. She took a couple of deep breaths and looked around the apartment. With the overhead fixture still burning, it looked cheery enough, though it was painfully clear that the place belonged to a bachelor. She turned back to the closet door, put out a hand and touched the knob.

“What’s behind door number one?” she said aloud. The sound of her own voice made it a little easier. “I’ll turn the knob, open the door, and a corpse will fall out, right into my arms. Just like on TV.”

No, no. That’d be too easy. She didn’t believe it. Although...a few images came to her, probably spawned by reading too many Stephen King novels, of dead bodies and expanding intestinal gas and rupturing flesh, and what if those thumps were the corpse’s arms falling off? Or a couple of internal organs squeezing out through a big hole in the stomach? She’d turn the knob, open the door, and something would be in there waiting for her, and reach out and pull her in. She thought of the painting again, of whatever it was she’d thought she saw in there.

“Jesus, I’m making it worse,” she said quickly, and with a swift turn and yank she pulled the door wide open and stepped back so the light from the overhead lamp could reach inside.

Diedra thought about laughing. On the floor of the closet lay a pair of black combat boots.

Thump-thump. One-two. Hitting the floor. She tilted her head and looked up at the shelf, about five inches above her eye level. There hadn’t been any boots there before when she looked, she was sure of that. Even if she had missed them, why would they have suddenly fallen now? She knelt and picked one up, then turned around and sat down with her back to the wall beside the open closet.

She’d thought they were combat boots—they were the right height, they were black, they laced up—but that was only at first glance. She turned the boot over in her hands, examined it. It wasn’t all leather, that was certain. She recognized the other material as some kind of synthetic, but not like anything she’d seen before. She brought it close to her nose, stared hard at the material, and thought it looked like...scales? Tiny scales? No...too regular. The sole was thick black rubber, like the sole of a hiking boot. She couldn’t find a brand name anywhere on it, or even a size, for that matter.

She heard the sound in her mind again. Thump-thump. As though they had just been dropped. Just like someone sitting on the edge of his bed, ready to sack out: pull off the boots, maybe look at one of them to see if anything was stuck to the bottom, then toss them into the corner. Thump-thump.

Slowly Diedra pulled the boot’s tongue out, loosened the laces further, and touched the inside of the boot. It was warm against her fingers, and very slightly damp. She made a face and, hesitantly, brought the boot up to her nose and sniffed. There was the scent of sweat there, yes, but not offensively strong. She picked up the other boot, held them side by side. They were very high quality, clearly enough, and well-maintained. And recently worn.

Diedra hopped up from the floor and went quickly through Matt’s bedroom to the adjoining bath, which she knew shared a wall with the closet. The bathroom was empty, and the molded acrylic wall of the shower-and-bath unit covered the place on the bathroom wall where any kind of concealed door would have opened.

She went back into the short hallway where the closet stood and opened the door next to it. The heating and cooling unit and water heater sat there, undisturbed, exactly as she’d left them when she’d finished with the air filter. She knocked on the wall shared by the two closets and found it satisfyingly solid.

Thump-thump. It wouldn’t get out of her head.

“Stuff doesn’t just appear out of nowhere,” she said. Hearing the words out loud didn’t do much to make her feel better. She kept talking anyway. “And if something did, it wouldn’t be a pair of boots, for God’s sake. It’d be something else—a little toothy creature, or an old book. Or a wheelchair. Or something. Not a pair of sweaty boots.”

Before she could say anything else she felt a change in the air. She couldn’t put any kind of name to it, but she felt it, just as surely as she would have felt the airflow from an electric fan suddenly turned on her. Sweat popped out on her skin and seemed to evaporate as soon as it appeared.

Something was coming.

Maybe she wouldn’t have felt it if she hadn’t already been so tense, waiting for something to happen. But something was coming, she knew it, the same kind of feeling she’d gotten from the painting but ten times stronger, twenty times. Every hair on her body tried to stand on end. Diedra ran to the wall switch and flipped it down, plunged the apartment back into the shadow-filled, weakly lit place she had first stepped into. The closet itself received no light at all, and seemed endlessly deep, a cavern to enter and never exit.

Diedra fumbled with her keys, tried to sort out which one was the passkey, and then heard a soft sound. Something brushing against the carpet. Something like skin. Her hands began shaking too badly to hold the keys, and she dropped them on the floor.

Diedra turned around, her back to the door, and faced the closet just as Matt Sinclair stepped out of it. The shelf was much too low for his head, so he stooped as he came out, slowly straightening to his full height, and for an instant, just a heartbeat, the light from the lamp shone straight through him, so that Diedra saw the wall of the hallway and the door to his bedroom through his chest. He wore only socks, a tight white tank-top, white briefs and a jock strap. Sweat beaded on his head and ran down his face, and he carried the same black bundle under one arm that Diedra had seen the first time.

He saw her immediately. She didn’t think anyone could actually move as fast as he did then, and her scream cut off abruptly as his hand clamped over her mouth. Quickly and gracefully, he spun her around and held her tightly to him, reached out and clicked off the one small burning lamp.

A hole in the world opened up and Diedra fell through it.


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