Laura glanced back at Nate and Thorson, not wanting to make a sound still, just in case. Nate was right about teenagers seeing this place as an open invitation to come inside. There was no knowing what they were about to walk into. She made a signal with her hands, gesturing to Nate and to the left, then to Thorson and to the right, and finally to herself and straight ahead.
The others nodded.
Laura moved with stealth down the corridor, hearing the others pad off to the sides as quietly as possible. The floorboards creaked as she moved along them, an unfortunate effect she couldn’t control. They needed to be stealthy here, but there were some things you couldn’t avoid in a building of this age.
The route she had taken led into a long kitchen space, covering the back part of the building. She cast the beam from her phone in a slow arc. There was nothing – no one. No sign of recent life. There were dusty, moldy plates stacked up by the sink, holding the remains of some long-dead meal. She listened, but there was no low buzz from the fridge to indicate it was turned on. She didn’t dare open it, imagining the smell of spoiled food that would spill out as soon as she did.
It was creepy, the whole place. Like someone had got up one day and left halfway through their normal daily life, then never come back. As if they’d simply fled some awful incident. A flood, a forest fire, a volcanic eruption, the onset of war. Some kind of evacuation. But the house was undamaged, preserved perfectly as it had been on that one day – just coated with a film of dust over it all.
Satisfied the room was clear, Laura moved back to the corridor. Twin beams of light swept from both the other sides of the hall and convened as she approached – Nate and Thorson had also conducted their searches. Laura raised her phone just slightly to illuminate their faces without blinding them, watching them both shake their heads. Nothing.
Laura was about to suggest the stairs, hoping they would be structurally sound, when a noise made her breath catch in her throat and froze her in place.
A voice?
Was that a voice?
She glanced at Nate. He had heard it to. He nodded to something behind her slowly.
Laura turned and looked. Another door, one she had overlooked. It was difficult in the pitch darkness; she must have swung her beam of light too far to one side and not seen it, sandwiched between two dusty, thin cabinets in the hall. She shivered lightly. There was a faint noise again, something that sounded just like a voice, even if too distant to work out what it was saying.
She reached for her gun at her belt, loosening it. On second thought, she drew it. If their killer was down there, they could be about to walk into a very dangerous situation.
She moved forward hesitantly, shining her light on the door. There were patterns in the dust around the handle and on the floor, as though someone stood here often to open it. This was it. It had to be.
Laura reached out for the door, bracing herself for a vision that did not come, and then slowly and carefully slipped it open.
To her relief, despite the age of the door and the house, there was no creak as it swung out towards her. It must have been regularly oiled, kept in good shape while everything else was falling apart. If this was the only area of the house that was used, it made sense.
To her dismay, but also not to her surprise, it was not another room that awaited them beyond the door.
It was a set of stairs, leading down. Down into a basement.
Laura took a deep breath, trying not to think about the burn on her hand and the fact that she’d been tied up in a basement when it happened, and stepped out onto the top of the stairs.
She held her breath, listening for a creak, but the wood held. That wouldn’t be the case further down, she thought, and the other two joining her would put even more pressure on the structure. They wouldn’t have the element of surprise here. They would have the benefit of the higher ground, but only in an enclosed space – and they would have to emerge into the basement presumably in full view of anyone who might be below. Her hand flexed on the grip of her gun, her heart in her mouth. This was dangerous. Maybe too dangerous. Maybe they should retreat as silently as possible and call for backup.
Then the voices floated up to her again from the stairwell. Voices, because there were two.
One of them, soft, impossible to make out fully. A little higher, more feminine, although to her ear it still sounded male. Perhaps someone younger, with a higher-pitched voice. Then there was another that answered, loud and booming. It seemed to echo strangely off the room below and up the stairs, creating an echo of itself that bounced around and confused her ear, making it impossible still to figure out what it was saying.
But it didn’t sound happy. It sounded angry.
Like someone shouting at a prisoner that was trying to reason with them.
Laura couldn’t wait for backup. Not hearing that. She could hear the potential scenario: the killer and his next victim, waiting down there, pleading for his life. There was nothing to say that the victims had to be killed at their own homes or in a public place, after all. Maybe this tailor of theirs had realized that he was close to being caught and decided to lure someone to his own home instead, delaying their discovery.
She couldn’t stand by and wait.
Knowing they would not be able to get the jump on him if they tried to creep down slowly and the wood gave them away, Laura made a split-second decision. There was light coming from below, beyond the bottom of the stairs. She put her phone away, gripped her gun in one hand and used the other to steady herself against the wall, and started to jump down the stairs two steps at a time.
She rushed headlong out of the opening into the basement, whipping her head around in all directions. She swung her gun around towards the first human figure she saw –
And froze, frowning, her brain trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
There was a strange scene spread out before her, one that took her a long moment to digest. There was a long table in the center of the basement, set up like a trestle table for a dinner party for a large group: covered in a white sheet and spread with various dishes across the middle, plates and cutlery in front of each chair, waiting for the guests to choose their food.
And it was not an empty table. At each spot around the table but one, someone was sitting, ready to eat. They were all frozen, as if waiting for something to happen before they could pick up their knives and forks.