in the Dark Of the Night (2006) by Saul| John

Author:Saul| John [John, Saul,]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-02-09T15:48:25.703000+00:00

Chapter 16

The strange tingling sensation began the moment Eric stepped into the storeroom. It started in his fingertips, but spread quickly through his whole body as he and Kent pulled the heavy plywood away from the doorway to the hidden room. As he crossed the threshold, his mind as well as his body was suddenly filled with unfamiliar stimuli. Every one of his senses seemed sharpened, and he felt imbued with an energy he'd never experienced outside this tiny room.

An energy that filled him not only with excitement, but with disori- entation as well.

Disorientation, and dread.

It was as if a force had gripped him, gripped him so tightly that he could not only feel it, but hear it, too. From somewhere far away, vague voices were again whispering darkly at the edges of his consciousness.

As the force tightened its grip on him, one small part of his mind told him to resist it, to back away before it was too late. Yet even as this small inner voice spoke to him, the voice of the force whispered its siren song, and instead of turning to escape back into the bright light of the summer morning, he moved deeper into the darkness of the room.

He and Kent lit the lanterns and peered around the chamber almost as if expecting the answers to Phantom Lake's mysteries to be spread before them on parchment scrolls or etched on the walls like some modern Rosetta stone. Eric had known they'd be back in the room the moment he awoke that morning; he'd felt its pull like some sort of fate or predestination, and after breakfast, when his mother left for a crafts fair with Marci, Tad and Kent had arrived.

With no need of a single word being spoken, they had gone directly to the carriage house to find some answers.

"Darby specialized in serial killers," Kent said, gazing around the room at all the dusty boxes and strange half-broken objects. "So if he really managed to buy Jack the Ripper's scalpels--"

All their eyes turned to the medical bag that still sat on top of the three-legged Formica table, and Eric could feel the strange energy that suffused the room increase as they focused on the dark object with its macabre contents.

"I'm not touching that thing," Tad breathed, his voice sounding oddly strangled.

Eric, though, moved forward and gently--almost reverently-- picked it up and set it on a bookshelf.

"So if that really was Jack the Ripper's bag," Kent went on, "maybe the rest of the stuff in here belonged to serial killers, too." He moved to an old wooden lateral filing cabinet and tugged on one of its long, warped drawers. It didn't budge, held fast either by the warping of the wood or the lock.

"Maybe that's the difference between the stuff in this hidden room and the stuff out there in the storeroom," Eric mused.

"This room wasn't just hidden," Tad said, his hands drawn almost against his will to the ornate scrollwork on the lamp base that still sat on the broken table.

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