Free The Cellar by Richard Laymon Page A

you heard, sir. I only know what I know, and I know more about the beast of this house than any other person, living or dead. The beast of this house has never carnally abused its victims.”
    “Then I apologize,” he said in a cold voice.
    “When the beast was done with Ethel, it rampaged through the parlor. It knocked this alabaster bust of Caesar off the mantle, breaking the nose.” The nose rested on the fireplace mantle beside the bust. “It dashed half a dozen figurines into the fireplace. It upset chairs. This fine rosewood pedestal table was thrown through the bay window. The racket, of course, awakened the restof the household. Lilly’s room was right up there.” Maggie pointed toward the high ceiling with her cane. “The beast must’ve heard her stirring. It went for the stairs.”
    Silently, she led the group out of the parlor and up a broad stairway to the second floor hall. They turned to the left. Maggie stepped through a side doorway and into a bedroom.
    “We’re now above the parlor. Here’s where Lilly Thorn was sleeping the night of the beast attack.” A wax figure, dressed in a lacy pink gown, was sitting upright, staring fearfully over the brass scrollwork at the foot of the bed. “When the commotion woke Lilly up, she dragged the dressing table from there”—she pointed her cane at the heavy rosewood table and mirror beside the window—“to there, barricading the door. Then she made her escape through the window. She jumped to the roof of the bay window below, then to the ground.
    “It’s always been a wonder to me that she didn’t try to save her children.”
    They followed Maggie out of the bedroom.
    “When the beast found that he couldn’t get into her room, he came down the hall this way.”
    They passed the top of the stairs. Ahead, four Brentwood chairs blocked the center of the corridor. Clothesline was strung from one chair to the next, closing off the center space. The members of the group squeezed between one of the lines and the wall.
    “This is where we’ll put our new display. The figuresare already on order, but we don’t expect to have them much before spring.”
    “That’s a shame,” the man with the two children told his wife in a sarcastic voice.
    Maggie entered a door to the right. “The beast found this door open,” she said.
    The windows of the room faced the wooded hillside behind the house. The room’s two brass beds looked much like the one in Lilly’s room, but the covers were heaped in disarray. A rocking horse with faded paint stood in one corner, next to the wash stand.
    “Earl was ten,” Maggie said. “His brother, Sam, was eight.”
    Their wax bodies, torn and chewed, lay sprawled face down between the two beds. Both wore the remains of striped nightshirts that concealed little except their buttocks.
    “Let’s go,” said the man with the two children. “This is the most crude, tasteless excuse for a voyeuristic thrill I’ve ever come across.”
    His wife smiled apologetically at Maggie.
    “Twelve bucks for this!” the man spat. “Good God!” His wife and children followed him out of the room.
    A trim woman in a white blouse and shorts took her teenage son by the elbow. “We’re going, too.”
    “Mother!”
    “No argument. We’ve both seen too much already.”
    “Aw geez!”
    She tugged him out the door.
    When they were gone, Maggie laughed quietly. “They left before we got to the best part,” she said.
    Nervous laughter whispered through the remaining members of the group.
2.
    “We lived sixteen nights in this house before the beast struck.” She led them through the corridor, past the blocking chairs and past the stairway. “My husband, Joseph, he had a distaste for the rooms where the murders happened. That’s partly why we left ’em well enough alone, and settled ourselves elsewhere. Cynthia and Diana weren’t so squeamish. They stayed in the boys’ room we just left.”
    She took the group through a doorway on