He preferred not to pull the cellar door shut behind him. It might be impossible for one of the deadbolts to slip a fraction of an inch into the striker plate on the doorframe, accidentally trapping him. On the other hand, seemingly impossible things had recently happened with some frequency.

Although only a pale glow would rise into the kitchen from below, and although Stuart Ulrich was unlikely to cruise by at just the wrong moment and notice a faint radiance in the house, David did not intend to use the electric lights in the cellar. He would rely on his flashlights.

He stepped onto the landing and hesitated.

Maybe he would find Emily’s body in its Egyptian windings, among the fourteen stolen girls, and would know beyond all doubt that she was long dead. But that would not explain Maddison.

Maybe Emily’s remains wouldn’t be found here. In that case, nothing whatsoever would be resolved.

In any event, mysteries would remain.

But what else was there to do but descend and see? Nothing else. This maze had brought him to a turn where, for once, there were no other paths to take.

He went down the stairs, carrying the folded stepladder. The steel-bar gate at the bottom stood open as before. He proceeded into what Ronny Jessup called the “receiving room.”

He withdrew his fingers from the lens, providing more light, although not enough to warm his chilled blood.

| 73 |

The maze of Ronny Jessup’s dark erotic dreams of absolute power was also the labyrinth of David Thorne’s nightmares. In this cochlea of eerie silence, the narrow serpentine passageways, with their low ceilings and walls patterned by creeping mold, testified to the seed of evil in the human heart—dormant in some, flourishing in others. Where it flourished, there was the narcissistic certainty of being superior and the associated insatiable lust for power from which all other wickedness grew. The need to control others and use them, to intimidate and abuse them, forcing them to submit until eventually they submitted with self-negating eagerness. In the twisting warrens of Jessup’s mind, which were here made manifest, all the varied gods of human history were dead and catacombed and powerless, leaving the new god, Ronny, whose one commandment was Do as I tell you, whose love was insatiable lust, whose grace was terror, whose promise was death everlasting.

Here and there, the flashlight beam played over a fragment of the dollar bill that, on his first tour, David had torn into pieces and used to mark the route that he had followed, so that he would not waste time revisiting places he had already explored.