Double

After better than seven miles of this, I came up out of a dry wash to the top of a rise and saw the house. It was the one in Lauterbach’s photographs, all right, and an even weirder sight in reality. No wonder the gardener had called Leonard Matthews crazy as a coot; the place looked as if it had been designed and built by one of the mad characters in the old Shudder Pulps.

There was a car parked on the big flat area in front and to one side, a dusty white Cadillac. Beyond it, in the empty desert that fell away to the northwest, I could see the remains of the water tower and the loading dock. The railroad spur track, too: broken up by time and the elements, pieces missing, ties missing, parts of it hidden by sagebrush and greasewood, making a snaky line toward the eroded, humpbacked hills that rose behind the house. I drove on down toward the house and parked next to the Caddy. My mouth was dry and dusty; before I got out, I drank some of the bottled water I’d bought in Borrego Springs on the advice of the gardener. It had been good advice: this definitely was not a place you’d ever want to be caught in without water.

Nobody came out of the house. But then, if the Caddy’s owner was inside, he might not have heard me drive up; there were some big things on the roof that looked like air-conditioning units and they were making a hell of a racket. In contrast, the high rocks and the sunblasted desert were silent, motionless, empty.

I went over to the Cadillac and looked through the driver’s window. The first thing I saw were wires hanging down from under the wheel — ignition wires, as if somebody had been trying to hot-wire the car. On impulse I tried the door. It was unlocked, and I opened it and leaned inside. The interior didn’t contain anything interesting that I could see. Neither did the glove box: no registration, nothing that told me who the Caddy belonged to.

I continued on to the house. The front door was recessed in an opening that looked like the mouth of a cave, and it was standing wide open. I poked my head inside and called out a greeting.

No answer.

“Is anybody here?”

No answer.

I went into a wide foyer that had five archways opening off it. I took the one straight ahead and found myself in a sunken living room with a fireplace in the middle. The Darrows’ gardener had said the house was abandoned, but all the parked cars in Lauterbach’s photographs had indicated otherwise; and this room, full of expensive furniture and artwork, confirmed that people either lived or spent a fair amount of time here.

When I didn’t get an answer to another hail I went prowling through the place. And it didn’t take me long, once I saw the other rooms, to figure out just what kind of place it was. A mirrored bedroom gave me the first hint, a room fixed up for the screening of what were clearly pornographic films expanded the idea, and a series of other bedrooms containing different personal belongings fleshed it out completely. The club McCone and I had kept hearing about wasn’t anything so mundane as a health spa; it was a private sex club, a place where a bunch of kinky people got together to look at X-rated movies and to hold orgies. People like Elaine Picard, Lloyd Beddoes, the Darrows, Karyn Sugarman, Rich Woodall.

That Cadillac out front, I thought. Woodall’s?

The last of the five foyer archways led to a closed and locked door that might have been rescued from a medieval English castle: thick black oak, ironbound, with an old-fashioned latch and keyhole. On the floor nearby was a big brass key that looked as if it would fit the lock; I picked it up and tried it, and it worked, all right. I opened the door and went inside.

It was like walking onto a stage set for a film about the Spanish Inquisition. Imitation-stone walls hung with chains, racks of whips and paddles and cats-o’-nine-tails, other stuff I didn’t recognize — all of it lit in a reddish glow from bulbs recessed in the ceiling. I could feel my flesh start to crawl. These people were into more than just orgies; they were into bondage and sado-masochism as well.

The room was L-shaped, and I moved ahead to where I could see what was around of the ell. More of the same... and a cross on the wall with a female figure hanging from it, a figure I thought at first was a dummy and then realized was human — had been human. In that bloody light I couldn’t tell the color of her hair or see her face, because the hair covered it, and I thought with a surge of horror that it was McCone. I ran back there but it wasn’t McCone; it was a woman I’d never seen before. Strangled. Dead a long time. Crucified with heavy rope in lieu of nails.

But McCone had been here. There was a purse lying on the floor, and when I grabbed it up and rummaged through it I found her identification. Torn strips of wallpaper lay on the floor too. And high up on the wall, near the ceiling, sunlight streamed in through a hole that led to the outside.