To the left? Jimmy flashed the light that way, and couldn’t see any road.
To the right? No.
Okay. So he’d have to do it differently; go back to the house and start all over, with quick on-oils of the flashlight right from the beginning, so he wouldn’t get lost. Flashlight off, he turned around and headed back the way he’d come.
No house. After a while he became pretty sure he should have reached the house, and there just wasn’t any house. No thin lines of yellow light at all, not a one.
Oh, the hell with this darkness! Switching on the flashlight, not putting any fingers over the glass at all, he aimed the beam all around himself, and didn’t see a damn thing.
Where was the house? Where was the road?
It was getting cold out here. The rain didn’t help and the wind didn’t help, and even without them it would have been cold. With them, it was becoming almost terrifying.
Well, he couldn’t just stand here. If he didn’t get to someplace pretty soon, he’d be in big trouble. He could die of exposure out here, and wouldn’t that be a dumb thing to do!
Apparently he’d come farther from the house than he’d thought. It had to be out in front of him, invisible in the pounding rain. So the thing to do was keep moving forward.
He moved forward. His shoes were becoming heavy with mud, and after a while it became easier to just drag his feet through the puddles rather than try to lift them.
Heavy. Cold. Hard to see in this light. And now the flashlight was starting to dim.
A road.
He didn’t believe it. He almost walked across it and off the other side, except that his sliding foot got caught briefly in one of the ruts. He looked down to see what the problem was, saw the parallel lines going from left to right, and shone the dimming light off to his right. A definite road, a farm road, two deep ruts with a grassy lane in the center.
Which way? He had to have overshot the house somehow, so it would be off to the left there. The highway would be to the right, so that’s the direction he took.
It was easier walking now, on the high grassy mound between the ruts. He made good time, all things considered, and he just didn’t believe it when he saw those yellow lines of light out in the darkness ahead of himself and to the right, just outside the yellow cone from the flashlight.
The house.
He could see the way it went now. The road didn’t go directly to the house, it came in from an angle and swept across in front of it. His ideas of his location and direction had been wrong at every single stage of the journey.
So the highway was back the other way. Jimmy turned and shone his feeble light down the road he’d just come along. He looked back over his shoulder at the house.
He sighed.
19
A L U M I N 0 U S afternoon ‘n the black-and-white forest. The monster, played by Boris Karloff, pauses as he hears the sweet notes of a violin. His face lights, he lumbers through the woods, following the sound. He comes to a cozy cottage amid the trees, very gingerbread. Inside, the violin is being played by a blind hermit, who is being played by 0. P. Heggie. The monster approaches, and pounds on the door.
Someone pounded on the door.
“Eee!” Murch’s Mom said, and jumped straight up out of her folding chair. Which folded, and fell over with a slap.
They had all been sitting around the battery-operated small television set they’d brought out to follow the kidnapping news. There’d been no kidnapping news-apparently the cops were keeping a news blackout on-so now they were watching the late movie. The three kerosene lamps, the hibachi in the fireplace, and the flickering television screen, all gave some light and less heat.
Someone pounded at the door again. On the TV screen, the blind hermit opened his door to the monster.
The others had all scrambled to their feet too by now, though without knocking over their chairs. Harshly Kelp whispered, “What do we do?”
“They know we’re here,” Dortmunder said. “Let me do the talking.” He glanced upstairs, and said, “May, if the kid acts up, say something about him having nightmares and go up there and keep him quiet.”
May nodded. The pounding sounded at the door for a third time. Murch’s Mom said, “I’ll go.”
They all waited. Dortmunder’s hand was near the pocket with his revolver. Murch’s Mom opened the door and said, “Well, for God-”
And the kid walked in.
“Holy Toledo!” Murch said.
Kelp, slapping his hands to his face, yelled, “Masks! Masks! Don’t let him see your faces!”
Dortmunder didn’t believe it. He stared at the kid, looking as wet and muddy and ragged as a drowned kitten, and then he looked upstairs. And then he ran upstairs. He didn’t know what he thought, maybe that the kid was twins or something, but he just didn’t believe he wasn’t in that room.
The door was locked, and Dortmunder fumbled with the key for a few seconds before remembering he had a flashlight in his other pocket-the pocket without the revolver in it-but once he had the flashlight out and shining he swiftly unlocked the door, pushed it open, stepped inside, aimed the light beam all around, and the room was empty.
Empty. How could that be? Dortmunder looked under the bed and in the closet, and the kid was gone.
But the door had been locked. The boards were still on the windows. There were no holes in the ceiling or the floor or any of the walls. There were no other exits from the room. “It’s a locked-room mystery,” Dortmunder told himself, and stood in the middle of the room, flashing the light slowly this way and that, completely baffled.
Downstairs, Kelp was the first one to find and don his mask, and then he ran over to grab the kid. “I’m not trying to get away,” the kid said. “I’m just closing the door.”
“Well, just stay put,” Kelp told him.
“I came back, didn’t I? Why should I try to get away?”
May too had put on her mask by now, and she came over to say, “You’re drenched! You’ll catch your death! You’ve got to get out of those wet clothes right now.” To Kelp she said, “Go up and get his blankets,” and to the boy she said, “Now get out of those clothes.”
Hearing the authoritarian maternal voice, both Kelp and the kid promptly obeyed. Meantime, Murch and his Mom were squabbling over the mask they’d both been using. Murch’s Mom hadn’t worn one during the kidnapping, and when she’d gone upstairs with May earlier she’d borrowed her son’s. It hadn’t been anticipated the whole gang would be in the boy’s presence at once. Now they were both holding the mask, and tugging a little. “Stan,” Murch’s Mom said, “you give me that. I have a much more memorable face than you.”
“You do not, Mom, you look like every other cabdriver in New York. I really need that mask, and anyway it’s mine.”
Going upstairs, Kelp found Dortmunder in the kid’s room, walking around in circles, shining his flashlight here and there. Kelp said, “What are you doing?”
“It’s impossible,” Dortmunder said. “How’d he get out?”
“I dunno.” Kelp picked up the blankets and the pajamas from the bed. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“He must of walked through the wall,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp went out, leaving Dortmunder still making circles, and hurried downstairs. May had the boy over by the fireplace now, where there was still some heat from the char. coal in the hibachi. She had him stripped down to his underpants, and she immediately began rubbing him down with one of the blankets, using it a towel. “You’re really wet,” she said. “You’re really wet.”
“And cold,” the boy said. “It’s no-fooling cold out there.” He yawned.
On the other side of the room, Murch’s Mom was triumphantly wearing the Murch family Mickey Mouse mask. Murch, showing his irritation by the set of his shoulders, sat at the card table with his elbows on the table and his hands over his face. Lantern light glinted on his eyes as he peered between his fingers.
Dortmunder came downstairs. He marched across the living room to where May was drying the boy with a blanket, glowered down at him, and said, “All right, kid. How’d you do it?”
May, on one knee in front of the boy, folded him in her arms, glared up at Dortmunder, and said, “Don’t you strike this child.”
“What strike? I wanna know how he got out of the goddam room.”