Chapter 28

Two weeks after his last visit to Dave’s house, Len is back. Last time he was glad to see the Mini parked in the driveway, but this time he knows in advance that it won’t be there. Dave is already in Boston, where he checked into the Four Seasons yesterday and will do his theater gig this afternoon. Len knows the details of the hotel reservation because he spent the better part of last week hacking into Dave’s computers—as best he could, anyway. There were many doors he couldn’t pry open in that effort, but he found enough red flags outside of those doors to launch him into full crisis intervention mode. And the one door he’s pretty sure he can open is the one on the front of Dave’s house.

He gets out of his car and walks up the winding concrete path to the front door, grateful for the privacy screen of towering hemlocks shielding the house from the road. For the first time in his friendship with Dave, he glances up at the roofline, searching for surveillance cameras tucked under the eaves. He finds none. Dave is apparently more concerned with cyber security than the physical kind.

Len pauses when he reaches the door. He could still turn back. Or he could call Dave and ask him outright what the hell is going on. But it doesn’t feel like there’s time for that, and he doubts it would get him anywhere. Dave was cagey when they last met face-to-face in this house and nowhere near right in the head. Now he’s out there on tour preparing to play ringleader to thousands of kids… and Len has a bad feeling about it.

That’s really what it comes down to—a hunch. But Len has learned to trust his gut when the facts don’t add up to anything good.

Not Good Fact #1: Dave’s internet search history from the weeks before he upgraded his security includes Amazon shopping searches for diethyl ether, alpha cotton cellulose filter paper, and Polar Pure iodine water purification solution. Searching for these items together turns up some pretty shady websites with instructions on how to make nitrogen triiodide, a volatile explosive and favorite of high school chemistry lab anarchists, thanks to the simplicity of the recipe. So simple a child could make it. Which keeps bringing Len back to Not Good Fact #2: a news story about a boy who was hospitalized in Connecticut last month after mixing a volatile combination of household chemicals.

But nitrogen triiodide appears to have been an ill-conceived component of Dave’s plans, whatever they are, tossed aside early on. His searches got more sophisticated in mid-July before disappearing without a trace. But even in those early stages, Len suspects Dave did some of his research on the dark web, collecting recipes where his activity couldn’t be tracked before browsing the innocuous ingredients on e-commerce sites, using his regular browser for shipping and billing.

Only he never ended up buying anything dangerous on those retail sites. Not unless you count a bag full of ball bearings shipped to Massachusetts. Len has watched enough Homeland and read enough news to know what a bulk order of ball bearings is likely for when the purchaser isn’t a mechanical engineer: shrapnel.

Not Good Fact #3: when Len hit a brick wall with the web searches, he started looking into that triple triangle logo he saw on what looked like prototype VR glasses Dave forgot to hide before letting him into the house. Maybe it’s a coincidence—there are only so many logo variations in the world and sometimes graphic designers are counterculture types fond of embedding their own in-joke references—but the logo is also a symbol for a god of chaos adopted by a variety of mass killers and terrorists of disparate ideologies since at least 2008. As far as Len can tell, the headset may have been manufactured by a defense contractor doing business under the name ZAX, which also happens to be the name of the “aethyr” or spiritual domain in which the god, Choronzon, is believed to reside.

And then there’s Not Good Fact #4: Dave’s house smells like a rotting body.

Len takes a tube of peppermint lip balm from his pocket and dabs it on his moustache, filling his head with menthol. Reviewing these facts on the doorstep has renewed his commitment to breaking in.

Knowing that his hacking skills far exceed his burglary skills, Len hasn’t bothered to pack any tools. He suspects that Dave has spent more coin and effort securing his hard drives than his home and is betting on the doorframe being no match for his sheer mass. He takes a breath, rocks on his heels, and throws his shoulder into the door. It responds with a satisfying crack!

One more blitz and he’s in, flailing to regain his balance before tumbling head-first into the spiral staircase leading off the foyer to the second floor. He catches the railing and steadies himself, then turns and looks for an alarm keypad beside the door he just crashed through. There isn’t one, and he doesn’t hear an alarm, but he didn’t look for one the last time he was here and couldn’t be sure until now. He tries to close the door behind him, which requires breaking off a piece of the splintered frame and jiggering with the deadbolt. He’s able to get it sort of closed, but it keeps swinging open, so he takes a couch cushion from the living room and leans it against the door to keep it in place.

The house isn’t much cleaner than the last time he saw it, but it doesn’t smell nearly as bad. The faint traces of an exotic, resinous scent hangs in the air, probably the ghost of some incense Dave burned to mask the rotten fruit odor, which is diminished but not entirely gone. He also detects a trace of something acrid and chemical, like ammonia, which brings to mind Dave’s chemistry experiments.

Len hikes his drooping shorts up and goes to the living room, where he searches the entertainment center for the VR headset, but it’s not on the dusty top of the shelf unit where he last saw it. He checks the cabinets and pokes around among the game discs and Blu-ray cases but doesn’t find it. Dave probably took it with him on his road trip.

He roams the first floor aimlessly, eyes alert to anything unusual, while deciding whether he wants to venture upstairs to Dave’s office or down to the basement first. His nose makes up his mind for him when he notices the scent is strongest in the kitchen near the basement door. This impression is confirmed when he opens the door a crack and gets slammed with a wave of acidic fumes and the reek of decay. He chokes down his rising gorge and takes a retreating step back from the door, eyes watering.

There’s a sliding glass door in the kitchen that opens onto the backyard where a stockade fence provides privacy from the nearest neighbors. Len unlocks it, slides it open a few inches, and inhales a lungful of fresh air. He holds the breath while returning to the top of the stairs, reaching into the dark and feeling for the light switch.

Relieved when fluorescent tubes flicker to life at the bottom of the stairs, he returns to the slider and pulls it fully open. The air outside is hot compared to the shady interior of the house, and there isn’t much of a breeze on this humid August day, but Len still finds the air from outside refreshing compared to the stagnant miasma hanging in the kitchen and the fumes wafting up from the cellar.

Holding his breath once more, he finds a whiskbroom tucked beside a beam in an unfinished wall of the basement stairwell. He stands between the basement door and the kitchen slider and swings the broom back and forth like a golf club, using it to fan the fumes up the stairs and outdoors. The rhythm of the mindless work makes him sweat and lulls him into rumination on his list of Not Good Facts again, but the trance is broken when Dave’s orange tabby cat—the famous Lemon—shoots out from under a kitchen cabinet and leaps out the back door with the perfect speed and timing to escape between broom strokes.

Len lets out a startled yelp and clutches his chest as the broom clatters to the tile floor. By the time he collects his wits and pokes his head out into the yard, the cat has already found a hiding place or bounded over the fence—and honestly, it’s the least of his worries. The damned thing’s probably better off.

Len waits for his heart to settle down and soon realizes he’s procrastinating. Best to get it over with. He knows what he’s going to find in the basement and there’s no need to draw it out. He takes another deep breath, closes the slider, and descends the stairs.

The bright fluorescent light only enhances the horror that awaits. At the far end of a mostly empty concrete room, lined with neatly stacked cardboard boxes, there’s a large plastic sink basin perched on metal legs between Dave’s washer/dryer units and the boiler. He passes a workbench on his way to the sink and dimly registers an assortment of tools and spray paint cans scattered around molds for lizard figurines.

There are rust colored stains on the concrete floor—smears and star-shaped drops. A pair of heavy-duty yellow rubber gloves lay draped over the sink faucet and tucked between the legs supporting the sink basin are three plastic gallon jugs. The one Len can read as he approaches is labeled: SODIUM HYDROXIDE LYE 100%

Still holding that last breath of fresh air, he picks up his pace, reaches the sink, and braces himself to look over the edge. The walls of the basin are streaked with coffee-colored sludge, which also puddles around a nest of dark hair clogging the holes of the drain. There are gelatinous chunks of a substance he can’t identify, and the brittle husks of what can only be bones.

A wave of nausea sends him staggering away, expelling the last dregs of his spent breath and gasping to take in a gulp of any air but that wafting off the stew of human remains. He presses a steadying hand against a metal shelf unit and pukes between his sneakers. At least half his breakfast ends up splattering the shipping box for a Dell computer. Looking at it, Len decides he’s seen enough to confirm his worst fears. The rest of his explorations lie upstairs on the machine that came in this box.