Dark Rivers of the Heart

black door. Whatever he found beyond it would decide whether he had a future with or without Ellie.
        He might have neither.
        "I didn't try to run back to the house," he said, returning in his mind to that distant night. "He would have caught me before I'd gotten there, before I could use a telephone. Instead, I went up to the vestibule, out of the cupboard, through the file room, and turned right toward the front of the building, into the gallery. By the time I was on the stairs to his studio, I could hear him coming through the darkness behind me. I knew he kept a gun in the lower left-hand drawer of his desk. I'd seen it once when he'd sent me there to get something.
        Entering the studio, I hit the light switch, ran past his easels, supply cabinets, to the far corner. The desk was L-shaped. I vaulted over it, crashed into the chair, clawed at the drawer, got it open. The gun was there. I didn't know how to use it, whether it had a safety. My right hand was throbbing. I could hardly hold the damn thing, even in both hands. He was off the stairs, into the studio, coming for me so I pointed and pulled the trigger. It was a revolver.
        No safety.
        The recoil about knocked me on my ass."
        "And you shot him."
        "Not yet. I must've pulled up hard on it when I squeezed the trigger, pulled off target, so the bullet took a chunk out of the ceiling. But I held on to the gun, and he stopped coming. At least he didn't come as fast, not pell-mell any more. But he was so calm, Ellie, so calm. As if nothing had happened, just my dad, good old dad, a little perturbed with me, you know, but telling me everything was going to be all right, romancing me with that sweet talk like in the black room. So sincere.
        So hypnotic. And so sure that he could make it work if I only gave him time."
        Ellie said, "But he didn't know that you'd seen him beat your mother and carry her back to the barn six years before. He might have thought you would put together her death and his secret rooms when you came down from your panic-but until then he thought he had time to bring you around."
        Spencer stared at the black door.
        "Yeah, maybe that's what he thought. I don't know. He told me that to be like him was to know what life was all about, the true fullness of life without limits or rules. He said I'd enjoy what he could show me how to do. He said I'd already started to enjoy it back in that black room, that I'd been afraid of enjoying it, but that I'd learn it was all right to have that kind of fun."
        "But you didn't enjoy it. You were repulsed."
        "He said that I did, that he could see I did. His genes ran through me like a river, he said again, through my heart just like a river. Our shared river of destiny, the dark river of our hearts.
        When he got to the desk, so close I couldn't miss again, I shot him.
        He flew backward from the impact.
        The spray of blood was horrible. It seemed for sure that I'd killed him, but then I hadn't seen much blood until that night, and a little looked like a lot. He hit the floor, rolled facedown, and lay there, very still. I ran out of the studio, back down here…
        The black door waited.
        She didn't speak for a while. He couldn't.
        Then Ellie said, "And in that room with the woman… those are the minutes you can't remember."
        The door. He should have had the old cellars collapsed with explosives.
        Filled in with dirt. Sealed forever. He shouldn't have left that black door to be opened again.
        "Coming back here," he said with difficulty, "I had to carry the revolver in my left hand because of how he'd clenched my right so hard in his, grinding my knuckles together. It was throbbing, full of pain.
        But the thing is… it wasn't just pain I felt in it."
        It looked at that hand now. He could see it smaller, younger, the hand of a fourteen-year-old boy.
        "I could still feel… the smoothness of the woman's skin, from when he'd forced my hand over her body. Feel the roundness of her breasts.
        The resiliency and fullness of them. The flatness of her belly.
        The crispness of pubic hair… the heat of her. All those feelings were in my hand, still in my hand, as real as the pain."
        "You were only a boy," she said without any evidence of disgust.
        "It was the first time you'd ever seen a woman