Speaking in Tongues

he seemed. He might have been faking. If he lied with words, he’d lie with actions.
    So she ran—to find the basement door.
    She heard Matthews’s unearthly scream—it seemed to shake the walls—and then footsteps.
    Making slow circles through the corridors, she finally found the door, the one leading to the basement. She grabbed a cinder block and smashed it down on the hasp and lock, which snapped off easily.
    Megan flung the door open, looked down into the musty place. For a moment she was paralyzed.
    No choice, girl, Crazy Megan the tour guide shouts. Move, move, move.
    But Josh, she protested silently, I can’t leave him.
    Hey, if you die, he dies. Go!
    She clomped down the stairs and found herself in a dimly lit warren of corridors. Trotting slowly from room to room, she took care to avoid the standing water so she wouldn’t leave footprints he could follow.
    Please, a door, a window . . . Oh, please.
    She heard the creak of footsteps from the ceiling above her as Matthews made his way to the door she’d just broken open. She found a door leading outside. It was locked. And the windows too were sealed. Another door. Nailed shut.
    Goddamn him! C.M. blurts. Why’d he padlock the fucking door upstairs if we can’t get out this way?
    Megan didn’t bother to answer. She couldn’t figure it out either. She returned to a room near the base of the stairs and glanced again at one of the windows. The bars on these were wider than the ones on the main floor but she doubted that she could get through.
    Fucking hips.
    Don’t start! Megan muttered silently and started to turn away. Then she paused, looked back. Thinking: Okay, maybe I can’t get through the bars. But I can make him think I did.
    She smashed the glass and pushed an overturned plastic bucket beneath it so that it looked like she’d climbed out.
    Then she ran back into the warren of dark storerooms to find someplace to hide.
    Most of the cardboard boxes piled in the rooms were too small to conceal her. And she didn’t have the strength to pull herself up into the pipes that ran along the ceiling.
    His steps were approaching the door upstairs. Then he started down.
    Megan ran into a cluttered storeroom, the farthest one from the stairs. It was filled with cartons, small ones like the others. But over to the side of the room, in the shadows, was a long metal box. It was almost too obvious a choice to hide in but this room was nowhere near the window where she’d faked her escape. And it was pitch-dark in here. Matthews might not even see the box if he bothered to look.
    Could she get it open? And was it empty?
    But Megan stopped asking questions. Matthews was now in the basement. A shuffle of footsteps, a moaning wheeze from the pain of the wounds, words muttered to himself.
    Now! Crazy Megan prods her. Go, girl!
    Megan unlatched the trunk. It took all her strength to lift the thick lid.
    And it took all her willpower not to scream as she looked inside and saw the blue-white flesh, the limp hair, the closed eyes, a dark, shriveled penis, the long yellow fingernails . . . Cuts and gouges covered the young man’s entire torso, which was further mutilated by the large Y incision from the autopsy. An ear and an arm had been crudely stitched back onto his body.
    It was Matthews’s son, Peter. She recognized the eerie face from the newspaper clipping.
    Oh, God . . . My God . . . Tate, Bett . . . Somebody!
    The footsteps were closer now. They sounded only thirty or forty feet away.
    Go on, Crazy Megan urges. Do it.
    I can’t do it, Megan thought. No way in hell.
    Get inside, C.M. chokes. You have to.
    Either you fight him with your fists, she told herself, or you hide in here. Those’re your choices. A moment’s pause. The doctor was now right outside the doorway, it seemed. Then Megan closed her eyes—as if that would lessen the horror—and climbed into the box, lying down on the corpse, on her back, shivering fiercely. She let the lid down. The air reeked of sweet formaldehyde, pickled flesh—she recalled the scent from biology class, hating to be in school at the time but now praying that she could somehow be transported back to that time and place.
    And beneath her, terrible cold.
    Nothing’s colder than cold flesh.
    Then she heard, faintly, a moan very near. Aaron Matthews was in the room.
    •   •   •
    Crossing a gap in the Shenandoahs, Tate glanced out the window of Bett’s car at the darkened bungalows and