Stairway to Forever Page 2

  Flodden sighed deeply. "That's just it, Fitz, this body here is not your son's body. Somebody has fouled up, somewhere along the line."

  "Well. . . well, of course it's my Fitz!" Fitz Senior had expostulated. "It's got to be! That Gunny, Heilbrunn, has the files and all."

  "Yes, yes, Fitz," Flodden quickly interjected. "I've seen the paperwork, it's accurate, complete, but it's just that they sent the wrong body with those papers, Fitz."

  Fitz had screwed his eyes tightly shut, shaking from head to foot, cold sweat oozing from his pores. If Flodden was right . . . ? If this damned, bloody, torturous business was to drag on still longer, could Janet take it without cracking completely and/or crawling so far into the bottle that she could never get out of it alive? Kath, too, was beginning to crumble a bit around the edges. And he, himself. . .?

  "But, Alex, you never saw that much of Fitz as he was growing up, so do you think you remember his face well enough to . . . ?"

  Once more, the mortician interrupted in his calm, sad voice. "Ah, Fitz, ah . . . this body has very little, ah, face left to it. I, for one, would hate to have the task before me of having to restore it for an open casket ..."

  "Then, damn it," Fitz had shouted into the telephone mouthpiece, his eyes still tight-closed, but now with tears compounded of grief and frustration and fear for his wife and daughter oozing from beneath the lids to trickle down his cheeks, "just how in hell can you assume it's not my boy?"

  Sensing the undertones of incipient hysteria, Flodden's voice became instantly, professionally soothing. "Fitz, my friend, it disturbs me deeply to have to add to your grief this way, please believe me. But this body is clearly not that of your brave, departed son, and there is no question about it. Fitz, this body is that of a negro—a very dark-skinned negro."

  More than three months after the initial notification of his demise, the remains of Lance Corporal Fitzgilbert, Alfred O'B. Ill, USMC, really came home. But by that time, his father's worst fears for his mother's emotional balance had been realized in full.

  Fitz had just lived with Janet and the endless problem she was become. Kath did too . . . for a while; but when the girl had had enough, she left home and, try as he might and felt he should, Fitz could in no way fault her decision, for Janet, when she was not comatose, was becoming more and more disgusting and unbearable with each passing day.

  The Janet he had married after World War Two had kept an immaculate house, had been an accomplished and innovative cook and had been possessed of high standards of personal cleanliness and appearance. This new Janet, however, went long periods without bothering to either bathe or change her clothing, and the house about which she staggered in her filthy, slept-in clothes was become as unkempt and slovenly as was she, herself, acrawl with flies and roaches. Now, those few meals that Fitz took at his

  home were of his own preparation—mostly TV dinners, cold sandwiches or canned beans or soups.

  Cursing himself for a coward, the time, he actually sought the out-of-town travels that once had been something he had accepted only when there had been no one else of his qualifications to send. But he always made arrangements before such trips for one of the sympathetic neighbors to place food outside for Tom—that and keep the back door water dish filled.

  At last, when matters had progressed far beyond the beyonds, he closed Janet's checking account and signed the necessary papers to deny her any access to his own. He took every one of her credit cards from her wallet, then paid off and closed every account. When next he came into the one-time home, she railed long and obscenely at him, spat out profane crudities that he had never in all their twenty-odd years of marriage suspected she knew.

  Then, a piece at a time, the sterling silver began to disappear. When he had cleared out or locked up everything of intrinsic value in the house, Janet began to steal.

  It was only after he had had to leave in the midst of a very important conference to fetch Janet—a sober, very shaky and sobbingly sorry Janet—from the city police lockup, wherein she had been immured for some hours after being apprehended and booked, caught in the act of shoplifting table wine from a supermarket, that he and Father Dan Padway had been able to convince her to enter a "rest home." He had had to dip deeply into their savings to finance the steep costs of her care and treatment, but he had felt the money well-spent when she had at length emerged so very much the old, much-loved Janet.

  The matted grass, weeds and woody roots of the

  hushes had made the digging slow with nothing but

  the dull, rusty spade, but nonetheless, Fitz felt that

  1 the grave was almost wide and deep enough when he

  ■ struck a much harder obstruction—stone, from the

  ; way the spade rang upon it. Sighing, he tried gently

  | pushing the edge of the tool down in first one place,

  then another, endeavoring to get under the rock and

  lever it up, out of his way.

  Janet had stayed dry for almost a year, faithfully ' attending her AA meetings, being counselled by Father Dan, as well as by a psychiatrist recommended by the priest and by the staff of the rest home that had done the job of drying her out. They had given her back her lost dignity, too: the house was once more become a well-tended home for her and Fitz and Tom. Fitz had begun to breathe almost easily once more and was considering the best ways of finding his absent daughter.

  But then, of a day, Kath appeared on the doorstep. Painfully thin she was, with sallow skin and permanently dark circles under her unnaturally bright eyes. Her once-golden hair now hung dull and matted and lifeless over the shoulders of her too-big man's shirt. The shirt and her torn jeans were crusted with layers of filth and her cheap, ankle-high boots lacked more than a trace of what had been heels and soles. There were open sores on her face and neck, her hands were broken-nailed and grubby and a nauseating stench hung about her. The girl was— although it would be a while before they were confronted with all the unpalatable facts—suffering from the combined effects of malnutrition, drug addiction, two venereal diseases and enteritis. She also was by then three months pregnant and had not even the

  foggiest notion as to who might have fathered her bastard.

  At some time during those first weeks of discovery atop painful discovery—none of them helped by the fact that Kath had allowed her health insurance to lapse and so every one of the multitudinous medical expenses had had to come out of Fitz's shrinking financial cushion—concerning the returned wreck of their only surviving child, Janet had crawled back into the bottle for good and all. And Kath, when once she had ingested everything in the house that even looked as if it might have been a drug, joined her mother in the bottle.

  Fitz had then tried to lose himself in his job, coming to the house that had once been his home as little as possible, and then only to collect the mail and feed Tom. Otherwise, he lived out of his car, staying out of town as much as he could and, when unavoidably in town, sleeping on the couch in his office and washing in the small sink of his half-bath there.

  Each and every necessary visit to the house left him sadder and more haggard. None of the neighbors any longer even spoke to him as he made his way through the knee-high grass from the driveway to the front door. Unless one or both lay comatose, Janet and Kath would be screaming filth at each other, usually ignoring him except to demand money.

  Upon entering, he had to gulp and breathe as shallowly as possible. The house stank, the air thick with a miasma of dirt, stale booze, rotting food, long-unwashed female flesh, excrement, urine and vomitus. The mail was always strewn the length and width of the tiles foyer, lying just as it had fallen through the door slot and been then scattered by

  heedless, stumbling feet. When he had stuffed it all into his briefcase, he went directly to the kitchen, now become roach paradise, where bowls and plates of unidentifiable food substances sat on the floor and on every other surface, covered with mold or alive with white, writhing maggots.

 
In the beginning, he had at least tried. He had scraped and bagged and canned the garbage and trash, washed the dishes enough to run them through the dishwasher, mopped the floor and scrubbed the counter tops. But in the end he gave up, just as he had given up on Janet and Kath and trying to live any sort of life in close proximity to the two of them.

  From his briefcase, he would take two large cans of cat food and a one-pound box of cat kibble. He had given over leaving canned cat food at the house after he had come back to find the opened cans here and there throughout the place, the spoons still in them, like as not, clearly eaten by one of the two women after the food money had all been spent for drugs or alcohol.

  Then he would go through the screened porch and down the back steps to heap the contents of both cans into Tom's licked-clean plate. He would rinse out and refill the feline's water dish, then empty the box of kibble into the weatherproof gravity feeder. After sitting for a while beneath the trees and giving the loving cat the human affection that he craved, Fitz would steel himself for another pass through the fetid house, retrieve his briefcase, get back in his car and go back to work, hating himself for having given up on his wife and daughter, but fearing for his own emotional equilibrium should he try to do other.

  "Maybe," Fitz mused as he dug, widening the hole in the mound top, vainly trying to find an edge

  to the flat-topped stone, which looked to have the smooth regularity of worked stone, "maybe Janet's death was not really accidental. Maybe, deep down inside her, she really wanted to die. But maybe not, too. At least the Janet I knew and loved and lived with for all those years, the good years, would have never—no matter how personally suicidal she'd become—have taken her own daughter and unborn grandchild with her into death."

  At last, the entire slab of stone was cleared of its covering of earth and roots and smaller pebbles and Fitz softly whistled to himself at the size of the thing. No wonder his prying spade had accomplished nothing on the first couple of stretches of edge he had found. The flat, rectangular stone was a good five feet long, nearly three feet in width and just how thick was anybody's guess. Yes, it was most definitely made work, not natural, though the master craftsman who had cut and shaped it had done it with such expertise that the fading afternoon light showed not even a single faint tool-mark on it—on it or on the stone-block framing around it.

  He felt, after so much expended effort, that he had to give one more try to moving the stone before he dug a grave for Tom in another location. He jammed the jagged point of the spade straight down into the interstice between one of the shorter edges and the framing and gingerly levered, not wishing to snap either the oxidized metal or the loose handle.

  Slowly . . . ever so slowly, and with a grating of stone upon stone that set his teeth edge to edge, bristled his nape hairs and raised gooseflesh on his arms and legs, the closest edge of the slab rose an inch or two, while the farther end sank an equal distance. When he had raised it still more and so

  wedged the spade that, hopefully, the weighty slab of stone could not slam back down on his hands, he worked his fingers down beneath the stone and crouched to put his back and his leg muscles behind the imminent effort.

  But, when open it did, the massive slab came up so easily and so suddenly that Fitz almost lost his balance and pitched, face-foremost, down the flight of steep stone stairs that led down into earthy-smelling blackness.

  "Now, what in God's name . . .?"

  Although apparently never mortared, the stonework that he could easily see was all so smoothly and finely finished and set that he doubted he could have inserted the blade of a penknife between any of them. Seventeenth century or not, surely this construction was not, could not be the work of American Indians.

  Colonial, maybe? A root cellar? Or could it be some long-lost and always secret fabrication of that enigmatic, missing Englishman, Mister Dineen? Was this why he had so promptly chased those anthropological or archaeological types off his land? Well, only one way to find out what lay down there in the darkness, and that was to go look.

  Upon his return from the house, Fitz had fortified himself with some two ounces of John Jameson and he came equipped with flashlight, the old, well-worn revolver from his tackle box—thinking that such a subterranean haunt would be perfect for snakes—a length of rope, a hatchet and a piece of lumber he had quickly and roughly pointed with the dull, rusted tool. When he had driven the stake into the ground with the back of the spade, he tied one end of the rope to it, looped the rope around the now-upright

  slab of stone tightly, then tied it off. It would not do to have the thing suddenly close, trapping him underground, possibly.

  After clipping the angle-head flashlight to his belt, Fitz cautiously commenced his descent, bracing himself with a hand on each of the cold, slimy stone walls. He quickly became glad that he had thought to don his sure-grip, canvas-and-rubber tennis shoes, for the steps not only were damp and slippery as the walls, but the treads of them were far too shallow for even his size-nine feet, appearing to have been wrought for feet no larger than those of children . . . and small children, at that.

  When the bright beam of light shining from his midriff showed a flat, wetly glistening wall just ahead, he at first thought that he had come to the bottom of the underground structure, but when he reached that point, he realized that he stood on a tiny landing, with the stairs continuing downward to his right.

  Fitz now doubted even Colonial construction, for no hard-working Colonial farmer would have exerted the stupendous amount of labor that had gone into making so deep an excavation—all by hand, too, in those days—plus the quarrying of the stones, transporting them here from wherever, and building this . . . whatever it was or had been.

  After yet another landing and right-angle turn that sent him in the opposite direction from that at which he had set out, above, Fitz at last reached bottom. Bottom, he quickly discovered, was but a bare, stonewalled, -floored, and -ceilinged chamber. It was rectangular, some six feet high throughout and eight or nine feet long, by perhaps four feet or less in width, with the stairs debouching at the end of one of the longer sides.

  The chamber was fashioned of the same fine, smooth, unmortared stonework as the rest of the edifice and it lay completely empty of anything. Recalling how the entry slab, aboveground, had pivoted, Fitz inched along the walls of the chamber, exerting pressure here and there along the edges of the stones, to no slightest avail. Finally, he gave it up. After all, it was getting on toward dark, above-ground, and he still had to bury poor old Tom.

  He had ascended but three of the steps, however, when some impulse impelled him to half turn and once more sweep the light over the length of the patently empty stone chamber. At least, that had been what he meant to do. But balanced with one too-large foot on each of two of the shallow, steep and slimy steps, he lost his precarious balance as he turned about and, his arms flailing, pitched face-first toward the hard, granite stones before him!

  His body tensed against the pain that was sure to be imminently inflicted upon his flesh and bone, his eyes tight-shut to hopefully protect them, Fitz instead felt his body land jarringly enough, but on a flat, warm and relatively soft surface. Gasping, he opened his eyes to see, bare millimeters from his face, what looked like nothing so much as sand—sand that his nostrils told him strongly emitted the clean, salt tang of the sea.

  "Oh, Christ!" He relaxed his arms and sank back down to lie supine, certain now that he was hallucinating as a result of a head injury and that his broken body actually still lay crumpled against the wall of that empty stone room at the foot of those treacherous stairs. He wondered if anyone would find him before he died of exposure or thirst or shock.

  "Damn, my legs are cold," he groaned to himself.

  "Oh, my God, don't tell me Tve broken my back? If I have, I hope I do die before anybody finds me!"

  He would much prefer to die here, like this, alone, unseen and unheard, unshriven, even, than to be seriously injured, as litt
le Kath had been in the terrible automobile accident that had claimed her mother's life. For all that the medical people had at last admitted to him that the girl's brain was irrevocably dead, still had they kept her mindless, wasted body there for long months, kept alive—if such could be dignified by that term—only by bottles and tubes and machines. And all the while, the horrendous costs of these doctors and bottles and tubes and machines had been taking away from Fitz every cent and possession he had acquired in thirty years. He thought as he lay there that a relatively quick, so-far painless death would be far preferable than to be subjected to such a perverse atrocity of medical science.

  When the greedy doctors and the even greedier hospital had taken and absorbed the last of Fitz's medical insurance and Janet's life insurance, the house, the furniture and every valuable personal possession, the savings account in toto, the cash value of Fitz's own life insurance policies and the last sums he could borrow from the company credit union, he had gone to visit Kath, late one night and very drunk. After sitting for he never knew just how long, listening and watching while the liquids dripped from the bottles into the tubes and the hellish machines rhythmically did their unnatural tasks of giving a semblance of life to a corpse, he had arisen, wedged the door shut and given his daughter the last gift he could give her—a quick and decent death, letting her long-tortured body join her brain.

  Because his personal car had been almost new and an appropriately expensive model, sale of it had brought him just about enough money to pay the lawyer whose expertise had gotten him free of all the many charges that had been filed against him. He had been adjudged not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. But that same judgment had also cost him his job, his twenty-four years of long and faithful work for the firm notwithstanding. Not fired, of course; just retired on medical disability, complete with testimonial dinner, gold watch and pension.

  However, with the credit union deducting a hefty chunk of the pension each month, it had been necessary for Fitz to find another job, not an easy task for a fifty-three-y ear-old sales executive, he quickly discovered, especially for one just publicly tried for the highly publicized murder of his own daughter.