Authors: Nicholas Wolff
He stared at the last line, his eyes questioning and his forehead deeply set with worry wrinkles. Then he started again.
No, I cannot believe this. I cannot believe that what I feel has anything to do with evil. At the very least, I love Becca. But what about when she is being unduly influenced—in whatever way—by something that is evil? What then?
Two weeks ago, I would have given six or eight perfectly good reasons why human intelligence can’t inhabit a different person. Cannot possibly influence the minds of others to the point of having them commit murder. We have many examples of people who thought this was true: cases of supposed demonic possession, schizophrenia, paranoia. Even the
National Enquirer
has stories about aliens stealing people’s brains.
But what if, lost in all those ridiculous stories, there were those rare—or not so rare—cases of true possession? And we’ve been missing them all along, from Monsieur Cotard to the Vatican to the rest of us? The interview with the
nzombe
professor said great sorcerers are born, not made, and born infrequently. Could it be that the true cases of
nzombes
have been hiding among the insane, camouflaged by a science that thought it knew everything but was missing a pattern in the most extreme cases?
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but it seems possible. How else can I explain what I’ve seen? When the discipline’s answers are no longer adequate, you have to search elsewhere. And that’s where I am, far past the frontiers of everything I’ve learned and dreading what comes next. There is the sensation of falling . . .
Maybe I’m losing my mind. That would be another possibility, and would in fact explain quite a lot. But John has seen what I’ve seen and he can’t explain it either. How can a cop and a psychiatrist both lose touch with reality at the same time, on the same case? It’s not logical.
Perhaps if I’d been in love before, I could compare the two states and detect any oddities. Do a comparative study. (But perhaps this thing knows this, and it is my “opening,” my blind spot, that I’ve never felt so strongly about someone else and so will mistake his probings for something they aren’t.) But I haven’t.
It doesn’t matter if the monster has Becca, watches over her, intends to do evil through her. I know what her eyes said. She is still in there somewhere, even if the thing controls most of her mind. I can’t leave her as a hostage.
So, this is the present status: I have no idea what is happening. And I don’t know what the traveler can do. I don’t know if the sorcerer’s spirit is really here in Northam. I am seeing only the appearances of things.
And yet I have to go forward. I have to save Becca.
Nat stared at what he’d written. The wobbly cart was coming back again, from the other direction this time, the noise of the wheel slowly building to a crescendo in the hallway. But he didn’t hear it this time; his eyes were alight with the white glow of the screen.
He was thinking of his mother and father. An image of them at the beach, an old snapshot, had popped into his head out of nowhere. Their vacations to Cape Cod were the best memories he had of them as a family, the trips to Dennis Port in their old Volvo, his father checking the oil and filling up on the neon-green coolant before they left. And the cheap, out-of-the-way motels his mother favored, like the Cutlass or the Oyster, outdated places built during the ’60s and packed with college kids or working-class families looking for an inexpensive place next to the beach. His father would rather have rented a house in one of the established towns or stayed at a four-star hotel. “Why does she like these shitholes?” he would mutter to Nat as his mother headed into the tiny office of one of the motels to announce their arrival.
It was as if his mother didn’t want to meet anyone from Northam during their little summer getaways. She’d always had this aversion to social life. His parents’ friends were his father’s friends: Mr. Deutch and Uncle Pat (not a real uncle, just his father’s frat brother) and the Seager twins. She never seemed to invite anyone to their home and was distant even with her own relatives. “Your mother,” his father had once told him, “is the only self-made orphan in the world.”
He thought of the accident that had killed his parents. The police explanation had always seemed odd to him. The driver behind their car that winter night twenty-two years ago had told the police that his father’s Volvo had been driving normally for
the few miles that he’d been behind it. Roads dry. No deer or darting animals spotted. But twenty minutes from Northam, he said, the car had suddenly veered to the right, clipped through the wire guardrail, and sailed off into the small valley where it had cratered, roof first, killing both his parents. No brake lights visible before the crash. No dead bucks or does to explain the swerve.
The cops came up with a working theory, based on interviews with family and friends. They thought that his mother, waking up after a long nap after visiting her mother’s parents in Virginia, had reached for something to pull herself up straight in the seat. It happens, they’d told Nat. Passengers unthinkingly reach out and grab the steering wheel, and half asleep, not realizing what they’re doing, they yank the thing toward them.
And off the road you go, straight into oblivion.
Nat stared at the glowing computer screen. He took a breath and copied the whole page, the text glowing under the blue. Then he clicked
Delete
.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
J
ohn Bailey woke up on Monday morning, rubbing his eyes. The TV was still on and some infomercial was blaring. He sat up heavily, and his belly jiggled left and then right before finally settling in the middle and going still. God, he had to lose some weight.
He checked his cell phone: 7:45 a.m. Plenty of time to get himself ready for work. Mrs. Finlay would be here in forty-five minutes.
John grunted, got up off the bed, and went to his chest of drawers, low and dark beneath the plasma TV. He rooted around, grabbed some boxer briefs and a clean white T-shirt. As he walked toward the bathroom, he hooked a pair of jeans from a wooden chair near the doorway and added them to the ensemble. Finally, he took a fresh towel from the closet and headed to the shower.
Inside the bathroom, he peeled off his Pats shorts and stepped in, letting the hot water dig into the back of his neck for a good five minutes. He slopped some blue liquid soap onto a hand cloth and spread it around. He felt buzzed—anxious—and sleepy at the same time.
John killed the water, got out of the shower, toweled off, and quickly put on the clothes he’d brought with him. He just needed socks, shoes, and a dress shirt, and he’d be ready to go.
He was trying not to think ahead too far. It had become a habit lately.
Take every minute as it comes, just try to survive the day.
What was that awful song his mother used to hum as she made
him breakfast, something about taking one day at a time, Sweet Jesus? God, he’d wanted to strangle her every time she sang it, but he was beginning to see the wisdom in its lyrics.
Dressed in jeans and socks, John walked into the bedroom, dabbing the last droplets of shower water on his chest, and stopped instantly. Something was wrong. Something had changed since he’d been in here ten minutes ago. He turned at the waist, his right hand still holding the towel slung over his right shoulder. He checked every detail in the room. The TV was off, the window to the backyard still showing gray sky, the bedside lamp still . . .
His eyes settled on the gun safe underneath the night table on the right side of the bed.
The door was ajar.
“Charlie!” he called, jerking the towel to the floor and breaking into a run as he dashed into the hallway.
He made it to Charlie’s door in six long strides. The room was empty, the toys neatly aligned against the far wall, with Charlie’s Avengers slippers next to them.
He called the boy’s name again as he fast-stepped down the hallway and then through the kitchen, heading for the basement stairs.
Just let me get my gun back and that’s all I’ll ask. Nothing ever—
He flicked on the light and jumped three stairs to the landing, ducking to scan the basement. The weights on his old bench gleamed innocently. But no Charlie. Nothing.
John swiveled, charged back up the stairs, and headed for the back door. He burst through it and ran into the yard.
“CHARLIE!” he bellowed. A few startled birds cried out and flew upward into a cloud-dimmed sky. Breathing heavily, a void spreading in his chest, John looked right and left and ran toward the back fence, calling the boy’s name. The air was frigid and he was shaking and the ground was covered in snow and he didn’t see any tracks heading toward Bishop Carroll.
Charlie had to be here somewhere. Had to be.
He screamed the name again, feeling that he was tumbling, tumbling, a black pit opening up in his chest.
The sound of bird wings. A clump of snow fell from a branch. His hearing was closing down. John could only hear his own frantic breathing, rasping above the beating of his heart.
Charlie. No. No, Charlie.
He saw something to his right. Behind a thick oak near the rickety wooden fence. A pair of knees, boy’s knees in their brown corduroy pants. John’s eyes went wide, but something inside him told him to go slow. He ducked forward and put his hands in front of him, then stepped toward the tree, angling around as he approached.
Charlie was kneeling in the snow, staring off at the playing fields behind the house. As if he were watching for something. His eyes were glassy and fearful.
“Charlie!” John said, relief flooding his body like strong drugs.
Charlie didn’t hear him. He was bringing something up, in his hand, something big and black.
John screamed and the cry hung in the crisp cold air.
Charlie stopped, the barrel of the gun resting on his bottom lip. The lip bent out under the weight of the barrel. John could see the pink flesh and then the whites of Charlie’s bottom teeth.
John felt all sensation leave him. His body seemed to consist of a force field of terror.
He held his hands out toward the boy, palms out.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “Give Daddy the gun, huh? Charl—”
He took one step toward the boy. Charlie stared at him. His eyes were empty and dark. The bared lower teeth made him look insane.
“Charlie?”
Another step.
Charlie took the gun into his mouth. Like you did the ther
mometer when you were sick.
“Charlie,
please
. Just give me the gun.”
Howhowhow did he get the combination to the safe?
Two more steps. John’s boots crunching in the snow, so loud he was afraid it would startle Charlie. The boy was only three feet away now, his feet still hidden by the thick trunk of the tree.
There was only one word in John’s mind now. One word holding back a world of horror that pressed on the word from the other side.
Please
, he thought. And then,
God, not this
.
John took one long step to where Charlie was kneeling and put his hand over the gun, his middle finger slipping behind the trigger. Then he eased it away out of Charlie’s hands. The boy, his head bobbling as if he were entering the first stages of hypothermia, stared up, his eyes uncomprehending.
John placed the gun on the ground behind him, then took Charlie by the shoulders and pulled him in.
“Oh God, oh God, oh Lord God,” he said.
Charlie was busy scanning the trees.
The morning shift at city hall, in the basement office, where it had all begun less than two weeks ago. Nat Thayer stared grimly at the green wall opposite his desk.
Tomorrow he would book the Buenos Aires trip. He’d had enough of Northam.
Do not visit us in winter
, he thought. It had never been truer than now.
Maybe the killer will show up tonight
, Nat thought, eying the clock.
Let me not say that. Look what happened last time I asked for company and Walter Prescott rang the bell.
He thought of Becca Prescott, closed up in her room like a specimen in a box at a museum. Her life slowly passing, breathing out her youth in that
fucking monstrosity of a house.
The thing that had been bothering him, taunting him, popped into the back of his mind again. A stark image, black-and-white—he’d seen it a hundred times but he couldn’t place it. Was it from his school yearbook? Was it something from the Internet, an image burned into his frontal lobe?
Take a walk
, he said to himself.
Get the blood flowing.
Nat walked out into the hallway and moved left. The passage was cold and dark, the emergency lighting on. The town officials and office workers hadn’t yet arrived for the workday. He climbed the stairs to the main floor of the city hall and began pacing the wood floors, up and down. Exit lights glimmered in the distance and the whirr of a water fountain motor catching and then shutting off.
A photo.
Creak.
An old one.
Nat stopped. He walked over to the wall. On it was framed a photo of a fat man in a beaver-skin top hat and a gold pince-nez, squinting. Nat glanced at the caption.
“ ‘Rutherford Wills,’ ” he said aloud, his voice echoing gently along the corridor. “ ‘Notary and Mayor, 1908 to 1912.’ ”
The water cooler hummed to life again, and Nat, who felt like he was on the verge of sleepwalking, moved toward the sound. He found the silvery surface of the fountain glinting next to the men’s room and instantly bent down and pushed the button, taking a sip of cool water.