The Captive Condition (28 page)

At tomorrow's sunrise service the pastor would assure his congregation that all who sought God's forgiveness would go to heaven, but I had no use for heaven. I needed badly to believe in a place of everlasting punishment and torment. Some people meditated on Paradise; I meditated on the Inferno. Speeding along the icy boulevard, I found it hard to suppress my laughter and pressed my foot against the gas. I could have run them down like a couple of stray dogs, saving them the trouble of making the futile and dangerous journey to Delacroix Cay, but in recent days I had developed certain sane affections for them both, an inexplicable expansion of spirit.

In my apartment late at night, with my ear pressed against the register, I'd overheard their ill-conceived plan to steal the money from Xavier's safe, and now the wine crate in Morgan's arms looked like a madhouse bassinet. As if to assure themselves that the big bundles of glorious greenbacks hadn't melted away like snow, they stopped on the street corner and cracked open the lid. When they peered inside they could practically smell the salty sea air and taste those first daiquiris and margaritas. In rapt contentment they saw it all: in the mornings they would walk along a pale band of beach, dipping their toes in therapeutic water as bright and blue as Chagall's stained glass; in the afternoons they would snorkel along the barrier reef that teemed with sea turtles and parrot fish; and in the early evenings, as they gazed at the lavender mountains, they would nap in hammocks gently rocked by the warm trade winds.

At the last possible moment, moved by an unfamiliar sense of compassion, I swerved out of the way and continued driving into the night. A few guests leaving the party stopped to watch Morgan and Lorelei pass through the monochromatic backdrop of the square, and for days and weeks to come, for as long as their memories served them, the people of Normandy Falls would speak of the contents of that wooden box, the fabled “lost treasure,” somehow thrilled by the telling of it, the bitter satisfaction of having indemonstrable proof, if more proof were ever needed, that this town was as impious and corrupt a place as anything dreamed up by the devil and forged by his own assured hand in a forgotten corner of hell's horrid foundry.

How my old beater, with its rusted underbelly and rumbling engine, made it as far as the valley I'll never know, but when it reached the two massive gates of Twisted Willows it finally stalled and died. As the headlights dimmed and went dark forever, I turned to my shivering passenger and, grinning with false amiability, said, “I'm afraid we walk from here, Professor. My apologies for the inconvenience.”

From the glove compartment I removed a flashlight and the
.38.
I knew nothing at all about guns, had never even held one before retrieving the pistol from the hayloft on the night after I followed Lorelei to the valley, and I worried that I might badly botch this exquisite execution. In my unblinking, bloodshot eye Martin Kingsley must have seen something wholly irrational, unappeasable, final, and he must have understood that I was determined upon a certain course of action and that he was powerless against me, his former student possessed by secret, towering furies.

“The valley looks like a different place in the winter,” I observed, enjoying how the snow muffled my voice and how it slowed our delicious advance through the woods. But now the time had come for the accused to speak.

“Listen to me, young man. You're making a serious mistake. You're obviously drunk. Or high. Quite possibly both.”

I raised the gun and shook it at him. “A gift from Emily Ryan. It's almost as if she dug herself free from the grave and personally handed it to me.”

Kingsley was quite stern. “I wish you would say something intelligent.”

“No, really, I found this pretty pistol inside an abandoned barn. The barrel was glowing in a beam of moonlight next to an old mattress, if you can believe it. Positively radiating, all cleaned and oiled and ready to be discharged. When I climbed the ladder to the hayloft, I fully expected my brains to splatter against the floorboards. But no, Emily would never lead me back to the barn just to see me die. I wondered for whom the gun was intended, but your mistress soon whispered the answer.”

“My mistress?” Now, instead of being merely frightened, Kingsley seemed deeply offended. “I'm dealing with a criminally insane clown. Things don't happen this way. This is some kind of demented fiction you've dreamed up, Mr. Campion. A sick fantasy. De Maupassant's influence, no doubt. I told you to study Flaubert, didn't I? I told you to focus on
naturalism,
not sensationalism?”

“But death is quite natural,” I said. “And so is revenge. Murder, too. Old as Cain. A very natural inclination.”

“You're mad.”

“I like to think of myself as a writer, and writers are not mad; it's the logicians who are mad, the mathematicians, the chess players, the scholars who spend years tearing Flaubert into extravagant tatters.”

“Help! Will someone please help?”

I pressed the gun into the small of his back. “Trust me, Professor, no one can hear you. Not way out here.” We moved on, and I said, “This part of the valley remains a silent and secluded place, one that has gone virtually unchanged since the earliest times when the first hunters came in search of beasts that no human eye has seen for many thousands of years—mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths with peg-like teeth and great lethal claws. Now you and I are the only monsters roaming the valley.”

I led him further into the woods, my useless keys jangling like silver coins in my coat pocket. We fought against a bracing wind, two lonely figures dwarfed by hardwood trees that hemmed us in on either side. Above us the limbs of the mighty oaks, frost stiffened and black, creaked and groaned and called down in sibilant whispers. Under our feet the dry snow crunched marvelously like a pile of skulls inside the catacombs of a medieval monastery, the cracked and brittle craniums of a thousand Capuchin monks reduced to dust.

“Life is full of marvelous serendipities,” I said as we approached the crumbling foundation of the ancient farmstead. “Several weeks ago I wandered through these woods and happened upon this very path. I followed it to a clearing where coyotes had scratched away the dirt and scattered the fallen leaves, exposing a heavy iron door. It took all of my strength, but I managed to pry the thing open. The muscles in my hamstrings and lower back ached for days.”

I pointed the beam of my flashlight past the cruel protrusion of jumbled sandstone blocks to a spot in the snow that looked glazed and dotted like an old painting.

“The door should be right there. Open it, would you please, Professor?”

I cocked the gun, and he complied without a word of protest. Using his bare hands, Kingsley scooped the snow until his fingers were pink and numb. When he could see the broad outlines of the door, he took hold of a steel ring large as a hoop and pulled hard. The earth released a fierce breath that reeked of fungus and decay. Under the domed cathedral of trees, the screeching hinges echoed like the angry cries of an owl that now circled slowly overhead. Kingsley, gasping with the effort of his task, wanted to clamp a hand over his nose and turned his face away.

“Steady,” I cautioned him. “If you drop the door you might lose a few toes.”

After lowering it gently into the snow, Kingsley fell to his knees and peered into that improbable abyss. The flashlight revealed a winding staircase that vanished into a cavern shimmering with a lurid green light.

“From up here it looks rather like a subterranean grotto,” I observed. “Or a swimming pool. Care to take a midnight dip, Professor?”

Kingsley rose to his feet and backed away. The raw wind ripped open his sport coat, exposing him to ice and snow. Except for the blood pounding in my head, everything was still and quiet. Maybe, he thought with waning hope, it wasn't too late. Maybe I would laugh and tell him that I'd taken this joke far enough. But I didn't laugh, and I didn't move the barrel of the gun from his heart or the beam of my flashlight from the pit.

“Another explosion of homicidal rage in small-town America,” he said miserably.

“On the contrary,” I told him in a very businesslike manner, “you'll be safe down there, I promise. It's warm as the womb. See the steam drifting up?”

Massaging his stiff fingers and struggling mightily to escape the insuperable effects of drugs and alcohol, Kingsley tried to muster the sobriety to beg for mercy, but he could only whine and whimper and gave a loud sob of dread. He followed the steps into that chthonic chamber, and with outstretched hands he groped the deteriorating masonry of the slick walls until his feet touched the floor and sank into the treacherous slime. He almost fell but managed to regain his balance.

“Ah, yes, I understand now,” he said, peering into the algae-skinned passages of that subterranean storehouse. “I'm still hallucinating. The Red Death is to blame.”

I regarded him with a cold, steady eye and answered with almost total indifference: “Yes, Professor, you're hallucinating.”

How else to explain the grotesquerie before him? Hundreds of glass jars, sealed tight with zinc canning lids, lined the shelves from floor to ceiling, and floating inside like the mutant aftermath of some long-ago atomic blast, hundreds of creatures, their stunted arms wading through a thick fluid that glowed faintly with phosphoric light. Kingsley saw reflected in those jars his own haggard face distorted by the darting death-fire of my flashlight. Maybe he felt a certain kinship with those lonely creatures floating forever in that ominous vault. He gibbered and laughed and tried to assure himself that they weren't real, but until these visions came to their inevitable, cataclysmic finish, whether through annihilation, rescue, or magic, his mind continued to populate the dark depths with the dumb lumbering beasts of his imagination.

“A fairy tale,” he breathed.

“That's right,” I said, “a fairy tale.”

It seemed senseless to argue with him, to convince him that this was all very real.

In my hand I waved a copy of Emily Ryan's letter, and one by one I dropped the sheets into the hole and watched them land in a puddle of acidic groundwater at his feet. “I'll leave you with a final story then, this one penned by the long-suffering wife of a merchant marine. Of course the words ‘long-suffering' and ‘wife' are a tad redundant, don't you think? Better perhaps to describe it as the supersavage poetry of a vindictive lover, a snarling woman under terminal stress.”

I raised the black eye patch and directed my left eye at him. Now covered in a cloudy film of pale blue, the eye seemed to lack an iris and pupil and moved independently of the right, more slowly and often in a different direction. I had trusted Emily to cure me of this affliction, but I had received instead a compensatory gift, for in that blind orb I could now see things others could not—dreams and visions and premonitions—and through its rotten lens Kingsley looked alarmingly like Father Montague, my former headmaster at the Jesuit school, his moon-blanched face old and weathered and bearing the handwriting of no common fate, one that made me shudder. Kingsley's mind, I believed, had been violently and permanently altered, his synapses wrested from their normal pathways and hastily rerouted in unknown and lunatic directions, and his incredulity, I was now certain, would remain intact and wholly undiminished up until the end.

But then Kingsley lifted his face, and between his inconsolable keening and his mad, murderous laughter, he spoke with perfect lucidity: “My family, my
family…
”

An inexplicable fear washed over me and shut out the sound of his voice. Desperate to extract myself from this inept nightmare, I used the limb of a fallen tree to lift the iron door, but before I could slam it shut and seal him forever within that impregnable dungeon, I felt as though I were burying two stillborn versions of myself, and the echo of Kingsley's low and foolish screams became the antiphony of their distinctive voices—one belonging to a man entering middle age, the other to a man entering the last stage of all, second childishness and mere oblivion, his voice all pipes and whistles.

For the first time since coming to Normandy Falls, I was satisfied that some mysterious cosmic circle was nearly complete, that justice had finally prevailed, and so it was only fitting that without pretense or ceremony, without giving Kingsley time to curse his preposterous fate, I bowed to the darkness and uttered these parting words: “There should be a law. A law of nature as well as a law of man.”

First, I thank my agent, David Patterson, a consummate professional, who in a wonderful flash of insight trimmed the original title. David has guided me in the right direction from the very start. He made certain I had this incredible opportunity to complete my second novel and see it in print with a major house.

I was privileged to work with Timothy O'Connell, my editor at Pantheon. Tim showed an enormous amount of patience as I submitted draft after draft of this novel, and he endured my sometimes obsessive rewrites. He pushed me hard to do my very best work, and his insights helped enormously in shaping the structure of this novel. I consider Tim a fantastic collaborator as well as a talented and committed editor.

I am also indebted to Jordan Rodman, my publicist at Pantheon, for her enthusiasm and hard work, as well as Tom Pold at Pantheon, who provided valuable insight along the way.

I must express my enormous gratitude to the Cuyahoga County Community Partnership for Arts and Culture for awarding me with a 2014 Creative Workforce Fellowship. The fellowship, and therefore my fellow citizens of Cuyahoga County, provided me with the financial resources to weather a particularly wicked polar vortex.

There are also many friends and acquaintances who continue to support my work, including Matthew Nocella and Ann Marie Latiak, tried-and-true pals who read portions of this book when it was in its infancy; Barry Goodrich, a longtime contributor to
Cleveland Magazine,
who checks in from time to time to make sure I'm still an interesting person; author Michael Garriga, who is always around to talk shop and encourage me with his wild and scarcely believable monologues on the writing life; and Karl Taro Greenfeld, who plucked me from obscurity.

Thank you to my brothers, my parents, my wife, and my daughter, all of them secretly conspiring to keep me grounded in reality. While this book is officially dedicated to Katie and Rose, I also dedicate it to the Keatings, the Milligans, the Edwards, the Christies, and the Scanlons.

Finally, I must offer thanks to a number of my literary gurus whom I paraphrase and allude to throughout this novel, including Homer, especially
The Odyssey,
in both the Robert Fagels and Robert Fitzgerald translations; Ovid, particularly the
Metamorphoses
as translated by Ted Hughes; three masters of twentieth-century American horror—Stephen King, Peter Straub, and H. P. Lovecraft; two masters of nineteenth-century “weird tales”—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe; the crime writer Dashiell Hammett, and his postmodernist successor Paul Auster; the screenplays of Robert Bolt, especially
Ryan's Daughter.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to those two greatest of contemporary prose stylists, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens. And is any novel complete without some kind of nod to the bard? Attentive readers may recognize a line or two from both
The Tempest
and
As You Like It,
specifically the Seven Ages of Man speech.