Authors: Tom Piccirilli
What an awful thought.
That there was no one in the world who loved him. He vaguely wondered why he was putting himself through this, which hateful part of him was keeping the dog around. Why his doubts should take this form. Some men had to struggle with a faceless despair and here he was with a nasty French bulldog. He figured his father had it better, just be depressed in front of the TV.
He thought of Emma Waltz folding beneath the same pressures her entire adult life. He knew he had only one final shot at redemption. He had to save her somehow.
“I’ve got my reasons for staying.”
“So do I.”
“You’ll be gone soon enough.”
“So will you.”
Flynn held back a sigh. The Charger’s headlights flashed across the terrain and immediately the grim nerve worked through his chest again, twitching under his heart. He was here.
The GTO sat in the driveway, already almost buried under the snow. Nuddin wasn’t only good with rifles, he was a damn fine driver too.
The Shepard house, black as the far end of the road.
The false mortar and fake ancient rock face, freezing metal and dark, empty windows like wide, blind eyes searching.
A good place for the endgame.
Flynn could only feel a growing sense of reality deepening around him, a resolve and call to purpose, an understanding of intent.
Love and fear entwined, that’s what Mooney had said. If Petersen the Tabasco king had been the fear, then was Nuddin the love? What the hell did it mean?
Autistic, living in his own reality, but visiting ours on occasion. An idiot-savant murderer. A natural manipulator, a honed killer.
He’s low-functioning autistic, so separated from the world that it hardly impacts on him.
It was good hearing Sierra’s voice in his head again. She’d always helped him, had always loved him. He couldn’t fully see that at the time, but it was obvious to him now. So was his own lack of appreciation and ingratitude. Even when she’d threatened to fire him she’d done it out of love for him. He was such a damn fool.
I wonder if he even felt any of the torture he was going through. He walks on the balls of his feet because there’s more pressure exerted on the nerves. He likes to be hugged hard. He can stare into a mirror for hours, unable to fully realize he’s looking at himself.
The Devil hates to be alone. He always needed someone to hear his voice of power, to listen to his whisper. It’s how he worked. It was the completion of the circuit. It was someone else’s evil that brought the savant to the surface.
Flynn got out of the car and made his way to the house, falling twice. The second time down he relaxed himself and went with the cold trying to consume him. He breathed in the snow and enjoyed the darkness trying to make him its own. He had no fear of the freeze. The light-headedness swarmed him. He hadn’t eaten in days, hadn’t slept at all. His exhaustion dulled him and dialed him down to nothing. He still wondered why his brother had saved his life that day, and if, after all these years, Flynn remained a good boy.
His eyes flashed open. He stood and got moving.
Trying the front door, he found it unlocked. He walked in feeling no pressure. He wasn’t worried for himself. He didn’t think he ever would be again.
The house was freezing. Someone had shut the heat off right after Shepard had been taken out of here, and no one had turned it back on.
He heard humming coming from somewhere deep in the house.
A girl softly murmuring a childish tune.
Flynn walked to the kitchen.
He found the door to the basement. It was back in place with the pins set back into the hinges.
He was playing it all wrong but something kept telling him this was the only way to play it. His brother’s presence felt so strong around him now that he could imagine spinning around fast enough to catch sight of Danny.
His mind shifted into fantasies spreading to the two ends of fulfillment. In the first, he and Danny were partners, going shoulder to shoulder, brothers and friends, ready for glory, unbeatable. In the next, Flynn turned to see Danny behind him, the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, handsome and only marginally tortured of soul, selfish and suicidal, out to cause pain. Flynn punched him in the mouth and went down into the dark alone.
But some things couldn’t be helped.
You decided on your course, and you saw it through.
Flynn went to hit the light but it was already on. A dim glow wafted across the bottom step.
He didn’t draw his .38. It wasn’t time yet.
It came back to him then, what Petersen had said right before he blew his own head off.
My evil was down deep where it was supposed to be, and he unlatched the cellar door.
Flynn descended the stairs.
Zero’s plastic hamburger was still at the bottom of the stairwell where the dog had left it.
Nuddin sat with Kelly in the cage in the middle of the room with a butcher knife pressed to her throat.
The door was ajar, the key in the lock. She was shuddering from the cold.
Flynn looked at Nuddin’s misshapen head and scars anew, realizing he had done all of that to himself, since he was a child. The thick, knotted welts and brandings that cross-thatched his body. The broken bones that tilted him one way, then another. Beating himself, crushing himself, destroying himself just to feel the contours of his own identity.
Nuddin started humming along with Kelly, and those gentle brown eyes an inch too far apart watched Flynn.
A pile of clothes had been set off to one side. Nuddin was covered in dried blood. After the first blow of the baseball bat, he’d stripped before continuing to beat Sierra to death. He made sure he covered himself with her, the streaming wet heat describing his own body. He’d cut himself too, and had been cutting himself since he’d been taken from this house. Old crusted wounds and new incisions curved and arced across his flesh.
His breathing came in short rasps, puffing clouds across the basement. He was actually sweating despite the chill.
For a moment Flynn couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in a body where you could feel almost nothing, not even the shape of your own skin. An instant later he realized, Oh yeah, he could, in fact, imagine it. In a fashion, he lived it. That’s what this was all about.
Flynn just stared for another second. Sometimes you needed an extra breath to help you decide where it was you wanted to go next.
“Are you all right, Kelly?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not.”
“It’s going to be okay.”
“I know. He killed Sierra.”
He wondered how much she had seen. “Has he been talking to you?”
“He doesn’t talk. Usually.”
“That’s right, not usually. But he does, doesn’t he?”
“Sometimes.”
Nuddin smiled. It was utterly innocent and perhaps even loving, enough to break your heart.
The cage. Christina Shepard had said she was protecting him. All the scars—they were self-inflicted. Maybe she’d known about his penchant for connecting with evil. She’d known not to let him loose on the world.
Sierra had told Flynn about autistics, how they had trouble understanding the contours of their own bodies. Nuddin used the pain to give himself an identity. Flynn couldn’t comprehend the willpower it would take to bash yourself in the head hard enough to dent your own skull. To twist your arms and break your own bones. How big a step was it before you were destroying other people?
He leaned down and stared through the bars.
“Hey, hello there,” Nuddin whispered.
It was the same voice Flynn had heard on the phone that night. The one that had told him it was afflicted. Anguish and sorrow that murdered men in their sleep or kept them locked up for decades. Flynn had been so close. He remembered thinking the voice had no name, that the person had never been identified, lurking unseen and unknown and never understood.
So close, but he hadn’t been able to see it.
“I’m your friend,” Nuddin said. “Can you talk to me? Can you understand me?”
Saying the things that Flynn had first said to him. Using his own words. Flynn remembered how the first time he’d heard Nuddin’s voice, through the heating vent, singing softly in the basement, his stomach tightened at the tune and his scalp had prickled. It was happening again.
Nuddin grinned, his gaze full of resolve. Nuddin, the thing inside Nuddin. He might not understand his purpose in life, but he recognized it and embraced it. That put him leagues ahead of most people in the world.
No one had cleaned up down here after that night. A dried pool of gritty copper remained on the floor where Shepard had bled after being shot in the heart by his wife.
“I know your secret,” Nuddin whispered.
He’s got a voice that comes from hell. You can’t resist.
It rang through Flynn and he felt his soul chime along with it. A voice that had no name, that had never been christened or identified. The hiss of your deepest lies and sins. The scream of your own human madness. The whisper of impending death. It was the sound of ice breaking beneath you.
Flynn was used to it by now.
“Big deal,” he said.
Flynn unclipped the .38. Nuddin’s eyes brightened and his smile twisted into a leer. He pressed the point of the knife harder into Kelly’s neck and she let out a gasp but did nothing more.
Flynn thought she had the makings to be the strongest, most determined person he’d ever known. He hoped he would be around in ten years to see her graduate from high school, but he didn’t think it was going to happen.
“Let Kelly go.”
“No,” Nuddin said. “No no no.”
Flynn unloaded his pistol. He rattled the bullets in his fist for a moment before tossing them to one side of the basement, the empty gun to another.
“I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Oh,” Nuddin said. “Oh oh oh. That’s bad.”
“Why?”
“You’re supposed to understand.”
Here it was, a retarded guy with drool on his chin telling Flynn he was stupid. Flynn was punctured by the thought that Nuddin had been controlling and directing everything that had happened these past weeks. That he had, in fact, been in charge of Flynn’s life because Flynn had allowed it. A multiedged personality—his dominant identity moronic, and the hidden killer beneath quiet and knowing and planning. It filled Flynn with awe.
“He doesn’t hurt the family,” Kelly said. “My mother told me. He doesn’t hurt family. Never. But we have to keep him from everyone else.”
The knife at her throat wavered an inch, then Nuddin retightened his grip and the blade straightened, aimed at her carotid. One yank and he’d tear her throat open.
All families have a dark secret.
Sometimes it’s you.
He tried to imagine what it had been like for Bragg. A Southern gentleman with a family history of slavery, violence and murder. Coming from a clan that drowned babies at birth. Slowly going out of his own head as the cancer ate into his brain. What did Bragg see in the boy when he was born? Had he destroyed the records, or had there never been any? Had he taken on the burden of his own son in some form of penance, an act of defiance?
“I know your secret,” Nuddin whispered.
“That doesn’t matter to me.”
But Nuddin seemed to think it should. His free hand started fluttering about, the awkwardly angled elbow striking the bars. That voice reaching out like a silken tongue moving into his ear. “You want to die.”
“You’re a real whiz with a rifle,” Flynn said.
“Daddy taught me.”
“Let Kelly go.”
“No.”
“You don’t hurt family. Ever.”
Nuddin grinned, lost in himself, perhaps even adrift from two selves. He shut his eyes, and a nervous tic twisted his face to the right until his nose pressed to Kelly’s hair. “Almost never. I hurt Mama. From time to time.”
Flynn recalled Sierra telling him how Bragg’s wife had been cut to pieces from cancer surgery. Now he saw it. Nuddin taking away pieces of his mother over the years. Bragg trying to teach the boy all that he knew about guns and knives. Maybe trying to channel the thing inside the boy. Nuddin unable to fully understand anything except using the skills and weapons he’d been given. Flynn wondered how many missing folks had wound up in the Chatalaha River and nearby swamps thanks to Nuddin. Bragg too ashamed to admit the truth to anyone, the woman alone with her wounds and her son locked in a cage smashing his own head in. Maybe Nuddin was only as insane as his parents, as his sister.
“Let Kelly go,” Flynn said, “and I’ll come sit in there with you. I want to, okay? I think we should sit together for a while.”
The whisper without sexual identity, not a male voice or a female one, and yet urgent and in pain, as if others’ dark riddles and mysteries affected and tainted it. The whisper becoming a hiss.
“You want to die.”