Twice Dying (23 page)

But this coldness lingered, becoming a
something.
It swiftly garnered power, like an iron talon closing around his being, crushing his breath. Terror struck him that it was Robby, trying to take Monks with him. Monks rolled away, fighting to stay conscious, to escape.

His blurred vision caught the white-clad figure of Alison, returning from across the room, holding something in her hands.

The heaped mound of wet plaster from the iron rack.

She knelt over Robby, moving without haste, gazing down without expression into his face. She dipped a finger into the blood that had pooled in the hollow of his neck, raised it to her face, and circled both her eyes.

Robby’s mouth twitched to form a word, a name, that Monks could not quite hear but understood without question.

Katherine.

His eyes softened, became the eyes of a boy
again. Then whoever was looking out through them began to fade.

Monks watched her smooth the plaster in handfuls over Robby’s face.

The icy fury slipped out of him, like poison drawn from a snakebite, and he allowed himself to fall into a rest that was safe.

M
onks drove the Bronco up the narrow road to his house in midafternoon, feeling weary but good. He had finished a twelve-hour shift in Mercy Hospital’s Emergency Room, and now had five days of freedom ahead. It was April, the winter rains over and the sun warming the earth: perfect weather for a leisurely canoe trip on Tomales Bay, with thick salami and Gruyère sandwiches and iced-down bottles of Moretti beer.

He pulled over at his mailbox to retrieve the usual accumulation of medical journals and junk. The door was jammed tightly shut. Dark thoughts toward the mail carrier passed through his mind. He yanked at the stubborn latch, trying to remember the amount of the Christmas bonus he had ponied up.

When the door gave, he had just enough time to register skinned knuckles and real annoyance. Then it came home to him that something was clawing its way up the bare flesh of his forearm.

Frozen, he stared. It was a rat, with small insane eyes and bared teeth, lunging toward his face.

Monks’s paralysis ended at the same instant the rat seemed to realize that it was heading toward confrontation rather than escape, somewhere around the elbow. He yelled and flailed his arm as if it was on fire. The rat leaped free. His last glimpse was of it slithering through the thick duff of redwood needles and oak leaves blanketing the earth, looking more like a reptile than a mammal, working its way deeper until only its pink naked tail remained.

Monks turned warily back to the mailbox and pulled free its contents. Magazines and envelopes came out in festoons of confetti and rat shit.

He drove uphill to the house, shaking with anger and fear. He walked straight to his safe and took out the shotgun.

Then he exhaled and put it back, realizing that he was starting to feel sorry for the rat. It had not locked itself into the mailbox, and could hardly be blamed for trying to rip the skin off something many times its size, reaching into its trap.

He dutifully checked rooms and closets. No one appeared to have been inside. The usual accumulation of dust seemed undisturbed.

So. The message seemed clear enough. Someone considered him to be a rat, and had, so to speak, put teeth in it.

He picked up a phone and called the local post office. It took him over a minute to get through a phone tree. The woman who answered sounded young, and so languid that Monks tentatively diagnosed vapors. He gave his name and address, and added:

“I came home today and found a rat in my mailbox.”

“A rat?”

“Correct.”

The next pause lengthened. Monks said helpfully, “R-A-T.”

“Was it, like, packaged? I mean, was there postage?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t think it was us, sir.”

“Am I right that it’s a federal offense to put an object without postage into a mailbox?”

Her voice took on a tone of formality. “Do you wish to file a complaint?”

“Will someone come out and investigate if I do?”

Pause. “You’d have to call the police about that.”

“If I call the police, they’ll say a mailbox is federal property and out of their jurisdiction. I speak from experience, you see,” he said, feeling it getting away from him, knowing there was no point
in taking this out on a clerk. “Every so often it gets bashed in by adolescent boys, and whoever I complain to tells me it’s someone else’s problem. Meaning, of course, mine.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, now with the patient weariness of dealing with a crank.

“Have you ever heard of Synanon House, Miss?”

“Sin what?”

He envisioned her sitting up sharply, pushing an alarm button or starting a tape recorder, whatever they did with calls that threatened to turn obscene.

“Long story,” Monks said. “Someone did the same thing, only with a rattlesnake. It almost killed a man.”

Silence.

“Vandalism is one thing,” Monks said, “but a live rat—I thought,” and, conscious that he had lost the battle, he finished weakly, “someone might be concerned.”

He placed the phone in its cradle.

When he got to the kitchen, the cats were waiting.

“There’s a rodent outside calling you guys pussies,” Monks said.

He was met with stony stares and yawns. Then he remembered: these were cats that had faced down a cobra. A rat was far beneath their dignity. He opened two cans of Kultured Kat turkey and
giblets, feeling vaguely that the fowl was appropriate, and divided it up.

Then he took out the Finlandia. It smoked as it poured over the ice cubes. He touched it with fresh lemon, drank it, and made another. He took this one out to the deck and stood at the railing, watching the light on the Pacific horizon, remembering back the several months, to cobras.

Stover Larrabee and Roman Kasmarek had come out damaged but alive, the first with a severe concussion and the second with a fractured cheekbone. They had been discovered and treated by a sharp young doc named Vernon Dickhaut, who had gone looking for Monks after the bizarre incidents in the hospital that day.

Robby Vandenard’s tracks had been traced by the police as far as was possible. He had been no fool about practicalities: had hidden large sums of money in numbered overseas accounts, bought property under false identities, hacked his way into illegal computer links that included LEIN and NCIC law enforcement networks. The chances of finding him again, with Alison made surgically docile and the likelihood of plastic surgery, would have been remote.

There had been much speculation about his psychology. Incestuous urges toward his sister, certainly. Rationalization of severe cognitive dissonance, a refusal to accept the fact that he had murdered her, resulting in a belief that she still
lived within him. Reinforcement of this by assuming her persona and repeatedly avenging her death, in a violent form of belated mastery.

The belief that by killing, he could add the “cobras” to her strength, like horses to a chariot. Which finally resulted in her signaling him that she was ready to return: into the flesh of Alison Chapley.

But the person who knew the most about it took his secrets with him when he died on the autopsy table in Mercy Hospital. Several more videos of the NGIs being stalked and killed had been found hidden in Jephson’s house. No other records had turned up to indicate whether he was moved by threat, by vicarious pleasure in the murder of men he had feared, or by something else entirely. Monks had revised his opinion again about Jephson’s rattlesnake bite, guessing that it had been brought about by Robby, in an early move to terrorize the man he would continue to dominate for three more decades. Or perhaps it was a declaration of passion.

As for Alison, she was gone: back to the East Coast, a long vacation, and a slow segue into private practice, away from the violent men who had been her fascination. Monks had received an occasional postcard from her, and sent the same back.

He walked inside and took from his desk the last card he had received. It was a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, of a distant solitary figure
standing on a beach, overwhelmed by the stormy sky and choppy ocean behind him. It was titled
The Monk at the Sea.
There was no message on it, only her signature. He surmised that it was the end of what could hardly have been called a correspondence.

He did not think of her as having deceived him. He understood that she had been driven by a need more powerful than the ties that drew her to him. And that that need of hers had been fulfilled, the deep question in her being, that answered. It was too private for her to share—or perhaps, to be reminded of—-and so she had put distance between them.

But from his own side, there was a chillier part to it. He could not entirely shake the sense that for those few instants, while he had watched her paint her eyes and smooth the death mask over Robby’s face, it
had
happened:

Katherine Vandenard—Naia—had touched her.

He poured another drink and started looking through his files, trying to spot the enraged mal-practitioner who wanted revenge on Monks for ratting him off.

NEIL M
C
MAHON
is a former Stegner Fellow whose short fiction has appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly, Boxing’s Best Short Stories,
and other publications. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

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