The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  ‘Let it go, Ronnie,’ said his friend, who was taller and fatter and also far drunker than his buddy. ‘I got to hit the head.’ He stumbled by her, mumbling an apology. He wore a black T-shirt with a white arrow that pointed toward his groin.

  The picture on the screen changed again. She looked up. Another man, different from the first, was caught in the glare of the lights. He looked confused, as though he’d wandered out of his house expecting to find quiet, not chaos.

  Wait, she thought. Wait. I know you. I know you. It was an old memory, one that she couldn’t quite place. She felt something stir inside her. There was a buzzing in her head. She tried to shake it away, but it grew louder. Her mouth filled with saliva, and there was a growing pain between her eyes, as though a pin were being inserted into her skull through the bridge of her nose. Her fingertips began to itch.

  ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you,’ said Ronnie, but she ignored him. She was experiencing flashes of memory, scenes from a series of old movies playing in her head, except in each one she was the star.

  Killing Melody McReady in a pond in Idaho, holding her head beneath the water as her back bucked and the last bubbles of air broke the surface . . .

  Telling Wade Pearce to close his eyes and open his mouth, promising him something nice, a big surprise, and then jamming the gun between his teeth and pulling the trigger, because she had been wrong about him. She thought he might have been the one – what one? – but he was not, and he had begun asking questions about Melody, his girlfriend, and she had smelt the suspicion upon him . . .

  Bobby Faraday, kneeling in the dirt before her, weeping, pleading with her to come back to him, as she walked behind him, took the rope from his saddle bag, and slipped the cord lightly around his neck. Bobby wouldn’t leave her alone. He wouldn’t stop talking. He was weak. He had already tried to kiss her, to hold her, but his touch repelled her now because she knew that he wasn’t the one for her. She had to stop him from talking, from trying to act upon his desires. So the rope tightened and Bobby – strong, lean Bobby – struggled against her, but she was strong, so strong, stronger than anyone could have imagined . . .

  A hand on a stove, and the soft hiss as the gas began to seep out, just as it had seeped out decades before in a house owned by a woman named Jackie Carr; the girl waiting for the Faradays to die, one window open just enough so that she could take breaths of night air. And then noise from the bedroom, a body tumbling to the floor: Kathy Faraday, almost overcome by fumes, trying to crawl to the kitchen to turn off the gas, her husband already dead beside her. The girl had been forced to sit on Kathy’s back, her mouth covered to protect her from the fumes, until she was sure that the woman was no more . . .

  Leaving signs; carving a name – her name, her real name

  – in places where others might find it. No, not others: the Other, the One she loved, and who loved her in return.

  And dying: dying as the bullets ripped into her and she tumbled into cold water; dying while the Other bled upon her, as she slumped forward in the car seat and her head came to rest upon his lap. Dying, over and over again, yet always returning . . .

  A hand tugged on her arm. ‘You fucking bitch, I said—’

  But Emily wasn’t listening. These were not her memories. They belonged to another, one who was not her yet was in her, and at last she understood that the threat from which she had been fleeing for so long, the shadow that had haunted her life, had not been an external force, an outside agency. It had been inside her all along waiting for its moment to emerge.

  Emily raised her hands to her head, pressing her fists into the sides of her skull. She closed her eyes tightly and ground her teeth as she struggled against the gathering clouds, trying in vain to save herself, to hold on to her identity, but it was too late. The transformation was occurring. She was no longer the girl she had once believed herself to be, and soon she would cease to be forever. She had a vision of a young woman drowning, just as Melody McReady had drowned, fighting against the coming oblivion, and she was both that woman and the one who was holding her down, forcing her beneath the water. The dying girl broke the water for the last time and looked up, and in her eyes was reflected a being both old and terrible, a black, sexless thing with dark wings that unfurled from its back, blocking out all light, a creature that was so ugly it was almost beautiful, or so beautiful that it had no place in this world.

  It.

  And Emily died beneath its hand, drowning in black water, lost forever. She had always been lost, right from the moment of her birth when this strange, wandering spirit had chosen her body for its abode, hiding in the shadows of her consciousness, waiting for the truth of itself to be revealed.

  Now the thing that she had become looked down at the little man who was holding on to her arm. She could no longer understand what he was saying. His words were merely a buzzing in her ear. It didn’t matter. Nothing that he said mattered. She smelled him, and sensed the foulness inside him that had forced the stench from his pores. A serial abuser of women. A man filled with hatred and strange, violent appetites.

  Yet she did not judge him, just as she would no more have judged a spider for consuming a fly, or a dog for gnawing on its bone. It was in his nature, and she found its echo in her own.

  His grip tightened. Spittle flew from his mouth, but she saw only the movements of his lips. He started to rise, then paused. He seemed to realize that something had changed, that what he thought was familiar had suddenly become desperately alien. She freed her arm and moved in closer to him. She placed the palms of her hands on his face, then leaned in to kiss him, her open mouth closing on his, ignoring the bitterness of him, the stink of his breath, his decaying teeth and yellowed gums. He struggled against her for a moment, but she was too strong for him. She breathed into him, her eyes fixed on his, and she showed him what would become of him when he died.

  Shelley did not see her go, nor Harbaruk, nor any of the others who had worked alongside her. Had their memories of that night been played back for them, displayed on a screen so that they could see all that had passed before their eyes, the girl’s departure would have appeared as a grayish mass moving through the bar, an excised form loosely resembling a human being.

  The big man in the arrow T-shirt returned from the men’s room. His friend was sitting where he had left him, staring vacantly at the wall, his back to the bar.

  ‘Time to go, Ronnie,’ he said. He patted Ronnie on the back, but the smaller man did not move.

  ‘Hey, Ronnie.’ He stepped in front of him, and stopped speaking. Even in his drunken state, he knew that his friend was broken beyond salvation.

  Ronnie was weeping tears of blood and water, and his mouth was moving, forming the same words over and over. Every capillary had burst in his eyes, and the whites had turned entirely red, twin black suns set against their skies. He was whispering, but his friend could still hear what he was saying.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ronnie. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .’

  29

  The woman, at a signal from Epstein, had brought more coffee, once again black for him, and a little milk for mine. Between us lay the two symbols.

  ‘What do they mean?’ I asked.

  ‘They are letters of the Enochian, or Adamical, alphabet, supposedly communicated to the English magician John Dee and his associates over a period of decades during the sixteenth century.’

  ‘Communicated?’

  ‘Through occult workings, although it may be a constructed language. Whatever its origins, this first is the Enochian letter “Und,” the equivalent of our letter “A.” In this case, it represents a name: Anmael.’

  Jimmy Gallagher, struggling to remember: ‘Animal – no that’s not it . . .’

  ‘And what is Anmael?’

  ‘Anmael is a demon, one of the Grigori, or the “Sons of God,”’ said Epstein. ‘The Grigori are also known as “Watchers,” or “the ones who never sleep.” Accordi
ng to elements of the apocrypha, and the Book of Enoch in particular, they are gigantic beings who, in one version, precipitated the great Fall of the angels through the sin of lust.’

  He held up two hands before him, but kept the thumb of his right hand tucked into the palm.

  ‘Nine orders of angels,’ he said. ‘All sexless, and above reproach.’ He moved his thumb, adding it to the rest. ‘The tenth is the Grigori, of a different essence from the rest, in form and sexual appetite similar to man, and it is this order that fell. In Genesis, it is the Grigori who lusted after flesh and “took themselves wives” from among the children of men. Such theories have always been a matter of some dispute. The great rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, blessed be his name, forbade his disciples to speak of such matters, but I, as you can see, have no such qualms.

  ‘So, Anmael was one of the Grigori. He, in turn, is linked to Semjaza, one of the leaders of the order. Some say that the angel Semjaza repented of its actions but that, I suspect, had more to do with a desire in the early church for a figure of repentance than anything else.

  ‘Now we have twin angels, Anmael and Semjaza, but here Christian and Jewish views diverge. In Christian orthodoxy, derived in part from Jewish sources, angels are traditionally viewed as sexless, or, in the case of the higher orders, exclusively male. The later Jewish view, by contrast, allows the possibility of male and female angels. The bibliographer Hayyim Azulal wrote in his Milbar Kedemot of 1792 that “the angels are called women, as it is written in Zechariah verse nine, Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and behold, there came out two women.” The Yalkut Hadash says: “Of angels we can speak both in masculine and in feminine: the angels of a superior degree are called men, and the angels of an inferior degree are called women.” At the very least, then, Judaism has a more fluid concept of the sexuality of such beings.

  ‘The body of Ackerman, and the boy killed by your father at Pearl River, both bore the Enochian “A,” or “Und,” burned into their flesh. The women, by contrast, were marked with the letter “Uam,” or “S,” for Semjaza.’

  He paused for a moment, and seemed to consider something. ‘I have often thought,’ he resumed, ‘that the children of men must have been a grave disappointment to such beings. It was our flesh and our bodies that they desired, yet our minds, and our lifespans, must have been like those of insects by comparison. But what if two angels, one male, one female, could inhabit the bodies of a man and a woman, and enjoy their union as equals? And as those bodies wear out, they move on, finding others to inhabit, and then begin to seek each other once again. Sometimes it may take years. It may even be that, on occasion, they fail to come together, and the search continues in another body, but they never stop looking, for they cannot be content without each other. Anmael and Semjaza: soul mates, if one could speak in such a way of beings without a soul; or lovers, of beings who cannot love.

  ‘And the price they pay for their union is, I believe, to do the bidding of another: in this case, that bidding is to bring an end to your existence.’

  ‘Another?’

  ‘A controlling consciousness. It may be that some of those whom you have encountered in the past – Pudd, Brightwell, our friend Kittim, perhaps even the Traveling Man, among those whose human nature is not in dispute, for did the Traveling Man not reference the Book of Enoch? – also did its bidding, but without even knowing it. Think of the human body: some of its processes are involuntary. The heart beats, the liver purifies, the kidneys process. The brain does not have to tell them to perform these tasks, but they serve the function of sustaining the body. But to lift up a book, to drive a car, to fire a gun in order to end a life, these are not involuntary functions. So, perhaps, there will be some who perform services for another without being aware of it, simply because their own acts of evil fulfill a larger purpose. There will be others, though, who are specifically charged with certain tasks, and hence their awareness will ultimately be greater.’

  ‘And what is this controlling consciousness?’

  ‘That we don’t yet know.’

  ‘“We,”’ I said. ‘I take it you’re not talking about you and me.’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘The Collector spoke of my “secret friends.” Do you qualify?’

  ‘I would be honored to think so.’

  ‘And there are others.’

  ‘Yes, although some might not be so willing to wear the mantle of friendship in the general sense of the word,’ said Epstein, choosing his words with consummate diplomacy.

  ‘No cards at Christmas.’

  ‘No cards at any time.’

  ‘And you won’t tell me who they are?’

  ‘For now, it’s better that you don’t know.’

  ‘Are you afraid that I’m going to make unwanted calls?’

  ‘No, but if you don’t know their names then you can’t reveal their identities to others.’

  ‘Like Anmael, if he chose to take his blade to me.’

  ‘You’re not alone in this matter, Mr. Parker. Granted, you are an unusual man, and I have not yet figured out why you have always been such an object of hatred and, dare I say it, attraction for such foul things, but I have other people to think of too.’

  ‘Is that what Unit Five is: code for what you call my secret friends?’

  For a moment, Epstein seemed taken aback, but recovered himself.

  ‘Unit Five is just a name.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Initially, for the investigation into the Traveling Man. Since then, its remit has broadened somewhat, I believe. You are part of that remit.’

  Rain began to fall. I looked over my shoulder and saw it darken the sidewalk and fall from the dark red awning over the doorway.

  ‘So what do I do?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Anmael, or whoever thinks he’s Anmael.’

  ‘He’s waiting.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘For his other half to join him. He must believe that she is close, otherwise he wouldn’t have revealed himself. She, in turn, is leaving traces for him, perhaps even without realizing it. When she comes, they’ll make their move. It won’t be long, not if Anmael was prepared to kill Wallace and mark the wall with his name. He senses her approach, and it will not be long before they are drawn together. We could hide you away, I suppose, but that would be merely to delay the inevitable. To amuse themselves, and to draw you out, they might hurt those close to you.’

  ‘So what would you do, in my shoes?’

  ‘I would choose the ground upon which to fight. You have your allies: Angel and the one who is, presumably, still lurking outside. I can spare a couple of young men who will maintain a discreet distance from you yet keep you in sight. Tether yourself lightly in the place of your choosing, and we will trap them when they come.’

  Epstein stood. Our meeting was over.

  ‘I have one more question,’ I said.

  What might have been irritation flitted across Epstein’s face, but he crushed it and assumed once more his habitual expression of benign amusement.

  ‘Ask it.’

  ‘Elaine Parker’s child, the one who died: was it a boy or a girl?’

  ‘It was a girl. I believe she named it Sarah. It was taken from her and buried secretly. I do not know where. It was best that nobody knew.’

  Sarah: my half sister, buried anonymously in an infants’ cemetery in order to protect me.

  ‘But I may have a final problem for you to consider in turn,’ said Epstein. ‘How did they find Caroline Carr? On two occasions, your father and Jimmy Gallagher hid her well: once uptown, before Ackerman died beneath the wheels of a truck, and then during her pregnancy. Still, the man and the woman managed to track her down. Then someone found out that Will Parker had lied about the circumstances of his son’s birth, and they came back to try again.’

  ‘It could have been one of your people,’ I said. ‘Jimmy told me about the meeting at the clinic. One of them could have let it s
lip, either deliberately or inadvertently.’

  ‘No, they did not,’ said Epstein, and he spoke with such conviction that I did not contradict him. ‘And even were I to doubt them, which I do not, none of them was made aware of the nature of the threat to Caroline Carr until she died. All they knew was that she was a young woman in trouble, and in need of protection. It is possible that the secret of your parentage might have leaked out. We excised the details of Elaine Parker’s dead child from her medical records, and she severed all contact with the hospital and the obstetrician concerned with monitoring the early stages of her pregnancy. Their files were subsequently purged. Your blood group was a problem, but that should have been a confidential matter between your family and their doctor, and he appears to have been above reproach in all respects. And then we warned your father to always be vigilant, and he rarely failed to heed our warnings.’

  ‘Right up to the night that he fired his gun at Pearl River,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, until then.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have let him go back there alone.’

  ‘I didn’t know what he was going to do,’ said Epstein. ‘I wanted them taken alive. That way, we could have contained them, and ended this thing.’

  He put on his hat and coat and prepared to slip by me.

  ‘Remember what I said. I believe that someone who knew your father betrayed him. It may be that you are at risk of betrayal too. I commit you to the care of your colleague.’

  And he and his bodyguards departed, leaving me with the dark haired mute who smiled sadly before she began to extinguish the lights.

  A bell rang somewhere in the back of the diner, causing a red bulb to flash above the counter for the woman to see. She put a finger to her lips, telling me that I should remain quiet, then disappeared behind a curtain. Seconds later, she gestured with a finger, asking me to join her.