The Follower

by Nicholas Bowling

  Vivian was watching the police officers coming and going, singly and in pairs, carrying cups of coffee, twirling their nightsticks. None of them gave her or the Carters a second look. How many of them were initiates, she wondered? All of them? Enough of them, as Gallardo had said.

  “We shouldn’t hang around here,” she said.

  “Right,” said Jerome.

  They found a litter-strewn park somewhere back towards the hospital and sat together on a bench. Vivian took the middle, Minnie and Jerome like her parents on either side. She told them what had happened in the barn, where Jesse was now. Minnie shook her head and tears leaked from the corners of her tiny eyes.

  “But is he better?” she asked.

  “He’s not awake yet.”

  “Did they get all that paint scrubbed off him?” asked Jerome.

  “It wasn’t paint.”

  “Wasn’t, huh? Then what was it?”

  “That was just how he looked,” said Vivian.

  Jerome frowned and opened his mouth, but his wife said, “More things in heaven and earth, Jerome.” She dabbed at her eyes.

  The three of them sat in silence and watched a mother spinning her child on the roundabout.

  “I’m sorry I had to bail you with your own money,” said Vivian.

  “Nonsense,” said Minnie. “Who else’s money were you going to use?”

  “And I’m sorry I didn’t find Nathan.”

  Jerome and Minnie looked at each other.

  “What were you saying before, in the street,” said Jerome. “You said something about… Jesus, I don’t even want to say it. Bodies? On the mountain.”

  “Some of the initiates, when they go up the mountain…” Vivian kept watching the toddler spinning around and around. “Well, you know. It’s a mountain. And they’re in robes and sandals. It’s freezing up there.”

  “But you said Nathan was in Sacramento?” said Minnie, and seized Vivian’s bicep again, tight enough to leave a bruise.

  “He could be. I mean, he should be.”

  “Then we should go and get him.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be that simple.”

  “Well, we’re not just going to go back to Gazelle, are we? Jerome?”

  Jerome shook his head.

  “We should still look into it. If there’s a chance…”

  “But you’re on bail,” said Vivian. “Aren’t you meant to stay around here?”

  “We’ll come back,” said Jerome. “We’d like to know, Vivian.”

  Vivian looked either side of her. Minnie’s fingertips were still digging into her arm. She thought of Jesse, wondered if he was awake yet.

  “Alright,” she said.

  She took out the Carters’ envelope and counted how much of their cash was left and began to plan her final pilgrimage to Telos.

  28

  BACK IN the hospital Jesse was still comatose. Vivian found the doctor at his bedside, explaining to a nurse why most people’s bench-pressing technique was all wrong. Vivian gave them the number of her new phone, a cheap “burner” she’d picked up from a liquor store for thirty dollars, told them to get in touch if there were any developments. She gave her brother a kiss on his bandaged head and tried not to cry again and went back to join Jerome and Minnie at the main reception.

  There were a few tense minutes while Jerome attempted to hire them a car. The man in the hire place checked his licence over and over, looking up, looking down, but the false DUI claim from the Lewiston police departments hadn’t yet caught up with whatever database the car hire company was using. In an hour they were on the freeway in a little Japanese automatic that smelled of strawberry bootlaces and caustic cleaning products, and the sun was hovering just above the barren hills to the right of the road.

  They hardly spoke on the journey. Minnie alternated between weeping silently in the back seat and exclaiming with surprise when the satnav said something out loud. Vivian couldn’t remember the exact address but had entered “Sacramento business park” and hoped that she’d recognise the place when she saw it. Jerome concentrated on his driving. Getting pulled over now would be the end of them.

  When they got to Sacramento it was dark. It turned out there were four business parks in and around the city, and they visited all of them before Vivian recognised the laminate flooring wholesaler and got Jerome to pull into the parking lot. The Telos building itself was as she remembered, without any defining features. It could have been the headquarters of the IRS, as far as anyone on the outside knew.

  Jerome turned off the engine and made to get out.

  “Wait,” said Vivian. “If we try and go inside they’ll just turn us away.”

  “Or worse,” said Minnie.

  Jerome sat back in his seat and closed his door and stared ahead at the building.

  “Are you sure this is it?” he said.

  “Pretty sure,” said Vivian. “That’s the big house.”

  “The what?”

  “Nothing. It’s just what somebody called it once.”

  She thought of Janek Blucas again, and the ruin that Telos had brought him – that her own father had brought him. Why couldn’t she have had a family like the Carters? Why couldn’t she have had a dad like Jerome?

  They sat and watched and Jerome put on the air conditioning with the heat turned right up. It was nearly seven o’clock, but most of the lights in the office were still on. The windows in the building were small but occasionally Vivian saw people moving inside. Was that a robe she saw? It was difficult to tell. It could have just been someone in a blouse, or an ill-fitting shirt.

  Vivian checked her cheap phone. No word from the hospital.

  After half an hour a few people emerged from the entrance. It was difficult to see them properly in the street lights, but they seemed as unremarkable as the building they’d left. Two men in shirts and ties and sensible slacks. A woman in jeans and a woollen jumper. Vivian’s heart got uncomfortably tight. What if it was just an office after all? She’d only had the information from Piotr Blucas. How long had it been since he’d left the Telos operation behind him?

  “I don’t know about this,” said Jerome, quietly.

  “Let’s just be patient,” said Minnie.

  Jerome sniffed. “Never thought I’d be staking out my own son.”

  The woman in jeans came towards them and Vivian and Jerome sank in their seats. The woman got into her own car and reversed out of the space and drove slowly past them.

  “There,” said Vivian, sitting up and pointing.

  “Where?”

  “Bumper sticker.”

  There was a purple triangle stuck to the inside of the rear windscreen, and next to it a white oblong that said: “Telos Welcomes You!” It was the same one Vivian had seen in Shelley’s living room.

  “Well, I’ll be…” said Jerome.

  They kept watching. More people left and went to their cars and bikes and scooters. Some made prayer-hands to each other before saying goodnight. One wore a rucksack that Vivian was fairly sure had a sacred rod poking out of the top.

  And then she saw him. He looked no different from the portrait photo the Carters had on their mantelpiece. He was in a well-tailored suit and his shirt was undone at the top and the only strange thing about him was that he wore no socks under his shoes.

  Jerome and Minnie were out of the car before anyone had said anything. They went running across the parking lot while Vivian struggled releasing herself from the seat belt.

  “Oh Nathan!” Minnie cried. “Oh son!”

  “Nathan, it’s us!” said Jerome.

  Vivian ran after them, her heart somewhere up around her ears. This was not how it was meant to go. There were still initiates leaving the office behind him – Ascended Masters, no less, according to Glenn’s definition. Jerome was slow with his cowpoke’s hobble and they hadn’t yet reached Nathan, but they’d got his attention. He was staring at his parents with total bewilderment. He didn’t even seem to recognise th
em.

  Minnie was brought up short by the look on his face.

  “Nathan, baby! You’re okay!”

  Nathan had been talking to another man in a suit, middle-aged, who looked like an accountant from his wireframed glasses and breast pocket of biros. He looked at this man and raised his eyebrows, made to leave.

  “Nathan?” said Jerome. “It’s us. It’s your mom and dad.”

  The pair of them stopped and turned.

  “I’m sorry,” said Nathan. “I think there’s been a mistake.”

  “This is private property,” said the accountant, more unkindly.

  “Nathan, come on now,” said Jerome.

  “What did I tell you,” said Minnie. She was shaking. “They’ve done something to his brain. Just like they did to your brother.”

  Nathan glanced briefly at Vivian, and then back at his mother.

  “Bless you,” he said. “But I’ve never seen you in my life.”

  “We’ve got cameras all along here,” said the accountant with satisfaction.

  “Please, Nathan…”

  Minnie went to embrace him, and as if drawing a concealed weapon, the man in the glasses made an inverted triangle with his fingers and started a high-pitched humming. Nathan did the same.

  “Lord have mercy…” said Jerome.

  “Nathan, you’re coming home. You’ve got to come home with us.”

  Visions of Jesse, and home, interposed themselves between Vivian and the scene that was unfolding.

  The accountant was now blowing through the triangle he had made with his fingers. Nathan held his own triangle at arm’s length from his body. He had a look on his face that was difficult to read in the haze of the street lights but which didn’t seem a million miles from pity.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think there’s been a mistake.”

  “You get going, Nathan,” said the accountant. “I’ll keep them here and get security.”

  “No need for that,” said Nathan.

  “No need? After everything that’s happened? Shiv and Glenn? You think we should let these two crazies loose, poisoning the energy round here?”

  “They’re not crazy, it’s just a mistake. Bless you.”

  “A mistake,” said the accountant. “Get gone, Nathan. I’ll deal with them.”

  “We don’t want any trouble,” said Jerome.

  Nathan backed up.

  “Oh son,” said Minnie, barely audibly.

  He looked at the other man and then turned and disappeared into the shadows of the business park’s topiary. The accountant increased the frequency of his blowing.

  “Easy there,” said Jerome. “We’re going.”

  “No…” said Minnie.

  “We’re going,” Jerome said again. “You don’t need to call anyone, son. It’s a mistake, an honest mistake. We’ll be on our way. You watch.”

  Vivian scanned the parking lot. Nathan was already nowhere to be seen.

  Jerome had to drag his wife by the elbow back to the car. Minnie was in ruins, stumbling and looking over her shoulder and occasionally collapsing completely. “I don’t understand,” she kept saying, and, “What did we do?” Over and over and over.

  The other man was still making his triangle symbol at them, right up until they were all back in the hire car. Jerome started the engine but didn’t go anywhere.

  “I don’t want to leave him,” said Minnie from the back seat.

  “We’re not leaving him,” said Jerome. “I just didn’t want that lummox calling security and getting us locked up for second time in twenty-four hours. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What in hell have they done to him.”

  “What did we do?” said Minnie yet again.

  “It’s not our fault, Minnie.”

  “We brought him up good…” Minnie said. “Why’s he doing this?”

  “We’ll find him,” said Jerome. “We’ll ask him.”

  The accountant wouldn’t stop watching them until they left. Jerome drove them out and made several slow laps of other lots of the business park. Most of them were completely empty, seeing as it was after seven. No cars or people. No Nathan. He could have caught a bus by now and be miles away. Jerome still had the car’s heater on full and the satnav kept trying to firmly direct them back to the same spot they’d just left, and Vivian became sweaty and irritable and desperate. She worried that she shouldn’t have left Jesse at all. She checked her phone again. There was still no word from the hospital. What if Gallardo had returned in her absence, and wheeled Jesse away to see his cousin’s shaman?

  Jerome stopped the car in lot B4 outside Telfer Express Refrigeration and a big billboard of a snowman winking. They had all been silent for the last few minutes, and Jerome’s usual stoic pragmatism seemed to have evaporated. He rested his head on the steering wheel and stayed like that for a moment.

  “We can come back tomorrow,” he said, into the instrument panel.

  Nobody answered.

  Vivian looked in the wing-mirror and thought she saw someone moving on the verge between the lot and the main road. The figure seemed abnormally tall and thin, well over six feet, and drifting among the palms and the yuccas like it was one of them, uprooted and carried by the wind. She turned from the mirror to the verge itself, but there was nothing there.

  While she peered into the wickerwork of shadows, she heard the door on the opposite side of the car opening. At first she thought that Minnie had taken matters into her own hands and gone off charging into the night to look for her son on foot, but Minnie was sitting directly behind her, and there was the sound of someone getting into the car, not out of it, and the car wobbled with a new weight.

  “Sorry about that, everyone.”

  Vivian turned away from the verge and looked in the back. It was Nathan. He was out of breath. He leaned over and pulled his mother into a hug and she just gaped silently and the tears started again. He sat up and looked around the interior of the car and then at Vivian.

  “Who are you?” he said. “Dad? What happened to the Buick?”

  * * *

  They drove out of the city until they found a McDonald’s, halfway to the airport, where Nathan thought it would be safe to pull in. Jerome gave him an incomplete and slightly confused appraisal of the situation. It was forgivable in the circumstances. He kept trying to hug his son with one arm while he drove, snaking his arm at painful-looking angles between the two front seats, and the hire car wove all over the freeway to a riot of horns. Nathan just laughed and told him to keep driving and he’d explain everything once they’d gotten somewhere. He apologised again and again for pretending not to recognise them – they really did have cameras everywhere, as the accountant had said, and the forecourt of Telos’s head office was no place for a family reunion.

  “I shouldn’t really be doing this at all,” he said as they took the off-ramp and passed under the restaurant’s golden arches. He suddenly checked out of the rear windscreen, as if worried they might have been followed. “But just seeing you again. It’s been so long. I hadn’t even realised how long it had been. You looked so sad. I am so sorry, Mom. I can’t believe you came all this way. I can’t believe you found me in the first place.”

  “You’ve got Vivian to thank for that,” said Jerome.

  Minnie had still barely spoken. She just beamed and squeezed her son’s thigh, and sometimes leaned over and squeezed the rest of him.

  They parked up and went inside. Nathan still seemed nervous and kept checking over his shoulder despite all the hugging and backslapping. Jerome went to the counter and ordered while Vivian and the others found a booth. When the food came Nathan looked around again and then bit into his cheeseburger ravenously. He half closed his eyes while he chewed and groaned with pleasure.

  “Oh my God,” he said with his mouth full. “I can’t remember the last time I ate junk like this…”

  Minnie and Jerome laughed, bright-eyed, delighted just to be watching their son eat; proud, too, of him and his youth
and his appetite. Vivian felt suddenly like a third wheel. An intruder in their wholesome family unit. She was envious, too, and not for the first time. When was the last time she’d sat like this with her parents in a McDonald’s? It had definitely happened. Different chain, perhaps. She couldn’t pinpoint the year, but there was a scene very like this somewhere in her memory. She and Jesse had been maybe eight or nine years old. Jesse had dismantled all the free plastic toys that came with the meal, as was his wont, and Vivian had got upset, and their dad had gone and bought them all the same meals again, just to get the toys, and the table had been piled high with burgers and fries that no one wanted to eat.

  Vivian chewed anxiously on the straw of her milkshake and checked her phone under the table. Still nothing.

  Nathan groaned with satisfaction again and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose I owe you an explanation. And an apology. I’m just so sorry. I mean, I know I’ve said it, but… I really am, Mom, Dad. I’m sorry. You must have been worried sick.”

  “Oh Nathan,” said Minnie. “We’re sorry. What did we do wrong?”

  “Wrong?”

  “You running off like that!”

  “What? Oh, Mom, nothing. Nothing. It wasn’t you. Oh, man. Listen. I didn’t join Telos for real.” He realised how loudly he was speaking, stopped, looked round the restaurant. Someone came past with a tray of drinks and he waited until they’d gone before he continued. “I was worried about Joy.”

  “Joy?” said Vivian.

  “His girlfriend,” said Minnie.

  “She signed up before me,” said Nathan. “Went crazy for it. Moved to Mount Hookey, stopped answering her phone. So I went after her. Dad, I remember you saying how weird it was up there. Joy, she was… just gone. I don’t know. So hard to keep things in perspective when everyone’s telling you what you thought was the real world isn’t the real world. I very nearly got sucked in myself. I mean, I did get sucked in. But the thing that kept me sane was I started looking at the whole thing from a legal point of view.” He turned to Vivian. “I’m a lawyer, by the way.”