‘Ellen, there are just two of them, right?’
I took her a moment or two to respond, then she nodded. ‘Two,’ she said. Her voice was strained from lack of use, and her throat was dry. I gave her the water bottle and she took a small sip from the straw.
‘Did they hurt you?’
She shook her head, then began to cry again. I held her, then moved away as Walter put her sweater over her arms and drew it down. He put an arm around her shoulders and helped her from the bed, but her legs collapsed almost immediately.
‘It’s okay, honey,’ he said. ‘We’ll get you down.’
We were about to make our way down the stairs when, from below, there came the sound of the front door opening.
My stomach tightened. We listened for a moment or two, but no sound came from the stairs. I indicated to Walter that he should leave Ellen. If we tried to move her again, we would alert whoever was downstairs. She made a tiny, mewing sound as he drew away from her and tried to hold him back, but he kissed her gently on the cheek to reassure her, then followed me. The front door hung open, and snow billowed in from the darkness beyond. As we approached the final steps, a shadow moved in the kitchen to my right. I turned and put a linger to my lips.
A figure moved across the doorway, not looking in our direction. It was the young man I had met on my first visit to the house: Caspar, the man I believed to be Caleb’s son. I swallowed hard and moved forwards, my hand up to let Walter know that he should hang back near the front door. I counted three and stepped into the kitchen, my gun raised and pointing to my left.
The kitchen was empty, but the connecting door into the dining room was now open. I sprang back to warn Walter, just in time to see a shape move behind him and a knife gleam in the dimness. He saw the look on my face and was already moving when the knife came down and caught him in the left shoulder, causing his back to arch and his mouth to contort in pain. He brought his gun across his body and fired beneath his left arm, but the knife rose and caught him again, this time in a slashing movement across his back as he fell. Caspar pushed Walter hard from behind, and his head impacted with a loud smack on the end of the bannisters. He fell to his hands and knees, blood running down his face and his eyes heavy and dazed.
The young man turned to me now, with the knife held blade down in his right hand. There was a fresh bullet wound at his hip, staining his filthy chinos a deep red, but he did not seem to notice the pain. Instead, he curled himself and hurled his body down the hallway towards me. His mouth was open, his teeth were bared, and the knife was ready to strike.
I shot him in the chest as he ran and he stopped hard, his body teetering on the soles of his shoes. He put a hand to the wound and examined the blood, as if only then would he believe that he had been shot. He looked at me one more time, cocked his head to one side, and then made as if to move at me again. I fired a second shot. This time, the bullet took him straight through the heart and he fell back onto the bare floor, his head coming to rest close to where Walter was trying to raise himself onto his hands and knees. I think he was dead before he hit the ground. Above me, I heard Ellen cry out, ‘Daddy,’ and saw her appear at the top of the stairs, dragging herself across the steps towards him.
Ellen’s cry saved my life. As I turned to look at her, I heard a whistling sound at my back and saw a shadow move on the floor ahead of me. Something caught me a painful glancing blow to the shoulder, missing my head by inches, then the blade end of a spade swept by me. I grabbed at the wooden handle with my left hand, striking back with my right hand at the same time. I felt it connect with a jaw, then used the momentum of the spade to pull the man behind me forwards, using my right foot to trip him as he moved. He stumbled ahead of me, then fell to his knees. He stayed on all fours for a couple of seconds, then rose up and turned to face me, framed against the night by the open door behind him.
And I knew that this, at last, was Caleb Kyle. He was no longer posing as twisted and arthritic but stood tall and straight, his thin, wiry limbs encased in blue denims and a blue shirt. He was an old man, but I felt his strength, his rage, his capacity to inflict pain and hurt, as almost a physical thing. It seemed to radiate from him like heat and the gun in my hand wavered with the impact. His eyes were fierce and glowed with a deep, red fire, and I thought instinctively of Billy Purdue. I thought too of the young women left dangling from a tree and the pain they had endured at his hands, and of my grandfather, forever haunted by his dream of this man. Whatever pain Caleb himself had endured, he had returned it a hundredfold on the world around him.
Caleb looked at his dead boy lying close by his feet, then at me, and the intensity of his hatred rocked me on my heels. His eyes shone with a deep, malevolent intelligence. He had manipulated us all, evading capture for decades, and had almost succeeded in evading us again, but it had cost his son his life. Whatever happened after, some small measure of justice had been achieved for those girls left hanging from a tree, and for Judith Mundy, who had died, brutalised and alone, somewhere in the Great North Woods.
‘No,’ said Caleb. ‘No.’
It was only then that I began to realise why he had wanted so badly to beget a boy. I think if Judith Mundy had given birth to a daughter then his hatred would have led him to kill the child, and try again for a son. He wanted what so many men wanted: to see himself replicated upon the earth, to see the best part of himself live on beyond him. Except, in Caleb’s case, that which he desired to see continue was foul and vicious and would have consumed lives just as its father had before it.
Caleb moved forwards a step and I cocked the pistol. ‘Back up,’ I said. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them.’
He shook his head, but moved back a few steps, his hands held out from his sides. He didn’t look at me but kept his eyes fixed on his dead son. I advanced and stood beside Walter, who had raised himself to a sitting position, his uninjured right shoulder against the wall and blood streaking his face. He held his gun loosely in his right hand, but he was unable to focus and was obviously in severe pain. I wasn’t doing so good myself. By now, Ellen was halfway down the stairs, but I held up a hand and told her to stay back. I didn’t want her anywhere near this man. She stopped moving, but I could hear her crying.
In front of me, Caleb spoke again. ‘You’ll die for what you did to him,’ he spat. His attention was now fully directed at me. ‘I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands, then I’ll fuck the slut to death and leave the body in the woods for winter feed.’
I didn’t reply to his taunt. ‘Keep moving back, old man,’ I said. I didn’t want to be with him in an enclosed space; not in the hallway, not on the porch. He was dangerous. I knew that, even with the gun in my hand.
He retreated back again, then slowly moved down the steps until he stood in the yard, snow falling on his exposed head and his outstretched arms, light from the front room gilding him slightly. His hands were held two feet away from his side and I could see the butt of a gun protruding from the belt of his pants.
‘Turn around,’ I said.
He didn’t move.
‘Turn around or I’ll shoot you in the legs.’ I couldn’t kill him, not yet.
He glared at me, then turned to his right.
‘Reach around. Use your thumb and forefinger to take the butt of the gun, then throw it on the ground.’
He did as I told him, tossing the gun into some pruned rosebushes below the porch.
‘Now turn back again.’
He turned.
‘You’re him, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘You’re Caleb Kyle.’
He smiled, a grey, wintry thing like a blight on the living organisms around him. ‘It’s just a name, boy. Caleb Kyle is as good as any other.’ He spat again. ‘You afeared yet?’
‘You’re an old man,’ I replied. ‘It’s you who should be afraid. This world will judge you harshly, but not as harshly as the next.’
He opened his mouth, and the saliva made a clicking sound at the back of his teeth.
‘Your granddaddy was afeared of me,’ he said. ‘You look the spit of him. You look afeared.’
I didn’t reply. Instead, I tossed my head in the direction of the dead man on the floor behind me. ‘Your dead boy, was his mother Judith Mundy?’
He bared his teeth at me and made as if to move in my direction, and I fired a shot into the ground in front of him. It kicked up a flurry of dirt and snow, and brought him to a halt.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Answer me: did you take Judith Mundy?’
‘I swear I’ll see you dead,’ he hissed. He stared beyond me to where his son lay, the muscles in his jaw tightening as he gritted his teeth against the pain he felt. He looked like some strange, ancient demon, the tendons on his neck standing out like cables, his teeth long and yellowed. ‘I took it to breed on, after I thought my other boy was lost to me, lost down a shithouse sewer.’
‘It’. ‘Is she dead?’
‘Don’t see how it’s any of your business, but it bled to death after it had the boy. I let it bleed. It weren’t of no account anyhow.’
‘Now you’re back.’
‘I came back for my boy, the boy I thought was lost to me, the boy that bitch kept from me, the boy all them bitches and sonsofbitches kept from me.’
‘And you killed them all.’
He nodded proudly. ‘Them as I could find.’
‘And Gary Chute, the forestry worker?’
‘He had no business being there,’ he said. ‘I don’t spare them that cross my path.’
‘And your own grandson?’
His eyes flickered for a moment, and there was something close to regret in them. ‘It was a mistake. He got in the way.’ Then: ‘He was a sickly one. He wouldn’t have survived anyhow, not where we were going.’
‘You’ve got nowhere to go, old man. They’re taking back their forest. You can’t kill every man who comes in.’
‘I know places. There are always places a man can go.’
‘No, not anymore. There’s only one place you’re going.’
Behind me, I heard a movement on the stairs. Ellen had ignored me and gone to Walter. I guess I knew she would.
Caleb looked over my shoulder at her. ‘She your’n?’
‘No.’
‘Shit,’ he drawled. ‘I saw you, and I saw your granddaddy in you, but my eyes must have deceived me when I saw you in her.’
‘And were you going to “breed on her” too?’
He shook his head. ‘She was for the boy. For both my boys. Fuck you, mister. Fuck you for what you did to my boy.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘To hell with you.’ I raised the gun and pointed it at his head.
Behind me, I heard Walter groan and Ellen shouted ‘Bird’ in her strange, cracked voice. Something cold touched the back of my head. Billy Purdue’s voice said: ‘Your finger moves on that trigger, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.’
I hesitated for an instant, then released my grip on the trigger and moved my finger away from the guard, raising the gun to show him that I had done so.
‘You know what to do with it,’ he said.
I slipped the safety and threw the gun onto the porch.
‘Down on your knees,’ he said.
The pain in my side was almost unbearable, but I knelt and he moved around me, Walter’s gun tucked into the waistband of his pants and a Remington shotgun in his hands. He stepped back so that he could keep us both in view.
Caleb Kyle looked upon him with admiration. After all that had happened, after all that he had done, his son had come back to him.
‘Kill him, boy,’ said Caleb. ‘He killed your half-brother, shot him like a dog. He was kin to you. Blood calls for blood, you know that.’
Billy’s face was a mass of confusion and harsh, conflicting emotions. The shotgun moved towards me. ‘Is that true? Was he kin to me?’ he said, unconsciously adopting the phrasing of the older man.
I didn’t reply. His nostrils flared and he brought the butt of the gun down in a glancing blow across my head. I fell forwards and from in front of me I heard Caleb laugh. ‘That’s it boy, kill the sonofabitch.’ Then his laughter subsided and, dazed as I was, I could see him move forwards a step.
‘I came back for you, son. Me and your brother, we came back to find you. We heard you was lookin’. We heard about the man that you hired to find me. Your momma hid you away from me, but I came lookin’ for you and now the lamb that was lost is found again.’
‘You?’ said Billy, in a soft, bewildered tone I had never heard from him before. ‘You’re my daddy?’
‘I’m your daddy,’ said Caleb, and he smiled. ‘Now you finish him off for what he did to your brother, the brother you never got to meet. You kill him for what he did to Caspar.’
I rose to my knees, my knuckles supporting my weight, and spoke: ‘Ask him what he did, Billy. Ask him what happened to Rita and Donald.’
Caleb Kyle’s eyes glittered brightly, and spittle shot from his mouth. ‘You shut up, mister. Your lies ain’t going to keep me from my boy.’
‘Ask him, Billy. Ask him where Meade Payne is. Ask him how Cheryl Lansing died, and her daughter-in-law, and her little granddaughters. You ask him, Billy.’
Caleb sprang onto the steps and his right foot kicked me hard in the mouth. I felt teeth break, and my mouth filled with pain and blood. I saw the foot come forward again.
‘Stop,’ said Billy. ‘Stop it. Let him be.’ I looked up and the pain in my mouth seemed as nothing to the agony etched in Billy Purdue’s face. A lifetime’s hurt burned in his eyes; a lifetime of abandonment, of loss, of fighting against a world that was always going to beat him in the end, of trying to live a life that had no past and no future, only a grinding, painful present. Now a veil had been pulled back, giving him a glimpse of what might have been, of what might still be. His father had come back for him, and all of the things he had done, all of the hurt this man had inflicted, he had done for love of his son.
‘Kill him, Billy, and be done with it,’ said Caleb, but Billy did not move, did not look at either of us, but stared into a place deep inside himself, where all that he had ever feared and all that he had ever wanted to be now twisted and coiled over each other.
‘Kill him, ’ hissed the old man, and Billy raised his gun. ‘You do as you’re told, boy. You listen to me. I’m your daddy.’
And in Billy Purdue’s eyes, something died. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You ain’t nothin’ to me.’
The shotgun roared and the barrel bucked in his hands. Caleb Kyle hunched over and tumbled back as if he had been struck hard in the pit of his stomach, except now there was only a dark, spreading stain in which viscera shone and intestines protruded like hydra heads. He fell over and lay on his back, his hands raised to try to cover the hole at the centre of his being, and then, slowly and agonisingly, he hauled himself to his knees and stared at Billy Purdue. His mouth hung open and blood bubbled over his lips. His face was filled with hurt and incomprehension. After all that he had done, after all that he had endured, his own boy had turned on him.
I heard the sound of another shell being jacked into the gun, saw Caleb Kyle’s eyes widen, and then his face disappeared and a warm, red hand obscured my vision, winter light dancing through it like thoughts through the mind of God.
From Dark Hollow the sound of sirens came, carrying on the cold air like the howls of wounded animals. It was 12.05 a.m., on December twelfth.
My wife and child had been dead for exactly one year.
Epilogue
It is December twentieth, and soon Christmas will be here. Scarborough is a place of ice cream fields and sugar-frosted trees, with coloured illuminations at the windows of the houses and holly wreaths on the doors. I have cut a fir in the yard, one of a crop my grandfather had planted in the year that he died, and have placed it in the front room of the house. I will add small white lights to it on Christmas Eve, as an act of remembrance for my child, so that if she is watching from the darkness among the trees she may
see the lights and know that I am thinking of her.
Above the fireplace, there is a card from Walter and Lee and a small, gift-wrapped box from Ellen. Next to it is a postcard from the Dominican Republic, unsigned but with a message written by two different hands: ‘This communicating of a man’s self to his friends works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves.’ The quotation is not attributed. I will call them when they return, when the interest in the events that took place in Dark Hollow has begun to recede.
Finally, there is a notelet. I recognised the handwriting on the envelope when it arrived, and felt a kind of wrench in my heart as I opened it. The message said only: ‘Call me when you can.’ Beneath this line, she had written her home number and the number of her parents’ house. She had signed it. ‘Love, Rachel.’
I sit by my window and I think again of the winter dead, and of Willeford. He had been found two days before, and I felt the news of his loss with a sharp, savage pain. For a time, after he disappeared, I had half suspected the old detective. I had done him an injustice, and I think, in a way, I may have brought death upon him. His body had been buried in a shallow grave at the back of his property. According to Ellis Howard, he had been tortured before he died, but they had no indication of who might have been responsible. It could have been Stritch, I thought, or it could have been some of Tony Celli’s crew, but I think, deep down, that he died because of the old man, Caleb Kyle, and I guessed that maybe it was Caleb’s son Caspar who had killed him.
Willeford’s name had been attached to the search for Billy Purdue’s parents. It was his number that the old woman, Mrs Schneider, had called. If she could find him, then so could Caleb, and Caleb would have wanted to know all that Willeford knew. I hoped that the alcohol had dulled the pain, had made him a little less frightened as the end came. I hoped that he had told all that he knew as quickly as he could, but I knew that was probably a false hope. There had been something of the old honour, the old courage, about Willeford. He would not have given up the boy so easily. I had a vision of him, sitting in the Sail Loft, his whiskey and his beer chaser before him, an old man adrift in the present. He thought that it was progress that would spell his end, not some demon from the past that he had raised by doing a good turn for a lost, troubled young man.
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