The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  When I went back into Faulkner’s preparation room, Angel had struggled to his feet and stood, slightly hunched over, at the wall, supporting himself with his hands, his injured leg raised slightly. His back had begun to bleed again.

  ‘You think you can make it up?’

  He nodded. I took his left arm, draped it around my shoulder, then held him carefully around the waist. Slowly, and with the agony etched clearly on his face, he made his way up the stone steps. He was almost at the top when his foot slipped and his back banged against the wall. It left a bright red streak as he lost consciousness, and I had to carry him the rest of the way. The stairs ended in a kind of alcove where a steel door stood open. A sheet of thick plastic lay beside it, slapping in the wind. Beside it, a shape lay rolled up in a second sheet stained inside with blood. Part of Voisine’s face was exposed. I recalled Pudd’s anger at the wounds inflicted by Angel on his associate; it looked like Voisine had since died from them.

  Angel regained consciousness as I laid him, facedown, on the floor. I removed the .38 from my holster and pressed it into his hand.

  ‘You killed Voisine.’

  His eyes focused blearily on me. ‘Good. Can I piss on his grave?’

  ‘I’ll make some calls, see what I can do.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To find Faulkner.’

  ‘You find him, you tell him I said “hi” before you kill him.’

  The rain fell relentlessly and the ground had turned to mud as I stepped carefully onto the grass. Some fifty feet behind me, the woman still lay where she had fallen and no sound came from inside Mr. Pudd’s spider house. The lighthouse was at my back, and in front of me a grass verge sloped down to the boathouse. There, in a sheltered inlet, was a small floating jetty. The door to the boathouse stood open and a boat bobbed at the end of the concrete ramp. It was a little Cape Craft runabout, with an Evinrude outboard. A figure stood on the deck, pouring diesel into the engine’s fuel hatch. The rain fell on its bare skull, on the long white hair plastered to its face and shoulders, on its black coat and black leather shoes. It must have sensed me approaching, for it looked up, the diesel spilling over the deck as its concentration lapsed.

  And it smiled.

  ‘Hello, sinner,’ said the Reverend Faulkner. He went for the revolver tucked into his waistband and I fired once, the can falling from his hands as he stumbled back, his shattered right arm now hanging loosely by his side. The gun dropped from his fingers to the deck of the boat, but the smile stayed where it was, trembling slightly with the pain of the wound. I fired twice more and holed the outboard. Diesel sprayed from the ruptured tank.

  He was, I guessed, about six feet tall, with long, white, tapering fingers and pale, elongated features. In the light from the cabin his eyes were a deep, dark blue, verging on black. His nose was exceptionally long and thin and his Cupid’s bow was tiny, his almost lipless mouth seeming to begin just where his nostrils ended. His neck was scrawny and striated, and loose flesh hung in a wattle from beneath his chin.

  At my feet lay a suitcase and a battered waterproof emergency pack. I kicked at it once.

  ‘Going somewhere, Reverend?’ I asked.

  He ignored the question.

  ‘How did you find us, sinner?’

  ‘The Traveling Man led me here.’

  The old man shook his head.

  ‘An interesting individual. I was sorry when you killed him.’

  ‘You were the only one. Your daughter’s gone, Reverend, your son too. It’s over.’

  The old man spat into the sea and his eyes looked over my shoulder to where the woman lay dead in the rain. He betrayed no emotion.

  ‘Step off the boat. You’re going to stand trial for the deaths of your flock, for the killing of Jack Mercier and his wife and friends, for the murders of Curtis and Grace Peltier. You’re going to answer for them all.’

  He shook his head. ‘I have nothing to answer for. The Lord did not send demons to kill the firstborn of Egypt, Mr. Parker; he sent angels. We were angels engaged in the Lord’s work, harvesting the sinners.’

  ‘Killing women and children doesn’t sound like God’s work.’

  Blood dripped from his fingers onto the timbers of the boat. Gently, he raised his injured arm, seemingly oblivious to the pain, and showed me the blood on his hand. ‘But the Lord kills women and children every day,’ he said. ‘He took your wife and child. If he believed that they were worthy of salvation, then they would still be alive.’

  My hand tightened on the gun and I felt the trigger shift slightly.

  ‘God didn’t kill my wife and child. A man tore them apart, a sick, violent man encouraged by you.’

  ‘He didn’t need encouragement in his work. He merely required a framework for his ideals, an added dimension.’

  He didn’t say anything more for some time. Instead he seemed to examine me, his head to one side.

  ‘You see them, don’t you?’ he asked at last.

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘You think you’re the only one?’ That smile came again. ‘I see them too. They talk to me. They tell me things. They’re waiting for you, sinner, all of them. You think it ended with their deaths? It did not: they are all waiting for you.’

  He leaned forward conspiratorially.

  ‘And they fuck your whore while they wait,’ he hissed. ‘They fuck both your whores.’

  I was only a finger’s pressure away from killing him. When I breathed out and felt the trigger move forward, he seemed almost disappointed.

  ‘You’re a liar, Faulkner,’ I said. ‘Wherever my wife and child are, they’re safe from you and all your kind. Now, for the last time, step off the boat.’

  He still made no move.

  ‘No earthly court will judge me, sinner. God will be my judge.’

  ‘Eventually,’ I replied.

  ‘Good-bye, sinner,’ said the Reverend Faulkner, and something struck me hard in the back, forcing me to my knees. A brown shoe stamped down hard on my fingers and the gun went off, sending a bullet into the jetty before it was kicked away from me and into the sea. Then a huge weight seemed to fall upon me and my face was pressed hard into the mud. There were knees on my upper back, forcing the air from my lungs as my mouth and nostrils filled with dirt. I dug my toes into the soft earth, pressed my left arm against the ground, and pushed upward as hard as I could, striking back with my right hand. I felt the blow connect and the weight on my back eased slightly. I tried to throw it off completely as I turned but hands closed on my neck and a knee struck me hard in the groin. I was forced flat on my back and found myself looking into the face of hell.

  Mr. Pudd’s features had swollen from the spider bites. His lips were huge and purple, as if they had been packed with collagen. The swelling had almost closed his nostrils, so he was forced to breath heavily through his mouth, his distended tongue hanging over his teeth. One eye was almost closed while the other had grown to twice its original size, so that it seemed about to burst. It was gray-white and partially filled with blood where the capillaries had ruptured. There were strands of silvery cobweb in his hair, and a black spider had become trapped between his shirt collar and his tumid neck, its legs flailing helplessly as it bit at him. I struck at his arms but he maintained his grip. Blood and saliva oozed from his mouth and dripped onto his chin as I reached up and dug the fingers of my right hand into his face, trying to strike at his injured eye.

  From behind me, I heard the sound of the boat’s engine starting and Pudd’s grip shifted as his thumbs tried to crush my Adam’s apple. I was tearing at his hands with my fingers, the pressure in my head increasing as my windpipe was slowly constricted. The outboard made a spluttering sound as it pulled away from the jetty, but I didn’t care. My ears were filled with the roaring in my head and the labored, spit-flecked breaths of the man who was killing me. I felt a burning pain behind my eyes, a numbness spreading from my fingers. Desperately I raked at his face, but I was losing the fe
eling in my hands and my vision was blurring.

  Then the top of Mr. Pudd’s head exploded, showering me with blood and gray matter. He stayed upright for a moment, his jaw slackening and his ears and nose bleeding, then tumbled sideways into the mud. The pressure eased on my throat and I drew in long, painful rattling breaths as I kicked Pudd’s body away from me. I got to my knees and spat dirt onto the ground.

  At the top of the grass verge, Angel lay on his stomach, the .38 outstretched before him in his right hand while the left used the plastic sheet to shield his injured back. I looked to the sea as the sound came to me of the runabout moving away on the dark, choppy waters. It was only thirty or forty feet from the shore, the white froth churning at the bow as Faulkner stood at the wheel, his white face contorted with rage and grief.

  The engine coughed, then died.

  We stood facing each other across the waves, the rain falling on our heads, on the bodies behind me, on the dark waters of the bay.

  ‘I’ll see you damned, sinner.’

  He raised the gun with his left hand and fired. The first shot was wild, impacting with a whine on the rocks behind me. He swayed slightly with the movement of the boat beneath him, aimed, and fired again. This time the bullet tugged at the sleeve of my coat but there was no impact. It passed straight through the wool, leaving only a faint smell of burning in its wake. The next two shots hissed through the damp air close to my head as I knelt down and flipped open the emergency pack.

  The flare was a Helly-Hanson, and it felt good in my hand. I thought of Grace and Curtis, and the patch of black tape covering James Jessop’s ruined eye. I thought of Susan, the beauty of her on the first day we met, the smell of pecans on her breath. I thought of Jennifer, the feel of her blond hair against mine, the sound of her breathing as she slept.

  Another shot came, this time missing by a good three feet. I pointed at the waves and imagined the incandescent glow spreading across the water as the flare shot along the surface; the flash of pink-and-blue flame as the diesel fuel ignited, bursting from the waves and moving toward the man with the gun; the explosion of the outboard and then the flames scouring the deck, engulfing the figure in their midst. The heat would sear my face and the sea would be lit with red and gold, and the old man would travel, wreathed in fire, from this world to the next.

  I tightened my finger on the trigger.

  Click.

  Out upon the waves, Faulkner rocked slightly as the hammer fell upon the empty chamber of his revolver. He tried to fire again.

  Click.

  I walked to the edge of the water and raised the flare gun. Once more the hollow sound came, yet the old man seemed neither to notice nor to care. The barrel of the gun followed me as I moved, as if with each pull of the trigger the empty weapon launched a fresh volley of lead that tore through my body and brought me, inch by inch, closer to death.

  Click.

  For an instant, the flare was level with him, its thick muzzle centered on his body, and I saw the satisfaction on his face. He would die, but I would damn myself in his destruction, and I would become like him.

  Click.

  Then the muzzle rose until the gun was above my head, pointing at the heavens.

  ‘No!’ cried Faulkner. ‘No!’

  I pulled the trigger and the flare shot forth, shedding bright light on the dark waves, turning the rain to falling silver and gold, the old man screaming in rage as a new star was born in the void.

  I went to Angel. A smear of blood lay across the width of his plastic shield, where it had fallen against his wound. Carefully, I lifted it away so that it would not stick. The gun was still in his hand and his eyes were open, watching the figure out on the water.

  ‘He should have burned,’ he said.

  ‘He will burn,’ I replied.

  And I held him until they came for us.

  The Search for Sanctuary

  Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier

  ‘Truth exists,’ wrote the painter Georges Braque. ‘Only lies are invented.’ Somewhere, the truth about the Aroostook Baptists remains to be discovered and written at last. All that I have tried to do is to provide a context for what occurred: the hopes that inspired the undertaking, the emotions that undermined it, and the final actions that swept it away.

  In August 1964, letters were sent to relatives of each of the families who had joined Faulkner more than a year earlier. Each letter was written by the male or female parent of the family involved. Lyall Kellog wrote his family’s letter; it was posted from Fairbanks, Alaska. Katherine Cornish’s letter came from Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Frida Perrson’s from Rochester, Minnesota; and Frank Jessop’s, which assured his family that all was well with his wife and children, from Porterville, California. Each letter was undated, contained general good wishes, and added little more than that the Aroostock Baptists were no more and the families involved had been chosen to send out the Reverend Faulkner’s message to the world like the missionaries of old. Few of the relatives involved were particularly concerned. Only Lena Myers, Elizabeth Jessop’s sister, persisted in the belief that something might have happened to her sister and her family. In 1969, with the permission of the landowner, she engaged a private firm of contractors to excavate sections of land on the site of the Eagle Lake community. The search revealed nothing. In 1970, Lena Myers died as a result of injuries received in a hit-and-run accident in Kennebec, Maine. No one has ever been charged in connection with her death.

  No trace of the families has ever been found in any of the towns from which their letters originated. Their names have never been recorded. No descendants have been discovered. No further contact was ever made by them.

  The truth, I feel certain, lies buried.

  Epilogue

  This is a honeycomb world, each hollow linked to the next, each life inextricably intertwined with the lives of others. The loss of even one reverberates through the whole, altering the balance, changing the nature of existence in tiny, imperceptible ways.

  I find myself returning again and again to a woman named Tante Marie Aguillard, her impossibly tiny child’s voice coming to me from out of her immense form. I see her lying on a mountain of pillows in a warm, dark room in western Louisiana, the smell of the Atchafalaya drifting through the house; a shining, black shadow among shifting forms, heedless of the boundaries between the natural and the man-made as one world melts into another. She takes my hand and talks to me of my lost wife and child. They call to her and tell her of the man who took their lives.

  She has no need of light; her blindness is less an impediment than an aid to a deeper, more meaningful perception. Sight would be a distraction for her strange, wandering consciousness, for her intense, fearless compassion. She feels for them all: the lost, the vanished, the dispossessed, the frightened, suffering souls who have been violently wrenched from this life and can find no rest in their world within worlds. She reaches out to them, comforting them in their final moments so they will not die alone, so they will not be afraid as they pass from light into dark.

  And when the Traveling Man, the dark angel, comes for her, she reaches out in turn to me, and I am with her as she dies.

  Tante Marie knew the nature of this world. She roamed through it, saw it for what it was, and understood her place in it, her responsibility to those who dwelt within it and beyond. Now, slowly, I too have begun to understand, to recognize a duty to the rest, to those whom I have never known as much as to those whom I have loved. The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another’s pain as one’s own, and to act to take that pain away. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness. I am a flawed man, with a violent past that will not be denied, but I will not allow innocent people to suffer when it is within my power to help them.

  I will not turn my back on them.

  I will not walk away.

  And if, in doing these things, I can make some amends, some recompense, for the things that I
have done and for all that I have failed to do, then that will be my consolation.

  For reparation is the shadow cast by salvation.

  I have faith in some better world beyond this one. I know that my wife and child dwell within it, for I have seen them. I know that they are safe now from the dark angels and that wherever may dwell Faulkner and Pudd and the countless others who wanted to turn life to death, they are far, far from Susan and Jennifer, and they can never touch them again.

  There is rain tonight in Boston, and the glass of the window is anatomized with intricate veins traced across its surface. I wake, my knuckle still sore from the treated bite, and turn gently to feel her move close beside me. Her hand touches my neck and I know somehow that, while I have been asleep, she has been watching me in the darkness, waiting for the moment to arrive.

  But I am tired, and as my eyes close again,

  I am standing at the edge of the forest, and the air is filled with the howling of the hybrids. Behind me, the trees reach out to one another, and when they touch, they make a sound like children whispering. And as I listen, something moves in the shadows before me.

  ‘Bird?’

  Her hand is warm upon me, yet my skin is cold. I want to stay with her, but

  I am drawn away again, for the darkness is calling me and the shape still moves through the trees. Slowly, the boy emerges, the black tape masking the lens of his glasses, his skin pale white. I try to walk to him but I cannot raise my feet. Behind him, other figures shift but they are walking away from us, disappearing into the forest, and soon he will join them. The wooden board has been discarded but the burn marks from the rope remain visible at the sides of his neck. He says nothing but stands watching me for a long, long time, one hand gripping the bark of the yellow birch beside him, until, at last, he too begins to recede,