The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  As he concluded, something white moved to my right. The bars of the cell were almost flush with my line of sight, so that the hand that emerged appeared to have passed through a solid wall of steel. The long white fingers probed at the air, twitching and turning, as if they were gifted with the sense not only of touch, but of sight and sound as well.

  And then the voice came, like iron filings falling on paper.

  ‘Parker,’ it said. ‘You’ve come.’

  Slowly, I walked toward the cell and saw the moisture on the walls. The droplets glittered in the artificial light, gleaming like thousands of small silver eyes. A smell of damp arose from the cell and from the man who stood before me.

  He was smaller than I remembered him, and his long white hair had been cut back close to his skull, but the eyes still burned with that same strange intensity. He remained horribly thin: he had not put on weight, as some inmates do when they switch to a diet of prison food. It took me a moment to realize why.

  Despite the cold in the cell, Faulkner was giving off waves of heat. He should have been burning up, his face feverish, his body wracked with tremors, but instead there was no trace of sweat on his face, and no sign of discomfort. His skin was dry as paper, so that it seemed he was on the verge of igniting from within, and the flames that emerged would consume him and leave him as burnt ash.

  ‘Come closer,’ he said.

  Beside me, the guard shook his head.

  ‘I’m good,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you afraid of me, sinner?’

  ‘Not unless you can pass through steel.’ My words brought back that image of the hand seemingly materializing in the air and I heard myself swallow hard.

  ‘No,’ said the old man. ‘I have no need of parlor tricks. I’ll be out of here, soon enough.’

  ‘You think?’

  He leaned forward and pressed his face against the cold bars.

  ‘I know.’

  He smiled and his pale tongue emerged from his mouth and licked at his dry lips.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To talk.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Life. Death. Life after death; or, if you prefer, the death after life. Do they still come to you, Parker? The lost ones, the dead, do you still see them? I do. They come to me.’ He smiled and drew in a long breath that seemed to catch in his throat, as if he were in the early stages of sexual excitement. ‘So many of them. They ask after you, the ones whom you have despatched. They want to know when you’re going to join them. They have plans for you. I tell them: soon. He’ll be with you real soon.’

  I didn’t respond to the taunts. Instead, I asked him why he had cut himself. He held his scarred arms up before me and looked at them, almost in surprise.

  ‘Perhaps I wanted to cheat them of their vengeance,’ he replied.

  ‘You didn’t do a very good job.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion. I’m no longer in that place, that modern hell. I have contact with others.’ His eyes shone brightly. ‘I may even be able to save some lost souls.’

  ‘You have anyone in mind?’

  Faulkner laughed softly. ‘Not you, sinner, that is a certainty. You are beyond salvation.’

  ‘Yet you asked to see me.’

  The smile faded, then died.

  ‘I have an offer for you.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to bargain with.’

  ‘I have your woman,’ came that low, parched voice. ‘I can bargain with her.’

  I made no move toward him, yet he stepped back suddenly from the bars, as if the force of my stare had forced him to do so, like a shove to the chest.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I’m offering you the safety of your woman, and your unborn child. I’m offering you a life untroubled by fear of retribution.’

  ‘Old man, your fight now is with the state. You’d better save your bargains for the court. And if you mention those close to me again, I’ll—’

  ‘You’ll what?’ he mocked. ‘Kill me? You had your chance, and it won’t come again. And my fight is not only with the state. Don’t you remember: you killed my children, my family, you and your deviant colleague. What did you do to the man who killed your child, Parker? Didn’t you hunt him down? Didn’t you kill him like a mad dog? Why should you expect me to respond any differently to the death of my children? Or is there one rule for you, and another for the rest of humanity?’ He sighed theatrically. ‘But I am not like you. I am not a killer.’

  ‘What do you want, old man?’

  ‘I want you to withdraw from the trial.’

  I waited a heartbeat.

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  He shrugged. ‘Then I can’t be held responsible for the actions that may be taken against you, or them. Not by me, of course: despite my natural animosity toward you, I have no intention of inflicting harm upon you or those close to you. I have never hurt anybody in my life and have no intention of starting now. But there may be others who would take up my cause, unless it was made clear to them that I wished no such thing.’

  I turned to the guard. ‘You hearing this?’

  He nodded, but Faulkner merely turned his gaze impassively upon the guard. ‘I am merely offering to plead for no retaliation against you, but in any case Mr. Anson here is hardly in a position to be of assistance. He’s fucking a little whore behind his wife’s back. Worse, behind her parents’ back. What is she, Mr. Anson, fifteen? The law frowns upon rapists, statutory or otherwise.’

  ‘You fuck!’ Anson surged toward the bars, but I caught his arm. He spun at me, and I thought for a moment he was about to strike me, but he restrained himself and shook my hand off. I looked to my right and saw Anson’s colleagues approaching. He raised his hand to let them know that he was okay, and they stopped in their tracks.

  ‘I thought you didn’t go in for parlor tricks,’ I said.

  ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’ he whispered. ‘The Shadow knows!’ He laughed softly. ‘Let me go, sinner. Walk away, and I will do likewise. I am innocent of the accusations leveled against me.’

  ‘This meeting is over.’

  ‘No, it has only just begun. Do you remember what our mutual friend said before he died, sinner? Do you remember the words that the Traveling Man spoke?’

  I didn’t reply. There was much about Faulkner that I despised, and much that I did not understand, but his awareness of events about which he could not possibly know disturbed me more than anything else. Somehow, in some way that I was unable to recognize, he had inspired the man who killed Susan and Jennifer, confirming him on the path that he had chosen, a path that had led him at last to our door.

  ‘Didn’t he tell you about hell? That this was hell, and we were in it? He was misguided in many ways, a flawed, unhappy man, but about that much he was correct. This is hell. When the rebel angels fell, this was the place to which they were consigned. They were blighted, their beauty taken away, and left to wander here. Don’t you fear the dark angels, Parker? You should. They know of you, and soon they will start to move against you. What you’ve faced until now is as nothing compared to what is approaching. Before them I am insignificant, a foot soldier sent ahead to prepare the way. The things that are coming for you are not even human.’

  ‘You’re insane.’

  ‘No,’ whispered Faulkner. ‘I am damned for failure, but you will be damned alongside me for your complicity in that failure. They will damn you. Already they wait.’

  I shook my head. Anson, the other guards, even the prison bars and walls seemed to melt away. There was only the old man and I, suspended. There was sweat on my face, a product of the heat he exuded. It was as if I had caught some terrible fever from him.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what he said to me when he came? Don’t you care about the discussions that led to the deaths of your wife and your little girl? Somewhere deep inside of yourself, don’t you want to know of what we spoke?’

  I cleared my throat.
The words, when they came, felt coated in nails.

  ‘You didn’t even know them.’

  He laughed. ‘I didn’t need to know them. But you . . . Oh, we spoke of you. Through him, I came to understand you in ways that you didn’t even understand yourself. I am glad, in a way, that we had this opportunity to meet, although . . .’

  His face darkened.

  ‘We have both paid a high price for the inter-twining of our lives. Divorce yourself now, from all of this, and there will be no more conflict between us. But continue on this road and I will be unable to stop what may occur.’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  I moved to walk away, but my struggle with Anson had brought me within Faulkner’s reach. His hand reached out and clasped my jacket and then, while I was off balance, pulled me closer to him. I turned my head instinctively, my lips apart to cry out a warning.

  And Faulkner spit in my mouth.

  It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and then I was striking out at him, Anson now pulling me away as I reached for the old man. The other guards came running toward us and I was hauled away, expelling the taste of Faulkner from my mouth even as he continued to howl out at me from his cell.

  ‘Take it as a gift, Parker,’ he called. ‘My gift to you, that you might see as I see.’

  I pushed the guards away and wiped my mouth, then kept my head down as I walked past the recreation area, where those deemed to be no danger to themselves or others watched me from behind their bars. Had my head been raised, and my attention been focused elsewhere than on the preacher and what he had just done to me, then perhaps I might have seen the stooped, dark-haired man watching me more closely than the rest.

  And as I left, the man named Cyrus Nairn smiled, his arms outstretched, his fingers forming a constant flow of words, until a guard looked his way and he stopped, his arms withdrawing back toward his body.

  The guard knew what Cyrus was doing, but he paid him no heed. After all, Cyrus was a mute and that was what mutes did.

  They signed.

  I was almost at my car when I heard the sound of footsteps on the gravel behind me. It was Anson. He shifted uneasily.

  ‘You okay?’

  I nodded. I had washed my mouth out in the guards’ quarters with borrowed mouthwash, but I still felt as if some element of Faulkner was coursing through me, infecting me.

  ‘What you heard in there—,’ he began.

  I interrupted him. ‘Your private life is your own affair. It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘What he said, it’s not like it seems.’

  ‘It never is.’

  A red glow began at his neck and spread into his features as if drawn by osmosis.

  ‘Are you being smart with me?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s your business. I do have one question. If you’re worried, you can check me for a wire.’

  He considered the offer for a moment, then motioned to me to continue.

  ‘Is what the preacher said true? I don’t care about the law or about why you’re doing it. All I want to know is: was he correct in the details?’

  Anson didn’t reply. He just looked at his feet and nodded.

  ‘Could one of the other guards have let it slip?’

  ‘No. Nobody knows about it.’

  ‘A prisoner, maybe? Somebody local who might have been in a position to spread a little jailhouse gossip?’

  ‘No, I don’t believe so.’

  I opened the car door. Anson seemed to feel the need to make some final macho comment. As in other things, he didn’t appear to be a man who believed in restraining his urges.

  ‘If anyone finds out about this, you’ll be in a world of shit,’ he warned. It sounded hollow, even to himself. I could see it in the mottling of his skin and the way in which he had to concentrate on straining the muscles in his neck so that they bulged over the collar of his shirt. I let him retrieve whatever dignity he thought he could salvage from the situation, then watched as he slowly padded back to the main door, seemingly reluctant to place himself in proximity to Faulkner once again.

  A shadow fell across him, as if a huge winged bird had descended and were slowly circling above him. Over the prison walls, more birds seemed to hover. They were big and black, moving in lazy, drifting loops, but there was in their movements something unnatural. They glided with none of the grace or beauty of birds, for their thin bodies seemed almost to be at odds with their enormous wings, as though struggling with the pull of gravity, the torso always threatening to plummet toward the ground, the wings allowing the slide for a time before beating wildly to draw them back to the safety of the air.

  Then one broke from the flock, growing larger and larger as it descended in a spiral, coming to rest at last on the top of one of the guard towers, and I could see that this was no bird, and I knew it for what it was.

  The dark angel’s body was emaciated, its arms black mummified skin over slim bones, its face elongated and predatory, its eyes dark and knowing. It rested a clawed hand on the glass and its great wings, feathered in darkness, beat a low cadence against the air. Slowly, it was joined by others, each silently taking up a position on the walls and the towers, until it seemed at last that the prison was black with them. They made no move toward me but I sensed their hostility, and something more: their sense of betrayal, as if I were somehow one of them and had turned my back upon them.

  ‘Ravens,’ said a voice at my side. It was an elderly woman. She carried a brown paper bag in her hand, filled with some small items for one of the inmates: a son, perhaps, or a husband among the old men in 7 Dorm. ‘Never seen so many before, or so big.’

  And now they were ravens: two feet tall at least, the fingered wing tips clearly visible as they moved upon the walls, calling softly to one another.

  ‘I didn’t think they came together in those numbers,’ I said.

  ‘They don’t,’ she said. ‘Not normally, nohow, but who’s to say what’s normal these days?’

  She continued walking. I got in my car and began to drive away, but in the rearview mirror the black birds did not seem to decrease in size as I left them behind. Instead, they seemed to grow larger even as the prison receded, taking on new forms.

  And I felt their eyes upon me as the preacher’s saliva colonized my body like a cancer.

  My gift to you, that you might see as I see.

  Apart from the prison and the prison craft shop there isn’t a whole lot to keep a casual visitor in Thomaston, but the town has a pretty good diner at its northern end, with homemade pies and bread pudding served piping hot to locals and those who come to talk after meeting their loved ones across a table or through a screen farther up the road. I bought another bottle of mouthwash at the drugstore and sluiced my mouth out in the parking lot before heading into the diner.

  The small eating area with its mismatched furniture was largely empty, with the exception of two old men who sat quietly, side by side, watching the traffic go by, and a younger man in an expensively tailored suit who sat in a wooden booth by the wall, his overcoat folded neatly beside him, a fork resting among the cream and crumbs on his plate, a copy of USA Today beside it. I ordered a coffee and took a seat across from him.

  ‘You don’t look so good,’ said the man.

  I felt my gaze drawn toward the window. I could not see the prison from where I sat. I shook my head, clearing it of visions of dark creatures crowding on prison walls, waiting. They were not real. They were just ravens. I was ill, nauseated by Faulkner’s assault.

  They were not real.

  ‘Stan,’ I said, to distract myself. ‘Nice suit.’

  He turned the jacket to show me the label inside. ‘Armani. Bought it in an outlet store. I keep the receipt in the inside pocket, just in case I get accused of corruption.’

  My coffee arrived, and the waitress retreated behind the counter to read a magazine. Somewhere, a radio played sickly MOR. The Rush revival begins here.

  Stan Ornstead was an assistant
district attorney, part of the team assembled to prosecute the Faulkner case. It was Ornstead who had convinced me to face Faulkner, with the full knowledge of deputy DA Andrus, and who had arranged for the interview to be conducted at the cell so that I could see the conditions that he appeared to have created for himself. Stan was only a few years younger than I was and was considered a hot prospect for the future. He was going places; he just wasn’t going there fast enough for him. Faulkner, he had hoped, might have changed that situation, except, as the warden had indicated, the Faulkner case was turning into something very bad indeed, something that threatened to drag everyone involved down with it.

  ‘You look kind of shaken up,’ Stan said, after I’d taken a couple of fortifying sips from my coffee.

  ‘He has that effect on people.’

  ‘He didn’t give too much away.’

  I froze, and he raised his palms in a what-you-gonna-do? gesture.

  ‘They mike sub-acute cells?’ I asked.

  ‘They don’t, if you mean the prison authorities.’

  ‘But somebody else has taken up the slack.’

  ‘The cell has been lojacked. Officially, we know nothing about it.’ Lojacking was the term used to describe a surveillance operation not endorsed by a court. More particularly, it was the term used by the FBI to describe any such operation.

  ‘The Feebs?’

  ‘The trenchcoats don’t have too much faith in us. They’re worried that Faulkner may walk on our beef so they want to get as much as they can, while they can, in case of federal charges or a double prosecution. All conversations with his lawyers, his doctors, his shrink, even his nemesis – that’s you, in case you didn’t know – are being recorded. The hope is that, at the very least, he’ll give something away that might lead them to others like him, or even give them a lead to other crimes he might have committed. All inadmissible, of course, but useful if it works.’

  ‘And will he walk?’

  Ornstead shrugged.

  ‘You know what he’s claiming: he was kept a virtual prisoner for decades and had no part in, or knowledge of, any crimes committed by the Fellowship or those associated with it. There’s nothing to link him directly to any of the killings, and that underground nest of rooms he lived in had bolts on the outside.’