The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  Stanovich's reign of terror had certainly lasted longer than most: a full eighteen years before the murders finally stopped with what was roughly calculated as the twenty-second victim. By that time, nearly twenty-five thousand suspects had been questioned, but not one of the long line of men who'd been summoned to various police stations throughout the Ukraine, many of them tortured—a few to the point of making false confessions—had been Andrei Stanovich.

  In the end, it was Stanovich who had revealed himself, though oddly, at least insofar as he appeared to have suffered a "complete physical and mental crumbling," according to one report, as if his body had finally collapsed beneath the weight of his own malignant mind.

  A school janitor had found him curled into the corner of the chain-link fence that surrounded the school. He'd been locked in a fetal position with no visible wounds, but whimpering and gasping, his eyes bulging and foam boiling from his wildly trembling lips. No identification had been found on Stanovich, either, save for a single square of torn paper that had been pinned to the front of what remained of his jacket. The word that had been scrawled on the paper was "Molech," a name, as authorities later discovered, that was derived from Melech, "king," and Bosheth, "shame." Molech, as it turned out, was a god the ancient Israelites had once worshipped, and to whom the Canaanites had sacrificed their own children.

  As if yanked to my feet and propelled across the room, I suddenly found myself at the window of my apartment, staring down at the street. It was deserted, but I could hear a car in the distance. Like a man who hears something in a dark room and rises to confront whatever it is, I opened the window and leaned out. By then the car was closing in, the lights growing brighter and brighter as it approached, then slowing suddenly, as if now moving through crystal-clear water, so that as it passed beneath my window, I saw that the driver was Hollis Traylor.

  Then quite without willing, I heard my mind repeat Max's admonition, Always remember, George, the Unseen, and at that instant glimpsed the profile of a woman sitting motionlessly in the backseat, her back straight, her head erect, her arms folded over her chest in what seemed an unearthly patience, as if she'd long been a passenger in this car.

  But was it a woman at all, I later wondered, a figure seen or only imagined, flesh and blood or pure phantasm, as real as Alice was and Katherine had once been, or as mythic as the Kuri Lam.

  I will never know, though it became quite clear that death was most certainly abroad that night in Winthrop, striking silent and unseen with its old familiar hand.

  17

  IT HAD STRUCK early in the morning, but I'd learned nothing of it until I reached the Winthrop Examiner at just after nine. "I guess you heard about Hugo Tanner," Charlie said.

  "No. What about him?"

  "He died last night. A neighbor found him curled up in that nutty house of his."

  Hugo Tanner had been one of Winthrop's best-known eccentrics, a man who dabbled in "the black arts" as I'd melodramatically put it in the profile I'd done of him. He'd lived in a small house on the outskirts of town, its rooms piled high with a vast collection of psychic paraphernalia. He'd turned his basement into an alchemist's lab, complete with hundreds of beakers and jars. An entire wall was given over to various chemicals, both liquid and powder, many of which, as I'd noticed at the time, were simply spices: cumin, turmeric, cayenne pepper and the like. One whole table had been strewn with the Bunsen burners Tanner had purchased from the old Depression-era Winthrop High School, before it was torn down.

  "He managed to dial 911," Charlie added. "But by the time EMS got there, he was gone."

  Charlie had picked the news up on his scanner, recognized Hugo's address, and followed the exchanges until he'd heard an EMS worker report to Winthrop Hospital that the ambulance would be arriving with a DOA.

  "Poor bastard!" Charlie shrugged. "He had nothing at all."

  "Except his passion," I said softly, though I had little sympathy for the way Hugo had lived his life, squandering what had quite clearly been a good mind on occult studies, a fruitless pursuit that had gained him nothing but a certain local celebrity.

  "Yeah, his passion," Charlie said. Then he shrugged. "But what did that get him in the end?"

  Nothing, I decided.

  Nothing at all.

  And so, for the rest of the day, I went about my usual duties, in this case, interviewing one of Winthrop's most prominent matrons about the upcoming Flower Festival, one she hoped to invigorate by having a parade with a surprise celebrity.

  "I was thinking maybe Kathie Lee Gifford, or someone like that," Mrs. Lancaster said. "Do you know anyone like that, Mr. Gates?"

  I shook my head and moved in mental lockstep to the next question: "This parade you're planning: Will there be floats?"

  The interview ended at just before noon. I drove to a local sandwich shop, ordered my usual ham on rye, then went to a corner table. It was warm inside, so I took off my jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. Then I sat down and unwrapped my sandwich, now scanning the room idly. The local high school was only three blocks away, so quite a few teenagers trickled in and out of the shop while I ate. Many were in groups, but from time to time a couple would stand, holding hands or with their arms slung loosely about each other.

  "So naive," I said absently, more or less to myself, so that I was surprised when a voice came from just behind me—little more than a whisper—but uttering a few words I have not since forgotten

  "At some point in life, we should all be fiercely wrong."

  I turned to see a woman standing in the takeout line beside my table. She was tall and quite striking, her long, dark hair streaked with silver.

  I had no doubt that she had addressed me personally, so I said, "I suppose so, yes."

  She started to speak again, but as she did so, the book she'd been holding slipped from her fingers. She retrieved it and held it gently in her hand, in such a way that the title was clearly visible: The Turn of the Screw.

  "Are you fond of ghost stories?" she asked when she saw my attention lingering on the book.

  "I might be if I believed in ghosts," I answered. "But people don't come back from the dead." I thought of Teddy, Celeste, the long line of the Never-to-Return, Alice soon to join their vanished ranks. "So a ghost story can never be about real life."

  The woman's eyes seemed unearthly still. "That's true," she said. "Ghost stories are about hope."

  She smiled sweetly, one of those smiles poets call "serene," and I thought she might add another comment, but the line moved forward abruptly, taking her with it as if on a smooth current, so that within seconds, or so it seemed, she had vanished.

  I finished my lunch and left the shop, but the woman's initial words to me kept circling in my mind: At some point in life, we should all be fiercely wrong. Perhaps they lingered because I suddenly thought of Hugo Tanner, the life he'd frittered away in ludicrous pseudo-scientific research, a waste that by the unknowable windings of thought returned me once again to lives taken prematurely: Teddy's life and Celeste's, and at last to the one that Alice would lose soon.

  A dark mood settled over me, one that had only deepened by the time I got back to the office.

  Charlie was sitting at his desk, working the phones. "Yeah, got it," he said, then hung up. His eyes blazed with a happiness that I'd rarely seen in them.

  "They caught Warren Maizey," he said. "Can you believe it? After all these years, he didn't get away with it." He clapped his hands. "It's a great day for Eden Taub."

  Eden Taub.

  She'd been found in a basement, lying on a bloodstained mattress, Eden Taub, eight years old, left in the care of a next-door neighbor her parents had paid to keep her while they sought work in the fruit orchards of the Salinas Valley. It had gone on for nearly three months, a systematic torture that included packing Eden in ice and submerging her in boiling water. She'd been lashed with a jump rope, pinched with toolbox pliers, burned with cigarettes, an agony inflicted in what appeared t
o have been diabolical relay games by Warren Maizey and his two imbecilic daughters, Gwen and Rhonda, aged fifteen and seventeen.

  Maizey had left his daughters to fend for themselves after Eden's murder, and with no capacity to provide for themselves or to consider the consequences of their own crimes, they had finally called a social worker who'd taken one look around the house and immediately called the police. I could still remember the answer they'd later given reporters about their father's whereabouts, both of them grinning into the cameras: Daddy, he just vanished.

  Which he had done, until now.

  "Fifteen years, but they finally got him," Charlie said happily. He gave his old familiar wink, the one that always seemed to say, Told you so. "I guess miracles do happen, don't they, George?"

  I shook my head and thought of all the ones who were never caught, and on that thought, felt the old wrath strike me once again, fierce and shattering, and from which I knew I would never be released, so that "I don't think so, Charlie," was all I found to say.

  And so the eddies of my mounting anger rippled on through the day, and were still rippling through me later that afternoon as Wyatt read my piece on the Flower Festival. While I sat silently in front of his desk, I recalled a question my father had asked as he lay dying, the look on his face when he'd asked it, along with the details of the hospital room: the scent of the air, even the small, blinking lights on the machines that monitored the steady ebbing of his life.

  "Why are we here, Georgie?" my father asked. "To suffer? To bear witness? That's what Chekhov says." For a moment, he added nothing more. Then, very slowly, his eyes opened and he seemed to be staring at me from a great distance, as from behind the starry curtain of some far galaxy. "Nobody has the answer but me." He smiled. "I have the answer, Georgie."

  "Then what's the answer, Dad?" I asked indulgently. "Why are we here?"

  Suddenly the serenity into which my father had briefly settled dropped away, leaving nothing behind but his blazing anger. "We are here to correct God's fucking mistakes!" he cried. "To undo His goddamn screwups!" For a moment, he glared at me with a rage that seemed too vehemently deathless for a dying man. "He had no right," he snarled. "He had no right to take Teddy!" Then he turned and faced the wall, a gesture so abrupt and oddly violent I knew that he meant it as a complete rejection, the cold shoulder he offered to the scheme of things, wordlessly his last word.

  "Not bad, George."

  I looked over to where Wyatt sat, my piece on the Flower Festival on the desk before him. "But awful purple at the end." He found the lines he meant, underlined them, and handed the page to me:

  The festival floats will be composed of living flowers, according to Mrs. Lancaster, none that have been cut, none that are dead, each bloom a colorful victory, as she seems to feel, over mortality's black hand.

  "Yuk, if you don't mind my saying so," Wyatt said.

  "You're right," I said. I took a pen and crossed the line out. "Something came over me."

  Wyatt took the page from my hand and gave me a pointed look. "Anything wrong, George?"

  Suddenly I thought of Eden Taub waiting as Warren Maizey moved toward her, listening for their footsteps in the corridor or clumping down the stairs, hoping for some miraculous rescue, and in a jangling instant, I knew Teddy must have hoped that the figure coming toward him as thunder rolled and the rain swept in, the figure he must have seen draped in a yellow rain slicker, that this figure, drawing ever more near, was his father come to take him out of the rain.

  Everything, I thought. "Nothing," I said.

  ***

  I have no doubt that some of the raging sadness that had swept over me as I'd thought of Teddy was still in my face when I handed Alice the photographs of Katherine later that same evening.

  "This is Katherine," I said. "I thought you might want to see what she looked like."

  Alice stared at me silently for a moment, then drew the pictures from my hand.

  I walked to the window and stood beside it, watching as Alice went through the pictures slowly, her drooping lids almost closing as she squinted. "Why aren't there any pictures of her after she was hurt?" she asked after she'd looked at the last one.

  "She didn't want any after that," I said. "She stayed in her house mostly, as you know from her story. The neighbors said she never turned off the lights."

  As I spoke, I could see that Alice was fully imagining the terrible loneliness of those endless nights, Katherine curled over a small desk, writing feverishly.

  "Sometimes I wonder if her story is a desperate note," I said quietly. "A plea for someone to save her." Another wave of anger hit me, and as if blown forward by its heat, I strode over to the chair beside Alice's bed and dropped onto it. "But in the real world," I said sharply, "no one comes to save you."

  Alice glanced at the pages I'd taken out of my briefcase, and as if prompted by the tone of my voice or the look in my eyes, drew them from my hands. "I'll read to you this time," she said.

  NOW

  The Chief smiles. "Of course," he says, "we can leave no evidence." He opens his right hand. "Nothing at all."

  The Chief's hand is empty now, but for a moment, Maldrow is back again in that distant time, a drenching rain outside the saloon, turning the town streets to mud. The stark loneliness of all the years that have passed since then falls upon him. He cannot calculate how long it has been since he last was called "father." He knows only what he knew at the moment of destruction: that his blood would forever run hot and that it was this searing inner heat that had risen into the overhanging sky, flaring out and out until somewhere in the impossible distance, the Chief, himself, had felt it.

  "Maldrow?" the Chief asks.

  Maldrow blinks himself back into the present. "There will be no evidence."

  Maldrow sees flashes of his past labors: women floating in ponds, lowered into wells, buried in ravines, covered over with stones. All the many ways they had been made to vanish.

  "There will be no evidence," he assures the Chief again, this time more emphatically.

  He recalls the dark glimmer he caught in Katherine's eye at the moment the horror was made clear to her.

  "Except a story," he adds. "She's writing a story."

  The Chief waves his hand dismissively. "Let her write it. No one will believe it."

  "No," Maldrow says. "No one."

  The Chief catches the melancholy tone in Maldrow's voice. "Was there anything about the work I did not explain to you?" he asks.

  Maldrow feels his mind whirling backward, racing through vast stretches of lost time, years and years and years of fleeing down midnight streets, across open fields, along secluded trails, down narrow alleyways, destined to remain unknown.

  "No."

  "Have you selected the place of sacrifice?" the Chief asks.

  Maldrow knows that this is part of the necessary recitation, part of the buildup for action, its relentless drive, without which, as he has learned, the grim task cannot be completed.

  "Yes."

  The Chief looks satisfied. "Then her fate is sealed."

  Maldrow recalls Katherine's gaze as she stood, facing his approaching car, stood still and firm even as he bore in upon her. He sees the beam from his flashlight sweep over her, a sickly yellow wave that illuminates yet more fully the nature of her condition.

  "Sealed," he says. "Forever."

  The Chief nods slowly, then reaches over and places his hand on Maldrow's, the insubstantial substance of the one sinking into the false substance of the other until they meld perfectly and are one.

  Alice placed the last page of the section at the bottom of the stack of pages in my hand, and with no further pause, read on:

  THEN

  I headed out along the river, toward the state campground where Maldrow had asked me to meet him. To my right, I saw the deserted fairgrounds. In the river beyond it, a few boats drifted toward the town marina, their running lights glowing softly in the dark air.

  I reached th
e campground a few minutes later, turned and passed beneath the stone archway, then wheeled to the right and followed the road into the deepening woods.

  Lawson Road lay at the far end of the campground, just as Maldrow had said, well beyond the bike path and the last of the walking trails. It was unpaved, and cut at an angle through deep woods, part of the old forest, I supposed, that had grown wild and untended through the years, and whose floor lay covered in a thick undergrowth.

  I followed his directions and headed down the road, looking for the trailer he'd described, but saw nothing until the road narrowed abruptly and began to twist and turn as if it were alive.

  At last I entered the pine brake through which it appeared suddenly, like an apparition, a small, boxy trailer eerily illuminated by the final fractured rays of moonlight. It was even more modest than Maldrow had described, and as I closed in upon it, I noticed how unsightly and poorly maintained it was. Its aluminum sides were flecked with mud, and its window screens were torn and drooped outward like slices of metal flesh.

  Closer still, the trailer gave off an even-less-welcoming sense. There were yellowish stains here and there, and the aluminum door slumped loosely to the left, like a man with a hunched shoulder. The entire undercarriage was badly rusted, and the top was carpeted in pine needles, so that it looked as if it had been in this place forever, part of the forest landscape that continually encroached upon it.

  I pulled into the empty driveway and waited. The trailer was dimly lighted, its door slightly ajar, so that I could see the edge of a sofa, a small table, a red Japanese lantern dangling from a faded white cord.

  I sat in my car and let the minutes pass, thinking now that I should not have come, not have followed the impulse that had urged me to come, fearing that Maldrow was a man to whom I had attached a fantasy, and thus, in the end, unreal, a fear that doubt redoubled, and which reverberated ever more violently within me, like a tremor growing into a quake.