Prayer for the Dead jb-1

by David Wiltse

  “You nearly killed me once,” Becker said.

  “That wasn’t my fault,” Hatcher said. “Some of the agents got overzealous…”

  “Not again.”

  “There was a full report on the Bahoud thing, I was cleared…”

  “Not again,” Becker repeated. He turned away from Hatcher and started the engine. Dismissed, Hatcher got out of the car.

  Becker drove down the county road and caught sight of the farmhouse from atop the hill. He could make out the general layout of the place before the road flattened and he lost sight of it over the corn. Driving at a normal speed, he took the approach road, his eyes taking in every detail as he drove past the Cohen farm and off into the distance. He had not seen much but it would be enough to orient himself when he returned by night.

  Thunder rumbled ominously in the west. The cloud cover was now so thick that it was already prematurely dark, as if dusk had come two hours early. Whatever he was going to have to do, Becker reflected that he would have a good night to do it.

  Tee woke from what had seemed an endless dream in which a beautiful woman had tied him to the bed and left him, subdued but eager for what was to follow. When she returned he arched to meet her, but she smiled at him with fangs and walked to the bed on six stalklike legs. His eyes fluttered open to see Dyce leaning over him.

  “You’re doing fine,” Dyce said in a voice so soft Tee could scarcely hear it above the rush of wind outside.

  Dyce’s bearded face vanished for a moment, although Tee made out his form as a darker shape against a dark background. The lightning flashed again and Tee suddenly saw everything in a second, as if in a photograph.

  He was lying down, close under a roof in an attic of a house that looked as if it had not survived an air attack. There were gaping holes in the roof, and rafters without crossboards gave way to emptiness below. Dyce was sitting astraddle a rafter, legs dangling into space, and just behind him, several feet away over the void, was a small island of intact flooring just large enough for a man in the fetal position to lie on. On the island was a brown grocery bag, a bottle of spring water, a small container that looked familiar but which Tee could not immediately identify, and a gallon jug.

  What held Tee in the air he could not tell, nor could he be sure what Dyce was doing to his arm.

  Tee tried to speak but couldn’t, but felt no surprise. He had known somehow on waking that he could not speak and could not move. It didn’t bother him too much; he was more curious than frightened.

  Lightning flashed again and Tee could see Dyce massaging his upper arm with his thumb, although he could feel nothing. A dark liquid dripped from a needle in Tee’s arm into an empty spring water bottle.

  “We have to speed things up with you,” Dyce said, as if sensing Tee’s curiosity. “I’m sorry to rush things, but we probably don’t have much time. We’ll both just have to do the best we can in the situation.”

  Tee realized then that it was Tee’s own blood that Dyce was massaging from Tee’s arm and into the water bottle. The bottle was nearly full and Tee had no idea if it was the first. He felt his heart lurch violently in his chest and for the first time felt the panic of fear.

  Dyce kept droning on in his soft, patient voice.

  “You’re not really right, of course. I mean, you just don’t really look right. That’s not your fault, of course. It’s nobody’s fault. You’re here-and I can’t tell you how hard it was to get you up the ladder-I nearly gave up, but I couldn’t leave you in the cornfield, you can understand that. And you’re here now, that’s the important thing, and I can’t very well get anyone else under the circumstances, but that young Nordholm was perfect, just perfect. Your friends took him away from me. You can blame them for that.”

  Dyce scuttled back across the rafter with surprising agility and put the full bottle of blood on the island. He returned with a fresh, empty bottle and began to massage Tee’s arm once more, pressing his thumb into the vein and sliding it down to the needle.

  Tee’s heart lurched again and his eyes widened; he was certain it was about to give out. Dyce stopped and placed his ear on Tee’s chest. His hair bushed against Tee’s chin.

  “You’ll be all right, I think,” Dyce said. “That happens sometimes when it goes too fast; that’s why I like to take it slowly. We’ll just stop right here. Now listen to me. Are you listening to me?”

  Tee stared at Dyce. His features had become clearer as Tee’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. Dyce put his hand lightly over Tee’s nose.

  “If you’re listening, just hold your breath for a count of six… Good, all right, you can breathe normally now. Now listen very carefully. I would normally give you another shot now to keep you quiet, but considering your heart and everything, I think I’d better not, so you’ll just have to cooperate. All right? What you must do is lie very, very still. Even if you feel some sensation coming back to your arms and legs, you must not move a muscle. If you do, first of all you’ll fall and hurt yourself-it’s a very long way down-but also you’ll destroy the illusion and then we’ll just have to start over. Do you understand? Hold your breath if you understand… Good. Keep your breathing as light as you possibly can. I don’t want to see your chest heaving up and down; that makes everything silly. And your eyes have to stay closed the whole time. All right? Now that you’re conscious you’ll be tempted to want to see, but you must avoid that, all right? Hold your breath if you understand… Very good.”

  Lightning flashed and thunder followed it so quickly from so nearby that the house seemed to shake. Tee saw the ladder tucked into the space where the roof met the walls. If I could move at all, he thought desperately, if I could nudge the ladder with my foot so it would fall, do something, anything. But he felt so weak and tired, horribly tired.

  “It will take me a minute or two to get ready,” Dyce said, propelling himself across the rafter with his hands. “You can keep your eyes open until I tell you.”

  Straining his eyes to the side, Tee could see Dyce on his midair island begin to undress.

  Becker turned off his headlights before he was halfway up to the crest of the county road. He drove in darkness, his eyes fixed not on the road invisible in front of him, but on the silhouette of the farmhouse that stood against the dark sky.

  Coasting with his foot off the gas, he counted seconds from the moment the car started downhill. It had taken a count of twelve when he did it in the daylight. At eleven he geared down into second, using his handbrake to slow the car so that the flash of red brake lights would not betray him. His right front tire slipped over the edge of the roadside ditch, and Becker compensated accordingly with the wheel, pulling the car onto the access road. He was moving beneath the shelter of the corn now and was hidden from the view of the house, but still he drove with his lights out. If he turned them on, they would splash off the corn and into the air like a warning beacon for Dyce. If Dyce was there.

  Becker waited for a flash of lightning, fixed the path in his mind, and drove straight ahead until the image faded from his retina. Then he stopped and waited for the next flash. When he was within a few yards of the entrance to the farmyard, he stopped. Timing his move with a clash of thunder, Becker opened the car door and stepped into the corn.

  Gold’s voice had been running through his mind like a tape since he got into the car and started toward the farm.

  “It’s a function of will,” Gold had said. “We all have fantasies. It’s whether we act on them that matters. Most of us don’t. You don’t, Becker.”

  “Don’t I?” thought Becker.

  “What you do, what you have done-the experience with Bahoud in New York, the incident in Washington, the other times-they cause the fantasies. It is not the fantasies that cause the incidents.”

  “Incidents. You mean the killings.”

  “All right, the killings,” Gold said.

  Becker bent between the corn rows and rubbed dirt on his forehead and under his eyes. The turtleneck rolled up to
just under his mouth. Lightning flashed and thunder roared so close it seemed to be over the cornfield itself Becker could smell the electricity in the air. Strangely, there was still no rain.

  The wind was beating against the corn stalks so fiercely they sounded like acres of crackling cellophane. The earth itself was so noisy there was no need for caution, but Becker moved silently, anyway, from long habit.

  Cutting diagonally through the field, Becker came to the edge of the cultivated ground where the corn stopped and the farmyard began. Kneeling, he studied the house and the barn.

  His heart seemed to have ascended in his chest and was beating rapidly just beneath his collarbone. Becker recognized the excitement for what it was-an eagerness for action and a tingling of anticipation. There was no fear involved in it. Caution, prudence, but no fear.

  “They were all justified,” Gold said. “You were in danger every time. You did what you had to do to save yourself”

  “Justified?”

  “Justified. Absolutely.”

  “But were they necessary?”

  Becker approached the barn from the rear where there was nothing but blank wall to watch him. He did not expect to find anything in it, but this was not the time to go on assumptions alone. That was Hatcher’s way, not Becker’s.

  “Why are you so sure he’s at the farm?” Hatcher had asked.

  Becker said, “I’m not sure of anything,” but he was. He could not say that he was sure because he had come to understand Dyce on a level that Hatcher could not begin to comprehend. The man’s life had fallen apart on him and he had fled to the place where it had all begun, the cruel, twisted injury that had made him what he was. He could not tell Hatcher that he understood the man’s thoughts and needs and darkly contorted emotions just as he had understood Bahoud’s and all of those since then.

  He could not tell Hatcher, but he had told Gold.

  “Don’t be so damned hard on yourself, man,” Gold repeated now in his mind. “You don’t want to do it; it happens because of circumstances. These are not pussycats the Bureau sends you after. These are multiple murderers, hardened killers who would have killed you in an instant.”

  “How do you know I don’t want to do it?”

  “How do I know? Because you don’t do it any other time, that’s how I know. What you experience isn’t joy; it’s a final release of adrenaline. You are in great danger, under terrible stress-you are feeling the sense of release, not pleasure. You were brought into this by accident. It turns out you’ve got great skills, but having empathy or understanding for these people does not mean you are these people, understand? You have the empathy to be a great shrink. I understand my patients, most of them. That doesn’t mean I am them, doesn’t mean I share their problems-but I understand them.”

  The farmhouse had two stone chimneys, one at either end of the house on the exterior. The stone walls had been breached as if a tank had driven through them, but those sections that still stood were enough to hold up the roof beam and the unburned portions of the roof.

  There was no blind side from which to approach. Becker counted on the darkness and moved swiftly across the yard. When the lightning struck, he dove for the ground and lay there motionless, hoping that if Dyce had seen his movement he would attribute it to a trick of the night.

  He lay still until his heart stopped racing. It was a job he had to do, he told himself. Nothing more. A job. There was a maniac to find, possibly a friend to save if he wasn’t already too late for that.

  Becker tried to turn off the tape in his head, but Gold’s voice insisted on being heard.

  “I can’t give you absolution, I’m not a priest. I can forgive you, I can understand you.”

  “I don’t want that.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to stop it.”

  “You have stopped. Just keep stopping.”

  “And if I go after Dyce?… I do have to go after him now.”

  “Good. Find the bastard.”

  “And then?”

  “He’s killed at least eight men. He may have killed your friend… Find the bastard.”

  “And then?”

  The first rain hit him as he lay and it felt like the initial gush from a faucet. The clouds opened as if rent asunder by the last lightning bolt. By the time Becker got to his feet, he was already soaked to the skin.

  Dyce was talking nonstop from his island in the air, but Tee was not listening. With every ounce of concentration he could muster he tried to move his foot toward the ladder. It was precariously balanced; it would only take a nudge to make it fall, but he could not move, he could not move. It seemed just a fraction away, as if a final effort could awaken his nerves and make them speak to his muscles, but it was a fraction he could not bridge. Tee did not think beyond the ladder. What would happen then, what he hoped to accomplish he could not say. It was an action, the only one available to him, or nearly available, and he had to do something before Dyce sucked him dry and left his husk in the deserted attic of an abandoned shell of a house. If only it didn’t make him so terribly tired to even try to think.

  Rain hit the roof over Tee’s face as if a firehose had been trained on the house.

  Dyce’s voice rose, claiming Tee’s attention over the noise of the rain. “I’m ready now,” he said.

  Tee turned his eyes to look at the maniac. Dyce was standing on his little space of floorboards, his arms spread as if to say, look at me. The container of talcum powder was still in his hand and sprinkles of the white powder drifted off his body. He was completely naked and white as snow. When lightning flashed it illuminated him as if he were lit from inside, but even in the dark he gave off an eerie glow.

  The son of a bitch has an erection. Tee thought. He’s mad as a hatter and hard as a rock.

  “Remember now, try not to move when you breathe and keep your eyes closed.”

  Tee did not need to be told. His eyes were already squeezed shut. Whatever was going to happen, he didn’t want to watch.

  From the ground the chimney looked wide enough to hold a man. They had built them large in the last century. Not that Becker expected to find Dyce squirreled away in the chimney-although it was a possibility he did not reject. He had mentioned it to Hatcher just as an example of what he might have overlooked. Even if he had hidden there when the FBI came by, he would probably not be there now, not on a night when he could come out and move without much fear of detection.

  The night is better for all of us, Becker thought.

  A noise that didn’t come from the storm teased Becker’s hearing, something not wind nor rain but more familiar, chased by the tempest so quickly Becker was not sure if he had heard it or imagined it. He crouched by the side of the first chimney, his shoulder pressed against the stones, readying himself to look into the house itself The porch was dangerous: too many charred boards that could break under his weight or groan to give away his presence-if any noise that weak could be heard now. He skirted the porch, crawling on his stomach to the edge of the wall where it had partially crumbled away.

  Lightning like a row of flashbulbs crackled in the sky, giving Becker a full view of the house. He looked up at the space Hatcher had not investigated. Many of the rafters were still intact, but the flooring across them was scattered and broken, a board here, two or three there running only a few feet. It looked like a net with bits of flotsam stuck to the webbing in places. One section was severed by fire into the shape of the letter C; another section, three boards wide and tucked against the junction of roof and rafter, was a bit over six feet long. A man, lying perfectly still, could stretch out unseen on that platform. The C might hold a person on his side, but Becker could see why Hatcher had dismissed the attic, or what remained of it, as a hiding place-it could be a sanctuary only for the very imaginative and desperate. But then that was what made Hatcher the way he was. He never credited desperate men with being bold enough to take truly desperate measures. Hatcher judged the men he chased by him
self, and assessed their hearts by what he found in his own. And I judge them by myself Becker thought. Which is why I would have looked in the chimneys and Hatcher didn’t. Hatcher is too sane to track the mad.

  The light vanished, swallowed by the storm, but Becker had seen something in the last faint illumination, a movement of a ghost against the blackness of the night.

  Crouched, he waited for the next flash, which seemed to take forever in coming. Even without the lightning, he thought he could almost discern the movement under the roof on the C section of flooring, something flapping, like the wing of a huge moth. But he could not be sure if he really saw it or simply willed it. Willed it because he wanted it to be there, he thought. I want him, Becker thought. I want Dyce as badly as I have wanted any of them. Running from it, hiding away in Clamden had done no good. They are all around me, the Dyces, in small towns and large. Whether they are attracted to me or I am attracted to them, we will find each other. The silent, secret killers and the one who hunts them down. We are bonded together, Becker thought. Opposite sides of the coin-or perhaps the same side, he didn’t know and right now it didn’t matter. He was here, where he wanted to be, where he had yearned to be despite his struggles against that desire ever since Tee told him of the disappearance of the men. And Dyce was here, where he, too, must have known he would end up, waiting for the man who would put him out of the misery of his madness.

  Maybe Dyce was here above him, caught in the web of roof and rafters, flailing like an insect. Be there, Becker urged. He willed him to be there.

  At last lightning struck again, followed by a roar so loud and instantaneous it seemed to come from the earth under his feet, and in the flash Becker saw it clearly, a specter in white, thirty feet up, arms raised and flecks of snow or dust wafting down. It was looking straight at Becker.

  When the light faded, Becker moved, knowing he had already been seen. The only way up was the walls themselves. He removed his shoes whose soles would be as dangerous as if he had greased them. Although he hadn’t paid any attention to the weather for several minutes, Becker realized now that the rain was still coming in torrents. Slender cascades of water rippled off the stones and into his face. He felt for his first handhold, pulled himself off the ground and began to climb.