by Jeff Giles
“So you encountered Stan Manggold at the Wallaces’ former residence?”
“Yes—if that’s his last name. He called himself Stan the Man.”
“My god,” said Zoe’s mom.
She even recognized the nickname.
“And how exactly do you know that Mr. Manggold is responsible for the deaths of Bertram and Elizabeth Wallace?”
“I saw—” Zoe began, then broke off immediately. She’d been about to say, I saw him do it. That would have gone over well: I saw it in a movie on the back of a superhot guy.
“You saw what, exactly?” said Baldino.
“I saw how he bragged about it,” she said. “And I saw the poker he killed them with. He thought Bert and Betty were rich. He was still trying to figure out where they hid their money. But they didn’t have any money—and now their bodies are in the lake.”
Her voice was shaking.
“Zoe,” said Baldino, “did you and your brother see anyone other than Stan Manggold while you were out at the lake—anybody you knew, anybody you didn’t know, anybody at all? I want you to think carefully about your answer. Because we’re going to write it down.”
At this, Officer Maerz looked up at his boss, as if to say, Are you talking about me? Baldino rolled his eyes and said, “Yes, Stuart, whatever she says, write it down.”
Everyone looked at Zoe, waiting. X’s face flashed into her head. She felt protective of him. He had carried them home.
Just then, there were noises from outside—it sounded like animals had gotten into the garage and toppled the garbage cans.
Zoe’s mother stood.
“Raccoons,” she said. “We’re going to need a quick recess. No questions while I’m gone.” She turned her laptop to face the policemen. “If you have a problem with that,” she said, “you can take it up with legalbeagle.com.”
“Would you like some help, Ms. Bissell?” asked Sergeant Vilkomerson.
“No, but thank you, Brian. The raccoons are just going to have to find a new place to play.”
Zoe stood, her calves rippling with pain, and went to one of the duct-taped windows in the living room. Outside, the clouds had shifted. The moon was a bright, white eyeball in the sky. The mountains were just wavy lines receding into the distance.
She felt weary for the thousandth time. She thought about Bert and Betty, about her father, about the big roiling mess that everything had become.
She thought about X. She knocked on the window—she didn’t know why. He was out there somewhere. She shouldn’t have let him go, but she couldn’t exactly force him to stay.
Zoe headed back to the table. She knew what she was going to say.
“We didn’t see anybody but Stan. Why?”
The moment Zoe said it, she knew she’d made a mistake. Miscalculated, somehow. Even her mother seemed to know she was lying, but how could she? Zoe’s stomach tightened again, like someone was turning a wheel.
Officer Maerz, she noticed, hadn’t written her answer down—not because he’d forgotten but because he knew it would be used against her later. Zoe thought that was cool and kind. In her mind, she put a star next to Maerz’s name, though she knew his little rebellion was about to get crushed.
“Stuart, write down what our young friend just said, word for word.”
This was Baldino. He smiled, drummed on the tabletop, and sat up straight. Now he looked merely three or four months pregnant, like he’d just begun telling people he was having a baby.
“Brian,” he said, “let’s show her the photo. You got it handy?”
So there was a photo. How could there be? And of what? The wheel in Zoe’s stomach turned three times in quick succession.
She was about to speak when her mother startled everyone by slamming her computer shut.
“What photo?” she said. “Why are we only hearing about it now—and why are you playing games with a seventeen-year-old girl?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Bissell,” Vilkomerson said, as he searched his phone for the picture.
“Why on earth are you apologizing to this woman?” Baldino said. “We gave the kid a chance to tell the truth.”
“I accept your apology, Brian,” said Zoe’s mom. “But you”—she was pointing at Chief Baldino now—“are starting to piss me off.”
It was the Instagram. Brian had an annoying daughter a couple of years behind Zoe at school, and the girl had seen the photo, thought it was hot, and left some lame comment, like YAASS! She’d also shown it to her dad.
The photo showed X from behind, his arms and legs spread so wide that he looked like an actual X. You could see his broad, shirtless back, lit by the glow coming off the ice. You could see the primitive tattoos running down his forearms. You could see Stan cowering miserably at his feet.
“Now, there are many odd things about this photograph,” said Chief Baldino. “For instance, the lake is orange.”
“That’s just a filter,” said Maerz. “Everybody uses them.”
Zoe had stopped listening. She was staring not at X but at Stan. Her mother was staring at him, too. She seemed stunned to see him again after what must have been decades. The man was vile: The buzz cut. The shock-white eyebrow. The ugly boulder of a head. Zoe had not just let him live, she had let him escape. She couldn’t pull her eyes away, even when she tasted bile in the back of her throat.
Baldino began hammering her with questions now: “Can you confirm that you took this photo last night? Can you confirm that you took it outside the former residence of Bertram and Elizabeth Wallace?”
Zoe felt dizzy. Only Vilkomerson noticed. He put a gentle hand on her arm, and said something she couldn’t quite process. Everything was sliding. Everything was flying sideways.
And Baldino wouldn’t shut up.
“We know that this man here is Stan Manggold,” he said. “The truck was stolen but we ran his prints, and it turns out he’s wanted by the State of Virginia for a whole bunch of nasty stuff. What we don’t know is who the other man in the picture is—the one with the tattoos. We ran the image through our database, and came up empty. So why don’t you stop wasting our time and tell us who he is?”
“I don’t know,” said Zoe.
“Do you know if he was involved in the murder of Bertram and Betty Wallace?”
“He wasn’t involved. No way.”
“How can you know that if you don’t even know who he is?”
“I just know.”
“How about you tell us everything else you just know about him?”
“I told you—I don’t even know his name.”
Baldino grunted. He was sure she was lying.
“You want to sit here all night, Miss Bissell?” he said. “I don’t—but I will.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” Zoe said. “He came out of the woods, and then he went back into the woods. I didn’t say two words to him. I don’t know who he is.”
“Then why have you been lying to protect him?”
Zoe was close to tears now. She looked to her mother.
Her mother stood up.
“This is totally unacceptable,” she told Baldino. “You’re harassing a girl who’s talking to you of her own free will. You think because I do yoga, I can’t find a lawyer who will kick your ass?”
In the silence that followed, there was a racket on the stairs. It sounded like a prisoner with a ball and chain. Everybody turned.
It was Jonah, looking horribly betrayed. His fingertips were covered with Band-Aids. His right ankle was dragging a skateboard on a piece of purple yarn.
Baldino shook his head and said, quietly for once and to no one in particular, “These people are not normal.”
Jonah told the police everything—because, as Zoe feared, he’d seen everything. He had woken up on Bert and Betty’s couch. He had shouted for Zoe. When she didn’t answer, he’d wiped the window with a cold little hand and peered outside.
Now Jonah was sitting on Zoe’s lap at the table, and pointing at the Ins
tagram.
“That’s Stan,” he said. “He said his last name was The Man, but he maybe made that up so you should check.”
Jonah stopped for a second.
“I threw a rock at him,” he said, then looked at his mother uncertainly: “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay just this once,” she said. “Your dad introduced me to Stan many years ago, sweetie—way before you kids were born—and I wanted to throw a rock at him, too.”
“What else can you tell us, son?” Vilkomerson asked.
“Stan was mean,” Jonah said, his voice breaking for the first time. “He hurt Bert and Betty, and he tried to hurt my dogs. I don’t know why. This other person in the picture, the kind of naked one … I don’t know his name, but he’s magic—and he saved them. He also made the ice get all orange like that.”
When Jonah finished speaking, everyone let his words settle. No one spoke, except for Officer Maerz who said, “Seriously—it’s a filter.”
Baldino turned back to Zoe.
“Young lady, can you corroborate any of what your brother is saying?”
“I can corroborate all of it,” she said.
Did he think she didn’t know what the word meant?
“Interesting,” said Baldino, the patronizing edge creeping back into his voice. “Even the part about the magic?”
“Especially the part about the magic.”
Chief Baldino announced that he was sick of being lied to—of being “trifled with by a damn teenager”—and soon he and his men were driving off into the night. The Bissells watched from the front door until darkness swallowed the squad car a quarter of a mile down the road.
Zoe’s mom asked her and Jonah to follow her out to the garage.
“There’s some mess we have to clean up,” she said.
“Now?” said Zoe.
It was four in the morning.
“Now,” said her mother.
“I hate raccoons,” said Zoe.
Her mother seemed not to have heard her—she probably hadn’t slept in 24 hours—but at length she responded.
“Hmm?” she said. “Yeah, I hate them, too.”
The garage stood on the other side of the circular drive. Zoe had lived on this plot of ground her whole life, but it still amazed her that it could be so quiet—deep-space, science-fiction quiet—when it was nighttime and there wasn’t a wind. Silence, her mother liked to say, could heal you or it could make you crazy. It all depended on how you listened to it.
Zoe couldn’t tell what the silence would do to her tonight.
“Why’d you tell me to shut up when I said the thing about the cops not going to get Dad’s body?” she asked her mother.
“First of all,” her mother told her, “I would never tell you to shut up, because those are uncool words. But nothing good’s going to come from stirring everything up now. The police didn’t do their job. End of story.”
Zoe let it go, and they trudged along some more.
“I know you think we were lying about what happened with Stan,” she said as they crossed the drive.
“We weren’t, Mom,” Jonah interrupted. He had stopped to stab holes in the snow with a stick. “We weren’t lying at all.”
“Of course you weren’t, sweetie,” said Zoe’s mom.
“Stan really did hurt Bert and Betty,” he said. “And the magic man really did save Spock and Uhura.”
“Of course he did, sweetie.”
Zoe was annoyed by the way she was just yes-ing him. She fell behind to walk with her brother, who was still hacking at the snow like it was his enemy.
“Can you not?” she told him. “The snow is dead. You killed it. You win.”
She loved Jonah, even during his weird outbursts. She felt it strongly now. She wished the night could have bound them even closer to their mother, and for a while it’d seemed as if it would. Now her mom was floating away from them, looking up at the stars like Zoe and Jonah weren’t even there.
“We didn’t lie, Mom,” said Jonah, trying to reel her back in. “We didn’t.”
“Just drop it, Jonah,” Zoe said. “It’s not important that Mom believes us—because we believe us.”
They were 20 feet from the garage, and only now was it taking shape in the darkness, like the bow of a ship approaching through fog. It was a shingled shed built for two cars and divided down the middle by a thin wall. Jonah was strong enough to open the doors all by himself. He rushed forward delightedly.
“Which one?” he asked his mother.
“The one on the right,” she said. “But let me do it, please.”
The carport on the left held her mother’s silver Subaru Forester. Zoe’s car—a heinous old red Taurus that she referred to as the Struggle Buggy—used to be parked on the right. But Zoe had let Jonah convert her side of the garage into a mini–skate park so he could practice year-round. Her brother had installed a quarter pipe and a rail, and covered the walls with posters that said, Shred Till Yer Dead, and, Grind on It!
Zoe’s mom let out a sigh that made a cloud of vapor in the air. She asked Jonah to step back. Jonah wasn’t happy about it—he stamped his feet in the snow like an impatient horse—but he did.
Zoe stood by her brother, his partner in pouting. From inside the garage, she could hear scratching and scrabbling. She pulled Jonah even farther away, prepared for the raccoons to come tearing out. They were nasty animals. She picked up a snow shovel that was leaning against the garage and gripped it like a baseball bat.
Zoe’s mother reached down to open the door, then stopped and turned to them.
“I do believe you guys,” she said. “I’m sorry if it seemed like I didn’t.”
She appeared to have more to say, but she opened the door before continuing. It swung up with a metallic groan.
“Later, I want to hear all about the magic man,” her mother said. “But right now—”
Zoe saw a dark figure huddled on the floor of the garage. The figure turned to her, his face damp and beautiful and as pale as chalk.
“Right now,” her mother said, “you’ve got to help me get him inside.”
part two
A Binding of Fates
four
X heard a flurry of noises outside the garage: Voices. The rustling of clothes. Boots in the snow.
The door rose with a shivery screech, and the wind rushed in around him. He felt feverish, nauseated, depleted. Every sound was like a detonation in his head.
He looked up and saw three figures approaching in a funnel of light. It was the girl from the lake and her brother. A woman stood in front, shielding them. Their mother, surely. X winced and closed his eyes, as if it would make them disappear. He wasn’t afraid that they would do him harm. He was afraid they’d try to save him.
X knew he couldn’t be saved. Bounty hunters like him were just glorified prisoners, and they were bound by laws. He had been reckless—he had trampled on every one of them.
The most ancient commandment was None Must Know, meaning that mortals could never learn of the Lowlands’ existence. It could never be more than a story they told one another, a legend about a lake of fire they called hell. They could never have proof. That way, the living could be judged on how they behaved when they thought there would be no consequences. Bounty hunters were never to be seen by anyone but their prey. They were to strike quickly: in shadows and in silence.
X had put himself on parade. He’d spoken to the girl. He’d carried her and her brother through the stark woods. Worst of all, he had let the soul he’d been sent to collect escape into the trees, like a virus gone airborne. Had a bounty hunter ever failed to return with the soul the lords had sent him for? Had a bounty hunter ever refused to do his duty? X had never heard of such an outrage, until he had committed it himself.
And why had he been so weak? Why had he let Stan vanish into the hills? Because the girl had wanted him to.
No, there could be no saving him now. The fever that racked his body was called the T
rembling. It was his punishment, and it had only just begun.
A day earlier, X had lain entombed in his cell in the Lowlands, a wholly different pain just beginning to stir.
He didn’t know if it was day or night—he never did—for the prison was plunged deep in the earth, like a tumor. He’d been trying to sleep for hours. He lay on his side, curled like a question mark on the rocky floor, when the ever-present bruises beneath his eyes began to burn. He ignored it at first, desperate for rest. But the pain grew until it was as if his face was on fire.
It was a sign—a signal. One of the lords would come for him soon and force him to capture some new soul.
X had heard stories about a Higher Power that ruled the Lowlands, but the lords were the most ferocious creatures he’d ever encountered. There were both men and women in their number, and they’d once been prisoners themselves. Now they were a race unto themselves. They wore golden bands that lay tight around their throats, and vivid cloaks that flashed in the gloom. Like the prisoners they ruled over—X knew of only one exception—the lords did not age. The ones who had been damned when they were young remained young forever. Often they were gorgeous and stately. The oldest, however, were a walking nightmare. X sometimes saw the elders stalking around the Lowlands, hissing and howling and sharpening their curling talons on the rocks. Some had long gray hair that rippled down their backs and bony hands that pulsed with veins as fat as worms. When X looked at their faces, he could see their skulls trying to press through.
He wondered which lord would come for him now—and to which corner of the earth he would be sent.
X must have drifted off. He woke up shouting.
The prisoner in the cell to his right, who was known as Banger, had overheard the exclamation.
“Bad dream, dude?” he said. “Heard you freaking out.”
The souls were forbidden from knowing each other’s true names, and Banger had earned his nickname in the simplest way possible: by beating his forehead on the floor to ease his mental anguish. Banger had been a bartender in Phoenix. It wasn’t long ago that, in a fit of rage, he had stabbed a patron in a bar. Then he’d fled to South America, abandoning his wife and four-year-old daughter. Banger was 27 when X hauled him to the Lowlands. Now he would be 27 for all eternity. The lords didn’t allow the guards to beat the prisoners, because they knew the prisoners found pain a welcome distraction. Banger, and many souls besides him, did violence to themselves instead.