The man seemed to speak several rapid sentences, but the translator boiled it down to one simple word: “Certainly.”
She walked forward slowly, her eyes focused on the shack’s closed wooden door and the single glassless window covered by a black cloth that fluttered slowly in a nonexistent breeze. The village around her fell away, the conversations of the people she passed, even the words of her translator, fading into a muffled drone she could not understand. It was hot and humid, but her skin sported gooseflesh, and her heart was hammering hard enough to break her rib cage by the time she reached the small building and reached for the rusted doorknob.
“Wait here,” she told the translator. She didn’t know what she would see or what would happen, whether she would find herself alone in an empty room or facing a fierce deity that would destroy her on sight for daring to invade its sanctuary. But this was her destiny, and she was determined to face it alone.
She opened the door, stepped inside, and carefully closed the door behind her. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the shack’s interior, she saw a man seated against the opposite wall. He looked familiar, and she squinted, peering closer.
“Tony?” she said, shocked.
It was indeed Tony Livesey, her onetime boyfriend, all grown up and much the worse for wear. He was dressed in a drab robe of rough cloth, and his face was lined far beyond its years. There was a scar down one cheek, and on that side of his face the corner of his mouth drooped as though there’d been nerve damage. His right hand was gone, the arm ending in a wrapped stump.
“Do you remember me?” she asked, stepping closer.
He nodded, meeting her eyes. “I never forgot you.”
She glanced around the empty room. “Are you their . . . god?”
“No,” he said tiredly. “Not exactly.”
He told her his story. He had joined the marines after high school and had been stationed in Saudi Arabia, where he had deserted, fed up with the horrors of regimented life. He had survived on the streets as a musician, a busker. But times had gotten hard and he’d been forced to steal and he’d been caught. A judge of one of America’s foremost allies in the Middle East ordered that his hand be chopped off as punishment for his crime.
It was his hand that was the god. For it had not died but continued to live, to grow. It had followed him, though he had tried at first to escape it, from the Middle East to South Africa to South America to the Pacific islands. It was now the size of a chair, and Tony slowly stood to reveal that he had been sitting atop it, that what she had taken for a throne was in reality the stump of wrist, palm and fingers of his enormous hand. Before her eyes, the fingers moved, reconfigured themselves, and now it was not a seat but something resembling a monster spider from an old science fiction movie.
He still felt its feelings, Tony said, was still connected to it, and when the local women polished and trimmed its nails, rode atop its oversize fingers to give themselves pleasure, he experienced those sensations as well.
“I can feel it, but I can’t control it,” he admitted. “It does what it wants.”
She stared at the gigantic hand, overcome by a feeling of wonder, awed by the majesty of the sight. “Does it perform miracles?”
“It is a miracle,” Tony said.
That was true. She looked at his empty sleeve, then at the hand on the other side of the room. Perhaps her husband’s hands would have survived had they been amputated. Maybe they would now be autonomous and independent, and she could be enjoying them, taking them into her bed each night, letting them roam over her body and do what they would with her. The idea made her ache with longing.
“Is it really a god?” she asked.
He nodded. “They’re all over the world,” he said softly. “The followers. They are not just here in this village. There are even pockets of believers in the United States. Men and women who recognize the divinity of my hand.
“It’s not the god but it’s a god.”
She reached out, touched the stump of his wrist, remembered when he had a hand there and what it had done to her. “It’s my god,” she said.
His voice was thick, raspy. “Go to it.”
They said no more to each other. Slowly but with purpose, she crossed the short space of the room. The hand had shifted position yet again, was now stretched out in a way that made it resemble a bed. She touched it, was surprised by the softness of its skin. Its size, location and backstory had led her to believe it would be rough, leathery, but despite the prominence of the whorled ridges that made up its enlarged fingerprints, the skin of the hand felt supple and silken. She got goose bumps just rubbing it.
She received no messages from the hand; it did not speak to her, but it didn’t have to. She knew what she had to do, and she sat down on the hard floor and pulled off her shoes, her socks, her blouse, her bra. She stood, pulled down her pants and panties, then climbed atop the palm. The hand seemed to recognize her. She recognized it as well, remembered its movements and unique individual attributes, and she leaned back, settled into it, rubbed herself against it.
It was too big to be able to do what it wanted to do, what she wanted it to do, and as the huge fingers, fingers as big as her legs, attempted to push into her, penetrate her, but managed only to press futilely against her, she saw the look of frustration on Tony’s face across the room.
She understood how the other women did it, sitting astride a finger, riding it as though it were a mechanical bull, but that was not what she wanted, not what Tony wanted, not what God wanted. She grabbed the thumb, held it, hugged it, felt the power surging beneath her, behind her, all around her.
“Get off!” Tony ordered. He sounded angry.
“It’s okay,” she said softly.
“No!”
She knew what he was thinking and understood all of a sudden what had to be done. “It’s okay,” she said again.
She settled more fully onto the hand, and as it closed and tightened, squeezing the life out of her, as Tony screamed and the translator and tribesmen pushed open the door and rushed inside, she thought what a glorious way this was to die.
Ten
It had been easy.
That was what really got to him.
The first few days were torture. Every time the phone rang at work, Steve assumed it was the law, some Columbo-like cop who would hound him with casual questions until he inadvertently revealed the truth. Sitting at home, he kept waiting for a knock at the door, knowing that when he answered it, the police would be there to arrest him. He was afraid even to look up information about Lyman Fischer’s death on the Internet for fear that any site he accessed would be red-flagged and all inquiries traced back to him.
But as the days passed, and then the weeks, he understood that he had gotten away with it. And he realized how easy it had been. He’d made a quick trip, done the deed, and while he may have left chaos in his wake, his day-to-day life went on as normal.
Maybe he should’ve silenced Jessica Haster at the same time.
He’d been telling himself his father would have been proud of him had he still been able to think clearly—wasn’t this the way he would have handled the situation?—but Joe Nye had never been proud of anything his son had done. It was far likelier that he would have been angry. After all, his dad was an old hand at this. He’d been killing for years, decades. Steve could easily imagine his father criticizing his poor planning and the fact that he had not tied up all of the loose ends—and then telling him how he should have gone about it.
Because if Lyman had talked to Jessica . . .
If Lyman had talked to Jessica, she would have called the police with any suspicions she had, and Steve would have been questioned.
It stopped here. He was already far more deeply involved than he should be or wanted to be. Not a day went by that he didn’t regret returning to Copper City, and when he was with Sherry or his friends, with normal people, he felt dirty, guilty, like a secret leper. At unwelcome moments, his mind
returned to the scene inside that dark, filthy house, and he felt again the sickening sensation of hard cartilage under dry, wattled skin as his arm tightened around Lyman Fischer’s neck.
He wished his father had just died from the stroke and he himself had never gotten sucked into this maelstrom.
And yet . . .
And yet he felt a strange sort of kinship with his father now, a sense of shared experience. In an odd way, he felt closer to his dad today than he ever had before. They had both killed people—how shocking it was to even think that!—and yet they both pretended as though they hadn’t, maintaining lives of middle-class normalcy rather than succumbing to the lifestyle of the criminal. He understood now the emotions that had lain within his father for all these years. He remembered, several years back, hearing about “millionaires next door,” average people who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, were rich. He and his father, Steve thought, were “murderers next door,” and that made him wonder how many others like them there were.
It was horrifying what he’d done, and the sensory elements of those few terrible moments were always with him—the sight, the smell, the feel, the sound—but the truth was that in addition to horror and revulsion, Steve experienced a feeling of tremendous power when he thought about what had occurred. Because he had been almost godlike in that moment when he had squeezed the life out of Lyman Fischer. The problem he had faced was insurmountable: The blackmail could have gone on forever and not only ruined his life but the lives of his family. So he had gone outside the human paradigm, had eschewed society’s acceptable half measures and compromised solutions, and had dealt with the situation in a more omnipotent manner by taking Lyman’s life, solving everything with one bold, clean stroke.
And still all was as it had been. He went to work, watched TV, hung with his friends, went out with Sherry.
Sherry.
He wondered how she would react if she knew the truth. Not well, he thought. But then, who would? He was a murderer and the son of a murderer. He did not deserve someone like her.
She was spending the night one Saturday when he let her read his story about the hand. Emboldened by his first sale, he showed her the new piece before submitting it, confident that she would appreciate his work. But she remained silent after reading the story, and when pressed admitted that she found it disturbing.
“Is that how you see women?” she asked. “Are we creatures controlled by our crotches and defined solely by our sexual urges?”
“No,” he said, confused. He was not sure how she had even come to that conclusion. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
“Then what did you mean? Her husband dies and all she misses is the way his hands gave her an orgasm?” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I really don’t mean to criticize. And I’m glad you’re showing me your writing. But this is . . . I don’t know. This is creepy.”
He felt hurt but was determined not to show it. “It’s supposed to be creepy,” he said defensively.
“I don’t think it’s creepy in the same way you intended.”
He dreamed that night of the clown again, only this time the clown was somewhere in Lyman Fischer’s house and it was Steve’s job to find him. Lyman’s dead body was lying on the floor where he had left it, only now it was decomposed, the whiteness of skull showing through the putrefying flesh. Steve was standing inside the open front door, staring at the body, and the screen was banging in the wind against the backs of his shoes. From down the hall, from one of the bedrooms, perhaps, came a high-pitched laugh that sounded both crazy and feminine. The clown. He didn’t want to find the clown, but he had to, and he stepped over Lyman’s decaying corpse and crept through the darkened living room toward the hallway. The furniture to either side of him—the couch, the tables, the chairs—didn’t look like furniture in the dimness but like people or creatures, the slumbering denizens of some carnival freak show. He kept his focus on the blackened rectangle of the hallway entrance, however, and saw when he reached it that swirling kaleidoscopic colors were seeping out from underneath the closed bathroom door. He tiptoed down the hall, trying not to make any sound, reached his right hand out to grab the bathroom doorknob, then quickly turned the knob and flung open the door. The small room was empty, no one in the tub, in the shower, on the toilet. There was only a round multicolored filter turning in front of a freestanding lamp atop the sink counter. He turned, intending to search the bedrooms—
—and the clown was right there behind him, his evil face lit by the swirling colors from the bathroom, laughing that horrible high-pitched laugh.
Steve awoke with a start, and for a second, Sherry’s face on the pillow next to him looked white in the darkness, as though she were wearing clown makeup. He looked up at the ceiling, taking a deep breath. He realized that it had been exactly a month since Lyman’s death. Now wide-awake, he carefully and stealthily got out of bed and made his way out to the hall and into the bathroom, where he closed and locked the door before leaning over and vomiting in the toilet.
At lunch on Monday, he decided to look up information about unsolved murders in the towns and cities his family had lived in over the years. It was high time that he started researching in more detail his father’s crimes. The partial knowledge he possessed and the speculation he engaged in were only slightly better than willful ignorance, and while the whole truth might make him uncomfortable, it was something he needed to know.
As it happened, he was working on putting together a twenty-year reunion booklet for a religious college in Utah, so that gave him a head start, made it easier to research unsolved murders from the two years his family had lived in Salt Lake City. He’d been five when they’d pulled up stakes and moved to Flagstaff, so his memories of the city were nearly nonexistent. He recalled a blue house, a red tricycle, a picnic in the backyard where he and some friend had eaten peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches, but that was about it. Their family had lived in Utah the same year the college students had graduated, so he used the database he’d been consulting for the reunion booklet to search for Salt Lake City residents who had disappeared or died mysteriously during that time, and whose whereabouts remained unknown or whose killings had never been solved.
There were three teenage girls and one teenage boy who’d been abducted and had never been found, a retired policeman who had been shot execution-style in his garage, a transient who had been stabbed outside a bar, a young woman who had been raped and strangled, and two brothers who had been the victims of an arson-caused apartment fire. His first impulse was to look carefully at the young woman who’d been strangled—although he didn’t think his father was capable of raping anyone—but then he thought of something his dad had said the other day: Both of them burned. It was a non sequitur, not something mentioned in the context of a conversation, and he’d thought it meant nothing at the time, was just more nonsensical rambling, but now it seemed to him that his dad had been recalling the arson fire that had killed those two brothers.
If he’d thought it meant nothing at the time, then why had he remembered it?
Because part of him had known that it had meant something, and he tried to recall other isolated phrases or sentence fragments that had stuck with him, that might be clues to the past rather than merely indications of his father’s mental condition. Nothing stood out, but maybe deeper research into some of these deaths would jog his memory.
He looked up what he could about the brothers who’d been burned. Alex and Anthony Jones. The real details were tied up in police case files not available to civilians, but there was enough public information for him to piece together what had happened. Salt Lake was also not Copper City, so the local newspapers— there were two!—had not only covered the deaths in depth but had online archives that he could access. Steve wrote down names, dates and places, then used a directory to look up the addresses and phone numbers of surviving relatives and witnesses who’d remained in the area.
He paused, looked over the information he’d
written down. Did he really think his father was involved here?
Yes.
If so, his theory was wrong. They hadn’t all been prostitutes.
They hadn’t all been women.
He stared at the names of the two brothers on top of his paper. Why would his father have killed those men? Had they cheated him? Threatened him? There had to be a reason. He refused to believe that his dad had just gone out and murdered people at random.
But that’s what serial killers do.
He pushed the thought from his mind and moved on to Flagstaff, where they’d lived after Salt Lake City. Aside from a stabbing and a shooting in two unrelated bar fights, the only other murder on record for the year they were there was the brutal slaying of a college coed from Northern Arizona University. The bar killings both had plenty of witnesses, and the drunken perpetrators had been apprehended immediately, so the coed’s murder was the only one that remained unsolved. Although he doubted that his father was behind it. The young woman had been stabbed repeatedly, assaulted on her way back to campus after attending a friend’s birthday party at a nearby bar. Her face had been slashed across both cheeks, and there were so many crazily inflicted knife wounds in her chest and abdomen that segments of partially shredded organs ended up outside the rent skin. It was the insane ferocity of the killing that made Steve think it had not been his father. Arson he could see. Pushing someone off a building? Yes. But no matter how hard he tried, he could not imagine his dad getting in there and stabbing someone over and over again while blood gushed out and spurted in every direction.
The only other possibility was that his father had been responsible for the two unsolved child abductions that had occurred in Flagstaff that year—although that seemed just as unlikely to him and even more distasteful.
Maybe there’d been no killing in Flagstaff. Maybe they’d moved on to Tempe for legitimate reasons.
He chose to believe that.
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