Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  “You a ranger?” Aqil said. “I didn’t realize this was a park. Is this area under your jurisdiction?”

  She turned the full force of the flashlight’s beam on Aqil, and he squinted his eyes shut, a hand in front of his face. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave this area,” the woman said. “The park is closed. There’s a sign, and there’s a gate. Maybe you didn’t see them.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you your name, ma’am?” Aqil said. “Do you have some identification that you could show me?”

  “Sir,” the woman said, and the horse shifted restlessly underneath her. “I need you to return to your car and leave this area.  This area is restricted after dusk, sir.”

  “Yeah,” Aqil said. “I get that. But what’s your name, Officer? I would really appreciate it if you could give me your badge number, if you don’t mind.”

  The figure was silent for a moment—and it occurred to me for the first time that it was possible that this person wasn’t a real officer, a real ranger, but whatever she was, she clicked her tongue and the flashlight shuddered along our faces as she began to approach at a trot.

  I felt Aqil’s hand clutch the ham of my forearm. “She’s got a gun,” he murmured. His breath against the helix of my ear. “She’s got it drawn.

  “I need you to jump,” he whispered.  And then he shoved me.

  —

  I thought there might have been the sound of a gunshot, but I wasn’t certain. A sharp crack—! And the  And

  I thought I saw Aqil’s arms fly back, pinwheeling, and then he fell down the embankment toward the river.

  I started to run—it was a pure panic now—but then I fell, too, tumbling end over end, down the side of the ravine.

  DECEMBER 11, 2012

  THE SLOPE WAS about a sixty-degree angle, and there was no way to catch my footing in the mud and leaves and brambles; there was only the hope that I could avoid hitting the trunks of trees that were flying past me, that I could somehow not break my neck. But I was in the hands of gravity, and when I reached the bottom I landed hard. My thoughts went black.

  And then Aqil was leaning over me, crouched, his gun unholstered and ready, and I could see that his shoulder was bleeding. The hand that held the gun was shaking so hard the movement was blurred.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Shhh. Shhh! Be quiet!”

  His eyes were wide. He turned swiftly in a circle, holding his gun in both hands. “Don’t move!” he hissed. “Don’t move!”

  I pulled myself to my hands and knees. The walking trail was a hundred feet above us, the hill a hunched shadow behind the net of bare trees that were angled along the slope. The horse and its rider were nowhere to be seen.

  We were silent. There was the sound of the river and the sound of cars passing over the viaduct in the distance.  No hooves.

  “Shh!” Aqil said. He held up his hand, and I saw that the entire left side of his shirt was soaked with blood.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, but Aqil kept his hand out to silence me. “Shhh!”  We listened together for a long time, both of us tense and waiting.

  There was nothing.  We were on the muddy banks of a river, and the light rain pattered and rustled. The fisherman we thought we saw was gone. There was no flashlight shining from above us, no ranger on a horse. After a long while, Aqil lowered his gun.

  “Aqil,” I said. “My God! We need to get to a hospital.”

  Aqil looked down at himself, puzzled. He wiped his hand over his bloody shirt and looked at the wet blood on his palm. “Fuck,” he said.

  “You’ve been shot!” I said, under my breath, and he turned to me scornfully.

  “Shot?” he said. “I got poked by a stick falling down that goddamned hill.” I watched as he grimaced and touched his shoulder gingerly.

  “It’s cops,” he said hoarsely. “Maybe real cops, maybe people dressed as cops. But that’s how they get them.”

  He touched his wound again and looked at his palm. More blood. He smelled it. “Okay,” he said. “Take me to the hospital.”

  DECEMBER 11, 2012

  BY THE TIME WE left the emergency room, it was almost midnight. I’d been sitting in the waiting area, trying to piece the events together into something coherent.

  Had we been attacked?

  If so, why didn’t they pursue us?

  I put my hands in my lap, clasped them, fingertips against knuckles: the feeling of being in a dream when you are not in a dream.

  Depersonalization. Derealization. It is a common symptom when you are experiencing an anxiety attack. I pressed my clenched hands against my chest, and an elderly black woman in a ski coat stared at me with disapproval.

  I smiled and nodded, but she looked away, avoiding eye contact by pretending that she was considering the dull abstract paintings on the wall.

  I took out my phone, and that gave me a little grounding. The online world reached out and gripped my hand. I heard the phone make its comforting musical sounds.

  New text messages.  From Aaron.

  11:51 PM December 11 WTF?

  6:50 PM December 11 Didn’t you make a big deal about having dinner together tonite? LOL Nvr mind.

  DECEMBER 12, 2012

  AND THEN AQIL emerged and stared at me sternly. He was still wearing his bloody shirt, though now there were bandages on his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.

  We walked grimly out of emergency and into the parking lot, where it was still raining.

  “Damn it,” Aqil said. “They knew we were there. They know about us. I should never have talked to Ellison!”

  “You think your friend Ellison is…?”

  “Pff,” Aqil scoffed. As if the thought of Ellison being involved was ridiculous. “It’s just that they all gossip among themselves, so they knew that we’d be looking around out there.”

  “I’m very confused,” I said. “Who’s ‘they’? Who was that woman on horseback?”

  “Must’ve been one of the cultists,” Aqil said. He considered. “Or maybe she really was a park ranger. But I didn’t like the look of her.”

  “Surely we can find out her name,” I said. “If she’s really a ranger. We could—”

  “Mmph,” he said. I felt his hand close over my forearm, and his fingers tightened. “I feel like I’m close to figuring it out. This has been really helpful.”

  I nodded uncertainly. I opened the door of the car, and then, I didn’t know why, but I was abruptly aware of an absence. “Oh,” I said. I touched the back pocket of my pants, and then I put my hands in my jacket.

  Empty.

  “I think I lost my wallet,” I said.

  DECEMBER 13, 2012

  BACK IN THE late eighties, early nineties, we earnestly believed in these things. My professor, Dr. Raskoph, was an authority on recovered-memory syndrome, dissociative identity disorder, et cetera. There had been no doubt that Satanic Ritual Abuse, as it was then known, was a real and true phenomenon. It was a legitimate subject to explore in a dissertation.

  It had been a hot topic for a while. How many people were living with repressed memories, we wondered? One in ten? One in three, perhaps? The image of the father leaning over the bed, your eyes opening, only half awake. The face looming toward you.

  Or: The image of hooded figures encircling you, peering down at you. The sensation of being awake but unable to move, the voice box shriveled and hard as a walnut.

  Some kind of violation by a powerful figure. A horned demon, clutching your wrists, forcing your legs open. A cluster of masked figures, exposing themselves above you, swollen, uncircumsized penises swaying pendulously. Your baby ripped live from your bleeding womb, your baby screaming and screaming, umbilical cord dragging behind it as the soft throat is slit, and the blood poured into cups. Various celebrities in the crowd, laughing. Sometimes it might be a powerful well-known figure—a senator, or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a pop star or talk-show host—watching from a distance as his bodyguards forc
e you to strip naked.

  It was a metaphor, of course. If the memories were not literally true, then they represented distorted versions of traumas that had truly occurred.

  But as the claims became more extreme, the whole thing became increasingly improbable. Lawsuits began to be filed against psychiatrists who had helped their patients recover memories of Satanic abuse; convictions were challenged; according to FBI Special Agent Kenneth Lanning, the number of alleged cases began to grow and grow. We now have hundreds of victims alleging that thousands of offenders are abusing and even murdering tens of thousands of people as part of organized Satanic cults, and there is little or no corroborative evidence.

  A professor from a California university testified that the theory of “repressed memory” was a myth unsupported by reliable scientific evidence. “It’s the worst form of quackery in the twentieth century,” he said. “These so-called therapists have destroyed thousands of American families.”

  —

  Meanwhile, I had finished my dissertation and received my PhD, and I had started a small practice, and I had testified in a number of court cases that involved recovered memory.

  I was aware, of course, that there was growing hostility to some of these ideas. I no longer spoke of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” but rather simply “Ritual Abuse,” or “Sadistic Ritual Abuse.” I freely admitted that Dissociative Identity Disorder had been wildly overdiagnosed for a period, even by Dr. Raskoph, who by that time had been stripped of her license to practice medicine and was on indefinite leave from her position at the university.

  But I thought I was being very careful and conservative in my diagnoses. I felt quite confident in what I was doing, until a patient that I had been treating recanted her testimony on the witness stand during a trial. Gina Deleo. Her father had murdered one of her childhood friends while she watched, she alleged, but then during cross-examination she had suddenly balked.

  “I don’t know whether anything I’m saying is true,” she said. “I think it might not be.”

  I had worked with her for over a year, and her disavowal shocked me as much as anyone. I had been convinced by the memories that she had recovered while under hypnosis. I had believed in them.

  In some ways, I still believed in them.  The event was so vividly described! I could still see her father sitting there next to his lawyer, with his thick white hair and pale eyes, and he would always look like a rapist to me.

  But her memories had come while she was under hypnosis, and the defense questioned whether these were even permissible as evidence.

  Later, Gina Deleo said that I had “implanted” the memories.

  “He made me think up the most horrific things,” she said. “And then he convinced me that they were real.”

  —

  There was a lawsuit afterward, which was settled out of court, but certainly the career that I thought I was going to have was ruined. I was married to Jill, and Dennis was three, and Aaron was an infant. Once again, I would need to completely reinvent myself.

  More than a decade passed.

  I thought I was safe.

  But now here I was, circling back. Or else it was circling back around me. Maybe I believed again—or maybe it once more believed in me.

  DECEMBER 14, 2012

  ON FRIDAY, BOTH bodies were discovered. Keegan Brewer was found in the basement of an abandoned building outside of Hiram, gunshot to the head, an apparent suicide, which, with his history, was exactly what I would have predicted; Slade Gable was in a gravel pit near the place where Grand River dumps into Lake Erie. Workers had found the corpse in a shoal of thick silt on the edge of a fence that surrounded Osborne Concrete & Stone Company.

  I guessed I would have expected that, too.

  —

  The river snaked a shallow, irregular path from the Kiwanis Park, near where Slade disappeared, to the lake, but police were speculating that the remains must have been slowly pulled downstream for some time—drifting, then catching on tree stumps or debris, and then drifting again, traveling, traveling, before finally coming to rest in a heap of sand.

  “That would be a pretty beat-up body, don’t you think?” Aqil said. “I wonder if they’re doing an autopsy. I’d like to see some photos.”

  We were on the pier, trying to get a look at the site where the body was discovered, but Osborne Concrete & Stone was protected by a high cyclone fence. If there was a crime scene that had been blocked off, it appeared that it had been taken down.

  “Ha!” Aqil said. “They probably didn’t even put tape around it. Probably just brought in an ambulance and picked up the corpse and hauled it to the morgue. This death isn’t going to be investigated. I have no doubt it’s going to come back from the coroner as an accidental drowning.”

  “Really?” I said. “I mean, there will have to be…some kind of inquest, right?”

  “Hm,” Aqil said, and looked at me sidelong. How naïve was I? “I’ll tell you,” he said. “A body is found in a waterway and there’s presumed alcohol consumption involved? The coroner isn’t going to be looking too deeply into it. I told you. That’s what makes these killings so smart.”

  “But the parents could insist,” I said. “If they think foul play may be involved.”

  Aqil shrugged. “Yeah, maybe,” he said, and made a wry face. “I haven’t had much luck with that. The cops usually finesse them, get them convinced pretty solidly. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to bring you on board, Doctor. I thought maybe you’d have more in common with these folks than I do. Thought maybe they’d be more likely to trust you.”

  He gave me a look that I found inscrutable, and we walked for a while in silence along the parking lot at the edge of the beach.  The waters of Lake Erie were choppy, bleakly hostile, like the eye of a fish.

  “It makes so much more sense now if I imagine that it’s cops,” he said. “God! Do you know the mischief even one corrupt cop can make, just by being a little bit careful?”  Aqil shook his head.  “My guess is there’s dozens.  All over the state.”

  “Really?” I said. “That seems like a lot.” And I glanced toward the horizon, the line between lake and sky almost indistinguishable. “So—what? These cultists just decided they’d infiltrate police departments? It’s not that easy to become a cop, is it?”

  “Of course it is,” Aqil said. “A person goes to the academy for a few months, takes the test. Hell, you could do it, if you wanted. As a matter of fact, I think it might be useful if you tried.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “The thing is, Aqil, almost all of the typical victims of Satanic abuse are young children, very occasionally teenaged females. Young adult males—I can’t think of anything that isn’t primarily associated with sadistic gay serial killers. Like Gacy or Randy Steven Kraft.”

  “But that’s what’s brilliant about it, right?” Aqil said. “It’s not going to make much of a splash in the news. A drunk college boy drowns? It’s a lot less conspicuous than babies or children or teenaged white girls. I mean, why not? Sacrificing a young dude might please the dark lord just as much.”

  I considered this.

  —

  In the summer, I imagined, Fairport Harbor might be a pretty place, an easy weekend drive from Cleveland. There might be sunbathers on the sand, and children chasing one another, inner tubes bobbing in the water, and people wading and swimming. There was a quaint lighthouse in the distance, looking out over Lake Erie.

  But in December, the sky and the lake were the same featureless steel gray. The shore rippled with dull, unfriendly waves, and the sand was washed out, colorless. Twenty miles down, the hazy stacks of nuclear power plants were exuding thick white steam from their chimneys.

  The rails on the sides of the pier were lined with seagulls, hundreds of them perched in a row that extended all the way down the boardwalk, and they lifted up as we passed and then settled back, hardly ruffled or even curious about our presence. “Creepy fuckers,” Aqil said. “This is Hitchcock
movie material.”  A gull held its mouth open soundlessly, as if to say, I bite!

  “I’ll bet these things made a few meals out of poor Slade,” he said. “Probably made a mess of that corpse.”

  I grimaced. It was not an image I wanted to picture. “Well,” I said. “What do we do now? If your theory is true, it’s going to be a year before they”

  “Take another victim?” he said.  “Maybe. But we’ve got more information than we had before. And we’ve had some kind of contact. Maybe now they know about us.”

  DECEMBER 15, 2012

  DENNIS WOULD BE home from Cornell at the end of the week, and I hadn’t done anything to prepare. There was no Christmas tree, I hadn’t bought any presents, the refrigerator was full of old leftovers and aging fruits and vegetables that neither Aaron nor I would really eat, though I kept replenishing the supply every time I went to the market. There was a lot of unused kale.

  It was only six weeks since Jill’s death, and I wondered—were these rituals necessary? Did anyone even want them? I didn’t know. My mind felt like a shipwreck, a clogged lagoon with broken pieces of flotsam bobbing in it, a clamor of voices speaking urgently.

  Do you believe, Aqil said in my head, even as I sat down with another patient to talk about compulsive eating behaviors, even as I scanned briefly through websites, looking for sweaters for young men that might make appropriate gifts for the boys, even as I sat up in bed and listened: the sound of a skateboard?

  Then I lay there, silent. Think of the constellations, I thought. The little speech that I had made up for my patients, I repeated it in my head like a prayer I had memorized. We look at them in one dimension, and it seems that they are all connected. We think that there’s some image we can make out if we connect the dots. But more than likely the dots are not connected.  They’re on separate geometric planes, light-years apart.