• • •
The ferry was small, with a half-open wheelhouse in the bow, an open deck in the middle, and a small seating area in back covered by a wind-jostled blue tarp. They hit rain almost as soon as they left the harbor, and the ten passengers who had boarded along with Shire found themselves fighting for space under the tarp alongside their own luggage and the boat’s fat smokestack, which was so overheated that even the insulation it had been wrapped in was hot to the touch. (More than one passenger made the mistake of leaning against the padding, only to recoil as if a snake had bitten them.) Only residents could use the car ferry that ran to the island’s northern end, otherwise Shire would have taken it in a heartbeat. Anything would have been better than this trembling, steaming junk heap.
The rain got so heavy you couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. A tense hush fell over the passengers. The two small children who had been excited by the downpour just moments earlier seemed to recognize the gravity of the situation and began pawing at their father’s pant legs. But Daddy Dearest was too busy staring at the spot where the northeastern horizon had been, with a tense set to his simian jaw. Then some protective urge roused him from his paralysis. He picked up his little girl in one arm, forcing his young son to cling to his right leg.
At least the seas are calm, Shire thought. But you still couldn’t see a damn thing, and that seemed important, even if the island was probably to the east of them now, sheltering the surrounding waters from the open sea. And he’d love it if the boat rocked and rolled, just a little bit. Right now, the whole thing felt too heavy on the water, its determined course the product of that steely arrogance that comes with old age. At any minute, it felt like water would close over the bow and the whole thing would just start chugging straight for the sandy bottom as if nothing were amiss.
The engine cut out. A dock appeared a few yards ahead, and just beyond it, several SUVs waited to shuttle guests to the nearby bed-and-breakfast, which Shire saw only in a glimpse of soaring Greek columns through the mist. Everyone disembarked except for Shire, the father and his two munchkins. Fifteen minutes later, they arrived at an isolated dock in the center of the island where a National Parks Service sign reminded them that the last ferry was at 6:00 p.m. They had reached the last stop, the island’s wild center.
Shire followed the father and his two kids up a dirt trail that led straight into a dense forest of gnarled live oak branches. Spiny palmetto leaves shot up out of the dense understory like claws. The island’s central trail ran north to south, wide enough to accommodate two vehicles side by side; tire tracks and hoofprints, presumably from the wild horses that inhabited the island, marched the patchwork of gravel, loose rock and sandy soil.
When it was clear he wasn’t going to follow them to the beach, the father appeared to recognize Shire for the first time; he offered a nod and a smile while his kids raced off into the expanse of low sand dunes, pursuing the sound of pounding surf. Then Shire was all alone, walking north under the constant canopy of interlocking oak branches, listening to the sounds of his own lonely footsteps, dodging the occasional palmetto leaf that reached out to snag his shirt.
After twenty minutes, he passed a sign that informed him he was leaving parks service property. Then he saw a large antebellum mansion sitting in the middle of an expansive clearing, shutters drawn, barn-style garage closed and locked. Yet to open for the summer season, he figured.
Ten minutes later, he spotted two brick columns marking the entrance to a gravel driveway. The Walters place; it had to be. The map had been right so far.
Without slowing his steps, Shire slid the right strap of his backpack off his shoulder so he could grip the whole thing in front of him like a papoose. Out came the hand-sized Sony digital camera, with the small telephoto lens attachment. He shifted the backpack to its previous position, and suddenly Shire was just a lone hiker, preparing to lift his camera at an interesting shot. Meanwhile, he held his finger down on the button, snapping a random, constant series of pictures of the Walters place while he held the camera against his thigh.
Once the house and driveway were out of sight, he stopped and examined his work.
The driveway was empty, but the gravel had fresh-looking tire tracks leading into the closed garage. The existing vegetation had been sculpted into a dense perimeter wall between the trail and the house, and the roof had two steeply sloped levels that intersected at a right angle; a trick to make the house look like it was two stories instead of one. It was a glorified cottage on a generous plot of land. And if the map continued to deliver, there was a narrower hiking trail that ran beside the property’s western edge. He trudged through the mud and tree branches in search of it, scanning the ground for snakes as he went.
A few minutes later, he had a pretty decent view of the house’s backside. He was crouching down in the brush, snapping photos of the house’s dark windows, when the smell hit him; too sour to be the septic tank, too full of rot to be household trash. His eyes were watering, his nostrils dilating, and then there was movement behind him. His first instinct was to jump to his feet, but he didn’t want to give away his location, crouched down in the dense brush, so he looked behind him over one shoulder.
The horse was nosing its way through the trail behind him. About seven feet tall from hooves to head, with a shiny coat the color of milk chocolate and a band of white hair around its neck, it didn’t seem to notice him at all. Shire couldn’t tell what the animal was doing, and he was less afraid of it than he was of having his cover blown.
Was the horse making that awful smell?
The damn things roamed wild on the island, didn’t they? Or maybe it had been drawn to the smell. Maybe there was something big and dead somewhere in the leaves nearby and the horse was trying to sniff it out. But that was ridiculous. He didn’t know much about any animals, but he knew horses weren’t carrion eaters, for Christ’s sake.
“Buzz off, pal,” Shire whispered. “I got work to do.”
The brush all around them erupted, and it took Allen Shire several minutes of clawing at branches and spitting leaves from his mouth to realize that he hadn’t been shot at, that the horse had just lost its fucking marbles on him. It was bearing down on him, hooves flying up, trailing mud clumps, piano key–teeth bared, lips sputtering, flaring nostrils washing Shire in damp heat.
If something had frightened the damn thing, it had responded by bearing down on Shire with sudden, wild fury. And in a terrible instant, he realized he’d tumbled backward through slick palmetto leaves and into the house’s backyard. The horse exploded through the brush after him. He tried to feign left and the monster mirrored him, still kicking and bucking like something from hell’s rodeo.
Knees bent, arms at his side, Shire found himself taking long backward steps across the yard. Then his feet slid out from under him and he landed ass-first in a patch of mud that smeared his hands. Even though it would have been the perfect moment to do so, the horse didn’t trample him. It closed the distance, then started pacing back and forth—horses can pace? Shire thought wildly—in case the man tried to run in either direction.
It’s corralling me. Son of a bitch, the damn horse is corralling me!
His right heel hit something hard, and then his ass landed on the house’s back steps with a hard thump, like a little boy who’d been cast into the nearest empty chair by the hand of an angry father.
The horse whined, an awful, piercing sound he didn’t know a horse was capable of making. Then the creature’s hind legs bent at the knees, and bile rose in Shire’s throat as he realized the monster was about to lunge at him.
Then the horse’s head exploded.
The animal’s skull seemed to give way down the center, as if an invisible sledgehammer had struck it in just the right spot. The jawbone slipped free from the collapsing skull in a single piece. After it came the brain matter, a slick, corded tumble the color of mud laced with red wine. And even as it all hit the earth with wet smackin
g sounds, the horse remained standing, and Shire realized that explosion wasn’t the right word for what he was witnessing. It was as if some congenital weakness inside the animal’s skull had picked that exact moment to trigger a total collapse. And as the seconds passed, as the horse remained standing, it looked as if the animal had just offered up its brain matter to Shire as a welcome present.
Then the animal keeled over and landed on one side so hard its legs bounced, and Shire was left with his own desperate gasps, the same sounds his pal Bobby Hurwitz had made after they all hurled him into the shallow end of the Audubon Park pool when they were kids and he’d been hauled to the surface, goggle-eyed and wheezing, too stunned to gasp for a complete breath. That’s what Allen Shire sounded like right now; a little boy who had been slammed into a wall of unforgiving concrete.
Then he took in the sight of the rest of the yard. It was not a patch of mud he had fallen into a few seconds earlier. He had, in essence, separated the remains of a deer’s head even further from its lifeless body and the stains all over his pants and arms were too red to be pure mud. The yard was littered with them, animal carcasses; skunks, possums, a few bobcats and snakes, plenty of goddamn snakes, and all of them had suffered the same fate as the horse from hell; their heads had been reduced to molten-looking piles of snapped bones and dung-colored brain matter. He’d been too busy trying to get a peek through the house’s windows to realize he was shooting pictures over a grotesque, open-air slaughterhouse.
Invisible hammer. Invisible hammer. These were the two words he couldn’t get out of his head; he thought if he kept thinking them over and over again they would bring him to a logical, earthbound explanation for what he was witnessing. No, it’s not an invisible hammer that did in these poor little critters, you silly fool, it was actually a . . . But his mind wasn’t filling in the blank, and there was blood over his clothes and hands, and the smell was worse here, much worse than it had been on the other side of the yard.
He was on his feet suddenly, because now the only thing that mattered was getting the bloody mud off his hands. Not just off his hands. Off his flesh. He spun around and knocked into the glass door at the top of the steps. Inside there would be water. Inside there would be a sink and soap and paper towels and maybe some of that new white tea–scented soap that always put him in a good mood because it reminded him of the redhead in Biloxi who’d kept it in her bathroom, one of the only decent one-night stands he’d ever had in his life.
He closed one gore-smeared hand around the doorknob.
Marshall Ferriot stared back at him from the other side of the glass. The kid was sitting upright in a motorized wheelchair. And he was smiling at him, and the smile was growing, his chapped lips curling into a leer that seemed to take up his entire emaciated face.
Hello, there.
He had mouthed the words so clearly Shire could read his lips. Then he cocked his head to one side and his leer softened into a smile that was less eager, and more self-satisfied.
Shire was still wondering how the doorknob had managed to dissolve in his grip when suddenly the entire world was wiped away as if with one quick swipe of a giant hand.
12
* * *
CHAMBERLAND ISLAND
The darkness gained texture. Fading sunlight glinted off the floorboards between his bloody sneakers and the foot of the bed across the room. For a few delirious seconds, Allen Shire thought it possible that the animal slaughterhouse and the stallion from hell had been the components of some terrible dream, and that he was really back in the Renaissance Concourse Hotel, watching flights to Paris, Los Angeles and—oh, please, God, yes!—New Orleans take to the air outside his window.
The blood on your sneakers is plenty real, jackass.
Nylon rope secured his legs to a dining table chair that was all cherrywood slats, but for some reason his hands were free. The chair wasn’t that heavy. He could probably make a run for it if he hoisted the thing up onto his back and pumped his legs with all his might. But he wasn’t alone. There was a woman sitting on the floor nearby, and she wasn’t moving.
His eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, and he knew that if he looked away he would spare himself some soul-searing, unforgettable sight. But he couldn’t. In the corner of the room, Elizabeth Ferriot leaned against the wall, legs splayed, head rolled forward on her neck so that her dirty blond tresses looked like frozen icicles framing her downturned face. The bloody meat cleaver she’d apparently gutted herself with rested precariously in one lifeless hand, and on the white wall above her head, part of a word had been smeared in blood—her blood, her blood, her blood, a shrill voice screamed inside Shire’s head—across the wall: E L Y S
Every profanity he’d ever learned came hissing out of him in a wild rush of desperate whispers.
Across the room, a single paper trembled slightly in Marshall Ferriot’s slender hand as he set it down on the tray table in front of him. The tray table was attached to his wheelchair, and his wheelchair was the high-backed kind designed to accommodate a patient capable of almost no upper body movement. The kid was fully conscious but barely capable of getting around on his own. So how in the name of God had Shire’s file end up on his tray table?
“You’ve read this?” Marshall asked, holding up one page of the file in his trembling fingers. Shire nodded. “Fascinating,” Marshall whispered. His voice was still raspy from years of disuse. “Do you believe what you read? You really think I was trying to kill myself that night?”
“I d-don’t know . . . Really. I—”
“I mean, there are far easier ways to kill yourself, aren’t there?”
“I guess . . . yeah . . .”
“I didn’t, Mr. Shire. I didn’t try to kill myself that night. What happened was something else altogether. The same thing that’s happening to you.”
“I don’t under—”
“The bank sent you? Daniel J. Stevens—he’s the trustee?”
Shire felt his lips moving, but there was nothing coming out. No sound, no breath. Marshall looked up from the papers in front of him, and maybe it was just a trick of the fading sunlight, but he looked surprisingly calm and patient for a man who had just returned to the world after eight years of darkness.
Shire nodded; it was the best he could do.
“And he sent you after us because she took me out of some place called Lenox Hill?”
Shire nodded again. His Adam’s apple felt like a cue ball inside his throat.
“Why?” Marshall Ferriot asked.
“Wh-whad d’y do . . . you . . .”
“Why did she take me out of Lenox Hill, Mr. Shire?” he asked with what sounded like strained patience.
“One of the nurses, she tr-tried to k-kill you.” This earned the young man’s undivided, wide-eyed attention. “She thought you could . . . they th-thought you could m-make people do things.”
“Smart girl.”
“How—how long have you been . . . ?”
“Awake?” Marshall asked. “Is that really what you want to know?”
“I don’t kn-know what you . . .”
“You want to know if it was an accident. Like the others. The nurse. You want to know if what I did to her”—he jerked his head in the direction of his sister’s corpse—“is like what I did to them?”
“I don’t know what—”
“Yes, you do, Mr. Shire. You know. They all told you. It’s right here in your file. And now, you’d like to know if I was awake when I forced my sister to use the knife on herself and start painting.”
Shire only realized he had started to cry when his image of Marshall Ferriot wobbled and split behind a fresh sheen of tears. Snot filled his nostrils, and several sharp intakes of breath weren’t enough to clear them. And he longed desperately to be back on that sunlit bench in Freedom Park with Arthelle Williams. Or maybe walking along the shore with that father he’d ridden over with on the ferry, smiling contentedly as they watched the man’s two small children blo
w the sand off seashells and speculate wildly about what might be swimming just offshore. Because now it felt like that same man’s brusque nod of farewell had contained some sense of foreboding, some vague sense that horrors were waiting for Allen Shire just up the central trail of Chamberland Island. And he felt like a fool, a fool for having walked up here alone, all this way. But how could he have known? How could he have known that voodoo was real and that animals can explode before your eyes from blows struck by invisible hammers?
“To answer the question you are too afraid to ask, sir. I don’t remember what happened to my sister, or the nurse.”
“Tammy Keene,” Shire said, so forcefully he startled himself. It felt as if some trapped bubble of determination and self-will had worked its way free and to the surface of his being. His captor might be a monster, but the nurse had a name, goddammit, before some phenomenon Shire couldn’t understand had stolen it from her. “Tammy Keene. That was her name.”
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