by Art Bourgeau
"Out."
"When will you be back?"
She picked up her purse and started for the door. "I don't know."
He followed her downstairs. "I'll wait up for you, we’ll have a drink, listen to some music like old times."
His smile was his most winning. Right now, though, it made her faintly sick to her stomach.
* * *
On the drive she tried to son; things out. What was it Charles always said . . . that sex was the physical communication of unspoken needs. The kindest interpretation of what Adam had done, but that was for patients. Adam was her husband. Loring was the patient, and in effect that was what he was doing, or trying to do, at the party . . .
She stopped at her office long enough to get Loring's address from her files. For a moment she thought about calling instead, then decided it was better to see him in person. They had to deal face-to-face with what he had done tonight. Yes, "they," both of them.
Admit it, she was angry, he had endangered the therapy. Probably she should terminate his therapy with her, but she was damned if she was going to. Too easy for her. And if she didn't continue to try to help him, no one else would ever be able to. He would never trust anyone again . . .
One good result had come from it. No matter what happened between her and Adam, Loring, she was confident, was no longer going to be a subject of her fantasies. He'd be another patient, like all the others. She’d moved him several concentric circles back from her center, she decided, remembering Charles' words at lunch.
As she passed Wissahickon and Hortter she saw the police cars alongside the road, lights flashing. Whatever had happened, it had to have been something major to involve that many blue-and-whites. God, not another murder, she hoped, like the optometrist she'd read about. The parks were risky enough without having people actually killed there. This was Philadelphia, not New York . . .
After a few minutes she found Loring's cottage on the edge of the woods facing Wissahickon Creek. There was a Mercedes in the driveway. The house was dark but she thought she saw a light in the rear.
No one answered the bell until the third ring. "Yes?"
"Loring, it's me, Dr. Priest. I believe we should talk."
"Go away."
"No, Loring, we have to talk."
A long silence, then she heard the sound of the lock being turned.
The door opened. As soon as she saw him she was even more certain she’d made the right decision to come now, not to wait or to phone. He still had on his tuxedo, minus the jacket, like he was getting ready to go out, not coming home. But from his red eyes she could tell he had been crying.
"Come in." A defeated voice.
He closed the door behind her and she followed him into the living room. She'd wondered what his home would look like. It was a very masculine room, more so than he projected in his personality, with windows along one side, lots of bookcases and a stone fireplace at one end.
* * *
He watched her sit down on the couch. The sight of her sent a spasm of pain into his stomach. He had had fantasies of her sitting there, but now that she was here, all he wanted was for her to go, leave him in peace. Too much . . . "I want to talk about what happened tonight," she said, just like he knew she would when he let her in. Pandora. Open the box at all costs, no matter what, damn you . . .
"Can I get you a drink?" Changing the subject.
She hesitated, not exactly professional, but this meeting was outside the canons too. "A small brandy, thank you."
In the kitchen he poured two drinks of Remy Martin, then drew a glass of water for himself, took out the bottle of belladonna from the cabinet and squeezed the dropper into the glass, counting the drops like he always did, this time not stopping until he reached fifty, five times the prescribed dosage. His need had long ago passed that point. He drank it down in a gulp. The familiar bitter taste of the deadly nightshade sometimes seemed the only thing still real in his life. Back in the living room he handed her her drink. "Sit down," she said. "What happened tonight was serious, important. So much so that I did not want to let it wait until our next session."
Watching her, he felt it begin to happen, the change, the double-vision of his perception . . . oh yes, he was there and she was there, but she had now assumed with increasing force and sharpness, as it had before, the outlines and then the substance of another, the image of someone so terribly, frighteningly familiar, superimposed on, gradually blotting out, the image of Margaret . . . it couldn't be, he didn't want it to be, even tried to will it away but failed . . . mother . . . it was she and no mistaking, emerging out of the features of what once had been Margaret. The sound of the voice, the tone, were the same. And so was the deceit, but he would defeat it, it would not destroy him . . .
Margaret felt more than saw what was happening. She felt his remoteness, his defensiveness. She tried to apply what she could to relieve him of what she was sure was his guilt over what had happened this evening . . . "Please understand that you are not at fault here. What happened is not all your responsibility. But it is your responsibility to care about your therapy, to understand that it matters more than anything else to you now, but it is you that we are working to reveal and understand and so make you well . . . " My God, his pupils, they’re so dilated, has he taken something. . . ?
I know you, he thought. I know who you are. And then he was able to give voice to his feelings, now that he had clearly seen who she was, what she was trying to do to him, just like always . . . "l know you" — voice rising — "you hurt me before but no more. I will be free of you, I won't be tortured any more to please you . . ."
She looked at him closely. Obviously he was going into another phase, but she was still startled, and not a little frightened by the intensity of him, by what might be coming and wondering whether she would be able to handle it . . . Concentrate, she told herself, on what he is really saying, on those words about being tortured . . . "Tell me who is torturing you," she said.
His voice was near-strangled. "Oh, you know, you damn well know, you've known right along but you pretended like it wasn't happening. I won’t be part of it, no more, I'd rather be a speck in space, lost out there, nothing. . ."
Like a schizophrenic, she thought, or an aggravated hysteric — never mind the clinical analysis, she lectured herself, this is a sick man, a patient, a human being. Never mind the label and get back to work . . . "Who is torturing you?"
He was looking beyond her, through the windows and into the darkness and the woods beyond. He knew, of course, that they were being watched. His stepfather, he was out there and he had come with her. A wary half-smile now. . . "You won’t get me to say it, I’m too smart for that. I can keep a secret, I have for so long . . ." And the look froze, gradually melted into an expressionless mask.
The clinicians, she knew, would call it transference, to her of what he had seen between his mother and stepfather. She was now the mother, and he was talking to her, saying things he may have once said to her, or wanted to say. She must keep it going. For him it was like hypnosis, a self-hypnosis. She watched his eyes watch her, move to follow her movements as she reached for her purse, took out a cigarette, lit it. She knew he liked to watch her smoke, that it reminded him of his mother and reinforced the transference . . . "You can tell me," she said.
"No, I can’t, not you . . ."
"Some secrets are better shared. Share yours with me," she said quietly, inhaling and blowing out a plume of smoke.
But he was looking through the windows again. Yes, he was still out there, he could feel him there, and now that he was concentrating, looking closely, he could see the eyes watching in the darkness. Those mean terrible scary eyes . . . It was starting again, all over again . . . "Listen, I’ll bet you didn't know that when a person dies, his hair goes right on growing, at least for a while. Do you think that means the soul doesn't leave the body right away, just slowly, in pieces, little pieces that can escape out there . . . ?"
"
That's an interesting notion. I didn't know that. But I do know that's not the secret . . ." No question, he had slipped into some form of self-hypnosis, into his own world, with its terrors and traps and escapes. He was reliving the most awful part of his life in the only way his mind could even begin to handle it . . . in a hallucination that nonetheless was bordering on the reality of his affliction.
His eyes seemed to focus more as he looked at her, puzzled and angry all at once. He shook his head. "How could you like something like . . . that? Want it to happen?"
She held her breath, waited. When he did not go on she said, "I’m sorry, I don’t understand — "
"Oh yes, yes, you do." He had gotten up and gone to the fireplace, staring down now at the cold ashes and the burned log. "You let it happen, whatever he wanted, you wanted. He's out there and you’re here for him, like always."
"No, I’m not here for him. I’m here for you. I want to see you free of this, but it won’t happen unless you tell me about it."
He was fiddling with the picture of the dog on the mantelpiece, turning it one way and then another, then picking it up and holding it ever so gently, like it was delicate china.
"That's not true. Wolf was the only one who helped, the only one . . ."
She got up from the couch and went to stand beside him.
"May I see?" And at her tentative gesture toward the picture he froze, then slapped her. "You, don't you ever touch him. The only time it ever stopped was when Wolf saw what he was doing to me and bit him. You know that. And you know that when he left me alone it was because he knew Wolf would stop him and protect me . . . and he did, until he was murdered . . . killed . . ."
Her legs were weak, she was still reacting to his slap but forced herself to pull herself together and backed off to the couch. It was a stupid thing to have done, to have approached him and threatened him that way. But maybe not . . . maybe it had provoked him to open up more . . . "Your stepfather, you're talking about your stepfather . . ." At least that much of the secret was out in the open, though it had been there for her to suspect for some time. But now he had brought it out. She would risk pushing him another step . . . "He was abusing you — "
"’Abusing’ me . . . what a nice proper way to put it. Don't be so delicate. He was doing to me what he did to you. Just like I saw him do to you that night. Never mind, be nice to him, try to love him, he’s your father now, that’s what you always said. And I tried. I tried . . ."
His face was tight, showing some deep pain, some shameful pain. But at least it was clear now — what lay behind his hatred of his mother, who did nothing to help, nothing to protect him . . . "You never told," she said. "Why?" Knowing even as she asked the reason but wanting to hear it from him, wanting him to hear himself say it.
"Because I knew what he would do — "
And abruptly his expression changed, as though someone had snapped their fingers to bring him out of his depths, out of his hypnotic state. He had to escape to the present, to the unreal world that seemed safer. Mother was gone, Margaret was back, and shame came over him about what he had wanted, what he had felt about her, and wanted and tried to get from her earlier that evening. He had become the kind of man he most loathed . . . the kind of man his stepfather had been. Shame and guilt brought a craving for punishment, any punishment, including the worst that might be waiting for him out there in the darkness. He deserved it.
He turned away to look down at the fireplace again, afraid he could not say what he wanted to if he were looking at her. "Margaret, at least this evening has shown me some things about myself, not pleasant but at least I’ve seen them . . . I just want you to know that I love you . . . I’ve never said that to anybody before . . . oh, yes, that's what a lot of men say, but I mean it . . ." He kicked idly at the burned log. "When I tried to show you how I felt, it all was wrong, it got mixed up somehow. Things have always been mixed up for me . . . I’ve never admitted this even to myself, but there were times when I . . . oh, God . . . when I almost welcomed what was happening to me, when I was old enough . . . by then it didn't hurt so much — this is terrible to say, but what I mean, it wasn't like that about you. I wanted it to be so different, and then I ruined it . . ."
"No, that's not true," she told him. "Your feelings were fine, normal, but they were with the wrong person. Under other circumstances, with another woman, not your therapist, I’m sure your feelings and attentions would have been welcomed. You have it in you to be a fine, sensitive man. A husband, a lover. You have a ways to go, but it is possible, try to believe that . . ." And try to believe it yourself, she added silently. He was going on in a monotone, as if he hadn't heard her . . . "Margaret, I want you to go now. I am not going to see you again not after what I did tonight. . ."
"And your therapy?" She tried not to show the near-panic she felt.
"That's over too, believe me, I know, I know what is best . . . Now go, I can't talk about it anymore. GO!"
The tone, the finality in it made it clear to her there was nothing more to be done now. Nothing but to say: "I’ll keep your appointment times open. We're so close to your problems. I very much hope you will reconsider"
When he did not reply or look at her, she had no choice but to go to the door, open it slowly, pause, then walk out and close it gently behind her.
* * *
After she had gone he went to the old leather club chair and curled up in it, the oxblood redness cold at first, then absorbing and reflecting his own heat like a caress. From there he could see the darkness outside the windows. He searched for the glint of the eyes he knew were out there. And then he saw them, gleaming faintly in the trees, staring unblinkingly at him, twin pinpoints of light in the black night. Now as he watched they seemed to move slowly closer, and he looked away, willing them to be gone from his life.
No use. It never was . . . He heard the voice, a man's voice, soft and seductive. "You cannot hide from me, Loring. No one can help you. Not her, that’s why you sent her away, you knew. You belong to me, Loring, always have."
He shut his eyes tightly. "Who are you?"
"You know who I am. Abbadon, the angel of the bottomless pit, with the power to change men, to make them seek out death."
This was no dream, this was real. But it couldn't be, it was happening to him but it wasn't. Like those other times, beginning in the store with the shrinking, and later, just before the loss of all awareness, and the awful sickness he felt afterward. Afterward . . . ? Was it the belladonna? No, yes, he didn't know. Abruptly he thought of the Bible class at St. Ignatius, and the text from Revelation . . . "And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit."
No, not the belladonna, it was the voice of truth, telling the damnation he felt but tried not to believe was real, was happening to him. Pray . . . "Holy Michael, the Archangel — " The voice stopped him, reading his thoughts, censuring him . . . "No, Loring. Michael did not help you when I changed you in the store, when I made you shrink. He has not helped you the other times you pretend not to remember. He will not help you now . . ."
So he had not been hallucinating, it had really happened to him in the store. . . "What do you mean 'the other times’?"
His voice was below a whisper.
"Come on, Loring, you know. The park, of course. The rabbits, the ducks, the dog, the man in the car, the boy, all as I ordered, and you, good boy, obeyed. You have a convenient memory, Loring. But that must change now. You must pay for your deeds. Remembering them is the beginning. . ."
He tried to clear his mind, to block it all out, but no use, what the voice said was true. And in a terrible flood, everything came back to him, the blood, death. He saw, disbelieving, yet knowing, saw himself steal the rabbits from the pen and kill them with his teeth, then later the ducks from the creek . . . and finally the taste for human flesh . . .
His stomach heaved.
When he was finally able to speak again he
could only say, "Please kill me," and meaning it with all his heart. His back was to the window, unable to look into the darkness, at the all-knowing eyes. "I can't live, knowing this . . ."
"After a time," the voice said, "but first there are things you must do for me."
He squeezed into a tight fetal position in the chair. "No, no more. Just let me die, now, please . . ."
"’Please,’ you say. Like always. Please, mother, please, father, please. Please what, Loring? You fooled Margaret, you were really very good. You even fooled yourself. But you know better, of course. You did not hate your mother because she did not protect you. You hated her because she had another man, because you were so jealous. She belonged to you, she had betrayed you, and she and the others would pay. You liked what your stepfather did to you. You liked the redemption through his punishment. It felt good, Loring. Remember, remember, it is beginning. And now you are ready to do what I have prepared you for. You are the angel of peace, the savior, the wolf . . . you will cleanse the herd, and only then be able to save yourself. Now stand up, Loring, and see for the first time what you have become."
Resistance was useless. He had no will. He stood and looked in the mirror over the fireplace. At first he felt relief, it seemed nothing had changed, and then he knew he was deceiving himself again . . . because as he stared he saw the eyes staring back at him, eyes not his own, eyes with a dark fire inside. And his lips, it was not so but it was. His lips were pulling back, revealing teeth. . .
And then blackness.
CHAPTER 19
MERCANTO TOOK his seat at the conference table in the fifth-floor room of the Roundhouse. He had stayed at the crime scene late into the night, walking around, trying to get a feel for the killer, but in the end he had come up empty. Even after seeing the results of two killings first-hand, he still had no telling clue. The man was, to put it mildly, an enigma. Crime was not such a difficult thing for him to understand. Growing up in the inner city he'd seen it all his life. The druggies, the gangs, professional thieves, husbands who battered their families, barroom fights, even rapes made some sort of sense to him. He didn't condone any of it but he at least understood where it was coming from. They all had motives, most of which boiled down to love and/or money, with the balance spilling over into injured pride. But this was different. A kind of violence where it seemed the act was the reason rather than the end-result. A perpetrator whose rules were known only to himself.