“It ain’t like some cult that dances around fires in silk robes and calls themselves Satanists so they can do drugs and fuck and listen to bad rock and roll,” she said. “I’m talking about the dark, man. The real dark and the real things that move in it, that live in it, you understand? This ain’t like some movie, it’s fucking real. They don’t use junkies like me, or street trash or even the innocent little girls who vanish from corner stores or parks or schoolyards or their own beds in the middle of the night—we’re just minor league players on the sidelines, around to be used and abused, demonic fucking toys. They scoop up the older ones like his mother, the small-town girls who go wandering into places like New York or L.A. looking for a better life. They show them the dark, show them the way then send them back to the world to give birth to the next wave.”
“The next wave of what?”
“Killers. Destroyers. The ones who devour.”
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Bernard’s final words on the taped suicide note.
I suddenly felt confined in the tiny kitchen, like the walls were creeping closer. “This is ridiculous. For Christ’s sake, Bernard never even knew who his father was. His mother never told him.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Probably because she had no idea who it was either.”
“Maybe it was because she knew exactly who it was.”
Anger swelled. “OK, so I’m supposed to believe there are demons walking among us like people and that they’re the ones responsible for all the evil in the world—not us, not human beings, but demons. They’re to blame. What’s next—garden gnomes? And let me guess, Bernard’s father was the Devil himself, right? Bernard’s Rosemary’s Baby now, is that it? Give me a fucking break. This is bullshit. I told you before; I’m not playing games. I need answers, goddamn it, not fucking fairy tales from the dark ages.”
“Oooo, big strong man making demands.” Claudia gave a mock shiver. “You’re the one who came to me, remember? You’re the one telling me about your dreams and visions and all that. You’re the one who wanted to know the truth, so listen real close, jack-off. I never said it was anything but people who are responsible for all the bad shit in this world. But people make choices—decisions—you understand? There are temptations, and once choices are made there are forces that influence people. Real forces. Some good, some bad, and they’re in constant battle with each other. They’re inside us, all around us, and you know it. We all know it because we all hear the voices in our heads, the whispers. We just learn to ignore them, to write them off, to label them with words like conscience. That’s the way of the worlds, Plato. This one, and the next.”
I ran my hands through my sweat-dampened hair. “Christ, I’m so confused.”
“That’s the shit Evil thrives on. Confusion. Deception. Uncertainty. Chaos. And the deeper you go the worse it gets, the more powerful it grows and the less sense it makes, because nothing ever makes sense in the dark.” Claudia stabbed another cigarette between her lips. “Welcome to the big leagues, asshole.”
“I knew Bernard’s mother,” I insisted. Skimpy bikinis and skimpier towels—slipping, shifting and falling—blended to suntanned skin slick with oil. “I knew Linda.” The bedroom at the top of the stairs—her room—the bed against the back wall, the mismatched nightstands on either side of the headboard, the clutter of overflowing ashtrays and empty liquor bottles. “She was eccentric but—” Garments stuffed into plastic clothesbaskets and strewn about the room as if thrown there or dropped there, an ironing board against one wall, a dressing table with mirror and closet against another. “—she was harmless, completely harmless.” Lipsticks and makeup, small bottles of polish and colognes and body sprays, tins of soap and powder rattling, clicking one against the other. “I knew her,” I said again.
“You knew Bernard too, what’s your point?” Claudia obviously sensed I was trying to recall the past without coming completely undone, but I couldn’t be sure if she meant to help or only make things worse. “She brought him into it the way you bring an innocent into it. Their little secret, got it? Things you don’t talk about, even with your best friends, because nobody would understand. It’s slow, a seduction. It’s not the truth she had to tell him, only lies and sacrilege masked in love and trust. She didn’t have to do anything else, no explanations or definitions of what he was or what he needed to do. She just positioned him, set him on the right course and let him go, knowing from the start that his path was already determined by destiny—or whatever label you want to give it—and that he’d find his own way. And that’s exactly what she did.” She threw a look my way that might have been pity. “I knew Linda’s kind too—dime a dozen. Sex, drugs and rock and roll, little devil stuff thrown in—why not, it’s trendy and harmless, right? I’ve seen the ceremonies, the gangbangs where they break in bitches like her. Father could be anybody—anything—but it don’t matter because what’s behind it, what’s holding their hands is pure fucking evil. Stupid cunts never have a chance; they’re in over their heads before they know it. When it’s over all that’s left is that same smiling Devil. By then Linda wasn’t no saint.” She plucked the still unlit cigarette from her mouth. “But then, I ain’t telling you anything you don’t already know.”
Knock once and go on in. I closed my eyes, saw that staircase again, the landing at the top and the open doorway just to the right; heard the bottles on the dressing table clicking together, the headboard slapping the wall, rattling everything in the room. I felt sick, like I had that day, a cramping, churning feeling deep in my bowels, as if someone had pushed their fingers through the skin below my navel, worked them deeper until they were inside me up to the wrist, curled around my intestines, twisting, crushing and yanking them free in one slimy, bloody mess. “No,” I said softly. “You’re not.”
“The dark loves denial. Broken memories. Buried memories.”
“So that’s where it started then?” I asked. “With his mother?”
“Where’d she go when she got pregnant with Bernard?” she asked. “And where did Bernard go when he lied about joining the Marines? New York City. Think that’s a coincidence? Think maybe he went there to see the same crowd his mother knew? The same crowd she was running with when she got pregnant with him? Think maybe it was a homecoming? Think maybe that’s where he learned to do what he ended up doing so well?” Claudia slid the cigarette behind her ear. “There were lots of killings there, especially back then, lots of activity, lots of history. Destroyers walked there, fed the streets. Fed them with blood. That’s what they do; they want blood flowing in the fucking streets. It goes in cycles, and with every wave there’s a destroyer, a beast. The rest of them, they’re just gone, dead or vanished. Fucking poof, like they were never there.”
“But wait,” I said. The heat was so thick I was having trouble breathing. “He attacks Julie Henderson when he’s thirteen years old, does nothing else for five or six years then goes to New York City and suddenly becomes a killer?”
“How do you know he did nothing else for five or six years?”
“Even if he did other things we don’t know about, he goes to New York and he starts to kill—maybe these, whatever the hell they are, his mother fell in with, taught him or helped him—and he slaughters two young women inside of a year. Then he stops as suddenly as he began, moves back to Potter’s Cove with the Marines story and doesn’t kill again for nearly two decades? Serial killers can’t just stop killing once they start.”
Claudia actually chuckled. “Is that what you think Bernard was, a serial killer who killed at random and couldn’t stop? His murders were ritual killings, you understand? And besides, he didn’t stop after New York and only start up again right before he died. There were others.” She rubbed her eyes with her palms and sighed. “We were in his car once, headed up to the Cape for a couple days.” She brought her hands down; her eyeliner had smudged. “
He told me one day they’d find them scattered along that highway, back in the scrub brush, in the woods. He told me he’d left a lot of them there.
“I was high. I laughed. Crazy motherfucker. Maybe he was telling the truth, maybe not. Didn’t know, didn’t care. And in the end it didn’t mean shit anyway, because it was all practice for those last killings he did in the months before he offed himself. Everything led to that. Those bodies they’re finding in Potter’s Cove now? He meant for them to be found.”
“How many are there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t—”
“I don’t fucking know, I said. You think I went with him, watched, helped?” This time when Claudia put the cigarette in her mouth she lit it. “I knew his plan, I was around, I listened—that’s it.”
I took a step away from the kitchen table and toward the back door. I needed to be closer to the sunshine. “Fine, you knew his plan. What were the rituals?”
Claudia took a drag on her cigarette, exhaled and picked a flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. “It’s all about the blood.”
“The victims in Potter’s Cove were bled,” I told her. “They were killed somewhere else and dumped. The same was true of the two unsolved homicides Donald came across in New York.”
She nodded. “The strongest spells—the darkest—always involve human blood. Blood holds life. Some believe the soul travels through the blood. It’s an ancient ritual. Kind of like back in medieval times, if someone was sick or possessed they believed you could bleed disease and evil out of them. And they weren’t that far off. You take the blood and you steal the soul, the life. From there, ain’t no telling what you can do with it if you’re powerful enough. At least that’s what a lot of those types believe.”
“Do you know where he did it?”
“No.” Claudia smoked her cigarette quickly, and after a few hard drags it was reduced to a butt she tossed into the sink along with the last. “You’re the one with the visions, man, not me.”
“That factory down in the south end,” I said.
She slowly shook her head in the negative. “He didn’t know the city well enough, it wouldn’t have been there. He would’ve done it where he felt safe, where he knew his way around, in and out.”
“Then why did that woman appear to me and lure me there?”
“They say the underworld don’t fit together exactly like this one does,” she said. “Sometimes it’s all representational, know what I mean? What’s the word—symbolic?”
I moved closer to the back door. “There’s a bunch of old abandoned factories in Potter’s Cove, too.”
Claudia shrugged.
“And why is this woman coming to me?” I asked. “Why me?”
“All the victims were single mothers.”
“I knew that much.”
“No.” She slid down the counter a bit, closer to me. “You have to do more than know, you have to understand.”
“But I don’t even know who the hell she is.”
“The victims were single mothers, all of them with sons. Just like Bernard and his mother. He was lining them up to join him on the other side, no doubt, but what he was doing was symbolic too, see? He wouldn’t be what he was without his mother, so in a way, he was killing her, killing the one who provided him with life, again and again and again. Then, near the end, he went one better. That’s how the rituals go, he would’ve taken it another step and not just killed the woman who represented his mother—life—but he’d kill the life itself. The child, the son who represented him.”
I was close enough to the doorway now to brace myself against the casing. Sweat trickled into my eyes, across my cheek. I wiped it away with my wrist. “Why?”
“It’s one sacrilege on top of another on top of another,” she said. “Spitting in the face of God, understand? He thought his rituals made him a god. He took life so he could make life. And after he took that step with the mother and child both, there was only one step left. The ultimate in sacrilege: suicide. Literally taking his own life, the one God gave you. It’s the final insult. And it ain’t like someone sick who does it for different reasons. This was calculated, so that even his own death was a ritual, you see?”
“They’re going to find the bodies of that woman and little boy, aren’t they,” I said softly. She didn’t answer so I said, “I just wish I knew why she came to me.”
Claudia had followed me to the door, and I hadn’t realized how close she was to me until she spoke. “Maybe the riddle isn’t about her.”
I looked over my shoulder at her. “What do you mean?”
“Deception. Maybe it’s more about Bernard, more about you. Could be she’s trying to help you.”
“And what about Bernard?”
“Maybe he knew you’d listen, maybe he has unfinished business, or he’s restless or can’t let go yet. Not all spirits cross peacefully. Some hang on.” She slipped past me, so close that her hip brushed my leg before she took up position on the other side of the doorframe. A tracer of sunlight formed a thin line across her face. The smudged eyeliner made her look strangely sinister. “Go back to the beginning. Watch. Listen. Keep your mind open to it and follow your instincts, those voices in your head—whatever you want to call them. If the other side’s looking for you, it’ll find you. That much I do know.”
The more I searched those sad, liner-smudged eyes, the less sinister they became. “Why do you think he never hurt you?”
“Never said he didn’t.”
“Didn’t kill you then?”
“I didn’t fit the mold. I was just a stupid junkie fuck-toy.” She smiled ever so slightly. “Didn’t have to worry none about me, right?”
I could’ve talked with her for hours, picking her brain and delving deeper and deeper into her time with Bernard, but I had to get out of that cottage. It was closing in around me and there were unsettling vibes passing between us. “Thanks for your help,” I said.
“Don’t thank me. I ain’t sending you anywhere good.”
“You aren’t sending me anywhere I didn’t ask to go.” I glanced at the poster across the room. “Hope things work out for you in Florida.”
She pressed a hand against the screen door and pushed it open, holding it there as she leaned closer to me. We stood together in the doorway a moment, our faces mere inches apart. I could feel her breath against my neck. “Be careful out there, Plato.”
CHAPTER 27
Sunday afternoon. It was hot, and I was exhausted. I paused at the base of the steps to my apartment and gazed at Life a moment, as if I was the only one moving and everything else was standing still.
Couples walked hand-in-hand and children played along the sunny bank of the cove across the street. Bass-heavy car stereos thumped from passing vehicles, and the air was filled with food smells typical of the neighborhood.
I was halfway up the staircase before I realized the door to my apartment was ajar. I froze a moment, then grabbed the railing and pulled myself a step closer in an attempt to see beyond the slight opening. I stole a quick glance back down the stairs at the parking spaces below. The cars blended one into the next like everything else under the rippling heat. Nothing looked distinct or individually defined; the world was all smooth edges and rounded angles, a nebulous blur of colors and shapes distorted by the slow steady burn of a brilliant and scorching sun.
I climbed the remaining stairs cognizant of my weight and the sound of my footfalls against the aged wood. When I reached the landing before the door, I pulled my 9mm free, and holding it down by my thigh, pushed the door open the rest of the way with my free hand.
Toni stood inside, shaded from the sun.
I don’t know why I’d suspected it might have been someone else.
My nerves settled and I joined her, closing the door behind me. I slipped the 9mm back into the holster then pulled the entire thing free of my belt.
“Why are you carrying a gun, Alan?”
I hadn
’t heard her voice in a while, and was troubled by how quickly unfamiliar it had become. Her clothes looked new, small purple shorts with a matching sleeveless top and a pair of white Keds. Sunglasses sat atop her head. She was tan and healthy-looking, which somehow seemed appalling under the circumstances. “I didn’t know you were going to be here,” I said.
It was then that I noticed the nylon bag dangling from her hand. Perhaps because she swung it rather casually down by her leg. “I came by to pick up a few more things.”
I nodded in answer. I’d been hoping for something better. I’m coming home, maybe. I wanted to see you, even. It didn’t seem possible that such a chasm could exist between us so quickly. Good, bad or indifferent, just weeks before I would have spent the day with this woman, cuddling on the couch or going for a walk, maybe catching a movie, ridiculously unaware that even with our problems it would ever change, that anything else might ever have meaning beyond our little cocoon, so certain it would always be her breath on my neck, her head on my chest, her arms around my back, her lips against mine, her dreams and fears and desires intermingled with my own. Didn’t she understand I was coming apart at the seams? Didn’t she understand that Bernard was a devil and that I was lost, lost in the dark and that he was there with me? Didn’t she know how much I needed her just then? Didn’t she still need me too? Had she ever?
“How are you?” she asked. Before I could answer she said, “You look tired.”
“Among other things.”
Toni clutched the bag with both hands, as if for comfort, and held it tight against her chest. It crinkled in her grasp, still empty, and for a moment I entertained the notion that I might be capable of convincing her to stay, or at a minimum, to prevent her from taking anything else from the apartment. I wasn’t sure how much more could be removed before what remained would become vestiges of a relationship no longer relevant. “Can you believe they found another body?” she asked.
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