Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “You mean your personal life?”

  “I mean everything,” she said, and now Raszer could taste the bile in her throat. “My kids, my home, my kitchen . . . my bedroom. What to read, what to watch, what to think. It’s like an infes . . . an infes . . . ” She swallowed. “An infestation. You don’t see it until it’s gone, and you’re left with nothing.”

  “What about your faith?” Raszer asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Do you still have that, or did they drive that away, too?”

  “That’s a funny question for a private detective to ask,” she said.

  “Why don’t you and I begin here by admitting that we don’t know anything about each other, so we have everything to learn? I’m not here to grill you, Mrs. Parrish. I’m here to try and understand what happened to your son, so that I can understand what might’ve happened to Katy Endicott.”

  “The only thing I have faith in, Mr. . . . Razor, is it?”

  “Yeah. R-a-s-z-e-r. But you said it right.”

  “ . . . Is that things can’t get any worse.”

  “Well, your son is alive,” Raszer said softly. “Are you at all close to the other families? The Horns or the Lees or . . . what was the other boy’s name?”

  “Strunk,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Joey Strunk. He was Emmett’s friend. He had dinner at my table at least once a week . . . till all this craziness happened. I talk to his mom, poor thing. The others, no. You see, Mr. Raszer, once the Witnesses shun you, you stay shunned. They made us invisible. The Horns and the Lees, they never stood up for us. Never even stood up for their own children—until it was too late.”

  “So through all of this,” Raszer said, “you never had contact with the church.”

  “We’re apostates,” she said, and wiped two fingers across her brow. “Like we’ve got triple sixes on our foreheads.” Grace Parrish paused to take a sip of cold tea. “At least I’ve got my memories of a time before the Witnesses, and sometimes I can grope my way down the hallway by those. That boy in there . . . ”

  She turned to stare at the closed bedroom door behind her left shoulder. A big black X had been spray-painted on it.

  “My son,” she said. “He doesn’t know how to live in the world. He doesn’t have any memories, except for seeing his father leave and his friends killed. The one time he stepped outside the church, all hell came down—just like they said it would. He blames me. He shuns me. If they’d have him back, if I’d let them have him back, he’d probably run . . . ” She tightened her lips until the blood had been squeezed out, and then released the words: “ . . . right back into their arms.”

  Grace dropped her head into her hand and began to weep. Raszer leaned forward, wanting to go to her side but not wanting to violate the sanctuary of her grief.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice had absorbed some of her anger. “Truly sorry it’s gone this way. Sorry that religion is ever about control. It isn’t supposed to be like that, Mrs. Parrish. It’s supposed to be about comfort. And wisdom.”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and waited for her focus to return so that she could register him clearly.

  Raszer allowed himself to be examined, let himself go passive on the inside. He let her look as long and hard as she wanted to, and waited for her to speak.

  “You want to understand what happened to Katy Endicott?” she said. “I’ll tell you one thing, mister. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. I don’t know if she’s whoring herself or chanting ‘Hare Krishna.’ All I know is that she never could’ve gone where she went if her father hadn’t paved the way. You take a person’s choices away, and you might as well be a rapist. Silas Endicott was no better than those boys.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  Her mouth, the most expressive part of her face, was dismissive. “He was the pastoral overseer. The enforcer. He was the one who came to the house that day to tell us my husband had been disfellowshipped. But he wasn’t the worst of them.”

  “Amos Leach,” said Raszer.

  She stared and said nothing, but that was affirmation enough.

  “May I speak with Emmett?” Raszer asked.

  “You can try,” she said. Some of the tightness had left her voice.

  “I’m not a therapist, or a deprogrammer, or, God knows, a priest,” he said. “I’m a tracker, mostly. But my work is with people—often young people—who’ve been . . . isolated. Stripped of choice. Sometimes spiritually defrauded.”

  “You mean cults?”

  “If you mean that in the sense of control, yes.”

  She stood up and smoothed her dress, then walked to the bedroom door and knocked softly. When no answer came, she leaned in, her hand on the knob.

  “Emmett?” she called. “Emmett, there’s a gentleman here to see you.”

  Raszer approached and stood at her side.

  “I’m going to open the door now, Emmett,” she said. “I’m going to let Mr. Raszer come in.” She turned the doorknob slowly. “He’s looking for Katy Endicott.”

  The room was unnaturally dark, even for the abode of a recluse, and it took Raszer a few moments to make out the small, slack figure on the far side of the unmade bed, sitting against the wall in his white briefs. His long hair was knotted and unwashed, of indefinable color. His bony arms were hitched around his knees.

  “Hi, Emmett,” said Raszer. “May I come in?”

  The boy didn’t stir, but in the faint light from the hall, Raszer saw his eyes shift.

  “My name’s Stephan,” he said. “I think maybe you can help me.”

  The smell of the room was close, human, but not as fetid as Aquino had led him to believe it would be. There was even a vague sweetness, and Raszer noticed candles placed on various surfaces. The bedsheets smelled of semen, but a boy’s, not a man’s.

  “I’m gonna have a seat on the bed here,” said Raszer. “If that’s all right.”

  He thought he saw the boy shrug his shoulders. Or maybe not.

  “I don’t know if your mom told you. I’m a private investigator. I look for missing people. Right now, I’m looking for Katy Endicott.”

  Emmett was as still as a spider in the corner of a web and, except for periodic blinks, might have been almost undetectable in the darkness. He could have been hiding, or he could have been getting ready to pounce.

  “Anything you can tell me about the night she was taken—and the men who took her—would be a big help. And just so we’re square, I don’t share secrets. I don’t have to. I don’t go after the bad guys, I just try to get back what they’ve stolen.”

  During the ten minutes of intervening silence, Raszer glanced about the room. There was nothing to evidence a young man’s presence: no trophies, no Xbox, no pinup girls or rap stars or Lakers posters. The only thing on the walls was a single black stripe at a height of about forty inches, spray-painted from corner to corner and running just over the top of Emmett Parrish’s head. It seemed to Raszer to define a safety zone of some sort, and if so, he was out of it—either threatened or threatening.

  “You’ve got a good idea there,” he said, slipping off the bed and onto the floor, about five feet away from the boy. He took off his jacket and pulled his black T-shirt over his head. “It’s cooler down here on the floor. A lot cooler without clothes. Don’t take it wrong if I join you. It’s just . . . well, we could be here for a while.”

  Emmett didn’t flinch as Raszer tossed his jacket and T-shirt on the bed, and made only the faintest grunt when he unsnapped his jeans and stripped down to his shorts.

  “You’re a briefs man, huh?” said Raszer, indicating the boy’s underwear. “I used to be. Even used to wear those bikini ones for a while. Now, I find most women prefer boxers. I dunno, maybe they’re less obvious.”

  Emmett shot a sidelong glance at Raszer’s shorts. His eyes seemed to widen when he saw that they were a green-gold paisley print. Raszer scooted a few inches closer. Without warning, the bo
y put a hand inside his own underwear and began to play with himself, like a squid threatening to release his ink of invisibility.

  “I have this superstition,” Raszer said, “that every time you fake it, you get one less for real. You go ahead, though, if you’ve got the urge.”

  Emmett paused for a moment, leaving his hand where it was.

  “I met someone who knows you,” said Raszer. “A very pretty Middle Eastern girl by the name of Layla. I gather she was Johnny Horn’s girl for a while.”

  The boy’s wide mouth gaped just slightly.

  “I gather also that before she was Johnny’s, she belonged to the men you saw take Katy. And that there was some kind of . . . arrangement.”

  The breath whistled out over Emmett’s dry lips.

  “But you didn’t tell the police about her.”

  Emmett shifted left to reclaim his distance from Raszer.

  “That puzzles me, because she would have been their strongest lead to the kidnappers. To the men who killed your friends. Without her, all we’ve got are four phantoms in a black Lincoln who almost come off like heroes, by your account.”

  “No,” Emmett said, from the back of his throat.

  “No, what?” asked Raszer.

  “Wasn’t like that,” said Emmett.

  “What was it like?”

  “Fucked up,” said Emmett. For a few moments, he locked onto Raszer’s right eye like a homing signal, then shuddered and said, “Oh, shit.”

  “What is it, Emmett?”

  “You’ll get inside me, won’t you?”

  “No,” said Raszer. “I can’t do that, and I wouldn’t if I could. But I think it might be a good idea for you to come outside for a while. It must be pretty scary in there.”

  “I feel naked.”

  “You are naked, Emmett, but so am I.”

  “You can see me?”

  “Yes, I can, Emmett. You’re real as rain.”

  Once again, the boy locked on, eye to eye with his visitor, and this time, he passed something across the space between them. Raszer felt a muscle twitch.

  “God is great,” said Emmett, without inflection. “God is good.”

  “Yes.”

  “But God went away, and the Devil owns the world.”

  “It seems that way sometimes,” said Raszer. “It must have that night.”

  “To whom shall we go?” said Emmett, parroting a Witness pitch line.

  “John, chapter six, verse sixty-eight,” said Raszer. “Good question. I think you can only answer it as a negative: not to the Devil.”

  “What if the Devil pretends to be God?”

  “That’s the puzzle, isn’t it?” said Raszer. “But in a way, you solved it. God took a powder. In the meantime, anyone who says he speaks for God is probably a liar.” Raszer felt a current move across his scalp. A static charge built up in the still, stale air, and he felt, more than heard, a snap. “God speaks through the ear of the heart.”

  “Henry Lee saw the Devil,” said Emmett. “So did Johnny. In Babylon.”

  “He’s playing both sides against the middle over there.”

  “Johnny said like you did. He said the only way to beat the Devil was to doubt everything people said. Nothing is true—”

  “Everything is permitted,” said Raszer. “Except for one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Playing God. What did you see that night, Emmett?”

  “It was really dark,” the boy said.

  “Yes, and foggy, too,” said Raszer. “But you saw the car come.”

  “I was in the woods. In the trees.”

  Emmett still had a hand on his genitals, but now more like a frightened child, or a man facing death.

  “You were hiding.”

  “Yes . . . no. Henry showed me how to be invisible. Henry said there had to be a witness.”

  “A witness to what, Emmett?”

  “When he called forth the servitor from the sigil. When the magic happened.”

  Raszer’s lower half became aware of a cold draft coming from under the bed, but in this very awareness, he realized that this part of himself was detached from whatever part was in contact with Emmett Parrish.

  “What kind of magic was Henry making?”

  Emmett glanced up at the black stripe that ran just over the crown of his head, then looked at Raszer. “Can I tell you?” he asked. “You won’t say anything?”

  “I won’t say anything, Emmett. People wouldn’t understand.”

  “To protect Katy,” said Emmett. “Henry said that the s-servitor—the magical Thought-Form—would make it so the men wouldn’t take her away. He had everything prepared. He said they just had to do the sex thing, like in his book.”

  “You told the police it was rape.”

  “Like you said, people wouldn’t understand. It was pretend. But it was real. It was a kind of . . . acting.”

  “Was Katy acting, too?”

  “No. Henry said that would mess it up. He said she had to think it was real. But they got her all fucked up on GABA so she wouldn’t freak out.”

  “GABA. GHB, right?” said Raszer. “The stuff you mix up in a bottle?”

  “Yeah. It fucks you up good. Makes you all lovey. Then you pass out.”

  “So Johnny and Henry—and your friend Joseph—they knew the men were coming? And they thought they could use magic to trump them? To protect Katy, kind of like”—Raszer tapped his knuckles on the black stripe—“like this protects you.”

  “Henry did. But Henry said that when you make a servitor, if . . . if something goes wrong or if you don’t finish the ritual, it can go against you. It’s s’posed to go away when the magic is done, b-but if something happens . . . ” His cheek twitched.

  “The entity you’ve created,” said Raszer, “can take on a life of its own, right?”

  “How did you know that?” said Emmett.

  “They don’t make PIs like they used to,” said Raszer. “I’m not going to find Katy Endicott by tracking credit card receipts.”

  “You know chaos magick?” asked Emmett, and suddenly he seemed very young and—despite the lines of experience already carved into his pale face—very, very innocent. “’Cause this thing . . . it won’t go away. Can you make it go away?”

  “I can’t make any promises,” said Raszer. “And you’d have to act . . . just like Henry said. Act as if we together have power over the servitor.”

  “I could try.”

  “All right,” said Raszer. The cold was creeping up his limbs, a cold that did not make any sense in a sealed, stuffy room. “Would it be okay with you if I took hold of your wrist?”

  “I guess,” said Emmett, in a small, distant voice.

  As soon as Raszer touched the boy, he knew where the cold came from. It came from the woods just below the snow line, and carried the scent of cedar and fear. It was the cold you felt when you were lost and alone in winter without a coat. A big V-8 purred in the background; the smell of its exhaust filled the room. The car door opened and the dome light shone on black leather.

  This was the place where Emmett’s mind still lived. He’d brought it home.

  “We need to do something first,” Raszer said. “We need to remember before we forget. There’s a girl out there as scared as you are, only she doesn’t have anyone to hold on to. I need to know where these men came from, and what Johnny owed them.”

  Emmett shook his head. “They never told me,” he said. “Or Joe. It was something they got into over there.” He glanced down at Raszer’s hand, at where it gripped him. He saw the old scars on Raszer’s wrist.

  They were an offering to the boy. A psychic kinship.

  “In Iraq,” Raszer said, after a beat. “In Babylon.”

  “I guess. All Johnny ever said was that the men came when you went beyond the perimeter. When the game got real. They weren’t good or evil—they were something else—and you only had one choice after they came. You had to serve them until you knew enough to
be their master.”

  “When the game got real,” Raszer repeated to himself.

  “And then you’d win. You could make a new world. That’s what Johnny wanted. He said this world was going to end soon, and chaos would rule.”

  “Pretty heady stuff for a boy from Azusa, California,” said Raszer.

  “Johnny always said that Jesus was a yahoo, too.”

  “And what would Johnny’s new world be like?”