Time crawls by.
Finally the Dunleavys pull up in their car and run to their daughter and hug her and cry.
And it’s done.
The spotlight is off them and they can only hope that the people farther along The Chain don’t screw everything up and send it spiraling back toward them again.
They drive home to check on Kylie and then go straight to the Appenzellers’ to remove all traces of their presence there. They clean out the basement and take down the board over the basement window, return the mattress to the upstairs bedroom, scrub away the prints. They put the mechanism into the back door and lock it as best as they can. The Appenzellers will definitely notice that something is wrong with it when they return in the spring, but spring is a long way away.
They drive the garbage to a dump in Lowell. When they get back, it’s late, but Kylie is still awake.
“It’s over,” Rachel says. “The little girl is back with her parents.”
“Is it really over?” Kylie asks.
Rachel banishes all uncertainty from her voice and looks Kylie straight in her big brown eyes.
“Yes,” she says.
Kylie bursts into tears and Rachel hugs her.
They order pizza and Rachel lies next to Kylie until she falls asleep. When Kylie is finally down for the count, Rachel texts her oncologist that she’ll call her in the morning. She hopes she isn’t dying. That would be the kicker to all of this.
She goes downstairs. Pete’s outside in his sweats chopping firewood. There are now half a dozen stacks of wood, each about six feet high. Definitely enough firewood to get through the winter and a zombie apocalypse or two. He comes in with a bundle of wood and lights a fire in the grate.
Rachel gets him a Sam Adams and he pops it and sits with her on the sofa. Something stirred in her when she saw Pete chopping that wood. Something ridiculously silly and primal.
She’s never known Pete well enough to have a crush on him. He’s always been away somewhere. Iraq, Camp Lejeune, Okinawa, Afghanistan, or just traveling. He’s very different from Marty. Taller, leaner, darker, moodier, quieter. Marty is handsome from fifty paces; Pete is more of an acquired taste. They don’t look alike or act alike. Pete is introspective; Marty’s an extrovert. Marty is the life and soul of the party; Pete is the guy in the corner browsing the bookshelf, checking his watch to see if he can quietly slip away.
Pete finishes the beer in one gulp and gets another. She lights him a Marlboro from Marty’s emergency bar-exam carton. “And we have this,” she says, producing a bottle of twelve-year-old Bowmore. She pours them two fingers each.
“This is good,” Pete says. He likes this feeling. This little booze buzz. He’d forgotten what that felt like. It’s a completely different type of high than you get with the opiates. Heroin is a protective blanket you throw over yourself. The most beautiful blanket in the world, a blanket that eases the pain and lets you sink into an autumnal universe of bliss.
Booze brings you out of yourself. Or it brings him out, anyway. And yet he doesn’t quite trust these emotions.
“I’ll just check the doors,” he says, clearing his throat. He gets up abruptly, takes the nine-millimeter from his bag, patrols the perimeter, and locks the doors.
Task completed, he has no choice but to sit back down on the sofa. He makes a decision. Time for him to tell Rachel the truth about himself. Both big secrets. “There’s something you should know about me,” he starts hesitantly.
“Oh?”
“It’s about the Marines. I was…I was honorably discharged, but it was a close-run thing. I avoided a court-martial by a whisker for what happened at Bastion.”
“What are you talking about?”
“September fourteenth, 2012,” he says in a monotone.
“In Iraq?”
“Afghanistan. Camp Bastion. The Taliban dressed in U.S. Army uniforms and infiltrated the perimeter fencing and got onto the base and started shooting up planes and tents. I was the duty officer of the engineering unit at hangar twenty-two. Except, well, except I wasn’t on duty. I was high in my tent. Just pot. But still. I’d left a senior sergeant in charge.”
Rachel nods.
“When I got over there, all hell had broken loose. Tracers and RPGs and total confusion. RAF guards shooting at Marines shooting at army. There were these private security contractors who just happened to be there, and they prevented a massacre. Never in a million years would I have thought that a Taliban team could penetrate that deep into the base. Prince Harry from England was there that night. The VIP area was two hundred meters from the firefight. It was a complete disaster, as you can imagine, and I owned a big chunk of it.”
“Pete, come on, that was six years ago,” Rachel protests.
“You don’t understand, Rach. Marines died, and I played a part in that. They punished me under Article Fifteen, but it would have been a GCM if they hadn’t been worried about the publicity. I quit anyway a couple of years later. Six years before my twenty. No real pension or benefits. What a complete asshole.”
She leans forward and kisses him gently on the lips.
“It’s OK,” she says.
The kiss takes his breath away.
You’re very beautiful, he wants to say but can’t. She’s exhausted, thin, and frail but still gorgeous. That isn’t the problem. The problem is articulating the feeling. He feels his cheeks redden and he looks away.
She pushes back a strand of dark hair from his furrowed brow.
She kisses him again, this time more seriously. It’s something she has been wanting to do. She’s worried it will be anticlimactic.
It isn’t.
His lips are soft but his kiss is strong and powerful. He tastes of coffee, cigarettes, Scotch, and other good things.
Pete kisses her back hungrily, but then after a minute, he hesitates.
“What?”
“I don’t know if I can,” he says softly.
“What do you mean? Don’t you find me—”
“It’s not that. That’s not it at all. You’re incredibly hot.”
“I’m skin and bones, I—”
“No, you look amazing. It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
“I haven’t…for a long time…” he says. It isn’t really a lie. He’s thinking about the second big secret—the heroin—and wondering whether he will be able to perform.
“I’m sure it will all come roaring back,” Rachel says as she leads him to the bedroom.
She takes off her clothes and lies on the bed.
She doesn’t know it but she’s wildly sexy, Pete thinks. Brown hair, long, long legs.
“Come on,” she says teasingly. “Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just…oh, it is a pistol.”
Pete puts the nine-millimeter on the bedside table and takes off his T-shirt.
When he drops his sweats, he’s somewhat surprised to see that everything is in full working order.
“Well, well, well,” Rachel says.
Pete grins. That’s a relief, he thinks, and climbs into bed next to her.
It’s pure we-survived-the-plane-crash sex.
Frantic, fraught, desperate, hungry.
Twenty minutes later, she climaxes and he climaxes.
A spectacular oasis after months of drought.
“So that was…” Pete says.
“Yeah,” Rachel agrees.
She goes to get the cigarettes and Scotch. “And also, you know, weird,” she says. “Even perverted. I mean, Christ, two brothers, who does that?”
“Just stay away from my father. I don’t think his heart could take it.”
“That is so gross.”
Pete gets up, walks to the living room, and thumbs through her vinyl collection, which is mostly Motown and jazz. Her CDs are all Max Richter and Jóhann Jóhannsson and Philip Glass.
“My God, Rachel, ever hear of a thing called rock and roll?”
He puts on Sam Cooke’s Night Beat.
When he comes back to the bed, she clearly sees the track marks on his arms.
It isn’t a surprise. She suspected something like this. She touches the track lines and then, gently, kisses him.
“If you’re going to stay here, you’ll need to be clean,” she says.
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“No, Pete, I’m serious. You gave Amelia the wrong food. You gave the gun to Mike Dunleavy. You need to be off that shit.”
Pete can feel the force of her gaze.
He’s ashamed of himself.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. You’re right. You deserve it and Kylie deserves it. This isn’t just about me anymore. I’ll get clean.”
“You need to promise me, Pete.”
“I promise.”
“Chemo isn’t the same thing, but I got through some hard times. I’ll be there to help.”
“Thank you, Rach.”
“What happened last night in East Providence? In Seamus Hogg’s house? You were high?”
“No. Not high, but…”
“What?”
“On the tail end. I just wasn’t thinking when I gave Mike Dunleavy that gun. I’m sorry. He could have killed us.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No.”
She climbs onto his chest and looks him in the eye.
“I couldn’t have done this without you, Pete. I mean that.” She kisses him on the lips.
“It was you, honey, it was you who saved your family,” Pete insists. “You did it. You can do anything.”
“Ha! I’ve felt like such a failure these past few years. Waitressing and all those menial jobs so Marty could study for the bar. Even earlier. You know that when I was coaching Marty for the LSAT, I got one seventy on the practice test. He got one fifty-nine. I had all this potential, Pete. I blew it.”
“You’ve turned everything around, Rach. It’s amazing what you did, getting Kylie back,” Pete tells her.
She shakes her head. It’s a miracle that Kylie is back with them, and you don’t congratulate yourself for a miracle.
Rachel puts her hand on his chest and feels his heart beating. Calm, slow, deliberate. He has three tattoos: an ouroboros serpent, the Marine Corps logo, and the Roman numeral V.
“What’s the V stand for?” she asks.
“Five combat tours.”
“The ouroboros?”
“To remind myself that there ain’t nothing new under the sun. People have survived worse.”
She sighs and kisses him again and feels him stirring underneath her. “It would be nice if this moment could last forever,” Rachel says.
“It will,” Pete replies happily.
No, Rachel thinks, it won’t.
Part Two
The Monster in the Labyrinth
43
A muddy hippie commune in Crete, New York, sometime in the late 1980s. It’s a morning in early fall, gray and drizzling. The community is built around a series of decrepit farm buildings. It’s been a going concern since the summer of 1974, but no one recruited since then has evidently had much competence in animal husbandry, agriculture, or even basic maintenance.
The name of the commune has changed several times over the previous decade and a half. It’s been called the Children of Asterion, the Children of Europa, the Children of Love, and so on. But the name isn’t important. When what takes place that particular fall morning makes it into the New York Daily News the attention-grabbing headline will simply read “Upstate Drug-Sex-Cult Massacre.”
But for the moment all is peaceful.
A toddler maybe around two, a little boy named Moonbeam, is outside with his twin sister, Mushroom, and an assorted bunch of other toddlers, older kids, chickens, and dogs. They are playing in a muddy field behind the barnyard without adult supervision. The kids seem happy enough although they are all damp and dirty.
Inside the barn, a dozen or so young adults are sitting in a circle tripping on Orange Barrel and Clear Light LSD. At the end of the seventies, there would have been thirty or forty people in here, but that was the heyday for this kind of experiment in alternative living, and it was a long time ago. The eighties have a very different vibe and the commune is slowly dying.
The events of today will be its grisly final chapter.
A station wagon pulls up at the edge of the farmyard. An old man and a young man get out. The two men look at each other and put on ski masks. Both men are armed with ugly snub-nosed .38 Saturday-night-special revolvers.
The men walk into the barn and start asking the tripping young adults where Alicia is.
Nobody seems to know where Alicia is or even, indeed, who Alicia is.
“Let’s try the house,” the old man says.
They leave the barn, walk by a rusting tractor, and enter the massive old farmhouse.
The place is a maze, an obstacle course. Mattresses, furniture, clothes, toys, and games are strewn everywhere. The men draw their weapons and clear the rooms on the first and second floors.
The men look up the stairs to the third floor. Somewhere up there, music is playing.
The young man recognizes the album as Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, which was one of Alicia’s favorites.
As they climb the stairs, the music gets louder. They enter a large master bedroom at the bit where “Sister Morphine” transitions into “Dead Flowers.”
They find Alicia, a young blond woman, naked with another young woman and a red-haired man with a ginger beard. They are in a large, old-fashioned four-poster bed. Alicia and the bearded man are tripping. The other woman appears to be deeply asleep.
The old man kneels down next to Alicia, slaps her on the cheek, and tries to get her to respond. “Where are the kids, Alicia?” he asks, but she doesn’t answer.
The young man shakes her and asks her the same thing, but she doesn’t respond to him either.
Eventually he gives up asking.
The old man grabs a pillow and gives it to the young man.
The young man looks at the pillow and shakes his head.
“Only way to be safe,” the old man says. “Lawyers will give them back to her.”
The young man thinks about it for a while, nods, and then, reluctantly at first, but then with growing anger, starts smothering Alicia with the pillow. Alicia struggles, scratching at the young man’s hands, thrashing her legs.
The bearded man comes to and sees what’s happening.
“Hey, man!” he says.
The old man takes out the revolver and shoots the bearded man in the head, killing him instantly.
The young man drops the pillow and takes out his .38.
“Tom?” Alicia gasps.
The old man shoots her in the head too.
Despite all the commotion, the other young woman hasn’t woken up, or perhaps she is pretending to be asleep. The old man shoots her anyway.
Feathers are flying and the sheets are drenched with blood.
The bathroom door opens and a naked young man enters the room holding a roll of toilet paper.
“What’s going on?” he demands.
The old man takes careful aim and shoots the perplexed young man in the chest. It’s a heart shot and it probably kills him, but the old man crosses the room and double taps him in the head anyway.
“Jesus, what a mess,” Tom says.
“I’ll take care of this while you look for the kids,” the old man tells him.
Ten minutes later Tom finds Moonbeam and Mushroom playing in the dirt behind the barn. He takes them to the station wagon.
With a bowie knife, the old man has cut off four fingers on Alicia’s left hand—the four fingers that scratched the young man and got his DNA on them.
He finds a jerrican of gasoline and trails gas all through the farmhouse. He wipes the jerrican with a handkerchief, goes to the kitchen sink, and pours himself a glass of water. He drinks the water and wipes the glass clean of prints.
He steps through the screen door, ho
lds the door open with his foot, lights a book of matches, and throws it onto the kitchen floor.
A line of scarlet flame races across the linoleum.
The old man joins Tom back at the station wagon.
They drive away from the commune, the old man at the wheel, Tom in the back with the kids.
They don’t meet any other cars on the narrow road that leads away from the farm—which is fortunate for everyone.
Tom looks through the rear window to see the farmhouse erupting in flames.
They drive for forty minutes, until they encounter a reservoir. The old man stops the station wagon, gets out, cleans both pistols and the bowie knife with a handkerchief.
He adds the bowie knife to the paper bag containing Alicia’s fingers. He pokes a hole in the bag and throws the bag and both pistols into the glassy water.
They sink immediately.
Three sets of ripples in the pond intersect briefly like the triple spiral one finds at the entrance to passage graves in Neolithic Europe.
The spirals fade and the black water is still again.
“Come on,” the old man says. “Let’s go.”
44
A blizzard. Cold. The bundles at her feet are birds who have frozen and fallen from the trees. Snow stings her face but she can barely feel it. She is here and not here. She is watching herself in a cinema of confession.
All she’s trying to do is get back to the house from the mailbox. But she can’t see through the white translucent depths of Old Point Road.
She doesn’t want to take a wrong turn and wander into the marsh. She walks gingerly in her bedroom slippers and her robe.
Why is she so underdressed? Underprepared? Unready?
The marsh waits for her to fill an absence. You owe the void a life because you got your daughter back.
On the water ducks raise an alarm. Something is lurking out there on the edge of the tidal basin.
The wind swirls the snow in front of her. What possessed her to come out in weather like this?
The whiteness darkens into the shape of a creature. A man. The curve in the hood of his coat makes it seem like he has horns.
Maybe he does have horns. Maybe he has the body of a man and the face of a bull.
The Chain Page 18