Contents
About the Author
Also by John Connolly
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
How to Use this eBook
Part I
Now
Chapter 1
Then
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part II
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Part III
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Part IV
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Part V
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Now
Chapter 101
Acknowledgments
About the Author
John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968. His debut EVERY DEAD THING swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers, and all his subsequent Charlie Parker novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers. BOOKS TO DIE FOR, which he edited with Declan Burke, was the winner of the 2013 Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity Awards for Best Non-fiction. He was the first non-American writer to win the US Shamus award, and the first Irish writer to be awarded the Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America.
www.johnconnollybooks.com
Also by John Connolly
The Charlie Parker Stories
Every Dead Thing
Dark Hollow
The Killing Kind
The White Road
The Reflecting Eye (novella in the Nocturnes collection)
The Black Angel
The Unquiet
The Reapers
The Lovers
The Whisperers
The Burning Soul
The Wrath of Angels
The Wolf in Winter
A Song of Shadows
A Time of Torment
A Game of Ghosts
The Woman in the Woods
A Book of Bones
Other Works
Bad Men
The Book of Lost Things
he: A Novel
Short Stories
Nocturnes
Night Music: Nocturnes Volume II
The Samuel Johnson Stories (for Young Adults)
The Gates
Hell’s Bells
The Creeps
The Chronicles of the Invaders (with Jennifer Ridyard)
Conquest
Empire
Dominion
Non-Fiction
Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels (as editor, with Declan Burke)
Parker: A Miscellany
Midnight Movie Monographs: Horror Express
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Bad Dog Books Limited 2020
The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 9781529398311
Hardback ISBN 9781529398298
Trade Paperback ISBN 9781529398304
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.hodder.co.uk
For Carolyn Mays
How to Use this eBook
You can double tap images to increase their size. To return to the original view, just tap the cross in the top left-hand corner of the screen.
I
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
NOW
1
The tide rolled in, erasing the first of the footprints in the sand, like the memory of a presence gradually being excised from the history of the beach. The marks were small, as of those left by a child, except no child had walked there, or none that Parker had noticed; yet when he looked up from his book, the evidence was before him. Bare feet: he could discern the marks of the toes, and the rounded indentations of the soles and heels. The footprints ended within a few yards of the tree against which he sat, as though the visitor had regarded Parker for a time before moving on.
But the prints progressed only in one direction, and seemed to ascend from the sea: an emergent ghost, arrived unnoticed, come to bear witness in silence.
Parker removed his glasses, cursing – not for the first time – the necessity of them. His optometrist had suggested progressive lenses, which struck Parker as just a fancier name for bifocals. It was an error she was unlikely to make again, Parker regarding progress
ives as a short step from adopting pince-nez, or wearing spectacles on a gold chain while smelling of cheap sherry. Now, nonprogressive lenses in hand, he looked left and right, but it was an instinctive response and nothing more, because he did not really expect to glimpse her: this lost daughter, this revenant being.
‘Jennifer.’
He spoke her name aloud, and let the wind carry it to her. He wondered what had drawn her here. She would not have returned to him without cause.
He closed his book and stood to brush the sand from his trousers. He was reading Louis L’Amour’s Education of a Wandering Man, and thought he might have enjoyed meeting the writer. He had devoured L’Amour’s Westerns as a boy, because his grandfather’s shelves were filled with copies, but he hadn’t returned to them in the years since. Parker supposed he’d underestimated L’Amour because of the nature of his novels, and their association with the games of cowboys and Indians played when he was young, or the TV shows that had once obsessed him: The Virginian, Casey Jones, The Adventures of Champion. Now it turned out that L’Amour had read more of the great works of literature than anyone Parker had encountered, either in life or in print. He had spent time as a hobo on the Southern Pacific Railroad, as a deckhand on Atlantic vessels, as a boxer, as a writer, and always with a book close at hand. Parker felt as though he had encountered a kindred spirit in L’Amour, albeit one much wiser than he would ever be.
The fall leaves were turning, the woods slowly transforming from green to red and gold, their colors like a smokeless conflagration. A chill had crept into the air as the day progressed: not so much as to make sitting by Ferry Beach uncomfortable, but sufficient to rouse a man from his reading and cause him to seek shelter at last.
But Parker did not want to leave, not yet. He experienced a familiar, unsettling sense of dislocation. The traffic sounded wrong to him, as though heard through fog. The light was smoked in sepia, the smell of the sea now heavy with decay.
And his dead child had come.
Parker recalled the night his mother passed away. He had been sitting with her at the hospital before returning to the house in Scarborough that they shared with his grandfather, and in which they had lived together since the death of Parker’s father. His mother was sleeping when he arrived, and sleeping when he left, neither speaking nor moving for the duration of his visit. It was dusk as he departed, and he remembered thinking that the world appeared oddly skewed, its angles and the disposition of its structures no longer true, so that he had to concentrate hard on his driving for fear he might sideswipe another vehicle, or mount the curb while turning. He had made himself a sandwich in the kitchen with some leftover beef, and poured a glass of milk. He ate just a few bites of the sandwich, and then out of necessity rather than appetite. The pleasure had disappeared from food as soon as his mother entered the hospital; now he, like she, survived largely on fluids. His grandfather was dozing in an armchair by the living room window, and had not heard him return. He did not wake the old man, who needed his rest. Those on a deathwatch do not sleep well.
When the call came shortly before midnight, summoning his grandfather and him to the hospital because his mother’s time was running short, he was not surprised. He had known it was near, even as he held her hand earlier that evening. He could see it in her face, hear it in her breathing, and smell it on her skin and breath as he kissed her goodbye. She seemed to be growing smaller in the bed, her life essence evanescing, diminishing her as it went, and in her withering she exuded a chemical rot.
She was dead by the time they reached the hospital. He thought she might already have been dead when the nurse called, or close enough to make no difference, and the woman had decided not to break the news over the phone, but instead let them remain a father and a son for just a little longer. His mother was still warm when they arrived, and he and his grandfather each held one of her hands until she grew cold.
At the time, Parker was seeing a girl from Scarborough named Kathryn, and while his grandfather spoke with a doctor in the corridor, he found a pay phone and used it to call her. Kathryn answered on the third ring, even though he’d expected her father to pick up at that time of night. She told him that she hadn’t been able to sleep, but couldn’t understand why. She’d been sitting on the stairs when the phone rang.
He had always loved her for that. Sometimes, he thought, a person could intuit.
Like now.
He decided not to linger, leaving the sand and the footprints behind. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one to have sensed the approach of wrongness. Whatever trouble was circling had also drawn his daughter, come to see what might be brewing, come to protect him. Vehicles passed him on the road, but all were unfamiliar, and he recognized none of the faces behind the wheel.
He reached the house. The external security light clicked on as he neared the front door, but he headed round the side to enter from the kitchen. He had grown into the habit of using this entrance because the house often felt too big, too empty, when he came in through the hall. Even the attempt on his life that had almost killed him – the shooters approaching from the trees, using the darkness as cover – had not caused him to alter this routine, although the additional safety systems installed in the aftermath of the attack probably contributed to a certain peace of mind, however belated it might be.
He placed his book on the kitchen table, turned on a lamp, and sat. He followed the movements of the sun as it altered the pattern of light on the salt marshes, and listened to WBQA, Maine Public Classical. Eventually he resumed his reading, and when the phone rang he was almost grateful, because he sensed that the source of the shadow was about to reveal itself at last. He picked up and a voice, unchanged, spoke to him from down the years.
‘Mr Parker?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is—’
‘I know. It’s been a long time.’
‘It has. I hoped we’d never have to speak of this again. I’m sure you felt the same way.’
Parker did not reply, and so the man continued.
‘I thought you should know,’ he said. ‘They pulled a body from the Karagol.’
The past shadows us.
The past defines us.
In the end, the past claims us all.
THEN
2
The Karagol was both lake and stream, the former temporarily consuming the latter, although the outlet stream was a feeble, shallow extrusion that soon became lost in mud and marsh, as though to hide itself in shame. Unlike so many bodies of water in the region, the Karagol took its name not from any indigenous tongue, nor from the homeland of some European settler, but from a combination of Greek mythology and Turkish geography: the mountain lake of Karagöl, in Izmir, was associated with the myth of Tantalus – Tantalus the cannibal, the filicide, the thief – whom the gods punished for his crimes by forcing him to stand in a pool of water from which he could never drink, sheltered by a tree, the fruit of which he could never eat, and threatened by a massive boulder that hung forever over his head.
The literal translation of karagöl, in its Turkish form, was ‘black lake’, an appellation with which few who looked upon its Arkansas incarnation were likely to take issue. It seemed to consume light, and was one of the few watering holes given a wide berth by local children, even in the worst heat of summer. Occasionally, some boy would dare another to dive into it, or attempt to submerge himself beneath its surface for a count of ten, but the wiser ones refused to accept the challenge, and the dumber came to regret their decision. The lake was always cold, the kind of algor that penetrated skin and flesh to take up residence deep in bone and joint, so that even a brief immersion was enough to set a person to aching for days after. Its color was a result of the dissolution of organic matter from the Ouachita Forest, rendering the water heavily acidic, although those schooled in such matters declared that it should by rights have been deep brown, not black, but could not explain the disparity, for the little stream that ran from it grew lighter the f
arther it flowed from its origins.
The Karagol, then, resembled less a lake than an oil spill, an impression given greater force by the viscosity of its contents, which clung to the limbs of anyone unfortunate enough to come into contact with it, as though the waters, having lured at last a warm body, were reluctant to release it again. Nothing lived in its depths, or no entity worthy of the description. A professor from the University of Arkansas – Go Razorbacks! – had traveled to the Ouachita some years earlier to study the lake, and claimed to have discovered in it a form of algae worthy of further investigation. The academic spent a week immersing himself in the Karagol, sometimes wading as deep as his chest, despite local injunctions to seek an alternative means of making his name in scientific circles. He subsequently fell sick from septicemia and died, and nobody from the university ever felt compelled to go paddling in the Karagol again.
Technically, the Karagol and its surrounds weren’t actually part of the Ouachita National Forest, or the Arkansas National Forest as was, dating back to the Louisiana Purchase. It stood at the forest’s southeastern boundary, but for some reason – either an administrative error, or some quirk of Roosevelt, Coolidge, or Hoover – it failed to make the grade as a succession of executive orders created, and then extended, the preserve. Perhaps, as more than one Arkansas native had suggested over the years, someone from Washington had taken the time to view the Karagol and decided, quite sensibly, that the US government had better things to do with its money than protect what looked like nature’s own cesspool.
This neglect didn’t affect the Karagol much either way. Nobody dumped in it, because the surrounding land to the east and south was marshy, and transporting anything heavy across it wasn’t worth the effort or risk; and the forest on its western and northern sides was inaccessible by road, in addition to consisting of protected rare pine, and so was preserved by law. Much of the Karagol stood on what everyone agreed was probably county land, known locally as the Karagol Holding, even if the county wasn’t rushing to claim it, and it wasn’t too clear what the county might have done with this territory had it decided to exercise its right of ownership to begin with.
So the Karagol was left alone.
The Dirty South - Charlie Parker Series 18 (2020) Page 1