by Lee Thompson
Kerr shook his head. “He was very troubled.”
Mike said, “No shit. But he didn’t come here when he was seventeen, right? Was he caught later on?”
“He was never caught. He came here because a woman had led him.”
“What woman? His real mother? Or the imagined one?”
Kerr smiled. “They were both the same, really. But no, a woman he had met and shared a brief fling with. Can you imagine meeting someone and them being forward enough to tell you that you were crazy, literally, and needed help? That you love them enough to admit it to yourself and actually take that step to seek help? It was a monumental thing.”
“Did he ever progress? Or slip further into his delusions?”
“There is no curing a person that afflicted.”
“Did others flock to him?”
“Nutley is a loner.”
Wylie glanced at Mike. Mike leaned back in the chair, and crossed his legs. “What did he want most of all while he was here? How was he released?”
“What do you mean while he was here? He’s never left. He’s too dangerous.”
Mike leaned forward again. Wylie stood. Kerr pulled his hands up as if he expected one of them to hit him. He said, “I thought you knew that. He’s in the same room he’s occupied for the last ten years. The familiarity is good for him.”
Mike stood. “Show him to me.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. I can sit down in here with you and feed you information without anyone knowing, but out there, in the madhouse, no. Questions will be raised by staff, the more frantic patients will create new fantasies. It will be a step back for everyone.”
Mike said, “I’ll double what I gave you.”
Kerr’s face was drawn as if contemplating the toughest and most noble decision of his life.
* * *
Mike peeked into the little glass rectangle built in the door and scanned the room.
Kerr said, “Is that him?”
Mike said, “There’s no one in there.”
Kerr, not quite the epitome of strength, tried to shove him aside but it was like trying to shove a brick wall.
Wylie said, “What the hell is going on?”
Mike stepped back and rubbed his temples.
Kerr glared in the window, said, “You had me worked up for a minute there.” His face was red.
Mike said, “What?”
The doctor straightened his shirt, took a deep breath and said, “He’s sitting on his bunk.”
Mike shook his head. He’d looked at the bunk, he’d taken in the whole pathetic room. “He’s not in there,” he said to Wylie.
Wylie nodded, said, “He sees an illusion.”
Mike thought about the tricks demons play. He remembered what happened a long time ago, when he was younger, before he’d developed empathy—while still quick to judge, quick to react—without knowing someone else’s circumstances. He said, “He’s not in there. What you’re seeing is something else.”
Kerr looked confused for a moment. Then he grinned, said, “I get it. This is some elaborate joke you’re playing. But I fail to see the point—”
“This isn’t a joke. All you’re seeing is smoke.”
“I think you should leave. I gave you what you asked for.”
“I want to know more.”
“Like what?”
“You said he gave up his friend Lucas.”
“Yes?”
“What did Lucas look like?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know that?”
“He never described him? Isn’t it your job to probe? Isn’t the devil in the details?”
“It is, and I did. But I talk to many patients. I can’t remember what every one of them described.”
“I think you’re lying.”
“Do you?”
“Did he ever say that Lucas was with him…here?”
Kerr sighed. “He said Lucas was always with him. He was the key to everything, the hammer that shattered the lock of Pandora’s box, the drum with which he’d create new music. He said there were three keys to happiness and Lucas was one of his.”
Mike said, “What did he say the other two keys were?”
“Why do madmen like to speak in riddles?” Wylie said.
“They’re not riddles, but they’re heavy on subtext, and, to be honest, I never felt I probed deeply enough into Abraham’s identity. Sure, I can give you assumptions and a diagnosis based on what he’s told me, but most of it could have been lies, or half-truths. As to the other two keys, he never spoke of them and would grow irate when pushed, as if offering just one of them was in itself a gift.”
“Why didn’t you ever probe deep enough? If he grew irate you’d just restrain him or sedate him, right?” Mike asked, though he thought he already knew.
Wylie stuffed his hands in his pockets, said, “Were you scared of what you’d find?”
“Sometimes. He is one of those rare cases.”
“Meaning?”
Kerr glanced back in the room, and Mike knew that the doctor thought he was looking at Nutley, that in itself quite the feat. Kerr shrugged. “Some people’s nightmares can be so powerful they make you question reality.”
“Did he do that?”
“Abraham was poor, his family always had been, and he had little in way of wants. Some patients would ask for newer televisions, pretty flowers, whatever, but he didn’t. All he ever wanted was…”
“What?”
“Never mind. You need to leave.”
“Wylie,” Mike said. “Did you see this man take money off me and share private information about his clients?”
Wylie said, “He’s in deep, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Kerr squirmed, but his rage was apparent beneath his paleness. He said, “I knew you—”
“You don’t know much of anything,” Mike said. “Except there was something wrong, really wrong, about this guy, right? It wasn’t just a fucked up family that rubbed off and stained him. He was touched by something else.”
“I don’t believe in any of that.”
“You don’t have to believe for it to exist.”
“I’m calling my staff to escort you out of here.”
“You don’t have to,” Mike said. “But if something happens to my friend, you’re one of the people I’m holding accountable.”
Wylie stepped back. Kerr looked like he wanted to curl up and die. Mike turned and looked at the walls, still the same as when his mom had been there wrestling herself, and, he hoped, hating herself for what she’d done, though he doubted it or she’d have confessed and the intervening years would have been written differently in their lives. He left Kerr worrying while Wylie followed him outside where rain slammed the cars and the storm bared its teeth.
* * *
Uncle Red shivered, standing in his apartment above the hardware store, hands stuffed deep in his pockets, watching the street where Mike and Wylie exited Division’s police station and moved quickly to the Jaguar. He had his gloves off, which he had only done a few times since he was fifteen, when he’d done something horrible, a huge part of his own story that he wanted kept secret. Floorboards shifted and creaked beneath his weight. He would have fixed them if he knew how, but he’d been sheltered, his parents hovering over him after he and the young lady who would become his girlfriend had gone missing for two weeks, back when milk was delivered to your door in bottles and a creature named Boom Stick entered his life; after his family had ran away from the small town in Michigan and moved to the mountains here, believing that somehow—he couldn’t remember their reasoning—that it would be safer, better.
He thought, You were wrong. This is where the worst of it happened. Where it continues.
He rubbed his hands.
In the street the Jaguar tore off south of town, rear windshield glinting in the sun.
Sometimes it hurt to look at the young. Sometimes you forgot the battles you faced because to dwell on them filled
your heart with questions. He wondered what the boys were up to, where John was, his hands restless until he covered them in velvet. If he was a drinker, which he was glad he’d never become, he’d be drunk by now, because he was remembering. He blamed his nephew for coming over earlier and mentioning the sisters he’d seen, the ghosts that shadowed him, the uncertainty of reality.
Red shook his head. “I hope this isn’t my fault.”
It made him want to do something for someone, hell, anyone. Since he’d isolated himself, he brushed shoulders with few. He believed he thought too much, and even after all these years, felt too much. It wasn’t good to be around other people. If there was a lesson life had taught him, it was that men are the monsters and their self-destruction consistent and immediate. He’d watched families implode, too many of them, watched flocks of people claim to love their spouse and yet cheat on them and make a mockery of faithfulness in the heat of their selfishness, he’d heard the lies spread thin on the lips of parents as they told themselves what a great job they were doing even as their children went the route all children go and explore, some of them much worse than others, all the while thinking that their parents were alien to them, that they couldn’t understand their blandness, their lack of passion, the hypocrisy of do as I say not as I do, realizing at some deep level that their parents weren’t all that different from them, only larger, older and more passive aggressive.
Red sighed. He remembered what it was like to have dreams, and he felt the sting of cowardice that came from running away from responsibility when he was still a boy. He wanted to call John and tell him, “No matter how dark it gets, no matter who gets hurt, don’t run.”
A gentle breeze shifted inside and the air grew lighter for a moment before it thickened with a blanket of neon green moss. He turned and pulled his hands to his chest as three women formed a triangle around his couch. They turned their heads as one and smiled at him. Red said, “What do you want?”
They held their hands out, palms open, but they were empty and he relaxed just enough, so slightly that it was barely noticeable. He said, “Are you here for me or here for John and his friends?”
They laced their fingers together. The sister in the middle said, “Your nightmare is free.”
Red stepped back, thinking that maybe if he just jumped from the window the games demons and angels played with him would end, it’d cancel his debt, the bad karma he’d stored up. But if he jumped he knew he’d only break his legs and he’d never even have the option to run, which his instincts told him he should, and had for years now. He wasn’t sure why he’d stayed. He mustered as much strength as he could, and said, “Which nightmare?”
The sister on the right licked her lips, said, “He who wears the spider…”
The sister on the left said, “…on his head, as caught in its web as those he preys on.”
The middle sister said, “He’s so close. You must be ready.”
“Who are you?” He studied them. He thought of fate, but he didn’t have the courage to ask if that’s who they were because if they said yes they might also tell him how the end would come and that was something he never wanted to know. With as much conviction as he could muster, trying not to think about the old days, he said, “Boom Stick disappeared a long time ago.”
Just the name made his skin crawl, made him feel too young, too small, too weak, and with it came memories that raised bile in his throat and grief in his heart, because after what had happened so long ago nothing had ever been the same. He wanted to weep for Amy and the life she should have had if only…always, he thought, if only…
The sisters said in unison, “He went away for a while because Proserpine tricked him.”
“Leonora’s sister.” Red scratched his head. He thought, None of us are safe. He cleared his throat and with tears in his eyes, said, “We can’t fight him. No one could before. No one ever caught him. I followed the news. What he did…” Red trailed off, lost in memories he desperately wanted to escape.
They said, “But you must stop him. It’s unfinished business. And he only grows stronger. You’ve shown rare spirit, and have had moments of blinding light. You worry for the search but those things are there.” The sister on the right pulled a crimson thread from her dress, molested it with her fingers as she frowned. She said, “Your time is nearly up. You must fight or fail. For your family and history and future. This moment is about to shatter.”
“No!” Red said, “You stop him. It’s not my problem, it never was. And it’s not John or his friend’s problem either.” He raised his chin, said, “I think you should leave.”
The sister in the middle pulled a rotten wisdom tooth from between her breasts. She tasted the decay with the flick of her tongue. She said, “They’re walking into the thick of it even now. Shadows keep step with them. Pray to whatever gods you trust that the light they bear is enough without you.”
They turned their backs on him and shook their heads, whispering among themselves, incantations and mysteries that sent a chill up his spine. He wanted to tell them to look at him, stare fate in the face and scream until they fled. But he was never good with aggression. And he knew fate turned a deaf ear to the pleading of insects.
Red closed his eyes. He hated this feeling as much as he’d hated it as a young man, as much as he hated the look on Amy’s face the day her dad died and how much stronger than him she’d been, willing to forgive, almost desperate in a way and he was never sure if it was because she truly loved him or just that she knew to not forgive was to condemn herself as well.
The sisters said, “Gather your courage…” and then they vanished, but they left him something on the end table. Through his tears it was hard to distinguish but whatever it was he knew it wasn’t his, it hadn’t been there moments ago. He looked out the window and turned his back on it, on whatever help or guidance or manipulation the fates had in play. He thought about John, Mike and all they’d recently been through, and he thought of all the secrets he’d kept from them, at the time telling himself it was to protect them because to possess certain knowledge was to be responsible for its power. He wasn’t sure they were ready.
Around him, the walls hummed with music, something dark and brooding and deep. He said, “Shit,” and pulled his gloves off again, felt his bones, more brittle now, and the muscles surrounding them so much weaker than they used to be, and he wondered why destiny didn’t hunt him down twenty years ago. He remembered Amy’s blood, hot at first and then cold on his shirt, trees clacking and hundreds of ravens weighing their branches, and an angel he and an old friend had dubbed Mr. Blue, nailed to a tree while shadows gutted him.
He thought about John again. He thought, Boom Stick will tear him apart. John doesn’t have a clue what he’s up against.
It only took a moment of contemplation. He gathered his wits and what courage he could muster and turned to the phone because he hadn’t driven anywhere in years and he’d have to call in a favor or two. He stumbled across the room, turning left and right, the light slowly fading. A boy’s voice came from the hall, one he could never forget. The boy said, “Everyone is going to die unless you help stop this. For some reason it’s all escalating. First with Proserpine and one of her brothers, and now Boom Stick has risen from the dead. Hell’s coming, Red. It’s been snapping at you since we freed Leonora and time changed.”
Red coughed into the crook of his arm. He hadn’t heard that voice in fifty years. Hate and love filled his heart, coursed through his blood, exploded in his head.
One time, he thought, you were my best friend. But you betrayed me.
He turned to Pig and whispered, “Boom Stick never died. And you’re not real.”
PART 2: WISDOM
TEN
Back in the car after that first case, with Jack White singing about conquests through the speakers, Kim said, “You did well in there.”
But I hadn’t really done anything except keep my cool. Tony Richards kept pushing his thick glasses up
his sweaty nose with a thick finger. He talked about how he was doing his best, but he lost his temper from time to time. He was honest, I’d give him that. He told us everything he’d done to his daughter—both good and bad—and how he wanted to fix it. All I did was sit there, clenching my jaw, wishing I could fill the bathtub and hold his head under water.
His daughter was quiet but strong. As confused as she was, she didn’t want to leave him because he did love her and when he wasn’t drunk he treated her like his little princess. It broke my heart and I could tell from the look on Kim’s face, and the way her stance shifted from aggressive to passive and back again, that it was tearing her apart. She gave him numbers to call, places to find help with anger management, and kept repeating every couple sentences, “She is not her mother. Don’t take it out on her. I’m serious.” And Mr. Richards tugged at his collar and said, “I know,” though doubt danced in his eyes and I could tell when he looked at his kid he saw her mother from time to time, he felt every harsh word, every belittling thing, the echoing crack of the door as she’d slammed it behind her for the last time.
Kim turned the radio down and said, “Tell me about your ex.”
My heart hurt. I saw smiles drifting in and out of dark fog, felt April’s touch on my skin and heard the wind outside while we lay safe in bed, so warm and so close, thinking that we knew each other. But we didn’t. We were strangers and it broke my fucking heart.
She said, “I’m sorry. Never mind.”
“We had everything planned out, how we were going to spend our lives together. Love bit me fast and hard and deep. I’d have given the world for her because she was that special.” I wiped my eyes, the illusion she’d presented and that I fell in love with cracking, distorting because she had never loved me the same way.