The Sleepless

by Graham Masterton

  This was the bay and that was the lighthouse; and it was here, where Sissy O’Brien had been taken from the ocean, that his life was going to change. He could feel his destiny swinging around the way the weathervane swings. He could hear the sand sizzling in the sea-grass. He looked back toward the lighthouse with excitement, with fear, and when Joe came across and took his elbow and said, ‘Come on, Michael, I’m starved. Let’s grab some breakfast,’ his eyes were wide and staring, he knew it, and Joe instinctively let him go.

  ‘Michael? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. But something’s beginning to come together.’

  ‘Want to tell me about it?’

  ‘I don’t know ... not yet. Let’s find some breakfast.’ ‘Hey!’ shouted out the coastguard, as they walked away. ‘Those are my goddamned binoculars!’

  Verna Latomba was standing in the kitchen pressing her black skirt when the doorbell rang. She reached over and turned down the television. She had been watching Oprah Winfrey talking about incest. A man with a very white face had been confessing that he had fallen in love with his sixteen-year-old daughter. Verna frowned, and listened. She wasn’t expecting anybody. She knew that Patrice wouldn’t be back till nightfall, maybe very much later, and in any case he had a key, and could let himself in.

  She propped her iron on its base and walked through to the living-room. She saw that she had forgotten to put the chain on the front door. She lifted her hands towards it, but before she could do so, the doorbell rang again, startling her. She hesitated, listening, waiting, but it didn’t ring again, so she went right up to the door and called, ‘Patrice? Is that you?’

  There was a long silence. Nobody spoke. But Verna was sure that there was somebody out there – and not just because she hadn’t heard footsteps retreating along the landing. She couldn’t hear talking. She couldn’t hear breathing. But somehow she could feel the presence of somebody waiting, somebody with infinite patience and unimaginable intentions.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she called.

  No answer. She took hold of the knob on the dangling end of the door-chain. Beside the doorframe, on the yellow-papered wall, a picture of Jesus stared at her sadly – Jesus depicted as a black man, with yellow eyes.

  ‘We’re friends,’ said a young man’s voice, from the hallway outside.

  Verna stood with the chain half-lifted toward the latch.

  ‘Friends?’ she demanded. ‘What friends?’

  ‘Friends,’ the young man repeated, as if that were quite enough.

  ‘You aint no friends that I know,’ said Verna.

  ‘Friends of Patrice.’

  ‘Patrice said not to let anybody in.’

  Another long pause. Then, ‘You can let us in.’

  ‘I can’t do that, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Patrice said you could let us in. We met Patrice in the street, just outside of the Palm Diner.’

  ‘Patrice told me nobody.’

  ‘You really won’t open the door?’

  ‘I can’t, Patrice would go crazy.’

  ‘If you won’t open the door, do you know what we’ll do?’

  ‘Don’t you go making no threats.’

  ‘If you won’t open the door, we’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow your house down.’

  ‘What are you, sick or something? Go away!’

  Another pause. She thought she heard whispering, and the shuffling of feet. She could have sworn she heard a young man giggle.

  Then – without any warning at all – the lock clicked, and the door was pushed open.

  ‘Out!’ she screamed. ‘Get out!’ She flung herself against the door, bruising her shoulder, but she didn’t stand a chance. Two young men in sunglasses forced their way into the room, shoving Verna ahead of them with the heels of their outstretched hands. One of them slammed the door behind him, and fastened the security chain.

  The other pushed Verna, push, push, push, into the living-room, and then pushed her back onto the sofa. It was an old sofa that a friend of Patrice’s had given them, and it was covered with a beige-and-white durry. Verna jarred her hip on it as she fell backward. She tried to get up, but the young man pushed her back down again.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked them, trembling with anger and anxiety. ‘You aint no friend of Patrice’s that I know.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Verna?’ one of the young men grinned at her. ‘Call the cops?’

  ‘The cops?’ she retaliated, even though her voice was off-pitch. ‘The people I’m going to call are going to make you a whole lot sorrier than cops ever could.’

  She tried to get up a second time, but the young man pushed her back, harder this time, and said, ‘Sit, Verna, sit! There’s a good bitch!’

  The young men were skinny and lightly built, no flesh on them at all, and at first glance she had thought they were twins. But as they looked around the apartment, she could see that they were very unlike each other, and it was only their floury-white faces and their tiny, impenetrable sunglasses that had made them appear so similar.

  One of them was tall, his greasy black hair brushed straight back from his forehead and tied in a small, lank pony-tail. His nose was large and fleshy, and his cheeks were sunken. His lips were so bloodless that they were almost mauve, and he had a mole on the left side of his chin from which a single long hair sprouted.

  He wore a silky black coat, with a black T-shirt underneath, and baggy black trousers. He reminded Verna of a rock manager she had once known – fashionable and hip but self-interested to the point of cruelty to everybody who depended on him, and infinitely sleazy.

  He had a strange and distinctive smell about him: like stale pot-pourri mingled with some kind of burned cooking oil, maybe walnut oil or sesame oil.

  The other young man had short-cropped hair and a short, pointed nose and a permanent wolfish grin, his lips stretched back over his teeth. He was shorter than his companion, wirier, and far more hyperactive, dodging from one side of the apartment to the other, picking things up, putting them down again. He was wearing a black polo-neck sweater and black leather trousers that were decorated with hooks and chains and safety-pins; and black rubber-soled combat boots. He had a black canvas bag slung around his shoulder, a bag that bounced on his hip as he circled the room.

  ‘We going to do it, then, Joseph?’ he wanted to know, ducking and weaving.

  ‘Certainly,’ said the one called Joseph. ‘Certainly we’re going to do it.’

  ‘We going to do it now}’ the young man asked, impatiently.

  Joseph smiled a mauve, bloodless smile. ‘Certainly, Bryan. Certainly we’re going to do it now.’

  Bryan lifted the black canvas bag over his head and set it down on the tile-topped coffee table. Joseph bent over and unbuckled it, and rummaged around inside. Verna heard metallic jingling and clinking; and then Joseph produced two chromium-plated lengths of thin wire, each about two feet long; and then a pair of pruning shears, the kind that gardeners use for dead-heading roses.

  Joseph turned back to Verna and smiled. ‘Have you ever panicked?’ he asked her. ‘I mean – have you ever totally panicked?’

  Verna stared at him, terrified, unable to understand the question.

  Joseph released the catch on the pruning shears, and snipped at the air with menacing snips, as if he wanted to cut the very morning into shreds. He whooped with laughter. ‘You never totally panicked? Never in your life? Well – no-o-ow’s your chance!’

  Eight

  Michael held the photograph up to the window and studied it for almost a minute without saying anything, even though he had recognized the girl at once.

  Six floors below, sirens still howled south on Cambridge Street.

  In the last photograph that he had seen of this girl, she had been just about to smile – one eye closed against the summer sunshine.

  This one had been taken in the morgue. A portrait in bruises and scars and encrusted burns.

  ‘Dear God,’ he b
reathed.

  Victor had been poring for the past ten minutes over the fax-blurred photographs that Michael had transmitted from Dr Moorpath’s office, making painstaking little pencil crosses here and there, and writing neat, intense little notes on a yellow legal pad. At the same time, he had been taking quick, wolfish bites from a salt-beef and dill-pickle sandwich, and swigging tomato soup out of a polystyrene cup.

  Suddenly, however, Victor realized that Michael had something important and painful to say, and he lowered his pencil and looked up at him, his eyes magnified behind his spectacles, his jaws chewing more slowly.

  ‘This is Elaine Parker,’ said Michael, and lowered the photograph with shaking hands.

  Victor laid down his pencil altogether, and swallowed. ‘You know her?’

  ‘I should do. I’ve seen enough pictures of her.’

  ‘But, who is she?’

  Michael came away from the window and sat down on the opposite side of the desk. ‘You remember the Rocky Woods air disaster? The L10-11 that came down?’

  ‘Who doesn’t. You were one of the insurance investigators, weren’t you? The Giraffe told me.’

  Michael dropped the photograph of Elaine Parker onto Victor’s desk. ‘Three hundred and twelve people died that night. The airplane split open like a goddamned peapod and they all dropped out of the sky. All except her.’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ said Victor.

  ‘She was on the passenger manifest – Elaine Patricia Parker, twenty-one years old, an arts student from Attleboro, Massachusetts. She was on her way to see some exhibition that was touring from Europe. Turner, Gauguin, I don’t recall. She checked in to the Midwest Airlines desk at nineteen minutes after three that afternoon. Her only luggage was a single plaid valise.

  ‘As far as we know, she had a cup of coffee and a Danish in the airport coffee lounge before going to the gate. In the coffee lounge several people saw her talking to a young man. Dark hair, smiling, that was the only description we ever got. But then, so what? The world is full of dark-haired, smiling young men, and young girls like to talk to them.’

  Victor looked down at the dark and blurry fax in front of him. He had already traced the outline of a sprawled and distorted body, and part of another. John O’Brien, bent double, headless. Dean McAllister, with his legs cut off at the thigh. He took another bite of sandwich.

  Michael said, ‘We searched eleven-and-a-half square miles – way beyond the perimeter of any wreckage – and we never found her body. We found her purse, we found one of her shoes. But we never found her.’

  He leaned over the table and stared at the photograph. The girl’s face was puffy from decomposition and horribly scarred. There were fish hooks penetrating her lips and cigarette burns on her eyelids. He hadn’t seen the photographs of the rest of her body and from the way that Victor had described it, he didn’t want to. He had never realized that it was possible for a woman to be hurt in so many ways.

  ‘She suffered, didn’t she?’ he said. ‘She really suffered.’

  ‘What? You want to believe it,’ Victor replied, with his mouth full.

  Michael stood up again and paced around the office. A human skeleton was dangling in the corner and he went up to it and stared into the dusty hollow sockets of its eyes. He touched it, gently, and it danced a little jig for him, its kneebones knocking.

  ‘We call him Idle,’ Victor remarked. Michael managed half a smile.

  ‘The question is – ‘ he began, but he was interrupted by the office door opening and Thomas walking in. Thomas looked tired and hot. Half of his shirt tail had come out of his crumpled fawn slacks and his necktie was all skewed. He said to Victor, ‘How’s it going?’

  Victor held up his half-eaten sandwich. ‘Nutrition break. It’s hard work, cutting people up. We’ve opened the thorax and the abdominal cavity, Keiller’s retrieving the stomach contents. I’ll send you up a quick preliminary report as soon as I can.’

  ‘Before dinner, preferably,’ said Thomas. ‘My digestive system is never too happy about this kind of thing.’

  He looked at Michael, and sniffed, and then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Well, Mikey – Victor tells me you’ve been giving us a little assistance with this case.’

  ‘More than a little,’ said Victor. He pointed to the photography lying on the desk. ‘Michael thinks he’s ID’d our Jane Doe from Byron Street.’

  ‘You’re kidding me,’ said Thomas. He picked up the photograph. ‘You know who she is?’

  Michael nodded.

  ‘You’re sure you know who she is?’

  ‘Absolutely. Her name’s Elaine Patricia Parker,’ said Michael. ‘She was the only one on the passenger-list in the Rocky Woods air disaster whose body we never found.’

  Thomas was head-and-shoulders taller than Michael. He stared down at him for a long time, breathing harshly through his open mouth. ‘Elaine Patricia Parker?’

  ‘That’s right. She was an art student from Attleboro.’

  ‘And you can recognize her, after all this time, in spite of the fact that she’s been tortured like that, and beaten like that, and facially disfigured?’

  Michael nodded. ‘Thomas, believe me, I studied every available photograph of that girl a hundred times over. I’m a professional.’

  Thomas raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m still a professional,’ Michael insisted.

  Victor briskly drummed his fingers on his desk, stood up, and reached for the green surgical gown that was hanging on the hatstand next to the chart of lymph glands from Hewer’s Histology. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’d better get back to it.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Thomas, without taking his eyes off Michael. ‘Let me know soonest, won’t you?’

  Victor went out of the door and Michael and Thomas and Idle the skeleton were left together in uncomfortable silence. Thomas picked up the photograph of Elaine Parker and held it up, close to Michael’s face. Michael glanced at it quickly from time to time, but couldn’t stand to examine it too closely. He could feel that dreadful familiar sensation of vertigo, as if the floor were just about to open up underneath his feet – as if he were just about to plummet 20,000 feet into freezing darkness. Then whipping branches, and bruising trees. Then straight into solid ground, like a swimmer diving into concrete.

  ‘You’re sure this is her?’

  Michael cleared his throat. ‘I’ll pull her file at Plymouth and bring it over. She had distinguishing marks, too, as far as I can remember. A small strawberry birthmark underneath her right armpit.’

  ‘I’ll tell Victor to look for it,’ said Thomas. He kept the photograph raised in front of Michael’s face. Michael looked pale and distracted, and he kept swallowing, and Thomas was very interested to know why.

  Michael said, ‘Her parents are still living in Attleboro, as far as I know. You – uh – you could ask them to identify her, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I’ll have to, if I’m persuaded that it is her,’ said Thomas. With his left hand, without lowering the photograph, he reached into his shirt pocket and took out a cigarette. ‘But you can see my point of view. I’m not going to expose anybody to viewing this girl’s remains if there’s any serious question that it isn’t her. What was done to that girl – that gave me nightmares, and I’ve seen plenty of very unpleasant things done to plenty of people.’

  ‘It’s her, I’m sure of it,’ Michael insisted. And he was sure.

  ‘If you’re right, Mikey, you’re giving us some pretty damned difficult questions to answer,’ said Thomas. ‘Like – how did she survive a high-altitude air disaster that nobody else survived?’

  ‘There are several possibilities,’ said Michael. ‘It could have been one of those freaks of physics, one of those million-to-one chances. Some of the Lockerbie victims were still showing vital signs when they were found, and they fell from 31,000 feet. Admittedly, they didn’t survive for very long. But when a human body falls from a great height, it reaches a terminal velocity of 110
mph, and then wind resistance prevents it from falling any faster. When it hits the ground, it’s no worse than a head-on smash between two automobiles travelling at 60 mph.’

  ‘And no better, either, I presume,’ put in Thomas.

  Michael shrugged. ‘The other possibility is that she wasn’t on the plane at all. She checked in, she was seen to check in – and her baggage was found on board, as well as a shoe and a purse. But of course we have no surviving witnesses to say that they actually saw her on board.’

  Thomas put the cigarette between his lips, and it waggled, unlit, when he spoke. ‘If you’re right about what’s-her-name, Elaine Parker, then we have two girls – both in the Boston area – who have both survived air-crashes in one way or another – and who have both subsequently been abducted, imprisoned, tortured and killed. And the whys and the wherefores and the whodunits of those particular questions – well, God only knows.’

  Michael said, ‘Of course we do have the pinprick connection – those scars that were made on both girls’ backs.’

  ‘For sure,’ Thomas agreed, tiredly. ‘But it’s not a whole lot to go on, is it? Somebody stuck needles in their backs. But so far we don’t have any idea why they should have wanted to. Part of the problem is that Jane Doe’s insides were too badly decomposed for Victor to determine what her assailant was trying to achieve – that is, apart from causing her extreme pain.’

  ‘When you say decomposed ... ?’

  ‘Maggots,’ said Thomas. ‘The larvae of the common flesh-fly. Ask Victor about it, he’s the expert. They ate her insides out like a condemned building.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Michael. ‘I’m pretty much up on maggots.’ He pressed the back of his hand against his forehead. He was feeling chilled and sweaty at the same time. It might be a good idea for him to call Dr Rice this afternoon, just to talk things over, just to re-orient himself. The real world was beginning to take on a cold and menacing cast, and he was beginning to feel very far away from Patsy and Jason, and Dr Rice’s quiet, reassuring office in Hyannis.