‘Except for this one,’ he said aloud to the ceiling. It was arched and led to an almost impossibly high skylight; the children, he thought, must have felt very small in here.
*
The air had been different there in Tennessee; the place he’d once unpicked a community apart as easily as a man might fillet a fish, remove its skeleton from the inside out until it became a mere facsimile of itself, something recognisable, but forever changed. He’d been back there more than once and stood on the hill where he’d sat that night as he’d allowed Blue’s dream to die – not die, he thought, more had the life choked out of it. He’d looked down at his hands: with these, he thought, with these very hands. He’d broken many people since, turned lives to dust, but the commune was his first real success, that first domino that cascaded to a terrifying crescendo of a life spent on the backs of others. Once there had been something growing inside him, like a sapling whose roots he’d decided to poison, and that poison had spread to colour everything he might have ever touched; it contaminated the well, his well. He could imagine it all now, the outlying buildings, the cars at the periphery of the high wall, the main house set back, the centre of the circle from which all the spokes of the commune reached out. He imagined a wheel coming loose, rolling uncertainly out of sight. How he might have given it a kick to help it on its way.
He’d walked onto the place where buildings had once stood, taken everything in again, the place where cars and trucks and even a school bus had once jostled for space, he remembered the front entrance and the gates and towers that had once stood there and how he stepped out of the darkness that night and called Bulley down towards him and how he had come willingly, how the pity and help had poured out of him, a true Samaritan. The fence had seemed so high then, so impenetrable that he could only wonder what lay beyond, and then he was among those people, the drifters and losers, but mostly the lost; he’d literally come through a darkened forest while they’d journeyed through their own metaphorical wood; everyone, he quickly saw, was looking for something. A way to belong, no matter how disparate the elements and strands that they had to tie together to help them make some kind of life.
Walker had always considered organised religion some kind of pyramid scheme, supposedly pulling others up along with you, but unsustainable in the end, morally bankrupt, one big empty from the top down. He wondered if the children of this failed orphanage had faith forced upon them; he could imagine meetings to talk about the good book and Sunday school and prayers before lights out. That said, he could still see why the people in the commune held on to their God, why they had flocked to Blue; he had, or so it seemed, a direction and a real vision, he didn’t just live in hope, he was moving forward, going somewhere, and if these people could somehow get caught up in his wake then who knew where they might end up, on some higher, hallowed ground maybe? Initially, Walker had felt their fervour too, but he quickly spotted the way that Blue’s fallibility, ego, need and lust were to be his undoing. They were Walker’s way in. Blue part-preached, he part-performed; he wasn’t sure he believed Blue’s exaltations of God, he could almost hear him counting the beats that might lead to a more dramatic conclusion to his sermons, they built and broke like carefully constructed songs, they had flourishes, they rose and fell, ended with a dramatic swell. Sometimes he imagined Blue might come back out, take a bow and then perform an encore.
‘Your old man’s smooth,’ he’d once said to Bulley, who’d responded with a fulsome thank-you. Bulley was moist-eyed with ardour for his old man, he couldn’t see behind the curtain to the tricks his father was playing. But then he was just a kid, which was more than he could say about some of the more ardent followers who’d tripped after Blue; the women clutched their hands tightly together when he spoke to them one on one, leaned in to hear him speak, their hand on his forearm, their eyes blazing with life, want and need; Blue didn’t seem to mind that lust was a sin.
Looking back now, Walker realised that it was envy that first fed his hatred of Blue, he’d liked him at first, admired him even; as soon as he’d explained his plight – with a few suitably galling embellishments: oppressive father, abusive childhood, how he’d been driven out of his own home after his mother had died – Blue had shown him real compassion and even set him up with his own room in the main house. A viper in his bosom, Walker thought, like something Blue might allude to in one of his sermons, and how he’d sat there, idling and waiting to strike.
The commune was where Walker had first felt his gift really bloom, where he started to see and feel words differently to others, they made shapes in front of his eyes, he’d look confusedly around as letters took to the air and filled the room then resolved themselves mere feet in front of him, sudden phrases laden with meaning, tight clusters of words that pulsed with insight, that said so much. It scared him at first; more than once he tried to reach out and grab the letters tumbling before him, and once, while still dazzled with the newness of it all, it occurred to him, quite wrongly, that someone in the commune had spiked him, that he was tripping out, which both appalled and delighted him. His father had long warned him that this day would come, but without any colour, without the charm, it was a transition for the old man, for him the gift of seeing was a miserable rite of passage, not this overwhelming and sensational wave of joy.
Walker had watched Blue preach and the words had floated up and out of him, consonants of red and white trailing upward like lost balloons at a parade; vowels were fatter, rosier colours, pastels, burnt yellows that glowed; certain words had an impact all their own; ‘praise’ was shot through with spirals of white and blue, like an unusual chunk of seaside rock. ‘Possession’ came out of him black and bold as he emphasised it, as he leaned on the word a little. As the leading ‘P’ melted into the ceiling, Walker felt a sudden surge of panic that this was what his family was, that the Devil was inside, driving him on; it would explain his mother, the tragedy, his father’s actions, the indifference – was this because of the debt they owed, had his father somehow bargained them all away to the Devil to obtain this strange, irresistible gift? He fled the sermon and sat out on the steps, the quickly disassembling words trailing behind him like party streamers caught on his clothes. This then was his lot; his father had doubted that the gift would ever come, be passed down from father to son, that he was the end of the line, but here he was sat among a haze of pronouns and adjectives, a thick cloud of letters and numbers swimming around his head and shoulders; he felt like a character in a Dr Seuss story overwhelmed by a landscape of trees, lakes and buildings built of words. He felt ridiculous and giddy and then stupidly powerful all at once.
Like Blue, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to spread the word. It was the injection of his father’s ego – the old man had been right: they weren’t like other people, they were better somehow, as he had said to him more than once; it was simple, they were more evolved. And in a world where survival of the fittest was at a premium, it meant they were always one step ahead. So here he was now, finally beyond the pack, and out of their reach. He looked around him at the rusting cars, the broken-down people; the gap in the fence where someone had drunkenly backed their truck up and split the timber. Everyone was smaller, shrunken somehow, fading from view. He felt like everything and everyone was in his wake, not Blue’s; the preacher might have opened his eyes, helped him see, but his vision now was much more rich; Blue merely looked to the skies, Walker saw beyond the stars, touched the heavens, he heard the whispers beyond the clouds, the voices of the ages were racing down to meet him.
*
Walker thought about the young man he once was as he slowly paced the orphanage’s corridors and halls. He wondered why his father had never abandoned him or banished him to a place like this – the school he’d sent him to back then was only meant to put him back on the path, set him true, push him towards the straight and narrow. A path that my father never chose to go down, thought Walker.
Back then he’d traced where
the compound’s perimeter wall once was, recalling the fencing that kept them all in and the world out, he paced a ragged circumference around a world he’d once inhabited and then destroyed. Out there in the countryside he tried to feel empathy or goodwill for the people he once knew and crushed, tried to understand their plight – he was their plight – but, as his father had once had it, sometimes Walker was just the sky falling and he didn’t give a damn where he landed or on who. Only the strong survive, he’d say, all that fist-pumping bullshit, how many times had he heard that over dinner? Walker pushed the thoughts away, this confluence of ghost and demons; sometimes he looked in the mirror and his father’s eyes looked back at him and that was about as much of a direct link back to the old man as he could stomach. The marrow of our bones, he thought, the blood beating in our chests, the same electrical spark prompting their synapses into life. He’d sat down among the now long blades of grass and pulled one distractedly from the ground and sat chewing the delicate stem as the sky burned around him. He remembered the cracking wood, the exploding glass, the ever-consuming fire that could never be sated, but mostly he remembered the heat and knowing that no matter how close he stood to the flames he would never burn.
It was near that very spot that he’d first met Lisa; he’d been walking out at the property’s edge like a dog at the very end of its chain that wants to leave but has nowhere to go even if it could get free. He recognised her from the main house, she was one of the many young women who haunted Blue’s door and were occasionally invited in; Walker had seen her literally waiting in the wings as Blue had preached, his words filling the eaves, her gaze a mixture of beatific hope, lust and want. Something had turned in her favour and then turned away again, she’d been at Blue’s side momentarily and then he’d let her drift, had kept moving even as she’d stood still, or that was how it must have felt. Once he’d returned her feelings and now they scattered as they came up against Blue’s indecipherable shell. Lisa looked like she’d been crying, but that, conceded Walker later, might have been a signal he wanted her to send. A rescue flare going up, he thought, but he was here to sink ships not rescue the survivors.
Walker had heard her story before: Blue’s brilliant oratory had seduced her heart and mind, soon they were living in the main house together, surveying the grounds from the large windows overlooking this tumbledown paradise, content, she was still young, but womanly somehow, a wife in all but name, for a little while at least. But as more people came, Blue’s attention wandered, his flock was multiplying, his people came first, not least some of the young women who gathered in groups in the front pews ignoring Lisa’s murderous stares.
The comedown was inevitable, from the main bedroom to one of the smaller single rooms on the top floor of the house, until one night she found herself on the couch in the living room feigning sleep as Blue and some shyly giggling new girl stole their way past in the half-light, two embracing shadows circumnavigating the stairs. Breaking her heart as completely and carelessly as if they’d stepped on it in the dark. That strange unknotting of the stomach as everything fell through her; I’m nauseous, she thought as she lay there among all the blackness, but it was a nausea that was ever ongoing, sending her into an endless descent, the pirouetting freefall of heartache. So, Lisa Gatherar, determined to escape her pain, bargained with the universe that long night, that it might take her and this inconsolable feeling of grief away, the heavy, chest-heaving tears, the unexplainable shaking hands, the gasping, gagging hurt. In her half-sleep, she offered herself up so that someone else might live; she imagined a sick child, the hurt in the world, vague notions that her death might bring some relief to a stranger far across the country, even around the world somewhere, that she might finally do some good. But she woke again in the breaking light of a new day despondent and whole, the sound of Blue moving around upstairs only adding to her bleak, imagined scenario of what might be happening above her head. How could she have known that the universe had heard her and that even now her prayers were being answered, that she had called the sky down and the clouds were quietly gathering around her?
She had walked out into the grounds of the house and, like the day she’d first arrived here, her belongings were gathered into a long holdall draped over one shoulder in a sagging quarter-moon-like curve. And there was Walker, this strangely confident young man walking towards her, death set like two crows at each shoulder; he carried the night sky around him, he was the end of days, the long shadows, the perfect storm, and it was as if Lisa, who only hours earlier had tried to bargain her life away, was silently complicit in her fate. She took Walker’s hand, as one would a lover’s or a stranger invited to dance, and they wheeled silently around this strange killing floor, his hold on her an ever-tightening vice, death’s very real grip. Bulley saw them both walk to the horizon together, he’d seen girls walk towards that tree-lined hill and out of his father and the community’s life so many times before, he was curious, but misunderstood his friend’s intentions, mistaking the evil in Walker for compassion and understanding, never knowing that Walker was the bloody messenger dispatching girls to the other side, working in a strange tandem with Blue, parlaying souls to another world as soon as the wood enveloped them and the leaves and tall trees snuffed out the light.
How many girls, thought Walker, did I take into that copse and silence their babble, still their broken hearts? Blue had caused so much damage and left him to clear up the mess. Blue owed him. That was how he remembered it now; Blue’s fault, all of it, even as Walker had choked the life out of those girls, drawn a blade across their necks, turned the earth over on their ever-cooling bodies; Blue was to blame – once Walker had washed the blood from his hands he was clean. He looked now at that distant hill, a solemn, easily discontent man, wreathed in twitching, self-delusory thinking, and wondered at the nature of good and evil, at Blue’s intentions – did he know that his behaviour, his patterns, were putting these young women in harm’s way? That somehow he’d have to pay eventually, that he too was indebted to the overarching power of the universe, that there had to be balance, someone had to pay; books to be balanced, Walker muttered to himself, actions and their outcomes.
And there he had found himself many times, and still he wondered why, turning the old compound earth over in his hands, working his fingers into the ground, this figure in the landscape, ruining his thousand-dollar suit, scuffing up his handmade shoes, drawing mud across his face as dark smears under both eyes. He had come here and sat just over the brow of the hillside, set back in the shadow of the trees, and he had dug and dug until his bruised and bloody fingers had hit the mother lode, the literal pieces he had left behind him all those years before, cracked skulls and broken ribcages, splayed, stone-white fingers, thigh bones, some jewellery now faded and almost colourless. They were his girls and now here they lay – he wondered how many people had passed this way after him never knowing what lay beneath, what he’d wrought there. He touched the crown of a skull and held it to his chest before leaning forward to kiss it gently.
He ran blackened fingers through his hair, he felt undone, a complete mess, when all he wanted was to feel like a kid again, to have never walked through the woods that night, to have never been gifted and cursed when another world, his father’s world, revealed itself to him. He wanted to lose himself in the land, become a part of this hillside, to disappear among the long grass, walk into the woods and be no more, ended like those girls had been ended. He’d lain on his back, the skull nestled in the crook of his arm, and watched the sun idle across the sky until his eyes hurt. It’ll be dark soon, he thought, and closed his eyes and tried to see Green flicker to life behind his eyelids. When he woke he knew it’d be time to meet him for one final showdown; there would, he thought with a thin smile, be a reckoning. And though he wished to see Green in his fitful sleep, it was Red that drifted through the empty rooms of his dreams, never coming when she was called, always and forever just out of reach. He woke in night’s indeterminat
e hour and staggered to his feet, a caricature made up of crumpled cotton and silk, a face blackened with dirt, his hair a jagged abstraction made up of grass and earth. He took broken steps down the hill, moving slowly through the darkness; his car was out there somewhere and beyond that something that he thought might be an approximation of salvation. Something good. He took a long look around him into the darkness; he had, he’d decided, said his goodbyes for now and forever.
Walker was seated now in the great hall of the orphanage where the children used to sit and eat at the end of the day. He looked out across the grounds and tried to imagine them playing there, but whatever joy – if any – this building had once held had long since faded into the stone walls and seeped down the stairwells until all the colours had been washed away. He pushed the food his men had brought him away and waited for night to finally fall.
*
It might have been the weekend, but Detective Green sat with a yellow notepad and his pen, scratching out his thoughts with curved, uneven arrows, exclamation points; names written hurriedly in capital letters and then scribbled out in what looked like a sudden explosion of fury. It looked like the gameplay plans of an indecisive football coach. Deep in concentration, he let the phone go three times until he answered it – even on a day off he could be called in and today he was too caught up in the minutia of something and nothing; he wanted to be held by the small stuff, he wanted to solve problems and unknot things, if only in his own head.
As he picked up the phone, two things struck him, though neither surprised him: Walker had his home phone number, and even though he could be anywhere in the world he was still here with him somehow, that ever unhappy face, that contemptuous veneer, his misery all-pervading even down a phone line. But Green breathed deeply and slowed his pulse, looked inward and tried to remain still as his heart began to beat hard inside of him; he could feel its bloody repetition as the temples flared in his skull. He tried to talk, but Walker cut across him; he didn’t sound angry, more detached, as if explaining that day’s plans to his PA.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 18