Shattered

by Jay Bonansinga

  On the second floor, three souls slumbered deeply, barely making breathing noises.

  Maura, nestled in her customary tangle of sheets, lay in the darkness of the master bedroom. She dreamt a fragmented mosaic of images, sensations, fleshy moments from Aaron’s birth; a strange nude shopping expedition; and a disturbing vignette of her husband accompanying her to a funeral of an old high school friend. At the visitation, Ulysses excused himself and went up to the altar, where the closed casket sat on its flowered bier. He glanced over his shoulder, and then inexplicably opened the coffin and climbed in. Instead of a body, there were stairs inside the enclosure, and Grove descended those stairs into the dark unknown until Maura finally rolled over and fell into sub-REM sleep.

  Outside her door, down the second-floor hallway, in the darkness of the baby’s room, two separate noises ebbed and flowed in syncopated rhythm: Vida’s soft snore and little Aaron’s quick, faint sleep breaths.

  Swaddled in a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket, his downy hair shimmering in the moonlight streaming through the blinds, the baby was curled against the side of the crib, fetal style, tiny moist thumb in his mouth. Across the room, Vida slumped in the rocker, her leathery brown face lolled to one side. A Pennsylvania Dutch quilt tented her lap—Maura had draped it over her earlier that night—and now Vida’s ancient adenoids and nasal passages burbled noisily as she slept.

  Vida’s dreams had a mythic quality, as though they were stanzas from a book, or dark biblical psalms. She dreamed of Africa, of her arid little village, of miles and miles and miles of dead, shriveled, black baobab trees. She dreamed of a demon on a black horse tearing through a hamlet of grass huts, trailing fire from its tail like golden ribbons. And she dreamed of her baby boy, her little beautiful baby boy, wandering into the dark distance of the Chalbi at sunset. It was a moment burned into her subconscious: the little brown child in a stained potato-sack tunic, head cocked high and brave, vanishing into a black hole of shadows as deep and opaque as a solar eclipse.

  But at some point in this macabre recurring dream, for the first time ever, Vida caught a glimpse of something new: Just before disappearing into the void, the boy turned and glanced over his shoulder. For the briefest moment he gazed back at his dreaming mother.

  The boy’s face was inhuman: contorted with rage, cut with deep creases, eyes as yellow as a jackal’s.

  The image nearly rattled Vida awake, but not quite. She merely snorted, repositioned herself on the rocker, and burrowed her gray, nappy head deeper into the throw pillow that Maura had gently placed there hours earlier. Within minutes she was snoring again.

  All of this went fairly unnoticed by the only semiconscious individual in the house.

  Grove lay in his underwear, two stories down, on the sofa in the basement, tossing and turning in the silent shadows. His notebook was on the floor next to him. Only a couple of hours earlier, on that same sofa, he had made fierce love to his wife. Afterward they had lain there for quite some time, contentedly talking of ordinary things, household things, their bodies clammy, their sweat cooling in the dank cellar. Maura had finally excused herself to go check on the baby. Grove decided to open his notebook back up and make some more notes on the Ripper profile. When Maura didn’t return, Grove figured she must have dozed off up there. Probably for the best. This way, Grove wouldn’t bother her with his compulsive chicken scratching in his notebook.

  Now, Grove had been wavering in and out of slumber for what seemed like an eternity.

  Sleep had always come uneasily to Grove. When he was involved in a case, it came over him like a poorly tuned shortwave radio station, gradually washing over the noise of his thoughts in fits and starts. When he was off duty, or on vacation, or spending a rare holiday with his family, it came even harder. He would stare at the ceiling for hours, thinking of work, thinking of what he should be doing. The doctors have a phrase for people like Grove.

  Slow sleepers.

  Which is why he was partially awake when the first noise came drifting across the backyard.

  At first, it hardly registered. In fact, Grove wasn’t even sure how long he had been listening to it. It sounded like a branch tossing in the wind out in the woods beyond the property line or maybe leaves rustling. He tried to ignore it, rolling over and pressing his uncooperative eyes shut. But the noise persisted.

  It was muffled and distant, but it seemed to be changing shape, coming into focus, refining itself. It had an awkward rhythm, like a faint snapping noise, a jittery tattoo…and as it clarified itself in Grove’s groggy ears, he became aware of something vaguely troubling about it.

  It seemed to be approaching the house.

  ELEVEN

  Looking back on that tense moment in the basement—specifically the point at which Grove recognized the noise was coming from the backyard—he would be hard pressed to precisely recount all the subsequent details. It was as though some silent alarm had sounded inside him, drowning all his other senses, even eliminating his awareness of the passage of time. It seemed like an eternity between the moment he sat up on the sofa…and the point at which he finally rose on creaking, sleep-numbed legs to pad over to the window.

  There were two narrow, horizontal basement windows, both of them on the west wall facing the backyard, one at each end of the room. The windows were shuttered and positioned near the ceiling. Each looked out upon a little gravel concavity, which was slightly below ground level, drastically hindering the view across the lawn. Maura had planted a clutch of multicolored petunias in each window well, further obstructing the view. At night, shadows latticed the little wells. The flowers looked black and funereal.

  Another eternity passed as Grove peered through the nearest window, seeing nothing but moonlight and dancing shadows out on the lawn, his head cocked with the rigor of a satellite dish, listening for that sound, that arrhythmic noise which had halted, for the moment at least. For an interminable length of time Grove stood wondering if he was hearing things. He wondered if the noise had been part of a dream. Maybe he was still dreaming. He didn’t want to turn on a light. Something told him to stay immersed—at least for the moment—in the safe anonymity of darkness.

  How long he stood there at the window, waiting for that maddening noise to return, would never truly be known. Maybe five minutes, perhaps less.

  Grove rarely lost track of time like that. In fact, if pressed, he could recall only two or three times in his career that he got so panicked or involved in the moment that he felt time slow down to a crawl. It happened in Alaska a couple of years ago, on a mountainside, when Grove finally came face to face with Richard Ackerman. Ackerman had been crazy as a loon, but also had displayed something behind his eyes which Grove had come to think of as Factor X.

  Factor X could turn a meek, persnickety accountant like Ackerman into a dangerous psychotic. Or transform a frightened Tulane grad student like Michael Doerr into a ritualistic killer. Factor X existed, it seemed, solely in order to turn people into puppets, make them perform off-the-scale evil acts. A Catholic might have called it a demon…but Grove believed that such an assessment was too easy. He believed that the jury was still out about Factor X’s true nature.

  Maybe this was why Grove, over the past two years, had become such a homeschooled expert in demonology and gnostic depictions of evil. After poring over the ancient texts, from the Greeks to the medieval period, he moved onto the modern acolytes such as Aleister Crowley, Bertrand Traviere, and Winston Baines Walker. Grove then created a virtual database of occult connections to the modern serial murderer. He saw consistencies in Old Testament passages about evil recurring down through the centuries, in the Kabbalah’s discussions of shattered psyches and violent internal schisms, and even in Islam, in the jahannam, with its complex political view of evil incarnate.

  Simply put, it seemed to Grove there existed a monolithic-antagonist—an alter ego that resurfaced down through the ages and hijacked the weak—that ultimately focused its bloody exploits toward some esoteri
c, cosmic purpose. Grove could even see evidence of this in the feverish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and William Blake, the flayed bodies of the damned and the contorted expression on the faces of the fallen angels. The demon face was so familiar to Grove. It was the face of utter bloodlust—cruel, cold, impassive—possessing an insatiable hunger. He had seen it on the face of more than one killer in his day, and he believed he might have once even worn the expression himself.

  In Alaska, when Grove had managed to become infected by this powerful force—or at least that was the consensus of those who had been present—he had ended up in the mental ward. That was another occasion during which Grove had lost track of time. He had floated in a dark abyss inside himself for nearly a week, until his mother and a small team of clergy and spiritualists had exorcised this new personality—or whatever it was—out of Grove. But the experience had changed Grove, galvanized him, made him realize his true nature: he was the polar opposite of Factor X.

  He was Factor Y.

  And now it felt as though another battle between the two polarities seemed to be brewing. It felt as though a horrible, inexorable dance was about to begin. Grove felt it in the pulse of his blood, the quickening beat of his heart, the humming in his bones.

  And right now, an invitation to that very dance was out in the woods behind his home, coming this way, coming toward his house.

  The noise had returned. Closer. This time it was unmistakable: the snapping of a twig. Footsteps. Grove stiffened, and felt the skin of his neck prickle. He peered out the window and saw what was making the noise.

  A man with a gun emerging from the woods.

  Coming this way.

  Maura stirred. Still half asleep, still in the throes of that weird dream of her husband vanishing down the black void of an empty coffin, she turned onto her side. The blurry, glowing numerals of a digital clock appeared in the gloom. They seemed to float in the void: 3:13 A.M.

  She swallowed an acrid taste in her mouth, and rubbed her eyes. She looked at the clock again. 3:13? Had she only been asleep for a couple of hours? She felt as though she had been sleeping all night. Had she heard a noise? Was Aaron crying? She had no idea what had awakened her.

  She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling, trying to gather her bleary equilibrium. The room was bathed in shadow, almost completely dark except for the dull red glow of the digital clock and a strand of moonlight adhering to the ceiling like a brushstroke.

  Gradually the events of that evening returned to her in stages. She remembered making love to Ulysses in the basement, and she remembered putting the quilt on Vida and kissing the slumbering Aaron good night. She looked at the other side of the bed. The huge queen-size comforter and sheet were still tucked neatly into the mattress.

  Where the hell was Ulysses?

  Maura remembered lying with him down there in the afterglow, softly talking, then telling him she was going to go check on Aaron. But then what? Didn’t he say he was going to make a few notes and then come up to bed? Or was she supposed to come back downstairs? She couldn’t remember. She supposed he was still down there; probably dozed off at the desk.

  Rolling back onto her side, she stared at the clock and considered getting up to pee. Her bladder was full, but she was so exhausted she could barely move. Ever since she had given birth to Aaron—a difficult cesarean—her energy level had been nil. Unfortunately her bladder had also been compromised by the incision, and she knew if she didn’t get up right now and go to the bathroom she would wet the bed.

  At last she climbed out of bed, then trundled across the room and out the door.

  When Grove, now dressed in his pants but still barefoot, reached the master bedroom on the second floor, he took a deep breath before pushing open the door. He knew that Maura was a light sleeper. The slightest creak would wake her. But he also knew that time was of the essence. The man he saw only moments ago, emerging from the woods behind the house, had been moving slowly yet steadily toward the two-story with obvious malice. It had been too dark to make out the man’s features, or to see much of what he was wearing, but the object cradled in his arms was unmistakable: either a cut-down shotgun or some hot, filed-down assault rifle.

  On one level, it seemed preposterous to Grove that somebody would be sneaking up on him in this fashion, guerrilla-style, in the dark of night. Burglars don’t operate like that. Burglars will case a place, and then look for a window—both of opportunity and of egress—through which to slip in and out unnoticed. Veteran burglars, in fact, usually don’t even carry firearms. In the state of Virginia, breaking and entering is a fairly mild class 3 felony…unless the perpetrator is armed with a deadly weapon, which bumps the penalty up to a class 2. This man coming toward Grove’s house was definitely not a burglar. Just exactly what he was, would remain undetermined for the next few critical minutes.

  The reality of this situation, though, was that Grove did not have the luxury or the time to ruminate on the intruder’s nature or motives. Too much was at stake. The clock was ticking. It is not only you who are in danger this time, Uly.

  He pushed the door open and glanced around the dark bedroom and stopped cold. The bed was empty. The baby monitor was off. Maura was gone, the blankets tossed and shoved toward the foot of the bed. Grove stared, momentarily paralyzed. His heart raced. For some reason, right at that moment, it didn’t occur to him that she could be in the bathroom. Perhaps it was the adrenaline humming in his system. Or maybe it was the urgent need to get to the closet.

  For a brief moment he considered calling out for her, but nixed the idea when he realized it would cause more problems than it solved. It would not only wake the rest of the household but also alert the intruder.

  Grove had two guns. One of them—a Charter Arms .357 Magnum Tracker with a 6-inch barrel—was at his office at Quantico, quaintly locked up in an antique glass case behind his credenza. His coworkers in the Behavioral Science Unit often teased him about that, calling him Barney Fife, claiming that locking up his gun like that looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. But they didn’t know what the gun meant to Grove. It had been a gift from his late partner, Terry Zorn. Grove owed his life to that gun. He had cornered Richard Ackerman on the summit of Mount Cairn with that gun. The speed-loader had frozen that day, and in a desperate gambit Grove had literally hurled the weapon at his adversary.

  Later, the CSI unit had retrieved the handgun from a rocky buttress and eventually returned it to Grove.

  The second gun in Grove’s collection was safely locked away in his bedroom closet. It lay in a storage case, unloaded, oiled, and disassembled.

  Grove padded across the dark bedroom and threw open the pocket door, revealing the spacious closet full of tailored finery. He and Maura shared the large walk-in space, and Grove had to reach up and push aside the hatboxes and the Pendaflex files of old letters to get to the black vinyl briefcase pushed against the back wall.

  The gun was inside, broken down into pieces, each metal component nestled in its spongy nest. Huddling in the darkness, heart thumping, the floor cold on the soles of his feet, Grove uprooted the grip from the case, the odor of machine oil wafting up at him. The barrel felt like ice in his clammy hands. The snapping noises seemed outrageously loud in the silent closet as Grove assembled the .44 Special Bulldog. His hands did not shake, and he remembered the procedure better than he would have guessed, but still, the entire process, from the moment he reached the closet to the moment he got the weapon put together, chewed up at least two minutes. Ordinarily that would be pretty impressive for a nonshooter like Grove, a man with one blind eye, who hadn’t touched a gun in months, but tonight the minutes were deadly. In less than two minutes the intruder could reach the back wall of the house. Another two and he could be inside.

  Grove spun around with the .44 in one hand and the speed-loader in the other.

  Maura was standing in the doorway, agape. “Where were you?”

  “Listen, uh, listen—” He tu
rned and glanced around the room, his mind racing. What should he tell her? Did he want her scared and alert…or oblivious and quiet?

  “I thought you were gonna come back up,” she said in a groggy wheeze, apparently still half asleep, coming toward him.

  “Listen—”

  “What is that?”

  “Okay, now let’s not—”

  “Is that a gun?”

  “Maura—”

  “What the hell is going on?” She had stopped midway across the room, her pale green eyes looking like Buffalo nickels in the gloom. “Why do you have a gun?” She swallowed hard, and Grove took a step toward her, and she backed away. “Why are you holding a gun?”

  “Okay, I’m going to need you to stay very quiet.”

  “What’s going on? What the hell’s going on?” Her voice had raised an octave. Her fists clenched.

  “Listen to me, listen to me.” Grove went over to her, shoving the gun down the back of his belt. “It’s gonna be okay, everything’s okay.”

  “Then why do you have a gun?”

  “Take it easy, come on.” He put an arm around her. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Don’t patronize me, goddamnit! Is it a burglar?”

  “I don’t know yet, I’m going to need you to stay here, and don’t move no matter what.”

  “Did you call 911?”

  “Maura, just stay here!” He went over to the door and locked it from the inside. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Wait!”

  He was already through the door, and he turned and quickly pulled it until it clicked.

  Then he quickly crept down the hallway to the nursery. A quick glance inside confirmed that his mother and the baby were still asleep, safe and oblivious.

  He locked the inner lock, then pulled the door shut until it clicked.