The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  'If that's what you would call it.'

  'But I don't. It's not compassion at all. Compassion means to "suffer together". It's an inactive state.'

  'I see.'

  'Prayer is active. You must participate. What I have done is offered communion. It's a very different thing.'

  'You've just been murdering people willy-nilly, Peter. Sorry to cut through the crap, but you can feel free to tell yourself whatever you want.' Outside, she watched a burnt farmhouse track past in her window. She wondered if she could recall the case, if anyone had been hurt or killed. But like many of the cases that crossed through her station house, she could not bring any particulars to mind.

  'Your observances are just different than mine,' he was saying. 'We both have our faiths.'

  'God,' she murmured, 'to talk to you, you seem sane.'

  He turned in his seat, twisting his head back over his shoulder, and she was eye-to-eye with him. 'I seem sane.'

  'Watch the road—'

  'Why don't you tell me what I am, Hazel?' He'd begun to speed up. 'Since you've been studying me for so long. I must be mad! Surely you think me mad! Who am I? Say my name!'

  'You're a brother-killer, Peter Mallick. And a wife-killer, a mother-killer—'

  He wrenched the car over to the side of the road and her head smashed into the door. The next moment, the door was open and he was wrenching her out of the back seat. Where did his strength come from? Her hips hit the snow-covered gravel shoulder and there was a shattering deep inside her and he dragged her into the middle of the road. She twisted onto her side and brought her knees up to her chest. He stood over her and she saw the last of the star-filled night in the gloaming beyond him. 'Peter Mallick is dead,' he hissed. 'His small life is over.' She spat a mouthful of blood onto his shoe. 'Now, shall I make you part of my great work?'

  'I don't care what you do to me.'

  'Do you care about your mother?'

  'My mother's already dead.'

  'If you believe that, then why are you here?'

  'Fuck you, Peter.'

  He kneeled down in front of her and pushed her over onto her back. He put a knee on her chest. She could barely feel the cold. The blood was flooding her limbs. 'How do you think your bravery sounds to me, Hazel? When I've witnessed true courage over and over again? You believe you're willing to die, but you don't need to die. That's the difference between you and them. They let go so beautifully because they needed to. I gave them their quiet, beautiful deaths and they accepted them like benedictions.'

  'I deserve to die.'

  'I predict you'll do it screaming, meddler.' He leaned into her and grabbed the front of her shirt, pulled her to sitting. It felt to her as if her legs had been cut off. 'You don't know what I am,' he said.

  'I do, though,' she said. 'You're the same as me.' He glared into her eyes. 'You're pride masquerading as justice.'

  He pulled her to standing. She heard his knees crack. She let him put her back into the car. 'Your mother is alive,' he said.

  They drove deep into the dark, pine-thick forest, the snow spiralling in the headlights. Her head was pounding and she could still taste blood. It felt as if her pelvis had been replaced by a block of ice, but she felt almost no pain at all. As he took a series of smaller and smaller roads, she began to wonder if she knew any longer where she was. They were somewhere in the northwestern corner of the park, but Peter was pushing off-road now, driving the narrow spaces between trees, crossing roads perpendicularly, taking their thin pathways and then cutting back into trees. Branches lashed the car, the shadows of snow-bent branches flickered by in dark stripings. She wanted to ask him where they were going and when they would get there, but her tongue was thick with fear now, her words boiled dry. Her cold bowels roiled.

  At last, he hit a pebbled path and stayed on it. It was almost seven in the morning now. Somewhere in this world, people were sitting down to their breakfasts in houses warmed by little fires. She could not be farther from the comfort and safety of anything she held dear.

  In the distance, a small shack appeared as a dark square against the base of the trees. He slowed as he approached it, and then stopped at the door. He pulled her to standing outside of the car. Smoke rose up from the chimney. She believed now that neither she nor her mother would ever be heard from again, and the grief of knowing how her children would suffer went through her like a blade.

  He stepped forward onto some flagstones leading to the door, and Hazel knew her only chance was now. She exploded forward, twisting and driving her shoulder into his back, her whole weight behind the blow, and it was like breaking down a door that was already open: his body offered no resistance. She felt herself propelled through the air with him beneath her and when they hit the ground, it was as if there'd been nothing to break her fall. She felt a nauseating crunch under her and the breath shot out of him. Silence beneath her, a spasm in his legs. She smashed her forehead into the back of his skull for insurance. She leaped up, fell, scrambled to her feet again and looked around frantically for something to smash her cuffs on. There was a huge hunk of grey-and-white stone beside the cabin and she ran to it and heaved her wrists at it again and again, smelling the sparks as they flickered up like tiny approximations of the night sky she'd stared into the first time she thought she was going to die this day. The cuffs warped and bent, gouging her flesh, and there was blood all over the rock. Finally, one of the clasps sprang open and she pulled her swollen wrist free of it and spun to see Peter trying to push himself off the ground. She was to him in an instant, kicking him in the ear with the tip of her boot, and then she was at the door in a single movement, crying for her mother and pounding the heavy door again and again with the full force of her body. At last, she stood back and kicked it in and there was a darkness before her filling with dust from which no sound emerged.

  'Mum!' She rushed into the lightless cabin, the air swirling with particles. It smelled bitter, like boiled mustard greens. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out a single table in the middle of the room with one chair tucked under it, and dark curtains over two windows, one to her right, beside a stove, the other across from her. Beneath it, in deeper shadow, there was a square shape, a bed, she saw now, and on it a form. A slow, sweet reek was making itself known.

  She rushed to her mother's side and the smell intensified. Insensate, Emily Micallef lay on her back, her cheeks sunken, and Hazel saw her mother's face slicked in stinking, black blood. She slipped to her knees and heard her own voice quietly crying out, the voice of a lost child. 'No no no—'

  'Get up.'

  She saw him standing in the doorway, a solid black shape, legs slightly akimbo. A needle of light danced off the tang of a long, curving knife. She'd seen her father use such a knife to gut fish when she was a child. 'Go to hell,' she said.

  'If you want her to live, you'll do as I say.'

  Her mother's cold hand in hers. The dead hand. She stood and faced him in the door. 'If I believed what you believed, I'd make whatever deal you asked for, Peter. But I don't. And whatever it is you want from me now, you're going to have to take it because I'm not offering it. You told me she was alive.'

  He'd stepped forward into the body of the room and she heard a match scraping and saw the tiny flare of a fire, then he lit a small oil lamp and the room shimmered into being. His forehead was matted with blood, his nose smashed against his face. He showed no sign of being in pain. He was otherworldly, calm, in utter possession of himself. On the walls to her right, she could see a line of pictures, pictures she knew from a cursory glance were his victims. His own pictures of them. His trophies. 'I did bring you here to make a trade, Hazel. She's not dead.'

  In the light, Hazel looked at her mother again. Beneath the thin, closed eyelids, she saw a faint strobing.

  'She dreams,' said Simon. 'Feverfew for her pain, enough to keep her asleep.'

  'You drugged her? You fucking—'

  'She is balanced on a line. The tincture of licoric
e root to thin the blood, the feverfew for the pain. But a dangerous combination. It can stop the heart. An injection of oil of thyme will bring her back, though.'

  'She's eighty-seven! You couldn't have just tied her to a chair like a regular lunatic, could you?'

  He remained behind the table. The lamplight was pale and yet his white face shone in it like a coin. He kept the knife in his hand, but pointed it to the floor. 'What you said about pride was right. But in the Bible, "pride" means blind arrogance; it is not a dignified thing. But I am proud. I have a right to be. My pride is just.' He tilted his head at her. 'Is yours?'

  He walked toward her, his broken face catching the stray light as if its facets were the folds in a crumpled piece of aluminium foil. 'Time is of the essence,' he said. 'I'm going to give you this knife, Hazel.' He stood in front of her, the knife held out to her in the palm of his hand.

  'I'm not going to kill myself for you,' she said, trembling.

  'Christ did.'

  'You've been reading a different book than the rest of us.'

  'And the night before, he bled in the Garden of Gethsemane.' He felt his face with his fingertips and held his stained hand up for her to see. 'As it is written. He was heavily pressed. He kneeled in the Garden and his awareness of what he must bear weighed on him.' He took another step toward her, the knife laid across his two palms. 'His messenger is lashed to you. You are anointed.'

  'Neither of us is Christ, Peter. You're just a griefstruck—' and she felt the point of the knife against her bottom lip.

  'Call me Peter again and I'll bind your lips with steel. What is my name?' She said nothing. He withdrew the blade. 'I've got something more efficient than a knife. If you'd rather die like a coward.'

  'Let us go,' she said, trembling. A thin rivulet of blood ran down over her chin. 'Think of all the people you've shown love to, and let us go. You know how to vanish. You can do that.'

  He flung his arm out behind him and the knife flew to the door and stuck in it with a bang. She jumped. He stepped back to a bag on the floor behind one of the chairs and drew a gun out of it. She stared at it. The knife had been a test, but she knew the gun was for real. 'I'll take her somewhere where your people can find her,' he said. 'I'll let her say a prayer over your grave before I drive her out of here. It'll be daylight when we go so she'll be able to find her way back. To lay flowers if she likes.'

  'Please,' she said. 'Wake her up. Prove to me she'll make it out of here alive.' He stared at her flatly, the gun hanging from his fingertip. 'Simon, please.'

  'Ah, now I'm Simon. Now that you want something from me.'

  'Just let me say goodbye.'

  'You want your mother to watch your death? Is that the kind of child you want to be to her in your last moments?' Without warning, he brought the gun up, aimed at her head, and pulled the trigger. She heard the empty click of the hammer and felt the power go out of her legs. She collapsed to the floor, her arm out, searching wildly for purchase. The broken handcuffs clinked on the floor. 'Go ahead and wake her then,' he said behind her. 'Leave her with that fine memory of you.' Hazel found her mother's arm and gripped it, pressed her face into that beloved flesh. The scent of her mother entered her, fugitive beneath the scent of rotting blood but still insistently alive, and it was that same scent that was woven into her memory, the whole record of her beingness: it was limned by this, the source of her life. She wanted to go on. It was a bright, clear thing now, this need to live. After losing everything that she thought had mattered to her, after loneliness and humiliation, after pain and failure, she still wanted to live. She dug her fingers into her mother's arm, but Emily Micallef did not wake. Hazel rose and faced her killer.

  'All right,' she said. 'I agree to your terms.'

  He was searching for something in one of his pockets and brought out a single bullet, which he loaded into the chamber of the gun. 'Terms? There are no terms here. Your agreement doesn't mean anything.'

  'No. Just like it was never truly a condition of what you offered your victims. You took advantage of their desperation, like you'll take advantage of mine.' She could hear the rattle in his chest. Exhaustion, starvation, sickness: death was as close to him as it was to her, like the shadow of a cloud racing across a valley. 'You broke His first commandment,' she said. 'Do you think He'll let you come to Him with all of these stains on you?'

  'No one who has died is truly dead.'

  'One of my officers found your brother in the cabin you shared, his body surrounded by dust, stinking and full of maggots, abandoned with no one to bury him. The one who brought you out of the hell you once lived in. And that was how you showed your love?'

  'It doesn't matter how I show my love, only how He shows his. And now, how you show yours.'

  'Just know this: I don't give myself freely.'

  'You said it yourself. You deserve to die.'

  'I do,' she said. 'But it doesn't mean I want to. I agree to your terms because I don't have a choice.'

  His jaw tightened and then he made himself release it, and he smiled at her. 'You should be careful. You don't want me to believe you're false. It may incline me to be false as well. And you do want your mother to live, don't you?'

  'I do,' she said. 'But if I'm to die here today, I won't do it as a liar. She wouldn't want me to tell a lie just to save her. The truth is, in my heart I don't want to die. I can't pretend that, even to save my mother.' She took a careful step toward him. 'If I give myself to you and you bring your brother back from where he's gone, what is he going to say to you? What will he think of your great work when it's cost the lives of so many people? Would he have saved himself at any cost?'

  'Every second you talk, Hazel, your mother moves closer to death. Tell me you want her to live.'

  'Put a bullet in me.' He lifted the gun and she looked down the dark eye of it. 'But first show me how you want my mouth.'

  'You needn't worry about that.'

  'I want to, though. If you're going to make me a liar, I want to tell the lie myself.'

  He watched her, motionless. She thought that if she could keep him here, that the last of his strength would ebb from him and he would vanish like smoke before her. For weeks she had feared him, hated him, but standing before him now, feeling the force of his broken heart, she felt for him for the first time. To get back what is gone no matter the cost. Who could not understand that? Anyone who has lost hope is in that wilderness, she thought. And there is only prayer in the wilderness.

  'I can tell the whole lie,' she said, 'I memorized it.'

  'Make your peace, Hazel.'

  'Libera eos de vinculis—'

  'Don't you—'

  'We've both lost the one who loved us most,' she said.

  'Your mother still lives.'

  'My husband left me. Your brother is gone. Simon is gone.'

  'He stands before you.'

  'No, his broken-hearted baby brother stands before me. Simon is gone forever. So you tell me: who is going to save Peter now?'

  She saw his eyes flicker backward and there was a shudder in his body. And then there was nothing. There was stillness and quiet and all the desolate, broken dead were in their graves. She saw him know it. 'Mortis,' she said.

  He opened his mouth as if to sing and put the gun in it.

  26

  Saturday 1 January

  New Year's Eve had seen its share of disturbances, misdemeanours, drunken behaviour. Sam Roth had driven his brand new Skylark clear across Howard Tyler's field at two in the morning and through the side of a barn. The car was a writeoff, but Tyler declined to press charges: the barn needed rebuilding anyway and Roth had saved him the trouble of demolishing it.

  There were nine fights, a bottle thrown through a window in Kehoe Glen, and an ambulance dispatched to Clifton right after midnight to assess a black eye caused by a champagne cork.

  It had begun to warm up since Christmas and on New Year's Day, the temperature would reach six degrees by noon. The Westmuir Record would r
eport the following week that it was the highest temperature ever for a January first. In the morning, the usual garbage blew across the streets and it rained. A quieter Sunday than many she'd recently passed.

  The hospital had sent Emily Micallef home on the Thursday morning, after almost a month in hospital, in time to mark the new year in the comfort of her own home. Hazel had transformed the living room into a bedroom: her mother could walk again, but the stairs winded her, and her doctor's advice was to preserve her energy as much as possible. The same went for Hazel. She'd driven out of the park with Peter Mallick's body in the trunk of his car and her mother reclined in the front seat, and the whole time she had been forced to hover over the driver's seat with her elbow braced against the door to keep from fainting from the pain. She'd not felt the disc in her back finally rupture when Mallick had dragged her out of the car – adrenalin had kept her attention away from it. As soon as she had her mother in the car, though, it announced itself, and Hazel had to make the drive in agony. It was more than an hour before she saw a sign for a hospital and when she turned into the curving emergency driveway, she leaned on the horn and blacked out. When she woke, they'd operated on her back and her mother had been airlifted to Mayfair, where she remained in a coma until the week before Christmas. In two separate hospitals they were hooked up to identical machines, their vital signs translated into electronic code, as if they'd both finally been plugged into the same ethereal grid that Peter Mallick had hunted his victims in. Hazel, not capable of much more than hobbling on a walker at first, spent her entire recuperation in her mother's Mayfair hospital room. She read her the yearly Christmas story from the Record when she woke up – the last part of it appeared on the day before Christmas Eve. Hazel could recall her father reading the conclusion of the Christmas tale to her and her brother, Alan, over the holiday turkey. Those hopeful stories. On 30 December, her mother came home.

  Emily Micallef would not talk about her ordeal. When she looked at Hazel, her eyes began to shine, and Hazel understood that the unspoken thoughts were too much to put to words, at least for now. They both hobbled back and forth through the house more or less avoiding each other, although there was no rancour between them. It was as if they had both been made aware of a grave new truth and its presence was enough to keep their minds occupied. The night of New Year's Eve, Hazel made them breakfast for supper: eggs, hashbrown potatoes, bacon and toast. Comfort food, which they ate in silence.