Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  “Was there any light?” Annie asked, her eyes opened wide. “I’m sorry. I interrupted again.”

  “No light,” I said softly. “It’s much better that way. Your eyes adjust to the darkness, and the darkness becomes your friend. It was a one-bedroom apartment, so it wasn’t hard to figure out where to go. I didn’t rape her.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Oh. She wore her socks to bed. During the brief struggle, she pulled off one sock. I don’t know why. Maybe panic. She grabbed at my hands, and the sock ended up draped across her throat. It wasn’t tied there.”

  “You didn’t even rape her? Then why’d you kill her?”

  “I wanted to spend time in her apartment, with her things, without her being there.”

  Annie took a long drink from her beer. “Well, shit. Why didn’t you just break in and sniff her underwear when she was at class? I like my version better.”

  Eventually, Annie married a guy from the business school. They moved to Connecticut and raised three children. Thirteen years after the warehouse fire, she sent me a gift—a copy of Loren Eiseley’s The Unexpected Universe. She had circled the author’s inscription: “To Wolf, who sleeps forever with an ice age bone across his heart, the last gift of one who loved him.”

  A month later, I killed her in a horse stall.

  I DOZED FITFULLY ON THE RETURN FLIGHT, thinking about Wolf’s extended stay in Vermont. He’d had plenty of time to plan what was happening now. It was mere detail work. The man’s design for himself spanned a lifetime.

  I also heard my father’s voice.

  Trust your own mind, lad.

  My father had thirteen “heart attacks.” Most of them were trips to one drunk tank or another. The South View at least once, the Pines more than once. Sometimes, as I discovered much later, it was the less posh Charles Street Jail. They didn’t have a coronary care unit there.

  Then he did die. Number fourteen was for real.

  I remembered standing on a hill as he was lowered into the ground, and thinking about how we inhabit both the surface and the depths of the earth—wondering how long it would be before there were more people beneath the ground than above. Maybe there already were.

  Because the living can be as blind as the dead, chance continues to rule the universe. There are no absolutes—not even in quantum physics. We exist for the blink of an eye in the lifetimes of the galaxies. We have no choice but to trust our own minds.

  I stood in that cemetery on the hill, and I watched a bird on a phone wire. It flew out from its perch, snapped an insect out of the air, then returned to the wire.

  “It’s a kingbird,” I had told my sister. “See the white band across the bottom of its tail?”

  She squeezed my hand and whispered, “Listen to what the minister is saying.”

  I didn’t understand a word of what the man in black went on about, but I was fascinated with the bird’s darting movements, its abrupt changes of direction, how it seemed almost to stop dead in midair.

  Wolf had given Janet Orr a page from Peterson—the kingbird.

  Dexter Willoughby’s words about Wolf’s note in The Collector echoed in my mind: “It was dated and he wrote down the time.”

  I had received a mockingbird.

  All of Wolf’s entries in his computer journal were numbered.

  Coots and old squaws.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, sitting up and grabbing the back of the seat in front of me.

  The woman in the seat beside me glared and pulled away.

  The first characteristic of Wolf’s that I had identified a year ago had been his rigidity. The man was methodical to a fault.

  You have owned your world, lad, but you had to give it balance and order, didn’t you?

  “Sorry, ma’am,” I said to my flight companion. “I left my duffel in a locker back in Hartford.”

  The birds had nothing to do with Wolf’s messages. It was the fucking page numbers. What had Jackson said? Coots, page sixty-one. Wolf had killed Chadwick about two months ago. I needed a calender, but I was willing to bet that sixty-one was the start of a countdown, the number of days remaining until Wolf’s grand finale. He had killed his sister about a month ago. Old squaws, thirty-four.

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  Again, the woman’s head snapped around.

  “My wallet’s in the duffel,” I explained, wondering how far I could go with that particular charade.

  Kingbirds, eight. Mockingbirds, one-twenty-four. Only the final digit mattered. Wolf had delivered the phoenix four days after he had killed Janet. What did that leave?

  Less than two days.

  Thirty-six hours.

  IT WAS LATE WHEN I ARRIVED BACK AT THE Willard. I wanted to sleep for an hour, but my mind wouldn’t stop. I settled back on the bed with a bottle of ale, and drifted.

  Suddenly, I was working in a restaurant on Nantasket Beach. It was the sixties. I wore jeans, a T-shirt, a white apron.

  I was closing the restaurant—Amanda’s—while Leo, the owner, counted the nights receipts.

  The kid was carrying a knife when he walked in through the kitchen at the hack. He held the blade at Leo’s chin and said he wanted the money.

  I felt a familiar stirring inside me. I grabbed the kid by his greasy black hair.

  He brought the knife up and sliced my arm. For an instant, I gazed into his eyes, at the wild panic there, then slammed his face down through the glass candy counter. Then I did it again. His blood spurted up, spattering my white apron.

  The cops questioned me. They said I might have killed the kid. They made it sound like I was the one who had done something wrong.

  Even Leo said, “Something like that happens, you just give ’em the money.”

  But I couldn’t. I had been cursed with my very own beast. A beast not unlike Wolf’s. I feared him. I loved him. I knew that if he ever escaped, ever took over, I would never be able to bring him back under control.

  After that incident—seeing the blade pressed into Leo’s flesh and feeling its edge myself—my beast was agitated for days, glaring at me with his black eyes, moving about, refusing to sit with his back to me.

  My sister had said, “It happened again, didn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Can’t you stop it?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “But…”

  “He’s part of me,” I explained. “He scares me, but he’ll never let me down.”

  “He always finds a way to get out,” I muttered.

  I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke spiral upward, remembering the fog as it moved in and hugged the Massachusetts shoreline. I thought about the worlds that lay beyond the fog. An ocean. A continent. Another continent. If I let my thoughts fly free enough and far enough, they circled the world, working their way home to me again.

  I couldn’t remember how old I was the first time I knew that I had lost my way. Too young to cross the street without holding my sister’s hand. Too young to walk down to the pier without her. But I could remember the sound of the waves crashing against the wall— the feel of the air and the smell of the sea. Even then I knew that people kill each other—a piece at a time, or in an orgasm of homicidal rage.

  A man like Wolf fits smoothly into the scheme of things. Just as I do.

  The line between us has blurred.

  It has to, if I am to stop him.

  LANE AND I WERE GETTING TOGETHER FOR A late dinner.

  I had my hand on the doorknob, prepared to step into the hall, then realized that I was distracted. I was about to walk out without my gun.

  I retrieved my nine-millimeter and headed for the lobby

  When I begin to drift, when my beast begins to stir, the breaking away becomes involuntary My thoughts assume lives of their own.

  Of all things, I was thinking about a family trip we had taken years ago to Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire. After a picnic lunch, Lanie and Savvy and I had crossed Route 3 to the Flume,
a series of underground caverns, rivers, waterfalls. Savvy said the place made her feel claustrophobic, so she had stayed behind in one of the larger caves while Lanie and I forged through the tunnels worn into the rocks over millions of years.

  “Pop?”

  I looked across the table at Lane.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You haven’t touched your food.”

  I looked down at the slivers of chicken breast adrift in a sea of maple syrup and slices of Mandarin orange. “Smells good,” I said.

  “It’s probably cold.”

  I tasted it. “Warm.”

  Lane’s plate was empty. I winked and smiled. “You eat too fast,” I told her.

  She shook her head. “You’re impossible.”

  I had decided to leave the matter of Wolf’s metal box and his obsession with me for a later conversation, preferably after the bastard was dead. Lane knew that I was the focus of Wolf’s rage, and I could see nothing to be gained by alarming her even more.

  The chicken was excellent, the wild rice cooked to perfection. I wished that I had eaten when it was still hot.

  “So, what do you think of the Knicks this year?” Lane said, laughing.

  “Watch out for the Miami Heat,” I said.

  I sipped my ale.

  “Pop?”

  “What, Lanie?”

  “When did you start paying any attention to basketball? I said something about Michael Jordan the other day, and you didn’t even know who he was.”

  “Is that what we were talking about?”

  “You glanced at a sports page.”

  Lane was well aware of my propensity for eidetic recall. While skimming through a book or newspaper, I might catch a glimpse of a page, then later reproduce it as a visual image in my memory.

  “Guilty,” I said.

  “You know, sometimes I wish I’d gotten that particular gene. Then, other times, I’m glad that I didn’t.”

  “What you only see can often get in the way,” I said.

  I was ready to give Lane my standard lecture on experience—the appreciation of all the senses—but I had distracted myself.

  What you only see can get in the way. What happens when your eyes adjust to the darkness? What about what you don’t see—or hear, or smell, or feel? Wolf’s reference to the underground had triggered my association to the Flume.

  What was John Wolf leaving for me to see? What was I seeing that was getting in the way? I had been so visually oriented that I thought I was missing something. It had nothing to do with what I wasn’t visualizing.

  The pages from Peterson. I had locked on their content.

  “Pop?”

  “Let’s walk,” I said, getting up from the table.

  “What is it?”

  “I want to walk,” I said. “Initial the check.”

  I headed for the door.

  “Was everything satisfactory, Dr. Frank?”

  I stopped. I had heard. I could still taste the maple syrup. I looked at the maitre d’ and had no trouble managing a smile. Sometimes these automatic behaviors can be a problem. “Most enjoyable,” I said.

  I shoved the door open and stepped out onto the sidewalk. I fumbled through my pockets looking for a cigarette, lit it, and sucked down the hot, soothing drug.

  Lane came through the door. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said.

  I handed her the package. “You can trash that.”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  “Until the next time,” I said. “Come on.”

  I started walking—threw the cigarette into the street—walked faster.

  Lane was almost trotting to keep up. “You’ve got him, haven’t you,” she said from behind.

  “Hell, no. I’ve just recognized my own stupidity. You out of shape?”

  She caught up. “God, you can be a royal pain.”

  “I do my best.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “For a walk. Tell me what you see.”

  “I’d rather hear about your trip,” she said. “Okay. I see buildings. Hotels, government offices, restaurants.”

  “Look closer.”

  “I see glass, bricks, steel, people …”

  “Closer.”

  “Cracks in the glass,” she said, struggling to keep up with me. “Posters on the walls.”

  I took the left onto Tenth Street and stopped. I pointed across Pennsylvania Avenue. “The Justice Department,” I said. “Law and order. Be nice if we ever had it. Big crook used to hang out there. John Mitchell.”

  I pointed to my left.

  “Ford’s Theater,” Lane said, “where Samantha Becker worked.”

  “Piece of history, isn’t it,” I said, gazing up. “Do you remember the play?”

  “Our American Cousin. April 14, 1865.”

  “The audience was laughing. Most of them never heard the sound of the shot.”

  “Booth got away on horseback. Later, they shot him. They said he was resisting arrest.”

  “Down there,” I said, pointing to my left. “Peterson House. They carried the president there. He died in the back bedroom. They still have the pillow that his head rested on. Bloodstained. Under glass. Like pheasant.”

  What you see can get in the way.

  “What do you hear, Lane?”

  “Pop…”

  “Do it,” I said, looking up at the building that a southern fanatic had rendered memorable.

  “Traffic. Voices. A plane going over.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Nighthawks. They spend most of their time on the wing, snapping insects out of the evening sky. They’re common in urban areas.”

  Lane looked up into the blackness. “I can’t see them.”

  “That’s the point,” I said.

  When everything is black, effectively we are blind and must rely on our other senses.

  Wolf knew that I would get hung up on feathers and birds and his ascension from the dead. I would look up, even into the blackest sky What I should have known was that I had to look back to where he had come from, beneath the earth.

  Underground.

  “I’ve been looking in the wrong direction,” I said. “He’s not soaring through the evening sky. His game has something to do with tunnels.”

  “You confronted him in the cellar.”

  “His home. He went deeper before rising up from his own ashes.”

  “Pop, this city is laced with tunnels. The subway, all the government buildings.”

  It wasn’t enough for Wolf that I was in Washington. He wanted me to join him for his fireworks underground. A year ago, I had been the hunter and had tracked Wolf to his lair. Now, I was the hunted. Would he come to my lair?

  “What about the Willard?” I asked.

  “Oh, Jesus, Pop.”

  “There has to be a basement of some sort. Maybe there’s something below that. Wolf has already demonstrated that he knows the building.”

  A cool breeze whirled dust up around us. “Let’s go back,” I said. “I’ll call Jackson.”

  For the first time since our arrival in the capital, I felt as if I was beginning to get a grasp on my phantom. I imagined the sketch of the nighthawk in Peterson’s Field Guide. Eidetic recall: page 101.

  Only the last digit mattered.

  THAT NIGHT, AS I SAT SILENTLY ALONE IN MY room, Hiram Jackson returned my call to his pager. After I had explained my thinking, he said, “I’ll get a team of specialists down in that cellar tonight.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “There are probably foreign delegations staying there. We’ll have to be discreet, get the Secret Service involved, work with the hotel’s management. With an old building like that, there’s no way to tell how much area they’ll have to cover. I don’t know how long this will take. We’ll move as fast as we can. We don’t want an international incident.”

  “Hiram, Wolf’s messages were in the page numbers from the bir
d book. It’s a countdown.”

  “How much time?”

  “I figure we’ve got about thirty hours.”

  Jackson said he would get back to me.

  I did what I knew I would eventually have to do. I began to stroke the back of the beast who lived so deep within me. He shifted uncomfortably, jerking his head from side to side.

  I remembered that night so many years ago, after the attempted robbery at Amanda’s, after the police had questioned me. I sat in my small room listening to the sound of the waves lapping across the sand. I took pencil and paper, and wrote down the few words that rattled around in my mind.

  it’s almost time, they say—

  they say, and walk away,

  leaving me with the night

  and the sea,

  and no handle on my soul—

  I had slipped out the window that night, and climbed down through the branches of the old lilac I walked on the beach, then sat in the deep sand, shivering, watching as the sky grew lighter in the east. The blood on my T-shirt looked black.

  I was afraid that I had shattered along with the face that I had plunged through the glass counter. There was the restlessness inside then, too—the glaring eyes, the muscular, hunched shoulders. My African lowlands gorilla refused to be quieted.

  I AWAKENED IN THE CHAIR WITH THE FIRST LIGHT of the D.C morning. My eyes felt as if they were filled with beach sand.

  I called room service for coffee, then retrieved the newspaper from the hall.

  John Wolf’s face was on page one.

  OVER COFFEE IN THE FBI ACADEMY’S CAFETERIA, I gazed at my image on the front page of the Washington Blade. It was not a bad rendition of a former life. Amazing what a skilled artist and a computer can do.

  I glanced around the room at agents and students carrying their trays of eggs, toast, and juice. A few carried newspapers.

  Two young men in jumpsuits sat across from me. One of them immediately unfolded his copy of the Blade. “You see this, Red?” he asked his partner.

  Red glanced at the composite, skimmed the first paragraphs of the story, nodded, then went about the business of inhaling his omelet. “We got twenty minutes, Louie,” he said.