Nocturnes (2004)

by John Connolly

  Clements looked up and heard a goat bleating.

  Poor beggar. He’ll be hungry soon.

  Sounds rose from below, the faintest contact of flesh upon stone, and he knew the creatures were starting to scale the rock face. He clutched his ax to his chest as a scratching noise came from above him. Clements looked up and thought he could detect movement in the shadows. A rock dislodged far to his right, and although he listened hard he could not hear it strike the base of the cavern. Now there was movement all around him, slowly drawing closer to the ledge upon which he sat. In the light of the lantern he fell to his knees and listened to the approach of the creatures, venom already dripping on him from the unseen fangs above.

  Clements rose to his feet. He sensed the creatures had stopped, and knew that they were preparing to strike. He thought of Molton, and their times together.

  “We should have stayed in the mountains, old man,” he said aloud. “We should have stayed where there was daylight.”

  And with that he stepped from the lip of the ledge, the lantern still clutched in his hand as he brought light at last to the depths of the Wakeford Abyss.

  The Reflecting Eye

  A Charlie Parker Novella

  The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d

  Lets in new light through chinks that time has made;

  Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,

  As they draw nearer to their eternal home.

  Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view…

  —Edmund Waller, “Of the Last Verses in the Book”

  I

  The Grady house is not easy to find. It lies on a county road that winds northwest from 201 like a reptile crawling off to die, the road dragging itself between steep banks of pine and fir, gradually becoming harder and harder to navigate as Tarmac gives way to cracked concrete, concrete to gravel, gravel to dirt, as if conspiring to discourage those who would look upon the blue-gabled house that waits at its end. Even then there is a final barrier for the curious to overcome, for the pitted trail that leads at last to its door has become wild and overgrown. Fallen trees have not been cleared and creepers and vines have exploited the natural bridges, thorny briers and stinging nettles joining with them to create an ugly wall of green and brown. Only the most tenacious will make their way farther, carving a path through the vegetation or working their way over ditches and rocks, tripping upon roots that seem barely to cling to the earth, the trees they sustain prey to the mildest of storms.

  Those who progress will find themselves in a yard of gray soil and foul-smelling weeds, the edge of the forest ending in a remarkably uniform tree line some twenty feet from the house, so that nature itself appears reluctant to extend its reach any closer. It is a simple, two-story arrangement, with a gabled attic window above the second floor. A porch runs along three sides, a decrepit swing chair to the east hanging askew by a single rope. Dead leaves lie curled inward like the remains of insects, piled up against the windows and doors. The mummified husk of a wren is buried beneath them, its body sunken and its feathers fragile as ancient parchment.

  The windows of the Grady house have long been covered over with wood, and the front and back entrances have been fortified by the addition of steel doors. Nobody has damaged them, for even the most daring of pranksters steer clear of the building itself. Some come out to look, and to drink beer in its shadow, as if to goad its daemons into taking action against them, but like small boys taunting a lion through the bars of its cage they are brave only as long as there is a barrier between themselves and the presence in the Grady house.

  For there is a presence there. Perhaps it does not have a name, or even a form, but it exists. It is composed of misery and hurt and despair. It is in the dust on the floors and in the fading paper that peels slowly from the walls. It is in the stains on the sink and in the ashes of the last fire. It is in the damp upon the ceiling and in the blood upon the boards. It is in everything, and it is of everything.

  And it waits.

  It is strange how John Grady’s name is rarely spoken except in reference to killings committed by others. No books have been written about him, even in this age of insatiable curiosity about the darkest among us, and the nature of his crimes remains unexplored in the popular imagination. True, if one is prepared to delve into the journals of criminology or the textbooks of violent crime, then there will be attempts to come to grips with John Grady, but all of them will fail. John Grady is inexplicable, for to explain him one must first know about him. There must be facts: a background, a personality. There must be schoolmates and fellow workers; an absent father, an overbearing mother. There must be trauma and conflicted sexuality. For John Grady, there are none of these things.

  He arrived in Maine in 1977, and he bought a house. His neighbors dropped by, and he invited them inside to take a look around. The house was old, but John Grady clearly had some experience in construction for he was tearing out walls, laying new floors, filling in cracks, and replacing old plumbing. His neighbors never stayed long, as John Grady was clearly a busy man, albeit one with dubious taste. The original expensive wallpaper was already gone, and a cheap, un-adorned replacement had been put up in its stead. The paste Grady used was of his own creation, and it stank, giving visitors another reason not to prolong their stay. Grady was doing all the work alone. He would talk about his plans for the house, and it was clear that he had already created it in his mind. He spoke of red drapes and deep velvet couches, of claw-toed bathtubs and mahogany dining tables. It was, he said, a labor of love, yet people looked up at that cheap paper, and smelled the rank substance that he had used to raise it, and quickly put Grady down as a fantasist.

  John Grady stole children. He took the first, little Mattie Bristol, from North Anson in the autumn of 1979; the second, Evie Munger, from Fryeburg in the spring of 1980; the third, Nadine Lincoln, from South Paris, in the summer of 1980; Denny Maguire, the fourth victim, and the only one to survive, as he walked from school in Belfast in the third week of May 1981; and his final victim, Louise Matheson, while she was walking from her home in Shin Pond to the house of her best friend, Amy Lowell, on May 21, 1981.

  That was his mistake, for Amy was so excited about her friend’s impending arrival that she was hiding in the woods at the verge of her house, hoping to leap out and surprise her. She watched Grady’s Lincoln pull up alongside her friend, saw the man inside lean over to speak to her, and then found herself unable to move as Grady’s big hand grabbed Louise by the hair and dragged her into the car. Amy’s parents heard her screaming, and within minutes the police were on their way, already mounting a search for a red Lincoln.

  They did not have to look far. The abduction of Louise Matheson was a crime of opportunity for John Grady. His previous victims had been taken from towns elsewhere in the state, then brought west to be killed, but Shin Pond was barely ten miles from the Grady house. John Grady’s appetites had become increasingly hard to sate, and the release that he gained from their appeasement did not last as long as it once had. It is possible to imagine him, on the day that Louise Matheson was abducted, prowling the roads, his hunger gnawing at him, perhaps promising himself that he was only trying to distract himself from his appetites by taking a ride, that he did not really intend to seek out another victim.

  John Grady was a tall, thin man. His hair was graying prematurely and cut close to his scalp, which served only to make his face seem even longer than it was. A calcium deficiency in his youth had given his chin an unfortunate prominence, one that he tried to hide by keeping his head low. He always wore a suit when out in public, set off by a bright bow tie and dark suspenders. There was something dated about him. His suits, though clean, gave the impression of having dwelt for some time in an attic or a thrift store. The shirts were a little frayed at the collars and cuffs. The bow ties looked faded rather than fresh, and bore wrinkles and stains that suggested many years of use.

  John Grady had long fingers and large hands.
Amy Lowell told the police that, when he gripped her friend’s head, the man’s fingers had closed on it entirely like the talons of a great bird, extending almost to her eyes. Despite her shock, Amy Lowell gave the police a good description of the individual who had taken Louise Matheson, and the vehicle that he drove. There were those who recalled John Grady’s ownership of a red Lincoln, and the police arrived at the Grady house and found the car. Nobody answered their knocks to the door, and a debate ensued on the porch steps of the Grady house concerning the nature of probable cause. It was curtailed by the sound, real or imagined, of a child’s cry, and the door was kicked in.

  John Grady was standing in the hallway of his house. His great work remained uncompleted, and there were ladders and drapes everywhere. His left hand was on the handle of the door to his basement, and he held a gun in his right. Before he could be stopped, he darted through the basement door and locked it behind him. He had reinforced it specifically for such an eventuality, replacing the flimsy original with sturdy oak and strengthening it with steel bands and a security bar. It took the police twenty minutes to break it down.

  When they entered the basement, Louise was dead. Slumped on the floor beside her was another child, a little boy. He was still alive, but unconscious from hunger and dehydration. This was Denny Maguire.

  John Grady stood over them both with his gun to his head. His last words, before he pulled the trigger, were:

  “This is not a house. This is a home.”

  II

  Winter was here. The north wind had almost stripped the last of the leaves from the trees, leaving only a sprinkling of foliage to threaten the dominion of the evergreens. Clusters of young beeches trembled beneath the canopy, and sugar maple seedlings lay sprinkled through the forests like lost gold. There was a kind of silence now in the woods, as animals prepared to slumber, or to die.

  In Portland, the trees of the Old Port were festooned with white lights, and a Christmas tree burned brightly farther up on Congress. It was cold, although not as cold as the winters I recalled from my childhood. When I was young, we would spend New Year’s at my grandfather’s house in Scarborough. He and my father would share whiskey and war stories, for they were both policemen, although my grandfather had retired many years before. My mother would listen indulgently to tales that she had heard told over and over again, then hustle me off to my bed. Outside, the snow would gleam with a bluish tinge, lit by a bright moon in a clear, dark sky. I would sit at my window, wrapped in a blanket, and stare at it, following its contours, basking in the otherworldliness of it. Even on the darkest of nights, when the moon was invisible, the snow seemed to hold light within it. To the child gazing at it from his window, it glowed from deep inside, and I would fall asleep with the curtains open so that its unsullied beauty was the last thing I saw before my eyes closed, the voices of those whom I loved distantly rising and falling in low cadence.

  In time, those voices from my past would be stilled. My grandfather, my parents, all were gone now. I found that I became what I had most feared when I was a child: a man whose blood ran only in his own veins, a figure without visible ties to those who had brought him into this world. And when I tried to anchor myself with a family of my own, that too was taken from me, and I drifted, and was lost for a time in places without names.

  Yet at last I learned to recognize that I was not entirely alone, and that there were deep connections binding me to all that I had known. I had to come back to this place to find them, to reveal them where they had always lain, waiting beneath fallen leaves and compacted snow in the memory of a child seated by a window. My past and my present were here in this northern place, and, I hoped, my future too. Soon I would be a father again, for my lover Rachel was due to give birth in the coming weeks. I felt part of a circle slowly completing itself in this region of my childhood, and I thought that I would always remain here. During the long winter months, I would bitch and moan with the best of the old men. I would complain when my wheels became mired in mud during the spring thaw, or when filthy piles of iced snow upon shady corners continued their slow melt into March, sullying the streets in a futile rearguard action against the coming of spring. I would strike out at mosquitoes and greenheads during the summer, and watch my lawn disappear beneath brown leaves in fall.

  Occasionally, even now, I would hear one of my neighbors joke about heading for Florida, that this was the last damn winter he could endure in the cold Northeast, but I knew that the speaker would never leave. It was part of the game we all played, the dance of which we were all a part. I could not live without seasons, for in seasons are reflected the rhythms of our existence: of birth and maturity, of decline and decay, yet always with the promise of renewal for those who remain. Perhaps I would alter my attitude as I grew older, as the winters took a greater toll upon me and the north wind brought with it a reminder only of my own mortality. I wondered, sometimes, if that was part of the appeal of Florida or Arizona for those in their later years: cut off from the seasons, it was possible to forget the rhythm that governed one’s life, even as one’s feet still moved to complete the final steps of the dance.

  My prospective client was late, but I didn’t really care. Up on Middle Street, the Half Moon Jug Band was playing carols to cheer the shoppers. I could hear the music from where I sat in JavaNet on Exchange, surrounded by kids playing with the computers. I kind of liked JavaNet, even if the geek quotient tonight was a little greater than I would have preferred. It had decent coffee, and some comfortable armchairs. It was also a pretty good place to meet people, as most of those sharing space were too caught up with internet dating or email to bother with what was happening around them. Its window was also a good spot for people-watching, and outside of Newbury Street in Boston or just about anywhere below 14th Street in Manhattan, the window of JavaNet on Exchange was one of my favorite places from which to watch the world pass by. I had already counted at least three women who, if I hadn’t been perfectly happy with Rachel, would probably have refused to have anything to do with me, and rightly so. I had also seen Maurice (pronounced “Maur-reese”) Gardner, who was something of a local celebrity among those of us with a blacker than average sense of humor, since Maurice had once shot and superficially wounded a Santa Claus at the mall. Maurice claimed that Santa had snuck up on him, while Santa, when he gave evidence at Maurice’s trial, claimed that he had merely been heading for the men’s room beside the mall office. Since Maurice was hopped off his head at the time on coke riffed with Persian Brown, a combination likely to make even Buddha a little edgy, the judge sided with Santa Claus and Maurice was locked up for a while for his own protection and to ensure that Christmas did not become a time of mourning for traumatized junior patrons of the mall stores. Maurice was now clean, taking his medication, and working as second mate on a lobster boat. In a nice circularity of events, he volunteered each Christmas to play Santa Claus at some out-of-town children’s charity. From what I heard, he felt it was the least that he could do to make up for his past sins.

  I like Portland. It has all the advantages of a city, but still feels like a small town. There’s an eccentricity to it, and a strength of character. It has more coffee shops than maybe any city its size rightfully needs, and there are one or two bars that could slide into the sea and make this a classier place by their absence, but that’s okay. It has a little movie theater that plays mostly foreign imports, and the downtown Nickelodeon has promoted itself back to first-runs. The Public Market is still going, and there are decent bookstores and a big library. All told, it’s not such a bad place to have on your doorstep, and when it preyed on my nerves—as it sometimes did—I had the reassurance that I didn’t actually live here. I could retreat back to my house on the Scarborough marshes within minutes, and watch the sun set on still waters.

  Some clown in a bad suit waved at me from the street, and I gave him a noncommittal nod in return. It took me about three minutes to recall him as the real estate salesman who had once tried
to convince Rachel and me that our lives would be improved by living in his sinkhole new development out Saco way. Since then, he had experienced some misfortune in his life. He had been screwing his secretary on the side, and when his wife found out she screwed him. His business went to the wall and he was threatened with jail when it emerged that he had been frugal with the information he had provided to the IRS. Both his wife and his secretary gave evidence against him, which says a lot about the kind of person that he was. A couple of the Saco houses had also subsided when a passing child sneezed too loudly, and all kinds of legal storms were now brewing on that front as well. But there he was, a shopping bag from Country Noel in one hand, waving to a man he barely knew but had once tried to rip off with a bad property deal.

  Really, you had to love Exchange Street.

  My client was now twenty minutes late and counting, but it still didn’t matter. There was life around me; life, and the promise of new life to come. Most of those on the streets were locals, reclaiming the Old Port from the tourists now that summer was gone and the leaf watchers had departed. I could see a group of skater kids dressed in hooded sweats and oversized jeans trying to pretend that the encroaching cold wasn’t bothering them. I guessed that about half of them would be receiving antibiotics and TLC from their moms before the week was out, but they wouldn’t share that fact with their buddies.