Nightjack

by Tom Piccirilli

  “Yes, he does. He spoke on the ward. Pia mentioned it in the car when we were leaving Manhattan.”

  “He doesn’t talk to me or you. He just giggles.”

  She grinned with such sorrow that he took another half-step toward her. “There are ways to communicate with your alternates even without directly assuming their personas.”

  “He isn’t an alternate.”

  “What is he then?”

  “Something else.”

  “You might find you can speak to him directly, if you make the effort.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him.”

  “No, but perhaps he wishes to speak to you.”

  Look at this. Two years at Garden Falls, maybe a thousand hours of group therapy and one-on-one psychoanalysis sessions, days and days in the straitjacket rig, all the pills, the months surrounded by Brutuses and Ernies, making ashtrays and pajamas, and she just brings up this new course of action now?

  Two oceans away, in the heart of a hurricane, in the house of the enemy, who didn’t even exist.

  “Forget about that now,” he said. “How did you get here? Did you come on Kaltzas’s jet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you on the helicopter?”

  “Yes.”

  “But—”

  She rose and slid into his arms, and kissed him with such passion that he actually moaned against her tongue. She tightened her embrace on him, urging him to crush her. Pace drew away and held her at arm’s length as she struggled to reach him again. He stared into her eyes, thinking the last time he’d been this close to her, on the verge of touching her, the same storm had been breaking wide over them both. Maureen Brandt kissed him and he searched her face, hoping she wasn’t going to stick a needle in his neck. The soft pressure of her body against his made his head swim, even a lunatic can enjoy a woman’s love, and as she whimpered a name that wasn’t his he felt—beneath the strata of concealing flesh—oh Christ—he felt the child within her womb.

  He realized, Goddamn, this is Cassandra too.

  twenty-nine

  The hot breath of the Minotaur brushed against the back of Pace’s neck, burning him once again.

  He turned away from Dr. Brandt to see Vindi standing in the doorway, his expression as dark and dense as an outcropping of reef. When Pace looked back, Maureen Brandt was gone and Alexander Kaltzas was standing there with his red lips like crushed roses.

  Pace walked out into the corridor and Vindi gently closed the door.

  “You play a filthy game,” Pace said.

  “I am sorry.”

  “Toying with me the way you have. What happened to them? Kaltzas and Dr. Brandt. They’re both dead.”

  Vindi’s bullish face softened around the edges, and a touch of real respect and alarm worked through his features. It was about time. He swallowed heavily twice before he found his voice. “But how do you know that? How could you possibly know that?”

  We are the possessed.

  Even though the man claimed to be superstitious regardless of his education, having grown up in an ancient land full of custom and ritual and myth, and despite his fear of the strange things that had encompassed the Kaltzas family, he would never believe Pace.

  “Don’t you feel it?” Pace said. A surging tide of comprehension began to break inside him. “Can’t you understand? We’re getting to the end of it. This is almost over. I’m almost done. Then you’ll have to deal with some other stupid son of a bitch who wears the same face.”

  Vindi was no longer the Minotaur at all, just a scared ugly man. “The end of what?”

  “She’s been making you jump through hoops and you have no idea why, do you?”

  Pace’s hands were so strong now that Vindi let out a small squeal of pain even before they touched him. And then Pace’s fingers were digging into the bone and muscle of the once brutishly powerful arms, bending Vindi backward. Vindi’s eyes flashed with terror and his tongue lolled, the flared nostrils becoming even wider as he gasped.

  Pace said, “Tell me what happened to them.”

  “Alexander Kaltzas died of heart disease shortly after he had Cassandra returned to Greece.”

  “So he never had anything to do with this at all.”

  “No. He knew his daughter was ill. She had grown almost obsessed with you after you saved her life. And later, when you were brought in for questioning by the police, when you were suspected of those heinous crimes. He respected that. Taking matters into your own hands, it was what his father had done during the war. And then, when you committed yourself, and she did the same. At first he—and I as well—thought that the two of you in the same hospital might be beneficial to her in some way. She and Mr. Pacella.”

  “You finally understand that I’m not him. I’m not William Pacella.”

  “Yes.” Vindi’s Adam’s apple bobbed and Pace leaned away, the hands calming down. “Alexander Kaltzas knew she was not raped. We all did. Even Dr. Brandt. You were in isolation, the girl free yet dominated by her adoration for you. Cassandra clearly found a way to get to you. But afterward, she was beaten. Scratched. Bruised by small hands. A woman’s hands. It was then Dr. Brandt instigated an investigation. An investigation into the rape of Cassandra. Do you understand? It was then that I knew that this woman was greatly troubled. This doctor who selfishly studied you like a lab animal. Who tortured you. That her fear, or perhaps her love for you had begun to so negatively impact her. I believe she may have beaten the girl herself. In her own way, she was even more obsessed with you than Cassandra was.”

  Pace caught a fragment of his reflection in the window. He thought, Christ, Pacella, what have we done? Everyone we came in contact with has died or gone even more insane than we are.

  “How did she die?”

  “She slit her femoral artery in the house on Long Island where you stayed your last night in America. There were many knives in that house.”

  The blades, she did it with Jack’s blades.

  “You stayed behind,” Pace said. “You were there. Watching the place, right? You saw us leave.”

  “I thought she might go with you. When I saw that she did not, I decided to speak to her. I believed she could still aid me in helping Cassandra. But when I arrived Dr. Brandt was dying. I tied a tourniquet about her leg and phoned for an ambulance, but the loss of blood was too great.”

  Jack was giggling like the maniac he was. The sound of it filled Pace’s head and he pressed his hands over his ears and thought, Lunatics have been known to kill themselves in extremely bizarre ways. Men truly can hold their breaths until they die. The human will to destruction is one that cannot be defeated. He pressed harder and harder, knowing he could crush his own skull. His hands could do it.

  He had his own love and hate and now he had his own sorrow and guilt.

  Pace drew the knife and stuck it between his teeth and champed down, swallowing the laughter. It took a while for the noise to stop. When he was ready, he sheathed the blade and had to try a few times before the voice he spoke with was actually his.

  “Did she say anything?” he asked.

  Vindi’s fetid breath blew a demon wind into Pace’s face. “Only that she was sorry. She was not in any pain. She seemed quite...relieved. Quite happy, actually.”

  “Thank Christ for that.”

  All of this, and now you had to get away from it and talk about other, lesser, more futile things.

  “You were in the helicopter.”

  “Yes,” Vindi said. “The storm made travel very difficult. I spent two days circumventing it, only to have another descend on us here.”

  “It’s the same one.”

  “No, that is not possible.”

  You couldn’t make them accept the truth, you could only speak it and go on. “Cassandra was the one who made sure the electric lights in the caves didn’t work. She lit the oil lamps.”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “You said there were monitors in the tunnels.”


  “Yes.”

  “Digital video cameras?”

  “No, simple electric eyes at either opening, and others around the site perimeter.”

  “And there are no guards?”

  “We had to take them off since Cassandra became ill. She would wander around the crypt at all hours of the night. She speaks in strange voices. Several times she was almost shot.”

  “And Cassandra’s mother is entombed there? And her father?”

  “No. The tomb is for an ancient, local magistrate names Terellicus who presided over the island three thousand years ago. Her parents are buried in Athens, near the university, as per their wishes.”

  “But she doesn’t realize it.”

  “She doesn’t want to. She wishes for them to be near at hand, in the place where her mother died, so she can do penance and suffer further.”

  Pace said, “I still don’t remember everything.”

  “Do you recall her sitting with you—with William Pacella—ah, does he...?”

  “Don’t worry about getting the names right.”

  “She sat with you in the hospital while you recovered from your burns. She read your novel.”

  “She read the book?”

  “And grew to love you even more. She could see the makings of Nightjack in you even before you began your vengeance against the Ganucci family. She talked of you constantly. She implored her father to pay your hospital expenses. That is when we first met, you and I. In the hospital, shortly after your wife’s death. You could barely move because of your wounds but you were already toying with knives. Your silverware. Your ballpoint pens. We had to replace your hospital bed several times because you would stab and rip it to shreds. You tore open your wounds time and again. The skin grafts wouldn’t take. Your scars are much worse than they should be because you would not rest. Later, after you were released, you refused any further assistance. After the destruction of the Ganucci syndicate, after you fulfilled your vengeance, she followed you into the psychiatric hospital.”

  “How could Kaltzas think that would help her? Why would he let her?”

  “He didn’t, at first. Her father would not even let her back on American soil. She was not allowed to leave the villa. But she grew sicker and weaker. As I said, we are a curious, superstitious people. We called in priests. We paid soothsayers from Crete to speak to the oracles. There were exorcisms. She spoke in strange tongues. Her obsession with you drove her. She needed you. In the end, that was all that mattered, all that might keep her alive. We admitted her to Garden Falls, and her health improved. I had–and still do have–a great admiration for you. A man who would pay off such an incredible blood debt, to avenge his wife. Your skill, your strength, is marvelous. Meritorious.”

  “There’s a price.”

  “Yes, there always is. I now know the extent of yours.”

  Jack was actually starting to think about the baby. What it would be like to raise a child of his own, to have a son to teach all his methods and surgeries to, and place the scalpel into the tiny chubby hand even before the bottle. Jack’s giggling petered out and he started imagining a cradle made from bones, how easy it would be to put the kid to use. Set him loose in the alleys where the whores would sweep him up in their arms and hug him to their diseased bellies. The boy finding the liver on the first stroke and cutting left, shearing it loose from the other organs. Jack trembled and Pace trembled.

  “She apparently had—” Vindi smoothed his beard around his mouth, covering his lips, embarrassed by the words, “—carnal relations with you while you lay tied to the bed in solitary confinement as punishment for fighting with one of the guards.”

  “They told me there was no DNA sample. How can she be pregnant with my kid?”

  “We believe Dr. Brandt bathed Cassandra and obliterated any evidence. After she had beaten her. And then proceeded with the investigation.”

  “Investigating a situation she herself was responsible for.”

  “Yes.”

  Pace stared at his hands for a while wondering what they were deciding to do. He raised his eyes and met Vindi’s gaze. “You handled this thing really really badly, you know.”

  Vindi nodded. “Yes, I have. I have never had to deal with such bizarre circumstances before. I did what I could to control the varying degrees of subterfuge, illness, madness...this...this absurdity, but I failed.”

  He stood unmoving, no different than any of the other man-beasts on their pedestals in the gallery.

  Pace heard someone shouting for him and turned back to the stairway. Hayden was running around downstairs calling, “Will! Will!” Pace moved to gallery banister and shouted down to him. Hayden came rushing up the steps.

  “Now what?” Pace said.

  It took a minute for Hayden to catch his breath. He looked back and forth from Pace to Vindi. He was clearly drunk on metaxa but something had happened to start sobering him up fast. His clothes were wet and he was shivering. Pace had to put a hand on his shoulder before he became sturdy enough to speak.

  “Ah, listen, I don’t want to get in the way of anything, you know. You guys look like you’re into something deep, but we’ve got a situation here.”

  “What is it?” Pace asked.

  “It’s Pia. She saw you and Cassandra kissing. It drove her wild.”

  Pace almost said, But I haven’t kissed Cassandra, I haven’t even seen her yet. It was the truth, or almost the truth. “Oh hell.”

  “She ran outside, man, into the storm. I chased after her for a while but I got lost, it’s bad out there, I couldn’t see anything. I don’t know where she went. I think Faust went after her too. I saw him for a second and then he was gone. He hasn’t come back yet.”

  “The village,” Vindi said. “The guards at the south gate will stop her.”

  “No,” Pace told him, knowing in his heart where she’d go, where he would go in his pain. To hide in the bowels of the underworld, where we are all driven down by love. “She’s in the caves.”

  thirty

  Blinding streaks of lightning clashed overhead, the thunder one long angry bellow. He rushed down the mountain path already calf-deep with the sweeping, rushing rainwater. His feet seemed to know where to go, how to maneuver the stony, rutted trail, and he just went along with them.

  He got to the mouth of the cave and saw that the electric lights were already on. The oil lamp he had placed in the niche of rock had been taken away. He sprinted into the narrow tunnels and wove his way through them, thinking that, somehow, his own redemption was tied to the others, and he couldn’t break his promise to Pia.

  The long-dead architects of the tomb of magistrate Terellicus must’ve built in a water-runoff system this close to the ocean. He heard the staccato pounding of the storm beating against the cavern from above, but there was hardly any leakage into the catacombs.

  He called Pia’s name and his voice and many other voices circled around the stone rooms. He shouted for Faust and Daedalus, who had built the labyrinth and would know how to escape it.

  It took ten minutes before he caught up with Pia close to the heroon shrine in the middle of the central cavern. The pyre was lit for Cassandra’s parents, whose graves weren’t even on Pythos. In the cold glare of the electric lights the temple had lost its romanticism and sat in a thirty-centuries-old heap of indifference.

  There was no more history here than in the graveyard where your old man was buried. The stone no more important than the gravel driveway of William Pacella’s house.

  Pia lay slumped over the corner of the tomb, like she wanted to join with it. All the happiness he had seen in her today while she danced and sang, while she laughed and wooed the boys, was gone. Its loss left her reduced and deflated, the blackness beneath her eyes much darker than ever before. Pace finally understood that she didn’t just want to die, she was already dying.

  “So, you love her,” Pia said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Now you’ll stay here with her and her
father and you’ll be the new master of the island, the mad king of Pythos.”

  “Her father is dead.”

  “Then there’ll be no one to come between the two of you.”

  “Get up, Pia, we’re leaving.”

  “There’s nowhere left for me to go.” Her eyes welled even as a cruel grin spread across her face. Here she was, the girl next door you wanted to cuddle with so badly, who would always take care of you while your fevers ran their course. Here she was, almost dead, and you couldn’t figure out a way to save her. Jack’s stomach fluttered.

  “You still want to know what I did to her?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “After you made love to her—after she fucked you that night—I told Dr. Brandt. I told her and I watched her beat the hell out of Cassandra. I watched her drag her into the showers and try to wash your seed right out of her womb. I thought she might get pregnant with your child and I wanted it dead too. You hear me, I wanted your baby dead!”

  “Why?”

  Her tears ran and hung in the hollows of her cheeks. “What?”

  “I asked you why.”

  “Because I’m crazy, you idiot!”

  “That’s not the reason, Pia.”

  “Because I love you! I love you and need you to love only me!”

  “Why?”

  “So you’ll kill me!”

  He said, “That’s not what love is, Pia.”

  She held her face up and presented her throat. “Don’t you understand? It is to me! That’s what love is to me!” She closed her eyes tightly and begged. “Jack! Jack, please! I’m the whore that got away!”

  Jack wanted out. Jack wanted this little bitch once and for all.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Pace hissed.

  His hands were ahead of him again though. They moved. His feet moved him. The knife was there and he bent forward and angled it close to Pia’s jugular, and Jack showed his teeth and his mouth watered with the hope of dissecting her later.

  Pace said, “No.”

  Jack exerted himself, under wraps for too long. The laughter broke free from Pace’s throat and his breath blew stray hairs back and forth on Pia’s forehead. The hand grew uncertain of its purpose. The laughter grew frenzied and much more horrible, and Pia’s smile grew even more ugly.