The Devil hates to be alone. He always needed someone to hear his voice of power, to listen to his whisper. It’s how he worked. It was the completion of the circuit. It was someone else’s evil that brought the savant to the surface.
Flynn got out of the car and made his way to the house, falling twice. The second time down he relaxed himself and went with the cold trying to consume him. He breathed in the snow and enjoyed the darkness trying to make him its own. He had no fear of the freeze. The light-headedness swarmed him. He hadn’t eaten in days, hadn’t slept at all. His exhaustion dulled him and dialed him down to nothing. He still wondered why his brother had saved his life that day, and if, after all these years, Flynn remained a good boy.
His eyes flashed open. He stood and got moving.
Trying the front door, he found it unlocked. He walked in feeling no pressure. He wasn’t worried for himself. He didn’t think he ever would be again.
The house was freezing. Someone had shut the heat off right after Shepard had been taken out of here, and no one had turned it back on.
He heard humming coming from somewhere deep in the house.
A girl softly murmuring a childish tune.
Flynn walked to the kitchen.
He found the door to the basement. It was back in place with the pins set back into the hinges.
He was playing it all wrong but something kept telling him this was the only way to play it. His brother’s presence felt so strong around him now that he could imagine spinning around fast enough to catch sight of Danny.
His mind shifted into fantasies spreading to the two ends of fulfillment. In the first, he and Danny were partners, going shoulder to shoulder, brothers and friends, ready for glory, unbeatable. In the next, Flynn turned to see Danny behind him, the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, handsome and only marginally tortured of soul, selfish and suicidal, out to cause pain. Flynn punched him in the mouth and went down into the dark alone.
But some things couldn’t be helped.
You decided on your course, and you saw it through.
Flynn went to hit the light but it was already on. A dim glow wafted across the bottom step.
He didn’t draw his .38. It wasn’t time yet.
It came back to him then, what Petersen had said right before he blew his own head off.
My evil was down deep where it was supposed to be, and he unlatched the cellar door.
Flynn descended the stairs.
Zero’s plastic hamburger was still at the bottom of the stairwell where the dog had left it.
Nuddin sat with Kelly in the cage in the middle of the room with a butcher knife pressed to her throat.
The door was ajar, the key in the lock. She was shuddering from the cold.
Flynn looked at Nuddin’s misshapen head and scars anew, realizing he had done all of that to himself, since he was a child. The thick, knotted welts and brandings that cross-thatched his body. The broken bones that tilted him one way, then another. Beating himself, crushing himself, destroying himself just to feel the contours of his own identity.
Nuddin started humming along with Kelly, and those gentle brown eyes an inch too far apart watched Flynn.
A pile of clothes had been set off to one side. Nuddin was covered in dried blood. After the first blow of the baseball bat, he’d stripped before continuing to beat Sierra to death. He made sure he covered himself with her, the streaming wet heat describing his own body. He’d cut himself too, and had been cutting himself since he’d been taken from this house. Old crusted wounds and new incisions curved and arced across his flesh.
His breathing came in short rasps, puffing clouds across the basement. He was actually sweating despite the chill.
For a moment Flynn couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in a body where you could feel almost nothing, not even the shape of your own skin. An instant later he realized, Oh yeah, he could, in fact, imagine it. In a fashion, he lived it. That’s what this was all about.
Flynn just stared for another second. Sometimes you needed an extra breath to help you decide where it was you wanted to go next.
“Are you all right, Kelly?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not.”
“It’s going to be okay.”
“I know. He killed Sierra.”
He wondered how much she had seen. “Has he been talking to you?”
“He doesn’t talk. Usually.”
“That’s right, not usually. But he does, doesn’t he?”
“Sometimes.”
Nuddin smiled. It was utterly innocent and perhaps even loving, enough to break your heart.
The cage. Christina Shepard had said she was protecting him. All the scars—they were self-inflicted. Maybe she’d known about his penchant for connecting with evil. She’d known not to let him loose on the world.
Sierra had told Flynn about autistics, how they had trouble understanding the contours of their own bodies. Nuddin used the pain to give himself an identity. Flynn couldn’t comprehend the willpower it would take to bash yourself in the head hard enough to dent your own skull. To twist your arms and break your own bones. How big a step was it before you were destroying other people?
He leaned down and stared through the bars.
“Hey, hello there,” Nuddin whispered.
It was the same voice Flynn had heard on the phone that night. The one that had told him it was afflicted. Anguish and sorrow that murdered men in their sleep or kept them locked up for decades. Flynn had been so close. He remembered thinking the voice had no name, that the person had never been identified, lurking unseen and unknown and never understood.
So close, but he hadn’t been able to see it.
“I’m your friend,” Nuddin said. “Can you talk to me? Can you understand me?”
Saying the things that Flynn had first said to him. Using his own words. Flynn remembered how the first time he’d heard Nuddin’s voice, through the heating vent, singing softly in the basement, his stomach tightened at the tune and his scalp had prickled. It was happening again.
Nuddin grinned, his gaze full of resolve. Nuddin, the thing inside Nuddin. He might not understand his purpose in life, but he recognized it and embraced it. That put him leagues ahead of most people in the world.
No one had cleaned up down here after that night. A dried pool of gritty copper remained on the floor where Shepard had bled after being shot in the heart by his wife.
“I know your secret,” Nuddin whispered.
He’s got a voice that comes from hell. You can’t resist.
It rang through Flynn and he felt his soul chime along with it. A voice that had no name, that had never been christened or identified. The hiss of your deepest lies and sins. The scream of your own human madness. The whisper of impending death. It was the sound of ice breaking beneath you.
Flynn was used to it by now.
“Big deal,” he said.
Flynn unclipped the .38. Nuddin’s eyes brightened and his smile twisted into a leer. He pressed the point of the knife harder into Kelly’s neck and she let out a gasp but did nothing more.
Flynn thought she had the makings to be the strongest, most determined person he’d ever known. He hoped he would be around in ten years to see her graduate from high school, but he didn’t think it was going to happen.
“Let Kelly go.”
“No,” Nuddin said. “No no no.”
Flynn unloaded his pistol. He rattled the bullets in his fist for a moment before tossing them to one side of the basement, the empty gun to another.
“I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Oh,” Nuddin said. “Oh oh oh. That’s bad.”
“Why?”
“You’re supposed to understand.”
Here it was, a retarded guy with drool on his chin telling Flynn he was stupid. Flynn was punctured by the thought that Nuddin had been controlling and directing ev
erything that had happened these past weeks. That he had, in fact, been in charge of Flynn’s life because Flynn had allowed it. A multiedged personality—his dominant identity moronic, and the hidden killer beneath quiet and knowing and planning. It filled Flynn with awe.
“He doesn’t hurt the family,” Kelly said. “My mother told me. He doesn’t hurt family. Never. But we have to keep him from everyone else.”
The knife at her throat wavered an inch, then Nuddin retightened his grip and the blade straightened, aimed at her carotid. One yank and he’d tear her throat open.
All families have a dark secret.
Sometimes it’s you.
He tried to imagine what it had been like for Bragg. A Southern gentleman with a family history of slavery, violence and murder. Coming from a clan that drowned babies at birth. Slowly going out of his own head as the cancer ate into his brain. What did Bragg see in the boy when he was born? Had he destroyed the records, or had there never been any? Had he taken on the burden of his own son in some form of penance, an act of defiance?
“I know your secret,” Nuddin whispered.
“That doesn’t matter to me.”
But Nuddin seemed to think it should. His free hand started fluttering about, the awkwardly angled elbow striking the bars. That voice reaching out like a silken tongue moving into his ear. “You want to die.”
“You’re a real whiz with a rifle,” Flynn said.
“Daddy taught me.”
“Let Kelly go.”
“No.”
“You don’t hurt family. Ever.”
Nuddin grinned, lost in himself, perhaps even adrift from two selves. He shut his eyes, and a nervous tic twisted his face to the right until his nose pressed to Kelly’s hair. “Almost never. I hurt Mama. From time to time.”
Flynn recalled Sierra telling him how Bragg’s wife had been cut to pieces from cancer surgery. Now he saw it. Nuddin taking away pieces of his mother over the years. Bragg trying to teach the boy all that he knew about guns and knives. Maybe trying to channel the thing inside the boy. Nuddin unable to fully understand anything except using the skills and weapons he’d been given. Flynn wondered how many missing folks had wound up in the Chatalaha River and nearby swamps thanks to Nuddin. Bragg too ashamed to admit the truth to anyone, the woman alone with her wounds and her son locked in a cage smashing his own head in. Maybe Nuddin was only as insane as his parents, as his sister.
“Let Kelly go,” Flynn said, “and I’ll come sit in there with you. I want to, okay? I think we should sit together for a while.”
The whisper without sexual identity, not a male voice or a female one, and yet urgent and in pain, as if others’ dark riddles and mysteries affected and tainted it. The whisper becoming a hiss. “You want to die.”
“That’s no secret. Even the fucking dog knows that.”
“You want a child.”
“Sure.”
“You want to kill me.”
“No.”
“You want to kill us both.”
“No.”
“Me and Emma.”
Nuddin’s smile faltered and he cocked the oblong head. Perhaps it truly was Flynn’s secret, the need to die and take Emma Waltz along with him. Perhaps his secret disgrace was knowing they’d both lived such miserable lives. It was a second-rate regret at best, no different than his father’s.
Nuddin sensed there was no fear in Flynn at hearing his hidden heart spoken aloud. The knife drooped.
Kelly showed absolutely no fear at all. Flynn felt a great surge of love for her. He thought if only he’d found her five years earlier he might’ve saved his marriage. The love he couldn’t provide his wife he might’ve been able to give to the kid.
“You want to take Emma with you into the water.”
Flynn reached into his pocket and drew out the mirror he’d taken from Sierra’s bathroom. It was covered with fine layers of powder and scuffed with mascara and lipstick. He held it up to Nuddin’s face and watched his reaction.
Nuddin froze, seeing himself. No longer lost to himself. Meeting himself in the glass just a few inches away.
He reached out with his free hand to grab the mirror but Flynn wouldn’t let it go. Nuddin tugged harder.
Soon he drew the knife away and used both hands to grip the mirror. Flynn gave it to him. Entranced, Nuddin peered deeper and began humming.
Nuddin went, La la la.
Flynn gestured for Kelly to come to him. She snaked around Nuddin without touching him, easing against the bars.
“Go upstairs and out into my car. You can turn the key all the way to start the engine and get the heat going.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go, Kelly.”
“You’re going to kill him, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You’re going to because he killed Sierra.”
He watched her rush up the stairs and another wash of affection went through him.
Flynn turned back and Nuddin was staring into his eyes.
They both went for the knife in the same instant. Flynn lunged into the cage and the two men grappled, slamming against the half-inch steel bars.
Nuddin’s strength astonished Flynn. He had no idea where it was coming from, the power in this guy who was as light as balsa wood. The thing inside him was made of iron.
In a moment Nuddin had the knife. Flynn managed to grab his wrist but couldn’t press him back at all. His other hand was trying to find purchase on Nuddin’s sweaty chest. He came to the only slightly horrifying realization that he wasn’t going to be able to win.
It made him cut loose with a sick giggle. You could die a lot of dopey ways but being stabbed in a cage while wrestling a naked autistic idiot-savant split personality was way the hell up there.
Flynn said, “No,” between his teeth and Nuddin forced him back another inch, and another, until the back of his head was being wedged among the bars and the knife was still moving toward his throat.
There was no room to lash out with a kick. Nuddin’s weight pressed against Flynn. The stink of blood made Flynn gag. He had time for maybe one final frenzied move but he had no idea what it should be.
His eyes spun and Nuddin smiled, still without an ounce of anger in him, his love no different now than when he was hugging Flynn in Sierra’s home.
The thought enraged him. The mirror was on the cage floor and Flynn knew that somehow everything was wrapped up in that.
He brought the heel of his shoe down on it and the mirror cracked.
Flynn said, “Now look at yourself.” Nuddin cocked his head, grinning, and angled his chin down to see.
Flynn swept the busted pieces forward with his toe. He was hoping to dig the shards into Nuddin’s groin. Maybe that would be enough pain for the guy, but he didn’t have enough leverage. The glass dug into Nuddin’s thigh and he weakened his hold the slightest bit. Flynn ground his toe into the glass, shoving it farther into Nuddin’s flesh.
It made Nuddin smile wider but he loosened his grip even more, enough for Flynn to make a final concerted effort. Instead of fighting, he flung himself out of the cage.
His shoulder caught against the lock and banged the door wide open against the bars. On his knees, Flynn reached, grabbed the steel door and tried to shut it.
It slammed on Nuddin’s head. He hardly felt it. Flynn knew now that on the phone Nuddin hadn’t been talking about an affliction of spirit. He hadn’t been talking about the murders. When he’d said I am afflicted he meant with the malady of not being able to understand pain.
Flynn slammed the door again. The metal tore a gouge in Nuddin’s forehead, smashed his nose and mashed his lips. He giggled and continued to come forward, the knife in front of him, slashing now. The blade caught Flynn across the arm of his coat, tearing through the fabric and digging into muscle. It hurt like hell and he held on to his hurt, knowing it was the thing that most differentiated him from Nuddin.
He threw himself against the
door and got his hand on the key, hoping to simply lock Nuddin inside. But it wasn’t going to go down that easy. It couldn’t. The knife stabbed out and narrowly missed Flynn’s eyes. Nuddin went, Oh oh oh. He shoved back and the cage door eased open farther and farther. Flynn shrugged himself against the bars and slammed the door once more.
A geyser of blood shot out in an arc that lashed Flynn’s chest. Nuddin’s face was smashed but he was still smiling.
“Stop it!” Flynn said and Nuddin came forward again, the knife slicing down. Bragg had taught him how to use edged weapons too. The blade slashed across Flynn’s chest. It went deep enough that he felt the knife nick a rib. He screamed and fell hard on his back. No cool anymore, man, no way. Frantically he kicked out and shut the door on Nuddin’s arm.
The cracking bone sounded like a gunshot as Nuddin tittered. He was enjoying being beaten to death, covered in hot blood.
Perhaps it meant he was showing some kind of love for Sierra when he’d killed her the way he had. It was his ultimate expression of devotion.
Nuddin stabbed again and Flynn slammed the cage door.
It took five more times before Nuddin’s eyes were gone and he’d stopped moving.
A brilliant smear of blood snaked across the back of his hand.
But the hand was steady.
The car chase, Petersen blasting himself, the murder of Sierra, and now having crossed the last line, having taken a life, and Flynn wasn’t trembling. What did it say about him? About his death wish, about his inability to find another way besides becoming a killer. What about his secret? What about taking Emma into the water with him?
The pool of blood on the back of his hand didn’t drop over the side of his wrist until he stood.
He picked up a shard of the mirror and stared at himself in it the way Nuddin had. Nuddin hadn’t only been stronger than Flynn, he’d been smarter. He’d been right in his last note too.
They were brothers.
It took him ten minutes to maneuver up the stairs. He carefully took his coat off but couldn’t keep from crying out, tore some dish towels into rags and staunched his wounds. It took a while to do even a half-assed job, but at least he wouldn’t bleed to death. He washed his hands in the kitchen sink and a wave of nausea rolled over him. The stink of rotting food wafted from the refrigerator, and his stomach tumbled. He splashed water on his face and tried to pull it together.
The Midnight Road Page 23