A Game of Ghosts: A Charlie Parker Thriller: 15. From the No. 1 Bestselling Author of A Time of Torment

by John Connolly

  He took a moment before he turned into the drive to check the alarm status on his phone. It was one of the modifications to the system added in the aftermath of the attack that had almost killed him. It now recorded any activity on the property larger than the movements of a medium-sized mammal, and cameras fitted to the house immediately responded by making a video record of the intrusion capable of being accessed from his cell phone. On this occasion, the only visit had occurred shortly before noon, when a UPS driver had dropped off a delivery, placing it against the front door instead of in the mailbox by the road. It was a thin envelope, and the sight of it made Parker feel unaccountably uneasy.

  He parked, emptied the trunk of the car, and deposited the Eklund material in his office before he opened the envelope. It contained a sheaf of legal documents, informing him that Rachel had begun proceedings to formalize visiting and custody arrangements for Sam. Parker read the papers once, with the realization that Rachel must already have set this process in motion before their most recent meeting. He took a seat by the window of his office and stared out at the moonlight and the marshes. He did not stir, and in time fell asleep with his face to the dark. His rest was unsettled, but he still did not witness Jennifer’s approach through the trees, nor did he wake to see her standing before the glass, gazing upon him with eyes that were too old for her face. After a time she sat on the porch, her back to the wall of the house, and there she kept vigil over her father until dawn came.

  44

  Parker woke stiff and cold in the chair, and feeling worse than if he hadn’t slept at all. The clock read 6.00 a.m. He almost considered just heading to bed and pulling the comforter over him behind closed drapes, but he was worried he might never get up again. The papers he had received from Rachel’s lawyer were not entirely unexpected, and their arrival left him more sad than angry, but also disappointed at what he perceived as a certain duplicity on Rachel’s part.

  It should not have come to this, he thought. But it’s my fault that it has.

  He went upstairs, stripped and showered, then dressed himself in fresh clothes and made some coffee and toast. He’d go see Moxie Castin later about the whole business, and find out what he was supposed to do next. Whatever it was, he wanted it to cause as little upset as possible for Sam. He knew Rachel would want the same.

  With a piece of toast jammed in his mouth, and a mug of coffee in his right hand, he went back to his office to give Eklund’s documents his full attention. Although it was cold out, he opened the window slightly because the room smelled of sleep. The action dislodged something red and black from the frame, which fell to the porch outside. He went to retrieve it. When he returned to his office, he was carrying a chain of winter pods and stems, the kind a child might have assembled in a quiet moment.

  The kind that Jennifer had loved to put together, and offer to her mother and father.

  Gently, Parker placed the chain around the neck of his lamp to hang beside him as he worked, as the light changed and the shadows altered, and he learned of the Capstead Martyrs and the end they met. But this was the name given to them by others, and not the name by which they called themselves.

  To their own, they were the Brethren.

  45

  Tobey Thayer knew of only one other person familiar with Jaycob Eklund’s investigations, or only one with whom he could trust his concerns. He was aware, through Eklund, of Michael MacKinnon’s familial connections to the late Caspar Webb. The name hadn’t meant anything to Thayer, but Eklund had shared enough of Webb’s history with him to make Thayer grateful that they’d never met, and he had no desire to make the acquaintance of those whom Webb had left behind, namely the ones known as Mother and Philip. He couldn’t, and wouldn’t, turn to them for advice.

  But now MacKinnon’s wife and child were dead, and Eklund’s whereabouts remained unknown. Thayer could have gone to the police to share what he knew, but at best he’d be dismissed as some kind of lunatic, and at worst he might bring down some suspicion on himself.

  So he made the call, and spoke with the woman named Michelle Souliere. He felt only a little better for the conversation. Souliere wasn’t a believer, not like Eklund, and certainly not like Thayer himself, but she agreed that they should both be careful. Unlike Thayer, she remained hopeful for Eklund’s safe return.

  Thayer hung up the phone feeling that Souliere hadn’t grasped the extent of the threat they were facing. She still believed that the Brethren, if they existed at all, were purely mortal in nature. He, by contrast, did not.

  He had often argued with Eklund about the Brethren. Eklund believed they were hopelessly corrupted before they arrived on these shores, and the New World had simply provided them with richer pickings than the Old. Thayer was not so sure. He wondered if there was something in the soil of the Americas, something elemental that drew creatures like the Brethren and fueled their worst appetites. He envisaged it as a kind of hidden fire, like the coal flames that burned unseen in this very state beneath the town of Centralia, manifesting themselves only in billows of sulfurous gas and fractures in the blacktop while deep down they blazed and blazed.

  Thayer sank into his favorite armchair. He could find the dead Brethren again. He knew where they were hiding, and he believed that he also knew why. All he had to do was close his eyes and dream.

  But he would not close his eyes.

  46

  To the north, Parker read on.

  The Brethren were scavengers, or began as such: a handful of brutal men and brutalized women who had found the promise of America to be less golden-edged than they had hoped; or maybe they had always anticipated as much and were already preparing to feed upon the weak even as their ships were tossed on seas so dark they differed from night only in the half-glimpsed fissures of the foam.

  Eklund had done what he could to trace their origins, but they came from different countries, and changed their names almost as soon as they reached dry land, for many were fleeing retribution for crimes committed in Europe, and feared that their pursuers might have a reach that spanned continents. Call it fate, or bad luck, but slowly these disparate individuals came together under the aegis of a single man. Call it something more, if you were Jaycob Eklund and those who shared his fascination.

  Call it the work of older gods.

  Call it the intent of angels.

  The leader of the Brethren was named Peter Magus, a name Parker recalled from some of the notes on the wall of Eklund’s basement. According to the information assembled by Eklund, he almost certainly came from somewhere in the area along the English-Welsh border known as the Welsh Marches. He possessed a certain level of skill in metalwork, suggesting that he might have been apprenticed, or even worked, as a blacksmith. A process of elimination had narrowed down his true identity to one of three men, of whom Rhydderch ap Rhys seemed the most likely candidate. Rhydderch meant ‘reddish brown’ in Welsh, and early contemporary accounts of the Magus referred to this as the color of his hair. Meanwhile, ap Rhys meant ‘son of Rhys,’ and the only son of a blacksmith named Rhys ap Madoc had disappeared from the local parish records of the town of Monmouth five years before the appearance of Peter Magus in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. What Rhydderch might have done in the intervening period was unclear. The only hint came from a survivor of his clan, a woman named Nessa Perry, who was probably one of the Magus’s lovers, and was subsequently hanged for her crimes. Perry claimed that the Magus told her he had spent many years ‘studying the runes’ and ‘reading gallants’ – a reference, according to Eklund, to occult volumes. The Magus appeared to have no religious affiliations, or none that any established church would have recognized. He spoke of the lore of angels, was well versed in the apocryphal scriptures, and claimed to consort with spirits in the night.

  ‘I do not pray,’ he once told Nessa Perry. ‘I speak with the angel as an equal.’

  Exclusive relationships between his followers were discouraged. Men and women cha
nged partners as a matter of routine, although some relationships lasted longer than others. Jealousy was not permitted. If it raised its head then, like that of the serpent, it was cut off.

  None of this particularly concerned those who were drawn to him, as few regarded a stable domestic life as a priority. What mattered was that the Magus – through his charisma and hospitality, and the adroit use of women and, later, children to create the illusion of a God-fearing family man, a leader of an extended clan seeking only a new home in a strange land – was able to gull travelers into lowering their guard, at which point they became easy prey: solitary horsemen, stagecoaches, even, toward the end, entire wagon trains, fell to the Brethren. That they escaped notice for so long was due, it seemed, to planning and brutality. No one was spared, and no one escaped. Bodies were buried, wagons cleansed of distinguishing marks, horses subtly rebranded. Wealth was carefully sequestered away, with riders dispatched far from the scene of their crimes to sell on any items of value that might otherwise have been easily identified.

  What separated the Brethren from other brigands, their inhumanity apart, was a willingness to wipe out entire lines. Those traveling alone did not die before revealing details of families and homesteads left behind, to which, in time, the Brethren came. A house without an adult male made for easy pickings, and the more isolated the better. In those cases, the favored mode of operation was simply to strip the abode and make the entire family disappear. Ideally, the desired impression would be that the settlers had just given up and moved on, but the Brethren were also content simply to leave their disappearance a mystery. Infants were often kept alive, and passed on to those of the Brethren’s women who were barren or had lost children of their own, or merely to add further credence to their pretense of normality. As the Brethren grew, they separated into smaller groupings so as not to attract attention, with some becoming settlers themselves, attaching themselves to communities, watching all who came and went, and feeding them, when appropriate, to those who remained nomads.

  It could not last, of course. Despite all their efforts, the Brethren began leaving traces of their passing. They grew careless. Witnesses survived. The net began to close on them. By then, the Magus had established his own settlement at Capstead, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. There he had dug himself in, his followers living in homes more akin to redoubts, with slit windows above, and earthen floors built below ground level. In early 1860, amid snow and ice, they fought off the first of two incursions by posses, one of which was supported by a contingent of soldiers, but it was clear that the end was approaching. A gunboat, the Pioneer, was sent upriver, and shelled Capstead to provide cover for a final assault, but before the settlement could be breached, smoke began to rise, then flames. It remained unclear whether the bombardment or those inside had started the fire, but the result was immolation for all but a handful of the Brethren. Most of the survivors, apart from the very youngest, were shot or hanged, many without even a cursory nod at a trial, since the soldiers were either unwilling or unable to protect them from the vengeance of civilians.

  But the actions of the military, combined with the failure to provide a fair trial for the Brethren, however guilty or innocent they might have been, caused discontent. Suspicion of a crime was not reason enough for women and children to be burned alive, and there were those who wondered, quite rightly, if what had been visited on the Brethren might not someday be visited on themselves, should they fail to bend the knee to the government. Thus it was that the name ‘Capstead Martyrs’ came into being. Capstead, it seemed, was the Waco of its day.

  Parker rose and stretched. There was more material about the period in Eklund’s files, but he didn’t need to look at it now. What interested him was the conclusion reached by Eklund and the various amateur historians with whom he had consulted, or whom he had read: Capstead might have marked the end of the Brethren’s predations, but it had not wiped them out. The rest, the ones who had blended into civilized society, remained. The question was: what became of them?

  This was the point at which Eklund’s theories spun off into a whole new realm of oddness. Parker had transferred to his computer the photos taken of the wall in Eklund’s basement, and assembled them into a coherent representation of the map. By flicking through the notes, and cross-referencing, it became clear that Eklund believed the alleged paranormal occurrences around each murder and disappearance were echoes of the original Brethren, including Peter Magus. How Eklund had decided this was not entirely clear, and appeared to be based largely on anecdotal evidence: mostly testimony provided by surviving friends and relatives who were willing to speak of the apparently impossible, if only because of what had befallen their loved ones. Eklund recorded their experiences with a degree of objectivity, although not skepticism, but even Parker had to admit that the similarities in the accounts were striking. It was possible, though, that Eklund had manipulated the data, or was recording a form of shared hysteria, with various interested parties exchanging information that in turn contaminated their own recollections, either deliberately or unwittingly, and facilitated by the Internet.

  Parker also noticed absences in the files. Some entries and references were incomplete. It meant that Eklund kept more material and updates elsewhere, probably on his laptop. Neither did anything Parker had read so far reveal a reason why more recent killings and disappearances should be linked to a group that had, for the most part, been wiped out in the nineteenth century.

  Unless, of course, some vestige of the Brethren continued to engage in criminal behavior, old habits dying hard, but these were not the same crimes. The historical Brethren were thieves: vicious ones, but thieves nonetheless, with murder as a by-product. Leaving aside unexplained disappearances of persons, the crimes recorded by Eklund appeared to involve murder as an end in itself.

  Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story. But even if this were true, it was a tale for which real people had suffered and died.

  47

  Angel and Louis arrived shortly before noon, the former carrying his toolbox.

  ‘There was a bug in the Lexus,’ he confirmed, ‘although I bet Philip is sorry he had it installed.’

  ‘Why would that be?’ Parker asked.

  ‘Because Charley Pride here played his shitkicker music all the way to our parking garage. I put up with it just because I figured that listening to it would be worse for Philip than for me. I’m almost numb to it by now.’

  ‘What was the range of the bug?’

  Parker asked because, depending on the limit, it might have required Philip to send someone to tail them. If that was the case, that person might still be nearby, and Parker didn’t like the idea of anyone involved with Philip and Mother being closer to Portland than Providence.

  ‘Pretty much limitless,’ said Angel. ‘It was hooked up to the electrical system, so there was no need for them to worry about batteries, and it would send out an alert when the car was started. The signal is transmitted over a 3G network. Philip could pick it up from the comfort of his mother’s bed.’

  That wasn’t an image Parker particularly wanted to entertain, so he did his best to erase it from his memory. Meanwhile, Angel went to work on the Mustang. Since he now knew what he was looking for, it didn’t take him long to find the second transmitter. It was a small black box with a gray microphone wire.

  ‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Angel asked, once they’d stepped away from the car.

  ‘What did you do with yours?’

  ‘Left it where it was until we’d spoken to you. It’s not like we discuss anything important when we’re on the road. You never know who might be listening.’

  Parker realized it wouldn’t take Philip long to figure out they’d found, and disposed of, the GPS trackers, but Philip might assume that they’d been content to get rid of those and hadn’t considered the possibility of listening devices. If they removed these as well, then Philip m
ight simply try again, and Parker didn’t want to spend every morning sweeping his car for bugs. But having a direct channel for the transmission of information – or, more probably misinformation – to Philip might be useful.

  ‘Let’s keep them in place for now,’ said Parker. ‘Come into the house. We need to talk.’

  Parker made a fresh pot of coffee, and found Fig Newtons that hadn’t expired too long before. Louis, who had a nose for such matters, took one look at them and passed, although Angel was untroubled. He reached for the box, but Parker whipped it away before he could lay a hand to it.

  ‘Did you make that medical appointment yet?’ Parker asked him.

  Angel’s shoulders sagged.

  ‘Yeah, I made the appointment.’

  ‘For when?’

  ‘Next week. Is that okay, Mom?’

  ‘Good. Now you can have a Fig Newton.’

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered Angel. He proceeded to eat and sulk simultaneously, while Parker told them of what he had managed to glean from Eklund’s files so far.

  ‘It’s not much,’ said Louis.

  ‘Eklund found a pattern of a kind. He just couldn’t figure out a reason for it all, or if he did it’s on his laptop. What he did seem certain of was that everything somehow connected back to the Brethren.’

  Louis looked skeptical. ‘So he showed pictures of folk from the nineteenth century to people who’d claimed to have seen ghosts, and they said, “Yeah, that’s them.” I don’t think that qualifies as scrupulous research.’