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

by John Connolly

  But Kirk still didn’t want to believe Sally was right, and that their home was no longer safe for them. He’d grown accustomed to it, and had started to enjoy being part of the community. For Sally, it was all a pretense: she was good at dissembling. She didn’t have any affection for the church folk, or even the people who supported her business by buying her pastries. He wouldn’t have put it past her to piss in the cake batter, just to spite them.

  But Kirk wasn’t like his sister – and was this really so surprising, given that he wasn’t the one who saw Eleanor and the others on a regular basis? For that much, at least, he was grateful. It enabled him to maintain a certain objectivity, and permitted him to retain a little of his sanity. In his private moments, especially when Sally was being particularly hostile toward him, Kirk often entertained fantasies of cutting himself off from his kin and leaving them to their bargain. He knew that he could easily manage to hide himself; he was the creator of identities, the provider of false names and histories. In recent years, he had even gone so far as to lay the groundwork for a new, unconnected life, although he was careful to work on it only when Sally was occupied by Brethren business, because when Sally was distracted it meant Eleanor and her kind were distracted too. That was the problem with being haunted: you could never be certain that an unseen presence wasn’t looking over your shoulder, and Kirk didn’t like to think about what would happen if his subterfuge was discovered. Sally, he believed, would have him killed. In the absence of Routh, she might even choose to take care of him herself; that, or hand him over to the placid, permanently grinning figure of Steven Lee, who would crush him inside a cube of metal as a favor to the family.

  So Kirk had opened a couple of new bank accounts, one of them in his own name and one in the name of Edward Dempsey, his chosen alias. He now had eight thousand in the first account and almost twenty thousand in the second, thanks to the doctoring of invoices, and taking on jobs for cash, including a couple that were highly illegal but distinctly lucrative. He kept telling himself it was just in case everything went south for both of them, in which case he’d share the proceeds with Sally, because he didn’t have any intention of leaving her, not really. But if that were truly the case, he’d have told her about the money, and Edward Dempsey. Instead he remained quiet, and waited.

  He knew that he would never have another chance like this one: enforced separation from Sally, with the necessity of remaining apart for a considerable period of time. It would enable him to go deep, and when he surfaced again it would be somewhere far from here, with a new name and a new background. He didn’t think the Brethren would find him, either. From what Sally had shared with him over the years, he knew that their link was always with only a handful of family members. Sally wouldn’t have been able to hide from them, but he probably could.

  And what of the next world? It existed – Kirk had no doubts about that – but wherever the Brethren roamed wasn’t somewhere he wanted to be, in the life to come or any other. He had long wondered if the need to curb dissent among the Brethren was linked only to fears of discovery, and might not also conceal a greater repugnance for repentance.

  And who could say with certainty that they were all damned to the same fate, that the pact could not be broken? Kirk was now infected by the Baptist faith that he and Sally had initially embraced only as a front, to the extent of reading much of the work of Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mohler, like other evangelicals, believed in the reality of the devil and demons. For him, evil was not an abstraction. He had given a talk on exorcism and exorcists at the Southern Baptist Convention in 2010, which Kirk was privileged to attend. ‘The powers that the forces of darkness most fear,’ Mohler informed his audience, ‘are the name of Jesus, the authority of the Bible, and the power of his Gospel.’ If Kirk could get to Mohler or someone like him, and convince him of the truth of what he had to tell …

  He realized that Sally was speaking to him, and forced himself to pay attention.

  ‘I said, “Do you know where he keeps his guns?”’

  Kirk nodded.

  ‘There’s a safe under the floor of the barn,’ he replied.

  ‘Keys?’

  ‘It’s a combination lock.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember the combination?’

  ‘Actually, I do.’

  Recalling numbers and passwords was one of Kirk’s talents. It came with his job, not that Sally had any fucking appreciation of it.

  He looked out the car window. It was cold and hazy beyond. Wherever he ended up after this, it would be warm. He’d had enough of harsh winters.

  ‘How do you suppose they found us?’ he asked. He had a vision of police cars surrounding their home, of detectives going through their possessions. Once they began examining the details of the latest of their invented lives, the loose threads would become apparent.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Sally. ‘I bet it was that nose-poking son of a bitch Ferrier, always hanging around, asking questions. I promise you, once this has all died down, we’re going to come back and deal with him.’

  Kirk glanced at Sally, but she was staring straight ahead, working at the inside of her cheek with her teeth, the way she always did when she was agitated. He knew how to conceal and reinvent himself, but she didn’t. Without him to help her, she’d be found. Would she keep quiet when she was? Possibly. Then again, if he ran away and cut off all contact with her, she’d have no reason to be loyal to him. She could just blame everything on him: Souliere, Eklund, all of it.

  He returned to looking at the landscape. He hadn’t liked hitting Souliere when she went for Sally, but it wasn’t as difficult as he might have anticipated. Had he been forced, he could probably have hit her some more. It was all a matter of getting one’s blood up. He touched his cheek where Sally had struck him. It still smarted. He’d have a mark there.

  And outside, the cold ground waited.

  86

  The lawyer Eldritch was in the ebb tide of his days. Even if he hadn’t felt the failing of his body and mind, he would have known by the manner of the nurse who was caring for him. She hid it well, but Eldritch had spent decades descrying truth in the faces of others, and none could conceal it from him for long.

  Yet as he prepared to leave this life, his concerns were not for himself but for his son, whoever or whatever he might be. Everything to do with this man Routh and the Brethren disturbed Eldritch. He had listened intently as his son described the contents of Eklund’s basement, and used this information as a springboard for his own researches. It was a slow, difficult business: his eyesight was now so poor that he had to magnify individual words on the laptop screen in order to read them, and could only concentrate for short periods on what he read, or was told, before he was forced to rest. Even then, most of what he had accumulated amounted to rumor and conjecture, but from it he had established this much: somehow, Peter Magus had struck a deal with an entity powerful enough, or so the Magus believed, to hide him and his descendants from divine justice.

  What little was known of the Brethren came from those who survived the Capstead siege and the extrajudicial killings that followed it. All were young women and children, and their testimonies were not entirely reliable, but those statements formed part of the historical record, and were held in the archives of the University of Missouri. The records had been digitized, but not shared, yet Eldritch accessed them all in a matter of minutes.

  According to the witness testimonies, Peter Magus claimed to be in contact with an elemental force, an angel. Eldritch had no time for the foolishness and sentimentality about angel lore that had birthed a lucrative industry involving imagery that owed more to fairy tales and the Pre-Raphaelites than the Bible. It was an angel that slaughtered the firstborn of Egypt, an angel that was sent to punish Israel for David’s numbering of the people, and an angel – specifically an ‘evil spirit’, to distinguish it from a demon – that God sent against Saul for
looting the Amalekites, while a single angel was credited with destroying 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. Eldritch had always been particularly fascinated by the various translations of Psalm 78:49: ‘He unleashed against them His hot anger, His wrath, indignation, and hostility – a band of destroying angels.’ But in the King James Bible, the angels were described as ‘evil.’ He had spoken with the Collector about this, but had never received a satisfactory answer, just as only rarely did his son allude to his own true nature.

  ‘What if I were an angel?’ he had once asked Eldritch.

  ‘Is that what you are?’

  ‘In truth, I can no longer tell. Perhaps I am only what others wish me to be.’

  It took a long time for Eldritch to discover what this might mean, and the revelation came from a most unexpected source: the rabbi named Epstein, who visited Eldritch while he was recovering from his injuries, before his son spirited the old lawyer away to safety. In the course of a conversation that seemed to last only minutes but in fact went on for almost two hours, Eldritch forgot his pain amid talk of the Buried God, of the angelic Watchers who sinned against the Divine by taking wives on Earth, and of the blurring of the distinctions between angelic and demonic during the period of the Second Temple, when divine messengers became tempters, tormentors, and punishers. It was Epstein who tried to explain something to Eldritch of the Kabbalah’s teachings on angels, of how they were not physical beings but more akin to emotional states controlled and personified by the Divine, so that those visited by them saw, in effect, what they wished, or were meant, to see. Thus similar entities might provide visions of comfort, of revelation, and of punishment, or so Eldritch understood it, although he had to admit that he was under the influence of painkillers and sedatives at the time, and could not have sworn to his ability to recall every detail.

  But this he knew: the ones who had rebelled, the fallen angels, were beyond the purview of the Divine …

  Beside him, the nurse read on. Her name was Berenice. The Collector had assured him of her discretion, and Eldritch had no reason to doubt his son’s judgment so he had entrusted to her the task of recapitulating the trove of new information. She was tall and dark, and although her individual features were without flaw, they had somehow combined to form an unattractive whole, as though she had been created from the scavenged pieces of others.

  Eldritch felt himself drifting off, and tried to remain conscious. Soon, he knew, he would drift for the final time.

  The nurse was reciting from a batch of documents e-mailed to him from the Boone County Historical Society. Why had he sought them? He could not recall. Something to do with one of the men involved in the final confrontation with Peter Magus, was that it? Yes, he believed so. A transcript kept by his family, a record of the dying whispers of one of the Brethren.

  His eyes closed. A woman stretched out a hand to him from the dark, but he could not see her face. She spoke, but he could not understand what she said. If he took her hand, he would die. This alone he knew. She would draw him into the void, and his life would end.

  The nurse paused to yawn. Eldritch heard her, but did not open his eyes. Her recitation resumed with descriptions of bodies, and the smell of burning wood and flesh, and a young girl who had not even reached her teens lying scorched in the ruins, babbling amidst her final agonies. A word brought him back with such force that he grabbed the nurse’s wrist, causing her to start violently.

  ‘What was that?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The name spoken by the girl. Read it again.’

  She put a finger to the screen and pinpointed the reference.

  ‘Belial,’ she said.

  Belial.

  ‘Find my son,’ said Eldritch.

  87

  Jennifer, the dead daughter, stood beneath a rocky promontory, the shape of her concealed by its shadow, with only the glimmer of her eyes to give her presence away.

  Below her lay the city. She had known about it for a long time, ever since she decided to follow a man and woman who had separated themselves from the great wave of the dead to vanish instead into the hills. Jennifer did not know what could have caused them to turn aside from the deep ocean that awaited them. Perhaps they were afraid of what might lie beyond it, intimating a subsummation into the whole that would result in a loss of self and, consequently, of each other. Whatever the reason, they found their way to the city, there to hide from the was and the yet-to-be. Jennifer wondered if they now regretted their decision. The city, shimmering darkly on the boundary between the real and the imagined, was a landscape of hurt, formed from the memories both of those who had wandered and gone irrevocably astray, and of those who had chosen to conceal themselves from the consciousness that lay beyond the sea.

  So much pain. So much badness.

  As she watched, a figure appeared at the southern boundary of the city, where the walls melted away to be replaced by scorched, barren earth, with a series of emplacements at its heart like a primitive fortress. The man’s pate was bald, but even from this distance she could see the frill of long red hair beneath it, and the curtain of beard that ran from ear to ear. Although she should not have been visible to him, still she felt his gaze upon her. He knew she was out there. He wanted her to come down.

  And then he would take her.

  More figures emerged to join the first, the Magus, so that in time a great crowd of the Brethren, generation upon generation, was watching her, all unmoving.

  Come. Come to us.

  But she remained where she was, waiting for another force to move against them.

  88

  Kirk was driving. Sally was in the backseat. Beside her, to her left, sat Eleanor. Sally’s left hand was outstretched. Invisible to Kirk, Eleanor’s right hand lay upon it.

  Eleanor didn’t speak. She was mute; death had silenced her. But she could convey emotions, and pick up on Sally’s own thoughts and feelings. Now Sally showed her the photographs of Parker from Eklund’s laptop, and felt Eleanor give a kind of shiver in response, flashing warning colors of red and purple. Sally didn’t know much about Parker beyond what she had discovered from the Internet and Eklund’s computer, but she recognized that to draw his attention was not dissimilar to having an unerring bullet fired in one’s direction, a projectile that would maintain its trajectory and velocity without diminution until it found its target. Sally tried to make Eleanor understand this, but the signals Eleanor was giving out were confusing, and Sally couldn’t be sure that she was reacting solely to Parker, or if some other factor was influencing her. Sally could only be certain that Eleanor was afraid.

  An image flashed in Sally’s mind, and Eleanor’s grip on her hand tightened.

  The shape of a man, then emptiness.

  I don’t understand.

  It came again: man and emptiness, two separate projections that then coalesced into a single image. Now Sally understood. Not empty, but hollow.

  Hollow Man.

  The image multiplied, one becoming many.

  Hollow Men. Who are they?

  Another image, this time of fire and destruction, and Sally felt Eleanor’s skin burn as the final moments of the Capstead community were re-created for her. Then the flames were sucked into a point of infinite density, and darkness prevailed.

  The end. But of what?

  Eleanor’s mouth moved, struggling to form the words. It took two tries, but Sally finally understood.

  Of us all.

  89

  Philip had made the arrangements. Now he and Lastrade were just waiting for the handover. In addition to the $100,000 from Stevie, they had another $35,000 they’d pooled from their own resources. Philip was optimistic they could triple or quadruple their investment, depending on how much they stepped on the heroin before they sold it. They’d also agreed an agent’s cut of $10,000 with Stevie, which meant they would ultimately emerge with anywhere from $120,000 to $150,000 apiece. All being well, they would reinvest most of that
in another batch of heroin, and maybe a little coke if they could negotiate a good price from the right suppliers.

  But they’d been forced to make a long journey to get to the point of purchase. Philip’s contact had insisted on meeting at Willets Point in Queens, popularly known as the Iron Triangle, which meant an eight-hour round trip for a destination that looked like Philip’s idea of hell: a landscape of rusting vehicles waiting to be cannibalized by the auto shops that lined its mostly unpaved streets, a stinking vista broken only by the occasional waste-processing plant. Redevelopment of the area was imminent, but Philip still thought it might have been better just to nuke the Triangle and walk away. As daylight began to fade, they waited, as instructed, by a disused lot in the shade of the Whitestone Expressway. They’d already been ordered to move position three times by two different callers, first over to Railroad Avenue and then up to Overlook Park. At Overlook Park they were told to change vehicles, and ditched Philip’s BMW in favor of a piece of shit Sebring, once Philip had found a 24-hour-garage in which to leave his car. Neither of the callers had sounded like Slaven, the main contact. An hour had gone by since the last communication. Philip twice tried calling the number he’d been given, but it went straight to voice mail.

  No, make that three times.

  ‘Well?’ asked Lastrade from the backseat.

  ‘Nothing. They’re not answering.’