The Unquiet

by John Connolly

  If the revenger had found him here, what would he have said? Teach me. Tell me how I may know the man whom I seek. I will be lied to. I want to learn how to recognize the lie when it comes. Would he have explained why he had come back to this place, and would the little man have believed him? Of course he would, for a lie would not slip past him.

  But the Guesser was long gone, and so the revenger was left only with the memory of their single meeting. There had been blood on his hands that day. It had been a comparatively simple task to accomplish: a vulnerable man laid to rest, a man who might have been tempted to barter what he knew for protection from those who sought him. From the moment that he had fled, his time left on this earth had been counted in seconds and minutes, hours and days, and no more than that. As five days became six, he had been found, and he had been killed. There was fear at the end, but little pain. It was not for Merrick to torture or torment, though he did not doubt that, in those final moments, as the victims understood the implacable nature of the one who had come for them, there had been torment enough. He was a professional, not a sadist.

  Merrick. That was his name then. It was the name on his record, the name that he had been given at birth, but it now meant nothing to him. Merrick was a killer, but he killed for others, not himself. It was an important distinction. A man who killed for his own purposes, his own ends, was a man at the mercy of emotions, and such men made mistakes. The old Merrick had been a professional. He was detached, disengaged, or so he told himself, although in the quiet after the kill, he sometimes allowed himself to acknowledge the pleasure that it gave him.

  But the old Merrick, Merrick the killer, no longer existed. Another man had taken his place, dooming himself in the process, but what choice was there? Perhaps the old Merrick had been dying from the moment his child was born, his will weakened and ultimately broken by the knowledge that she was in the world. The revenger thought again of the Guesser, and of the moments they had passed together in this place.

  If you looked at me now, old man, what would you see? You would see a man without a name, a father without a child, and you would see the fire of his rage consuming him from within.

  The revenger turned his back on the sea, for there was work to be done.

  The house was silent when I returned, a brief welcome bark from my dog, Walter. I was grateful for that. Since Rachel and Sam had left, it seemed that those other presences, long denied, had found ways to colonize the spaces once occupied by the two who had taken their place. I had learned not to answer their call, to ignore the creaking of boards or the sound of footsteps upon the bedroom ceiling, as though presences paced the attic space, seeking what was once theirs among the boxes and cases that filled the room; to dismiss the gentle tapping upon the windows when darkness came, choosing instead to call it something other than what it was. It sounded like branches stirred by the wind, their very tips glancing against the glass, except that there were no trees near my windows, and no branch had ever tapped with such regularity or such insistence. Sometimes I would awaken in the darkness without quite knowing what had disturbed my rest, conscious only that there had been sound where no sound belonged, and perhaps faintly aware of whispered words trailing off as my conscious mind began reerecting the barriers that sleep had temporarily lowered.

  The house was never truly empty. Something else had made its home there.

  I should, I know, have spoken to Rachel about it long before she left. I should have been honest with her and told her that my dead wife and my lost daughter, or some phantasms that were not quite them, would not give me peace. Rachel was a psychologist. She would have understood. She loved me, and she would have tried to help me in whatever way she could. It may be that she would have spoken of residual guilt, of the mind’s delicate balance, of how some suffering is so great and so terrible that a full recovery is simply beyond the capacities of any human being. And I would have nodded and said: Yes, yes, it is so, knowing that there was some truth in what she said and yet that it was not enough to explain the nature of what had occurred in my life since my wife and child were taken from me. But I did not say those words, afraid that to speak them aloud would be to give what was occurring a reality I did not want to acknowledge. I denied their presence, and my doing so tightened their grip upon me.

  Rachel was very beautiful. Her hair was red, her skin pale. There was much of her in Sam, our daughter, and just a little of me. When last we spoke, Rachel told me that Sam was sleeping better now. There were times, while we had lived together beneath this roof, when her sleep had been disturbed, when Rachel or I would wake to the sound of her laughter, and occasionally her tears. One or the other of us would check on her and watch as she reached out with her small hands, snatching at unseen things in the air before her, or as she turned her head to follow the progress of figures that only she could see, and I would notice that the room was cold, colder than it should have been.

  And Rachel, I thought, although she said nothing, noticed it too.

  Three months before, I had attended a talk at the Portland Public Library. Two people, a doctor and a psychic, had debated the existence of supernatural phenomena. Frankly, I was slightly embarrassed to be there. I seemed to be keeping company with some people who didn’t wash often enough and who, judging by the questions that followed the session, were intent upon accepting as true every manner of mumbo jumbo, of which the spirit world appeared merely to be one small part, taking its place alongside angels who looked like fairies, UFOs, and alien lizards in human form.

  The doctor spoke of auditory hallucinations that, he said, were by far the most common experienced by those who spoke of ghosts. Older people, he continued, particularly those with Parkinson’s, sometimes suffered from an ailment called Lewy body dementia, which caused them to see foreshortened bodies. That explained the prevalence of stories in which the spirits allegedly glimpsed appeared to be cut off at the knees. He spoke of other possible triggers, of diseases of the temporal lobe, of tumors and schizophrenia, and of depression. He described hypnagogic dreams, those vivid images that come to us in the spaces between sleeping and waking; and yet, he concluded, he still could not entirely explain away all reported supernatural experiences using science alone. There was too much that we did not know, he said, about the workings of the brain, about stress and depression, about mental illness and the nature of grief.

  The psychic, by contrast, was an old fraud, full of the nonsense that seems to come with the worst of her kind. She spoke of beings with unfinished business, of seances and messages from the “world beyond.” She had a cable TV show and a premium-rate telephone line, and she performed her routine for the poor and the gullible at community halls and Elk lodges across the Northeast.

  She said that ghosts haunt places, not people. I think that is a lie. Someone once told me that we create our own ghosts, that, as in dreams, each one of them is a facet of ourselves: our guilt, our regrets, our grief. Perhaps that may be an answer, of sorts. Each of us has our ghosts. Not every one of them is of our own creation, and yet they find us all, in the end.

  Rebecca Clay sat in her kitchen. There was a glass of red wine before her, although it remained untouched, and all of the lights were extinguished.

  She should have asked the detective to stay with her. The man had never approached her house, and she was confident in the security of its doors and windows and the efficiency of its alarms, particularly after they had been checked by a consultant recommended by the detective, but as the night had drawn in such precautions began to seem insufficient, and now she was aware of every noise in the old building, every settling of boards and rattling of cupboards as the wind played through the house like an errant child.

  The window above the kitchen sink was very dark, quartered by the white frame, with nothing visible beyond. She might have been floating through the blackness of space, with only the thinnest of barriers separating her from the vacuum beyond, were it not for the gentle exclamation of unseen waves bre
aking upon the beach. For want of something better to do, she brought the glass to her lips and sipped carefully, noticing just too late the musty smell that arose from the wine. She grimaced, then spit it back into the glass and rose from the table. She walked to the sink and poured the liquid away before turning on the faucet and washing the red splashes from the metal. Leaning down, she sipped water straight from the flow, cleansing her mouth of the taste. It reminded her, uncomfortably, of the way her ex-husband had tasted, and the rankness of his kisses in the night as their marriage entered its final, terminal decline. She knew that he had detested her then just as much as she now hated him and he had wanted to be rid of this burden that they shared. Rebecca had no longer wished to offer her body to him, and had felt not even the tiniest residue of the attraction she had once enjoyed, but he had found a way to separate love and need. She wondered, sometimes, of whom he fantasized as he moved upon her. Sometimes, his eyes grew vacant, and she knew that even as his body was bound to hers, his true self was far away. At other times, though, there was an intensity to his gaze, a kind of loathing as he stared down at her that made the sexual act feel like a violation. There was no love in it then, and as she looked back upon those years, she found it hard to remember if there had ever been love there.

  She had tried to do the same, of course, to conjure up images of past or potential lovers to make the experience less unpleasant, but they were too few, and they brought with them their own troubles, and in the end she had simply given up. Her appetites had faded to such a degree that it was easier just to think of other things entirely, or to look forward to the time when this man would be gone from her life. She could not even recall why she had wanted to be with him to begin with, and he with her. She supposed that, with a young daughter and all that had happened with her father, she had just desired some stability for a time, but he had not been the man to give it to her. There had been a debased element to his attraction to her, as though he saw something within her that was corrupted, and he had enjoyed touching it by entering her.

  He had not even liked her daughter very much, the product of a relationship begun before she was fully ready to have one. (And who knows, perhaps she was never meant to have a proper relationship, not really?) Jenna’s father had drifted away. He had seen his child only a handful of times, and then only in the early years. He would not even recognize her now, Rebecca thought, then realized that she was thinking of him as if he were still alive. She tried to feel something for him, but she could not. His life had ended prematurely on a dark minor road far from home, his body dumped in a ditch, his hands tied roughly behind his back with fuse wire, blood soaking into the soft ground to feed the small scurrying things that burrowed up from below to scavenge upon him. He had not been good for her. He had probably not been good for very much at all, which was why he had ended up the way he did. He had never been one to keep his promises, to make good on his commitments. It was inevitable, she supposed, that one day he would encounter someone who would not forgive him his trespasses and would instead extract a final, grim payment from him.

  For a time Jenna had asked a lot of questions about him, but in recent years they had become fewer and fewer until at last they were either forgotten, or she elected to keep them unspoken. She had not yet worked out how to inform Jenna that her father was dead. He had been killed earlier that year, and she had not found the right opportunity to talk with Jenna of his death. She was deliberately putting it off, she knew, yet still she waited. Now, in the darkness of her kitchen, she decided that when Jenna next raised the subject of her father, she would tell her daughter the truth about him.

  She thought again about the private detective. In a sense, Jenna’s father was the reason that she had approached him. Jenna’s paternal grandfather had talked of the detective. He had wanted him to look for his son, but the detective had turned him down. She thought that the old man might have felt bitterness toward him, especially after the way things had worked out, but he had not. Perhaps he understood that his son was already a lost cause, even if he refused to surrender himself to the consequences of that understanding. If he had no faith in his son, then how could he expect another, a stranger, to believe in him instead? So he did not blame the detective for declining to help him, and Rebecca had remembered his name when the stranger came asking about her own father.

  The faucet was still running, so she began to pour the rest of the bottle down the sink. The water circled around the drain, stained with red. Jenna was asleep upstairs. Rebecca was making plans to send her away if the detective could not quickly rid her of the stranger’s attentions. So far, the man had not approached Jenna, but she was concerned that such a situation might not last, and he would use the daughter to get at the mother. She would tell Jenna’s school that the child was sick, and she would deal with the repercussions when the time came. Then again, perhaps she might simply tell them the truth: that a man was bothering her, that Jenna might be at risk if she stayed in Portland. Surely they would understand.

  Why now? she wondered. It was the same question the detective had asked her. Why, after so many years had gone by, would someone come asking about her father? What did he know about the circumstances of the disappearance? She had tried to ask him, but he had only tapped his forefinger against his nose in that knowing way of his before saying: “It ain’t his disappearance I’m interested in, missy. It’s another’s. He’ll know, though. He’ll know.”

  The stranger had spoken of her father as though he were certain that he was still alive. More to the point, he seemed to think that she knew it too. He wanted answers she could not give him.

  She lifted her head and saw herself reflected in the window. The sight gave her a sudden shock so that she jerked slightly, the face before her turning from a single image to a double through a flaw in the glass. But when she had regained her composure, the second image still remained. It was like her, yet not like her, as though she had somehow shed her skin as a snake might, and the discarded membrane had settled upon the features of another. Then the figure outside drew closer and the impression of a doppelgänger faded, leaving only the stranger in a leather jacket, his dark hair slick with grease. She heard his voice, distorted by the thickness of the glass, but she could not understand his words.

  He pressed his hands against the glass, then slid the palms down until the tips of his fingers were resting against the window frame. He pushed, but the lock inside held. His face contorted in anger, and he bared his teeth.

  “You get away from me,” she said. “You get away now, or so help me-”

  His hands withdrew, and then Rebecca saw a fist punch its way through the glass, shaking the frame and showering the sink with fragments. She screamed, but the sound was caught up in the screeching of the alarm. Blood coursed down the shattered pane as the stranger pulled his hand back through the glass, not even attempting to avoid the jagged edges that ripped at his skin, tearing red channels across his palms and severing veins. He stared at the wounded fist, as if it were a thing beyond his control, surprising him with its actions. She heard the phone ring and knew that it was the monitoring company. If she didn’t reply, the police would be called, and someone would be sent to check up on her.

  “I shouldn’t ought to have done that,” said the man. “I apologize.” But she could barely hear him over the shrieking of the alarm. He tilted his head to her. It was a strangely respectful gesture, almost old-fashioned in its courtliness. She stifled the urge to giggle, fearful that if she started to laugh she would never stop, that she would descend into hysteria and never surface from it again.

  The phone stopped, then began to ring again. She made no move toward it. Instead, she watched as the stranger retreated, leaving her sink covered with his blood. She smelled it as, slowly, it combined with the stink of the corked wine to create something terrible and new, lacking only a chalice from which it might be sipped.

  Chapter III

  I sat at Rebecca Clay’s kitchen table, wa
tching as she cleaned the broken glass from the sink with a brush and pan. There was still blood on the windowpane. She had notified the cops immediately after calling me, and a South Portland cruiser had arrived shortly before I did. I had identified myself to the patrolman and listened as Rebecca gave her statement, but otherwise I had not interfered in any way. Her daughter, Jenna, sat on a sofa in the living room, clutching a china doll that looked like it might once have belonged to her mother. The doll had red hair and wore a blue dress. It was obvious that it was an old and cherished possession. The mere fact that the girl was seeking comfort from it at this time attested to its value. She did not seem as shaken as her mother, appearing more puzzled than disturbed. She also struck me as both older and younger than her years: older in appearance yet younger in her demeanor, and I wondered if perhaps her mother sheltered and protected her a little too much.

  There was another woman sitting with Jenna. Rebecca introduced her as April, a friend who lived nearby. She shook my hand and said that, since I was there and Jenna seemed okay, she’d go home so that she wouldn’t be in the way. Rebecca kissed her on the cheek, and they hugged, then April leaned back and held Rebecca at arm’s length. A look passed between them, one that spoke of shared knowledge, of years of friendship and loyalty.

  “You call me,” said April. “Anytime.”

  “I will. Thanks, hon.”

  April kissed Jenna good-bye, then left.

  I watched Jenna while Rebecca walked the cop around the outside of the house, pointing out the place where the stranger had stood. The child would grow up to be a very beautiful young woman. There was something of her mother in her, but it was rendered more striking by a slim, aquiline grace that came from elsewhere. I thought I saw something of her grandfather in her as well.