Dominance

by Will Lavender

  “Are you saying Fallows is behind all this?” she asked. “Fallows is dead, Keller. You know that as well as I do.”

  Keller flinched. Then he said, “Let me show you.”

  At first she didn’t budge. She held him, pulled at him with all the strength she could muster. But then she relented. By degrees she pulled away until he was free, massaging his palms where she had torn into him. I have to see, she thought. If I’m ever going to forgive myself for letting him find the manuscript, then I’ve got to see what he kept.

  Cautiously, she backed away. Keller turned around and went to a small writing table in the corner of the room. He opened a drawer and removed something. It was a yellowed sheet of paper. When he held it up for her to see, the light shot through, revealing unbroken, heavily struck-through typefont. He held the page at a distance, as if it might infect him.

  “One page,” he repeated. “It’s all that’s left.”

  He placed it on the dresser beside her. In the half-light, Alex read.

  There were nine of them. His job now was to bring them all together. But how?

  This question had consumed him for the last few months. He waited on some kind of special knowledge—a secret whispered by a passing stranger, a note handed to him at the library where he spent his evenings—that would explain how it could be done. Instead there was nothing but endless days of confusion, impotent nights where he lay in a sweat and turned the plan over in his mind. And then, almost by accident, it came to him. They could all return to mourn. Perhaps he had been going backward, taking his plan from the end and trying to weave it through the needle’s eye. Here was the way: give them a reason to come back. And suddenly he knew how; stuck there in his darker nature like a shard of black glass was the first act. One of them would die—a suicide, perhaps, so there could be no questions about him—and then he could truly begin. The eight would inevitably return to the old house and he would be there, waiting for them. Observing.

  Alex read the page, and then a second time. She traced the bubbled type with her finger. Even the words, the way they were chipped and broken and hanging apart like a busted hinge—tilted e’s, frantic and struck-through lines—held an intensity. A pulse. It’s Fallows.

  “The end,” she said then, her voice a hollow croak.

  Slowly, Keller looked up.

  “How does it end?”

  He stared at her as if trying to find the words, to put this awful thing into some kind of context. “They . . .”

  “Tell me, Keller.”

  “They all die. All of them except one.”

  She waited for him to continue. It was the last thing she wanted to hear, but she couldn’t turn away. Not now.

  “It was Fallows himself, Alex. The last line of that”—he made a face as if he’d just tasted something awful—“goddamned thing was that Fallows lived. The author himself is the narrator. He killed them all and made it out of the old house. Aldiss must have gotten to the manuscript. Re-created it. Put the game into motion”

  It hit her in the gut. She drew back, nearly doubled over. The game. Aldiss is the one. Aldiss was there all along. Aldiss created the cyndrot.

  But then she looked up at Keller. She saw him dropping the manuscript into the fire, watching it burn, the paper falling into shreds and the flames licking in his eyes. She saw him smile.

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  Keller blinked. He looked like he’d been slapped.

  “This is all bullshit. I don’t believe a word you’re saying.” He reached out for her, and she yanked her hand away. “Don’t you dare or I’ll scream. I’ll fucking scream for them and tell them that you’re the one who did this. That you’re the reason we’re all trapped in this house.”

  “Alex . . .”

  But she was walking away, leaving the room. Out in the hallway now, her anger disorienting her, she saw the form of a man standing on the other side of the hall, hidden in shadow. It was Frank again.

  “You scared the hell out of me,” she said.

  The man said nothing. He was looking out a porthole window down onto the front lawn. Alex stepped out into the hall and Frank still didn’t move. He stood there, leaning against the wall and looking outside—

  Alex stopped.

  She stared at the man.

  Thought, No.

  She looked closer. Noticed the unnatural way his head was bent, how his chin cocked at a strange angle. Then she saw something glisten in the window, the thing catching the moonlight and running upward like a spider’s web. And Alex followed the thing up, up, to the top edge of the porthole that had been pushed inward. Saw a wire anchored there, yanked taut to the windowpane.

  She screamed for Keller.

  Iowa

  1994

  41

  “What is wrong with Lydia’s son, Dr. Locke?”

  Keller’s question was where they had been moving for the last half hour. Locke was loosening up to the two of them. Perhaps it was being around students again; perhaps he simply wanted to discuss Fallows for the first time in years. Either way, Alex saw a change in the man. He had begun to trust them.

  “No one is quite sure,” the professor explained. “My guess is paranoid schizophrenia. But I was never around him enough to know. She hid him away in that house on Olive Street. Every time I saw him he was watching cartoons like a child.”

  “He was in a home for a time, wasn’t he?” asked Keller.

  “That’s right. But Lydia became convinced the experience would damage the boy. That she could raise him on her own. So she brought him home, and that’s where he has been ever since.”

  “And now he’s thirty.”

  “Twenty-nine, I believe. Exactly the age of Charles Rutherford when he died.”

  Alex looked at the old professor. They were so close, but not quite there yet. She could feel it, feel the pull of Richard Aldiss from his prison cell. He’d learned something new. New. Locke appeared to have stopped looking decades ago, so sure was he that Charles Rutherford was Paul Fallows.

  “The doctor,” she said now. “Dr. Morrow.”

  Locke looked at her. “Young lady, I’m afraid I don’t—”

  “Fallows used that name in The Golden Silence, and Lydia Rutherford also said it. Dr. Morrow treated Charlie.”

  Locke looked startled. “I don’t believe,” he said slowly, “that you will get anywhere if you follow the ‘clues’ in those books. People have been searching for years but have yet to come up with anything substantial. Lord knows I spent a great deal of my life doing the same. My theory is correct: Charles Rutherford was Paul Fallows, and his novels were stories—nothing more and nothing less. The books only grew in importance when Paul Fallows became a ghost.”

  “But if we were to follow this route,” Keller said, “and find this Morrow, where would we go?”

  Locke eased back in his chair. There was something in his eyes: Don’t. Don’t do that.

  “I’m sure the man is retired by now,” Locke said cautiously. “Charlie would have been under his care in the seventies.”

  “The home,” Alex said. “The place where Charlie stayed for a time. Where was that?”

  “That place.” Locke’s eyes went to the window again, as if he was remembering something horrible. When he spoke next his voice was low, almost strained. “It’s about an hour’s drive from here in a town called Wonderment, just outside of Des Moines. The home itself is called the Shining City. But I wouldn’t go there if I were you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because all you will see is human misery.”

  * * *

  It was another thirty miles, as Hamlet receded into the gray distance behind them, before she understood what it meant.

  It was a memory. A recollection that she knew had dawned on Keller at the same moment. As the landscape rattled past and as Alex drove the rental into the fading sun, he looked at her. The expression on his face said, Finally.

  Shining City.

 
That was the name of the place, the home where Charlie Rutherford had stayed. And those were the same exact words Richard Aldiss had used in one of his lectures at the beginning of the night class. So innocuous then, so meaningless—but now it was heavy in the cabin of the little rental car.

  “But you will go nowhere without the knowledge of who Charles Rutherford was,” Aldiss had said, “and of the shining city from where he came . . .”

  Charles Rutherford. Charlie. Father and son, puzzle pieces that fit together in the most natural way. Alex smiled. They were almost there. They had almost passed Richard Aldiss’s night class.

  Alex

  Present Day

  42

  Alex reached out and grabbed Frank Marsden, touched his shoulder and felt him shift, fall toward her, slump like the dead weight he now was. She fought with him, her mind a wreck, the wire around his neck keeping the man upright as if he were some kind of puppet, the blood from his mouth smearing against her shirt and—

  “Here. Don’t.”

  Keller behind her now, moving the man back against the wall. The wire sagged, then snapped taut as the actor slumped.

  “How?” Alex asked. It was the only word she could manage.

  Keller looked. The wire had been dropped in through the window. “The roof,” he said. “Aldiss is up there. We need to get Black.”

  Movement. It was the dead man writhing, twitching. Blood bubbled at his mouth. He groaned and Alex stepped back. For the first time since Iowa, Keller looked afraid.

  “Go,” he said to her then, reaching out for Marsden. The man’s eyes rolled back and he gargled again, his throat ruined. “Get someone.”

  She screamed for help.

  “No,” Keller said. “The house—it’s too big. We’re in an entirely different wing. You’ll have to go.”

  Alex ran. She turned the corner and sprinted for the stairs, her sock feet stinging on the threadbare carpet.

  She stopped. The elevator Fisk used to move between floors was to her left. She pushed the down button and waited, heard the thing grind to life three floors below. As it approached she thought about what Keller had said. The roof. She imagined Aldiss pushing in the window, dropping the wire, slipping it over Marsden’s head and then yanking it taut.

  “Help!” she shouted again, her voice echoing.

  A door at the far end opened and Christian Kane appeared. The man had been sleeping, and it took him a minute to focus.

  “Alex, what’s happening?”

  “Get someone, Christian. Get Black. Something’s happened to Frank.” The elevator ground to a stop and its ancient doors parted. She shoved Christian inside. “Go! Go!”

  Alex turned then and ran back the way she had come. She had to get back to Keller, see if she could help him (He’s dead, Alex; you saw his eyes) with Frank. She rounded the corner in a sprint and looked down the hallway.

  Nothing.

  The wire hung there, limp as a vine.

  Keller and the dead man were both gone.

  Iowa

  1994

  43

  Aldiss had led them to the end of the world.

  Shining City had been an insane asylum in another era: Gothic-fronted, black-shadowed eaves, a turret that jutted anonymously from the side of the building like a portent. It was out of place amid the starkness of the land—and yet weren’t the students as well? Nothing fits here. Alex thought as they passed the security gate and approached the building. Especially not us.

  A drab, blackened sign announced the place: SHINING CITY, HOME FOR TROUBLED BOYS, EST. 1957. The two stood outside the entrance, perhaps willing themselves to go inside, maybe waiting for a signal that would explain why they were there.

  Because we have to find Fallows. Because Aldiss is innocent. Because the two mysteries are one and the same.

  The place held no promises. A few orderlies swept in and out of the great room, but otherwise it was silent. No manic patients, no wandering insane—the home had been left behind in the seventies. Even the wallpaper was stripped, outdated, its rainbow pattern suggesting a sort of happiness that was alien here.

  Alex was flying blind. And yet Keller followed her down a long antiseptic corridor and into another just like it. She heard him say, “I don’t know about this, Alex,” the tentativeness in his voice urging her on to prove him wrong. She didn’t know, either—and the thought enraged her. If they had made a mistake, if this was not where Aldiss wanted them to be, then there was nowhere else. Tomorrow they would be on a plane back to Jasper College and the night class would be over.

  “Can I help you?”

  She turned. The woman who had spoken was standing a few feet from them, clutching a stack of folders. She wore flat shoes and a white coat. A doctor.

  “We’re looking for someone,” Alex said. “A therapist who worked here at one time. Maybe he still does.”

  “There aren’t many docs left now,” said the woman. “They’re razing this place, and we’re in the process of transferring patients to an institution in Des Moines right now. What was his name?”

  “Morrow,” Alex said. “His name is Dr. Morrow.”

  “Can’t say it’s familiar,” she said. “But I’ve only been at Shining City for two months. Let me ask someone who might know. Wait here?” She gestured toward a dim lobby.

  Alex sat in the kind of unwieldy chairs you only find in hospitals. She offered Keller the chair beside her but he waved it off as if he was fine with standing. Then she saw: the plastic chair was too small for him. Alex smiled despite herself.

  Two minutes later a thin, silver-haired man stood at the door. He looked weary, as if this was his last stop of the day. He eyed the students suspiciously and said, “Terese said you wanted to ask me a few questions.”

  “Dr. Morrow?” Alex asked.

  “No,” the man said, a hesitant smile breaking across his lips. “My name is Allen Bern. I interned under Morrow. He died in ’91.”

  Her heart stuttered. They were too late.

  “But maybe I can help you?”

  “We’re here because of a patient Dr. Morrow was in charge of,” Keller broke in. “He would’ve been very young, only a boy. He was at Shining City for a short time. But we believe Morrow had a profound effect on him. His name was Charles Rutherford Jr.”

  The man’s eyes jumped. He knew something.

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I should be going. I don’t want to—”

  “Please, Dr. Bern,” Alex said. She heard her own desperation and didn’t try to check it. “We’ve come such a long way and we just need a few answers. If you know anything about this patient, anything at all, then—”

  “He lied about not being able to speak.”

  Alex blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “I saw Morrow with so many patients over the years,” Bern went on. “So many troubled youths came through Shining City, and Morrow was brilliant with them all. Every one he treated as his own son, as if that boy was special. Unique. But Charlie . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “I had just started,” Bern explained. “I was young, not long out of med school. I was still learning my way into therapy, and to me Morrow was a sort of deity. I had read his articles at university, had begun to appropriate some of his methods in my own sessions. Everything he did with these patients I wanted to replicate.”

  “And did you watch him treat Charlie Rutherford?” Keller asked.

  Bern nodded. “I want to say I still think of it, but the truth is I don’t. I haven’t thought of it for a very long time. Almost twenty years now. Maybe I wanted to put it out of my mind. To forget it ever happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was performing the Rorschach test,” Bern said. “He was showing Charlie the ink blots. I remember Dr. Morrow shuffling through the cards, the sound of them against his fingers. That was the only sound in the room, because Charlie—of course he wasn’t speaking. He never spoke. He wrote his responses on a litt
le pad Morrow had given him.”

  “What did he write?” Alex asked, and glanced at Keller. The Rorschach test—they were both thinking of it. What could it mean?

  Bern turned to her slowly, resolutely. His gaze held the past now, the memory heavy and fierce. “Atrocities,” the man said. “Every blot, every image was another violent detail. One was fire; the next was pain; another was blood. All of these words scratched onto the pad. Sometimes he would copy what Morrow showed him. Draw his own blot and then hold up the card to the therapist as if he were some sort of mirror. Then he would smile as if he had done something grand. When the session was over I looked at Morrow and saw . . . I don’t know. I saw this distance. He was afraid of the boy.”

  “But Morrow must have seen violent patients before,” Keller said, keeping his voice calm and steady. “It would have been common at Shining City for children to come through who had that kind of temperament.”

  “No,” Bern said quickly. “Not like Charlie. The other boys, even the ones with violent pasts—they were acting. Playing a role. But with Charlie you felt it was real. He had been damaged innately. He had been turned, somehow.”

  “You say he lied about being mute,” Alex goaded the doctor. She wanted to get to the bottom now, get out of this place. She was beginning to understand why Aldiss had sent them to this private little hell, but some piece of the puzzle was still out of reach.

  “Yes,” he said, his gaze drifting away and his voice softening. “This was three months after he came to Shining City. They were having another Rorschach session. They were just to the end, and Charlie looked at Morrow and said something. It was one word—we both heard it. When the boy left the room Morrow came to me, pale and shaking, and said, ‘Did you . . . ? ’ Of course I did.”

  “But that must have been a breakthrough,” Alex said, remembering Lydia’s praise of the doctor the night before. “Morrow’s work, it would have been changing Charlie. Healing him.”