He was just finalizing these plans when he heard the bell ring on the door below. His first reaction was his heart sinking as he thought a customer had come in and he would have to explain that the store was shut. Then he remembered he had turned the sign to Closed. He had locked the door and tested it. It must be Emily.
He took a step toward the top of the stairs.
But she had given her keys to Rothwell, and he had handed them on to Carter.
He walked down the stairs as quietly as the wooden steps would allow. The storeroom/coffee-making area was empty. He moved into the store proper and found it empty, too. The tone of the bell still hung in the air. He looked closely at it. It hung motionless.
* * *
The sports store was having a sale, and Carter got a good deal on a sleeping bag. On an impulse, he bought a cheap foam roll to lay over the mattress. He had no intention of sleeping on plastic and being disturbed by its crackling all night, but part of him maintained an irrational belief that the old but barely used mattress would harbor bedbugs. Exactly how they’d survived for seven years without feeding was part of the irrationality of it.
He hesitated before buying the bedroll. He knew he didn’t really need it, just as he knew he hadn’t really heard the door chime. Logically, he knew there was no way it had rung. The door was locked, the rear of the store was secure, and he was the only person in the building. There was, he admitted willingly, the possibility of something other than the door ringing it. Perhaps it rang in sympathy with other frequencies. A passing truck might have made the building shudder. Perhaps even the sunlight filtering through the tinted windows was enough to make the metal of the spring expand and shake the bell as the tension was released. These were all logical possibilities. Carter had never seen anything truly inexplicable other than what went on in some people’s minds.
Like Martin Suydam.
Carter was eating in an Italian restaurant he had found a couple of blocks from the bookstore, a little family-run place. His fork paused, halfway between the dish of puttanesca and his mouth. He hadn’t thought of Suydam for months. Hammond still troubled him almost daily, but Suydam had faded from his memory until now. He’d never seen a man so happy to be gutshot.
The restaurant owner saw the slowly lowering fork and bustled over with dismay to make sure everything was all right. Carter assured him that the food was fine, and the owner was content to refill Carter’s wineglass and leave him alone with his thoughts once more.
So … Suydam. Carter still drank with some of the guys from the 76th and knew more than he should about how the clear-up of the case had gone. The man might have been dead, but missing child cases that had been suspected as his doing still had to be confirmed one way or another, and there was the chance that he was responsible for out-of-state abductions.
As it turned out, the educated guesses had been good: from the remains extracted from beneath the cellar floor and another body found dumped exactly where Suydam’s exhaustive notes said it would be, all the disappearances ascribed to him were confirmed. His notes said nothing about taking any boys from outside the counties of the New York metropolitan area at all, and all but a couple were taken outside the five boroughs.
The notes were unusual in as far as they made sense. They were cogent and ordered, which came as a relief to the officers who’d had to read them. There was none of the cramped writing, overwriting, marginalia (relevant and not), random additions, and such that were usually the mark of a troubled mind. Suydam presented his thoughts as clearly as a scientist recording his experiments for posterity. But while reading the notes might have been straightforward, their contents were still wearing on the psyche.
Suydam was obsessed with the limits of human perception, even the limits of machines. He wrote at length on something he called “The Twist,” always capitalized. The detective who told Carter that detail didn’t even bother making a joke about dancing. It was obvious they’d tried every variation of that in the precinct house and ground whatever few grains of humor they could find there out of it long ago.
“The Twist” itself was not explained. From his writings, Suydam took its nature as self-evident, and felt no impulse to explain it in notes that were always meant only for himself. He was not writing one of the ranting declarations of purpose so beloved of mass killers, after all. The psychiatrists and psychologists who studied the transcriptions and facsimiles could offer no explanation beyond the obvious, that Suydam absolutely believed in The Twist, and that all his efforts were bent on perceiving it more clearly.
To do so, he had attempted to hotwire the brains of young boys. He needed them young because their brains had not yet finished their maturation and were more “perceptive” than adult examples. More than once, he decried the “fossilized” and “programmed” state of his own brain, its synapses long since in place, and “too much learning and experience” cluttering the halls of its architecture. The victims were all male because Suydam explicitly stated that women have enough violence visited upon them without him adding to it. It was comments like that, and parts of the procedure that were intended to be as humane as possible, that set Suydam aside from the body of serial killers. He had no psychosexual motivation. His notes even contained his worries that the abductions might be considered sexual in nature, and that people might think him a pedophile. Being a child killer was acceptable in Suydam’s world. Being mistaken for a pedophile was not.
“The sickest thing?” Carter’s friend had told him over beers. “Out of a whole shitload of sickness? The sickest thing was that the fuck was doing it for the good of humanity. This guy was a reg’lar altruist.”
“Madness,” said Carter, borrowing wisdom from elsewhere, “is when you keep doing the same thing and expect different results.”
“Yeah!” The friend raised his bottle to this. His face clouded. “Yeah. The last three kids, he said he was getting there. The Mottram boy, he said he’d had a breakthrough. Estes he was real excited about, wrote that he knew what he’d been doing wrong. He’d get it right next time.”
“That’d be the Watts kid?”
“Yeah…”
“And?”
The detective slung back his beer. “There weren’t any more notes. Not after he took Georgie Watts. The notes just stop.”
* * *
The notes just stop.
Carter thought about it while he walked back to Hill’s Books with his purchases. Why would they just stop? Why would the assiduous note taker stop taking notes? He was still active, after all. He took one more victim. No, not really a victim. More like bait. He’d never intended to harm Thiago Mata, just to provoke the police into finding him quickly and to kill him. Hell of a thing. Suicide by cop. Suicide.
Why by cop? Why at all?
Carter shook his head slightly, an outward expression of inward exasperation. It wasn’t his case. Suydam had claimed one last victim—somehow—in Charlie Hammond. That was it; Carter was done, done with all that.
The bookstore was as he had left it. He muffled the bell with his hand on entering, and found himself thinking of electronic alternatives. Specifically ones that could be turned off when they weren’t needed. Then he realized he was thinking about the long-term operations of the store, and smiled to himself.
When he took his hand from the bell, it rang quietly and maybe even reproachfully. Carter was becoming fanciful, and he knew it. He put it down to the effect of the store upon him; being surrounded by all that fiction had to have some sort of effect on a man, didn’t it? He was also beginning to like the place. Maybe he would keep it going as a concern, deal Emily in, and be a silent partner.
The ceiling above him creaked.
It was probably nothing, just an old building settling in the cool evening after a sunny day. Probably nothing, but Carter put down his shopping quietly, drew his pistol, and—having checked that the store front and rear were empty—made his way slowly up the stairs. This time he remembered the creaking step and made
it to the top in near silence.
The studio apartment was unoccupied.
Carter swore under his breath. He was trying to like the place, but it kept putting him on his guard like this. He’d just have to get used to it.
There it was again, a definite belief that he would be involved in the store in the future. He thought of Ken Rothwell then, a man born with a mouthful of silver spoons, just saying he’d like to buy it, discussing it like it was a secondhand car. Fuck Rothwell and his money. Carter would give Emily a share in the store because she deserved it.
He went to his car to pick up the overnight bag he kept in the trunk for eventualities like this, and returned to prepare himself for the night. He stripped off the bed’s plastic covering and checked the mattress closely, fully aware of how absurd it was. He found nothing, as he knew he would. He cut the navy blue foam bedroll out of its wrapping and ran it down the right-hand side of the bed, the side he found himself preferring even when sleeping alone. Then he laid the sleeping bag on it. Belatedly he realized he didn’t have a pillow, but found one in a store cupboard. It was musty with age—the cupboards not having had Emily’s regular eye upon them—so he stuffed it inside the cloth sack the sleeping bag had come in, shaped it with his hands, and laid it at the end of the bedroll. Not exactly five-star accommodations, but he’d slept in enough cars and even on a couple of concrete floors in his life to make him appreciate sleep anytime it involved lying down on a surface that conformed to the shape of the body.
It was already dark outside, and an Atlantic weather system had come ashore, bringing with it a steady, penetrating rain. Carter stood by the window and watched the cars go by through the blurred glass, traces of light against wet asphalt.
He should have felt alone, but he did not. There was an atmosphere in the apartment, as if it had risen up from the store below. Nothing malign, and nothing to stress his already oversensitive sense of self-preservation, but just the aura of a well-lived house. He gauged the place to have been built in the 1920s, maybe a decade or so earlier. There was something jaunty about it, even in its old age. If it had been a man, it would have worn a straw boater and sung in a barbershop quartet. Perhaps that wasn’t the store’s personality, though. Maybe that was Alfred Hill shining through.
Carter looked at the bookshelves for something to read while he wound down for sleep. These were Hill’s personal books, he guessed. At least, none of the few he flicked through bore prices in soft black pencil on the flyleaves. He’d also noted that the stock downstairs contained—very old-school—a simple substitution cipher of the price the store had paid, a real hangover from decades before. He’d heard of such systems, but had never actually seen one used. It was strange to see the odd little characters there, refugees from a time before electronic points of sale, bar codes, and JIT management.
Hill’s own collection was clear of any such markings, though. There were a lot of them, but Carter started skimming the titles after only reading the first few as he began to realize that Hill’s interests did not coincide with his own.
There were a lot of books of mythology, folklore, and the occult. None of them sported lurid covers. Instead, they were revealed by a riffle of the thumb to be dry, academic volumes. Carter hadn’t realized it was possible to make satanic orgies boring, but one of the books he took down managed it.
Another shelf carried fiction, but it was all fiction involving mythology, folklore, the occult. He didn’t recognize any of the writers—Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, Frank Belknap Long—but the titles were as lurid as the academic books had been dry. He flicked through a volume of the Dunsany, nearly gagged on the violet prose, and put it back. No, there was nothing to read there, either.
Finally, and feeling a cliché for doing it, he went down into the store and picked a novel from the shelf of detective stories. He decided to at least not go for anything hardboiled, and picked up something British instead, The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin. Carter liked impossible crime stories—he used to love reruns of Ellery Queen and Banacek when he was a kid—so a novel about a whole toy store vanishing looked like it might work for him.
He took the book upstairs, put it by the bedside, brushed his teeth, stripped to his underwear, and climbed into the sleeping bag.
The book … well. Quite quickly, Carter didn’t know what to make of the book. He knew it was British, but he hadn’t been expecting it to be quite that British. He read of Richard Cadogan, the famous but impoverished poet, who liked pistols but was a lousy shot. He read of Spode, Nutling, and Orlick, “publishers of high-class literature.” But there was only a Mr. Spode, as Nutling and Orlick were fictional even within the novel. He read of a journey to Oxford, and realized he had no idea where most cities were in the United Kingdom. He could place London, and that was all. When Cadogan ended up marooned in Didcot, he could have been on the moon, for all Carter knew. Crispin threw in literary references, too, none of which meant a single damn thing to Carter.
Carter felt himself slowly being overwhelmed by the effects of a long day, travel, events, and now a book that was better than him, and knew it. He got as far as Cadogan’s first sight of the eponymous toyshop and decided he’d buy the book in the morning and read it when he was more alert. He returned it to the nightstand, beat the makeshift pillow back into shape, and switched off the light.
Chapter 6
THE DREAMS IN THE BOOK HOUSE
Carter rarely dreamed, and when he did, he didn’t enjoy it. Even as a child, he had avoided “I had the weirdest dream last night” conversations. His friends dreamed of catching buses that traveled so long that they forgot where they were supposed to be going and started living on the bus instead. They dreamed of it being their birthday, but every present was empty because friends and relatives had decided to wrap the boxes before going out and buying the gifts, because it was more efficient that way; look, here they are, in the garage the whole time. They dreamed of schtupping that girl in class who nobody liked because she had personality issues, but she was really nice in the dream.
Carter always said he never remembered his dreams. If pressed, he’d make something up. Late for school. Being locked out. Typical, boring anxiety stuff.
Carter didn’t usually remember his dreams because, at an early age, he learned how to forget them. He didn’t dwell on them. He didn’t talk about them. The idea of a “dream diary” made him panicky. If he avoided every thought of them, derailed every train of thought that took him back to them, then they faded after a little while. It wasn’t just the best thing to do. It was the only thing to do.
Over the years he had gotten very good at it, both the forgetting of his dreams and the lying about them.
Soon all that was left was the lingering dread of just how fucked up his unconscious mind was, and how much it wanted to destroy him. He managed to hide that, too. From the outside world, at least. As far as he knew, he’d aced every psych assessment, and he didn’t take the skills of the department psychiatrist lightly.
That lingering dread, though, that was always there, and manifested in small ways. He disliked open spaces. Not real agoraphobia, but just a sense of vulnerability when he was outside in an open area. The sea, too, troubled him. He couldn’t understand why anybody would want to go on it for shits and giggles. It was dangerous. He didn’t panic if he had to go on the ferry, though. The idea of the ferry sinking while he was aboard didn’t bother him any more than it would bother anyone else. That wasn’t the nature of the dread—and it was an apprehension rather than a fear. It was something altogether bigger than just a morbid fear of drowning.
Until the deaths of Martin Suydam and Charlie Hammond, Carter had never had a dream he couldn’t erase from his memory with a little mindful neglect, and Carter had never had a dream he had known was a dream as he dreamed it.
* * *
Tonight, he knew he was dreaming. He didn’t know how, because nothing felt wrong or partially formed. He was in Union
Street, actually standing in the middle of the street, right in front of the precinct house. Union Street wasn’t wide, lined with redbrick tenements opposite the station all the way along but with gaps on the other side, like kicked-out teeth. One of the gaps was occupied by the precinct house itself, a brown brick building with a blue-tiled frontage.
Carter wasn’t worried about standing in the street. There was no traffic, only parked cars. There were no people, either. He listened, but couldn’t hear anything. No traffic sounds, no music, no aircraft, not even birdsong.
He went in because he was a cop, and why else would he be standing in front of the precinct house unless he meant to go in? He only remembered he wasn’t a cop anymore much later. All the vehicles parked out front were patrol cars, which was odd. He’d never seen more than three or four out there before, but there was a shining row of twelve black-and-whites. They looked new. When Carter walked between two to get to the sidewalk, he was wary of touching them. It wasn’t smearing their pristine wax jobs that worried him. It was that they were there at all, gleaming and reeking of newness. That wasn’t the 76th Precinct he remembered.
He entered and the place was empty. No. Silent, he realized; not empty.
Lying by the public counter was a uniform cop. Carter saw the spray pattern on the wall, and knew before he even reached him that the man had been shot through the head. The face was untouched. Carter didn’t know him and thought he must have started in the precinct after Carter left. That he still believed himself to be a police officer didn’t glitch for him at all. The back of the skull was missing, a section of skull the diameter of a clenched fist blown out by the passage of a bullet. The dead man had his gun in his hand, so at least he hadn’t died without trying to retaliate.
His gun was a S&W Model 5946. Carter knew it wasn’t just any 5946; it was Charlie Hammond’s. He didn’t know how that was possible, or how he knew it from any other, but he was sure. He had a half thought that maybe the precinct reissued the handguns of dead cops. Now that its new owner was dead, too, would they reissue it again?
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