Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands

by Richard Montanari

  Lilly tried to digest it all. Twenty years. She looked around. The room was crowded with steamer trunks, wooden crates, broken furniture. At one end was an enormous hospital bed with filthy sheets. On the dressers were stacks of food-littered trays. Everywhere were tattered silks, bent linking rings, rusted cups, torn playing cards. The walls were covered with old posters and yellowed news clippings.

  “Do you remember the time we played Tulsa?” he asked. “Do you remember Harwelden?”

  Lilly shook her head. The man faded in and out. Coherent one moment, gone the next. Earlier she had wandered over to the door, and covertly tried the knob behind her back. It was locked.

  “Do you remember Blackstone?” he asked.

  Lilly looked at the wall. On it was a framed poster of a man, in caricature, with two small devils at his feet, and another on his shoulder. The name BLACKSTONE was emblazoned across the bottom. There was a smaller legend there, too. Lilly quoted it aloud.

  “Blackstone?” she asked. “The greatest necromantic extravaganza on earth?”

  The man seemed to come alive. Color rose in his cheeks.

  “Yes!” he said. “The greatest magician the world has ever known.” The old man struggled to his feet. “It is time to prepare for the stage.” He held out his fragile hand. Lilly took it, helping him up.

  “What’s the Fire Grotto?” Lilly asked.

  He assessed her with his milky eyes. “I’ll show you.”

  He crossed the room to a small table, pulled out the drawer, slid it back in. Next to the table a wall panel slid up, revealing a number of wooden file cabinets. There had to be twenty in all.

  The old man contemplated the labels for a while, then opened a drawer. He rifled the contents. He soon found an envelope full of photos. “Here you are at the fair in Baton Rouge,” he said.

  He showed her an old photograph, a picture of a young woman in a scarlet gown standing next to a box with seven swords sticking out of it. A man in a cape and top hat stood to her right. The man was clearly Karl Swann. A fair-haired young boy stood off to the side. He looked to be about five years old. Lilly recognized his eyes. It was her captor’s eyes.

  The old man produced a second photograph. “This is Faerwood on the day we moved in. It was earlier this year. Isn’t it magnificent?”

  Karl Swann proffered a picture of himself and his young son. In the photograph the old man looked young and strong. His son looked sullen.

  Earlier this year, Lilly thought. He is gone. She turned the photograph to the candlelight, looked at it carefully. It took her breath away. It wasn’t the expressions of the man and boy, or the way they seemed to be standing in two different worlds, it was the house itself. The tower, the huge porch, the four chimneys rising into the sky like tortured, barren trees.

  Lilly had lived with this image, frozen in her mind, for months.

  It’s him, she thought. My God, it’s him. His name is Joseph Swann. She had told him everything, and he had kidnapped her and brought her here.

  Lilly steadied herself by putting a hand on the table. She felt nauseated.

  “Behold the Garden of Flowers.”

  Lilly looked at the old man. He was still busy with the file cabinet. He hadn’t said a word. The sound had come from behind her. Lilly spun around. The television was now on. On the screen she saw seven rectangles. Six different video feeds playing. In the upper left was something called the Garden of Flowers. Next to it was an illusion called the Girl Without a Middle. When Lilly looked at the third video her heart nearly stopped. She knew the girl in the large water tank. She felt lightheaded again. When she looked back at the screen the last video was playing. There was a girl in a bridal gown being led to a big box. The girl in the video was Claire.

  Joseph Swann was a murderer. He was dressing up like his father, and killing girls in a chamber of horrors.

  There was one video left on the screen. It was black. For now. Lilly knew exactly who it was for.

  Karl Swann rummaged through another drawer. He extracted a folder. Inside the folder were pages and pages of drawings and brittle diagrams, scribbled blueprints. He extracted a single page.

  “This,” he said, “is the Fire Grotto.”

  The drawing was of a large box, a cage made of steel and smoked glass. As Lilly ran her eyes over the drawing, she catalogued every corner, every hinge, every latch. “How does it work?” she asked.

  Five minutes later, when the old man finished telling her how the illusion worked, and of its spectacular, fiery flourish, Lilly knew all she needed to know about the Fire Grotto. She also knew what was going to happen. Joseph Swann aimed to put her in the box, and set it afire. There was no doubt in her mind.

  “You must remember the secret latch on the bottom,” the old man said. “This is very important.” The old man then held up another yellowed blueprint. “It is quite easy to get lost in Faerwood. There are many rooms here, many machines. If you do get lost, this will help.”

  Lilly took the old blueprint. She instantly memorized the dimensions, the details, where the doors and hidden stairwells were located, where the switches were. It seemed each room had a secret.

  Before she could ask Karl Swann another question, Lilly heard the sound of a car engine. She looked out the barred window. Three stories below a van pulled into the driveway.

  Lilly grabbed the blueprint and ran to the corner of the room, to the secret passage. The man stepped in front of her. He put something in her hand. “You will need this.”

  When she reached the opening, Lilly heard the old man add, “Remember the secret latch. Remember, Odette.”

  Lowering herself into the dark shaft, Lilly had no idea if she was returning the way she had come. She scrambled forward as fast as she could, banging her knees and elbows. Her hands were slick with sweat. The passageway seemed endless, and even darker than it had earlier. After a full minute she stopped, felt the sides, the ceiling. Had she passed Claire’s room? She had no idea. She listened for any change in the hot silence. She heard only her pulse.

  She continued onward. The sound of the classical music returned, this time louder. She was finding her way back. She was about to stop again when she saw the faint rectangle of light in the distance. She rumbled forward as quickly as she could, emerged through the panel, dashed into the room, gulping the fresh air. She heard footsteps in the hallway outside. A key turned in the lock.

  Lilly grabbed her shoes from the opening, letting the panel slide shut. She bolted across the room and dove under the covers as the second key turned. As the door opened, Lilly noticed she had dropped the old blueprint on the floor. She grabbed it, pulled it under the comforter at the last second, her heart racing.

  Joseph Swann.

  The Fire Grotto.

  Lilly did not know how she was going to get out of this, or if she would make it until morning, but she knew one thing for certain.

  She could not allow Joseph Swann to get her inside that box.

  | EIGHTY-ONE |

  | 3 : 20 AM |

  THEY HAD NEARLY ONE HUNDRED ADDRESSES OF PEOPLE NAMED SWAN, more than thirty for Swann. Uniformed officers from virtually every district were pounding on doors, calling in on police radios.

  They had gotten word on the publishing house that handled David Sinclair’s books. It was a small outfit in Denver. According to the senior editor, no one there had ever met Mr. Sinclair. Sinclair had sent an unagented proposal to them six years earlier, by mail. The editor had spoken to the man many times over the course of the writing and editing of the book, but Sinclair had never come to Denver. They corresponded with the author via a Hotmail account and a street address in Philadelphia, an address that turned out to be a drop box on Sansom Street. Their records showed that the man had rented the box by the year, sending a money order for a year at a time. There was a high turnover rate in employees, and the few who were contacted at this hour could not recall the man who rented box 18909. The initial form that was filled out appeared to be type
d on an old IBM Selectric, and the street address and phone number listed were both phony.

  Payments from the publishing house were made by company check, made out to David Sinclair. They had never been cashed.

  The bookstore in Chester County had no address for him, just the cell phone number the detectives already had. It was a dead end.

  At 3:20 AM a department car roared to a stop. It was Detective Nicci Malone. “We’ve got prints,” she said. “They’re on that Chinese box.”

  “Please tell me they’re in the system,” Jessica said.

  “They’re in the system. His name is Dylan Pierson.”

  THE TEAM DESCENDED on a run-down row house near Nineteenth and Poplar. Byrne knocked on the door until lights came on inside. He held his weapon behind his back. Soon the door opened. A heavyset white woman in her forties stood before them, her face puffed with sleep, last night’s mascara racoooning her eyes. She wore an oversized Flyers jersey, baggy pink sweats, stained white terrycloth flops.

  “We’re looking for Dylan Pierson,” Byrne said, holding up his badge.

  The woman looked from Byrne’s eyes, to the badge, back. “That’s my son.”

  “Is he here?”

  “He’s upstairs sleeping. Why do you—”Byrne pushed her aside, bulled through the small dirty living room. Jessica and Josh Bontrager followed.

  “Hey!” the woman yelled. “You can’t just … I’ll sue you!”

  Byrne reached into his pocket. Without looking back he tossed a handful of his business cards in the air, and stormed up the stairs.

  DYLAN PIERSON WAS NINETEEN. He had long greasy hair, a feeble soul patch below his lower lip, way too much attitude for the time of night and Byrne’s mood. On the walls were a mosaic of skateboarding posters: Skate or Die; A Grind is a Terrible Thing to Waste; Rail Against the Machine.

  Dylan Pierson had been arrested twice for drug possession; had twice gotten away with community service. His room was a sty, the floor covered in dirty clothes, potato chip bags, magazines, questionably stained Kleenex.

  When Byrne entered, he had flipped on the overhead light and all but lifted Dylan Pierson from his bed. Pierson was cowering against the wall.

  “Where were you tonight?” Byrne yelled.

  Dylan Pierson tried to comprehend how his little kingdom had suddenly been invaded by big scary police in the middle of the night. He wiped sleep from his eyes. “I … I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Byrne took out a picture, a blowup of a computer screen capture of the Collector. “Who is this?”

  The kid tried to focus. “I have no idea.”

  Byrne grabbed his arm, yanked. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait! Jesus. Let me look.” He turned on a desk lamp, looked more carefully at the photograph. “Hang on. Hang on. Okay. Okay. I know who this is, man. He looks different with that beard and shit, but I think I know him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Byrne reared back, fists clenched.

  “Wait!” The kid cowered. “I met him on the street, man. He asked me if I wanted to make some money. It happens to me all the time.”

  Jessica looked at Nicci Malone, back at Dylan Pierson, thinking, You ain’t all that, kid. Still, he was young, and that counted for a lot on the streets of a city like Philadelphia.

  “What are you talking about?” Byrne asked.

  “I was hanging by the bus station, okay? On Filbert. You know the bus station?”

  “We know the bus station,” Byrne said. “Talk. Fast.”

  “He started talking to me. He pointed at this girl, maybe sixteen or so. Maybe younger. She looked like a runaway. He said if I would go up to her, give her some shit, and he came in like a white knight, he would pay me fifty bucks.”

  “When was this?” Byrne asked.

  “I don’t know. Two days ago?” The kid touched his cheek. “He burned my damn face. You should arrest this guy.”

  Byrne held up a photograph of the Chinese box. “How did your fingerprints get on this?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Say ‘I have no idea’ one more fucking time,” Byrne said. “Go ahead.”

  “Wait! Let me think, man. All right. And this is true. When I met the guy I sat in his van for a while.”

  “What color was the van?”

  “White. When I first got in he asked if I would move some of his things around in the back. This box was in there, I swear to God.”

  Byrne paced, kicking clothes and debris out of his way. “Then what happened?”

  “Then I got out of the car, walked up to the corner, started talking to the chick.”

  “Then what? He burned your face?”

  “Yeah. Like out of nowhere. And for no reason. When it was all over I met him around the corner and he gave me something.”

  “What did he give you?”

  “A book. He put the fifty inside it.”

  “He gave you a book.”

  “Yeah,” Pierson said. “I don’t really—”Byrne lifted the kid off the chair like he was a rag doll. “Where the fuck is it?”

  “I sold it.”

  “To who?”

  “The Book Nook. It’s a used-book store. They’re right around the corner.”

  | EIGHTY-TWO |

  | 3 : 42 AM |

  THE BOOK NOOK WAS A USED-BOOK STORE ON SEVENTEENTH STREET.

  The grimy front window haphazardly displayed comic books, graphic novels, a section of recent best-selling fiction, some vintage board games. There was a single light on inside.

  Byrne knocked hard, rocking the glass door. Jessica got on her cell phone. They would find the owner. They did not have that much time, but protocol—

  Byrne threw a bench through the door. He threw Dylan Pierson in afterwards, then followed him.

  —was clearly not going to be followed.

  “What was the name of the book?” Byrne yelled, flipping the light switch, turning on the fluorescents overhead. His fellow detectives scrambled to keep up.

  “I don’t remember,” Pierson replied, picking bits of glass out of his hair. “I think it was something about outer space.”

  “You think?”

  Dylan Pierson began to pace. He had no shoes on, and he was hot-footing on the glass. “It … it had a red planet on the cover … it was something about—”

  “Mars?” Bontrager asked.

  He snapped his fingers. “Mars. That’s it. Mars something. Guy named Hendrix wrote it. I remember the name because I’m really into old school stuff like Jimi—”

  Byrne ran down the Science Fiction aisle, found the shelf for authors whose last name begins with H. Heinlein, Herbert, Huxley, Hoban, Hardin. And then he found it. Mars Eclectica. Edited by Raymond Hendrix. He ran back to the main room. “Is this it?”

  “That’s it! That’s the one! Dude. You are awesome.”

  Byrne handled the book by its edges. He riffled through the pages. Then a second time. There was nothing. No notes inside. Nothing highlighted.

  “Are you sure this is the book?” Byrne asked.

  “Positive. Although, I gotta say that one looks a lot newer than the book this guy gave me.”

  Byrne reached for Dylan Pierson’s throat. Josh Bontrager was able to step between them. Byrne then flung the book across the store. His eyes roamed the walls, the shelves, the counters. Behind the front desk were a pair of push carts. One of them had a sticky note pasted to the side, with a handwritten New Books.

  Byrne vaulted the counter. He tore the books off the top shelf of the cart. Nothing. He ripped the books from the bottom shelf. And saw it. Mars Eclectica. It was a well-worn copy.

  He flipped through the book. It didn’t take long. In the table of contents there were two places where something had been cut out with a razor blade. They were sections of author’s names.

  ____ White, The Retreat to Mars.

  Robert ____ Williams, The Red Death of Mars.

  Byr
ne turned the book to Dylan Pierson. “What’s missing here?”

  The kid looked. “I have no—I mean, I don’t know. I don’t read that much.”

  One by one Byrne showed the page to the other detectives. “Anybody know these people?”

  No one knew.

  “Fuck!”

  “The other copy,” Jessica said. “Get the other copy of the book.”

  In a flash Josh Bontrager was at the back of the store, rummaging through the strewn books. He found the book in seconds, and was back.

  He put it on the counter next to Byrne’s copy. They looked at both versions of the table of contents.

  With the missing names, the entries read:

  Cecil B. White, The Retreat to Mars

  Robert Moore Williams, The Red Death of Mars

  “Cecil B. Moore,” Byrne said. He looked at Jessica.

  “The baseball field,” she replied.

  They’d found the diamond.

  | EIGHTY-THREE |

  | 4 : 03 AM |

  THE BASEBALL FIELDS AT CECIL B. MOORE AVENUE AND NORTH Eleventh Street were deserted. The mahogany cabinet sat at home plate. Its glossy surface shone in the light thrown from the sodium streetlamps.

  Byrne was out of the car before Jessica could stop it.

  “Goddamn it!”

  Byrne vaulted across the field, reached the box first. There was no hesitation, no stopping him. He opened the box, stared inside. And froze.

  Jessica and Bontrager made it across the field. Jessica saw what her partner was looking at. Inside was a girl, wearing an antique white satin dress. It looked to be a wedding gown from the 1920s or 1930s. A veil covered her face. The bodice of the dress was soaked with her blood.

  Byrne reached in, put two fingers to the girl’s neck.

  “She’s alive.”

  | EIGHTY-FOUR |

  | 4 : 16 AM |

  THE AMBULANCE SCREAMED OFF INTO THE NIGHT. THE GIRL HAD LOST A lot of blood, but when the paramedics got her onto the gurney, her pulse was stronger, her blood pressure stable.