The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  “What list?” John said.

  Outside the edges of things were glowing with frost—trees, mailboxes, the crust of snow over the trimmed grass.

  Nat brought the book out of a zippered carrying case he usually carried his laptop in. He flipped through the pages as he walked toward John. At the back of the book was a list of the squadron members. He stopped there and handed the journal to John. “Here,” he said.

  John looked at him dubiously. “What is it?”

  “It’s a diary by a member of a squadron from the Marines 2nd Regiment. The regiment was sent to Haiti in the summer of 1919. I won’t get into the reasons, but it was basically a restore-order kind of mission. We occupied the country for the next seventeen years; the 2nd Regiment was the second wave of troops going in. They sailed from Baltimore harbor in June 1919. Part of the regiment was a squadron under a Captain Thomas Markham. The squadron was all from around here. Northam men.”

  John stared dully at the pages. “John Prescott,” he said. “Ezra Dyer.”

  “Yep.”

  John’s eye slid down the list. He stopped. “I’ll be a son of a bitch. Otis Bailey.”

  “Your great-great-grandfather?” Nat said.

  “Yeah. I knew he was in the Marines, but I never knew he’d gone to Haiti.”

  “He did. They all did. And when they were down there, something ugly happened. Bad enough that the squadron leader, Captain Markham, was brought back here and hanged in the town square.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” John said again.

  Nat stared at his friend. “Look at the next name.”

  “Vincent DeMott. So what?”

  “What was the name of the first guy that Chase Prescott killed when he went on his little rampage?”

  John’s forehead wrinkled. “Matt DeMott.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Nat said.

  John was staring at the rug. “Margaret Post, too?”

  Nat moved closer to John and pointed at the list of squadron members. The third name was Steven Post. “I checked Genealogy.com. He was Margaret’s great-great-uncle.”

  “So Margaret is the last of his relatives?”

  “No. The last one in Northam. The literature says that the traveler can only work within a certain range, so any cousins in California or wherever are probably safe. For the moment.”

  “That’s why Margaret’s parents, the missionaries, aren’t dead? Because they lived in Brazil.”

  “That’s my guess. But I’d get them the hell out of town if I were you.”

  John stared at the page. His lips moved.

  “Okay. So everyone who’s died or gone missing recently has a relative on this list. Post. Dyer. Godwin.” His brow wrinkled. “John Thayer,” he read.

  “My mother’s grandfather.”

  John rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands and then stared at the carpet. “Do we know they’re related, or are we guessing?”

  “We know. I just spent some time with Mr. Atkins at the Northam museum. Not the most pleasant two hours of my life, I can tell you. We went over genealogies of some of the twelve families: Markham, Kelly, Monk, Ford, Prescott, Dyer, Godwin, Bailey, Thayer, Post, DeMott, and McIlhane. I thought we might find some mysterious deaths there, some evidence that our killer had been working at, let’s say, pruning the family trees before he got down to our generation. Atkins and I had the town death records for the past hundred years.”

  “And?”

  “I underestimated him. It. In fact, his work is almost done.”

  “What?”

  Nat pulled a sheet of paper from his right front pocket. “You want the box score?” he said bitterly. “McIlhane and Ford were murdered by Captain Markham. Unmarried and childless, both of them. Markham was executed here. No children. Kelly died in Haiti two weeks after Bule’s death. He blew his head off with his Marine-issued Springfield rifle. He was just eighteen years old and had no wife or kids that we know of. Ford went insane soon after, ran amuck in the camp outside Port-au-Prince, hacking at soldiers with his bayonet. He was shot in the chest by a Marine guard, died three days later. No descendants either.”

  “So who’s next?”

  Nat shrugged. “Let’s go with Private Post. He made it back to Northam, married a local girl, Sarah Bishop, and had three children.”

  The word children slowed Nat down. He cleared his throat and his voice quieted just a bit. He read from the sheet of paper in his hand. “Nicholas Post died, age twelve, as a result of a boating accident on Brooks Pond. No newspaper reports to be found, possibility of foul play unknown. Balthazar Post was employed as a forger in the ironworks over on the east side and died at age seventeen, poisoned himself with an industrial dye. Delphine Post survived, married, and had two children. Mary—”

  “Enough!” John cried.

  Nat stopped reading.

  “They all died?” John said.

  “Not all, obviously. We’re here. Some members of the squadron survived long enough to have children, some escaped with a natural death. But yeah, the rate of suicides, murders, and accidental deaths was much higher for the descendants than for the general population in Northam.”

  John rubbed a hand through his greasy hair. “Who’s left?”

  Nat felt he’d burdened John enough already. “You sure you want to know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Of the original families? In Northam? Margaret’s dad, me, you . . .” He stopped.

  “Charlie,” John said.

  Nat was about to say, Nothing’s gonna happen to Charlie, but he and John had never been bullshitters, so he just said, “Yeah. And Becca Prescott,” and his mind filled with an image of her face. He set his jaw. “He’s in some kind of a hurry.”

  “You can say that again. Speaking of which, I visited the widow Godwin. She’s half off her rocker.”

  “I had her at the clinic. She’s convinced her dead husband is walking the hills.”

  “Crazy is what it is,” John said. “But hold on. What about Jimmy Stearns?”

  “No relation to the squadron. Did you find out anything about him?”

  “Not a lot there. Local, kept to himself. Seemed to have a crush on the Dyer woman, from what some of his friends said.”

  “Maybe he got in the way.”

  “But why all this killing now? What happened?”

  “Who knows? Maybe the traveler’s found a powerful host, someone whose gifts are stronger than anyone before. The binding is the combination of two souls. Maybe the traveler has met . . . another powerful spirit.”

  Nat let the journal fall onto the coffee table.

  “You know, my mother always said the family was cursed. Mental illness, alcoholism, strange accidents that were probably suicide.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  “But now we know, old man,” Nat said. “Now we can stop it.”

  “Stop it how?”

  The question Nat had been turning over and over in his mind all night. “By finding the traveler.”

  John’s eyes asked, Then what? As if he knew the answer but didn’t want to say it out loud.

  “And then we kill him or her before the spirit has a chance to jump to another host.”

  “But Charlie . . . ,” John said.

  “What about Charlie?”

  John pursed his lips. “What if I took him out of town?”

  Nat stared at his friend, then dropped his gaze. “Would Leah let you do that?”

  John closed his eyes. “No. She wants him near her mother, to keep an eye on us.”

  “What would happen if you did it anyway?”

  “I’d lose him for good, probably.”

  Nat thought that over. “I’m not sure it matters, John. When the traveler’s done here, it’ll move on to its next set
of victims. Might as well keep him close.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  The next morning, John drove down Hanover Road and parked thirty yards down from the tree where Margaret Post had been hung. He waited for two cars to pass him, then made a U-turn and parallel-parked between a Land Cruiser and a Jeep Cherokee. John killed the engine, hit the button to pop the trunk, and got out. Inside the trunk was the rake he’d placed there after breakfast. He hoisted it out and carried it across the street.

  He was tired of thinking about nzombes and spirits and travelers and the rest of it. That was Nat’s specialty; Nat was smarter than him and would figure it out. He’d decided to go back to what he knew. He was going back to inspect the crime scene again. Forensics had inspected the site, but it never hurt to look again.

  Should have done it a few days ago, John thought. This voodoo shit has me all discombobulated. Back to basics now: hard work and a fucking Glock 19 on his hip.

  But he didn’t want the Northam News spotting him out here and coming around to ask questions. He hadn’t brought any crime scene tape or any of that. He was wearing his old green Dockers work pants that he used to work around the house, and a Red Sox ball cap. If people mistook him for a Wartham maintenance man prettying up the shrubbery, it was all good. No one needed to know.

  John stood in front of the tree and studied the thick branch where he’d found Margaret’s wrists tied. It looked normal. Only a thin strip of bark missing where the rope had scraped against the tree as Margaret struggled for her life. The breeze kicked up, and the bare branches above his head began to knock into one another in a whispery rhythm. In between the hard clacks, he could hear the indrawn breath of the wind.

  He inspected the foot of the tree. The day of the murder, it had been drizzling. The branches above, even without their leaves, had protected the ground from any rain falling directly on it, but eventually the water had seeped through and dripped onto the ground. There’d been a struggle when the killer grabbed Margaret, a hell of a struggle, he’d guessed. He’d remembered the ground being all mashed up, no footprints as such—he’d checked, and forensics had confirmed—just churned-up mud. Now John dropped the teeth of the rake onto the far edge of the patch and said a little prayer. Let me just find something, God. Lead me to the killer.

  He pulled on the rake handle. The metal prongs kicked up dirt as they went, and objects shot out ahead of the moving pile of dirt. John leaned over, picked up the biggest one—a rock—and tossed it aside. When he’d reached the end of the dirt patch, he went back and sifted the freed-up dirt, sweeping through the grit slowly with his big hand. Nothing.

  He took up the handle and went back to the far edge, resting the last tooth in the final row he’d made on the first run. Then he jerked back and pulled it through again.

  Two Heineken bottle caps and three more rocks on the second pull. John bent down and picked up one of the bottle caps, brought it out onto the sidewalk to get a little sunlight on it. It showed faint ridges of light red rust running along the creases where the opener had bent the metal. That had to take a little time, he thought. The caps had been down in the mud a couple of weeks at least, which told him he was going deep enough with the rake.

  He tossed the cap and went back to the patch, lifted the rake to the edge, and pulled. Nothing this time, just clumps of mud and a few broken twigs that had been trampled down into the earth. An SUV came riding up Hanover, a silver Honda Pilot, slowing as it approached John. He pivoted away, toward the brick wall, and leaned on the rake, pretending to rest. The car slowed even further; John stood there, willing the SUV to keep moving. Finally, the engine revved and he saw the Pilot continue down the street.

  John walked slowly back, moved the rake farther to the left, and went again. He was halfway through the patch when something silver and dirt-encrusted spit out from the right side of the rake. It disappeared into the churned-up mud, and John leaned on the rake, looking for it. Where the hell’d it go? He walked around the edge of the patch, propped the rake on the brick wall, and returned, squatting down over the last place he saw the flash of silver. John slowly ran his fingers over the center of the mud patch, sifting, feeling for something odd. He brushed away the top layer of dirt—as light as chocolate shavings—and peered at the stuff beneath it. Nothing. He grunted, moved left a few inches, and repeated the procedure.

  I’m sure I saw something, he thought. Too heavy to be an old pull tab from a soda can, and too evenly shaped to be a piece of slate or a shiny rock. Where the hell—

  He brushed a little mound of dirt with his fingers and there it was. A little glint of silver. John picked it up and began to rub the dirt away with his thumb. It was a medal, round and heavy in his hand. It showed a bearded man striding across what looked like a river with a little boy on his back, the man’s calves half submerged in the water.

  John Bailey knew his saints. There it was, written at the bottom in raised letters: St. Christopher protect us.

  I’ll be damned, he thought.

  He turned it over. On the back, in flowing script, was written: To Becca, from her father, 4-9-2008.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Charlie entered his Gmail password—Patriots88—and his in-box came up. There were two new e-mails, the first from someone called FoxyRedhead, but he quickly deleted it and moved down to the next one. It read LeahSD72. That was Mommy.

  He opened the e-mail:

  My big boy—

  Don’t worry about Daddy, he’s probably just working too much. As usual. Has he yelled at you a lot? Charlie, has he hit you ever, even once? I won’t get Daddy in trouble but that’s something you can always tell Mommy.

  I don’t want you to tell Daddy this, but I’m planning a surprise visit—well, it’s not much of a surprise anymore, is it?!!—in a few weeks when I can get away from work. I will come to see you as soon as I fly into the airport. There might even be an early birthday present in my luggage, but only if you can be a good boy and keep our secret. I don’t know about an Xbox, baby, Mommy’s job isn’t giving her the hours she needs, but I will bring you something special.

  Charlie, if Daddy does anything that really scares you, just let me know and I’ll send Grandma over to get you right away. That might get me in trouble, but don’t worry about that. We’re a team, right? You and me. So if you feel afraid, EVER, just write me.

  I’ll see you soon, baby, and we’ll go for ice cream at Mrs. Cathay’s, I don’t care how cold it is. The ice cream out here is so terrible you wouldn’t believe it.

  Don’t worry, my love. I’ll see you soon.

  Love,

  Mommy

  Charlie frowned and clicked the Sign Out button and turned off the power. He stared at the dark screen.

  He wanted to see his mother, but he was afraid of a fight between her and daddy. And why didn’t she tell him what to do? Maybe there was a medicine his Daddy needed. Or a book he could get to tell him what was wrong.

  Charlie didn’t even want the Xbox anymore. He just wanted his daddy to go back to being normal.

  * * *

  John sighed deeply. He was sitting in the front seat of his car. Between the pad of his thumb and his right index finger was the St. Christopher’s medal, turned upside down. He was rubbing it as his thoughts wandered, always returning to the same uncomfortable place. He could feel the scratchy outline of the inscription underneath his thumb.

  He was thinking of Nat. This will kill the poor bastard, he thought. John often worried about Nat being alone, wanting to be alone. As much as John kidded the guy about his primo bachelor existence, Nat took it to extremes. He’d never let himself care about anyone, except Charlie and himself. It was like they were the only real human connections the man had. He was the most popular loner John had ever met, always keeping people just far enough away so that they wouldn’t have any claims on him.

  But Becca? Nat’s eyes went wid
e when he talked about her. The girl had gotten to him.

  And now this.

  “Goddamn it,” John said quietly, rubbing his right temple with his fingers. A headache was taking root right under the skull. What if Becca had killed Margaret Post? It was, at best, a murder by—what do you call it? Murder by proxy—he remembered it from one of his academy classes. That’s when you convince someone to kill on your behalf.

  But what do you do when the real killer might be some dark presence, a long-dead Haitian sorcerer? And could Becca Prescott really have slit Margaret’s throat, gutted the poor girl, while that thing was inside her? Goading Becca on?

  John closed his eyes tight and rubbed his temple harder. The headache seemed to shoot its tentacles to every part of his brain. Go back to what you know, John. Police work. Bring the woman in and charge her if she’s the one. At least you’ll get one of the creatures off the street.

  “Ah, hell,” he said, picking his phone up off the center console and dialing Nat’s number.

  * * *

  In his condo, Nat sat back slowly on his couch, his cell phone to his ear.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  John’s voice was scratchy, and sounded far away. “There’s been a development in the Margaret Post case. I found something. I’m coming over—”

  “Just tell me.”

  He heard John sigh. “I found a piece of jewelry belonging to Becca.”

  Nat closed his eyes, a feeling of dread rising in his gut. “Where?”

  “Right under the tree. Where the struggle was.”

  Nat, his eyes still closed. He saw in his mind not Becca’s face but the gouges in her wooden door, down the gloom of that airless hallway. He could not keep the thought away: What if it wasn’t a possessed Walter Prescott who was chopping at that door, screaming to kill his innocent daughter? What if Walter seized a rare moment of sanity, when the traveler’s “thought stream” was weak, and tried to kill the source of his misery and his family’s destruction? What if that was the true message of those horrible murderous gashes on her door?