The Intruders

by Michael Marshall

  “Very rarely. She was strong. She was also far too young. There’s some concern over how Marcus got through in the first place. One of our helpers may have been involved.” She shrugged. “Sometimes revisitors jump ship. Once in a blue moon, they get kicked out. Someone will keep an eye on the girl. We’ll see.”

  She saw how I was looking at her and shook her head. “Not going to happen here. I told you on the pier. This is who I am. How I’ve always been, underneath.”

  I noticed a gray limousine parking fifty yards away up Yesler. A man got out, old, African-American, distinguished-looking. The car drove off, and the man walked down toward the square. He sat on a bench by himself. This struck me as odd in some way.

  I was distracted by Amy lighting another cigarette. It’s the simple things that seem the most wrong. Even though it was clear to me that I was not there with someone I understood, I didn’t want her to leave. Once this person left, whatever she was now calling herself, I could be left with no one at all. So I started asking questions again.

  “What was Anderson’s ghost machine?”

  She sighed. “You shouldn’t know about that either.”

  “Tough. I do. What was so important that a guy like Bill had to be killed? And his wife and child?”

  “He chanced upon something that allowed the eye to glimpse certain things.”

  “Christ, Amy—just be straight with me. What things?”

  “The clue’s in the title, Mr. Whalen.”

  “The machine meant you could see ghosts?”

  “Souls. While they’re waiting to come back again. They’re all around us, they live in a…Trust me, it was a bad machine. No good would have come of it. People are better off not knowing certain things.”

  “So Cranfield paid Bill to drop his research.”

  “Joseph was a kind man, and he had become rich and powerful and gotten used to handling things his own way. Even people with his experience forget the broader picture once in a while. It was a mistake. It should have been discussed among the Nine.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The people who look after things. Make strategic decisions. First among equals. You know the kind of thing.”

  I realized that another man was sitting on the bench in the Square now. He was not communicating with the first man, just sitting at the other end, watching the world go by. And a woman in her late fifties was standing by herself on the other side, near the totem pole.

  “Unfortunately, the money made Anderson aware he was onto something,” Rose said. “He started hinting about his work to people on the Internet.”

  “That was his big crime? Hinting?”

  “There will come a time when the Internet will be our best ally. Sooner or later someone there will have said everything that can be said, proved every cross-eyed piece of lunacy, and then there’ll be no distinction between what’s true and what’s not. We’re not there yet.”

  “So your people had Anderson murdered.”

  “Nothing should have happened to his family.”

  “But now I know some things. So—”

  “You think you know, that’s all. And I’m sure you realize how it sounds. How seriously did you take Gary when he told you what he thought he knew?”

  “So what happens to me?”

  “That’s up for discussion—though not with you.” She hesitated. “I find myself unable to mandate the usual course of action. Amy’s still strong. But that will pass.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” I said. My voice felt shaky. “She’s pretty tough.”

  “We do, however, know about the night when you allegedly chanced upon suspicious activity in Los Angeles. We know that your colleagues and Internal Affairs elected to accept your version of events on the basis of exemplary previous ser vice and on the fact that the four men you shot dead would not be missed by their own mothers. But I also know, because Amy knows, that’s not the way it was. You went out that night looking for two of those men, and you took your gun but not your radio or your badge. What happened was premeditated. Amy could testify to that.”

  “She wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Maybe. But I would.”

  “In which case I’d start talking.”

  “And all that gets you is a cell with thicker padding on the walls. Your record is not your friend here. Nor your personality in general.”

  There was coldness in her voice now that made me realize I’d spoken with this woman at least once before. The day I’d seen Amy, on the pier, for some of the time I’d been dealing with Rose. And before that? Presumably. Maybe from the day we met, those moments when my wife had seemed just a little different, unaccountable, not quite like herself. As we all do, from time to time.

  When had Rose started to take fuller control? When we lost the child that would have kept us together? Could an event like that have made Amy start to withdraw deeper inside herself, leaving the stage empty? Or was it just something that was destined to follow its course, an assumption of power that happened according to schedule?

  “So who’s the guy in the pictures on your phone?”

  She smiled. It was a warm, private smile, the kind to make a husband sad. “His name’s Peter, since you ask.”

  “I didn’t ask his fucking name. I asked who he was.”

  “Oh, sorry. He’s a computer programmer, Jack. He lives in San Francisco. He’s twenty-four. He plays guitar in a band. He’s very good. Is that more what you meant?”

  I didn’t know what I’d meant. “How long have you been seeing him?”

  “We’ve only met once. Night before last, in L.A.”

  “That’s why you were down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “How come you had pictures of him, if you never met before?”

  “One of our other helpers tracked him down. She took some pictures, sent them to me. She had the preliminary conversation with him, which is one of the tasks the shepherds perform. We exchanged text messages after that.”

  “I still don’t get it. What do you mean, ‘tracked him down’?”

  The smile still hadn’t left her face, and it made me aware how long it had been since I’d seen a glow like this on her. I wondered how much of that was my fault and how much of it had been outside our control.

  “A long time ago,” she said, “there lived a young woman who was very, very much in love. With a jazz musician. An incredibly talented man, someone who could create music like nobody else, who could…Well, I guess you had to be there. But this man was also someone who couldn’t come to terms with the nature of who he was, of the way things worked in his head. He fought himself. He drank too much. He died very young. But I’ve found him again now, and it will be different this time.”

  “So is he here? In Seattle?”

  “No. He needs time to adjust. But the first meeting went very well. I think he’ll come here soon. I hope so.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “I always have.”

  For a moment I hated her very badly, of course, yet still I didn’t want her to go. I’d spent the last seven years of my life with someone who at least looked like this woman. I knew that when I stood up, the first step I took would be into a world I’d never been to before.

  She was glancing across at the square more often now. There were now five or six people standing there, unconnected but in the same space.

  I looked at her face, remembering all the ways I’d seen it, all the places.

  “Did you do anything about Annabel’s birthday?”

  She grinned, and for a moment it was different, and in her eyes I saw something of a woman I used to know. More than something. A lot.

  “Check,” she said. “Girl’s going crazy in Banana Republic ’round about now.”

  Then she was gone. “Don’t worry,” Rose said briskly. “Amy will continue to do her jobs, perform her roles in other people’s lives. No one but you will ever know.”

  “And wha
t about me?”

  “What about you?” she said, and the conversation was over. Her cup was empty. I’d run out of time.

  “What is it about this place?” I asked nonetheless. “This square? Why does it feel like it does?”

  “There are places where the wall is thinner,” she said. “This is one of them. That’s all.”

  I counted the people now standing beneath the trees, as if they were eight strangers, looking in different directions. One of them over the far side, I now noticed, was Ben Zimmerman.

  “I only see eight.”

  “Joe was the ninth,” she said. “A replacement has been selected.”

  I nodded. I understood. The move to Birch Crossing had started soon after Cranfield had died, I now realized, though presumably the grooming process had started long before: when Amy had been chosen to be part of the transfer of ownership of the building in Belltown.

  Perhaps even back when she was eighteen, and had met someone named Shepherd, and her life had started to change track.

  “So what happens now?”

  “I say good-bye.”

  She got up, started to walk across the foot of Yesler Way, toward the square.

  “Amy,” I said loudly. The woman hesitated. “I’ll be seeing you again.”

  Then she resumed walking. When she reached the other side, she stepped into the square beneath the trees, stood among the others there. None of them spoke, but for a moment all bowed their heads. They could still have been random passersby, pausing in a place that had been here long before this modern city, that had been the real reason, perhaps, that it came into being.

  This city, in what had been far wilderness, a place that certain people could call their own: somewhere that had been special and revered even before they found their way here. On the flight to L.A., I had read some of the book on local history that I’d bought only a couple of blocks away. I knew that there’d once been a village called Djijila’letc on this spot. The translation usually given for the name was “the little crossing-over place.”

  Or, I suppose, the place where you can cross over. From here to somewhere else. And perhaps back.

  I let my gaze drift up to the few remaining leaves in the trees, as a soft wind seemed to move the branches. I could not feel it where I sat, but I was close to the building behind me, and the afternoon was cold anyhow.

  I watched these leaves for some time, listening to their dry, whispering sound. It seemed then as if it were raining, too, yet not raining, as if it could be both at once, as if many things and conditions could exist in the same place, together, hidden only by the splendor of light.

  When I looked back down, the square was empty.

  chapter

  FORTY-FOUR

  As soon as I let myself into the house, I knew that everything had changed. Houses are pragmatic and unforgiving. If something alters in your relationship to them, they shift, turn away. I saw that Amy’s computer had gone, some of her books, a few clothes. In a way it was distressing to see how little had been removed, how small a part of the life that had been lived here was now judged to be worth moving on.

  I limped back to the living room and stood in the center. Took out my cigarettes and lit one. Defiantly, thinking, That’s the end of all that. But I couldn’t go through with it. I unlocked the door onto the deck and went out there instead.

  People never really leave. That’s the worst crime committed by those who go and those who die. They leave echoes of themselves behind, for the people who loved them to deal with for the rest of their lives.

  I hardly slept at all that night, or the next. Even if my mind had been able to find any quietness, the pain in my shoulder wouldn’t have allowed it to settle. Lying on my back hurt. So did lying on my front and my side. So did sitting. Existence in general, in any posture, hurt.

  I spent the days in the living room or out on the deck. Eventually I dragged one of the chairs out there and stopped going back inside, except when I was trying to sleep. It was far too cold for that.

  Two days later the snows finally came.

  They came all at once, in the night. I missed their arrival, having at last managed to get some rest. When I hauled myself out onto the deck the next morning, I gasped aloud.

  Everything was white. Everything I could see. I knew that it was all still there underneath, of course, but for the moment the world looked as if it had been made afresh, as it always does.

  I love snow. I always have. And in loving it at that moment, I was wishing Amy were in the house to go wake up, to bundle into a robe and drag out onto the deck to see it with me. To stand there shivering with her, not caring about the cold, looking at all that white and feeling as if we’d been reborn together, reborn into a new world we could make our own.

  And finally, and savagely, I cried.

  In the afternoon I forced myself to consider going into town. I was running out of the only things I had appetite for, coffee and cigarettes. As I was checking my wallet for cash, I realized there was something wedged among the bills. A small blue plastic rectangle, barely thicker than a credit card and a sixth the size.

  It was the memory stick Gary had given me, from the camera on which he’d taken the photographs of Amy in Belltown. I’d forgotten about it.

  I went into the study and put it into a card reader attached to my laptop. There were only four files on the disk. The first two were the pictures I’d already seen. Even at greater magnification, and with the benefit of hindsight, Ben’s identity wasn’t obvious. I couldn’t blame myself for not working it out earlier, though I tried. The next file was a Word document. When I double-clicked it, nothing seemed to happen for a moment, and I thought the document had been corrupted and crashed the machine. When it finally came up on-screen, I realized that the delay had been caused by the fact that it was huge. Tens of thousands of words, littered with diagrams.

  I scrolled through it, trying to figure out how the document was organized, but soon decided that it simply wasn’t. It started with a list of people Gary believed had been intruders (Frank Lloyd Wright, J. S. Bach, the Wandering Jew, Nikola Tesla, Osiris, vampires, the builders of Stonehenge, Thomas Jefferson, all of the Dalai Lamas, to name but a few). The prophets of the Old Testament, too, with their extraordinary ages—four, five, eight hundred years. Naturally, they didn’t live that long as the same person, Gary wrote; it was the same soul returning time and again to different bodies. From here he moved to another quasi-historical figure: one who on the morning of his birth received three visitors bearing “gifts”—symbolizing this child’s experiences from previous lives. Gary claimed that the boy’s mother was told not that the Holy Ghost would come upon her, as the Bible had it, but that one would come upon her son.

  The promise of life everlasting. The Lord, who is our shepherd. Father, Son, Holy Ghost.

  “ Oh, Gary,” I said.

  But I continued to read, and it soon dawned on me that he’d been hiding the truth even on the day he died. He’d spoken then as if he thought the intruders were an isolated phenomenon, a few individuals who’d worked out a way to persist down the generations, a cabal who were different from the rest of us. But he hadn’t believed that at all.

  He wrote that the word “nightmare” was derived from the Scandinavian legend of nachtmara—demons who squatted on the chests of sleepers, bad dreams long having been believed to be caused by evil spirits trying to force their way inside. He claimed that the original role of midwives had been to scout for healthy pregnant women, whose babies would probably live past infancy, who would make good sites for aging intruders to move into next time around. He noted that nobody knows how antidepressants work and claimed they masked a badly integrated intruder—which was why initial benefits often turned to worse depression or self-harm: suicide an unconscious attempt to kill an intruder, the thing roosting inside, conflicting our lives. He believed that this also explained our species’ affection for drugs and alcohol, as they dampen the main personality, allow
ing the intruder some time in the sun, a chance to direct our behavior once in a while. The intruder was less inhibited, more experienced, and simply a different person, and prone to make us behave uncharacteristically. This, presumably, was why Gary had given up drinking, and why it’s said God looks after drunks and small children. It’s not God, of course. It’s the hidden person inside.

  The person, Gary believed, inside all of us.

  Only a small group of these were aware of coming back. To keep the rest of us sane, secure in our identities, we were happy to have the second soul fenced off, gagged and occluded from our conscious minds. When something leaked through the wall in our head—a piece of déjà vu, a dream about somewhere we’d never been, a confused body image, a facility for a foreign language or a musical instrument, the simple feeling that we should be somewhere else and having some other life—we shrugged it away as being merely the human condition: fucked up, fractured, never masters of our own minds.

  Gary even had a scientific rationale. It was an adaptation, he said—and the real reason humans ruled the world. At some point on the flat, grassy plains of Africa or in the cold mountains of Europe, our species derived evolutionary advantage from being able to support two souls within a single body. The modern soul didn’t realize but was able to make intuitive decisions—lifesaving and thus naturally selecting calls—on the basis of experience gained in the intruding soul’s previous lives. But there was a cost. When the souls cooperated, the person worked. When they didn’t, the person was damaged. Broken, dysfunctional, violent, alcoholic. This was why some of us are mentally ill, or bipolar, or just can’t get our shit together, and seem to enter the world like that.

  The soul goes somewhere for a while, but then it comes back, forcing its way into children, into our babies. Then it waits, consolidating, growing in power, until the time is right. Why do we hear nothing about Jesus until he was in his mid-thirties, Gary asked? Because that was when the intruder was mature, ready to assume control. Any internal threat to the security of the system was dealt with swiftly, as he claimed Salieri had done with Mozart, when the latter grew disenchanted and worn out and started dropping hints in his work, disguising them as hidden references to Freemasonry. And why had Jesus himself never returned, as he promised? He got lost on the other side, was just another shadow among those who Bill Anderson’s machine would have enabled us to glimpse, had it not been destroyed.