‘‘Let’s go back,’’ Wilson said. ‘‘Maybe something else will occur to us in the meantime, and we can come at it from another angle.’’
Brian didn’t tell Wilson about what he’d seen, about the letter. He wasn’t quite sure why. Part of it was a proprietary interest in the information. Part of it was embarrassment about his dad’s connection to all of this. Part of it was . . . something else.
They drove back to the Times building, speaking very little on the return trip. Wilson, no doubt, was thinking about his article, planning on how to write around the fact that he lacked a final interview with Bill Devine. But Brian was thinking about that letter. It was like a virus, this written language, popping up everywhere all of a sudden, corrupting everything with which it came into contact. What did it mean? he wondered. Was the secretary in on this? Could she read that letter? Did she know what those symbols meant? Was she able to communicate that way? Or was she like his mom, merely a confused recipient, trying to figure out what the hell was going on? Was Bill Devine going to end up like Tom Lowry, slaughtering his loved ones and going on some sort of murderous rampage?
Was his dad?
Brian pushed that thought from his mind.
There was too much to think about, and he didn’t want to think about any of it. He glanced out the side window of the car but quickly readjusted his focus to look at the glove compartment in front of him.
There was graffiti on the cement wall adjoining the freeway.
And he didn’t want to discover that any of it consisted of those strange scribbled symbols.
Once in the newspaper office, he and Wilson went their separate ways, Brian to the bathroom, Wilson to Jimmy’s office to explain what had happened. But they were apart for only a moment. Brian was just sitting down at his desk, about to check his e-mail, when Wilson poked his head around the corner of the cubicle. ‘‘Come here,’’ he said. The seriousness of his voice and the shortness of the command told Brian that something was up, and he followed the other reporter to his desk.
‘‘I received a new message,’’ Wilson said. ‘‘From Bill Devine.’’ He said no more but handed the phone to Brian, pressing a button on the console.
Brian grew cold as he heard the by-now-familiar voice with its deep tone and robotic cadence.
‘‘My cock is raw and red and bleeding. But my erection will not stop. Oh no, it will not stop.’’
Six
Kirk was awakened in the middle of the night by a wild pounding on the door of his apartment. The noise was so sudden and explosive that it startled him out of sleep, and for a brief disorienting second, he thought that a monster from his nightmare had invaded the real world and was coming for him. Then he recognized the sound for what it was and scrambled out of bed, pulling his robe on over his underwear and hurrying out to the front door.
He put his eye to the peephole to see who could be out there at this hour.
His dad.
Kirk’s heart lurched in his chest. His father was standing in the well-lit corridor dressed in a tuxedo, as though he had just stopped by on his way home from an awards show. He stood there calmly, arms hanging passively at his sides, and there was no indication that he had been the one to beat so frantically on the door only a few seconds prior.
Kirk remembered what Tina had said about Orlando at the Mediterranean restaurant—I expect to wake up one morning and read about him in the paper: MAN KILLS WIFE AND SELF—and thought once again that the description applied just as well to his dad. More so, perhaps. For Orlando was merely horny, immature and a little too intense. His father was weird in a whole different way, a more primal and ultimately more unfathomable way. If Kirk had been the type of person to believe in aliens or nonsense like that, he might have suspected that his dad had been replaced by a pod person, so great was the change in his personality.
Only that wasn’t really the truth. The truth was that the change was more organic than that and, as much as he hated to admit it, the seeds of this behavior had been there all along.
Kirk continued peering through the peephole at his father. The scariest thing was that he recognized the expression on his old man’s features, that bland, blank look of utter vacuity. He’d seen it on his own face. Earlier this week, Diana had stayed over for a few days on her way to Milan for some fashion show or other. They’d had fun, as they always did. There would never be anything serious between them, but whenever they hooked up, it was a party.
Her second night there, though, he’d had a freaky dream, and in the dream he’d craved blood. He did not seem to be a vampire, not exactly, but he desired the taste of blood, and when Diana announced that her period had come, he’d ripped off her pants and panties, thrown her down on the bed and shoved his face in her crotch, lapping up the warm red liquid that was leaking from the soft opening between her legs.
He’d awakened with an erection and a mouth so dry that it made him cough.
In reality, Diana’s period had come, and though he knew it was crazy, he’d carefully sneaked out of bed, crept to the bathroom and looked in the wastebasket, where he found a menstrual pad wrapped in toilet paper. Kirk withdrew the object, unrolled the toilet paper and gently touched his tongue to the red spot in the center of the pad. Gagging, nearly throwing up, he spit into the toilet and quickly downed a swig of Listerine to purge the sickening taste from his mouth. Disgusted with himself, he’d thrown everything back into the wastebasket, feeling ashamed and horrified and sickened.
Yet . . .
Yet he’d still retained something of the craving. The reality of blood had grossed him out, but the idea of it still held an allure.
Sealing up the bottle of Listerine, he’d looked at himself in the mirror.
And had seen that blank, vacant expression.
He’d made Diana leave in the morning, inventing a transparently false excuse that offended her enough to get her out but not so much that she’d never come back. Then he’d dumped all of the trash in the building’s incinerator—to avoid temptation.
Something was wrong with him. He didn’t know what it was, but he sensed that it was not something that could be cured by a psychiatrist. This was not the result of some childhood trauma or chemical imbalance. It went deeper than that. This was something inexplicable and inhuman that had recently manifested itself from God-knew-where. And was now a permanent part of him.
The same was true for his dad.
Tenfold.
His father held up both hands, ready to pound on the door once again, and Kirk announced, ‘‘Hold on a sec! I’m opening up!’’ He unlatched the dead bolt, the chain lock and the door lock, then opened the door, filled with a sense of dread, unsure of what might happen, prepared for anything.
His dad rushed in, the bland, blank expression gone, replaced by a look of fear and frantic worry that, if he had not known otherwise, Kirk would have sworn had been there all along. ‘‘Your mother’s in the hospital! I just stopped by to pick you up on my way there! She’s had some sort of hemorrhage, and the surgeons have to operate right away! Hurry up, get dressed and get your things together! Your mother needs you!’’
Kirk did not believe him. About any of it. He did not believe his mom had had ‘‘some sort of hemorrhage,’’ whatever that meant, and he did not believe she was in the hospital or that that was where his father intended to take him. He thought of the way the old man had stood there in the hallway, calm, placid, unmoving, and Kirk shivered with a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. But he got dressed and accompanied his dad anyway, both because he was afraid not to and because he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that something had happened to his mom—and that his father was the cause.
It was more uncomfortable than ever, being alone with his dad, and the two of them rode through Manhattan in silence. His father had actually driven here himself. That was a shock. Kirk had not even known that his dad could drive. Right there, his mental alarm bells should have been set off. As far as
he knew, his old man always had a driver on call, and whatever the reason might be for the great and powerful Stephen Stewart to motor himself around the city in the middle of the night, it could not be good. Kirk glanced over at his father, who was staring straight ahead, face impassive. He could see a dark spot on the white tuxedo shirt, and although it looked black in the bluish glow of the dashboard lights, he found himself wondering if the spot was really red.
If it was blood.
His mom’s blood.
They weren’t going to any hospital. As if he’d needed any proof of that, his dad was driving in the wrong direction. He could be mistaken, but it looked to him as though the old man was heading home. Kirk stared out the windshield at the passing city, wishing he’d brought along some kind of weapon. Glancing again to his left, he saw that dark spot on the white shirt.
Blood.
He clenched his fists, wondering where they were going, wondering where his mom was, as the car rolled silently through the night.
Arlene lay on the hardwood floor, bruised, bloody and battered, unable to move, legs nailed down, broken arms lying uselessly at her sides. She had never before felt such agony—at one point she had passed out from the pain—but now she was simply numb, her senses overwhelmed and shut down by the brutality of the experience. Stephen’s sexual urges had been getting more deviant and dangerous for quite some time, but she still hadn’t been prepared for tonight’s assault, for the savagery of it.
For the incomprehensible strangeness of it.
She wondered where he was now, if he was planning on coming back. Her fear was that he’d gone for Kirk, that he intended somehow to harm their son.
Why the hell had she left Paris? She should have stayed there. A part of her had known it would come to this—fear was one of the reasons she’d taken the trip in the first place—but it was not something she’d wanted to acknowledge. Besides, she’d returned for her son. She’d missed him.
And, though she’d never admitted it until now, she’d been afraid for him.
She gagged, a wad of Stephen’s fur caught in her throat, and she quickly turned her head to the side as she tried to spit it out, not wanting to choke in case she vomited. Even such limited movement caused the pain to flare up again, and a lightning flash of agony burst through the fog of numbness and shot through her body all the way to her crotch. Her bowels evacuated.
For the hundredth time, she tried to think of a way to get to the phone. If only she kept her cell phone on her person instead of leaving it in her purse. But of course that was impossible. She’d been asleep when he attacked her, when he’d yanked her off the bed and thrown her to the ground, screaming out his joy as he’d pissed on her face and stomped on her arms. There was no way she could have avoided any of it, and though she knew she was merely parroting the clichéd women’s group mantra that she was the victim and was not at fault, it was true, and it gave her comfort to cling to such civilized bromides.
There was noise from downstairs.
Voices.
Stephen’s and someone else’s.
Kirk’s?
Arlene tried to call out, tried to scream, but all her scraped throat could manage was a raspy wheeze. Her heart was racing, which only made the blood pump out of her faster. She felt it oozing from between her legs, seeping from the cuts and bites all over her body, in rhythm with the pulse pounding in her head. Arlene was under no illusions about her accomplishments as a mother. She knew she had always been far too self-absorbed to ever make a good parent. But despite whatever mistakes she had made, she loved Kirk, and it was her concern for him that enabled her to lift her head slightly an inch, two inches, three—and then let it fall to the floor. The sound of her skull hitting hardwood seemed deafening in her head, but she doubted that it was more than a muffled thump in the real world, so she struggled to do it again, hoping to lift her head higher this time and bring it down with more force, in order to make a louder noise. She needed to warn Kirk, needed to alert him to the fact that she was here so he wouldn’t be caught off guard.
So Stephen wouldn’t be able to kill him.
For she knew now that that was the plan. Stephen had left her alive only so she could watch her son die in front of her. This hadn’t been just a sex thing. Not this time. It was something else entirely, and though she didn’t understand it, she was pretty sure how it would end. Her only hope was to warn Kirk and pray that he would be able to fight off his father.
The voices grew closer. Footsteps sounded on the stairs, footsteps that were amplified through the wood of the floor. The voices were definitely Stephen’s and Kirk’s, and while she couldn’t make out any words, she could hear the tone of each, and she knew from the stilted, awkward rhythm of their speech that both of them were wary, suspicious of each other.
There was hope yet.
A moment later, they walked through the door, and she saw instantly the look of shock and horror that engulfed Kirk’s features. He turned and swung at his father, but Stephen was ready for him, and with a fiendish grin, he head butted his son and grabbed his groin, squeezing and yanking, eliciting from Kirk a shriek of pure primal pain.
Arlene closed her eyes, not wanting to see the rest. Beneath Kirk’s cries, she recognized Stephen’s familiar grunts of pleasure. She did not know what was happening, but she could guess, and when her son’s tortured screams were abruptly cut off, she was filled with a horrible sense of relief. Warm liquid was seeping from beneath her closed eyelids, and she could not tell if it was blood or tears.
It ends this way, Arlene thought. She was filled with a bottomless bone-deep sadness. Here, at the last, where there was no deception, only truth, she could admit that the sadness was not for her son but for herself, for all the things she hadn’t done and would never get to do, for all the possibilities that were now no longer possible. She thought back to her childhood in Marfa and wished she’d never left, wished she’d married Tully Daniels and had a big brood of kids and led a life of simple domesticity out there on the prairie. She hadn’t become what she’d wanted to be, who she’d wanted to be. She’d ended up not an actress or a writer or even an astronaut, but a trophy wife, and if her dreams had to be thwarted, at least she should have been allowed to live longer, at least she shouldn’t have had to die like this.
The pain returned, slicing through the numbness, a spike of agony that shot through her wounded body and caused her eyes to flash open. Something close to a scream erupted from her raw, raspy throat.
Stephen was standing above her, looking down. She could not tell what he had done to hurt her even further, but she saw that he had ripped off his tuxedo and was naked. Moonlight from the window glinted off his scales, and his tufts of fur looked like tribbles attached to the sides of his body. His cock was fully erect. Grinning, laughing, singing in some alien language, he began dancing, his feet stomping on her arms and legs, on her pelvis and her rib cage. She managed with great effort to close her eyes, and as the life ebbed out of her, she saw in her mind images of the past: the plains of Texas, brown weeds bending in the prairie wind; Marfa as it had looked in her childhood; and Kirk, as a baby, lying in his crib and cooing up at her, his toothless smile promising a future that had never come.
Seven
1844
James Marshall stood on the porch of his cabin looking out at the barn and the field beyond. A small breeze blew, causing dead leaves to dance through the swaying forest of tall green grass, inspiring a crow to glide through the sky instead of fly, black wings spread out as it coasted on air. A chicken walked by, pecking fastidiously at the dirt in front of the house, then flapped up, squawking, as a stray gust fooled it into thinking it was being attacked. His gaze alighted on the cows, placidly standing by the fence that enclosed their meadow. He had built this farm out of nothing, constructing the house and outbuildings himself, using what little remained of his money to buy seed that first year. In the time since, he had made a life for himself here in Missouri, and he’d become so
successful at farming that he’d been able to expand his endeavors and start a trading business. That, too, had flourished, and he had done far better here than he had ever foreseen.
He had always been a restless man, moving far and often, continually chasing opportunity in search of a better life. But Marshall had found that better life here, and he honestly thought that he had finally settled down, that this would be it, that he would live out the rest of his days in the Platte Purchase—and happily so.
His eyes welled with tears as he looked out at his land, and he angrily wiped them away, embarrassed to be showing such feminine emotion. It was foolish to become attached to any one place, to allow sentimental feelings to form over what was, after all, just earth. But the truth was that he had put a lot of himself into this farm, a lot of thought and effort, toil and time, and if it had not been absolutely necessary to leave, he would have chosen to remain here until the day he died.
Two years.
That was all the time the physician had given him, and James had no doubt that the man was right. For the past five years, he had suffered unduly from fever and ague, maladies that refused to go away no matter what remedies he ingested. And he had tried them all. If there was to be any hope for him, he would have to leave these bottom lands, abandon his farm and his business and set off for healthier climes.
The thought saddened him. Not merely because of the hard work and energies that he had invested in this place, but because he had grown fond of the people as well. Farming was a lonely life, but trading was not, and he had many friends in Leavenworth as a result of his ventures. He would miss the fort and the community of settlers that surrounded it. There was even a woman he had been courting, Susan, whom he thought he might eventually marry, but that was no longer a possibility. She would not leave Missouri, and if he had any chance of living beyond the short time the doctor had allotted him, he could not stay.
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