Nightscape

by Stephen R. George

  “But what about Evan? Why is he saying those things?”

  “Well, I talked to Helen Johnson, and she assures me that Evan has not suffered any consistent or ritual types of abuse. She thinks his memory loss is due to simple trauma. The accident. In fact” — and now Peterson looked away from her — “she suggested that the boy’s ideas of being followed and his fear of his father might have come from you.”

  “That’s not true!”

  Peterson shrugged and held out his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”

  Bonnie composed herself, feeling slightly sick.

  “Well, what about this Shep Thomas?”

  “Did he ask you for money?”

  “No!”

  “He’ll get around to it, if he contacts you again. Trust me. There are people who do this for a living. Zero in on other people’s grief and need.”

  “This is crazy. I mean, I’m coming to you with information, but you’re telling me to forget it.”

  “I’m telling you that you better prepare yourself for having Evan for quite a while. Whatever way you look at it, your ex probably won’t be in any shape to take the boy, even if we find him today. I think you should help Evan adjust to that, and help him get over these fears.”

  “You mean imaginary fears.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Angry, Bonnie stood, sending her chair rattling across the floor. Looking uncomfortable, Peterson led her back down to the lobby.

  “Listen, if you’re not satisfied with what I’m telling you, why don’t you contact somebody else?”

  “Like who?”

  Peterson dug out one of his cards, and on the back scribbled down a name and a number. Bonnie took it from him.

  “Marcus Vernman?”

  “He’s with the department. A consultant. We’ve gone to him with this case. But if you’d prefer to hear it from the horse’s mouth, he’ll talk.”

  She shoved the card in her purse, still angry.

  “I’m sorry there’s nothing we can do,” Peterson said. “But, really, there is nothing we can do. I’ll check out what this Thomas guy told you, but don’t hold your breath.”

  He shrugged his shoulders in a gesture that made it obvious he thought it would be futile.

  “Goodbye,” Bonnie said.

  “Listen, if you need anything, don’t hesitate to call.”

  She nodded distractedly as she headed for the main doors, and for the first time realized that he didn’t mean what he said, about calling him. He had never meant it.

  Grandpa waved to Evan from the step.

  “Tomorrow, you bring some clothes you can get dirty, and maybe me and you will drop the canoe in the river and paddle around a bit.”

  Evan glanced at his mom. “Can I?”

  “Sure, I guess, if you’re sure,” she looked up at her father-in-law.

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Thanks for looking after him. And thanks for the clothes for him. I had nothing. See you tomorrow.”

  “Our pleasure. Sure you won’t stay for dinner?”

  “No, but thanks.”

  Evan looked through the door of the house, but he could not see Grandma. She had disappeared when Mom arrived.

  “Bye, Evan!”

  “Bye, Grandpa.”

  In the car, Mom chewed her lower lip as she drove. Evan watched her with interest. She looked worried. When she realized he was watching her, she smiled.

  “How was your day?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do anything special?”

  “Nah.”

  “Looks like somebody changed your dressing.”

  Evan instinctively moved his hand to his side so she could not see it.

  “I did it myself,” he said.

  “Hmmm.”

  When they were on the freeway, she looked at him again.

  “Evan, do you remember when you were telling me that you thought your dad wanted to give you away?”

  The question caught him by surprise, and for a few seconds he did not answer. Mom looked at him, waiting.

  “Uh huh,” he said at last.

  “I asked you what they wanted to do to you, and you said, change me. Remember?”

  “Uh huh.”

  A slow chill was spreading over his shoulders, and he shivered.

  “What did you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was your dad mixed up with some people that you didn’t like?”

  Again, the question caught him by surprise. It made him think of the black time, and when he did that he got frightened. He thought of this afternoon, of the lady and the man outside the window, and how he had seen himself through their eyes. That was from the black time, too.

  “Evan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was staring straight ahead now, going faster than the other cars. Evan held tight to the door handle.

  “Yesterday, when I went to the bookstore, you left the car. Did somebody chase you?”

  She knew! He turned to her, feeling relief as well as shock.

  “How did you know?”

  “Who was it?”

  “A man.”

  “Did he try to hurt you?” Her knuckles were white around the steering wheel.

  “No, he just scared me because I didn’t know who he was. He helped me. I think. He stopped them from getting me.”

  “Stopped who from getting you?”

  “Them. A man and a lady.”

  “How did he stop them?”

  “He held them while I ran.”

  Mom blew out a deep breath. She looked at him. “Were they friends of your dad’s?”

  “Maybe. But it wasn’t the same lady.”

  “The one with the red hair who wanted to kiss you?”

  “It wasn’t her. She was there this afternoon.”

  The car swerved and Mom made a small sound. “She was where?”

  “At Grandpa’s and Grandma’s. Outside, looking at the house.

  “Did Grandma or Grandpa see her?”

  “No.”

  “Did she do anything?”

  “No.”

  For a long time Mom just drove. She stared straight ahead, and chewed her lower lip.

  “Honey, do you know what a cult is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you heard the word?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “A cult is a group of people who make other people be their friends, and then make them do things they sometimes don’t want to do.”

  “Oh.”

  “Was your daddy mixed up with a cult?”

  Evan thought about it. He thought about the lady with red hair, and the fat boy/man. Dad had been frightened of them, he thought. At first, anyway. And as he thought about it, another slice of memory came to him, of knocking on Dad’s bedroom door because he had heard a noise in the night darkness, and opening the door, and seeing the lady with red hair on the bed, sitting on top of Dad, without clothes on, making noises like she was hurt, and how she had turned around and saw him and smiled, and how he had closed the door slowly, backing away, but not until he had seen the other shape, standing in the corner in shadow, smiling, drooling.

  “What’s wrong, honey?”

  He shook his head, feeling sick, trying to block off the memory. This was the kind of thing he didn’t want to remember.

  “Daddy didn’t like them.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “But they made him like them.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

  “Daddy cried one time, but he didn’t know I saw.”

  Mom swallowed hard, shoulder-checked, and made her off ramp.

  “Evan, did they ever do anything to you?”

  Evan squeezed his hurt finger. Even thinking about those things made the finger throb, made him look into the blackness for other memories, but he pulled back and closed his eyes.

  “I don’t know.”


  “Think, honey, think hard.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to think.”

  “Okay, sweetie, okay, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  They didn’t talk again until they got back to the house.

  “Can I go to the park?” Evan asked. He’d had enough of being inside for one day.

  Mom looked at him as if he’d called her a name. “Maybe you better just come inside. It will be dark soon.”

  “Not for two hours yet.”

  There were other kids in the park, throwing a ball. He hadn’t played with other kids in a long time.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, honey. Not yet. Please, for me. Just come in and watch television. You can go out some other day. Soon. I promise. But not yet.”

  He could tell that she was near to crying, so he shrugged and nodded. She put her arm around his shoulder and hugged him as they walked up the path.

  They were quiet through dinner, and afterward they watched television. There was a movie on about a crippled boy who went for experimental surgery that worked for a while but then made him worse again. Mom cried. Evan thought it was pretty stupid.

  It wasn’t even completely dark when he went to his room. He could still hear kids outside, playing somewhere. They laughed and screamed once in a while. He wished he was with them, but knew he never would be. He was an outsider. Always had been. He could also hear his mom, somewhere in the house, walking around. The TV played quietly.

  He was half undressed when he noticed the rash on his stomach. The skin was pink and shiny, covered in little bumps. It didn’t itch at all. He couldn’t feel it.

  He pulled off his pants and underwear. The rash extended from the middle of his abdomen, down past his crotch, onto his thighs. The skin looked puffy.

  “Oh, gross,” he said.

  He pressed his stomach softly. Silvery fluid pushed out through the skin.

  “Oh, yech.” Just like his finger.

  He opened the door and started to call for Mom, but decided against it. She would cry. She would take him to the hospital. And besides, it didn’t itch or hurt at all.

  At his belly button a patch of skin was flaking, just like sunburn. He sat on the edge of the bed and poked and picked at that for a while. The skin came off in his fingers. At first in little pieces, and then in larger pieces. Silvery fluid covered the skin underneath. It didn’t hurt at all.

  He pulled at one particularly loose piece, and was horrified to see it pull farther and farther away from his belly, lifting up from the skin underneath. He had to use both hands to pull at it, tearing it softly away from his abdomen. It continued to come, lifting easily in a single sheet, from one side of his belly to the other. As it rose on his chest it started to split and tear. One flap came off cleanly to his left nipple, and stung as it passed the protruding bud of flesh.

  “Ouch!”

  The sheet of skin in his hands was at least a foot per side, ragged and wet. He dropped it to the floor and closed his eyes. He ran his hand over his belly. It was moist and slippery.

  “Oh, shit.” His dad said that sometimes.

  He took one of his few T-shirts from the bag Grandpa had sent along and started wiping his belly. The silvery fluid came off, soaking the shirt. He dried himself as best he could. A sweet decaying smell filled the room.

  Afterward, he put on a pair of pajamas. With the tips of his fingers he picked up the sheet of moist skin and pushed it under the bed. He pushed the wet T-shirt after it. He would take care of them tomorrow.

  Shivering now, feeling slightly sick, a bit weak, he climbed into bed. He closed his eyes tightly, hugging himself. He thought of the lady with red hair, and her smiling face followed him down into sleep.

  Chapter Eleven

  After getting Evan up, feeding him breakfast, and shuttling him across town to the Laws, Bonnie was late for work. When she arrived, Mike gave her a sad little look but said nothing.

  “Sorry. Traffic.”

  He said nothing, but his eyes said On Saturday morning?

  She spent the first half of the morning boxing magazines for return, but her mind was not on the task. She worked distractedly, and more than a few times had to recheck what she had done after accidentally mixing magazines with distributors. The job took an hour longer than it should have, and the whole time Mike stood watchfully in the receiving room.

  At 11:00 she relieved him in the back so that he could work in his office. She loaded a cart with newly received books and began putting them out on the shelves. She found this relaxing, a job that took enough of her attention to keep her occupied, but left her mind free enough to wander.

  It was while she was passing the True Crime section, on the way to Military History, that she spotted the two titles.

  Cults: Their Methods and Madness by Simon Maitland, and The Secret Ways: Cults and Their Victims by Lionel Moore. The store tags on the back told her the books had been in stock for a good four months, but she had never spotted them before. True Crime was not one of her interest areas, not like History, or Performing Arts, or even Bestsellers, but as she stared at the covers, both of which were very tight black-and-white close-ups of faces you couldn’t quite define, she felt a chill.

  She left the cart of books in the aisle and took the two cult books to the front counter. The store was empty. From the speakers in the rear corners came the electronic strains of one Vangelis track or another. Outside, stray pedestrians strolled by, cars stopped at lights, the sun shone down, dust spiraled in the warm morning air.

  Moore’s book, a mass-market paperback, was the more commercial of the two. Bonnie read through a series of accounts of abductions, torture, and sacrifice. Half the book was dedicated to an interlinked series of Satanist groups in California who, if Moore could be believed, had abducted and either a) killed, b) tortured, c) sexually abused, d) brainwashed, or e) all of the above, as many as three thousand children since 1982. At the center of the book were photographs: ritual daggers with wavy blades intended to inflict savage wounds; stone altars that might have come from some steaming Peruvian jungle, dripping virgin’s blood; a residential bungalow in Sacramento used, purportedly, as a diabolical torture chamber; a line of twenty small corpses exhumed from unmarked graves in a Bakersfield farm; blank-eyed children, naked and nearly starving, transported through time, somehow, hideously, from Dachau or Belsen, chained to pillars in what looked like a barn, while police officers, traumatized by the sight, attempted to free them; arrest photographs of men and women with heads hung low, arms cuffed behind them. It all made Bonnie feel rather sick. Was this sort of thing really going on around her? Jesus, it was horrible. What kind of world was this? She closed the book, disgusted, and realized that she was trembling.

  Reluctantly, she picked up the Maitland book. This one was trade-paper format, and a bit more scholarly in tone, focusing on the pervasiveness of secret cults in contemporary North America. Most of it Bonnie found unreadable sociological analysis, demographic breakdowns of cults and their adherents. She was about to close the book, disappointed, when she discovered the appendices at the rear. Appendix C was a regional breakdown of cult activity. The first page was a map of North America, shaded according to amount of cult activity. California was a hotbed, shaded nearly black. After the Moore book, she had expected that. What surprised Bonnie most of all was the Midwest, covered in every shade from light gray to darkest black. A splotch in the middle of the continent. Minnesota was black as the pupil of some devil’s eye. She flipped through the pages until she found the detail listings for the state.

  And here it was. A record as long as her arm of the cults active in the area. Satanists, devil-worshipers, pedophiles, Anubists, Aztecs, moon worshipers, torturers, death freaks, everything a twisted human psyche could dream up as diversion. The largest segment of all consisted of quasi-religious groups, weird Christian sects. Bonnie read through the descriptions of each. Peterson was right. She had given him enough information to finger any or a
ll of the groups mentioned here, or effectively none of them. She checked the index, but found no listing for “creche.” At the end of the Minnesota section, listing the experts who had been consulted, was the name Marcus Vernman. She closed the book, and again shuddered.

  Looking out the window at the street, she felt as if she were looking at a different world than she had known only ten minutes ago. Things were going on out there that she knew nothing about, that she didn’t want to know anything about. Little people going about their nasty, secret business, living and breathing under the same sun and clouds as she and Evan.

  A noise from the shelves caught her attention, and Bonnie turned from the window with a start.

  Somebody was in the store. She glimpsed a head bobbing below the shelves of Religion/Philosophy. For a moment, the face looked eerily like the close-ups on the covers of the cult books, splotchy and ill defined. A man.

  She stiffened, backed up against the desk. When had he come into the store? Had the bell tinkled? Had she been so immersed in the books that she had not heard?

  The head bobbed into view again, and this time the face registered properly. A youngish face, perhaps her own age.

  His eyes caught hers and looked away.

  Just a customer, Bonnie thought. But she could not move. She felt frozen to the desk. Her legs felt rubbery.

  The Vangelis CD had ended, and now Mike had put on the Bernard Hermann sound track to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She had never liked the sound of it, but now less than ever. The store seemed to close in on her.

  He’s just a customer, she thought. Just a customer. That’s all. And she had work to do. She’d wasted enough time with those books.

  Steeling herself with a deep breath, she left the security of the front counter and moved into the aisles. She’d left the cart of books near the back, and she wound her way there now, peering down the rows of books. He was crouched now in Health, flipping through a book. He glanced toward her as she went past, then quickly away.

  Just a customer.

  She had picked two mysteries out of the cart to shelve when he left the Health aisle and moved her way.

  Bonnie froze. He was taller than she, and bigger. His face was very white, his eyes small and blue, his hair blond and neatly combed. Just like those faces she had seen in the book, bent to the ground, humiliated in capture. He smiled, or started to, and she saw that he had no teeth, just glistening gums.