The Intruders

by Michael Marshall Smith

  I left, walking more quickly now. Fisher was not standing in front of the hospital. That could have been because of the media presence beginning to build there—the killing had been pretty public—but he wasn’t answering his phone either.

  And when I got back to his hotel, the man behind the desk told me he’d checked out a half hour before.

  I retrieved my car and drove out of town. On the way down to the freeway, I pulled over opposite Pioneer Square. I got out on impulse and walked over to it. My hands were shaking. I don’t know why. Because of Anderson. Because of what Blanchard had brought up about things that had happened in L.A. I sat on the bench for twenty minutes, taking deep breaths, until I felt okay again.

  Then I left the city, headed east toward the mountains. The morning was clear and bright at first, a few fluffy clouds only for decoration. Traffic was light, and I seemed to slip along almost too easily, as if the world was colluding in letting me run from a place where I’d been instrumental in a man’s death.

  As I pulled toward the top of the Cascades, it began to get colder, the scene more muted, rusty dogwood the only color among the trees and bushes, their stems looking a little too much like sprays of dried blood. The sky frosted over, and clouds crept down out of it to touch the land, roosting in trees like the ghosts of long-ago campfires, a damp and silent echo of the lives of the people who had once lived peacefully here with the wood and the earth and the water.

  Would something of this kind persist now in Byron’s, the impression of a man sitting hunched at a table in slanting morning sunlight, or would people sometimes see or sense a shape at the door or the window of the house up on Broadway, the remains of a man trapped on the other side of a curtain, trying to find his way home?

  A shadow of my father had remained in our house in Barstow after his death, I knew that much. My mother had lasted only five months before selling the place and moving to be closer to her sister, of whom she was not overly fond. I went home for the weekend perhaps three, four times during that period, and each time the house felt as if it had been dismantled while I was away and put together again exactly the same. I always felt like I was trying to catch up with what had happened in it, partly because of the way I’d received the news.

  At college I had a notably progressive professor who, among other fine qualities, was open to having favored students hanging out at his house on Friday evenings and—while engaged in suitably brainy talk—helping themselves to the alcohol-based contents of his fridge. It had been on a morning following one of these freewheeling tutorials that I’d woken to the knock of two cops on my dorm-room door. I was hung-over, majorly freaked out—there was a small stash of marijuana in my drawer—and their presence made me feel caught out, late, permanently off balance.

  My father was found on the kitchen floor, wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else. He’d heard something in the night, come down to investigate—as men must. He had suffered extensive stab wounds from a large, serrated hunting knife but died of blows to the head from a claw hammer. The hammer lay next to him on the floor. It was his. I’d been with him when he bought it, on a Saturday-morning walk, and had watched him use it to mend chairs and fences and put up pictures. As I’d told Anderson, the intruders had stolen little. The household’s money had always gone toward making sure that there was good food on the table, that I had clothes and the books I needed for school. The stuff that matters can’t be taken—except, I suppose, for fathers: stolen by strangers looking to finance the evening’s drinking or a new set of tires or a bet on a horse that was already set to lose.

  It was clear that whoever had shattered Bill Anderson’s life had not been on so mundane a quest. In a few days, it would rotate off the television and radio coverage, but not out of my life. I had lied to Blanchard. Up until 8:51 that morning, Anderson’s existence had been of tangential relevance to my own. But no longer. There is an intimacy to carrying someone else’s blood on your hands, in seeing their eyes as they realize the sharp and finite limit to how much more of the world they themselves will see. Anderson’s soul had now been nailed to my own, which meant that Joe Cranfield’s estate and the building in Belltown were problems I had to solve, together with the question of how this related to my wife.

  By the time I turned off onto 97 and started into the woods toward Birch Crossing, I knew that this was something I could not now let go of, and that this would not be a good thing for me, or for others. The God of Bad Things still knew where I lived. He always would. If I did nothing, he would come and find me anyway.

  Maybe it was time to take the fight to him.

  chapter

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Madison’s second night on the streets had felt even longer than the first. After going to see the silly man in his office—an episode that was a little cloudy to her now—she had walked for quite a while. She bought some food at a small market and ate it in a park, and cried for a bit, then went walking again, going on and on, long after all the stores and restaurants were shut, keeping to alleys and moving within shadows. She stood for a while in front of a building that was boarded up, even went and pressed on one of the buzzers. She took out the keys she’d found in the back of the notebook, tried them in the door. They did not fit. This annoyed her a great deal. Something had been stolen from her, she now believed. This was where it was.

  She turned away from the building and stalked back into downtown and along near the Barnes & Noble, past the public library with its weird glass and metal. She let herself be led down the right side of the slope, diagonally toward the bay. She walked for so long that after a while it seemed to her that she was asleep and only dreaming that she was a little girl, always on the move, trying to find something she knew was important. The only problem was, no one had ever told her what that something was. She finally wound up in an area from which she had no inclination to move. It was a tiny park in front of an old building, but there was nothing obviously special about it—except, she noticed, that the building had the name “Yesler” on it, one she recognized from reading the notebook. The park had no grass, just trees and a covered place to sit and a totem pole. There was also a small statue of an Indian chief’s head, where you could get a drink of water.

  She had to move away often, because there were others around, homeless people who appeared on the corners of streets opposite and wandered over to stand in the park for a time, not doing anything, before shuffling on. Sometimes they took a drink of water. They seemed to want to be there for a while, but not to stay. She wanted to stay, but she could not. When you’re a little girl you’re not allowed to do a lot of things. Being a little girl sucked. She had never realized just how much before now, how bad it could make you feel.

  Eventually she just got too tired to keep moving. She climbed over a low wall and found a door where the bottom half was broken, and via a short passage made her way into a parking lot that was shaped like a sinking ship. On the very top level was a single car, left alone and by itself overnight.

  The car was like her, she decided. The back door was unlocked.

  She climbed in and made herself comfortable.

  And woke, very suddenly, an hour later. For a moment she had absolutely no idea where she was. But there was something else that she could remember now. Very clearly.

  She pulled out the Post-it note and pen from her pocket and quickly wrote down the four numbers in her head, as fast as she could, convinced that they would be snatched away from her as they had been before.

  But no, this time she made it. She counted the numbers, feeling her heart start to race. It looked like enough. It finally looked like the whole number.

  Moving quickly now, she got out of the car and ran down through the parking lot and back out through the passageway. She emerged in the side street and spun around, looking for a phone. Couldn’t see one and started running again, knowing that this would draw attention but also that she had very limited time.

  She ran and ran until she final
ly found a phone that worked. She grabbed the handset and stabbed in the numbers from the piece of paper. She let out a short, fierce shout of triumph as she got the last one done.

  Hopping from foot to foot, she waited until she heard it picked up at the other end and a voice—and then she started to babble, talking as fast as she could.

  But a blackness poured down across the inside of her eyes, and she stopped being able to hear what she was saying. She fought it, as she had fought in that man’s office the previous afternoon and seemed to be always fighting now, struggling against this dark cloud that got thicker and thicker around her, a cloud that sparked and was lit from within with thoughts and memories that made no sense, that made her want to do bad things. She screamed in her head and pushed harder and harder, trying to keep them away from her.

  But the next thing she knew, she was walking away from a phone that was now broken, and the piece of paper that had been in her hands was shredded to pieces and floating away on the wind, and her knuckles hurt, and when she realized that there was blood on her hands, her first thought was surprise that for once it was her own.

  She was woken again sometime later by the sound of a car door opening.

  “Jesus Christ,” said a voice.

  Madison sat up quickly. She was back in the car, and it was bright now. She felt like she’d slept for quite a while. She felt a little better, too. Less…confused.

  A man was standing outside the car, staring wide-eyed at her. He had pale skin and sandy hair. He was looking not at her face but lower down. She looked, too, and saw that both her hands were speckled with patches of dried blood. There was a little on her coat, too.

  “It’s okay,” she said, though actually she now realized that her hands hurt quite a lot. “I’m fine. I broke a phone, that’s all.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I needed somewhere to sleep. You left the door unlocked. Don’t worry. I haven’t stolen anything.”

  “That’s…look…”

  The man evidently didn’t know what to do. He was wearing a suit and a tie and had the glaze in his eyes that Madison’s dad did when he was really busy and was having trouble seeing past the front of his own head. But he obviously also believed he had to do something nice.

  “It’s okay,” she said soothingly. “I’m fine. Honestly.”

  “I need to…I’ll take you to the nearest police station. Come on.”

  “That really won’t be necessary,” Madison said, slipping out of the car and smiling up at him.

  “I think it kind of is. Necessary. I can’t just…”

  She shook her head. “What time is it, friend?”

  “What? It’s nearly midday. But…”

  “Perfect,” she said. “Thanks for everything. I shall recommend your facilities very highly.”

  She reached her right hand up toward him. Disconcerted into an automatic response, the man shook it limply. Madison shook his hard and then walked away. As she started down the stairs, she turned and glanced back. He was still standing there, looking down at his hand. She knew he wouldn’t be coming after her. She’d never understood how easy it was to deal with grown-ups, after you realized most of them were basically frightened of you. Sure, moms and dads were okay with their own children, but they always watched other children out of the corner of their eyes, as if all other kids were wild and ungoverned. And children could be, Madison knew. Little girls had a power and light all their own. It was something most grown-ups couldn’t see—but something that, once glimpsed, you wanted to share. You wanted to spend time with them, to get to know them thoroughly, get to know them very well. This was what the man in the yellow car in Portland had been about, she now realized, though he’d been an amateur. He didn’t know you could find the spark and keep it, too. If she had her time again, she would have talked to the man properly, told him what she knew.

  She emerged from the parking lot and walked down toward the square with the totem pole and the drinking fountain. A lot of things were clearer to her now, even parts of the notebook that had originally been inexplicable:

  The seven ages of man?

  Of course not. As with everything, there are nine.

  By 9—we must be rooted, living securely above or below. 18—we may start pulling strings. By 27—there should be sufficient control to be consistent in aim. At 36—adulthood, true Dominance begins. 45—without integration, the crisis point. 54—the age of Power. 63—Wisdom. At 72—the search starts again. 81—time to leave: we do not die as others do, and so the parting of this place must be under our control. Add the numbers which make up these nine ages—3 + 6 or 7 + 2—all in turn resolve to a digital root of 9. So it has been enshrined, hidden in plain sight. A triangle = 180° (1 + 8 + 0 = 9); the square and circle are 360° (3 + 6 + 0 = 9)—all regular geometrical shapes have a digital root of 9. Even 666—do I need to tell you by now to add those three numbers, and then add them again?

  This is not an accident. Our mathematics was created to honor the power of 9. To the power of the Nines. But the Nines themselves have become weak in the meantime, spiritualized, have even come to believe in their own cramped version of the lies. To believe that our power must be constrained, that we must enter life as a newborn—must hide in plain sight, just another tree in the forest.

  But the forests have all been cut down.

  I will not fall with them. Did Aristotle not say “The weak are anxious for justice and equality: the strong pay no heed to either”? What happens to those who do not believe as the Nines do? Those who dare contradict them? Ah—over those souls, the truly free, then they would make themselves gods, sitting in judgment upon us.

  St. Thomas Aquinas said: You must know a soul by its acts.

  You are free to know me by mine.

  And Lichtenberg said: We imagine we are free in our actions, just as in dreaming we deem a place familiar which we then see doubtless for the first time.

  I am what you dream

  I watch your back, always.

  I am what guides your hand.

  As she entered the square, she caught sight of her reflection in a plate-glass window and was surprised at how short she was. She looked at herself for a long time, remembering the day when she and Mom bought the coat in Nordstrom’s, at the head of Courthouse Square in Portland. Remembered the two of them seeing it for the first time and knowing they were circling it together, that it was really expensive but they both wanted it in their lives. Madison had said nothing, knowing that this was a decision her mother had to come to under her own steam, that an extravagant spur-of-the-moment gift would appeal to her sense of hip motherhood, where acceding to a demand—however muted or subtle—would not: Madison not understanding how she knew this, but knowing it all the same.

  They left the store and walked around others, looking but not really looking, and Maddy had known that if she just kept quiet and was sweet, they would find themselves back in Nordstrom.

  They had.

  And she realized now how she’d known how to get what she wanted that day, and on other days. She realized that something within her had always known how to dominate, how to quietly get people to do what she wanted. Someone had been at her back then, too.

  He had always been inside.

  It was nice in the square, but it did not feel as it had at night. Though there were more people around, it somehow felt less crowded. Maybe that was because the people here now were not the same. They were not like the homeless men, but rather were tourists, passing through. People who took pictures of things instead of seeing them, who thought they owned a place because they stood in it, instead of understanding it worked the other way around.

  One of them was different, though. When she’d been there about half an hour, sipping her way through an Americano from the Starbucks on the corner, Madison saw an SUV pull up on the other side of the street. A man got out. He walked straight through the traffic and into the square. He didn’t seem to be there for any reason, but
sat on a bench for a while. He was quite tall and had broad shoulders and for a moment Madison had an urge to run over to him and tell him her name and ask him to help. She could see that he was different from the man whose car she’d slept in, that if this man knew that there was something he should do, then he would not stop until it was done.

  But instead she found herself slipping off the bench and walking quickly out of the square—not looking back until she was sure the man wouldn’t be able to see her. Madison might want the man’s assistance, but the man in the cloud did not. She dimly recalled the attempted phone call in the night—largely through the aftereffects on her hands—but not what it might have been about. Instead she realized that she now wanted to make another call, to the man she’d previously been avoiding. She felt stronger now. She could deal with him.

  When she located a phone—this time in the lobby of a hotel a few streets away, a fancy one with an awning with red and gold stripes—she got out the notebook and removed from it the white card with the number on the back.

  He answered immediately.

  “It’s me,” she said. “I need some information.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Did you hear what I said, Shepherd?”

  “Look,” the man said. His voice was patient and annoying. “I want to help. But I need to know where you are. You’re nine years old. You’re…not safe.”

  “Are you done talking?”

  “No,” he said. “Madison, nothing’s going to happen until you tell me a place to come and meet you. Do that and we’ll talk. I’ll find out whatever it is you need to know. But you’re making it hard for me to do my job.”

  “You’ve done your job,” she said. “And have been paid. Despite the fact that you didn’t do as you were told, did you? Which means I have no reason to trust you.”

  “What did I do wrong? I came to you—”

  “Too early. You were supposed to wait until I was eighteen, like always, but you wanted your fee now and didn’t care that I wasn’t ready. But I am ready, in fact. I’ve always been ready to take control. Though I guess you remember that. You had better anyway.”