Then the camera moved in a series of slow steps, as the person holding it stepped into the bedroom and then back and to the side. There was a quiet swishing sound and then a click. The image got even darker.
The camera panned slowly and unsteadily around the room. A faint, cold light through drapes showed shadowy, grainy images of a jungle mural on the wall, a baby-size chair and table, an orderly collection of toys stowed in a shelving unit. The view turned in a complete circle to pass the door, now closed, and ended back on the area made lighter by the clock. Looking down into a child’s bed.
The bed had bars on all sides, a crib designed for someone not yet old enough to be allowed to traverse the world under his or her own steam. You could make out the shape of the sleeping child within. Hear it, too, the slow rise and fall of its breathing.
Nothing happened for a couple of minutes. You could tell that the camera was still capturing the scene in real time, however, because of the quiet sounds of two people breathing and the noise of the image as the camera tried to cope with the near darkness.
This wasn’t anywhere enough to hold my attention. I was just about to get up when I heard something very quiet out of the television speakers.
“What was that?” I said.
Gary held his hand up, gesturing me to keep silent.
On-screen, the camera changed position. It moved quickly back from the bed, around to the side, and dropped a couple of feet. From here it had a view between a couple of the bars, of the side of a baby girl’s head.
I leaned forward, peering at the murky screen.
Nothing for a moment. Then the noise came again. It was a long, drawn-out sigh. From its quality it was obvious it hadn’t come from the person operating the camera—Gary, I assumed. Nothing for maybe another minute. Then, out of the speakers, very quietly:
“I don’t know.”
I blinked. I knew what I thought I’d just heard. There was silence again for fifteen, twenty seconds.
“Can anybody hear?”
This time there was no doubt. The words sounded strained, unevenly inflected. The child’s eyes were shut. Her body was motionless.
And she was two years old.
“Go ’way,” she said then, and this time her voice did sound right, the words vague and unformed.
“No,” the other voice said, still coming out of Bethany’s mouth. “I’m going nowhere.”
The child suddenly turned on her side, toward the camera. The motion was angry.
The operator caught his breath, evidently afraid she was going to wake, see him, and wail the place down.
But her eyes did not open. There was the very faint sound of crying, the child’s chest rising and falling more rapidly.
“I can wait,” the voice said.
Then the girl turned quickly onto her back again. There was another long sigh, and she went quiet. A moment later the screen flicked to black.
I turned to Fisher.
“Play it again.”
He rewound the tape. At no point was there a perfect view of the child’s mouth at the same time as the voice was audible. It was too dark in the room, and her face was generally at least partially obscured by the bars of the crib. But it was hard to believe that the voice had been dubbed in afterward—it shared too much of the same quality as the background sounds of breathing. Even harder to ignore was the way the child turned over at the end. There was something adult about it, fast, bad-tempered. Did children move like that?
I didn’t know. I hit PAUSE and froze the tape on the image of Bethany lying in her crib.
“How does this relate to Amy?”
He stared at me. “You’re kidding, right? I even got the name for them from you. From your book.”
“Name for what?”
“You’ve just heard one, Jack. Heard its voice, coming out of my baby’s mouth.”
I stared at him. “You think someone’s inside your child?”
“Not just her. Don’t you get it?” He leaned forward, his eyes sparking with inner light. “They’re the intruders, Jack. They’re the people inside.”
chapter
THIRTY-FOUR
There’s a feeling you get to be very familiar with as a policeman. The realization that the person you’ve been talking to has, all this time, been lying. It might be something big, could just be some small detail. But suddenly you understand that the world he’s been describing, with plenty of eye contact and the apparent desire to be helpful, is simply not real.
I didn’t think Gary was lying. But otherwise it felt the same. You want neurosis to be heroic, to confer a shamanic majesty upon the tangled and pathless inner landscape some people are unable to escape. It isn’t. There is no upside. It’s just bitterly sad.
He saw the way I was looking at him. “No, Jack. You just saw it, right there on the screen.”
“I saw a child sleeping. I heard some words.”
“Some of which she is not capable of saying.”
“Some part of your kid’s brain has gotten ahead of itself, Gary. That’s all. It’s practicing in downtime. Talking in your sleep is no big deal. Amy did it for a while. Back when she was a kid, and recently.”
Gary smiled in a strange, overconfident way. “Really.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Explain Mozart to me, Jack.”
“Excuse me?”
“The guy was composing at four, yes, and we all know this, but instead of pointing out how fucking freaky it is, we just say, ‘Cool, how super smart he must have been.’ But how could that possibly work—unless he came into the world with a flying start?”
“Are you talking about reincarnation, Gary?”
“No. This is not an individual coming back into a new body. This is when you have two people inside the same mind.”
“You think Bethany has an additional person in her head.”
“I know it. And who it is.”
“For God’s sake—you told me you didn’t believe that crap about Donna. I thought you were just drunk.”
“You didn’t watch me carefully enough that evening,” he said. “I didn’t finish half my beers. I don’t drink much anymore. I’m too smart for that.”
“Right. Sure. Whatever. And what exactly does this have to do with my wife?”
“Joe Cranfield had an intruder, too, Jack. He was the intruder, in fact, the older personality roosting in the body of the person I met. This is why Cranfield was able to hit the ground running. A financial prodigy, yes? A Mozart of music. He’s what clued me in to the whole thing in the first place. That’s why he cleared his estate at the end, without warning his wife—who wasn’t an intruder and so didn’t know the score. That’s got to be part of the system. The way these people work.”
“Which people, Gary? Your two-year-old and a dead businessman from Illinois? They had some conspiracy going between the two of them? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Jack—of course not. There’s more of them, all over the world. A group who’ve organized things so they can come back, who’ve done it time and time again—figured out how to do this hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years ago. You said it yourself, back at school. You said that thing about Donna, remember? That she came into the world knowing things.”
“Gary, that was just a figure of speech. I was eighteen, for Christ’s sake. I was just trying to sound smart.”
“But you were right. That’s the thing—some people do come into life knowing things they shouldn’t, or at least the second soul that lives inside them does. A group of people figured out that they could come back, get into other people’s heads. Hitch along for another ride. They found ways of reminding themselves who they’d been before. They started to plan ahead, coming up with ways to be truly themselves next time, instead of just thoughts in the back of someone else’s head. This is why some people are born bad, Jack. This is—”
“Gary, listen to someone with experience. People are not born bad—
”
“Really? You think all cops would say the same? All social workers? All defense lawyers? All the parents out there dealing with a kid who just cannot seem to behave, who is determined to go through all the wrong doors and kick them hard? Some of the intruders are good people, decent people. Joe Cranfield was. But some of them are not. They only come back because they didn’t fuck the world hard enough last time. The intruders wait until they’ve seen that a baby’s not going to die of some infant-mortality thing, then bed down inside it. This is why tantrums start around age two or three—as two souls start to struggle together for prominence. And why some kids have nightmares for the next five, six years, as they try to fend these things off in their sleep—confused, frightened, not understanding what’s moving into their heads in the night, when they’re vulnerable and weak. Note how prodigies always either die young or go nuts, Jack. It’s okay if you know what’s going on, if the intruder takes center stage and is in conscious charge of its destiny—if it’s part of the gang. But if you don’t know that this is what’s happening to you, then it’s too confusing and too much of the endless inner voices, and people drink or drug themselves to death or go insane.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. “I keep failing to hear how my wife fits into any of this bullshit, Gary.”
“The firm that handled Joe’s estate works out of the building that has her name on the papers, Jack. Burnell and Lytton are tied in to the organization that keeps the system going. The intruders must have to fiscally reboot each time; otherwise you’d have people with huge amounts of cash they’d accumulated, without any inheritance route, which would blow things out into the open. So my guess is that when you’re coming to the end of your present lifetime, you have to get rid of everything. Start next time afresh. Which is what—”
“Gary, you can’t use a lack of something to prove—”
“I know that, Jack—I’m a fucking lawyer. But face it: Amy and Cranfield are connected. In the end it comes back to the ten percent kept aside from Cranfield’s estate. I didn’t tell you one thing because I didn’t think you’d believe any of this back then.”
“I don’t believe any of it now.”
“The charity Burnell and Lytton helps administer? The Psychomachy Trust. You won’t find the word in a modern dictionary. So at first I assumed it was made up. But it was in use a couple hundred years ago. It means ‘a conflict between the body and the soul’—or between a person and the thing that’s inside. The trust’s a front. When an intruder dies, it pays a tithe—in Cranfield’s case nearly twenty-six million dollars. This money is used to keep the system going, or staff, or…Look, I don’t know exactly how it all works,” he admitted irritably. “But—”
“Okay,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to leave now. And seriously, Gary—go home. I mean it. Spend some time with your family and talk to someone good before this gets any worse.”
“I don’t blame you for thinking I’m…I know this sounds very strange,” Fisher said. “I have evidence, Jack, lots of it. I’ve done my research. But you already know what some people are like. The dissatisfaction, the yearning to be or to have someone or something else, people who can’t stop themselves from doing things they know are wrong, other people who seem to be able to tap into some kind of higher power right from the get-go.”
I was putting my gun in my jacket by now—I wasn’t going to need it here, I could see that, and being in this room with Fisher was making me feel worse even than talking to Anderson had. I wanted out.
But I hesitated. I guess I was thinking of a woman who’d had nightmares as a child, started talking in her sleep a year ago. Who was not behaving like the woman I knew. Who almost smelled different. Since Natalie had asked me the question, I’d been forced to realize that, when I thought back, Amy had been changing subtly over the last couple of years, from even before what had happened with our son. Was all of this explicable through the hidden presence of another man? Some tea-drinking, pink-liking enabler, promoting the emergence of a different Amy? Was it simply time in her journey for a change, a chaotic swerve into midlife, with old baggage being abruptly thrown over the side?
Or was there something else going on?
I shook my head. No. I was leaping at anything that would explain Amy’s behavior in a way less injurious to me, less to do with lack of love and irreversible change. Almost anything felt better than the obvious.
However ludicrous.
“So why did they kill Anderson?” I asked, losing momentum. “What does he have to do with this?”
“You tell me. You were the guy he talked to.”
“He barely said anything before he got shot.”
“Right. And what was that about? What could a man like Anderson do that would provoke someone to tear down his life and shoot him to death in a public place? You think that killer was working alone? Of course not. So what merits all this? What’s big enough? Tell me.”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I—”
My phone rang. I yanked it out. “Hello?”
“Mother fucker,” a voice said.
I swore. I’d forgotten just how much some guys won’t give up on the prospect of an easy buck. “L.T.,” I said. “I meant to block your number. I’ll do it now.”
“You owe me. Last chance.”
“Or what? I owe you shit. I already told you, I’m not interested.”
“You sure? They here now.”
“Who is?”
“At the place. Three people just go in.”
I reevaluated. “Into the building? What did they look like?”
“You interested now, huh?”
“Just tell me what they look like.”
“Like any other white motherfuckers. One a businessman. He wearing a suit. Other two, I don’t know.”
“Stay where you are. Call me if they leave.”
I closed the phone. Fisher was sitting on the bed, staring at the frozen image of his daughter on the screen. He looked older. Older and smaller and alone. There were wet tracks down both of his cheeks.
“What?” I asked, feeling cold. “Gary?”
“I miss her,” he said quietly. “I miss them all.”
“So go home. Forget about all this.”
“It’s too late for that.” He looked at me. “You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe in this.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. But some people just went into the building in Belltown. You want to find out who they are?”
He rubbed his face with his hands, as if having to haul himself back into the here and now.
But when he looked at me again, his eyes were clear. He stood and reached for his jacket. “Why would they even let us in the door?”
I got a clip out and clicked it into my gun, so that—for the first time that day—it was loaded.
“I’m not planning on giving them a choice.”
chapter
THIRTY-FIVE
The call came in the dead of night. Todd had fought waking. Fought it hard. He’d lain wide-eyed for hours when he went to bed. When he finally found sleep, he wanted to stay there. The sound of the phone ringing had been faint, from downstairs. Livvie had banned a telephone by the bedside a decade before, after a spate of strange calls, some wacko calling up in the night to speak to their middle child, then only eleven years old.
The ringing stopped as the machine clicked in. But barely thirty seconds later, it started again.
Todd opened his eyes. That was weird. People hitting a wrong number usually understood their error as soon as they heard someone else’s message. They didn’t call back. Anyone with a legitimate message left a message.
He rolled over. The clock said 3:21. Jesus.
No call at that hour of the night can be ignored.
He grabbed his robe and hurried downstairs. By the time he got to the hallway, the ringing had stopped again.
He heard the answering machine click in. Nobody said anything. It clicked off.
Then the ringing started once more. He grabbed the handset. “Look—”
“Be quiet,” said a voice. A young girl’s voice. It made the hairs on the back of Todd’s neck rise.
“Who is this?”
“Listen.”
There was silence for a moment.
“Dad?” A different voice. Older. Scared.
Crane gripped the phone.
“Dad, it’s me.”
“Rachel? What’s going on?”
He heard the catch of her breath. As if she were crying, trying not to let him hear. He felt frozen in place, heavy, blurred sleep turning to anger and fear.
“I’m sorry.” Then she was gone.
“Okay,” said the other voice, and he knew now where he’d heard it before. In his office the previous afternoon. “You’re going to listen now, Toddy. I found myself somewhere to stay. Guess where?”
“Put my daughter back—”
“That’s right. Rachel’s going to describe her situation to you now. Listen carefully.”
A pause as the phone was handed over, and then his daughter spoke slowly into it. “I am tied to my table. She is standing behind me. She has a knife.”
The other voice returned. “A little Hemingwayish for some tastes, perhaps, but I hope it gives a clear picture? I need you to be fully focused, Todd.”
“Please,” Crane said. “Please don’t hurt her.”
“I may not,” the voice said, as if considering the idea. “You never know. But that’s going to depend. I said I wanted to meet with someone. You were a bore about it. I need you to find another way of looking at the situation. A more workable solution, as a someone close to me might put it. I need you to set up that meeting.”
“Who—”
“Rose.”
Todd opened his mouth, shut it again. “But—”
“No. There can be no buts here, Todd. Don’t be thinking in a ‘but’ frame of mind, or I’m going to fuck Rachel up. Arrange it, and do it fast. If you don’t, I’ll just kill Rachel. If you talk to the cops, tell anyone else what’s going on, I’ll know. And then I’ll just work on her instead. So she’ll be around for you to see afterward. For you to know you made her this way, as you take out all the mirrors in her sweet little house and refit it for wheelchair access.”
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