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, allowing 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.
And so on.
There was more of it. Too much to read or believe, far too much evidence for it to be true. I didn’t know what to think about the person who’d been my wife, about what had caused her to change. But I couldn’t help wondering if I’d helped caused Gary’s obsession, through something I’d said by the side of a running track long ago, if my dumb comment had lain festering at the back of his mind all these years, as Donna’s death had, gradually taking over his mind. I closed the document.
The final file on the disk was another picture. When it came up onto the screen, I caught my breath. It was a photograph of Gary, with Bethany. A badge on her dress said she was two years old that day, which meant that the picture must have been taken only a few weeks before she died. She had a big old slab of cake in one hand and whipped cream all over her face and in her hair—and was grinning up at her father, her eyes bright with the shine of someone gazing upon one of the two glowing souls who make up her entire world.
The picture had been taken indoors, with flash, and was very sharp. I magnified it and scrolled to the area at the side of Bethany’s right eye, then sat there looking at it for a long time.
She did have a scar there. Small, crescent-shaped.
When I closed my eyes, I knew, as Gary had, where I’d seen that scar before.
I walked into town. It took a long time. Pushing through six inches of snow caused a sharp pull in my shoulder and neck with every step. By then I had accepted the pain. There was no escape from it.
Birch Crossing was almost empty of cars, but Sam’s Market was open. I walked alone along the ai
sles, staring without comprehension at all the things you could buy. My hand hovered over a can of sauerkraut for some time, but then I realized I didn’t know why I liked it and left it where it was.
When I got to the checkout, Sam himself was standing there. He bagged my few purchases without saying a word, but as I shuffled toward the exit, he spoke.
“Could get the boy to bring things up to you at the house,” he said. “If you wanted.”
I stopped, turned. I remembered the last time I’d seen him, at the gathering at Bobbi Zimmerman’s house. I thought it was unlikely I would be buying anything in Birch Crossing again, but I nodded.
“Thank you.”
“Need to look after that shoulder,” he said.
I hadn’t managed to make much sense of this by the time I struggled back to the road that led to the house. And by then I’d noticed that the gate had been pushed wide open and there were tire tracks leading up our drive.
A car I’d never seen before was sitting next to the SUV. I let myself into the house and went to the top of the stairs to look down.
A man was sitting on my sofa.
I went back to the kitchen. Poured a cup of coffee from the pot. I had gotten badly chilled on the walk back. I took the coffee down the stairs and sat in the chair opposite the sofa. The man had a cup on the table in front of him.
“Make yourself at home,” I said.
“The keys,” Shepherd said, nodding toward the table. “Rose doesn’t need them anymore.”
“Why are you here?”
He reached into his coat, pulled out my gun and my cell phone. Put these on the coffee table, too. Then finally the clip from the gun. “How’s the shoulder?”
“How do you think?”
“It was nothing personal. You just looked like the kind of man who would get in the way.”
“You killed a friend of mine.”
“Like I said. Nothing personal.”
“You’re the second person who’s shown concern for my shoulder this afternoon.”
“I assume you’ve figured out that this town is one of their places? A headquarters?”
“I was getting there. I chanced upon a pre-meeting celebration, I think, at my neighbors’. Are there a lot of towns like this?”
“Only two in this country. There aren’t many of these people, all told.”
“And who are they, exactly?”
“I assume Rose gave you the wacky version. She likes to kid around sometimes. They’re just a club, Mr. Whalen. Like the Masons. The Rotarians. The Bohemian Grove. Successful people who scratch one anothers’ backs. Some of them have this mythology thing going. Doesn’t mean anything. It’s like having Santa Claus as an excuse to give presents at Christmas. Nothing more.”
I looked at the stuff on the table. “How come I’m getting these back?”
“They’re yours, and the big meeting is over. Evidently you were discussed.”
He reached into his coat once more, brought out a small box, which he put on the table next to the other objects. “If you decide to accept, walk up the hill and talk to Mr. Zimmerman. He’ll explain the deal.”
“Whatever it is, I’m not doing it.”
He rose. “That’s up to you.”
I watched as he ascended the stairs. At the front door, he stopped, turned.
“Let me just make one thing clear,” he said. “These people only take yes-or-no answers. If it’s no, someone will come to call on you. That won’t be personal either.”
He left.
I picked up the cell phone first. Amy’s number had been removed, along with Rose’s, and the call log had been erased. I could look up Amy’s number easily, of course, but I knew that there would be no point. If I hoped ever to see her again, it would not come about through a phone call. At the moment I had no idea what an alternative course of action might be.
I put the phone back and moved the small box toward me. Inside were business cards, printed on pure white stock. There was nothing on them but a name, or perhaps it was a job title.
Jack Shepherd
I left the cards on the table and went outside to the deck, closing the sliding door behind me. The world sounded dead and flat.
And very quiet.
I walked to the end of the deck and down the stairs. Instead of heading onto our land, I turned and went around the side of the house, up the slope, pushing the snow-covered bushes aside. When I neared the front, I got in close to the wall and moved my head out carefully.
The car was still parked in our drive.
I pushed the clip into my gun and flicked off the safety. Kept low as I moved across to the back of the car. Straightened quickly as I slipped out around the driver’s side. There was no one in the car. Just a black suitcase on the backseat.
I walked over to the door to the house. Stood to the side and pushed it. It opened slowly. I swung out, gun in front. My shoulder didn’t hurt anymore. I nudged the door with my foot and stepped inside.
The house was still and silent. I took four steps, five, until I was within six feet of the top of the stairs. I waited there.
Moments later Shepherd came out of Amy’s study and into the center of the living room, moving quietly, swiftly, at ease in someone else’s place. There was a gun in his hand.
I fired three times.
When I got down to the living room, he was still alive, lying twisted on his back. He seemed to be gazing at something behind me, something or someone, staring past me like a man facing down a crowd. He was trying to raise his gun. I didn’t think he was going to make it, but you want to be sure.
I shot him again, and it was done.
I stood over him for five minutes, perhaps ten, as his blood pooled out over the wooden floor. It was spattered over the coffee table, too, and across the sofa where I’d last seen Amy when she was in this place, sitting working, as she so often had. I remembered the way she would look up at me and smile when I came down the stairs, making me feel I was home. I remembered also something that she/Rose had said:
There’s some concern over how Marcus got through in the first place. One of our helpers may have been involved.
It occurred to me to wonder whether Rose had sent Shepherd here to tie me up as a loose end or if the hope had been for it to pan out the other way around. If I had already started working for them.
“You killed a friend of mine,” I said again, to the man at my feet. But I knew in my heart that was not why I had done what I’d done.
He’d come to murder me. I had no choice.
I am not a killer. Not Jack Whalen. Not my father’s son. But something inside me is, and with every year that passes, I feel it struggling harder to get out.
I am on the road now. I am in Shepherd’s car. I brought nothing from the house except a photograph of myself with a woman I once loved and may once more, if I ever see her again. I have looked in the suitcase that lies on the backseat. There is a change of clothes that will probably fit me, and a large sum of money. Both the case and its contents belong to me now, I guess.
It is growing dark, and the sky is leaden. It will snow again later. I will watch it alone. By then I hope to be far from here. I don’t know where I’m going.
I never have.
Acknowledgments
A huge thank-you to my editors, Jane Johnson and Carolyn Marino, for their help in making this book a book; also to Sarah Hodgson, Lisa Gallagher, Lynn Grady, and Amanda Ridout; to Jonny Geller and Ralph Vicinanza for advocacy and advice; to Sara Broecker and Jon Digby for research; to Ariel for the web; to Stephen Jones, Adam Simon, David Smith (and The Junction) for support—and to Andreia “Peppa” Passos for so much else. Mad props as always to my ho, Paula, and to the shortie, N8. Y’all be clutch.
About the Author
Philip K. Dick award winner MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH is a screenwriter and the author of the trilogy The Straw Men, The Upright Man, and Blood of Angels. He lives in London.
www.michaelmarshallsmith.com
Credits
Jacket design by T.H. Nicholas
Jacket photograph © by Michael Manzanero/Arcangel Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE INTRUDERS. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Marshall Smith. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780062390844
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