The Bleeding Season

CHAPTER 20

The sun was going down but still bright, still hanging on and struggling against the horizon as if it had waited for us, the shafts a beautiful collage, varied hues of orange and red cutting the sky and reflecting off the gentle waves of the Atlantic.

Rick had been released a few hours earlier, set free after serving his time. He’d emerged from the gates, and upon seeing us, trotted down the steps the way the gangsters in old movies used to do it, sideways and graceful—like a dancer—as if to show that all was well, and the hop in his step proved it. While he was still in good shape physically, his football-player-build had suffered somewhat. Because he had lost a lot of weight his body looked thin and tight as opposed to thick and powerful, and it showed the most in his face, which at first glance appeared drawn. Having been deprived of sound sleep for a long period, large dark circles had taken residence beneath both eyes, and since his time spent outside had been severely limited, his complexion was paler than it had been in the past.

He’d made it very clear in the days leading up to his release that he wanted us there to pick him up and not his family. He’d need a few hours out before he could face them, he’d told me. But even we were nervous, lifelong friends or not, all of us uncertain of what to say or how to say it, of what to do or how to do it. He came to me first, and we hugged. Despite his attempt at a composed demeanor, his body felt rigid and tense.

“How you guys been?” he said, leaving me to hug Donald, and finally Bernard, who had hung back closer to the car like a shy younger sibling. Yet it was Bernard who had embraced him the longest that day, clinging to him until Rick finally wrestled himself free in a rather awkward and embarrassing maneuver, whispering, “It’s OK, man, it’s OK, take it easy.”

Rick looked at the sky like he’d never seen it before. He smiled but it came off as meaningless. Our leader had returned. Locked away the head Sultan—our Warlord—only time would tell what had emerged in his place. “Let’s go to the beach,” he said.

It was the first time I’d heard his voice without having a sheet of thick plastic between us in months, and it sounded rich and full, but not exactly as I’d remembered it. Like his smile, it lacked the conviction it once had. He’d been broken in there, and despite his best effort it showed.

“The beach,” I said. “You got it. Whatever you want.”

The ride there was quiet. Initially Bernard had tried to make small talk, but no one responded, so he let it drop. Rick sat in the front passenger seat, looking out the window but not focused on anything specific until we hit the beach parking lot. It was early fall, the tourists had all gone home and the beach was deserted. Before I had a chance to park he rolled the window down and drew a deep breath of ocean air. He smiled, and this time it seemed closer to genuine, like he was working his way toward it. “You miss the weirdest shit. All kinds of stuff you never really think about.”

We held back, allowed Rick to take the lead and get out of the car first. As he crossed the sand, trudging along toward the waterline, we slowly emerged from the car and trailed him, giving him a wide berth. Once he’d reached the water he crouched down and touched it, then looked out at the waves and the sky and the slowly setting kaleidoscope sun.

After a moment we slowly converged on him and formed a half circle behind him. The temperature was dropping, and the wind off the water was growing stronger. No one said a word—even Bernard knew enough to keep quiet—while Rick bonded with the sand and sky and air and water and whatever else he needed to see and feel and think and know. He ran his hands through the sand, let it fall between his fingers, then grabbed a handful and tossed it out at the water.

He turned back to us, cheeks flushed. “So what do you guys want to do?”

“It’s your night, dude,” Bernard said. He stepped forward and lit a cigarette. In an attempt at cool that was even less genuine than Rick’s earlier efforts, he cupped the flame from his lighter with both hands, cocked his head and did his best James Dean. “How about we go to Brannigan’s and get some steaks? We can throw back a few then hit a titty-bar or something like that.”

Bernard had begun to prematurely bald his senior year of high school, and since Rick had gone, Bernard had taken to wearing a rather silly looking wig that would eventually become one of his defining characteristics. Between that and his thick glasses, Donald often joked that he looked like he was wearing a bad disguise, but it apparently made Bernard feel better about himself.

“Check this guy out,” Rick said, doing his best to appear amused. He had clearly been shocked by Bernard’s appearance, but never said a word about it. “You a big titty-bar guy now, Bernard?”

Bernard grinned. “A lot’s changed.”

“Yes,” Donald said quickly, “Bernard’s become a wild stud while you were away. King of the Titty Bars is what we call him now. It beats Moronic Dipshit and looks better on a t-shirt.”

“At least I like titties,” Bernard said, laughing now too.

“Yes, but do titties like you?” Donald plucked the cigarette from Bernard’s lips, took a drag then stuffed it back into his mouth. “That is the question.”

“You know better than to ever get into it with Donny.” Rick put an arm around Bernard, looked at me and winked as they headed back toward the car. “Sorry that whole thing with the Marines didn’t work out.”

“Fucking training platform,” Bernard grunted. “I was kicking ass and taking names until I fell off that goddamn thing. Wrecked my knee. It’s better now though.”

“Still, that took a lot of balls, joining up like that. I’m proud of you, man.”

Bernard looked back at Donald and me and beamed.

“Like a kid with a cookie,” I mumbled.

“True,” Donald agreed. “But which one’s the cookie?”

As we followed behind them I heard Bernard say, “I told you, Rick, a lot’s changed.”

And while I had no idea just how right he was, things had changed for each of us in our own way. Tommy was a few years dead, Rick was already fighting to find an old self he’d never quite fully recover, Donald had begun to lose the battle against depression and the alcoholism that accompanied it, I was within months of being engaged to Toni—so certain marrying her would somehow salvage us both, make us complete—and Bernard… Bernard, like Tommy, while not yet buried, was already a couple years dead too, slowly rotting from the inside out. Only no one knew it. Or maybe no one wanted to know it. No one wanted to know anything. Not about Bernard, not even about ourselves.

Later that same night, while Donald and Bernard walked along the beach, Rick and I managed a quiet moment. We had taken up position at a small gazebo set back from the tall grass and overlooking the sand and ocean. After sitting quietly for several minutes, listening to the waves and the wind, I finally said, “It’s getting cold.”

“Yeah, I like it though.” Sensing my discomfort he said, “Alan, it is what is. We just got to keep moving. Like sharks, right? We stop, we die.”

“I just want to be sure you’re OK. I mean really OK.”

“Eventually we’ll all be OK.”

So many years later, we were still waiting.

A pounding on the front door brought me back. I hadn’t really been sleeping, but wasn’t totally awake either, so it took me a few seconds to realize I was on the floor, next to the couch, having apparently rolled off at some point during the night. Bright sunshine powered through the windows. I was stiff and sore, my muscles and joints ached and my head was throbbing. I struggled to my knees, and using the edge of the couch for leverage, hoisted myself to my feet. The knocking on the door resumed, harder this time. “Yeah, I’m coming,” I called. “Hold on, for Christ’s sake.” I rubbed my eyes, stretched, and staggered to the door.

I found Rick and Donald standing there when I pulled it open, along with a blinding shaft of sunshine that felt like it had gone directly through my skull. I vaguely remembered making plans with them, telling them to be here because I had wanted to pursue the Chris Bentley angle. But I’d had so much to drink I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been passed out, or what day it was. The inside of my mouth felt like it had been lined with cotton. “What are you guys doing here so early?”

“We called four times and never got an answer,” Donald scolded. “It’s almost three o’clock in the afternoon.”

I shielded my eyes and squinted at my watch. He was right. “Shouldn’t you be at work then, Donald?”

Rick shook his head. “It’s Saturday, you daffy fuck.”

Donald launched a disapproving glance. After what had happened with Toni apparently he felt name-calling—even in fun—qualified as piling on at that point. Even in the midst of madness, Donald retained his flair for fair play and a sense of decorum, as if etiquette might tame an otherwise untenable situation. He meant well, but it reminded me of the way characters in those old British novels would stop to change into freshly pressed shirts in the middle of a war zone. “Alan,” he said patiently, “it’s the weekend.”

“You been on a couple day drunk there, paisan,” Rick said, as if he truly believed this would be news to me. “Now, we supposed to stand out here like two dicks swinging in the breeze or you gonna let us in?”

I motioned them in and they shuffled into the kitchen. Donald was dressed in a short-sleeved striped oxford, khaki pants and a pair of loafers. In typical contrast, Rick was wearing black lightweight sweatpants and a tight t-back muscle shirt with no sleeves at all, his powerful chest and sculpted arms displayed like the trophies he considered them. I, on the other hand, looked and felt like I’d been run over by a fleet of oil trucks.

I went to the refrigerator, found the orange juice and chugged some right out of the carton. “Aren’t you two looking summery,” I said. “J.C. Penny have a sale?”

“You been out cold since last night?” Rick asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“Then you didn’t hear the news?”

I leaned against the counter; my legs didn’t feel sturdy. “No.”

Rick looked to Donald and gave him the signal to tell me what they already knew. “They found another one, Alan. Buried in the sand down at the public beach in the tall grass between the beach house and the water. They found another body.”

“Jesus.” A wave of nausea and darkness swept through me. “Another woman?”

Rick, with the nervous energy of a child, and equally uncertain of how to dispense it, gave a quirky nod. “What was left of her.”

“They haven’t released a lot of details yet,” Donald said, “but like the first, she’s been dead for quite a while.”

“Give me ten minutes.” I started for the bedroom. “I need a quick shower and a change of clothes before we head out.”

Rick struck one of his heroic poses. “Where we going this time?”

“One step closer to the truth, hopefully.”

“Or another step closer to Hell,” Donald mumbled.

As it turned out, we were both right.

CHAPTER 21

The heat was rising. Spring had become summer with little transition time, as it had become prone to do in recent years. The handful of aspirin I’d popped before we left was finally kicking in and had begun to ease my headache, but the humidity wasn’t helping any. The dealership where Bernard had worked was in the south end of New Bedford, just blocks from the warehouse and the job site I’d been fired from, and less than a mile from the cellar where he’d taken his life. As we drove deeper into the city I wondered if I’d ever again be able to go there without those ghosts tagging along for the ride.

Rick parked across the street from the car lot. We’d all been there before at one point or another in the past, to pick Bernard up or drop him off or meet him, but as with everything else since his death, it didn’t feel the same. What should have been familiar—even vaguely—seemed distant and alien. I slid a hand into my pocket, touched the photograph of the mystery woman but pulled out the business card instead. I told Donald and Rick I was going alone and wanted to keep it low-key with Bentley. Neither objected.

I put a pair of dark sunglasses on, hopped out of the Cherokee and crossed the street. The lot was large and filled with rows of used cars—many of them quite nice—and a small office building was set at the rear of the property. I had just hit the lot when a heavyset, moon-faced man emerged from the office and made his way toward me, waving and grinning as if we were old friends.

“Hey there!” He offered a pudgy hand. “Great gosh all-mighty—hot enough for you? Phew! Welcome to summer! But what a great day to buy a car!”

I reluctantly shook his hand. It was damp and made a squishing sound when he tightened his grip. He pumped my arm with the enthusiasm of someone hoping to draw water. I smiled, pulled free and flashed the business card. “Is Chris Bentley around?”

The jolly routine vanished. “Sure, pal. I’ll get him, he’ll be right with you.”

I nonchalantly checked out a couple cars while waiting. Within a minute or two a man younger than I’d expected—late twenties at most—strolled out of the office wearing mirrored sunglasses and made his way over to me. “Can I help you, sir?”

I held up his business card. “Chris Bentley?”

“That’s right.” We shook hands.

“I’m Alan Chance, was hoping I could talk to you for a couple minutes.”

“Absolutely.” He pointed to the card. “Have we talked before? You look vaguely familiar for some reason.”

“I got your name from a mutual friend.”

“Terrific. Have you heard about the special financing packages we—”

“I’m not looking to buy a car.”

He removed his sunglasses and looked me over. “Then what can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry to bother you at work, but I wanted to talk to you about Bernard Moore.”

The veil of defensive hostility he had erected fell away with recognition. “That’s where I’ve heard your name, from Bernard. You’re one of his buddies from Potter’s Cove, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Man, some crazy stuff happening over there these days, huh?” he laughed lightly. “Bodies turning up in a town like that can’t be good. Hell, if you’re not safe in Potter’s Cove you’re not safe anywhere.”

“True enough.”

“Hope they catch the psycho.”

“Me too.”

Bentley slid the sunglasses back on, folded his arms over his chest and leaned back against one of the cars. “Anyway, I was really sorry to hear about Bernard’s passing. I know he had a hard time after he lost his mom and all, and then when they let him go here he was in rough shape. I didn’t even know he’d died, felt bad. After he left here I’d call him now and then, sometimes we’d hook up and have lunch. I hadn’t heard from him in a while and I knew he was having a hard time, so I called and talked to his—what was it, his cousin’s place he was staying at, right?—and he told me that Bernard… well, you know.”

“Committed suicide.”

“Yeah.” He sighed long and hard. “Bernard was—well I don’t have to tell you, being his bud and all—he was kind of out there in some ways, but he was a good guy. He was always cool to me. He was in the biz longer and helped me out when I started, taught me a lot about sales. Most guys won’t do that. They feel threatened by younger salesmen. There’s only so much of the pie to go around, you know? But Bernard was always cool. He talked about you and his friends from Potter’s Cove all the time. Said you guys were all pretty tight.”

I watched my reflection in the mirrors covering his eyes. “Yeah, we were close.”

“Well, I’m sorry for your loss, man, truly. Real shame.”

There was something inherently insincere about Chris Bentley. Like many people, he wore a mask of concern but was apathetic to anything that didn’t affect him directly. His controlled smile promised his indifference was nothing personal.

Since I’d been thinking rather than speaking, Bentley said, “So… is there something I can do for you, Alan?”

My mind hadn’t been clear enough to strategize prior to talking with him so I decided to wing it. “Bernard’s cousin Sammy gave us his duffel bag. Toward the end it was the only thing he had, and it had a bunch of his stuff in it—nothing of any real value—just sentimental. We went through it and we found a photograph.” I pulled it from my pocket but kept it down against my thigh while the rest of the lie formed in my mind. “There was a sealed envelope attached to it and a little sticky note saying to forward it to the person in the photograph. The only problem is, none of us know who the person is. I saw your card in his day planner and I remembered Bernard talking about you a lot—you were basically the only guy he worked with he liked—and I thought since you were friends with Bernard too, maybe you’d know who she is.” I displayed the photograph for him.

He leaned forward and looked at it for what seemed an inordinate amount of time.

“I’d really like to fulfill his wishes and get that letter to her,” I said, “but we don’t have any idea who she is.”

“OK, this must be an old picture, but you can still tell it’s her.” Bentley removed his sunglasses and stared at the photograph again. “You don’t know who this is?”

“Should I?”

He chuckled, shrugged and put his glasses back on. “Well if you guys were as close as Bernard always said you were, it’s a little weird you don’t recognize his girlfriend.”

Although I found nothing humorous in his answer I nearly laughed. All nerves. “His girlfriend?” I turned the photograph back to me and glanced at it. “This is Bernard’s girlfriend?”

“Used to be, I guess. I only met her a couple times but if I remember right they were together for at least a couple years. I didn’t see her the last few months before Bernard died and I don’t remember him mentioning her. I figured they’d split up or something. He was having such a bad run, it would’ve just figured, you know? Her name’s Claudia something—never got the last name. He used to bring her by now and then, usually just on quick stops, you know, like when he was getting his check or something like that. I really didn’t know her or anything, but that’s how he introduced her, as his girlfriend. He talked about her a lot too, but never really said much about her specifically, if you know what I mean, he’d just mention shit they did or if they went somewhere or something. Went to the movies last night with Claudia; hung out at Claudia’s house yesterday, that kind of thing.”

It was probably too late to appear anything but shocked. “Just seems strange that he never mentioned her to any of us,” I said.

“That it do.” Bentley nodded. “But to tell the truth, I always got the impression that Bernard had a lot going on people didn’t know about. I don’t mean that in a bad way, just saying, I think he kept a lot of things separate. His work life and his personal life, both sides—the side he had with you guys, his older friends, and the side he had with guys like me, guys he worked with. I think he kept them separate—hey, lots of people do, no big thing.”

I could tell he was holding back. He knew more but was treading carefully. I ignored the beads of sweat collecting in my hairline and did my best to put him at ease. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, but seriously, I can’t remember Bernard ever having a girlfriend. Ever. And I’m having a real hard time believing that if she were his girlfriend he wouldn’t have told me about her. Knowing Bernard he would’ve been bragging night and day about it. Seems strange even for him.” He laughed lightly, and I joined him. Awkwardness hung in the air like the heat engulfing us. “Either way, I feel like I should get that letter to her. You don’t have any idea where I can find her or how I can get a hold of her, do you?”

The discomfort he was feeling revealed itself in his posture. “Look, man, I don’t want to get into stuff that maybe you don’t want to hear, OK?”

I played it cool, wondering if the smile he wore ever completely faded. “We’re both adults here, Chris, whatever you can tell me I’d appreciate. Between you and me, makes no difference who this chick is, I’m just trying to do what Bernard wanted and get her the letter.”

“New Bedford isn’t a small town,” he said, relaxing somewhat, his chin held a bit higher as if he were looking beyond me to something more important in the distance. The mirrors reflected the street behind me, and though I could see the Cherokee parked against the far curb, the glare from the slowly setting sun made it impossible to see Rick and Donald waiting inside. “But it is a small city, if you know what I mean. It’s not like everybody knows everybody else, but for natives everybody knows somebody who knows everybody else. In other words, the circles are small here. A couple of the guys here knew who Claudia was from being around the city for so long. One of them remembered her from school but couldn’t remember her name or anything, and the other one sort of knew who she was through a friend of a friend kind of thing. It’s not like they were friends with her or anything, but they basically knew who she was. And they knew what she was. She had drug problems even before high school the way I heard it, and she started hooking not long after that, was into it for years. I don’t know if she still is, or still was when she was seeing Bernard, but it’s probably a safe bet. Those kind don’t usually ever change.”

I looked at the photograph again before returning it to my pocket. “At least the whole dating Bernard thing is starting to make sense though.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I mean Bernard wore those glasses and that stupid-ass wig and all—it was kind of sad. He was always talking about how she was his girl and all this, and the guys would laugh at him behind his back about it because they knew she was a prostitute. Bernard worked in the city but he wasn’t from here, and he never really figured out how small a community this city still is.”

I finally wiped the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. “You wouldn’t have any idea where I might be able to find her, do you?”

“Try Weld Square,” he said with a short, sardonic laugh.

Weld Square was an infamous corner of the city littered with dilapidated apartment buildings, deserted businesses, and vacant, garbage-strewn lots. It was easily accessible from the state highway, and was known in the city and beyond for drug dealing, prostitution and violent crime. In my early days with the company, when I’d been given some of the worst details, I’d worked night security in a few of the businesses still operating in the area at that time. I was in no hurry to return.

Despite the probable accuracy, Bentley knew the humor in his comment had been wasted on me. “You ever heard of The Captain’s Hook? It’s a bar down by the waterfront. Real shit-hole. Tough crowd. Bernard told me Claudia worked part-time there as a waitress. I don’t know if he was telling the truth, but he probably was, because a lot of hookers hang out there too. You could try checking out that place, but be careful. Cops are forever dragging people out of there, real jewel of a joint. This huge fat chick runs it; she’s owned the place for years. She’s supposed to be a psychic or a witch or something—probably just a gimmick to rip off a bunch of drunks and druggies, but that’s what people say. Supposedly some weird shit goes on in there. Wouldn’t put anything past that dump.” He hesitated a moment then said, “Anyway, other than that, I don’t really know what to tell you. Claudia lived in the city, but I don’t know where.”

I shook Chris Bentley’s hand again, and thanked him for his help.

“Wish I could tell you more, help you find this broad, but Bernard never really dealt much in specifics—you know what I mean? That’s just the way he was, at least around me. I worked with him for a couple years, spent hours talking with the guy, and most days even now I feel like I never really knew him at all.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I get the feeling you do.”

“Thanks again for your help.” I offered him his business card. “You want this back?”

“You hang onto it.” He selected the sincerest smile in his arsenal and pasted it on for me. “The next time you’re in the market for a quality used car or truck, you come see me, OK?”

Given Bernard’s consistent lack of success with women, and the problems he clearly had—many of which we were still uncovering—none of us were particularly surprised to learn he had sought out prostitutes. At a minimum, he had sought out one, and a sense of sadness more than anything else permeated the Jeep as we headed away from the car lot and Chris Bentley’s eternal smile. Like so much else with Bernard, it seemed impossible for us to have missed it previously, yet once out in the open, it made perfect sense. Had I assumed him to be a monk? Where else would he have gone for sex? Had I ever really given it any thought at all—and if not, then why not—hadn’t it even once occurred to me what he might be doing when out of my sight? I couldn’t help but feel as though I had let him down as a friend. Here he was, a rapist, a butcher and killer of young women, and I was the one feeling remorse. Memories of him at our apartment flashed through my mind, memories of how he’d sometimes come for dinner and never know enough to go home, lingering and making excuses and small talk until Toni finally had enough and I was left with no choice but to tell him we needed to go to bed and work the next day and it was time for him to leave. I knew then how lonely he was. We all did. Had he gone home after those nights at our apartment, or had he cruised these same streets in that rundown old car, searching for prostitutes—maybe victims—to sate his needs, however twisted and dark? Had I gone to bed and snuggled into the warmth and loving arms of my wife while one of my best friends snuggled into the underbelly of the city? Had I known? Deep down, had I? And would it have mattered even if I had?

Ten minutes after leaving the lot we were cruising along the waterfront looking for The Captain’s Hook. Rick had heard of it but wasn’t precisely sure where it was, so we had to cover a few different avenues until we finally found it on a desolate side street across from a fish processing plant. A small building sandwiched between a vacant commercial property on the corner and an insurance office, it was set back a bit from the sidewalk, receded farther than the buildings on either side of it. A large door that had been painted black but that was nicked and gouged rather badly marked the entrance, and two narrow windows on either side of it housed neon beer signs. Cheap curtains had been slapped up in each window to block what little might be seen through them rather than to serve any cosmetic purpose, and above the door a sign shaped like the bow of a pirate ship protruded from the face of the building. Painted in chipped blood-red letters across the faux bow was the name of the establishment.

The neighborhood was one of great history, home to some of the literal “dreary streets” Melville had written about. A few blocks over, near the famous, (or infamous) whaling museum, where renovations and several nice retail and dining establishments had moved in, several years earlier the city had converted a few streets to their original cobblestone in an attempt to lend a sense of quaint historical authenticity to the area. But even now, under the haze of imminent darkness, this lesser-traveled street still radiated the same ominous level Melville had discovered more than a century before.

A few older cars were parked on the street, including one rundown Chevy that occupied the space directly in front of the bar, but otherwise, the area was deserted.

Rick slowed the Cherokee, and from the backseat Donald said, “Have I mentioned what a bad idea I think this is?”

“About twelve times now.”

“You walk in there asking questions,” Rick said, “you better be a cop.”

I motioned to an empty space a bit farther up the street. “Park it.”

He mumbled an objection but pulled over anyway. “Fine,” he said, slamming the shift into Park, “but I’m going with you.”

“I’m just gonna go in and have a quick look around, relax.” I knew Rick meant well, and I knew I’d be safer with him by my side, but I also knew that outside a controlled setting like the club his temper would more than likely get the better of him. “Let me go scope the place out a little, see what I can see.”

He stared at me, his jaw clenching then releasing then clenching again. “You got five minutes,” he said. “Then I’m coming in looking for you. Donny, go with him.”

With a sigh, Donald rolled a cigarette between his lips. “I was so hoping I could.”

“Hey,” Rick said, “no smoking in the vehicle, ass-wipe.”

Donald ignored him and slipped out onto the street with an irritable grunt.

I really didn’t want him with me either but the sun had almost completely set and night was slowly closing in around us, there wasn’t time for arguments.

I pulled my sunglasses free, tossed them on the dashboard then turned back to Rick. “Keep this fucking thing running.”

CHAPTER 22

The door was heavy and scraped the base of the frame as I pulled it open, making a subtle entrance all but impossible. As we moved into the bar I said, “Let me do the talking,” but I wasn’t sure Donald heard me because he didn’t respond. The only answer was metal grinding metal as he closed the door behind us, the grating sound still resonating as I focused on the saloon. The lighting was sparse, and the place could’ve used a fan or two. The air hung stagnant and sour, and a colossal cloud of cigarette smoke filled the room like a dense fog. I smelled stale booze and sweat, cigarettes, a trace of marijuana, and the faint aroma of urine. To make matters worse, the lack of air circulation made the already high humidity nearly unbearable within the confined space, and I wondered how anyone stood it in here for any length of time.

The room was narrow and deep, and the building seemed to go back farther than the exterior had suggested it might. The ceiling, low and stained with years of abuse, gave off a claustrophobic feel, and an oak bar—large, long and battle-scarred—dominated the left-hand wall. Opposite the bar were a few small tables bolted to the filthy tile floor, rickety chairs scattered about, and an aged, silent jukebox.

Neither the tables nor any of the stools at the bar were occupied.

The bartender was tall, lanky, decked out in jeans and a leather vest with no shirt, and sported thinning but frizzy hair he had grown nearly to his waist. He turned and glanced at us with disinterest, undersized, rodent-like eyes blinking behind a pair of blue-tinted granny glasses. Without a word he returned his attention to a television over the bar.

The unfinished wood walls were decorated with an array of nautical effects—buoys, lobster pots, harpoons, fishing nets and the like—a couple dart boards, various neon beer signs and posters of scantily clad women draped over motorcycles, racing cars, or posing suggestively with various name brand beers or alcoholic beverages. Perched over the center of the bar, a wall clock that advertised Harley Davidson motorcycles blinked on and off in timed intervals.

Through the smoke and haze I noticed an open doorway beyond the tables that led to a back room of sorts. I was able to make out the corner of a pool table and could hear an old Zeppelin tune playing, distorted and tinny, like it was coming from an inexpensive boom box that had been turned up too loud. Some dark forms were moving around back there too, and a burst of laughter spilled out into the bar area, though I was relatively sure it hadn’t been directed at us. From where we stood, I couldn’t be sure they even knew we were there.

Donald remained close to the exit, leaned against the jukebox and pretended to read the song list. The bartender had his back to me, so I slid onto a stool closest to the door and said, “Can we get a couple beers over here?”

He finally looked at me. “All out of beer,” he mumbled.

I keyed on a full bottle of Jack Daniels displayed among a bevy of others behind him. “How about a couple shots of J.D. then?”

“All out of that, too.”

I refused to break eye contact, and so did he. “Well, then what do you recommend?”

He put his hands on the bar between us. “That you and your boyfriend go find someplace else to drink.”

I could feel Donald behind me, but he remained quiet. “Is Claudia around?” I asked.

“Who?”

“She waitresses here, or at least she used to.”

“This look like the kind of place that has waitresses?”

Donald was suddenly by my side. He put out his cigarette in an ashtray on the bar then lightly touched my arm. “Come on, Alan, let’s just go.”

I pulled the photograph from my pocket and held it up for the bartender. “This is Claudia. She and I had a mutual friend. He died. He left something to her and wanted me to get it to her, only I don’t know how to find her. All I know is she used to work here or hang out here or whatever. I really don’t give a shit, I only need to find her to—”

“Dude, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, OK? Why you coming around here hassling me? I don’t know you and I don’t know nobody named Claudia.”

“I’m not looking to hassle you.” I waved the photo at him. “I just need to talk to this girl, figured you might be able to help me out.”

“Well, I can’t.” He leaned closer for emphasis. “So fuck off.”

This time Donald gave my arm a tug. “Now.”

“Thanks, appreciate all your help,” I quipped.

The bartender smirked, and as I turned to leave I realized the three of us were no longer alone.

A man from the backroom had filtered out into the bar and now stood staring at us. Another person had remained behind him in back, but was almost entirely concealed in shadow and smoke. It wasn’t until I casually slid the photograph back into my pocket and dropped from the stool that I saw there was a second man who had circled behind us and was now leaning against the exit. Donald was a few feet to my right, pale and nervous.

The one close to us, a stocky man with a beard and greasy hair dangling from beneath an equally greasy red bandana, stepped closer. In his hands he held a pool stick. He seemed roughly our age, maybe a few years younger, but there was a lot of mileage on him so it was difficult to tell for sure. His jaw was set at an odd angle, his lips thrust forward to indicate that he was no longer in possession of a full set of teeth. “Everything OK, Mick?” Though his question had been directed at the bartender he never took his eyes from me. It was clear these guys had been ingesting more than alcohol in that backroom.

“They were just leaving, Tooley,” the bartender told him.

“Yes,” Donald blurted, “we were just—just leaving, actually.”

The man continued to stare at me as if I’d spoken instead of Donald. “They giving you a hard time, Mick?”

“Look,” I said, “I—”

“I wasn’t talking to you, boy.” The man came closer still.

I held my ground but said nothing.

An awkward silence fell over the room and I realized then that even the music from the back had stopped. Images blinked across the TV over the bar, but it too was silent. Donald’s discomfort was palpable, and he seemed unable to determine exactly what he should do with his hands. I was as nervous as he was, but knew if I showed it, we’d be in even worse trouble. The one called Tooley held my equally intense stare for what seemed forever, then slowly nodded and allowed a slight smile to tickle his upper lip. “What are you doing in here, boy?”

Call me boy one more fucking time, I thought.

The man by the door—who was considerably younger, taller, and had his hair pulled back into a ponytail—chuckled as if he’d read my mind. Although he was in his late twenties, from the look on his face I guessed he probably possessed the intellect of a dimwitted teenager. He wore jeans and a grimy Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt that was sleeveless and showcased an array of tattoos that stretched from his shoulders to his wrists. On his feet he wore jackboots. When he smiled I noticed a tiny black tattoo in the shape of an upside down cross just below his left eye. Among the coiled serpents, grim reapers, death masks and other odd symbols painted across his arms, I saw the words: Hell Bound.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said finally.

“He was asking questions about some whore used to come in here,” the bartender said.

“Which one?”

The men laughed.

“Claudia,” I said.

“But obviously this was a mistake,” Donald added suddenly, “and now we’re leaving.”

I wanted to tell Donald to shut his mouth, to just be quiet and let me handle it, but I maintained my composure.

“I know Claudia.” The tall one with the tattoos looked me over. He was flying on something and having a hard time keeping his eyes in one spot.

“You know where I can find her?” I asked.

“What you want with her?”

“I need to talk to her about a mutual friend who—”

“You got any money?” He shuffled his feet, his movements jerky and spasm-like.

“That depends,” I said. “You got any information?”

Tooley stepped forward. “You even know where the fuck you are?”

I gave a smart-ass smile right back to him. “A toilet?” If we were going to make a move for the door, I figured this was as good a time as any. “Whatever—forget it.”

I turned to leave and Donald did the same, but the man at the door didn’t move.

Donald raised his hands. “Look, what—what’s all this about?”

“Shit,” the man said, “you just got here.”

“There’s no reason to get into all this, it’s completely unnecessary, we—you don’t understand, we’re not—there’s no reason to make more of this than we need to. We’re not children here.” Donald looked from one man to the next, the words tumbling from him like he had lost all control of them. “This is absurd. We don’t want any trouble, we—”

“Then what the fuck you doing here? This place is all about trouble, ain’t you heard?”

His friends laughed.

Donald looked as frustrated as he was frightened. “Fine, you want—your friend asked if we had any money.” Donald reached for his back pocket and smiled, like doing so would somehow set everything right. “If it’s just a matter of cash then—”

“If we want your money we’ll fucking take it.” The man motioned to the backroom with his pool stick. “Usually a couple pussies like you cause trouble and we lock the door, take them out back and have a little talk. You see what I’m saying?”

Donald looked to me, his face screaming: Do something. But I wasn’t exactly sure what there was to do. The only thing I knew for sure was that eventually Rick was bound to become impatient, worried, or both, and when he joined us we’d have the definite upper hand, but there was no telling how long that might be or what might happen between now and then.

“Just throw them out, Tooley.” The bartender sighed. “Fuck it.”

Tooley and the other man narrowed their distance from us, book-ending us slowly but brazenly. “Tell you what. Since Mick wants us to give you a break, if you say you’re sorry and ask my permission, you can go.”

I kept my hands down at my sides but clenched them into fists. Ignoring the tight feeling in my stomach, I looked at the curtains and blinking beer signs in the small windows on the front wall, then back into his dark depraved eyes. “Fuck you.”

“This is insane.” Donald turned toward the door. “This testosterone-fest has gone far enough, we’re leaving”

The taller man blocked his path.

With disturbing casualness Tooley reached out and brushed his fingers along Donald’s cheek in a gesture that seemed almost tender. Donald reared back as if the fingers had been flames. “Get your goddamn hands off of me.”

I waited, knowing that if the man moved just a bit closer to Donald I’d have a clean shot at him. In my mind I saw my fist crash into his face and knock him to the floor. Rick, I thought, where are you?

“Last time I was in prison I had a little faggot bitch looked a lot like you,” Tooley chuckled. “Used to give it to him every night. Fucking queer loved it.”

“Well, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black,” Donald said.

Both men looked at him quizzically. “What the fuck he say?” the tall one asked.

The main door screeched as it was pushed open.

I had never heard a more welcome sound.

Through the smoke and dim lighting, someone hesitated just inside the main entrance, glanced casually in my direction then walked toward the bar. The others saw him too. Only difference was, I knew who it was.

The three men seemed unsure of what to make of this latest development, and stood silent and staring. Rick strolled into the bar, a slight grin on his face. “Well now,” he said smoothly, hands on hips, “what’s all this then?”

I was certain I would never again laugh at one of his heroic poses.

“We’re closed for a few minutes, bud,” the bartender snapped. “Take off.”

“No problem, bud.” Rick gestured in my direction, then in Donald’s. “But these guys are with me.”

“So?”

“So the three of us are gonna walk out of here. You guys got no problem with that, right?”

Tooley gripped his pool stick with both hands, swung it slowly down by his feet like a pendulum. “What if we do? Then what?”

Rick’s grin slowly faded. “Then I kick your ass.”

“That’s enough of all that.”

The voice distracted everyone. It was a deep, raspy voice belonging to someone who smoked too much. It had come from the back, and we all turned toward it in unison.

In the smoky doorway to the back area was an enormous woman in a bright flowery muumuu. Her considerable feet were forced into a pair of flimsy flip-flops, puffy skin and toes strained to the near exploding point beneath her weight. The woman’s hair, styled into a sort of bouffant-gone-wild, was dyed jet-black, though several renegade strands of gray survived along her temples. She wore heavy, powdery makeup, gobs of eyeliner and mascara, and her plump lips were painted a brilliant red. When she parted them with a smile they revealed stained brown teeth too small for her otherwise huge face. She leaned on a thick walking stick that appeared to have been carved from gnarled wood, and waved a chubby hand at us. “You come on back here and have a talk with Mama Toots.” Waddling around with great effort, the woman started back into the area from which she’d come, but before disappearing into the smoke and darkness, she looked back over her shoulder at the other three men. “Leave them be.”

The bartender immediately returned to his duties, wiping down the bar as if nothing had happened, and Tooley and the tattooed man drifted away from us and joined their friend at the bar.

“What the fuck was that?” Rick asked under his breath.

“You got here just in time,” Donald said. “Let’s get the hell out of—”

“Watch my back,” I said, already moving across the room. I could hear Donald scolding me but I kept moving. I hesitated in the doorway; saw a pool table, a boom box sitting on a small counter area against one wall and a row of booths along another. The lighting was worse here, the air just as stagnant and smoke-filled. The woman had somehow managed to cram herself into the last booth and now sat watching me.

Rick remained in the doorway like a guard, arms folded over his chest and one eye on the bar. Donald accompanied me a bit deeper into the room, if for no reason other than to convince me to leave, but by the time I reached the last booth he had fallen silent.

At close quarters the woman was even larger than she’d first appeared. She had to be at least six feet tall and well over four hundred pounds. “Who are you?” I asked.

“Who am I?” A burst of roaring laughter bellowed forth, jiggling the mammoth breasts beneath her muumuu. “Who am I, he says. Maria Tootrachelli, that’s who I am, but don’t nobody call me that. I’m Mama. Mama Toots.” She flashed her brown teeth again. “This is my place.”

“We didn’t come in here to cause trouble, lady, we just—”

“I heard all that,” she said in a gravelly baritone. “Have a seat.”

Donald stayed on his feet, a few feet back, as I slid onto the vacant bench across from her. I noticed a deck of cards, a shot glass and a bottle of whiskey in the center of the table between us. Next to her was a smoldering cigar stub teetering on the lip of an ashtray.

“This ain’t a good place to come poking around uninvited.” She scooped up the bottle and poured herself a shot. “Few months ago a couple college boys came in here acting the fool.” The shot glass vanished in her fleshy paw as she drank it down then slapped it back on the table. “They had a bad time.”

“Well I appreciate you calling off your dogs,” I said.

She looked beyond me to Donald, and then to Rick. “It’s OK, Muscles. They won’t do nothing.”

Rick nodded. “That’d be better for them.”

“Do you know Claudia?” I asked.

The fat woman’s eyes returned to me. “You must want to talk to her something awful to go through all this.”

“I take it you already heard my explanation out there. Do you know her or not?”

“Of course. Mama Toots knows everybody, darlin’.”

“Where can I find her?”

She touched the deck of cards, stroked it slowly with chubby fingers. “She lived down off Milner Avenue, an old industrial road not far from the airport, you know the one? Only a couple old houses down in there. I don’t know the exact address, it was a little shack all off by itself. Little shit-hole about a mile in, on the left—can’t miss it.”

“She still live there?”

“Ain’t heard nothing about her moving. Haven’t seen her in a long while, though.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Brewster or Brewer, something like that. Don’t use last names much around here.”

“How do you know her?”

“From here, where else?” She shuffled the cards. “She used to hook in here on Fridays and Saturdays. A few girls do. It’s a break from the street, safer, and it’s a regular clientele, you know? They work the customers then kick back a percentage to me. That keeps Mama happy, and when Mama Toots is happy, everybody’s happy.”

“When did she stop working here?” I asked.

“About a year ago.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know exactly. She stopped coming around. Girls in that biz come and go.”

I cocked my head toward the bar area. “The guy with the tattoos out there said he knew her too. You think he’d know—”

“They used to hang around a lot of the same people.”

“Used to.”

“That’s what I said, darlin’.”

“Claudia… is she into that shit too?”

“What shit would that be?”

“From his tattoos I think it’s safe to assume he’s into some dark shit.”

“Aren’t we all?” Another brown grin. “Some wear it on the outside is all. He likes to scare people, thinks it’s fun, but he’s just a punk and a drug addict. Nothing more.”

“Why did you help us?”

“Didn’t. Helped me. Blood on the floor ain’t nothing new here, but I like to avoid all that stuff if we can. Especially with outsiders.”

Donald stepped forward. “Thank you for the information, madam. Alan, let’s go.”

“I know you got troubles,” she said to me, ignoring Donald and holding up the deck of cards instead. “You wanna know what the future holds?”

“Not particularly.” It was so hot in the backroom I had broken into a heavy sweat. I wiped some perspiration from above my eyes. “I’m more concerned with the past.”

“Too late do anything about the past.”

“Can’t know the future without knowing the past, though.”

“That’s true.” Mama grabbed the cigar stub from the ashtray and stuffed the already wet and chewed end into the corner of her mouth. “But I got a gift, and my gift helps me see the future, helps me see spirits. Truth is, the spirits brought you here so I could read you. I know that ‘cause don’t nothing happen by accident. You’re here ‘cause they brought you to me.”

“I don’t believe in psychics.”

“You think magic gives a shit if you believe in it or not?” She shuffled the cards again. “Don’t matter. Magic’s like a tree. A tree don’t give a shit if you believe in it. It just is what it is, you see? Tree still gonna be a tree, it’s still gonna grow, still gonna be there day in and day out whether you believe in trees or not. Belief only matters if you’re fighting it.”

“I can see a tree,” I said. “I can touch a tree.”

“Same thing with magic. Just got to know how.”

I swallowed hard. “Ever give Claudia a reading?”

Mama chewed the cigar for a while before answering. “Once.”

“What’d the cards say?”

“Ask her. What happens between me and a believer is private.”

“What are you, a priest?”

“In a way.” Mama shuffled the cards yet again, this time without breaking eye contact. “Why, you want me to hear your confession?” When I didn’t answer she caught Rick’s attention in the doorway. “How about you, Muscles?”

“I’ll pass.”

“You afraid?”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Rick said.

Mama threw me a conspiratorial wink. “That means he’s afraid of everything.”

Rick said nothing, and I was grateful he let the comment go. Donald shuffled about just feet from the booth. “Will you light somewhere?”

“We need to leave,” he said. “It’s Saturday night, this place will be packed in—”

“Relax,” Mama Toots told him before returning her attention to me. “Been having dreams for a while now. Strange dreams. The spirits told me strangers were coming, strangers that needed my help. Now them dreams make sense.”

I started to stand. “Thank you for your help, but I told you, I don’t believe in—”

“Maybe you don’t do what the spirit world say.” Mama slammed the deck on the table with such force it stopped me. “But I do, even when I don’t want to—like now. Shuffle the cards.”

I eyed the deck like a child considering candy from a stranger then picked up the cards. They were warm and slightly damp, but otherwise a normal deck. I shuffled them twice then handed them back to her.

Donald lit a cigarette and puffed away apprehensively.

Mama glanced at him, barked out another laugh, adjusted her considerable girth and slowly placed six cards face-up on the table. She arranged them into a large semicircle then placed a seventh in the center. As she focused on the display something changed in her expression, and she immediately gathered the cards, returned them to the deck and offered it to me a second time. “Do it again.”

“What was wrong with those?”

“They’re just a prop; a tool. Do like I said.”

I complied then watched as she laid the cards out a second time in identical fashion. She studied them for what seemed a long time without speaking then plucked the cigar from her mouth with a moist popping sound. “It ain’t good.”

“Is it ever?”

Her suddenly humorless face lacked the arrogance it had before. “It ain’t good.”

“Why, what do they say?”

“You don’t believe anyway.”

“Thought it didn’t matter.”

“I’m gonna give you some advice, so listen up.” Mama folded her arms across her mountainous breasts. “Long time ago, I learned not to stick my nose in where it don’t belong, and to never ask questions you shouldn’t know the answers to. So I don’t know what three nice, neat small-town gentlemen like you are doing in here, or what you want with that tramp girl—don’t know and don’t care—but you need to understand the world ain’t always what you think it is.” She rolled the cigar back between her lips and suckled it. “This is a great city, New Bedford, lots of history here, a long past. Compared to where my people come from in Italy—the old country—this city ain’t nothing but a baby. But for America, it’s old. It’s an old city, lots of spirits here, lots of old ghosts. Take the city away and it’s ancient, this land. Under all the light and reality is what come before, you see? All that come before, just… there. Waiting, doing, watching, listening. The city’s like that, too. It got a dark side, secrets just like anything else. Just like in life, certain neighborhoods you should stay out of. Spirit world got those same places. Dark places. Not everybody got the gift like me, so not everybody sees what I see, and it’s better that way. But you should never fuck with the spirit world. Know why?” She smiled coyly. “‘Cause it’ll fuck back.”

“I’m just trying to find a girl.”

“Why you want to go messing around with the dark?”

“Maybe the dark’s messing around with me,” I said.

“Could be.” She nodded and gave me a look somewhere between accommodating and challenging. “You want to see, then I’ll show you.” She closed her eyes, drew several deep breaths then consulted the cards. After a moment she said, “There’s trouble all around you.”

“Go on.”

She shook her head and the flesh on her neck swayed as she reached again for the deck. “Usually when I do this it’s clearer but this don’t… It don’t really make sense, I…” She counted off a series of cards from the deck then selected one and pulled it free. Carefully, as if afraid the table might collapse beneath it, she very slowly laid the card next to the one in the center. “There’s something here, I—Jesus, Lord—I ain’t never seen anything like it before. Not like this, not like…” For the first time her face registered more fear and discomfort than confusion. “I seen my share of negative energy and dark spirits before but not—not like this—never like this. It’s so strong. This ain’t just dark, it’s—it’s unclean—evil.” Despite the heat in the room Mama shivered and began to rub her bare arms with her hands. “And there’s something else, something… something about the eyes. Occhi violenti.”

“Say again?”

“Occhi violenti,” she said, her face a mask of sorrow and burgeoning terror. “Violent eyes.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Death,” she said in a loud whisper. “Sacrilege—it’s sacrilege, you can’t—you can’t stop it now, it’s all around you.”

“I don’t—”

“Whole lot of death.” She shivered again, her doughy face contorting into one pained and fearful expression after another. “Jesus—sweet—Sweet Jesus, this…”

I felt my earlier anger returning. I’d had my fill of shadows and smoke. What had begun as a routine she’d probably been through thousands of times before was now transformed into something more, something real, and something she had clearly not expected.

“It’s like a current it’s so—so strong, but… I never seen nothing like this. It’s cold.” Her hands were shaking with such ferocity she was having difficulty holding the cards. Even as I struggled with the stagnant and engulfing heat in the room, I noticed goose pimples rising along her arms. She was rocked by another shiver. The deck fell from her hands and cards scattered across the table. Again, she shook her head, as if in answer to voices only she could hear. Her face twisted into a grimace and her eyes narrowed as she stared at the clutter of playing cards. “Jesus, God,” she whispered, her hands hovering just above the table. “Jesus… Jesus, God.”

Donald dropped his cigarette to the floor, stepped on it. “This is nonsense,” he said with little conviction. “Absolute—”

Mama’s massive body began to tremble, her lips moving rapidly as if in silent prayer. She seemed to be looking beyond the cards to some deeper horror that had opened a portal known only to her. “No, you—you need to go.”

“What do you see?” I asked.

She blinked her eyes rapidly. “You don’t understand, you—you have to go.”

I stood up, leaned on the table. “What do you see?”

“Get out of here,” she growled, her clarity of mind returning. “Get out, I—”

“What!” I slammed the table with my hand. “Tell me, goddamn it!”

Mama’s body continued to shake. She held her hands up as if to ward me off. “I don’t go there, I don’t go there, Christ Jesus, I don’t go there, I—”

“The natives are getting restless,” Rick said, motioning to the bar. “Let’s move.”

I felt someone grab my arm, realized it was Donald. I pulled free and stepped closer to Mama. “Where don’t you go, Mama? Where don’t you go?”

Her eyes turned wet, and as she held her hands out for me I saw that her fingertips were somehow raw and bloody about the nails and cuticles. They looked as if she’d been clawing at cement for hours.

I remembered the dream with Bernard, and how his hands had looked much the same.

“Good Lord,” Donald said softly.

A chill scampered up the back of my neck. “Where, Mama?” I pressed. “Where don’t you go?”

She began to choke. “There’s—there’s so much blood, it—rivers of it.”

“Move!” Rick said suddenly. He stood in the doorway, partially blocking my view of the bar, but even through the smoke and haze I could see movement out there. The volume of Mama’s voice had signaled something was wrong, and they were coming.

“Mama, where?”

A quiet whimper escaped her. “The dark.” She looked at her bloody hands and began to weep, though she seemed far off now, unaware. “The dark beneath the dirt. You don’t never come back from that dark. You don’t—you don’t know what’s down there, it—it ain’t like us. It wants you—it—wants to bring you down there with it, under the dirt.” Her lips moved slowly, slightly out of sync with the sound of her voice. “It’s got a taste for you. It’s been waiting for you down in that dark under the dirt. You don’t never come back from that dark. Never.”

“Why Mama? Tell me why.”

“‘Cause you got to be dead to be there.”

Before I knew it Donald and Rick were hustling me to the doorway.

“You got to be dead,” Mama’s voice cried behind us. “You got to be dead to be there.”

Tooley and the tall man ran by us into the backroom, hesitating a moment like they weren’t sure if they should stop us or attend to their friend first. They opted for the latter and we kept moving, Rick in the lead, Donald between us, and me pulling up the rear.

The bartender scurried out from behind the bar and stepped in front of us, blocking the door. He held a baseball bat, cocked it back in a threatening posture. “What the fuck did you do to her?”

Rick pivoted and threw two rapid kicks, the first into the bartender’s midsection and the second into his throat. The man vaulted back and crashed into the bar, scattering two stools. As the bat left his hands it rattled against the floor and rolled toward the corner.

We were nearly to the door when I heard screaming and the sound of heavy footfalls behind me. I turned in time to see the tattooed man closing on me, Tooley lumbering along a few paces back.

I might have been able to make it through the exit had I kept running, but probably not. Either way, I was not destined to find out, because I came to an abrupt halt, and as the tall man tried to stop he practically ran right by me. I swung at him as hard as I could while he was still off balance. My fist connected with the side of his face, and as the impact reverberated through my hand and up into my arm and shoulder, he groggily staggered back and fell to the floor.

In the blur of confusion Tooley rushed past, and seconds later, behind me I heard scrambling and heavy, urgent breathing, some shouting—Donald’s voice—then a grunt. I turned toward the scuffle. Donald swung awkwardly at the man but missed, and Tooley knocked him aside with two hard shots to the stomach and head. As Donald fell, Rick came to his aid and fired a three-punch combination that dropped the man.

I moved to help him when someone hit me from behind. The blow landed between my shoulder blades with tremendous force, and I staggered forward. I spun in time to see that the tattooed man had regained his feet and was closing on me quickly. Struggling to maintain my balance, I threw a punch but he ducked away in time, raised a fist and hammered it across the side of my head.

I knew he had connected directly with my temple because my equilibrium was suddenly off, and a tingling feeling spread across my eyes and jaw—like a yawn that wouldn’t stop. My vision blurred, cleared then blurred again before I realized I was toppling to the floor face-first. Before my chin slammed the dirty tiles, I broke my fall with my hands and did my best to roll through it.

I scrambled to my feet, head still spinning a bit. The man laughed like a moron, and there was something so inhuman, so sick in his drug-glazed eyes, I hesitated for just a second. From the look on his face, I knew he had sensed my indecision and interpreted it as weakness. As he charged me again, I timed a punch, braced myself then threw it.

He ran right into my fist. His head snapped back and he stumbled. There was no blood, just a puzzled expression, as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. While he wobbled about on shaky legs, I stepped in to finish him, but Donald came out of nowhere and hit him with a wild, arcing punch.

This time he went down. I rushed forward, straddled him and hit him again and again. He covered the back of his head with his hands and started to crawl away, mumbling something unintelligible as he went, but I kept punching him until he was no longer moving.

I fell off of him, my hands slick with blood, most of it his. He was moaning and just barely conscious, his arms still folded across his head in a feeble attempt to protect it. On the floor next to him, near his face, a trickling stream of blood was beginning to pool.

Still a bit disoriented, I watched Donald crouch and pick up the baseball bat the bartender had dropped. Over his shoulder, I saw Tooley and Rick circling each other like a pair of jungle cats. Due to the blood both were sporting, I knew neither had gained a clear advantage since Rick’s initial knockdown.

Tooley lunged and Rick countered with a combination that put him down a second time. He coughed, spat blood then slowly began to rise, but Rick pounced again, raining fists down on him in rapid combinations that made sickening sounds as they connected with skin and bone. Bloodied about the eyes, nose and mouth, the man fell again.

Rick stood at the ready, chest heaving. “Stay down, asshole.”

The man grunted and began to rise yet again.

I scrambled over to Donald and pulled the bat from his hands just as Tooley let out a defiant growl and stormed Rick in a frenzy of rage. “Rick!”

He looked to me as I tossed the bat into the air. In one fluid motion he caught it and swung it down across the man’s shins.

Tooley howled and crashed to the floor. Moaning, he rolled back and forth clutching his legs, knees pulled in to his chest.

Rick and I stood staring at each other a moment, out of breath, dazed and oddly satisfied, if not thoroughly surprised.

Donald had sunk to one knee, perhaps due to the blows he had sustained earlier. I reached down and helped him to his feet. “You all right?”

“Oh, spectacular,” he groaned.

Rick threw the bat aside and wiped a slow trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. “Let’s get the hell out of here before any more of these cretins show up.”

We turned our backs on the fallen bodies, the blood and the muffled cries still coming from the backroom, and together, walked out of the bar.

Still riding an adrenaline rush, I stepped into the street. No remnants of daylight remained. A hot summer day had become a hot summer evening, and everything was heightened, sharpened and more vivid than normal.

It seemed apt that night had fallen. We’d glimpsed the wisdom of the spirits in this old city—however briefly—and after all that had happened, after all that was breathing down our necks, for now, we were better suited to the dark.

CHAPTER 23

It was still early summer. We were a few weeks away from tourist season, so the landscape had not yet changed. Though a handful of early bird summer residents had arrived and opened nearby cottages, most of Donald’s neighborhood remained in the tail end of its hibernation. We’d cleaned ourselves up, nursed our minor wounds then taken the short walk through a small section of woods behind Donald’s cottage to a bluff overlooking the ocean. The moon had turned burgundy, and was so full and bright that it didn’t look real in the otherwise clear sky. Despite its brilliance the powerful pulse of strobe lights swirling from the public beach below overshadowed it, even at this distance.

The three of us stood in the sand and beginnings of tall grass along the dunes, watching the official vehicles that were still parked at haphazard angles along the beach. A tent had been constructed where the body itself had been discovered, and several temporary stadium-like lights had been set up, giving the small area an oddly surreal look, an artificial glowing oasis surrounded by darkness. Though it was several hundred yards away, we could make out policemen and various authorities still scouring and investigating the area. Beyond the barriers they had put up along the parking lot, a small crowd had gathered to watch the goings on. Since the body had been found hours before and was long gone from the scene, I wondered what the townsfolk were hoping to see. I watched the red and blue beams pan and play about Rick and Donald’s faces, and wondered the same thing about us.

“I wonder if he came here,” Donald said. “The night he put that body there. I wonder if when he was done, after he’d buried that poor woman’s remains down there, beneath the sand, I wonder if he came here to see me. I wonder if he came and sat in my home and talked about nothing at all the way Bernard was so good at doing, the way he could do for hours. I wonder if he laughed to himself about it later. I wonder if he found it amusing.”

Rick was holding a six-pack of beer held together by plastic rings. He pulled one can free and ran it against his forehead. “Lot of FBI guys down there. They must be turning over every grain of sand hoping to find something. The local politicians were already bitching on the news about how this is going to hurt the tourist season. You believe that shit? Even the poor folks who can’t afford a real Cape Cod vacation won’t be showing up here if they think a serial killer’s on the loose. Hell, they can go further toward or up Cape and be safe.”

“Or so it would seem.” The lights painted Donald’s face. He looked so strange with a bit of dried blood along his slightly swollen lip. It didn’t suit him, the face of a fighter. “They can bring in the CIA and it won’t matter. They’re hunting a ghost.”

“Bodies popping up out of the fucking ground and all they’re worried about are summer businesses being down,” Rick said.

My hands were sore, my knuckles covered in several small cuts and gashes, but the bleeding had been minor and stopped on the ride back to Potter’s Cove. I looked down at them, flexed my fingers. “Let me get one of those beers.”

Rick held the cans out, dangled them from his grip on the vacant ring of plastic. I reached out and plucked one loose. It was cold and felt good in my hand. The heat was still high but a slight ocean wind made it somewhat tolerable. I opened the can and took a long swig. It could have been—should have been—a beautiful night.

“We could’ve been killed tonight,” Donald said, and it was then that I realized we’d been speaking in hushed tones.

“But we weren’t,” I answered.

“We could have been.”

“Yeah, but we weren’t.”

Donald ran a hand through his hair, eyes trained on the beach below. “The bodies will keep turning up, and once they’ve reached the end of the road Bernard created, all of this will end. They’ll either never know who the killer was, or they’ll somehow discover it was Bernard. Regardless, he’s dead and gone, and there’ll be nothing anyone can do. After the news stories have been reported, the television shows have aired and the books have been written, this whole horrible business will end. It’ll just fade away quietly until it’s reduced to some vaguely heinous memory, a scar Potter’s Cove will always have to endure, but little else. It’ll be a Remember When bit, that’s all. And in the end, none of it will have meant a goddamn thing. It’s a storm, Alan, and I plan to sit and wait it out.” He turned to me, his face half concealed in darkness, half illuminated by the moon and alternating swaths of police lights. “And once it passes, I’ll get on with this semblance of a fucking life I have. It’s not much—God knows—but it’s all I’ve got. I’m out.”

I killed the beer. “I’m sorry about tonight, I never should’ve—”

“I’m out.”

“Donald, you heard what that woman said tonight, you saw—you saw her hands.”

Rick moved a few feet ahead of us toward the edge of the bluff and sunk down onto the seat of his pants, the beers balanced in his lap.

“Yes,” Donald told me, “I heard what she said and I saw her hands.”

“And you still want to just walk away?”

“You’re flipping over rocks, Alan. Don’t be upset with me if I don’t want to roll around with the bugs slithering in the mud beneath them.” He nervously wiped a bead of sweat from his temple. “I’ve never been in a brawl in my life, and here I am pushing forty and suddenly I’m in some used tampon of a bar trying to avoid being killed by lowlife thugs who may or may not have known some prostitute Bernard was seeing. I’m listening to a woman either possessed or insane babbling about evil spirits and darkness and grave soil, her skin splitting and bleeding right in front of me like some cheap parlor trick only it’s real—it’s real because I saw it and felt it. But it’s still madness, Alan, and it’s only going to get worse. I want nothing more to do with any of it.”

I tossed the empty can aside, in Rick’s direction, and squared off with Donald. “Sticking your head in the sand and hiding isn’t the answer.”

“Call it whatever you’d like. I’m out.”

“Donald, I—”

“I’m sorry, Alan. I’m out.”

I was hoping Rick might back me up but he was watching the beach or the water or the night sky and clearly had no intention of getting involved.

Donald let a hand rest on my shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I need a cigarette and a drink. Beer’s not going to come anywhere near touching what I require this evening. I’ll be inside, you guys are welcome to join me.”

I watched him turn and walk back along the path toward his cottage. The darkness and trees swallowed him within seconds.

“He’s right, man,” Rick said from behind me.

I moved over toward him and crouched down. He had opened another beer and was nearly finished with it. “You out too?” I asked.

“It’s a miracle one of those assholes wasn’t packed, Alan.” He glanced at me and smiled, somewhat helplessly. His eyes were red and glassy. “I get into scuffles all the time, shit, it’s my fucking job, happens at the club on a regular basis. But it’s different there. It’s my turf, I’m in control, I know the situation, the score, and in most cases, the players. It’s a controlled setting. But in a place like tonight it’s different. You never know what you’re walking into.”

I knelt into the sand, felt it shift and sink under my weight, then sat back on my heels. The faint sounds of a police radio echoed up along the dunes before escaping across the slow steady waves of the Atlantic. “You saved our asses back there.”

Rick shrugged. “You’re gonna go look for that chick, aren’t you.”

“Yes.”

“You’re playing around with people who aren’t like us, man. These people don’t live in the same world we do. Shit, they’re just barely on the same planet. You go fucking around with that kind of crowd and all the shit they’re into and sooner or later you’re gonna find yourself in a situation. It’ll either get you killed or you’ll end up killing somebody else, and either way, Alan, you fucking lose.” He chugged some beer, belched. “I can’t be in situations like that, man, you understand? What if I’d killed that guy tonight? Oh, sorry, your honor, my dead friend and the motherfucking spirit world made me do it in self-defense. I can bring that fucking whale into court in a wheelbarrow and she can do her bleeding fingers trick. Yeah, that’ll work.”

“This shit’s not funny, man.”

“You see me laughing?” Rick shook his head to emphasize the point. “I’m not ever going back to prison. Not for anything. Not for anybody. What if somebody had gotten killed tonight?”

“Rick, what if whatever’s out there wants us dead anyway?”

A cooler breeze rustled the tall dune grass as if in answer, but it was chased by a swell of heat and continued on through the trees behind us, making the respite from humidity short-lived.

“Then we’re probably gonna die,” he said. “Look, I’ll always be here if you need me—you know that—but I can’t keep chasing—”

“You saw what happened in that backroom tonight.”

He turned to me quickly, like he planned to snap at me, but instead looked away and drank his beer. After a while he said, “Let the dead lie, Alan.” Rick opened another beer, held it out for me. “Let the Devil have his Hell, and let Bernard and the rest of them rot there. Go find Toni and get her back. Whatever’s real or whatever isn’t, that’s the only world—the only life that matters.”

I began to respond but thought better of it. I took the beer he was offering and replaced it with my hand. We shook for what seemed forever. When he finally let go he looked out at the water and quietly continued drinking. I wanted to tell him there wasn’t enough beer in the world to make all this go away, but stayed quiet and gazed down on the scene of the crime instead.

Somewhere down there was that darkness beneath the dirt Mama had spoken of. Darkness you didn’t come back from because you had to be dead to be there.

And not only was I on my way there, I knew now I’d be going alone.

CHAPTER 24

The prospect of returning to an empty apartment was less than thrilling, but I did it anyway. I checked the answering machine, hopeful to find something from Toni, but there were no messages. The refrigerator was nearly empty and the cupboards weren’t doing much better, so I called downstairs and caught the pizza parlor just before they closed. One of the kids who worked there ran me up a couple of plain slices and a Coke. I ate out on the steps and let the sounds of Saturday night in downtown Potter’s Cove distract me for a while. The apartment was beyond hot, and everywhere I looked I saw Toni. The place still smelled of her, of her cologne and gels and powders and lotions, and even though she had taken quite a few things with her traces remained, traces of us.

By the time I’d finished eating and forced myself under a cold shower, it was nearly two in the morning. My back was sore, the side of my head where I’d been punched was throbbing and my hands still ached. Rather than think about how old and out of shape I felt at that moment, I did my best to enjoy the brief break from the humidity the cool water provided.

I emerged to find that things had quieted the way things do in towns—even big towns—after midnight. I stood at the foot of the bed and looked at the rumpled sheets for a while. I’d been unable to sleep in it since Toni left.

I wrapped a towel around my waist, went into the den and settled down onto the couch, certain I’d be unable to sleep. Within minutes, I had slipped off.

I awakened in the morning to the realization that I’d had the dream again. This time, in addition to Bernard and the strange people accompanying him, Mama Toots was there too, wiggling fat bloody fingers at me and grinning demonically with her grimy teeth.

My body was stiff and sore, and although I had slept, I didn’t feel rested at all, and wondered if I’d ever be able to totally relax again. I rubbed my eyes, stood up and shuffled to the bathroom.

While I dressed all I could think about was the bar and everything that had happened there. The events continued to replay in my mind despite my attempts to concentrate on other things, and I felt confronted by a strange fusion of satisfaction and anxiety.

I dressed in a pair of jeans, sneakers and t-shirt, then went to the bedroom closet and pulled a large lockbox from the top shelf. It contained several holsters, my 9mm, a box of ammo and two clips. I checked the weapon over, laid it on the bed then turned to the holsters and selected one that attached to my belt. Grabbing a clip of ammo, I shut the box, locked it and returned it to the shelf.

Because of my job I was licensed to carry a concealed firearm, but the only time I ever did was during periodic work details that required me to do so. I felt strange strapping on a gun outside of work, but I had no idea what might be waiting for me out there this time. Wading through the dark alone was bad enough; I didn’t intend to do it empty-handed as well.

I secured the holster and gun to the back of my belt and pulled my t-shirt down over it. Studying myself in the mirror, I stretched the shirt out a bit until it hung looser and the bulge was less noticeable. Sweat had already formed across my forehead and down the back of my neck. It was a little after eight o’clock, so I knew if the humidity was already this high we were in for another scorcher. Strange to see a heat wave this early in the season, I thought. But then again, everything else had gone haywire, why not weather patterns too?

On the nearby bureau one of our wedding pictures distracted me. We looked impossibly young, happy and unaware, the two us sitting at the head table, Toni in her gown and me in my tuxedo, arms entwined while sipping champagne from each other’s glasses.

Bells from a church about a mile up the street chimed, echoed beautifully in the distance, reminding me today was Sunday.

I reached out and gently laid the photograph face down.

Milner Avenue was an old, nearly forgotten stretch of desolate road not far from the airport. At the very end of the road sat the shell of an ancient mill that was slowly crumbling from years of neglect. Most of the outer walls were covered in graffiti, and the grass around the property was badly overgrown and unkempt. Garbage littered the area. Amidst the brush and vacant sand lots an occasional ramshackle cottage emerged, remnants of the inexpensive housing provided decades earlier for some of the workers employed by the then thriving mill. Most of the tenements were condemned and boarded shut.

I drove the four-mile length of Milner so I’d know where it came out, and found that beyond the old mill was a dirt road that eventually led to an intersecting paved boulevard. Less than a mile from there, I came across an onramp back to the state highway.

Comfortable with the way in and out, I circled around and this time paid closer attention to the tachometer from the moment I pulled onto the avenue.

A little more than a mile in, in the middle of a dirt lot horseshoed by an expanse of brush and dead trees, I saw a small cottage off by itself just as Mama had described. It was set atop cinder blocks and in horrible shape, but still looked somewhat livable. There were no cars parked alongside the cottage, but there was an old mailbox at the edge of the lot closest to the road. I checked my watch. It was nearly nine o’clock.

I continued on a ways, then turned around and came back again. Diagonally across from the cottage I pulled over to the side and dropped the car into Park. The far-off rumblings of a slowly awakening city battled with the hum of the engine. The desolation of this empty and forgotten corridor on the outskirts of the city made me uncomfortable. It was the kind of place where you could scream, and even if anyone in the distance was able to hear you, odds are, no one would care. I leaned back against the seat and felt my gun press into the small of my back. Although I had never drawn or fired it except at the range, the reminder of its presence gave me a slight sense of security nonetheless.

After watching the house for a few minutes, I climbed from the car and slowly approached the property.

Dulled by the haze of humidity, just over the span of brush and dead trees, the sun hung low but fierce in the sky. I moved across the dirt lot until the shade of the cottage itself blocked the rays. I gave a quick look around. The building was in rough shape, and the screen door and screens on the front windows were old and battered. A filthy bare bulb sat in a socket above the front door and an ancient welcome mat had been thrown down before it. I knocked and waited. Nothing. I knocked again. More nothing.

After a moment I stepped over to the window to the left of the door and leaned into it, cupping my hands on either side of my head so I might see the interior of the cottage. The screen was hard to see through however, and the window itself was so dirty it blurred all that lay beyond it. I backed away, knocked a third time.

I could hear cars rushing along the highway in the distance. Slowly, I walked around the side of the house and peered into the area behind it. An old picnic table that looked like it hadn’t been used in ages was propped against the back of the house and there were two small trash cans parked along the far corner. Another short stretch of dirt led to the beginnings of the brush at the rear of the property, and I noticed a clothesline had been strung from the back left corner of the house to a thin pole several feet away that had been planted there for that specific purpose. The clothesline was bare, and I began to wonder if anyone lived here after all.

Carefully, I walked behind the cottage to the trashcans. Flies buzzed about noisily, and when I pulled the lid free of the first can I realized I still couldn’t be sure if someone was residing here because the garbage was mostly frozen dinner boxes and food, and most of it looked anything but fresh. The smell in this heat was gripping, so I replaced the lid and continued back around the corner of the house until I’d again reached the front door. I looked back across the way. But for my car, it was empty.

I went next to the mailbox near the road. There were two pieces of mail inside. I looked around again then reached in and pulled them free. One was a light bill and the other was an advertising flyer for a department store. The postmark on the light bill was less than a week old, so I knew it had been delivered within the last day or two. I slid them back into the box and closed it.

Once back at the car I hesitated before getting behind the wheel. Maybe this was a mistake, I thought. Maybe it’s just as well she isn’t here. But just as I slid my sunglasses on to combat the glare of the sun, something near the mangle of dead trees caught my attention.

My legs shook and my stomach clenched. I pulled the glasses off, forced a swallow and heard indecipherable whispers breaking over the trees and across the dirt lot. They swirled around me, and I told myself not to be afraid, that this was all in my head, but the fear refused to subside. My mind told me to run, to get into the car and drive away from there without ever coming back. Instead, I drew a deep breath, closed my eyes and held them shut. After a few seconds I slowly opened them.

The whispers had stopped. Or maybe they’d never really been there at all. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter as much now.

I climbed back into the car and headed toward the city proper.

After nursing a cup of coffee at a local diner for over an hour, I drove around New Bedford for another thirty-odd minutes until I’d summoned the nerve necessary to return to Milner Avenue.

It was nearly eleven when I pulled over in front of her cottage a second time. Everything looked the same, until I realized the front door was open. There were no other cars around so I assumed she’d either been sleeping when I’d come before or someone had dropped her off in the interim.

I stepped from the car and scanned the trees and brush. Visible waves of heat rose from the dirt to distort the landscape, but nothing else moved.

I removed my sunglasses, tossed them onto the dash then walked toward the house with a purposely-unassuming gait. At the screen door I hesitated and craned my neck in an attempt to see deeper into the cottage, but due to the lack of light within, it was impossible. Both of the front windows were also open and protected only by screens. The house was quiet but for a subtle thudding sound from somewhere nearby. I knocked on the screen door but no one appeared or answered, so I listened more carefully.

The thudding was coming from behind the house.

As I turned the corner I saw a large throw rug draped over the clothesline. Behind it, someone was hitting it, knocking dust free with a broom. The thudding stopped rather suddenly, and from behind the rug a woman emerged.

Her hair was cropped short and spiked in a style that made it difficult to tell if it was meant to look disheveled or if she just hadn’t combed it in a while. Hair that had been auburn in the photograph was now jet-black. She looked physically smaller than the photograph suggested, far thinner and considerably older. The woman in the photograph had been no more than early twenties; this person was early thirties. I raised a hand to my eyes to shield the sun so I could get a clearer look at her, but still couldn’t be certain it was the same person.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but are you Claudia?”

She slipped under the clothesline, the broom still in her hands. She wore an old shirt with faint black and white checks she’d only bothered to button to the middle of her chest. The shirt arms had been hacked away with scissors, leaving behind strings and strands dangling awkwardly from sockets where sleeves had been. Heavily worn Levis and a pair of scuffed black boots rounded out the ensemble. Her left ear was pierced several times but her right sported only a single small hoop. Her complexion was pale, her eyes tired, and it looked as if this was the first time she’d seen sunshine in quite a while. She wore heavy eyeliner but no other makeup.

She sized me up a moment without responding.

“I’m looking for Claudia Brewster.”

“You a cop?” she asked, her voice whispery and a bit deep for such a petite woman.

“No, I’m—”

“Then you’re trespassing. Fuck off.”

“Are you Claudia Brewster?”

“Brewer.”

“Brewer then.”

“What do you want?”

“My name is—”

“What do you want?” She let the broom rest on the ground and leaned on it, crossing her hands over the end of the knob. I noticed small black tattoos just below the first joint of each of her fingers. Each was different—a star, a crescent moon, an ankh, a pentagram—but inked in the same bland, amateurish style.

“I want to talk to you.”

“About what?”

I wiped my hand on my jeans and offered it to her. She glanced at it with disinterest. “I’m Alan Chance,” I said. She gave no reaction. “Bernard was a friend of mine.”

She maintained her distant cool. “Who?”

“Bernard Moore.”

“Never heard of him.”

“I’m not here to play games, lady. Bernard’s dead. He hanged himself.”

After a moment she nodded, face expressionless. “I know.”

“I found this in with his things after he died.” I pulled the photograph from my pocket and held it out for her. “I’ve been through hell trying to find you.”

“You wouldn’t know Hell if you were burning in it.”

The deadpan tone of her voice gave birth to a tide of discomfort—if not outright fear—that fired through me like electrical current. As it dissipated, I pushed the photograph at her again.

This time she reached out, took the picture and studied it a while. The quiet returned until she said, “That was taken years ago. Another life. Long… long fucking time ago.”

“You can keep it if you want,” I said.

“I don’t know what he was doing with it, that was taken years before I met him. An old… somebody I knew back then took it.”

“I figured you gave it to him.”

“Maybe I did. Maybe he stole it. Who knows? A lot of life’s a blur, know what I mean?” She tucked the photograph into her back pocket. “So is that it, you just came here to give me that?”

“I came here for answers.”

“If you got this far you already have them,” she said.

“Some. Not all.”

We stared at each other a while. Her eyes were disconcerting. They had once been rather beautiful—like in the photo—but now looked dull and old beyond her years, soulless. “I need to know what you know.”

“About what?”

“About Bernard. About what he was involved in and about what in the name of Christ is going on.”

She ran her tongue slowly along her bottom lip, moistening it. “Christ ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

“I need to know what you know,” I said again.

“No you don’t. You want to know. There’s a difference.”

“Strange things have been happening since Bernard’s death.”

“I bet.”

“I need your help.”

“With what?”

“With all that’s happening. I need to find the truth.”

“Truth’s overrated.” Claudia swung the broom up behind her head until it rested behind her neck, then slung an arm over either end the way James Dean had held a rifle in that famous pose from the film Giant. Even in her own space her movements were telling, her body language indicative of someone for whom most of life had been spent in situations where she was unwelcome, made to feel self-conscious or didn’t want to be. At once a longtime victim and battle weary survivor, she possessed an inherent toughness and a deliberately honed exterior that left no doubt about the authenticity of either. At close range, it was easy to believe she had likely been victimized in more ways than I could ever imagine, but she was far from a helpless waif. She looked as strong and potentially dangerous as she did pained, just as capable of victimizing someone else, if need be. She seemed to me the kind of person who would kill if cornered, and perhaps already had at some point.

I stood there awkwardly. “Will you help me or not?”

“What do you want from me?” She shook her head. “I don’t even know who you are and I’m supposed to just—”

“I told you, my name is Alan Chance. I was a friend of Bernard’s.”

“So fucking what? You’re just a guy in my yard. I don’t know you.”

I sighed and ran my hands through my hair. They came back damp with perspiration. “I’m sure Bernard mentioned me.”

“Yeah,” she said, “he did. But you were his friend. Not mine. He kept things—people—separate. If he hadn’t we would’ve met a long time ago, right?”

“I take it you’ve heard what’s been happening in Potter’s Cove?”

“I’ve been away for a while. Just got back yesterday, but yeah, I heard.” She nodded. “What’s any of that got to do with me?”

“You tell me.”

The broom came down from behind her neck and she held it by her side. “You accusing me of something?”

“Are you guilty of something?”

She turned toward the house. “Get the fuck out of here.”

I reached out for her arm. “Claudia, wait, I—”

She spun around, bringing the broom with her, and in a split-second the handle was less than an inch from my eye. “You put your hands on me again, asshole, and I’ll drive this thing right through your fucking brain, you hear me?”

I believed her. “I’m sorry.” I raised my hands but otherwise stood perfectly still. “I’m not looking to hurt you. I only need your help.”

Claudia lowered the broom and relaxed her stance a bit. After a beat she said, “I told you, I just got back into town. I’m here a few hours and already I got a call from some old friends downtown—friends who aren’t friends anymore, who I don’t want to hear from no more—telling me there were people looking for me, causing all kinds of trouble. That crazy old bitch Toots giving me warnings and throwing her hexes around, as if anybody besides greenhorns and marks give a shit, and then I got you sniffing around like some dog with his nose up my butt. I don’t want any of this, OK? I just want to be left the fuck alone.”

“I didn’t ask for any of this, either,” I said quietly.

She looked at the sun and drew the back of her hand across her forehead, wiping away some sweat. “I don’t expect you to understand this, and I don’t give a shit if you do or not, but I want to make a clean break of things this time. I’m starting over. I don’t want no part of whatever problems you got. I got enough of my own.”

“I’m not expecting you to get involved. All I ask is that you tell me what you know.”

She let go a brief, ironic smile. “Oh, is that all?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t need your help.”

Claudia leaned the broom against the back of the house. “I don’t know anything.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

She threw me a defiant shrug.

I sighed. “Like I said, strange things have been going on since Bernard’s death.”

“Oh yeah?” As she dug a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of her shirt, I noticed an oddly benign flash in her otherwise apathetic expression. She slid an unfiltered Lucky Strike between her lips then patted herself down for a lighter, which she eventually found in her jeans. “Like what?”

“You mean besides bodies turning up in Potter’s Cove?”

Claudia drew a deep initial drag on her cigarette, held the smoke a bit longer than normal then released it in a slow steady stream from her nostrils. She gave me a stern look that made it apparent my question didn’t warrant an answer.

“I know this is going to sound crazy, but—”

“We’re all crazy. The world’s crazy.”

“Since Bernard’s death,” I began again, “we’ve all had the same dream, we—”

“We?”

“My friends—Bernard’s other friends—Rick and Donald.”

She waited a moment before responding, as if what I’d said was slowly solidifying in her mind. “He used to talk about you three a lot.”

I flicked a bead of sweat from my temple. “We all started having nightmares not long after Bernard’s death. Identical nightmares. And I’ve been–” I forced myself to say it, “I’ve been having hallucinations or visions or waking dreams, I—I don’t know for sure exactly what they are. Then the other night, that woman—Toots—she told me—”

“I know what she told you,” she said. “The fat bitch thinks you’re possessed, said she saw your demons and they attacked her, drew her blood.”

“Do you believe her?” I asked.

“You’d be surprised what I believe.”

“I know it’s all tied together. I know Bernard was involved in—”

“Why are you so sure I know anything?”

I stared at her without answering.

“Even if I do,” she said, “why would I tell you?”

“To help me.”

“And why would I want to do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know, how about because it’s the right thing to do?”

“What the hell universe you living in?”

“Thought you said you wanted a fresh start.”

She left the cigarette perched between her lips as tendrils of smoke crept past her face. “That gun on your belt loaded?”

I was stunned, unsure of how she had seen it since she’d been in front of me the entire time. “Yes.”

“Planning on shooting somebody?”

“It’s strictly for protection.”

Apparently she found my answer amusing because her face hinted at a smile, but it left her quickly. Slowly, she turned her attention to the trees behind us, as if searching for something hidden there, watching. “Come on,” she said softly, cocking her head toward the house. “Let’s get out of the sun.”

CHAPTER 25

The interior of the cottage was the disaster area I’d anticipated it to be. There was an undersized kitchen; an equally small living room and a dark jog of a hallway I assumed led to a bathroom and bedroom. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust after crossing from bright sunshine into this cave of sorts. What little light existed seeped through the two open windows in the living room, but in the kitchen area, which we had walked into through the back door, the windows were closed and covered with cheap green canvas pull-shades. A musty smell hung in the air, and everything was covered in a thin film of dust. I stood awkwardly near the door, watched Claudia cross to an ancient refrigerator. The door opened with a clang and light from within punctured the room. She reached in, pulled out an unlabeled brown bottle and held it up. “Want one?”

“No,” I said. “But thanks.”

She closed the door, leaned back against it. Her throat was slick with perspiration. “It’s only root beer.” She twisted off the cap and casually tossed it into the nearby sink, which was brimming with filthy dishes and hundreds of swarming ants.

I moved closer to a table in the center of the room, noticed a suitcase sitting in the doorway to the living room.

Claudia saw me looking at it and said, “I just got back last night, haven’t had a chance to unpack. Or clean up, obviously.” She drank from the bottle, gulped loudly.

“I came by a little while ago but—”

“Yeah, you woke me up with all that knocking.”

“Sorry.” I smiled uncomfortably and pulled one of the chairs out from the table. “Mind if I sit down?”

Claudia motioned to the chair with the bottle. “Been in rehab for a while. Had a meth problem. It was fucked up but, man, so is this. No more drugs, no more booze. All I got left is nicotine, sugar and caffeine. Figure one of these days I’ll kick butts too, but one step at a time, that’s what they say. I beat heroin and coke a few years back—so I figure I can do this. Least that’s what I keep telling myself. You got to play these little head games with yourself, it’s fucking sick but it works. This one counselor told me I had what’s called an addictive personality. I was like: Yeah, no fucking shit, Kreskin.” She let slip a genuine, very pretty smile. Her teeth were a bit too large for her mouth, and there was a noticeable gap between the two in front, but like the rest, they were straight and bright and lit up her entire face.

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Claudia.”

The smile crept away. “That what you think I’m doing?”

“I don’t know.”

She finished the root beer, pushed away from the refrigerator and placed the bottle on the counter. “I’ve been on my own since I was twelve years old. I’ve lived most of my life like a fucking animal. Worse. Animals have standards. They’re better than us. All that superior species hype’s a bunch of bullshit. We’re the fucking mistakes, man. We’re the deformities, the abominations of evolution. Any fool knows that. But I don’t apologize for nothing and I don’t explain myself to nobody. Know why? Because I didn’t make the fucking rules and I don’t owe anybody a goddamn thing, that’s why.”

The level of natural intelligence she possessed was surprising, and I couldn’t help but wonder what she might have accomplished had her life been different. “I didn’t mean to infer—”

“‘Course not.” She walked slowly along the front of the counter, her eyes never leaving me, the heels of her boots clacking on the tile floor. “I’ve been a junkie and a whore and a whole lot of other things you don’t want to know for so long it doesn’t seem real for me to be anything else. But I am. I am something else now. It’s still a fucking mess but I’m working on it. And I’m leaving soon.” She pointed at a tattered and stained poster on the wall advertising Florida, a bathing suit clad couple with their backs to the camera running hand in hand across a beautiful stretch of sand toward the ocean beyond. “Never been, always wanted to go. Now I’m gonna do it. This time I’m really gonna do it.” She eyed the poster for a few seconds. “Ever been there?”

“On my honeymoon, a long time ago.”

“Does it really look like that?”

“In parts, yeah.”

“Gonna get some stupid waitress job or something, and every day off I’m gonna lay on the beach and go swimming and all that shit. It’s all about the forgetting now.” Claudia snapped out of her dream and leaned back against the counter. “Point is, I ain’t gonna be around here much longer. I been where you’re going—and like I told you, I don’t want nothing to do with it anymore.”

“I understand.”

“This conversation and the one we’re gonna have never happened. You were never even here, got it? And if you go to the cops I’ll—”

“I won’t.”

“You do and—”

“I won’t. For Christ’s sake, I have to trust you too. You could just as easily go to the police after I tell you what I know.”

“Yeah, well, you know us junkie whores.” She grabbed the front of her shirt, pulled it away from her chest and blew down between her breasts. “We ain’t too reliable.”

“I’d say you’re taking less of a risk in trusting me than I am in trusting you,” I told her. “We are what we are, right?”

“Oh, that’s fucking deep, Plato.” Claudia let her shirt go. I followed it to the curved tops of her breasts. “Only problem is most people don’t have clue-one about who they are. They know even less about the world they’re living in. All sunshine and picket fences and ice cream and roses, right? Cockeyed motherfuckers. I’ve seen the shit out there no one ever wants to see. I’ve been treading water in swill since I was a kid, and I’m still here. I’ve seen and done things, and had things done to me you couldn’t believe even if I proved them. Your mind couldn’t get around them. You think you know what hell is? I’ve fucking lived it, and through it all, I’m still here… what’s left of me anyway. You want to put your trust in something? Put it in that.” She dug her cigarettes from her pocket. “You want to know what I know? Fine. You first. I ain’t saying shit until you tell me what you know.” Like a cloud slipping past the moon, a condescending look appeared, rolled across her face and was gone. “What you think you know.”

“I knew Bernard from the time we were little kids,” I heard myself say with a fondness that made me uncomfortable. “Since he died I’ve done nothing but think about things, back on things, and none of us ever suspected him of anything because we didn’t take him seriously. One thing you never did with Bernard was to take him seriously. He was always kind of weird, but—but we were used to it—it’s just the way he was, the way he always was, so none of us ever gave it much thought. What might have been red flags for most people didn’t mean anything when it came to Bernard. He used to lie a lot. He’d exaggerate everything and always make himself out to be something he wasn’t. At least that’s what we thought. You never really knew what was true and what wasn’t. He’d make so much shit up you never knew for sure, but it—as strange as it sounds—it didn’t matter. Bernard was just Bernard. I always thought he told his stories and went on and on because in reality he had nothing. In reality he was alone and hadn’t accomplished much of anything with his life. We got good at letting things go, at looking the other way when it came to him. We were all different, Donald and Rick and Bernard and me, but in a lot of ways we were the same, too. None of us were perfect, who the hell were we to judge Bernard or think less of him for being himself, for stretching the truth now and then or making a fantasy world for himself where he wasn’t the brunt of jokes, the weak one, a person no one other than his friends would ever give a second look or thought to?”

Claudia nodded. “If you want to sweeten it up while you walk down memory lane, that’s your problem. But remember, I knew him too. Maybe the side I saw was different, but it was just as real. He was a lying sack of shit most of the time, but the thing with Bernard was that he’d tell just enough truth to make you think, to make you wonder if what he was saying was real. He’d lie and lie and lie and then throw in a truth, but you never knew which was which. And the few times I questioned him, I was wrong and he had been telling the truth. He’d prove it. You want to still make excuses for him, go ahead, but Bernard was a trickster, and he’d been one for years. He was evil.”

“He was human,” I said softly.

“Partly.”

What bothered me most was that she meant it. “Partly?”

She dismissed me with a look. “You were saying?”

I ignored the smells hanging in the stagnant air as I took a deep breath and tried to organize my thoughts. “Not long after he died, I started to think back about things, like I said, and some things from the past I hadn’t thought of in years came back to me and took on new meaning. One of those memories led me to a woman who lived in Potter’s Cove with us when we were kids. I found out that Bernard raped her while he was still in his teens. It destroyed this woman, and she’s been in and out of institutions ever since. She claimed there was more to Bernard than met the eye even then.” The look of disgust on Claudia’s face made me think there was a response coming, but she remained silent. “God knows what else he did before that. Later, after high school, we thought Bernard had joined the Marines,” I continued. “He came back saying he’d torn up his knee in a fall during basic training, and that he’d been discharged, but we found out after he died that the entire thing was a lie. He’d never been a Marine and went to New York City instead. He claimed… He didn’t exactly come right out and say it but he claimed he had started killing women there.”

“You said you found this out after he died?” she asked.

“Yes.” Although I had promised Donald and Rick I’d keep the subject of the tape between us, I felt at that point I had no choice but to trust Claudia with the information. If I had any chance of gaining her trust in return, I’d have to put all my cards on the table and risk it. I calmly explained about the tape being sent to Rick, how we had all listened to it together, and the specifics of what had been on it. I then explained how Donald had researched crimes in New York City during that time and how he had found two unsolved homicides that were strikingly similar to the murders in Potter’s Cove.

She gave no reaction until I’d finished. “So you know he was a liar and a sick little boy who liked to torture and rape and who knows what else.”

“Yes.”

“And you think he killed these women?”

“I know he did.”

“Then what more do you need? Isn’t that enough?”

“It would’ve been,” I said, “if it hadn’t been for the dreams.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Donald, Rick and I all had an identical recurring nightmare. We’re still having it.” I described the dream for her in detail. “And then I started to experience worse things. Hallucinations—or visions or whatever the hell they are—of this woman and her child. Horrible visions. They started subtly, but they were so real, and eventually I had them while I was on a job. This woman in the vision, she lured me to an old condemned factory down in the south end and I saw… I saw some things down there. If there is a Hell, these things she showed me came straight out of it.”

“If,” Claudia scoffed quietly.

“I saw other things I can’t explain or even fully remember down there. I don’t know for sure if I want to remember them. It’s the same when I think back to when Bernard and all of us were kids. The memories are scattered, you know? But there are huge pieces I can’t remember that come back to me now in scraps and blurs. Maybe it’s the same thing and I don’t want to remember them more clearly either. Maybe if I do it’ll unlock something else, something worse.” Everything I was saying sounded absurd to me, like I was completely out of my goddamn mind. “And besides the visions, sometimes I hear things—whispers or—or I just feel something.” I explained the experiences with the woman and child in as much detail as I could. “It’s like all of this is stalking me somehow, together with my memories and nightmares of Bernard. I lost my job, my wife… maybe my mind. And it still won’t stop. I need it to.” A rush of emotion suddenly welled in the base of my throat. “I need it to stop.”

Claudia finished her cigarette with a succession of repetitive drags then tossed the butt into the sink with the dishes and the ants. It rolled behind a plate, disappearing into the clutter, and I heard a soft hiss as ember hit water. “My childhood lasted about ten minutes,” she said through a sigh. “Kids like me grow up quick, you know? But one time, when I was still a kid, before the world got a hold of me, I was talking to this priest. My grandma used to take me to church, dress me up in little dresses and hats, gloves—the whole bit. She died when I was twelve, but before that she was this all-star Catholic, used to go to the rectory and help out the priest with dishes and cleaning and shit like that after mass. One day I was at the rectory waiting for my grandma to finish, and I started talking to the priest. Father Naslette was his name. Old bastard, looked like a bald eagle with glasses. My grandma used to have National Geographic magazines at her house, and one time I saw these natives in like New Guinea or some shit, and I started wondering, you know, the way little kids do? Anyway, Father Naslette used to tell me that if you didn’t believe in God and obey His laws, you’d go to Hell. So I asked him what about the natives in National Geographic? They didn’t even know what a Catholic church was, so how come they were going to Hell?” She scowled like she’d suddenly tasted something bitter. “And you know what he told me? He told me that only people who had the knowledge were responsible for it. He said that if you didn’t know about God then it was OK and wouldn’t nobody blame you for that. Those natives, they didn’t know, they were innocent so they wouldn’t be punished. Hell was only for those who knew and fucked up or didn’t obey. So sometimes it’s better to not know, because whether you believe in that shit or not, once you have knowledge, you’re responsible for it. Well I got news for you. God ain’t the only one who works that angle.”

The only emotion I felt now was growing anger. “Look, the woman I told you about, the one Bernard attacked when they were teenagers, she acted the same way you do. Like there’s some big fucking secret everyone knows except me, and I’m sick and tired of it. I want to know what’s happening. I want to know what all this means. And I don’t give a shit what kind of strings are attached to it, you understand me?”

“Oh, I understand,” she said. “You just better hope you do.”

Claudia lingered near the counter and folded her arms across her chest, crushing her breasts together in a swell that revealed a considerable amount of cleavage and created the illusion that she was bustier than she was. The pose, and its result, were executed in a wholly blasé manner and had not been intended as a means of affecting me. She clearly could not have cared less if I took notice or not.

“That’s the problem with people like you,” she said in her throaty voice. “You want and think everything’s out in the open—explained and seen and safe. Things are only like that on the surface. The real world is the one underneath. The one I moved in for years. The one Bernard moved in. That world’s different. It’s shadows.”

I nodded. “Then show me the shadows, Claudia.”

She grimaced but quickly masked it, as if specters of what lived in those shadows had suddenly flashed before her. “I got into drugs real early in life, had a lot of problems,” she said. “I lived with my grandma, she always took care of me. She was the only one who ever gave a shit about me. When she died I was only twelve, and I pretty much been on my own ever since. Met my mom a few times when I was a kid, but never really knew her. Wouldn’t know my father if I fell over him. My mom died when I was nine. Somebody strangled her and threw her in a dumpster in Fall River. I found out later she was a drug addict and a hooker, my mom. Apple don’t fall far from the tree, right? I had nothing, no family, only the system, and when you’re a kid going through that—foster homes, shelters and halfway houses—all that bullshit—you can just slip away and let the world take you. And nobody cares. See, unless you kill somebody, try to kill yourself or do something real bad, the system can’t be bothered. It’s not about helping people, only punishing them, so until you do something the system thinks needs punishing, they got nothing for you. Thing is, there’s so many runaways, lost and fucked up kids, and so many real crimes and shit that the cops can’t cover it all. Half the time they don’t even go through the motions, and kids like me just fade away. We either die or we survive. Period. Either way, it ain’t pretty.

“So I’m my mother’s daughter, right?” she continued a moment later. “It don’t take long. The streets love girls like me, swallow them right up. One fucking gulp and you’re gone. And it’s like a maze, you know? You go a little ways before you get stuck, only there’s always somebody there to take you by the hand… or the hair or the throat… to take you to that next level. And on and on. ‘Cause they never tell you the only way out of that maze is death or fucking insanity, and that’s only if you get real lucky, because the deeper you get, the meaner and darker those shadows get. And the Devil, he gets closer. So close you can feel him. It’s his game, his maze. That’s how he works. Devil don’t want you to fear him until it’s too late to get out from under him. Like a trap, you know? No cheese, no motherfucking mouse.” She looked at me with a hard stare. “It’s tough to understand if you’re a mark. No offense, but—”

“None taken.”

“I’ll try to put it in a way that’ll make sense to you.” A thoughtful pause, and then, “You ever watch porn?”

I hadn’t expected the question but answered it honestly anyway. “Well, I’m not an aficionado or anything but I’ve seen it before, sure.”

“It’s kind of like that,” she said. “Works the same way. Pulls you in, but slow. Gradually. It don’t want you to fear it at first. It’s fun. Be happy. No harm. And for a lot of people that’s just how it is, they get whatever it is they get from it and walk away. But some don’t. Some can’t, and those are the ones the world wants. Starts with a little T&A, then it gets harder. Pretty soon straight sex gets boring, right? Seen it a million times. Been there, done that. So you wonder, what else you got? And the Devil, he’s got plenty. He offers it, and you look. A little while in you’re watching shit you never would’ve believed could turn you on. Fantasies you keep pushed way down because they’re more powerful than you are. But now they’re on the loose and you want more. You want to see what else they can do to that cunt in the pictures or in the movie, in the magazine or on the web site. Cum on her face, piss on her, shit on her, get a dog, let’s see the bitch fuck it—how about a horse? Rape the little slut, beat her ass, cut her throat and watch her bleed. And one day—”

“Christ almighty, I get the point.”

“And one day,” she said again, “you realize the person you were is gone, and somebody else is there instead. Somebody as mean and dark as the shadows you’re living in. Somebody who forgets and then doesn’t care that on the other end there’s a person too. And what you don’t see is all the shit that person went through to get that far in, to do things so fucked up. Not a picture or a movie but a fucking human being. Or what’s left of one. And the Devil, he just smiles. ‘Cause by then he’s got you both.”

I was unsure of what to say. Picturing Bernard with this woman required a healthy dose of imagination. It seemed outside the realm of possibility that he could have manipulated someone as savvy and streetwise as Claudia. But if manipulation hadn’t been the culprit, then what was? I hadn’t expected her to open up to this extent, to pour out her life history as if she’d been waiting for years to have the opportunity to do so, and I still wasn’t sure what any of this had to do with Bernard. What I knew for sure was that her pain was palpable, so hideous and utterly her own that it had become as much a facet of her being as any physical characteristic. Regardless of who or what she had been, was now, or hoped to be, she was demanding respect, and I gave her mine.

“So you drown in it,” she said. “You close your eyes and you drown in it, and all of a sudden life’s not about survival anymore. You stop giving a shit. You open your veins and slide in whatever gets you through the day or night, and you wonder every time you stick that spike in if that’ll be the time you don’t ever wake up. Before long you start to pray for it. You don’t really want to live anymore, but you’re afraid of death. Devil’s waiting on the other side of that long sleep, right?”

“Maybe God’s waiting there instead,” I said.

“Maybe.” Her tone was flat. “But when you been throat-deep in evil as long as I was you ain’t about to lay money on it any time soon, you see what I’m saying?”

“You keep talking about evil. What—cults or something?”

Claudia waved as if deflecting the words from the air between us. “That’s always there, those kind are never far from that world. They’re either right in the mix or hanging nearby, Satanists and those types. I ran with people like that for a while, when I had to. But they’re no different than the Bible-thumpers when you get right down to it, because both of them are banking on the easy answer, and both are convinced they’re right. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. All I know is that evil is whatever it needs to be. It’s not a simple answer like both sides of that old fight want it to be.” She leaned back against the counter and crossed her feet out in front of her, at the ankle. A long time ago, she might have looked demure and childlike in such a stance. “The truth is deeper, beyond all that other stuff. The truth is that evil is different for everybody. That’s the power, and that’s why it preys on Man. It’s the perfect predator because it’s totally individual. It touches everybody, no matter your religion or belief, and it does it on your terms, whatever they are. So how do you stop something that manifests itself in totally different forms to different people, that can be anything to anyone; that can be whatever you need it to be? It knows who we are, our fears and worries and dreams, our weaknesses and strengths, and it uses it to twist its way through our fucking minds and bodies. And when you get past all the formal crap on both sides and you look closer, you figure out that Evil doesn’t give a shit who you are or what Church you go to, what you do or what you don’t do. None of that matters, because it’s coming for you anyway. And you can’t stop it. All you can do is learn to deal with it, to keep it caged up more than you don’t. Because just like good, it’s inside of us, it’s a part of us, and you can’t just cut it loose. Like they say, personal demons, right? Well that’s exactly what they are.”

I remembered Julie Henderson, the crucifixes in her windows, and how she’d told me that they were “her reality,” and therefore worked for her.

“That’s what you see when you get beyond the cults and bullshit and see evil for what it really is. It doesn’t give a shit about rules or laws or books written by either side, ‘cause that’s just the point. There are no fucking sides. There’s the light and the dark. They just are what they are, and somewhere along the line somebody or something decided to drop us all right into the middle of it. From there, you draw your lines in the sand and fight your fights, whatever they are. Or you close your eyes and let one or the other take you.” Claudia drifted closer to the table. “By the time I was in my mid-twenties I was already too old for the crowd I’d been running with, the crowd that owned me. I’d been through the blood and gore and sex and crazy-ass shit and I was still here. Used up, drugged out. That’s when that world tosses you aside and they go looking for the next wave of twelve-year-olds. So I did what I’d been doing for years, I peddled my ass. I stopped running with any crowd, just kept pumping shit into my veins and started working the streets to pay for it, all the while hoping sooner or later my body would give out and the shit would just take me, let me drift off to wherever the fuck I was going.

“Did that for years,” she continued. “Ended up doing a lot of time in jail, and one two-year stretch in prison for drug possession and prostitution. Figured out quick that prison makes jail look like a fucking motel. Ain’t much to do inside besides fuck with people, get fucked with, eat pussy or read. I learned everything I could while I was inside, read everything. Some people find God in prison. Some find the Devil. I found my brain. Hadn’t used it since my grandma died. But it still wasn’t enough, ‘cause the nightmares never stop. The shit I saw and did, the shit that happened to me again and again, it wouldn’t ever go away. And when they finally let me out they just pushed me right back out onto the street. So I ended up where I was before, shooting up and selling my ass to pay for it. Fucking zombie. Still part of the dark. Still a piece of shit on the bottom of somebody’s shoe. I’d known some scary motherfuckers, some seriously evil bastards. But they knew how fucked up they were, they got off on it. I figured by then I’d seen it all, wouldn’t nothing surprise me or show me any corner of the dark I hadn’t seen.” She clutched the back of the chair across from me, applying a grip that turned her knuckles white. “And then one night I met Bernard.”

CHAPTER 26

A mosaic of memories regarding Bernard unexpectedly appeared in my mind, though this time they were random—his face, a smile, quick flickers of trivial past events—a reflexive parade of flashes and subconscious recollections of no particular import. They grew fainter the moment Claudia continued speaking.

“The first time I saw him it was just after dark. He was cruising Weld Square. A lot of the girls on the street knew him on sight as a regular, he cruised the square three, four times a week. I hadn’t worked that area in a long time and I’d only just started working it again, so I had no idea who he was, but a lot of the girls liked him, said he was an easy date, never any hassle, always paid and usually just wanted head or a straight lay. They all saw him as the harmless lonely heart type, you know? The kind who’d take you out to breakfast afterward or try to be your friend. The kind you can string along, work for extra cash or whatever. I was in his car ten seconds and figured him for a pure mark, and let me tell you something, Plato, I’m not wrong very often. I had way too much experience to misread people, especially men, and in that world a fuck-up can cost you your life. But I was wrong about him. Totally wrong.” She spun the chair around so that it faced her then straddled it and sat like a rebellious teenager. “Bernard played up the sad sack image, and same as the other girls, I bought it at first. Like I told you, he was a trickster. That’s what Bernard did. He deceived. But every now and then he’d let his guard down, the mask would slip a little and you’d see pieces of the demon behind it.”

The sun shifted in the sky, betrayed by a fresh beam of light that crept from the front of the cottage and struck a small section of kitchen just over Claudia’s shoulder. There must have also been a slight breeze, as ash from an ashtray on the counter momentarily swirled and flew a few inches into the air before gracefully spiraling to the floor like tiny black snowflakes.

“I’m sure you know what I mean,” she said.

“Yeah,” I answered. “But I guess I just never knew there was anything behind that mask besides an eccentric, sad and lonely guy. A childlike, harmless sort of guy.”

“You and everybody else. And that’s what he found his power in. Deception.” Claudia scowled. “The only thing behind Bernard’s mask was evil. I know. I saw it.” She reached into her back pocket, pulled out a red bandana and mopped her forehead with it. “Fucking hot,” she mumbled. She moved the rag to her neck then slid it across her chest, over the tops of her breasts and between them, soaking up the perspiration as she went. “Bernard got to be one of my regulars. I built up a group of them. They’d call me and we’d meet on neutral ground for dates. It was easier and safer than walking the street, and these were clients I knew I could count on to pay me and not give me a hard fucking time. Bernard was a steady for a couple weeks before we really started to get to know each other. He had this dork side to him but there was something else there too. It was below the surface and it took me a while to see it, but once I did I knew he was more than just some stupid mark like the rest of them. There was shit going on behind those eyes, you know? In that head.” Another far off look overtook her as she absently wiped herself with the bandana. “When you’re in the life, and especially if you’ve walked the darker roads out there, you get like this radar almost, this sense where you just know when you come across somebody else who’s been there too. Everybody who’s been in the dark—the real dark—has a way about them, and we can see it in each other. It don’t go away no matter how far from the dark you run. It’s always with you, like a brand. Kind of like the way all us jailbirds can pick each other off. I can spot somebody who did hard time in a second, and they can spot me. Same thing. I knew Bernard was moving in the darkness, knew he was more than he pretended to be, and I knew he had some sort of plan, too. People in the dark always got some sort of plan. Most of them never pull it off because the dark has a way of beating you down to where you just don’t give a shit anymore, but I could tell Bernard wasn’t like that. The dark didn’t control him like it did me and all the others I knew. He controlled it.” She dropped the sweat stained bandana on the table. “And that told me something very important about him. It told me he wasn’t new to the dark, that he’d been moving in it and mastering it for a long time. Years. Nobody who moves in the dark is ever that confident unless they’ve been there for years.

“It was all real subtle at first,” she went on. “He never really talked about it or anything but we both knew what the other was about. We started to hang out a lot more, not just on dates but other times too. He’d always pay, didn’t seem to have anything else to spend his money on, and like I said, he had a plan. Figured I fit into that plan somehow, and he brought me into his world slow and careful. For me, I was still strung out then, still pumping that shit into myself every chance I got, so Bernard was good for me. He’d supply me with the cash I needed to buy it, and sometimes he’d even get it for me. Sometimes he’d fix me himself. Got good at it, actually.”

I searched her bare arms. A few old scars; mostly faded. She no longer bore the typical ravaged flesh many addicts did, but glimpses of those same arms bruised and bloodied flashed before my eyes anyway. I pictured Bernard on his knees, administering a syringe of heroin into this woman’s veins.

“Couple times near the end I fixed him, too,” Claudia said. “He wanted to try it and liked doing it now and then, but he never got deep enough into it to get hooked. He had other addictions.”

“Like what?”

As if staged, the shaft of sunlight that had invaded the room earlier slipped away, returning the kitchen to near-darkness. “The other side,” she answered. “Torture and death. Destruction. Blood.”

A chill swept through me, temporarily defusing the humidity. “The other side,” I said, “like an afterlife?”

She nodded. “That was part of his deal, getting shit ready for when he crossed over to the other side. He believed what he did in this life would determine the kind of power he’d hold in the next one. Ain’t about Heaven and Hell to those like Bernard. It’s all about power. Only power he had here was what the darkness gave him, but on the other side he thought he could be different.”

“He was insane.”

Claudia raised an eyebrow. “You think?”

“Don’t you?”

She watched me a while. I could almost hear her thinking. “We got close, me and Bernard. Wasn’t really something I wanted but I was a drug addict, and drug addicts ain’t exactly got a lot of options. He kept me fixed, and he made me feel powerful too. Like I told you, I’d been around, seen and knew a lot of things before I met him, but Bernard let me get in close so I knew what he was doing. And it was fucking intense. Besides, I hadn’t left the dark yet myself, still thought it was where I belonged, and he was all I had.”

“You knew he was killing people?” I asked.

Claudia stood up slowly, gradually, and slid the chair out of her way. She moved around the side of the table with a slinking, feline-like stride, until she was right next to me. I looked up at her, uncertain of her intentions.

She reached down and touched my t-shirt, running her fingers across the collar and onto my throat. Her flesh was damp and slightly warm, as was mine. “Come here,” she said in a loud whisper, and in one motion, grabbed hold of my t-shirt and pulled me from the chair. I cooperated and allowed her to stand me up. I was taller than she was, and had to look down to meet her eyes. She stepped closer, so close that her chest touched mine. She smelled of cigarettes, sweat and cheap perfume. Her arms wrapped around me and she smiled as her hands roamed along my back to my waist, past the gun on my belt and onto my ass. One hand slid between my legs. I swallowed nervously as she clutched me—hard—then ran her hands along the insides of both thighs.

“I’m not wearing a wire,” I told her.

Without answering me she sunk to her knees, her hands following, moving along my knees and calves. She looked up at me, her face in line with my crotch. I resisted the sudden desire to touch her hair, the side of her face. Claudia rose, nonchalantly spun around and strolled back across the kitchen. “You hear a fucking word I said, Plato? You think that was the first time I was ever around a killer, around violent bastards who did the most depraved and fucked up shit you’ve ever imagined?” She faced me again once she’d reached the counter. “Difference was, most of the people I knew fell into it one way or another, went looking for the dark and found it or just got dragged in—you see what I’m saying? But not Bernard. Bernard was born into it.”

I remained standing. “What are you talking about?”

“Another one of his addictions,” she said softly. “His mother.”

“What about her?”

“You’ve heard the stories.”

“Before he was born she was in New York City, got mixed up with a bad crowd, mob guys or something, and got pregnant. That was the rumor around town. She never talked about it in specifics and neither did Bernard.”

“‘Course not.” Her eyes nearly sparkled, and I couldn’t tell if she was genuinely amused or only making fun of me. “She went off and got mixed up with a bad crowd, that much is true. But they weren’t no mafia guys. The people she fell in with make the mob look like choirboys.”

“More of these people from this world you keep referring to?”

“Crazy motherfuckers who think their rituals can conjure the Devil himself, can blur the boundaries between this world and the one underneath. People who believe they can manipulate both worlds with rituals and hexes and spells and dark prayers.”

“This is what Bernard told you?”

“He didn’t know himself until his mother brought him into it. He was in his early teens by then.”

The same timeframe in which he had attacked Julie Henderson and begun his descent into madness, evil or whatever the hell it had been. “But his mother left all that and went to Potter’s Cove to have Bernard and raise him in a safe environment. She ran from these people, from this world, so how could—”

“She didn’t run, she moved back into the world like they all do.”

“Like all who do?”

“All of us who come up against them, who run with them.” Her eyes turned dead. “Demons, Plato. Fucking demons.”

In my denial, or inability to fathom what she’d said, I responded with a burst of nervous laughter. Julie Henderson had sworn they were all around us, and just like Julie, Claudia was either completely sincere, or completely out of her mind. Maybe both.

“It ain’t like some cult that dances around fires in silk robes and calls themselves Satanists so they can do drugs and fuck and listen to bad rock and roll,” she said. “I’m talking about the dark, man. The real dark and the real things that move in it, that live in it, you understand? This ain’t like some movie, it’s fucking real. They don’t use junkies like me, or street trash or even the innocent little girls who vanish from corner stores or parks or schoolyards or their own beds in the middle of the night—we’re just minor league players on the sidelines, around to be used and abused, demonic fucking toys. They scoop up the older ones like his mother, the small-town girls who go wandering into places like New York or L.A. looking for a better life. They show them the dark, show them the way then send them back to the world to give birth to the next wave.”

“The next wave of what?”

“Killers. Destroyers. The ones who devour.”

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Bernard’s final words on the taped suicide note.

I suddenly felt confined in the tiny kitchen, like the walls were creeping closer. “This is ridiculous. For Christ’s sake, Bernard never even knew who his father was. His mother never told him.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Probably because she had no idea who it was either.”

“Maybe it was because she knew exactly who it was.”

Anger swelled. “OK, so I’m supposed to believe there are demons walking among us like people and that they’re the ones responsible for all the evil in the world—not us, not human beings, but demons. They’re to blame. What’s next—garden gnomes? And let me guess, Bernard’s father was the Devil himself, right? Bernard’s Rosemary’s Baby now, is that it? Give me a fucking break. This is bullshit. I told you before; I’m not playing games. I need answers, goddamn it, not fucking fairy tales from the dark ages.”

“Oooo, big strong man making demands.” Claudia gave a mock shiver. “You’re the one who came to me, remember? You’re the one telling me about your dreams and visions and all that. You’re the one who wanted to know the truth, so listen real close, jack-off. I never said it was anything but people who are responsible for all the bad shit in this world. But people make choices—decisions—you understand? There are temptations, and once choices are made there are forces that influence people. Real forces. Some good, some bad, and they’re in constant battle with each other. They’re inside us, all around us, and you know it. We all know it because we all hear the voices in our heads, the whispers. We just learn to ignore them, to write them off, to label them with words like conscience. That’s the way of the worlds, Plato. This one, and the next.”

I ran my hands through my sweat-dampened hair. “Christ, I’m so confused.”

“That’s the shit Evil thrives on. Confusion. Deception. Uncertainty. Chaos. And the deeper you go the worse it gets, the more powerful it grows and the less sense it makes, because nothing ever makes sense in the dark.” Claudia stabbed another cigarette between her lips. “Welcome to the big leagues, asshole.”

“I knew Bernard’s mother,” I insisted. Skimpy bikinis and skimpier towels—slipping, shifting and falling—blended to suntanned skin slick with oil. “I knew Linda.” The bedroom at the top of the stairs—her room—the bed against the back wall, the mismatched nightstands on either side of the headboard, the clutter of overflowing ashtrays and empty liquor bottles. “She was eccentric but—” Garments stuffed into plastic clothesbaskets and strewn about the room as if thrown there or dropped there, an ironing board against one wall, a dressing table with mirror and closet against another. “—she was harmless, completely harmless.” Lipsticks and makeup, small bottles of polish and colognes and body sprays, tins of soap and powder rattling, clicking one against the other. “I knew her,” I said again.

“You knew Bernard too, what’s your point?” Claudia obviously sensed I was trying to recall the past without coming completely undone, but I couldn’t be sure if she meant to help or only make things worse. “She brought him into it the way you bring an innocent into it. Their little secret, got it? Things you don’t talk about, even with your best friends, because nobody would understand. It’s slow, a seduction. It’s not the truth she had to tell him, only lies and sacrilege masked in love and trust. She didn’t have to do anything else, no explanations or definitions of what he was or what he needed to do. She just positioned him, set him on the right course and let him go, knowing from the start that his path was already determined by destiny—or whatever label you want to give it—and that he’d find his own way. And that’s exactly what she did.” She threw a look my way that might have been pity. “I knew Linda’s kind too—dime a dozen. Sex, drugs and rock and roll, little devil stuff thrown in—why not, it’s trendy and harmless, right? I’ve seen the ceremonies, the gangbangs where they break in bitches like her. Father could be anybody—anything—but it don’t matter because what’s behind it, what’s holding their hands is pure fucking evil. Stupid cunts never have a chance; they’re in over their heads before they know it. When it’s over all that’s left is that same smiling Devil. By then Linda wasn’t no saint.” She plucked the still unlit cigarette from her mouth. “But then, I ain’t telling you anything you don’t already know.”

Knock once and go on in. I closed my eyes, saw that staircase again, the landing at the top and the open doorway just to the right; heard the bottles on the dressing table clicking together, the headboard slapping the wall, rattling everything in the room. I felt sick, like I had that day, a cramping, churning feeling deep in my bowels, as if someone had pushed their fingers through the skin below my navel, worked them deeper until they were inside me up to the wrist, curled around my intestines, twisting, crushing and yanking them free in one slimy, bloody mess. “No,” I said softly. “You’re not.”

“The dark loves denial. Broken memories. Buried memories.”

“So that’s where it started then?” I asked. “With his mother?”

“Where’d she go when she got pregnant with Bernard?” she asked. “And where did Bernard go when he lied about joining the Marines? New York City. Think that’s a coincidence? Think maybe he went there to see the same crowd his mother knew? The same crowd she was running with when she got pregnant with him? Think maybe it was a homecoming? Think maybe that’s where he learned to do what he ended up doing so well?” Claudia slid the cigarette behind her ear. “There were lots of killings there, especially back then, lots of activity, lots of history. Destroyers walked there, fed the streets. Fed them with blood. That’s what they do; they want blood flowing in the fucking streets. It goes in cycles, and with every wave there’s a destroyer, a beast. The rest of them, they’re just gone, dead or vanished. Fucking poof, like they were never there.”

“But wait,” I said. The heat was so thick I was having trouble breathing. “He attacks Julie Henderson when he’s thirteen years old, does nothing else for five or six years then goes to New York City and suddenly becomes a killer?”

“How do you know he did nothing else for five or six years?”

“Even if he did other things we don’t know about, he goes to New York and he starts to kill—maybe these, whatever the hell they are, his mother fell in with, taught him or helped him—and he slaughters two young women inside of a year. Then he stops as suddenly as he began, moves back to Potter’s Cove with the Marines story and doesn’t kill again for nearly two decades? Serial killers can’t just stop killing once they start.”

Claudia actually chuckled. “Is that what you think Bernard was, a serial killer who killed at random and couldn’t stop? His murders were ritual killings, you understand? And besides, he didn’t stop after New York and only start up again right before he died. There were others.” She rubbed her eyes with her palms and sighed. “We were in his car once, headed up to the Cape for a couple days.” She brought her hands down; her eyeliner had smudged. “He told me one day they’d find them scattered along that highway, back in the scrub brush, in the woods. He told me he’d left a lot of them there.

“I was high. I laughed. Crazy motherfucker. Maybe he was telling the truth, maybe not. Didn’t know, didn’t care. And in the end it didn’t mean shit anyway, because it was all practice for those last killings he did in the months before he offed himself. Everything led to that. Those bodies they’re finding in Potter’s Cove now? He meant for them to be found.”

“How many are there?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t—”

“I don’t fucking know, I said. You think I went with him, watched, helped?” This time when Claudia put the cigarette in her mouth she lit it. “I knew his plan, I was around, I listened—that’s it.”

I took a step away from the kitchen table and toward the back door. I needed to be closer to the sunshine. “Fine, you knew his plan. What were the rituals?”

Claudia took a drag on her cigarette, exhaled and picked a flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. “It’s all about the blood.”

“The victims in Potter’s Cove were bled,” I told her. “They were killed somewhere else and dumped. The same was true of the two unsolved homicides Donald came across in New York.”

She nodded. “The strongest spells—the darkest—always involve human blood. Blood holds life. Some believe the soul travels through the blood. It’s an ancient ritual. Kind of like back in medieval times, if someone was sick or possessed they believed you could bleed disease and evil out of them. And they weren’t that far off. You take the blood and you steal the soul, the life. From there, ain’t no telling what you can do with it if you’re powerful enough. At least that’s what a lot of those types believe.”

“Do you know where he did it?”

“No.” Claudia smoked her cigarette quickly, and after a few hard drags it was reduced to a butt she tossed into the sink along with the last. “You’re the one with the visions, man, not me.”

“That factory down in the south end,” I said.

She slowly shook her head in the negative. “He didn’t know the city well enough, it wouldn’t have been there. He would’ve done it where he felt safe, where he knew his way around, in and out.”

“Then why did that woman appear to me and lure me there?”

“They say the underworld don’t fit together exactly like this one does,” she said. “Sometimes it’s all representational, know what I mean? What’s the word—symbolic?”

I moved closer to the back door. “There’s a bunch of old abandoned factories in Potter’s Cove, too.”

Claudia shrugged.

“And why is this woman coming to me?” I asked. “Why me?”

“All the victims were single mothers.”

“I knew that much.”

“No.” She slid down the counter a bit, closer to me. “You have to do more than know, you have to understand.”

“But I don’t even know who the hell she is.”

“The victims were single mothers, all of them with sons. Just like Bernard and his mother. He was lining them up to join him on the other side, no doubt, but what he was doing was symbolic too, see? He wouldn’t be what he was without his mother, so in a way, he was killing her, killing the one who provided him with life, again and again and again. Then, near the end, he went one better. That’s how the rituals go, he would’ve taken it another step and not just killed the woman who represented his mother—life—but he’d kill the life itself. The child, the son who represented him.”

I was close enough to the doorway now to brace myself against the casing. Sweat trickled into my eyes, across my cheek. I wiped it away with my wrist. “Why?”

“It’s one sacrilege on top of another on top of another,” she said. “Spitting in the face of God, understand? He thought his rituals made him a god. He took life so he could make life. And after he took that step with the mother and child both, there was only one step left. The ultimate in sacrilege: suicide. Literally taking his own life, the one God gave you. It’s the final insult. And it ain’t like someone sick who does it for different reasons. This was calculated, so that even his own death was a ritual, you see?”

“They’re going to find the bodies of that woman and little boy, aren’t they,” I said softly. She didn’t answer so I said, “I just wish I knew why she came to me.”

Claudia had followed me to the door, and I hadn’t realized how close she was to me until she spoke. “Maybe the riddle isn’t about her.”

I looked over my shoulder at her. “What do you mean?”

“Deception. Maybe it’s more about Bernard, more about you. Could be she’s trying to help you.”

“And what about Bernard?”

“Maybe he knew you’d listen, maybe he has unfinished business, or he’s restless or can’t let go yet. Not all spirits cross peacefully. Some hang on.” She slipped past me, so close that her hip brushed my leg before she took up position on the other side of the doorframe. A tracer of sunlight formed a thin line across her face. The smudged eyeliner made her look strangely sinister. “Go back to the beginning. Watch. Listen. Keep your mind open to it and follow your instincts, those voices in your head—whatever you want to call them. If the other side’s looking for you, it’ll find you. That much I do know.”

The more I searched those sad, liner-smudged eyes, the less sinister they became. “Why do you think he never hurt you?”

“Never said he didn’t.”

“Didn’t kill you then?”

“I didn’t fit the mold. I was just a stupid junkie fuck-toy.” She smiled ever so slightly. “Didn’t have to worry none about me, right?”

I could’ve talked with her for hours, picking her brain and delving deeper and deeper into her time with Bernard, but I had to get out of that cottage. It was closing in around me and there were unsettling vibes passing between us. “Thanks for your help,” I said.

“Don’t thank me. I ain’t sending you anywhere good.”

“You aren’t sending me anywhere I didn’t ask to go.” I glanced at the poster across the room. “Hope things work out for you in Florida.”

She pressed a hand against the screen door and pushed it open, holding it there as she leaned closer to me. We stood together in the doorway a moment, our faces mere inches apart. I could feel her breath against my neck. “Be careful out there, Plato.”

CHAPTER 27

Sunday afternoon. It was hot, and I was exhausted. I paused at the base of the steps to my apartment and gazed at Life a moment, as if I was the only one moving and everything else was standing still.

Couples walked hand-in-hand and children played along the sunny bank of the cove across the street. Bass-heavy car stereos thumped from passing vehicles, and the air was filled with food smells typical of the neighborhood.

I was halfway up the staircase before I realized the door to my apartment was ajar. I froze a moment, then grabbed the railing and pulled myself a step closer in an attempt to see beyond the slight opening. I stole a quick glance back down the stairs at the parking spaces below. The cars blended one into the next like everything else under the rippling heat. Nothing looked distinct or individually defined; the world was all smooth edges and rounded angles, a nebulous blur of colors and shapes distorted by the slow steady burn of a brilliant and scorching sun.

I climbed the remaining stairs cognizant of my weight and the sound of my footfalls against the aged wood. When I reached the landing before the door, I pulled my 9mm free, and holding it down by my thigh, pushed the door open the rest of the way with my free hand.

Toni stood inside, shaded from the sun.

I don’t know why I’d suspected it might have been someone else.

My nerves settled and I joined her, closing the door behind me. I slipped the 9mm back into the holster then pulled the entire thing free of my belt.

“Why are you carrying a gun, Alan?”

I hadn’t heard her voice in a while, and was troubled by how quickly unfamiliar it had become. Her clothes looked new, small purple shorts with a matching sleeveless top and a pair of white Keds. Sunglasses sat atop her head. She was tan and healthy-looking, which somehow seemed appalling under the circumstances. “I didn’t know you were going to be here,” I said.

It was then that I noticed the nylon bag dangling from her hand. Perhaps because she swung it rather casually down by her leg. “I came by to pick up a few more things.”

I nodded in answer. I’d been hoping for something better. I’m coming home, maybe. I wanted to see you, even. It didn’t seem possible that such a chasm could exist between us so quickly. Good, bad or indifferent, just weeks before I would have spent the day with this woman, cuddling on the couch or going for a walk, maybe catching a movie, ridiculously unaware that even with our problems it would ever change, that anything else might ever have meaning beyond our little cocoon, so certain it would always be her breath on my neck, her head on my chest, her arms around my back, her lips against mine, her dreams and fears and desires intermingled with my own. Didn’t she understand I was coming apart at the seams? Didn’t she understand that Bernard was a devil and that I was lost, lost in the dark and that he was there with me? Didn’t she know how much I needed her just then? Didn’t she still need me too? Had she ever?

“How are you?” she asked. Before I could answer she said, “You look tired.”

“Among other things.”

Toni clutched the bag with both hands, as if for comfort, and held it tight against her chest. It crinkled in her grasp, still empty, and for a moment I entertained the notion that I might be capable of convincing her to stay, or at a minimum, to prevent her from taking anything else from the apartment. I wasn’t sure how much more could be removed before what remained would become vestiges of a relationship no longer relevant. “Can you believe they found another body?” she asked.

“Yeah, down at the public beach.” I emphasized the word public because the cottage her friend Martha was letting her use was located on one of the few private stretches of beach in town.

She sighed and frowned a little. “The whole town’s terrified. It’s all everyone talks about. It’s all over the news, on TV and the radio, in the papers. There’s even national media in town some days. People look at each other on the street with such distrust now, and there are FBI agents and strange law enforcement types all over the place, it’s like something out of a movie. Have you noticed how at night it’s so much quieter than it used to be? Everyone goes home, locks their doors like prisoners, and hides. It’s awful.”

I shrugged. “It’s never been that noisy where you are now.”

She continued speaking like she hadn’t heard me, the words spilling from her quickly. “The police even released a statement about how the bodies are not recent murder victims. They were killed months ago, and they say it as if that fact should put people at ease, like the killer has moved on or hasn’t killed anyone lately. One article even quoted an unnamed source in the police department that said the killer might be a transient, and that there’s a good chance he’s already left town. Apparently some killers cross the country traveling by rail, like hobos or something, hopping trains and killing people from one end of the country to the next, and since the train runs through town, well… you know. One article said the killer might be targeting low income single mothers.” Toni lowered the bag, holding it with both hands against the front of her thighs like a schoolgirl. “Anyway, the selectmen had an announcement in the paper about it too, with tomorrow being the Fourth of July and all, did you see it? About how it’s the official kickoff of the tourist season and tourism doesn’t need to suffer because of it—blah, blah, blah—can you believe it?”

“Yeah, actually, I can.”

“They’re still going ahead with the fireworks.”

“I’ve always hated fireworks,” I said.

She became very still. “Alan, do you really think Bernard may have been involved in these killings?”

I stood there idiotically, the holstered 9mm in my hands. “I don’t know.”

“So you’re no longer convinced then that—”

“No,” I said. I didn’t want her involved, didn’t want her to know what I knew, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized how much I still loved her, still felt the need to protect her in some antiquated, intrinsically male way. Beneath the older and wiser exterior, beyond all the disappointments and complexities, this was still the girl I had held in my arms as a teenager, still the girl I had whispered silly and melodramatic love snippets to while gently sprinkling her face with kisses. I remembered the taste and texture of her then—her eyes and nose and cheeks and lips and chin, so certain I could prevent pain from ever again reaching her simply by willing it to be so, by holding her in my arms and loving her so desperately. “I don’t… I don’t know anymore, probably not, I—no, I was wrong, I guess. He probably had nothing to do with it, I was just—I thought he did but not anymore.” I smiled self-consciously.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Of course I’m not all right.” I wanted to scream it but didn’t. It came out uncertain and hushed instead. “I just need to work some things out.”

“I wish you’d talk to someone, Alan.”

“I’m talking to you right now.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t think I do.” Truth was, we’d talked more since our troubles began than we had in years. Despite the familiarity of our relationship, much of our time together had been spent in silence. Some days that silence was a testament to the potency of our bond—we hadn’t required small talk, we were beyond all that and could be together quietly, without the chatter—but it also shone light on that which festered beneath.

Toni held the bag up again. “Well, just wanted to grab a few things.”

“You mean I should talk to someone like Gene,” I said.

The mention of his name didn’t sting her as I’d intended. If anything, her expression softened. “Are you still taking your pills?”

“No.”

“They’ll help you sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” I said.

“And you think that’s a healthy way to feel?”

I wondered what the two of them did together, besides the obvious. What did they talk about? Did she settle trustingly against him in the night the way she had with me? Did they laugh like we had? Did she tell him the things she told me? Did any of that even matter anymore? I wondered if she ever thought about me when she was with him. “I just need a little time to get things together,” I said. It sounded lame the moment it left my lips, but it was all I had.

She nodded at me, like everything suddenly made perfect sense.

“I miss you,” I said, and without thinking, reached for her. She shrunk a bit—a subtle reaction, but an honest one. I dropped my hand to my side.

Her eyes filled. “Do you think we’ll ever be all right again?”

“You’re the one who left,” I said. “You’re the one who had to think.”

She looked at me with an expression that said: And you’re the one who went crazy.

I let her go, watched as she walked into the bedroom with a spring in her step I hadn’t seen in years. Her body was out of sync with her emotions, one spry and the other pensive. It seemed a clever deception, like an illusionist’s use of misdirection, and I found myself resentful suddenly of her attempt at a healthy, lively veneer. Yet deep down I could hardly blame her, and was glad she’d again be leaving soon, distancing herself from me, if only for now. Bernard was a disease, and he had infected me. I didn’t want the same for her, and until I could rid myself of him, she was at risk. I felt particularly contagious of late.

In the kitchen, I put my gun down on the counter and had a quick shot of whiskey. It left a warming path as it slid through my body, and I embraced it, allowing my nerves to calm. By the time I’d had another and put the shot glass in the sink, I heard Toni rummaging about in the bathroom.

I met her near the front door, careful not to get too close.

“All set,” she said softly. The bag was now bulging in places with items removed from the medicine cabinet and bathroom shelves. I had also heard her bureau drawers closing earlier, so I knew she’d taken more clothing as well. She smiled, though it was solely for my benefit. “I hope you have a nice fourth. We’ll talk soon, OK?”

I had run out of chitchat. The whiskey was seeping through my pores and mixing with the sheen of perspiration already painted across my skin. The goddamn humidity was swallowing everything whole. I nodded but said nothing.

With head slightly bowed, Toni slipped past me through the door.

From some black corner of Hell, Bernard whispered to me, and as my wife moved down the stairs and blended into the blurred heat below, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever see her again.

CHAPTER 28

Go back to the beginning, Claudia had said. And that’s exactly what I did.

After Toni left, I drove across town to the neighborhood where I’d grown up, and parked in front of the house Bernard and his mother had called home for years. I experienced the same waves of nostalgia I had the last time I’d revisited these hallowed stomping grounds of my youth, and although most were of the pleasant variety, once I focused on Bernard’s old house—still empty and slowly rotting away—all the thoughts and memories turned to black. The house looked about the same as it had in winter, but for a realtor’s sign stabbed into the front lawn. Apparently the bank had decided to sell the property after all, but had yet to do anything to dress it up, which led me to believe this was a recent development. A few feet from the realtor sign was a No Trespassing sign with a warning to any who vandalized the property that they would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

I checked my rearview mirror. It was late afternoon but the humidity was still lethal. The other houses on the street sported window fans and air-conditioners, and but for two young boys riding their bikes, no one was on the street. With all that was happening in town, with all the police everywhere, the last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to myself as someone sitting in a parked car in a neighborhood where I no longer lived, so I grabbed a pen from my visor and pretended to jot the number on the sign down as the two boys pedaled past, laughing and shouting to each other. I watched them until they disappeared around the bend at the end of the road. Shirtless and in cut-off denim shorts, hair buzzed down for summer, bodies tanned brown from hours spent playing outdoors and at the beach, they might as easily been ghosts of Bernard and me; trouble-free versions of us in less complicated times.

If those times had ever really existed.

Once the boys were out of sight and quiet returned to the street, I climbed out of the car. Just in case anyone was watching, I strolled across the property like a prospective buyer then circled around to the fence that ran along the side yard. As in winter, the lawn was dead again, only now it was burned and matted down from sun and grubs. I opened the gate and stepped through, closing it quietly behind me. I looked up to the circle of trees just beyond the backyard as I had the last time I’d come here, but on this occasion no birds welcomed or warned me. Only silence.

Even more windows had been broken from thrown stones, and additional graffiti had been added, spray-painted along the back wall of the house, including a crude pentagram, a parade of profanity and the scribbled names of a few rock bands I recognized. I could see how in a town like Potter’s Cove, where teenagers had little to do, a house like this could quickly become a late night retreat, the neighborhood spooky house, abandoned and easily accessible for hanging out, drinking beer, smoking pot—whatever.

I crossed to the cement patio in back. The chaise lounge, lawn furniture and plastic garbage bags that had been there before were gone. Cigarette butts and a few spent beer and liquor bottles littered the area instead.

It was then that I noticed the sliders off the patio.

A section of glass near the bottom was missing, kicked in from the looks, and while the sliding door was closed, the wooden rod that fit into the track and held it that way was gone.

That same uncompromising feeling that I was being watched returned. I looked back at the yard and trees. Nothing. Not even a breeze. Just heat and sky and silence.

I tried the slider. It quietly slid open, and a waft of musty air met me, a dank, mildew smell that intensified once it mingled with the humid air outside. I fanned the initial blast away with my hands then stepped through the open slider and into the kitchen.

Vivid memories still lived here for me.

I could almost see Bernard’s mother flitting around on a hot summer day just like this one, dressed in high-heeled slippers and a terrycloth waist-length cover-up that did little to cover much of anything, especially the bikini beneath. I remembered her pouring us lemonade and dancing her way back to the refrigerator while music played from a radio on the counter, Tommy, Rick, Donald, Bernard and me—just kids—huddled around the table, sweaty and out of breath from playing, gulping our lemonade and laughing, reliving adventures we’d had earlier in the day.

It occurred to me then just how long it had been since I’d set foot in this house. Although Bernard continued to live here as an adult, he had preferred instead to come to our houses or to meet us at some other neutral point—and strangely enough that had been fine with us. The last time I could remember being inside the house was a few weeks before his mother was hospitalized with cancer. A few years now, I thought. Odd.

The memories receded, leaving behind a dirty, dilapidated kitchen and a musty stink. There was an uncomfortable stillness to the house, the walls and those windows still intact providing an unnatural quiet, a buffer to the world outside that seemed different somehow, more intense and final. Though the windows that were not broken were filthy and smudged, I was careful to avoid them anyway.

The floor was dirty and littered with dirt tracked in from outside and what appeared to be small rodent droppings. I crossed the kitchen and slipped through the doorway into a living room. There had once been wall-to-wall carpeting here, but that had been ripped up for some reason to reveal old wooden flooring beneath. Void of furniture, and stripped bear of everything else, the room looked larger than I remembered. The wallpaper was cracked and hanging in places, and more graffiti had been spray-painted across the walls and even on the floor. I stepped around a pile of trash and debris and continued on to the foyer just inside the front door. To my left was the staircase leading to the second floor. Beyond it was a short hallway that led to a bathroom.

I stood at the base of the stairs and looked up. Darkness waited at the top in more ways than one. I wiped sweat from my hands onto my pants and slowly climbed the staircase. The carpeting remained and cushioned my steps, but the banister was gouged and scarred, as if someone had been at it with a knife. The destruction kids had caused in the time the house had been unattended was surprising. All those years before, when we’d been kids ourselves, I could never have imagined this result for a house where I spent so much time, where I had so many memories, good and bad. But here it was, a dead shell, a decaying monument to nothing.

When I reached the top I hesitated, hand still on the banister. It wasn’t quite dark but due to the low ceiling and location of the landing in relation to any of the upstairs windows, light was limited. The musty smell wasn’t as bad here, but there was another odor I hadn’t detected previously. It smelled like sulfur, recently lit matches. I took the final step, and once on the landing at the top of the stairs, saw a bedroom directly ahead. Linda’s bedroom. Further down the hallway was Bernard’s old room, so I lowered my eyes and fled to it, hoping to escape the other if even for a short while longer.

The light increased as I neared Bernard’s room. There had once been a door there but it was now removed and leaned against the wall next to the doorway. It had been kicked and broken in places. The room itself was empty. I walked in as I had so many times over the years, but now it was as impersonal and barren as an open grave. In my mind I could still see his bed, his desk, his record player, and the posters that had once covered his walls. I ventured deeper into the room. His closet stood to my right. I opened it, swinging the door wide. But for a string dangling from a light bulb fixture on the ceiling, it too was empty.

A soft scratching sound stopped me cold. Movement. Scurrying movement within the wall, as if Bernard had been sealed away behind it and was now clawing his way out.

Mice, I told myself. It’s only mice.

Familiar laughter from the past echoed through the empty hallway, each echo reverberating one atop another until it sounded like a group laughing, the dead amused by the living. But the laughter was Bernard’s, duplicated again and again.

Even in death he was abandoned, hidden in shadow and deceit.

My mind calmed a bit, absorbed the laughter and quieted it. I slowly scoped out the room, found only a rather lethargic wasp slinking across one of the cracked windowpanes facing the street. For now, we were alone.

I forced myself back into the hallway, back toward the other bedroom at the top of the stairs. I felt like that sleepy and disoriented wasp, just another creature that had taken a wrong turn and become lost within these dying walls, destined to spend its final hours sharing space with all the secrets trapped here.

What secrets, Alan? What secrets live here?

Secrets. Memories. Lies. Nervous smiles and downcast eyes replaced all that had existed prior, as comfort turned to dread. Forgotten, pushed down—deep down—pretending that not believing in the Devil was enough, that it would disarm him and protect you from him, when all the while disbelief only made him stronger.

All the good and clear memories were before—before we were teenagers—before the changes in us, in our bodies and minds and in the way we saw the world, the way we experienced it—before Bernard had been introduced and brought into a realm he did not yet know was his legacy. What had been a regular hangout and a safe haven—Bernard’s house—ceased to exist as such once those changes happened because it had become too difficult, too strange. The memories turned from good, carefree and innocent to bad, dark and shameful, and we needed to stay away—we all needed to stay away—or we might remember. And we did not want to remember. I did not want to remember.

But now that was no longer an option.

What did you see?

The bedroom was closer now; I could have reached out and touched the doorframe had I wanted to. My throat became dry, my lips pasty, and as I moved into the room I realized my entire body had begun to tremble. I made myself look.

It was empty like the rest of the house, but I saw the past—Linda’s bedroom—and all that had been there so long ago. The bedroom at the top of the stairs, the bed against the back wall, the mismatched nightstands on either side of the headboard, the clutter of overflowing ashtrays and empty liquor bottles. Garments stuffed into plastic clothesbaskets and strewn about the room as if thrown or dropped there, an ironing board against one wall, a dressing table with mirror and closet against another. Lipsticks and makeup, small bottles of polish and colognes and body sprays, tins of soap and powder rattling, clicking one against the other.

And what else? What else did you see?

“Jesus, God,” I whispered, falling against the doorway for fear I might otherwise collapse.

Candles. The shades all pulled tight and candles scattered throughout the room. Black candles. Who—why black candles? Why—

What else, Alan?

Pain pierced my temples like ice picks, and I brought my hands to either side of my head with the hope that clutching my skull hard enough might ward off the throbbing. Tears filled my eyes and dripped into the back of my throat.

The bed, moving and shaking, the headboard slapping the wall and the box spring wailing in rhythmic squeals as shadowy fingers cast from candlelight skipped along the ceiling. And sounds—words—no, prayers, but alien and backward, twisted and mocking.

Linda’s eyes, her body nude, slick with sweat and lunging forward then back with each thrust, her head hitting the headboard and her voice still deep and urgent even after her dark prayers had been recited. Good… good… good boy.

I shut my eyes but vision remained, refused to let go.

It is night and that makes no sense, because it is not night, not really. Neither was it night then—but here, in this dream place, it is night. I am lying on the floor watching TV, and she is sitting behind me on the couch. She calls me, gets my attention, asks me to come and sit next to her. I do, though hesitantly, unsure of her motives, and my own. Such motives and feelings are still new to me. I am still trying to decipher many of them, to identify them for what they are and why I have them, but I sit beside her anyway.

She turns her back to me, looks over her shoulder and smiles, tossing her hair. She looks like a model in one of those makeup commercials on TV; like a movie star. I’m afraid and angry with myself for feeling so nervous—I should be a man even though I’m not yet a man—I shouldn’t be afraid of a woman, a barely dressed beautiful woman who is my friend, who likes me and wants me to like her. Only a few short months before Bernard and I were huddled in the woods giggling over his secret pornography stash, unaware that such childish things were mere tips of the flames inching closer and closer to us even then.

Lust and fear are one as she raises her hands to her breasts and cups them.

She asks me to please unhook her bikini top. I laugh. This can’t be happening, but it is. She’s serious; she means it. Don’t worry, she says, I want you to.

While she continues to encourage me, I struggle with the plastic hook, my hands shaking.

When it finally comes free I feel a rush of excitement along with nervousness in my stomach. My face is so warm I know it must be flushed bright red. I worry that I look idiotic even as I stir beneath my shorts, feel it press angrily against my thigh.

She holds her top in place now, her hands the only thing preventing it from falling to reveal that which lies beneath, that which I have seen only in quick flashes and glimpses.

She is the most frightening and beautiful woman I have ever seen. So many times in recent months I have wondered if this would happen, and now that it is I’m unsure of what to do. The confident and skilled lover I am in my teenage fantasies is in reality an awkward and frightened fool—and besides, this is different, this is—I hate myself for being so weak and childlike. I smile, knowing this is wrong but gazing at her tanned skin just the same, a smooth bronze, soft and warm. She knows I’m looking.

Her hands fall to her lap and the top follows, fluttering to her knees, the strings dangling across her shins. Her bare toes, painted light pink, wiggle into the carpet and she turns at the waist so that we face each other. She slides one hand between her legs, rubs at the front panel of her bikini bottoms, and with the other reaches out and touches my face, strokes it gently with her fingers. Her hand slowly pulls my face toward her, toward her chest, and I go, I allow her to draw me there and to push my mouth against her. Her brown nipple brushes my bottom lip, shrivels, tightens and hardens. She moans quietly, her breath escaping in a series of murmurs.

I suckle, my mouth working, pulling, my teeth nipping as she forces me closer, crushing my face into her until I think I might suffocate. All I can smell is her skin and tanning lotion mixed with perspiration and perfumed deodorant.

Why I think of God then, I don’t know. I think about my father too, wonder if he can see me, can see what I’m doing from wherever he is. I envision my mother next, sitting at the kitchen table like she so often does, sipping a drink.

I can’t breathe—I can no longer breathe.

Her skins seeps sweat, and I slip against the pressure. Her belly is flat and firm—but still soft—and the perspiration forms a puddle in her sunken navel. With a loud popping sound her nipple pulls free of my mouth, and I fall forward, against her, my face sliding along the damp skin between her breasts. She pushes me back—gently—then takes my hands and places them on her. I knead her breasts, squeeze them harder when she arches her back and moans again. They feel almost exactly as I imagined they would. I manipulate them with my fingers, watching her for a sign that this is what I’m supposed to do next.

It’s OK to be frightened, she tells me. It’s OK.

Then she is suddenly on her feet, her back to me again as she hitches her bikini bottoms with her thumbs and peels them down, revealing the two sculpted halves of her ass, milky and white against her otherwise tanned skin. Even her breasts are not this pale in comparison. As she steps out of the pants and drops them to the floor she smiles at me. I watch her buttocks bounce a bit, and she backs into me so that they’re against my face like two small pillows. She reaches around and again takes my hand, this time wrapping it around the front of her, pushing my fingers between her legs. She’s so wet and sticky I wonder if there’s something wrong, if it’s supposed to feel like that, but she pushes me deeper, still standing and grinding against my hand now.

I try to pull away. I want to stop and I’m angry with myself for being such a baby but I don’t know what to do or how to express what’s happening inside me. I want—I have to stop, I tell her, and it sounds stupid and immature but I just want to stop. I want to run out of there and forget this, I’m not ready, and she’s not the one I should be doing this with. I—I want to stop, I say again, shuddering as a wetness of my own explodes into my shorts.

Mortified, I wiggle away from her and collapse to the floor. I’m dizzy and embarrassed and when I look up at her she is so naked, right there in front of me—I’ve never seen anyone so naked—and this is wrong it’s all wrong, all wrong, all wrong.

She kneels next to me on the floor, takes me in her arms and tells me to do as she says and everything will be all right. Trust me, she says. Trust me.

I don’t want to do this.

It doesn’t matter.

Darkness closes in and she swallows every bit of me, devouring scraps I can never regain, pieces of me I can never rebuild.

Wandering through the house now in this new darkness, I stumble about, hands reaching for the walls, hoping they might guide me or give me some bearing. None of the light switches work and I can’t find any of the windows—where are the windows?

And then I am back in the same living room, and she is there on the couch, smiling at me. Her breasts are bloody, the nipples ringed in crimson and dripping. The sight sickens me, but she wanted me to; demanded that I hurt her like that with my teeth, and so I can taste her too—on my lips—her blood, her life, her soul. All that is inside her is now inside of me, and I’m afraid. I’m afraid.

She reaches out, walks her fingers up my leg like a spider and grabs hold of me. It’s OK, she says, no one will know unless you tell. She drops to her knees; whispering her demented prayers again and smiling at me like a mannequin—hollow beyond her exteriors, void of anything real.

I am inside her again, this time between her legs.

She is warm, wet, empty and soulless.

I can feel blood running through my veins; can hear my heart pumping it.

Something from deep inside her crawls into me, slips beneath my skin, slithers through me like a garden snake, its tiny head and scaled skin slinking up the back of my throat, gagging me as its tongue flicks at the roof of my mouth.

More echoes from the past taunt the present. Someone calls out to the angels, calls them by name. Someone screams in agony.

I’m certain it’s me.

When those memories part like dark curtains, I again find myself at the top of the stairs peering into Linda’s bedroom, listening to the sounds and watching all that is happening to her there. Her eyes meet mine, though briefly. She knows what I have seen, knows by the grimace on my face that I am terrified and repelled, but she is neither.

She is pleased.

Good… good… good boy, she whispers, though not to me.

I back away and move as quietly as I can down the staircase, my heart racing. I can see the door, am moving toward it, but it seems impossibly far away—painted on a distant backdrop—a light at the end of a tunnel I can never reach.

And then it’s quiet, gone from me, buried so deep that maybe it was never there at all.

It wasn’t until I came awake that I realized I had either fallen asleep or passed out.

My first thought was that I’d been sealed into a tomb of some sort, because the darkness I opened my eyes to was no longer dreamlike. This was real. The flooring beneath me was cool and damp, and at the farthest reaches of my peripheral vision I could make out only slivers of faint light. Visions of being deep in a grave, of having been buried alive flashed through my mind, and I tried to move as I came awake, gasping and lurching into a sitting position all at once.

What I intended as a screech strangled the base of my throat and came out as a gagging cough instead, and I scrambled around, flailing, slipping on the cement beneath me while trying to gain my bearings.

As the haze cleared and my eyes gradually adjusted to the near dark, I saw that I had somehow ended up in the basement of the house. The light was from a series of squat windows positioned along the foundation. The stale smell was worse down here, but despite the heat wave it was relatively cool.

I leaned against the brick wall and ran a hand through my hair. How the hell had I ended up here? I had no memory whatsoever of having left the upstairs. Slowly, I sank back down into a squat and tried to collect myself.

Across from me was an area that had once housed a washing machine and dryer. A bit further down the wall was the bulkhead, the doors intact but rotted and splintered in places. I followed the light to one of the windows and on tiptoes, saw the backyard from ground level. There was still daylight but it was burning fast.

Night was on its way.

Behind me was a wooden staircase that led back upstairs. I remembered that on the other side of the door at the top of those stairs was a small pantry off of the kitchen. In my state of sleepwalking, hallucinating or whatever was happening to me, I must have wandered back downstairs, through the kitchen and down these stairs to the basement. “But why?” I asked the walls, the darkness. “Why here? Why here, Bernard?”

Something told me to look back over my shoulder to the section of cellar I had awakened in. Empty space. Brick walls and a cement floor. Nothing.

I walked back across the cellar, glancing at the array of thick cob and spider webs lining the rafters overhead. At the spot where I had awakened, I looked more closely at the rafters, at the wall, and finally the floor. I had either subconsciously put myself here or had been placed here by some external force for a reason, so I crouched down and searched the area for clues or some sign that might explain why.

On hands and knees I swept my hands along the floor. It was damp and a bit grainy from small particles of sand and dirt but I found nothing out of the ordinary.

Until my hand came across a small pile of dirt where the floor met the wall.

I looked closer, and though the light was sparse I managed to see that it was a small mound of some substance, though not dirt. I grabbed a handful and let it slide back to the floor between my fingers. It was gray in color and had a granular feel. Cement.

Cement from an interior wall that had been constructed to separate the washing machine and dryer from the rest of the basement.

Tracing the short jog of brick wall with my finger, I followed a logical path upward to a point where the debris had more than likely originated. The first few rows of bricks were intact, so I followed the narrow avenues of cement between them with a fingertip, running my hand along as if following a maze, and eventually hit a soft spot a bit higher up the wall.

On my knees, I looked at the brick more closely, and saw a small divot. I pushed my finger against it and it gave way, widened and grew as more loose granules fell to the floor and joined the little pile below. I continued working the area with my finger, pushing and scraping until enough had given way for me to get two fingers into the crevice. The brick began to loosen rather easily, and I realized then that it had been fitted back into this section of the wall and made to look intact when in fact it was anything but. I grabbed the face of the brick and wiggled it, and with minimal effort pulled it free of the wall with an eerie scraping sound.

Dust motes flew about from the now open segment of wall like tiny escaping entities.

I placed the brick on the floor and peered into the hole I had created, but I couldn’t see a thing, so I tried one of the bricks next to it. To my surprise, it too gave way with little effort, and suddenly, the one beneath it fell out as well.

An odd clicking sound emanated from behind the bricks, like dice or dominos clacking one against another, and I moved back a bit while still trying to gain a better view of what was happening.

Something emerged, sliding from the opening like the granules before it, but these objects were bigger and shaped in various patterns, and rushed from the open wall like they had been piled and hastily hidden away behind it.

It was the bright white color that gave them away.

I backed away, watched the growing pile of bones accumulate as they continued to pour from the ruptured wall. Little skulls and legs and spines and teeth and pelvises tumbling one atop another, cleaned and so white they appeared bleached, the remains of countless small animals that had been systematically killed, skinned and dismembered, their remains sealed off behind this wall.

Bile gurgled in the back of my throat.

The skeletons just kept coming, spilling onto the floor until the mountain of bones was complete.

I choked back the horror and realized I was seeing Bernard’s early work, those things he had killed before human prey became the preferred method of achieving whatever sick and demonic triumphs he had hoped to attain.

Our mutual love of animals had been a common point between Bernard and me.

More fucking lies.

The fact that he had left the brick loose in the wall could only mean that from time to time he had returned to this portion of the cellar to view his little trophies from the past. He had come here and pulled that brick free and watched the bones fall as I had, then—what? What did he do down here? Plunge his hands into them like a pirate rummaging a treasure chest? Relive the moments when he first killed these poor creatures? Compared them to his slaughter of human beings? Was there any difference, or was it all just death, ugly, violent and unnecessary death, killing just to kill?

Regardless, it had begun the same for Bernard as it had ended, in a cellar, alone in the dark with his deeds and demons.

I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there, but crouched down and made myself study the bones instead. They were glossy and white. The sonofabitch had cleaned and polished each one.

I took a closer look at the opening in the wall and noticed something protruding from it. A piece of lightweight metal, the corner of a larger piece, was clearly visible. I reached in and pulled it out from under what I thought were the few bones that hadn’t yet fallen out. But the items lying across the metal sheet were not bones. It was jewelry.

“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered.

Several women’s watches, rings, necklaces and earrings rained across the pile of bones. None of them looked to have any significant value, and one was even a medical alert bracelet. But they were scraps, belongings of human beings who were surely as dead and gone as the animals who had once inhabited those bones.

And Bernard had killed every last fucking one of them.

The bile was back. A shiver grabbed me by the neck and throttled me a moment, so I turned my attention to the piece of metal I had pulled free. To my surprise it was fairly large, at least two feet in height and perhaps one foot in width. The corners were worn with age and the entire thing was caked with dirt, but overall it was in relatively decent condition, and most of the colors were still distinguishable. The cartoon face of a man smiled at me, waving a hand as if we were old friends. I wiped at the dirt caked across it with my thumb and more shapes beneath began to form. Letters. I stood up and moved closer to one of the windows, holding it up to the slowly dying light.

It looked like something out of the 1950s. It was a poster of sorts, with an illustration of a man waving, complete with pompadour, big bright smile and a jumpsuit reminiscent of factory workers at that time. Across the top of the poster were the words: Employees! Please be sure to wash your hands! Each corner of the discolored and aged metal had a hole where it had been fixed to a wall, and along the bottom, in small but still legible print it read: Buchanan Textile Corporation.

Another evil souvenir, a clue, an inside joke—what? Had he laughed when he tore it from the wall? Had there been a dead body within reach?

Buchanan Textile was one of the old mills that had once operated in Potter’s Cove years before. For decades now, like the string of other dinosaurs that had once constituted the town’s industrial area, it was an old, immense, condemned and forgotten husk of a building on the edge of town.

Now I knew where he killed them, where he bled them.

I dropped the poster, left it there with the bones and jewelry of the dead, with the memories and nightmares and secrets, and slowly made my way back across the cellar, up the stairs and out of the house.

As I slipped through the side yard gate, I froze.

Rick was across the street, watching me.

CHAPTER 29

His Jeep Cherokee was parked in front of my car. Rick was leaned against it, arms folded. I crossed the street, approached him. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was gonna ask you the same thing,” he said.

“You tailing me?”

“Yeah, since you went to see that chick in the shack in New Bedford.”

“Thought you wanted out.”

“I do.”

“Then why are you following me?”

“Somebody’s got to watch out for your stupid ass. Besides, I can’t let you do this shit by yourself while I hang on the sidelines, ain’t my style.” Rick’s gaze alternated between the house and me. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t know who to trust?”

“Do you?”

“Not anymore than you do. But I’m hoping.”

“Well that’s not exactly the same thing, is it?”

Above us, the sky was turning bleak and gray. Storm clouds were creeping in off the ocean, promising much needed rain and a respite from the heat wave.

Rick sighed. “I figure it’s like shooting craps, you know? Even if it’s not your turn to throw, you take a long hard look at the guy rolling the dice, at his history and your history with him, then you decide. You place your bet and you watch him throw, and in a way, you’re throwing too. You think you know, you even go so far as to bet on it, but until the numbers come up all you really know for sure is that you hope you’re right.”

“Maybe it’s all in the history.”

“That and the throw.”

We were quiet a while, recognizing and remembering that history in each other’s eyes.

“We good then?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

I held my fist out to him, and after a moment he tapped it with his own.

I motioned to the house. “Have you been in there too?”

He nodded slowly, as if not certain he should, and from the look on his face I knew he had found the same things I had. Despite his efforts to mask it, the dread Rick was feeling was apparent. “Me and Donny checked it out. I was gonna tell you, man, but then when you headed here I knew you’d—”

“Tomorrow night,” I said. “That’s when we make our move.”

“Tomorrow’s the fourth.”

“Exactly, the whole town’s going to be distracted with the fireworks, parties and all that shit. The cops will be tied up with traffic and crowd control. Nobody’s gonna be watching the edge of town, and that’s where we’re going.”

“OK, I’ll grab Donny and—”

“No, leave him out of it.”

“Why?”

“Let him know what we’re doing, but he stays home. We need somebody on the outside of all this in case something goes wrong. In case—”

“I say we stick together and—”

“Rick,” I said, grasping his arm, “in case we don’t come back.”

He thought about what I’d said for a while before reluctantly agreeing. “OK.”

A moment later I said, “The old Buchanan mill.”

“You think that’s where Bernard is?”

“The evil he left behind.”

“What if it is there, what do we do then?”

I looked back at the house, at the past. “We end it.”

CHAPTER 30

The plan was set, but still twenty-four hours away. Rick went to work and I decided to kill some time at Harry’s, a quiet lounge I sometimes went to a few blocks from my apartment. I’d been drinking a lot more heavily than I normally did, but it took the edge off my constantly wired nerves, and although the results were only temporary, I needed the reprieve from anxiety liquor provided.

I recognized some regulars huddled at the bar, and since I wasn’t in the mood for conversation, I ordered a drink and sat instead at one of the tables along the opposite wall. The bartender was a summer-hire I didn’t recognize. He brought my drink along with a little white napkin, placed it before me and hung his hands on his fleshy waist. “Hot enough for ya?”

I was certain if one more person asked me that I’d snap. “Rain’s coming.”

“Yeah, any minute. About time, huh?” He scratched at the stubble along his chin. “You believe the shit going on?” He lowered his voice. “Scary, huh?”

I nodded, sipped my whiskey. “Sure is.”

“You hear the shit he did to them poor girls? Christ. Sick mental fucking bastard.”

I gave an obligatory smile and wondered if this was the way Bernard had felt when he was alive, knowing something no one else did, carrying around knowledge of things others could only speculate about and all the while pretending he was as clueless as the next guy.

“Anyway,” he said, motioning to my drink, “you need another one gimme a holler.”

I thanked him and he went back behind the bar. I sipped my drink and tried to clear my mind, but everything was piling up, streaming through me as if a floodgate had burst. Even stronger than what had happened in the house were the things Claudia had told me. I could hear her voice in my head. I could see her face, her body, her feline-like movements and dark eyes. We could not have been more different as people, and yet, I felt an undeniable bond between us. We were both isolated, in pain and afraid in our own ways. Truth was, I hadn’t stopped thinking about her and all she’d said since we’d met, and wasn’t certain I ever would.

A thunderclap shook the bar.

The rain had finally arrived, but all I could think about was Claudia, and whether she’d left town yet.

I finished my drink and signaled the bartender for another.

By the time I reached my car I was soaked to the bone.

The rain was falling in torrents, bringing with it the darkness of night and pouring from the heavens with a steady ferocity that made driving more of a challenge than it should have been. The downpour had begun to cool things down almost immediately, but the heat was still high.

With three whiskey and sodas under my belt, I took the highway to New Bedford.

Visibility was low, and by the time I reached the city limits the rain had become even heavier. Occasional forks of lightning split the black horizon, and thunder exploded every few seconds, as if in timed intervals. No one was on the street, and even the normally busy interstate was eerily empty.

I pulled onto Milner Avenue, which was deserted as ever, and followed it to Claudia’s cottage. The entire area was pitch black. I remembered there had been a light bulb above the front door, but it too was dark. Between the rain and darkness I couldn’t even make out the building until I turned toward it and crept closer with my headlights on high beam. The dirt lot was flooded, a mass of puddles and rivers as the rain continued its assault. I checked my watch, holding the face close to the lighted dash. It was only a little after nine. Claudia was a night person, so it seemed doubtful she’d be in bed at this hour. Odds were she had already left town.

Still unsure of exactly what the hell I was doing there, I wiped some rainwater from my face and neck and sat watching the cottage, as if for some sudden revelation.

It came to me in the form of a slight flicker of light.

I sat forward and squinted through the rain and swing of the windshield wipers. A tiny patch of light wavered in the darkness.

I dropped the headlights down to low beam and waited. After a moment the front door opened a few inches. I leaned out of the car, into the rain. “Claudia?”

“Who’s there?” she called from behind the door, her voice barely audible above the storm.

“It’s Alan.”

“Who?”

I shut the car off but left the headlights on. “Plato,” I said. “It’s Plato.”

The door opened a bit wider, and I could see her eyes reflecting the light. “What are you doing here?”

I stepped out of the car. Thick raindrops pelted me like water-bullets. “I was hoping maybe we could talk.”

“Didn’t we already do this?” She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the headlights, so I reached in and shut them off. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that Claudia was holding a candle. She opened the door wider still, but I couldn’t see much of anything beyond her face. “What do you want?” she asked.

“Getting out of the rain would be nice.”

“So go home, you got a roof there, right?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Again?”

“Yes, for Christ’s sake—obviously.”

She may have smiled a bit, but I couldn’t tell for sure. She watched me a few seconds then motioned with her head for me to come inside. I tramped through puddles and mud to her front door. Rain dripped from my hair to my eyes and across my face. My clothes were drenched and pasted to me like a second skin. Claudia held the candle higher for a better look at me.

“I wasn’t sure I’d still find you here,” I said.

“Well I wasn’t sure I’d still be here.” She swung the door enough for me to pass and stepped back out of the way. Once I was through the threshold the door closed behind me and she was at my side, the candle providing enough light to reveal pieces of the front room and bits of us. Claudia was wrapped in a large white towel and nothing else. Her hair was nearly as wet as mine. “What do you want? What are you doing back here?”

I stood dripping on her floor. Rain spattered against the windows and gushed from gutters along the roof, splashing into puddles in the mud. “I just—I was hoping maybe we could talk for a while.”

“You’ve been drinking, I can smell it on you.”

“Yeah, a little.”

“You one of those guys who grows a set once he’s had a few?”

“I’m not sure what kind of guy I am right at the moment.”

She shook her head, both annoyed and amused from the looks. “Look, I thought I made this clear before. I’m not in the business anymore.”

“I understand that.”

She spun away, walked over to a battered couch and sat down. Darkness closed around me, the light encircling her as she placed the candle on a rickety coffee table in front of her. “I was soaking in the tub, chilling out and trying to groove with the rain, and I’d like to get back to it if you don’t mind. In case you haven’t fucking noticed, it’s nighttime, this is my place and you’re here uninvited again. So I’ll ask one more time. What do you want?”

I moved closer to her, closer to the flame. “Why don’t you have any lights on?”

“They turned the electric off. I’m leaving tomorrow, so who cares?”

Lightning blinked, washing the room in blue for an instant.

“We’re going in different directions,” she said. “You’re running into the dark and I’m running away from it. I tried to be cool with you before, I was honest, I told you what you wanted to know, so why are you fucking with me now?”

“I’m not fucking with you, Claudia. I…”

She glanced at my wedding ring. “Go home to your wife, Plato.”

“My wife’s not at home.”

Her dark eyes blinked at me through the candlelight. “What do you think I’m running here, a lonely hearts club?”

“I’m sorry to just show up like this,” I said. “I just…”

“You just what? Jesus H., you got any complete sentences going on tonight?” Claudia stood up, holding the towel tight against her chest. “You think you can just come strolling in here like Joe Stud and fuck me, is that it? Or you just slumming tonight, out for some cheap thrills? Wife’s gone and you’re all fucked up, so what the hell, me being a used up old junkie whore and all I’d have nothing better to do than to put my legs in the air for you, right? Man, what a lifesaver, thanks for coming by.”

“It’s not like that, I—”

“Get out.” She moved out from behind the coffee table. “Just get out.”

“I only want to talk.”

“No you don’t.”

I stood staring at her, still dripping like some pitiful lost puppy wandered in from the storm. I had never felt so ridiculous, and never quite so alone. “Did Bernard ever come here?” I asked.

She left the candle behind on the coffee table and joined me outside the light. “Yeah, a few times. So what? Why?”

We were standing so close I could hear her breathing. “Do you ever still feel him?”

She closed her eyes as if hopeful that not seeing me might mean I was really no longer there. “I don’t feel much of anything anymore.”

“Claudia—”

“Just get out and leave me alone.”

“Drop that wall a minute and let me talk to—”

“It’s a good wall, a sturdy wall. Been building it for years. It keeps me safe.”

“It keeps you numb,” I told her. “I know because I’ve been behind one for years too.”

“Better to be numb than in pain.”

“At least if you’re in pain you know you’re alive.”

“You don’t have to be alive to feel pain.” Her eyes glistened. “The dead feel it too.” She walked away and mumbled, “Get out.” But as she slipped into the hallway she allowed her towel to loosen, and it fell open to reveal her bare back and the curve of her buttocks in the faint candlelight.

I followed her. The hallway was short and narrow and led first to a bathroom that was filled with lit candles placed around the tub and on the sink and counter. I hesitated in the doorway, but she was not there, so I continued on to the bedroom at the end of the hall. A handful of candles burned here as well but did little to combat the darkness. The only furniture was a bureau and an old unmade bed, the sheets in a heap near the foot. Over the bed was a framed but faded black and white poster of Billie Holiday. The floor was bare. I stood just inside the room, watching the flames play in the night, illuminating what they chose to show me, including Claudia, standing beside the bed and still holding the towel in place in front of her.

Our eyes locked for what felt like hours, and though neither of us made a sound, countless words passed between us.

The towel fell to the floor in a twisting motion and lay at her feet.

An enormous black tattoo began at her left calf, wound upward, wrapped along her thigh and encircled her waist. It ended just below her navel, where it split in two. The forked tongue of a serpent, coiled around her, marking her.

Her pale skin contrasted with the dark hair on her head and between her legs, but the tattoo was so dominant it was difficult to look at anything else. She seemed smaller out of clothes, more petite and delicate, at ease and not nearly so tough. But the essence of her—the physically weathered essence—remained even in candlelight. The majority of scars Claudia had collected over the years were internal, but a handful lived in plain sight, material evidence of a brutal past sprinkled across her body.

She radiated a primordial animalism in her movements and stances, and even in her nakedness she possessed a raw and dangerous edge, a kind of unpredictability one might encounter in a tiger just released from its cage. I imagined her as sexually aggressive and wild, if not outright violent. Heart thudding, my eyes skulked across her body. When my eyes finally returned to hers, her face bore a look as alluring as it was defiant. “This is what you came here for, isn’t it?” she asked quietly.

I nodded.

“Do you even know why?”

“No,” I said.

“I can feel what you think.”

As could I, and it sickened me. I wanted to take her, to fuck her. Hard. I wanted to hurt and abuse her in every way the darkest corridors of my mind could conjure. I wanted to hear her scream. And I didn’t know why. My anger and fear was frothing, bubbling to the surface, and I wanted to take it out on her. Maybe because others had, maybe because I could, maybe because I imagined it was all she knew.

“I’ve never had thoughts like this,” I stammered.

“Yes you have. You just keep them bound like all good devils.”

“They’re not me. They’re not who I want to be.”

“They’re not who any of us wants to be.”

There is instinct, and there is judgment.

I crossed the room in two long strides. My hands were suddenly in her hair, pulling her into me. Our lips met, and as I held her against me our tongues entangled and her hands slid up my chest and onto my shoulders, grasping me there with surprising strength before she broke the kiss and pushed me away. Nearly out of breath, I kissed her again. She tasted of cigarettes and rainwater. She cupped my face and looked up at me in a manner I had not until then thought her capable of. Deep inside her shreds of innocence still remained, vulnerability and need. “Not so rough,” she whispered. “Slower… gently. Like this, it’s better like this.” Her lips brushed mine, and her tongue softly traced my bottom lip before slipping into my mouth.

Still locked in our embrace, I lifted her from the floor, and the violence and madness left me like blood flowing from a fresh wound. In its wake lay the simple beauty of passion, of two scared and lonely people pooling their sorrow, trading it in for tenderness, for a chance to be safe and wanted and loved and needed unconditionally and totally, even if only for a short while.

At that very moment, I thought of Toni. But as Claudia wrapped her legs and arms around me, the thought retreated, leaving us alone.

There, in the dark.

CHAPTER 31

I met Toni in high school and immediately thought she was the sweetest, most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Cynical even for a teen, the instant and often overwhelming love we felt for each other surprised me, but like most couples that meet and commit in high school, our relationship was very intense. The highs were amazingly high, the lows amazingly low—a typical stormy romance—and not long after graduation we were forced to make a decision. Either we stayed together and got married, or went our separate ways as a test of our relationship, and ultimately, ourselves. If our love was real and meant to be, our theory concluded, then we’d end up together eventually anyway. Although it was painful for us, we decided the best move was to split up and see other people for a while. Little did we realize three years later we’d be back together and engaged, and that a year after that we’d be married. In the time we were apart both of us dated and slept with other people, but since our engagement I hadn’t been with anyone other than Toni.

When I found Claudia I had no idea we would eventually wind up in bed together. It hadn’t been something I’d thought about or even wanted until that night, and I was certain she had felt the same. But here we were. And while I struggled with feelings of guilt and regret, there was also exquisiteness to it, a raw sensuality and honest affection existing for a time amidst a dreamscape of devils and nightmares, an oasis in a desert of shadow.

It ended with silent intensity while rain sprayed the windows. The candles had burned down to nearly nothing, but lightning still blinked, illuminating the room every few seconds. Exhausted, we drifted off to sleep, her body draped over mine, head on my chest, breasts crushed against my stomach, our nude forms slick with sweat, warm and wet, entangled from head to toe.

In the night I lost my way, wandered from our sanctuary to the murky borderlands of sleep, where all that was ghastly and unclean waited for me.

I groggily opened my eyes. Claudia was still wrapped around me, her breath hot and steady on my chest. The storm clouds had dissipated and the rain had softened, giving way to the moon. Shadows moved along the walls. The floor creaked. I sensed movement before I saw it sweep past the corner of my eye.

Blended with darkness, new moonlight revealed several figures shrouded in black silently circling the bed, dancing around it like part of some ancient ritual. My muscles constricted in terror. I tried to sit up but my body remained paralyzed, stuck to the mattress and pinned beneath Claudia. I tried to call out to her but the words stuck in my throat, and the harder I tried to speak the worse it became. The figures continued their dance, increased their speed and began to violently convulse.

Claudia’s head suddenly jerked up, her chin in my chest and her eyes alive and wild. “Ever wonder what happens when you close your eyes?” she giggled. “What comes awake once you go to sleep?”

I struggled to get her off me but my arms and legs wouldn’t respond, and the more I attempted to thrash about the harder Claudia laughed.

“Get… off,” I finally managed to choke out.

“Ever wonder what that odd feeling is you sometimes get in the night?” she whispered, looking over her shoulder only long enough to grin at the beings still circling the bed. “The feeling that you’re not alone, that there’s something in the room with you once the lights go down and it’s quiet? We all feel it sometimes. Like maybe somebody or something is standing right next to your bed? We all open our eyes and look even though we know we won’t see anything. But deep down you know you felt something, and it scares you. Know why? Because something really is there.”

Suddenly I was able to move, and my arms pushed her away with such force that she became momentarily airborne before crashing back onto the mattress beside me. I scrambled from the bed, swinging punches at the darkness and releasing a primal scream. But the shadows were gone.

I staggered across the room, still off-balance, and crashed against the wall.

Claudia remained on the bed, sprawled out on her back. Snarling whispers filled the room as smoke rose from her body and it began to convulse. The cottage followed suit, shaking as if from an earthquake. Terrified, I scanned the room and ceiling, half expecting things to fall on me from above. I clutched the gold crucifix hanging around my neck. It had been a gift from my mother just months before her death. I held it tight as tears filled my eyes. Do you still believe? My mother’s voice, from so long ago…

“Are you all right?”

The sound of Claudia’s voice stopped it all as quickly as it had begun. I traced her voice to the bed. She was sitting up, watching me with a confused look on her face. “Are you dreaming?”

“I don’t know,” I said, voice breaking.

“It’s OK.” She crawled to the edge of the bed and sat back on her knees. Her body was still damp. “Keep the evil in your dreams and nightmares, whether you’re asleep or awake, it makes no difference. As long as it’s there its bound and you can control it. If it gets in here,” she said, pointing to her temple, “it’s in control. Once you let it in your head, or it fools its way in, once it’s there for real, it can do whatever it wants.”

Slowly, I moved back toward the bed, still uncertain of who or what I was dealing with. “Am I awake?”

“Remember what I told you.” Claudia opened her arms. “It’s all deception.”

As I leaned in to accept her embrace I heard a strange cracking sound, like small bones or pencils being broken, snapped in half, cracked and splintered.

Before I could process any of it an appendage burst through her abdomen. Warm blood sprayed my face, and I threw myself backward to the floor as more jointed and furry appendages burst from her stomach and chest. Coated with blood and bodily fluids, her body glistened. With more cracking sounds her back arched and the spider-like legs clicked into position to support the weight of her torso.

I scuttled across the floor to the door, but it slammed shut before I could get to it. Behind it I could hear growling and scratching. On the other side of the room Claudia’s destroyed body had transformed into some bloody, writhing and macabre hybrid of human being and arachnid.

Flames appeared, encircled the bed and rose nearly to the ceiling. The thing that Claudia had become was gone. Her normal form had been restored, but impossibly, she began to climb the wall like an insect might, scaling it slowly, as if crawling across the floor. When she reached the ceiling she stopped and looked down at me.

Her eyelids were gone.

From the darkness behind me two bloody hands grabbed either side of my face and pulled me back. I fell against whoever was there, and their clutch tightened, the blood from their fingers sliding across my cheeks. In a voice that sounded like he had just gargled cut glass, he said, “Don’t you know who I am?”

I struggled to break free but couldn’t. The hands shook me, gave my head one quick but savage jerk, and I went limp. “Bernard,” I gasped.

“Wrong,” the voice whispered in my ear. Something wet touched the side of my neck. A tongue. Gliding upward. Hot. Moist. Fetid. “His father.”

It was no longer night, but not quite morning either. Dawn was moments away, and the rain had stopped. Though the sun had not yet broken through the darkness, in the distance I could hear birds singing, welcoming its approach. I was still covered in sweat and had come awake not with a sudden jolt, but gradually, the way one might emerge from a peaceful sleep. I slung a hand out for Claudia but found only mattress and pillow next to me. My heart still racing, I rolled over. She was sitting near the window in a small wooden chair, smoking a cigarette and watching the sky. Nude, with her tattoos and dark eyes, she reminded me of a vampire anticipating sunrise and contemplating her escape.

Without looking at me she said, “You were having a nightmare.”

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“You were thrashing around.” She drew on her cigarette. The orange tip glowed bright in the fading darkness. “Couple times you called out.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“It’s better to let these things run their course.”

My body was sore and despite the nightmare I could have easily gone back to sleep. “Been a long time since I’ve woken up anywhere but next to my wife,” I said.

She looked at me. “Is she coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want her if she does?”

“We’ve been together a long time.”

“Do you love her?”

I nodded.

“Does she love you?”

“Used to.”

“But she doesn’t anymore?”

“I don’t know.”

She turned back to the window. The sun had just begun to break over the horizon. “What’s it like?”

“Being married?”

“Being loved.”

I went quiet, unsure of how to answer. Had she still been beside me I would have pulled her in close to me and held her a while.

Eventually she said, “Did you dream about the dark?”

I sat up, swung my legs around until my feet touched the floor. “Claudia, remember before when we talked about Bernard’s father? Do you know who it was?”

“No.”

“Bernard never told you?”

“He made claims, but Bernard was a liar.”

“Who did he claim his father was?”

She smoked her cigarette a while before answering. “The Devil himself.”

Fear scraped my spine. “Did you believe him?”

“Of course not.” She crushed her cigarette on the windowsill and tossed the butt to the floor. “But it doesn’t matter if I believe it or not.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s all a mind-fuck, Plato.” She crossed her legs, folded her arms across her breasts and sat forward a bit. “I think his mother got gangbanged like all the rest of them. Lots of guys, probably an animal or two—those types are into that stuff—could’ve been any number of people or things. All that matters is what she believed. And what he believed. That’s what evil lives on—belief. You either believe it or you don’t, can’t change it either way. It just is what it is. That’s where people fuck up. They think they can control what they believe. They can’t. They can pretend they do, convince themselves they know what’s real and what isn’t, but they’re just blowing smoke up their own ass. I told you before, the dark knows us better than we know ourselves.”

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “This evil, Claudia… can I kill it?”

“It’s already dead.”

“Can I stop it? Destroy it somehow?”

She smiled, but it was a helpless gesture. “Believe.”

“Is it still Bernard I’m dealing with? Was it ever?”

“It’s more about you at this point than you realize,” she said. “In ritual black magic, human body parts are powerful ingredients, all with different uses. The first thing Bernard did to his victims was to take their eyelids. He made his prey look into the afterlife for him. Whatever he is now, he was once a man, so his struggles and obsessions are still those of Man. He’s more powerful now, but he’s not without weakness. He’s faithless, and the faithless are weak.”

“Why the hell is this happening to me?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It’s the way of the world, his world.”

I held my hand out. After a moment she stood up and accepted it. “If I asked you not to leave town,” I said, “if I asked you to stay, would you?”

Claudia ran her fingers through my hair with her free hand then sat next to me on the edge of the bed. “If I asked you to come with me, would you?”

I managed a cowardly smile. “I feel a closeness to you I can’t explain.”

“I’m part of your nightmare, Plato. And you’re part of mine.”

She was right. More had existed between us from the very start than we’d realized, and even on this night more had transpired than just sex. Pieces of us had passed from one to the other, body and soul, kindred spirits clawing their way out of a shared hell. And wherever we were going, both of us knew then that regardless of final destination, we’d never be coming back. I touched her tattoo, ran my fingers along the bend in her thigh then kissed her on the forehead. She leaned into me and we fell back onto the bed together, quiet and holding each other as the sun continued its slow climb over the city.

For the first time in recent memory I slept peacefully, and for hours, through the morning and into the afternoon. When I finally awakened, Claudia was gone.

CHAPTER 32

As Rick’s Cherokee pulled away I watched Donald grow smaller and smaller in the side mirror, receding into the distance the further we got from his cottage. Standing in the driveway, watching after us, the look on his face was a mixture of disapproval and guarded relief. None of us knew what Rick and I were walking into, and while Donald felt reticent about speculating, he had made it perfectly clear earlier that he wanted out. This time around I didn’t blame him, but I could tell he felt guilty staying behind, so I didn’t offer it as an option, which spared him having to reconsider while also providing a graceful way out.

The plan was simple. While the town was distracted with the evening festivities, Rick and I would check out the remains of the Buchanan Mill on the outskirts of Potter’s Cove. Donald would stay by the phone and wait to hear from us. If there was no word by nine o’clock the following morning, the decision was his from there on out, either follow us to the mill and take his chances, or notify the police and tell them everything.

We took a corner and I quickly inspected my 9mm before returning it to the holster on the back of my belt. Rick brought along a large scuba knife he strapped to his calf whenever he went on one of his diving excursions. The weapon was double-edged, one side smooth and the other serrated, both razor-sharp. It lay in its scabbard on the console between the seats. In a sullen tone he asked, “You think we’ll need any of this shit?”

“I don’t know. Let’s hope not.” In truth, I felt like an ass. Two grown men with knives and guns on their way to a rumble with demons or ghosts or God knew what, going to war with the past, with some dark demented corner of ourselves. Straightjackets all around, please.

It was already growing dark. The sky had taken on a strange fiery glaze, streaks of red and orange mixed with rolling black along the horizon like brushstrokes from an ethereal painter-gone-mad hidden in the outlying clouds.

The fireworks were set to begin soon after nightfall, so the streets leading to and near the public beach, where tourists and residents alike gathered to watch the display, were already packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic and a bevy of pushcart vendors selling everything from flags to inflatable animals to food to glow-sticks. Luckily we were headed in the opposite direction, farther down the coast, and skirted the congestion easily.

We rode in silence for several minutes, the neighborhoods becoming more and more desolate the further we went. “When you hit the woods, pull over.”

“We can drive right up to the gate,” Rick said. “Hop the fence and—”

“I got a plan.” I turned and looked out the window, wrestling the tension, the fear. “Just do it, OK?”

“Sure.” Rick gave an awkward nod. “OK.”

The old mills had all been built inland along a series of bluffs overlooking the Atlantic. They’d been constructed in a cleared out section of state forest, one after another, to form a line of enormous old structures on huge plots of paved land. The Buchanan Mill was first in line. Prior to the property was a fairly dense but minor section of state forest, and behind the mill was a short stretch of land followed by the cliffs then the ocean below and beyond. The next mill was nearly a full mile away, separated by an enormous expanse of parking lot and another small patch of forest.

We pulled onto an old service road, the pavement cracked and littered with potholes. “So what happened with you and that chick?”

“Claudia?” Before leaving Donald’s I had gone over our conversations and all the things she’d explained to me. “I already told you everything she said.”

“You believe her?”

“Aren’t we beyond all that by now?” I asked. “Yeah, I do.” I remembered waking up in her cottage to find nearly all trace of her gone. The candles were burned down and extinguished, and even the poster of Florida had been removed from the wall. The rain had stopped but puddles littered the area and water still dripped slowly from the gutters and dead tree branches. The sun was blanketed in a hazy glow as the heat again began to rise and burn away the remnants of the storm the night before. I wondered if Claudia had sat on the bed and watched me a while before she did it, contemplating the evening prior, or had she quietly slipped away while I slept, already thinking of other things, other places?

Visions of her flashed before my eyes, accompanied by images of Toni, and eventually, Bernard. We were all tied together now—forever—and I could no longer separate the three, could no longer think of one without also thinking of the others. When I’d been inside Claudia, her past—and those who had been there before me—didn’t matter. It wasn’t until I thought of Bernard having been there too that for one brief but brutal moment I’d been sickened, and from that point forward I knew that even if Toni and I ended up back together, I’d never be able to look at her again without also experiencing these spectral memories.

“So she’s gone now, huh?”

I saw her in a blink, the towel pressed against her chest, her face washed in candlelight. You’re running into the dark and I’m running away from it.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s gone. She wanted to go someplace else and start over. She believed she could, anyway.”

“Must be nice.”

“Starting over?”

“Yeah.”

I nodded. “Guess it all depends on how you do it.”

“Think we’ll ever get the chance?”

“Think we’ll take it even if we do?”

“Probably not.” He laughed lightly, ironically. “This fucking town’s all we know, all we’ve ever known and probably all we ever will know.”

“Kind of sad,” I mumbled.

“It’s not so bad. This is our home. Where the hell else are we supposed to go?”

The road had grown a bit more uneven and rugged. The Cherokee jostled us about and Rick slowed his speed. The beginnings of forest awaited us in the distance. “Pull over,” I said. “We’ll walk in from here.”

We locked up the Jeep and stood near the edge of the woods. Just over the treetops, the highest points of the Buchanan building were visible in the distance, an unnatural glitch in the otherwise pristine skyline. The sun, all but swallowed by the horizon, continued to sink, a final hurrah of red glowing radiance filtering through the trees as it gradually slipped from sight. We watched the sky without speaking. Before we reached the end of the forest and crossed onto the Buchanan Mill parking lot, it would be completely dark.

Rick clutched his scuba knife in one hand, a large flashlight in the other. He held them both up, as if to remind me that he had them. In a sleeveless, skintight black shirt, black jeans and black hiking boots, hair slicked back and skin tan and muscular, he looked like some special ops commando on a night raid. But the usual expressions that colored his face, those of confidence bordering on arrogance, enthusiasm and an ease with himself and his surroundings, the premeditated satisfaction he had always drawn from being in control and self-assured, had gone missing. The last thing I needed at this point was a paper tiger.

“You all right?” I asked.

“I’m good.” He slid the scabbard into his belt. “Let’s just get this done, OK?”

I turned my head toward the distant sea. We weren’t quite close enough to hear it yet, but I could smell it. I could feel it.

I could also feel faded vestiges of Bernard here. He had driven these roads, walked these woods, breathed this air and watched night close in over the tops of these trees the same as us. Had he done things here, right here? Had his victims looked at this same sky, all the while wondering if it might be the last thing they’d ever see? Did they know, as they stood on this very ground we now walked on, that death was inescapable? Did they cry here? Fight and plead for their lives?

Did they bleed here?

We trudged into the forest, moving toward glimpses of the distant mill through the trees. Rick took the lead with long, powerful strides, forcing me to hurry to keep up with him. The cool air the storm had brought with it the night before was already gone, replaced again with stifling humidity, but within moments we encountered a welcome and steady breeze bounding in off the ocean.

Unexpectedly, Rick came to an abrupt halt and looked around. “Why’d we have to come through here?” he asked quietly.

And then I knew he felt it too. Bernard had used this stretch of forest, I was certain of it. He had brought them here first. It made perfect sense. His earliest prey had been victimized in the woods, and for some reason it had a connection to the hideous acts he committed. This particular stretch was the perfect area for his demented games. Isolated but accessible, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run other than to the rocky coast and ocean beyond, or the old mill. And once there, he would have even more privacy. No one could hear them. No one could help them. Cries and shrieks of terror and agony would go unanswered, echoing through the bowels of a forgotten and decaying relic.

“He brought them here, Rick.”

He nodded but said nothing. The ghosts were back, and they spoke to me instead.

Bernard held her tight, one hand on the small of her back, the other cradling her neck. Her hair, wet and matted, streaked and stuck together in clumps from rain and dirt and sweat lay pasted against her cheek. He drew a deep breath, inhaled her scent, detecting earth—soil—mixed with perspiration and some uniquely feminine smells. He tightened his grip, held her closer still and leaned back his head. His eyes struggled to focus through the darkness and rain falling through the treetops overhead, tickling his face and reminding him just how alive he was. His lips parted, allowed the drops to trickle into his mouth. As it accumulated and sloshed free, running over his chin, across his throat and over his neck like the blood of Earth it was, he looked into what was left of her eyes. “Can you see God?” he whispered, so only she might hear.

Her clothes, strewn across nearby branches, billowed in the wind. He kissed her forehead and squeezed her tight. Her bones, so close to the skin, brought him back. And then it was just the two of them—for now—there in the forest, Earth and sky, night and day, good and evil, blood and dirt, all exploding into one.

As he released her frail form, she slumped over into a bed of wet leaves, arms flopping out, legs bent and pinned beneath her. He rose slowly to his feet, his legs shaking and unsteady, chest frantically rising and falling as cold rain gushed from a night sky. He staggered to a nearby tree, found the knife he had plunged into it earlier, and yanked it free. Turning in a slow pirouette, he threw back his head, arms outstretched to worship the rain. His dance led him back to her, and he dropped to his knees, draping himself across her upper body, his cheek against hers, one hand clutching the knife and the other gently stroking her throat. Cracked and battered lips moved as the woman’s chest heaved. He pressed his ear to her mouth. “Kill me,” she whispered.

He touched her face tenderly; stunned she still had the strength to speak. “What do you see?” he asked, gazing into her mangled eyes. “Tell me what you see.”

The wind answered, as did the rain, but she could not.

“Tell me,” he insisted. “I need… I need to know for sure.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance, breaking his concentration. He stood up, slipped the knife between his teeth and grabbed her by the feet. Trudging through the leaves and mud, he dragged her to the designated tree, found the rope and used the dangling end to bind her legs at the ankle. With three strong pulls of the rope she was raised upward, her limp nude body swaying, arms and hair hanging, reaching for the ground.

Once the rope was secured, he pulled the knife from his mouth and squatted so his face was in line with hers. He pawed at his eyes, wiped away the rain and gently brushed his lips against her. “It’s all right to be afraid.” He looked to the section of forest from which he’d come. Interspersed with flashes of lightning, visions of him skipping and tossing her clothes as he went flickered through his mind. And like a child who had peeked under his bed to find that a monster did, in fact, reside there, he struggled back into a standing position, feet slipping and sliding beneath him.

He placed the blade against her pubic bone with a disturbingly steady hand and found himself wondering if his suspicions were correct. Maybe Hell was here on Earth. Maybe he’d already found it. And as the master had tempted the one he despised—the one from Nazareth—all those years before, perhaps this too was little more than a final temptation, a test of his conviction.

Bernard turned back to the woman. “You’re supposed to die screaming.”

And as he thrust the blade forward, gripped the handle with both hands and dropped to his knees, gutting and tearing her open from pelvis to throat in a single ripping motion, she did her best to comply…

I was sure whatever evidence these woods had held was long gone. No one ever came out here, and animals and the elements would have destroyed remains within days. Months later, besides the ghosts and the stories they felt compelled to tell me, there might be a bone here or there, but not much else.

Silence followed the breeze, whispered through the forest. It hadn’t become completely dark yet, but night was close.

Rick snapped his flashlight on. Through a loud swallow he asked, “You think there’s bodies here?”

“Not here.” I motioned over his shoulder. “There.”

We were mere feet from the edge of the woods. Beyond the last line of trees stood a chain link fence separating the beginnings of parking lot from the wooded area. Perhaps one hundred yards away sat the phantomlike silhouette of an enormous structure, the decomposed remains of a behemoth from earlier times staring down at us through rapidly darkening skies.

Without a word, we headed for the fence.

CHAPTER 33

Thankfully the fence was only about five feet high. We scaled it and dropped down into the parking lot, and I suddenly felt like I was twelve years old again, hopping fences and climbing trees, going on adventures like the world was still new and innocence still meant something.

Waves crashed the beach beyond as darkness closed in around us.

“My grandparents worked here,” Rick said.

I’d driven by a few times but had never set foot on the property before. I vaguely remembered walking miles of beach or riding our bikes along the sandy coastline when we were kids, watching the huge old buildings ominously perched atop the cliffs, rundown and neglected even then. In those days they had represented intrigue and menace, dinosaurs at the edge of town only the elderly could speak of with firsthand knowledge. To us, as kids, they were oddities, the topic of endless imaginary possibilities.

“No unions then, fucking sweatshops,” Rick continued. “In those days there was nowhere else to work in this town besides the mills. Broke their fucking backs in this place. A lot of people did. Made them old before their time.”

“Life has a way of doing that,” I mumbled. “Come on.”

With Rick leading the way, his flashlight aimed at the cracked and uneven pavement before us, we started across the parking lot.

“I wonder if the cops checked out these buildings?” he asked a moment later. In the dark, and in this strange place, the sound of our voices was somehow comforting.

“Probably.”

“I mean, they already said they know the killer tortured and murdered his victims somewhere besides where they found the bodies, right? These buildings make sense. They’re about the only places in town where you could do something like that and no one would know. Problem is they’ve all been condemned and abandoned for so long they say they’re unsafe to the point where you can’t even walk around in most of them. If they checked them out, I bet they did it half-assed. That’s if they even got this far yet. If you read the papers or listen to the news, they’re all stuck on the drifter bit and the killer already being long gone.”

The killer. Even now, he couldn’t bring himself to use Bernard’s name.

The smell of sea air grew stronger, and the wind off the ocean was a bit steadier, which helped to lessen the humidity some.

“I think even if the cops did check these places out they only found what it allowed them to find, what it wants them to see.”

“It?”

We stopped, looked at each other. “Those other bodies were found because Bernard wanted them to be found and eventually revealed to the authorities. The rest of it, I’m not so sure about.” I motioned to the mill. “I think whatever’s in there is for us to find. Things he wants revealed to you and me. Maybe only you and me.”

Rick puffed his chest out like he hoped to intimidate his own fear. “Something’s either there or it’s not, Alan.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Unless it all depends on who’s looking.”

Neither of us spoke for several seconds, but as we turned and continued toward the mill, I said, “I wonder why the town still leaves these beasts standing in the first place?”

“It’d cost a fortune to demolish the fuckers,” he said. “Plus, it’s Potter’s Cove history. About all this shit town has for history, anyway.”

Until now, I thought. Now town history would forever hold hands with violent and bloody death, with torture and mayhem and madness.

We were within one hundred yards of the main building when a loud boom stopped us. The sky lit up over the mill, brilliant blues and reds bursting and streaming in various directions before trailing slowly toward the ground. The fireworks had begun, and against the night sky, in this old and forgotten hellhole, they offered a beautiful contrast, a magical presence of the surreal against an otherwise decidedly conventional setting.

Forgetting it all for a moment, we stood looking up at the sky like starstruck kids.

Every few seconds a new display briefly painted the sky, washing our faces in colorful hues that slipped past like headlights along the walls of a dark room.

The spell finally broken, we approached the front of the building. Rick slowly raised the flashlight, moved it gradually up the face of the mill. Most of the long vertical windows were broken or completely gone, and the few panes still intact were blurred with years of grime. The doors and windows on the first floor were boarded up, covered in graffiti and filth.

“Getting inside might be a problem,” Rick said. “They got it boarded up pretty good.”

And then, as I studied the mammoth before us, it hit me.

“I’ve seen all this before,” I said quietly. “That night in New Bedford. The old factory across from the car lot, I—it was the same. It wasn’t this building, but—but it was. It looks the same. I was in a completely different place, but what I saw was the same. What I saw was this.”

Rick swung the flashlight around, pointed it at my chest so that there was just enough light illuminating my face. “Say again?”

“I’ve been here before.”

I snatched the flashlight from him, aimed it at the front of the building and swept the beam across the first floor until I located a doorway. The large doors that had once constituted the main entrance had rotted and mostly fallen away, and a partially decayed wooden plank that looked like it had fallen from above and landed there ages ago was wedged diagonally across the doorway. It was all exactly as I had seen it before.

“There,” I said, stabbing with the light. “That’s the way in.”

Squatting at one end of the plank was an enormously plump rat. Making odd grunting noises, it sat back on its hind legs, reared up and bared its teeth.

Everything was the same, the same as that night.

“Shit, dude,” Rick whispered, “that is one bulbous motherfucking rat.”

I trained the beam on the animal, and it reflected off its eyes, causing them to glow fire-red. As before, the standoff continued until, after a few contemplative sniffs, the rat turned, waddled to the end of the plank and dropped from sight.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We carefully climbed over the plank and through the doorway, and immediately slammed into a host of nauseating smells. I stepped over a pile of rubble and garbage and panned the light slowly in front of us. The nearest wall was covered with graffiti, and the floors were thick with debris.

“All this trash and shit, I bet some homeless dudes squatted here,” Rick said, his voice echoing through the empty bowels of the building. “You think there’s still any around?”

“There’s nothing alive in this place anymore,” I said. “Except them.”

A group of rats a few feet ahead of us scattered, escaping into darker corners as the pyrotechnics resumed. Fireworks exploded and roared overhead like thunder, and multicolored shafts of light spilled through various holes and wounds in the building, shooting through the open spaces and puncturing the darkness. As one round faded, another followed seconds later.

I could hear the nervous cadence of Rick’s breath beside me. “Now what?” he asked.

I looked up. The ceiling was so high I couldn’t make it out. I turned to my right, brought the flashlight around and followed the beam to the far end of the large room. “This way.”

We walked through the debris and clutter, the ray of light bouncing with each step, and as the fireworks subsided for a moment, I focused on a hallway I knew would be there. My heart began to race as memories of the night in that factory—this factory—beckoned me. A clammy sweat broke out across my forehead. “Down here,” I said.

Moving through the hallway, the building seemed to close in around us and become much smaller, and although once the fireworks started up again we could still hear them, we were no longer able to see them. The confined space rapidly became overwhelming, the walls narrow and the ceiling low. I swept the light up and down repeatedly as we continued on, trying to reveal as much of the hallway as possible.

The stench grew worse here.

We reached a smaller room off of the hallway. An old plaque to the right of where the door had once been caught my attention, and I focused the flashlight on it. “Looks like this was some sort of office.” I wiped at the filthy plaque until I could make out a few letters. “Personnel, I think.”

I slipped through the doorway. The room was the same one the woman had lured me to that night. There was garbage strewn from one corner to the next, and as I moved the light about the room, I saw the familiar symbols painted in red paint or blood smeared across the walls. What was once the door to the office had been suspended between two small stacks of cinderblocks to form the same makeshift altar I had seen that night.

The same as before, something lay beneath it in a heap on the floor, dark and unmoving, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

“What the fuck’s that shit all over the walls?” Rick asked from behind me.

“Hexes or spells—God knows.” I sighed. “I have no idea.”

“Is it blood?”

“I think so.”

“Jesus.”

“I think it’s some sort of announcement, or a marking, something like that.”

“Maybe it’s a warning.”

A chill of fear reminded me I hadn’t thought of that. I nodded, swung the light over to the door across the cinderblocks. “That’s supposed to be an altar, I think.”

“What’s that on the floor?”

I swallowed so hard I nearly gagged. “Not sure.”

“I got a bad feeling about all this, man.”

“Yeah, no fucking shit, do you really?” I shot him an annoyed look, crouched a bit and crept deeper into the room, toward the altar. When I was within a few feet of it, I realized that whatever was beneath it had been covered with an old wool blanket. I waved Rick over and handed him the flashlight. “Shine it here,” I said, pointing.

He did, and I noticed it trembling slightly, along with my hand, as I reached for the blanket and yanked it free.

“Oh, Christ.” I dropped the blanket and backed away. “No.”

Rick kept staring, the flashlight pointed at it. “It doesn’t look real.”

I ran a hand through my sweaty hair. “It’s destroyed.”

He shook his head, his lips moving rapidly but soundlessly.

“That night in the factory,” I said, “the woman lured me to this room and showed me her little boy. He was dead. They were—they were both dead.” Memories of that night flooded my mind, but I no longer needed them, they had become truth right before my eyes. “Bernard’s victims were all single mothers with sons. The killings were rituals, and Claudia told me the final victims, the final ritual sacrifices before he committed suicide would include not only the mother, but also the son.”

“Why would he do that to a… a little kid?” Rick mumbled. “Why would he do that?”

“Goddamn bloodbath,” I said. “He slaughtered him and painted the walls with his blood. He butchered a helpless little boy.” I forced myself to look back at the small body crumpled beneath the altar, tossed there like the rest of the garbage littering the floor. That which Bernard hadn’t savaged, the rats had. What remained was mutilated and battered to the point that when I had first seen it I wasn’t entirely certain of what it was. I could only imagine the terror the child had suffered, the abject terror. Anger joined the fear coursing through my veins. “You motherfucker!” I screamed at the darkness, my voice echoing eerily in the empty space. “Motherfucker!”

Rick grabbed my shoulder, hard. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

I shook free of him, reached down and threw the blanket back over the body. “We’re not going anywhere until this is finished.” I faced him. “This ends here, tonight.”

Just then, Rick noticed something in the darkness. His eyes slowly lifted, and I could tell from the look on his face that there was something above us. “Jesus—Jesus Christ,” he babbled. “Sweet Jesus Christ in Heaven.”

Following his stare, and then the flashlight beam to the low ceiling overhead, I saw the woman—the boy’s mother—floating in midair.

CHAPTER 34

I was either in shock or frightened to the point where I was incapable of running. Instead, I stood gawking, struggling to prevent my mind from splintering, and a moment later realized the woman was not floating after all.

She had been crucified to the ceiling.

I heard Rick vomit as I moved closer and gazed up at the carnage. The woman had been gutted, and her emaciated torso lay open and empty. Nails roughly the size of railway spikes had been driven through her hands and feet. Her eyelids had been sliced away, and her eyes were sunken and covered in gray mucus, forever forced to look down upon her maimed child. Her face was drawn and sallow, just as I remembered it.

You here about the plumbing?

“No,” I whispered, “and neither was he.”

In those few seconds it seemed all sanity deserted us. We were in Hell, and I was so terrified, so overcome with fear, I could barely prevent myself from completely breaking down. Emotion was raw now, and all the rules of life and death had changed. Lies and truth, fantasy and reality, good and evil—they had all become one.

“He’s here.” I took the flashlight back. “I can feel him.”

Rick wiped his mouth clean and gave a resolute nod.

I pushed past him and left the room. There were two small offices and a large metal staircase at the end of the hallway. We inspected the offices quickly. They were filled with broken furniture and garbage but nothing else, so I shone the light toward the staircase. Most of the steps were cluttered with debris. Two large windows at the head of the stairs were smeared with filth, but as more fireworks exploded, the colorful lights bled through the old panes and offered a glimpse of the top of the stairs.

In the flash of light, something on the landing moved.

“Fuck!” I backed away and nearly tripped. I swept the flashlight around but the beam wasn’t strong enough, and darkness again swallowed the top of the stairs.

“What? What is it?”

“There’s something up there,” I whispered. “I just saw it move.”

“More rats?”

I shook my head in the negative. “Too big.”

“There must still be homeless living in here then,” he said hopefully.

Rather than answering, I held my hand up for him to be quiet. We stood still a moment and waited for lapses between the fireworks to listen more carefully, but each time, all we heard was wind and ocean.

I climbed the first two stairs, distributing my weight carefully to make certain they could still safely accommodate us. Rick followed close behind. Once we’d covered three stairs, the flashlight was finally able to reveal the landing. I leaned against the railing and aimed the light, but from our vantage point all I could see beyond it was more darkness. We had no way of knowing if the second floor was safe to walk on, but something was up there, and one way or another, I was going after it.

We crept onto the landing and saw that the second floor was entirely gutted, an enormous open space with high ceilings. Again, the floor was cluttered and the same horrible smells pervaded the area, but the darkness here seemed different.

It was nearly alive.

I slowly swept the pool of light across the vast room.

“Who’s there?” Rick yelled suddenly. “Come out, we just want to talk to you.”

I glared at him but he didn’t notice, his eyes staring straight ahead. There was no answer, no sounds of movement.

“You’re sure you saw something?” he whispered.

As I slid the light along the wall closest to us, it illuminated a nearby open doorway. Shadows darted away, and this time I knew Rick had seen them too. “Positive.”

My heart and mind were racing so fast I wasn’t sure how much more I could endure. I wrestled with a tremor of fear, fought it off and stepped closer to the doorway. The light reflected off something within the room. Tiles. A wall covered in old filthy tiles.

“It’s a bathroom,” Rick said.

The sign buried in the cellar wall of Bernard’s house had been taken from a bathroom, a bathroom in this mill.

With my free hand, I reached behind me, pulled my 9mm free of its holster and glanced nervously at Rick. He dropped a hand to the grip of his knife but left it in the scabbard. His face and neck were slick with sweat.

Another round of fireworks burst across the sky, and on this floor, with all the windows and open space, it lighted the area far more intensely than it had below. I pictured countless people gathered on the public beach several miles down the coast, watching the displays and enjoying their Fourth of July. I pictured Donald pacing near his telephone. I pictured Toni dressed in dark clothes, standing at my gravesite with another man and grinning at me from behind black lace. I pictured Claudia in her dark and dirty cottage, straddled atop me, rocking slowly, hands pressed flat against my chest, pushing me deeper into the worn, stained mattress, her breasts full, wet and dripping sweat as I tell her, “I’m closing in on him.” And her shaking her head and whispering, “He’s closing in on you.” I pictured the families and loved ones of the victims crying and mourning, walking alongside caskets leaking blood. I pictured Bernard painting walls with the same blood, with body fluids and excrement, and from somewhere deep inside, heard the shrieks of the dead mingled with his laughter.

The fireworks faded to black, returned us to darkness.

We followed the shadows into the bathroom. The stench wafting from within was gut-wrenching, and as the flashlight crawled along ahead of us, we saw that the tiled walls were awash in a caked crimson so dark it was nearly black. I moved the beam around the room. The entire area was covered in blood. Even the floors were smeared with it. With the smell, in limited light and enclosed space, I imagined it was similar to being trapped within the bloody carcass of some enormous, brutally slain animal.

“Over there,” Rick said, his voice flat, void.

I swung the light in the direction he indicated.

A large industrial size sink ran nearly the full length of the back wall, above which had once been a mirror, though only shards and small sections of glass panels remained intact, fracturing our dark reflections back at us as if through some demented prism.

There was a line of urinals to our right, but only a few were still attached to the wall, the rest had fallen or been torn free and lay in pieces on the floor. On the opposite wall were the devastated remnants of stalls and toilets. Blood spatters were everywhere, like a painter had taken a very wide and wet brush and flicked it repeatedly about the room for hours, only to finish by taking up the paint bucket and dousing the area with whatever remained.

We inched closer to the sink. It had overflowed long before with what could only be a sickening combination of various body fluids and blood. Whatever the concoction had once been, it was now reduced to a dark gelatinous slop.

And within this demonic fluid lay a bevy of body parts protruding from the mess like dinosaurs stuck in tar pits. I moved the light along the sink, past a human head, to a portion where what appeared to be a torso floated on its side. Maggots writhed along the surface. Rick turned away and vomited again, and though my body wanted to join him, I was hit with violent dry heaves instead.

“Fucking slaughterhouse,” Rick gasped.

I holstered the 9mm, bent over, put my hands on my knees and took several deep breaths. The pool of light fell between us. On the floor, facing the sink, an upside down cross was painted in blood. Other strange symbols had been drawn around it, along with a word that had been smudged and neither of us could make out.

“I can’t even tell how many are in there,” I managed a moment later.

Rick spat on the floor. “Have you ever—ever—felt anything like this before?”

I knew exactly what he meant. There was a pervasive sense of evil here, a tangible essence of it hanging in the air like dense fog, and it was so strong that I could feel it being absorbed into my pores, mixing with the moisture in my eyes, inhaled up and into my nose and clinging to the roof of my mouth. “No.”

“We’re leaving right-fucking-now.” He staggered away and headed for the door.

I followed, trying my best to keep the light aimed in front of him, but he was at a full run before I reached the main room, and once there, it took me a few seconds to locate him. Firing the flashlight in various directions and calling his name, I finally found him running through the room, stumbling through piles of garbage and debris as he went, the knife free of the scabbard and clutched in his hand, blade down.

A glow of various colors lit the sky and a greater portion of the room, which gave me my bearings. Instead of making for the staircase, Rick had become disoriented and was running the wrong way, deeper into the darkness. “Rick, no! Wrong way! Wrong way!”

He looked back over his shoulder, nearly fell, quickly regained his balance and spun around in an attempt to change directions. But as he did so a loud cracking sound echoed across the room, and with a frantic and helpless shout, he fell straight down and out of sight.

The floor had given way and swallowed him whole.

I ran toward the spot where I’d last seen him, doing my best to keep the light level and all the while fearful the floor might also give out on me at any moment. I arrived at the hole quickly, crouched next to it carefully and shined the light through. A large section of flooring had collapsed and now lay in a heap on the floor below, along with Rick, who was sprawled out and covered in filth, but conscious.

“Are you all right?” I called down. He didn’t answer, but moved groggily and shielded his eyes from the light. His arms and legs were moving, albeit slowly and with some effort, but it didn’t look like he had sustained any serious injuries. “Stay there,” I told him. “I’m coming down.”

I noticed his knife near the edge of the hole. He had apparently dropped it when he fell. I scooped it up with my free hand and aimed the light back in the direction of the staircase. But before I had taken a step I heard a strange squishing sound, and from behind me came a deep gurgling voice.

“Welcome to my Eden.”

CHAPTER 35

A stream of fireworks shot through the sky, firing sparks into the air and releasing shrill wails as they fell to the ground in slow spirals. A rapid-fire series of red and blue bursts followed. The finale had begun.

Against the rear wall of the mill, draped in shadow, a huddled figure watched me from the darkness. Its head was shiny—slick and wet—and it wasn’t until I stepped a bit closer that I realized it was covered in blood. His head was bald, like it had been completely shaved—the wig gone—but I recognized the face even before the eyes opened, two white orbs emerging from crimson. They looked at me as if I were some sort of anomaly, as if I were the one out of place in the universe. And maybe I was.

My emotions became too great, and even attempting to control them seemed inane. Laughing, crying and choking all at once, I was certain I had slipped off the precipice into complete madness, because that which stood before me was not possible, could not be possible, and yet, there it was. But with this awareness also came an odd clarity, a release and an acceptance of the inevitable—whatever it might be—and at the moment of this epiphany my fear tapered off, my tears stopped and I became surprisingly composed. I had come to this house of horrors to find the evil, to stop it or to die trying. And now, I had found it.

He cocked his head as if he had heard my thoughts. For a fleeting moment something in his eyes spoke to me, and I glimpsed who he had once been so very long ago.

“Bernard,” I said.

“Come closer, Alan.” His voice was a bit deeper than normal, and gurgled and reverberated like his lungs were full of fluid, or like he was gargling while attempting to speak.

I did as he asked, and the closer I got the wider and more intense the flashlight beam became. He was nude and covered in shining blood to his shoulders so thick and bright it looked almost like paint. The fireworks finale continued, one explosion on top of the next as colors rained through the mill and slinked across our faces and bodies. I followed one moving shaft of blue light to his lower extremities. He was crouched there in the dark like a suddenly discovered and cornered animal. Around his feet the floor was covered in a kind of jellylike mass of quivering flesh, blood and bone, a great deal of which was also on the wall behind him, as if violently thrown there. It looked to be gradually passing through the floor and wall to somewhere else, like little by little, it was being absorbed.

Not all spirits cross peacefully, Claudia had said. Some hang on.

He seemed to have a normal range of motion but moved groggily, and at a snail’s pace. He reached a blood-soaked hand to his face, wiped a space clear around his eyes then looked away to indicate brooding, contemplative thought. As he exhaled each breath through his nose, more blood ran free of his nostrils and joined the sheen already coating him. Eventually he began to breathe loudly through his mouth.

Movement to my left distracted me. The shadowy figures from our nightmare stood several feet away, barely visible in the dark corner and just beyond the reach of both my flashlight and the illumination of the now constant barrage of fireworks.

But I knew who they were. I had seen them before.

“And you know why they’re here,” Bernard gurgled.

“You’re not real,” I told him. “None of you are real.”

“Are your dreams real? Your nightmares?”

“You’re ghosts in my mind.”

“Close.” He exhaled through his mouth with a loud hiss that sounded like air escaping a pipe, and his bloody lips peeled back into a grin. He no longer had teeth, only slick pink gums. “There are no ghosts, Alan. Only memories… echoes… residue.”

“Why did you do this?”

The eyes shifted, and a black tongue slowly traced his lips. “It’s my nature.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You were my friend.”

“A friend, a relative,” he gurgled. “Someone you trust, someone you believe in. I have no unique characteristics; there are no giveaways. Don’t you realize that by now? I’m everywhere, Alan. I’m everyone. Anyone.” His mouth opened wide as a gush of dark blood spilled from his mouth and poured over his chin. “The inconsolable, the weak, the lonely and the lost, the faithless and the unclean. The damned. The lovely damned.”

The fireworks stopped, and both silence and darkness returned to the mill. Only my flashlight remained, along with the sounds of the nearby ocean. I tightened my grip on the scuba knife.

“You came here to kill me, is that it?” The wet white eyes dropped to my hands. “With your ridiculous toys?”

I stared at the monstrosity before me, my chest heaving.

“Well I have darker toys,” he said.

“Why are you tormenting us?”

Wet crimson fingers caressed his bloody chin. After a moment, those fingers reached out for me, the tips dripping. “Come together, Alan. I’ll show you the beauty of torment.” He grinned as I stepped a bit closer. “Did I mention your mother’s down here with us?”

“My mother’s nowhere near you.”

“Can you be sure of anything anymore? Ever again?”

I forced a swallow. “I’m sure of that.”

“You had such nightmares then,” he said, using my mother’s voice now. “When you were a little boy. Do you remember, sweetheart?”

I’m afraid—so frightened I can barely breath. I’m crying violently, choking, and my entire body trembles. But then I realize my mother is there—so loving and patient, with the most beautiful deep brown eyes I have ever seen. She is holding me, sitting with me there on my bed, rocking me in her arms and whispering to me. She smells fresh and clean and warm, and I feel safe. “It’s OK,” she tells me. “Just bad dreams, little one, only bad dreams.” She gently wipes away my tears with her fingers, and the blur I had seen her through previously vanishes. “What were you dreaming about that frightened you so?”

“Something in the dark was chasing me,” I tell her. “I was running and it was behind me and it was growling and biting me, biting me on my feet and on my legs.”

She kisses my forehead. “There’s nothing in the dark but the dark.”

“There’s monsters in the dark,” I tell her.

“No such things as monsters, kiddo.”

Even though I know different, I also know she will never fully understand, so I focus on her face, and the perpetual sadness in her eyes. I am afraid and she is sad. These are our markings, burned into our flesh and mind and as much a part of us as spots to a leopard.

“Why are you always so sad?” I ask. “Is it because Daddy died?”

“I’m not always sad, my love.” She’s lying, but smiles and kisses me again. “Think you can try to go back to sleep now like a big boy?”

I look over her shoulder at the darkness from the hallway leaking in under the door… or maybe escaping beneath it. There is nothing to see, nothing hiding behind the curtains or beneath my bed. But we’re not alone. I can feel it. Inside me, I can feel it.

“Sweetie, it was only a dream,” she says, sensing my uncertainty. “Are you still afraid?”

I shake my head. This time it is my turn to lie. “No.”

“Leave her out of this,” I said. “Leave her alone.”

“But I gave her to you, Alan. I gave you your perfect mother.”

“You don’t frighten me.”

“Everything frightens you,” it replied, again using Bernard’s distorted, gargling voice. “You’re still a terrified little boy whistling in the dark, Alan. And I see you. I’ve always seen you. Now, you see me.”

“And what do I see?”

He hunched over a bit, turned, looked down at the floor and back at the wall as if he too were dissolving into it. “The beginning. The end. The old. The new. The past. The future. Different faces, different names, different lives, but you’re always with me and I’m always with you, feeding on you, on your fears and weaknesses.”

“A parasite,” I said. “A bleeder of innocent women and children.”

“No one is innocent.” More blood poured from his nose and mouth but he seemed not to notice. “I set those silly cunts free. I let them see their useless gods.” The thing grinned again with its gums. “I’m on the threshold of something wonderful, Alan. You’re the lost one, lost in your own self-righteousness just like the rest of them. The world doesn’t want to stop me, not really, it gave birth to me—created me—and made me whole. The truth is in the dark, Alan. Here, with me.”

“You’re a disease.”

“No, only a symptom. I’m the open sore festering and blistering across their flesh, eating them from the inside out and laughing at their arrogant attempts to ignore me. They don’t try to stop me, they only pretend I’m not there. Nero fiddled, Alan.” He sighed, ran a bloody hand across his equally bloody dome. “And Rome burns.” He looked around like he had momentarily forgotten where he was. “I set those women free of their hypocrisy and meaningless lives. I gave them purpose. No one cares about some low-rent single mothers and their bastard children. No one cares if they live or die, if they suffer or bleed. The world won’t miss them. The world misses nothing, no one. But I made them immortal. I brought importance to their useless existences. In death, they matter, don’t you see? They have purpose. And now, like all of you, they belong to me. In my darkness, they belong to me. I’m their God. I’m their messiah.”

The figures in the corner stepped forward, their forms crossing into the pool of light, their eyes black as a shark’s, just like in the dream.

I squared off between them, doing my best to keep both in my line of sight. The bloody atrocity against the wall straightened, and a cage of ribs rose then fell within its slimy skin. Unseen things scurried beneath its flesh, scuttling about like spasmodically stirring insects. He caught my eye and grinned at me again, slurping blood from his gums.

It was no longer possible to find any semblance of Bernard in this creature. Gone were any traces of the little boy I had grown up with, played baseball with, rode bikes with, laughed with and experienced so much with. Gone was the young man I had become a teenager with, experienced the loss of our friend with and graduated high school with. Gone was the grown man who attended my wedding, who had been my lifelong friend. Yet even in the midst of this madness I couldn’t help but remember him as a young boy, as it was perhaps the only time he had truly been who and what I believed him to be. For that little boy, for what happened to him, my heart broke, because the innocent small town boy Bernard had once been was long dead. And simple death had apparently not been sufficient. He’d been completely annihilated.

Bernard nodded. He had heard me thinking again. “You and I, we know quiet little towns are never what people think they are,” he said. “Quiet little towns hide quiet little secrets… quiet little screams. Listen to the screams, the whispers in your mind. Obey them. The voices are mine, don’t you see? In this world, and the next.”

“You’re no prophet, no dark messiah,” I said, spitting the words at him. “You’re no sorcerer. It’s all lies. Fucking lies meant to frighten and intimidate. You’re a lie.”

“Not me, Alan—you. You’re only real because I made you real. I fucking made you, all of you. My rituals made you real, and they made me a god.”

The world is not always what you think it is.

“You’re just a sad and pathetic little man,” I said. “A loser full of rage and violence with delusions of grandeur. A deeply disturbed man, nothing more.”

He smiled at those awaiting us in shadow, then at me. “There’s no need to be anything else. Our capacity for evil, mindless brutality and destruction is unequalled. We’re never free of it, Alan. We pretend to be, but we’re never free of it. Those black places in our souls never let us go. Never.”

The real world is the one underneath, and that world is different. It’s shadows.

I ignored the ringing in my ears and motioned to the others. “I know why they’re here. Just like in the dream, they’re here for you.”

“They’re not here to take me to Hell, Alan.” He blinked blood drops from his eyes. “They’re here to take you.”

My blood turned cold. “No.”

“Come together, Alan,” he said. “Wash with me in their blood, feel it running over you while it pumps free of their slowly dying bodies. Let it run in their filthy fucking streets. Bleed them with me, Alan. We’re gods.”

I held the knife down by my thigh, gripping it tightly. “I’m sorry for what happened to you as a child, Bernard. I’m sorry for what your mother did to you—to all of us. For that little boy, I’m sorry. But for what that little boy became, I’m not sorry. For that sorry excuse of a human being I feel no compassion whatsoever. You’re the same now as you were then, the same as you allowed yourself to become. You’re nothing. Powerless. Alone. And you need to die.”

Bernard laughed, his voice bellowing and echoing through the empty space. Blood again gushed from his lips. “What happened to me as a child made you possible, you fucking fool. My rituals allowed you to stay behind, made you real. You should have paid more attention to what the whore told you. I’m already dead and buried. It isn’t me you’re dreaming of. It isn’t me you see. It’s you. It’s yourselves you see, the part of me that lives in you, in all of you.”

Screams cut the night, screams of unimaginable terror. Rick’s screams.

“We’re all one. We’re all the same. Come home to me, Alan.”

Rick’s screams grew worse. “Stop it.” I said.

“Everything you have, I gave you. It all started with me.”

“Stop it!”

“Such beauty,” he hissed. “Such beauty.”

I pitched forward and lumbered toward him. Bernard rose from his crouch but made no attempt to defend himself. With a primal scream of my own, I slashed the blade down across his face then back across his throat. Swinging my arm in a violent repeating arc, I slashed again and again across the crimson mass, spraying us both with blood and bile. Bernard staggered back, still grinning, and finally fell back against the wall.

Winded, I slammed the knife into Bernard’s belly, fell back and dropped to my knees. I reached beneath my shirt, fingered the crucifix my mother had given me.

Do you still believe?

I slowly regained my feet. Spattered with blood, I watched the creature watching me, slashed and punctured but still standing and still staring me down, still grinning.

Do you still believe what it stands for?

Blood pulsed from the thing steadily, and he slowly sank to the floor, sliding along the wall until he was sitting in the mixture of flesh and bone.

I stepped closer. “Do you believe in Hell?”

“Hell is on Earth,” it gurgled. “See what’s right in front of your eyes. The whole planet, they’re all damned and don’t even realize it. They’re already in Hell. I’m just closer to the core, and now, so are you. You’re all fucked. All of you, fucked.”

Are you still afraid of the dark?

With a quick tug I snapped the chain holding the crucifix around my neck, pulled it out from under my shirt and held it tightly in my free hand. The flashlight had become surprisingly steady.

Do you still believe He can protect you?

“Do you believe in a God who never punishes?” I asked.

That He loves you?

“A forgiving God?”

That He has never forgotten you?

“Rather than a vengeful God?”

Are you still afraid of the dark?

I saw the crucifixes dangling in Julie Henderson’s windows, her reality protecting her, remembered the day my mother had pressed this crucifix into my hand and told me she loved me. I remembered how not long afterward, she was dead, and all I had left of her was what I now held in my grasp.

Do you still believe?

“Tell me… do you believe in that kind of God?”

Blood ran from its mouth. “I don’t believe in God at all.”

“No,” I said. “But I do.”

I slammed my fist down into its mouth, past its slimy gums to the sticky wetness of its tongue, and as it tightened its jaws around my wrist, I pushed my hand deeper and stabbed the crucifix into the back of its throat.

It vomited up my arm with such force that I toppled backwards and crashed to the floor. I dropped the flashlight and it rolled away, sweeping circular light across the walls as it went with a strobe-like effect.

I saw my arm, slick with its blood up to my elbow. I saw the nightmare forms watching from the shadows.

“I gave you your beliefs.” The thing that had once been Bernard stared at me with its wet white eyes then began to convulse and writhe. Faster and faster still, it became an impossibly rapid blur of frantic, hideously violent movement.

Growls and whispers circled me like a pack of wolves, and the old mill began to tremble and quake.

The building was coming down all around us.

CHAPTER 36

As the building shook, pieces of ceiling began to fall, the walls crumbled and the floor split. I got to my feet, stumbled through a pile of debris and saw a thick piece of old wooden beam within reach.

I snatched up the board and closed in on Bernard. His bloody form sat collapsed against the wall, still a blur, still writhing and shuddering with inhuman force. I raised the board over my head.

He stopped, suddenly still, the violence now around him, transferred to the collapsing building. The wet eyes opened, looked up at me with something akin to innocence. “Alan?” His voice was high-pitched, like when we were kids. “Alan? Help me, it’s—it’s so dark here, I can’t find my way out.”

I held the weapon suspended above me.

“I’m afraid! Alan, I’m—I’m afraid!”

“You’re a lie. You’re not real.”

“But I’m you, Alan,” he said. “I’m you.”

I swung the board as hard as I could. It connected with the side of his face, splitting it open. He slumped over onto his side, spasms wracking his body, and with the mill imploding around us, I raised the board like a bat and smashed it down again and again, disturbingly calm and collected—cold—while I pummeled his head to a thick soupy pulp. I stood staring down at what I had done, oblivious to all else.

Maybe he was right.

I heard commotion in the distance followed by labored breathing, and somewhere through the numbness I heard Rick screaming my name. Everything came back into focus and suddenly he was standing behind me. His clothes were dirty, he was scraped and disheveled and had a small cut on the side of his face but otherwise looked unharmed. He was shaking from what appeared to be equal doses of fear and anger. “I saw him down there,” he said. “I fucking saw him.”

I looked back over my shoulder, but darkness had swallowed the creature.

“This way!” Rick called.

I dropped the two-by-four and dodged a chunk of ceiling as it hurtled past me and exploded against the floor. Shielding my face with a forearm, I ducked and ran toward the sound of his voice. The floor tilted and shook, and I lost my balance but kept running, rubble falling all around me.

Rick had found a pair of large vertical windows against the back wall of the building that reached to the floor and had been boarded over. By the time I got to him he had begun smashing the wood with his fists. It splintered and we both began peeling and tearing the pieces free. Ignoring his bloodied hands, Rick kicked and punched at the breaks until he’d made an opening large enough for us to squeeze through.

He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me toward it. “Go! Go!”

I pushed through, the jagged edges tearing at my shoulders and legs, and was met by a burst of fresh sea air. I tumbled to the ground, found myself lying on sand and surrounded by the tall grass that signaled the beginning of the cliffs along the rear of the property. The fireworks had ended but the sky was clear, and a three-quarter moon perched high above provided enough light for me to find my bearings.

I knew even then that if we took the time to negotiate the steep slant of the cliffs we’d never make it. The building would topple and crush us before we could reach the cover of overhang on the beach below. We’d have to run and jump and hope to do so with enough velocity to clear the beach and reach the water. From there, it was a matter of pure luck. The drop was not enormous but considerable—at least ninety to one hundred yards. Even if the water was deep enough at our point of entry, we’d have to pray the tide would bring us back to the beach in enough time to find safety against the base of the cliff. Otherwise we’d have to swim to deeper water and hope to get far enough to avoid the falling rubble.

Rick climbed through the opening and fell next to me in the sand. “The whole goddamn thing’s coming down right on top of us,” he gasped. “Keep moving!”

“There’s nowhere to go but down!”

Rick and I exchanged a quick, frantic glance. We were out of options.

With the sounds of destruction exploding around us, we ran as hard and fast as we could, right off the edge of the cliff.

I leapt, my fear of the ocean screeching in my ears as I clawed and kicked at the air in an attempt to straighten my body for the fall. I knew I had to hit feet-first or I’d be in trouble, but the moment I left the cliff I couldn’t be sure of anything. I closed my eyes, and all the air in my lungs left me in a single frenzied rush.

I remembered plummeting as if in a void. Time stopped, all sound ceased.

Until I felt the crash of impact on the bottoms of my feet and the rush of water as I plunged into the ocean.

I kicked reflexively and rose to the surface, but initially had no idea where I was or in which direction I was facing. I was swallowing a lot of water and knew I needed to fight the panic and relax to the extent that I was able. Once I had accomplished this I felt the waves carrying me, drawing me toward the beach.

I turned over, spinning toward shore. It came into view through the darkness then vanished beneath my line of sight as I bobbed along the surface. Still stunned and disoriented, I kicked my feet and swept my arms through the water, this time deliberately and to make sure they were still intact and functioning properly.

My legs brushed something solid, and I realized I was no longer floating but bouncing along the ocean floor with the balls of my feet. I climbed from the surf and flopped belly-down into a foamy pool of shallow water and moist sand breaking against the shore. I coughed out more water, wiped my eyes and face and forced myself up into a half-pushup. I could hear things crashing into the ocean, and saw debris raining down around me. Calling out for Rick, I jerked my head to the left then right, searching for him hysterically.

Across the narrow stretch of sand was the base of the cliffs. Safety. I rolled onto my knees and saw Rick tumble out of the ocean behind me, rolling lifelessly with the tide onto the beach.

Still gasping for breath, I crawled to him, put him on his back and dragged him away from the reach of waves. He came awake with a sudden, agonizing scream, and I noticed the sickening position of his lower body. His left leg was bent at an obviously unnatural angle, and a nub of thick bone with chunks of flesh dangling from it protruded through the torn pants on his right thigh. I had never seen a fracture so horrific but tried to downplay my reaction for Rick’s sake.

I pulled him the rest of the way and collapsed against the base of the cliff with his head and shoulders in my lap. I tried to find my breath as his screams subsided and became muffled sobs. “My legs,” he moaned. “Christ Almighty, my fucking legs.”

I held him tight, his wet hair against my chin and my arms wrapped around his chest. “Hang on, man. Hang on. I’m gonna get us out of here.”

He went limp, and for a moment I thought he’d died. But I felt his chest rise and fall. Though he’d only passed out I knew he had to get to a hospital, and fast. Police and fire personnel were more than likely already rushing to the scene, as the collapse of the building had surely rattled everything as far as downtown, and the disturbance in the ocean could easily be seen further down the coast, where the fireworks display had originated. But it would take them a while to locate us, and I wasn’t certain Rick could hold on that long. I’d have to get him out on my own. It would mean carrying him on my back along the water’s edge for nearly a mile. Once I reached the forest I could make the lesser climb then cross back to where we had left the Jeep. If I got lucky, someone might see us as I trudged along the waterline.

I looked out at the ocean. The ground had stopped shaking and although numerous small particles of debris still flickered about like swarms of flying insects, the massive portions of the mill that had fallen into the sea had now come to rest.

Exhausted, I allowed my eyes to close a moment.

As they opened, the moonlight revealed dark figures slowly breaking the surface of the waves, creeping toward shore, emerging from the surf and walking toward us like zombies, black eyes sparkling.

CHAPTER 37

I came awake with a start to find a young nurse gently shaking me by the shoulder. “Mr. Chance?”

“Yeah—yes.” My body was sore from head to toe, and the hard plastic chair I had fallen asleep in wasn’t helping. My clothes were filthy and still damp in places, and mud from my shoes had marred the waiting room floor.

“I’m sorry I startled you,” she said warmly. “Are you all right?”

A daytime talk show was playing silently on a small television in the corner, and in a chair across from me a middle-aged Hispanic woman sat nervously leafing through an old magazine. “Yes, sorry,” I said to the nurse. “I was just—I fell asleep.”

She smiled. “Mr. Brisco is out of surgery and awake.”

I struggled to my feet and followed her down a quiet hallway. “How is he?”

“He’s got a long road ahead of him in terms of physical therapy before he’ll walk again, and he may need further surgery at some point, but he’s doing miraculously well.” She stopped at an open doorway, motioned for me to enter then left us as I slipped into the room.

Rick lay in a bed against the wall. It didn’t seem possible he could be so seriously damaged.

I sat in a chair next to the bed. “Hey, man. How you feeling?”

He opened his eyes. He was pale, drawn and groggy, but his face brightened a bit when he saw me. “Well, there goes my fucking ballet career.”

I wanted to laugh but couldn’t quite summon one. “You’re going to be all right.”

“So they tell me. You OK?”

“Little banged up, but yeah.”

Without raising his head from the pillow he tried to take in as much of the room as he could. “Is it still night?”

“No, morning.” I checked my watch, still uncertain of how long I’d slept in the waiting room. “I called Donald. He’s on his way.”

His arm flopped onto the edge of the bed. He opened his hand, offering it to me. “You saved my life.”

I put my hand in his. He gripped it weakly.

“I must’ve hit shallow water, I don’t know what the hell happened.”

“We got lucky,” I said. “When the mill let go, police and rescue responded to check it out. By the time they got there I had us a ways up the beach. They saw us, thank God.”

He sighed faintly. “I’m all doped up, man. Can’t think straight yet.”

“It’s OK, just try to rest.”

His glassy eyes searched mine. “What’d you tell the cops?”

I checked behind me. The doorway was clear; we were still alone. “That we were up on the cliffs watching the fireworks,” I said quietly. “I told them we were a bit farther down the coast than we actually were, and when the mill collapsed it shook the cliffs. We were closer to the edge than we should’ve been, lost our balance and fell.”

“They buy it?”

“Yeah, no reason not to. Chalked it up as an accident and our own stupidity for being up there in the first place. They said they’d be by to talk to you about it. It’s no big deal, just a formality. Tell them the same thing and we’ll be all right.”

His thoughts seemed to wander elsewhere, and I saw fear rise in him then gradually recede. I was sure he’d sensed the same in me. “I saw him, you know. When I fell. Down in that hole, I saw him.” He motioned for me to come closer, so I leaned in. “He was biting me,” he whispered. His eyes filled with tears. “He was down there waiting for me and he—he—”

“Easy,” I said softly. I tightened my grip on his hand. I understood his tears all too well, but it was still difficult to believe he was actually crying. “I saw him too.”

He looked deep into my eyes then, like he was praying I had told the truth. “How could we both—”

“I don’t know.”

“I killed him,” he said. “I think I—I’m pretty sure I killed him.”

I nodded. “Me too.”

He sniffled, fought off the tears. “You think they’ll find what’s up there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“But they’re bound to find—”

“What if it wasn’t really there?”

“We both know what we fucking saw, Alan.”

“Like I said before, maybe it’s all in who’s looking.”

“Well, when I look, I… I don’t want to see this anymore.”

“Hopefully there’s nothing more to see.”

His fear now in check, he turned to anger. “Why us?”

“Maybe he knew we’d listen. Maybe he knew we had to.”

The devils in our heads grew quiet, slowly faded. Shadows moved along the walls.

“Always figured something was either real or it wasn’t. But it’s not that simple, is it?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “I don’t remember anything anyway. If I did I… I think my mind might come apart, you know? So I don’t. I don’t remember anything. OK?”

“OK, man.” I gave him a look that let him know I understood. “OK.”

“Had some horrible dreams while I was out, though. Horrible dreams.” He pulled his hand free of mine and wearily rubbed his temple. “But I can sleep now. They’re over.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re over.”

Just outside the Emergency Room exit I found Donald smoking a cigarette in his typical manic fashion beneath a sign on the side of the building that read: No Smoking On Hospital Grounds. He looked tired and hung-over but otherwise all right.

The sky stretched above us like a giant cloud-filled canopy, the sun a dull sphere veiled in haze. It wasn’t yet noon and humidity had already thickened the air.

Donald noticed me standing there like the disheveled survivor I was. He looked guarded, uncertain. “I hate hospitals,” he said. “I’ve been standing out here for at least ten minutes trying to convince myself to go inside.”

I could think of nothing to say.

Smoke leaked from his nostrils. “Quite a Fourth in old Potter’s Cove this year. First the Buchanan Mill collapses and a good portion of it falls into the ocean, then very late last night—the wee hours of the morning, actually—a terrible fire broke out over on Bridge Street. Seems Bernard’s old house burned to the ground. Completely gutted and destroyed. The authorities are convinced it was arson. Isn’t that scandalous?” Donald smiled ever so slightly. “Damn kids.”

“Shame,” I muttered.

“Mmm, pity.”

I was glad Donald had torched the place, and was only sorry I hadn’t been there to watch it burn.

“I saw him.” His face cracked into an overwrought smirk. “In that house. In the flames, I saw him, Alan. I watched him watching me through the windows. I watched him burn.” He studied me a while, taking stock. “As I was leaving something drew me to the backyard, to the trees. I saw Tommy standing there, but I wasn’t afraid. I felt safe, protected, and completely out of my mind. And then they were gone and so was I.”

I knew what it felt like to be gone, to feel like the world had devoured you from the inside out and left behind only a husk. We all did. We always had.

“What happened up on those cliffs last night?” I could tell Donald sensed my apprehension the moment he asked, but he gave no indication of letting me off the hook.

“We put a stop to it. In our own ways, we all did.”

“It’s over then?”

“As much as it ever can be.”

“Why did he do this?” he asked angrily.

“I think Bernard came apart when Tommy died. Then when his mother… Donald, the same evil touched us. All those years ago Bernard drowned in it and the rest of us pretended none of it ever happened. He knew what frightened us because it frightened him too. It consumed him and wanted more. It wanted us.”

His lips became a thin tight line. “But what did it—he—want?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he wanted all of us to be together again. Maybe he woke up alone and afraid in the dark. Not a god, just a scared little kid. He knew us, knew our lives, our pasts. He knew what was inside us, what was lacking in us.” I ran my hands through my hair and sighed. “But he was just out of reach. And to him, so were we. Kind of like knights chasing dragons, you know? They never caught one because in the end all they were really chasing was some dark, fire-breathing piece of themselves.”

“How do you know they never caught one?” He exhaled some smoke for emphasis, perhaps in a desperate effort to lighten the mood and salvage our sanity. A moment later he said, “Nothing’s ever going to be the same again.”

“Would you want it to be?”

Donald pulled his sunglasses from his shirt pocket and slid them on. Our childhoods seemed so very long ago. “What did you find in that mill, Alan?”

“Hell.”

“I’m not sure I believe in Hell.”

I moved closer to him and lowered my voice. “They say you can’t see evil, but you can feel it. Well we saw it, Donald. We all did. For Rick and me it was up in that mill, for you it was in that old house. We all saw what we needed to see—whatever versions we needed to confront and kill off. Whether they were a real entity, a part of our own souls, or both, I don’t know. Is he really out there somewhere, watching us? Or is he only in our heads? Does it even matter? The only thing I know for sure is that sometimes you have to believe certain things to make it through the night. And sometimes you have to not believe them. It doesn’t matter if they’re real or not. Either way, it’s all we’ve got.”

“What about Bernard then?” he asked. “Do you still believe in him?”

I plucked the cigarette from his lips and tossed it away. “Bernard’s dead.”

CHAPTER 38

Toni was waiting for me on the apartment steps. I was too tired to be anything but happy to see her, but she was tense and looked worried to death. We said hello with our now customary awkwardness and went inside. I walked directly into the kitchen to pour myself a drink. She followed without being invited. I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and said, “There was an accident.”

“I know.” She nodded so furiously a sprig of hair fell across her face. She hooked it back behind her ear without missing a beat. “Donald called me. He said Rick was hurt.”

“He filled you in then?” I asked, hopeful I wouldn’t have to.

“Yes.” I could tell she wasn’t having any of it. “Is he going to be OK?”

“He was sleeping peacefully when I left him.”

Toni stepped from the doorway into the kitchen as if for the first time, looking around like I’d redecorated in her absence. “And how are you?”

“I feel like somebody worked me over with a crowbar, but I’m not hurt.”

“I’m glad you’re OK.”

“Never said I was OK.”

We were quiet for a long time, and in our self-imposed silence I thought of her alone in that cottage by the beach, and me alone here. Maybe being alone together had been worse, but even now I wasn’t so sure. I thought of her smiling, pleased I was still able to recall it. I thought of how deeply I loved this woman. How I loved the lines in her face and the depth in her eyes. I thought of her body, familiar even as it changed—evolved and improved with age—the way living things do, even though they’re also slowly dying.

“I’m sorry, Toni,” I said. “For everything I’ve ever done or didn’t do, I’m sorry.”

She let me touch her, and instead of wincing or recoiling, she fell into me the same as she had years ago, before we knew the future.

“Me too.” She kissed my cheek.

“Come home.”

“I can’t,” she said faintly. “And you know it.”

I sat back, away from her, only then aware that for her, our embrace had been a goodbye. She was already there, already living a different life, a life apart from me.

As Donald had said, nothing would ever be the same again.

She began to cry, though silently, one hand pressed flat against her forehead and the other gripping her side, her delicate frame bucking subtly. “I love you, Alan,” she finally said, her voice shaking. “But we can’t do this anymore.”

“I always meant to protect you, Toni. Not to drive you away or to hurt you, never to hurt you.”

She wiped the tears from her cheeks, and I envied her. I wanted to do it, to be the one to dry her tears like I once had. “I’m not having an affair.” She said it in a way so void of emotion it startled me to silence. “I didn’t leave you for someone else. I just left.”

Despite the ghosts, we had once found safety in our love; it had protected us. But now our very presence tied us to a past we both wanted to forget enormous pieces of, and no matter how much we loved each other we could never undo that which was already done. Our pain had always outweighed our joy, but in these recent seasons of violence and blood, memory and nightmares, death and rebirth, it had become impossible to segregate one from the other.

“Gene’s just a friend,” she said. “He helps me sometimes. He’d help you too, if only you’d let him.”

“If I did… would you stay?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Like a drowning man still clinging to a life preserver he knows he’ll eventually lose the strength to hold onto, at first I refused to let go. In my mind I fell into bed, asleep in her arms while we nursed each other back to health. I was whole and she was happy loving me. But then I let the life preserver go, felt myself slip beneath the surface and slowly sink, deeper and deeper, further and further away from her.

Although the finality was frightening, there was also something peaceful about it.

Our secrets were safe with each other, even if we no longer were.

I pictured Claudia as I sat there stupidly, not for reasons of guilt or anger or even revenge, but because despite her very brief but real influence on my life—on my still being alive—she seemed make-believe, in a sense. And Toni did not.

I stood, wrapped my arms around her and kissed her forehead. She held on tight, but only for a while, and when she left, all I could think of was the escape sleep might once again provide. I wanted to sleep away the rest of this awful summer. I wanted to sleep until it all went away. I wanted to sleep until I learned how to live again without this madness creeping through my brain.

I’d already seen what was behind the curtain, and I didn’t want to look anymore. I didn’t want to look ever again.

I only wanted to sleep.