A Time of Torment (2 page)

Good fortune: God – if He existed – finding His attention briefly distracted.

And inside, the Gray Man danced.

O
rmsby’s wife had died suddenly when she was in her early forties and her husband was in his mid-thirties. It was a blessing, of a kind. By then, Ormsby, the Gray Man, had already begun playing his long game, and was concerned that his wife, who was not a stupid woman, and even actively curious, might begin to take an interest in his activities. Sometimes he wondered if, had her heart not simply failed unexpectedly while she was testing the firmness of avocados at a sidewalk market – such a curious detail, and one that had led him to avoid avocados ever since – he might have been forced to get rid of her. He wasn’t even certain why he had married her to begin with. He suspected he had craved some form of stability, given his own family background of divorce and acrimony, and a mother whose maternal instincts extended no further than occasionally taking it upon herself to heat some mac and cheese instead of delegating the task to her only son. Ormsby’s relationship with his late wife had been affectionate, if almost entirely passionless, a situation that had not troubled either of them unduly.

But perhaps also, even then, he was already creating a framework for his life, and an identity for himself, that would arouse the least amount of suspicion: Roger Ormsby, contentedly if unexceptionally married, with a job selling painting and decorating supplies that required him to spend time on the road, staying in dull motels, mostly eating alone, but always watching, always listening.

He heard a thumping from the trunk of his car and turned up the volume on the radio: a news program on NPR, which was just the kind of show to which a man like Roger Ormsby might have been expected to listen. He used to smoke a pipe too, puffing contentedly on it as he drove, but then he’d learned about throat and tongue cancer, and decided that Roger Ormsby would be sensible enough to let this particular pleasure go. He missed the pipe, though. It had given him something to do with his hands.

He’d have to kill the girl quickly, of course. The unplanned ones were always difficult. He might not have taken her had winter not recently crept into the air, giving him an excuse to light the furnace in his big old house. He’d spend the night questioning her, find out as much as he could about her family, then put an end to her: a single blow to the head, knocking her out cold, then strangulation. He didn’t want her to suffer.

After that, the game could begin.

He fantasized about the months and years to come.

And the shadows that were following him, the arc of the hunters, went entirely unnoticed.

In a curious way, Ormsby had been inspired to pursue his particular appetites by base conflicts in lands he had never visited, and in which he had little interest on a political or social level. He had found himself fascinated by the actions of the military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, which routinely ‘disappeared’ those with whom they differed, leaving the families to mourn phantoms, nearly certain that their loved ones were dead but unable to let go of them until they could identify their remains and lay them in the ground, although the chances of this were remote when the military’s favorite methods of dispatch included dropping the bound bodies of living captives into the sea from aircraft, or, in the case of the Chileans, using railway ties to ensure that the corpses didn’t float to the surface.

And then there were the Irish terrorists who dragged widowed mothers from their homes and tortured them in secret before shooting them in the head and burying their bodies on some desolate stretch of beach. When the deed was done, they returned with clear consciences to their own families and communities, there to pass the desolate, orphaned children on the street, continuing to do so for decades after in a strange dance of murderers and victims, each party knowing the identity of the other but never confronting the truth of what had been done, and so the dance went on. Ormsby, who was depraved beyond comprehension, thought he might have enjoyed fighting for freedom if he could have passed some of his time so pleasantly: the misery for those left behind lay in not knowing, in uncertainty. It was sadism refined to its purest essence.

Ormsby’s house appeared before him. He turned into the driveway and activated the garage door. The garage connected directly to the house through the utility room, which in turn had another door leading to the basement. It meant that he was able to move his victims easily, and without being noticed. He pulled into the garage, killed the engine, and hit the button on his key fob a second time, causing the door to begin its descent. He was already out of his car, and poised to open the trunk, when he saw that the door had frozen.

Ormsby stared at it. He tried the button again. Nothing happened. The door didn’t even jerk slightly, as might have been expected if the mechanism had somehow become fouled. He took a flashlight from the shelf and checked the door’s workings, but could see nothing wrong. The street beyond appeared empty, but the door was not even a quarter of the way down, and while the light was fading, it was not yet dark enough to guarantee that he wouldn’t be seen by one of his neighbors if he tried to move the child.

Regardless of this, he couldn’t just leave the door unsecured. The garage was connected to his house alarm, and the button on the fob automatically deactivated it. His home was now vulnerable, and it wasn’t as if he could call someone to take a look at the door, not with a child tied in a sack in the trunk of his car. The girl was kicking again: he could hear her, and the lid of the trunk shook with the impact.

He tried the button one more time and, miraculously, the door began to descend. He held his breath until it stopped again an inch or two from the floor. It wasn’t perfect, but from outside it would appear closed. He’d worry about it again in the morning, once the girl was dead.

Ormsby turned on the garage’s interior light. Only now did he open the trunk of the car. The child in the sack was wriggling, and screaming against the material. He’d managed to get cable ties around her hands by working fast, but not her legs. They remained free, and the best he’d been able to do was cinch the drawstring of the sack around her shins and tie it off. He’d been forced to hit her once to stun her, but he hadn’t enjoyed it, and had no desire to do it again.

Ormsby spoke.

‘If you keep making noise, you’ll force me to hurt you,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to hurt you. Keep quiet and listen to me.’

The child stopped moving. He could see the sacking inflating and deflating where it was closest to her mouth. She was sobbing.

‘I’m going to help you out of the car. If you struggle, you risk falling, and the floor here is hard. Also, if you try to lash out at me, you’ll make me strike you, and I hate striking children. Nod if you understand.’

There was a pause, and then he saw the girl nod.

‘Good. Now I’m going help you out of the trunk.’

He leaned in carefully, still wary of her, and he was right to be. As soon as she sensed him drawing close, she tried to swing at him with her legs, hoping to catch him on the head with her knees or her feet. Objectively, he had to admire her spirit, but he couldn’t risk incurring a broken nose, or even a bruise to his face. Any injury might be enough to raise suspicions, even in the case of harmless Roger Ormsby.

He stepped back.

‘I warned you,’ he said. ‘Now you’re going to make me do something that I didn’t want to do.’

The girl began wailing and writhing. Ormsby was just drawing back his hand to give her a sharp slap on the head when the doorbell rang.

Ormsby listened. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He could try to ignore the bell, and hope that whoever it was went away. On the other hand, if one of his neighbors had seen him pull into the garage they’d know he was home, and if he didn’t answer they might begin to worry. The last thing he needed was for the police to be called.

And what if it was the police? Suppose he had been seen? The street had appeared to be empty and unwatched, but one could never be sure …

The bell rang a second time. Ormsby struck the girl once to subdue her before he closed the trunk again. He moved through the house, turning on a lamp as he entered the hallway. He saw a shape through the glass fan of the door: a tall figure.

Ormsby paused when he was still five feet away.

‘Who is it?’ he called, but received no reply.

Ormsby shuffled his feet and tried again.

‘Who’s there? What do you want?’

Finally, the voice spoke. It sounded to Ormsby like that of a black man.

‘Delivery for Mr Cole.’

Ormsby relaxed.

‘You have the wrong house,’ he said. ‘Cole lives in fourteen thirty-seven, across the street. This is fourteen thirty-six.’

‘You sure? Says fourteen thirty-six on the slip.’

‘Well, your slip’s wrong.’

‘Shit,’ said the man, and Ormsby saw his shape ripple as he took in the street. ‘Don’t look like anybody’s home over there. Maybe you could sign for it, save me a wasted trip.’

Ormsby experienced a creeping sense of unease.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I don’t open my door to strangers after dark.’

‘It’s not dark yet.’

‘Even so.’

‘Shit,’ said the man, again. ‘Okay, you have a good evening.’

He went away. Only when Ormsby heard his footsteps moving down the path did he slip into the living room and ensure that he had departed. The caller was wearing a jacket, and didn’t look like any delivery man Ormsby had ever seen, but as he paused at the sidewalk, Ormsby saw that he was holding a box. The man hung a right, and was lost behind the tall hedge that marked the perimeter of Ormsby’s property. Ormsby waited, but he did not reappear.

Ormsby returned to the garage and opened the trunk of his car.

The sack lay limp and flat on the rubber matting.

The girl was gone.

L
et us leave Roger Ormsby for now, staring into the empty trunk of his clean, well-maintained car, in his big, anonymous house with its many unused rooms, the whole surrounded by a pretty garden with beds that flower throughout the year, for Ormsby prided himself on his plants, and they flourished thanks to his care and attention, the addition of copious amounts of old coffee grounds …

And human ash.

It was one month earlier, and the town of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, had witnessed the final exodus of its summer tourists. The boardwalk concessions had closed, along with those bars, restaurants, and stores that relied exclusively on the season for their income. Here and there rainbow flags still flew, for Rehoboth was as gay-friendly as such towns came, and anyway, the pink dollar was only pink in a certain light. Once it arrived at the bank, it was as green as any other.

In the bathroom of a house at the edge of the town limits, the lawyer Eldritch was shaving, working at his sparse whiskers with an old straight razor. His was the only room with a mirror, and even then it was barely large enough to enable him to see his own face. Beyond the bathroom was his bedroom, and downstairs was his home office, where he continued the work of reassembling the records he had lost in the explosive fire that had destroyed his original business premises in Lynn, Massachusetts, some years earlier. Eldritch had almost entirely recovered from the physical injuries he received in the blast, but he remained frailer than before. His right hand shook slightly as he cut swaths through the shaving foam.

Beside him was a window that gave a partial view of the sea through some trees. A man stood smoking on the lawn, his back to the house. This was Eldritch’s son, although the old lawyer had long conceded that he was his son in name only. At the moment of his birth, something had colonized his being: a wandering spirit, an angel, a demon. Call it what you would, but it was not human.

The doctors were surprised that the child had lived: his umbilical cord had become wrapped around his neck during delivery, asphyxiating him. The boy had, in fact, been born dead, and only the swift actions of the attending staff had resuscitated him. Eldritch and his late wife – who barely lived long enough to see her boy begin to walk – had feared brain damage or some other disability, but their son appeared to be entirely healthy, if unusually quiet. Eldritch could only remember him crying, really bawling, a handful of times, and he had slept for seven hours a night throughout his infancy. Other fathers told him he was blessed. Mothers too.

But he was not blessed: his son
had
died, and just as his soul left his body another force had taken its place, one that had only gradually revealed itself to Eldritch as the years passed. Even now, after many decades, it remained something of an enigma to him. As it grew and matured, so too did it alter Eldritch’s own nature, so that a once ordinary attorney with the usual slate of minor civil and criminal work became an examiner of the consciences of men, an assembler of evidence of base acts, and he presented his records to this being, who decided if action should be taken. The man now smoking on the lawn was an instrument of justice, although of whose justice Eldritch was uncertain.

Eldritch had been raised Lutheran, but his faith quickly became a half-remembered matter irregularly indulged, like the expensive coat he only wore to church for his biannual attendances at Easter and Christmas. Then, as the creature that hid itself in the guise of his dead son became manifest, the reality of a world beyond this one concretized for Eldritch, but it was not a realm that bore any resemblance to the paradise of which the preachers spoke. From the little that Eldritch could glean, the being responsible for the creation of the universe had been silent for millennia. For all anyone knew, He might even be dead. (Perhaps, Eldritch’s son had suggested, spurred into an astonishing blasphemy by a rare indulgence in alcohol, He had killed Himself in despair at what He had created.) God, to give the entity a name, might have been unheard and unseen, but other creatures were waiting, and listening, and it was best not to draw their attention through loose talk.