A Time of Torment (51 page)

Shit.

Cassander had cash, but he’d need more. Starcher asked Cassander what his plans were. Cassander said that he didn’t know, but to begin with he would head for a safe house in Bedford, one of a number that the Cut maintained to serve as temporary refuges and storage facilities. Starcher told him that he’d arrange to have cash delivered to Cassander there, and hung up. Later that evening, having given Cassander time to get to the safe house and settle in, Starcher commissioned two freelance button men named Purvis and Stone to head to Bedford and kill him.

When they arrived, Purvis and Stone discovered the house empty. Cassander had been there – they found some fast-food boxes and empty beer bottles, along with the remains of a fire that had been set in a garbage can – but had clearly left again. They waited all that night and most of the next day, but Cassander did not return. Perhaps, they suggested to Starcher, he had been forewarned, but Starcher assured them that only three people knew of the planned hit, and Cassander was not one of them.

Starcher wanted Cassander dead. If the police captured him, and he tried to strike a deal, Starcher’s position could be uncomfortably altered from defender to defendant. But Cassander had disappeared, and unbeknownst to Starcher, the police were already on their way to Lewisburg. Within hours, Starcher was under arrest.

The Dead King had warned Cassander that the killers were coming: not in words, or images, but feelings. Starcher could no longer be trusted, but Cassander would deal with him in time. He stayed at the safe house only long enough to eat, change his clothes and add some fresh ones to a small case from the supply kept in the basement. He also shaved off his beard and most of his hair, and dyed what was left from a bottle kept in the bathroom for that very purpose, before burning the hair in a garbage can and disposing of the bottle in the trash as he drove away.

The Dead King never stopped speaking, even if only to itself. It was almost enough to prevent Cassander from sleeping, and when he did manage to doze the Dead King took shape in his dreams, and Cassander would wake screaming. Cassander’s sanity was eroding, but while it still remained to him he debated the existence of the Dead King, even as he heard it whispering in his head in an unknown tongue. Was it a symptom of their collective madness, an infection of the mind passed down through generations, a voice given to a form that they themselves had created? In that sense, were they not all the Dead King?

Only then did he notice the silence in his head. He waited, barely able to breathe. It was gone. Whatever it was, it—

And he heard the Dead King laughing.

Parker, Angel, and Louis could not avoid being questioned by the state police and the FBI. It was an especially uncomfortable experience for the latter pair, and only a request from Parker for Ross’s intervention prevented it from becoming something worse than that. Ross made it clear to Parker that a favor had been called in, and he would be expected to return it, with interest.

‘Whatever deal you struck with him,’ said Louis, as they prepared to leave Plassey County, ‘it was a bad one.’

Jerome Burnel’s was one of the first bodies uncovered, because it was the most recently interred. He had been buried in a pit used to inter the remains of the Cut’s dogs.

The Dead King was uncomfortable sharing Cassander’s skin. It was not a thing of the living, but of the dead. It needed to hide among bare bones.

Cassander, in turn, wanted to punish someone for what had befallen the Cut, and he had two targets: Henkel, and the private investigator named Charlie Parker. Henkel was out of reach for the moment – perhaps forever, given the near impossibility of Cassander’s return to Plassey County. That left Parker. Cassander knew a lot about the private detective. Oberon had spoken about him, and the Dead King had sensed his coming. Parker was dangerous, and Cassander wasn’t certain he could go up against him and survive. As he drove, Cassander thought about Roger Ormsby, the abductor and killer of children whom Parker had tracked down. Ormsby hadn’t just killed his victims: he’d made them vanish without trace, adding an exquisite layer of torment to the lives of those left behind.

Cassander knew all about the stripping of flesh from bones, of boiling and preservation. So he began to formulate a plan, one that would serve both his desire for revenge and the needs of the Dead King.

It should be noted that children at play are not merely playing; their games should be seen as their most serious actions.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592),
Essays
I, 23

S
am sat on the ground at the edge of her grandparents’ property, where a small copse of trees surrounded a pond. She wasn’t supposed to go there alone. Her grandfather had warned her about the dangers of even shallow bodies of water, but then her grandfather warned her about lots of things: crossing the road, boys, eating undercooked chicken, strangers, her father, her father’s friends …

In Sam’s right hand lay the near-desiccated body of a dead bird: a little whip-poor-will that she’d found hidden amid bark and leaves by the entrance to its nest. She had no idea how it had died, but it appeared largely undamaged. Slowly, using a box cutter that she’d liberated from her grandfather’s toolbox, she cut the bird open and discarded what was left of its internal organs, carefully reducing it to feather and bone.

Jennifer, Sam’s half-sister, watched from over her shoulder.

The dead daughter and the living, together.

Jennifer spoke.

it’s coming

‘Yes.’

are you frightened?

‘No.’

It wasn’t quite a lie, but Jennifer sensed doubt.

maybe—

‘Go away,’ said Sam. ‘You’re distracting me.’

Jennifer left her to her work. She returned to her own place to sit on her rock and watch the dead go by. She thought that Sam didn’t love their father in the same way she did. How could she, when she was both human and something more, something beyond comprehension? Their father had once asked Jennifer if Sam frightened her, and she had not answered. She did not want to say it.

Sam did not frighten her.

Sam terrified her.

Two days later, Cassander Hobb snatched Samantha Wolfe, the daughter of Charlie Parker, while she was playing by that same pond. It was, he thought, his good fortune that she should be alone, and out of sight of her house, when he came for her. He showed the child the gun, and warned her to be quiet, before cuffing her hands in front of her, gagging her with tape that he wound around her head, and forcing her into the trunk of the car. He warned her that he’d cut off one of her ears if she tried to escape. By the time she was missed, and the alarm raised, he was already halfway to New Hampshire.

He feared to use any of the safe houses, and had instead checked into a motel at the edge of the White Mountain National Forest that was content to take cash on the nail. He was given a quiet room at the end, but since only two other rooms were occupied, he had little fear of being seen or heard. He waited until the evening darkness descended before carrying the girl from the car into the room. He barely noticed how little she struggled, or the excited, insane chitters of the Dead King. He just wanted it all to be done with.

He placed her in the bathtub, lit himself a cigarette, and regarded her in silence while he smoked. She stared back at him, but did not move. Eventually, she tried to speak. He showed her the gun in one hand, and the knife in the other, before putting the gun away and cutting the tape away from her mouth.

‘I need to pee,’ she said.

‘Pee in the tub.’

‘I’ll get it on my clothes.’

‘I don’t care.’

She shook her head, but he noticed that she didn’t pee. It was probably a trick, he thought. Still, she was a strange kid. She hadn’t cried once. She just sat there, her eyes fixed on him, waiting for something to happen. It would, and soon. He was working up the strength to cut her throat. The Dead King wanted it.

Finally, she spoke again.

‘Your nose is bleeding,’ she said.

A drop of red exploded on Cassander’s jeans, closely followed by a second. He put the fingers of his left hand to his nose, and they came back red. He reached for some toilet paper, wadded it into balls, and pressed it to his nostrils.

‘Soon you’ll be bleeding from other places, too,’ said Sam.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your ears, your eyes, the pores of your skin.’

Cassander felt a sharp pain deep in his head. The Dead King asked a question only it could understand, and to which no living creature had an answer.

‘What’s inside you isn’t supposed to be there,’ said Sam. ‘It can’t survive for long in a body that’s alive, so it kills it, in the end. It’s not just the Dead King. It’s the King of Dead Things.’

Cassander coughed, and blood sprayed over the tiled floor and the edge of the tub. His vision was blurring. He rose unsteadily, and saw in the mirror that he was weeping tears of blood. Pinpricks of red appeared on the white of his shirt, growing in size. He felt dampness in his jeans as their fabric began to darken. He couldn’t stay upright so he slumped down on the toilet and let his face rest against the cool of the tiles.

The child rose from the tub, and the Dead King started screaming. Sam was wearing a blue jacket. Awkwardly, her hands still cuffed, she unzipped one of its pockets and reached inside. When her hands opened again, they held the remains of the whip-poor-will, its chest opened and its wings cut to reveal the bones inside. It was wet against her fingers, and smelled faintly of lighter fluid.

Blood was now flowing from the sleeves of Cassander’s shirt and the bottoms of his jeans. His face was entirely red, as were his eyes, the whiteness of them lost in the bursting of the capillaries. He was barely conscious, his brain already failing.

But Sam didn’t want him to die, not yet.

She held up the body of the bird, and felt it stir against her fingers as the Dead King passed into it. She climbed from the tub and dropped the delicate remains in the sink. She took the toilet paper from its holder and wrapped the bird in layers of it. Finally, because it was easier than searching with her cuffed hands for the book of matches concealed in her windbreaker pocket, she removed Cassander’s Zippo from his shirt, and used it to set the bird alight.

Behind her, Jennifer appeared, and together they watched as the Dead King, caught in its snare of bones, passed from this world in smoke and fire.

Kimberly Beckman, owner of the Low Mountain Motel, looked up from her chair to see a little girl in a blue jacket standing in front of the reception desk. The TV behind her was carrying a news report about a missing child.

‘Can I help you, honey?’

The girl held up her cuffed hands.

‘My name is Samantha Wolfe,’ she said. ‘That’s me on TV.’

C
assander Hobb was still alive when the police reached the motel. He was still alive when they got him to the hospital and put him on life support.

He’s still alive now, if you can call it living.

Parker went to visit him once. Cassander’s eyes were closed. He was being fed through a tube, and the medical staff assured Parker that he was brain dead. In time, his body would follow.

Just as Parker was leaving, Cassander jerked on the bed.

‘What was that?’

‘Spinal cord neurons,’ said the nurse. ‘Reflexes. Have you ever heard of the Lazarus sign?’

‘No.’

‘It’s when brain-dead patients spontaneously raise their arms and drop them again. Scared the living Jesus out of me the first time I saw it happen.’

‘Does Hobb exhibit the Lazarus sign?’

‘Not any more. He just spasms now and again. There’s nothing in there, Mr Parker. He’s gone.’

Cassander’s mind is like an empty house: no furnishings, no decoration, no life. Beyond its windows there is only darkness, broken by flashes of lightning as a stray neuron flares.

A presence moves through the house. It has no form, and no name. It chitters endlessly. It smells of smoke and burnt feathers. It is waiting: waiting for Cassander to die, waiting for him to be reduced to bone in a pauper’s grave.

Waiting, so that it may be reborn.

I’m grateful to John Lorenzen, regional correctional manager in the Maine Department of Corrections, Division of Adult Services, for his patience in explaining to me the intricacies of the probation system in the state of Maine, but he remains one of the few human points of contact in the research for this odd book. The majority of the background work involved trawling through works of folklore and myth, most of which are namechecked in the novel itself, although
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
by Frances Larson (Granta, 2014), provided a wonderful guide to concretizing some of the ideas and images that were roiling in my mind as the book progressed.

The band Espers very kindly allowed me to quote from their song ‘Dead King’, which could almost serve as an accompaniment to sections of this book. They also declined to charge a fee, which says a great deal about them. Details of their work can be found at
www.dragcity.com/artists/espers
.

As always, I’m indebted to Emily Bestler, my editor at Atria Books, and all those who work alongside her, including Lara Jones, and David Brown; and to Sue Fletcher, my editor at Hodder & Stoughton, and Carolyn Mays, Swati Gamble, Kerry Hood, Breda Purdue, Jim Binchy, Ruth Shern, Siobhan Tierney, and everyone at Hodder & Stoughton and Hachette Books Ireland. My agent, Darley Anderson, continues to show remarkable forbearance in the face of an author who is both awkward and a Liverpool fan. Thanks, too, to Clair Lamb and Madeira James and to Kate O’Hearn, writer and friend, for all her hard work in securing clearances for quotes and CDs. Finally, love to Jennie, Cameron, and Alistair.

The Charlie Parker Stories