Greely's Cove (21 page)

Everyone except Mitch Nistler.

It was late by the time Cannibal and Stella dropped him at his house near Greely’s Cove. They thundered away in the Blazer, shit-brained with cocaine and whiskey, leaving him alone in the dark, cold rain.

He stood a moment in the quiet of the night, watching their taillights bouncing away through the trees, listening to the fading growl of the Blazer’s V-8, and hating Cannibal and Stella with every calorie of energy he could muster. Then the hunger stirred, and the demon-taste bubbled up from his guts. His hatred of Cannibal and Stella faded in importance. He felt himself trudging along the weed-infested walk to his house, propelled by a sick urgency that part of him wanted to deny. He felt himself pushing open the front door, moving inside, not needing light.

Who owns Mitch Nistler?

He climbed the stairs in the darkness, arousing creaks and snaps from old boards. The hunger owned him wholly now, and he knew the uselessness of trying to fight it. Every muscle in his body, every bone, every fiber of nerve was under its control, and he was again the man he had been just twenty-four hours earlier—the master embalmer, the artist with certainty in his hands, the giver of beauty to dead and discarded flesh.

Dancing in his head were answers to great mysteries, solutions to ancient riddles and visions of magical faces and symbols. Rowing through him, coursing up from that vacancy in his soul, was the power of Anubis, the god of embalmers, whose red dog’s eyes and slavering canine teeth flashed briefly in his brain like a lick of flame, followed by the scaly, homed head of the Lord of Misrule, who smiled horrifically, approving.

And swarming within the cloud were symbols he somehow recognized, that in defiance of any sane man’s reason gave him power and urgency—the four Hebrew consonants of the Divine Name, the five-pointed star, the bronze hand, a multitude of others, all conjured from an ancient time when every breath of wind had a message, every tree and stone a soul. These were the ken of wizards and warlocks, of learned scholars who studied dark tomes—not of Mitch Nistler. He had never read such books. He had never studied the grand mysteries of time and death and magic. The knowledge could not have been
his.

His head cleared when he came to the upstairs landing, and he stood a moment in the pitch blackness, listening to the pounding of his heart. From below came the labored sound of his old refrigerator kicking on, and from above, the patter of cold rain. His senses were incredibly alive, and for a moment he fancied that he could hear his own hair growing, that he could actually taste the odors of old cardboard and rotting wood.

He moved forward in the blackness toward the door he knew to be closed, needing no light because he could feel its location without touching it. Old hinges groaned and squealed as he pushed through into the cluttered bedroom. The cloying scents of the embalmer’s perfumes filled his throat and lungs.

He knew exactly where Lorna Trosper lay, and he went to her. Snaking a gentle arm beneath her neck, he lifted her dead weight upward, and with his other hand he worked away the sheet in which he had wrapped her the night before. After letting the sheet fall to the floor, he stood upright, his hungry eyes round in the dark, his heart skittering, his chest heaving. Vaguely he became aware of his hands working again, this time on his belt and the buttons of his faded slacks. With pants and undershorts gone, he attacked his shirt, and it too fell away.

He stood naked in the dark. His hands went to his groin, and he nearly screamed with excitement and alarm: His cock was monstrous, twice as big as it had ever been, a sinewy rod of steel.

Who owns Mitch Nistler?

Down, down he went, until the skin of his chest touched the corpse’s breasts. For an excruciating moment his heart cried out in revulsion, for they were not warm and silky as he had imagined a woman’s breasts to be, but cold and vaguely moist, like latex filled with something went and spongy. His thighs found hers, and his cock played in the cold hair of her groin. He forced it into her, no longer expecting warmth and delight, wanting only depth. He achieved it. Just as his tongue achieved the depth of her dead throat after forcing her teeth apart with his own.

He tasted embalming fluid and sassafras and lavender and humectant.

He tasted the unthinkable slime of bacteria and fungus, already growing in the oral region.

He tasted the sickness of death as no man was ever meant to taste it, and his soul writhed in agony. His body squirmed and his hips jounced as he thrust his mindless cock into and out of that poor, dry vagina.

He came explosively, and thunder clapped in his head. With every spasm he screamed into the blackness, as if yearning to rouse the faintest whisper of response from Lorna’s defiled corpse. He lay silent and spent, gasping, worrying insanely that he was smothering her with his weight. Rain fell, and somewhere in the night the refrigerator whirred.

Somehow, now that the hunger was gone, he managed to sleep.

Lindsay Moreland had insisted that the gathering for Lorna in Suquamish Park be neither a funeral nor a memorial service, but rather a simple coming together of friends and loved ones to comfort each other and to remember.

“An informal celebration of Lorna’s life,” she had called it, for this is what Lorna would have wanted in place of a lugubrious ceremony and tearful eulogies. Those friends who felt a need to make short speeches were certainly welcome to do so, and a few of them did. They remembered Lorna’s loving nature, her willingness to involve herself in community projects, her hands-on support of the local arts, her unflagging readiness to do charity work even though she herself was far from well-off. Old Hannie Hazelford—shrivelled and tiny under full-length black velvet, outrageously rouged and be-wigged in blond—spoke of Lorna as a woman of great wealth, measurable not in money but in “richness of spirit,” the treasure of love for her fellow humans, the riches of steady friendship.

Carl was glad when the speeches were over, for he had come dangerously close to tears more than once during the outpouring of love. He made his way to the fringe of the surprisingly large crowd that had gathered under the barbecue shelter, hoping that no one had noticed his fluttering eyelids. He edged into the tentative sunlight that poured between billowy gray clouds.

The morning had been cold and dank, and the meager warmth felt good on his shoulders. The music resumed, played through a sound system that someone had set up under the shelter and connected with a long cable to a utility pole nearby. There was Beatles’ music from the
White Album
and
Rubber Soul
, salvaged from the stash of records that had somehow survived the terror of Lorna’s final days. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young came next, then Simon and Garfunkel.

The lump in Carl’s throat grew hot and painful as he remembered younger times, loving times with Lorna. This was the music that moved her. And him, too. He wondered how he ever could have left her.

His eyes wandered over the tall cedars and pines of Suquamish Park, down the grassy hill that ended on a brief stretch of gritty beach and then beyond to the white-capping waves of the Puget Sound. Cormorants and gulls dipped and wheeled overhead, tankers and container ships lazed in the distance. A breeze stirred the rain-laden trees, producing a sibilant background whisper that could be heard between the gentle rock songs.

This had been one of Lorna’s favorite places, where she had often set up her easel in quest of capturing its magic in watercolors, a retreat during those brief hours when some kind friend had agreed to look after Jeremy in order to let her savor a morsel of aloneness. Here she had allowed her mind to roll outward over the waves, or soar high into the billowing clouds. Here she had created beauty.

In better times Carl had often come here with her, for the park was only a five-minute walk from their bungalow on Second. They had strolled along the beach or eaten sack lunches on the picnic tables or lain hand in hand on a blanket in the grass, watching the sky as it sailed by. They had often joked about that summer night shortly after their marriage, when they had slunk into the park like a pair of randy teenagers, to shed their clothes and lie naked in the questionable privacy of a cluster of cedars near the shore. They had drunk cheap California wine and munched expensive Oregon cheese. They had fucked like a couple of insatiable hamsters. The odds were at least even that Jeremy had been conceived on that very night.

Carl tore his gaze from the clump of cedars—

—and it landed on Lindsay, who stood under the barbecue shelter where she shepherded well-wishers up to the long tables on which was spread a staggering array of casseroles, salads, home-baked breads and desserts, steaming coffee urns, and jugs of punch, all contributed by Lorna’s legion of grieving friends. Since this was neither a funeral nor a memorial service but merely a simple coming together for an outdoor lunch on a Tuesday, Lindsay wore no mournful black but rather a green classic blazer over a white blouse and a green windowpane-plaid skirt.

For a blinding fraction of a second, Carl saw her cold-reddened cheeks as Lorna’s, her grain-colored hair as Lorna’s. The easy movement of her lithe frame, the way she tossed her head to banish stray hair from her eyes, the way she crossed her arms—all were Lorna’s. Carl felt his face grow warm with new guilt. Even after the fraction of a second was gone, the tickling in his groin remained, and he knew that he was craving the body of his dead wife’s sister.

Jeremy sat at a picnic table apart from the crowd, alone in the shadowy lee of the bandstand, dignified and somber in the dark suit that Carl had bought him earlier that morning in Bremerton. With his legs crossed and his arms folded, he looked very adult, very much in control of himself.

Carl experienced a minor flash of anger toward the milling crowd, simply because no one was taking any notice of Jeremy, the human being whom Lorna had loved above all others, the one who would miss her most. Why weren’t people thronging around
him
, laying comforting hands on his shoulders and hugging him with shared grief, as they were doing for Lindsay and Nora Moreland, as they had done for Carl himself? He suspected that many citizens of Greely’s Cove still considered Jeremy something of a freak, the product of an unknowable miracle, or at the very least a stranger whose beautiful hazel eyes seemed full of secrets. This was perhaps understandable. Best to leave the unknown alone, went the common wisdom.

Carl wanted his son’s company and was about to move in the direction of the bandstand when Stu and Judy Bromton approached him. He had always thought them an odd-looking couple: Stu a mountain of rock-hard muscle and Judy a tattered sparrow of a woman. Their marriage had produced a daughter who was large and heavily muscled like Stu and a son who was tiny and mousy like Judy, exactly the reverse of what they had expected and wanted. More odd, however, was the mix of personalities: Stu was gregarious and fun-loving, ever ready for a good laugh; while his wife was quiet and retiring, always on the verge, seemingly, of taking refuge behind Stu’s protective bulk. Judy and the Beast, Carl had always called them.

They all shook hands, hugged and traded the kind of smiles seen at funerals. They talked about how the weather was cooperating, the great turnout and the wonderful array of food. Close on the heels of the Bromtons were Stu’s in-laws, Mayor Chester Klundt and his wife, Millie, handsomely attired in their most expensive Sunday clothes, in stark contrast to Stu’s shabby suit and Judy’s plain wool dress.

Carl soon tired of the small talk. The Klundts, who were born-again evangelicals, kept trying to steer the conversation to things Christian, which made Carl uneasy. He found himself moving backward, one step at a time, retreating. Before drifting away completely, he caught Stu’s eye and winked, hoping to convey gratitude to his old friend for having interrupted the search for Teri Zolten in order to attend this gathering. Stu nodded and smiled a little, as though to confirm that he and Carl should get together again soon for some serious talk.

Carl found himself talking to Ken and Sandy Zolten, who—despite the burden of sorrow and fear they carried for their missing Teri—had come out to celebrate the memory of Lorna, their friend. Carl was moved. He fought hard to hold back tears, for their faces were slack with exhaustion, their eyes baggy and red. He astounded himself by hugging them both.

He made several circuits through the crowd, talking with old acquaintances from his youth and thanking Lorna’s friends for taking time to show their love. The gathering began to thin as people headed for their cars, having dedicated a lunch hour to the memory of Lorna Trosper.

As he watched them go, he thought of what Stu Bromton had said Sunday night at Liquid Larry’s: that a darkness had settled in Greely’s Cove, hanging just beyond the limits of human vision, a kind of sickness that twisted and distorted the normal life processes of the community. He could not deny that there was something evil in Greely’s Cove; one needed only to gaze into the ravaged faces of Ken and Sandy Zolten to become aware of it. Some maniac was abducting innocent people and doing God-knows-what to them. The community as a whole was sick from the “darkness,” including Carl himself, even though he had only recently returned to the town. Stu’s story about visitors in the night, along with the vagaries supplied by Lorna’s suicide note, had momentarily sickened Carl’s own mind, to the extent that he had imagined all kinds of unmentionable evil in the presence of Dr. Hadrian Craslowe, the man who had delivered his only son from a life of screaming insanity.

There was indeed something evil in Greely’s Cove, but not the kind of creeping evil that Stu and possibly others imagined. There was a criminal here—a demented kidnapper who was, in all likelihood, a murderer to boot. His capture would cure the sickness, once and for all. Greely’s Cove would return to normalcy, as would its people.

Having told himself this, Carl began to feel good again. He felt even better when his gaze alighted on a solitary figure who stood on the beach, clad in rumpled khaki trousers and a weathered aviator jacket—a slim man of his own age but slightly shorter, topped with a thick mop of coal-black hair that fanned in the brisk breeze. The man turned from the rowdy water to glance up the gentle hill toward Carl, and Carl’s mouth dropped open.