Nightjack (10 page)

Vindi snorted again in his bullish manner, speaking in Greek, calling to someone inside Pace. It was a challenge of some kind, Vindi urging someone to come out. Pace tossed the screwdriver over his shoulder and his hands became hard as stone. They were strangler’s hands, and they had done a lot of work for him already. Vindi quit moving.

“And what’s to stop me from breaking your neck?” Pace asked.

Vindi smiled without warmth. “I assure you it would not be to your advantage, nor would it be effortless. My employer does not hire incompetents.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Oh, but you would.”

Talk about a contrary prick. Pace tried to picture Cassandra Kaltzas but could only see Jane’s burning face. The kids had scurried back and were whining for strawberry swirly, fudge ripple, chocolate mint chip. They tugged on his sleeve, saying, Please please please please,
oh please
.

“I was in a straitjacket when Cassandra was raped, they tell me.”

“We doubt the veracity of that particular report.”

“Why?”

“You and Dr. Maureen Brandt were lovers. She undoubtedly forged certain documentation. The fact that you’re free now is proof that she is able to subvert the clinical system.”

“But she acts like she hates me. Where do you get your information?”

“With the proper inducement, anyone is willing to talk. It is simple to bribe the proper authorities. They sought to hide the situation, rather than approach it openly. They feared repercussions. Money quells fear.”

“Why didn’t Kaltzas call them on it? Have a full investigation made?”

“It was decided the matter should be dealt with directly and personally.”

“Is that so?” Pace handed out the ice cream cones, and each of the kids took theirs in turn, saying, Thank you, thank you,
oh thank you
before running off. He stared after them as they skipped and bounded away. “I really look forward to meeting him.”

“You have met him.”

“Whatever. I still have things to think through. We need your car. And money.”

“Certainly.” Vindi stepped aside, allowing Pace access to the Jag. Raindrops began to spatter against the windshield. “There is a billfold in the glove compartment filled with five thousand dollars.”

“That’s really why Kaltzas sent you, isn’t it? You’re here to direct our course. To make sure we get to Pythos.”

“A private jet is waiting for you at Kennedy Airport.”

You didn’t go willingly to your reckoning, you let it come to you, inch by inch.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe you had to meet it at least halfway, if you were ever going to get any of the answers you needed.

Pace slid behind the wheel of the Jag. The computerized tracking equipment set in the dashboard made it look like a cockpit. “Where is he now?” Pace asked. “And where is Cassandra?”

The Minotaur smiled, shards of golden bone appearing through the forest of wiry beard. “On Pythos. Waiting for you.

nine

Crumble enjoyed the Jag and stuck his head out the sunroof, tongue lolling, barking into the rain. Dr. Brandt said, “Please, Hayden, people are looking.” She turned to Pace and asked, “Are you ready to discuss what happened yet?”

“No.”

Finishing up her third Double Cheesy Bacony Burger, Pia let out a contented moan. All the men in the car—the hundreds of them, even the gay ones, even the dead ones—stiffened at the sound. She could do it to you even when she wasn’t half-trying, reaching inside to pluck at your guts.

Faust, somehow more in tune with Pace, sensed his rising agitation and put a hand to the back of Pace’s head, like he could hold everybody inside there and keep them from pouring free.

“It’s all right, Will.”

“Sure. We’re almost there.”

Pace followed Map’s directions through a couple miles of wetland, along a series of curving sand-blown roads heavy with saw grass. Now that they were off the main streets traffic thinned and the towns turned into hamlets and fishing villages, the woods deepening as brackish inlets began to surround them.

The house was tucked away on a small spit of sand and weeds. The area around it peeled back into a mixture of silt, black mud, and eddying saltwater drooling across a stony shoreline at low tide. Lapping waves could be heard.

Faust threw his door open the moment the Jag came to a full stop. “It’s like a church,” he said. “One of those country churches where the town would huddle in the middle of a yellow fever epidemic. Where they came to die together. The town marshals would seal them inside alive to quarantine them. Our father who art inescapable.”

“You’re fun as a fuckin’ barrel of dead spider monkeys, you are,” Hayden told him.

They climbed out. The pelting cold rain hurt, but no one made a sound. Pace popped the trunk and they gathered their meager belongings and tramped up the gravel walkway in the darkness.

The storm broke in full as Pace led them to the front door. Dr. Brandt asked, “Is this your house, Will?”

“No,” he said. He found a key hidden in a niche between two of the cedar shingles below the front window. He unlocked and pushed the door open. They filed in and he turned on the lights.

“How did you know where the key was?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, of course. You were a school teacher and your wife managed a restaurant in Manhattan. I’ve seen your financial records. You couldn’t afford a house in this area.”

“You know it all, lady.”

Hayden said, “Jack must’ve paid cash for it after ripping off all the goombas. Those mobsters horde their payoffs, they’re tighter with a buck than a Thai hooker.”

“Do you know any Thai hookers?” Pia asked. “Or mobsters?”

“A few of each. After they’d get arrested they’d show up at the home to do community service taking care of me and the mongoloids. Nice folks all around, really. Taught me Texas Hold‘em.”

Pace tried to imagine Jack walking into a realtor’s office with three-quarters of a mill in twenties and fifties. Setting up accounts to have the electricity and water paid automatically each month. The guy asking him if he was married, had children, and Jack just standing there giggling.

“When did you first come here, Will?” Dr. Brandt asked.

“Don’t you ever get tired of asking questions?”

He thought, Maybe canning fish wouldn’t have been so bad.

You sit there all day long in front of a conveyor belt covered in tuna, squid, halibut, cod. Pick the slimy things up, reach for one of those little cans, and just smash ‘em in there. Next to you is a robot that welds the lids shut. The robot wants to learn how to be human, keeps asking you to explain things. What is love? You tell him, I don’t know, Robbie. Where is the soul located? No clue, Robbie. Why do men pay Bubbles LaRue twenty dollars to lie with them in the back of her 1982 El Camino with Edlebrock valve covers and flowmaster exhaust during the designated lunch hour? That’s easy to explain, Robbie—Do you agree that it is necessary to have an underlying principle or dictum to rejoice when we succeed and to take solace when we fail? You’re a little over my head there, Robbie. Is it better to live without requiring assertion of value or belief in the admittedly doubtful existence of a clinical entity thus far unconfirmed in the known structure of the visible universe? Fuck are you talkin’ about, Robbie, lighten up a little, yeah? So you try teaching him how to acquire a sense of humor. Start off with knock knock jokes. Robbie tells you, That does not compute. You work your way up to the traveling salesmen making it with the farmer’s daughter, her crotch smelling like corn on the cob. Robbie going, That does not compute! His metal arms flailing, claws snapping. Eradicate! Expunge! Other fish canners lying broken and dying all over the factory. The salmon staring at you while you stuff it into the fucking can.

Sniffing like he was having an allergy attack, with his head tossed way back, Faust announced, “The stink of murder is here.”

“So this is it,” Hayden said, holding his pad, getting ready to write to his mother. “The house that Jack built.”

The one-story house was old, one of those converted cabins from back when rich New York urbanite bankers used to build this far out on the island to accommodate their mistresses in the summer. It was furnished in a quaint countrified style, lots of wicker and oak, rocking chairs and throw pillows with embroidered sayings on them.

Home is Where your Love is.

All realities once were dreams
.

Eat at Tiny Bob’s Lobster Pavilion
.

The weight of history bore down. Men had given way here, women had borne children, art had been conducted and completed. A broad stone fireplace against the far wall looked like an alter where human sacrifices had once been performed.

“So’s the stink of love,” Pia intoned, the word taking on a heavy, tragic cadence. “It’s everywhere. In the walls, the very lumber.”

“You say that as if it’s bad,” Faust said.

“It is.”

“Somebody’s been taking care of the place while you’ve been in the Falls, Will.”

Pace said, “A woman. I think she comes in to clean once a month.” The truth of it struck him with such force and clarity that he had to turn his chin aside like he was dodging a blow. The middle-aged woman’s wide face was burnished with real character. She was the wife of a fisherman. She’d lost her firstborn to the sea decades ago and carried the guilt around with her always. The shame of a mother who could not protect her child from the dominion of the ocean.

It wasn’t that odd, this far out on the island, to have repairmen and weekly or monthly cleaning services, where the owners and the help never saw one another. A lot of these homes were used only in season, a couple of weekends a year. Jack must’ve had several automatic withdrawals made from his account.

“This is your house, Will,” Dr. Brandt repeated. When the lady got a hard thought in her head, she couldn’t let it go. Talk about neurotic.

“No, it’s not.” He tried not to take offense at her compulsion to call him Will, always with the Will. “I’ve never been here before.”

“You knew you had a place to go to, but you didn’t know how to get here. But you knew the address and where to find the key. You’ve already separated from yourself again, Will. Distancing yourself from your emotions and personal history. That’s why you’re not healthy.”

“Yeah.”

“So it
is
yours.”

“No, it’s not,” he repeated. Saying it like he was a little sad for her, that she just couldn’t understand. She’d never be able to understand, which was why she was such a lousy shrink.

He knew she wished she had a tape recorder on hand. Even after two years in Garden Falls she hadn’t come close to getting to the bottom of him. Any of him, any of them. He remembered her sitting there writing and making him talk into a video camera.

He’d talked for hours and days and months and he wasn’t sure if he’d told a single lie, or a single truth. About himself or anybody else, even though so much of it was honest even while everything contradicted itself.

Hayden had his notepad out and was writing to his mother again.

“All this time,” Faust said, sounding a little amazed and crestfallen, “and you still know so little about us, Dr. Brandt.”

“True dissociative identity disorders are extremely rare, Faust. You’re all quite unique.”

“Perhaps even more so than you know, doctor.”

That got her attention. She took on the professional air again, ready to analyze, to diagnose. “How do you mean?”

“Yeah,” Hayden said. “This I gotta hear.”

Pia jumped into a wicker seat. “I am all ears.”

“Perhaps we’re not suffering from DID at all.” The scar on Faust’s forehead looked pink and raw, like it was ready to give birth. “Let me submit, doctor, that we are
not
creating personalities within ourselves due to traumatic experiences which have fractured our psyches.”

“Then what?”

“That we are instead actually
channeling
these other individuals, entities, and beings. Drawing them in from other dimensions, through time and space across the cosmos. Gathering them to us. Them, and the souls of the departed. These others do not originate organically from within. They consume and subsume and the worst of them devour. We are simply the beacons. We are the vessels. We are the conduits. We are the possessed. Our father who art infinite.”

Dr. Brandt licked her lips and something inside Pace bucked. She took a moment to gather her thoughts. When they came, they were worthless. “Even you don’t believe that.”

“You might be surprised at what I believe, doctor.”

“No, Faust, I wouldn’t. I’ve heard it all before, from each of you over the years you were in therapy. But your alternate personalities are nothing more than inventions of an afflicted psyche.”

“I’m hurt,” Hayden said. “You sound like you don’t like us anymore.”