Shattered (13 page)

“He's an MPD.”

The dashboard light glowing off her gaunt face, Dr. Susan Boeski spoke in low tones. She sat in the front passenger seat of Reinhardt's war-battered sedan. The detective was hunched behind the wheel, steering the car up Old Six Mile Road, just north of the wild forest skirting Pickman Creek. Deep black shadows rushed past the windows like ghostly veils unfurling against the sky. It was nearly midnight.

“Highly functional, too, with components of delusional psychosis.” The doctor glanced over her shoulder at the backseat. “Are you familiar with the term MPD, Helen?”

“No, ma'am.” Helen Splet felt like a prisoner being led to the gas chamber. Alone in the backseat, clutching herself as though she might fall apart at any moment, she looked out at the barren landscape. She wanted to die. She wanted to crawl into a hole.

“It means Multiple Personality Disorder.” The psychiatrist looked owlish in the green glow. “It's quite rare, actually. But we do see it occasionally. And I'll be honest with you, we still have a lot to learn about this disorder and what makes it tick.”

Helen managed to croak, “You're telling me my husband is…
schizo
or something?”

“Not
schizo
, Helen. Schizophrenia is much more common. The schizophrenic hears voices, has trouble connecting with reality. The MPD, on the other hand, is literally a series of different individuals competing with each other.”

Helen swallowed. “Competing for
what
?”

“Dominance, control. They're called alters, as in
alter ego
. Some alters are dominant, some are submissive. And some are so deeply buried in the patient's brain they surface only under controlled hypnosis. To me, though, MPD patients are quite heroic. Their brains are amazing corrective mechanisms, fractured early on.”

“What do you mean, ‘fractured early on?'”

“Childhood trauma, usually. The different alters become defense mechanisms. One thing we've noticed, though, with functional MPDs—especially those who keep the disease a secret like Henry—is that they have a place they go to when they feel a ‘switch' coming on. It's the
locus convertere
. The place of change. Sometimes it's a secure room in their house, an attic, somewhere private. Henry has a place like that. Way out in the country. It isn't foolproof. Sometimes he experiences blackouts. Wakes up someplace unfamiliar. But most of the time he keeps his transformations hidden inside this one location.”

After a lengthy pause Helen said very softly, “That's where you're taking me, isn't it?”

Boeski shot a glance at Reinhardt.

“Almost there,” he murmured.

Boeski looked at Helen. “About a year ago your husband came to me for something very straightforward. He couldn't sleep. Nightmares. He wanted a quick fix. We tried hypnosis, and it was during one of those sessions that another personality tried to come out.”

Helen made a moaning sound.

The doctor went on: “I haven't even told him yet. It's very delicate, introducing the dominant personality to his alters. I was about to tell him when he disappeared.”

Helen looked at the back of the doctor's impeccably groomed head. “You're telling me he doesn't even
know
?”

Boeski nodded. “It's a process, a very delicate process. That's why we want you to take a look at this place. Maybe give us some insight.”

Reinhardt took a left turn at an unmarked farm road. The lack of streetlights instantly plunged them into darkness. On either side of them, as far as the eye could see, stretched vast landfills and fallow cornfields. “It's right up here, around this corner.”

Chills crawled up Helen's spine as they rounded a bend and the building came into view.

The barn rose in the murky middle distance like a ghostly monolith, its warped siding and rotten roof gable silhouetted against the black sky, the sole manmade structure for miles. It sat back from the dirt road on about half an acre of scrub grass and weeds, surrounded by a broken-down barbed-wire fence. In the darkness it looked like a rheumatoid beast, slumped and sagging.

A sign posted near the dangling, broken gate—once printed with
UNITED STATES IMPLEMENT AND TRACTOR
—was now so sun-faded only these letters remained:

 

U           ST    E    I           T

 

Reinhardt pulled up to the gate, put the sedan in park, and got out.

Helen watched from the backseat, chewing her cuticles, as the private investigator shoved the gate open, then climbed back in to the car and carefully pulled into the weed-whiskered gravel lot. Tires crunched, the roar of crickets coming through Reinhardt's open window. They parked in front of the barn and Reinhardt turned the engine off.

The silence hummed in Helen's ears, raising gooseflesh on her arms. She glanced out the window to her right. “Oh my God, there's his car!”

In the darkness to the west, the SUV was canted across a bald patch of earth under a mammoth oak tree. The satellite dish on the roof, the road cases in back, the WJID decal prominently visible on the driver's door.

“Been there since Tuesday,” Reinhardt said as he climbed out of the sedan with a groan.

“It's okay, Helen, no reason to be afraid.” Dr. Boeski unbuckled her seat belt, then got out. “It's possible your husband hallucinates when he's here, sees this place as some significant milestone from his past.”

Helen Splet reluctantly opened her door and stepped out into the night air on wobbly legs.

She followed them across broken glass to the double door. Upon closer inspection Helen could see that the barn was padlocked. A rusty Yale lock secured the ancient latch. She felt faint, standing there, shivering, staring at the padlock. “You're saying Henry comes here and…
changes personalities
?”

“At first I didn't even believe it myself.” Reinhardt stood behind her and lit a cigarette, the tip glowing in the darkness. “He goes in, futzes around, comes out a different person, different clothes sometimes. Once I saw him come out dressed in a nurse's outfit.”

“That's enough, Ray,” Boeski said. “Helen, I have to ask you a question.”

Helen Splet was on the verge of tears. “I don't think this is a good idea.”

Boeski put a hand on Helen's shoulder. “Helen, did Henry ever tell you much about his childhood?”

Helen shook her head. “I don't know. Some.”

“Did he ever tell you about a bad thing that happened to him at one of those self-storage places?”

A tortured pause, Helen trying to remember. “His foster father was…not a nice man. He got physical with Henry.” She thought about it some more, wiping her eyes, looking at that forlorn building in front of her. “Never told me anything about a storage place, though.”

“The reason I ask is—”

The doctor abruptly fell silent. A noise had come from the other side of the barn, the faint crunch of gravel, then silence. Reinhardt wheeled around, then became very still.

Helen listened. “What was that?”

Dr. Boeski shrugged, trying to appear calm, but her eyes burned with nervous tension. Reinhardt cocked his head and listened. It sounded as though something was skittering around inside the barn. A raccoon? Mice maybe.
Maybe…

Helen's whisper was choked with fear. “Could that be—?”

“Sshhh.” Reinhardt motioned for the two women to stay put, then turned and crept toward the northeast corner of the barn. Helen watched the detective vanish into shadows, heard his crunching footsteps abruptly halt.

The two women stood there, waiting for the investigator to return. At last, they heard his footsteps again, and saw him emerging from the shadows with a sheepish look on his face.

“Nobody there,” he said, joining the women at the double doors.

Something moved inside the barn again. A puff of air, some muffled shuffling noises. The threesome turned toward the door. The shuffling noises persisted. Helen gaped, a deer-in-the-headlights look on her face now, her voice suddenly getting stuck in her throat.

It sounded like—

The double doors burst open, the padlock catapulting into the air like a mortar.

A massive shadow leapt out.

 

The group disabled the detective first, Nurse White surprising him with a knife to his throat. He was fumbling for his .38 (which he kept taped to his right ankle) when the big woman slashed a half-inch-deep cut across the bottom of his Adam's apple. Massive breast cleavage bouncing above her stained white togs, the nurse growled some inarticulate battle cry as Reinhardt staggered. Then she kneed the man in the groin, and the detective finally collapsed in a bloody mist of arterial spray.

Meanwhile the psychiatrist and Helen had finally snapped out of their horrified stupors. Dr. Boeski gasped, then whirled around and started running headlong toward the shadows of the neighboring landfill.

Helen Splet was backing away in the other direction in utter terror, her slender hand going to her mouth, muffling her agonized moaning and garbled attempt at speech. Another denizen of U-Store-It darted out of the shadows to her left. Knuckle crawling like a little baboon, chubby little pug-nosed face all screwed up with rage, Angel had a flexible motorcycle chain clutched in his sticky fists.

The chain whipped around Helen's shins as she tried to turn and flee. She stumbled, sprawling across the pavement, her breath knocked out of her lungs.

The feral child loomed over her. Helen tried to crawl away but the chain came down hard on the back of her head. The greasy linkage dug deep into her skull, bouncing her cranium off the asphalt. Dynamite erupted in her brain, and Helen was mercifully knocked out, her last conscious thought a jumble of regret and recrimination toward her God. How could the Lord let something like this happen?

Unfortunately these final thoughts would vanish like ashes in the ether, forever unanswered, as the razor-sharp chain came down on her skull and neck.

In the meantime the psychiatrist had gotten a head start across the northern edge of the property, and now was frantically scaling the steep hill that bordered the adjacent junkyard. She had kicked off her one-inch Fendi heels, and now was scurrying barefoot up the slope, a distant vapor light providing a dramatic bit of theater to the struggle. She reached the top of the berm and saw an ocean of wrecked vehicles and discarded appliances stretching out before her, the dented metal mosaic like a vast chipped-enamel sea.

Dr. Boeski paused at the apex to catch her breath when the shot rang out.

The blast struck her right shoulder just above the deltoid ligament. It felt like a fist punching through her bone, spinning her on a wild axis in a blood cloud, right before the second round struck her left temple, turning her power off forever. The psychiatrist crumpled, tumbling down the ravine into a gully of broken glass.

Her body did not lie there unobserved for long.

A figure appeared almost instantly at the top of the hill above her. Silhouetted in the arc light, the man was dressed in drag. He was a little thick in the middle, his posture slightly stooped, but mostly of average height and build. He looked a little ridiculous in the tattered dress—a fifty-seven-year old amateur transvestite.

Henry Splet gazed down at the carnage, still drenched in sweat from his long journey. His .45 handgun, with its homemade silencer, was still smoking.

Other figures joined him. One by one, they came up over the rise like phantoms and stood with Henry, a conquering army, the other tenants of the secret warehouse: Angel, the feral child; Nurse White in her blood-spattered togs; the Circus Lady; Mister Klister; Arturo, the Graffitti Artist; the Hillbilly; and others. Over a dozen of them.

They stood there, side by side, gazing down at the lifeless doctor.

 

A quarter of a mile to the west, amid the squall of barking dogs, the owner of Amalgamated Salvage came out of his shack and gazed off to the west. A squat, hairy Italian with a linebacker's neck, Sonny Massamore had been working on the last fingers of a bottle of Jim Beam and playing solitaire when he heard the two gunshots as plainly as church bells.

Now he was shoving his cell phone and his Glock nine into his jacket pockets as he raced over to his rust-pocked golf cart.

It took Massamore a little under a minute to wheel across the hardpacked road that bisected the junkyard. His little golf cart rattled over broken bottles and shredded tires, shaking him hard enough to crack his jaw. His heart pounded as he approached the westernmost edge of the yard.

He scudded the golf cart to a stop behind a tower of engine blocks and hopped out.

In that horrible, pregnant silence before Massamore noticed the body of Dr. Susan Boeski lying crumpled like a rag doll in the gully to his right, he saw two very odd things. The first was a sign way up at the crest of the hill, nailed to a fence separating his junkyard with the neighboring deserted farm. Somebody had doctored the faded, missing letters of the original United States Implement sign: