The Calling (23 page)

'Take it all with you, Detective,' said Hazel. 'Do
what you have to do and call us from your hotel.'

They heard him helplessly puking.

* * *

He'd muscled her into the front seat of his rental
and on the way back to town she neither protested
her treatment nor made reference to her rights.
He hadn't arrested her and he took her meekness
as a sign that she thought herself in enough
trouble that co-operation was her only option.
That or she wasn't clever enough to know that
he had no right to take her with him unless he
was going to charge her with a crime. And he
had no intention of leaving a paper trail in that
town. Port Hardy would barely know he'd been
there.

He told her to direct him back to her house and
she complied. Her place was just off the main drag,
in an old wooden house painted light blue. 'Am I
going to get my car back?' she asked.

'What do you think?' She stared out the wind-shield
at her house. 'Are you guilty of a crime?'

'No.'

'Are you sure?'

She absently nudged a paper bag on the floor by
her feet. An apple core rolled out of it. At last she
said, 'I didn't know Peter was dead. All I did was
bring his mail.'

'Sure you did,' Sevigny said, 'because you knew
nothing.' He threw open his door. She waited for
him on the other side and got out when he opened
her door.

'What are we doing?'

'We're going into your house.'

She cast a frightened glance over the top of the
car, as if she were worried someone might be
watching them. 'Don't you need a warrant for
that?'

'I could get a warrant. Do you want me to get a
warrant?' Another look up the street. 'Are you
expecting someone?'

'They don't like attention. Simon and Peter.
They would be upset if they knew I was talking to
you.'

'Well at least one of them will never find out.'

'I'm the secretary, okay? That's all. I volunteer
my time.'

'Why?'

She shook her head slowly, her upper lip in her
teeth. 'Look. I have nothing. I have the church and
my government cheque and that's it. And my car.'

He reached for his wallet in his back pocket, and
she followed it with her eyes as he brought it up
between them and opened it to take out two
twenties. She made no sign of being disappointed
that money was about to change hands. He folded
the bills in his hands and held them out, then
pulled them back just a little. 'How does a woman
with nothing have a house?'

'It's not my house,' she said. 'It's the church's.'
He kept the money in the air. 'It's theirs, okay?
They own the house.'

He gave her the cash and led the way to the
front door. 'When we're done here, if I think
you've been helpful, I'll drive you back to your car,'
he said.

He got back to the motel just after 4 p.m. A low,
dusky light was lying across the harbour and the
die-hard pleasure-boaters were heading out in
the cool fall air to fish or take in the sunset. The
only thing between them and the giant evening
sun was an imperceptible line separating the earth
from everything else. He'd taken a small folder of
paper from Jane Buck's house. Nothing that would
incriminate anyone, but he had a sense that some
of the information in that folder, at the right time,
would cast a little light in the right direction. More
pressing, however, was the laptop. He placed it on
the little wooden desk in the motel room along
with the books. The books were old; some were
bound in leather. His mother had once had high
hopes for him entering the priesthood, but even
given his years in the seminary, his Latin was worse
than poor. The only book in English was an old
formulary, a guide to the uses of various plants.
This made sense: it was clear by now to them all
that the Belladonna was a self-taught pharmacist of
some kind, except his specialization ran to the
lethal. He checked all of the books for markings,
but they were clean.

The computer had been used for a single
purpose: apart from the operating system, the only
program was a web browser about five years out of
date. It had even been stripped of the games that
came with it. Sevigny clicked the open browser,
but there was no signal here. The browser returned
a grey screen with the news that the 'server was not
found'. He was fairly certain the killer wasn't
getting a signal out in the death shack either, so
where was he hooking up to the Internet? There
were no bookmarks in the browser, but when he
pulled down the history, he saw links for an online
email service and links to a site called
Gethsemane. He knew what Gethsemane was. He
was going to have to get online to find out what it
meant to the Belladonna.

He called the front desk, and they were happy to
let him use their single computer, but there was no
way to connect this laptop to the Internet. They
wanted to help him. He told them he was looking
for a good place to fish steelhead. 'The man in
room five caught a lunker this morning just five
kilometres out in Bear Cove.'

'That's great,' said Sevigny. 'But I still need the
Internet.'

There was an Internet café in town, but it closed
at four o'clock on Sundays in the winter. He asked
the woman if she knew the name of the person who
owned the Internet café, and she did. It was Kevin
Lawton. 'Everyone calls him "Kev",' she said. There
were five thousand people in Port Hardy. He called
directory assistance and got the man's home number.
He reached the man's daughter, who gave him her
father's cell number. The man was on a boat.

'Who?' said Kevin Lawton.

'Se-vin-yee,' said Sevigny. He could hear the
wind coming out over the ocean.

'Well, I'm fishing tarpon, buddy,' he said. 'Not
that they're interested in me, I'll tell you that.'

'I'm on police business. This is what you would
call an emergency.'

'Bad connection,' said the man. 'You sound like
a Spaniard.'

'Close,' said Sevigny. 'I'll pay you two hundred
dollars to open your café for one hour.'

'Oh fer jeez sake,' said Lawton, 'if it means that
much to you, I'll go fishing tomorrow.'

Tomorrow was Monday, thought Sevigny. A
regular business day, but then again, he didn't have
much of a sense of what kind of world he was in
now, anyway. Maybe they went fishing here anytime
they wanted.

He met the man at his café, and Lawton refused
Sevigny's money and let him in. He snapped the
lights on, revealing a small establishment done up
in a Hawaiian theme. Sevigny was about to ask, but
then thought better of it. The man put a pot of
coffee on to brew.

The laptop was set up for a wireless connection,
and as soon as Lawton had his system running, the
browser came to life. Sevigny clicked the link for
Gethsemane and the page that came up showed a
single image: the rough black stone he'd found
standing on Peter Mallick's staved-in chest. He ran
the cursor over the image, but there was nothing.

He went back to the history menu and clicked
on the Belladonna's webmail link. He got a home
page with a login screen. The computer filled in
the username. It was 'simon'. The password
window was blank.

Lawton came over with coffee and a thick piece
of carrot cake. The smell of it made the back of
Sevigny's jaw ache: he hadn't eaten since he'd been
sitting in his car on Sewatin Road. Lawton looked
over his shoulder, and Sevigny lowered the screen.
'This legal?' he asked.

'Let's say the owner of this computer would not
be happy to see me doing this.' He took a massive
forkful of the carrot cake. It was salty-sweet.

'You know the password?'

'Not a clue.'

'Sometimes there's a keychain in one of the
preferences folders that'll tell you the password, or
at least give you a bit of code you can paste in.'

'I'll try that,' said Sevigny. Lawton began to
move away. 'Can I ask you a question?'

'Sure,' said the man, stopping.

'You know the name Simon Mallick?'

'I heard of him, but it's been a while. He was the
pastor of a church up here.'

Sevigny got out his notebook. 'Where is this
church?'

'There wasn't really a "where" to it, if you get my
drift.'

'I don't.'

'More of a "what". It was him and a bunch of
back-to-basics types. They were scattered all over
Vancouver Island, but the Mallick place was sort of
their Mecca. They'd assemble up here once in a
while and go baptize a bunch of people in kayaks,
that sort of thing. They were harmless ... there's
about a thousand little religions festering in the
trees out here, you know? Most of them disappear
up their own assholes, excuse my French.' Sevigny
narrowed his eyes. 'Mallick's group called themselves
the Western Church of the Messiah. They
were vegans, if that tells you anything.'

'When's the last time you saw him? Simon?'

'Oh God,' said Lawton, and he drew his hand
over his mouth. 'It's been absolutely years. Him and
his brother, Peter, live up in a little shoebox out in
the forest. Is all this about the church?'

'No,' said Sevigny flatly.

Lawton looked at the empty plate in Sevigny's
lap. While talking to Lawton, he'd devoured the
entire slice. 'I could just put that back into
the cupboard. You want another one?'

Sevigny did but said no. He felt he couldn't
waste his hands on anything but what was in front
of him. Lawton dipped his head and told his guest
that if he needed anything, he'd be at the front
desk playing online poker. 'Good luck,' said
Sevigny.

So, a priest of some kind. He supposed that made
some sense, but he didn't know how he could apply
that information to the problem in front of him.
He returned his attention to the little white box
where the password went. The box was the
keyhole. He typed in 'Peter', and 'Mallick', and
'PeterMallick', to no effect. He went back to the
Gethsemane site and rolled his cursor all over
the rock again. Nothing happened.

The Garden of Gethsemane was where Jesus had
been taken by the Romans the night before his
crucifixion. It was an olive grove. Sevigny recalled
that the night before his crucifixion, Jesus had bled
in the garden. In the story, his blood was likened to
olive oil. Sister Agata had raised her bony arm and
cried out, '
Jésus s'est oint!
' Jesus had anointed
himself.

Sevigny typed in 'Gethsemane' and nothing
happened. He typed in 'Jesus' and 'Jesu' and
'Goddammit' and nothing happened. He felt like
throwing the laptop across the room. He stared at
the screen until it felt like the tiny dots of light
there were going to burst apart. There was something
behind that light; the barrier was an atom
wide. He just had to lay the right word overtop of
it and it would part for him. He typed in
'JaneBuck', and the page returned the error
message again.

He tried 'petersimon', and 'simonpeter' and
'simon'. Would this man, as smart as he was, make
his username and his password the same thing?

He would not.

Sevigny sat back in his chair with a groan and
closed his eyes. He'd barely slept since his plane
had landed. It would be something unguessable. He
leaned forward again and typed in the number of
Jane Buck's rural postbox – '31290' – and the
killer's inbox opened before his eyes like a blossom.
He heard himself gasp. The inbox was empty.
Sevigny, his hands quaking, checked the sent
folder, but it was empty as well. There was nothing
in 'outbox'. He clicked the 'deleted items' folder,
and a list of emails trickled down the screen.

Sevigny clicked on email after email. Name after
name sang to him. After reading a dozen of the
terse messages, he went back to the Gethsemane
web page and added a forward slash and the word
mashach
to the url and the black stone evaporated
like so much steam and revealed the world to him.

'Braid Vincent's hair less.'

'Cull those berry vines.'

'Rave, you violent bears.'

Jill Yoon looked up from her computer. Hazel
Micallef, Ray Greene and James Wingate were
staring at the fridge door, which was covered with
a bedsheet. On it, the green ligature had been
clothed with a human face. Yoon had explained
that she'd developed a digital mouth that averaged
together the measurements of the victims' sixteen
mouths. The mouth that spoke to them from James
Wingate's fridge was, she said, the visetic offspring
of sixteen dead bodies. Now they spoke as one, in a
computerized voice. But they said such things as:

'Dave plows yearly,' and 'Cube the vibrations.'

'Cube the vibrations,' said Ray Greene. 'That's
going to come in handy one day, I feel certain of it.'

'How many different things can it say?' asked
Hazel.

'Twenty-four hours isn't a lot of time for something
like this. I haven't nearly exhausted all of the
possibilities.'

'But?'

'But I've come up with a vocabulary of sixtyeight
words,' said Jill Yoon, 'and I'm up to a
hundred and fifty-five phrases.'

'Do we want to hear any more of them?'

Yoon searched down her list. They stared at the
bedsheet, where their sixteen dead had been
melted down into a living, electronic face. It
breathed in and said, 'A cute doe saves belief.'

'Fuck,' said Ray Greene. He walked into the
living room and sat heavily on Wingate's couch. 'I
liked this better when there was a possibility we
could have programmed Hazel's lips to promise me
a raise.'

'We're not going to hit on it right off, Ray. It's
not an exact science.'

'That's right, it's witchcraft.'

Wingate was standing beside the fridge, staring
at the inhuman face. 'What if it's not in English?'
he said. 'You made DI Micallef talk French
earlier.'

'It was a party trick,' said Jill Yoon. She'd
borrowed one of Wingate's sweaters from the
dresser in his bedroom and moved around in it like
a clapper inside a bell. She'd raided his bed for its
sheet. He'd felt sick when she called them back to
his apartment at five in the afternoon and seen
that she'd all but moved in. The sink was full of
dishes from some kind of pasta meal she'd made
herself from shrimp in his freezer, olive oil, fresh
peppers, and a sundried tomato pasta he'd hidden
at the back of a cupboard and never imagined she'd
find. For a tiny thing, she ate like a bear. He
wanted her out as soon as possible. 'I have highschool
French, that's it.'