The Calling (31 page)

'Your badge,' he said.

'You want my gun too?'

'Wingate will hold on to it for now.'

'Why can't Wingate hold on to my badge.'

'He can reassign the gun.'

'That's not what I asked you.'

'Just give me the goddamned ID, Hazel, and get
into the car.'

She tried to stare him down, but the man was an
obelisk. He just stared back at her as if thinking of
something else entirely. She'd never settled for herself
whether Mason's sangfroid was a result of not
caring or having seen it all. 'There's nothing you
can do to me, Ian, that's any worse than what I've
done to myself.'

He shook his head slowly, and she realized to her
regret that he was pitying her. 'After all this time,
you still don't know me at all, do you, Hazel?'

It was a long, silent drive back to Pember Lake.

She cleaned the house for the rest of the day,
furiously mopping, spraying the windows and washing
them with newspaper in wide, wild circles,
swabbing out various basins and tubs with mad
application, and called in to the station every half
hour for updates. She spoke only to Cartwright,
standing in front of one of the clean windows with
sweat pouring down her. There was no progress at
all. She went back to cleaning, but in the middle of
the afternoon when there wasn't a single unscoured
surface, she broke down and threw a scrub brush
into the hall mirror. It exploded like a window
shattered by a rock, but revealed, instead of the
unmediated background, a dark, featureless wall.

She recalled a theory from one of Martha's high-school
science classes. She couldn't bring to mind
all of the details, but the basic idea was that if you
put a cat in a windowless box and subjected it to a
random process that could cause the cat's death at
any given moment, then you had to say that the cat
was both dead and alive until you were able to
observe what was actually happening. This was
how she felt about her mother. Her mother
was equally dead and alive at this moment in time,
and their investigation was the box. Simon Mallick
was the random element, the radioactive isotope
(as she now recalled) that might, at any moment,
break down and cause her mother's death. The
feeling of helplessness that suffused her now combined
with the urgency in her muscles and she felt
a kind of sick thrill in her veins, as if she were dying
and being born all at once.

Night fell. She lay on the bed with the phone on
her chest. She dialled Melanie every half hour
until her shift ended at eight o'clock. Then she
dialled Staff Sergeant Wilton. He said,
There's
nothing
in her ear all night long. He stopped saying
I'm sorry, Hazel,
at three in the morning. She
could hear the voices of her people in the background.
Somewhere, in the deeper background,
was her mother, and Hazel didn't know if there was
still a voice to be heard.

The house seemed like a museum where all the
artifacts from her life had been carefully reproduced
and placed in attitudes that recalled to her
that she had once lived there and had, at times,
been happy. She had led a married life here, as a
wife and a mother, with no awareness of what her
future held. She would leave everything behind
now, she told herself, this house, this town, this
body even, if her final thoughts could contain the
knowledge that her pride and her stupidity had not
cost her mother her life. But what was there to
hope for now? Her mother had not had her calcium
supplement in two days, nor her blood thinners,
her painkillers for her arthritis, nor her manganese,
her B vitamin, or her iron. The Fosamax she took
for her osteoporosis lay powerless in its bottle. And
it was so cold outside now, with the snow falling
and falling, accumulating – where was she? She
had been taken in indoor shoes and without her
coat. Was she outside? Was she walking in this?
Was she alive?

The Toronto
Sunday Star
: 'Maverick Smalltown
Police Chief Puts Eight-Year-Old in Line of Fire'.

She took her pills early and kept to her bed and
the living room. Her heart kept pounding. She
took Ativan. Daytime television seemed especially
sinister, like some kind of alternative reality in
which lonely women were being trained for a
violent takeover of the world's kitchens. She would
watch the various shows with their strange codes
and drowse off with the sound up. When the
credits music woke her, she called the station
house. Melanie was back on as of ten. There was
still nothing to report. Hazel was dying. 'I never
thought I'd be saying this,' said her mother
standing in the big picture window, the light a
corona around her head, 'but I think you should eat
something.'

'I'm not hungry.'

Emily Micallef came and sat on the coffee table,
pushed the jumble of the day's newspapers aside.
'Public life has its risks, Hazel. We think we'll be
commended for serving, but really, the only thing
that gets noticed is failure. You just had a longer
run than most.'

'You can shake off a political mess, Mother. But
if you let a murderer go, it's something else.'

'It's just a different level of public relations,' said
Emily.

What she wouldn't have done to be twelve
again, in tears, her face against her mother's chest,
willing, at last, to listen to the soothing platitudes
mothers are so good with when their children's
tempests threaten to overflow their teacups.

Except this wasn't a tempest, it was an earthquake.
She realized that she could see the
television through her mother's chest and she sat
up on the couch, fear rippling through her. 'Where
are you?'

Her mother was fading. 'Somewhere cold,' came
the reply, and then Hazel was alone in the room.

Saturday 27 November, 4 a.m.

She woke and lifted her head off her chest. Her
eyes fell on an expanse of darkness broken only by
a thin yellow flame clinging to the wick of an oil
lamp on the other side of the room. It illuminated
only the space of the lamp itself, four glass panes
enclosing a square of dim light. She was in a hardbacked
chair staring out onto nothing, but the
staleness of the air suggested an enclosed space. A
back room or a shack of some kind. She moved a
foot over the floor and felt her shoe rumbling over
grit. She swept to the right and then, with the
other foot, to the left – semicircles to the sides of
the chair. Nothing. She was not bound in any way.
It meant she was free to move and it also meant
that he was in complete control, that he did not
fear she could somehow turn the situation to her
advantage. It was risible, anyway, to think of herself
sitting there, in the cold, looking for an angle. But
what person who wanted to live would not?

What must Hazel be going through, she
wondered. She thinks I'm dead. And they must
know about poor Clara by now. She clenched her
eyes. We who survive our widowhoods, our
cancers, the benighted mates our children choose,
the many small insults of old age ... and then to
die like that, in sudden pain and horror. She tried
to push back the image of her dear friend's mild
eyes, that unassuming smile. And the sudden savagery
of it, those features she knew so well
vanishing in a moment of unthinkable violence.
Her friend's blood was still on her clothing. And
then this man had stepped over Clara's body as if it
were nothing more than a spot on the floor and
herded them out of the back of the house, the
remaining four of them steeped in a terrible silence
full of knowledge. At the last moment, he'd held
her back and put the others into the garden shed.
The screech of the steel door closing on them.
'They'll die of cold,' she'd said to him, and she'd
felt a sharp pain in her upper arm. She thought
he'd cut her. But then a strange warmth filled her
and she was falling through space and the next
thing she knew, she was in a chair in the dark.

He was using her for bait.

She tried to imagine all the mechanisms that
were already in place to find her, and she dreaded
what it meant for Hazel. Because if she was alive, it
was Hazel he wanted. Although Emily could not
imagine what difference her being alive or dead
could make to this man. She hoped that they
would never find her. It was the only hope she had
now.

Her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the poor
light, and although she could not see her own body,
ten feet away there were a few inches of lit wall
behind the oil lamp. There might be a door in that
wall, she thought. She decided to try standing, and
she leaned forward to get up, but as she did, she
heard a flutter of movement from the other side of
the room and she slowly lowered herself back into
the seat. A bandaged hand floated up in the space
between lamp and wall, and the flame climbed the
wick. Its light crept along an arm to a shoulder and
stopped there, holding the disembodied limb in its
glow, and then the man who had called himself
Simon leaned into the light and it picked his eyes
out of the darkness like two dying stars. She
thought her heart would stop.

'You're awake,' he said. 'How are you?'

She wondered if he could see her, if she was yet
safely enclosed in her own darkness, and she felt
like shrinking into it, pushing away from the threat
of that light on the other side of the room. But
when he'd spoken, she knew from how the sound
of his voice had travelled that there was not far to
run.

'You may feel a little weak. Be careful if you get
up. I wanted to keep the light low in case you
needed to rest longer. Are you rested? Do you feel
all right?'

'Do you care how I feel?'

'I do.' He turned the lamp up higher and a yolky,
pulsating light bloomed into the space. Now she
saw what she had intuited: a small cabin with
nothing in it but a table and two chairs, a wood-stove
in the corner where he sat, and a window
beside it looking out on a moonless night. He was
dressed exactly as he had been (earlier in the night?
How long had she been out?), his coat flowing over
his legs. There was a single door to the shack,
directly in front of her. He saw her looking at it.
'Do you want to go outside? Take the air?'

'No,' she said quietly.

'Ask yourself if you'd be alive right now if I did
not will it.'

'I would have come with you. You didn't have to
do what you ... what you did.'

'Words would not have been enough to express
the urgency of my situation.'

'I would have come if you'd only asked.'

'I apologize then. If I was too forceful.' He rose
on
forceful
and her chairlegs squealed beneath her:
she'd instinctively pushed herself away from him.
He picked up both the lamp and the small table it
had been sitting on and came toward her. The ball
of light went with him as he moved through the
room and she saw his body in full again: he was like
a sliver of black soap, as if the very air had been
wearing him away to nothing. When she'd first
seen him, in the briefness of her fear he'd seemed
immense. Now it was as if he were made up of
incommensurate parts: the heavy, bony hands, one
of them wound with a bloodied cloth wrap, at the
end of the seemingly powerless arms; the starved
skull over broad shoulders. She had a strange
thought: he was not the man in charge. He was the
forward scout, the messenger. She expected a man
with more life in him to come through the door.
Although she knew in her heart it was only this
man, just this man, and whatever unnameable
thing he carried with him she was never going to
see nor understand. He put the table and the lamp
down in front of her and then retrieved his seat and
gingerly lowered his body into it. A sweetly sour
odour emanated from him, like stale sweat, and
something else, something she couldn't identify.
He seemed exhausted with the effort of crossing
the room three times and she could hear the air
whistling thinly in his chest when he sat in front of
her. She took him in: the sallow, parchment-coloured
skin, the putty-pale eyes. She looked at
his hand. 'What on earth happened to you?' she
said.

'I hurt myself.'

He blinked as slow as a tortoise. 'Tell me ... did
you choose your life, Emily Micallef?'

'Yes, I did.'

'Could you have said no to any of the things you
were called upon to do? Any of the things you were
meant to be?'

'I could have.'

'If you could have, you would have learned your
calling was false,' he said. He laid his hands on his
knees – long, thin hands her mother would have
called piano-playing hands – and straightened his
back. 'Else you did what you were meant to do.'

'I was in politics my whole life,' she said.
'Meaning never came into it. People who claimed
to have a calling were usually people who couldn't
justify their actions any other way.'

He turned his chin minutely to the left, as if to
look at her more closely. The light of the lantern
hit his right eye and turned it a blinding white. 'I'm
not in politics.'

'No. You help others by murdering them.'

'We pass into others' care,' he said. 'And they
pass into ours.'

'If that's what you want to call it.'

'You were once mother to a helpless child, and
now she houses you. Soon she'll feed and bathe
you. You brought her into life, and she'll ...' He
breathed in and out deeply. 'She'll play the role
nature gave her.'

'So you're an agent of nature.'

'A different nature.'

'And whose child are you, then?'

'No one's,' he said, and his eyes moved off her.

'You're someone's child.'

'No,' he said. 'I am not child, parent or brother.
I am not even I. Simon has survived himself. And
he guides those who are willing to survive their
deaths to another way of being.' He brought his
gaze back and his eyes were dead now, flat like a
dried stone. 'So much as a loyal child guides her
mother to death.'

She made eye contact with him. His hair lay
down along his forehead and the sides of his skull.
'I don't need Hazel to die,' she said. 'All you need
to do is keep me here another day or two without
my medications, and I'll be quite capable of dying
on my own.'

'I'll minister to you.'

'I'm sure you will,' she said. She'd placed the
other scent now. It was the odour that came off a
steak that had gone grey in the fridge. Fleshrot.

'Your daughter and I will have much in
common,' he said. 'I wonder if she will give of herself
as I have.'

'We'll see what she has to give when she finds
you. I think you might be surprised.'

'She won't find me,' said Simon. 'But yes, I'm
sure it will be a surprise.' He scraped his chair closer
over the grit until his knees were almost touching
hers. The scent of decay washed over her. 'Have
you accepted my apology?'

'For what?'

'For your friend. I don't want there to be bad
feelings between us.'

'What does it matter to you what I feel?'

He wiped his hands over the tops of his legs, as if
sweeping crumbs away. 'You're right. It doesn't matter.
But there's no need for me to be rude.' He put one
hand, his fingers splayed, against his chest and smiled
with a mouth full of loose teeth. 'I'm your
host
,' he
said. He stood again. 'Why don't we have some tea?'

'No, thank you.'

He got up and moved back to where she'd first
seen him, where there was less light, and she heard
metal scrape and sparks flew up from the inside of
the stove. He put a kettle over the fire. She looked
toward the door across from her again. He'd invited
her to 'take the air', and she wondered what would
happen if she did. She got up from her chair, being
sure to make enough noise that he wouldn't think
she was trying to be careful. Her legs had fallen
asleep from sitting as long as she had and her knees
buckled as she stood. The table was close enough
to steady herself on. 'Don't get up too quickly,' he
said from the stove.

She turned around and looked at what was
behind her. There was another window above a
low, single bed. It glowed in the dimcast starlight
like something seen at the bottom of a pond. She
could also make out a line of small, shiny squares
on the wall above the bed, but could not figure out
what they were, beyond the fact that they were of
identical shape and size. There were at least twenty
of them. As she stared at them, trying to see clearly,
they began to brighten as if imbued with their own
light and the skin on the back of her neck prickled.
Simon was coming up behind her with the lamp.
'Can you hear them?' he asked her.

The objects were Polaroids and the light was
beginning to pick up details. Faces. Mouths. The
blood was roaring in her ears. 'My God,' she
gasped. She heard the chair she'd been sitting in
clatter to the side before she was even aware she'd
burst for the door. She opened it and was through
it and immediately she felt the sudden, too-bracing
cold around her like a noose and the snow was
beneath her feet and all around her the naked
limbs of birch and alders stood against the predawn
sky, vertical bars of treetrunks lining the world on
all sides. She turned in a circle once, twice, the air
piercing her, and she fell to the ground. He stood
in the door to the cabin, the gauzy orange light
bleeding out from behind him, the only sign of life
anywhere and he called to her. 'Do you need some
help?'

'Go to hell,' she cried.

'Hell?' he said, stepping down from the doorway.
'Do you mean where there's fire and it's warm?' He
laughed softly and returned to the cabin, closing
the door behind him. Emily pushed herself up to
sitting and stared at it. He would not let her die.
He needed her. Even though Hazel would come
anyway. She would come for her whether she was
alive or dead. But Emily wanted to live.

She could barely get herself to standing; it felt as
if she weighed a thousand pounds, dragging herself
back to the promise of the cabin's meagre warmth.
The door was locked. He would humiliate her now,
make her beg for his murderous succour. 'Let me
in!' she shouted, and banged on the door. After a
moment, he did, and he stepped aside as she
entered. Steam rose from the mouth of the kettle.
'Take the blanket from the bed,' he instructed her,
and, quaking, she did, pulling it around herself and
sitting on the edge of the mattress. She felt powerless
now, and for the first time, her fear gave way to
grief and she felt her eyes fill. 'Now for something
to warm you up,' he said.

'Just kill me,' she pleaded. 'I want it over with.'

He was removing objects from a kitbag she
hadn't seen before now and placing them on the
stovetop. Glass vials. 'Are you offering your life?'

'Will you leave my daughter alone?'

'Do you offer it freely?'

The tears were coursing down her face now.
'Yes,' she said. 'I do.'

He put the vial he was holding back down on
the stove and came toward her. 'Shake my hand,'
he said. She looked at him bewildered. Her life
would end on a deal sealed with a handshake, like
a business transaction or a bet. He held his hand
out, palm up. After a moment, her heart breaking,
she laid her hand in his. But he didn't close his
fingers over the back of her hand as she expected,
only moved his forearm up and down minutely in
the space between them. 'Just as I thought,' he said,
moving back toward the stove.

'Just as you thought?'

'One hundred and fifteen pounds,' he said,
reaching for one of the vials. 'Now, let's see what
you'll take in your tea.'