The Glister (2 page)

He'd found the Wilkinson boy by accident, at the end of a chain of ordinary incidents and events that, in themselves, should have added up to nothing. It was Halloween, around ten in the evening; Morrison had been at the old vicarage, dealing with a minor vandalism incident, going out on foot because he felt he needed a stretch, and because, at that time, he thought people found it reassuring to see a policeman on the beat. The weather had been pretty harsh, clear but bitterly cold for the time of year, and Morrison had been on his way back to the police house to brew up some tea when he came upon a man and two boys at the near end of the West Side Road, which led out to the old rail yards and the little wood that everybody in the Innertown called the poison wood, because the trees, though still alive, were strangely black, a black that didn't look like charring or the result of drought, but rather suggested that the trees were veined with a dark, poisoned sap, black, but with a trace of livid green in the essence of it, a green that was bitter and primordial, like wormwood, or gall. The boys looked scared and unhappy, but they also had an embarrassed air, and Morrison had been suspicious to begin with. He thought something had happened to frighten them, but he wondered if they were as innocent as they wanted to appear. He hadn't been in the job long, and his first line of defense in most situations was skepticism. That was what he thought being a local policeman was all about in the end, a contagious sense of calm and a readiness to take things with a pinch of salt. Still, these boys had been scared, no doubt about that; though, to begin with, he couldn't make much sense of their story, other than that it had to do with a boy called Mark, some old den out by the poison wood, and a spool of cotton thread.

Meanwhile, the man with them, a middle-aged widower called Tom Brook, whom Morrison knew somewhat through family connections, wasn't helping matters any. In a gray cardigan and blue corduroy trousers, though without a coat in spite of the cold, Brook had the look of someone who has just left his cozy living room, pulled on a pair of boots, and gone out into the night without thinking. It was a look Morrison had come to know well, the look of someone singled out, in the middle of ordinary matters, by chance, or perhaps by fate. Trouble was, Brook had got one garbled version of the story already, and he kept asking questions that, for Morrison, had no context and so only confused matters.

“All right,” Morrison said, finally. “Let's start this again, at the beginning.” He spoke slowly, quietly, as he had trained himself to do, to inspire calm in others. He had practiced his calm look in the mirror, as he ran through lines in his head that he thought would be reassuring. He wished he looked older. Or not so much older as more experienced. People knew it wasn't that long since he'd worked as a lowly security guard—a night watchman, in effect—at one of Brian Smith's properties in the Innertown. To date, he'd not learned much in the job, but he
had
learned one thing, which was that people didn't quite trust young policemen. “Who, exactly, went where and how long ago?” As soon as he finished speaking, he was annoyed with himself. He'd just broken one of his principal rules. One question at a time. Take it slowly. Keep everybody calm, get one person to talk.

Tom Brook looked at the boys, then shook his head. “Well,” he said, “I know it sounds odd. He's only been out there a short while, really.” He turned to one of the boys, who had started to cry openly now. “It's all right, Kieran,” he said. “The policeman's here. We'll find him—”

“Find who, Tom?” Morrison's mind was already drifting back to tea and digestives at the police house. Maybe to sit awhile with Alice, quietly together at the kitchen table, in those days before sitting with Alice had not been a chore. This was going to be nothing, he could feel it. Maybe he was new to the job, but he had an instinct for police work. This would be nothing more than a silly prank, or some misunderstanding. He didn't want to spend the rest of the night wandering around the poison wood, looking for some runaway who'd only been gone for an hour and a half.

“It's Mark Wilkinson,” Tom Brook said. He already seemed less sure of what had transpired. Morrison's native skepticism was obviously catching. “They say he went into the woods and he hasn't come back.”

Morrison looked at the boys. It was odd: they really had got a scare, that was obvious, but the taller lad seemed as much embarrassed as frightened. The boy Brook had addressed as Kieran was smaller, a little stocky, but with a sweet, almost girlish face; he was close to desperate, a step away from hysterical even, looking from Morrison to Tom Brook as if he suspected that they were the ones who had made his friend vanish into thin air. “So,” Morrison said, “tell us exactly what happened. From the beginning.”

In spite of their different emotional states, the boys were utterly consistent. It seemed they had been playing a game out in the woods, and because the game was an old Halloween ritual, probably dating to pagan times, Morrison quickly returned to his suspicion that this was all a storm in a teacup, that the disappearance was some kind of schoolboy's hoax, a piece of silly theater that had simply gone too far. Possibly the taller boy, whose name was William, had been party to the hoax all along, but then something had happened that wasn't in the script, which left him torn between worry and skepticism—and also embarrassed, because the game they had been playing was a girl's game, one that Morrison only knew about from one of those “Did You Know” type articles he'd seen in the paper the previous week. Maybe Mark, or one of the others, had read the same article about how, once upon a time, a girl would take a bobbin and tie it to one end of a length of cotton thread. She would go out into the woods and, after repeating the necessary spell, she would toss the bobbin out into the dark as far as it would go, keeping a tight grip on the other end of the line. The bobbin would fly out into the darkness and land some distance away, hopefully still attached to the line, while the girl stood waiting for some sign—a movement, a tremor, something tugging urgently, or gently, at the line, calling her out into the dark. The article had said that, when they followed the line out to where the bobbin had landed, those pagan girls believed they would meet their future lovers in spirit form, and so perhaps learn who it was they were to marry when the appointed time came. Mark had suggested to the others that they should play this game out in the poison wood, to make it more real; he had even seemed to think the trick would produce some result, that there really would be someone waiting in the dark at the end of the line.

“So what did you think you would find?” Morrison asked William. “You're a bit young to be thinking about a wife.”

William looked even more embarrassed than before. “We weren't looking for
wives,”
he said, with obvious distaste.

Morrison gave him an encouraging smile. “So what were you looking for?” he asked. William stared at his feet then, not wanting to look any more foolish than he already felt. Morrison turned to Kieran, who had begun to calm down. “How about you?” he said. “What were you looking for out there in the woods, son?”

Kieran shot a glance at William, who shook his head but kept his eyes fixed on the ground. “We were looking for the Devil,” he said, after a moment. “It was Mark's idea. He said this thing about girls and husbands and stuff was all rubbish, it was really a trick to find the Devil.” Now that he had stopped crying, he seemed angry. Or indignant, rather—and Morrison sensed that Kieran was one of those boys who would grow up angry at the world for occasionally including
him
in its problems.

“The Devil?” he said, in his best skeptical-policeman's voice.

Kieran stared at him. “Yeah,” he said angrily.

Morrison turned to Tom Brook. He wanted to say something reassuring, to tell them all that this was either a hoax gone wrong, or one of those minor mysteries that everybody laughs about afterward, but Brook spoke before he could say anything. The man looked both sad and relieved.

“You don't go looking for the Devil, son,” he said. Both boys looked up at him then. He was the older man, so he had their attention. “Didn't anybody ever tell you that?” he said. He turned to Morrison and gave a sad, but conniving smile. “You don't need to go out to the woods searching for the Devil,” he said again. “The Devil finds
you,
doesn't he, Constable?”

That had been the story. Daring himself to look the Devil in the eye, Mark Wilkinson had thrown his bobbin into the dark reaches of the poison wood and, when nothing happened, he had walked out alone, tracing the line to where it had fallen. The last thing he'd said to the others before he vanished into the shadows was that, if he didn't come back right away, they shouldn't wait for him. Then, with a laugh, he had walked out of the ring of flashlight and vanished among the trees. William and Kieran had waited a long time for him to come back, but they were too scared to go out into the Devil's night to look for him. Instead they had panicked and run, leaving their one flashlight behind. Morrison heard their story patiently and decided that the best thing—the only thing—to do was to pack these boys off to their beds, and go out into the poison wood to investigate. First, though, he would go by the Wilkinson house, to see if young Mark was tucked up in bed, laughing at the trick he had played on his friends, while congratulating himself on his lucky escape from the Devil. It was nothing, this story, just a kids' game, and Morrison was surprised the boys had got into such a state about it. Still, the poison wood was a pretty scary place at night, even with company and a flashlight. “All right. Here's what we'll do,” he said, “I'll go out there and take a look. If nothing else, then maybe I'll find your torch, at least. Mark is probably back at his house now, watching TV. You boys get off home, too. There's nothing to worry about.” He turned to Tom. “Maybe Mr. Brook could see you back?”

Brook nodded. “It's not far,” he said. “I've got nothing better to do,” he added.

That was when Morrison remembered what a very special anniversary for Tom Brook this night was. It was a story everybody knew, a story Tom would trail silently around with him for the rest of his days, defined by this one event, this one painful fact. For it had been around this time last Halloween that Tom's wife, Anna, had died from a huge, inexplicable growth in her brain that had eventually driven her insane. She had been reduced, at the end, to an abject, desperate creature who, lying in her own bed, believed she had been buried alive. For several days before she finally gave up the ghost, she'd clawed desperately at the imaginary box in which she thought herself enclosed; when he had gone round to the house briefly to see if he could do anything to help, Morrison had been reminded of the story of Thomas à Kempis, the saint who really
had
been buried alive, a fate that was only discovered years later, when Thomas was disinterred for a more distinguished burial site after his canonization. Contemporary descriptions said that the body was wizened and twisted, the arms curled up under the coffin lid as if the author of the
Imitatio Christi
had died while trying to push his way out, the fingertips a robin's pincushion of splinters and dried blood, where he had scratched and clawed at the wood in his desperation to be free. Morrison had heard that story in school, while his mother was on her sickbed; after she died, he would go to the churchyard and lie on the grave with his ear pressed to the ground, listening. He had been terrified that his mother was still alive down there, with six feet of earth holding her down, scratching and crying to be free. When he'd heard about Anna Brook, Morrison tried to imagine how he would have felt if he'd been obliged to listen to his mother calling his name, in some bloodied darkness deep under the ground, and been unable to do a thing to help her. That had been Tom Brook's fate: to see his wife buried alive, to watch her clawing at her coffin lid, to hear her screaming for help, and be forced to sit helplessly by. Tom knew, as Morrison knew, that his wife wasn't actually buried alive, that her predicament was imaginary, but her agony was no less real for that. It had been a terrible time and Morrison was disgusted with himself for forgetting this anniversary so easily. “Thanks, Tom,” he said. He wanted to say something else, something commemorative perhaps, but he didn't know what. He turned back to the boys. “There's nothing to worry about,” he said. “Everything's going to be fine.”