Son of the Endless Night, page 28
Conor looked down at Father Merlo. "I have to leave; Charley needs to shower and get ready for school. What are you going to do?"
Merlo said with a slight grin, "Retire." A blight of unhappiness occluded Conor's gaze. "Don't mind me," the priest said. "I'm always saying that. Actually I would like to see your brother."
"When?" Conor asked, not troubling to conceal his relief.
"Today, if it can be arranged. The fact that he's in jail presents problems. We should talk to the lawyers first. When can you be ready to leave for— what's the name of that town again?"
"Chadbury. It's about two hours from here. You said you hadn't slept for a while."
"If you don't mind doing the driving, I'll catch a nap on the way."
48
Adam Kurland said, as soon as the visitors were settled in his corner office on the fourth floor of the Deerhorn Valley State Bank building in Braxton, "I think I should make it clear before we get into any discussions about Rich that I don't buy Conor's conviction that his brother is possessed by the devil. I was raised a Unitarian, and I'm not so sure there is any such thing as the devil."
He was sitting on one side of his worktable, an oval of mermaid-green onyx bound in rococco bronze. It was almost the size of a snooker table and looked as if it weighed as much as the bank's vault. All the furnishings in the large rectangular office were similarly old and eccentric-looking, two centuries worth of family hand-me-downs, but someone had coordinated all this eclecticism beautifully. The walls, paneled in squares of ornamental tin, and the cast-plaster ceiling had been painted a uniform butterscotch shade. The centered windows that overlooked the green were uncovered; the morning sunlight seemed blown-in, concussive in its brilliance.
Adam reached behind him and picked up a letter. "Maggie Renquist evaluated the first set of psychological tests Rich did for her when he got out of the hospital, and she's heard the tape Linds made two weeks ago. Based on his test responses she feels he's a classic paranoid schiz, capable of wildly divergent types of behavior. One of the personalities is the proverbial 'lost soul': weak, confused, unable to integrate his primal urges with the demands society has made on him. The other is a maniacal bully, given to outbursts of hostility and rage, which is how he solves his conflicts. He's very strong and agile, as we know, and contemptuous of human life and dignity. Rich calls him 'the demon.' Rightly so. It was a demonic impulse that resulted in Karyn's death. Titanic, unstoppable. But there are no significant religious implications, despite Rich's Catholic upbringing."
Father Merlo, who sat on a sleigh-shaped couch against one wall, an Egg McMuffin in a Styrofoam container in his lap, nodded amiably and glanced at Lindsay Potter, who was standing near the windows. She wore a tweed suit with an apricot blouse and a neat white rectangle of bandage high on her forehead. The direct light of the sun gave her averted face a look of scoured austerity.
Aware of his scrutiny, she said in a quiet voice, "I haven't been able to explain to myself— or to anyone else— what I saw; so I'll stay out of this."
Adam folded and refolded the psychologist's letter, lips pressed together in disapproval of her lack of support. A cabinet clock chimed: ten thirty.
"Maybe he is schizophrenic," Merlo said to Adam. "He could be a lot of things. Psychology's not my field. Neither is comparative theology. I'm trained to deal with certain phenomena I've found to be authentic, and at
Conor's request I'm here to meet with his brother. Under certain conditions. Otherwise I won't see him at all."
"What are those conditions?" Lindsay asked.
Merlo took a bite from his Egg McMuffin. "Nobody sees him but Conor and myself. I can protect the two of us well enough, but when there's a crowd it gets complicated. I don't want any prison guards hanging around with guns. No guns. I'll talk to Rich in a cell if that's the best we can do, but it's not necessary for the sake of security. While I'm with him I'll be in control."
"He's sedated," Adam interjected.
"He was sedated last time, when he went stunting around that room you were in. I use a different kind of tranquilizer: the Word of God."
"I don't think his body could survive that kind of stress again," Conor said vehemently.
"I can't promise there won't be a manifestation."
"I talked to Maggie Renquist about the— the violent physical activity," Adam said, turning his expansion-band watch around and around on his wrist. He stared assuredly at Conor, who had begun to prowl around the perimeter of a badly worn Persian carpet. "Maggie feels that, although Linds and I are trained observers, there is a lot of latitude between what we thought we saw and what actually occurred. None of us have been able to agree on exactly what happened; true? Okay, I'm certainly not an expert on what highly stressful situations can do to a person's mind, so I'm willing to accept Maggie's hypothesis. Her term for the phenomenon is interreactive hysteria."
"Bullshit," Conor exclaimed. "How do you explain the Venetian blind flying apart? The cigarettes? This." He thrust up his bandaged hand. "Do you know what the melting point of gold is? I do: I looked it up. One thousand and sixty-three degrees Centigrade."
Adam sighed. "I don't want to be pulled back into an old argument, but it's worth pointing out that three of us had lit up, it's not a large room, and there was smoke aplenty in the air. As for the blinds, Rich could easily have torn them down. The cross was twisted out of shape, granted. Not inconceivable that someone of your great strength could have done it, unconsciously, under enormous provocation. The burns may have been self-induced, and I can explain that. I've given it considerable thought. Persons who have suffered for years from extreme pain, nerve problems or migraine headaches, learn to control that pain through biofeedback training, first by directing heat to the palms of their hands. I'm willing to believe that your hand was burned through some super-feedback complication, again brought on by stress that had a psycho-religious orientation. Now, I'm more than satisfied with Maggie's appraisal of Rich's mental state and feel that it's something we can begin to build upon for acquittal, NGRI, and I'm afraid I don't think Father Merlo's conclusions will be helpful toward that end."
"I want Rich to see him," Conor insisted. "I want to save his life— but I've become more concerned about his soul."
Adam spread his hands, a gesture that managed to be both accommodating and arrogant.
"Right. I just wanted you to know my position."
Lindsay said unexpectedly, "I was nearly deaf for three days. So was Conor. That terrible noise— how could it have come from a human throat?"
"Come on, Linds, you agreed with me— "
"Adam, I don't think I've agreed to anything," she replied, but not heatedly. Finding his face studiously closed, as if suddenly he had begun to solve difficult trigonometric equations in his head, Lindsay turned instead to Father Merlo, revealing, in a shy lifting of one hand toward her face— which was all but unseeable in the light that drowned her— the beginning of signing, a nervous entrancement with the power he represented, although he was not wearing a Roman collar and more closely resembled a once-sprightly Harlem Globetrotter than a priest. She was fallen away (he would have guessed), but not beyond the needs her religion had formerly served.
Merlo washed down more of his breakfast with a chocolate shake from a container with Ronald McDonald's vaguely malevolent face on it. "Let's hear the tape," he suggested.
Adam played one of the copies he had made on a reel-to-reel Nagra recorder. For the most part the priest listened silently. When the voice that sounded nothing like Richard Devon's said "Ask Conor about lust; ask him about sodomy,'' Lindsay Potter turned her face away from the men in the room and Conor stood with his burned hand clenched and pressed against his lower lip, his cheeks scarlet from humiliation. But no one except Adam looked at him.
"Can't you take a little joke? Of course it's me: Rich."
As they listened, the power of the morning sun was slowly dimmed by clouds; their interconnected shadows on the butterscotch walls, once strong as char, faded to mere transparencies, negative images that powerlessly haunted each other. And then pandemonium, as on the tape Conor uprooted Rich from his chair and pasted him like an effigy against a wall of the interview room.
' 'Demon Serpent, Foul Tyrant, I show you the cross of our most precious Lord!''
"Turn it down!" Lindsay begged, still looking away from them, the reflection of her face trapped at one low edge of a glass-covered collection of powdery lepidoptera; she seemed pinned there herself, nervy and alive on mildewed black velvet. The sound began that she had dreaded: Low, cracking, groaning, a weight of pain like poured lead swiftly hardening in the volute chambers of the ear.
Merlo sat up straight on the couch.
"Let me hear that again! Can you play it fast-forward?"
"Sure," Adam said, reversing the tape, stopping it. He made the adjustment. The sound came to them again after moments of shrill babble.
"-ZAAAARRRAAACHHHHHHHHHHHH! ROHHHMMMMMMMMM BRAAAGHHHHHHH!"
Four seconds, and it was over.
Adam stopped the tape again and looked dourly at the priest, aware that something would be made of this.
Merlo had laced his long fingers behind his head; the exposed palms, pale with their backing of purple-toned licorice, expressed a potency the hands of a Caucasian priest could never have. He scanned the ceiling, obedient to some inner alert. With the light of the sun withheld, the big office seemed colder than it was.
"It almost sounded like a voice to me," Conor suggested after a few moments.
"It was a voice," Merlo assured him, with a casual lack of emphasis, his own voice curiously soft and soothing, as if he had been thinking of a lullaby. But his posture was rigid, his brow sternly knit. "An old, old language which I know by sight but hardly know by ear, because I imagine only the long-dead or the unenfranchised still speak it."
Adam sighed in exasperation.
"What did the voice say?" Lindsay asked, with a tepid shudder.
"I'll have to study the tape," the priest answered; but they all felt he already knew.
49
"Hilllarrrryyyyy!"
Hillary Devon, home in her bed with a cold and fever, drowsy from the medicine she'd been taking, thought she heard her name called: the sound blended poignantly with the receding daydream that had occupied her semiconscious mind, a vision of herself in an old-fashioned white dress in a summery field stippled with yellow flowers not unlike those on the wallpaper in her room. She was on an outing with her father, who was thinner and was allowing her to shave off his beard. So much more handsome that way. She sat up slowly, feeling an ache, a chill.
Maybe the television was all she had heard. It had been on all morning, for company. Soaps. Troubled faces and desperate passions, lingering closeups of actors who had bad complexions under their heavy makeup. The fish in her tank goggled at her and swam over blue gravel, through miniature sunken temples. Her mind felt as distant from her body as the lightweight shadows of the swimmers on the wall behind her study desk were distant from the watery chuckling tank. She rubbed a sore spot on one breast where a button on her pajamas had pressed too hard. It couldn't have been her mother, who was at work, or one of the boys, who were in school— weren't they? She blinked at the dashed red LED numerals on the clock radio. Ten after one. No, the boys were still in school, she had the house to herself, and so nobody had called from downstairs. Outside, then.
"Hillllanryyyy."
Definitely she was being hailed from outside. A girl's voice, but not one she recognized.
Hillary looked toward the windows. Beyond sheer figured curtains over blinds pulled all the way up she saw a dull gray day. That neutral, impoverished look of winter's bottom of the barrel. But snow had been promised by nightfall. She pushed the heavy covers aside and reached for a bottle of nasal spray, slid her feet over the side of the bed, creating static electricity. While she was jetting spray into each held-back nostril, her feet felt around for her slippers. When she had them on she got up and scuffed to the windows, coughing into a tissue, her throat acrid. She looked out through the curtains.
A car drove by on Carroll Street, slush spewing from the rear wheels. A girl was standing on the other side of the street, in front of the Capalettis'. She didn't seem to be waiting for anyone: she was looking directly at Hillary's bedroom windows. She could have been anywhere from twelve to fifteen. She wore a light green cape with darker border, a red tam, a red scarf, red snowboots. She held her hands inside the cape. Hillary was a little too far away to see her face clearly, but she was certain she didn't know the girl.
"Hillary?"
It was odd; she heard the girl, not as if they were a hundred and fifty feet apart with two thicknesses of glass between them, but clearly, conversationally. Hillary was receptive to every nuance of tone. The girl was glad, so glad, that Hillary had come to the window to acknowledge her. She had been waiting a very long time out there. Obviously she must know this girl. But where had they met? And what did she want? So puzzling.
Hillary desperately wanted to be able to think with more precision. Her brain was as dull as the sky of lightless lead. But she did recall fragments of the phone conversation she'd had with Beth LeMaster about the girl whom she supposedly had walked with from Erickson's dance studio to the IGA a couple of weeks ago. Beth had had a description: this was that girl, wearing the identical outfit.
No, but I was alone. Or was I?
Curiouser and curiouser. She couldn't trust her own memory anymore.
Go down and let her in.
That much was distinct in Hillary's mind, it was almost like a command. She must go downstairs immediately and—
But they had a strict rule at the Devons'. Her mother would be furious, unforgiving, if she violated it; would never trust her again. The rule was this: if for any reason she, Hillary, had to be alone in the house, even for a few minutes, she was never to open the door to anyone except a member of the immediate family. No exceptions. Not even if it was a policeman on their doorstep. Policemen's uniforms, Gina had told her, were not difficult for the wrong people to obtain.
The wrong people.
Hillary was aware of a biting knot of concern pulling tightly under the heart, and worse, she felt an almost painful tucking-in, a shrinkage below the navel, the way she always felt when one of the pediatricians had to see her without panties on and she knew his fingers would soon touch her in secret places.
"Hilllllarrryyyyy."
She sounded so cold, lonely and despairing. In need of friendship.
Hillary peered out again. The girl was still standing there, motionless, breath steaming, lifting one booted foot slowly, then the other. A girl of about her own age, who was dying for someone to talk to. Maybe she had no parents, or— or else she had just moved to the neighborhood and hated her school. Hillary knew what it was like to be an outsider, at the mercy of cliques and snobs. She held her own but was far from the most popular girl at Blessed Sacrament. Tried too hard, sometimes, to be liked, which was always fatal. Hillary felt a tender sense of responsibility for the girl who waited, hopefully, for some gesture of kindness.
A Roto-Rooter truck went by fast, heading up the hill; the girl stepped hurriedly back from the curb. She took an ungloved hand from beneath the cape and appeared to wave, meekly, as if she knew what thoughts were going through Hillary's mind.
I'm okay, she might have been saying. I'm just like you. We'll be great friends. Just give me a chance.
Hillary was tired of her illness, now in its third day, bored with lying abed, sick of the television dramas and inane game shows and the long dragging minutes spent alone. She turned from the windows and picked up her robe from the foot of the bed. She was so lost in anticipation of meeting the girl across the street that her revenant reflection springing from the mirror on the partially opened closet door startled her. She hesitated, an icy spray of caution dispelling some of the mists in which her brain was wrapped. She was reminded of The Rule.
Hillary, please hurry.
Just this one time. Her mother wouldn't know.
"Coming," Hillary murmured, as if the summons inside her head had been as insistent as a knock at the stout front door.
She left her room and went slowly down the carpeted stairs to the center hall of the Colonial house. It was darker downstairs, because the drapes in the living and dining rooms, on each side of the center hall, had been closed almost all the way to conserve heat. But the polished hardwood floor of the hall lifted light toward her feet as she reached the bottom of the steps; the light came through narrow windows on either side of the front door, windows covered only with opaque pleated curtains on little brass rods. More misgivings, as she turned to the door; they were prompted by the expression on her mother's face that morning while she reminded Hillary, again, that it was necessary for her to stay in her room unless she needed something from the kitchen, and to keep all doors double-locked.
Don't answer the phone. When I call—
You'll let the phone ring twice, then hang up and call right back. Mother, I know. I know.
A kiss on Hillary's dry hot forehead, a stitch of guilt at one corner of Gina's mouth. I just hate leaving you alone, even for part of the day, when you're sick.
Oh, I'll be fine. Don't worry.
The front door was solid rock maple and had two locks, one just above the curved brass door handle with its thumb-pedal latch release. The first lock was not a very strong one, with only an oval-shaped bolt throw on the inside. The other, eight inches higher, was a massive Medeco dead-bolt arrangement. In the center of the door, at an eye-height Hillary could reach by going up a little on her toes, there was a peephole that gave a fisheye view of the front stoop and the steps leading down to the street. Fourteen steps in all, bordered by azalea bushes now winter-wrapped in burlap sacking, and two levels of terrace surfaced in old porous snow, crossed and recrossed by the tracks of small birds and animals.
