A Game of Ghosts

by John Connolly

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘But you continue to do what you do, and it almost cost us Sam.’

  Parker remained silent.

  ‘So why keep doing it?’

  ‘That question doesn’t have a simple answer either.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I do it because I’m afraid that if I don’t, nobody else will. I do it because if I turn away, someone else might suffer the way I have. I do it because it’s an outlet for my anger. I do it for reasons that even I don’t understand.

  ‘But mostly,’ said Parker, ‘I do it because I like it.’

  ‘You’re not going to stop, are you?’

  ‘No. I’ve tried. It never took.’

  Frank wiped his mouth. It wasn’t very warm in the room, but he was perspiring. He watched cars passing slowly on the street, the glow of their headlights catching one side of his face, freezing him half in shadow, half in light.

  ‘But when that man abducted Sam, he planned to kill her.’

  ‘Sam didn’t die.’

  ‘She could have!’

  ‘She didn’t. She won’t. No harm will come to her.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘Frank, look at me.’

  Frank turned away from the window.

  ‘Rachel once told me that after your son died, you insisted on collecting her every day from school until she was sixteen. When you weren’t in town, your wife had to do it instead, and you called her to make sure. You only stopped when Rachel handcuffed herself to a railing in protest.’

  This was true. It was one of the things Parker loved about Rachel.

  ‘They were plastic cuffs,’ said Frank huffily, clutching at the nearest straw.

  ‘That’s not the point. There were countries under military rule with looser curfews than your home.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing. Rachel has been put at risk by your work. Now Sam has, too. Christ, she saw a man die because of it!’

  ‘Frank—’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Frank!’

  Frank Wolfe stopped talking.

  ‘We can’t leave these people to wander the world unchallenged. They’re predators. If they can’t feed in one place, they move on and find easier prey, and they continue inflicting pain until they’re stopped. We can hide our children away, and lock our doors, and close our ears, but they’ll just go after others instead.’

  ‘But she’s your child,’ said Frank.

  ‘They’re all someone’s children.’

  A light went on in the hall. The innkeeper appeared in the doorway. His office was at the back of the house, where a trellised walkway curved to the property in which he and his wife lived. He must have heard them arguing and come to find out the cause.

  ‘Is everything okay, gentlemen?’ he asked.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Parker. ‘Strong opinions.’

  The innkeeper gave them both the hard eye before deciding that violence wasn’t imminent.

  ‘Well, at least you’re the only guest,’ he said. ‘I guess you can be as strong as you want with them. Goodnight.’

  He left them alone again. Frank stood.

  ‘I should get home,’ he said.

  ‘I’m parked in back. I’ll drop you.’

  ‘I can drive.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Parker. ‘Just come by and pick up your car in the morning.’

  He spoke gently. The coffee had helped Frank some, but Parker wasn’t sure that it was enough. He was prepared for another argument, but didn’t get it.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Frank. ‘But I can call a cab.’

  Parker told him it was no trouble. He had his car keys in his pocket, and the Wolfe property was only a ten-minute ride away – twenty in this weather.

  The innkeeper’s intervention appeared to have put an end to any further discussion of Parker’s vocation, but he wasn’t so deluded as to believe he could change Frank Wolfe’s mind about anything. Nevertheless, he felt that progress of some kind had been made. They had talked, and been reasonably civil with each other. And Frank was right: they were both fathers who had lost children, and somehow they had come through that loss – not without ongoing pain, and not without fractures, but they had endured, and each had a daughter whom he loved, and memories, however fragmented and imperfect, of the dead, memories that he cherished. The difference between them was that his departed child did not visit Frank Wolfe in the night – or, if he did, it was only in dreams.

  They drove in silence to the Wolfe house, mostly because Frank began snoozing five minutes into the ride. The ice had been cleared from the center of even the minor roads, but stretches of it still remained at the margins, and the new snow meant that the car headlights couldn’t pick out the telltale glisten in the dark. Parker drove carefully, and in time they came to the Wolfe property. A light burned in the hallway, and another illuminated the front step and a patch of the yard beyond. The converted stables in which Rachel and Sam lived were quiet and dim. Had it been earlier, Parker would have asked to say a last goodbye to Sam. It pained him to be so close yet not be able to hold her or speak with her.

  Parker stopped the car but remained staring at the building in which his daughter slept. Frank came awake beside him, and the two men sat together without speaking. Eventually, Frank said:

  ‘Rachel worries that Sam is hiding some kind of trauma over what happened. But I worry that she isn’t.’

  Parker turned to him.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Frank, ‘I hear her talking to another person. Not when she’s playing with her dolls, or when the dog is in the room with her, but when she’s entirely alone. She speaks, and she listens, and she speaks again. I know kids are supposed to have imaginary friends, but this is different. I can’t explain it. It frightens me, if that makes any sense. There’s an intensity to these conversations. Even her voice changes. It’s older, somehow. More serious. It’s like an adult’s voice. Who can she be talking to in that way?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Parker lied, but he thought that perhaps the other man saw the lie and simply chose not to call him on it.

  Frank opened the car door and got out.

  ‘Thanks for the ride,’ he said.

  ‘It was no trouble. And Frank?’

  Frank Wolfe leaned on the car door, waiting.

  ‘Thank you for looking out for both of them.’

  Frank nodded. No more was said. They were done.

  13

  May MacKinnon advanced through the snow in her yard and paused at the edge of the woods, where the light from the bulb outside the back door began to fade. She looked back to see Alex at the kitchen window, watching her. She waved at him, and tentatively he waved back.

  May scanned the trees with the flashlight, trying to use it to pierce the shadows instead of create more, but the night simply swallowed the beam, like a light stick thrust into a pool of pitch. She could see no signs of movement, no people. She moved closer, advancing marginally into the woods. She didn’t want to go too far because the ground was uneven and her boots only came up to the lower part of her shin. She’d had enough of cold, wet feet.

  But neither did she wish to leave the light.

  The flashlight was bugging her. It wasn’t long since the batteries had been replaced, and she hadn’t used it very much since then. The beam should have been stronger than this. She used it to examine the snow between the trees. It was an evergreen wood, but the coverage offered by the foliage wasn’t perfect, and so most of the terrain was white. None of it had been disturbed, and no footprints were visible, but that didn’t seem possible. People had been walking through it not minutes before. She’d seen them, for crying out loud: men and women, but no children. They’d all been adults, and some had even looked old enough to be grandparents.

  May didn’t believe in ghosts. She might have enjoyed Scottish ancestry, but that didn’t mean she was prey to fairy tales and midnight shockers. She didn’t even go to church, although she was
not entirely an atheist. Her view was that if a greater power existed in the universe, it did not look like an old man with a beard, and did not work through saints and angels. It didn’t care if hymns were sung to it, and it didn’t listen to prayers. It was a presence without name or form, but it was in everything that surrounded her, and every facet of her own being. She was a pantheist of sorts, but that word was unfamiliar to her. Now she would never hear it, and never learn more of it, because she would soon be dead. She would join her husband, and the truth of the universe would at last be revealed to her.

  But she did not feel the imminence of her own mortality as she stood among the trees, not unless the chill of it was concealed by the night air; and the pain to come was one with the biting at her fingertips, and at the end of her nose, and at the lobes of her ears; and the tears she would shed at the end were inseparable from the two that fell to her cheeks as the cold touched her eyes; and a sudden sharp wind cut the air like the breath of a presence unseen, an expired creature with no warmth to it that exhaled only as part of its imitation of life.

  There is nothing here, she thought. I was mistaken.

  The house called to her with its light and its warmth. She backed away from the woods and did not turn from them until she was almost within touching distance of the door. Only then did she take her eyes from the trees, returning to the safety of her home.

  And death entered with her.

  14

  It was the law of such things: having spent so much time talking with Frank Wolfe, Parker found himself unable to sleep when he returned to the inn. Instead he sat at the desk by his window and worked more slowly than before through the details of Jaycob Eklund’s life and career. He had no particular hope of a pattern emerging at this early stage, or of spotting a single crucial detail that might have explained Eklund’s disappearance, but this background knowledge would be useful once he began searching Eklund’s home and office. It was groundwork, and one ignored the mundane at one’s peril.

  After half an hour he was no wiser than when he started, but had built up a picture that corroborated Eklund’s ex-wife’s description of a solitary man. Ross had come through with business and personal credit card statements going back two years, but they gave no sign of any great vices on Eklund’s part. Parker saw some motel costs, the kind that would have been replicated on his own expenses – business trips requiring overnight stays on behalf of clients who might have begrudged any accommodations more expensive than a Red Roof Inn, and any repast more lavish than mall dining – but nothing to suggest a man indulging himself, or anyone else; gas; stationery; clothing. And books. Eklund ordered a lot of books.

  Apart from the occasional blowout at an Olive Garden or Outback Steakhouse, and the growing library, Parker might have been looking at a version of his own life, which depressed him slightly. He closed his laptop and undressed for bed. His room was one of the more masculine at the inn, but only by the standards of the rest, which tended toward the kind of rustic chic that Parker associated with wealthy spinsters. His pillows had lace edging. If he died here in his sleep, his friends would never stop laughing.

  Before he slept, he prayed for Rachel and Sam. He prayed for Frank Wolfe and his wife, too. Whether his prayers were in vain or not, he didn’t care. It was the effort that counted.

  But he knew that, somewhere, those prayers were being heard.

  15

  ‘Mom.’

  The voice was a whisper at May MacKinnon’s ear. She woke in shock, and felt a small hand cover her mouth. Her son was standing by the bedside in his pajamas, his face lit by the glow of the digital clock on the nightstand. It was eleven-thirty. He should have been asleep.

  ‘Mom,’ he repeated. ‘I think there’s someone downstairs.’

  He removed his hand from her mouth. She listened, but all was quiet.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she whispered.

  ‘I heard a noise.’

  She climbed from her bed. She was wearing an old sweatshirt and a pair of leggings that were torn at the knees. Her feet were bare. The house wasn’t very old, and didn’t have the nightingale floor of her childhood home, a medley of sounds that plagued her late teens and early twenties, making it impossible to sneak in or out without causing a racket that could have woken the dead.

  Alex tried to take her hand, but she pushed it gently aside.

  ‘You wait here,’ she told him. ‘If you hear anything that sounds like—’

  Like what? Like I’m being raped? Murdered?

  She settled for ‘If you hear anything bad’ – whatever that might mean – ‘you call the police.’

  There was a landline by her bedside which Alex could use. She picked up her cell phone from beside the clock and slipped it into the pocket of her leggings, then reached under the bed and pulled out a hammer. She didn’t like guns, and certainly didn’t hold with keeping them in a house where a boy’s curiosity might lead to an accident. There was a limit to how much damage Alex could inflict on himself with a hammer.

  ‘Mom!’

  He tried to hold her back by yanking on her sleeve, but she tugged it away from him. She would go to the hallway and listen. If she detected any sound that suggested the presence of an intruder, anything at all, then she’d lock the bedroom door and call the cops herself. The Millwood PD had a pretty good reputation for responding quickly to emergencies, especially if they involved a woman and child under threat, but she wasn’t about to cry wolf too soon. Alex had the jitters and, truth be told, she did too. She’d been dreaming when he woke her. In her dream, she and Alex had been at his bedroom window, watching figures move through the trees. She had gone outside with a flashlight – she’d been reading about the gypsies at the mall and thought some of them might have been in the woods – but found no signs of footprints in the snow. Then she had gone back inside and—

  That was when Alex had spoken.

  Wait, she thought. What was the dream?

  She was still struggling to separate the real from the imagined, two realms bleeding into one, as she walked to the bedroom door. She couldn’t remember what had happened between returning to the house and going to bed. She was confused, and her head was throbbing.

  She stepped into the hallway. The little night-light in the outlet between her room and the bathroom was working, but the lamp at the bottom of the stairs was dark. She always kept it lit, using one of those eco bulbs that were supposed to last for years and might help to save the environment in the absence of anyone else giving a rat’s ass. It shouldn’t have gone out.

  Alex stood in the doorway. He was crying. Why was he crying? She wanted to hug him, but there wasn’t time, not now. She held on to the doorframe as she listened. It was cold and damp to the touch. She rubbed the condensation between her fingers. The whole house was freezing. She hadn’t noticed it in her bedroom because that room was always cold. The radiator had been on the fritz for a week, so she’d been making do with a heavy blanket over her comforter and a hot water bottle to warm the bed before she got in. She’d meant to call someone to take a look at it, but she was afraid it might be a sign of a larger problem with the heating system, and money was tight this month. Now it seemed as though her suspicions had been confirmed, and the whole house was about to turn to ice. Damn: that wouldn’t be cheap to fix.

  ‘Mom,’ said Alex for the last time, but she didn’t pay any attention. She pulled the door closed behind her, turning the handle so that it would make no noise, and her son’s face was lost to her. The heating had given her something practical on which to concentrate. No more dreams; no more shapes in the woods, half glimpsed. And as for burglars, they’d be better off leaving before they froze to death instead of wasting their time trying to find anything of value in this house, although they could take the TV before they left. That was acting up as well, and the insurance would probably cover one of those new HD models.

  She moved slowly down the stairs, the hammer in her hand. She saw more condensation on the walls.
It made no sense. Could the temperature really have plummeted so fast? And she wasn’t cold. That was the other peculiar aspect. The house might have been challenging the Arctic in the chill stakes, but she remained warm. How could she not be cold?

  The moonlight poured through the glass pane above the front door, liquid and heavy. Instinctively she raised her hand to it, as though she might grasp it in her palm, raise it to her lips, and taste it, the sweetness of it trickling like honey down her chin.

  Her hand stopped. Her breath stilled.

  She heard movement in the living room.

  16

  Tobey Thayer had a gift. It was not one of which he spoke very often, and was as much a curse as a blessing – more the former, in fact, because it brought him little joy and great unease – but it was his, and it made him special.

  Thayer was resolutely average in all other respects: average build and height, averagely handsome with an averagely good-looking wife, averagely wealthy by the standards of the circles in which he moved. His two kids, thankfully, were doing better than average, and both were now at college, one at NYU and the other at Amherst. Their combined fees and living costs were two of the reasons he wasn’t wealthier, but most of the time he didn’t mind.

  He owned Thayer’s Discount Furniture Sales, which had outlets in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. The bulk of his income was derived from the warehouse area in back of the stores, which was where he displayed the mismatched, end-of-line, and slightly damaged goods that he sourced from suppliers for dimes on the dollar, and sold to his customers at just enough of a markup to satisfy both his own needs and theirs, which was the trick to being a good businessman. Oh, he did well enough on new suites and armchairs, but they involved deposits and ordering. A great deal of the warehouse business was cash on the nail, with no returns. Rain or shine, the warehouse was always full of stock, as well as the buyers for it. All of Thayer’s staff started out in the warehouse. It was where they learned their trade, just as he had learned his from his father, Freddie, although Tobey differed from his father in that his own home was furnished entirely from the best of the new, whereas old Pop Thayer had filled his family home with the kind of warehouse junk at which even the most desperate of his customers would have balked. Thayer blamed his back problems of late middle age on the family living room suite, having realized too late in life that the floor would have offered a more ergonomically advisable option.