A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  Also by Randall Silvis

  Ryan DeMarco Mysteries

  Two Days Gone

  Walking the Bones

  Edgar Allan Poe Mysteries

  On Night’s Shore

  Disquiet Heart (also published as Doubly Dead)

  Other Novels

  Excelsior

  An Occasional Hell

  Under the Rainbow

  Dead Man Falling

  Mysticus

  Hangtime, a Confession

  In a Town Called Mundomuerto

  The Boy Who Shoots Crows

  Flying Fish

  Blood & Ink

  Only the Rain

  First the Thunder

  Short Story Collection

  The Luckiest Man in the World (winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize)

  Creative Nonfiction

  Heart So Hungry (also published as North of Unknown)

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2019 by Randall Silvis

  Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Sourcebooks

  Cover image © Dragan Todorovic/Trevillion Images, sema srinouljan/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60563-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  II

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  III

  Seventy-Six

  Seventy-Seven

  Seventy-Eight

  Seventy-Nine

  Eighty

  Eighty-One

  Eighty-Two

  Eighty-Three

  Eighty-Four

  Eighty-Five

  Eighty-Six

  Eighty-Seven

  Eighty-Eight

  Eighty-Nine

  Ninety

  Ninety-One

  Ninety-Two

  Ninety-Three

  Ninety-Four

  Coda

  Ninety-Five

  Ninety-Six

  Ninety-Seven

  Ninety-Eight

  Ninety-Nine

  One Hundred

  Excerpt from Two Days Gone

  One

  Two

  Reading Group Guide

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For my sons, Bret and Nathan,

  heart of my soul, soul of my heart

  My thanks, as always, to Sandy Lu, literary agent par excellence,

  and to my inestimable editor, Anna Michels

  I

  Come dance with me, the darkness says

  when rain shines on the cobblestones

  and the bones of memory tick tap tick

  like flies on a body three days dead,

  and the moon wraps itself in diaphanous cloud

  like a mourner’s shroud around an old woman’s head.

  —from “3 a.m.,” Thomas Huston

  When I first spot him, a soft little voice inside my head says Him. He’s the one. I have no doubt that voice came from my Guardian. He had come to awaken the magician in me.

  Brenner is average size, in his thirties maybe, one of those bland Caucasian faces, and he’s walking along so careless and oblivious with his earbuds in that I can’t help being amused. He is fast asleep and doesn’t even know it.

  It’s exactly 10:29 p.m., and dark in only the way a city can be dark, with a sky so black and low that the only thing visible in it is a pair of red blinking wing lights. No stars here. And down on the street there are only pools of light from the streetlamps, so that the darkness pooled around those lights looks oily and slick.

  So I drive past Brenner and turn at the corner. I wonder if he feels my presence, some strange electricity in the air. The fact that he doesn’t stop, look around, change his mind and hustle back to the safety of his cave tells me how numb he really is. He’s out for a stroll after a late dinner. And now he’s full of c
hemicals and preservatives, animal fat and gluten, just another slave ignorant of his enslavement.

  I check out a couple of intersections along his path and find a corner that looks good. An empty parking space three back from the corner. Not a lot of light. No restaurants or bars that might spill out a patron or two.

  So I go walking up to him, not too fast, moving in and out of the light so that I don’t spook him. Excuse me, sir. There’s something wrong with my car. Could you help me please?

  He slows down like he’s not sure what to do. He says, What kind of problem are you having?

  That’s when I get this déjà vu kind of feeling that what I’m about to do has already been done, and that the two of us are here just to reenact it all again. So I tell the guy, like I’m reciting lines from a play, I can’t start my car. The key seems to be locked in the ignition. I can’t even pull it out.

  Okay, he says. I’ve had that happen too. All you have to do is depress the brake and give the steering wheel a quick turn. You have it in Park, right?

  I say, I tried that already. I’ve tried everything. Do you mind having a quick look at it? I don’t know how I’m going to get home otherwise.

  And two minutes later he’s sitting in the driver’s seat. But I’m leaning in from the passenger side like I don’t want to miss a thing he does. He turns the key and, surprise surprise, it turns. That was easy, he says.

  And then I push my cell phone into his side. And because it’s not really a cell phone, he starts twitching and jumping in the seat, even banging his head against the ceiling. I keep zapping him until he falls forward over the steering wheel. Then I grab the tape off the floor in the back, and get it around his face and wrists as fast as I can. When he starts fighting back a little I stun him again, then get the tape around his ankles.

  The hardest part of the whole thing is pulling and dragging him into the passenger side and buckling him in. Then I do three more loops of tape over his mouth and nose. And we’re on our way.

  Honestly, it took no time at all. It flowed like music. I was pure will. Will and intention in a perfect, seamless flow.

  He bounces around in the seat for a couple of minutes, suffocating, and then he goes quiet. I’ve already chosen the place for the rest of it. I park so that the car blocks any possible view of him when I drag him out onto the grass.

  It’s hard to explain the way I feel when the blade starts cutting. It’s like somebody is whispering good good good as the saw rips into him. The saw is Magus’s idea. Maximize the horror, he said. Maximize the fear.

  I kept waiting to feel bad or sick or something, but I never did. And know I never will. Why should I? He was asleep, and I woke him. He was in prison, and I set him free.

  That was the first one. The first step toward Completion. More will follow.

  I am Erebus, son of Khaos.

  One

  The sky was ash. Lake Erie was ash. Even with the midday August sun out there somewhere behind the gray, everything DeMarco looked at through the hospital’s fifth-floor window was painted in the same monochromatic hue. Even the silence outside the window seemed gray, not an actual silence but that of life tamped down, muted, and capped—the silence of a bottled-up scream.

  Ever since he had stepped off the plane, a heaviness in his chest and a mild soreness just above the sternum made him wonder if he was developing some kind of infection. Flying was a notoriously easy way to catch something. He kept waiting for the condition to worsen or fade, but it never did, and he sometimes found himself tapping his breastbone as if that might dislodge the heaviness and allow him to breathe easier.

  This was his third visit to Laraine in as many days, and she had not yet uttered a word to him nor even glanced his way. Technically, he was still her husband, and so felt an obligation to keep trying. Yet what good was he doing here?

  After her suicide attempt, she had been admitted on a 302, involuntary commitment for emergency evaluation and treatment. He had received the phone call in Kentucky in the middle of the night, flew back to Pennsylvania the next morning—with Jayme’s blessing, thank God. He went straight from the airport to the hospital, but was informed that visitors were not permitted in the locked Behavioral Unit, so he returned to his closed-up home an hour south, where, for the next three days, he relied on long walks in the woods and long telephone calls back to Kentucky to keep him from falling into old habits.

  Finally, on the fourth day of Laraine’s hospital stay, she was moved to a private room. He arrived just after lunch that first restraint-free day, and found her sitting up beside the bed in a cushioned chair. She would not look at him or respond to his questions, so he sat on the edge of the bed and told her about the case he had wrapped up in Kentucky just a week earlier, the seven skeletons, the summersweet bushes and the butterflies.

  He told her about the amateur cold case investigators he had worked with and sometimes against over the past few weeks: Hoyle, the obese retired medical examiner; Vincente, the retired lawyer; and Rosemary Toomey, the retired librarian. He recounted his ordeal in the mountains, and described Cat and Virgil Helm, two of the kindest people he had ever known, despite the fact that Cat had tried to frighten him away with a gunshot, and then, failing to chase him off, had trapped him overnight in an elaborate bear cage.

  He told her about the government-hating McGintey brothers and Reverend Royce, the slimy TV evangelist. And about Toad Burl and Dr. Friedl, two thoroughly despicable men. From time to time as he talked, a light seemed to flicker in her eyes, but then she would close her eyes as if to deny him that light. Eventually he surrendered to her silence and returned home to fall asleep in his chair with the television on.

  On his second visit, he returned to the hospital around 2:00 p.m. This time she was in her bed, so he sat beside her in the cushioned chair. And this time he told her about meeting the writer Thomas Huston the previous summer, and the horror that befell the Huston family that fall. “It was rough,” he said, “finding a friend like Tom, and then losing him so quickly.” And he told her about Jayme, how she was helping him to recover from all that, and had convinced him to take the RV trip to Kentucky. “Can you picture that?” he asked. “Me in an RV? It was touch and go between us for a while, but she hung in there. And now I’m not drinking like I used to. Getting more exercise too. Watching what I eat.”

  And finally, because the more he shared with her, the easier it became, he told her about the dreams he had had of his and Laraine’s son while in the mountains of Kentucky. “Those dreams have helped me probably most of all,” he said. “Seeing him half-grown-up like that, not a baby anymore. I can’t even describe how much good it’s done me.”

  When he spoke of Ryan Jr., she had turned her face to the window. He watched her reflection in the glass, her mouth in a scowl. Did she resent him for having those dreams, and for finding some comfort in them? When he touched her hand, she jerked it away. And so he’d left her again.

  And now, on his third visit, as he stared across the gray parking lot at gray water melting into a gray sky, he had all but resolved that the best way to help her was to leave. They shared a wound that would never heal, and he knew that her ache was just as deep and fresh as his, but the loss of a child was more often a divisive ache than a binding one. Her ache was all grief and anger, his grief and guilt. Deep in his heart he wanted no relief from the pain because he deserved none. So how could he ever do her any good? On the other hand, why had she given the hospital his telephone number? Was it only so that he would suffer more?

  It was unlike him to give up so easily. After all, he had remained married to Laraine for over a dozen years despite their estrangement. Despite her silent treatment all that time and the way she regularly punished him by sleeping with men she barely knew. One of those men had hung around long enough to call 911 after she used the blade of her scissors to etch diagonal lines across both slender wrists, just as DeMarco’
s mother had done a quarter century earlier. He wondered if that was Laraine’s way of saying First you killed your mother, and now you’re killing me.

  Over the past three days, he had been her only visitor. He wanted to question the head nurse’s advice to him an hour earlier, but doubted his own judgment, and his own motivations.

  To the window, he said, “I want to stay, because I want to be here for you. But…according to Nurse Ratched out there, your doctor thinks maybe I’m the cause of your…lack of communication. Seeing as how you respond to everybody else except me.”

  She sat in her bed and stared expressionless at the wall, the ceiling, the window—anywhere but into his own eyes. Did she even know anymore why she behaved this way? If a nurse came in to administer a pill or take her pulse, Laraine would smile, answer a question, come quietly alive again for those brief moments. But if DeMarco spoke to her in the nurse’s presence, his words were ignored; they left no trace on her.

  Yet he stayed. He talked until he had nothing more to say. Sat beside her, stood at the window, leaned against the wall. When her eyes closed, he simply looked at her, remembered how she used to be. Remembered the laughter of the early years and the insatiable hunger they had felt for each other. Other than his mother, Laraine was the first woman he had ever loved. And how different those two loves were, just as his love for his baby son was different, and now his love for Jayme.

  It was a funny thing, love. It could take so many forms. Could be so freeing, or imprisoning.

  He felt tied to each of them. Least of all to his mother, the one longest gone. Still, he wished he had been with her on her final night. Instead he had been in Panama, barely a man, reducing a neighborhood to ash.

  And he would always be tied to Ryan Jr. too, although, strangely, less so to him as well, ever since those dreams in the Kentucky mountains. Or no, not less, but differently. Much of the heaviness had lifted. When he thought of his son now, he saw him less frequently as a baby, and more often as the twelve-year-old in his dreams. And his chest was warmed not by grief and guilt but wonder and hope.

  But seeing Laraine like this, knowing that he, ultimately, was to blame for her condition…

  “So I guess I’m going to go,” he told her. “Not because I want to. But because I want what’s best for you. I want you to be happy. I want you to move on. If I can, you can.”