A sentence slashed Graves’ mind: You took me to her, boy. A terrible alarm swept over him. He heard Gwen scream, felt the rope bite into his arms as he struggled to free himself, come to her aid. Then the scream died away just as it had that night, absorbed by fields and hollows, alerting none but owls and field mice, summoning no one who might put an end to pain.
He felt his agitation spike suddenly, a name leap inside him. He quickly stood, took a deep breath, and let the silence surround him. Looking out over the grounds, he was relieved that there were no boats on the water, no campers at the picnic tables, no sounds but what came from the night birds and insects, no movement but the wind through the dense trees and over the otherwise placid water. The stillness sank into him like a drug. Silence, final and eternal, seemed all he yearned for now.
He remained there for a long time, breathing slowly, struggling to climb back onto the ledge he lived upon. In the distance he could see the manor house of Riverwood as it rested grandly on its green hill, silent, princely, surveying its domain. He had never been inside so great a house, save the one his imagination had created. Malverna. Ammon Kessler’s ancestral home. A honeycomb of dungeons and laboratories, dripping chambers fitted with chains and hooks, webs of rope and pulleys. The place where the old woman in the bus station would no doubt have spent her last hours had the tale continued. He could see her strapped to a metal table fitted with drains on either side, her tortured eyes darting desperately right and left as Kessler shouted his orders, slapping the back of Sykes’ head or pinching his ears, using tiny bites of pain to remind his shivering slave of the deeper and more protracted agony he could, at will, inflict.
Graves closed his eyes, drawing down the curtain on a story whose grisly progress he had no wish to imagine.
The darkness had deepened further by the time he opened them again. The sweet smell of mountain laurel drew him helplessly back to the summer following his parents’ death, that night when, as a boy of twelve, he’d approached his own house from the nightbound fields. Once again he could hear the crickets and cicadas, smell the blackberry cobbler bubbling in the kitchen oven, feel the hoe as it bumped against his bare shoulder. He’d been at work all that long day, hoeing a distant field in the relentless Carolina heat. At noon Gwen had made the long walk from the house to the field, bringing him his lunch, a ham and cheese sandwich, iced tea in a Mason jar. They’d talked companionably while he ate, sitting together under the old elm, a sultry summer breeze playing through Gwen’s chestnut hair. She’d left an hour later, pausing where the woods rose up at the far end of the field, waving to him before she’d turned and entered them. After that he’d gone back to his work, carefully weeding the rows of corn and beans and green pepper until the end of day.
By seven, with the sun lowering, he’d finished the last row, slung his hoe over his aching shoulder, and begun the long walk home. He was tired, but it was a good tiredness, one that made him feel older than his years, the “man of the house” his father had instructed him to be.
Night had already fallen by the time he’d closed in upon the spare, isolated farmhouse he’d lived in all his life. That’s why it had struck him as so strange, the fact that as he’d drawn in upon the house, the light Gwen always kept burning for him on the back porch, a shining beacon to guide him home, had suddenly winked out.
CHAPTER 3
As Graves opened the cottage door he recognized that it was not a servant who’d brought breakfast to him. The woman was tall and slender, her silver hair pulled tightly back and secured by a small jeweled clasp. Her eyes were large, gray, perfectly round, and set in a face that seemed sculpted from pale stone. Only the fullness of her lips gave it a touch of sensuousness. A daub of rouge had been applied to her cheeks, but only enough to give them the faintest sense of color, hardly more noticeable than the studiedly modest white pearls in her earlobes.
“Good morning, Mr. Graves,” she said. “I’m Allison Davies.”
She was dressed in a style that struck Graves as elegantly informal, a loose-fitting white blouse and khaki trousers. Even so, she gave off an aura of command. Graves could hear it in her voice and see it in her manner. He was sure the confidence of wealth and power also lay like a fine varnish on the desk in her office and floated invisibly beneath the Tiffany lamp in her sitting room. He saw delicate lace curtains in a large dining room, heard the tinkle of French chandeliers, sniffed the faint musty odor of leather-bound books, and instantly imagined a whole family history to go with such luxurious things, a kind of Hudson Valley version of The Magnificent Ambersons, but tinged with that dread and sense of imminent horror that darkened Graves’ every creative thought, turned every place into some more subtle version of Malverna, every person into Kessler, Sykes, or one of the hapless strangers they’d worked their worst upon.
“I’ve brought your breakfast,” Miss Davies added. She offered a smile, but it was a quick, tentative one, and Graves immediately suspected that despite her wealth she’d known considerable distress, borne the weight of grave responsibilities. There were certain forms of anxiety she would never know, of course, but there were others she would in no way be able to escape. One of Kessler’s idle meditations occurred to him: Money rids the rich of none but vulgar care. He opened the screen door.
But she did not step inside. “I thought you might take it in the open air,” she said. “The table by the pond. I’d like to talk with you, Mr. Graves.”
“All right,” Graves said with some relief. He’d not slept well. The rural look of the cottage too easily recalled the Carolina farmhouse he’d lived in as a boy, the final scenes he’d witnessed there. He was happy to escape it.
They walked to a wooden picnic table beside the lake and sat down opposite each other. Graves placed his hands on its rough wooden surface, suddenly heard straps of rope slapping against its legs, and quickly drew his hands into his lap.
“Well, I guess you’ve been wondering why I asked you here to Riverwood,” Miss Davies said as she pressed the breakfast tray toward Graves.
Graves glanced at the food without appetite.
“To begin with, I’ve followed your work for quite some time,” Miss Davies told him. “A young college student who once spent the summer here first recommended your novels to me. Evidently you’re somewhat popular with college students.”
Graves did not dispute such “popularity,” though he knew that it had been severely limited, little more than a brief flirtation. At first he’d suspected that his student admirers had been drawn to his books by the icy nihilism they found in them. Kessler was their spokesman, rather than Slovak. Later he’d entertained the darker possibility that youthful readers had been attracted to his writing by Kessler’s sadism. The way he ordered Sykes to commit vicious injuries, then sat back and watched the whole terrible ordeal as if it were really Sykes who was the subject of the experiment. When he allowed himself to ponder it, Graves feared that it was precisely this aspect of his books to which his “fans” were drawn, Kessler’s relendess effort to invent a cruelty so hideous, Sykes would finally refuse to enact it, take the pain himself radier than inflict it.
“I must admit that I was rather skeptical,” Miss Davies went on. “After all, different generations don’t usually have the same literary tastes.” She smiled. “But on the whole, I was quite impressed. Particularly by the way you come up with strange dynamics. For your characters, I mean. Their reasons for doing things are sometimes quite unexpected, and yet, once revealed, their motivations seem entirely believable.”
Graves could tell by the somber look in her eyes that this last remark had not been meant to flatter him. Allison Davies was not a fan. She had invited him to Riverwood for one particular facet of his writing, the part that bored into life’s secret festering. It was the darker impulses that interested her, Graves thought. The serpents in the grass. Once again he heard Kessler’s arctic whisper: It is life itself that smiles and smiles … and is a villain.
“I’ve done
a little research on you, Mr. Graves. I know that you’re forty-five. The same age as Slovak. You’ve never married or had children.”
Nor ever would, Graves thought. Since to live alone meant you had no one to protect, no way to fail in the awesome duty of protection.
“You were raised in North Carolina,” Miss Davies continued. “After your parents were killed in a car accident, you and your older sister continued to live on the family farm.” She regarded him solemnly. “But that was only for a year or so, the time you lived alone with your sister.”
Graves nodded silently, hoping it might be enough to prevent her from going on.
“You were only twelve years old when …”
She stopped abruptly, clearly trying to determine how she should continue, by what means she should approach the darkest moment of his life.
“I’ve read the newspaper accounts,” Miss Davies began again. “So I know what happened to your sister.” She gave Graves a strangely anguished look, as if her sympathy alone could make him talk about it, release a floodgate, penetrate a wall of silence that Sheriff Sloane, for all his tenacious effort, had been unable to breach years earlier.
“I’m simply saying, Mr. Graves, that I know what you’ve been through,” she said finally.
He felt his throat begin to close. He managed to get out, “Why does what I’ve been through concern you?”
“Because your life was marked by crime,” Miss Davies answered. “So was mine. So was all of Riverwood.”
He saw the first tiny fissure in the otherwise solid wall of her composure. It was no more than a small movement in her eyes, but in it he detected an inner disarray he knew too well, the aftershock that reverberates through time, moving in endless, undulating waves from the murderous scene of the explosion.
“I don’t know if what I have in mind will work, Mr. Graves. I know only that I have to try it, and that you’re the best person for the job. And, of course, it’s not just because of what happened when you were a boy. It also comes from my having read your books. You have something I require. Imagination.”
For the first time, Graves felt a stir of interest in what Allison Davies might say next. Long ago he’d recognized that imagination was his only gift. The way the world came to him in stories was a way of seeing that had emerged almost immediately with that first story Gwen had read to him, then more powerfully with the first he’d written. Almost unconsciously he had begun to tell stories to his classmates, amazed at how intently he could hold their attention. Often, he’d listened to his own stories in the same way his audience listened to them, without knowing where the tale was going or what the ending would be, as surprised as they were when it all came together. It was a gift that had never deserted him, the one constant in his life, as natural to him as breath. Even during the long year when he’d been mute, sitting silently in the dingy wooden swing that hung in Mrs. Flexner’s front yard as Sheriff Sloane came and went, determined to find out what he’d seen and heard that night, even then, especially then, it had been his imagination that had sustained him, drawn him protectively into the far less dangerous world of his own mind.
Allison Davies leaned forward. “But now, after having met you, I’ve come to think that you also have something beyond that. Beyond imagination. A certain restlessness. I can see it, Mr. Graves. This agitation.”
How had she seen it, Graves wondered, the restlessness she’d spoken of? After all, he could sit still and concentrate for long hours on a single task. He didn’t fidget or have tics. And yet he knew what she was talking about. The jittery undercurrent of anxiety that never left him, and which he felt like a frantic pulse incessantly beating. It had begun the night he’d stopped in his tracks as the light blinked off on the back porch of his home. Since then, he’d never lost the sense of a creature stalking him through a tangled wood, a predator he could hear and smell and even glimpse occasionally as it darted through the undergrowth. In the end he’d even given his stalker a human form, wrapped it in a black leather coat, named it: Kessler.
“Your character. Detective Slovak,” Miss Davies said. “He’s very intuitive. Very observant too. He seems to know a great many things about people.”
As far as Graves was concerned, Slovak knew—or thought he knew—only one thing, that people sought love but rarely found it. It was Kessler who really knew things about people. Particularly the mad drive of even the dullest and most worthless life to sustain itself, to go on seeing and hearing regardless of what it saw and heard. Kessler ceaselessly depended upon this simple, primordial urge to get his way in the world. Of course, Kessler knew other things as well. The drive for power. The ecstasy of conquest. The rapture of cruelty. The delight in hearing someone beg to live, and how the writhing anguish of one person could enter another like a warming sip of rich red wine. Most important of all, because of his long experiment with Sykes, Kessler knew that there was no bottom to the human pit, no act to which terror could not drive a man. Graves wondered if Allison Davies had noticed any of these things in his books as well.
“But Slovak never actually wins, does he?” she asked. “Never actually captures Kessler. Slovak’s goodness is his fatal flaw.”
Graves had never actually thought of it in the same way, but he knew she was right. Slovak’s mighty effort to track Kessler down was made futile by the fact that something forever stayed his hand. The rules of the game. The constraints of conscience.
“But even so, your detective puts things together quite well,” Miss Davies added. “I’ve always been impressed by the way Slovak sees connections—extremely subtle connections—that other people miss.” She stared at him intently, and Graves could see that she was approaching the actual reason she’d asked him here to Riverwood, brought his breakfast, escorted him down to the table beside the lake for this early morning conversation. “Of course, I realize that Slovak isn’t a real person,” she said. “But you are a real person, Mr. Graves. And you created Slovak. You’ve gone with him through fourteen books. So you’ve lived with him for a long time. More than twenty years, to be exact. You must have something in common with him.”
Graves considered the long comradeship he’d forged with Slovak, aging him book by book, adding bulk to his frame, aches to his joints, wrinkling his face, blurring his vision. In book six he was still recovering from a head wound suffered in book five, and he’d never lost the limp he’d gotten in a fall in volume nine. Worst of all, two decades of pursuing Kessler through fog and rain, searching for him in dank cellars and through the teeming wards of charity hospitals and workhouses, had at last produced a harsh, racking cough. But time had inflicted a greater injury still. In book twelve Slovak’s wife had died after an illness that had spanned the two previous volumes. Her death left him with an aching grief as well as a strange, inchoate need for revenge. In the thirteenth volume a spiritual malaise had begun to settle in, slowly draining away the raw vitality that had sustained him for so long. By book fourteen, the latest one to have been published, this dispiritedness had deepened, leaving Slovak glum and sleepless, a spectral figure who spent his evenings slouched in the dimly lighted corners of after-hours bars. By volume fifteen, the one to which Graves had finally come to the end just the previous day, and which had taken him the longest to write, Slovak’s inner life had begun to spiral downward at an ever-accelerating rate. Plagued by hideous visions of past crimes, his mind echoing with the screams of Kessler’s long-dead victims, Slovak’s view of life had turned so intensely grim that his character seemed poised on the brink of an absolute despair.
“You’re like Slovak in many ways, I think.” Miss Davies watched him silently, and Graves wondered if some aspect of Slovak’s decline, the deep loneliness that gnawed at him continually, had suddenly swum into his own face. “I’ve asked you here to solve a mystery, Mr. Graves,” she said finally. “A murder mystery. You see, years ago a young girl was murdered here at Riverwood. Her name was Faye. Faye Harrison. She was my best friend.” She smiled the sor
t of fleeting, rueful smile Graves put on the lips of the burned-out, melancholy women he wrote about now, the ones Slovak met in smoky bars and drew beneath his arm, though with no other motive than to ease and comfort them, all desire extinguished, departed with his wife.
“She was murdered here during an otherwise perfect summer.” Some element of that happier time appeared briefly in Miss Davies’ face, then no less quickly vanished. “Riverwood was wonderful in those days. We all lived together. My whole family. Faye’s father worked as a groundskeeper. She was eight years old when he died. After that, Mrs. Harrison and Faye stayed on here at Riverwood. Mrs. Harrison continued to work as a teacher in a local school.” Miss Davies glanced over Graves’ shoulder, fixed her attention briefly on something in the distance, then returned to him. “Faye was the closest friend I ever had, Mr. Graves. She was part of our family. Beloved. And that summer, the last one we spent together, was the best one of my life.”
For an instant, Graves thought of his own favorite summer. He could remember how beautiful Gwen had looked when she brushed her hair in the evening and the way she’d always checked in on him before going to bed each night. Are you all right, Paul? He had never felt more safe, more loved, more at home on earth than when he’d answered her. Yes, I’m fine.
“Faye had just turned sixteen when she was murdered,” Miss Davies went on. “That was on August 27, 1946. The summer after the war.”
The scene spontaneously materialized in Graves’ mind, a stage set of brilliant summer days, placid lakes, bright flags flying in the small villages of upstate New York, a few young men still in uniform, all America buoyant and full of celebration, relishing the last lingering pleasure of its recent military triumph. He heard the lilting refrain of “Sentimental Journey,” saw crowded troop ships returning from Europe and the Pacific, soldiers running down wide gangplanks into the arms of relatives, friends, lovers.
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