by Joe McKinney
When the phone rang, the first thought that went through Keith Anderson’s mind was that he had overslept. It would be Levy on the end of the line, calling to bitch him out for being late. Anderson was so miserably tired, and it was all he could do to focus on the glowing green display of his digital clock.
“Four o’clock,” he grumbled. “Damn it.”
Next to him, Margie said, “What? What is it?” She sounded like she wasn’t really awake.
“I got it,” he said, and swung his legs out from under the covers and ran a hand over his face as he tried to focus on the caller ID.
He didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?” he said.
Margie sat up next to him and said, “Who is it?”
He gave her a hold on a second wave of his hand and listened, and right away he was wide awake. “Paul,” he said, “Paul, slow down. You’re going too fast for me. Where are you?”
“I’m in a Stop-n-Go parking lot at the corner of Rosa Parks and Utley. You know the one?”
“I can find it,” Anderson said. “Paul, what’s going on?”
“When you get here,” Paul said.
“No, Paul. Tell me. What the hell’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you everything when you get here. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.” There was a pause on Paul’s end, then he said, “It’s about Rachel, my wife. She’s gone. He’s got her.”
That last part made no sense to Anderson. The air raid siren in his head that ordinarily would have been sounding the alarm was silent, and it never even occurred to him to wonder why. He looked down at his milky white old-man legs and sighed thoughtfully. Margie was sitting up beside him now, one hand on his shoulder.
“Who was that?”
“Officer Paul Henninger,” he said.
“You mean, the one who—”
“Yeah.”
“What did he want?”
“He wants me to meet him as soon as possible.” Anderson turned so that he was facing her. “Margie, I think all this is almost over. For better or for worse, it’s almost over.”
He put one hand over hers and gave her a reassuring pat.
“There’s so much I want to say, Margie. So many things I’m sorry for. It’s like the world has been pulled out from under me and I’m standing here trying to figure out where it all went. I don’t even know where to begin.”
She gave his fingers a gentle squeeze.
He squeezed back.
“Did I tell you I’ve been seeing Bobby’s face in every crowd I see? It’s like...when John died. All over again.”
If that worried her, she gave no sign of it. She knew him better than anybody else. Maybe she knew he had been seeing ghosts.
“We’re both hurting. I’m sorry, too.”
He nodded, and it amazed him how much they could say to one another without using any words. They were a team, the two of them. Two people, one love. He was, he realized, a very lucky man.
“I’ll make you some coffee,” she said.
He gave her a smile. “Thanks, Margie.”
***
Paul watched Anderson’s car pull into the parking lot. He crossed over to it and opened the passenger side door and climbed in. Anderson didn’t speak. He sat there, waiting for Paul to make the first move.
Paul stared out the window for a moment. Then he looked at Anderson. He saw the picture of Anderson’s dead son over the speedometer, and it made him think of the last time he and Anderson were together in the car.
“Turn off your voice recorder,” Paul said.
Without saying a word, Anderson reached beneath his Mr. Rogers sweater and took a small, digital voice recorder from his shirt pocket. He showed it to Paul and pushed STOP. Then he put it on the dashboard.
“You’re not gonna want a record of this anyway,” Paul said.
“No,” Anderson said, “you’re probably right.”
Paul told him everything. He started with his father, with the death of his father, and he told him about Mexico and Magdalena Chavarria and the murders at the Morgan Rollins Iron Works and the boy from the train yard and how the bodies disappeared from the morgue.
“But you know about that already,” Paul said. “You saw your friend that night we went into the superstructure at Morgan Rollins.”
“Yes,” Anderson agreed. He appeared to think about that for a moment. “Is that what your father is? Is he some kind of ghost?”
“He practiced witchcraft. He tried to pass that on to me, but I killed him. And after that, he came back. So yeah, I guess you could call him a ghost. That word works as well as any. He’s powerful. He used that power to come back, and he’s using it now to control the dead from the morgue. Your friend at the Morgan Rollins factory, he was under my father’s control. And seeing as I’m telling you this, you should probably know that I was, too.”
Anderson looked up at him, suddenly nervous.
“I’m not now,” Paul said, reading his look.
“How do I know that?”
“You don’t, I guess. All I can tell you is that I mean to go after him. Maybe that will convince you. I mean to go after him, and I mean to stop this tonight. He’s not going to turn me like he thinks he is. I’m going to stop him.”
“He wants to turn you into some kind of witch? Is that what you said?”
“Of a sort, yes. That’s probably the closest thing to what he has in mind that we would all know about. That’s what I thought he meant. God, I was so naïve. I was thinking he intended me to be some kind of great unifier. I would bring peace to the world. I should have known right from the start that wasn’t what he meant, but I let myself believe what I wanted the truth to be. I know now that he meant something much different.”
“Different how?”
“A long time ago, when he was living with Magdalena Chavarria and her grandmother, my father learned how to control this power. But he’s not a perfect conduit for it. It burns him up, like too much current going through too small of a battery.”
“That’s what the black stuff is.”
“What black stuff?”
“We found this black, gritty resin at most of the scenes. It was inside some of the bodies, too. Bobby Cantrell had it in him. We had it tested and it came back as a mixture of human tissue and cedar resin.”
Paul nodded. “I guess so. I’ve felt that stuff, too. I felt it at the train yard.”
“So your father is burning himself up trying to get to you?”
“Trying to cross over, yes. He’s not a perfect conduit, as I said, but he thinks I am. He thinks I can use that power to bring about an apocalypse.”
“An apocalypse? You mean, like the end of days?”
“Something like that,” Paul said. “But he would qualify that. He would say the end of these days, and the beginning of a new era. All things in balance. A beginning to every end, a death for every life.”
“And you believe that?”
“That he’s capable of bringing this about? That certain people can learn to use that power to change the world around them? Yes, I believe that.”
“Do you believe you’re one of those special people?”
Paul took a deep breath. He had hoped to avoid this.
“Hold up your hand,” Paul said.
“What?”
“Like this,” Paul said, and put up a hand, palm towards the windshield, like he was motioning for the traffic outside to stop.
Anderson held up his hand.
“Now what would you say if I told you your hand was on fire?”
Anderson smiled. “I’d say it feels fine.”
“And if I made you believe that it was on fire.”
“You couldn’t.”
But the last word came out in a gasp of pain. Paul had already found Anderson’s mind, the tendrils of his own mind reaching through Anderson, taking hold of him. Sweat was popping out all over Anderson’s skin now. He began to shake, thrashing from side to side against
the steering wheel and door panel and the seat. His whole body was seizing up in pain and he couldn’t control it. Paul let his mind drift back from Anderson’s, but he didn’t relinquish his control over it.
“How about now?” Paul said.
“I don’t believe it.”
Paul gave Anderson’s mind another shove.
Anderson screamed.
“It’s on fire! Jesus Christ, stop it!”
Paul was completely in Anderson’s head now. He could see what Anderson saw. He could see himself through the man’s eyes, enormous and horrible. He could feel the man bucking against the pain, and yet still resisting. He believed in the pain, but not in the source.
Anderson looked up at him then, his eyes full of tears, and begged for it to stop. He was whimpering like a dog hit by a car. He was ready to do anything to stop the pain.
Paul grabbed him by the wrist and said, “It’s over.”
Instantly, Anderson went still. He stared at Paul with demented, feral eyes. And then, by degrees, the wildness left him and his muscles went slack. His chest was still pounding, but he no longer felt the pain. He looked from Paul to his hand and seemed surprised that it wasn’t black as charcoal from the fire.
“How?” he said, panting.
“A parlor trick,” Paul said. “That’s nothing. Every minute that goes by I can feel the power swelling inside me. I think, if I wanted to, I could make the ground split open beneath this car and swallow it whole.”
Anderson was still pale. He said, “You’re not going to do that, are you?”
“I wouldn’t have called you here for that,” Paul said. “But you’ve just seen two parts of my father’s plan. You’ve experienced the pain. That much is easy to imagine. Consider every human being on the planet feeling that kind of pain all at once. Consider somebody who could turn that pain on and off whenever he needed to. You can see where that would lead.”
“Yes,” Anderson said.
“But there’s more. You can beat a man until he’s willing to say that up is down and one plus one makes three. Hell, you can terrorize his mind to the point where he’ll probably even believe it. But you can never be sure that he’s truly yours, body and soul. There’s only one way to be absolutely sure. To make sure that power is absolute, and that is through death. I would show you, but I think you remember pretty well what it was like seeing your friend up on the superstructure. His old life is over, and now his new life has begun—completely under my father’s control.”
Anderson looked thoroughly unsettled, and Paul still had enough of a handle on his mind to know that the man was drifting, his thoughts forming only with the greatest difficulty.
Finally, he said, “Why did you call me?”
“My wife,” Paul said. “My father has her. It’s his way, I think, of forcing my hand. Of forcing me to come to him. When I do he will try to finish what he started six years ago. He’ll try to turn me to his purpose.”
“And you’re going to fight him?”
“Yes. And when I do, I want you to get my wife out of here. Can you do that? Can you get her as far away from here as possible? As far away from me as possible.”
Anderson flexed his hand, the memory of the pain was still fresh in his mind. Paul could feel the echo of it.
“Can you really fight him?” Anderson said. “How will you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Paul said.
“Well, what will you do? How can you possibly expect to fight somebody who’s already dead?”
“I won’t fight him in the way you mean,” Paul said. “Not with my fists. Think of it like electricity. My father believes he can connect us. He believes by doing that he will make me stronger. I think I can turn that circuit back on him. I think I can blow the fuse.”
Anderson let his hand fall back into his lap. “You’re talking about suicide,” he said. “You mean to kill yourself.”
“If that’s what it takes to stop this, then yeah, I guess I am.”
“Paul, you can’t.”
“Keith, I’m not gonna argue with you. My mind’s made up.”
Anderson opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. He looked down at his hands in his lap.
“Are you ready to go?” Paul said.
Anderson sighed, then seemed to make up his mind about something. He looked at Paul then and said, “Son, you sound like you’re in love with death. Like you’ve already made up your mind that that’s where you’re going. Listen to me, I have seen death. I’ve seen so much suffering. You have no idea. I’ve seen the dead rotting in the grass out in some abandoned field. I’ve smelled them cooking on the asphalt in the summer sun after a traffic accident. I’ve seen them on the autopsy table, all their dignity gone. You can’t possibly want that for yourself. You have no idea what that would do to Rachel to live with that kind of knowledge. Paul, some wounds don’t ever heal. Don’t be that cruel to her.”
Paul didn’t hesitate with his answer. It all came out in a flood.
“Keith,” he said, “I’m not at all sure who I am anymore. I used to know. I used to be so sure. I used to think I’d gotten a raw deal in the parents department. A psychopath for a dad. A mental vegetable for a mom. Then I became a husband. And then a policeman. All those things defined me in their own way. I knew where I came from, and I knew where I was headed. But now—Hell, I don’t know. Everything I thought I knew about myself has turned out to be wrong. Can you possibly know what that’s like, finding out that everything you know about yourself, about your past, is just wrong? Now I find out that I’m some kind of horror waiting to be loosed upon the world. I hate what I’m destined to become, Keith. Is it any wonder to you that I’m in love with the idea of dying? Wouldn’t you feel the same way in my shoes?”
Anderson looked away.
“I don’t know,” he said, and it was the truth. “I really don’t know.”
Chapter 24
Anderson pulled his Ford Taurus into the south entrance of the Morgan Rollins Iron Works and turned off the lights. He turned to Paul and said, “So, what next? We walk from here?”
Paul looked up at the ruins. The place was dark, a twisted skeleton backlit by the distant, hazy orange glow of downtown. It cast long, intensely black shadows down the drive towards them. He cleared his mind and thought of Rachel. She was up there somewhere. He could feel her fear and her confusion as though they were his own.
“You’re sure your father’s up there?” Anderson said.
“I’m sure,” Paul said.
“But how do you know? I still don’t understand that. Is it some kind of telepathy?”
“I don’t know what to call it. Maybe it is telepathy. All I can tell you is that I can feel Rachel’s mind up there. She’s scared and tired. But hearing her is like trying to pick a voice out from across the room with a loud party going on in between.”
“And your father? You feel him, too?”
Paul nodded. “My father is different. With him, it’s like stepping outside and seeing a tornado coming up the street. It feels like he’s everywhere at once.”
Paul turned back to study the superstructure. The Barber fifty cent piece was in his hands, glittering in the light from the dashboard as it rolled over the backs of the knuckles.
Anderson watched it fly back and forth, back and forth.
Finally he said, “Paul, why did your father choose this place?”
The coin stopped suddenly.
“This is where it all started for him,” Paul said.
“I thought you said he learned this witchcraft stuff in Mexico.”
“He did. But he was up in that superstructure when this vision of his first grabbed hold of him. This is where it all started to make sense to him. This is where he wants it to grab hold of me. I guess he sees in that a kind of balance.”
Anderson looked up at the superstructure and frowned.
“You ready?” Paul said.
Anderson swallowed hard and said, “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.”
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***
There had once been an asphalt driveway that snaked its way up from the south entrance to the main parking lot in front of the iron works. After twenty years the asphalt had crumbled and grass had grown up through the cracks and squeezed in from the curb line, giving the edges of the drive a sort of beach-like shape. A tattered remnant of yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the air above the driveway. Metal fence posts leaned at odd angles along the western edge of the factory, and they cast long, intensely black shadows down the length of the drive.
Anderson was walking with his head down, shoulders stooped forward, like a tired man walking into a strong wind, and he was starting to breathe hard, even though the slope of the drive was not that steep.
“Wait up, please,” Anderson said to Paul, his voice breathy and winded. “You’re going too fast.”
Anderson drew the Glock at his hip. As the detective came abreast of him, Paul watched a bead of sweat pop out of his forehead and roll down his cheek.
“You’re not gonna need that,” Paul said, nodding at the gun. “Bullets won’t hurt him.”
“It makes me feel better knowing I’ve got it.”
Paul shrugged.
“When we get inside, I want you to go straight to the smokestacks. You’ll find Rachel there. Get her and get her out of here.”
“Okay,” Anderson said. “Just don’t walk so fast.”
A wind moaned through the ruins above them, and it brought with it a fetid odor that was deeper than scorched vegetation and dust and rot.
Anderson groaned.
Paul turned and looked at him. He knew what was happening to the detective. His mind was being assaulted by despair and pain, his father’s first line of defense. With his mind, Paul could feel the energy flowing around him like he was a rock in a fast-moving stream. But Anderson wasn’t equipped to push that energy aside.
“Can you go on?” Paul asked.
Anderson closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, the expression there was soul sick, but he nodded.
Good man, Paul thought. Strong.
They entered the superstructure and started climbing their way through the twisted, ruined mass of cables and pipes and collapsed metal walkways. “Up here,” Paul said, and pulled himself onto an elevated catwalk. Then he knelt down and reached a hand through the bars for Anderson to grab and said, “Here, give me your hand.”
