Twice Dying

by Neil Mcmahon

  Robby was moving again, briskly setting out a sterile tray. It held gauze, bowls of antiseptic solution, and another surgical knife still in a packet.

  He help up a pair of surgical gloves.

  “Size seven and a half, I believe?”

  Monks said slowly, “It won’t work, Robby. You’ll just be destroying another life. Like Katherine’s.”

  “I didn’t destroy Katherine’s life. I kept her from going in a wrong direction.”

  “What wrong direction, growing up? Becoming a normal human being?”

  “She’s never stopped talking to me, Monks. She told me how to feed her the cobras, to make her stronger. She brought the vessel to me. She’s talking to me right now. Telling me she’s very angry with you.

  “When she gets angry—” the voice rose into the eerie high pitch, echoing through the vault with venomous intensity—“she becomes Naia.”

  Robby stepped to an alcove in the stone wall. He stood with his back turned for half a minute, leaning slightly forward, hands moving like those of a woman putting on makeup. When he turned back to Monks, his eyes were ringed in red and dark hair streamed down his shoulders. He advanced with the silent gliding steps. He was holding the grape-picker’s knife again.

  “Everything alive consumes other life, Monks,” the high voice crooned. “Look at her, and admit the truth.” The knife made a hooking gesture at Alison. “You were feeding off her all along, lapping at her soul: her flame, her fearlessness, the way she put herself on the edge. When you had your hands around her throat that night, didn’t you feel her life spilling into you? Wasn’t that what really scared you, the power that was so delicious?”

  Monks’s hand touched his back pocket. The razor was still there. He slid it loose, keeping it hidden, and turned with the circling figure.

  “Alison, get up!” he yelled. “Get out of here!”

  Monks shuffled backwards along the iron rack. Robby glided after him.

  Then sidestepped and disappeared from sight.

  Crouched, skin prickling, Monks stayed motionless, straining to hear.

  “I lived with people who understand these things, Monks.”

  The voice came from above. Monks’s head jerked up so sharply a burn shot through his neck. Robby was standing on top of the rack.

  “In Africa,” Robby said. “Not much fancy modern medicine out in the bush. But cobras. Masks. The knowledge of how death feeds life, and how it can be used. It’s as old as time.”

  He stepped into the air and dropped, landing silently: feet spread, poised, knife ready.

  “Get up!” Monks screamed. He stumbled away, skirting around the rack’s far end. His hand hooked on one of the masks. He wrenched it loose and hurled it like a discus to shatter against the wall above the bed where Alison lay.

  “That,” the high voice said with controlled rage, “was a mistake.”

  Robby lunged, driving under Monks’s clumsy out-thrust arm. A hot streak of pain burned across his belly. He clasped it with his left hand, backing away, feeling the seep of slippery blood through his fingers.

  Another lunge. Monks flailed out, but the quick body spun and kicked a knee out from under him. He went down heavily.

  “Come on, Dr. Monks. The offer stands. A couple of bandages and a shot of Demerol and you’ll be fine, I don’t hold grudges.”

  Monks got to his feet and ran blindly, staggering, colliding with the walls, deafened by his own shrieking breath. Another hot slice flared across his back. He hit the stone floor on hands and knees, the razor flying from his hand and skittering across the floor.

  He screamed, “You can’t empty out a human being like a jar and fill it up with somebody who’s dead.”

  Monks dragged himself a little further and lay still, his cheek again on the stone, cool and comforting now. He was aware of his blood slipping away.

  The pain seeped away with it, and an image appeared in his mind, of a day almost two decades earlier, at the beach at Point Reyes. Crystal blue sky, hot sun and fresh breeze, miles of pristine sand. His young wife with their son and daughter, playing in the surf; the perfect family, in a life and world that seemed as fresh as they themselves.

  “All right, Monks, I’ll have to do it myself after all,” the voice said. It sounded very far away. “But I’ll need some practice first. Let’s see, where shall I start? I know.”

  Monks felt a hand on his neck, then the pressure of a knee across the small of his back, the full weight of a man coming to rest. Something sharp hooked into the flesh at the inside tendon behind his right knee.

  In that instant of pause, there came a sound that he could feel: a tchhh, like a knife slicing into a slab of meat.

  A splash of wann liquid hit his neck and face. The weight on his body lessened, then lifted.

  Monks forced his eyes to open. Robby Vandenard was on his knees, swaying, both hands clasping the left side of his throat. Blood was pumping between his fingers with the quick rhythm of pulse.

  Behind him, Alison stood, with the razor in her hand.

  It fell from her fingers. As if it had held invisible puppet strings that supported him, Robby dropped back to his haunches, then sagged again.

  He settled beside Monks like a shy lover, his face only a few inches away. Blood pulsed from the gaping slash across his carotid artery. Monks’s hand moved of itself to compress the wound, but then stopped, his mind knowing it was hopeless. He felt a sensation he knew all too well, of a life leaving, with coldness where it had been.

  But this coldness lingered, becoming a something. It swiftly garnered power, like an iron talon closing around his being, crushing his breath. Terror struck him that it was Robby, trying to take Monks with him. Monks rolled away, fighting to stay conscious, to escape.

  His blurred vision caught the white-clad figure of Alison, returning from across the room, holding something in her hands.

  The heaped mound of wet plaster from the iron rack.

  She knelt over Robby, moving without haste, gazing down without expression into his face. She dipped a finger into the blood that had pooled in the hollow of his neck, raised it to her face, and circled both her eyes.

  Robby’s mouth twitched to form a word, a name, that Monks could not quite hear but understood without question.

  Katherine.

  His eyes softened, became the eyes of a boy again. Then whoever was looking out through them began to fade.

  Monks watched her smooth the plaster in handfuls over Robby’s face.

  The icy fury slipped out of him, like poison drawn from a snakebite, and he allowed himself to fall into a rest that was safe.

  Chapter 17

  Monks drove the Bronco up the narrow road to his house in midafternoon, feeling weary but good. He had finished a twelve-hour shift in Mercy Hospital’s Emergency Room, and now had five days of freedom ahead. It was April, the winter rains over and the sun warming the earth: perfect weather for a leisurely canoe trip on Tomales Bay, with thick salami and Gruyère sandwiches and iced-down bottles of Moretti beer.

  He pulled over at his mailbox to retrieve the usual accumulation of medical journals and junk. The door was jammed tightly shut. Dark thoughts toward the mail carrier passed through his mind. He yanked at the stubborn latch, trying to remember the amount of the Christmas bonus he had ponied up.

  When the door gave, he had just enough time to register skinned knuckles and real annoyance. Then it came home to him that something was clawing its way up the bare flesh of his forearm.

  Frozen, he stared. It was a rat, with small insane eyes and bared teeth, lunging toward his face.

  Monks’s paralysis ended at the same instant the rat seemed to realize that it was heading toward confrontation rather than escape, somewhere around the elbow. He yelled and flailed his arm as if it was on fire. The rat leaped free. His last glimpse was of it slithering through the thick duff of redwood needles and oak leaves blanketing the earth, looking more like a reptile than a mammal, working its way deep
er until only its pink naked tail remained.

  Monks turned warily back to the mailbox and pulled free its contents. Magazines and envelopes came out in festoons of confetti and rat shit.

  He drove uphill to the house, shaking with anger and fear. He walked straight to his safe and took out the shotgun.

  Then he exhaled and put it back, realizing that he was starting to feel sorry for the rat. It had not locked itself into the mailbox, and could hardly be blamed for trying to rip the skin off something many times its size, reaching into its trap.

  He dutifully checked rooms and closets. No one appeared to have been inside. The usual accumulation of dust seemed undisturbed.

  So. The message seemed clear enough. Someone considered him to be a rat, and had, so to speak, put teeth in it.

  He picked up a phone and called the local post office. It took him over a minute to get through a phone tree. The woman who answered sounded young, and so languid that Monks tentatively diagnosed vapors. He gave his name and address, and added:

  “I came home today and found a rat in my mailbox.”

  “A rat?”

  “Correct.”

  The next pause lengthened. Monks said helpfully, “R-A-T.”

  “Was it, like, packaged? I mean, was there postage?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t think it was us, sir.”

  “Am I right that it’s a federal offense to put an object without postage into a mailbox?”

  Her voice took on a tone of formality. “Do you wish to file a complaint?”

  “Will someone come out and investigate if I do?”

  Pause. “You’d have to call the police about that.”

  “If I call the police, they’ll say a mailbox is federal property and out of their jurisdiction. I speak from experience, you see,” he said, feeling it getting away from him, knowing there was no point in taking this out on a clerk. “Every so often it gets bashed in by adolescent boys, and whoever I complain to tells me it’s someone else’s problem. Meaning, of course, mine.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, now with the patient weariness of dealing with a crank.

  “Have you ever heard of Synanon House, Miss?”

  “Sin what?”

  He envisioned her sitting up sharply, pushing an alarm button or starting a tape recorder, whatever they did with calls that threatened to turn obscene.

  “Long story,” Monks said. “Someone did the same thing, only with a rattlesnake. It almost killed a man.”

  Silence.

  “Vandalism is one thing,” Monks said, “but a live rat—I thought,” and, conscious that he had lost the battle, he finished weakly, “someone might be concerned.”

  He placed the phone in its cradle.

  When he got to the kitchen, the cats were waiting.

  “There’s a rodent outside calling you guys pussies,” Monks said.

  He was met with stony stares and yawns. Then he remembered: these were cats that had faced down a cobra. A rat was far beneath their dignity. He opened two cans of Kultured Kat turkey and giblets, feeling vaguely that the fowl was appropriate, and divided it up.

  Then he took out the Finlandia. It smoked as it poured over the ice cubes. He touched it with fresh lemon, drank it, and made another. He took this one out to the deck and stood at the railing, watching the light on the Pacific horizon, remembering back the several months, to cobras.

  Stover Larrabee and Roman Kasmarek had come out damaged but alive, the first with a severe concussion and the second with a fractured cheekbone. They had been discovered and treated by a sharp young doc named Vernon Dickhaut, who had gone looking for Monks after the bizarre incidents in the hospital that day.

  Robby Vandenard’s tracks had been traced by the police as far as was possible. He had been no fool about practicalities: had hidden large sums of money in numbered overseas accounts, bought property under false identities, hacked his way into illegal computer links that included LEIN and NCIC law enforcement networks. The chances of finding him again, with Alison made surgically docile and the likelihood of plastic surgery, would have been remote.

  There had been much speculation about his psychology. Incestuous urges toward his sister, certainly. Rationalization of severe cognitive dissonance, a refusal to accept the fact that he had murdered her, resulting in a belief that she still lived within him. Reinforcement of this by assuming her persona and repeatedly avenging her death, in a violent form of belated mastery.

  The belief that by killing, he could add the “cobras” to her strength, like horses to a chariot. Which finally resulted in her signaling him that she was ready to return: into the flesh of Alison Chapley.

  But the person who knew the most about it took his secrets with him when he died on the autopsy table in Mercy Hospital. Several more videos of the NGIs being stalked and killed had been found hidden in Jephson’s house. No other records had turned up to indicate whether he was moved by threat, by vicarious pleasure in the murder of men he had feared, or by something else entirely. Monks had revised his opinion again about Jephson’s rattlesnake bite, guessing that it had been brought about by Robby, in an early move to terrorize the man he would continue to dominate for three more decades. Or perhaps it was a declaration of passion.

  As for Alison, she was gone: back to the East Coast, a long vacation, and a slow segue into private practice, away from the violent men who had been her fascination. Monks had received an occasional postcard from her, and sent the same back.

  He walked inside and took from his desk the last card he had received. It was a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, of a distant solitary figure standing on a beach, overwhelmed by the stormy sky and choppy ocean behind him. It was titled The Monk at the Sea. There was no message on it, only her signature. He surmised that it was the end of what could hardly have been called a correspondence.

  He did not think of her as having deceived him. He understood that she had been driven by a need more powerful than the ties that drew her to him. And that that need of hers had been fulfilled, the deep question in her being, that answered. It was too private for her to share—or perhaps, to be reminded of—-and so she had put distance between them.

  But from his own side, there was a chillier part to it. He could not entirely shake the sense that for those few instants, while he had watched her paint her eyes and smooth the death mask over Robby’s face, it had happened:

  Katherine Vandenard—Naia—had touched her.

  He poured another drink and started looking through his files, trying to spot the enraged mal-practitioner who wanted revenge on Monks for ratting him off.

  Acknowledgments

  This book owes a great debt to help from many people. Special thanks to:

  Kim Anderson, Dan Betz, Constance Chang, Carl Clatterbuck, Dan Conaway, Alix Douglas, Frances Kuffel, Drs. Barbara and Dan McMahon, and Dr. Dick Merriman.

  Thanks also to the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University, and to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for providing support in the past; and to the Jean Naggar Literary Agency, for their sterling efforts.

  About the Author

  NEIL MCMAHON

  is a former Stegner Fellow whose short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Boxing’s Best Short Stories, and other publications. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  PRAISE FOR

  TWICE DYING

  “Devastating….Twice Dying is a genuinely frightening and suspenseful thriller that demands to be read in one sitting. Neil McMahon surely has a future of prestige and honor ahead of him.”

  The Missoulian

  “A wild plot … Satisfying … Reads like a cross between Raymond Chandler and Thomas Harris. More Monks, please, Mr. McMahon.”

  Chicago Tribune

  “McMahon tells a story that is rich in medical detail and steeped in horror.”


  San Antonio Express News

  MORE PRAISE

  “A mesmerizing thriller [with] a strong sense of menace …. McMahon maintains the suspense to the biner end.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “Neil McMahon raises the bar with Twice Dying, an intelligently-constructed, beautifully written novel of suspense and revelation. I can guarantee the ending will knock your socks off.”

  James Welch,

  author of Fools Crow

  “[A] taut, spare debut … a unique voice…. McMahon’s clean and concise style is refreshing.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “A triumph.”

  Boston Teran,

  author of God is a Bullet

  “E.R. meets Psycho … a disturbing tale of damaged souls in a wounded world. Terse, moody, compelling.”

  Bonnie MacDougal,

  author of Angle of Impact

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  HARPERTORCH

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  New York, New York 10022-5299

  Copyright © 2000 by Neil McMahon

  ISBN: 0-06-109835-3

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