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Stoughton, Massachusetts, eleven years ago, dinner time, a man bursts into an upper-class bistro in the downtown area. He has blood running down his shirt, as though he has perhaps thrown it up on himself. He is screaming profanities and nonsense and pushing over tables. Later, witnesses will tell police that he seemed to be screaming one phrase over and over again and then starts whispering it nearer to the end of the incident.
Reportedly, the man eventually grabs hold of someone, nearly as though he has been looking specifically for him. He is a middle-aged man, balding, out with his wife and two daughters for a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary dinner. Following the dinner the family has tickets for an Opera. But they wouldn’t be attending it that night.
By this point, when the crazed man has grabbed the middle-aged one and all the other diners have either run in a panic from the restaurant or cleared far enough away, a maitre de has dialed police. They arrive to find the man holding a steak knife snatched from a white linen table cloth to his victim’s throat. As they approach, guns drawn, attempting to talk him out of the situation, the attacker plunges the knife into the chest of the man who had been celebrating his anniversary. Apparently the stab comes with careful consideration as there is little blood, but then this attacker removes the blade from his victim and drives it into his own mouth. This second stab is an upwards thrust, into his brain and he is dead instantly. Both men fall backward toppling a dessert tray and another table of china, crystal glasses and entrees. The name of the bistro in downtown Stoughton is The Druid and The PennyMaker, a name that would become a label for all subsequent scenarios.
The middle-aged man is pronounced dead by medical technicians on the way to hospital, but is miraculously revived less than fifteen minutes later. Written details on how this happens remain sketchy—as generally no one continues procedures once time of death has been stated.
The middle-aged man continues to progress, all the way back to near-perfect health. Near close to perfect for a man approaching fifty years of age who has been stabbed in the chest with a steak knife, that is.
In weeks he is back at work, leading the same life as before and his family is, obviously, feeling blessed and happy. They praised God, the wife and mother is quoted as saying.
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Four weeks after his healthy and triumphant return to cheers at the life insurance company where he works, it appears that the man goes mad. He gets in his car and drives off in the middle of a work day, apparently after punching a co-worker in the face and pushing over a set of dividing baffles. He drives north to Lowell, Massachusetts and what follows is another extremely bizarre set of circumstances.
He bursts into a private residence on the south side of town, the home of a man and woman, both somewhat younger than himself. Each is currently unemployed. The older man pushes past the wife, runs up the stairs, and finds his victim where he proceeds to try and drown him in his own bathtub. Then, still holding the victim by the throat and around the chest, he plunges them both backwards out the bathroom window, where he, still clutching the victim, plummets to his death on a concrete patio. He lands first with his victim lying on top of him—his spine is crushed.
The young wife performs CPR on her husband and manages to save his life—he coughs up blood and soapy water, but is given a clean bill of health and some antibiotics by doctors. He returns home that same evening from the hospital.
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The man who had burst into The Druid and The Pennymaker was originally from the San Francisco Bay area, Malin said. Autopsy reports indicated that he was high on PCP, methane, morphine and black tar heroine, among a slew of other substances. The week before, his girlfriend was found in their hotel room near Tacoma. The drug addict, Clutch as he was called, had been a fairly promising young guitar player on the west coast. Another man, at the time unidentified, was found dead apparently from the same attack as the girlfriend. He lay in the parking lot at a club where Clutch had just played a show and then suffered his first overdose...
“...and Clutch’s given name,” Malin continued, “Was ‘Sebastian Williamson’—”
Sebastion’s eyes blinked several times and his head shifted to one side.
“—And,” she continued, expecting Sebastion’s surprise, “The middle-aged victim at the Druid in Stoughton, his name was ‘Wilhelm Sebastian Korova’”—a polish immigrant who had arrived in Boston as a child with his parents and built a life for himself until he fell two stories to a concrete slab and broke his back. “The man he nearly drowned in the bathtub—his name was Sebastien Lauren-Redding, an out-of work brick-layer originally from Montreal.”
“His middle name wasn’t William. But yours is.”
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Sebastion was reeling.
A name is one’s most personal possession.
William.
A name is like a suit of clothes.
His father’s grandfather’s name.
A name is worn sheepishly or like gold.
Sadie, his mom, had insisted, so the story went, that their first born son get her grandfather’s name, and Oliver with no choice but to accept that, compromised and gave him the middle name of his grandfather.
And here it was, here it was, the sheepish crown of thorns, the combination that nearly had him shot to death in his house, bleeding on his carpet while some emotionally-wrought technician pounded his chest with a defibrillator.
Sebastion William Redfield.
“B-But I thought this was just random. I thought that—”
Panic was rising in him. He could feel it swimming below the surface and his words were moving towards the whine of a little boy, scared of the dark, and pleading with his mum to leave the light on and the closet door open. He took a breath, relaxed ever so slightly, and tried again. “Pinkertt said that, by all accounts, this was random. That the man who broke into my house was running from police, that it was just by coincidence that he found me there—”
“—Sebastion, have you ever heard of the study of parapsychology?—”
“—Heard of it, yes, but what does that have to do with any—”
“Parapsych deals with concepts that can’t easily be explained by science and criminology. I guess you could call it the bastard cousin of those things. It’s widely disregarded by many professionals, but I’ve been finding myself intrigued with some of it anyway. And truth be told, I’m actually here on my own time—I’m on unpaid leave from my job in Houston. The point is...I now believe these cases can only be enlightened by a para-explanation.
“With you—I’ll be honest—with you I wasn’t sure about anything at all. When I walked in I didn’t know what to think. It was, in my mind, wholly feasible that you could have been touched by this...this...whatever it is. I needed to find out if you were really you.”
“Really me?”
“Well, yes. The majority of criminologists and experts whose responsibility it fell under not only to solve the killings under the Druid name, but also perhaps to predict and put a stop to any more of them believed it was ritualistic. That there was a cult involved...or some kind of brainwashing. That the victim was, how can I put it, set free and instructed to kill in the name of some...I don’t know—higher power?—while his predecessor sacrificed himself. But I believed there was something bigger going on, something that couldn’t be as easily explained away.”
“Parapsych?”
“Exactly. Something that you can’t put a tag on and line up in an evidence case. And you can’t run your fingers across the letters of it in a police report. Much to the detriment of my career, I made it known that I believed there was something pushing these twin sets of deaths forward, perhaps even one person. Traveling among all the victims.”
“What, like moving from each to the next—”
“—and down the line to another, yes. A bit like a stone skipping across water...it touches down then lifts off again. And so on and so on.”
“...You
said that when you started looking at the cases, there wasn’t much interest.”
Malin told him that after her paper was published, controversial as it was with its paranormal slant, there were seven more deaths over the next several years. All of the deaths were similar in fashion. Some were drownings or poisonings. And every time, the attacker died, and the victim lived, only to attack someone else after an unpredictable amount of time. It was always unexpected and apparently always at random. Not all of their names were variations on Sebastion’s. Only the earliest were—those directly following the guitar player and the insurance salesmen in Stoughton. After, it seemed to just become anyone. Anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time. “I believe with you it was random.”
Malin explained how, three years ago, she had interviewed Willem Nash, family man and father of two, who had been attacked by a co-worker at the factory where he worked. She said that family and friends called him different following his near-fatal drowning, but that it was a better kind of different. His wife even alluded to marital problems leading up to the accident, but said that he had seemed, not more receptive afterwards, but happier. To her, it felt like a miracle.
After those interviews, satisfied, Malin believed this Druid, whoever he was, whatever he was, had finally stopped. That it was all over. And that, maybe he was even gone. She went back to Houston. But just over three years later, here she was again, following the shooting in the Farukh family business on Yonge Street and another the same morning at the Redfield residence.
She now believed that the Druid, as she was calling him, found something. Maybe not exactly what he had been looking for. But something close. “Some trigger effect,” she said, “Some event brought him into madness again and made him, not necessarily hunt you down specifically. But, then, who’s to say what he’s capable of, right?
“You’re a part of...something...with this Druid.”
Sebastion was rubbing his eyes. “I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“Well you are.”
He took his fingers out of his eyes and stared at the surface of the table between them. Like the morning that this all began he felt like he was being bombarded with far too much information. He just wanted it to stop. And what was worse is that Malin seemed to approach it with a muted zest.
His arm was throbbing again and he wished he had another trio of little white pills. His absorption of the details was slow. Actually, he hadn’t even begun absorbing them. He was still taking it all in.
He looked up from the surface of the table, not into Malin’s eyes, or even at her. Instead, he started looking about himself, measuring up the space between them and the other tables. The large cafeteria space was a surreal scape of upturned chair legs on tables. They protruded towards the ceiling like great white staffs, but they stood a large distance from the glass wall which, itself, showed another world safely out of their reach. He felt it all too close. Despite how far away it really was, he still felt it too close.
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Days before all this information, Sebastion had felt confident enough in Malin Holmsund to trust her with his own touchy details. He must have, or truth about his father, truth about anything, would have been kept locked away, dark and deep.
But he had also told her at length about what he believed was a real place, what had felt like a real place, the moment the bullet had pushed through his body. She nodded quietly on that day, and her demeanor towards him, while improving greatly up to that point, had drastically changed. For the better.
She explained now, as he eased back into the wheelchair, that she had been cold for both their sakes. “I was trying to remain distant and unattached at the start. Just in case you turned out to be who I’ve been looking for.
It wasn’t, she elaborated, that she didn’t like Sebastion, or that she had a distaste for him. In fact, having read files of information about he and his father, records from hospitals, schools, one therapist he had seen when he was thirteen, and a host of other details from scattered sources, she had been expecting a complex individual. She had been correct.
Only after his description of what he called the precipice did she really begin to understand for certain, that Sebastion was really Sebastion, and not someone else doing a convincing job of pretending. She had been fooled by the Druid as Willem Nash and a few others before. But none of them had ever mentioned such exquisite detail of their after-deaths. None of them had described the struggle over a cliff where ocean waters pummeled the shore below. And none of them had alluded to a crazed man in a maroon shirt coming after them like Sebastion had.
Still, she was wary. It was the description of Oliver’s death that wholly convinced her, and it was Sebastion’s request to have that tan and gray book of passages brought to him that was the absolute clincher. It all seemed to click with that; no one else, the Druid doing a bang-on impersonation, nor anyone, would have had that kind of attachment to such a thing. And no one other than Sebastion would have mentioned that one self-effacing detail: the smell of urine by his father’s deathbed.
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She said something at last about the Druid specifically, before they moved onto other topics. She wondered aloud, as though these thoughts had maybe occurred to her a few times in recent years, specifically what the Druid had been hunting for. In her wildest imaginings, she said, she could not guess.
Willem Nash had, she also pointed out, looked odd on the security footage the police had acquired from the confectionary where Ahmed Farukh had been attacked in the early morning. Nash, she said, in the grainy black and white videotape, had displayed some common physical signs of a schizophrenic having an episode. She wondered if there were some of these other people, all the victims, somehow stored up in him still. Even now.
She made mention of a case study she had read a long time before which cited a patient possessing an elaborate and highly complex multiple personality disorder. He kept inventing separate and distinct personas until all of them finally started to blend.
She said that it finally drove that patient insane.
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For months after the people at Hospice took Oliver’s remains away, after the equipment had been removed from the basement next to the turntable, after the rented bed and the used up bile rags were gone, after the funeral arrangements were made, after the outward end of it had come and gone, Sebastion sat in near silence. He was not bedridden, but he rarely left its crumpled sheets. There was an unamenable exhaustion in him but he could not feel it when his eyes were closed or when the television roared. There was a void not experienced, so much as it was sensed from a remote plank of observation. Depth of field was a distant cousin you didn’t make plans to see any more.
In those emptied spots, those nulls, though, that’s when the trouble came. In those little dead pieces of blank volume and black tube, the less-than-a-second blip after a commercial break and before the program renewed with its pre-recorded laugh track, that’s when he heard the whisper.
During all those days and nights, as the snow fell and the black asphalt and the brown lawn found itself shrouded, there in a rollover, as the mattress squeaked and the lungs took a breath, it lived as well—a skinny exhale: but he was dying anyway.
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“You never said anything about my father.”
Sebastion looked vaguely at Malin.
“...Did you need me to?”
“Not necessarily. I thought you’d have a strong opinion about it. About me. Or an aversion.”
“I’ve seen some things in this world, Sebastion. Some pretty messed up things. You and your dad, what you told me, it’s ...it’s...something that probably shouldn’t have happened. I believe you can look at things one of two ways. Both start with this phrase: People die. One goes on to say that you can sit and dwell on the circumstance. The other says, hey, keep breathing. Move forward.”
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Sebastion wrote a short passage in his Book of the Dead that would hav
e particularly irked his father, but he decided it was, actually, most fitting for his father—along with a number of other passages in that thick, self-indulgent volume.
That phrase was this: “A ‘wake’ is what’s left behind; Funerals are for the living.”
The weather turned cold after Oliver’s death and the only people who turned up on the chilly September afternoon of his funeral and burial were a few underlings from the firm, Walter Whitman’s wife, Riley Fischer and himself. Sebastion did not read a piece of obscure text or even a well-known one from the bible. It was the end, and like a fizzled firecracker with no pop left, it proceeded in that exact manner.
Fish, after the earth-turning, and the descent of the casket—more like a friend and less like a co-worker—approached Sebastion and told him that John Merridew, now the sole head functionary of Whitman & Merridew, would be considering Red’s re-instatement in the New Year—in a somewhat reduced capacity.
Sebastion guessed that the only reason for such an offer came by way of the firm’s legal arm. It was, sure as sun, made to guarantee that Sebastion would not, out of spite, liquidate his father’s third of the company’s holdings. That would put Whitman & Merridew in a somewhat precarious financial position.
Only the messenger in such a memorandum, Fish, solemn and quiet with none of his usual bemusing and giddy child play, delivered what was required of him and backed away through a cascade of silently falling snow. Sebastion would never see him again and would only speak to him once more, through the receiver of the gray and tan telephone of his Vaughan kitchen. Moments later that telephone would be smashed in resentful haste.
Thalo Blue Page 30
