Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  Kittim was tall, six two or six three. The cap and glasses that he habitually wore almost obscured his features, intentionally so because there was something wrong with Kittim’s skin. Bowen didn’t know precisely what it was, and he had never worked up the courage to ask, but Kittim’s face was a pinkish purple color, with wispy clumps of hair attached to the flaking skull. He reminded Bowen of a marabou stork, built to feed on the dead and the dying. His eyes, when he chose to reveal them, were a very dark green, like a cat’s eyes. Beneath the coveralls his body was hard and slim, almost emaciated. His nails were neatly trimmed, and he was clean shaven. He smelled vaguely of meat and Polo aftershave.

  And sometimes of burning oil.

  Bowen looked beyond him to where the young man lay, then returned his attention to Kittim. Carlyle was right, of course: Kittim was a freak, and of Bowen’s small retinue only Landron Mobley, who was himself little better than a mad dog, appeared to feel any kind of affinity for him. It was not merely the torments being visited on the Jew that disgusted Bowen, but the sense of carnality that accompanied them. Kittim was aroused. Bowen could see it straining against the coveralls. For a moment, it caused anger to overcome Bowen’s underlying fear of the man.

  ‘You enjoying yourself?’ asked Bowen.

  Kittim shrugged. ‘You asked me to find out what he knew.’ His voice was like a broom sweeping across a dusty stone floor.

  ‘Carlyle says he knows nothing.’

  ‘Carlyle isn’t in charge here.’

  ‘That’s right. I am, and I’m asking you if you’ve found out anything useful from him.’

  Kittim stared at him from behind his shades, then turned his back on Bowen.

  ‘Leave me,’ he said, as he knelt to recommence his exploration of the young man. ‘I have not finished.’

  Instead of departing, Bowen drew his gun from its holster. His thoughts were once again concentrated on this strange deformed man and the wraithlike nature of him and his past. It was as if they had conjured him up, he thought, as if he were a personification of all their hatreds and fears, an abstraction made flesh. He had come to Bowen, offering his services, and the knowledge of him had begun to seep into Bowen like gas into a room, half-remembered tales assuming a new substance around him, and Bowen had been unable to turn him away. What was it Carlyle had said? He was a legend, but why? What had he done?

  And he didn’t seem interested in the cause, in the niggers and the faggots and the kikes whose very existence gave most of his kind the fuel they needed for their hatred. Instead, Kittim seemed distant from such matters, even while he was inflicting torments on a naked victim. Now Kittim was trying to tell him what to do, ordering him to leave his presence like Bowen was just some house nigger with a tray. It was about time that Bowen regained control of this situation and showed everybody who was boss. He stepped lightly around Kittim, then raised the gun and pointed it at the young man on the ground.

  ‘No,’ said Kittim softly.

  Bowen looked over and—

  And Kittim shimmered.

  A sudden wave of intense heat seemed to pass over him, causing him to ripple behind its passage, and for an instant he was both Kittim and something else, something dark and winged, with eyes like those of a dead bird, reflecting the world without revealing any life within. His skin was loose and withered, the bones visible beneath it, the legs slightly bent, the feet elongated.

  The smell of oil grew stronger and, for an instant, Bowen understood. By doubting him, by allowing his own feelings of anger to break through, he had somehow permitted his mind to register an aspect of Kittim, the truth of him, that had remained hidden until now.

  He’s old, thought Bowen, older than he looks, older than any of us could have imagined. He has to concentrate to hold himself together. That’s why his skin is the way it is, why he walks so slowly, why he keeps himself apart. He has to struggle to maintain this form. He’s not human. He is—

  Bowen took a step back as the figure reconstituted itself, until once again he was staring at a man in coveralls with blood on his gloved hands.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Kittim.

  Even in his confusion and fear Bowen knew better than to answer truthfully. In fact, he couldn’t have told the truth even if he wanted to because his mind was doing some pretty rapid work to shore up his threatened sanity, and now he wasn’t sure what the truth was. Kittim couldn’t have shimmered. He couldn’t have changed. He couldn’t be what Bowen had thought, for an instant, he might be: a thing dark and winged, like a foul, mutated bird.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Bowen. He stared dumbly at the gun in his hand, then put it away.

  ‘Then let me get back to work,’ said Kittim, and the last thing Bowen saw was the fading hope in the eyes of the young man on the ground before Kittim’s thin form blocked him from view.

  Bowen brushed past Carlyle on his way back to the car.

  ‘Hey!’ Carlyle reached out to grasp him, then drew back and allowed his hand to fall as he saw Bowen’s face.

  ‘Your eyes,’ he said. ‘What happened to your eyes?’

  But Bowen didn’t reply. Later, he would tell Carlyle what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen, and in the aftermath of what was to come Carlyle would tell the investigators. But for now Bowen kept it to himself and his face registered no emotion as he drove away, not even when he stared into the rearview mirror and saw that the capillaries in his eyeballs had burst, his pupils now black holes at the center of red pools of blood.

  Far to the north, Cyrus Nairn retreated back into the darkness of his cell. He was happier here than outside, mingling with the others. They didn’t understand him, couldn’t understand him. Dumb: that was the word a whole lot of people had used about Cyrus throughout his life. Dumb. Dummy. Mute. Schizo. Cyrus didn’t care too much about what they said. He knew that he was smart. He also, deep down inside, suspected that he was crazy.

  Cyrus had been abandoned by his mother at nine and tormented by his stepfather until he was finally incarcerated for the first time, at the age of seventeen. He could still recall some details about his mother: not love or tenderness – no, never that – but the look in her eyes as she grew to despise what she had brought into the world in the course of a difficult, complicated birth had remained with him. The boy was born hunched, unable to stand fully upright, his knees buckled as if he were laboring constantly beneath some unseen weight. His forehead was too large, overshadowing dark eyes, the irises nearly black. He had a flattened nose with elongated nostrils, and a small, rounded chin. His mouth was very full, the upper lip overhanging the lower, and it remained slightly open even in repose, making Cyrus appear always to be on the verge of biting.

  And he was strong. There was thick muscle on his arms and shoulders and chest, tapering down to a narrow waist before exploding again at his buttocks and thighs. His strength had been his salvation; had he been weaker, prison would have broken him long before now.

  The first sentence was handed down for aggravated burglary after he had entered the house of a woman in Houlton, armed with a homemade knife. The woman had locked herself in her room and called the cops, and they’d caught Cyrus as he tried to escape through a bathroom window. Through signing, Cyrus had told them that he was just looking for money to buy beer, and they’d believed him. He’d still pulled three years, though, and served eighteen months.

  It was in the course of an examination by the prison psychiatrist that he was first diagnosed as schizophrenic, exhibiting what the psychiatrist told him were classic ‘positive’ symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, strange patterns of thinking and self-expression, hearing voices. Cyrus had nodded along as all of this was explained to him through a signer, although he could hear perfectly well. He simply chose not to reveal the fact, much as it seemed that he had chosen, one night a long, long time before, no longer to speak.

  Or perhaps the choice had been made for him. Cyrus was never entirely sure.

  He was prescribed medi
cation, the so-called first generation antipsychotics, but he hated their debilitating side effects and quickly learned to disguise the fact that he was no longer taking them. But more than the side effects, Cyrus hated the loneliness that came with the drugs. He despised the silence. When the voices resumed, he embraced them and welcomed them as old friends now returned from some faraway place with strange new tales to tell. When he was eventually released, he could barely hear the standard patter of the guard processing him over the clamor of the voices, excited at the prospect of freedom and the resumption of the plans they had so carefully rehearsed for so long.

  Because for Cyrus, the Houlton affair had been a failure on two accounts: In the first place, he’d been caught. In the second, he hadn’t gone into the house for money.

  He’d gone in for the woman.

  Cyrus Nairn lived in a small cabin on a patch of land that his mother’s family had owned, close by the Androscoggin River, about ten miles south of Wilton. In the old days, people used to store fruit and vegetables in hollows dug into the bank, where the temperature would keep them fresh long after they’d been plucked or dug up. Cyrus had found these old hollows and strengthened them, then disguised the entrances using bushes and timber. The hollows had served as his retreat from the world when he was a boy. Sometimes, it almost seemed to him that he had been created to fit into them, that they were his natural home. The curvature of his spine; the short, thick neck; his legs, slightly bent at the knees: all seemed expressly designed to enable him to fit into those places beneath the riverbank. Now the cold hollows hid other things, and even during the summer, the natural refrigeration meant that he had to go down on his hands and knees and sniff the earth before he could catch a hint of what lay beneath.

  After Houlton, Cyrus had learned to be more careful. Each knife he made was used only once, then burned, and the blade buried far from his own property. In the beginning, he could go for a year, maybe more, without taking one, satisfying himself by crouching in the cool silence of the hollows, before the voices got too loud and he had to go a-hunting once more. Then, as he grew older, the voices became more insistent, their demands coming closer and closer together, until he tried to take the woman in Dexter, and she screamed and the men came and beat him. He got five years for that, but now the end was in sight. The parole board had been presented with the results of Cyrus’s Hare PCL-R evaluation, the test developed by a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia that was now widely regarded as the standard indicator of recidivism, violence, and the subject’s response to therapeutic intervention, and the board’s reaction had been positive. Within days Cyrus would be free to go, free to return to the river and his beloved hollows. That was why he liked the cell, the darkness of it, especially at night when he could close his eyes and imagine himself there once again, among the women and the girls, the perfumed girls.

  He owed his release in part to his natural intelligence, for Cyrus, had the prison psychiatric services studied him further, would have provided some support for the theory that the genetic factors that contributed to his condition had also endowed him with a creative brilliance. But Cyrus had also received help in recent weeks from an unexpected source.

  The old man had arrived in the MHSU, had watched Cyrus from behind his bars, and his fingers had begun to move.

  Hello.

  It had been so long since Cyrus had signed to another person other than a head doctor that he had almost forgotten how to converse, but slowly, then faster, he began to sign in return.

  Hello. My name is—

  Cyrus. I know your name.

  How do you know my name?

  I know all about you, Cyrus. You, and your little larder.

  Cyrus had pulled back then and returned to his cell, where he lay huddled in the corner for the rest of the day while the voices shouted and argued over one another. But the next day he returned to the edge of the recreation unit, and the old man was waiting for him. He knew. He knew that Cyrus would come back to him.

  Cyrus began to sign.

  What do you want?

  I have something to give you, Cyrus.

  What?

  The old man paused, then made the sign, the one that Cyrus made to himself in the darkness, when it all threatened to become too much for him and he needed some hope, something to cling to, something for which to yearn.

  A woman, Cyrus. I’m going to give you a woman.

  Barely yards away from where Cyrus lay, Faulkner knelt in his cell and prayed for success. He knew that by coming here he would find one that he could use. The ones in the other prison were no good to him; they were long-term prisoners, and Faulkner was not interested in long-termers. So he had injured himself, necessitating the transfer to the mental health stabilization unit and access to a more suitable population. He had expected it to be more difficult, but he had spotted Nairn instantly and had felt his pain. Faulkner tightened his fingers together, and the whispering of his prayers increased in volume.

  The guard Anson approached the cell quietly, then paused as he stared down at the kneeling figure. His hand flicked in a neat, practiced movement and the ligature passed over the head of the praying man. Then, with a swift glance over his shoulder, Anson tugged and Faulkner was dragged, retching and clawing, to the bars. Anson pulled him up, then reached through the bars and gripped the old man’s chin.

  ‘You fuck!’ hissed Anson, keeping his voice low, for he had seen the men in Faulkner’s cell before the preacher was moved and suspected that some form of monitoring was in progress. Already, he had spoken to Marie and warned her to say nothing of their relationship in case his suspicions were correct. ‘You ever open your mouth about me again and I’ll finish what you started, you understand?’ His fingers dug into Faulkner’s dry, hot skin and felt the bone beneath, fragile and waiting to be broken. He released his grip, then allowed the rubber cord to slacken before he jerked it back again, banging the old man’s head painfully against the bars.

  ‘And you better watch what you eat, you old cocksucker, because I’m gonna be playing with your food before you get it, y’hear?’ Then he slipped the cord over Faulkner’s head and allowed him to fall to the ground. The preacher raised himself slowly and staggered to his bunk, drawing deep ragged breaths and touching the indentation on his neck. He listened as the guard’s footsteps faded away, then, remaining seated and keeping his distance from the bars, he returned to his prayers.

  As he sat, something on the floor seemed to draw his attention and his head turned to follow its movements. He watched it for a time then brought his foot down hard and firm upon it, before scraping the remains of the spider from his shoe.

  ‘Boy,’ he whispered, ‘I warned you. I warned you to keep your pets under control.’

  From close by came a sound that might have been the hissing of steam or an exhalation of barely restrained rage.

  And in his own cell, half asleep, the remembered smell of damp earth flooding his senses, Cyrus Nairn stirred as another voice was added to the chorus in his head. This one had been coming to him more and more regularly in the previous weeks, ever since he and the preacher had begun to communicate and share the details of their lives. Cyrus now welcomed the stranger’s arrival, feeling him stretch searching tendrils through his mind, establishing his presence and silencing the others.

  Hello, said Cyrus, hearing in his head his own voice, the one no one else had heard in so many years, and signing his words by habit with his fingers.

  Hello Cyrus, the visitor responded.

  Cyrus smiled. He wasn’t sure what to call the visitor, because the visitor had lots of names, old names that Cyrus had never heard spoken before. But there were two that he used more than others.

  Sometimes he called himself Leonard.

  Mostly he called himself Pudd.

  7

  That night Rachel watched me, unspeaking, while I undressed.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ she asked at last.


  I lay down beside her and felt her move in close to me, her belly touching my upper thigh. I placed my hand upon her and tried to sense the life inside.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

  ‘Great. Only puked a little this morning.’ She grinned and poked me. ‘But then I came in and kissed ya!’

  ‘Lovely. It’s a testament to your personal hygiene that I didn’t notice it being any more unpleasant than usual.’

  Rachel pinched me hard at the waist, then raised her hand so that she could run it through my hair. ‘Well? You still haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘He said that he wanted me – us, I guess, since you’ll be called too – to withdraw from the case and refuse to testify. In return, he promised to let us be.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’

  ‘No, and even if I did, it wouldn’t change anything. Stan Ornstead has doubts about my suitability as a witness, but I think he’s just edgy and those doubts really don’t extend to you anyway. We’ll be testifying whether we want to or not, but I got the feeling that Faulkner didn’t really care about our testimony and that he was pretty certain of making bail after the review. I don’t understand why he called me to him except to taunt me. Maybe he’s so bored in prison that he thought I’d provide some amusement.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘A little, but he’s kind of easily amused. There were other things too: his cell is freezing, Rachel. It’s almost as if his body is drawing all the warmth from its surroundings. And he baited one of the guards about a relationship with a young girl.’

  ‘Gossip?’

  ‘No. The guard reacted like he’d been struck in the face. I don’t think he’d shared that information with anybody. According to Faulkner, the girl is underage, and the guard confirmed as much to me later.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’