Nocturnes (2004)

by John Connolly

  “You have to keep them motivated,” I said.

  “Motivated? It’s all I can do to keep her moving.”

  He made his way along the bar, grabbed a soda from the cooler, and patted the woman on the ass as he went by.

  “I’m gonna bill you for that an’ all,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Maguire. “You got change of a dollar?”

  “Asshole.”

  Maguire took a seat across from me, lit up a cigarette, and laid its tip beside the still-smoldering remains of the waitress’s butt.

  “So?”

  “I’ve been hired by a man named Frank Matheson,” I said.

  Maguire gave me nothing.

  “You know who Frank Matheson is?” I said.

  “I know. What’s it to me?”

  “He’s concerned that someone with knowledge of the history of the Grady house may have gotten some ideas from what happened there in the past. He’s afraid that the someone in question may have targeted a child.”

  “Like I said, what’s it to me?”

  “What happened there took place before my time. I got some of it from the newspapers, a little more from Matheson, a little less from the chief over in Two Mile Lake. I was hoping you could tell me more.”

  “Because I was there, you mean?”

  “Yes. Because you were there. You were there when John Grady died.”

  Maguire waited for a while before answering. He watched the woman moving behind the bar, joshing sourly with one or two of the regulars who had perked up some now that they were being exposed to a little female company. He seemed to take in the grim walls, the faded posters on the walls, the hole that someone had punched in the door of the men’s room.

  “You know, I own this place,” he said at last. “Bought it three years ago from a man named Gruber. He was a German Jew. Never could understand why he had a shamrock on the sign. When I asked him, he told me that nobody ever lost money on a bar that looked Irish. Didn’t matter what happened once you got inside. Kind of people who come into a place like this, they’re not too concerned about decor. They want to drink, drink some more, have one for the road, then stagger home and be left to themselves from start to finish. So when Gruber said he was going to retire, I bought it, because it suited my disposition. I like being left to myself. I don’t like people asking about my present or my past. Why do you think I’d make an exception for you?”

  Now it was my turn to pause before answering. There was a game being played, and I think Maguire knew it. I had come here in part to find out what he could tell me about the Grady house, because to understand the present you have to understand the past. But I also wanted to take a look at him. He was the only child to have entered the Grady house and survived, and I didn’t like to think about the kinds of scars that experience had left upon him. While those who have been abused in the past, or who have suffered in the way that he had, do not automatically themselves become abusers, it does happen, and it was something that needed to be considered.

  “I came here to look into your eyes,” I said.

  Maguire met my gaze levelly.

  “And what do you see?”

  “I know what I don’t see: I don’t see a man who has been transformed by his own pain into the very thing that caused that pain to begin with.”

  “You thought I might have been behind whatever is troubling Frank Matheson.”

  He said it softly, but without blame or anger.

  “I had to consider it.”

  He took a long pull on his cigarette, releasing the smoke slowly through his nostrils. Along with the fumes, some of the suspicion seemed to ease from his body.

  “What made him hire a private investigator?”

  I handed him one of the copies of the photograph, the unknown girl caught in her pose, ready and waiting for the ball to be released, for her chance to strike at it. Maguire picked it up and examined it for a time.

  “Do you recognize her?” I asked.

  “No. Where did it come from?”

  “Matheson found it in the mailbox of the Grady house. He doesn’t know why it was left there. He thought that it might be some kind of tribute to John Grady.”

  Maguire was quiet for a long time. I knew that at the end of his silence, he would either stand up and tell me to leave or open up to me. The decision would be his to make, and if I spoke before he reached it I felt certain I would get nothing from him.

  “An offering,” said Maguire.

  “Perhaps.”

  “He used that word, you know, when I was with him. He called the Matheson girl that. He said she was an ‘offering.’ ”

  “An offering to what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe to whatever he believed made him do the things that he did. He talked all the time I was there, but only some of it was addressed to me. I don’t remember so much of it. I was too scared to listen while I was conscious, and when I came to he was dead. I’ve blanked out most of the rest. I didn’t do so good in high school so they sent me to a doctor, a shrink, and he said I needed to confront what happened in that house, but I prefer it the way it is. Hidden. Locked up, just like I was.”

  It wasn’t for me to comment on how he chose to deal with what he had endured, but I had a brief flash of a barred cellar door, and inside a small boy was being tormented by John Grady, over and over again. Whatever front he presented to the world, that was the reality of what was hidden inside Denny Maguire’s head.

  He retrieved his cigarette from the ashtray, took a drag on it, and continued.

  “Mostly,” he said, “he spoke to something that I couldn’t see.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  “The mirrors. There were mirrors on every wall. I could see him reflected in them. It was like the room was filled with John Gradys. I remember that, and I remember the remains of the other children. They were sitting over by the far wall. I don’t like to recall how they looked. He talked to them too, sometimes, in a way.”

  “Do you recall anything about Louise Matheson?”

  He shook his head.

  “I think I heard the shot that killed her, but I was pretty far gone by then.”

  “Why did he keep you alive?”

  Maguire pretended to think about the question, but I guessed it was one that had troubled him all his life, ever since Grass had led him from that terrible place.

  “I was the only boy he took,” he said. “He spoke to me some, told me about himself, about the house he wanted to create. He hated the little girls, but me, I was different. I still think he’d have killed me, in the end, or maybe just let me fade away and die. Could be he saw something of himself in me. I hope to Jesus he was wrong, but I think that’s what he believed.”

  The cigarette had almost burned down to the filter. A column of ash toppled like a condemned building and exploded into dust upon the tabletop.

  “Can you remember anything else that he said?” I asked.

  He looked at me, then stubbed out the cigarette and rose.

  “Like I told you, I don’t remember the details. I do recall that he didn’t talk directly to the other children,” he said.

  It sounded as if there was dust caught in his throat.

  “He talked to their reflections in the mirrors. He talked to them like they were inside the mirrors, and if those policemen hadn’t come, then he’d have been talking to me that way too. I’d have been lost in there with them.”

  And in the gloom of his grim little bar, Denny Maguire began to cry.

  The streets around the Desperate Measure were quiet as I walked back to the parking lot at the rear of the bar. I wasn’t sure that I was learning much that I hadn’t already suspected: John Grady was a vile human being, and all those who had come into contact with him remained tainted by his touch.

  When I turned the corner, I saw a man leaning against the hood of my Mustang. He was smoking a cigarette in his right hand while the fingers of his left tapped a delicate rhythm against
the bodywork. I knew who he was, even as he watched my approach, his eyes lost deep in his domed skull and his lank hair hanging like an afterthought at the back of his head.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  The Collector had turned to watch my approach. He looked sickly in the yellow glow of the single light that illuminated the lot, and appeared to be dressed in the same clothes that he had worn to his interview with Matheson. I could see the sole of his shoe gaping like a fish’s mouth.

  “I think you can,” he said, “and perhaps I can help you in return.”

  “I can give you the address of a good tailor,” I said. “He might also know someone who can fix your shoe. After that you’re on your own.”

  The Collector glanced down, as if noticing his ruined sole for the first time.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Look at that.”

  He shot a plume of smoke into the night air. It went on for a long time, as though he were manufacturing it deep inside his lungs.

  “You want to step away from my car?”

  The Collector considered it for a moment. Just when it seemed as if I’d have to drive off with him draped across the hood, he tossed his cigarette to the ground and stamped it out with his good shoe, then moved a couple of feet away from my car.

  “My apologies,” he said. “You work for Mr. Matheson.”

  “I think we have a misunderstanding,” I said. “I wasn’t offering to exchange information in return for you finding someplace else to rest.”

  I stood by the Mustang, but I didn’t take out my keys. If I tried to open the car door, then I might have to take my eyes off the man in the lot for an instant, and I didn’t want to do that. Matheson was right. The Collector’s appearance, his greasy hair combined with his filthy clothes, was a distraction, a ruse to fool the unwary. His movements were slow and precise because he chose to make them that way. When he wanted to, I sensed, he could move very quickly indeed, and his old coat and tattered trousers concealed strong bones and lean, stringy muscles.

  “I suspect Mr. Matheson told you about me.”

  I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to reveal anything to him.

  “I know about the picture,” he said.

  Everything changed.

  “What picture?”

  “The picture of the little girl.”

  “Do you know who she is?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you know who took the photograph?”

  Again, he shook his head.

  “Then you’re no use to me. Go find another dark place to haunt.”

  I made a show of fiddling with my keys.

  “She’s at risk,” said The Collector. “If you give me what I want, some of that risk will diminish.”

  I wondered if he had taken the photograph, if its placement in the mailbox was all part of his efforts to receive payment for whatever old debt he believed he was owed.

  The Collector was smart. He was waiting for me when I reached that conclusion. “But she is not at risk from me,” he said. “I have no interest in children. I merely want my debt paid.”

  I took a couple of steps toward him. He didn’t appear threatened.

  “And what debt is that?”

  “It’s a private matter.”

  “Are you working for somebody?”

  “We all work for somebody, Mr. Parker. Suffice it to say that John Grady attempted to secure a certain asset before he died. He partially succeeded. A token gesture will be enough to undo the damage. Your client is unwilling to make that gesture.”

  “The debt is not his to pay. He has no obligation to you, and even if he had, I don’t see how paying it diminishes the ‘risk’ to the girl in the photograph.”

  The Collector lit another cigarette. In the flare of the match, his eyes filled with flames.

  “This is an old and wicked world. John Grady was a foul man, and the Grady house is a foul place. Such places retain a residue that can pollute others. If you help me, then some of that pollution may be removed.”

  “What do you want?”

  “A mirror, from the Grady house. It has many mirrors. One will not be missed.”

  “Why don’t you just take one yourself?”

  “The house is secured.”

  “Not so secure that a man couldn’t get into it if he wanted something badly enough.”

  “I am not a thief,” said The Collector.

  It was more than that. For the first time, his eyes shifted from mine. He was scared of the house. No, not scared, but wary. For whatever reason, he was unable to enter the house himself.

  “I think you need to talk to the lawyers, or the bank,” I said. “Talk to somebody, anybody, but just don’t talk to me again. I can’t help you.”

  As I spoke, I opened the car door. He remained standing, isolated in the middle of the lot, watching me.

  I closed the door and put the key in the ignition. When I looked up, The Collector was gone, or so I thought until the tapping came at my side window. He was close to the glass, so close that I could see the lines in his face and the veins running beneath his pale skin. It looked too thin, as though only the slimmest of membranes concealed the bloody redness beneath.

  “I will collect,” he said. “Remember that.”

  I gunned the engine and pulled out so quickly that he was forced to throw himself back against the big Toyota in the next space. He hung in the rearview mirror like an infected wound in the flesh of the night, and then I turned the corner and he disappeared from my sight.

  There was no moon over Scarborough as I drove home. Great swaths of cloud hid the light. Soon the marshes would flood, and a fresh round of feeding and dying would begin. I wondered what effect that cycle might have on me, and if the water in my own body might somehow be prey to the revolutions of a chunk of dead rock in space. Perhaps it affected my behavior, making me act in odd and unpredictable ways. Then I thought of Rachel, and what she might say if I shared those thoughts with her: she would tell me that my behavior was odd and unpredictable anyway, and that nobody would notice a difference if they tried to make a lunar connection.

  Our first child was due, and every time my cell phone buzzed I expected to hear Rachel’s voice telling me that it was time. I had long given up cosseting her, for not only was she fiercely independent, but she saw in my actions an attempt to guard against the loss of another child. My daughter and my wife had been stolen from me only a few years before. I was not sure that I could live if another was taken from me. Sometimes that made me overprotective of those I now held dear.

  I stopped my car before entering the driveway to our home. I thought of Matheson and his wife: how did they see themselves now, I wondered? Was one still a father, a mother when one’s child was dead? A wife who has lost her husband becomes a widow, and a husband bereaved of his wife a widower, but there was no name for what one became when one’s only child was wrenched from this world. But perhaps it didn’t matter: in my own mind I was still her father, and she was still my child, and regardless of the world in which she now dwelt, that would always be. I could not forget her, and I knew that she had not forgotten me.

  For she came to me still. In the lost time, in the pale hours, in those moments between waking and sleeping when the world was still forming around me, she was there. Sometimes her mother was with her, cloaked in shadows, a reminder of my duty to them, and to those like them. I used to dream of being at peace, of no longer experiencing these visions. Now I know that it is not meant for me, not now, and that my peace will only come when I close my eyes and at last take my place beside them in the darkness.

  Rachel was lying on the couch, reading, her hand resting on her belly and her long red hair descending in a braid across her left shoulder. I kissed her forehead, then her lips. She placed my hand alongside hers, so that I could feel the child within.

  “You think the kid is planning to leave anytime soon?” I asked. “If the baby stays there any longer we can start charging rent.”r />
  “Get used to saying that,” she said. “You’ll be asking the same question until our child goes to college. Anyway, I’m the one who has to carry another person around inside me. It’s about time you started shouldering some of the burden.”

  I went to the kitchen and took a soda from the fridge. “Yeah, what about all the ice cream I have to keep bringing home? It doesn’t float here on its own.”

  “I heard that.”

  I stood at the kitchen door and waved a carton of Len Libby’s orange sherbet at her.

  “Tempted? Huh? Do we want a little spoonful for the road?”

  She threw a cushion at me.

  “How I ever allowed you to get close enough to impregnate me I really don’t know. I guess it was a moment of weakness. Literally a moment, in your case.”

  “Harsh,” I said. “You’re not including cuddling time.”

  I sat down beside her and she folded herself into me as best she could. I shared my soda with her, despite her hurtful comments about my alleged lack of stamina.

  “So how did it go?” she asked.

  I told her about my day: the cops, the Grady house, my conversation with Maguire. None of it added up to very much. Rachel had spent some time going through the files Matheson had left with me. Now that the birth was imminent, she was not taking on any new academic or professional work, and consequently the Grady case offered her an opportunity to stretch some underused psychologist’s muscles.

  “Mirrors,” said Rachel. “Conversations with an unseen other. A display of victims yet without any real interaction. No actual sexual or physical abuse of the children, beyond the final act of taking their lives. Even then, he seemed determined to put them through as little pain as possible: a single blow to the head to render them unconscious, then suffocation.”

  “Then there’s the house,” I said. “He had great plans for it, yet never did much to improve it from what I can see. All he did was start wallpapering and put too many mirrors on the walls.”

  “And what do you think he saw in them?” asked Rachel.

  “He saw himself. What does anyone see in a mirror?”