A Game of Ghosts: A Charlie Parker Thriller: 15. From the No. 1 Bestselling Author of A Time of Torment

by John Connolly

  They pulled up outside the house, and Sumner turned the car so that it was facing toward the gate. Whatever happened next, they’d be leaving fast, and he didn’t want to panic and risk a collision with the house or one of the Thayers’ cars. At best, it would leave evidence, and at worst it might result in the kind of damage that would disable the vehicle. They’d debated whether or not Sumner should just stay in the driver’s seat while Richard took care of the Thayers, but reached the conclusion that it would be better if both of them entered the house, as two men would be more intimidating than one. It was decided to keep the motor running, though, just in case.

  They got out of the car.

  They walked to the front door.

  They rang the bell.

  78

  Thayer heard his wife coming down the stairs in response to the doorbell. He only owned one gun, a Taurus Public Defender revolver that had been recommended to him by his brother-in-law, a retired local judge. He’d never fired it outside a range, and stopped carrying it years earlier after he hired a security company to take care of cash runs. It mostly sat in a safe at the bottom of his bedroom closet because his wife hated the sight of it.

  Thayer tried calling to Laurie, but his damn throat was clogged up with phlegm, and all that emerged was a kind of croak. He wasn’t sure what he would have said to her anyway, other than to advise her not to answer the door. She knew of his gift. She didn’t like to talk about it any more than she liked to think of that gun in his closet, but she understood that his abilities were real. If he warned her about something, she’d pay heed to him.

  He stumbled to the door of his den, barking his shin painfully against the corner of a table along the way, and got to the hall just as his wife reached the front door. They had a camera system, but it didn’t record. It was supposed to, but it had gone on the fritz a couple of weeks earlier after they changed ISPs, and Thayer hadn’t got around to calling the guy who’d installed it in order to get it fixed. There was a screen in the kitchen, and another upstairs, but he wasn’t near either of them. He could only assume that his wife had checked and decided it was okay to answer the door.

  Except it wasn’t. He could feel it.

  The door was solid wood, with thin panes of glass at either side. He could see no one.

  He tried to speak again.

  His wife reached for the door.

  And Tobey Thayer’s world went black as he fell to the floor.

  79

  Sumner and Richard rang the bell a second time and waited. When no one answered after thirty seconds, Sumner began to feel uneasy. Thayer was in there – he had to be. Maybe he and his wife were out in the yard and hadn’t heard the bell. If so, he didn’t know what they might be doing. They could hardly be gardening.

  He turned to Richard.

  ‘I guess we go round back.’

  80

  Thayer opened his eyes. He was sitting against the wall, his feet outstretched. His wife was kneeling beside him, wiping his face with a damp cloth. Laurie he recognized, but the two men standing behind her he did not. One was tall, black, and dressed in the kind of suit and jacket combination that rarely graced the floor of Thayer’s Discount Furniture Sales, or of a discount anything. The other, smaller and of uncertain racial heritage, was the kind of guy Thayer would have dispatched a security guard to keep an eye on if he ever set foot in his store. He looked like someone who could steal out with a sofa under his shirt while your back was turned.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Thayer.

  ‘My name is Angel,’ said the smaller man.

  Thayer blinked.

  ‘I think,’ he told his wife, ‘I may have hit my head.’

  Richard and Sumner were in the Thayers’ garden. The whole first floor at the back of the house was a combination kitchen and dining room, with a glassed-in area furnished with chairs and couches that extended out into the yard. Most of it was lawn, with a surrounding line of mature trees that provided shelter from the wind.

  Sumner was nervous now. They had given the Thayers no cause for alarm, or not before they’d started prying around the back of their property, so he could see no reason they might have retreated into the depths of their house and refused to answer the door. If their suspicions had been raised, then the police were almost certainly on their way, and he and Richard would be better off putting as much distance as possible between Greensburg, Pennsylvania and themselves. But why should the Thayers have been concerned by the appearance of a car in their driveway? If they were that paranoid, the gate wouldn’t have been wide open to begin with.

  Maybe the Thayers weren’t home after all, and owned more than two cars between them. If that was the case, he and Richard could find a way to hide their own vehicle and wait for them to come back. This might be their only chance to deal with Thayer. Sally had texted a seemingly innocuous message to let them know that Michelle Souliere was dead, and if Thayer wasn’t already aware of her murder, then he soon would be, and might make a connection between her killing and the possibility of some harm befalling him. No, Thayer needed to be dealt with as quickly as possible. Sumner certainly didn’t want to have to face Sally and tell her that they’d failed, not after she and Kirk had managed to kill Souliere.

  Richard glimpsed movement in the house: a man moving from the stairs to a room on the left, from which he did not emerge again.

  ‘There’s someone inside,’ he whispered.

  Sumner’s bowels contracted. He needed a restroom like he’d never needed one before. Now he understood why burglars sometimes took a dump on the floor of people’s homes. They weren’t simply being assholes, although some of them undoubtedly were; the call of nature was just too much for them.

  Richard gestured at the glass door, and Sumner tried the handle. The door opened under the pressure of his gloved hand. He stepped aside, allowing Richard to enter first. Richard held the gun in a two-handed grip. To Sumner, he looked like he knew what he was doing, which was good, because Sumner wasn’t capable of killing another human being. He wasn’t like Richard. The Smith & Wesson was starting to feel heavy in his hand. Sumner wanted to be rid of it.

  In a brief, final flash of sanity, it struck Sumner that he should never have agreed to this.

  Richard was halfway across the kitchen floor.

  Sumner, already doomed, followed him.

  VI

  It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows. Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into sleep.

  Maxim Gorky, ‘On a Visit to the Kingdom of Shadows’ (1896)

  81

  Angel explained to Tobey Thayer why they had come. Thayer had never met Michelle Souliere, but he had spoken with her over the phone, and thought that he might have enjoyed spending time with her face-to-face, if only to tell her just how wrong she was about the pathways between this world and the next. It would never happen now.

  He and his wife were sitting in the den with Angel and Louis. Laurie had made coffee. To a casual observer, the situation might have appeared almost normal.

  ‘I see things,’ said Thayer. ‘I guess that’s the best way to put it, although it doesn’t really cover it. I get flashes, images. Sometimes I perceive colors, or hear sounds, and I have to extract meaning from them.’

  ‘You ever get lottery numbers?’ asked Angel.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sucks.’

  ‘Yeah. I did predict the score of the 1993 Super Bowl, though. Dallas against Buffalo, 52–17.’

  ‘I’m not psychic and I could have predicted that,’ Angel pointed out.

  ‘I guess,’ said Thayer. ‘Pity I don’t gamble.’

  ‘How long have you known about the Brethren?’ asked Louis.

  ‘I feel like I’ve always known about them. I saw them in dreams when I was younger, but it wasn’t until much later that I started to recognize a pattern. I’d glimpse them reflected in glass, or in water. Maybe I’d be writing something on a piece of p
aper at work, and then look down to find I’d drawn a face, or a house. I started keeping a record of dates and times, and gradually I was able to connect some of my sightings – or “attacks”, as my wife calls them – with incidents. It’s not easy, though. It never was. There are about forty murders every day in this country. It would be hard to experience a sighting and not find that it coincided with a killing somewhere. And then, if you start factoring in disappearances, it becomes impossible. It’s nothing I could go to the police with, and this gift that I have, it’s not something I speak about with others. If I could find a way to rid myself of it, I would. It only brings pain.’

  ‘And then Eklund found you,’ said Angel.

  ‘Actually, I found him. I read something he posted on a message board about a year ago, and I got in touch. I was cautious at first, and so was he. Makes it sound like a date, doesn’t it?’

  Louis raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Except,’ Thayer added hurriedly, just in case anyone got the wrong idea, ‘it wasn’t. Between us, we began making progress. We established what were almost solid correspondences, and I—’

  He paused, and it was clear to Angel and Louis from the look he cast at his wife that this was not something he had previously shared with her.

  ‘Go on,’ said Louis.

  Thayer gulped some coffee.

  ‘I’d always tried to smother what I could do, or ignore it. It used to be that, when I had an attack, I’d just lie down for a while, or distract myself with the TV until it passed. It’s like a muscle, you know? If you start using it, you develop it, and it gets stronger. I didn’t want it to get stronger.

  ‘But Eklund, he convinced me to open myself to it. He wanted me to go deeper, to find clues about the people who were doing these things. So that’s what I did.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said his wife.

  Thayer ignored her. He was unburdening himself of this, perhaps for the first time. He was no longer looking at any of them. Whatever he saw was both deep inside and far away.

  ‘I began searching for them,’ he said. ‘I’d wait until Laurie had gone out, and I’d sit in here where it was dark and quiet, and I’d close my eyes and try to relax. It was like willing myself to dream. And sometimes, if I did it right, I’d find myself walking down twilight streets, moving through a shadow city. I had to be careful, though, because once I opened myself they began calling to me, all the voices. There are so many of them, and you don’t want them to get into your head, because they’ll drive you mad. You have to keep moving, and not acknowledge them, but it’s hard because they’re in so much pain. Most of them are just lost, but some …’

  He was trembling. His wife reached out, placed her hands over his, and calmed him.

  ‘Some of them are hiding. That’s what the Brethren are doing: they’re hiding.’

  ‘From what?’ asked Angel.

  ‘From judgment.’

  Louis knew that they should already have been moving the Thayers away from their home. They were at risk here, and would be safer in a motel. But he also understood that what he was hearing was important. Parker would want to be told of it, and if they interrupted Thayer now it was possible he might clam up and never speak of it again, or not so openly.

  ‘It makes you sick, being in that place,’ said Thayer. ‘It’s not for the living. It’s not even for the dead. It’s a kind of limbo, a crawl space between worlds. It’s full of cracks and crevasses and dark, dark corners, all places to conceal and be concealed. That’s where the Brethren have sequestered themselves. They’ve made a lair there, far from the ones who’ve just gone astray. It’s a fortress, and it’s theirs. They only emerge if they have to, when there’s killing to be done in their name, and that’s when I catch flashes of them on this side. But they had no idea I could see them, not at first. They’re almost blind in our world, but not in theirs. That was the mistake I made. I shouldn’t have gone looking for them. Eklund was wrong to ask.

  ‘Because they sensed my coming, and now they know.’

  It was like walking through a city made of smoke: that was how Thayer described the place in which the Brethren were hidden. There were houses, and streets, and buildings, but they resembled projections on mist. They shimmered, and their lines and dimensions were not fixed. The sky was red, and the distant hills were little more than patches of darkness against the firmament. He recognized some of the architecture, especially on the skyline, which combined elements of any number of great American cities, and he understood instinctively that this landscape had been created from the combined memories of all those who moved through it. That was why the great skyscrapers were less detailed than the small houses: the latter were important and intimate, while the former were simply backdrops to daily life.

  The city was filled with wraiths, figures as indistinct as the environment through which they moved. Some wandered aimlessly, calling out the names of loved ones, while others sat in the windows and doorways of the homes they had conjured up from what could be recalled of their old lives, staring emptily at eternity. But the children were the worst: Thayer could feel their distress, and could not help but respond to it. When he did, they turned to him, reaching out, and as they touched him he experienced a leaching of his own life force, and was acutely aware that it would be possible to die in this place. The furniture salesman seated in a chair in his den would be found lifeless, and his death blamed on a heart attack, or a stroke, but the truth of it would lie elsewhere, and no one would ever know. He had to disentangle himself from the small hands, and force his other self, the one in the chair, to wake. He did so suddenly, like a man shocked into consciousness by a dousing with cold water. Only a minute or two had gone by, but it took hours for his fear to ebb.

  That was the first time.

  ‘And you went back?’ said Angel.

  ‘Eklund told me we had to learn more. He was right, I guess, but he didn’t know what it was like for me over there, or didn’t want to know. All he cared about was tracking the Brethren. He talked me into it, over the phone. But, you know, I was also curious. It wasn’t just Eklund. It was my fault as well.

  ‘The second time I explored farther, and drew closer to where I sensed they were, but when I tried to return I couldn’t. I’d gone too deep, or spent too long on the other side. Either way, I couldn’t seem to wake. That was when the children came back, and this time there were others with them – adults, but they wanted the same thing as the kids. I think I was like a beacon, and they believed if they followed me they might find a way out. And even if I couldn’t help them escape, I represented light and heat. I was life.

  ‘I began to panic, and that saved me. When I came to in my chair, I thought I was having a seizure. My chest hurt, and I swear that my face had gone purple. Eventually, I found the strength to crawl up to my bed. When Laurie came home, I told her I was feeling unwell. You remember, honey? That was back in December.’

  ‘I remember,’ she replied. She looked like she wanted to slap her husband across the back of the head for this foolishness, and only the presence of the two visitors prevented her from doing so.

  ‘I’m sorry for it,’ said Thayer.

  ‘So you should be,’ she replied, but Angel noticed that she did not take away her hands, and retained her grip on her husband. She might have thought him a fool, but he was her fool.

  ‘And you told Eklund about this?’ said Angel.

  ‘I did. We came to an agreement: I would only go searching for the Brethren if he was with me, and we’d set a limit on the time I’d spend over there. He came here shortly after New Year’s, when Laurie was away visiting our daughter in Boston, and we gave it a trial run. I sat in this very chair, Eklund beside me, and I traveled over. Eklund said he could tell when I was gone because my eyes opened, which he said was the damnedest thing – to be stared at by someone who wasn’t seeing you. He counted to ten, then brought me back.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was just like waking a sleeper. He shook me h
ard, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I was back here. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, but without the ruby slippers.

  ‘So with Eklund to help, it seemed safer than before. I wouldn’t have only myself to rely on. There’d be someone else looking out for me. We agreed on twenty minutes, which was twice as long as I’d ever spent there before, but I knew where I had to go. I’d developed a sense of the place, and recalled the route that would get to where they were.’

  ‘And you trusted Eklund?’

  ‘I had no reason to doubt him, and he didn’t let me down. He kept his word.’

  Louis and Angel noticed that Thayer had started shaking again. It was just the faintest of tremors in the hands, arms, and jaw, like a man in the early stages of Parkinson’s, but it was enough to cause his wife to raise a hand to his face in an effort to calm him. Thayer’s eyes grew large, and a great desolation filled them, as though he had been forced to gaze into a pit filled with the remains of innocents.

  ‘What happened wasn’t Eklund’s fault,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t have known. Neither of us could.’

  ‘Known what?’ whispered Angel.

  ‘How bad they are.’

  Which was when the doorbell had rung for the second time that afternoon.

  82

  Sumner stopped breathing as soon as the man appeared, and it took him a few seconds to start again once the figure had vanished into the room off the hall. When he released his breath, it emerged in a rush that sounded like a wave breaking on rocks, and caused Richard to cast a warning glance in his direction. Sumner raised a hand in apology, but this was all wrong. The doorbell worked. They’d heard it ring twice inside the house, yet no one had responded.

  But someone should have.

  They ought to leave.

  Now.

  But Richard was moving again.

  Into the kitchen.