“I’m not sure,” he said. “If he comes back, tell him to call me right away.”
“Scott?”
“Yes?”
“Are you calling from inside the house?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“Do you hear that?”
Neither of them spoke; they both just listened, and Scott realized the background hissing noise had become slightly louder, shaping into recognizable sound. It was whispering, the words slipping out too quickly to be recognized, its cadences underscored with choppy little inhalations and pauses as if whoever it was couldn’t draw a full breath. Moving again, Scott crossed the dining room, walking toward the door in the corner. It grew even more distinct until he could almost make out what it was saying—house, help, hope—and more urgent at the same time—him, hurt, hit—bursts of language rushing together. Hate, hack, heart. He reached out with his free hand and pressed it against the cold surface of the door.
“No!” The voice inside the cell phone became a deafening shriek. “No, please … DON’T—”
Grunting with surprise, Scott dropped the phone and withdrew his hand quickly from the door. The cell landed on the bare wooden floor next to his right shoe. He took a step back and regarded it with dull dread, like some enormous, revolting insect that had just crawled out from under a rock. Although it sounded as if the crackling, hissing sound had stopped, he didn’t think he was going to be able to pick the phone up again, at least not anytime soon. Kicking it away from himself as hard as he could, though—now there was a possibility with some real promise.
He looked back across the dining room. It remained empty, with no sign of Colette anywhere. Apparently his lie about being alone hadn’t been a lie after all.
“Colette?”
Alone in the house; that couldn’t be right. She had been here with him two minutes earlier. Scott walked through the entryway to the hall leading to the kitchen, thinking she might have come here looking for another drink.
“Colette?”
The kitchen was also empty, a bare white oblong with its smoothed shelves and round counters undisturbed, all the cabinets closed, the sink polished and shining.
He closed his eyes.
Inside his eyelids, he could make out quite clearly the figure of Faircloth standing at the kitchen sink after his most recent murder, whistling softly to himself as he washed the cop’s blood from his hands. Faircloth was holding some bright object under the stream of cold spring water—a tin star, the cop’s badge, turning it over in his hands, scrubbing the red stain off the engraved letters with a child’s toothbrush. Scott saw Faircloth picking up a hand towel and patting the badge dry, pinning it carefully to his flannel shirt, and then lifting a frying pan to admire his reflection in the makeshift mirror. A dull, ugly grin spread over Faircloth’s face, seeping into his expression like mold in time-lapse photography. In Scott’s mind’s eye, he saw Faircloth’s lips twisted around the words.
Howdy, partner.
Satisfied, he took the badge off and …
The image trailed away, leaving Scott staring into the empty cabinet of his own imagination: an audience member staring at a blank screen. The Black Wing, and the character of Faircloth, had already turned out to be much more real than he’d initially thought. He wondered now in an abstract way if that was who had been in his mind while he’d been thrusting into Colette, the stranger, the other who had enjoyed the sound of her screams.
Abandoning the kitchen, he went back down the hall to the dining room, where the laptop and manuscript still sat waiting by the air mattress. He sank down on the air mattress and settled the laptop on his knees. It was an awkward position, and the computer wobbled back and forth as he typed, but he didn’t even notice.
Faircloth stood over the kitchen sink, holding the frying pan like a hand mirror, admiring the badge on his shirt. He thought about how it had been riding on Dave Wood’s uniform just an hour earlier–poor, unsuspecting Dave who had come out here thinking he could trap Faircloth into confessing to the murder of his wife.
“Who’s wearing the badge now, Sheriff?” Faircloth asked. “Who’s wearing that old tin star now, partner?” He began to sing the song he’d been whistling earlier, out loud and with great gusto. “We don’t want the bacon… We don’t want the bacon…” And for some reason, the very fact that he was here singing struck him as hilariously funny. He burst out laughing.
When the laughter subsided, he unpinned the badge and reached down, opening a kitchen drawer. It opened heavily, catching a little, already quite full. Faircloth pushed aside the pink hair clips, ribbons and bows, a lipstick, a compact, a torn-off button, a lollipop that had been licked only twice. It was stuck in the hair of a Kewpie doll, the kind you won at the state fair for tossing balls into milk bottles. A pretty pearl necklace. Bright and shiny things.
In the back of the drawer, two baby-food jars clinked together, one full of nail clippings, the other stuffed with hair–blond, brunette, black. Dave’s hair was reddish brown. Faircloth decided he would trim a strand of that for the jar too.
Scott stopped and reread what he’d written. Although it wasn’t at all what he’d intended for Faircloth’s character or the novel as a whole, he knew intuitively that this was exactly what had to happen. Faircloth’s true purpose had surfaced at last, like a splinter working itself out of the skin. In the end, Scott realized, Faircloth wasn’t the victim of his wife’s infidelity, an innocent man driven to murder. He was—had been—something much darker, perhaps from the outset. For the first time, it occurred to him that it wasn’t the house that had done this to the man, but—
“But what?” he muttered.
You killed them all.
Scott stood up and looked at his hands, half expecting to find them covered once more in a layer of partially dried blood. They were clean but shaking badly, the palms slimed in sweat.
My great-great-grandfather … He built the house—
It was always in your family.
He felt his eyes drawn inexorably, terribly, back to the door in the corner of the room.
You said, “I killed them all.”
No, I said—
The door was open again, just a crack.
He was a Mast, after all.
Her name was Rosemary Carver.
It was always in your family.
He was a Mast.
I’m a Mast.
Scott walked over to the door and slipped his fingers around the edge, now so smooth it felt almost shapeless. As always, he found a closet, nothing more. What had his father seen? An ocean swell of black feeling tumbled over him, so powerful and abrupt that he didn’t have words to describe it. Rage, confusion, dread—all those different terms came close, but none quite captured the immediacy of what he felt. The sensation was like being buried alive, overwhelmed by the weight of his true inheritance. With an involuntary cry, he cocked his fist and thrust it forward with all his strength, smashing it into the back of the closet, drew it back and swung again, hard, fast, unhesitating.
Crash.
He hit it again and again.
Back, forth, crash. Back, forth, crash. It felt good—great, actually—sharp and hard, knuckles popping, smearing blood across the white wall, harder now, a solid thing, something he could beat against.
It was always in your family.
Whatever was missing from his family should have been back here. Whatever he should have inherited from his father, whatever manhood or understanding, this was where it should have gone. Instead, it was just a bare wall for him to beat himself bloody against, over and over, until—
Thump.
Scott stopped. Awakened from a daze of violence, he drew back his throbbing fist, gasping for breath, his arm already going numb to the shoulder. The room, perhaps the entire house, revolved dizzily around him.
He stared at the hole he’d knocked in the back wall, the thin plaster cr
umbling away. Leaning forward, he peered into the hole and the space beyond it but could see nothing.
The space on the other side was solid black.
OWEN PRESSED HIS FOREHEAD against the window, watching the snowy woods. The glass felt good against his face. Red was driving them down the snow-covered highway outside of town. It was very dark, and every now and then the truck’s wheels would skid a little across patches of black ice. But it was okay. Red was a good driver.
“Where are we going?” Owen had a feeling he’d asked that question before, perhaps more than once, but Red just nodded patiently at the spotlight and the guns stowed behind them.
“Jack a deer,” he said. “There’s a ton of ’em out here.”
“Too cold.”
“Bullshit.” Red made a mild scoffing sound in the back of his throat. “It’s all instinct. You’ve done it a million times.”
“Sleepy.”
“Here.” Red swung off the highway through the trees and lunged into the whiteout of an unmarked country road. Owen saw an iron gate. It reminded him of the gates of the cemetery where his mother was buried and something else too—he couldn’t think of what it was. Twenty or thirty yards down the road, the engine shuddered to a halt. Red flicked a switch and the headlights disappeared, drowning them in darkness. There was a rustling sound as Red’s arm brushed past him on its way into the backseat, followed by another click, one that could have meant anything. Owen felt a chill having nothing to do with the temperature spreading up and out from his pounding heart, and he felt himself waking up and becoming sober, which only made the panic more acute.
“Watch out,” he said. “I’m gonna puke.”
“Take it easy,” Red’s voice said mildly, from somewhere in the void. Under the heavy canopy of pines, in the middle of the New Hampshire woods, it was so black that Owen couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. The dome light, he thought, with sudden hope. It’ll come on if I open the door. All I have to do is—
He found the latch and tugged on it, the door clicking open, but something was wrong and no light came, only freezing air, sawing straight through his jacket and skin into his bones, making him cough and splutter and shiver like an old man.
“Hold on.” Red’s whispering voice was no longer to his left. Now it was in front of him, outside the truck, mingling with the icy wind. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
Owen’s hands groped vacancy. “Where’s the lights?”
“I turned ’em off. They scare the deer away.” A hand clamped on to Owen’s forearm, the pressure just shy of painful. “Take it easy. Your eyes’ll adjust.” The hand pulled him out of the truck, and Owen stumbled, nearly falling into the snow. He found his balance at the last possible second, felt the snow piled thick and fluffy up to his knees, so dark. A penlight winked up, and Owen saw the planes of Red’s face floating in front of him, Red’s eyes examining him, flat and expressionless.
“Let’s talk about my wife,” Red said.
Owen swallowed hard. Somehow, even up till this very minute, some part of him had hoped that he’d been wrong about why they were out here, that he’d just been paranoid. Now he realized he had been right all along. He knows, Owen thought. He knows everything. “Please, don’t …”
“I loved you like a brother.” Red’s voice was mellow, unhurried, the words rolling off his tongue. “Nobody else in this whole town treated you that way, not even your real brother. They all think you’re just a worthless drunk, but I always stood up for you. No, you’ve got him wrong, I always said.”
“I’m sorry,” Owen whispered. “Look, Red, you gotta believe me, it was—”
“Never mind me.” Red’s expression hardened even further in the penlight’s minuscule glow. “Let’s talk about Colette.”
Owen swallowed, tasting bourbon, snot, and dirty snow. The urge to throw up was almost overwhelming now, but he was afraid if he started, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He could already hear the next thing Red was going to say: I know all about what happened between you and her, so don’t try to lie about it.
“You know,” Red said, “how important that Bijou Theatre project is to her.”
Owen blinked and stopped swallowing, wondering if he’d somehow misheard. He found himself able to meet the other man’s eyes for the first time.
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb—the demolition project, the theater. I know your family’s all tangled up with that fire, and there’s a lot of, what do you call it, hurt feelings there. But do you have any idea what it’s going to do to her if word gets out that you and your kid have been finding bodies down there, corpses that she’s covering up?”
Owen could only shake his head.
“You talk too much, Owen.” Now Red sounded regretful, almost sad. “Delia was the same way. I loved her, God knows, but in the end, she just didn’t know when to shut up. Come on, let’s go.” The penlight dimmed out, blackness returning to engulf the scene and Owen felt his whole body liquefying, becoming formless as a rustling noise filled the night. Red grabbed his arm, practically dragging Owen along. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a—ow!” There was a dull thud and Red’s voice broke off with a grunt of pain. “What the hell?”
The penlight winked back on. Very dimly, Owen saw Red standing in front of a car, half buried in the snow. Even in his current drunken stupor, Owen recognized it. It was his brother’s rental car, the Saturn …but what was it doing out here in the middle of nowhere? All at once, Owen remembered the old house Scott was renting. He had never been out to see it, for reasons he would never be able to articulate past the old recurrent nightmare of the thing outside his window, shouting his name in the night.
Red crouched down, shining the light inside to make sure there was nobody in there. When he was satisfied, he turned to look at Owen.
“They say these woods are haunted,” Red said. “Colette’s old aunt told me they’re full of unquiet spirits, the walking dead. So I thought, what better place to take the least quiet guy I know?”
“I don’t get it.”
“You will.”
“Red?”
“Yeah, pal?”
“You aren’t gonna hurt me, are you?”
Red just smiled.
THE TRUTH WAS, Red had never meant to hurt the dumb bastard. Lashing out at a guy like Owen would have been redundant anyway—he was his own worst enemy. All you had to do was stay out of the way and let him do all the damage himself. Case in point: his entire life. But Red did intend to throw the fear of God into him, make good and damn sure he didn’t forget who was in charge.
Red had the whole thing planned out. On the way home from the woods, he would pat Owen on the back and say, I don’t ever want to hear any more loose talk about bodies in the basement of the Bijou Theatre again, you get me? Or next time, you’re not coming back from the woods.
Because … Well, dammit, there was something else that Red hadn’t mentioned about the Bijou project: It was his last chance with Colette. A few weeks ago she’d noticed how much cash he was withdrawing from the joint checking account. The bitch never looked at bank statements when they’d first gotten married. And she’d started asking some increasingly uncomfortable questions about where he’d spent his time, and with whom—specifically Sonia Graham.
The weird part was how cool Colette had been about the whole thing, almost as if she’d known all along. Red had said he was sorry, begged her for another chance, promised he’d turn himself around—take charge of the Bijou project and get serious about the family business. And Colette had just stood in her corner, a White Russian in her hand and a maddening little half smile on her face, probably already mentally calling her lawyer. At that moment, Red was visited by a painfully vivid glimpse of his future—divorced, broke, thirty-eight years old, living in a one-room apartment somewhere in Dorchester with his newspaper clippings and a bunch of old glory days stories nobody wanted to hear.
I won’t blow this, he’d pr
omised her, forcing a loving sweetness into his voice that he didn’t feel. I’ll make it right, baby, I promise.
And she had just nodded, still holding her drink with that mocking little quirk of a smile. Two ways to wipe that away, a kiss or a slap, and Red trusted himself with neither. Instead, he’d taken a deep breath and mentally promised himself one more roll in the hay with that little librarian—Sonia Graham was becoming way too much trouble—and the thought calmed him down enough to just walk away.
So here they were, he and Owen, out in the woods, taking the first step toward making things right. Although Owen hadn’t even seen the house yet, he was standing here looking sufficiently scared. In fact, he looked terrified, pissing in his boots, as if he really thought Red had hauled him out here to shoot him. Red thought about that, and the little smile on Colette’s face, the combination adding up to something bigger, but what?
Then, out in the woods, in the dark, something crackled.
“Jesus Christ.” Owen spun around, his eyes huge, looking everywhere at once. “What was that?”
“Just a deer,” Red said, but even he had to admit that it sounded much too big to be a deer. His thumb fumbled for the penlight, but it slipped from his gloved hand and plunged deep in the soft snow below them. “Hell.” The penlight had been brought along for effect; why hadn’t he carried a normal flashlight too?
The crackling of branches grew louder and closer, and then abruptly fell silent. Only the wind was moving now, a low, uneasy moan that rustled the trees. Red realized whatever was in the woods had either stopped its advance or entered the road ahead, which meant it was looking right at them from somewhere very nearby.
Except no animal would do that.
Red dropped to his knees and began feeling around for the penlight, cursing himself for not bringing the spotlight or the rifle. He’d only wanted to scare Owen, but—
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