But the boy hesitates, unsure if he should enter. He hears the other voice again—a man’s voice that reminds him of his own—but cannot make out what it’s saying. Two words, only two words—but the voice is behind him now, far away in the void at the bottom of the stairs.
It doesn’t matter, the boy thinks.
And then he steps forward into an attic full of stars.
Chapter 91
Markham was sure he’d lost consciousness; was vaguely aware of a loud explosion in front of his face—but then the pain, in a burst of bloodred stars, shot across his nose and sent him flying backwards. Something happened next—blurry movement and a loud buzzing as the sky threatened to iris into black—and then the taste of blood in his throat brought him back, started him coughing.
He rolled onto his stomach, shook the cobwebs from his skull, and spat into the grass. The buzzing in his ears was replaced by ringing, and something whispered of a blink forward in time—how long a blink, he wasn’t sure. One part of his brain told him his nose was broken, while another part registered his gun lying a few feet away. Instinctively he crawled toward it, his hand reaching for the warm barrel when suddenly, underneath the ringing, he thought he heard the footsteps crunching in the grass.
And talking? Did I just hear someone talking?
Markham turned and saw the Impaler staggering out into the field beyond the old oak tree. He grabbed his gun and rose on all fours. A wave of pain at the bridge of his nose sent him reeling, but he found his feet and stumbled toward the tree—took cover and peered around it to discover the Im-paler had slowed. He could see him clearly now in the open field—naked, about thirty yards away, his muscular flesh a milky gray in the moonlight. He was unarmed.
Markham whirled from around the tree, his empty gun trained on the man’s back. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” he shouted, but the Impaler seemed to ignore him—staggered a few more steps and then sank to his knees.
Markham lowered his gun and watched in fascination as the man in the field began clawing upwards at the open air. He struggled to stand; and when he did, he lifted his left foot and dropped it quickly. He repeated the motion with his right and then his left again, stepping in place over and over as if he were trying to climb an invisible staircase. Then all at once he stopped, stood motionless, and fell face-first into the grass.
Markham rushed to his side and turned him over, pulling back immediately when he saw the blood gushing from the hole under the young man’s right eye. He was handsome, Markham thought, suddenly detached; younger than he expected, too—but his breathing was shallow, and his lips moved as if trying to speak.
“It’s over,” Markham whispered. But it was clear the Im-paler didn’t hear him, didn’t see him either; for the young man seemed to gaze past him and up toward the sky.
“Come back,” he managed to say at last. “Come back.”
Epilogue
Two weeks later, the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, Quantico
“Would you like some?” Gates asked, raising the pot of coffee.
“No, thank you,” Markham said. “I don’t touch it anymore.” He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring up at the large bulletin board: dozens of photocopies of newspaper articles taken from the Impaler’s cellar.
Gates nodded and replaced the pot on the burner. “Meant to tell you yesterday that the nose looks good,” he said. “But I have to admit I liked it better before the swelling went down. Gave you a sort of street cred.”
Markham smiled thinly, and Gates sat down—slipped out one of Claude Lambert’s notebooks from the pile on his desk and leaned back in his chair.
“Lambert,” he said, opening the notebook. “Family history in North Carolina goes back to the late nineteenth century. Before that, the line hailed from Louisiana. Looks like they were run out of New Orleans in the decade following the Civil War. We found records of an absinthe house established on Bourbon Street around the same time. Seems to be a connection there, some kind of falling-out between business partners, but we’ll never know for sure. The notebooks speak of an absinthe recipe in the Lambert family dating back generations. The old man was simply building on tradition.”
Markham fingered a newspaper article.
“Claude Lambert was an interpreter in World War II. Did you know that?” Markham nodded. “He was stationed in France for some time after the Allies took Normandy. Guess he kept up the tradition of speaking French, too. We interviewed his son in prison. Said his father only spoke French when he was down in the cellar cooking up his experiments. Claims he never really understood what was going on down there. Odd part of it is I believe him.”
Markham said nothing, only scanned the bulletin board.
Gates closed the notebook and set it back on the pile. The business with Schaap, the names from the cemetery—Markham couldn’t understand how he missed it. True, Gates thought, given the size of the cemetery, without the military connection it would’ve been like shooting blind from the white pages—thousands upon thousands of names, over one hundred Lamberts listed in the city of Raleigh alone. Add on how the gravestone marked Lyons had confused them—no, Schaap stumbling onto the Impaler was literally a one-in-a-thousand shot. They would’ve found him eventually, but Schaap shouldn’t have gone it alone. That was reckless, unacceptable, and stupid. But still, Gates knew his supervisory special agent felt somewhat responsible.
“How’s the girl doing?” Markham asked.
“I talked to her mother today,” Gates said. “Says she’s doing better but still wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. That’ll soon pass, I expect. Or at least it’ll become more manageable.”
“Part of the equation.”
“What’s that?”
“General equals E plus Nergal,” Markham said absently, tracing his finger over an article. “The equation the Impaler spoke of on the phone—the nine and the three—all this must be a part of it, too. Gene Ralston equals Stone Nergal.”
“The obituary, you mean? The one we found on the cellar wall?”
“Yes. Looks like Ralston committed suicide just after Lambert returned from Iraq. Lambert wrote out these anagrams on the obituary and in one of the notebooks. You can tell by the way he crossed out his letters in the notebook that he was trying to solve a problem. Looks like he found part of the solution in Gene Ralston’s name. Stone Nergal. Christ, what are the chances of that? Even a sane person would have a hard time denying some sort of cosmic connection.”
“What about the word ‘general’ itself? You think that was in play before or after he made the connection to Nergal?”
“Not sure. His excessive narcissism, his military aspirations, perhaps paralleling his delusions of being a second in command to the Prince. E plus Nergal equals General. His real identity, part of the equation.”
“Other parts are here,” Gates said, patting the pile of notebooks. “Claude Lambert’s formulas, the experiments with his own children, the hybrid absinthe production, and the drug supplies from Ralston. The abuse had been going on for years, but seems to have stopped once Edmund reached puberty. And from what we can gather from Claude Lambert’s notes, Edmund never had any idea. At least not while his grandfather was alive.”
“Not consciously, no, but I suspect he knew something was there. Like the death of his mother. A problem, an equation that needed to be solved. The word ‘general’ and the first seven letters of Gene Ralston’s name—a connection of which his subconscious might have been aware.”
“The old man made his notes in coded French. Even with the help of French Intelligence it took us a while to figure it all out. Hard to believe that Edmund Lambert could’ve deciphered anything in here. His grandfather was quite frank about what he let his buddy Ralston do. Basically pimped out his own children and grandchildren all in the name of science. Some paranoid, insane scheme about a mind-control drug that he and Ralston would sell to the government.”
Markham was silent.
“However,” G
ates continued, opening a file on his desk, “Claude Lambert seems to have been far from insane. A textbook sociopath, yes, but there’s something almost Nazi-esque in his writings—the meticulous documentation and his twisted rationale for the continued abuse he let Ralston inflict upon his family. He even talks about the suicide of his daughter as if it were simply a failed experiment.” Gates flipped through his file and read, “‘Have to be more careful with the boy’s prompt,’ the old man says in his notes. ‘His mother took hers too literally. I didn’t think she’d remember, but at least we know the prompt worked.’ You ever hear of anything like this, Sam?”
“C’est mieux d’oublier,” Markham muttered, removing a newspaper article.
“What?”
“This clipping,” Markham said. “This one about the theft of the lion’s head from the taxidermy shop in Durham. It’s quite different from the other articles that were found on the cellar wall. The only one on which he wrote c’est mieux d’oublier.”
“He wrote that phrase in one of his grandfather’s notebooks, too. Translates as ‘It’s better to forget.’”
“Claude Lambert refers to a prompt in his notes but doesn’t say what it is specifically. I’m willing to bet we found it.”
“Then perhaps Lambert had some kind of suppressed memory of the sexual abuse by Ralston. Perhaps the identification with the god Nergal, the anagrams and whatnot, were simply the young man’s way of negotiating in his mind something that was too terrible to for him to remember; something that he might’ve been incapable of remembering because of the drugs, but that his subconscious nonetheless knew was there.”
Markham nodded and stared down at the article.
“It would make sense,” Gates said, leaning back in his chair. “If the psychoactive suggestion is something rare, something only the person in control knows, then there’s no risk of anyone else saying it. But to give a child that kind of drug repeatedly …”
“Hard to imagine the long-term effects on the brain. Then again, with Edmund Lambert, we don’t have to imagine. Delusions, hallucinations, some form of paranoid schizophrenia, perhaps. Classic symptoms.”
“Appears as though he thought the god Nergal was communicating with him everywhere. Everything had the potential to be a message, including that song and the play he was working on at Harriot. I saw the trap he designed for Macbeth—exactly the same design as his tattoo.”
“Everything connected. All part of the equation that proved he was Nergal’s chosen one.”
“Mix in a family history of mental illness and … well, life sure served this kid quite a cocktail.”
“And the bottle?” Markham asked. “The one they found with the notebooks under the floorboards labeled ‘medicine’?”
“Trace Evidence Unit found residue of the absinthe hybrid, but says the bottle hadn’t been opened in years. And we know Edmund Lambert never used drugs on any of his victims.”
“A souvenir, I’m willing to bet, that Lambert kept after the old man passed away. Part of the equation that needed solving. The letters on the bottle and in the anagrams. Lambert wrote them the same—dash-dash-dash.”
“Our labs corroborate Claude Lambert’s notes,” Gates said. “To a certain extent, that is. Everything is still being tested, but the preliminary report says that, with the right dosage, the old man’s absinthe-opium hybrid could possibly have an effect similar to Sodium Pentothal.”
“Truth serum?”
“Yes, but specifically with regard to how it’s administered to patients suffering from extreme psychological disorders. Has an almost hypnotic effect on them and opens their minds up to suggestion.”
Markham frowned and returned the article to the bulletin board—thrust his hands in his pockets and stared up at the scraps of paper. He appeared to Gates as if he were looking past them, through the wall and into the next room.
“Claude Lambert was married twice, you know,” Gates said. “The first time briefly, to a woman he brought back from France after the war. No children, but records indicate she died under suspicious circumstances. Alcohol poisoning was ultimately listed as the cause of death.”
“I’m willing to bet alcohol was only part of the formula,” Markham said. “A formula that the old man didn’t get right until he remarried and had children. And grandchildren, for that matter.”
“Edmund Lambert’s mother committed suicide when he was only five years old, but it was the boy who found her. She had a lot of problems as a child, James Lambert told us—cutting, self-abuse, and whatnot—but by all accounts she was a great mother until one day she just snapped. She hanged herself in the attic.”
“A lot of violence in that family,” Markham said.
“James Lambert said he only met his nephew a handful of times; said he didn’t regret killing the kid’s father and would do it all over again if given the chance. He also added that his father and Rally never laid a hand on him when he was a child.”
“The old man’s notes tell a different story.”
“Edmund Lambert’s contacts at Harriot, his fellow soldiers from the 101st are a dead end, too. All of them saying he seemed like a nice enough guy, but kept to himself mostly. Dedicated and loyal are two words that keep popping up.”
“Loyal’s a good way of putting it,” Markham said. “I’m willing to bet the same thing could be said about James Lambert. Loyal to his old man even now.”
“The Smith girl is our best shot, Sam, but we’ll never really know what made Edmund Lambert tick; how those drugs affected his mind, or to what extent some kind of underlying mental illness played a part. Most disturbing was his psychological profile from the Army. Nothing to indicate there was anything wrong with him. If we assume that it was Edmund Lambert who either found the ancient seal or played a part in its induction into the black market, maybe that was the final tick of the clock that set him off—the message for which he’d been waiting all along.”
Markham shrugged, and a heavy silence fell over the office as he stared up at the board.
“The superposition principle,” Gates said finally. “It’s eating away at you isn’t it? Still so many questions now that the Impaler’s dead. You never got entirely in his wake. Can’t see the messages, the equations from his point of view. Not all of them, anyway.”
“No. Not all of them.”
“But you saw enough to catch him, and that’s what matters.”
“Is it?”
“As far as we can tell, Edmund Lambert had been killing since late December, early January. Twelve victims in four months, including the two drifters we found buried behind the barn—the ones you said he used as his doorways. Andy Schaap, Cox, and the four he got with the car bomb were only icing on the cake for him.”
Markham was silent.
“I know how it looks,” Gates continued. “You flying in from Quantico and catching the Impaler in just over a week—”
“I didn’t catch anybody,” Markham said, turning. “It was Schaap who found Lambert, and Lambert found me. I got lucky the Smith girl showed up when she did. I’ve been getting lucky a lot lately. Lambert, Briggs—most of all, I’m lucky people don’t start seeing me for the fraud I really am.”
“Trust me,” Gates said, rising. “I understand how difficult it is to wrap your mind around the reasons why Schaap bit it and you didn’t. The same goes for the Cindy Smith factor. You saw what Lambert did to her. It was only a matter of time before he tore her to shreds. You saved that girl’s life, Sam, no matter how much you try to deny it because she saved yours.”
Markham narrowed his eyes at him.
“That’s right,” Gates said. “Schaap found Lambert and Lambert found you, but the fact that Schaap is dead doesn’t give you the right to feel sorry for yourself because you’re not. Nor does it make you any more of a fraud than it makes Schaap unlucky.”
Markham studied him. His boss was staring up at the clock above the door.
“You’re a good man, Sam,” Alan Gates said
distantly. “You deserve to live. I suggest you remember that in the days ahead. To think otherwise will only drive you insane.”
Later that evening, Markham placed the thank-you card from Marla Rodriguez on his bureau—“I jumped for joy!” it read; a smiling, cartooned frog leaping from a lily pad.
He’d kept his promise—returned her computer to her family and bought the little girl her own laptop. He also showed her how to password-protect her startup so her brother Diego couldn’t use it. Marla had really appreciated that, and kissed him on the cheek and told him she loved him. Markham told her he loved her, too.
He missed her terribly; had felt closer to her in that one moment than he had to anyone in the last ten years. And as he stared from the card to the plaque above his bedroom door, the FBI agent felt suddenly like he couldn’t breathe.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
A flash of Edmund Lambert’s tattoo—of his bloody chest and the temple doors at Kutha, the doorway to Hell.
Markham reached up and pulled the plaque from the wall—tossed it into the closet, put on his Windbreaker, and dashed outside.
The fresh air felt good, and he breathed it greedily as he walked down to the pond. He could hear the ducks rustling in the thickets and wondered if he was disturbing them. He didn’t care to look up at the stars just yet; preferred instead to gaze out over the water to the lights that dotted the opposite shore. Lights from town houses just like his own; lights from lives that couldn’t be more different.
He thought of Andy Schaap and the life he left behind; he thought of his people at Quantico, of their lives and the distance from him that had already settled in their eyes. But he felt nothing for them. Like the lives across the water, like the stars above his head, they were all so far away from him.
Markham saw a light go out in one of the windows and immediately thought of Edmund Lambert—of the look in his eyes when he spoke to the stars and breathed his final breath. To whom did the Impaler speak—His grandfather? Eugene Ralston? His mother? The god Nergal?—well, that was anybody’s guess now.
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