He decided he had to risk the short walk to his office’s en suite bathroom. He would have to do it doubled over and with his ass clenched, but whatever was wrong with him was getting worse, and out was definitely better than in.
When he tried to rise, though, he couldn’t. He tried again, but his legs and arms were too enfeebled to lift his body. His first thought was, again, flu, and that it had weakened him. But he dismissed that almost immediately. He didn’t feel weak. He had suffered the enervating effects of illness enough in his life to know how that sapping of strength felt, and this wasn’t it. His muscles felt normal, with none of the aches that flu would have caused. It took him several seconds to realize the truth, and he immediately disregarded it as impossible. Then the chair groaned beneath him and he had to accept it.
He was growing heavier, putting on weight literally by the second. His clothes felt tight. He watched with too much disbelief to be horrified as the legs of his pants grew taut with the expanding flesh within. Then he was distracted by the sight of his stomach visibly expanding. A shirt button popped off.
It wasn’t possible. It just couldn’t be happening. He shoved the half-finished plate of ribs away from him, looking for reasons no matter how absurd and settling upon some incredible form of poisoning. Even as the plate skidded away from him across the surface of the desk, he knew it wasn’t the cause. He fumbled with the handset for the casino’s secure communications and for a terrified moment almost dropped it. If it ended up on the floor, he doubted he could reach it. Already the arms of his chair were digging into his sides, pinning him in it.
“Rand!” he blurted as soon as he opened the “red” channel for emergencies. “Help me! For Christ’s sake, help me!”
There was no reply for a moment, the longest moment. Then Rand said, “Boss? What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
“I’m sick, I think. Something’s wrong with me. I’m in trouble, Alia. Help me…”
The last word turned into a groan as the chair arms dug deep into the sides of his growing torso.
* * *
Hayesman never, ever used first names with staff. He was old-school. Rand didn’t have a problem with it; it kept things military and she was fine with that. Hearing him call her “Alia” shocked her more than if he’d been screaming. She set off for his office at a sprint, palms flat, arms pumping, shouting an order at a hospitality greeter as she went by him to call 911, medical emergency in Hayesman’s office.
* * *
He couldn’t even look down anymore. His neck had swollen and might as well have been in a cervical collar for all the movement he could manage. The underside of his desk was digging into the upper thighs, and he could feel and hear seams giving way in his clothes. His feet were in agony; he wore good shoes and they were refusing to split.
He was going to die. He knew that. There were so many things left to do, some bridges to rebuild, some things to attend to. He regretted that the chances to attend to them were now gone for good, and he would die with so much unfinished business. He’d worked too much, he realized. That old work-life balance. He’d fucked it up and now he was going to die unfulfilled, and all the hours and concentration he’d given to the casino were nothing to him.
His last thought was his wonderment at just where all this fucking meat was coming from, anyway?
* * *
Twenty feet from Hayesman’s office door, Rand stopped at the sound of a dull explosion. It was more a rumble than a concussion, a heavy blow that shuddered through the floor. She couldn’t imagine what it might mean. She reached the door, and remembered in great detail afterward how the handle felt in her hand, and how it looked as she turned it and opened the door.
She wasn’t sick, which later struck her as remarkable, but she was leaning against the outside wall of the office in shock when one of her fellow floormen caught up with her and looked in. He threw up.
* * *
Carter woke to find almost an hour had passed, he was lying by a pool of his own vomit, and the man had gone. He had his pistol in his hand.
He dropped the weapon and rolled onto his feet, where he stood unsteadily, staring at the pistol as if he had awoken holding a scorpion. He shook his head, clearing it of the wisps of memory of the experience that had felled him. He breathed deeply and slowly, recovering composure and reveling in the pleasure of breathing, putting away that feeling of dismay and even disgust at how jury-rigged and inadequate the human body was at doing the simplest things. He had felt it before in a curious anticipatory state, as if a curtain was about to be pulled back and the utter pathetic failure of humanity revealed by comparison to something greater. Something else. Something …
The vomit was thin and watery; at least he could now be grateful that he had missed a meal. It was growing dark. He looked up and down the spit of woodland between the houses and the water, but there was no sign of the man. Carter couldn’t even bring himself to be angry. The man had not been the most focused individual, and it was not too much to presume he had psychological issues. When Carter had suffered his … episode, the guy had either been frightened and run away, or understood nothing untoward was happening and just wandered off. Carter favored the second theory. Either way, the man was gone, and Carter was really hungry now.
Across the water, the streetlights were already on. He didn’t remember seeing any on Waite’s Bill, and decided to leave before it got darker and the chainsaw cannibals who surely occupied the weirdly isolated little road came out to play. He turned to walk away, and kicked something. It was a battered blue and white sneaker, failing at the toe cap.
Behind him, Providence River lapped at the bank.
* * *
Colt’s car had gone, which didn’t surprise Carter in the slightest. After a brief reconnoiter to confirm it, he returned to his own car and drove out of the trees and off the spit of land. He felt an undeniable leavening of his spirits as he traveled through the oaken tunnel and back into the real world, such as it was. It was foolish, and he would have chided himself for it in the normal run of things, but his experiences on Waite’s Bill had been unusual and unpleasant, and he put it down simply to being glad to be out of there. He would research the fuck out of Waite Road in general and the last house on the eastern arm in particular. Even if he had come across solid evidence that Colt had just gone there selling cookies, he would not have given a damn. The place had more than bothered him. He now understood that it had scared him, even before his fit or whatever the hell it had been. He would see his doctor to get a clean bill of health, and then he was going to tear the roof off every house on that absurd little street and find what secrets lurked within. Carter did not like to be scared; being scared made him angry.
Back off the peninsula, he saw the lit streets and houses that had irritated him with their small-town conformity before, yet he now appreciated them as markers that he was back in a world he understood.
In the driveway of a house on the corner, a man was washing the windshield of his car clean of gull shit in the illumination of his garage and porch lights. He paused to watch Carter drive by with open curiosity and, on an impulse, Carter pulled up.
He walked back to the man, assuming the mien of a confused out-of-towner as he approached.
“Hi! I was wondering if you could help me? My GPS is screwing up or something, and I can’t find Dalton Road.”
“Dalton Road? I don’t know any Dalton Road around here,” said the man.
“Maybe I got the name wrong,” said Carter as if to himself. He knew there was no street of that name in the city. He nodded at the isthmus road. “So that’s not it? I couldn’t see a sign.”
The man laughed. “Man, soon as I saw you coming out of there, I knew you were lost. Nobody goes on Waite’s Bill unless they’re a Waite.”
“What?” Carter didn’t have to work hard to portray consternation. “There must be a dozen houses down there. They all belong to one family?”
“The whole spit does. That�
��s private land.”
“I didn’t see a sign.”
“There isn’t one. Isn’t really needed. People who go down there, they come out again pretty quickly.” He leaned closer. “Not real friendly, the Waites. That’s if you even see them. When we first moved here—must be … yeah, fifteen years ago—the wife and me went down there just to say hi, being new neighbors and all. Got to the end of the road that gets you over the land bridge and, man, we just stood there. You’ve seen those houses. Doesn’t feel right down there, you know? Gave it a minute, turned around, and we walked out again. Never been over there again in all the years since. You see a Waite, they’re in a pickup, they drive out, they drive in, never look left or right.”
“They are literally all Waites?”
The man nodded his head from side to side indecisively. “I got to say, I don’t know that for sure. In the neighborhood, we just call them the Waites because of the name of the bill and the little road in there. Some of them are Waites for sure, because they own the land, have for as long as anyone knows. And they all look kind of related.”
“I saw one guy while I was over there.” Now Carter leaned closer, making the man a co-conspirator, at least in his own mind. Men, Carter knew full well, could be the most amazing gossips with the right handling. “I got to admit, ‘inbred’ was the first thing I thought.”
“Yeah,” said the man, drawn into enjoyable small talk, “the men are all ugly. Real ugly.”
“The women, too, I guess.”
“Yeah, well, yes and no. They’re not going to be getting on Project Runway anytime soon, if you know what I mean. They got those big Waite eyes, for one thing. Kind of too big. But…” He didn’t speak for several seconds, staring at the dark tunnel of trees that led to Waite’s Bill. He flinched as he realized how long he’d been silent. “They’re not so bad. The younger ones, anyway.”
Carter looked down the road, too, mainly to avoid eye contact. He didn’t know what the man meant by “younger” and didn’t need to know. He didn’t want to know.
“Well, I’d better get on my way. It’s getting darker and I still have to find Dalton Road. I think I must have got the name wrong. I’ll call and check.”
They shook hands, and Carter left.
Chapter 14
AD OBLIVIONE
Carter decided not to go see the doctor after all. When he ran through in his imagination how he would describe his symptoms, especially the hallucinations and the sudden desire to eat a bullet, he realized that it could work out very badly for him further down the line. Besides, he felt fine now, and the feeling had not come back.
The vividness of it was taking its time dimming, however. More than once he would find himself doodling tall towers with a few odd asymmetric windows on his notepad while talking on his office phone. He was pretty sure he’d never seen their like in anything historical or even any movies he could think of. They had come from his imagination, that was all. He hadn’t realized he had such a strong imagination. Now that he knew he did, he kind of wished he didn’t.
The research had proved troublesome. Waite’s Bill was off the grid in a variety of ways. He could get basic information, and things like census data, but otherwise it was as if the peninsula existed as something the city did not deign to acknowledge, the civic equivalent of an anal wart.
Finally admitting defeat, at least as far as online resources would permit, he girded himself to do things the old-school way and look at physical files.
The drive from New York to Providence was beginning to become routine to him, and he wondered if he should check out the opportunities for a PI there. New York was proving disappointingly repetitive in terms of work, the big agencies garnering all the interesting cases. He was very aware that he was dining on crumbs from their table, and he did not enjoy it at all. He could always get work with them, and had already been offered some outsourcing from one agency purely because they had more clients than they knew what to do with. But no; he wanted to be his own boss.
Inquiries at Providence City Hall took him around three departments where they looked at him with rising disgruntlement before he was sent to the archives. There he made the acquaintance of an intern, whose enthusiasm was thankfully matched by some local knowledge.
“Waite’s Bill?” said the young man, who introduced himself as Luis Blanco. “There’s a name you don’t hear too often.” He led Carter through a file storage area into a room that looked like it belonged in an academic library. He seated Carter at a worn deal table and gave him some white cotton gloves to wear. “Some of these papers are old,” he explained.
“This is the earliest document we have on Waite’s Bill and Waite Road.” He carefully opened out an antique, discolored sheet of parchment.
“How old is this?” asked Carter. He was being polite; the document was clearly too old to have any relevance to the current state of affairs on the little peninsula, but he needed Blanco’s enthusiasm if the search for anything useful turned into an extended trawl. So he would indulge this little history lesson, as long as Blanco kept it brief.
Blanco grinned. “Sixteen thirty-six. That’s the year the city was formally founded. But get this … the deed makes reference to a house already having been on the bill for sixteen years. So, that’s around 1620.”
Carter was having trouble reading the curling copperplate, partially obscured by stains and marbling of the parchment. “Who owned it then?”
“Jonas Waite, it says here,” said Blanco, pointing. “Married to … what is that? Tamar? Is that a biblical name?”
“A Waite? The same Waites as are there now?”
“I guess, though I’d have to check to be sure. That’s quite something, isn’t it? The land’s belonged to the same family for almost four hundred years now, and they still live there, assuming it is the same Waites. Got to be, hasn’t it? It’s not that common a name. It’s got to be.”
Blanco was able to give Carter two hours of his time, and in that period, judicious samples of documentation covering the intervening generations showed beyond reasonable doubt that the descendants of Jonas and Tamar Waite had held the tiny spit of land without interruption for the entire time, and were still to be found there to the present day. The papers showed that they had built a fortune through ships, primarily a fishing fleet until the late nineteenth century, but some mercantile shipping, too, including bringing in slaves to sell or to work on their farms, a trade they maintained until the very minute of the emancipation. The minutes of a council meeting showed the Waite patriarch of the time, one Newton Waite, had argued vehemently in favor of slavery, referring to the Africans in terms of bestial idiocy, a servitor race that should not and must not be given self-determination.
“Nice guy,” said Carter.
“Meh.” Blanco shrugged. “He gets a pass because it was a different time, different world. There’s so much stuff like that in the records. People talked like that then, that’s history. It’s people who talk like that now—no pass for them.”
* * *
After Carter finished up, he swung by Hill’s Books to get some food and, if he was being honest with himself, to see Emily again. Over a sandwich, he told her about the investigation, of the mysterious Mr. Colt, and the even more mysterious Waite’s Bill. He didn’t mean to talk about the strange fit he’d suffered, but did so anyway, even if he played down its intensity.
“That ever happen to you before?” asked Lovecraft, her expression unreadable.
He’d answered, “No,” before he remembered the glimpses of people who were not, could not be there, of the increasingly unforgettable dreams that troubled him, or of events he had experienced that never truly occurred. He lied and told her his doctor had given him a clean bill of health.
Then he’d told her of Waite Road and what he had learned about it.
“Sixteen twenty? Seriously?”
“They’re an old family.”
“No, I mean, 1620? I’m not sure that makes sense.
Sixteen years before the founding of the city, there just weren’t any Europeans around here. They weren’t far away—up in Boston or down in New York … hell, it wouldn’t even have been New Amsterdam back then. Just some fur trappers. I’m not even sure Boston was ‘Boston’ that far back.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“I’m getting at the fact that there was no settlement here in 1620. The natives weren’t necessarily all that friendly, Dan. Contact with Europeans can do that. A lone family out on their own, maybe days away from help? It’s crazy. The date must be wrong.”
“It looked pretty clear to me. The document wasn’t in great condition, but even I could make out the reference to sixteen years.”
“Then I don’t get it. The Pokanoket were pretty friendly to the settlers, but an isolated group in Pokanoket territory without permission, that would be provocative.”
“They made a deal?”
Lovecraft nodded, but didn’t seem entirely convinced. “Must be, I guess. It’s not like a handful of settlers could have scared the Pokanoket into leaving them be, now, is it?”
* * *
Carter took a call from Detective Harrelson, and they arranged to meet in the same not-a-cop-bar where they had met last time. Harrelson sounded distracted, perhaps even worried on the phone, so Carter decided not to ask for details beyond what the cop was prepared to give without prompting, “More weird shit happened.”
* * *
Harrelson was already nursing a beer when Carter arrived. Carter got one for himself at the bar and sat down in the booth with him.
“The way Belasco died was off, right?” said Harrelson.
Carter didn’t know why Harrelson might need reassurance on this point, but offered it anyway. “You know it. Whatever happened to him, somebody made it happen. I don’t know how, but he was murdered.”
Harrelson took a long drink from his glass, and Carter saw that he wasn’t just distracted, or even worried. Harrelson actually seemed afraid.
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