by Gideon, John
24
Mitch Nistler accomplished his rendezvous with Luis Sandoval’s courier in the dark belly of downtown Seattle and returned on a ferry across the Puget Sound to Cannibal Strecker’s crack house, bearing a fresh load of unprocessed cocaine. The night was very starry and cold, the full moon still high in the western sky.
“Good job,” said Cannibal, after examining the contents of the gym bag. “Me and Stella’ll get right on this shit and have it turned into crack by tomorrow night. Be here by eight o’clock to pick it up, okay?”
“You mean I’m making another run tomorrow night?” asked Mitch weakly.
“Like I told you before, we’re stepping up production. We’re gonna be making two, three, maybe four deliveries a week. What’s the matter, don’t you understand the King’s fucking English?”
Mitch forced a smile in order to head off another explosion of Cannibal violence. His hand went to his bruised and aching ribs and rubbed them. “It’s just that—well, it’s—”
“It’s just fucking what?”
“I’m just a little worried, that’s all. Making so many trips—well, it could be dangerous, man. I don’t want to get ripped off, or busted.”
“What the hell are you complaining about? You’re getting paid, aren’t you? Besides, Stella and me are the ones who gotta stay up all night, workin’ our butts off to get this stuff converted. Do you hear us bitching and whining? Shit, I’m gonna have to drop a hundred bucks worth of meth just to stay awake tonight.”
The big difference, thought Mitch, is that you’re the one who’s becoming a millionaire, not me. I’m the one who gets to put my balls on the block, take all the risks, for a paltry two hundred and fifty dollars a load. I’m the one who’ll end up with a knife in my guts, bleeding to death in some dark alley, or sitting in a steel-walled closet in Walla Walla, nursing my bloody asshole after the wolves have had their fill of me.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I was worrying over nothing. I’ll be here at eight o’clock.”
“Goddamn right you will. Now get out of my face; I got work to do.”
Mitch’s stink-filled house seemed deserted when he arrived home, black and silent like a grave, but he knew that it was not deserted. Grateful as he was for the silence, he worried that it might not last long. Before leaving for Seattle earlier in the evening, he had served up the last remaining dog to the newborn, in answer to the mewling scream that had come from upstairs, a savage and infantine demand for food. Thus far, it had consumed one kitten on Saturday night, the second kitten and one of the three dogs on Sunday. The final two dogs had met their end today.
Each time the screaming started, Mitch had lugged one of the stuporous animals to the mouth of the stairway, opened the door, and heaved it inside, then quickly slammed the door in order to spare himself the gruesome spectacle. Until Mitch had carried them to their hideous fate, none of the animals had moved an inch from where Jeremy had left them, or had begged to go out or to be fed, or had even touched the water pan that Mitch had set before them. The job of feeding the newborn disgusted him, and he felt for the poor, entranced beasts who were its meals. But more troublesome was the question of what food he would provide when the screaming started again.
“That is indeed a problem you must deal with,” said Jeremy Trosper, giving Mitch a horrible fright. The boy had appeared silently at the door of the bedroom and had spoken just as Mitch was about to turn off the light and collapse in exhaustion.
Mitch stared openmouthed a moment and sat down on the bed to collect himself, not having guessed that Jeremy was on the premises. He considered saying something, then thought, what the hell? The kid can hear my thoughts; why bother talking?
“True,” said Jeremy, moving into the room and alighting on the bed next to Mitch. “I know everything you’re thinking, so you needn’t ever try to hide anything from me. As to the matter at hand, I am obliged to tell you that my brother, the newborn, no longer requires small animals for food.”
Mitch felt a tide of relief. Thank God for small favors. “What it requires now,” said Jeremy, his hazel eyes sparkling, “is something a little richer, something with a little more meat on the bone. Are you following me, Mitchell?”
Oh, indeed Mitch was following him, and his throat was aching, and his chest was paining, and he was desperately trying not to cough up the fire in his lungs, and his tender soul was demanding to know when this fucking nightmare would end. Something a little richer, with a little more meat on the bene. Not canned stew, then, and tuna salad was out.
The newborn needed people. Human flesh. And Mitch was expected to procure the entrees.
“It won’t be long,” assured Jeremy, “before the question of food will take care of itself. A victim, you see, is not totally consumed in one sitting but is allowed to go on living for quite some time, allowed to absorb some of the Giver’s powers and abilities, to dream the most exquisite dreams. And, of course, to recruit others like himself. The victims—oh, I detest that word, Mitchell; let’s call them dreamers—the dreamers will provide all the food that the Giver needs. But until our newborn is mature—which won’t be very long, considering the rate at which it’s progressing—it needs your help. You must procure its first several real meals.”
Mitch wheezed and sobbed, and he wondered if anything in his world would ever get better, or whether he was doomed to commit deeds ever more vile. The most loathsome aspect of his existence was that he had no choice but to do everything demanded of him, from stealing a corpse to carrying crack to—God, this has to be the end of it!
Slow murder.
“My advice to you,” said Jeremy, “is that you install a strong padlock on the stairway door, one that you can lock from the outside. You and I will each have a key. Best to do this early tomorrow, don’t you think?”
Mitch nodded, bit his rashy lower lip, and just managed to hold back a flood of enraged tears. Jeremy rose from the bed to head for the door.
“I know that I can count on you, Mitchell,” he said with a confident smile. “I know that you appreciate your obligations. You will find a meal for my brother, and you will do so before the full moon wanes, which means that you have one more night. After tomorrow night, Mitchell, it will be too late, so please don’t waste any time in this matter—for your own sake.”
With that he turned and glided out of the room. A moment later Mitch heard the front door close.
25
The golden rays of morning flooded through Carl Trosper’s window and fell across his face, waking him. He rolled to his side and turned his back to the sun, craving the blankness of the dreamless sleep that he had sampled only in fits during the night. But awareness won out and wrested him away from his pillow, forcing the day upon him. He poked his feet into a pair of slippers and wrapped himself in a terrycloth robe, then steered himself into the hallway, where he lingered before his son’s closed bedroom, worrying. Hoping. Dreading.
He twisted the knob and pushed open the door, saw Jeremy mounded over with blankets in his bed and breathing in heavy, regular cycles. Carl’s innards relaxed a little.
Beyond the window of Jeremy’s room was a yellowing spirea that should have been atwitter with morning birds proclaiming a new day. But the spirea was dead and empty.
He stood a moment longer, scanning the stacks of musty tomes that lay around Jeremy’s bed, on shelves, on the little writing table that Carl had long ago expropriated from the freshman dorm at UW—books with unsettling titles like The Magic of the Dark and The Protocols of the Magus. For Christ’s sake, where were the posters of rock stars and NFL quarterbacks, the fold-out from Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, the catcher’s mitt and the football, the plastic models of the F-16 and Ferrari Testarossa, the butterfly collection, and all the other appurtenances of a red-blooded American boy’s bedroom? Carl could have accepted that his son had too recently awakened from his sickness to appreciate the trappings of normal boyhood, if not for those eerily unwholesome, inexpli
cably worrisome, fucking books.
Yes, Jeremy had come home, but not until midnight had come and gone.
And not until Carl and Renzy Dawkins had frantically telephoned every friend and acquaintance in Greely’s Cove, including Hadrian Craslowe out at Whiteleather Place, to ask if they had seen him or knew where he was.
And not until Carl had called the local police, only to hear that Chief Stu Bromton was not available. (Besides, a person isn’t officially missing for the first forty-eight hours, the dispatcher had said, absent some clear evidence of foul play.)
And not until Carl and Renzy had boarded the Roadmaster to cruise the moonlit streets for hours on end, creeping up and down alleys, circling the parking lots of every fast-food place in town, scouting school yards and playgrounds and video stores, reconnoitering parks and shoreline, climbing out of the car now and again to call his name into the darkness.
And not until Carl and Renzy had gone back to the bungalow on Second Avenue, exhausted and fevered with worry, defeated—
—had Jeremy come home. Looking no worse for wear, a smile on his beautiful face. A shrug in his shoulders and hands in his pockets. Ready for bed.
Carl had been too weary, too thankful that his son was safe, to stage the battle that must eventually erupt, a battle for explanation, for understanding and authority, for mutual respect—for all the prizes over which fathers and sons go to war with each other. Better to sleep awhile, to regroup. There would be time enough later for battle.
Renzy, bless his soul, had offered to stay the night in the guest room, just in case Carl needed his help and support. So they had all three hit their respective sacks with a minimum of fanfare and the thin pretense that everything was fine, that the universe was spinning along safely on its designated course.
And suddenly, morning.
“It’s about time you got up,” whispered Renzy from behind him, and Carl pulled the door closed softly.
“Hell, it’s only a few minutes after sunup,” he replied. “If I thought I could sleep, I’d go back to bed.”
“Yeah, but its winter, and sunup comes late in the winter, in case you hadn’t heard. It’s after seven already. You should be out there grabbing the world by the balls, shaking it around. Why can’t you be more like me?”
Carl came close to laughing at this, despite his weariness and distress over Jeremy. Carl was glad that his old friend had stayed over.
“In case you’re wondering,” said Renzy, who was dressed and ready for the day, “I used your razor, your soap, and your bottle of good-smell. But don’t worry, I didn’t use your toothbrush. I’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”
“I hope you didn’t use all the hot water.”
“Forget about the hot water, because you’re not taking a shower yet. I’ve got omelettes going in the kitchen. Take a whizz and pinch a loaf if you have to, and then report for breakfast.”
Which Carl did. Though he wasn’t really very hungry at first, the omelette tasted great. After the first bite he dug in and kept digging until he had devoured it, along with two slices of buttered toast and three cups of strong coffee. He and Renzy had missed dinner the previous night.
“My secret,” said Renzy after breakfast, lighting a Marlboro and leaning back from the table, “is mayonnaise—about a tablespoon whipped in with the eggs. Gives the omelette a nice, creamy texture, don’t you think?”
“Someday you’re going to make someone a great wife,” said Carl.
Renzy sipped his coffee and sucked a drag of smoke. “I hate to say this, but it’s not going to be you, Buckwheat. I never date people who already have kids. Speaking of kids, how long do you plan to let yours stay in the fart sack?”
“Until I can’t put it off any longer. I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to say to him.”
“Mmmh. Want to rehearse something?”
“I haven’t figured anything out yet. All I know for sure is that I miscalculated somewhere along the line, that I came back here with all kinds of rosy visions about being a father and having a son, and now all those visions are in the toilet.”
“So what did you expect?” asked Renzy, serious now. “A perfectly normal pubescent kid? I’ve told you before, Bush, and you’ve said it yourself: You can’t expect Jeremy to be like other kids, given his history. And you can’t expect yourself to be the good old all-American dad, given yours.”
But his expectations weren’t the problem anymore, Carl insisted. He had lived long enough to know that expectations were the main ordeal of life—giving them birth, coping with them when they don’t turn out, coping with them when they do turn out. The problem was—
He didn’t know. Something to do with those damnable books in Jeremy’s room. Or the boy’s capacity for maliciousness. Or his uncanny ability to get inside someone else’s head. Something horrible was happening to his son, Carl was sure, and he meant to find out what it was.
They sat in silence for a full minute, listening to a fresh pot of coffee perking. Renzy rolled his depleted cigarette butt into a little ball and hooked it into an ashtray. Carl rose from the table and paced the floor.
“After we went to bed last night,” Carl said, “I couldn’t sleep for shit, so I got up and stared at the sky through the window for half an hour. The stars were out, and I tried to find the constellations and remember all their names. I thought back to when I was a kid, about fourteen—and you might remember this, too, because I’m sure we talked about it—I read that the light from those stars has been traveling a long time before it ever reaches the earth. Years, hundreds or thousands or even millions of years. Ever since then, whenever I’ve looked up at the stars, I’ve always wondered if they’re still there—I mean, really there. Why couldn’t they have just given off their light and winked out, like somebody flipped off the switch? Or gone supernova or something? It might be millions of years before anyone would ever know about it here on earth, because the light would just keep on coming, even after its source was dead.”
“Seems to me I do recall you talking about some sort of garbage like that,” said Renzy, arching one eyebrow like John Belushi.
“Why is it garbage, Renzy? We see the light from the stars, but it’s light that was made long before any of us was born, most of it before there were even humans on the earth. The point is, what we see may not really be there. Maybe there’s nothing at all where once there were stars. Or maybe there’s something else.”
“I’m getting the message: You think there’s something more going on with Jeremy than what you think you see, or what you’ve been told.”
“Give the man a cigar.”
“And you intend to find out what that something is, right?”
“Bingo, you win a side of beef.”
“And just how, pray tell, do you intend to do this?”
Carl sat down at the table again, folded his arms and leaned on them, studied the sleeves of his terrycloth robe. He hoped that what he was about to say would not sound wild.
“Craslowe. It all has something to do with Craslowe, Renzy. I can’t tell you how I know this, but he’s hiding something from me. I’m going to find out what it is, and I’m going to start today.”
A flicker of shadow crossed Renzy’s green eyes as he lit a fresh cigarette.
The telephone call from Dr. Esther Cabaza came just as Lindsay Moreland was wrapping up a meeting with a new client, and she waited until the young man was out the door of her office before picking up the phone.
“Esther, hello. Sorry about the wait.”
“No problem. How’s your morning going?”
“Fine, so far—great, in fact. My first client of the day was a nineteen-year-old security guard who just won two million dollars in the Washington lottery. He wants to give a third of it to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, another third to a shelter for the homeless, and the rest he wants to invest with us. Can you believe it?”
“Does this mean there’s a smidgen of decency left in the world?”
> “Yes—there apparently is some decency left. It’s good to get a taste of it now and then.”
“And how! Anyway, the reason I called: I heard back from my people in Olympia concerning your nephew’s shrink, so I thought I’d better get in touch with you right away. Lindsay, are you sure you got his name right?”
“Well, I think so. It’s Hadrian Craslowe—Oxford, Cambridge, some mental health institute in Switzerland.”
“No middle initial or anything else that might differentiate him?”
“Not that I know of. Is there a problem?”
“Listen to this: The state board of clinical psychologists licensed him to practice about fourteen months ago after he passed the board examination—which he did with flying colors, by the way. They’ve got copies of his diplomas, peer reviews, certifications, and some papers he wrote for the Royal Academy of Mental Health Consultants in England. Everything looks on the up and up.”
“Then I’m authorized to breathe a sigh of relief, right?”
“That might be a little premature, Lindsay. One of the state board’s staff guys telephoned Oxford University—let’s see, I think it was Trinity College....” Lindsay heard the shuffling of papers on Dr. Cabaza’s end. “Yes, here it is: Trinity College, Office of Academic Records, Oxford, England. The people there dug out the records of one Hadrian Craslowe, physician and surgeon—not a shrink, because there wasn’t any such thing as a shrink back then—who took his degree in medicine in 1754. Needless to say, it can’t be the same guy.” Esther laughed gustily.
But Lindsay did not. “And that’s it? No Hadrian Craslowe since then?”
“None on the record. That’s not the end of it, I’m afraid. The Royal Academy of Mental Health Consultants has never heard of him, or at least that’s what they said on the phone. They have no record of a Hadrian Craslowe or anyone with a similar name who wrote articles or conducted studies for them. The documents he gave to the Washington board must’ve been extraordinarily well-done forgeries.”
