The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

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  To Tim Hartigan

  Man is wolf to man.

  —Latin proverb

  CHAPTER ONE

  If there’s a time to visit my little corner of Massachusetts, Dr. Nat Thayer thought as he walked quickly along the darkened path, January isn’t it. When friends were thinking of journeying to his small city of Northam, he always told them: Come in May, when you can hear the knock of baseballs on aluminum bats from three blocks away. Or early fall, for the foliage and the hand-pressed apple cider. Half of New York City does. Northam was famous for that crap. Get your cider at Johnson’s stand, not from that fraud Matheson, who laces his stuff with brand-name stuff from Stop & Shop, and head back home with an image of the golden Berkshires to last you awhile.

  But get out by the end of November, by all means. That’s when the smart ones shutter their vacation homes and take their L.L.Bean duck boots and their mountain bikes back to Boston and points south, and the population settles back to around four thousand souls. The smart ones know. You don’t come here in winter, especially if you’re prone to black thoughts. Here the hills block whatever sun we get and soak it into the loam along with the dying leaves, the locals turn inward, and the alleyways between the quaintly named bars get splashed with blood. The thin church steeples rake the sky like a handful of knives held blade upward.

  No dementia caused by inbreeding up here, Nat thought as he walked briskly toward city hall. We’re not Southern Baptists or anything, just good old God-fearing Yankees. But plenty of doom-ridden landscape and seasonal depression. And just . . . darkness. Of every kind.

  The little valley Nat was coming up from was stripped of all colors except black and stone gray, the hills plunged off to his right into darkness and mist, the color in the trees now sunk back into the ground, replaced by its opposite, the bottomless night of rain-soaked birch trees against a darkening slate blue sky. He could see a half-moon low in the eastern sky as he walked, caught and sliced to bits by a dozen black fingers of branches.

  This was another city now from the one you saw in summer. This was the place Margaret Post had left, violently and unwillingly, only two nights earlier.

  * * *

  Three hours later, Nat was sitting in the satellite office of the Northam Mental Health Clinic in the basement of city hall, rubbing his hands together like two dry sticks and cursing the town fathers. Jesus Christ, it was cold. It was like sitting in a puddle at the bottom of a stone quarry. The three-hundred-year-old granite walls conducted cold and wet like steel did for electricity.

  10:14 p.m. “What the hell am I doing here?” he whispered as he blew a breath into his hands.

  Getting money for Buenos Aires. He always got out of Northam every winter, at least for a few weeks. God knew how dark his mood would get without that dose of sunlight and rum cocktails. And no one else in his life was going to spring for a South American vacation. Nat had no family to speak of left in Northam, except for some distant cousins, and they didn’t speak at all. His friends were broke or married, which usually amounted to the same thing. He was the end of the line, old man. And he liked it that way.

  A sudden chattering noise nearly snapped him out of his chair. It was his cell phone on the desk, rattling like a skittering pebble, giving the low growl that meant an incoming text. Nat picked the phone off the imitation mahogany.

  Suicide: . . . the message said.

  Nat frowned. It was from John Bailey, his oldest friend, now a detective with the Northam Police Department. John was working a double shift on account of Margaret Post’s murder, the same reason Nat was here at the clinic. All part of an effort to calm the citizens of Northam into believing that her killer was far away, heading to Boston after his stopover in their sleepy little burg. Psychiatric outreach, they called Nat’s night job here. Personally, he believed the town fathers were hoping whoever did it would wander in to his little office and confess.

  The phone buzzed in his hand with the rest of the message.

  Boned Maggie Voorhees.

  Nat’s frown changed into a sly grin. He and John had invented this game in high school. It was called Northam Suicide Note, or Suicide for short. They’d been bored back then. Hell, maybe morbid, too, typical outsiders in jock-ruled Northam High.

  The aim of Northam Suicide Note was to re-create the last words of someone driven to kill himself for any particularly local reason. They’d write the note on a piece of paper—Suicide: Ran over Ma with snow blower, oh God, the blood or Suicide: Maggie Voorhees just smiled at me all sexy-like—and pass it to each other. Poor old Maggie got mentioned a lot, being the ugliest girl in school.

  But it had been years since he and John had played the game. What had made his friend think about it now, on a Friday night in the dead of winter?

  Nat typed out U dated her freshman year. Repent. and hit Send.

  Outside he could hear the wind start up with a low shriek, that shrill inhaling sound announcing one day it would rise and rise and you’d never hear the top of it because the stones would have fallen in on your head.

  Something began to ring in another part of the building.

  Nat checked the little TV screen by the side of his desk. It showed the locked outside door that led into the clinic. Nothing but freezing rain on its small black-and-white screen, plus a small cone of bright white light and beyond it the darkness of the back side of the hill, descending downward to the Raitliff Woods. Who the hell was going to come out on a night like this?

  Nat almost wished someone would show up, ring the bell under the bulb at the end of the wooden walkway that would sound in his office. Company would help pass the time. Still, only forty-five more minutes to go before he was done for the night.

  Buzz. He picked up the phone and read the screen. Exactly why I should KM. Kill myself, part of their old code they’d used in high school to avoid teachers freaking out over their notes. Now John had to watch what he said on department time.

  Strange. The messages didn’t sound like good, yeoman-solid John Bailey. He must be out of his mind, parked in an unmarked car in this horrible weather. John had mentioned he’d be staking out the college entrance where Margaret Post’s body had been found, in hopes the killer might return to the scene of the crime. Nat had walked by there himself yesterday on his way to the hospital and felt a chill zigzag up his back. The stakeout must have John reverting back to the old days. Next he’d be making a joke about seeing Margaret Post’s sliced throat . . .

  He caught himself. Too soon, old man. Nat wouldn’t be able to stop himself joking about it eventually, of course; it was his nature to make light of even the most horrendous events in life. But the girl’s murder was still too fresh. How goddamn awful it must have been. Walking home, alone, the comforting stone wall of the college to her right. Margaret had been twenty yards from the big Wartham College gate, with the words Terras Irradient inscribed in stone on an archway twenty feet above the ground. Just inside the gate sat a little security booth with a guard inside 24/7. But she’d never made it.

  Judging by the grip marks on Margaret’s left arm, the killer came up from behind, grabbed her, and dragged her into the bushes just short of the gate, then hung her on an ash tree next to the wall. But not before doing something to her so terrible that the newspapers could only hint at “disfiguring wound
s.”

  Over in the psych wards at Mass Memorial, his day job, Nat wasn’t exactly known for his empathy. Sometimes he wondered if he’d gotten into the wrong profession. Your curiosity and your need to stay interested, his mentor, Dr. Francesci, had once written on an evaluation, overwhelms your recognition that this is a human being in need in front of you. Touché.

  But he could still feel for Margaret Post. All joking aside, they needed to catch the freak who had killed her.

  The phone rattled on the desk. John again. All OK? the message read. Any takers over there?

  Nat scooped up the phone and walked to get some blood flowing to his toes, which were quickly losing feeling. The disembodied messages out of the ether were starting to spook him. He felt like calling John. But Nat typed instead as he walked out into the dark hallway.

  Nope. Yankees hate psychs. Rather drink.

  Nat paced, walking up one flight into the tall arched hallway of the building. It boomed with a low, full-bodied echo; the place was old, built in 1729. In the gloom of the exit light, Nat passed the black-and-white archival photographs of famous Northamians: mostly sea captains or whalers (they were only forty miles from the ocean) or old codgers in top hats standing over some cornerstone or inaugurating the water mill. There were even a couple of public hangings in the town square depicted somewhere near the front entrance. Ghoulish fun for schoolboys.

  It was, if that was physically possible, even colder in the hallway.

  The phone buzzed in his hand.

  Ur not psych. Ur bait. Be careful.

  Nat caught his breath in surprise, then laughed. It could be true. The town was locked up, windswept, seemingly deserted. He’d been the only one out tonight in the ten minutes it took to walk from his condo to city hall.

  Well, send him in, Nat thought. As long as he has an extra blanket and a bottle of Jack.

  He thumbed the phone’s keys.

  Suicide: Found out best friend John secretly married to Maggie Voorhees. Shame too much.

  It took thirty seconds by Nat’s count for the little balloon to appear with his response.

  I’m serious, Nat. Watch urself. Had reports . . .

  Nat waited.

  But nothing appeared under his little text window. Nat frowned. Reports of what, John?

  He stared at the phone, then watched his breath disappear into the gloom. Damn it, what was John saying? He gave the phone a little shake, as if the extra letters were stuck somewhere in the circuitry and would tumble out with a little coaxing.

  Nothing but the boom of the wind outside.

  What was John up to? He felt a little fissure of concern. Maybe he should give the guy a—

  DDDDDRRROOOOMMMM.

  A huge metal tone boomed through the hall, then sank lower. Nat ducked and wildly looked up. He had forgotten how deep and melancholy the clinic bell was. Scared the hell out of him.

  Nat hurried back, taking the steps two at a time. He walked into the clinic office, leaned over the desk, and shot a look at the security monitor. There was a man standing there, waiting outside the door in a dark green slicker and narrow-brimmed hat.

  Nat’s heart froze. The man . . . he had no face. Beneath the dark cone of light was a completely featureless expanse of blank skin. A wave of repulsion swept over Nat as he stared, horrified, at the eyeless and mouthless oval.

  Then he looked again and let out a long breath. Jesus Christ, get a hold of yourself. The visitor was turned away from the camera and the sharp relief of darkness under the brim wasn’t his face but the back of his bald head.

  But somehow Nat kept thinking of it as a face—a no-face. He stared at the back of the man’s head, but the guy didn’t move. Rain splashed off the top of his hat and the shoulders of his slicker, danced briefly in the light, and then disappeared. Odd.

  Nat walked out of the office and turned left toward the outside door. As uncanny as it was, that image of the faceless man faded as he headed down the darkened hallway. It had been replaced by a thought that disturbed him even more:

  Why the hell is he watching the woods?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Nat hurried upstairs and turned left again at the corner. The heavy gray metal door was twenty yards in front of him, down a hallway with cupped lights set high in the wall. The man was still out there, the plunging gloom of the forest behind him. He didn’t seem to have moved.

  Maybe it really is about his face, Nat thought. Maybe he doesn’t want me to see it? Like he’s missing a nose or has a terrible deformity?

  Between Nat and his visitor was a fire door with metal-­threaded, double-paned security glass, nearly soundproof. No-face wasn’t going to get in unless Nat allowed it. Regulations. He walked quickly to the door and pressed the intercom button.

  “How can I help you?”

  The man didn’t move. Up close, he was about six foot two, a couple of inches taller than Nat, and his body seemed tense, as if he were on alert.

  Nat thumbed the button again. “Sir?” He could hear his voice boom out into the rainy night.

  No-face remained staring at the woods. Nat felt a wave of revulsion crawl over his skin. The man was spellbound.

  Slowly, Nat approached the safety glass. He felt he was approaching a captive lion at a zoo; he knew the lion couldn’t get to him, but he didn’t quite believe it.

  The raindrops danced off the man’s shoulders, sparking in the overhead light.

  Come on, Nat thought, and a surge of anger went through him. He knocked firmly on the glass.

  The man’s head now rose, and he turned crisply to face the window. Nat felt a shock, as if a wave of heat had passed through the metal-threaded glass and swept over him in the cold hallway.

  The visitor was in his sixties and had a long, angular face, dark skin with deep creases running from the edges of his cheekbones to the corners of his mouth, and thin red lips that seemed fixed in a sneer.

  Nat met his eyes. They were . . . He searched his brain for a description. Diseased, he finally thought. They pushed out slightly as if some internal pressure were forcing them slowly from the sockets. The whites were the color of an old tobacco stain—­yellowed, dingy. They were shot through with red veins, and the irises were a flinty blue and intense. He looked like some army colonel who’d gotten a gutful of viruses in the tropics and had come home to die right on this goddamn doorstep. But not from a wasting disease, not malaria or a dose of yellow jack.

  No, something that drove you crazy with fits. Lunatic energy.

  Nat’s eyes instinctively twitched down to the visitor’s right hand. No weapon there, he was relieved to see. Just a big bare hand dripping with rain.

  What had John said again? Reports of what?

  Nat went to the intercom. “Can I help you?” rang out on the other side of the door.

  The man just stared at him, studying the lines of his face. Then he met Nat’s gaze and mouthed something, two fast words, but through the glass Nat only heard a smear of an urgent bass voice.

  “What?” Nat asked.

  No-face said it again, baring his teeth on the second word. He looked enraged, or frantic that Nat wouldn’t let him in.

  Nat pointed to the left side of the door. “Use the intercom,” he said.

  The man’s pencil-thin lips—the only real color in the whole scene framed in the window—opened, and he stepped closer to the window, the dark eyebrows beetling over the sick eyes. Nat took a step back, then jerked his finger down toward the intercom. Finally the guy understood. He reached his right arm over to the bell.

  “SHE’S SLEEPING” boomed into the hallway and echoed past Nat into the area upstairs.

  Nat waited for more, but the man only drilled him with his gaze.

  “Okay . . . ,” Nat said, pressing the button. “What’s your name, sir, and how can I help you?”

  Th
e guy looked angry now.

  “You can open the door for me,” he said through the intercom.

  Nat frowned. This is my rodeo, Sally. Protocol said the patient had to tell the psych what the problem was before entering. Especially when people were being murdered in the general vicinity.

  “State your name and business, Mr.—?”

  The raindrops danced off the man’s shoulders.

  “Prescott, Walter Prescott. And I need to talk to you about my daughter.”

  Satisfied, Nat reached over and hit the buzzer. Prescott reached out and grabbed the handle. The little rubber gasket around the metal door popped, and a gust of cold air rushed over Nat. As Prescott came forward, Nat stepped back to give him room. The man’s frame blocked out the light for a second in a blot of shadow, and then suddenly he was standing in the hallway, dripping.

  Walter Prescott smelled like old medication. Stale but sharp somehow, like a piece of old gauze with a spot of fresh ruby blood at the center.

  “Mr. Prescott, is your daughter in need of immediate medical attention?” Nat said. That one was state law.

  “Med—?” Prescott said, worry lines bunching on his forehead. “No, no, nothing like that.”

  “Okay then. My office is one floor down. After you.”

  Nat held his arm out, headwaiter-style, toward the stairs at the end of the hall. It was something you learned your first year of residency. Let the crazies go first. Self-preservation.

  Prescott frowned, then started toward the stairs.

  “I assure you, Doctor—?”

  “Thayer.”

  “Thayer?” Prescott stopped. “An old Northam name.”

  The voice was more formal, more cultured, than Nat had expected. He sounds like a historian giving a talk at the local women’s club. The voice doesn’t match the eyes.

  Prescott smiled, a hideous thing of yellow teeth.