The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  John had wanted to say, In what world is that remarkable? Didn’t you just hear me describe the wounds to an innocent twenty-one-year-old girl, you sicko? Like his fellow cop Barney Waverly said, It’s not the dead that are the problem, man. It’s the living.

  There was more. The Japanese were fucking blood groove crazy, according to Marcus Wilbur. They had many varieties of them on their weapons, and they named the top of the blood groove the hi (pronounced bi, said Mr. Bayonet with a vigorous little grunt) and the bottom the tome. One example was the kaki-nagashi, where the blood groove tapers . . .

  John had roared at him, “Just tell me about the fucking bayonet, okay?!”

  Mr. Bayonet had gone quiet and asked: “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with where it was made.”

  Marcus asked for the measurements of the blade incisions. John Bailey gave them.

  “The blade was straight?” said the voice on the other end.

  “What do you mean, straight?” John had said, cupping his forehead in his right palm.

  “The edge was straight, not serrated? It’s just that during World War II, the Germans used a sawtooth blade that infuriated the American—”

  “Yes. For fuck’s sake, yes.”

  Silence.

  “Well, then. It’s probably American. Remember I said probably.”

  And so now he knew that the blade that had pierced Margaret Post’s flesh and cut her chest from the dimple in her throat above the breastbone down to the belly button in a clean arc, laying her intestines and chest cavity open to the night air, and then proceeded to nick the large arteries attached to her heart before going on to push the lungs aside so the person wielding it could get to the kidneys, probing and cutting Margaret Post’s innards . . . He’d listened to Dr. Hobart describing what happened, but he’d blocked it out at the end. Well, it was a bayonet, a product of our great steelmaking industries, made in the good ol’ US of A.

  And it was probably old, Mr. Bayonet went on to say, undaunted by John’s curses. Something about the dimensions of the gutter . . .

  John Bailey stood up now and headed down the badly lit hallway that led to the locker rooms. He was going to spend some time deciding which soda to buy instead of thinking about blood grooves. Mountain Dew or Dr Pepper? He reached the soda machine glowing in the darkened hallway and began to debate the merits of each of them. Mountain Dew had a kick to it, good for getting the old blood flowing. Then again, he hadn’t had Dr Pepper in a while, not since he’d eaten that spicy Italian grinder for lunch at the station last week. That was a damn good sandwich, too.

  Good, John. Keep it up.

  Dark thoughts make bad cops. That’s what Marty O’Farrell had told him his first day on the job. Meaning, don’t take all the awful things you see to heart. Dark thoughts, they make a home inside your brain, Marty said. You invite them in one too many times and you can’t get them to leave. Stubborn fuckers. Then they start controlling your thoughts, your alcohol intake.

  It was good advice. He’d found it to be true.

  Maybe he’d call Marty. Talk the Patriots’ passing game or something. Anything but fucking bayonets.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Nat strode toward the city hall, carrying his laptop in one hand and a flashlight in another. More psychiatric outreach tonight—two more sessions and he’d have enough for Buenos Aires. He’d been spending an inordinate amount of time on Flickr lately, looking at people’s vacation pictures, imagining himself at Punta del Este, the Uruguayan beach near Buenos Aires that his Argentinian friends were telling him to visit. Drinking the cocktail known as El Pato while he waited for his steak to be seared and served to him with thick-cut fries. The pictures calmed him. There were other places besides Northam, other lives being lived out there beyond Grant’s Hill.

  The weather was closing in again, as it seemed to do every evening lately. Black-shadowed storm clouds spilled over the foothills to his left, and mist was moving up the valley to his right from below, where the Raitliff Woods began. It was going to be another cold night in the clinic. This time, he hoped for no visitors at all. He would surf the web, checking out restaurants in Buenos Aires, confirm his flight reservations for next month, book one of those hop-on, hop-off bus tours in advance. Do those things sell out? he wondered, and the small question seemed to confirm that, yes, he really was going to get on a plane to Argentina in the near future. So tonight he would be calm, responsible, anonymous.

  Nat didn’t want to do any more community outreach. He was fully tasked with Becca Prescott, thank you, and the outbreak of . . . He didn’t even have a name for it. The murder hysteria. In the face of what was happening, he felt an urgent and growing need to keep his routines as normal as possible.

  He was beginning to find Northam oppressive. He’d woken up this morning and been breathing as if he’d been running a half marathon, the sweat running over his rib cage in little trickles. The sheets were wet. Some oppressive weight that had been pushing down on his chest had stayed there until his second cup of coffee. Three days after Walter Prescott’s death, the whole business was getting to him.

  What had he been dreaming of? He couldn’t remember. Just heat. Heat and fear.

  Nat came around the corner of city hall and saw someone waiting for him. His heart jumped as he stopped dead in his tracks. The figure was leaning toward the window of the door, looking in. It put a hand over its eyes and shifted around, trying to see down the hallway.

  Nat took a breath and resumed walking, slower now.

  The person waiting at the door heard his footsteps and turned toward him.

  When he came closer, he saw that it was a woman. A gaunt, elderly face with too much makeup on coldly regarded him.

  “Are you the psychiatrist?”

  It was like an accusation. He came up to her, the steam of his breath hanging in the air between them.

  “Yes. I’m Dr. Thayer.”

  Fussy was the thought that crossed his mind. She looked petulant, standing there, and impatient. He felt an instant dislike for her.

  “I need to see you.”

  “Okay,” he said, “come on in.” His voice sounded fake: wholesome, falsely upbeat. She’s just having trouble sleeping and wants some pills, Nat thought. She wants to talk about an affair she had that she never told her husband about. She’s lonely; she’s constipated and misunderstood what the clinic was for. Normal matters of the human heart and maybe the digestive system.

  Nothing weird.

  He took out his key chain and found the key for the hall door. It flashed dimly in the moonlight as he turned it to make sure it was the right one, then inserted it into the lock. Nat pushed the door open and held it for the woman, who was, he could now see, dressed in a trench coat. She scuttled forward, the corners of her mouth pulled down as if attached to weights. He walked past her, letting the door slam shut behind him, and headed down the stairway. “This way,” he said. The woman—the silent, dour Yankee, the real article—followed Nat into the office.

  “Have a seat,” he said, flicking the light switch up. He laid his laptop on the desk and propped the flashlight in the corner next to his office chair. He took off his coat and placed it on the back of the chair.

  The woman had already sat down and was watching him, her eyes gray.

  “My name is Stephanie Godwin,” she said.

  “Okay, Mrs. Godwin. What brings you here tonight?”

  No games. Play it right down the middle. But then the sudden feeling came over him: Nothing will ever end well again.

  Nat studied her as she fidgeted in the seat.

  “I saw him.”

  His flesh pebbled under his oxford shirt. Shit, not this again.

  Nat felt the urge to throw her out of the office, physically force her down the hallway and stairs and eject her from the building into the ni
ght air before she could speak another word.

  “Saw whom?” But he knew. He knew . . .

  Her face was a mask, dead flesh, but her eyes were burning. “Chuck. My husband.”

  “Okay.”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “He was killed in a car accident yesterday.”

  Sure he had, though. Local news. An accident over on Wellesley Avenue. Hit-and-run.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. And you . . . saw him?”

  Her eyes were boring into his. “Yes. Walking into the Raitliff Woods tonight around dusk.”

  Nat sat back in his chair. His body felt suddenly cold and lifeless. The lines they were speaking had been written long ago and had to be said. But he wanted to stave off the ending.

  “Your husband just died yesterday, Mrs. Godwin, and you think you saw him—”

  “No, I don’t think,” she said, her voice quivering. “I’m not senile, I don’t have dementia, and I’m not drunk! My mind is very sharp. I saw what I saw.”

  Mrs. Godwin tilted her face up at him, as if to say, Deny it.

  “Of course not,” Nat said, dropping his eyes to the desk. “How did you sleep last night?”

  “Terrible. The dreams.” She pursed her mouth and shook her head.

  “Tell me about the dreams.”

  She paused. “What I saw wasn’t a dream, Dr. Thayer. Not an illusion or a wraith. It was Charles . . . Enright . . . Godwin, my husband. Do you hear me?!”

  Her voice was beginning to screech.

  “Did you identify your husband’s body at the morgue?”

  “Yes. He was supposed to have been brought to McKinley Funeral Home this morning. But I called them and the body wasn’t at the morgue when they went to pick him up. They thought I’d gone to another mortician’s.” She was now leaning over the desk. “I did no such thing. I told Mr. McKinley, the son, when he called me. The McKinleys are the funeral directors for the Godwins, and they know that. Something else is going on.”

  Nat closed his eyes. “What did the morgue say?”

  Silence. He looked up. “You did call them?”

  Mrs. Godwin shook her head slightly. “No. I was afraid to.”

  Nat massaged his forehead. He stood and went to the window. The yellow cone of light, the streetlight shaking in the wind. It was like the night with Walter Prescott, the same night over and over again.

  “Mrs. Godwin, grief is one of the most powerful emotions we know of. We can desire to see our loved ones after they pass. It’s very . . . human. And common. But we both know that your husband is dead. And the dead don’t just . . . rise up.”

  “What if he didn’t die?”

  Nat made an impatient sound. “I’m not sure I’m the right person to be having this conversation. I—”

  “Doctors make mistakes, don’t they? I read about people waking up in their . . .”

  “In their coffins. That’s very rare.”

  “But it happens.” She paused suddenly and took a deep shaky breath. Her eyes swam with tears. “I think he woke up down in that morgue. And came looking for me.”

  She smiled, and for a moment he saw the face of a young woman flitting behind the dry, chapped skin of Mrs. Godwin.

  He looked down. Something told him, Go on. This is your world now. Deal with it.

  “Did you approach him?”

  “Yes. I ran out in my housecoat. I crossed Village Road and ran after him. I could feel the cold mud splash up. He was walking down the path that the rabbits use.”

  “You called to him?”

  “Yes.”

  He could imagine that. The fear in her voice turning to disbelief. It can’t be becoming Maybe. The whispered prayer that her husband was really alive.

  “Did he turn around?”

  She shook her head no.

  “What did he do?”

  “Walked. As if he was drawn to something. I ran up ahead and . . . and . . .”

  “What?”

  “I reached out for his arm and grabbed it. He . . . he stopped. And he turned to look at me.”

  She pulled open her handbag and snatched a handkerchief out of it. She was making a whimpering noise as she pressed the piece of gaudy silk to her lips. Mrs. Godwin began to rock back and forth.

  “Mrs. Godwin?”

  “He wasn’t . . .”

  “Yes?”

  She shook her head as she rocked.

  “He wasn’t what?”

  “Alive.” Her eyes were wide and terrified. “Not in the way you and I know. Then I thought of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  “Revelations, you mean.”

  “Yes. Are you saved, Dr. Thayer?”

  “No,” he said, now annoyed. “I’m not. So, what happened next?”

  “His eyes were black. The pupils and the whole eyes were black.”

  A pipe banged in the subterranean depths of the basement.

  “It was dark. Are you sure you could tell?”

  “Dr. Thayer, we were husband and wife for forty-two and a half years. Are you saying I couldn’t see Chuck’s own eyes?”

  Nat frowned. “I’m merely suggesting that it was dark.”

  “It was him!” she screamed suddenly.

  Nat took a deep breath. Her scream echoed out into the hallway and came back. I know it was him, he thought.

  Right now, he didn’t want Mrs. Godwin in his office. He didn’t want to think about her problem. He only had the strength right now to battle for Becca Prescott. What am I supposed to do for this damn woman anyway?

  Mrs. Godwin placed her bag on the floor next to her, as if she would stay awhile. He looked at her fearfully.

  “I said to him,” she began, “ ‘Chuck, where have you been?’ He looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. His face was . . . set. There were bruises on his forehead, two deep cuts in his right cheek. But his face had no . . . expression . . .”

  Nat hesitated before he spoke again. “I believe you saw your husband. I do. But I don’t know how to help you.”

  Mrs. Godwin looked at him, and a fresh wave of terror crossed her face. “Can there be any other explanation?”

  “I think we’ve covered them all.”

  “But I was thinking, what if Revelations was wrong?”

  “Wrong how?”

  She stared into the hands sitting in her lap.

  “Mrs. Godwin?”

  “What if the dead do come back, but under someone else’s power, Dr. Thayer? What if the last days are here but Jesus isn’t in control?”

  Nat’s eyes went wide. That thought had never occurred to him. Yes, what if? He felt dizzy.

  “Then I think we’re all in a lot of trouble,” he said finally.

  “I believe that we are.”

  Nat looked up. Mrs. Godwin’s eyes were filled with that panic you see in old people when their mind begins to go, when the world they knew disappears seemingly overnight and is replaced by something darker and altogether new.

  * * *

  Stephanie Godwin left a few minutes later, with Nat having recommended a visit to her priest at the Anglican church. This had seemed to calm her. Nat walked her to the door, murmured good night, and then walked up to the main level and its long dark hallway, to pace and think.

  To the sound of the water fountain motor surging on and then quitting, Nat walked up and down the hallway, gleams of moonlight on the old tiled floor. His mind was foggy, stubbornly so. All that came to him was a black-and-white image, drifting into hazy view at the back of his mind before flitting out of sight. The same one from the other night.

  What the hell was it? Some memory of a painting? A photograph maybe? Was it something he’d drawn as a boy? The image felt familiar, and old, but he couldn’t place
it.

  And what was its connection to the walking dead and Mrs. Godwin?

  Nat bit his bottom lip and continued back and forth up the hallway, his heels clicking loudly, rhythmically, on the waxed floor, until his shift at the outreach clinic was over.

  No one else came to call that night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The pale brick steps of St. Adolphus School were teeming with kids. John Bailey pulled into the circular driveway twenty feet away behind an old green Suburban and began scanning the smaller children for Charlie. Every day when he picked the boy up, he hoped he’d find him interacting with some other kid, their heads bent over a Transformer or something. An ally, a pal. Someone to share secrets with.

  Kids find each other, he thought. Someone will find Charlie and see what’s inside of him. So what if he doesn’t talk? Half of what kids do, you don’t even need to talk.

  He scanned the roiling mass of schoolboys wrestling and talking and bumping into girls, and there was no Charlie. His gaze went to the right, to the stone banisters flanking the steps, where the older kids were hanging out, too cool to actually watch for their parents’ cars. Nothing. Finally, he arched his neck and looked all the way back.

  There. Charlie was sitting alone, near the far banister, staring at the ground. John frowned. God, he thought, can’t he at least make an effort? He hit the horn, two short bursts, and Charlie’s head came up. John gave him a bright smile, though he didn’t feel it, and the boy came walking over, his shoulders stooped.