The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  TOOOOM. A big one. Charlie stepped on the first stair and bent over, trying to listen for his father.

  One step, two. Charlie was shaking. He didn’t want to hear the noise again. But he knew it was coming and then it shivered the air again. The sound moved through him and he thought he would drop to the floor. It was coming from somewhere behind the stairs. Back where he couldn’t see.

  What was back there? Daddy’s set of weights. An old exercise bike. And the laundry room.

  Three steps. Four. There were only two left, then the cold concrete floor.

  “Daddy?” he said to himself. “Who has you?”

  The floor sent a shock of cold up his feet. His mouth was open now. He started to turn.

  TOOOOOOMMMMM.

  He came around the stairs slowly. The orange glow lit up the arms of the weight bench, but the bench was empty. No one was killing his daddy with one of the barbells. The sound was coming from the door to the laundry room.

  A door Charlie had never thought of before, but now his eyes strained in the darkness toward it, hard to pick out on the blank wall.

  TOOOMMM. Oh God, it was loud. The noise made the lock rattle. There was something in the room. Trying to get out.

  Charlie turned. If he could dash back up the stairs, he could run to Mrs. Finlay’s house three doors down in a minute. But she was old and weak. He couldn’t leave Daddy alone.

  Charlie began to walk past the weight bench. His foot knocked against something metal, and his lips curled over his teeth in a silent scream. He paused for a second, his eyebrows arched in pain.

  Slowly, Charlie reached out a hand, and it shook as he approached the door knob to the laundry room. It was gold and black. He ducked his head down and crouched over, in case the door opened and something jumped out.

  He touched the door knob.

  TOOOOOOOMMMMMM. The door shook and rattled in his hand.

  Charlie pulled as far away from the door as he could, turned his face away and put his hand on the knob. The door squealed as it came open. He was shaking, but he had to turn and look. Had to help . . .

  Charlie swiveled his head, his mouth open in horror.

  Standing in the doorway was his father. His forehead was bleeding, and his eyes, oh, they were dead.

  His daddy was all alone in the room. There was no monster. Daddy was banging his head on the door. But why?

  There was nothing in his eyes. He looked at Charlie.

  Charlie was too scared to run to him—his father’s face was like a mask, it didn’t move, just the eye. Charlie reached his fingers out for his father’s hand. He would lead his daddy upstairs, and they would lie in his bed and get warm.

  His father’s hand reached out and Charlie felt himself begin to cry. His father had been stuck in the room and now Charlie had saved him. He just wanted to be back in bed with Daddy holding him.

  But the hand didn’t reach for his hair, to rub it the way Daddy always did. It reached to the left and it grabbed the handle of the door, and with his head wobbling with terror, Charlie watched as his daddy, his eyes staring at the opposite wall, pulled the door of the laundry room shut, leaving Charlie outside.

  TOOOM.

  Charlie stared at the golden door knob as it shook in the door. His mouth worked, but only a thin whine of terror came out.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Nat walked down the stairs of the Prescott house and got into the Saab. His face was grim and drawn. He drove through the Shan over to State Street and parked his car in front of the squat granite building off the old town square that Becca had stared at yesterday with such hatred in her eyes. He paid two dollars on the muni-meter for an hour’s parking before he realized it was Sunday night and he’d just wasted his money.

  He’d been inside this granite building a half dozen—no, a full dozen times—all during his school years. He’d tramped to the Northam Museum with his parents every Fourth of July weekend for the parties given to celebrate the double holiday that all Northam people took pride in. He could practically hear the speech of the museum’s curator, Mr. Atkins, a cynical plain speaker whose only joy in life was the history of the small city. Atkins spoke before they served the punch and the chocolate chip cookies on the waxy red, white, and blue paper plates. This city was founded the same year as our country, 1776, and we are here to celebrate the establishment not only of our national home but of our little community of Northam, too. (Small applause.) Then some patriotic songs, ice cream, and, when the sun had sunk below the western hills, fireworks.

  When he was twelve, Nat had felt up Joanna Christien in the backyard during one of those fireworks shows, and she’d pressed her hand on his swollen crotch with promises of more to come, and that was his best memory of July Fourth at the Northam Museum.

  He hadn’t been inside for twenty years. It wasn’t the kind of place you brought visiting friends to unless they were amateur history buffs, and Nat didn’t know any of those. Atkins was too hard-core for the casual visitor.

  As he walked up the stone steps, he performed a little mental health self-check. Are you, Nat Thayer, experiencing delusions? No. Paranoid much? No more than usual. Sleeping well? Not really, but that’s not new.

  Everything okay at work? Well, there you have it. The line of inquiry he was pursuing with Becca’s case was not a normal one. It was bizarre. And he was not particularly comfortable with bizarre. Exhibit A: he’d admitted to Becca that nonrational forces were at work in her case. It shocked him now to remember that. He was so far into the deep weeds that it was beginning to scare him.

  But there is no rational explanation for what’s happening here. If I work off the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Becca could end up hanging from a tree. I have to at least pursue this supernatural shit. If only to prove it wrong.

  He pressed the bell. He wondered if Atkins was still here. Back in the ’90s, it had been his show. He did the tours, wrote the pamphlets, assembled the exhibits, and acquired whatever artifacts the locals brought in. He was Mr. Northam himself.

  The glass in the door flashed and the door opened.

  “Who’s that?”

  There he was in the flesh. Wilbur Atkins, thin and tense with annoyance. The prescription in his frameless glasses was more intense, and the man’s blue eyes were freakishly magnified.

  “Mr. Atkins, it’s Nat Thayer.”

  “Nathaniel’s boy?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mr. Atkins stood regarding him in his glasses. “Need to use the bathroom? The Subway franchise across the square has a better one.”

  “I had a few questions about the city. I was wondering if I could pick your brain for a few minutes.”

  Atkins blew out his breath. “We don’t open late on Sundays. Says so right here.” Atkins angled his arm out of the doorway and pointed at the Opening Hours sign.

  So why are you here? Nat thought. Then he remembered that the guy lived in a room upstairs.

  “I just need to talk.”

  Atkins regarded him through his lenses.

  As if you have a lot of better things to do, Nat thought. Airing out the Revolutionary-era quilts or rearranging the tin soldiers in the Civil War case? You self-important old bastard.

  “Well, I suppose.”

  Atkins didn’t ask him to come in, just left the door ajar and walked into the coolness of the dark space.

  Nat followed him in and pulled the door shut. The glass in the windows made a vibrating noise, and then he was inside, following Atkins’s footsteps toward a lighted room off to the left.

  It was the Seagoing exhibit. The walls and ceilings were painted eggshell blue, as if you were sitting under the Atlantic Ocean, and the glass exhibit cases were filled with shells, huge fishing hooks, lobster traps, a wooden harpoon, a few doubloons—Nat’s mind filled out the inventory even before his eyes swept briefly a
long the cases and spotted the artifacts. It had been his favorite room in the museum as a boy, a tiny thread connecting him with Henry Morgan, Caribbean pirates, Captain Kidd, and treasure. In the corner was a tall wooden ship’s wheel. Nat frowned. He remembered it as being enormous, a gargantuan thing taller than himself, its handles as big as bananas. But now it looked small and quaint.

  He noticed there was now a Do Not Touch! sign affixed to one of the spokes.

  “I used to spin that thing,” Nat said.

  “That’s why I had to put a sign on it,” Atkins said shortly. “That came off the Lady Contessa, a frigate commanded by a Northam man for thirty years. Carried black powder to the Union forces that was used at Gettysburg, among other things. But it would be a pile of wooden boards if I let the likes of you touch it.”

  Nat rolled his eyes. Atkins was picking nearsightedly through some carvings laid out above the glass case of foreign coins. He brought one up to his eye and turned it in the light. It looked like a gargoyle, a half-human creature with a human head, leering eyes, and a tongue, but the body of a shark.

  “Scrimshaw?” Nat said. He was slightly proud of remembering the name.

  Atkins grunted.

  Good, Nat thought. That’s the end of the formalities.

  “I wanted to ask you about West Africa.”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you know of any connection between Northam and Africa? Any travelers there, missionaries . . .”

  Atkins put down the carving, and his glasses caught a glint of light. “Slave traders?” Atkins said.

  “Them, too.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m interested, that’s all.”

  Atkins gave him a don’t you bullshit me smile. “Don’t say? You woke up this morning with a sudden interest in the connection of the Atlantic slave trade to Northam?”

  Atkins was enjoying this.

  “You know, I get people in here asking questions about pirates from Northam and slavers, all kinds of things. Usually, they pretend that they’ve discovered a sudden interest in the history of western Massachusetts, but after a few minutes it’s usually revealed”—Atkins smiled, revealing a set of black-flecked dentures—“that there’s a question of inheritance. People wondering if their ancestors stashed some bags of gold away. Or gossip.”

  Atkins polished a rough spot on the gargoyle’s left ear. “But that’s not why you’re here?”

  “Exactly. Pure historical interest.”

  Atkins eyes looked like freshly peeled grapes, moist and quivering. “I don’t think so.”

  “Is the information classified, Mr. Atkins? Are you working up a big slave-trading exhibit that’s going to blow the socks off Northam?” Nat hated to take that tone, but the man was annoying.

  Atkins said nothing. He picked up another piece of bone-white carving and began cleaning it with a cloth. Nat waited him out. He knew the man couldn’t resist talking history, no matter what he pretended.

  “There is no history to speak of,” the curator said finally, scratching at a grooved mouth in the scrimshaw. “The slave-trading families were in Boston and Salem.”

  “What about missionaries?”

  “Maybe one or two.”

  “So no stories of, let’s say, massacres, for instance.”

  “Massacres?”

  “Yes. Massacres. Notorious crimes. I need to know about bad things that happened in Africa but started here.”

  This was Nat’s working theory. If he accepted that there was some power at work in Northam, and that it had something to do with Becca’s being guided or enchanted or whatever you wanted to call it, and it was implicated in Walter Prescott’s death and Margaret Post’s, too, there had to be a reason that this force had chosen this place. Even if the nzombe idea was bunk, something had obviously returned to Northam with evil intent. Murders of specific individuals were the result of deep negative emotions. A need for revenge. Why else would these things be happening if some dark act hadn’t caused the city to become a target?

  Atkins stood up, color rising in his face. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I need to know if there were any locals involved in anything . . . Opium smuggling. Slave buying. Spreading disease, like Lord Jeffrey Amherst giving blankets infected with smallpox to the natives.”

  “That happened right here in Massachus—”

  “I know where it happened. Hell, you told me the story yourself, during one of your tours.”

  Atkins’s eyes watched Nat carefully.

  “I want to know about stuff like that,” Nat continued. “Very bad things committed by Northam people in Africa. I have no goddamn idea what I’m looking for, which is why I came here.”

  Nat slapped his hand down on the case. The rattling sound hung in the air as he stared at Atkins.

  The old man looked away first and something in his face had altered. “West Africa?”

  “That’s right.”

  Atkins shook his head no, the thin jowls vibrating with the movement. “Nope, sorry, Dr. Thayer.”

  “Nothing? And you would know of such things?”

  “I would.”

  Something in Atkins’s manner struck Nat as off. He’d gone polite, or at least civil. Or maybe I’m just paranoid, he thought.

  Nat blew out a breath.

  “You mind if I take a look around?”

  Atkins gave him a smile. “Be my guest.”

  Nat began strolling through the exhibit rooms, glancing into the tall glass cases. Something was bothering him, that same image that had been tugging at the back of his memory when he was doing outreach at city hall. A painting, a photo, something in a frame. Something stark, black-and-white. Powerful enough to lodge in his memory banks and stay back there twenty years. The lines of it were waving from the back of his mind, and a chill spread across the line of his shoulders.

  What was it he remembered? A boyhood thing? Was it here in the rooms?

  Fifteen minutes later, he stepped over the lintel into the refracted blue light of the Seagoing room and glared at Atkins. The old man glanced up at him. “Find what you were looking for?”

  “No.”

  Atkins shrugged.

  “I’ll be leaving now,” Nat said.

  Atkins put the scrimshaw down and came padding after Nat. He took hold of the door after Nat had pulled it open.

  “Dr. Thayer.”

  Nat stopped and turned. Atkins was grinning, oddly. “I really would like to know why you ask.”

  It was as if he wished to say something but only if the circumstances were right.

  “It’s not an inheritance,” Nat said.

  Mr. Atkins frowned. “I know that,” he said, his voice with a flat edge.

  Nat wanted to tell Atkins. Maybe it would shake something loose. But Becca . . . he couldn’t.

  “Just let me know if anything comes to you,” he said, and walked down the stairs to the path.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Nat was sitting at his desk at the hospital the next morning, his forehead propped in the palm of his right hand. His skin looked pale, ashy. A lock of unwashed black hair had fallen over his fingers. The sounds of the hospital—the alarm of IV pumps, the chattering of nurses, and the occasional bark of manic laughter or cry of psychic pain—babbled outside his door.

  I have to sleep better, he said to himself. I’m not thinking right.

  The glow of his MacBook reflected Nat’s puzzled face. He had the Google home page open, but he’d completely forgotten what he was supposed to be searching for.

  He was trying to remember something. Something he had to do.

  What was it? It had to do with Becca, he remembered. Did he need to check on her history? No, something to do with numbers.

  Numbers. What goddamn numbers?
>
  “Got it,” he said. Fifty-two: 52 Garmin Street. The darkened house that Becca had visited on her catatonic tour of Northam.

  He searched for White Pages, then hit on Address & Neighbors. He entered the street address into the little box, typed in Northam, MA and hit Find.

  The result came back quickly: Mark and Elizabeth Post.

  Nat stared at the screen for a moment, then clicked the little red button and the page disappeared. How much do you want to bet that Mark and Elizabeth were Margaret Post’s parents? He didn’t even bother to look any further. He knew it was true.

  The Posts were staying at their Northam home while they filled out the paperwork for claiming their daughter’s body, got her affairs in order, dealt with the college and their attorneys. And, no doubt, consulted with said attorneys on what was sure to be a monster lawsuit.

  Nat hunched his shoulders as a ripple of sheer dread seemed to wash through him. Why had Becca gone to 52 Garmin Street while seemingly in a kind of trance? Why was she scouting the dead girl’s house?

  Should he be getting a second opinion on all this? Should he bring Dr. Greene in, let her talk to Becca, walk it around a bit? But what could he say? By the way, there’s the possibility that the girl has been hypnotized by, uh, you know, some outside force. Just thought I’d mention it? Not only would they stare at him in shock and pity—as he himself would have only a couple weeks before—but they would immediately take Becca out of his care as well. They would diagnose her as delusional and possibly psychotic and put her on antidepressants and maybe a mood stabilizer. Lithium. Valproate. He knew exactly the course of treatment that would be followed. And it would mean Becca would sit in her room and talk very slowly about how her oatmeal was that morning.

  If that didn’t work, they’d consider electroconvulsive therapy. A few rounds of ECT to shock her brain waves back into neat little rows. What if they determined that she had chopped her own bedroom door to bits, and was growing fond of sharp instruments? Straight into a state hospital for three days, minimum. Chapter 123, section 12, of the General Laws of Massachusetts: “Emergency restraint and hospitalization of persons posing risk of serious harm by reason of mental illness.” He’d used it on a few patients himself.