The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  He was thinking of his mother and father. An image of them at the beach, an old snapshot, had popped into his head out of nowhere. Their vacations to Cape Cod were the best memories he had of them as a family, the trips to Dennis Port in their old Volvo, his father checking the oil and filling up on the neon-green coolant before they left. And the cheap, out-of-the-way motels his mother favored, like the Cutlass or the Oyster, outdated places built during the ’60s and packed with college kids or working-­class families looking for an inexpensive place next to the beach. His father would rather have rented a house in one of the established towns or stayed at a four-star hotel. “Why does she like these shitholes?” he would mutter to Nat as his mother headed into the tiny office of one of the motels to announce their arrival.

  It was as if his mother didn’t want to meet anyone from Northam during their little summer getaways. She’d always had this aversion to social life. His parents’ friends were his father’s friends: Mr. Deutch and Uncle Pat (not a real uncle, just his father’s frat brother) and the Seager twins. She never seemed to invite anyone to their home and was distant even with her own relatives. “Your mother,” his father had once told him, “is the only self-made orphan in the world.”

  He thought of the accident that had killed his parents. The police explanation had always seemed odd to him. The driver behind their car that winter night twenty-two years ago had told the police that his father’s Volvo had been driving normally for the few miles that he’d been behind it. Roads dry. No deer or darting animals spotted. But twenty minutes from Northam, he said, the car had suddenly veered to the right, clipped through the wire guardrail, and sailed off into the small valley where it had cratered, roof first, killing both his parents. No brake lights visible before the crash. No dead bucks or does to explain the swerve.

  The cops came up with a working theory, based on interviews with family and friends. They thought that his mother, waking up after a long nap after visiting her mother’s parents in Virginia, had reached for something to pull herself up straight in the seat. It happens, they’d told Nat. Passengers unthinkingly reach out and grab the steering wheel, and half asleep, not realizing what they’re doing, they yank the thing toward them.

  And off the road you go, straight into oblivion.

  Nat stared at the glowing computer screen. He took a breath and copied the whole page, the text glowing under the blue. Then he clicked Delete.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  John Bailey woke up on Monday morning, rubbing his eyes. The TV was still on and some infomercial was blaring. He sat up heavily, and his belly jiggled left and then right before finally settling in the middle and going still. God, he had to lose some weight.

  He checked his cell phone: 7:45 a.m. Plenty of time to get himself ready for work. Mrs. Finlay would be here in forty-five minutes.

  John grunted, got up off the bed, and went to his chest of drawers, low and dark beneath the plasma TV. He rooted around, grabbed some boxer briefs and a clean white T-shirt. As he walked toward the bathroom, he hooked a pair of jeans from a wooden chair near the doorway and added them to the ensemble. Finally, he took a fresh towel from the closet and headed to the shower.

  Inside the bathroom, he peeled off his Pats shorts and stepped in, letting the hot water dig into the back of his neck for a good five minutes. He slopped some blue liquid soap onto a hand cloth and spread it around. He felt buzzed—anxious—and sleepy at the same time.

  John killed the water, got out of the shower, toweled off, and quickly put on the clothes he’d brought with him. He just needed socks, shoes, and a dress shirt, and he’d be ready to go.

  He was trying not to think ahead too far. It had become a habit lately. Take every minute as it comes, just try to survive the day. What was that awful song his mother used to hum as she made him breakfast, something about taking one day at a time, Sweet Jesus? God, he’d wanted to strangle her every time she sang it, but he was beginning to see the wisdom in its lyrics.

  Dressed in jeans and socks, John walked into the bedroom, dabbing the last droplets of shower water on his chest, and stopped instantly. Something was wrong. Something had changed since he’d been in here ten minutes ago. He turned at the waist, his right hand still holding the towel slung over his right shoulder. He checked every detail in the room. The TV was off, the window to the backyard still showing gray sky, the bedside lamp still . . .

  His eyes settled on the gun safe underneath the night table on the right side of the bed.

  The door was ajar.

  “Charlie!” he called, jerking the towel to the floor and breaking into a run as he dashed into the hallway.

  He made it to Charlie’s door in six long strides. The room was empty, the toys neatly aligned against the far wall, with Charlie’s Avengers slippers next to them.

  He called the boy’s name again as he fast-stepped down the hallway and then through the kitchen, heading for the basement stairs.

  Just let me get my gun back and that’s all I’ll ask. Nothing ever—

  He flicked on the light and jumped three stairs to the landing, ducking to scan the basement. The weights on his old bench gleamed innocently. But no Charlie. Nothing.

  John swiveled, charged back up the stairs, and headed for the back door. He burst through it and ran into the yard.

  “CHARLIE!” he bellowed. A few startled birds cried out and flew upward into a cloud-dimmed sky. Breathing heavily, a void spreading in his chest, John looked right and left and ran toward the back fence, calling the boy’s name. The air was frigid and he was shaking and the ground was covered in snow and he didn’t see any tracks heading toward Bishop Carroll.

  Charlie had to be here somewhere. Had to be.

  He screamed the name again, feeling that he was tumbling, tumbling, a black pit opening up in his chest.

  The sound of bird wings. A clump of snow fell from a branch. His hearing was closing down. John could only hear his own frantic breathing, rasping above the beating of his heart.

  Charlie. No. No, Charlie.

  He saw something to his right. Behind a thick oak near the rickety wooden fence. A pair of knees, boy’s knees in their brown corduroy pants. John’s eyes went wide, but something inside him told him to go slow. He ducked forward and put his hands in front of him, then stepped toward the tree, angling around as he approached.

  Charlie was kneeling in the snow, staring off at the playing fields behind the house. As if he were watching for something. His eyes were glassy and fearful.

  “Charlie!” John said, relief flooding his body like strong drugs.

  Charlie didn’t hear him. He was bringing something up, in his hand, something big and black.

  John screamed and the cry hung in the crisp cold air.

  Charlie stopped, the barrel of the gun resting on his bottom lip. The lip bent out under the weight of the barrel. John could see the pink flesh and then the whites of Charlie’s bottom teeth.

  John felt all sensation leave him. His body seemed to consist of a force field of terror.

  He held his hands out toward the boy, palms out.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said. “Give Daddy the gun, huh? Charl—”

  He took one step toward the boy. Charlie stared at him. His eyes were empty and dark. The bared lower teeth made him look insane.

  “Charlie?”

  Another step.

  Charlie took the gun into his mouth. Like you did the thermometer when you were sick.

  “Charlie, please. Just give me the gun.”

  Howhowhow did he get the combination to the safe?

  Two more steps. John’s boots crunching in the snow, so loud he was afraid it would startle Charlie. The boy was only three feet away now, his feet still hidden by the thick trunk of the tree.

  There was only one word in John’s mind now. One word holding back a world of horror that pressed o
n the word from the other side.

  Please, he thought. And then, God, not this.

  John took one long step to where Charlie was kneeling and put his hand over the gun, his middle finger slipping behind the trigger. Then he eased it away out of Charlie’s hands. The boy, his head bobbling as if he were entering the first stages of hypothermia, stared up, his eyes uncomprehending.

  John placed the gun on the ground behind him, then took Charlie by the shoulders and pulled him in.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh Lord God,” he said.

  Charlie was busy scanning the trees.

  * * *

  The morning shift at city hall, in the basement office, where it had all begun less than two weeks ago. Nat Thayer stared grimly at the green wall opposite his desk.

  Tomorrow he would book the Buenos Aires trip. He’d had enough of Northam. Do not visit us in winter, he thought. It had never been truer than now.

  Maybe the killer will show up tonight, Nat thought, eying the clock. Let me not say that. Look what happened last time I asked for company and Walter Prescott rang the bell. He thought of Becca Prescott, closed up in her room like a specimen in a box at a museum. Her life slowly passing, breathing out her youth in that fucking monstrosity of a house.

  The thing that had been bothering him, taunting him, popped into the back of his mind again. A stark image, black-and-white—he’d seen it a hundred times but he couldn’t place it. Was it from his school yearbook? Was it something from the Internet, an image burned into his frontal lobe?

  Take a walk, he said to himself. Get the blood flowing.

  Nat walked out into the hallway and moved left. The passage was cold and dark, the emergency lighting on. The town officials and office workers hadn’t yet arrived for the workday. He climbed the stairs to the main floor of the city hall and began pacing the wood floors, up and down. Exit lights glimmered in the distance and the whirr of a water fountain motor catching and then shutting off.

  A photo.

  Creak.

  An old one.

  Nat stopped. He walked over to the wall. On it was framed a photo of a fat man in a beaver-skin top hat and a gold pince-nez, squinting. Nat glanced at the caption.

  “ ‘Rutherford Wills,’ ” he said aloud, his voice echoing gently along the corridor. “ ‘Notary and Mayor, 1908 to 1912.’ ”

  The water cooler hummed to life again, and Nat, who felt like he was on the verge of sleepwalking, moved toward the sound. He found the silvery surface of the fountain glinting next to the men’s room and instantly bent down and pushed the button, taking a sip of cool water.

  Up again, turn, walk.

  A photo in black-and-white, very black-and-white.

  He veered this time to his right, and studied the photo between the doors marked County Clerk and Water Department. This one was of a baseball team, The Black-and-Yellows, State Champions, 1906. The men, half with mustaches, wore droopy wool uniforms and held their banana-fingered baseball mitts out in front of them, frowning in concentration. Nat went on.

  Toward the end of the hallway, something huge and red hung on the wall. He went farther and passed beneath the exit light and saw the red thing was a metal box fixed on the wall. Inside was a fire hose, its surface coarse like a snakeskin, fixed to a brass nozzle, new and glowing in the red light. The thing stirred something else in his mind.

  Fire.

  Turn, walk.

  Yes, fire. Flames everywhere.

  Pace. Water fountain. Pass on.

  The dream. Of course. Becca’s dream of the house on fire, somewhere in a jungle. The painting in her room was probably related to the same nightmare. A man burning.

  Stop, turn. Walk.

  Slower now.

  Nat stopped suddenly. The glass window of the sanitation department, William Carlisle, Commissioner stenciled in gold letters trimmed in black was to his left. On the door up ahead, he couldn’t read the letters. But something in his head had told him to stop.

  You’re warm.

  He took a step forward.

  Warmer.

  An image started to come to him, but blurry. Figures against a phosphorous-white sky, bony stick figures.

  He took another step.

  Hot.

  Suddenly, Nat turned his head, knowing what he would find there. The photo seemed to bloom in his mind even before he set eyes on the black-framed thing on the wall, with its stark blacks and bleached whites. The photo of the hanging in the town square.

  His eyes open and his heart pattering fast, Nat stepped up to it. Of course. The image seemed to merge with the one that rushed into his mind now, the one that had been lurking in shadows. Every line, every angle matched up.

  It was the photo of a public execution. The gallows stood in the town square on a crisp fall day. A thin man, his figure impossibly black against the sunlight that threw the photo into stark relief. The edge of the city hall’s cornice jutted into the top left of the picture, while the backs of the townspeople, the men in their dark wool coats and the women in billow-sleeved white blouses, formed a black border from which the gallows rose. The photographer had obviously been down among the spectators, as the camera was tilted up toward the hanging man. Whose neck was clearly broken.

  Nat’s eyes darted to the little placard at the bottom.

  The execution of Captain Thomas Markham, US Marine Reg. Two. June 14, 1920. Convicted of murder during the occupation of Haiti.

  Nat stared in astonishment. Not West Africa. Haiti. An echo from his high school history class came back to him, and he remembered an occupation, American soldiers sent down for . . . He had no idea. But the Marines had gone in, that he remembered, and here was one of them, apparently a Northam man, being hanged for murder. But the murder of whom?

  He brought his face closer to the photograph. Who did you kill, Captain Markham? What did you get up to down in Haiti? The white spaces of the photo seemed to throb, phosphorous and aglow in the darkness.

  Nat reached up and rubbed his lips with his palm. Easy, man. Take it easy.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Charlie was swaddled up in his father’s bed. There were wisps of things still in his head—the Magician’s face, smiling and then scowling, and a feeling of heaviness in the back of his brain, as if a cloud were slowly moving away—but he felt fine now. Just a little cold. The grass outside had been cold like little icicles that bent.

  Out in the backyard, before his daddy came, he’d been talking with the Magician. About many things, snowstorms and flying horses and red-striped monsters. Mostly about monsters. While they were talking about the ones they feared the most, the Magician had revealed to Charlie a rather big secret. There was a monster of sorts, a little goblin that lived inside his—Charlie’s—mouth.

  And do you know what? the Magician said. That’s the reason you can’t talk like other boys. The goblin won’t let you! He’s quite mean. He’s afraid if you tell someone about him, they’ll come and pull him out.

  Well, that’s terrible, Charlie said in his mind to the Magician. And he’d flushed with anger at the thought of a goblin blocking his words before anyone could hear them. He felt shock and happiness at once—he’d always wondered why he couldn’t speak ­really, though his parents had tried to explain it to him.

  It is, said the Magician. Indeed it is.

  Charlie had moved his tongue around, trying but failing to feel the goblin in the back of his mouth. He told the Magician this.

  Oh, you’ll never catch him. He has a powder that made your tongue all numb back there. He’s quite safe.

  Charlie had thought about that.

  Hold on. Does this mean you’d like to talk, Charlie?

  Yes, I would. Very much!

  Well, then, I’ll tell you a little secret. Do you know what the goblin is scared of most in the whole wide world?
r />   More than grown-ups finding him?

  Yes, more than that.

  What? he’d said in his mind. Tell me.

  A gun.

  He felt the gun in his hand then. He hadn’t remembered taking it from his father’s safe, but he must have. He could feel the little bumps along the handle, and he’d run his finger along it.

  Show it to the bad little goblin and he’ll get scared and run away, Charlie. Then you can talk all you like. You’ll gab all day long!

  He’d hesitated only a moment before opening his mouth. He’d raised the gun, so big it almost didn’t fit over his bottom teeth, and worked it in past the tip of his tongue. The metal was oh so cold.

  But I still can’t talk, he’d said to the Magician. Did I do something wrong?

  Oh, dear. The reply had come after a moment. The goblin isn’t scared enough. I’ll tell you what, pull back on the trigger and scare him good, Charlie. He’s a tough one. He won’t go ’way unless you give him a real fright.

  He’d started to pull the trigger back, but his daddy had come to stop him then. I’m getting rid of the bad goblin, he’d wanted to tell his daddy. But of course he still couldn’t speak, and his pad was nowhere close. Daddy had carried him inside to the bed, and worn out with the disappointment of not getting the goblin out, he’d fallen asleep.

  But Charlie still wanted to talk. Maybe there were other ways to scare the goblin enough so that he’d leave. He would ask the Magician the next time he came.

  Before he fell asleep, his daddy had talked to him about never touching his gun, never ever, no matter what, and told him the gun would be locked away in the safe from now on, but please, he should never even touch the safe. Charlie had nodded at all of it; his father looked like he was getting sick, like he’d eaten something that made him feel bad, and Charlie wanted to make him better.

  Now, refreshed by his nap, he waited for his father to leave before he went out and talked to Mrs. Finlay. There were three door sounds that always followed one after the other: the door to the garage closing, the chunk of the car door, and then the screech of the automatic door as it went up its track and then back down. When he heard the last one go still, Charlie walked out to the living room.