Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series)

by John Manchester

  A light comes on for a second, and you see where you really are. Then it’s dark, and you can pretend again.

  One day, there’s a light so glaring that it burns itself into your retinas, and you just can’t forget.

  Beaky clean and sober was not his old shuck-and-jive self. Instead he was awkward and raunchy. Like Fred, but without the nastiness. Beaky was almost sweet in his oddness. Maybe the drugs had been his way of hiding it.

  One night in the Meeting Hall, Karl was pontificating. He’d gone on so long that even with him there I was on the verge of nodding off. From the corner of my eye, I caught Beaky standing and came wide awake. He interrupted Karl mid-sentence. “Karl Maxwell!” He spoke in an uncanny parody of Karl’s portentous whisper. “Tell us what you had for lunch.”

  Karl reacted instantly. He rose from his cushion and hissed, “Eat shit and die!” pointing to the door, like God expelling Adam and Eve from Paradise.

  I’d stopped breathing. From the silence in the room, I figured everyone else had too. No one moved a muscle. The Meeting Hall vibrated with our collective shock such that I was afraid the ceiling would come down. Karl’s mask had slipped again, revealing the predator.

  And this time, it was in public.

  Finally, Beaky moved, shambling out of the room. We never saw him again. Karl resumed speaking as if nothing had happened, but everything was different.

  Questions raced through my mind. What about those Negative Emotions? I argued to myself: It’s only Karl teaching, doing his crazy wisdom thing. Shocking us into consciousness.

  Except I knew. Nobody, let alone a spiritual teacher, beats on someone like Beaky, who isn’t all there. It’s just wrong.

  When it came to Beaky’s last stand, I think he might have been the one playing the crazy wisdom card. Because in all those years there striving for enlightenment, nothing opened my eyes like the sound of that “Karl Maxwell!” In that instant, I knew that Karl’s voice, his slinking walk, his whole act was just a bag of cheap tricks.

  With Beaky gone, Karl went after Bassman. It was like he suddenly had a license to torment our weakest members.

  One night, Karl began the meeting by addressing our bass player. “Bass-MAN. Are you really a man? Then why haven’t you ever been with a woman? Maybe I should call you Bass-BOY. But you’re not ready for a woman yet. Practice being sexual with a tree.”

  What? Was he telling Bassman to go fuck a tree? And never mind that we were all under the stricture of NO SEX. So what was he telling Bassman to do?

  Bassman just sat there and took it, like he’d taken everything in life. Karl knew he would never defend himself, never dare pull a Beaky.

  After that meeting, I approached Bassman. His face looked gray. I couldn’t say anything, of course, but I gazed at him, tried to show him I understood what he must feel. He just slunk away.

  Without thinking, I’d begun keeping track of him. As long as he didn’t disappear, it meant he wasn’t in The Backroom tripping his brains out. I knew that would be the last straw for him.

  His cough, which had started when we laid those bricks, had never really stopped. The day he disappeared, I actually hoped it had landed him in the hospital.

  But no. I was pruning trees out near the cliff the next day when he drifted toward me from The House with a listless gait, like a specter, a set of garden shears flopping in his hand against his pants. And I knew he’d been to The Backroom.

  We looked at each other for long seconds in silence. It was strange, because it was the first time he’d ever really made eye contact with me. I stared into the black pools of his eyes and could see that he was still in The Backroom, in the darkness with a million colors. I had to look away. I was afraid that I might fall in there with him, to a place from which there was no coming back. I sometimes imagine him still wandering the reaches of some obscure dimension, forever lost.

  He spoke in a voice devoid of all affect, except for a little tremor that made me feel like my whole body might start shaking in sympathy with it.

  “I can’t do it. I just can’t.”

  He was breaking the rule against speaking. Now, so did I. “What, you can’t prune these trees? This is nothing. You made that floor.”

  “No, I can’t do any of it.”

  He was going to leave. Go out into the Outer Darkness. I said, “You need to think about this. Give it a few days. You can’t…”

  But he was turning away.

  Even at that very late date, I still believed in everything Karl had fed us. So I believed the worst thing that could happen to Bassman, to any of us, was to leave the group. But Karl had taken Bassman’s soul, stolen what little life he had. I couldn’t see that there was really only one thing Bassman could do.

  He could take his life back from Karl.

  I found out about it at home the next morning. Though Susan and I weren’t speaking, she handed me the local paper, and left the room without looking at me: “Musician plunges to death in river.”

  He’d driven down Route 145 to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. Parked halfway across, gotten out, leaving the motor running, and climbed the rail to the walkway. He’d mounted the second rail, then jumped in the river. Only it was shallow there, not deep enough to drown. He’d shattered both legs and lay there for a long time. I imagine him down there, in the dark and cold, moaning in agony, crying for somebody to help, but no one heard. Like none of us had really heard all along.

  Karl called a meeting. As he spoke, he didn’t assume a posture of grief, and never lost his guru cool. “Life is a river, and death is the great ocean. Just as the rain falls on the roof of this house and eventually finds its way to the sea, we all are destined…”

  And I might have bought it, except for his choice of metaphor. It was in the worst of bad taste. My friend had jumped into a real river and died. He wasn’t headed to some great ocean. He was going into a box in the ground and never coming out.

  Karl ended with, “So he was just a tiny drop…”

  Was he saying this was no big deal? Because, no, it was huge. For some reason, Karl looked at me. My mask was off, that blank face I’d carried for years. I don’t know exactly what showed on my face, but it felt like naked rage. And as his eyes locked onto mine for a moment I saw the strangest thing. A little nervous smile twitched across his lips. It was gone in an instant, but he didn’t finish his sentence: “a tiny drop…” In the bucket? Or in the great ocean?

  That marked the beginning of Karl’s facade slipping. I left that meeting feeling as if I’d been slipped another drug, one stranger even than LSD. My body was numb and sluggish yet filled with crazy energy.

  Over the next weeks, it was like seeing an actual mask crumble away in slow motion. The twitching in his lips spread to his eyes, which darted around the room. The way he walked, hunched over, he seemed to have actually shrunk.

  He was afraid. What was underneath the mask? It didn’t seem to be a dangerous animal any more. More like the silly Wizard of Oz flailing at his knobs with the curtain torn back.

  During this time I ran into Lorraine out on the road on the way to my car. She smiled at me, a wide knowing smile, the first real smile I’d seen on any of us in years.

  I was seeing the first crack in another façade—our collective face, that impassive mask we’d all worn.

  The next day Lorraine flashed me another smile, and I returned it. That night she called me, explicitly breaking the taboo against speaking. And she kept calling me. She told me stories. It was clear that a lot of members had been worse than me at obeying Karl’s command to NEVER SPEAK.

  I said only, “Unh-huh” and “I see,” clutching the receiver until my knuckles were bone white. At first I held the phone like it was a handle to hold onto the group, frantically trying to come up with alternate explanations for her stories.

  And then I crossed some threshold, and the phone bec
ame a lifeline, pulling me away.

  Lorraine told me about Bodine and the money. About cruelties I’d known of, but that by this point no longer shocked. The mundane stuff was almost as damning. All those weekend Sundays while we slaved away, Karl was apparently upstairs, “watching the game on TV.”

  Football? And where did the electricity come from for the TV? I found this somehow the hardest to swallow. To this day, I still don’t quite believe it.

  And yet, Karl was there in The House, now. With a computer. Or was he? It made no sense, but Ray needed it to. He needed to know where Karl was, what he was doing, and who he was doing it with…but how?

  By going to The House. He’d knock on the door, and Karl would answer, shake his hand, invite him in, Ray, how have you been? with all the shadings of meaning he’d put in a seemingly superficial question.

  Ray laughed darkly. He wasn’t going there. He’d gone through twenty conniptions, had to dose himself half-crazy with acid just to get in that house with the writing. He dove back into it.

  It was only later that I realized Lorraine only spoke of what happened to others. That she might have been hiding something from me. It wasn’t hard to guess what that could be.

  But outwardly she kept smiling, and it spread through the group like a contagion. As Karl stooped and shrank before us, we stood taller. Walked faster, our bodies looser as the chains of constriction fell away.

  But not Susan. She clung to her slack face, her measured movements. We hadn’t spoken in months. She’d moved into the spare bedroom. I avoided her, waiting for the sound of her door when we returned from The House before going down to the kitchen for my beer.

  Yet deep as I was in grief at the disintegration of our marriage, there came moments when I tasted imminent freedom. My head still couldn’t wrap around it. But somewhere in me I knew.

  It was uncanny, how something we’d so believed in for so long could just fall apart so fast. Life with Karl, which was supposed to be so vivid, was simply fading like an old Polaroid in reverse, the events of only a week ago distant as ancient memories. The House, which we’d considered more solid than any on earth, seemed to shimmer, appearing translucent as if it was in the process of dissolving into the air.

  I’d bought Karl’s rap about the great lineage of teachers. I’d believed the group would last long past our individual lives, down the generations until the sun burned out. But in a matter of days, it was over.

  I’d always dreaded Karl’s unexpected appearances out of fear. Now I dreaded them out of embarrassment. He was suddenly around a lot. He must have sensed the end was coming. But it was too late. After that initial slip, his mouth, which he’d always held in a firm line, now seemed to constantly struggle to suppress something: an apology, an explanation? What radiated off of him was not psychic power, but enormous sheepishness. It was as though he’d been caught out doing something far more embarrassing than the stuff he’d once made us stand and admit to.

  By the very last meal, the group had shrunk so that there were only twelve of us. Karl said, “I’ve always thought twelve was the right number.” We laughed, but the joke of comparing himself to Jesus was obviously terrible—as pathetic as his river metaphor after Bassman died. I understood why Beaky had so enraged Karl. In imitating him, he’d pointed out what was just the other side of all that pretension. Ridiculousness. I later thought of it as Karl’s Last Supper.

  Those final days had the unreality of a fairy tale, as though Bassman’s hitting the river had broken a spell, waking us up. We blinked, rubbed our eyes and looked around in wonder. It’s ironic, because Karl always said our goal was awakening to consciousness. But the group had actually been deep in slumber.

  One of the very last days—though I couldn’t know yet that it was –started normally. We sat meditating in the Meeting Hall. Karl assigned some exercise, then we milled around the bulletin board upstairs to see what our job was for the day.

  At the bottom of the list:

  Karl—Painting.

  His name had never been on the list before. He’d never worked with us peons. After the morning meeting, he’d disappear until lunch, unless he popped out to surprise you with one of his takedowns.

  But there he was, carrying a can of paint out back. I walked behind him on my way to prune trees. For once, he didn’t see me. He stopped at the corner of The House and stooped over the can. I stood, frozen, not wanting to interrupt whatever he was doing, not intending to eavesdrop, but also afraid to move in case he noticed me.

  The paint was white—of course, what other color? It took me some moments to figure out what he was doing, because he was so bad at it. He was trying to get the can open. Drips down the side indicated it had been opened before. And unless it had just been closed, the paint would have dried, sealing it. It was easy enough to open if you had a screwdriver and you knew how.

  He had a set of keys. He worked at the thing, to my amazement, visibly becoming more and more frustrated. Karl, unknowledgeable about a simple practical matter, Karl incompetent, was hard to believe.

  But frustrated? That was a Negative Emotion.

  He picked the can up with a snarl and flung it at the side of The House. The lid finally came off and gobs of paint sprayed over the stones. Karl stalked off.

  I still didn’t move. I’d just witnessed my teacher being quite stupid and very pissed off.

  Karl didn’t show up for Bassman’s funeral. But Bodine did. The service was held in that little church down the road from The House. Bodine played an out-of-tune upright, a simple hymn that segued into a long, sprawling blues. Bassman had loved the blues. There were many tears.

  Afterward, Bodine came up to me outside. “Man, I should have brought you a guitar. But I have something else in my car.”

  He opened the trunk. There was a six-pack of beer. I’d been cheating on NO DRUGS at home with my own beer. But as I clinked bottles with Bodine and exchanged a look—for Bassman—I knew I was done.

  Karl hadn’t bothered to show up at the funeral. The next day, I just didn’t show up at The House. There was no drama. I didn’t say goodbye to him. How could I have? I may not have been able to speak, but I was finished with lying.

  It was true, every word he’d written. As best as memory could serve, that’s how it had gone down. So why was he rubbing his fingers nervously on the couch?

  He kept rubbing, stared from the window, and then it came. He’d missed a piece. He’d missed it in the writing because he hadn’t been aware of it at the time.

  Grief and rage had done what nothing else could and driven him from Karl’s house. But even as he walked away, he’d carried something that remained buried in him for decades.

  Doubt. What if Karl had been a true holy man, and Ray’s leaving him had been the biggest mistake of his life? The doubt was what was behind that recurrent dream where he was back with Karl, and all was forgiven. It’s what had him Googling Susan. It’s what had him struggling to get into The House, through the writing.

  At the same time, he wished he could erase it. Because if he didn’t, he was never going to be free.

  For all the terrible things he’d just evoked from the past, there was a new bad thing: malignant thoughts, infecting his brain. So he was suddenly convinced that Karl had sent the brick and dead cat not as warnings but teachings, designed to wake Ray to that ever-elusive higher state. But it was a waste of Karl’s oh-so-precious time, because Ray still wasn’t learning.

  But, God save him, he wanted to.

  He shook his head and reached to his throat. Just like that, the lump was back, so big that his breath was rasping. That was part of Karl’s new teaching too. He’d told them not to speak for a good reason. It had something to do with energy, but Ray was so freaked out he couldn’t for the life of him remember what.

  He remembered Bassman at one of their last gigs, just standing there like he did, those fi
ngers pumping out that hellacious bottom. It practically brought tears but pulled him away from the poisonous thoughts.

  It was almost five. Ray went down to the bodega, bought a six of Magic Hat, and carried it over to Bodine’s. He heard no barking as he approached the door. He knocked, and a minute later Bodine opened it.

  Ray said, “Is Mingus okay?”

  “Fine. You’ve been over here so often lately he didn’t bother to get up when you came. Good thing I was working here in the theater or I wouldn’t have heard you.”

  “You need a new doorbell.”

  “I was about to call you.” He looked at the beer. “What’s that for?”

  “For Bassman.”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember his funeral?”

  Bodine’s face turned solemn. “I do. You mind sitting outside? It’s not too cold.”

  They sat on lawn chairs by the back wall, and Ray told Bodine what he’d written.

  Bodine said, “Oh, man, I never heard the gory details before.”

  “Because I couldn’t speak.”

  “You know I’m not big on second-guessing. But I will confess that I still sometimes wonder if we couldn’t have done better by him.” He laughed ruefully. “One time I tried to help him out. There was this skinny little chick, I forget her name, she obviously had the hots for him. I told him she liked him. Set up for them to meet. She was sweet, gentle, shy herself, utterly unintimidating. But it was a disaster. I shouldn’t have pushed it.”

  “How could you know? How could you understand someone like that, who doesn’t believe he deserves anything good? I have plenty of my own guilt. What if we’d never driven him up to Karl’s? Because he didn’t have a license, never learned to drive.”

  “No. He’s not on us. He’s on Karl Maxwell. Karl wasn’t there that night on the bridge, but he might as well have been. Might as well have pushed Bassman right in the river. I don’t hold personal grudges. But this isn’t about me. If I believed in an afterlife, I’d like to think Karl is going to spend eternity with his cold, shriveled heart getting munched on by giant cockroaches.” He stood and walked over to the filthy remains of the snow bank and gave it a few kicks.