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

by John Manchester

  “In 1803. Thanks.”

  Ray glanced to the door. He wanted to get there while it was still light. But Bodine was staring at the museum case, an odd expression on his face.

  Ray said, “What?”

  “I need to look at those emails again.”

  They climbed upstairs, and Bodine got into Ray’s account. He found the picture of Susan. “I knew there was something about this. You see how crappy the quality is? These lines?” He pointed.

  “A bad scan?”

  “No. This isn’t a photo. And it’s not from a cell phone. It’s a still. From a video.”

  “How do you know? Graphics are more my thing than yours, and I can’t tell.”

  “You never told me about Susan and Karl. Well here’s something I never told you, that I’m not proud of.” He led Ray into the theater and back to the open case. He picked up an old, but not ancient device.

  Ray asked, “Is that a video camera?”

  “One of the first commercial ones, from the seventies.”

  “And?”

  “Karl had me install one just like it in the wall of a room upstairs.”

  “That’s how he taped Susan. Flying on acid.”

  “It could be. But there wasn’t a bed in there then. It was an office.”

  “So he got you to do one part of the dirty work, then made someone else move the bed in. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What did Karl think he was going to use it for?”

  “The room had all these books on religion and a nice chair. I figured maybe he’d tape himself giving one of his spiels for posterity.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. If you remember, Susan was a bit of a photographer. Early on she told me how she brought a camera to The House. She tried to take Karl’s picture, but Karl said, ‘No graven images!’ Susan explained that meant no images of God.”

  “I didn’t know that. Plus, he’d be taping himself.”

  “Was it a corner room, where you installed the camera?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which one?”

  “The northeast one.”

  “The hard one to see in.”

  “That doesn’t mean that’s where he’ll be. And if there are other people, they could be anywhere in The House.”

  They stood looking at each other. Bodine looked away. He wasn’t big on guilt, but even though it was a different camera, it was a glaring exception to his rule about no personal items in his museum. Had he put it there to remind himself? Ray let it go.

  He picked up the sleeping bag and headed for the door. “If you don’t mind, I’m bringing the laptop you gave me.”

  “Why?”

  “In case I want to write.”

  “Writers. Just don’t get it wet. And charge it up. You keep the screen dim it should have three, maybe four hours of life. Uh, I’ve got one more thing in my closet.” He headed up to the office. He returned with a sheepish look and a handgun.

  Ray blanched. “What the hell are you doing with that? You’re a pacifist!”

  “It’s a long, long story. I would never use it. I keep meaning to get rid of it.”

  “Not by pawning it off on me. I’m not taking it.”

  Bodine followed Ray to the door and grabbed a nylon parka from its hook on the wall. “Well take this. It’s supposed to rain the next couple of days. Stay in touch with your cell—but make it short. You need to conserve your batteries. Then again, they may not even have service up there.”

  “But Susan spoke to Karl.”

  “He always called her. He could have gone somewhere to call.”

  Ray opened the door.

  Bodine said, “Promise me one thing. You won’t go in that house.”

  Ray looked away. “My promises aren’t too good. I seem to remember promising not to write.”

  “Well, then, don’t do anything stupid. You hear me?”

  “Yeah.” Except the whole time he’d been at Bodine’s, that volcano had been simmering in him. Karl had thrown Susan right in his face, a naked, tripping Susan. On that Victorian bed, the same one where he fucked her and taped it for posterity.

  Bodine was staring at him. “You’re not listening to a word I say. You need to get your shit on the ball. I don’t know what you’re headed for, but it’s no picnic in the mountains this time of year. It’s going to be cold at night. You’ll have to sleep in your car.”

  But Ray was barely listening. Karl hadn’t just had Susan in that bed. He’d had Crystal.

  Which made the flames burn hotter. “I always thought Bassman was the only thing Karl took that couldn’t be gotten back. I was wrong. He stole Crystal’s chance of having babies. And mine too.”

  “How?”

  “I was a mess after Susan. It was years before I had a decent relationship. And then it was too late. My girlfriends were too old. Susan and I were going to have kids, before we met Karl.”

  “I’m sorry. That is some poisonous regret. But right now, you need to focus.”

  “I hear you.”

  Mingus trotted over, and Ray gave him some serious petting. He headed home. It was almost balmy out.

  Up in the kitchen, he threw food in a backpack, along with the Power Bars and bottles of water. He was a little miffed that Bodine hadn’t told him before about installing that video camera. But he’d admitted he was ashamed of it. Which must have been hard. Who knew what damage even macho Bodine had sustained in his time with Karl? Ray thought of the roof and shuddered.

  But Bodine’s gun? Bodine was as strictly committed to nonviolence as anyone Ray had ever known. He could barely get himself to kill mosquitos when he went camping. Ray shook his head and smiled. Who wanted predictable friends? They were boring.

  He remembered something from back then. Ray had been even more weirded out when he found out about Karl’s gun.

  It was time to go, but he needed to write this while the laptop had power.

  I was allowed upstairs in The House one time, early on. Ethan ushered me up. With each step, my excitement grew. I was entering the realm of the inner circle! I sniffed the air like it was fresher, looked for signs.

  I followed Ethan down a long hall, with closed doors on either side. They were polished to a fine luster. The walls were freshly plastered and painted Karl’s signature white. We reached the end of the hall, and Ethan opened a closet and handed me a mop and bucket.

  I was disappointed. I got mopping, afraid that at any moment Karl might pop out of one of those doors and give me a withering look. Is that how you mop a floor?

  But he didn’t show. When I’d mopped the whole floor twice and couldn’t get it any cleaner, I opened the closet to return the tools. With one eye out for Karl, I took a guilty look inside.

  A broom and dustpan. Rags. A suitcase.

  And a rifle. I didn’t know anything about guns. This had two barrels. Was it a shotgun? No, the barrels were too slender. The gun looked old, perhaps antique, but the stock was freshly oiled, and the hardware gleamed. The only things in that place that saw such care belonged to Karl. That meant the weapon was his. But what was Karl Maxwell, spiritual master, doing with a gun? Coming out of the sixties, I’d naturally assumed my guru would be a man of peace.

  Now I wasn’t so sure. Later, when Karl’s anger showed, the gun haunted me.

  Ray emailed this last bit to Lou. They might intercept it. It didn’t matter, anyway, because if they came back to his place, he’d be gone. He called his artist friend Maurice, who, once Ray offered him cash, was eager to man the store.

  It was getting dark. Too late to leave today.

  He had a big breakfast at Jo’s early the next morning. He didn’t know when he’d eat another decent meal.

  As he left, he told her, “I’m leaving
for a couple of days.”

  “Where are you going? You never—”

  “Go anywhere. I know. I just need to get away.”

  She gave him a skeptical look. “So you need food?”

  “Now that you mention it, how about one of those little chocolate cakes?”

  Back home down in the gallery, he checked his email a last time. Just opening the account made him jumpy—would there be another threat?

  A message from Lou: “Call me!”

  Ray stood, rocking from foot to foot as he called.

  Lou was pumped. “This new stuff is the balls! I cleaned it up, sent it over to that editor and he loves it. Bodine on the roof? That’s hardcore. But …sorry about your wife.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Your friend, Bassman. That abortion. I knew Karl was a wicked harmonica player. I had no idea he was plain wicked.”

  “It feels good to be done.”

  There was a pause. “Done? What about the last thirty years? What’s he doing now? Is he even alive? Does he still have that group?”

  “Uh, I haven’t been able to find any trace of him after that.”

  “Well, you need to. This is a good beginning. But it doesn’t make a book.” Lou paused. “Hey—what’s this new email from you?”

  “I just sent it.”

  “I’m reading it…a gun! Now we’re really talking. How do you know he didn’t use it?”

  “Maybe he did.”

  “Well, keep sending me this good stuff. And there’s got to be something on Karl on Google. Do I need to do your job for you?”

  “No. I’m on it.”

  Lou hung up. Ray winced. He was never writing about what was happening now with Karl. So how was the book getting published? He wasn’t sure he cared anymore.

  Ray drove north on I-87. He exited off the highway south of Albany and headed west, past weary houses with scrubby lawns. The neighborhood was unfamiliar. Had he taken the wrong exit?

  No. This had been farmland last time he’d been here. Now it was a crummy suburb of the state capitol. In the years since he’d come this way, these sad houses had been built and had already worn out. As the road started climbing onto the limestone plateau, the falling-down barns and blown-out trailers became familiar. This area was still dirt poor.

  As he gained altitude, spring slipped back into winter. Dirty snow smudged the north edges of lifeless brown fields.

  Ray rode the rolling hills for a good twenty minutes without crossing a bridge and remembered the reason. Bodine had told him that these Helderberg Mountains concealed a secret: a vast network of caves. A natural sewer system carved in the limestone that swallowed all the streams entering its domain. The rock lay just inches below the skin of soil and in the higher places protruded in layers of dark blue. Pastures dipped down into depressions that funneled rain underground via deep pits. They hid behind clumps of trees left to grow by farmers to keep cows from falling in. The trees appeared now like heaps of cigarette ash. Even in his car Ray felt precarious riding over this hollow earth, as if it might at any moment open and swallow him. Like that cave Bodine had taken him in that time.

  He shuddered.

  Bodine had said something about rain, but the sky was mostly clear. Even if it poured, every drop would disappear underground. Ray licked his lips, grateful for the bottles of water in the back of the car.

  The ruined farms and dreary landscape sucked at his mood. For all the trouble the writing had created over the last weeks, it had given him purpose, pulling him from the worst of his depression. But with each mile, he could feel that purpose leaking away into this dry plateau at the ass-end of winter.

  A moment’s paranoia made Ray glance in the rearview mirror. No one was following him. There was no one on the road at all. Then he remembered: Karl and the mirror.

  Karl had come up once, gotten in Ray’s face and stared wordlessly. Ray felt stripped naked, certain Karl was seeing his every thought and feeling. Karl whispered, “I’m a mirror,” and was gone. What could he have meant? Ray spent years trying to figure it out.

  Now he knew. He’d been looking for some profound explanation. It was so simple, so obvious that he’d missed it. Karl mirrored whatever you presented to him. If you looked scared, he would draw his face back and widen his eyes. He mimicked surprise by raising his eyebrows. If you felt unsure, his lips would quiver. Betray an ounce of anger and Karl would lock demon eyes with yours.

  Terror, self-doubt, rage: Karl’s famous Negative Emotions. Ray had assumed Karl’s role was to reflect their higher selves. What if he hadn’t offered the limpid surface of wisdom, but a funhouse mirror, distorting, bringing out the worst in them?

  Ray turned off the plateau and descended into a deep hollow. With a shock he saw the first landmark on the way to The House: that church. Up to now, he’d somehow doubted any of this could be real. Though every flake of paint was gone, and the windows were all broken, Ray recognized the church like he’d last driven by yesterday. At its sight, his body began a series of reactions precisely as it had back then whenever he approached Karl’s domain.

  They were his own somatic Stations of the Cross. The church triggered a hard ticking in his temples. As he swung onto the dirt road, the car lurched into a rut and butterflies swarmed in his gut. Coming up the switchbacks and the butterflies became frenzied, hating the altitude. As he entered the darkness of the slot in the cliff, scrambling to turn on the headlights, he held his breath.

  As the reactions accelerated, he slipped into the future, anticipating the coming reactions. In just seconds, with the first glimpse of the blue walls of The House, his palms would turn slippery on the wheel. By the time he parked—and not in the ditch, but not in the road either, or else!—he’d be practically hyperventilating. Walking down the hill from his car, his whole body would thrum with his pulse. And then pausing before the door, he’d hit the top of the crescendo of anxiety, every muscle coiling in upon itself. Inside, and suddenly he’d be numb with resignation.

  As he reached the exit of the slot, he slammed on the brakes. He wasn’t going in that door, or even driving past The House. He’d come to snoop on whoever was there, but what was to stop them from seeing him? What if they were waiting for him, had lookouts, in the windows, atop the cliffs? Whoever had placed a dead cat in this car would recognize it. How many old blue Volvos were there out in this poor part of the state? The few vehicles he’d seen were ancient pickup trucks, rusted out jalopies.

  He slowly backed up, out of the slot and down the switchbacks. With nowhere to turn around, death was just a slip of the wheel away. He white-knuckled it down, his neck straining from staring into the rearview.

  He reached the bottom, pulled out onto the main road and headed back the way he’d come. He felt a huge letting-down, as he had every time leaving The House. And the sudden urge for a beer. Not today.

  He had a rough idea how to reach the quarry. He climbed again onto the plateau. He drove maybe twenty minutes, but they seemed interminable. Stained teeth of limestone loomed high above the trees, and he slowed.

  The road ahead on the right must be the one. Ray’s skin again prickled with paranoia. His eyes darted around. There was no one behind him. No one in that field. No one in the woods. He slowed, turned, and gunned the car into the turn.

  It was barely a track, with no signs of recent use. Which suggested that the quarry was closed. The road crossed an area of broken rock spotted with anemic bushes. There was no snow here to show his tracks.

  He entered a line of trees and slammed into a foot of snow. He slid across, hit mud. It slurped at the tires, and he gunned the engine, slipping to one side, just missing a tree. What the hell was he going to do if he got stuck? It was not an option. He found himself driving with a skill he didn’t have.

  He was relieved to reach the tall iron fence. It was rusted, but still app
eared solid. Ray climbed out. It had the biggest padlock he’d ever seen. He squirted Liquid Wrench into the hole and waited. A gust of cold wind slapped his face. All he could see over the enclosure were those limestone teeth, which up close seemed not only discolored but suffering serious decay.

  The lock succumbed to Bodine’s key with a rude creak, and the gate opened with a shriek that chewed at his nerves. He relaxed. The mountain between him and The House had muffled dynamite before.

  He drove through and closed the gate. Should he lock it? Nobody had been in here in years. But he’d feel safer if he did.

  He got out and reached with his fingers through the gap between the gate and fence, snagged the bottom of the lock and swiveled it far enough towards him that he could slip the key in. It was tricky. He barely had hold of the heavy lock and if it slipped, the key would fly off God knows where. But he got it locked and zippered the key in a pouch on the side of the backpack. He got in the car and followed a faint track past a dilapidated warehouse.

  He turned a corner and the limestone workings revealed themselves. He stopped the car. There was no doubt about its being abandoned. No one had been here in years. Though Ray considered himself ecologically minded, he’d thought talk of the “rape of mother earth” was over the top. No longer.

  It wasn’t just that quarry men had torn half of the mountain away. They’d left the place an obscene mess. A crumpled network of rusted conveyor belts and sluiceways fed shattered concrete silos. A gantry had collapsed on itself, soot-black, like a monster grasshopper caught in a brush fire.

  Ray followed the road around the side of the silos, parked, climbed out and stood. A series of wide ramps cut into the stone descended from where he stood to a pond filled with some black substance. Across it, he faced a sheer hundred-foot cliff. The right side of it was half buried in a chaos of rotted timbers and bent corrugated sheets. To the left side was the fence, this side hugged by a narrow path leading up to the saddle, just inches from a sheer wall of the quarry.

  The wind picked up, whistling in the structures, a moment later startling him as it angrily slapped tarpaper against the remains of a caved in roof.