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

by John Manchester

  Across the room from the bed stood a pyramid more than three feet high made of cat food cans, source of the tuna smell. Next to it were empty food and water bowls. Ray remembered the cat in the video, poor thing. On a table sat an open can, half eaten, a fork beside it. He’d heard of old poor people doing this. Seth had been living on cat food, along with his cat. Until he killed it. And it must have been his only companion.

  These were not the digs of a great teacher. Seth couldn’t have had a group.

  So what had Susan been doing here? She hadn’t come to resume her affair with Karl. And there was no group. And she was giving Seth money. Why?

  Next to the unfinished meal sat a Nintendo video game console, a monitor, and games. But where was Seth’s computer? The console was plugged into a power strip hooked to a heavy orange extension cord that snaked out the door and down the right side of the hall. Ray found matches and lit the candle again. He traced the cord to the last room. The windows were empty of glass. Here was the generator, and a satellite dish, which explained Seth’s internet access. It was a clever place to install them, out of the rain, but where the generator fumes vented to the outside. He might have been a loon, but Seth was not impractical.

  A second orange extension cord also led out of the room, hugging the other side of the hall. Ray followed it downstairs and down another hall. It disappeared into a hole outside The Backroom.

  What the hell? The door was locked.

  He returned to The Bedroom and searched for keys. Seth had locked him in the basement. And unlocked the door when he came back down to go in the cave. He’d had the keys with him when he fell. Shit.

  His computer must be in The Backroom. And why had he locked that door?

  Maybe he’d left the keys in the door to the basement. Ray went downstairs, and there they were hanging from the lock. He tried keys at the Backroom door, holding the candle in the other hand. Karl had been wrong about electricity. Living without it was a pain in the ass.

  The door finally swished open. He hesitated on the threshold. Last time he’d been in here was during that nightmare trip. The room had been empty. Now there was a trestle table covered with electronic devices. He walked up to it.

  The laptop had black smears on the keyboard. The cat’s blood. The mantelpiece of the baroque fireplace was lined with VHS tapes. A VCR sat on the table. He hadn’t seen one in years. It was on.

  The tapes were labeled in Karl’s elegant hand: Crystal, Lorraine, a half-dozen other women.

  And Susan. Ray flashed on the emailed picture of her, the one that was burning on the chest of the mannequin. Bodine had said it was a still from a video. Ray’s hands clenched.

  He knew he should stop. But he needed to see. He grabbed the box. It was empty. He hit Play on the VCR and it ratcheted and whined. The TV monitor above it came to life. But nothing was on the screen. He fussed with the controls. It was near the end of the tape.

  He rewound to the top. This was the same scene as in the still Seth had emailed him. Susan lay on the bed, her hand gripping the red cover. Her eyes were wide, staring off at some distant planet. A minute later they flitted from side to side, blinking in a mechanical rhythm. She was terrified, tripping her brains out. She clutched at the cover as something below the frame tugged at it. She lost the battle and it slipped down, exposing a breast.

  Big fingers appeared from the bottom of the frame and plucked at the nipple of the breast like snatching change from a store counter. Another hand appeared and yanked the cover from her hand, exposing the other breast, then pounced on it. The hands kneaded in the same rhythm as her blinking eyes. Had there been music? The video didn’t have sound. Tufts of dark hair bobbed in and out of the bottom of the picture on the upbeats of the hands.

  It was Karl, going down on Ray’s wife. The Susan he’d known had sexual tastes that ranged from vanilla to Presbyterian. She hadn’t liked oral sex. But there was no telling what Susan had emerged under a thousand mics of acid and in bed with her beloved teacher.

  Up to now, only Susan’s eyes had moved, but now her mouth got into it, her lower lip trembling, her tongue darting out. She was making sounds. Ray was grateful there was no audio, just the faint squeak of the tape crawling past the heads of the old machine.

  Karl was definitely getting an intense reaction from her, but it didn’t look like pleasure. She looked like she was being devoured by a ravenous predator. Talk about oral transmission.

  He stopped the video, his own eyes wide. His hands trembled, but he wasn’t cold anymore. He felt like he was spiking a fever. He fumbled for the switch on the machine and punched it off.

  He’d come to this house intent on seeing Karl. Even after the sight of his corpse, even after his son was dead, he’d still wanted to see. No more. It was good to know his desire to see had a limit.

  He couldn’t say the same for Karl, who’d made this tape. Or, for that matter, for Seth. He was no expert, but the tape seemed well-worn. Seth had somehow loaded a still from it into the computer. From what Bodine had said about that camera he’d installed in The Bedroom, Susan and the others hadn’t been aware they were being taped.

  Karl and his “no graven images.” So what had the top of his head been doing in that video? Was it hypocrisy, or did it not matter if only God was acting and looking?

  Hold on. How old had Seth been? Ray had only seen him for less than a minute, most of which he’d spent believing he was seeing some reincarnation of Karl, and then across that pit in bad light.

  But he’d looked about the same age as Karl last time Ray saw him, in 1978. Which was partially why Ray had freaked so badly, thinking Seth was Karl. Karl had been around thirty when Ray left the group. He couldn’t have been hiding a kid when they were all here. So Seth must have been born shortly after Ray left.

  Who was his mother? It had to be one of the group members. Ray’s eyes flitted up to the shelf of videos. It wasn’t Crystal. She’d been sterile after that abortion. Or Lorraine, for that matter. She’d left when Ray did.

  After Seth had come into the Meeting Room, in that moment when Ray knew he wasn’t looking at Karl, he’d been relieved that he wasn’t going crazy. But as he stared at Seth’s face he’d gotten a bad feeling. Because though there was a lot of Karl in his face, there was someone else there as well. He’d been pretty sure who but wasn’t admitting it until he absolutely had to.

  He ejected the tape and was placing it back on the shelf when he noticed something at the end of the set of tapes: a CD, without a label.

  He slotted it in the computer and the screen came awake. There were no videos on the CD, just a couple handfuls of photos. Karl’s dirty picture collection, to go with the videos.

  But no. They were baby pictures. A large, chubby fellow, looking goofy, then a little older, smiling. He was alone in a few, but in most he was held by one of three women.They’d still been with the group when he left. Crystal and Lorraine weren’t among them.

  Neither was Susan, which brought a huge sigh of relief. But which one was the mom? He stared at the pictures. The women beamed down at the baby, no one more than the others.

  He tried to get into the email on the computer. As he suspected, it required a password. But why did he need it? He knew what was in it: the dead cat video and the threats.

  The computer desktop was littered with folders, so it took me a minute to find the folder labeled “Susan.” Inside was a file with a .mov suffix. The bad feeling was back.

  He wasn’t done watching after all. He clicked on the file. A window opened, and it started playing. This had much better quality than the earlier Susan video. It was crisper. Recent, technology marching forward. To his relief, she was fully dressed in this one, in a blouse and skirt, sitting where? He looked around the room. She’d been on the old couch across from the table. If the computer had sat where it did now, she could have been recorded on its webcam.

&nbs
p; Seth was not in the picture. As Ray watched, he had the sense that she again didn’t know she was being taped. Ray hadn’t known when Seth spied on him in his house using Ray’s computer. Seth must have used the same trick on her.

  She looked about the age of her last picture online, at that corporate thing. The hint of a shadow on her face in that photo had deepened. She looked tortured. Damned. For the first time since the terrible day when Ray had last seen her, his heart flooded with all the love he’d been hiding away somewhere all those years. The feeling was excruciating.

  This video had sound. It was deeper, older, sadder, but it was her voice. He’d seen those pictures of her online. He hadn’t heard her voice since that last day. As she spoke, the tumult in his chest got even worse.

  She said, “I have your money, dear. Do you need anything else?”

  “What else could you give me? You’ve had nothing, been nothing since you left.”

  “I didn’t leave, Seth. He sent me away.”

  No! Ray flinched hearing those old words of doom. He’d assumed Susan had finally seen the truth and left of her own accord, like the rest of them. If Karl had sent Susan away, she’d never get over it. Karl’s approval had been like the air she breathed.

  But the tape continued.

  Seth said “He sent you away because you defied his will, giving into your lower nature.”

  “Did he tell you that? Oh, Seth, I’m so sorry.” She was starting to cry. “No, all I did was nurse you, one time. All I did was try to be your mother. Karl was everything to me before you came. And then…you were everything. And he was jealous. First, he wouldn’t let me touch you. Then he wouldn’t let me see you. He passed you around to those other women. One of them caught me sneaking in to feed you and told him. He sent me away.”

  Karl had sent her into the Outer Darkness. Sent her to hell.

  “And he threatened me, told me if I ever came back, ever tried to see you, he’d hurt you.”

  “You think you can lie to me? He would never harm a hair on this head. He knew who I was.”

  Susan had been incapable of such a lie. She might have been after The Truth, but she also believed in truth with a small t. It’s why she’d been so brutally honest about Karl the last time Ray saw her.

  But she was still talking. “The last thing he said to me was he’d take care of you. He didn’t take care of you. He…” She sobbed uncontrollably.

  “Enough! I have no mother. I never needed a mother. You were just a vessel of weak flesh. Now get out. Don’t come here again.”

  She lost it completely, howling with grief, but the clip ended. It started playing again. Ray punched the window on the computer shut and slammed the lid.

  Susan had been sent away again. By her delusional son, whom she’d abandoned to a monster. And she’d seen how that had turned out. The son was as bad as the father, only cruder. And he was crazy.

  How had it gone for him as a kid? Ray had read about cults, how children can be made communal property so as to keep the love and attention on the leader. On that vampire who needs every ounce of it for his craven self.

  Those baby pictures had a professional look. He could imagine Karl forcing Susan to take them, as a kind of punishment, recording her son in the arms of other women, while she was forbidden to touch him. And he didn’t think Seth considered them ordinary baby pictures. He’d been keeping them, had scanned them and burned them on a CD. Pictures of the enlightened one, the Great Teacher, just arrived on the planet. Good News!

  Ray looked at the creation date on the video. He couldn’t remember the date of the crash.

  But he was sure it was that day.

  Why did Susan return to The House? Seth had sent the photo in the manila envelope that she shredded. What was in it—the still from the acid trip video or a baby picture? It didn’t matter. Either one would have been enough to get her to start sending him money. Not because he was blackmailing her, but out of guilt. Out of love.

  Seth had told her Karl was dead, and he needed money. With Karl gone, she no longer had to stay away from him. She wanted a relationship with him, and, being Susan, would have given Seth anything he desired.

  She came to see him because she wanted to see her son. But why did he want to see her? In order to make the tape. And now that he had it, he was going to blackmail her. He figured pest-control hubby might be able to handle an old lover, even a kid. But Ray had talked to the guy. He would never understand his wife being in a wacko cult. If Seth revealed it, her world would blow up.

  Then Seth had gotten greedy. He could have hit her up on a permanent basis. Instead he had sent the golden goose to her death. When he saw her, he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t help lashing out and saying things a mother should never have to hear.

  All this came to Ray in a flurry. He wasn’t sure of the details, but believed he had it pretty much right.

  And now he was finally done with Karl. The doubt was over. He’d lost the last shred of belief.

  There was no relief, just terrible fatigue, and an empty place in him, like what he imagined it felt like when they cut out an organ. A diseased organ.

  But what about Seth? The kid had watched tapes of his father getting it on with disciples. Was he studying the perks of his future life as the Great World Teacher? But he hadn’t just watched his father. He’d seen his parents. Maybe he was searching, looking for the time when he was conceived. Which for all Ray knew, is what he’d seen a few minutes ago.

  He clutched the reeking overcoat around him, but the shivering returned. There was no heater in this room.

  The emails in Seth’s laptop were the only thing tying him to Ray. He grabbed it. He locked the door of The Backroom and pocketed the keys and stalked to the Front Door.

  The bulletin board was still in the foyer. The Rules were there on a curled page. Ray flattened it out. The ink had faded, but was still legible, in Karl’s inimitable fancy public school hand.

  never speak about what we do

  no cigarettes

  no drugs

  no gossip

  no sex

  stop all negative emotions

  He tore the paper off the board and stuffed it in a pocket. He passed through Karl’s Portal for the last time.

  He glanced up at the façade of The House. It was ugly as ever. He was half-running around the side toward the back, headed to his lair, when he stopped. The damned key to the gate. It was somewhere this side of the fence, where he’d dropped it.

  He turned and hightailed it up the road toward the quarry. It wouldn’t do for someone to see him, though it was unlikely at this hour, which must to be past midnight. Seth must be known in town. Once he stopped showing up they’d wonder, and they might remember seeing Ray.

  At the gate, he set Seth’s laptop on a tree stump and crawled around in slush looking for the key. His pants were getting soaked again and the snowmelt burned. He couldn’t get any colder. And there was no key.

  He eyed the fence, then climbed. There was a bad moment at the top as he launched a leg over, but then he was down. In just a minute he’d gone from freezing to drenched in sweat. His body heat had roused even more stink from the coat. He tore it off and ran it to the black pool and threw it in. He’d have the car heat soon enough.

  He hiked up to the saddle and fumbled in the little cave for his stuff. His car keys were still in the backpack.

  He drove his ancient Volvo toward the gate. When he was twenty feet away he gunned it. If the gate fell forward, he’d drive over it. If it fell toward him, it would smash the windshield. Most likely it wouldn’t budge. In which case he’d be doing some very cold hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere. What if he was picked up by a local who’d remember when Seth went missing? If he could hike to a place with cell service he could call a locksmith. And tell him what?

  He rammed the gate twice. This third shot shou
ld do it. That’s what Karl would say. It took five attempts before the rusted steel collapsed outward. The front of his car was battered, but had been was on its way to being an old wreck to begin with. He rememberd Seth’s laptop and retrieved it from the stump. He drove away.

  Ray looked up from his laptop and blinked. He’d been so ensconced in typing into it that for a moment he didn’t know where he was. He was sitting at a narrow Formica counter, gleaming blue under harsh fluorescents. Outside stood gas pumps.

  He was at an all-night rest stop, the parking lot empty aside from his Volvo and a car that must belong to the girl behind the register. He glanced over. She seemed uninterested in the fact that he’d been sitting here all this time, writing. How long? Long enough for the coffee in the Styrofoam cup to be stone cold. It was undrinkable anyway.

  He’d stopped here to pee, and realized he was starving. All they had was junk food. That was just the ticket. He bought a large coffee, a couple of crumb cakes, a Ring Ding, and some candy. He was sitting here gobbling the junk food, waiting for the coffee to cool, when he noticed a laptop on the table. He’d picked it up from the car without thinking. His eyes darted to the girl behind the counter in a moment of panic—was this Seth’s? She didn’t seem like someone who did curious, at least this time of night. And Seth’s laptop was in the backseat under his pack. This was his.

  He’d poked the power button, but it was dead. He plugged it in to an outlet under the counter and after a long minute it stirred. And he was furiously typing.

  Now he closed the computer. The whole scene from the moment he’d seen Karl embalmed in the coffin had been so intense that he just had to write it, as if by getting it out on the page he could purge himself of it. Maybe it had worked. Because all he felt was bone-tired, and drained, which must be why he was famished.

  He hadn’t finished his coffee, but must have demolished the sweet stuff, though he had no memory of it. He bought another Ring Ding. The girl gave him his change and said, “Have a good one.”