A Memory of Demons

by Ambrose, David

  The problem was, however, that in order to achieve and maintain an erection I found myself having to concentrate on those images from my past with even more ferocious effort than ever before. The result was that, instead of replacing my fantasies, I was reinforcing them. And by reinforcing them, I knew even then that I risked goading myself into repeating them.

  Which I did not want to do.

  Believe me.

  If Karen had known what was going on in my head during our sessions together, she would have run a mile in terror. But as our relationship progressed I became more relaxed about my double life – inner and outer. I functioned. Actually I functioned pretty well. We made a nice couple. To the world we were as normal as apple pie. To Karen herself we were as normal as apple pie. Only I knew what lay beneath the surface.

  Karen and I broke up after a few months, but we remained friends. I used to see her around with other boys. I had a couple more relationships myself: I had the trick of it now; it was relatively easy.

  But still it wasn’t what I wanted. I knew what I wanted, though I wished I did not want it. I knew only that I was driven by some overwhelming force that I could neither define nor analyse, a force that propelled me in a direction that both terrified and excited me. To try and understand myself, I started reading books about human behaviour, graduating pretty quickly to psychology textbooks. I discovered that the kind of sexual crime upon which I had become fixated was essentially about possession: total power over another human being. I grew familiar with terms like ‘necrophilia’, and ‘sexual sadist’ – described somewhere as ‘the great white shark of sexual predators’. That gave me an odd thrill, though I would hate to claim I was proud of it.

  I felt alternately empowered and diminished. What I was learning about myself was unthinkable. Except I did not have to think it. I had only to recall it. I had already lived it.

  Once, years earlier, I had asked my father what morality meant. He told me that morality was what you did when nobody was watching. I smiled about that, thinking back, as I read about the id, the ego and the superego, the internalization of parental authority, and adaptation to social convention. That, I discovered, was what psychology was finally all about: striking a balance between personal fulfilment and the ability to function acceptably within society. Right and wrong did not come into it. That was for philosophy to worry about; and it too came to no firm conclusion. Altruism, the notion that we were capable of acting out of any motive other than selfishness and the search for self-gratification, was at best unproven. If you believed in it, that was because you wanted to believe in it. And if you didn’t, it was because you didn’t.

  By the time I went to college, I knew what I wanted to be. Of course, I had to pretend to learn over again a lot of things I knew already because of my extensive reading in the subject. But that wasn’t hard. And to be honest, I learned quite a few things I hadn’t known already. Among them was the realization that knowledge changes very little. It will get you to the moon, or give you a nonstick frying pan, but it does not help with the great mysteries. It is powerless before them.

  One of the things I knew, part of my ‘knowledge’, was that I would never change. But, I discovered, I could function. It was pointless to fight what I was: I could only hide it. Just as we all hide something.

  While in Boston, I published a couple of articles and received an offer to write a book. I was making a name for myself, and I was proud of doing well. I enjoyed the recognition and the respect with which a successful professional man is treated. I was also fascinated by the work itself, tinkering with young minds until they functioned in the way that was required of them. If I had to compare myself to anyone it would be an engineer – someone working with the finest and most sophisticated machines in the world. I could diagnose their problems and fine tune them to . . . if not perfection, functionality.

  Marriage was something that colleagues and acquaintances occasionally hinted about. Why wasn’t I . . . ? Was I thinking about . . . ? Had I met so-and-so’s sister . . . ? Would I make up a four at a restaurant? I was sociable, within reason, though I worked hard. And I usually managed to have some woman in my life on a more or less regular basis, though I never lived with anyone. These relationships usually lasted from six months to a couple of years; I managed to wind them down amicably as it became obvious to the women involved that they were not going to culminate in marriage.

  There were no more incidents after the German girl.

  Until Melanie Hagan entered my life.

  50

  I moved to Saracen Springs for several reasons. For one thing, it was small and it was beautiful, and I expected it to provide me with a quieter life, leaving more time for reflection and writing. Also, it was close enough to Albany and its surrounding communities to provide me with a big enough practice to earn a decent living; it wasn’t as though I was burying myself in the middle of nowhere.

  Shortly after I settled there, I was invited to deliver a paper at a convention in Toronto. I decided to drive there, taking a couple of days to relax and be alone. I stayed a night longer than I had intended, seeing a couple of old friends. It meant I had to drive back nonstop, which was not a problem if I started early, though it meant arriving home in the middle of the night.

  I picked up Melanie near Utica. More accurately, she picked me up. I had stopped for something to eat at a burger place. It was about ten at night. As I was leaving, she approached me in the parking lot. She asked where I was heading. I told her Saracen Springs.

  ‘Where’s Saracen Springs?’ she asked.

  ‘Not far from Albany,’ I said.

  ‘Great,’ she said, getting in the car without even asking. ‘Albany’s where I’m going. You can drop me off.’

  She started talking about a couple of bands that were playing at a festival I didn’t even know was happening there. She said she’d come from Niagara Falls, hitched a ride with an old couple as far as Rochester, then a woman with two screaming kids had taken her to Utica.

  ‘You planning to stay long in Albany?’

  She shrugged. ‘Depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On what happens,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll get a job or something.’

  Frankly, I had not been aware until that moment of the resemblance she bore to my sister and to Naomi, as well as to the girl in Germany – though, of course, it must have registered subliminally In fact, the physical resemblance was not all that remarkable. It was only when she started to talk that I realized just what it was I had with me in my car that night. The same knowing look behind the eyes, the same suggestive subtext in the language she used, the same sly hints of what was so far an unspoken promise; and the same conviction that she could do with me whatever she chose.

  In a sense, she was right. Fatally so.

  ‘Have you got any money?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not much,’ she said.

  I looked over at her. She was gazing out of the car window with deliberate casualness, but fully aware that my eyes were on her.

  ‘Got any ideas?’ she said. It was obvious that she had taken my question as the opening move in a process of negotiation.

  I let a few moments pass in silence, creating the impression that I was thinking this over. As indeed I was. Because I knew with absolute certainty what would happen if I took one more step in the direction things were going.

  She took it for me. As the silence lengthened, she turned to me and said, ‘You want to help me out?’

  It was my last chance. I could have stopped the car there and then and thrown her out. But that would have risked provoking the trailer-park vindictiveness I was already quite sure she had in her. There would have been nothing to stop her noting down my licence plate and filing a complaint that I had tried to molest her, or worse. The embarrassment, considering my position, would have been considerable. As everyone knows, even if nothing is eventually proved, mud sticks. There was, I realized, no last chance. A line had been crossed.
It was already too late.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe we can talk about that.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  She gave me a smile of such sunny innocence that for a moment I was almost ready to believe I had misjudged her. Then I noticed that her thighs had parted slightly under the briefest of short skirts that she was wearing. I almost laughed aloud at my own naivety.

  ‘Just to establish a spirit of goodwill,’ I said, fishing out my wallet with one hand, ‘why don’t I give you fifty dollars on account?’

  Her eyes widened greedily at this unexpected windfall, and her hand was already out there waiting as I pressed the bills into it. ‘Hey thanks,’ she said. ‘Great!’ I watched her fold the money carefully into her purse.

  ‘Now all we’ve got to do,’ I said, ‘is figure out where to go.’

  ‘Go?’

  I looked at her. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Oh – right.’

  She sounded less sure than she had when she was asking for money. But I figured she was on the hook now. She would be thinking there was more where that came from.

  ‘We could go to my place, but my sister’s there,’ I lied. ‘We’ll have to find someplace else.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Promise had been replaced by reluctance in her tone now. She was trying to hide it, though without success. I decided that maybe I’d been wrong to think she was on the hook; now that she had fifty bucks, all she wanted was a way out of the transaction before she had to deliver her end.

  We were already approaching the outskirts of Albany, although I was still unfamiliar with the detailed geography. It was pitch dark outside, and I could see nothing in my headlights except an empty road with what looked like an abandoned industrial landscape on both sides.

  ‘This looks OK,’ I said, pulling the car off the road onto some wasteland. My headlights swept across a curious-looking house. Tom Freeman would later describe it to me as looking like an exposed tooth in a well-worn gum. It was abandoned, though not quite a ruin, but with its windows broken or boarded up and tiles missing from the roof. There was a strange tower at one corner, like an imitation Gothic castle.

  ‘OK for what?’

  I gave her a look that said I knew she was kidding and I didn’t mind. But it was a look between equals. There was no room to change her mind now.

  ‘Get out of the car,’ I said, doing so myself.

  She didn’t move. ‘It’s creepy. I don’t want to stay here.’

  ‘It’s not creepy. Get out of the car.’

  I walked a few yards, enjoying the chance to stretch my legs and take in the cool night air. Part of me, I knew perfectly well, was secretly hoping she would take the money I had given her and just disappear. It would be better for both of us if she did. If I’d stopped in town, or even at a gas station somewhere, I was fairly sure she would have done just that. But out there? That was another question. I realized I was playing some kind of game, one that I had not chosen to play but to which I was now committed.

  I stopped as a distant, twanging discord reached my ear. I listened a moment, turning, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. Then, further up a gentle rise, and only now visible as my eyes got used to the dark, I saw faint, strobing patterns of light reflected in the night sky. By chance, I realized, we had stumbled across the rock festival she had been looking for. It was only a few hundred yards away, just over the horizon. She had said it was supposed to go on around the clock for three days.

  ‘Come out here,’ I called back to the car. ‘There’s something you should see.’

  This time she didn’t even answer. I bent down and peered into the vehicle. There was no sign of her.

  How little we know ourselves, even those of us trained to peer below the surface of human behaviour. A moment earlier, I had thought this was what I’d wanted. And so it had been. But not, I realized now, for the reasons I had thought. I had wanted her to run not to end this thing, but to make it happen. I wanted this betrayal, this insult. Only this would release the things I had kept locked within me for so many years. The genie was out of the bottle now. I did not know if I would ever get it back.

  I saw a flash of movement not far away. It could only have been her. I started after her. My eyes were well accustomed to the dark by now, better than hers would be after sitting in the car with the dash light in her face. A couple of times she made a wrong turn and had to double back. She didn’t know where she was going. Neither did I, but all I had to do was follow her, getting closer to her with every mistake she made. It was not long before she tripped and fell, and I was on her. She started to scream, but my hands were already at her neck, and she fell silent.

  It would surprise many people to learn that I believe in God. It strikes me that a rigorous application of Occam’s Razor to the mystery of our being leaves us with no credible alternative. Any other explanation is both over-complex and incomplete.

  That I do not automatically assume He is benign might come as less of a surprise. I believe that He is beyond good and evil, which are merely categories we have invented to rationalize the capacity for pain and pleasure with which He has endowed us. The Devil is our invention, not His.

  We exist for His amusement. He plays with us.

  When it was over, and my head began to clear, I realized I faced serious problems. I had taken a risk, a reckless one. Someone could have seen the car, noted the licence plate. No reason why they should and no reason to think they had. But I had been foolish to gamble on it not happening.

  I looked around. There was no sign of any kind of life. But I could see from the sky that dawn was not far away. I had to dispose of the body.

  My gaze fell on the old house, with its absurd tower and its weed-clogged garden. I picked her up and ran towards a half-rotten door leading into what must be the basement.

  Inside, I dumped her on a rough earth floor. It was too dark to see properly what I was doing, though a faint dawn light was starting to filter through a small skylight. I realized I had cut my hand. My blood was mixed with hers. And other things. DNA profiling was by then a perfected forensic tool. I could not afford to have the body found.

  I went out to my car, and was alarmed by how visible it had become in the dawn light. In the distance I could still hear the sound of electric guitars and strident caterwauling, but there was nobody in sight. All the same, I moved my car to a concealed spot amidst some run-wild overhanging trees, then opened the trunk in search of something I could use to dig a grave. All I had was a small snow shovel and a jack that I could use as a pickaxe to break the hardened surface of the earth down in that cellar.

  As I hurried back, checking all around for any signs of movement, I saw something that almost stopped my heart. A man, dirty and unshaven, ran out of the door I was heading for and through which only moments earlier I had carried the body. I was fairly sure he hadn’t seen me, but he was moving as though he’d seen something – something that had half-scared the life out of him. Perhaps he had seen me. Perhaps he’d been in there, in that cellar, all the time, though that would not explain why he should be running away only now.

  And was he alone? He seemed to be, but I could not be sure. I could not be sure of anything, yet I had to act. If he got help now, I was finished. I had to stop him somehow. It was a moment of the worst panic of my life.

  I watched him as he scrambled through long grass and undergrowth and up a slope towards a road. I had to stop him before he got there. I sprinted across at an angle, but didn’t make it in time. He was already out in the open, running as fast as he could, intent, I could only imagine, on raising the alarm.

  As I ran after him along the road, I heard a truck approaching. It wasn’t a big truck: a pickup, with a single driver, who must have been very drunk from the way he took the corner as he came into view. He was having trouble holding his vehicle in any kind of straight line. The man I was chasing leapt out in front of him, waving his arms. I doubt if the driver even saw
him – he might have seen some blurred image, and certainly should have felt or heard the impact. But he didn’t stop, just floored the accelerator and sped off as fast as he could to get out of there.

  The moment the truck appeared, I dived into the bushes. The driver couldn’t possibly have seen me, even if he had been capable of seeing anything clearly. I waited for a moment to be sure he wasn’t going to stop, turn around and come back, but the sound of his engine faded into the distance.

  I crawled out of my hiding place and headed towards where the man I was chasing had landed – on the edge of a ditch, with his limbs spreadeagled and his head at an angle that made me think his neck must be broken, though I couldn’t be sure. I checked him over. He had a pulse and he was still breathing – just. His forehead was gashed and bleeding heavily. I suspected he might have brain damage, because he barely stirred when I covered his mouth and nose – and kept them covered till he stopped breathing altogether.

  There was no one in sight as I looked around. I stayed low as I moved away and started back towards the overgrown hollow and the basement of that strange old house. I was satisfied that, so far, my luck had held.

  The man I would later come to know as Tom Freeman was dead.

  51

  A shallow grave was the best I could manage for the girl. Any stray dog would have had little trouble uncovering the remains. There was also the risk of children playing. Anyone could get in there, just as I had – and, apparently, the man whose life I had ended. Aside from which, there was always the risk of someone buying the building and knocking it down to put something in its place. One way or another, she was sure to be found, and I could not rule out the risk of a DNA trace leading back to me. In the end, I had only one choice: buy the place myself.

  One advantage of being the child of a lawyer is that you tend to find out for free tricky things that other people have to pay dearly for – such as how to buy a piece of property without revealing your identity. Using the name of Adam St Leonard, a name I got off a tombstone in Albany, and for which I eventually obtained a driver’s permit and a passport, I tracked down the title to the building. The owners were so astounded that anyone should want to buy it that they practically gave it away. After that, I flew to a couple of sun-drenched islands to sign the necessary papers, and the house was bought by a company whose origins were shrouded in mystery.