Scavenger

by Tom Savage

  There was a moment then, in the cold, wet fog, when Mark very nearly decided to stop. It would be so easy, he realized, to simply get back in the car and drive away. He could return to the city, check out of the guest house, and go back to New York. To Bedford Street. To Tracy. He could find some other way to make this man, this Scavenger, come forward.

  No. As if there were an actual human voice speaking from the mist behind him, the words of instruction came into his mind. You must follow my scenario strictly, as it is presented to you. This was his chance, his only opportunity to find out what Scavenger wanted him to know.

  Mark did not leave. He didn’t even turn around. Instead, he reached into his jacket and pulled out the Smith & Wesson .38. Then he walked resolutely up the two steps and across the brick-paved veranda to the open front door. Extending his left hand before him, he slowly pushed the door wide open. The creak of the unoiled hinges sounded like a shout.

  The music was louder now, and the glow of light was coming through the archway that led to the living room on his left. The main hall before him and the other front room on his right were dark. He stood at the entrance of the house, listening intently. The music stopped, then began again. The rustling in the trees behind him continued. Otherwise, all was still silent.

  Then, taking a long, deep breath to steady himself, Mark walked forward into the nightmare.

  Beyond the archway, the enormous living room glowed in the light of a hundred candles. Long red candles, he noticed, everywhere, on every available surface, even the floor. The flickering lights made the white sheets that covered all the furniture seem to be alive, actually moving. Scattered evenly over the dust-rimed wood floor and the filthy Oriental carpets was a multicolored layer of confetti. The faded white ceiling was almost completely obscured by a riot of balloons in every color of the rainbow. The incongruous sounds of the Dixieland band emanated from a large portable compact disk player that stood on the sheet-covered coffee table in the center of the room, surrounded by tall red candles.

  There was one other object on the coffee table, and Mark stood staring at it for several long seconds before he could will himself to move. He realized that he had been holding his breath ever since he’d entered the room, and the gun was clutched in his right hand, pointing rigidly out before him. When his breath returned, when the pounding in his chest and temples subsided, he walked across the carpet of confetti to the table.

  It was a shiny black-lacquered cardboard box, somewhat larger than the boxes his shirts were in when they came back from the laundry, and it was carefully, festively decorated with black ribbon. A big black bow sat in the exact center of the lid. Mark stared down at the package, and several long seconds passed before he realized with a little shock of embarrassment that he was actually aiming the gun at it. Uttering a dry, mirthless chuckle, he put the gun down on the table and reached for the bow. The black ribbons fell away, and he slowly lifted the lid.

  The box was filled with black tissue paper. Moving several crinkly layers aside, he discovered what he had suspected, had known, would be there: a big, ornately decorated papier-mǎché Mardi Gras mask.

  It was in the general shape of the face of some small animal, as well as Mark could determine. A wolf, perhaps, or a fox. A jackal? Yes, that was what it most resembled. The almond-shaped eyeholes, the tapering snout, the pointed ears, the tips of white lower teeth sticking up from the corners of the ferally grinning mouth. Nothing so noble, so elegant as a wolf: this animal, whatever it was, fed on the abandoned kills of other, braver creatures.

  A scavenger.

  Yes, Mark decided, a jackal. The lowest form of life.

  But this was far from a realistic representation. It was closer to something Japanese, a garish Kabuki mask. The swirling lines of metallic red and yellow outlined, emphasized the cruel features. There was definitely something evil, something obscene about it.

  Mark actually smiled to himself as he began to lower the object back into the box. Then he stopped, arrested by the sight of the black envelope that rested in the tissue.

  He put the mask down on the table next to the gun, picked up the envelope, and tore it open. There was a folded sheet of black-edged white linen stationery inside. A funeral note, he thought as he opened the paper and stared down at the lines written in the now-familiar neat hand with a red felt-tipped pen.

  The note read:

  Four people and one animal died in this room. Can you feel them watching you? Masks were important to The Family Man because they let him be anyone he wanted to be. I have a very special gift for you. Check out the chair in the corner.

  Silence. The music stopped temporarily, and there was an almost palpable, deathly silence in the house. Mark strained his ears to listen, but there was nothing anywhere. Then the Dixieland band started up again with its jaunty rendition of the old New Orleans song. His rational mind informed him that he was alone in the house, alone and far from any other humans. But he could feel the eyes. He was being scrutinized, silently assessed. Can you feel them watching you? Yes. Yes, he could feel them watching him. Four people and one animal.…

  He turned slowly around in a circle, peering into every shadow, every dark corner of the room. The flickering candles caused the shadows and dark places to waver slightly, their boundaries constantly shifting. The empty doorway, the sheet-covered furniture, the confettistrewn carpets. The chairs and carpets were new, presumably; the originals had been soaked with the Tennant family’s blood. Sarah would have had them removed, destroyed. His survey ended when his gaze fell on the lone sheeted form in the farthest corner from where he was standing, in the darkest part of the room.

  I have a very special gift for you.

  Mark would later wonder why he didn’t pick up the gun from the table. Instead, he picked up the nearest red candle. As he began to move, the music started up again, filling the place with its driving rhythm. Slowly, cautiously, his gaze riveted to the white sheet that glowed softly in the dark before him, he walked across the room.

  Check out the chair in the corner.

  He stood before it, looking down. It was one of those big, overstuffed armchairs, from the shape of it, and the sheet hung loosely, tentlike, over the high, wide bulk. In one swift move, Mark reached out toward the top of it, grasped the dusty cover in his fingers, and yanked. With a soft whisper of sound, the sheet fluttered slowly to the floor.

  The jolt of raw, electric shock welled up in him, exploding outward against his rib cage. His limbs went briefly numb, and he nearly lost his balance. The candle sputtered out as it fell to land at his feet. Uttering a little cry of surprise, he took an involuntary step backward and brought his hands up to cover his gaping mouth. He breathed heavily in and out, nearly hyperventilating, staring.

  There was a man sitting in the chair. He was of medium height and build, as well as Mark could determine, with close-cropped, bright red hair. He was wearing black slacks and shoes, and his dress shirt was white—or rather, it had been white at one time. His entire face was obscured by the shiny, colorful Mardi Gras mask he wore, an exact duplicate of the one in the box on the table across the room. But even this, even the mask, was not the most remarkable thing about him. There was a deep, jagged brown slit across his throat just under his chin, and the blood, once red but now a dry rust color, had rained down onto the white shirt, saturating it. As Mark stared, a single fat black housefly materialized from somewhere to buzz around, and then to land on, the gaping wound on the man’s neck. After a moment, the fly began to feed.

  Mark couldn’t think. Somewhere, in some deep recess, some fundamental part of him, there was an instinct to move, either toward or away from the thing in the chair that had very recently been a live human being. The man was not alive now; there was no question of it. The stench of dried blood and urine emanated outward from the body, permeating the room as it assaulted Mark’s nostrils. Yet he did not, could not will himself to move. He merely continued to stand there, staring.

  Wh
en the big, rough hand came around from behind him, clapping something soft and wet and sweet-smelling over his nose and mouth, it took him a full five seconds to react. But by then, of course, it was too late to do anything at all. He had drawn in his breath involuntarily, inhaling deeply of the odd perfume. His attempt to struggle against the iron grip over his face was almost instantly weakened as the chemical began to work. He tried to hold his breath, but after several long moments he inhaled again, sending a second dose into his lungs.

  The gun, he thought. The gun is on the table behind me, next to the mask, some ten or twelve feet away. It might as well be a hundred miles.

  And still the arms were holding him. He breathed in again, no longer able to fight it. An odd sense of euphoria overtook him now, and an overwhelming desire to go with the flow, to give himself over to the growing darkness. Perhaps this is death, he thought. Perhaps that was the goal all along, to isolate me and kill me. And yet…

  It was his final coherent thought. Another slow, deep breath, and then the raucous Dixieland band exploded in his head in a white burst of deafening noise. His vision darkened, the room dissolved from solidity into liquid form and began to spin around him, and the dead body in the chair faded from his view as he at last slid from the strong grasp of the arms that held him from behind and sank slowly, slowly, so slowly, forever to the floor.

  27

  He worked quickly and efficiently, because he didn’t know how long Mark Stevenson would be out, and there was much to do before he regained consciousness. He moved around the room like a shadow, only occasionally illuminated as the flickering lights from the increasingly fewer candles caused his pale gray eyes or the shiny black buttons on his coat to sparkle. Manipulating the Dustbuster was not easy because the translucent rubber surgical gloves dulled the sensation in his fingers. But soon, after several hasty trips to his car behind the house, the job was done.

  The fog was dissipating as he drove away down the drive, through the stone columns, and away down the road. He stopped once, at a remote section of a bayou, and opened the car’s trunk. The soft splashes of the heavily weighted objects entering the murky water could not be heard even a few feet away. In a matter of minutes, he was back on the road. A bridge, and then the highway. The lights of the city soon appeared in the dark distance.

  There was still much to do, and precious little time in which to do it. But he had memorized every action of his part in the game, assessed every brilliant detail. He knew everything he was supposed to accomplish, and why. This game had an irresistible reward. He wanted it as he had never wanted anything, not even his freedom. There would be no mistakes between now and midnight on Saturday.

  Midnight, Saturday. The last scene of the game. The final dramatic flourish. The violent, bloody, screaming end of Mark Stevenson.

  The end of Matthew Farmer.

  In the chill silence of the speeding car, the man with the scar smiled as he reentered New Orleans. His first destination was Mullins Guest House, but he was only there for a few minutes. Then he drove north through the dark streets toward the lake. He arrived in the parking lot of the Pontchartrain Clinic just before midnight, at the same moment when Mark Stevenson opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling of the living room of Tennant House some twenty-five miles away.

  WEDNESDAY

  28

  He had been dreaming about his family, about his father, and reality was slow in returning to him. He lay on his back on the floor, waiting for the dizziness to pass. His mouth was dry, and there was a throbbing in his temples. At first he wondered where he was, and why he was lying on the floor of an alien room.

  Then he began to remember. He was in Tennant House, and there was a dead man sitting in a chair in this room. Hands—he had no doubt as to whose hands they were—had grabbed him from behind, and he had been drugged. Dr. Tilson with his slicked-back brown hair above his white lab coat: Mark had a sudden image of the veterinarian who took care of the Farmer family dog, Sam, and he wondered why that was until he remembered the distinctive smell. Chloroform. Scavenger had rendered him unconscious.

  Scavenger. Was he still here, in this room with him? Mark rolled over onto his left side and tucked himself into a tight, fetal ball, bracing himself for whatever would come next out of the overwhelming darkness. A vicious kick, perhaps, or the sharp blade of a knife. The knife that had dispatched the red-haired man in the chair, whoever he was. The knife that could even now be moving forward in the darkness toward his jugular vein.…

  Nothing happened. He remained there, still, silent, willing himself to breathe as quietly as possible, for several long minutes. After a time, he concentrated on listening. No sound emanated from any other part of the room. It was only then that he realized the music was gone. He peered through the darkness around him, and he began to make out the bulky forms of sheeted furniture nearby. There was a couch, and over there the table that had held the black-lacquered box. The mask and the note. I have a very special gift for you.

  Now, at last, his panic and confusion receded, leaving him drained, heavy. He was possessed of a sudden, overwhelming urge to sleep. I mustn’t do that, he thought. I have to get up from the floor and go back over to the chair. I have to remove that awful jackal’s mask and see who is there. The red-haired corpse with the gash across his throat, the bloated housefly sucking his coagulated blood.…

  When Mark opened his eyes again, he was aware that more time had passed, but he could not even guess how long he had been there. He had slept again, he was certain of that, but if he had dreamed this time, he didn’t remember it. It had been the sleep of exhaustion brought on by the shock, the drug, the experience of being in this house, in this room. The carefully reproduced scene of the long-ago crime, and the dark mind that had conceived it. And the new victim, the body in the chair.

  The body. This thought propelled him groggily, shakily to his feet. He wasn’t later certain how he managed it, but he was standing upright, rubbing his eyes before peering through the darkness at the room. What he eventually saw in the gloom around him almost caused him to sink to the floor again.

  It was gone. All of it. Everything. The candles, the balloons, the confetti. The box that had been on the table. The source of the music. He was standing in the center of the Tennant living room, slowly making out the shapes of sheet-covered furniture, empty surfaces, the immaculate rugs. All was as it had presumably been before last night, when Scavenger had arrived here to set the stage for Mark. He stumbled weakly forward across the open space to stand once more before the big armchair in the corner.

  He remembered that it had been upholstered in a striped material, dark red alternating with deep purple, but the stripes looked gray to him now, as did the neatly folded sheet that rested on one overstuffed arm. Otherwise, the chair was empty. Slowly, trancelike, he leaned forward to inspect the upholstery, then he picked up the sheet and unfolded it, holding every section of it up before his face to study it. Nothing, anywhere. No drop of blood, not even the horrible smell of the dead man remained. It was as if Mark had hallucinated, as if the whole event had never occurred.

  He wondered about that as he made his way through the archway and across the foyer to the front door. Was it possible that he had been somehow drugged, or hypnotized? That all of it, like the dreams about his family when he was unconscious, had simply happened in his mind? He arrived at the big front door and opened it, startled by the bright sunlight that immediately assailed him. He was now able to see the watch on his wrist: nearly eight o’clock. In the morning. He had been inside the house for some ten hours.

  As he stared down at the face of his watch, all thoughts of drugs or hypnosis left him for good. A single, bright red flake of confetti detached itself from the sleeve of his leather jacket and fluttered down to land, a scarlet drop of blood, on the doorsill at his feet.

  So, he thought. It was not a dream. It happened. The dead man in the chair had been real. Still, he knew that he could not go to the police w
ith his story, even if he wanted to do so. Why would anyone, looking at the empty living room, believe the ravings of a man, famous for his crime stories, with his current bestseller based partially on the events in this very house? A stunt, they’d say. Publicity for his writing career. For the book he was planning to write, the actual nonfiction account. Especially as there was no physical evidence: no balloons, no candles, no confetti. And no dead body. Just a famous writer, a man with a bizarre story about a sick game he was playing with a phantom. A famous writer armed with a—

  Mark’s hands flew up to slap against the inside pocket of his jacket. The empty inside pocket. His gun was gone.

  He turned around and plunged back into the dark interior of the house. Of course, he remembered as he ran, I left it on the table beside the box. He paused to flick the light switch just inside the living room archway. Nothing happened; the electricity had been turned off years ago. But there was now enough sunlight coming in through the open front door behind him to illuminate the downstairs rooms. And to illuminate the table.