The Dead King rested on a throne carved from a single massive block of black wood. The throne stood at the top of a short flight of wooden steps, so that the figure dominated the room. A cloak of dark furs covered its shoulders and upper arms, and gold rings glittered on its fingers. It sat entirely upright, skeletal hands clasped on the arms of the throne, its feet flat on a small stool. Its ribs were unbroken beneath the cloak, its lumbar vertebrae straight and undamaged, the hollows of the ilium free of dirt and insects.
But it was the skull that haunted. It was the color of amber, although the lower jaw was slightly lighter in color, and better preserved than the rest. All of the teeth were still intact, but the nasal bone had been broken at some point, enlarging the fissure at the center of the skull. Parker looked into the hollows of its eyes, and the Dead King stared back, a messenger from a world into which all others must inevitably pass. A band of beaten gold lay upon its brow, decorated with finger bones that pointed to the heavens.
But as Parker stepped closer, he saw, despite the dim light, that the bones of the Dead King did not quite match: some were smaller and yellower than others; the right tibia was significantly shorter than the left; and the teeth were jagged and uneven, incisors and molars alternating with canines. Parker discerned the wires that held the bones in place, the careful acts of restoration and attachment, and he understood.
The Dead King was not one but many, a being fashioned from the victims of the Cut, each contributing bones to its creation, each death enhancing its potency. Parker wondered if something of Jerome Burnel was among them, and felt certain that there was. Only the neurocranium and facial skeleton came from a single source, the mandible excepted, and it struck Parker as older than the rest. This was the point of origin, the first victim. If the Dead King had any identity beyond that of the wretches who comprised it, then it lay there, but whatever name it might once have borne was now long forgotten.
A metal spike was set in the ground close to the throne, and from it hung two sets of manacles. Parker tested their mechanisms, and found that they moved easily. He thought again of Burnel, and the other unfortunates who might have spent their final days and hours in the company of the Dead King.
The blockhouse felt empty. Parker had been anticipating a sense of malevolence, of palpable evil, but he felt nothing beyond the deluded human baseness that had led the Cut to create a god of bone from the remains of its victims. The Dead King existed because the Cut wanted it to exist, but Parker did not have to believe in it. He turned away from the abomination. He did not want to look upon it any longer.
Angel and Louis were standing at the door, gazing at the hollow god on his throne. Henkel appeared behind them, and all three stood in silence for a time, taking in its decayed majesty.
‘What is it?’ asked Henkel at last.
‘Evidence,’ said Parker.
‘Of what?’
‘Generations of murders. Have you found Hobb?’
‘Not yet.’
‘When you do, that thing will damn him.’
‘This place stinks of gasoline. Nobody better strike a match.’
Louis had moved to the right, the better to examine the Dead King, when he paused.
‘Shit,’ he said.
Parker followed his gaze. A discarded cigarette pack, seemingly still full, lay open by Louis’s feet. It rested on a mound of earth.
‘Out,’ said Parker. ‘Now!’
Nobody needed to be told twice, not with the smell of gas in their nostrils. All firing in the Cut had ceased, and the muted sound of voices carried to them from the Square. Three state troopers were moving up the slope toward them as they emerged.
‘Get back,’ said Henkel. ‘We have a potential problem here.’
From inside the blockhouse came a hissing sound, followed by a low thump, like someone lighting a stove, and the problem moved from potential to actual. The blockhouse was illuminated from within as the incendiary device ignited the gasoline, and even from a distance Parker felt a blast of heat before the door slammed shut, as though the fire itself had decided that the Dead King’s immolation should be hidden from sight. The walls began to smoke before the first fingers of flame reached through, and then the whole structure was ablaze, tree and building burning together. All who were able to do so gathered to watch as the fire grew higher, and the walls and roof collapsed. The oak began to burn like a great hand, and in the midst of the conflagration they glimpsed a figure on a black throne, grinning as it was consumed.
92
Cassander paused momentarily to watch the smoke rising above the Cut. Had there been anyone to witness it, his expression would have appeared entirely neutral: no rage, no regret, no sadness. The Cut, as he had known it all his life, was gone forever. He would never return there.
But Cassander was not alone.
For the Dead King was in him.
93
It took most of the rest of that day to round up the remnants of the Cut, and transport the injured to hospitals and the dead to the morgue. The process of questioning and interrogation would require days, even weeks. As a precaution, every adult member of the Cut was arrested and Mirandized, while arrangements were made to get them before a magistrate as soon as possible, when they would again be informed of their rights and, where appropriate, granted bail. In West Virginia, any person accused of a felony offense had the right to request a preliminary hearing, either within ten days if the defendant was being held in custody, or within twenty days if released on bail. Plassey County, and the state of West Virginia, were about to have a lot of legal work on its hands.
But it was being made clear to the Cut that those who cooperated with the investigation, and helped with the recovery and identification of the remains of victims, would receive an easier ride. Already, fingers were pointing at maps, and tales were being told of the last days of men and women. Most were buried in the Cut’s cemetery, hidden beneath its own dead. Odell Watson, meanwhile, told for the first time of the woman he had seen brought down by dogs, and recounted again his tale of the hooded man being led into the Cut by night.
The next day, the digging would begin.
The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources stepped in to advise on how best to deal with the minors involved. After hurried discussions, it was decided that all the adults who had taken shelter in the prison hut during the fighting in the Cut should be charged initially as possible accessories to kidnapping, rape, sexual assault, and murder, with further charges potentially to follow, but the state would not object to bail, under strict conditions, among them that the Cut should remain sealed off from its former inhabitants pending forensic examination. The Plassey County Recreation Complex was designated as a temporary holding center, which enabled the state to kick a little further down the road any decision on what to do about the children. The male prisoners were split between the Plassey County Jail and a handful of the state’s correctional facilities.
But of Cassander Hobb there was no trace.
Cassander hadn’t intended to run. His two sons had been taken from him, and Cassander in turn had ordered the killing of the Cut’s leader, the man who was once his closest friend, and finished off Sherah, the woman both he and Oberon had shared. The attacks on Henkel and the private investigator had failed, and the captive women had managed to get away. The Cut was lost, but Cassander’s intention had been to die defending it, until he heard the Dead King call his name.
In the darkness of its court, the Dead King entered him, and any thoughts of fighting for the Cut vanished from Cassander’s mind. What was important now was that the Dead King should survive, and so Cassander would have to carry it inside him until a new nest of bones could be found. He felt the Dead King’s presence as a weight upon his soul and a shadow across his vision. It whispered and chittered in his head, and its madness infected him.
Cassander emerged from the Cut to the northeast, close to the Barnett property. Millard Barnett was a bachelor who u
sed to raise broiler chickens with his two older brothers until his siblings passed away within a month of each other, whereupon Barnett stopped caring about chickens, or anything else, and settled into solitary retirement. Cassander shot Barnett dead when he answered the knock on his front door, and dumped his body down a disused well. He then took Barnett’s Saturn Ion and drove into Virginia. He made only one stop, and that was to call Daniel Starcher from a pay phone to alert him to all that had occurred, although Starcher didn’t need Cassander to tell him since he could see it for himself on TV. Starcher had already set about erasing any incriminating traces of his ties to the Cut, including the unofficial adoption service. He’d leave it for as long as possible before breaking the news to the unhappy prospective purchasers that they wouldn’t be receiving their little bundles of joy anytime soon. He’d also have to refund their money, which included the large goodwill deposit put down by the consortium for one of the children.
Shit.
Cassander had cash, but he’d need more. Starcher asked Cassander what his plans were. Cassander said that he didn’t know, but to begin with he would head for a safe house in Bedford, one of a number that the Cut maintained to serve as temporary refuges and storage facilities. Starcher told him that he’d arrange to have cash delivered to Cassander there, and hung up. Later that evening, having given Cassander time to get to the safe house and settle in, Starcher commissioned two freelance button men named Purvis and Stone to head to Bedford and kill him.
When they arrived, Purvis and Stone discovered the house empty. Cassander had been there – they found some fast-food boxes and empty beer bottles, along with the remains of a fire that had been set in a garbage can – but had clearly left again. They waited all that night and most of the next day, but Cassander did not return. Perhaps, they suggested to Starcher, he had been forewarned, but Starcher assured them that only three people knew of the planned hit, and Cassander was not one of them.
Starcher wanted Cassander dead. If the police captured him, and he tried to strike a deal, Starcher’s position could be uncomfortably altered from defender to defendant. But Cassander had disappeared, and unbeknownst to Starcher, the police were already on their way to Lewisburg. Within hours, Starcher was under arrest.
The Dead King had warned Cassander that the killers were coming: not in words, or images, but feelings. Starcher could no longer be trusted, but Cassander would deal with him in time. He stayed at the safe house only long enough to eat, change his clothes and add some fresh ones to a small case from the supply kept in the basement. He also shaved off his beard and most of his hair, and dyed what was left from a bottle kept in the bathroom for that very purpose, before burning the hair in a garbage can and disposing of the bottle in the trash as he drove away.
The Dead King never stopped speaking, even if only to itself. It was almost enough to prevent Cassander from sleeping, and when he did manage to doze the Dead King took shape in his dreams, and Cassander would wake screaming. Cassander’s sanity was eroding, but while it still remained to him he debated the existence of the Dead King, even as he heard it whispering in his head in an unknown tongue. Was it a symptom of their collective madness, an infection of the mind passed down through generations, a voice given to a form that they themselves had created? In that sense, were they not all the Dead King?
Only then did he notice the silence in his head. He waited, barely able to breathe. It was gone. Whatever it was, it—
And he heard the Dead King laughing.
Parker, Angel, and Louis could not avoid being questioned by the state police and the FBI. It was an especially uncomfortable experience for the latter pair, and only a request from Parker for Ross’s intervention prevented it from becoming something worse than that. Ross made it clear to Parker that a favor had been called in, and he would be expected to return it, with interest.
‘Whatever deal you struck with him,’ said Louis, as they prepared to leave Plassey County, ‘it was a bad one.’
Jerome Burnel’s was one of the first bodies uncovered, because it was the most recently interred. He had been buried in a pit used to inter the remains of the Cut’s dogs.
The Dead King was uncomfortable sharing Cassander’s skin. It was not a thing of the living, but of the dead. It needed to hide among bare bones.
Cassander, in turn, wanted to punish someone for what had befallen the Cut, and he had two targets: Henkel, and the private investigator named Charlie Parker. Henkel was out of reach for the moment – perhaps forever, given the near impossibility of Cassander’s return to Plassey County. That left Parker. Cassander knew a lot about the private detective. Oberon had spoken about him, and the Dead King had sensed his coming. Parker was dangerous, and Cassander wasn’t certain he could go up against him and survive. As he drove, Cassander thought about Roger Ormsby, the abductor and killer of children whom Parker had tracked down. Ormsby hadn’t just killed his victims: he’d made them vanish without trace, adding an exquisite layer of torment to the lives of those left behind.
Cassander knew all about the stripping of flesh from bones, of boiling and preservation. So he began to formulate a plan, one that would serve both his desire for revenge and the needs of the Dead King.
V
It should be noted that children at play are not merely playing; their games should be seen as their most serious actions.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Essays I, 23
94
Sam sat on the ground at the edge of her grandparents’ property, where a small copse of trees surrounded a pond. She wasn’t supposed to go there alone. Her grandfather had warned her about the dangers of even shallow bodies of water, but then her grandfather warned her about lots of things: crossing the road, boys, eating undercooked chicken, strangers, her father, her father’s friends …
In Sam’s right hand lay the near-desiccated body of a dead bird: a little whip-poor-will that she’d found hidden amid bark and leaves by the entrance to its nest. She had no idea how it had died, but it appeared largely undamaged. Slowly, using a box cutter that she’d liberated from her grandfather’s toolbox, she cut the bird open and discarded what was left of its internal organs, carefully reducing it to feather and bone.
Jennifer, Sam’s half-sister, watched from over her shoulder.
The dead daughter and the living, together.
Jennifer spoke.
it’s coming
‘Yes.’
are you frightened?
‘No.’
It wasn’t quite a lie, but Jennifer sensed doubt.
maybe—
‘Go away,’ said Sam. ‘You’re distracting me.’
Jennifer left her to her work. She returned to her own place to sit on her rock and watch the dead go by. She thought that Sam didn’t love their father in the same way she did. How could she, when she was both human and something more, something beyond comprehension? Their father had once asked Jennifer if Sam frightened her, and she had not answered. She did not want to say it.
Sam did not frighten her.
Sam terrified her.
Two days later, Cassander Hobb snatched Samantha Wolfe, the daughter of Charlie Parker, while she was playing by that same pond. It was, he thought, his good fortune that she should be alone, and out of sight of her house, when he came for her. He showed the child the gun, and warned her to be quiet, before cuffing her hands in front of her, gagging her with tape that he wound around her head, and forcing her into the trunk of the car. He warned her that he’d cut off one of her ears if she tried to escape. By the time she was missed, and the alarm raised, he was already halfway to New Hampshire.
He feared to use any of the safe houses, and had instead checked into a motel at the edge of the White Mountain National Forest that was content to take cash on the nail. He was given a quiet room at the end, but since only two other rooms were occupied, he had little fear of being seen or heard. He waited until the evening darkness descended before carrying the girl from the car int
o the room. He barely noticed how little she struggled, or the excited, insane chitters of the Dead King. He just wanted it all to be done with.
He placed her in the bathtub, lit himself a cigarette, and regarded her in silence while he smoked. She stared back at him, but did not move. Eventually, she tried to speak. He showed her the gun in one hand, and the knife in the other, before putting the gun away and cutting the tape away from her mouth.
‘I need to pee,’ she said.
‘Pee in the tub.’
‘I’ll get it on my clothes.’
‘I don’t care.’
She shook her head, but he noticed that she didn’t pee. It was probably a trick, he thought. Still, she was a strange kid. She hadn’t cried once. She just sat there, her eyes fixed on him, waiting for something to happen. It would, and soon. He was working up the strength to cut her throat. The Dead King wanted it.
Finally, she spoke again.
‘Your nose is bleeding,’ she said.
A drop of red exploded on Cassander’s jeans, closely followed by a second. He put the fingers of his left hand to his nose, and they came back red. He reached for some toilet paper, wadded it into balls, and pressed it to his nostrils.
‘Soon you’ll be bleeding from other places, too,’ said Sam.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your ears, your eyes, the pores of your skin.’
Cassander felt a sharp pain deep in his head. The Dead King asked a question only it could understand, and to which no living creature had an answer.
‘What’s inside you isn’t supposed to be there,’ said Sam. ‘It can’t survive for long in a body that’s alive, so it kills it, in the end. It’s not just the Dead King. It’s the King of Dead Things.’
Cassander coughed, and blood sprayed over the tiled floor and the edge of the tub. His vision was blurring. He rose unsteadily, and saw in the mirror that he was weeping tears of blood. Pinpricks of red appeared on the white of his shirt, growing in size. He felt dampness in his jeans as their fabric began to darken. He couldn’t stay upright so he slumped down on the toilet and let his face rest against the cool of the tiles.