He wandered back to the bedroom. The temptation to do a little weed was strong, but with it would come the urge to lie down on the couch and flick through the million and one channels on Teddy’s cable box. To distract himself, he set out his oils and continued working on the painting that he’d started the day before Marielle had kicked his ass out of her house. ‘My’ house: that was how she’d described it, and he’d been tempted to argue the point before he realized that she was right: it was ‘her’ house. Apart from her short-lived marriage, she’d lived there all her life. She loved it, just as she’d loved their father in a way that Grady never had, just as she loved Falls End, and the woods, those damned woods. Everything came back to them. They were the only reason anyone ever came here, the only reason the town thrived.
Grady hated those woods.
So Grady had stopped shouting at his sister, right there and then. He realized that it didn’t matter what happened with the banks, or how much the house might be worth and what his cut might be. He wasn’t about to put pressure on her to take out a loan that might endanger her hold on the place, not in this economic climate. She wasn’t earning much as a schoolteacher, even supplementing it with waitressing on weekends. He’d decided to tell her not to worry, and planned to go over and clear the air the next day. When, or if, the money came through, she could send it on to him. For now he’d stay with Teddy, and paint, and try to figure out where to go next. There were still houses in which he hadn’t worn out his welcome, couches and basements where he could crash. He’d put up some flyers offering to do murals, design work, whatever it took.
His old man was dead. What did it matter?
The painting was coming together quickly. It showed the house, and his parents, and was reminiscent of Grant Wood’s American Gothic except that the couple were happy, not dour, and in the background two children, a boy and a girl, pressed their faces against the inside of their bedroom windows, waving at their parents below. He intended to give it to Marielle as an apology, and as a token of what he felt for her, and their mother and, yes, their father too.
‘He went to your show!’ Marielle had said, screaming the words at him as the tattooed girl pulled on her jeans, realizing that she was in the middle of a serious domestic meltdown and there was no percentage in her hanging around to see how it all panned out.
‘What?’ He wished he hadn’t drunk so much at Darryl’s. He wished he hadn’t smoked that second blunt. He wished he’d never even spoken to the Fabulous Tattooed Lady. This was important, but he couldn’t get his head clear.
‘Your show, your lousy New York show, he went to it,’ said Marielle, and she was crying now, the first time he’d seen her cry since the funeral. ‘He took the bus to Bangor, and from there to Boston and on to New York. He went in the first week. He didn’t want to go on the opening night because he didn’t think that he’d fit in. He thought you’d be ashamed of him because he lived out by the edge of the woods, and he couldn’t talk about art and music, and he only owned one suit. So he went to your show, and he looked at what you’d done, what you’d achieved, and he was proud. He was proud of you, but he couldn’t say it and you couldn’t see it, because you were too out of it to understand, and when you weren’t out of it you were just angry. And it was all fucked up, all of it. You and him, the way it could have been, it was all lost over nothing but pride and booze and drugs and . . . Ah, Christ, just get out. Get out!’
I didn’t know, he wanted to say; I didn’t know. But the words wouldn’t come, and ignorance was no excuse. It wasn’t even true. He had known that his old man was proud of him, or suspected as much, because how many times had his father tried to reach out to him in his way, and how many times had he been rebuffed? Now it was too late, because it was always too late. Some revelations only came with the sound of dirt falling on a coffin: the ones that mattered, the ones that made for regrets.
So he was painting a picture for his sister, and maybe for himself too. It would be the first such offering he had made to her since they were children, and the most important. He wanted it to be beautiful.
He heard the sound of a vehicle slowing down, and headlights raked the house as Teddy’s truck pulled into the drive. Grady swore softly. Teddy had a heart of gold, and there was nothing that he wouldn’t do for Grady, but he liked background noise in his home: the sound of the TV, or the radio, or music on the stereo, usually something from the sixties or seventies sung by men with beards. Grady thought that it came from living alone for too long while being uncomfortable with his own company. Now that Grady was around, Teddy liked being in his presence as much as possible. He’d insist that Grady watch old sci-fi movies with him, or smoke some weed while listening to Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon or Frampton Comes Alive.
The engine died. He heard the doors of the truck opening and closing, and footsteps approaching the house. The front door was unlocked. Teddy always left it that way. It was Falls End, and nothing bad ever happened in Falls End.
Doors, Grady realized: Teddy had brought company. Hell, that meant that any small hope Grady had of working for an hour or two had just gone right out the window. Grady put down his brush and walked to the living room.
Teddy was kneeling on the floor, his head bowed and his hands clasped behind his back. He looked like a man bobbing for apples.
‘You okay, Teddy?’ asked Grady, and Teddy looked up at him. His nose was broken, and his mouth was bloody. Grady wasn’t sure, but even through the blood it looked as if some of Grady’s teeth were missing because there were gaps where there had not been gaps before.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Teddy. ‘I’m so sorry.’
A boy jumped from behind the couch, like this was all just a big game, a game whose main purpose was to scare Grady Vetters to childhood and back, which the sight of the boy had pretty much done. He had the swollen, unhealthy pallor of a cancer sufferer, and his hair was already thinning. There was bruising around his eyes, his nose was swollen, and his throat was distended by an ugly purple mass. Under other circumstances Grady might almost have pitied him, except the boy wore an expression that was simultaneously blank and malevolent, the way Grady had always imagined concentration camp executioners looked after their victims grew too many to count. The boy was holding a pair of blood-stained pliers in his right hand. He made a throwing motion in Grady’s direction with his left, and four teeth landed at Grady’s feet, roots and all.
Grady wondered if this was a nightmare. Perhaps he was still asleep, and if he willed himself awake none of this would be happening. He’d always dreamed vividly: it came with being an artist. But he felt the night air on his face, and he knew that he was not dreaming.
A woman appeared in the doorway behind Teddy, her face partially marred by what at first might have been mistaken for a roseate birthmark but was quickly revealed as a terrible, blistered burn. A patch of gauze covered her left eye. All of these details were incidental, though, next to the gun that she held in her right hand, and the plastic cable ties that dangled from her left.
She pointed the gun at the back of Teddy’s head and pulled the trigger. There was an explosion that made Grady’s ears ring, and Teddy was no more.
Grady turned on his heel and ran back into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him. There was no lock, so he pushed his bed against the door before he began opening the window. He heard the sound of the doorknob turning, and the bed moving across the floor, but he did not look back. The window was stiff, and he had to punch the frame to force it open. He already had one foot on the windowsill when he felt a weight land on his back and a small arm snake around his neck. He tried to pull himself forward and out, but he was off balance and the boy’s full weight was hanging from him. Grady teetered on the windowsill, his arms straining against the frame, and then there were more hands on him, stronger hands, and his fingers lost their grip. He fell back and landed awkwardly on the floor, the boy rolling away from him so that he would not be trapped under the weight of Grad
y’s body. The woman spread herself across Grady’s chest, one knee on either side of his body pinning his arms to the ground, and she leveled the gun at the center of his face.
‘Stop moving,’ she said, and Grady obeyed. There was a sharp pain in his left forearm, and he saw that the boy had injected him from an old metal syringe.
Grady tried to speak, but the woman placed a hand over his mouth.
‘No. No talking, not yet.’
A great tiredness came over Grady, but he did not sleep, and when the woman’s questions commenced, he answered them, every one.
29
Davis Tate had been forced to secure himself to the heavy radiator in the living room. The intruder had already attached one cuff to the pipe before Tate’s arrival, so now only Tate’s left hand remained free. At least the radiator wasn’t on, which was something, and the mild weather meant that the apartment wasn’t too cold. The fact that Tate could joke about his situation, even to himself, suggested that either he was braver than he thought, which seemed unlikely, or he was going crazy from fear, which was more probable.
The man from the bar sat in a chair beside Tate, flicking his butterfly knife open and closed, each snick of the blade making Tate wince at the further pain that it promised. The cut on his neck had stopped bleeding, but the sight of his shirt stained red made him queasy, and the smell of nicotine at close quarters had become so strong that it felt as though his nose and tongue were burning.
And the intruder terrified him. It wasn’t just the knife in his hand, although that was bad enough. The man conveyed a sense of implacable malice, a desire to inflict hurt that was beyond reason. Tate recalled an evening in a club in El Paso at which he’d been introduced by a mutual friend to some men who claimed to be fans of his show, nondescript figures with sunburned skin and the glassy eyes of dead animals who were either on their way to, or coming back from, the conflict in Afghanistan. As the night wore on, and more alcohol was consumed, Tate worked up enough courage to ask them what it was they did, exactly, and was informed that they specialized in the interrogation of prisoners: they waterboarded, and starved, and froze, and tormented, but they made one thing clear to him: there was a purpose, an end to what they did. They did not torture for the pleasure of it, but to extract information, and once the information was extracted, the torture stopped.
Most of the time.
‘We’re not like the other guys, the bad guys,’ said one, who told Tate that his name was Evan. ‘We have a set goal, which is the acquisition of information. Once we’re certain that this been achieved, our work is done. You want to hear what’s really terrifying? Being tortured by someone who has no interest in what you know, someone for whom torture is an end in itself, so that no matter what you tell him, or who you betray, there’s no hope that the pain will stop, not unless he decides to let you die, and he doesn’t want to do that; not because he’s a sadist, although that’s probably part of it, but out of professional pride, like a juggler trying to keep the balls in the air for as long as he can. It’s a test of skill: the louder and longer you scream, the greater the vindication of his abilities.’
Tate wondered if here, in his own apartment, he was now looking at just such an individual. His suit was wrinkled and stained, the collar of his shirt as yellowed as his fingers, his hair slick with grease. There was no military bearing to this man, no sense of someone who had been trained to do harm.
But this man was also a zealot. Tate had met enough of them in his time to recognize one when he saw him. In his eyes burned a fierce light, the fire of righteousness. Whatever this man did, or was capable of doing, he would not view as immoral, or an offense against God or humanity. He would hurt, or kill, because he believed that he had the right to do so.
Tate’s only hope lay in the man’s use of a single word: perhaps.
Time, perhaps, to die.
Or, perhaps, to live.
‘What do you want?’ asked Tate, for what must have been the third or fourth time. ‘Please, just tell me what you want.’
He felt and heard the sob catch in his throat. He was getting tired of posing the question, just as he had tired of seeking the man’s name. Each time he asked a question the intruder just gave the blade a double flick in reply, as if to say ‘Who I am doesn’t matter, and what I want is to cut.’ This time, though, Tate received an answer.
‘I want to know how much you got for your soul.’
His teeth were yellow, and his tongue was stained the dirty white of sour milk.
‘My soul?’
Snick went the blade. Snick-snick.
‘You do believe that you have a soul, don’t you? You have faith? After all, you speak of it on your radio show. You talk about God a lot, and you speak of Christians as though you know the inner workings of each and every one. You seem very certain about what is right and what is wrong. So what I want to know is, how can a man who has sold his soul speak of his God without gagging on the words? What did they offer you? What did you get in return?’
Tate tried to calm himself, still clinging to the precious perhaps. What answer was this man seeking? What answer would keep Tate alive?
And suddenly the intruder was upon him, even as Tate tried to kick out and keep him at a distance. The knife was back at his throat, and this time the snick was followed by the drawing of more blood from behind his right ear.
‘Don’t calculate. Don’t think. Just answer.’
Tate closed his eyes.
‘I got success. I got syndication. I got money, and influence. I was a nobody, and they made me somebody.’
‘Who? Who made you this somebody?’
‘I don’t know their names.’
‘Not true.’
Snick! Another cut, except this one was lower, slicing through his earlobe. Tate shrieked.
‘I don’t know! I swear to you I don’t know. They just told me that the Backers liked what I did. That’s what they call them: the Backers. I’ve never met them, and I’ve had no contact with them, only with the people who represent them.’
Still he tried to keep back the names. He was scared of this man, scared near to death, but he was more frightened of Darina Flores and the desolation he had experienced as she spoke of all that would follow if he crossed those who were so anxious for him to succeed. But now it was the intruder who was whispering. He held Tate’s face in his hand as he spoke, and breathed a fug of fumes and filth and rotting cells into his face.
‘I am the Collector,’ he said. ‘I send souls back to their creator. Your life, and your soul – wherever it may lie – hang in the balance. A feather will be enough to shift the scales against you, and a lie is the weight of a feather. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ said Tate. The manner in which this man spoke left no room for misunderstanding.
‘So tell me about Barbara Kelly.’
Tate knew then that there was no point in lying, no point in holding anything back. If the man knew about Kelly, then how much else did he know? Tate didn’t want to risk another cut, maybe a fatal one, by being caught out in a lie, and so he told the Collector everything, from his first meeting with Kelly, through the introduction of Becky Phipps and the destruction of the vocation and life of George Keys, right up to the meeting earlier that day concerning the fall in his ratings. He sniveled and wheedled, and engaged in the kind of shameless self-justification that he believed himself to be duty bound to shoot down when his opponents tried to rely on it.
And as he spoke he felt as if he were engaged in a process of confession, even though confession was for Catholics, and they were barely above Muslims, Jews and atheists on the list of folk for whom he reserved a particular hatred. He was listing his crimes. Taken individually they seemed inconsequential, but when recited as a litany they seemed to assume an unstoppable momentum of guilt; or was he merely reflecting the feelings of the man seated opposite him, for although his interrogator’s expression never varied – rather it seemed to grow gentler and more encourag
ing as Tate’s lanced conscience spewed out its poison, rewarding him for his honesty with something that might have been mistaken for compassion – there was no escaping the knowledge that Tate’s soul was still being weighed against a feather on the Collector’s scales, and found wanting.
When he was done, Tate sat back against the wall, and hung his head. His earlobe ached, and his mouth tasted of salt and sour things. For a time there was only silence in the dim room. Even the sound of the traffic outside had faded, and Tate had a sense of the boundlessness of the universe, of stars racing away into the vacuum, colonizing the void, and of himself as a fragment of fragile life, a fading spark from a vital flame.
‘What are you going to do?’ he finally asked, when his own insignificance threatened to unman him.
A match flared, and another cigarette was lit. Tate smelled the vileness of the smoke, the odor that had first alerted him to the intruder’s presence, except now the word ‘intruder’ had become inappropriate. Somehow, this man belonged: here, in this room, in this apartment, on this street, in this city, in this world, in this great dark universe of dying light and distant, spiraling galaxies, while Davis Tate was merely a temporary fault in nature, a stain upon the system, like a mayfly born with one wing.
‘Would you like a cigarette?’ asked the Collector.
‘No.’
‘If you’re concerned about ruining your health, or becoming addicted, I wouldn’t worry.’
Tate tried not to think about what that might mean.