“Fuck this,” I said.
Perhaps it was this fact that slowed me down; or perhaps it was just that I’ve pursued enough fugitives to know that it’s easy for someone to injure themselves when they’re being chased; there was that, of course, and the strong possibility that I would have injured myself; either way I stopped running.
“You’re going to break your leg or take your eye out running in the dark like this, Martins.” I laughed out loud as if the sound of my own amusement might make what I was doing seem more normal. “This was a stupid idea. The guy’s probably nuts anyway. Almost as nuts as you are. Anyone who can eat that amount of fucking pizza belongs in the bughouse.”
I looked around, trying to make out which way I had come. A grackle shrieked in the darkness, which did little for my nerves and seemed to set off some laughing gulls. Like the wind, wild birds at night have a capacity to make even unimaginative people such as I am feel very uncomfortable. The battery in my tactical flashlight was dying already; it had been months since I’d bothered replacing it. In the shifting darkness of that small and overgrown forest there was no sign of the near-derelict house. I wasn’t exactly lost, but I had no idea which direction would lead me back to the house and the street. I holstered the gun and looked hopefully at the sky in the hope of seeing the curtain of cloud part to reveal the way back.
Hope did not last long because a second or two later the wind dropped suddenly, the birds stopped their noise, and I heard a heavy, inhuman panting sound in the surrounding bushes that chilled my blood. It was slow and steady and—there can be no other word for that sound—frightening. The panting sound turned into a thick, salivating swallow that gradually became a low growl.
“Mr. Hindemith, is that you, sir?” I paused. “If that’s you fucking around with me, I should warn you I’m armed and nervous and that’s not a good combination.”
Even as I spoke, I was sure it wasn’t a man. No man ever sounded like that. I might have said it was a dog except that it was too large; and I might have said it was a big cat—perhaps a mountain lion—except that even the biggest cats know how to move through undergrowth with great stealth. I struck a match and held it over my head in the hope of seeing some sign of a trail I’d made that might afford me a way of escape.
What I saw in the flickering light drew such a horrified cry of disgust from my own lungs that I dropped the match and, stepping instinctively backward, I tripped over a thick bush and fell heavily onto the ground. I might have found another match and lit it but for the strong desire never again to see what I had seen a moment or two before. This was the supine naked figure of a large and powerful man; only it had not been Charles Hindemith I saw but someone else, the malevolence of whose horrible but intensely bright face and penetratingly awful gaze was now vividly attached to the back of my retinas. It was an extraordinary moment, for it was as if I had glanced into the dead silence of another unnatural world and seen something hideous that was human and yet was like no human I had ever seen. I can’t express it any better than to say that I instinctively knew I had come face- to-face with something unspeakably evil that seemed to regard me as—for want of a better word—prey.
“Who are you?” I heard myself bark.
I reached for my gun and found to my horror that it had slipped out of its holster. I twisted around and, ignoring a branch that scratched my face, patted the ground around me in a desperate and ultimately futile search for the Glock. If I had found it, I would without hesitation have started shooting, so great was my fear and horror. But not finding it in the dark, I had little choice but to address the thing again.
“Who are you?” I repeated dumbly because, in the core of my being, I found I was suddenly aware of an answer to this question that simultaneously flashed the answers to several other questions, too, an awful insight that even then, perhaps, served to restore my faith in the Church of Rome. Had something like this happened to Philip Osborne and those others? Was this the reason that Willard Davidoff had tried to climb a forty-foot tree in Olmsted Park?
The wind dropped again. In the darkness the growling sound persisted for a moment and then stopped completely; and the darkness and the palpable silence that followed became the real source of my terror. To be alone with something as horrible as that in the dark was like all my childhood nightmares made living, loathsome flesh.
And the smell—the smell was of something long decayed from the bottom of a deep well or unfathomable pit. It was the same smell that I had encountered in the diocesan house down the street.
As it was of old, in the beginning and in the Bible.
The next second I picked myself up and ran. I didn’t know where, I just knew I had to get away from that terrible spot.
And now I had the certain knowledge that whatever I had seen was running after me. The chaser had become the chased. I ran as if the shadows themselves were in pursuit of me; and perhaps they were. Panic took hold of my whole self as I crashed into a tree before going around it and running on. Once again I tripped and sprawled on the ground and, glancing around, heard something following close behind me. I picked myself up and this time I was more fortunate because the clouds parted and the moon appeared again, illuminating my position and the direction I needed to go. I sprinted toward the back of the house and, reaching it, went through the French windows and slammed them shut behind me.
For a moment, I stood there with my foot jammed against the bottom of the frame, panting loudly and shaking with terror and staring through the dusty windowpanes at the moonlit garden where something in human shape hovered on the edge of the tree line. My heart felt as if it were going to leap out of my chest and take off on its own. Never had I felt fear like this, not once since joining the FBI had I felt myself actually physically sick with dread. It was as though my whole personality had changed from man to boy. My heart was such an afflicted thing and my breathing so labored that at any moment I thought the very life would flee from my terrified body.
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck was that?” I muttered. “What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that?”
I stayed there, staring out of the window for several minutes before the movement in the trees ceased altogether and my heartbeat and breathing returned to something like normal.
“Get a grip,” I whispered, almost angry with myself for being so afraid of something I couldn’t explain. “And that’s all it is. Just something you can’t explain. For all you know, that could have been someone in trouble, lying on the ground. Maybe it was Mr. Hindemith. Maybe he also fell and hurt himself. Perhaps he’s still lying there, hurt, waiting for you to come and help him. Perhaps he’s in need of an ambulance. Instead, you’re cowering in here like a fucking pussy. So much for all your FBI training. Jesus, you’re such a fucking pussy.”
I started to laugh.
“You’re such a fucking pussy, Gil Martins.”
I paused, still running in my head the film my brain had shot in the split second when I’d lit the match and seen the weird-looking man lying on the ground. Was it really a man I’d seen? There was no getting away from the fact that something about that man I’d seen was not right. Yes, the expression on the man’s face had been extraordinarily hostile. And there was also the way the thing had groped at my feet. But it wasn’t so much that as the fact that the long, bony fingers had been more like claws.
“So, he needs a fucking manicure,” I said. “Come on, Martins, anyone looks like shit when they’re hurt. If he looked pissed off, it was because you chased him through his own back garden, you dumb asshole. And I bet you’d look pretty damned evil if someone came wandering into your house in the dark.”
I swallowed hard and finally caught all of my breath.
“Just don’t go believing that shit Nelson Van Der Velden told you. This has got nothing to do with that. You hear? Come on, man. Let’s see what you’re made of. Get back out there and do your fucking
job, okay? You’re an FBI agent, not a lingerie designer.”
I opened the French windows once more and stepped out onto the overgrown lawn. The wind dropped again and the night seemed to hold its breath as if keen to see the outcome of this act of lunacy on my part.
This time I walked slowly down the lawn.
At the bottom of the lawn I turned and looked back at the house, just to get my bearings and then, with my heart in my mouth, I stepped cautiously into the woods and struck several matches, one after the other, but I didn’t see anything.
I stood still for a moment and listened carefully. “Mr. Hindemith? Or whoever you are, please identify yourself. I’m an FBI agent and I’m armed.” That part was a lie, of course; my gun was still lying on the ground somewhere in the garden.
But I heard nothing by way of a reply. Just the wind in the trees. And an owl hooting somewhere in the darkness.
A minute passed and then another until I figured I was wasting my time and moved again, only this time I disturbed something else that was lying on the ground—probably the ibis or the spoonbill I thought I’d seen earlier; it flew up into the air with a great beating of wings and then was gone, leaving me with a stupid grin on my face and the beginnings of a terminal cardiac condition.
I walked back to the house and out the front door, and jogged my way back down the street—all the time looking around to see if I was being followed by something—toward the lights of the diocesan house and home.
The wind had picked up again and this time there was some rain in the air; it cooled my face and dampened my shirt and felt good against the skin on my forehead as if the water had been taken straight from the font. But my hand on the doorknob of the diocesan house was such a trembling thing that it looked as if I had Parkinson’s disease, and I wondered if it would ever be still again. Inside the house I tried to close the door quietly, but at the last second the wind seemed to catch it and the door banged shut with a loud and reverberating noise.
I let out a breath and then fetched myself a drink from the cabinet, downing it quickly.
“That’s better.”
The scotch collected what human spirit I had left, fortified me a little so that I was able to resist the true implications of what I had experienced for just a while longer. Surely I had mistaken what I had seen.
“Of course you did. You imagined it.”
Yes. My own imagination had carried me away for a moment. Nothing could have been what I had thought. Such things were impossible. For me, especially. I had made a choice, after all. And I should stick with that choice. There was no self-respect to be had in abandoning that earlier, rational decision, especially on such flimsy evidence. Fuck that. If I changed my mind now, it would just be from fear, and all that would be left would be that same fear and self-loathing. Nobody could live like that, could they?
“Jesus Christ,” said a woman’s voice.
I spun around to see Sara in the doorway. She was wearing a T-shirt and not much else other than a severe look of alarm. The look on her face was all due to me.
“What the hell happened?”
I shook my head. “Nothing much,” I said, fixing a sort of smile onto my face. “The wind is picking up. I think there’s a storm coming. It caught me by surprise. I went into the backyard to close the gate and it blew back into me and knocked me flat on my back, that’s all. Stunned me for a moment.” I touched my face and found some blood on my fingers. “Shit. Must have cut myself, too.”
She swallowed noticeably. “That’s not what it looks like.”
“Really, I’m fine,” I said.
“Come here.” Sara took me by the hand and led me back into the hall, then placed me in front of a full-length mirror that hung on a wall, and switched on the overhead light.
She didn’t accuse me of lying, not right away; she didn’t have to; all she did was let my appearance speak for itself.
I was quite a sight. My hair was standing on end as if I’d been electrocuted; the irises in my staring eyes were so dilated I looked as if I’d been taking drugs; and my face and chest were covered in blood. There were five parallel scratches on my face and my chest—deep enough to have torn through my shirt—as if a large and fierce animal had lashed out at me with razor-sharp claws. I looked as if I had been mauled.
“Holy Christ,” I whispered.
“You’d better let me put something on those claw marks,” she said quietly.
“They’re not claw marks,” I insisted. “Where do you get an idea like that? The gate left me stunned, that’s all. In the dark I walked into a tree and scratched myself on the branch. Let’s not get carried away here, Sara.”
“They look much more like claw marks than anything a tree might have done.”
I shrugged. “What, you think there’s a mountain lion out there? This is East Texas, not Arizona, Sara. It was a tree. I walked into a fucking tree. It was my own stupid fault.”
She pointed at my holster.
“Your gun is gone.”
“It must have fallen out when I fell over. No harm done, I’ll find it in the morning.”
“Which begs the question why you took it in the first place.”
“Oh, I see. There’s a flashlight on the muzzle.”
“Do you have any iodine?” she asked. “Or antiseptic?”
“Under the kitchen sink, I think.”
I fetched myself another drink and knocked it back quickly. Glancing down at my chest, I tried to recall the moment I had received the lacerations; surely it had just been the branch of a tree, after all—a branch with five smaller branches that only resembled the fingers and claws of an outstretched hand. That’s all it could have been. In my panic to be away from that man lying on the ground I had simply run into the clawlike branch of a tree. And yet, somewhere inside my soul—for I think such things do exist—I knew differently. After all, how could I account for that man lying on the ground?
“Yes, a tree,” I said. “That’s all. I’m not really injured, you know. I think it looks worse than it is.”
I could see that Sara didn’t believe me. She didn’t say so. Perhaps she, too, knew but didn’t want to know. I understood what that felt like.
“After I brushed my teeth,” she said from the kitchen, “I went outside to ask you something and you weren’t there.”
“Like I said, there’s a storm coming. That’s why I probably didn’t hear you.”
She came back into the room with a bowl and a roll of paper towels.
“I appreciate that you’re trying not to scare me,” she said. “Really, I do. But from now on, I think it’s best if you don’t lie to me. Even for the best of reasons.”
“All right,” I said.
“You’d better take that shirt off so I can dress those wounds. And then you can tell me what really happened.”
I took off my shirt; then I sat beside her on the sofa and let her wipe the wounds with antiseptic-soaked paper towels. For some reason, I started to tremble.
“I think you’re suffering from shock,” she said.
For a moment, I almost laughed. Shock, I wanted to say, that’s not shock, lady, that’s fucking terror. But I restrained myself just in time. I could see no point in adding to Sara’s considerable store of terror with a large spoonful of my own.
“I don’t suppose this will help very much,” she said, and then she kissed one of my scratches. “In fact,” she added, “there’s probably”—she kissed another—“a very good chance”—and another—“that what I’m doing now could even infect them, the average human mouth being as dirty as it is.”
I took hold of her dimpled chin, looked at her generous lips, and then kissed them with lingering appreciation.
“There’s nothing dirty about your mouth,” I said, licking her sharp little teeth and under her upper lip. “In fact, it’s just about the
nicest mouth I’ve ever seen.”
Rain pattered against the window as if reminding us that there was still a real world outside.
“I should go put the top up on your car like I meant to do earlier. Be a crime for the rugs in that thing to get wet.” I kissed her some more. “Did you have your bath like I told you?”
“Not yet.”
I nodded at the ceiling. “You go up and have one, and I’ll be along in a moment.”
“All right,” she said, but she insisted I kiss her before letting me go.
I went outside. I still had the Bentley’s key in my pocket, and it was only a matter of a few seconds to operate the top. I had just turned back to the house when I heard Sara scream.
My chest immediately tightened again and I ran with limbs made clumsy by fear, and then I fell, half crawled, and then scrambled up the steps into the house.
TWENTY-THREE
She was huddled up into a ball in a corner of the bathroom, hugging her knees to her chest, with her eyes closed and her beautiful face pressed against the wall. I knelt down and, for a moment, I looked closely at Sara’s head and body for some injury or sign of what had scared her, but found nothing that gave a clue as to what had happened. The bathroom looked the same except that the bath was running. I turned the tap off and came back to her side.
“Hey, there,” I said gently. “Take it easy. What happened? What’s the matter?”
Sara didn’t answer, but as soon as I put my hand on her head, she threw her arms around me like a little child and held me tight and started to cry. I let her hold me like this for several minutes before she became calm enough to tell me what had frightened her.
“You said we’re alone here,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
“That’s right. We are alone. I promise. It’s just the two of us.”
“Yes, I saw you make up the bed,” she said haltingly. “I saw you. I helped you. We did that, didn’t we?”