Dark Rivers of the Heart (19 page)

The silencer needed to be replaced soon. The baffles were worn from use. The muffled shot had been loud enough to carry out of the room, though fortunately not beyond the walls of the house.

Guinevere was gazing at the rune stones on the table when Roy shot Chester. She must have been deeply immersed in her reading, for she seemed confused when she looked up and saw the gun.

Before she could raise her hands in defense and force Roy to damage them, which was unthinkable, he shot her in the forehead. She crashed backward in her chair, joining Chester on the floor.

Roy put the gun away, got up, went around the table. Chester and Guinevere stared, unblinking, at the skylight and the infinite night beyond. They had died instantly, so the scene was almost bloodless. Their deaths had been quick and painless.

The moment, as always, was sad and joyous. Sad, because the world had lost two enlightened people who were kind of heart and deep-seeing. Joyous, because Guinevere and Chester no longer had to live in a society of the unenlightened and uncaring.

Roy envied them.

He withdrew his gloves from an inside coat pocket and dressed his hands for the tender ceremony ahead.

He tipped Guinevere’s chair back onto its feet. Holding her in it, he pushed the chair to the table, wedging the dead woman in a seated position. Her head flopped forward, chin on her breast, and her cornrows rattled softly, falling like a beaded curtain to conceal her face. He lifted her right arm, which hung at her side, and put it on the table, then her left.

Her hands. For a while he stared at her hands, which were as appealing in death as in life. Graceful. Elegant. Radiant.

They gave him hope. If perfection could exist anywhere, in any form, no matter how small, even in a pair of hands, then his dream of an
entirely
perfect world might one day be realized.

He put his own hands atop hers. Even through his gloves, the contact was electrifying. He shuddered with pleasure.

Dealing with Chester was more difficult because of his greater weight. Nevertheless, Roy managed to move him around the table until he was opposite Guinevere, but slumped in his own chair rather than in the one Roy had been using.

In the kitchen, Roy explored the cabinets and pantry, collecting what he needed to finish the ceremony. He looked in the garage as well, for the final implement he required. Then he carried those items to the round room and placed them atop the wheeled chest in which Guinevere stored her divining aids.

He used a dish towel to wipe off the chair in which he had been sitting, for at the time he had not been wearing gloves and might have left fingerprints. He also buffed that side of the table, the crystal ball, and the snowflake crystals that he had arranged earlier for the psychic reading. He had touched nothing else in the room.

For a few minutes he pulled open drawers and doors in the tool chest, examining the magical contents, until he found an item that seemed appropriate to the circumstances. It was a pentalpha, also called a pentagram, in green on a field of black felt, used in more serious matters—such as attempted communication with the spirits of the dead—than the mere reading of runes, crystals, and Tarot cards.

Unfolded, it was an eighteen-inch square. He placed it in the center of the table, as a symbol of the life beyond this one.

He plugged in the small electric reciprocating saw that he had found among the tools in the garage, and he relieved Guinevere of her right hand. Gently, he placed the hand in a rectangular Tupperware container on another soft dish towel that he had arranged as a bed for it. He snapped the lid on the container.

Although he wanted to take her left hand, too, he felt that it would be selfish to insist on possessing both. The right thing was to leave one with the body, so the police and coroner and mortician and everyone else who dealt with Guinevere’s remains would know that she’d possessed the most beautiful hands in the world.

He lifted Chester’s arms onto the table. He placed the dead man’s right hand over Guinevere’s left, on top of the pentalpha, to express his conviction that they were together in the next world.

Roy wished he had the psychic power or purity or whatever was required to be able to channel the spirits of the dead. He would have channeled Guinevere there and then, to ask if she would really mind if he acquired her left hand as well.

He sighed, picked up the Tupperware container, and reluctantly left the round room. In the kitchen, he phoned 911 and spoke to the police operator: “The Place Of The Way is just a place now. It’s very sad. Please come.”

Leaving the telephone off the hook, he snatched another dish towel from a drawer and hurried to the front door. As far as he could recall, when he had first entered the house and followed Chester to the round room, he had touched nothing. Now, he needed only to wipe the doorbell-push and drop the dish towel on the way to his car.

He drove out of Burbank, over the hills, into the Los Angeles basin, through a seedy section of Hollywood. The bright splashes of graffiti on walls and highway structures, the cars full of young thugs cruising in search of trouble, the pornographic bookstores and movie theaters, the empty shops and the littered gutters and the other evidence of economic and moral collapse, the hatred and envy and greed and lust that thickened the air more effectively than the smog—none of that dismayed him for the time being, because he carried with him an object of such perfect beauty that it proved there was a powerful and wise creative force at work in the universe. He had evidence of God’s existence secured in a Tupperware container.

Out on the vast Mojave, where the night ruled, where the works of humankind were limited to the dark highway and the vehicles upon it, where the radio reception of distant stations was poor, Spencer found his thoughts drawn, against his will, to the deeper darkness and even stranger silence of that night sixteen years in the past. Once captured in that loop of memory, he could not escape until he had purged himself by talking about what he had seen and endured.

The barren plains and hills provided no convenient taverns to serve as confessionals. The only sympathetic ears were those of the dog.

…bare-chested and barefoot, I descend the stairs, shivering, rubbing my arms, wondering why I’m so afraid. Perhaps even at that moment, I dimly realize that I’m going down to a place from which I’ll never be able to ascend.

I’m drawn forward by the cry that I heard while leaning out the window to find the owl. Although it was brief and came just twice, and then only faintly, it was so piercing and pathetic that the memory of it bewitches me, the way a fourteen-year-old boy can sometimes be seduced as easily by the prospect of strangeness and terror as by the mysteries of sex.

Off the stairs. Through rooms where the moonlit windows glow softly, like video screens, and where the museum-quality Stickley furniture is visible only as angular black shadows within the blue-black gloom. Past artworks by Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton and Steven Ackblom, from the latter of which peer vaguely luminous faces with eerie expressions as inscrutable as the ideograms of an alien language evolved on a world millions of light-years from Earth.

In the kitchen, the honed-limestone floor is cold beneath my feet. During the long day and all night it has absorbed the chill from the Freon-cooled air, and now it steals the heat from my soles.

Beside the back door, a small red light burns on the security-system keypad. In the readout window are three words in radiant green letters:
ARMED AND SECURE.
I key in the code to disarm the system. The red light turns green. The words change:
READY TO ARM.

This is no ordinary farmhouse. It isn’t the home of folks who earn their living from the bounty of the land and who have simple tastes. There are treasures within—fine furnishings and art—and even in rural Colorado, precautions must be taken.

I disengage both deadbolts, open the door, and step onto the back porch, out of the frigid house, into the sultry July night. I walk barefoot across the boards to the steps, down to the flagstone patio that surrounds the swimming pool, past the darkly glimmering water in the pool, into the yard, almost like a boy sleepwalking while in a dream, drawn through the silence by the remembered cry.

The ghostly silver face of the full moon behind me casts its reflection on every blade of grass, so the lawn appears to be filmed by a frost far out of season. Strangely, I am suddenly afraid not merely for myself but for my mother, although she has been dead for more than six years and is far beyond the reach of any danger. My fear becomes so intense that I am halted by it. Halfway across the backyard, I stand alert and still in the uncertain silence. My moonshadow is a blot on the faux frost before me.

Ahead of me looms the barn, where no animals or hay or tractors have been kept for at least fifteen years, since before I was born. To anyone driving past on the county road, the property looks like a farm, but it isn’t what it appears to be. Nothing is what it appears to be.

The night is hot, and sweat beads on my face and bare chest. Nevertheless, the stubborn chill is beneath my skin and in my blood and in the deepest hollows of my boyish bones, and the July heat can’t dispel it.

It occurs to me that I’m chilled because, for some reason, I’m remembering too clearly the late-winter coldness of the bleak day in March, six years ago, when they found my mother after she had been missing for three days. Rather, they had found her brutalized body, crumpled in a ditch along a back road, eighty miles from home, where she had been dumped by the sonofabitch who kidnapped and killed her. Only eight years old, I’d been too young to understand the full meaning of death. And no one dared tell me, that day, how savagely she’d been treated, how terribly she had suffered; those were horrors still to be revealed to me by a few of my schoolmates—who had the capacity for cruelty that is possessed only by certain children and by those adults who, on some primitive level, have never matured. Yet, even in my youth and innocence, I had understood enough of death to realize at once that I would never see my mother again, and the chill of that March day had been the most penetrating cold that I’d ever known.

Now I stand on the moonlit lawn, wondering why my thoughts leap repeatedly to my lost mother, why the eerie cry that I heard when I leaned out my bedroom window strikes me as both infinitely strange and familiar, why I fear for my mother even though she’s dead, and why I fear so intensely for my own life when the summer night holds no immediate threat that I can see.

I begin to move again, toward the barn, which has become the focus of my attention, though initially I had thought that the cry had come from some animal out in the fields or in the lower hills. My shadow floats ahead of me, so that no step I take is on the carpet of moonlight but, instead, into a darkness of my own making.

Instead of going directly to the huge main doors in the south wall of the barn, in which a smaller, man-size door is inset, I obey instinct and head toward the southeast corner, crossing the macadam driveway that leads past the house and garage. In grass again, I round the corner of the barn and follow the east wall, stealthy in my bare feet, treading on the cushion of my moonshadow all the way to the northeast corner.

There I halt, because a vehicle I’ve never seen before is parked behind the barn: a customized Chevy van that no doubt isn’t charcoal, as it appears to be, for the moonlight alchemizes every color into silver or gray. Painted on the side is a rainbow, which also seems to be in shades of gray. The rear door stands open.

The silence is deep.

No one is in sight.

Even at the impressionable age of fourteen, with a childhood of Halloweens and nightmares behind me, I’ve never known strangeness and terror to be more seductive, and I can’t resist their perverse allure. I take one step toward the van, and—

—something slices the air close overhead with a whoosh and a flutter, startling me. I stumble, fall, roll, and look up in time to see enormous white wings spread above me. A shadow sweeps over the moonlit grass, and I have the crazy notion that my mother, in some angelic form, has swooped down from Heaven to warn me away from the van. Then the celestial presence arcs higher into the darkness, and I see that it’s only a great white owl, with a wingspan of five feet, sailing the summer night in search of field mice or other prey.