Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

Mr. Moore did manage to find a shovel in the basement, along with a couple of lengths of strong rope, and he put them all outside the kitchen door while the rest of us were in the living room. Then we all went in to dinner, the prospect of what we were about to undertake keeping most of us pretty quiet through the better part of the meal. Mr. Picton, fortunately, filled up the silence with a stream of talk about the cases he’d been studying; then it was back into the living room for a little more of the music what Cyrus had been playing the day before. Finally, the time came to head upstairs. We’d have to wait for Mr. Picton and the detective sergeants to go to bed, at which point the rest of us would leave the house separately, to meet up around the corner on Ballston Avenue. From there we’d head down to the cemetery.

The house finally grew completely quiet at just past one o’clock. I left my room carefully and got outside, almost running headlong into Mr. Moore on the front lawn as he made his way around from the kitchen with his shovel and rope. We didn’t see any sign of the rest of our fellow ghouls until we arrived at the appointed meeting spot around the corner. The Doctor and Miss Howard were sharing a cigarette, with Cyrus peering anxiously around at the darkened houses on either side of the street. He could’ve saved himself some sweat, the way I saw it even given what we were up to: Ballston Spa was obviously the kind of town what shut down early and stayed shut down, even on a Saturday night.

“All right now, remember,” the Doctor murmured, as Mr. Moore and I reached them. “What we are about to undertake is a serious criminal offense. Moore and I will therefore be the only ones to actually participate. Stevie you’ll stand watch at this end of the street. Cyrus, you go an equal distance in the opposite direction. Sara will be our last line of defense-she’ll guard the cemetery gate.”

”With the artillery,” she said, producing the weapon what she used on really special occasions: a.45-caliber Colt revolver of her own, one with a short barrel and pearl grips. She checked its chamber with the quick moves of an expert as the Doctor went on:

“If you encounter anyone , any of you, you must claim complete ignorance. You’re a guest of Mr. Picton’s, and you’re out taking the air on a lovely night. Understood? Very well, then…”

Mr. Moore started to move farther up the block with Miss Howard and Cyrus. “Why don’t you stay here with Stevie until I’ve got the hole dug, Kreizler? The fewer people inside at one time the better, and it’s not like-” Mr. Moore cut himself off quickly, though he’d already glanced at the Doctor’s bad left arm.

“Yes,” the Doctor said, following Mr. Moore’s eyes down to his slightly withered limb. “I take your point, Moore-I wouldn’t be much use to you in the digging. Very well. Signal when you’re ready.”

Nodding and looking a bit sorry for what he’d said, even though he’d clearly meant no offense, Mr. Moore hustled off with the other two.

The Doctor and I just stood there for a few minutes, myself not knowing exactly what to say to break the awkward moment brought on by the subject of his arm. But he soon made that job unnecessary by himself glancing down at the thing again, and then laughing once, quietly.

“It’s strange,” he whispered, “I never thought it might actually serve some purpose…”

“Hunh?” was all I could say.

“My arm,” the Doctor whispered back. “I’ve been so used to seeing it as a source of pain and a reminder of the past that I never imagined it could be anything else.”

I knew what he was talking about with that “reminder of the past” business: when he was only eight, the Doctor’s left arm had been smashed by his own father during the worst of their many fights. The older man had then kicked his son clear down a flight of stairs, aggravating the injury and making sure that the arm would never heal properly. The recurring pain in the scarred bones and muscle, along with the underdeveloped state of the arm, served to keep the trials what the Doctor’d been through during his childhood pretty constantly in his mind. But as for what he meant by the arm “serving some purpose,” I couldn’t tell, and I said so.

“I was referring to Clara Hatch,” he said, taking his eyes off the arm and glancing up and down the street. “From our first meeting, I naturally felt some empathy with her having lost the use of her right arm, quite probably because of an attack by her own mother.”

We both turned when we started to hear the quiet sounds of a shovel digging into dirt; but it’d been a wet summer, and as the shovel reached deeper, softer ground, the sound died away altogether. The Doctor continued his story:

“Today I decided to use the coincidence of our injuries in my effort to make her feel safe enough in my presence to start to allow images of what happened to reenter her thoughts.”

“Images?” I asked. “You mean, she doesn’t remember the whole story?”

“A part of her mind does,” the Doctor answered. “But the greater portion of her mental activity is directed at avoiding and erasing such memories. You must understand, Stevie, that she is emotionally hobbled by the fact that her experience makes no apparent sense-how could her mother, who should have been the source of all safety and succor, possibly turn into a mortal threat? Then, too, she knows that Libby is still alive and could return to strike again. But the combination, today, of the set of colored pencils I gave her and the story I told her about my father and my injury seemed to at least plant the idea in her mind that she might begin to confront such confusions and fears, and perhaps even share them with another person.”

I smiled. “She really went for the pencils, hunh?”

The Doctor shrugged. “You’ve seen such things at the Institute. It’s remarkable, what seemingly mundane objects can achieve in such situations. A toy, a game-a colored pencil. Not surprisingly, the first one she reached for was red.”

“Blood?” I asked quietly, figuring that, in her position, I probably would’ve made the same choice.

“Yes,” the Doctor answered, shaking his head and hissing. “Imagine the savagery of that scene, Stevie… It’s no wonder she can’t speak of it, that even its memory has been exiled to the farthest corners of her conscious mind. And yet from that corner it presses-it cries -for release, but only if that release will be safe for her.” The Doctor paused, thinking the matter over. “A red stream… you remember the picture of the Westons’ house that she showed Cyrus? There’s a brook that runs behind it, and she added that brook to the picture today. But she drew it in red-gushing torrents of red. And beside the stream she drew a dead tree, a tree whose roots reached down into the red water.” The Doctor shook his head, then held up his left hand, clenching it into a fist. “I tell you, Stevie, if we do no more while we are here than help to mend that poor girl’s mind, the trip shall not have been wasted.”

I thought about that for a few minutes, and then asked, “How long do you figure it’ll take before she can start to communicate with you about it?”

“Actually, I’m fairly optimistic, based on her behavior this afternoon. It should only be a matter of days before we can discuss the incident through pictures and simple questions. But as for getting her to speak-for that I will have to come up with some new strategies.”

We didn’t say much more, for a while. I guess I was just absorbing the idea of little Clara living out there on that farm, among people who’d once been strangers, trying desperately day and night not to think about why she should have to live with them, but at the same time wanting so badly to understand why. How could her brain operate, when it was given two sets of orders that were so opposite and so urgent? How could she ever get a moment’s sleep, or even peace, with all those voices screaming inside her skull, telling her to do different things? It was a miserable thought; and I began to be grateful, standing there on that street corner, that when I’d been a young boy in New York I’d at least been clear about who my enemies were, and what it would take for me to survive. Badly as she’d behaved, I didn’t think my mother’d ever wanted me actually, literally dead ; and for the first time I saw that as, if not a blessing, at least one of the better on a long list of bad choices.