Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

“Why would Mrs. Harrison hide the rope?” Eleanor asked.

Other words spun out of the whirlwind, Everybody loved Faye. “Because she loved her daughter,” Graves replied. “And because of that love, she wanted to conceal what had really happened to her.” He saw the walls of Mrs. Harrison’s spartan room, Mary in her anguish, cradling her dead child. “She was a devout Catholic. She wanted Faye to be buried in sacred ground. And so she had to hide the truth about the way she really died.”

Eleanor was watching him intently. “Paul, do you know how Faye really died?”

“Yes,” Graves said. “She-” He stopped. The dread rose in him like a stinking water, bringing it all back. Everything he knew about Faye’s death. The precise nature of it. Each detail. Along with how he knew it. He saw Gwen standing in the middle of the room, Kessler slowly circling her, stroking his chin, before he stopped suddenly and barked his command, Get a rope!

He saw the rope move through the air as if it were alive, a serpent slithering weightlessly through space, toward Kessler’s outstretched hands. He could see Gwen standing limply beside him, desolate beyond imagining, watching vacantly as Kessler shaped the rope into a noose and slung it over the wooden beam, snapping his commands even as he worked: Bring me that chair! Get her on it!

“Faye wasn’t strangled,” Graves told Eleanor. “Not manually. Not lying on the ground. With someone on top of her. Tightening the rope.”

“But the autopsy…”

Graves lifted his hand to silence her. The whole story had suddenly formed in his mind, the design growing out of the detail, as it always did for Slovak. “The photograph. The one Portman was looking at when he died. The one that showed her hands.”

He saw Kessler dangle the noose before Gwen’s battered face, his eyes flashing as he taunted her, Ever seen a hanging, bitch?

“Faye’s hands were red and raw,” Graves said. “Her nails were broken. Because she’d struggled to pull the rope from around her neck.”

Gwen was dangling now, a battered doll bung from a thick cord, her hands pulling desperately at its tightening coil.

In a voice that seemed far away, Graves heard himself say, “Faye was hanged.”

Eleanor drew in a quick breath, but Graves did not look at her. Instead, he stared toward the woods, imagining the trail that led through them, passed Indian Rock and down Mohonk Trail to where the cave gaped open. He saw a tree a few feet beyond it, a stump beneath a low-slung limb, feet poised briefly on the stump, then thrust forward, jolting the limb violently, the feet now struggling to regain the stump, sawing wildly as the rope tightened, kicking chips of rotten wood onto the surrounding ground.

He felt his mind hurl backward to the steaming farmhouse on Powder Road, the moment when Kessler’s foot had stopped suddenly as he was about to kick the chair, another idea coming to him, a better way to hang a girl, one much more torturous and agonizing.

“Hanged slowly,” Graves said.

He saw Kessler lift Gwen from the chair, place her once again on the floor, the noose still around her neck, the other end tossed over the beam.

“Faye had time to look around,” Graves went on. “Time to see the river and the cave.”

Gwen’s eyes were bruised and swollen, but still open enough to see Kessler as he seized the unattached end of the rope and began to move away from her.

“Time to think about what was happening. Time to know that she was going to die.”

He saw Kessler grab Sykes’ arm, press the rope into his trembling hand. Heard his order split the air, Haul her up!

“Faye’s neck wasn’t broken. She didn’t lose consciousness.” Graves saw the rope grow taut, saw Gwen’s feet begin to rise slowly off the floor. “She fought to get a footing.” First to the balls of her feet, held there for a time at Kessler’s command, then lifted farther, to the tips of her toes. “Fought to get her breath.” Held again, then hauled up a final time, though just off the ground, to dangle there while she gasped for life. “Fought to live.”

He saw Gwen’s fingers claw at the rope, jerking, pulling, yanking until her hands were torn, her fingernails bloody, broken.

“That’s the way Faye died,” Graves said.

Eleanor’s eyes bore into him like two searing lights. “Paul, how can you be so sure of that?”

He had no choice but to answer. “Because that’s the way my sister died.” He saw Gwen’s bare feet pointed violently downward, her toes stretched out, searching desperately for the floor as he knew Faye’s had sought the crumbling stump, tried frantically to regain it, but feeling it shatter each time she touched it, too rotted and insubstantial to bear her weight. “She kept tearing at the rope, pulling herself up, gasping, then dropping again. By the time it was over, her hands and fingers looked just like Faye’s did in that picture Portman held when he died.”

Eleanor stared at him fiercely. “How do you know all that, Paul?”

Graves felt his throat close.

“Did you see it? You were there when it happened? When your sister was murdered? You saw what Kessler did to her?”

“Everything he did,” Graves murmured. “And made Sykes do.”

With each new outrage, Kessler had made his offer plain, You can stop her pain. All you have to do is take her place. In his mind Graves heard Kessler demand his name, something to call him during the long ordeal, What’s your name, boy? He had never given it, but only because Kessler had not pressed the issue, had not pinched or slapped him, or used on him any of the devices he’d later forced Sykes to use on Gwen. Forks and matches. Pliers, tweezers, wrenches.

“Made Sykes do,” Eleanor repeated intently.

Graves felt the old terror sweep over him. How expertly Kessler had wielded it. Using terror to inflict terror. Slap that bitch! Creating a separate being. Dance! Faster! Sling her round! In his likeness. Get that rope! Subject to his will. Haul her up! Made savage and remorseless by fear rather than by hatred. Let her hang! And so become the keenest and most cutting of all his many instruments of night. Gut her!

“Because he was so afraid, you see.” Graves’ voice came in an aching whisper. “So terribly afraid.” He saw Kessler’s eyes fall upon him, heard him bestow a horrid knighthood. I’ll give you a name, boy.

“Sykes,” Eleanor said softly. “Sykes is”-her gaze was deep and terrible. Graves felt his soul fall from him like a body through a scaffold floor-“you.”

When dawn broke, Graves found himself on the porch of his cottage. He’d walked there in the darkness. He couldn’t remember doing so. All he could recall was how Eleanor had stared at him a long, agonizing moment, then turned away. After that the numbness had swept in.

He was still on the porch when Saunders arrived to drive him to the bus. He saw the old man’s lips move, and felt his own lips move in response. Later, when Saunders shook his hand in farewell, he felt only a further tightening, the sense of the air thickening around him, as if he were being buried alive in invisible sand.

When the bus arrived, he took the first free seat. It no longer mattered to him whether he sat in the front or the back, by the window or on the aide. There were other people on the bus, but he no longer imagined their fates. Past and present fused. The future did not exist at all.

The bus arrived in the city. He got off. A square of light beckoned him out of the sprawling station. On the street, habit turned him left or right, a blind horse heading home.

In the apartment, he sat, then rose, then sat again. He felt nothing but a single steady urge. It grew more weighty with each passing second, pressing out all other urges: to be rid of it.