John Connolly - Bad Men

He smelled her perfume as she knelt down beside him, and her arm brushed his hair gently as she reached across and carefully removed a disc from the pile. He placed his hand against the discs beneath, steadying them so that they would not fall. She put a bright blue CD into the player, then skipped through the tracks until she got to number six. Slow funk emerged from the speakers.

“Sounds like Prince,” he said.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Maybe you’re not so out of touch after all. You’re close. It’s Maxwell. This track’s called ‘Til the Cops Come Knockin’. I thought you might appreciate the humor.”

“It’s good,” he said. “The song, I mean. The humor I’m not so sure about.”

She swiped at him playfully, then rose and sipped her coffee, her body swaying slightly to the music. Dupree watched her from the floor, then turned awkwardly and stood from the knees up. He lifted his coffee mug, instinctively grasping it in his hand instead of trying unsuccessfully to fit his finger through the handle. Little things, he thought. It’s the little things you have to remember.

Marianne walked to the window and looked out on the dark woods beyond. Her body grew still. He waited for her to speak.

“The bird-” she began, and he felt his back stiffen in response. Had she also noticed their absence? Instantly, his conversation with Amerling and Jack returned to him, and the pleasure of the evening began to dissipate like smoke.

“The gull that you put out of its misery?”

He felt relieved for a moment, until he thought about Danny and the look on his face after he had killed the bird.

“Like I said, I’m sorry about that,” he interrupted. “I should have made him walk away.”

“No, it’s not that. I think Danny dug it up, after you’d left. I think he dug it up and…did something to it.”

“Like what?”

“I found blood and feathers.” She left her fear unspoken, hoping the policeman would pick up on it.

Dupree put his cup down and stood beside her.

“He’s a boy. They can be curious about things like that. If you want, I can talk to him.”

“I guess I’m just worried.”

“Has he ever hurt any living animals?”

“I’ve told him off for throwing stones at cats, and he’s mischievous about bugs and stuff, but I don’t think he’s ever really hurt anything.”

“Well, then. I’d maybe leave him be this time.”

She nodded, but he sensed once again that she was far away from him, walking in the country of her past. He finished his coffee and placed the mug carefully on the tray.

“I’d better be going,” he said.

She didn’t reply, but as he moved to get his coat, her hand reached for him and laid itself softly upon his arm. He could feel the heat of her through the fabric of his shirt. She looked up at him, and the expression on her face was unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Like I said, it’s been a long time. I’ve forgotten how this should go.”

Then he inclined his head and body toward her, bending almost double to reach her. He kissed her, and her mouth opened beneath his, and her body moved against him. Later, she led him into her bedroom and they undressed in darkness, and he found her by the light of her eyes and the paleness of her skin and the fading scent of her perfume. For a time, all of their pain was forgotten, and the night gathered them to itself and wrapped them, briefly, in peace.

And while they made love, the painter Giacomelli sat in his studio, the lamp on the table casting its harsh light across brushes and paints and leaning canvases. Jack wanted a drink. He wanted a drink very badly, but he was too afraid to drink. He wanted to be alert and ready. After his conversation with Dupree and Larry Amerling, he had gone for a late-afternoon walk along the wooded trails that crisscrossed the center of the island, but he had not gone as far as the Site. Instead, he had stood at a forest of dead trees, the roots drowned by bog, and looked toward the dark interior in which the ruins lay. There was a stillness there, it seemed, the kind of quiescence that comes on late-summer days when the sky is overcast, the heat oppressive and unyielding, and the world waits for the weather to break and the skies to explode violently into rain. He stood on the trail, looking out over the patch of dead beech trees, their trunks gray and skewed as their decaying root structures failed to hold them upright. A mist seemed to hang about them-no, not a mist, exactly, but rather it appeared as if their slow decay had now become visible, the tiny fragments combining to cast a veil over the trees and the ground. He dragged his fingers across the front of his coat and raised his hand before him, expecting to see them coated in gray, but they were clean.

He walked no farther that day.

Now he sat and stared at one of the flawed paintings, which were, in their way, better than anything that he had ever done before, for the waves seemed to move over the bodies, causing them to bob slightly in the tide, and there was a silver light over the waters and the rocks that he had never previously managed to capture, for it had never been apparent to him until now. In fact, he admitted, he couldn’t recall adding the sheen of light to the picture either, and no moon hung in the dusk sky of his work.

Or what used to be his work.

Moloch woke.

For a moment, he felt himself in the semidarkness of the prison, for in the cell block a dull light hung over all things, even at night. He could hear men snoring, and footsteps. He raised himself from the sweat of his pillow and ran his hands through his hair, then saw Willard, now also awake, watching him from his post beneath the window, the curtains drawn to discourage snoopers.

He had been dreaming again, but this time there was no girl and no killing. Instead, he was alone among the trees, walking through wooded trails, dead leaves crunching beneath his feet, moonlight gilding the branches. Yet when he looked up there was no moon visible, and the skies were black with clouds. Ahead of him lay a darkness, marked only by the thin shapes of dead beech trees, impaled upon the earth like the spears of giants.

Something waited for him in the shadows.

I could map this place, he thought, this landscape of my dreams. I know it well, for I have seen it every night for the last year, and each time it becomes more familiar to me. I know its paths, its rocks, the landings along its coastline. Only that darkness, and what lies within it, is hidden from me.

But in time, I will know that too.

He got to his feet. Willard remained seated, his eyes fixed on him.

“You okay?” asked Moloch.

“Dexter doesn’t like me,” said Willard. “Shepherd neither.”

“They don’t have to like you.”

“I think they want to hurt me.”

Moloch was grateful for the cover of darkness.

“They won’t do that. They’ll do what I say.”

“What you say,” echoed Willard. He spoke in a monotone.

“That’s right. Now let’s go downstairs, get something to eat.”

He waited until Willard rose. For a moment, they stood together at the doorway, each seemingly unwilling to turn his back on the other. At last, Willard stepped through, and Moloch followed him, just as Moloch had followed him from the bar years before.

I trust you.

Followed him to a house.

They’ll do what I say.

Followed him to a woman.

What you say.

And bound himself to Willard in damnation.

The giant was gone. He left her before the clock read five, for he would soon have to relieve the patrolmen on duty and allow them to catch the ferry back to the mainland. A new cop was coming over on the return leg; a rookie, he said, one who had never been given island duty before. He stroked her hair as he spoke, his arm holding her to him as they lay close together in the false intimacy resulting from their lovemaking.