John Connolly - Nocturnes

“Anyway, we got there, and found Grady with the gun already pointed at his head. If it wasn’t so horrible, it might almost have been funny. After all, there we were with our guns pointed at him, threatening to shoot, and there he was with a gun in his hand ready to blow his own head off and save us the trouble. Only one way it was going to end, I guess.

“I remember what he said before he died: ‘This is not a house. This is a home.’ Still don’t know what he meant by that. The place looked less like a home than anywhere I’ve ever been. Sticks of furniture, half-painted walls, cheap wallpaper already starting to peel. There was dust and filth and damn mirrors on every wall. Those mirrors, they completely threw me. It seemed like there was movement everywhere: our reflections, the reflections of our reflections. I’ve never been so jumpy in all my life.

“I was pretty close to Grady when he pulled the trigger. I recall his face, and his eyes. You know, what he did was beyond belief, as terrible a thing as I’ve seen in all my life, but he was a tormented man. I could see it on him. His skin was covered with some kind of rash. There were sores all over his mouth, and his eyelids were swollen and puffy. He was just this haunted, sick creature. I was the closest man to him. I saw myself reflected in his eyes and, I swear, I knew what he was about to do and I wanted to stop him: not because I cared if he lived or died, but because I had this feeling that if he died at that moment, then somehow he’d take a part of me with him, because I was trapped in his gaze. Makes no sense, does it? I was so wired at the time, so freaked out by all those mirrors, that the fear just kind of hit me. I didn’t think it through. Suddenly, it was just there.

“Anyway, he kind of looked to his right and saw his reflection in the mirror, and his face changed. He looked almost relieved. Then he pulled the trigger, and the mirror just disappeared in a shower of blood and glass. That was it for him. We found the bodies with him in the basement, and the little Maguire kid, who was drifting in and out of consciousness. The best thing that can be said about what happened to those kids is that the M.E. figured they died quickly, but this is children we’re talking about. Jesus, what are we reduced to when we have to console ourselves with the idea of a fast end to their sufferings?”

He raised his bottle for another beer. I was on coffee. I don’t drink much anymore. I don’t have the taste for it.

“I can’t believe all that stuff just came out,” said Clem. “Strange what you keep inside, almost without knowing.”

I thought of Denny Maguire, carried from the house in the arms of a policeman, wrapped in a stranger’s coat. I got the feeling that he probably hadn’t slept well after he closed up the bar on the night that we spoke. Then again, I guessed Denny Maguire had rarely slept peacefully since the day John Grady stole him from his family and brought him to that house. He had kept it all inside too, and it had turned him into an old man before his time.

Clem’s beer arrived, but he didn’t touch it.

“I just told you all that, and I don’t even know why you’re asking about him.”

I briefed him on Matheson, and the photograph of the little girl.

“Children,” he said, quietly. “It’s always children with you.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to.

“Some cops, they have a thing,” he continued. “Cases of one kind just seem to come their way more than others. They don’t go looking for them. They just kind of happen upon them. With some, it’s domestics; others, it’s rapes. They develop a way of looking at them that’s different from the rest, and then it’s like they attract them. With you, I guess, it’s children. Must be hard for you, after what happened.”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“You believe in God?”

“I don’t know. If He exists, then I don’t understand what He’s doing.”

“If He doesn’t exist, then we’re lost. I look around, I think about men like Grady and what he did, and I wonder sometimes if there’s anybody beyond this who really cares. And then, it’s like the fog clears for a couple of seconds, and I see a pattern. No, not even a pattern, just the possibility of one.”

“You see the hand of God?”

He laughed, and tapped his cheekbone with his finger.

“Cop’s eyes: I see his fingerprints. I see patterns on the glass. You get older, you start thinking about these things. If there is a God, then you and He are going to be having a serious talk in the near future, so you start thinking about what you might say. Mostly, you figure you’re going to be saying ‘Sorry.’ A lot.”

Clem seemed to remember what he was doing here.

“I’m rambling. You say Grass is looking into this thing?”

“He’s skeptical. He says he wants to be discreet, in case he freaks out some family for no good reason, or starts a panic among parents.”

“Grass is a straight arrow. He was a young man when the Grady thing happened but, like me, he was there at the end. I don’t think it will ever leave him. From what I hear, he takes his stewardship of the place pretty personally. He doesn’t want to remind people of what happened there, and I suppose he’s right to take that view. Next thing you know, it’s on a death trip tourist trail, or somebody takes it into his head to torch the place. No bad thing, if you ask me. I don’t understood why Matheson wanted to keep the house to begin with. But, like I said, the Grady house is now Grass’s patch. He’s taken on the burden of it.”

I wondered if Clem was right. Grass, Denny Maguire, even Clem himself-all seemed to carry with them some remnant of what had taken place in the Grady house, like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps wiping it from the earth would help to bring some relief to them and to all those whose lives had been touched by John Grady. Even Matheson must have begun to reconsider his urge to preserve it as a monument, now that it had found a way to extend its reach into an unknown girl’s life.

“Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

“There’s not much more to tell,” he said. “Grady was a blank slate. I don’t even know if that was his real name. His fingerprints weren’t on record, and nobody came forward after his death to claim his body. He cost the state a funeral and a cheap cross.”

He pushed the bottle of beer away from him.

“Don’t know why I ordered this. I drink more than one bottle in the afternoon and I’m napping for the rest of the day. I’m already finding it hard to think of details that might be helpful to you. I suppose the only thing I can add is that we took some material from the house-books, mostly-that was kind of odd.”

“Odd how?”

“It was woo-woo stuff. You know: witchcraft, dæmons, pictures of those star things.”

“Pentagrams.”

“Yeah, trust you to know the name for them. It wasn’t low-end stuff, either. Some of those books were pretty old. I hear they made some money for the widows and orphans when they were sold.”

“They were sold off?”

“Well, there was no reason to hold on to them in the first place, since Grady was dead, and it wasn’t like there was going to be a trial or anything. Someone put them to one side and forgot about them, and they lay around in a basement for twenty years. Then there was that big clearout last fall. I went over to take a look, just in case there was anything worth holding on to as a souvenir. Those books turned up, and someone decided to get a valuation on them. The word went out to some of the dealers in the state, and literally the next day a guy showed up to take a look at them. He offered a thousand dollars for the lot, and walked out with them five minutes later.”