John Connolly - The Unquiet

But who was shadowing Merrick? Again, there seemed to be only one possible answer.

Hollow Men.

Angel seemed to be following some of my thoughts.

“We know where he is,” he said. “If he’s tied in with this, then we can find him if we need to.”

I shook my head.

“It’s a storehouse, nothing more. Merrick was probably allowed to use it for a while, but I’ll bet he never made it down to the cellar, and I’ll lay you another ten he never met anyone connected with the house apart from the lawyer.”

“The lock on the back door was new,” said Angel. “I could smell it. It had been changed recently, probably in the last day or two.”

“ Merrick ’s key privileges might have been taken away. I don’t think Merrick will care. It didn’t look like he’d been there in a while, and he’s the suspicious kind anyway. My guess is that he cut himself loose as soon as he could. He wouldn’t want the lawyer to be able to keep tabs on him, but he had no idea who was bankrolling his search. If he did, he’d never have gone anywhere near that house.”

“But we’re still ahead of this guy, right? We left that place just like we found it. We know he’s involved, but he doesn’t know that we know.”

“The fuck are you?” said Louis. “Nancy Drew? Let him come. He’s a freak. We had our share of freaks before. One more ain’t goin’ to cap-size our boat.”

“This one’s not like the rest,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because he doesn’t take sides. He doesn’t care. He just wants what he wants.”

“Which is?”

“To add to his collection.”

“You think he wants Daniel Clay?” asked Angel.

“I think he wants the men who abused Clay’s patients. Either way, Clay is the key. The Collector is using Merrick to try to smoke them out.”

Louis shifted in his seat. “What are the options on Clay?”

“Same as on everyone else: he’s either alive, or he’s dead. If he’s dead, then either he killed himself, like his daughter suspects, in which case the question is why did he do it, or someone helped him along to the same end. If he was murdered, then it’s possible that he had some idea of the identities of the men who were abusing those children, and they killed him to keep him quiet.

“But if he’s alive, then he’s concealed himself well. He’s been disciplined. He hasn’t contacted his daughter, or she says that he hasn’t, which isn’t the same thing at all.”

“You takin’ her word for it, though,” said Louis.

“I’m inclined to believe her. There’s also the Poole thing. She hired Poole to see if he could find her father, and Poole didn’t come back. According to O’Rourke in the Portland P.D., Poole was an amateur, and he may have made some bad friends. His disappearance might not be linked to Clay’s, but if it is, then either his questions brought him into contact with the men who killed Clay, and Poole died for his trouble, or he found Clay, and Clay killed him. In the end, there are only two possibilities: Clay is dead, and nobody wants questions asked, or he’s alive and doesn’t want to be found. But if he wants to stay hidden badly enough to kill someone in order to protect himself, then what is he protecting himself from?”

“It comes back to the children,” said Louis. “Dead or alive, he knew more than he was telling about what happened to them.”

We were at the Scarborough exit. I took it and followed Route 1, then headed for the coast through moonlit marshes, toward the dark, waiting sea beyond. I drove past my own house, and Rachel’s words came back to me. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I was haunting myself. It wasn’t a very consoling thought, but neither was the alternative: that, as at the Grady house, something had found a way to fill those spaces that remained.

Angel saw the way I looked at my home. “You want us to come in for a while?”

“No, you’ve paid for your fancy room at the inn. You’d better enjoy it while you can. They don’t do fancy up in Jackman.”

“Where’s Jackman?” asked Angel.

“Northwest. Next stop Canada.”

“And what’s in Jackman?”

“We are, as of tomorrow, or the next day. Jackman’s the closest piece of civilization to Gilead, and Gilead, or somewhere near enough to it, was where Andy Kellog was abused, and where Clay’s car was found. Kellog wasn’t abused outdoors either, which means that someone had access to a property in the area. Either Merrick was up there already, and he didn’t have any luck, so he was forced to keep yanking Rebecca Clay’s chain back down in Portland, or he hasn’t made the connection yet. If he hasn’t, then he soon will, but we can still be one step ahead of him.”

The bulk of the Black Point Inn loomed up before us, lights twinkling in the windows. They asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner, but I wasn’t hungry. What I had seen in the cellar of that house had deprived me of my appetite. I watched them ascend the steps into the main lobby and vanish into the bar, then reversed the car and headed for home.

According to a note from Bob, Walter was over with the Johnsons. I decided to leave him there. They liked to go to bed early, even if Shirley, Bob’s wife, never slept straight through due to the pain of her arthritis, and could often be seen reading at her window, a little night-light attached to her book so that she wouldn’t wake her husband, or simply watching the darkness slowly turn into daylight. Still, I didn’t want to risk waking them just so I could have the dubious pleasure of giving my dog a bonus walk on a winter’s night. Instead, I locked the doors and put on some music: part of a Bach collection that Rachel had bought me in an effort to broaden my musical parameters. I made a pot of coffee and sat at my living room window, staring out at the woods and the waters, conscious of the movement of every tree, the swaying of every branch, the shifting of every shadow, and wondered at the ways of the honeycomb world that could have led my path and the path of the Collector to cross again. The mathematical precision of the music contrasted with the uneasy quiet of my home, and as I sat in the darkness I realized that the Collector frightened me. He was a hunter, yet there was something almost bestial about his focus and his ruthlessness. I had thought of him as a man unconcerned with morality, but that was not true: instead, it was more correct to say that he was motivated by some strange morality of his own, but it was rendered debased and unsavory by the assemblage of souvenirs that he had accumulated. I wondered if he liked to touch them in the darkness, remembering the lives that they represented, the existences ended. There was a sensuousness to their appeal for him, I thought, a manifestation of an urge that was almost sexual in nature. He took pleasure in what he did, and yet simply to call him a killer was incorrect. He was more complex than that. These people had done something to bring him upon them. If they were like John Grady, then they had committed some sin that was intolerable.

But intolerable to whom? To the Collector, yes, but I sensed that he believed himself to be merely an agent of another power. He might have been deluded in that belief, but nevertheless it was what gave him his authority and his strength, perceived or otherwise.

It was clear that Eldritch was a key, for it was Eldritch who sourced properties for him, bases from which he could move out into the world and do the work for which he believed he had been appointed. The property at Welchville had been acquired long before the possibility of Merrick ’s release became apparent. True, in the interim he had intervened in the Grady case and retrieved the mirror that now sat in the cellar closet, reflecting a distorted view of the world that might well have matched the Collector’s own, and the other items in his trove suggested that he had been busy elsewhere, too, yet none of this explained why the Collector made me so uneasy, or why he caused me to fear for my own safety.