John Connolly - The Unquiet

“He shouldn’t ought to be in there. Those men tore something in him when they took him. They broke his heart. They’re not his fault, the things he does.”

He looked down at the floor again, once more unable to keep the memories at bay.

“Your daughter drew pictures like Andy’s, didn’t she?” I asked him. “Pictures of men with the heads of birds?”

Merrick nodded. “That’s right, just like Andy did. That was after she started seeing Clay. She sent the pictures to me at the jail. She was trying to tell me something about what was happening to her, but I didn’t understand, not until I met Andy. They were the same men. It’s not just about my little girl. That boy was like a son to me. They’ll pay for what they did to him as well. The lawyer Eldritch understood that. It wasn’t about just one child. He’s a good man. He wants those people found, just like I do.”

I heard someone laugh, and realized it was me.

“You think he’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart? You ever wonder who is paying Eldritch, who employed him to secure your release, to feed you information? Did you take a look around that house in Welchville? Did you venture down into the cellar?”

Merrick’s mouth opened slightly, and his features became clouded with doubt. Perhaps the thought had never struck him that there was someone other than Eldritch involved.

“What are you talking about?”

“Eldritch has a client. The client is manipulating you through him. He owns that house you crashed in. He’s shadowing you, waiting to see who responds to your actions. When they emerge, he’ll take them, not you. He doesn’t care whether you find your daughter or not. All he wants is-”

I paused. I understood that to say what he wanted made no sense. To add to his collection? To dispense another form of justice in the face of the law’s inability to act against these men? Those were elements of what he desired, but they were not enough to explain his existence.

“You don’t know what he wants, if he even exists, and it don’t matter anyway,” said Merrick. “When the time comes, no man will take justice out of my hands. I want recompense. I told you that. I want the men who took my little girl to pay for what they did, to pay at my hand.”

“Recompense?” I tried to hide the disgust in my voice, but I could not. “You’re talking about your daughter, not some…used car that gave out on you a mile from the lot. This isn’t about her. It’s about you. You want to lash out at someone. She’s just your excuse.”

The anger flared again, and once more I was reminded of the similarities between Frank Merrick and Andy Kellog, of the rage always bubbling away beneath their exteriors. Merrick was right: he and Kellog were like father and son, in some strange way.

“You shut the fuck up!” said Merrick. “You got no idea what you’re saying.”

The gun shifted hands again, and his right fist was suddenly poised above me, the knuckles ready to smash down upon me. And then he seemed to become aware of something, for he paused and looked over his shoulder, and as he did so, I sensed it too.

The room had grown colder, and there was a noise from the hallway outside my door. It was soft, like the footsteps of a child.

“You alone here?” said Merrick.

“Yes,” I replied, and I couldn’t tell if I was lying.

He turned around and walked slowly to the open door, then stepped swiftly into the hallway, the gun held close to him in case someone tried to knock it from his grasp. He disappeared from view, and I could hear doors opening, and closets being searched. His shape passed by the doorway again, then he was downstairs, checking that all of the rooms were quiet and unoccupied. When he returned, he looked troubled, and the bedroom was colder still. He shivered.

“The hell is wrong with this place?”

But I was no longer listening to him, because I smelled her now. Blood and perfume. She was close. I thought Merrick might have smelled her too, because his nose wrinkled slightly. He spoke, but he sounded distant, almost distracted. There was an edge of madness to his voice, and I thought then that he was going to kill me for sure. I tried to move my lips to pray, but I could remember no words, and no prayers would come.

“I don’t want you meddling in my affairs no more, you understand?” he said. His spittle landed on my face. “I thought you was a man I could reason with, but I was wrong. You’ve caused me enough trouble already, and I need to make sure you don’t trouble me again.”

He returned to the satchel on the floor and withdrew a roll of duct tape. He laid the gun down, then used the tape to cover my mouth before binding my legs tightly together above the ankles. He took a burlap sack and draped it over my head, securing it with more tape wrapped around my neck. Using a blade, he ripped a hole in the sacking just beneath my nostrils, so that I could breathe more easily.

“You listen to me, now,” he said. “I got to put some harm your way, just to be sure that you got your days filled without worrying about me. After that, you mind your business, and I’ll see that justice is done.”

Then he left me, and with him some of the chill departed from the room, as though something was following him through the house, marking his progress to ensure that he went. But another remained: a smaller presence, less angry than the first, yet more afraid.

And I closed my eyes as I felt her hand brush against the sackcloth.

daddy

Go away.

daddy, i’m here.

A moment later there was another in the room. I felt her approach. I couldn’t breathe properly. More sweat fell into my eyes. I tried to blink it away. I was panicking, suffocating, yet I could almost see her through the perforations in the sack, darkness against darkness, and smell her as she came.

daddy, it’s all right, i’m here.

But it wasn’t all right, because she was approaching: the other, the first wife, or something like her.

hush

No. Get away from me. Please, please, leave me alone.

hush

No.

And then my daughter went silent, and the voice of the other spoke.

hush, for we are here.

Ricky Demarcian was, from all outward appearances, a loser. He lived in a double-wide trailer that, for the early years of his occupancy, had left him freezing in winter and gently roasted him alive in summer, basting him in his own juices and filling every space with the stench of mold and filth and unwashed clothes. The trailer had been green once, but the elements had combined with Ricky’s inept painting skills to take their toll upon it, fading it so that it was now a filthy, washed-out blue, like some dying creature at the bottom of a polluted sea.

The trailer stood at the northern perimeter of a park called Tranquility Pines, which was false advertising right there because there wasn’t a pine in sight-no mean feat in the grand old state of Maine-and the place was about as tranquil as a nest of ants drowning in caffeine. It lay in a hollow surrounded by scrub-covered slopes, as though the park itself were slowly sinking into the earth, borne down by the weight of disappointment, frustration, and envy that was the burden carried by its residents.

Tranquility Pines was filled with screwups, many of whom, curiously, were women: vicious, foul-mouthed harridans who still looked and dressed the same way they did in the eighties, all stone-washed denim and bubble perms, simultaneously hunters and hunted trawling the bars of South Portland and Old Orchard and Scarborough for ratlike men with money to spend, or muscle-bound freaks in wife-beater shirts whose hatred of women gave their temporary partners a respite of sorts from their own self-loathing. Some had kids, and the males among them were well on their way to becoming like the men who shared their mothers’ beds, and whom they themselves despised without understanding how close they were to following in their footsteps. The girls, meanwhile, tried to escape their family circumstances by creating families of their own, thereby dooming themselves to become the very women they least desired to emulate.