James Patterson - Murder House

Well, six days a week, not seven. His mom comes here once a week. The boy doesn’t come on that day.

But all the other days, the boy slips through the gate and comes around the back.

“Did you kill yourself today?” he asks Mr. Dahlquist.

“Nope. Did you?”

“Nope.”

Their running joke.

“I won’t... if you won’t,” Holden always says at the end. “Prom... promise?”

Sometimes Holden looks happy to see him. Most days, he doesn’t look happy about anything else. Always unsteady on his feet, always reeking of alcohol — “my medicine,” he calls it — always slurring his words, forcing them out in small spurts.

Every day there is a chore, and the reward of ten dollars. Usually the task is really small, like raking a meager pile of leaves or shoveling snow off the front walk or washing a few dishes. The boy can tell that most of this work has already been done by someone else, and only a small portion of the project has been reserved for him.

Most days they talk. The boy, mostly. He tells Holden stories about his life, or his day at school, or the things that bother him. Holden doesn’t like to talk about himself, or even his family, for some reason. He likes to listen more than talk.

The boy watches Holden sometimes, even when he doesn’t come in for a visit, standing outside the gate and just watching. Holden doesn’t leave the house very much. He lives alone, save for the servant who comes in every other day to clean and cook and run errands.

He doesn’t have any other visitors, except the pretty women who come by once in a while and stay for a few hours, looking disheveled and sometimes bruised, sometimes limping, when they leave. Holden doesn’t like to talk about them, either.

Sometimes Holden paints. Sometimes he reads. Always, he drinks.

Canvases fill his upstairs, nearly all of the artwork dark, macabre. Storms ravaging houses, angry oceans, portraits of people dying, sometimes in bloody, grisly fashion, spears protruding through their midsections, gaping wounds in their chests. Anguished, tortured faces, death and destruction.

“You don’t... have to come here... every day,” Holden tells him one day.

“I want to.”

“You have... friends... friends your... age? Kids in... school?”

“Not really,” he says, when the true answer is a hard no . “I’m not really—” The boy isn’t sure how to finish the sentence. “They’re not... like me.”

Holden turns away from his artwork and looks at him, appraises him.

“I’m not like them,” the boy says.

Holden nods.

I’m like you, the boy does not say.

His other secret — the one he hasn’t even told Holden: the journal.

Or diary, whatever you call it. The thick book, bound in red leather, more than two hundred years old, which the boy found around Christmastime in Holden’s parlor. Wrapped in plastic for preservation.

He doesn’t understand every word of what’s written in that journal. Some of the words he has to look up in a dictionary. But he gets the gist of it. Some passages he reads and rereads. He doesn’t dare dog-ear the pages, but he slips makeshift bookmarks into those pages.

From Winston, the patriarch:

I’ve come to surrender my inhibitions and any pretense of civility. I may be able to fool the authorities, but I’m far too advanced in age to fool myself. There is a monster inside me. It can sleep for days, for months. But it will never go away. It will feast on me, prey on me, until the day I die.

From Holden III, Winston’s great-grandson:

The lust has taken up permanent residence within me. I can no longer resist it, any more than I can resist my very existence. Blessing or curse, it is now my identity. I will use an axe, and I will watch Anna bleed, and then I will pray for death.

Holden VI:

Like Winston before me, I have surrendered. I can say that I’m filled with remorse over the four dead tourists, but in fact what swims inside me is neither dread nor sadness, but relief.

They can’t help it. That’s what they’re saying. It’s not their fault. They can’t stop it. It’s a part of them. It’s outside their control.

They don’t want to do it. They have to do it.

He reads it every day. It makes him feel different. It makes him feel better. As if something inside him is blossoming, something changing, like a drug releasing its contents into his bloodstream.

He’s not the only one.

He’s not the only one who feels like there’s a monster inside him.

And he knows that Holden’s just like him, too. No matter how hard he tries to resist it, Holden’s no different from him, no different from his ancestors.

So he will wait. It may take months. It may take years.

He will wait for the moment when Holden is ready to show everyone what lies inside him.

It’s late, so late that now it’s technically called early. Predawn, nearly five in the morning.

The man who sometimes thinks of himself as Holden positions the note card carefully on the desk, his fingers covered in rubber gloves. He considers cutting the words out of a magazine or newspaper, like an old-fashioned ransom note, but there is no time for that. So he will write with his nondominant hand, to avoid detection by any handwriting expert.

Again, this is him being smart.

The words come out wobbly — especially the words bodies and Aiden, for some reason — but they’re legible, which is all that matters.

He closes up the envelope but, of course, does not lick the adhesive. That would be something, wouldn’t it? After all this time, to make a mistake like that, leaving his DNA on the envelope?

On his way, he makes a detour and turns down Ocean Drive. It’s still dark, and nobody will see him. He likes to visit this time of the day.

When he reaches 7 Ocean Drive, he steps out of his car and crosses the street to the magnificent wrought-iron gates, leans against them, pokes his nose between the bars.

He can’t fit between the bars anymore.

“Bet you never expected this, did you, Holden?” he whispers.

Who could have expected this turn of events? But it’s happening.

He pushes himself off the gate and returns to his car. It’s not far from dawn, and he wants to deliver the note under the cover of darkness. He throws the car into drive and heads back toward town.

It isn’t difficult to find the car, parked on the street, and nobody is out at this hour. He tucks the note on the windshield, safely and securely beneath the wiper blade, like a flyer advertising a liquidation sale at a sporting goods store or a buy-one, get-one-free at some fast-food restaurant.

This note, of course, has a bit more gravity to it than a coupon.

This note’s going to turn everything on its head.

I leave Aiden’s house and get home before dawn. My apartment is a slum, papers strewn about, the bed unmade, unwashed glasses in the kitchen sink, a musty smell.

I’m exhausted but propped up by the hum of adrenaline. I look again at the newspaper photo I pilfered from Aiden’s scrapbook, with the caption NEWBORN ABANDONED AT POLICE STATION.

I must be right. It makes everything fit. Aiden’s mother, a prostitute, had a second child, one fathered by Holden VI. She gave the boy up for some reason — because she didn’t want a child fathered by Holden, or because she didn’t want Holden to have any influence over him. But in some way I can’t possibly know, father and son were reunited.

But then — why is Aiden a part of this? How does he figure in?

And more importantly — who is that second child, Aiden’s half brother?