A Time of Torment (31 page)

If what Williamson was telling him was correct, then the men who had been with Harpur Griffin at the Porterhouse were involved in the creation of a dead king. Jerome Burnel, it seemed, had come to their attention when he killed two of their number at Dunstan’s Gas Station, and that had doomed him.

But what of Burnel’s wife? She and Griffin came from the same county in West Virginia. If she had somehow sold out her husband to the servants of a dead king, a plan undone by her husband’s secret acquisition of a weapon, and had then set out to ruin him, did she do so on her own initiative, or at the instigation of others? If it was the latter, then it could only be that those same individuals had also urged Griffin to make Burnel’s time in prison as miserable and painful as possible. What linked Griffin to Burnel’s wife, Burnel himself apart, was where they had come from.

Somewhere in Plassey County, West Virginia, was a dead king.

‘There is one more thing you should consider,’ said Williamson. He looked serious, and almost sad.

‘What would that be?’

‘This man Griffin didn’t say
a
dead king, he specified
the
dead king. It may just have been a turn of phrase, and could mean nothing.’

‘Or?’

‘What Mrs Gutch told my grandfather was this: if you create a dry, safe place in your garden, then a creature will make its home there. You’ll find a spider or an earwig, or even something larger, like a bat or a bird. A dead king is similar: if it becomes strong enough, potent enough, it can act as a magnet. It’ll attract something to itself, something that will be happy to make its nest amid old bones. It may not have a name, or a form, not until a composite of the dead supplies it, but once it gets in there, it won’t leave. Suddenly, those who wanted a talisman to protect them, who paid a kind of lip service to it in return, and called it a dead king, will find that their ruler isn’t quite as lifeless as they once thought. They may even discover that they prefer it that way.

‘So if that nest of bones is old and powerful enough, it will draw to it a malignancy of similar age and power, and then what you have isn’t just
a
dead king anymore. You’ve given physicality and purpose to something very unpleasant indeed. If Harpur Griffin didn’t misspeak, then he wasn’t just referring to a talismanic object.

‘He was speaking of an entity.’

A
s he had watched Parker arrive, so too did Williamson watch him leave. The academic stood at his office window, keeping the private detective in sight as he crossed Maine Street and headed in the direction of the museum and its
Nocturnes
exhibition. It was appropriate, thought Williamson: Parker was a creature of the dark.

Almost absentmindedly, Williamson reached for a round glass display case on a nearby shelf. Contained within it was a fragment of the ruined church at Prosperous. Williamson lifted the glass and rolled the piece of stone between his fingers. He thought he felt the slightest of vibrations from it, the vestigial remains of the power that it had once contained.

Williamson had traveled a long way to get close to Parker. He had turned down better-paying jobs in favor of the post at Bowdoin, and had exhausted every testimonial and promise of support in order to obtain it.

Now Parker had come to him.

O
beron was working on the engine of his truck, winterizing it for the months ahead. It was a little early to be starting on it, but it paid to be careful with the weather being as unpredictable as it was. Regardless, the routine allowed him a degree of solitude and space to think, his hands and eyes taking care of the actions while his mind worked on the problems to hand.

Around him the branches of the ash trees were bare, retaining only the dark seed bunches. The leaves of the beeches had turned a deep yellow, the Virginia creeper the red of wine. The scent of apples was in the air as a team of women and small children manipulated the cast-iron presses behind the Square, filling bottles with juice and setting the mush aside to feed to the pigs.

Oberon worked up a fifty-fifty mix of antifreeze and water that would protect the truck against temperatures as low as twenty degrees below zero. The Cut was unusual meteorologically as well as geographically: its temperature was always a couple of degrees lower than the rest of the county, which was welcome in summer but less so in winter.

Henkel. Henkel was a threat.

Oberon added distilled water to the battery to cover the lead plates, checked the cables and terminals, then set the battery to recharge because the water would have diluted the electrolyte solution.

Killian and Huff. Those damned bodies …

He then went through the truck’s 4WD system, ensuring that the transfer lever, locking hubs, and push button engagement were all moving well. He didn’t bother to install new wipers, as the ones in place were only a couple of months old, and he’d performed an oil check a week or two before. Finally, he gave the truck a good coat of wax to protect the finish from ice and salt, took a soda from the little refrigerator in his garage, and walked into the woods. He’d placed a carved wooden bench in a glade well out of sight of his house, and his family tried not to disturb him when he went there. Oberon brushed some leaves from the seat, then sat and watched a pair of deer move through a big stand of conifers that his father had planted to provide the animals with winter cover from wind and snow. The deer, Oberon knew, would already have begun to decrease their food consumption in preparation for the coming cold, during which they’d rely on their fat reserves and their ability to conserve energy to survive, as deer could live for up to a month without eating. People who didn’t know any better sometimes put out food for them in winter, but deer were sensitive creatures, and could take weeks to adjust to a new food source. Corn was the worst: it caused acute acidosis, which could kill a deer agonizingly within days.

Nobody hunted in the Cut except the people of the Cut themselves, and they were careful to take no more than they needed. Oberon didn’t hunt at all because he no longer ate meat; he’d stopped a decade before because it made him feel sluggish, and now he consumed mostly vegetables and fruit, with some fish for protein.

Life in the Cut, although hard, was also somewhat idyllic, but an idyll had to be protected and supported, which required funds. Some of that came from the ranges, the name the Cut gave to their systemized robberies and burglaries, but less so than in the past ever since the deaths of his sons. Oberon thought of them often. Years had gone by before he risked the trip to Maine to visit their pauper’s graves, and even then he had not lingered.

Up there, where the law had failed to trace their origins, they were Tobin Simus and Henry Forde. To Oberon, they were Gideon and Balder – Balder the prince, the heir – born to different mothers but of the same father. Oberon knew that Russ Dugar might have been aware of who they were, even though they had left the Cut years earlier to roam as part of Balder’s apprenticeship, returning only rarely and discreetly to their home. The old sheriff had handed Oberon a copy of photographs from the men’s licenses, which had been circulated to law enforcement agencies around the country following their deaths in Maine. Dugar had torn the document into four neat pieces before placing them in an envelope and giving them to Oberon. Neither had said a single word about it again, not even after Oberon left a package containing $10,000 on Dugar’s porch mat.

Gideon, the younger of his sons, had been dangerously depraved, and Oberon recognized that he might have been forced to kill him himself if his behavior continued to deteriorate, had Jerome Burnel not done it for him, but Balder was to have been his successor, the leader of the Cut. Now Oberon had no male heirs, and Cassander might soon make a move against him.

It was Oberon who had determined that the Cut would no longer engage in the same degree of criminality that had sustained it until the second half of the last century. Larceny, burglary, kidnapping, bank robbery, and the targeting of rival organizations and the sequestration of their assets, usually at gunpoint and occasionally with associated fatalities, had been the Cut’s methods for most of its existence. But the world had changed, and such activities were no longer worth the risk, although the recent killings of Killian and Huff had netted $48,000, after Lucius and Benedict, Zachary Bowman’s fool son, had convinced them that they could buy their lives if they handed over all the money they had and promised never to set foot in West Virginia again. Once the cash was theirs, Lucius and Benedict had shot the two men, and then mishandled the disposal of the bodies.

Lucius, aided by his younger brother, Marius, and their comrade Jabal, had also later mishandled the killing of Harpur Griffin. Oberon had not sanctioned Griffin’s death, but he should not have been surprised that Marius chose to revenge himself upon Griffin after all these years. Only the public nature of Griffin’s murder angered him. It was unnecessary, and risked drawing attention.

Cassander’s sons had returned from Maine earlier that day. Marius and Jabal instantly vanished, leaving Lucius to relay the details of what had happened in Maine, and then explain why he and Benedict had not buried Killian and Huff deeper, and farther from the Cut. Oberon blamed Lucius for the mess, because Lucius was the elder of the two. But then Lucius had always been unreliable; it came with his propensity for violence, which was useful on some occasions. Not everyone in the Cut had the stomach for what sometimes needed to be done.

But what Lucius told him had simply added to Oberon’s worries. Lucius said that they’d had to rush the job of burial because he’d seen Charlie Lutter’s boy – Perry, the idiot – walking through the woods, and if Perry came across them with the bodies they’d have a bigger problem, because something would have to be done about him.

‘You should have come clean with me when it happened,’ said Oberon, as Cassander watched and listened, one hand on his son’s left shoulder in a gesture of support.
My blood, wrong or right
, thought Oberon.

‘We didn’t want to get Perry in trouble,’ said Lucius, but that wasn’t the reason, and Oberon knew it. He had just decided to keep quiet about the possibility of a witness until the discovery of the grave had forced him to be honest.

It was then that Benedict spoke up.

‘The grave wasn’t so shallow,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Oberon.

‘I helped dig it, and we put those bodies nearly three feet down. I even had time to put stones on them before we covered them up with dirt.’

‘Yeah,’ said Lucius, and his sullen expression changed as Benedict threw him a line that might enable him to escape Oberon’s anger. ‘Hey, I remember that!’

‘It didn’t stop an animal digging it up,’ said Oberon.

‘What animal?’ asked Lucius.

Oberon thought. His informant had been detailed, and quite specific, in his description of the scene.

‘Fox tracks.’

‘No fox could have uncovered those bodies,’ said Benedict.

Cassander spoke.

‘If not an animal, then who was it?’

But Oberon already had an answer, and it made him feel tired and old: Perry Lutter.

The deer moved off, ears and tails flicking. Oberon was still angry with Lucius and Benedict. They hadn’t handled the situation well, even if, as they claimed, they’d been forced to shoot Killian and Huff earlier than anticipated after Killian made a grab for Benedict’s gun. That left them with two bodies to bury, and they didn’t want to risk being pulled over for any reason with corpses in the bed of their truck, so they’d made a judgment call and buried them at dusk close to Charlie Lutter’s land. They believed themselves to be in the next county, but they were mistaken.

The question was: had Perry Lutter simply stumbled upon the disturbed ground, and out of curiosity begun to dig, or had he witnessed the burial? Perry might not have been about to join Mensa anytime soon, but Oberon had enough experience of his ways to recognize that he possessed an innate cunning. He liked the woods, and was known to wander many miles from home while always finding his way back again, unless he was given a ride by someone from the county, because everyone knew Perry.

He saw a lot, but he gabbed a lot too.

Officially, the police had not confirmed the identity of the person who found the burial site, but even without his sources it wouldn’t have been hard for Oberon to guess that it might have been Perry Lutter, and Henkel hadn’t denied it when Oberon mentioned Perry’s name at the diner. Except now it appeared that Perry might not simply have stumbled across the grave accidentally. Oberon would have to talk with him, and away from his father and mother, who were as protective of their son as bears with a cub.

Then there was the private investigator, the one who had confronted Lucius and Jabal in Portland, necessitating the killing of Griffin in order to ensure that he didn’t talk, as well as satisfying Marius’s blood urges. With luck, Griffin’s death would mark an end to his inquiries, but Oberon decided that he would look into this man Parker, just in case. The Cut did not have Internet access, just as it did not have cable TV, or use any but a handful of the most basic burner phones that were replaced every two weeks. Oberon would have to visit an Internet café outside the county to research Parker.

Which left the matter of Sheriff Edward Henkel. Oberon wanted him gone, but had resigned himself to waiting until the election. Henkel was well liked in the county, and had easily won his first term. It had rapidly become clear, though, that he was no friend of the Cut. Still, serious confrontations had largely been avoided in the early days, but recently Henkel was becoming markedly more hostile, and Oberon had decided that he didn’t want him working against them for another four years. He had already put together a list of influential individuals who were to be targeted with polite requests, bribes, and what could be viewed – depending on how one took them – as threats in order to ensure that a less proactive sheriff was installed in Plassey County.