Charisma (36 page)
He walked slowly down the hall, stopping at every door, opening every door. The rooms were all empty.
Behind him, the patrolman was repeating the process, just in case.
Two doors from the end of the hall on the left side, Pat Mallory got to Andy Murphy’s room. He didn’t know it was Andy Murphy’s room. He only knew it was full of photographs, just like the room of that woman down on Sullivan Street. He looked on the floor and saw the crumpled heap of boy’s clothing, the mess on them that had to be blood. He raised his head and heard the sirens coming up outside.
He had just decided to go back down and meet them when Susan’s voice exploded over his head.
“No,” she shouted. “No, Dan, no, don’t you dare
touch
him.”
She had only been able to see a little sliver of space, but she had seen this. Andy coming for the boy named Mark and Mark with the knife out, with the knife ready. She kept thinking that it was right, not Christian, but still right, she wanted to see Andy dead and bloody on the attic floor at this boy’s hand. Then the sliver was clouded with a blacker thing and she realized in shock that she had forgotten again, forgotten about Dan.
Dan was coming up on the boy’s other side the way he had come up on hers. The boy was paying no attention. He was too crazy to pay any attention. Even in her hiding place, she could see that. Dan was reaching out for the boy and Andy was backing up, backing up, putting the boy in position.
Susan grabbed the loose board she had used to get into the space and pulled it, hard, so hard that she cracked it in half. The sharp smack of it went across the attic as if another gun had gone off and they both turned. Both her brothers turned. The boy did not. Susan could see the boy coming up on Andy, moving steadily, not changing plans at all and she let him come.
“No,” she shouted at Dan. “No, Dan, no, don’t you dare
touch
him.”
“Fucking holy
bitch
,” Dan said.
That was when the boy’s knife came down on Andy’s neck, slashing into the side of it, cutting across the windpipe and coming through the other side.
A second later the attic door burst open and Pat Mallory launched himself in, went down on his knees, and fired.
He caught Dan Murphy in midair, with a shot to the heart that went in clean.
He caught Mark Harrigan with the knife in his hands, staring at the damned thing as if he’d never seen it before.
He caught Susan Murphy fainting.
1
A
T FOUR O’CLOCK ON THE
morning of Tuesday, December 23, Denny Grissom woke up. Pat Mallory was there to see it—although he didn’t. He was sitting at the back of the PICU waiting room with his legs stretched over a coffee table, fast asleep. It had been a long night after a month of long nights, made even longer by the realization that he had panicked, just a little. Those photographs they had found in Martha O’Connell’s room had not really included every public official in the city of New Haven. They hadn’t even included most of them. What he hadn’t noticed in his first shock he noticed later: there were a lot of repeats. Now he had two major problems on his hands and no idea what to do about either of them. There was the Case itself, not quite ruined by all the publicity he had made sure it got. It had a special prosecutor down from Hartford, an investigative unit from the state police, and little clots of men from the U.S. Marshal’s office and the FBI, all swarming around, trying to work it into something they could understand. Then there was the Fallout, as Susan persisted in calling it: the body of Father John Kelly, found in a window seat on the first floor along with the body of the very last boy; the boys they had found when they had finally raided The Apartment; and Mark Harrigan. Any civilian bright enough to spend his Saturday nights watching reruns of “Hill Street Blues” would have thought that Mark Harrigan was part of the Case, and no cop would have expected him to be. He was not only a twelve-year-old child, but crazy as a loon.
On the other side of the waiting room, Denny Grissom’s mother had fallen asleep with her head against the plate-glass window that looked in on Denny’s bed. She began to slump and caught herself, grabbing onto the windowsill with one hand and locking her knees. When she was upright again, she looked through the glass and swallowed hard. God only knew where Ken was. This had gone on so long it could have been going on forever, time before time and time after, like God in the Athanasian Creed.
On the couch, Pat Mallory stirred and wondered, in his sleep, what Susan was doing.
On the other side of the plate-glass window, Denny Grissom moved his head very slowly from side to side, from side to side, from side to side. His eyes were a camera panning a movie-set hospital scene, but he didn’t know that. He only knew that his eyes were open and that when his head was flat back against his pillow, he caught sight of his deliverance. He wanted to look at nothing else, but he couldn’t make himself stop moving.
On her side of the plate-glass window, Karen Grissom was rubbing her eyes with her fists. Her eyes stung and she kept wishing they would stop. She kept feeling full of salt. She put her hands down at her sides and blinked, willing tears. She turned toward the plate-glass window and stopped.
Denny’s head was just the way it had always been, lying back, pointed toward the ceiling, but there was a difference.
He was staring at her.
Susan Murphy didn’t know when she had first realized that Mark Harrigan was the boy that nobody wanted. Even his parents, who had been brought up from Oxford three days after the Mess had gone down, didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They couldn’t bring him home, not after everything he’d done. They couldn’t make him fit the picture they had of the son they’d lost, either. He’d been eight when he was picked up. He was twelve now. In a little while, he would be a man. In the meantime, he was on a locked ward at the hospital, cleared for visitors under observation, waiting for disposition of his case.
Susan had started spending her time with Mark partly because she was interested in him, and partly because where he was was the only safe place she knew—safe from the police. She didn’t want to talk about Dan or Andy, or what they had done. She had been living in Pat Mallory’s guest room since the night her brothers had died. She supposed that, after a while, she would move across the hall to Pat’s own room and they would finish what they had started. Pat Mallory’s guest room was no place to keep the book she was reading. It would certainly be no place to dispose of it when she was done.
She dog-eared the lined page she had just finished reading for the third time and put the book down on her lap. It was one of those sewn-binding, cloth-covered “keepsake books” you could buy in any Hallmark outlet, and it was crammed full of Andy’s handwriting. Andy’s handwriting was so small, she sometimes wished she had a microscope to read it with. Mark was sitting cross-legged in a chair on the other side of the room, holding her copy of the breviary, reading Lauds. She had offered to say the hours with him, even to let him read the declamations while she prayed the response, but he had turned her down.
When she put Andy’s book on her lap, Mark closed the breviary and looked up at her. “Is it still what you told me it was?” he said. “All about your father?”
“Yes.”
“Will they say it was your father who made him do what he did—do what he did to us?”
“Not if I don’t give them this.”
They looked at each other and almost smiled—almost, because the mirror on the north wall of the room was two-way, and there might be someone behind it. It was a long shot at four o’clock in the morning, and an even longer shot in the case of Mark. For all the vaunted interest of psychiatrists in studying “unusual” cases, there wasn’t one in the city of New Haven interested in studying Mark. They shied away from him, the doctors did, and the nurses did, too. Susan and Mark both noticed it. The people in white filled Mark full of Thorazine and disappeared.
Susan picked up Andy’s book again and looked at the cover, back and front and spine. She had found it where she knew no police officer could, in one of those places—in the walls and under the floors and God knew where else—that the house on Edge Hill Road was full of. There were things of hers up there in places like that, too, bits and pieces of her adolescent privacy, when privacy had been a treasure and revelation an act of suicide. She put the book back in her lap and said, “I thought, you know, at the time, that it was Dan who’d killed him. That he’d gone into one of his drunken insanities and things had just gotten out of hand, and then that Dan and Andy had worked it out together and covered it up. But things didn’t get out of hand at all. For once in his life, Daddy was stone-cold sober.”
“He was just a bad man,” Mark said, “your brother Andy.”
“Dan was no prize either. They were both men who looked at people as assets and liabilities, and nothing else. Our father was the worst possible kind of liability.”
“That’s how I know it really is the Holy Spirit who talks to me,” Mark said. “That’s how I know I have a charism.”
Susan opened her eyes. “How?”
“Because I set out to kill you,” Mark said. “You were the first one. I saw the notice in the newspaper, the little newspaper the church puts out—”
“Connecticut Catholic?”
Mark shrugged. “He put a sword in my hand,” he said, “to cut down all the people who had betrayed Him. I was supposed to cut them down and leave them where they could be found, to let the others know, to let everybody know it was connected.”
“Nuns who left their orders and what happened to you at The Apartment were connected.”
“In times of great apostasy, the devil always has his way with the world. I read that in a book.”
“It sounds like you did.”
“When they decided not to be nuns anymore, they gave the devil their energy. They were like batteries. Making him go.”
“Who?”
“Your brother Andy. Your brother Dan. All the rest of them.”
“That’s a ‘them.’ ”
“I thought you were one of them,” Mark said, “but I never made any real mistakes. The Holy Spirit kept me from that. He gave me a charism, and then when we were all together, us and them, in the attic, He made me
see.
”
“Yes,” Susan said, “I know He made you see.”
“He’s gone away from me now,” Mark said. “Did you know that?”
“Yes,” Susan said, “I know that.”
“I hope they let you do what you asked them to do,” Mark said. “Send me to that place your order runs. I think I’d like it there. Like being a monk forever.”
It was getting on toward four-thirty and Susan thought it was time she went down and got herself some coffee to drink. Mark’s last Thorazine had been delivered half an hour ago. It was beginning to get to him. She could see that his eyes were growing heavy and his shoulders were beginning to slump. Thorazine was not supposed to put people to sleep, but it always did just that to Mark. Maybe the doctors put something in it to make sure it did just that.
The place that her order ran was called a mental hospital, but what it really was was an old-fashioned insane asylum, a hospice for hopeless cases.
She picked up the book again, put it down again, picked it up again, put it down. When she finally abandoned it and looked back at Mark, he was asleep.
It was time she got rid of this book, and found Pat, and tried to talk him into going home.
Up in PICU, Pat Mallory was in no position to go home. He didn’t know what he was in a position to do, because he didn’t know what was going to happen. Karen Grissom had just done a very odd thing. She had leaped for the door of the back unit, pulled it open, and raced inside. It was equipped with an alarm that had to be blocked before the door was opened. The alarm was set whenever the receptionist was away from her desk, to make sure no one in the waiting room did anything stupid. Since the waiting room was usually full of parents the people in it often felt called upon to do something stupid. Now the alarm was going off like the fire-drill siren in a parochial school. Nurses were racing in from everywhere, running up to the door of the PICU and rattling its knob, yelling through the plate-glass window for Karen Grissom to turn around right this minute and come
out.
Karen Grissom wasn’t listening to them. She was standing over Denny’s bed, looking down at his face, and he was looking back at her. From what Pat could see, Denny didn’t hear the sirens any more than his mother did.
Karen Grissom put out her hand, touched Denny’s forehead, and smiled.
Denny put out
his
hand, touched
her
hand, and said, “Mama?”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1992 by Orania Papazoglou
cover design by Heather Kern
ISBN 978-1-4532-9303-4
This 2013 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
