Instruments of Night (8 page)

Later that same night, as he’d lain in his bed in the room he’d been given in Mrs. Flexner’s house, Graves had seen it all like a movie in his head: a small blond boy standing in a pale yellow field, the line of fire slithering toward him, twisting as it came, like a flaming snake. “Milford,” he’d whispered. It was the first word he’d uttered in a year.

Still, for all the horror of the story she’d told him, it was also Mrs. Flexner who’d undoubtedly done the most
to help Graves get back to normal after his sister’s murder. She’d never insisted that he turn off the light in his bedroom, and she’d been willing to sit up with him during the long black nights when he could not sleep, playing Parcheesi with him at the kitchen table. She’d taken him to the local swimming hole, and said nothing when he’d refused to go into the water. She’d taken him to the county fair as well, and watched with him as other kids trustfully clambered into metal rocket ships or lined up for the Haunted House, taking risks Graves would not take, seemingly eager to know fear because they’d never known terror.

But more than anything, Mrs. Flexner had never once during his long year of silence pressured Graves to speak. She’d always seemed quite confident that one day he’d talk again, that given time and patience, his shattered heart would mend.

It was this simple faith in his ultimate recovery, Graves supposed, that had made Mrs. Flexner finally insist that Sheriff Sloane stop making periodic visits to question him.

Graves had been sitting in the old wooden swing when the sheriff came that last time, close enough to hear what he said to Mrs. Flexner as the two of them stood together in the front yard:

Martha, the fact is, what was done to Gwen Graves was the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen.

I don’t doubt that, Sheriff.

She was hung, ma’am. Hung from a beam and cut open. Like an animal. Yes, I know.

And it’s been almost a year, and right now I don’t know one bit more than I did when I started. There’s just one thing I know for sure. Whoever it was, he’s still out there somewhere. Free as a bird. Looking for some other young girl.

I know, Sheriff.

That’s what’s so frustrating. The fact that I don’t have a thing to go on. Just car tracks in the driveway, that’s all. The boy, there, he’s the only thing I got that’s even close to a witness.

But if Paul wasn’t at the house, what good can he do you?

Not much, I reckon.

Well, back when he was talking, he said he hadn’t seen a thing. Said he never came to the house that night. Said he slept in the field a mile away.

Yes, I know he said that.

Then what’s the good of keeping after him?

Graves had always remembered how Sheriff Sloane’s eyes had slid over to him when he gave his answer:

Well, if he didn’t go home that night, then what about the hoe?

The hoe?

Why wasn’t it with him when we found him in the field?

Where was it?

Inside the house. Near where his sister hung.

A shadow suddenly spread across the diner’s speckled Formica table top, startling Graves, jerking him back into the present.

“Will there be anything else, sir?”

Graves glanced up. The waitress had long, straight hair, and for an instant she seemed to hang above him, swinging slowly, suspended by a cord but still alive, her hands clawing at the rope, red and raw, blood flowing down her arms in gleaming rivulets.

“How about a warm-up?”

Graves shook his head. “No, nothing else.” His voice was a whisper.

She nodded and moved away, leaving him in the booth, the thick white coffee cup squeezed tight in his fingers. He could see the two men in green coveralls as they began to
saunter toward the far corner of the street. He was still watching when they reached the end of the block. Then a truck swept by, blocking his view. Once it passed, the pair was gone.

He finished the last of his coffee, rose, and headed out of the diner.

Normally, he would have gone back to his apartment after having breakfast. But the thought of returning to his typewriter, to a scene in which Slovak stood on a narrow ledge, staring hopelessly into Kessler’s triumphant eyes, did not appeal to him. Instead, he decided to take a stroll, observe the great spectacle of the city on a bright summer morning.

He’d arrived in New York in the fall, only a month after his eighteenth birthday. He’d had nothing but the meager money he’d gotten from the sale of the family farm, but it had been enough to buy a bus ticket, rent an apartment, and keep him fed and clothed until he’d found a job. He’d never been in doubt as to why he’d come to New York. He’d seen it portrayed countless times in movies and magazines, a dense cityscape that was the exact opposite of the wide fields and empty woods and remote farmhouses of rural North Carolina, all of which filled him with a panicky sense of dread. The sheer density of the place, its teeming crowds, answered his need to surround himself with high walls, to walk streets that were never deserted. Once in the city, he’d moved into the most crowded neighborhood he could find, into the largest building on its most congested street, and in that building had chosen the apartment that had the thinnest walls. He would never again live in a place where screams could not be heard.

It was a tiny studio that looked out over the southwest corner of First Avenue and Twenty-third Street, and at night Graves took comfort in the proximity of his neighbors,
the sounds they made as they came and went from their apartments. Morning and evening were best, but regardless of the hour he overheard a steady stream of life, people padding up and down the narrow corridor, chatting or bickering as they went. It never mattered what they said, only that they were so close. He needed only to feel their nearness, their vigilance, their eyes upon him, their ears listening. For he knew that the greatest evils required isolation. They were carried out in distant woods, deep basements, lonely farmhouses. Places out of sight. Out of reach. Where nothing stirred but the will to harm. Never to be entirely alone, that was the only safety. He had concluded that such nearness was the only protection against what others might do to you. Or what you might do to others.

It was nearly noon by the time Graves returned to his apartment. He made a ham sandwich and ate it at the wrought-iron table on the terrace. It had little taste, as all things did to him. He felt textures, the gristle in the meat, the slosh of what washed it down. All else was mere gruel.

After eating, Graves returned to his typewriter and once again sought a way out for Slovak. But once again, nothing came. And so after an hour of futile striving, he lay down in his bedroom, hoping a short nap might refresh him, or that a solution might suddenly present itself in a dream.

He’d been asleep for nearly an hour when the phone rang. He rolled over and plucked the receiver from its cradle.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Mr. Graves? Allison Davies. I hope I’m not
disturbing you, but I wanted to know if you’d looked at the photographs I sent you.”

“Yes, I did.”

“And have you reached a decision about coming to Riverwood?”

Graves realized that, in fact, he
had
made his decision, that while he’d slept, his imagination had played a scene for him, one that existed in none of his books. In the scene, Slovak crawls through a dank, dripping tunnel to find the decomposed body of a little girl. Even as he crawls, he knows that her body has been decaying for days, that nothing is left but slime and maggots. And yet Slovak goes on, dragging himself through the stinking muck because he knows that this pile of rotten flesh was once a blue-eyed child, one whose mother still waits for him to bring her murdered daughter home.

“Mr. Graves?”

“Yes, I’m here,” Graves answered. In his mind’s eye he could see the photographs Miss Davies had sent him. They were still spread across the table in the adjoining room, Mrs. Harrison’s letter resting forlornly in their midst.

“Well, will you do it, then?”

He heard Slovak whisper in his ear.
Sometimes you must do a thing because your own darkness will overwhelm you if you don’t.

It was a line he’d written years before, written in his first book. But now it seemed like nothing less than the old detective’s solemn admonition, the dying wish of someone Graves had long ago created and now come to revere, his weary, wasted questioner of Cain.

“Will you come to Riverwood?” Miss Davies asked.

He gave his answer achingly, like someone beaten into submission, the word dropping from his mouth like a broken tooth.

“Yes.”

T
he next morning Graves did his laundry, threw away the few perishables that had accumulated in his refrigerator, then arranged for Wendy, the young woman who lived next door, to pick up any mail he might receive while at Riverwood. She hadn’t bothered to look through the peephole before she’d opened it, and for a long time after he returned to his own apartment, Graves found himself considering the things that might have been done to her had some other man been at the door, pressed his dusty boot against it, then pushed it open. He’d even briefly envisioned Sykes at work while Kessler sat nearby, barking orders—
Use that. Stick it there
—delighted by the horrors he could instruct another to perform.

To escape the mood such visions called up, Graves busied himself with the last of his chores, then packed a single suitcase—the same one he’d brought from North Carolina over twenty years before—and placed it beside the door. He put his typewriter in its carrying case and placed it
beside the suitcase. That was it. There was nothing more to do. No plants to water. No animals to care for. No friends to notify of his move to Riverwood. He had nothing to nurture, nothing to protect. No one to whom anything of value should be entrusted. He’d given Wendy the key to his mailbox and the key to his apartment so that she could leave his mail on the kitchen table. He knew that when he returned, the usual accumulation of bills and third-class flyers would be waiting for him. There’d be no personal letters, however, no notes from relatives or friends. It was the path he’d chosen—a conscious choice—to live so stripped of human connection that when he died there would be no grief.

He read for the rest of the day, shifting from the sofa to the chair, from his desk to the small table by the window. At around six he made dinner, ate it quickly, then walked out onto the terrace and watched night fall over the city. In recent books Slovak had taken up the same twilight vigil, a lonely figure perched on a rusting fire escape, staring out over the jagged field of spires and chimneys. This merging of Slovak’s habits with his own did not trouble Graves, however. It seemed the inevitable consequence of the life they’d lived together. But while Slovak brooded about Kessler as he peered out over the city, working to unearth the force that drove the latter to such awesome acts of harm, Graves worked only to empty his mind of thought.

Once the darkness had settled over the city, Graves returned inside, stretched out on the sofa, and began to read again. The book was a huge nineteenth-century novel peopled with scores of characters, plots and subplots, a work whose vast sweep made his own novels appear puny, repetitive, limited in theme. And yet he could not write anything other than what he wrote, could not portray a single aspect of the human experience beyond Kessler’s
evil, Sykes’ cowardice, and Slovak’s futile effort to bring them down.

He read for nearly two hours, then rose from the sofa, walked into the bedroom, and crawled into bed. He had just reached for the light, when he heard a hard thump on the other side of the wall. He knew that it came from Wendy’s bedroom, and for a time he listened anxiously for some other sound, a low moan, a cry of pain. Or something worse. A sound he recalled from the depths of his past, the soft, rhythmic pleading of a young woman, begging, however hopelessly, to live.