A Time of Torment (32 page)

But the discovery of the bodies of Killian and Huff was the most immediate threat to the Cut. Following his meeting with Henkel in the diner, Oberon was convinced that the sheriff would exploit any opportunity offered by the investigation to direct its resources toward the secretive community at the heart of the county. He might already be doing so, for who knew to whom he might be speaking, or what kind of friends he had at the state or federal level? It wasn’t hard to kill a sheriff – Russ Dugar had learned that, in his last moments – but it was a whole lot harder to deal with the consequences.

Oberon didn’t believe that the sheriff’s department, or anyone else, had enough evidence to secure a warrant to search the Cut, not yet, but he had made a couple of calls in an effort to muddy the waters. It would buy them some time, at least, and divert resources. If county, state, or federal forces were about to make a move on the Cut, he would almost certainly be given some warning. He would set out a plan of action, and share it with Cassander and the other elders. Each would be assigned a task to carry out in the event of an impending raid. In the meantime, he would find Perry Lutter, and try to establish what he had or had not seen on the night that Killian and Huff were killed.

But there was one loose end that he could take care of right away.

Oberon returned to his home. The whole house smelled of vinegar as Sherah, his wife, and their daughter, Tamara, were preserving tomatoes, cucumbers, and capers for the winter. Sherah was his second wife. He had married her a decade to the day after his first wife, Jael, died of pneumonia. Sherah was Jael’s younger sister, and both were daughters of Zachary. In a close-knit community like the Cut, such second unions were not unusual. Gideon had been born to another woman between his marriages, and it was this woman whom Oberon blamed for his son’s deficiencies. She, like their troubled offspring, was now dead.

He picked up Tamara and raised her high above his head. She was four years old, and one of the youngest of the children in the Cut. He had hoped for a boy, but had grown to dote on Tamara. He continued to be surprised by just how much love he felt for her. He thought he might even love her more than he had Jael, and certainly more than he loved Sherah. He still wanted another son, but so far Sherah had not conceived again.

‘Have you finished your work for the day?’ Sherah asked him.

‘No, I have one more task to complete.’

‘Will it take long?’

‘It shouldn’t, but I’ll have to wash when I’m done.’

He did not take his eyes from his daughter’s face during the entire conversation. Sherah did not mind. She was used to her husband’s ways. She knew that she was little more than a replacement for her sister, and new breeding stock for her husband. She wanted to give him the son he desired. She enjoyed the process of trying, and she thought Oberon did too, but she did not know whose body was failing them.

Oberon put his daughter down, and went to his private office. When he returned to the kitchen, Sherah saw that he had added to his belt a long knife in a scabbard. She did not comment on it, nor did she do more than pause for a moment in the pouring of vinegar when she saw him take a spade from the shed, and a sealed green bucket, the one in which he stored the quicklime.

‘Where is Daddy going?’ asked Tamara from her perch on the chair by her mother.

‘He has something he needs to finish.’

‘Can I help him?’

Sherah pulled her daughter to her and kissed her on the crown of her head.

‘Maybe when you’re older.’

C
assander was crossing the Square to his house, one of his dogs trotting alongside him, when he saw Oberon approaching, the spade in his left hand, the knife hanging against his right leg. Cassander knew that knife. Oberon used it only on meat.

Cassander opened his mouth to speak, but Oberon threw the spade in his direction before he could say anything. Cassander caught it, and registered the expression on Oberon’s face. It boded well for no one.

‘Tell Lucius to dig the hole,’ said Oberon, without pausing in his stride. ‘And make sure that it’s deep this time.’

Henkel received the call shortly after four p.m., from a buddy in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, an investigator named Scott Stokes. According to Stokes, the investigation into the deaths of Killian and Huff had taken a new turn, based on intelligence received from a CI, a confidential informant. It now looked likely that they’d crossed one of the four cartels – most likely Sinaloa, which controlled eighty percent of the meth trade in the United States, largely through its aggressive policy of combining high purity with lower prices.

‘That’s bullshit,’ said Henkel. ‘Sinaloa doesn’t have a cell in West Virginia.’

‘They’re in Ohio, and that’s close enough, in case you haven’t looked at a map since high school. And Killian and Huff were out of Columbus, which DEA says is simmering nicely for Sinaloa.’

‘No, you have to listen to me here, Scotty. This is local business. It’s tied to the Cut.’

‘DEA says otherwise, and they’re all over this one. They were convinced Huff in particular would lead them to Sinaloa’s door. They figured he was ripe for the turning.’

‘Aw, damn it …’

‘Look, if you find anything solid that says otherwise, then let me know and I’ll run it up the chain. I don’t understand why you’re getting all hot and bothered about this anyway. Nobody here is complaining about the DEA taking two corpses off our hands.’

‘Yeah, well that’s where we’re different, I guess.’

‘Come on, don’t get all sanctimonious on me.’

‘I think you’ve been in Charleston too long, Scotty. You’re becoming citified.’

‘And you’ve been out there with the hillbillies for too long. You need to try living somewhere with a hard road. If the mood takes you, come on down here for an evening and I’ll feed you something better than hoecake.’

Henkel told Stokes that he’d think about it, and hung up. He was furious, but there was no point in taking it out on Stokes, and Henkel wanted to remain on good terms with him. He sat back in his chair and dug a pencil into the wood of his desk until the point snapped. A CI? Maybe he’d been mistaken about the Cut’s involvement, but he didn’t think so. Someone was baiting a hook, knowing that the DEA would bite.

Oberon. It had to be.

Jerome Burnel was blinded shortly after he was brought to the Cut. It had been a simple thing to do – two flicks of a blade – but it made the Dead King’s influence more profound. Still, before Oberon had taken away his eyes he’d permitted him to catch a glimpse of the king, just so Burnel would understand the nature of the entity with which he had been imprisoned.

By now, Burnel was as good as insane.

He was chained to a stake that was anchored in concrete set into the floor of the blockhouse. He slept on dirt, and was fed only water and grits. He stank of his own filth, and no longer tried to speak, reason, or bargain with his captors. Instead he lay flat on the ground, and emitted a low keening. His head barely turned at the sound of Oberon entering the blockhouse.

Oberon knew how the voice of the Dead King sounded. It was unsettling to hear, like small bones rattling in a sack. It spoke in no intelligible tongue, and yet those familiar with its voice held no illusions about its needs and desires. They were unceasing, and foul. Even after all these years, Oberon tried to limit his exposure to the Dead King.

Burnel had been alone with it for days.

The original dead king was almost as old as the Cut, a relic from another age and culture brought to the New World by the earliest Nordic settlers. But the Dead King, the force that now inhabited it, was older than worlds.

Oberon lit a lamp that hung from one of the lower tree branches that ran through the interior. The lamp cast its illumination over Burnel and the Dead King. Its chatter came clearly to Oberon, rendered only slightly more bearable by the fact that it was directed at Burnel.

Oberon knelt beside the blinded man, and drew the knife. In all the time that he had been here, no one had confirmed to Burnel the one thing he surely wanted to know above any other:

Why?

Oberon could have told him, and now, at the last, he decided to do so, although he was not certain that Burnel, in his madness, would understand. He grabbed Burnel by the hair and raised his head. Burnel’s ruined eyes stared up, unseeing. His mouth hung open, and Oberon saw that part of his tongue was missing. He had chewed it off. Oberon wondered if the Dead King had told him to do it. Probably, just as it had encouraged him to draw out his fingernails with his teeth and pile them in a cairn by his water bowl, and pluck the hairs from his head, one by one, leaving him with scattered bald patches like a mangy hound.

‘They were my sons,’ Oberon whispered. ‘All of this is because you killed them, and it will still never be enough. But it’s over now. Your time of torment is done.’

He had intended simply to cut Burnel’s throat, but at the final moment he turned the knife and stabbed him in the chest, and once the first wound was inflicted he found that he could not stop, and so Oberon struck at the dying man over and over – jabbing, slicing, tearing – until he knelt in a pool of blood and flesh, his head filled with the chittering of the Dead King.

Oberon regained consciousness by the mutilated body of Jerome Burnel. He did not know how much time had passed, only that the light was different, and the lamp had gone out. The Dead King was now talking to itself.

Oberon left the blockhouse. He walked down to the river, laid his bloodstained clothes by the bank, and immersed himself in its depths, the blood indistinguishable from the darkness of the water as it flowed around him. When eventually he emerged, he was shivering with cold and shock. He put on only his trousers, and used the end of his shirt to clean most of the blood from his knife. He returned to the Square to discover Cassander seated on the grass by his house, smoking a cigarette, the spade at his feet. The porch light caught him, revealing the dirt on his hands and clothes. He rose as he saw Oberon, took the fleece from his upper body, and placed it on the shoulders of the older man. He didn’t need to ask if it was done.

Oberon glanced at the spade, and the mud on Cassander’s skin.

‘I told you to get Lucius to dig that hole.’

‘I couldn’t find him, so I dug it myself.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

It was a lie, but Oberon did not call him on it. The two brothers, Lucius and Marius, were plotting somewhere, now that they had returned to the Cut. Maybe even Cassander did not realize how dangerous they really were.

Oberon glanced back over his shoulder. The blockhouse was not visible from where he stood.

‘You’ll need a sheet of plastic to carry him in. It’ll have to be burned after. The quicklime is still up there somewhere.’

‘I’ll take care of it.’

‘There’s a lot of blood. If they come—’

‘I told you: I’ll take care of it.’

He walked Oberon to the door of his home, where Sherah was waiting for him, but Oberon did not eat, and later he did not sleep, for he had spent too long in the blockhouse, and the voice of the Dead King was in his head. Instead he watched the darkening of the Cut, and felt the cold air from the north creeping into his bones.

J
ennifer drifted through her father’s house, aware of him as he slept upstairs, but not daring to approach his room, much as she loved to be close to him. He was acutely sensitive to her now; sometimes, even when she watched him from a distance, or silently from the shadows, she would find him turning as if to catch a glimpse of her, the expression on his face that of one who simultaneously wishes to see yet is fearful of seeing.

While she had no sense of time passing when she sat by the lake, here she was aware of the ticking of the clock in the hall, the buzzing of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the flickering of the bulb in the lamp that her father always kept lit in his office. She thought it might be for her, so that she could find him in the night, although she would never have any difficulty making her way through the marshes to the house on the hill. She enjoyed once again being part of this world that she had left – the transience of it, the slow decay measured in minutes and hours. The lake was always still, set in an airless landscape. Only her father’s brief presence there, lingering between realms of existence, had altered it for a time: the shell of a building had appeared, and an old car, driven by entities that had taken the form of grandparents she had never known. He had caused them to manifest themselves, and they had vanished as soon as he turned away from them, electing not to take the Long Ride.

Jennifer wondered what lay at the end of the paths of the dead, beyond the crashing of the waves, where the Long Ride ceased. She recalled the Almost-Mother, and thought that what waited for all was both being and non-being – a loss of self, and its absorption into the whole. But Jennifer did not want to lose herself. She desired to hold on to the complexity of her emotions, to fascination and confusion and love and hate and joy and sadness and envy and rage and—

All of it: she wanted to retain all of it, and by returning to the world from which she had been so violently torn she was reminded of why. Perhaps if her father came with her, it might be different. He had changed the other world once: was it not possible that he could do so again? Or maybe they could stay together by the lake, watching the dead go by, like sentinels at a gateway.

Yet in the end, was it not just that her father remained here while she and her mother were elsewhere, and when he died so also would her connection to this mortal world cease? Then, together, they would join the ranks of the dead, walking hand in hand into an existence where old names had no meaning, where something so small and fleeting, yet so deep and enduring, as human love would be lost forever, like a tear shed into the sea.

She walked to his desk. A book lay open on it, and beside it an array of papers: notes in his handwriting, photocopies, maps, flight reservations for the morning to Columbus, Ohio, and a rental car confirmation. She leafed through them, and had someone been passing in the hall, someone who was not her father, they might have thought that the wind had found its way beneath the window frame to sow disorder while it could.