A Time of Torment (40 page)

‘I told you: it’s used for storage as well.’

‘Open it, please.’

‘Perry Lutter isn’t in there, and I shouldn’t need to remind you that you don’t have a warrant.’

Oberon didn’t move. Further back, Henkel glimpsed a handful of the Cut watching from the base of the trail. Lucius was one of them.

‘I did say “please”,’ Henkel reminded.

Oberon unclipped a key from his belt, concealing its bone fob in the palm of his hand, and joined Henkel at the door. It opened easily, revealing an unlocked second door with a plastic window, beyond which was a large room piled up with a random assortment of boxes, some old chairs, a couple of couches, and a table. At one end was a pair of bedrooms, each containing a single bed and a locker, and between them a small bathroom barely big enough to accommodate the shower stall, toilet, and sink that it contained. It smelled of a scented soap or gel. Henkel saw hairs around the drain of the shower. They looked damp to him. The shower, at least, had been used recently.

Only bare mattresses remained on the beds. The lockers were open and empty. There were marks on the wall where pictures of some kind had been stuck up. Traces of adhesive material still clung to the paintwork.

The walls of the building were thick. They’d keep the rooms cool in summer, thought Henkel, and warm in winter. The roof might have been tin, but it had been well insulated. The floor was wood laminate, and free of dust. It felt solid enough under Henkel’s feet. A couple of rugs had been rolled up and stood in a corner of the main room.

‘What’s in the boxes?’ Henkel asked Oberon.

‘I don’t know. I haven’t been in here for a while. If you want to search them, feel free.’

Henkel didn’t bother. If Oberon was happy to let him poke around in the boxes, then they contained nothing worth seeing. He stood in the center of the room, his hands in his pockets. Something about the building wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it might be.

‘If you’re done?’ said Oberon.

What am I missing?
Henkel wondered.
What am I not seeing here?

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m done.’

P
aige could just about make out the sound of two voices – one of them Oberon’s – from down in the basement, but not what they were saying. She was seated on the dirt floor against a wall. A pair of battery-powered lamps provided the sole illumination. There was one beside her and another by Gayle, who sat directly across from her. The younger woman was watching Paige carefully, fully engaged with her environment for the first time in months. If they were down here, it was because the man speaking with Oberon represented a threat. This wasn’t just some casual visitor: a threat meant more than an outsider. A threat meant the law.

But Paige didn’t dare move or make a sound because Hannah was beside her, whispering in her ear. Her every word made it clear that if Paige so much as breathed too loudly then what would follow would make her previous punishments seem like blessings by comparison. She held the cattle prod in front of Paige’s face.

‘I’ll touch this to places it was never meant to touch,’ said Hannah. ‘Do you understand?’

Just in case Paige didn’t, Hannah placed the tip against Paige’s right nipple.

‘Zzzzt,’ said Hannah. ‘Zzzzt. Zzzzt.’

She moved the prod down, over Paige’s belly, her groin, before letting it rest between her legs.

‘Zzzzzzzzzt!’

The voices ceased. Footsteps resounded dully from above. A little dust fell from the ceiling. Paige heard the sound of the door closing.

No. No, no, no, no …

But Sherah and Hannah did not move, and the four women remained in the basement for what felt like an hour to Paige, but was almost certainly less, until the door above their heads was opened again, footsteps came across the floor, and the section of laminate hiding the basement entrance was removed. Oberon appeared in the gap that was revealed.

‘Bring them up,’ he said. ‘It’s safe now.’

The ball gags were removed from the women’s mouths, and Sherah cut the plastic restraints with a small knife. Paige shot Hannah a look of pure vitriol as she helped Gayle up the rough wooden steps to the main room, but said nothing. She thought that Hannah was disappointed not to have been able to hurt her with the prod.

Their few possessions were returned, although nobody offered to help them restore the food to the cupboards, or put the pictures back on the walls. Some of the latter were crumpled and torn, including a poster of some boy band of which Gayle was inexplicably fond, as though Paige needed reminding of just how young she really was. A couple of hours later, Sherah and another woman, Agathe, brought the evening meal. It was better and bigger than usual – roast turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, carrots, and peas, all freshly made – and included a cupcake for Paige and Gayle: their reward for being well behaved in the basement. Paige could still taste the rubber of the ball gag in her mouth, and not even the sweetness of the cupcake could overcome it, but she ate everything. Gayle did the same. She had not spoken a word since they had been released from the basement. She had not even recommenced her crooning, and ignored Paige when she asked her if she wanted to wash or dry the dishes and utensils tonight, so Paige did both. Whatever was up with Gayle would reveal itself in time.

Lights out was usually at nine p.m., but both women had small battery-powered book lamps to use for reading, and a pair of flashlights that weren’t much more powerful than the lamps. The computer was charged for them twice daily since the hut had no outlets that the women could access. It was currently fully juiced, so Paige watched a couple of episodes of
That ’70s Show
from a box set that someone from the Cut had bought well used. Gayle didn’t join her, and Paige didn’t laugh at the sitcom. It was just an escape – meaningless sound and light in which she could lose herself for a while, because she didn’t think she could focus on a book, or even a magazine article. For the first time since she had been abducted, someone from outside the Cut had come to the house, and it was probably a lawman. What had brought him? Was there progress at last into the investigation, something to link her or Gayle to the Cut? No, it couldn’t be that: a solid lead would have resulted in more than a cursory examination of their prison. Nevertheless, an outsider had been here, in this room. He would have heard her if she’d been able to cry out.

So close, so close.

And what then? The Cut would have killed him, lawman or not. Kidnapping was good for ten years in West Virginia – Paige had read about it in a newspaper article – and a single rape conviction could put someone away for up to thirty-five years, never mind multiple charges linked to any number of women. Nobody that Paige had encountered so far in this place – not Cassander or Oberon, and certainly not fucking Hannah – was going down without a fight.

Sherah came to check on them shortly after nine, and then the main lights were extinguished. Paige had gone to the bathroom while there was still power, but Gayle had not, and Paige heard her fumbling around by the flashlight’s illumination while she undressed in her own room. Paige ran her hands over the swelling at her belly. She felt heavy and tender. She also thought that she might have to pee again. She wished Gayle would hurry up. She pulled her nightgown over her head and sat on the edge of her bed. A few minutes later she heard the toilet flush, and then Gayle appeared at her door.

‘I have a present for you,’ she said. As she came closer, Paige could see that she was smiling.

Paige wasn’t sure that she liked the sound of this. She knew all of Gayle’s possessions by heart. There was nothing that the girl could give her, or nothing that she might want.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

Gayle held out her hands, palms down, clenched into fists. She had big hands for a small girl, with long, muscular fingers. She’d told Paige that she used to play the piano, before – well, before whatever it was that had made her run away, which she still hadn’t shared with Paige, but about which the older woman had her suspicions. It was in the way Gayle said the words ‘my mom’s boyfriend’, and the expression on her face that came with them, like she’d just swallowed something bad.

‘Pick one.’

‘I need to pee.’

‘Please, just pick.’

‘The left.’

Gayle opened her fist. Lying in the palm was a section of red brick: a good heavy one, too, by the looks of it. Paige took it from her, and weighed it in her hand.

‘Where did you get it?’ she asked.

‘The same place I got this,’ said Gayle, opening her right fist to reveal a long, narrow stone, with a kind of dull point at the end, like some ancient tool discovered in the course of an archaeological dig. ‘In the basement. I dug them up with my fingers while we were stuck down there.’

Paige stared at Gayle with new eyes. While she’d been listening to voices and footsteps that might represent the possibility of rescue, and thinking about how much she hated Hannah, Gayle had been proactive.

These weren’t just stones. These were weapons.

‘So when can we use them?’ asked Gayle.

Paige tightened her grip on the piece of brick, lifted her hand, and brought it down in a single swift movement.
Yes
, she thought,
I can do this
. She pictured Sherah’s nose breaking, and Hannah bleeding from the ears.

‘Soon,’ said Paige.

Real soon.

And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.

Deuteronomy 12:3

P
arker headed east not long after his talk with Alvin Martin, just as the light was starting to fail. The clouds hung low over verdant hills, white wisps trailing from the woods like the smoke from unseen fires. He passed houses with too much junk in their yards, and too little money to maintain them. He saw cheap signs for clothing alterations, barbers and hair salons, the kinds of businesses that could easily be opened with only a little investment, and just as easily closed again. Mailboxes gaped emptily for houses hidden among the trees, and he lost count of the number of
PRIVATE ROAD
signs. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians fought for believers alongside roadside churches that gave no hint of the substance of their beliefs beyond plain crosses and plainer exteriors, most of them indistinguishable from the beaten-down stores and battered homes that surrounded them. If there were any Catholics down here, Parker thought, they were staying low, and out of range.

He had learned little from Norah Meddows, but had anticipated as much. It was enough that he had rattled her, and through Alvin Martin he now believed that he had a name and location for those involved in the torment of Jerome Burnel: the Cut.

If, as he thought, Meddows was involved in all that had befallen her husband, she would call her accomplices in the Cut, and the decision would be theirs to make: whether to continue to ignore Parker’s interest in their affairs – which seemed unlikely, even unwise – or take action against him. They might delay for a time, but eventually, if only by his presence, he would force them to move against him. He would draw them down upon himself, and in doing so, they would reveal themselves. After that, he could start picking them off.

He did not think it strange that the investigation into Jerome Burnel’s disappearance had brought him into contact once again with Alvin Martin, just as he had not considered it particularly odd that Ian Williamson’s grandfather should have provided him with a link to the Dead King. Parker was a weapon in the hands of an unseen god. He walked tangled paths, and the surprise was not that they sometimes crossed, but that they did not do so more often.

But seeing Alvin Martin had reminded Parker of another time, when he was less than he was now, a creature composed of rage and pain, risking his own destruction by seeking out the man who had butchered his family in order to avenge himself upon him. Speaking with Martin brought Parker back to the Traveling Man, and a house in Brooklyn that had once promised so much, and a vision of himself bathed by police lights with the blood of his wife and child on his hands. Some of that anger still remained within him, but now he could feed on it without allowing himself to be consumed in turn.

Or so he assured himself.

He drove in silence toward Plassey County until the rain came and the road grew slick beneath his wheels. A tiredness came over him, and his side and back began to ache. He saw a red-and-yellow light manifest itself among the trees, and he pulled into a parking lot sprinkled with woodchips, behind which stood a low building with a log façade, and windows of stained glass. It appeared more church than diner, but the sign –
RICKETT’S COUNTRY PROVISIONS
– promised coffee and baked goods, along with ‘hand-crafted religious iconography’. Ordinarily, the promise of the latter might have caused Parker to seek more conventional surroundings in which to rest, but the pain was insistent, and he needed to get out of the car and stretch his legs.

Inside, Rickett’s smelled of coffee beans and freshly shaved wood. A counter to the left held mugs and paper cups, and a glass display case with muffins, cinnamon rolls and slices of pound cake. A series of windows ran along the wall behind it, while in front were three tables with mismatched chairs. Choral music was playing in the background, although Parker could not identify it. It didn’t matter. His attention was on the rest of the interior.

Every available space – walls, floors, even the beams under the roof – was covered with carvings. Some were merely heads or busts, others entire bodies. All were images of saints and angels, although Parker recognized only a handful, a holdover from a childhood that had included time spent as an altar boy. Icons of the four evangelists were in a cluster to his left, each depicted in various forms, so that Matthew was a winged man with a lance in one version, and in another he held a purse; John bore a chalice with a snake emerging from it, but beside it, in the form of a smaller carving, he carried an eagle on his arm. Elsewhere, Francis of Assisi was surrounded by a phantasmagoria of birds, fish, and wolf heads, while behind him an armored Gabriel blew a trumpet blast to herald the resurrection of the dead and the coming of the Lord, although Parker recalled Father Flannan telling him that the Bible did not identify the herald by name, and such iconography was a product of Byzantine art, of which Parker knew little then and less now.