The Burning Soul (2 page)
Authors: John Connolly
Tags: #Mystery, #Azizex666, #Horror, #Fantasy, #Suspense, #Thriller
The two people came together and were halfway across the yard when the front door opened wide and a woman ran toward them. She was in her late thirties, carrying a little weight on her waist and her thighs, her hair flying loose behind her. The new arrivals stopped at the sight of her, and the middle-aged woman raised her arms as though expecting the other to fall into her embrace, but instead the younger woman pushed her way past them, jostling the doctor, one of her shoes falling from her foot, and the white stones on the drive tore at her skin so that she left smears of blood across them. She stumbled and landed heavily, and when she rose again her jeans were ripped, and her knees were scratched, and one of her fingernails was broken. Kurt Allan appeared in the doorway, but the woman was already on the road and her hands were at her mouth and she screamed a name over and over and over . . .
‘Anna! Anna! Anna!’
She was crying now, and she wanted to run, but the road curved to the right and to the left, and she did not know which way to turn. The middle-aged woman came to her and wrapped her in her arms at last, even as her charge fought against her, and the doctor and Allan were approaching as she screamed the name again. Birds took flight from the surrounding trees, and unseen creatures burst from brush and scrub as though to carry the message.
The girl is gone, the girl is gone.
Only the ravens remained. The sun was at last swallowed by the horizon, and true darkness began to fall. The ravens became part of it, absorbed by it and absorbing it in turn, for their blackness was deeper than any night.
Eventually the weasel returned. The fat corpse of a field mouse hung limply in her jaws, and she could taste its blood in her mouth. It was all that she could do not to tear it apart as soon as she had killed it, but her instincts told her to control her urges. Her self-restraint was rewarded, though, for a smaller mouse had crossed her path as she returned to her home, and she fed on that instead before hiding its remains. Perhaps she would retrieve them later, once her larger prize was safely stored away.
She did not hear the raven’s approach. Her first awareness of it came with the impact of its talons upon her back, tearing through her coat and into her flesh. It pinned her to the ground, then slowly began to peck at her, its long beak carving neat holes in her body. The raven did not feed upon her. It simply tortured her to death, taking its time over her agonies. When it had reduced her to a mess of blood and fur, it left the corpse for the scavengers and rejoined its companions. They were waiting for the hunt to begin, and they were curious about the hunter who was to come.
No, the one who had sent them was curious about him, and they watched on his behalf.
For he was the greatest predator of them all.
2
T
here are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one’s humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before. The paradox is that, if this realm is not to be turned into a charnel house, there are those who must accept these truths while always holding fast in their hearts, in their souls, to the possibility that once, just once, the world might give them the lie, that, on this occasion, God will not have blinked.
here are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one’s humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before. The paradox is that, if this realm is not to be turned into a charnel house, there are those who must accept these truths while always holding fast in their hearts, in their souls, to the possibility that once, just once, the world might give them the lie, that, on this occasion, God will not have blinked.
Here is one of those truths: after three hours, the abduction of a child is routinely treated as a homicide.
The first problem encountered by those investigating Anna Kore’s disappearance arose out of the delay in activating the AMBER Alert. She had disappeared from a small but busy strip mall on the mainland where she had gone with a school friend, Helen Dubuque, and Helen’s mother to do some Saturday shopping, and particularly to pick up a copy of
The Great Gatsby
for school. She left the Dubuques to go to the new-and-used bookstore while they went into Sears to buy school shoes for Helen. They were not excessively worried when twenty minutes went by and Anna still had not joined them; she was a bookstore child, and they felt sure that she had simply curled up in a corner with a novel and started reading, losing herself entirely in the narrative.
The Great Gatsby
for school. She left the Dubuques to go to the new-and-used bookstore while they went into Sears to buy school shoes for Helen. They were not excessively worried when twenty minutes went by and Anna still had not joined them; she was a bookstore child, and they felt sure that she had simply curled up in a corner with a novel and started reading, losing herself entirely in the narrative.
But she was not in the bookstore. The clerk remembered Anna and said that she had not stayed long, barely browsing the shelves before collecting her book and leaving. Helen and her mother returned to their car, but Anna was not there. They tried her cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. They searched the mall, which did not take long, then called Anna’s home, just in case she had caught a ride back with someone else and neglected to inform them, although this would have been out of character for her. Valerie Kore, Anna’s mother, was not at home. Later, it would emerge that she was having her hair done by Louise Doucet, who ran a hairdressing business from the back of her home off Main Street. Valerie’s phone rang while she was having her hair washed, and she could not hear it above the sound of the water.
Finally, Mrs. Dubuque called, not 911, but the Pastor’s Bay Police Department itself. This was force of habit and nothing more, a consequence of living in a small town with its own police force, but it created a further delay while Chief Allan debated whether or not to alert the sheriff’s department and the state police, who would in turn inform their Criminal Investigation Division. By the time the AMBER Alert was issued, more than an hour and a quarter had gone by, or more than a third of the three-hour period regarded as crucial in any potential abduction of a minor, after which the child would be presumed dead for the purposes of the investigation.
But once the alarm was raised the authorities reacted quickly. The state had set procedures for such disappearances, and they were immediately activated, coordinated by IMAT, the joint organizational incident-management team. Police patrols converged on the area and began riding the routes. An evidence response team was sent to Pastor’s Bay, and plans were made to forensically examine Anna Kore’s computer, and to seek a signed waiver from her mother granting them access to Anna’s cell phone records without subpoena. Her service provider was alerted, and efforts were made to triangulate the location of Anna’s phone, but whoever had taken her had not only turned off her phone but also removed its battery, making it impossible to trace it by ‘pinging’ the towers.
The victim’s details were passed to the National Crime Information Center, whereupon Anna Kore officially became a ‘missing or endangered person.’ This in turn triggered an automatic notification to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and to the FBI. Team Adam, the NCMEC’s specialized missing children’s squad, was prepped, and CART, the FBI’s regional Child Abduction Response Team in Boston, was put on alert pending a formal request for assistance from the Maine State Police. The game wardens began preparations for a full search of the natural areas surrounding the scene of the presumed abduction.
When the three-hour marker was passed, and Anna Kore had still not been found, a ripple ran through the law-enforcement officials. It was a silent acknowledgment that the nature of the investigation must now inevitably change. A list was assembled of family members and close associates, the first suspects when any harm comes to a child. All agreed to be questioned, backed up by polygraph tests. Valerie Kore was questioned first.
Five minutes into her interview, an unanticipated call was made to the FBI.
Anna Kore had been missing for more than seventy-two hours, but it was a strange disappearance, if it can be said that the circumstances of the abduction of one child are stranger than those of another. It might be more correct to say that the aftermath was proving stranger, for Valerie Kore, the bereft mother, did not behave in the way that might have been expected of one in her circumstances. She seemed reluctant to appear before the cameras at first. There were no quotes from her, or from relatives speaking on her behalf, in the TV reports or the newspapers, not initially. The vanishing of her daughter only gradually became part of a public spectacle, the latest act in an ongoing performance that played upon the general fascination with rape, murder, and assorted human tragedies. It was left to the police, both state and local, to farm out information about the girl to the media, and in the first twelve hours following the AMBER Alert those details were given out sparingly. Veteran reporters felt that there were mixed signals coming from the authorities, and they scented another story behind the bare facts of the girl’s disappearance, but any attempts to work their police sources were rebuffed. Even the local population of Pastor’s Bay seemed to have closed ranks, and the reporters had difficulty finding anyone prepared to comment on the case in even the most general of terms, although this was attributed to the characteristic oddness of the population rather than to any great conspiracy of silence.
After her daughter had been missing for three days, Valerie Kore consented to, or was permitted to give, her first public interview, in which she would appeal for anyone with information about her daughter to come forward. Such appeals had both advantages and disadvantages. They attracted more attention from the general public, and thus could lead potential witnesses to offer assistance. On the other hand, it was often the case that the more emotional the pressure applied to the culprit in these cases, the greater the walls he or she might put up, so a public appeal risked antagonizing the abductor. Nevertheless, it was decided that Valerie should face the cameras.
The press conference took place in the town hall of Pastor’s Bay, a simple wood-frame building just off what was called Main Street but might just as well have been termed Only Street, since Main Street implied that there were other thoroughfares worthy of note when, in fact, the town of Pastor’s Bay pretty much vanished if you stepped more than a stone’s throw in any direction from the bright lights of Main. There was a drugstore and a general store, both owned by the same family and situated adjacent to each other; two bars, one of which doubled as a pizzeria; a gas station; a bed-and-breakfast establishment that didn’t advertise its presence, as the owners were anxious to avoid attracting the ‘wrong kind’ of clientele, and so relied entirely on word of mouth and, it was sometimes suggested, psychic emanations in order to secure custom; two small houses of worship, one Baptist and one Catholic, that didn’t unduly advertise their presence either; and a small library that opened mornings only, and not at all if the librarian was otherwise occupied. When the media circus was given strictly controlled access to the town, it was the most significant influx of strangers that Pastor’s Bay had known since the town was properly established in 1787.
Pastor’s Bay took its name from a lay preacher named James Weston Harris who arrived in the area in 1755 during the war between the English and the French. One year previously, Harris had been among the small group of forty men led by William Trent who were given the responsibility of building a fortification at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in the Ohio Country. The Frenchman Contrecoeur arrived with five hundred men before the stockade could be completed, but he allowed Trent’s party to depart unmolested, and even purchased their construction tools to continue building what would subsequently become Fort Duquesne.
Harris, who had believed himself to be in mortal danger, and had become resigned to death at the hands of the French, took his salvation as a sign that he should commit himself more fully to spreading the word of God, and so he led his family to the tip of a peninsula in New England with the intention of establishing a settlement. The area’s natives, who had sided with the French against the English, in part because of their natural antipathy toward the English’s Mohawk allies, were unimpressed by Harris’s renewed sense of vocation and hacked him to pieces within a month of his arrival. His family was spared, though, and following the cessation of hostilities they returned to the site and created the community that would ultimately become known as Pastor’s Bay. The family’s luck did not improve, however, and the twin forces of mortality and disillusionment eventually cleansed Pastor’s Bay of any lingering Harris presence. Still, they left a town behind them, although there were those who said that Pastor’s Bay had been blighted by the original killing, for it never truly thrived. It survived, and that was about the best that could be said for it.
Now, after the passage of centuries, Pastor’s Bay found itself the focus of serious attention for the first time since the seeds of its foundation were sown and sprinkled with James Weston Harris’s blood. News vehicles were parked on Main Street, and reporters stood before cameras, the thoroughfare at their backs, and spoke of the agonies being experienced by this small Maine town. They thrust microphones into the faces of those who had no desire to see themselves on television, or to speak with strangers about the misfortunes of one of their own. Valerie Kore and her daughter might have been ‘from away,’ but they had made their home in Pastor’s Bay, and its people protectively closed ranks around them. In this they were not discouraged by their police chief, a turn of events that caused some citizens of Pastor’s Bay to whisper, just like the reporters, that there might be more to the disappearance of Anna Kore than met the eye.
A table had been set up at one side of the town hall, with coffee and cookies available for the visitors. The table was staffed by Ellie and Erin Houghton, twin spinsters of uncertain vintage, one of whom, Erin, was also the town librarian, while her sister managed the mysterious, elitist bed-and-breakfast, although it was not unknown for them to swap roles when the mood struck them. Since they were identical, this made little difference to the smooth running of the community. They served coffee in the same manner in which they performed all their tasks, voluntary or otherwise: with a politeness that did not invite undue intimacy, and a sternness that brooked no disobedience. When the first reporters began jostling for space at the table, and some creamer was spilled as a consequence, the sisters made clear from the way they held the coffeepots that such nonsense would not be tolerated, and the hardened journalists accepted the rebuke like meek schoolchildren.
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