The White Road-CP-4 (13 page)

“The truth is, I’d prefer not to be here myself,” I said. “I don’t want to face Faulkner again, not until the trial.”

The two men exchanged a look. “Rumor is that this trial has all the makings of a disaster,” said the warden. He seemed tired and vaguely disgusted.

I didn’t answer, so he spoke to fill the silence.

“Which, I guess, is why the prosecutor is so anxious that you should talk to Faulkner,” he concluded. “You think he’ll give anything away?” The expression on his face told me that he already knew the answer but I gave him the echo he expected anyway.

“He’s too smart for that,” I said.

“Then why are you here, Mr. Parker?” asked the colonel.

It was my turn to sigh.

“Frankly, colonel, I don’t know.”

The colonel didn’t speak as he, along with a sergeant, led me through 7 Dorm, past the infirmary where old men in wheel-chairs were given the drugs they needed to maximize their life sentences. The 5 and 7 Dorms housed the older, sicker prisoners, who shared multibed rooms decorated with hand-lettered signs (“Get Use To It,” “Ed’s Bed”). In the past, older special prisoners like Faulkner might have been housed here, or placed in administrative segregation in a cell among the general population, their movements restricted, until a decision was made about them. But the main segregation unit was now at the Supermax facility, which did not have the capacity to offer psychiatric services to prisoners, and Faulkner’s attempts to injure himself appeared to require some form of psychiatric investigation. A suggestion that Faulkner be transferred to the Augusta Mental Health Institute had been rejected by the attorney general’s office, which did not want to prejudice any future jurors into making a pretrial association between Faulkner and insanity, and by Faulkner’s own lawyers, who feared that the state might use the opportunity to discreetly place their client under more elaborate observation than was possible elsewhere. Since the state regarded the county jail as unsuitable for holding Faulkner, Thomaston became the compromise solution.

Faulkner had attempted to cut his wrists with a slim ceramic blade that he had concealed in the spine of his Bible before his transfer to the MCI. He had kept it, unused, until almost three months into his incarceration. A guard on routine night rounds had spotted him and called for help just as Faulkner appeared to be losing consciousness. The result was Faulkner’s transfer to the Mental Health Stabilization Unit at the western end of Thomaston prison, where he was initially placed in the acute corridor. His clothing was taken away and he was given instead a nylon smock. He was placed under constant camera watch, as well as being monitored by a prison guard who noted any movement or conversation in a logbook. In addition, all communication was recorded electronically. After five days in acute, Faulkner was transferred to sub-acute, where he was allowed state blues to replace his smock, hygiene products (but no razors), hot meals, showers, and access to a telephone. He had commenced one-on-one counseling with a prison psychologist and had been examined by psychiatrists nominated by his legal team, but had remained unresponsive. Then he had demanded a telephone call, contacted his lawyers and asked that he be allowed to speak to me. His request that the interview should be conducted from his cell was, perhaps surprisingly, met with approval. When I arrived in the MHSU, the guards were finishing off some chicken burgers left over from the prisoners’ lunches. In the unit’s main recreation area, the inmates stopped what they were doing and stared at me. One, a stocky, hunched man, barely five feet tall with lank dark hair, approached the bars and appraised me silently. I caught his eye, didn’t like what I felt, then looked away again. The colonel and the sergeant sat on the edge of a desk and watched as one of the unit’s guards led me down the corridor to Faulkner’s cell.

I felt the chill while I was still ten feet away from him. At first, I thought it was brought on by my own reluctance to face the old man, until I felt the guard beside me shiver slightly.

“What happened to the heating?” I asked.

“Heating’s on full blast,” he replied. “This place leaks heat like it’s blowing through a sieve, but never like this.”

He stopped while we were still out of sight of the cell’s occupant, and his voice dropped. “It’s him. The preacher. His cell is freezing. We’ve tried installing two heaters outside, but they short out every time.” He shifted uneasily on his feet. “It’s something to do with Faulkner. He just brings the temperature right down somehow. His lawyers are screaming a blue fit about the conditions, but there’s nothing we can do.”

As he concluded, something white moved to my right. The bars of the cell were almost flush with my line of sight, so that the hand that emerged appeared to have passed through a solid wall of steel. The long white fingers probed at the air, twitching and turning, as if they were gifted with the sense not only of touch, but of sight and sound as well. And then the voice came, like iron filings falling on paper.

“Parker,” it said. “You’ve come.”

Slowly, I walked toward the cell and saw the moisture on the walls. The droplets glittered in the artificial light, gleaming like thousands of small silver eyes. A smell of damp arose from the cell and from the man who stood before me.

He was smaller than I remembered him, and his long white hair had been cut back close to his skull, but the eyes still burned with that same strange intensity. He remained horribly thin: he had not put on weight, as some inmates do when they switch to a diet of prison food. It took me a moment to realize why.

Despite the cold in the cell, Faulkner was giving off waves of heat. He should have been burning up, his face feverish, his body wracked with tremors, but instead there was no trace of sweat on his face, and no sign of discomfort. His skin was dry as paper, so that it seemed he was on the verge of igniting from within, and the flames that emerged would consume him and leave him as burned ash.

“Come closer,” he said.

Beside me, the guard shook his head.

“I’m good,” I replied.

“Are you afraid of me, sinner?”

“Not unless you can pass through steel.” My words brought back that image of the hand seemingly materializing in the air and I heard myself swallow hard.

“No,” said the old man. “I have no need of parlor tricks. I’ll be out of here, soon enough.”

“You think?”

He leaned forward and pressed his face against the cold bars.

“I know.”

He smiled and his pale tongue emerged from his mouth and licked at his dry lips.

“What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“About what?”

“Life. Death. Life after death; or, if you prefer, the death after life. Do they still come to you, Parker? The lost ones, the dead, do you still see them? I do. They come to me.” He smiled and drew in a long breath that seemed to catch in his throat, as if he were in the early stages of sexual excitement. “So many of them. They ask after you, the ones whom you have dispatched. They want to know when you’re going to join them. They have plans for you. I tell them: soon. He’ll be with you real soon.”

I didn’t respond to the taunts. Instead, I asked him why he had cut himself. He held his scarred arms up before me and looked at them, almost in surprise.

“Perhaps I wanted to cheat them of their vengeance,” he replied.

“You didn’t do a very good job.”

“That’s a matter of opinion. I’m no longer in that place, that modern hell. I have contact with others.” His eyes shone brightly. “I may even be able to save some lost souls.”

“You have anyone in mind?”

Faulkner laughed softly. “Not you, sinner, that is a certainty. You are beyond salvation.”

“Yet you asked to see me.”

The smile faded, then died.

“I have an offer for you.”

“You’ve got nothing to bargain with.”

“I have your woman,” came that low, parched voice. “I can bargain with her.”

I made no move toward him, yet he stepped back suddenly from the bars, as if the force of my stare had forced him to do so, like a shove to the chest.

“What did you say?”

“I’m offering you the safety of your woman, and your unborn child. I’m offering you a life untroubled by fear of retribution.”

“Old man, your fight now is with the state. You’d better save your bargains for the court. And if you mention those close to me again, I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” he mocked. “Kill me? You had your chance, and it won’t come again. And my fight is not only with the state. Don’t you remember: you killed my children, my family, you and your deviant colleague. What did you do to the man who killed your child, Parker? Didn’t you hunt him down? Didn’t you kill him like a mad dog? Why should you expect me to respond any differently to the death of my chidren? Or is there one rule for you, and another for the rest of humanity?” He sighed theatrically. “But I am not like you. I am not a killer.”

“What do you want, old man?”

“I want you to withdraw from the trial.”

I waited a heartbeat.

“And if I don’t?”

He shrugged. “Then I can’t be held responsible for the actions that may be taken against you, or them. Not by me, of course: despite my natural animosity toward you, I have no intention of inflicting harm upon you or those close to you. I have never hurt anybody in my life and have no intention of starting now. But there may be others who would take up my cause, unless it was made clear to them that I wished no such thing.”

I turned to the guard. “You hearing this?”

He nodded, but Faulkner merely turned his gaze impassively upon the guard. “I am merely offering to plead for no retaliation against you, but in any case Mr. Anson here is hardly in a position to be of assistance. He’s fucking a little whore behind his wife’s back. Worse, behind her parents’ back. What is she, Mr. Anson, fifteen? The law frowns upon rapists, statutory or otherwise.”

“You fuck!” Anson surged toward the bars, but I caught his arm. He spun at me, and I thought for a moment he was about to strike me, but he restrained himself and shook my hand off. I looked to my right and saw Anson’s colleagues approaching. He raised his hand to let them know that he was okay, and they stopped in their tracks.

“I thought you didn’t go in for parlor tricks,” I said.

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” he whispered. “The Shadow knows!” He laughed softly. “Let me go, sinner. Walk away, and I will do likewise. I am innocent of the accusations leveled against me.”

“This meeting is over.”

“No, it has only just begun. Do you remember what our mutual friend said before he died, sinner? Do you remember the words that the Traveling Man spoke?”

I didn’t reply. There was much about Faulkner that I despised, and much that I did not understand, but his knowledge of events about which he could not possibly know disturbed me more than anything else. Somehow, in some way that I was unable to recognize, he had inspired the man who killed Susan and Jennifer, confirming him on the path that he had chosen, a path that had led him at last to our door.

“Didn’t he tell you about hell? That this was hell, and we were in it? He was misguided in many ways, a flawed, unhappy man, but about that much he was correct. This is hell. When the rebel angels fell, this was the place to which they were consigned. They were blighted, their beauty taken away, and left to wander here. Don’t you fear the dark angels, Parker? You should. They know of you, and soon they will start to move against you. What you’ve faced until now is as nothing compared to what is approaching. Before them I am insignificant, a foot soldier sent ahead to prepare the way. The things that are coming for you are not even human.”

“You’re insane.”

“No,” whispered Faulkner. “I am damned for failure, but you will be damned alongside me for your complicity in that failure. They will damn you. Already they wait.”

I shook my head. Anson, the other guards, even the prison bars and walls seemed to melt away. There was only the old man and I, suspended in darkness. There was sweat on my face, a product of the heat he exuded. It was as if I had caught some terrible fever from him.

“Don’t you want to know what he said to me when he came? Don’t you care about the discussions that led to the deaths of your wife and your little girl? Somewhere deep inside of yourself, don’t you want to know of what we spoke?”

I cleared my throat. The words, when they came, felt coated in nails.

“You didn’t even know them.”

He laughed. “I didn’t need to know them. But you…Oh, we spoke of you. Through him, I came to understand you in ways that you didn’t even understand yourself. I am glad, in a way, that we had this opportunity to meet, although—”

His face darkened.

“We have both paid a high price for the intertwining of our lives. Divorce yourself now, from all of this, and there will be no more conflict between us. But continue on this road and I will be unable to stop what may occur.”

“Good-bye.”

I moved to walk away, but my struggle with Anson had brought me within Faulkner’s reach. His hand reached out and clasped my jacket and then, while I was off balance, pulled me closer to him. I turned my head instinctively, my lips apart to cry out a warning. And Faulkner spit in my mouth.

It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and then I was striking out at him, Anson now pulling me away as I reached for the old man. The other guards came running toward us and I was hauled away, expelling the taste of Faulkner from my mouth even as he continued to howl out at me from his cell.

“Take it as a gift, Parker,” he called. “My gift to you, that you might see as I see.”

I pushed the guards away and wiped my mouth, then kept my head down as I walked past the recreation area, where those deemed to be no danger to themselves or others watched me from behind their bars. Had my head been raised, and my attention been focused elsewhere than on the preacher and what he had just done to me, then perhaps I might have seen the stooped, darkhaired man watching me more closely than the rest. And as I left, the man named Cyrus Nairn smiled, his arms outstretched, his fingers forming a constant flow of words, until a guard looked his way and he stopped, his arms withdrawing back toward his body.