The Man From Primrose Lane Part 17

Why do demons choose to hide in plain sight? David wondered as he drove up to Brune's house the following afternoon. Dahmer, Gacy, Ridgway. Like Brune, they'd all lived in workaday homes. Not like the movies, not in dungeons or old Victorians poised above run-down motels.

It was a drab, low-slung ranch, a vinyl-sided bungalow with a postage-stamp front lawn and a mailbox in the shape of a fish. It sat in a run-down allotment in the no-man's-land between Akron and Canton, near the regional airport.

He didn't know what he hoped to find here. He certainly didn't entertain any notion of finding conclusive proof of his emerging theory: that Brune had been a rapist of women, his protege the serial killer of young girls. He doubted such evidence existed; Riley Trimble was not the type to keep a diary.

Still, he was drawn to the place. There was a thought playing at the back of his mind, a romantic, thematic thought. And it was this: the only thing that separated him from absolute truth now was a single dimension, Time. He stepped out of the car. Here he was, in the exact location-in three dimensions-where Trimble, presumably, had driven into his garage with Sarah Creston in the back of his van. The only thing keeping him from witnessing the crime was Time; a single, but very necessary, ingredient in both absolute truth and soft-batch cookies.

David knocked lightly on the door and a s.h.i.+rtless man with a paunch and a stubbly goatee answered. David did his best to explain his interest in the house, and then asked a crazy question. "Could I take a look inside?"

"I don't think so, boss," the man said.

"Did you ever look in the crawl s.p.a.ces? Ever find anything unusual?"

"That's about all I have to say." The man closed the door.

David returned to the car and drove around the block to a tiny cemetery situated behind Brune's house. The cemetery was separated from the home by a thick swatch of forest a quarter mile deep. Again, he had no real hope of finding anything. Again, he was flying on instinct. Wouldn't a serial killer bury things in the woods? Didn't that happen on TV? It did. But in real life? He thought it was worth ten minutes of his time. He parked in the back, near a tilting tombstone from 1897, dedicated to some guy with only a first name, Tanner. Tanner. He filed it away for later use. He liked the sound of the name. Strong. Underused.

It was the beginning of a hot summer and the air was heavy, rippling with gnats and midges and horseflies, the ground saturated from recent thunderstorms. He hadn't prepared for the briars and burrs and berry bushes that lined the forest and they bit at his khaki pants and stung his ankles, but when he was through, the going was easier. Skunkweed and ferns grew to his knees, but bent as he pa.s.sed. After a while he became acutely aware of the silence. He heard no birds, no deer crackling the bracken under hoof, no squirrels fighting in branches overhead. He heard no crickets or frogs. This patch of old-growth forest was utterly silent except for his intrusions. And it was old-growth. The oaks were wide as cabins, their canopies blocking out the sun almost completely. It was dark, but there was also a darkness. He felt it in his bones, in a dull aching in his head, the taste of copper in his mouth, like dried blood. This place had remained untouched throughout modern human history, undeveloped by white man. Had the Indians avoided this place, too? Was it some hallowed or evil ground that people avoided subconsciously? How much was David imagining simply because he knew how close this place was to a den of true evil? Not much-even the birds felt it.

As he was about to turn back, David happened upon the clearing.

It was lined with giant white elm trees that had miraculously avoided the disease that felled their Ohio cousins: great, formish, idyllic elms, the likes of which David had never seen and never would again. It was a large circle, perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, carpeted with bluegra.s.s that bended and lolled in the dank, wet hot. It was so bright in the center that David's eyes hurt and he was forced to squint so much his vision was reduced to a thin slit. It was several minutes before he noticed the stuffed animals.

The animals were crucified upon the elms.

Brown bears, sock monkeys, a child's furry tiger. Someone had nailed them to the trees that lined the clearing, every single elm, so that they faced the center. David inspected the closest tree, where the tiger was crucified. Its paws, he saw, were not just nailed to the tree, but also stapled and tied. A swatch of duct tape had been applied to its mouth. Two roach clips were secured to the fur where the tiger's b.r.e.a.s.t.s would be. There was a gaping hole where its private parts were located. As he watched, a hornet crawled out of the hole and zipped away. The tiger had been there a long time, its once-orange fur mottled with fungus and brown as sewage. He couldn't tell if the animals had hung here long enough for Trimble to have done it. It was possible some other troubled boy had lived nearby and discovered this clearing one unlucky afternoon. For a moment he caught an image of a blond-haired boy dancing in the clearing, naked and singing a nonsensical song in a foreign and lost language David thought might be Aramaic.

His imagination could get away from him if he let it. Especially when he was scared. If he let the fear in, if he let in the fear that had tightened its grip around his heart the moment he stepped into the clearing, if he let that fear run around inside him, there would be a cascading of delusions like this, he knew, and he would find himself running back to his car half out of his mind.

His father had taught him how to control his fear. When he was twelve, David had stayed up through the night after watching The Exorcist on TV. The next day, his father had made him walk through the woods behind their house alone, all the way to the end of their property and back, to prove to David that there were no demons waiting for the opportunity to kill him. It had been a particularly frightening hike because the neighborhood kids had believed those woods to be haunted. Legend had it that the Native American tribe that had once occupied the area believed a demiG.o.d lived there, an imp that took the form of a cat and who would allow pa.s.sage only by subjecting travelers to degrading acts of corruption and humiliation. But he had returned unscathed. Little had frightened him since.

But now he was sure that something was watching him.

Still, he couldn't leave without seeing what was in the middle of the clearing.

It was a stump, the stump of a gargantuan oak. He wanted to touch it, to feel its oldness, to find out if it was petrified. He didn't dare. Whatever was darkening these woods came from this stump, from the roots that still thrived in the ground below.

A single word was carved into it: BEEZLE.

The word meant something to David, but not in this context. He knew of beezle from Dr. Seuss. Horton Hears a Who. The animals in that little gem of a story had planned to commit genocide on the Whos of Whoville by throwing their world (which existed on a speck of dust perched atop a flower) into boiling Beezle-Nut oil.

He felt an urge to say the word aloud, to hear the sound of the word, the name, in this clearing. But the thought of the repercussions stopped him. What would happen here if he muttered such an invocation? He did not care to know. If this was the place Beezle called home, he didn't want to meet him. Or It. And he certainly did not want to call it.

And through the wrongness of the clearing, he felt something else. Or imagined it. The sensation surfaced as a picture in his mind as he tried to draw out the a.n.a.logy. He thought of two bar magnets, placed such that their opposite polarities were close to touching. Slowly, the magnets scooted toward each other, gathering speed, and collided, then rested, at last. In some way, he was one of those magnets. And this clearing. No, this stump, the Thing it represented. This darkness was the other magnet and it pulled at him, promising a final rest for his soul if he would only surrender to it.

David awoke to himself, just as he was about to step onto the stump. He blinked the daze out of his eyes, turned, and walked out of the woods. He forced himself to go slowly.

In the car, David kicked it into gear and macht-schnelled the h.e.l.l right out of there. He stopped at the nearest gas station and bought a pack of Marlboros. He unwrapped the pack and placed a cigarette in his mouth. He was too afraid of emphysema to smoke it, so he just rubbed his tongue around the filter and felt the weight of it between his lips. It calmed him immediately.

She's cheating on you, David. She's f.u.c.king the band director. They share an office, you know. She always stays after work so late. What is she doing there? She's not grading papers, I'll tell you that.

Brune's voice, nasal and meek, the voice of a good accountant.

David looked at the clock above the kitchen sink. It was almost eight.

He's fingering her right now. He's knuckles-deep, digging.

"Stop it," he said.

He looked down. Brune's Box of Fabulous Files was spilling over. David had gathered police reports from every jurisdiction that had cases of missing or murdered girls from the early eighties and nineties, trying to find a link, something definitive to tie Trimble to the crimes. He realized, sickly, what he was really doing. He was feeding Brune's box. Adding evil to it. New tales of murder, added and mixed with Brune's own handiwork. And as he added to the box, Brune's voice grew louder within his head. He was feeding a ghost and the ghost was becoming more real.

Why are you still wasting your time on this? I left these notes behind for a real journalist. Not you. Not some kid. You don't have the stones.

He had written one word on a blank sheet of printing paper.

Beezle. Ha, Beezle. You don't know what you're talking about.

He heard Elizabeth's key in the door's lock and shuddered because he knew what Brune had in mind, what Brune really wanted.

Do it.

Never.

She's a cheating c.u.n.t. Take her.

No.

Then do the world a favor and cash out.

I might.

You're a coward. I don't believe anything you say.

"David?" her voice, her hand on his head, twisting his hair, loving.

How he wanted to twist that hand behind her until it broke, until she couldn't fight back. He didn't have roach clips in the apartment, but he had tweezers that might work. And he had some spare wire and his car battery.

"Go away," he said. "Elizabeth, please. Go away for a bit."

"What are you talking about?"

"Go to your aunt's. I'll call you."

"David, talk to me."

"Get the f.u.c.k out of here," he said. "Get the f.u.c.k away from me. Leave me alone."

She left. He never looked at her.

Coward.

She'll be back.

You're getting weaker.

She'll be back.

Let's read some more. What do you say? Let's read some more about my favorite Boy Scout, the apple of my eye.

"I'm planning to kill myself," he said.

Athena Popodopovich, the thin psychiatrist whose name he'd randomly picked out of the phone book earlier that afternoon, a week and a day after he had made Elizabeth leave their apartment, looked back at him with genuine concern and interest. "How will you kill yourself?" she asked.

"I'm going to jump off the Y-Bridge."

"Well, that'll be messy."

He watched for a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth but she wasn't being cheeky. She was being blunt, being true.

"You wouldn't be the first of my patients to take a swan dive off the Y-Bridge," she said. "I just figured a writer would be a little more imaginative."

"I thought about eating hot coals but that's been done. Most suicides are cliches. The running car in the garage, the gun in the mouth, the hanging-"

"The jumper."

"See," he said. "It's hard to find a new angle. Besides, the whole reason I'm at this point is because I can't think original thoughts anymore. I can't write anymore. My editor is going to figure that out soon. And then I won't have a job."

"Why can't you write?"

"I need to hear my voice, in my head, you know, when I write. Sounding out the words, telling the story. That's part of my process. I can't hear my voice anymore."

"Why can't you hear your own voice anymore?"

"All I hear is Brune. Ever since I opened that box, I hear his voice. I think about him all the time. From the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep and then he's in my dreams. I can't get Sarah Creston's face out of my head. Donna and Jennifer are there, too, but it's Sarah mostly, because I have so many pictures of her."

"Are these voices telling you to harm yourself? To harm others?"

David buckled. His chest heaved. He started to cry. Heavy sobs. "Yes," he said. "There's something inside me. I can feel it burrowing in."

Dr. Popodopovich sat up in her chair and wrote on a green form. "David," she said in a calm and friendly voice not devoid of amus.e.m.e.nt. "It's possible you're suffering from post traumatic stress disorder brought on by your exposure to these horrific stories. In a sense, you're reliving these tragedies. I've seen this before in journalists who've covered the wars in Iraq. David, you're going to spend the night at the Glenns; it's a mental health facility just a few miles west of here. When someone tells me they intend to harm themselves I must do this, you see. But I will promise you that the nature of everything you have told me and everything you will tell me in the future will remain under the strictest of confidences. Do you understand why I have to do this?"

"Yes."

"The fact that you sought me out tells me you are stronger than you believe yourself to be. We'll get you through this. And the first step begins right now."

He stared at his feet.

"Look at me, David. We're going to get you through this. David, look ...

... at me," Elizabeth said, as they walked back into the courtroom. "Just look at me, if they start attacking you, okay?"

He nodded and walked to the witness stand. A moment later, the jury entered, and then Judge Siegel, and everyone stood. "Be seated," he said.

Synenberger was out of his seat in a flash. Out of the corner, he unleashed a hard punch.

"Mr. Neff," he said. "Are you crazy?"

"Objection!" shouted Russo.

Synenberger waved him away. "I'll restate the question. Mr. Neff, are you suffering from any psychological impairments?"

"I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but it's never been an impairment," he said. In a room on the ninth floor of this very building, Russo had grilled him just like this, so he knew what to expect and how to answer. It had felt a little like training for a fight-but no matter how many times you punch a bag, it's still difficult to avoid flinching when you're up against the real deal.

"But you are taking medication for this, correct?"

"Correct."

"If it's not an impairment, why do you need to be medicated?"

"Well, Mr. Synenberger, it's sort of like being an alcoholic," he said. "Some alcoholics can function, can do their job very well before their livers turn on them. In my case, I always managed to hit a deadline but I could feel something wrong inside."

"Like an alcoholic's liver, except it was your brain, your mind that was not right?"

David cringed a little. "Basically, yes."

"You were hearing voices. Hearing people who were not there."

"Yes."

"Isn't it possible you were also seeing people who were not there?"

He thought of that awful night, of the homeless man outside their bedroom window, the one with the knife and the lame eye. But there was no way Synenberger could know about that. That was buried deep in his shrink's notes, inadmissible in court.

"No," he said. "I don't think so."

"I'm speaking about Gary Gonze. Your secret source for the book. Gary Gonze is not real, is he?"

"Unfortunately," he said, "Gary Gonze is very real."

They drove back to Ohio in Katy's car, a ten-year-old Saturn stuffed with CDs and vinyls of bands David had never heard of: Salt Zombies, the Decemberists, Neutral Milk Hotel.