‘Do I need to tell you what happened to me in Warren?’ he asked.
‘Only if you want to,’ said Parker.
‘You can figure it out for yourself, but the beatings were the least of it. Even in protective custody, I wasn’t safe. For more than four of those five years, I lived in hell. For the last few months, it was just purgatory.’
‘What changed?’ asked Angel.
‘I was everybody’s punch, if they could get to me, but I had a core of tormentors, and their ringleader was a man named Harpur Griffin. He was released five months before I was, although he left me something to remember him by. On the day after his release, five men took turns raping me. They told me it was Harpur’s treat.’
Burnel finished his beer.
‘This is what I believe, Mr Parker: everything that happened to me was a result of my actions at Dunstan’s Gas Station. I was set up so that I would go to jail, and be punished for what I’d done. It’s also likely that those same people found Paige Dunstan, and Corrie Wyatt, and made them vanish from this earth. Pretty soon, the same thing will happen to me.’
He dipped into an inside pocket of his jacket and produced a brown padded envelope. He slid it across the table toward Parker.
‘Inside there is all the money I have left, minus a few dollars to keep me going until they come for me. When I’m gone, I’d like you to look into what happened, if not for me then for Paige and Corrie, and for the family killed by those two men, and those friends of Corrie’s that were shot.’
Parker didn’t touch the envelope. At best, Burnel was a damaged man; at worst, a self-deluded one. He was looking for a reason for all that had occurred. He wanted to believe that there was a logic and purpose to his suffering.
And Burnel, guessing his thoughts, said, ‘Why would I lie about the child pornography, Mr Parker? Why now? What purpose would it serve? I’ve done my time. Those lost years can never be returned to me. My reputation will never be restored. Were I to live long enough, maybe I’d get some sympathy job that the state or my lawyer helped to arrange for me, surrounded by others accused of the same crimes, all of us clearing garbage and weeds from public lots, but that existence will never be a reality. I did nothing wrong. All I did was stop for coffee at the wrong gas station, and soon I’ll pay for it with the last thing I have, just like Paige Dunstan and Corrie Wyatt paid. And here’s the rub, Mr Parker: I don’t mind paying that price, because I’ve paid all the others. I just don’t want it to be for nothing.’
Louis called for more wine, and he was the first to speak again after it came.
‘That’s quite the story,’ he said.
‘And you don’t believe it,’ said Burnel.
‘I’ve heard stranger.’
It was Burnel’s turn to look skeptical, but his doubt faded under Louis’s implacable gaze.
‘I need the men’s room,’ said Burnel. He didn’t particularly, but he sensed that these three men might want some time alone to discuss what they had heard. He went into a stall to pee, and kept the door locked, because he could no longer stop his body from shaking when he entered a restroom.
‘Well?’ said Parker, when Burnel was gone. He waited for Angel to speak.
‘I think he’s telling the truth about the child pornography,’ said Angel.
‘Good,’ said Parker, ‘because so do I.’
‘But as for the bigger conspiracy theory,’ said Angel, ‘it’s a stretch.’
‘If he’s telling the truth about the pornography, then someone set him up.’
‘My money is on the wife,’ said Louis.
‘Ex-wife now,’ said Parker. ‘But what did she gain? It doesn’t sound like he would have objected to a divorce, even before the shooting.’
‘Maybe she just plain didn’t like him,’ said Angel.
‘That’s a big can of not-like to want to see a man jailed and raped,’ said Louis.
‘We only have his side of the story,’ said Angel. ‘He could have been the husband from hell.’
‘You think? Man doesn’t even strike me as the husband from heck.’
‘And then there’s the two missing women,’ said Parker.
‘Coincidence?’ asked Angel. ‘Plus, we don’t know anything about this Corrie Wyatt. Just because she stopped visiting him doesn’t mean she’s been abducted, or is dead.’
‘But it is a bunch of odd,’ said Louis. He raised his glass to Parker. ‘It’s your call.’
Burnel returned from the men’s room. There was fresh blood on the cuticles of two of his fingers. One more thing about him was probably true, Parker knew: he would not live long. He was a hanging leaf, waiting to fall.
Burnel did not resume his seat, but stood before them.
‘I’ve held one detail back,’ he said. ‘I thought you might find it too odd, or think that I’d made it up, but while I was in the men’s room I thought about something this gentleman said.’ He gestured at Louis. ‘He told me that you’d heard stranger tales than mine, and from what I’ve read about you, Mr Parker, that may well be true.’
Parker could see the effort it took for Burnel to go on talking.
‘Shortly before his release, Harpur Griffin raped me for the last time,’ he said. ‘Two of his friends were holding me down. Griffin had gotten hold of some Adderall, so he was worse than usual. Mostly he stuck with cursing me for being a pedophile, a deviant, or even simply a fag – whatever term of abuse he favored at any particular moment. But that morning he was in another place: he was twitching, hallucinating. And violent, just so violent.’
Burnel stared at a spot somewhere on the table, not looking into the faces of the men to whom he was speaking.
‘Griffin leaned over to whisper in my ear. He said—
“This is for the Dead King.”
Over and over, in time with his thrusts—’
This is for the Dead King. This is for the Dead King.
Dead King. Dead King.
Dead King.
III
Take to my side
And we’ll walk on
To where the frost of the Dead King
Weigh heavy on the vine.
Espers, ‘Dead King’
24
To everyone in Plassey County, it was known as ‘the Cut’, after the cleft in the hill that towered above its northern extreme. The Cut wasn’t a large area – maybe only ten square miles in total – but it was all private land, and those who lived within its boundaries kept themselves to themselves, or as much as was possible in the twenty-first century.
Plassey County lay east of Charleston, at the point where forested hills began to turn to arable land. Technically, in Appalachian terms, it was a cove, a valley between two ridges, but it was shallow rather than deep, with the gentle declination of the terrain barely noticeable as one moved further into the Cut’s territory. That was the other thing: the Cut was both the place itself and its inhabitants. They lived in the Cut, and were the Cut. It was in and of them, and they in turn were of it. Sometimes its people were referred to in the singular, but just as often in the plural: the Cut ‘is’, the Cut ‘are’. It was of no consequence. It was all the same, for it was all the Cut. This might have proved confusing for outsiders, but the people of Plassey County did their best not to refer to the Cut at all, and certainly not to strangers. It was better that way.
Now and again, the Cut came into the towns of Mortonsville, Turley, and Guyer’s Crossing – the three principal settlements in Plassey County – to buy supplies, or very occasionally see a doctor, although they were largely self-sufficient, and had been for generations. They grew their own fruit and vegetables, and raised pigs, a few cattle, and a lot of chickens. There were apiaries too, but they’d been having problems with them lately, like so many other beekeepers. Oswald Hosey knew this because he kept bees and one of the Cut – Oswald thought it might have been one of the younger Gantleys, but he couldn’t be sure – had come by a year or so back to discuss the matter with him. Pesticides, t
hat was Oswald’s opinion about it, but the Gantley boy said they didn’t hold with such things in the Cut, and Oswald had tried to explain to him that it was all very well him and his kind not holding with pesticides, but unless he could keep his bees tied to the hive with lengths of thread, they were going to come into contact with pesticides whether he liked it or not.
At that the Gantley boy had taken off his straw hat, wiped his brow with his sleeve, and looked out with disgust upon the houses and farms that formed the greater part of the community of Guyer’s Crossing as though, if it were in his power, he would have wiped them and all others like them from the face of the earth. Then he’d thanked Oswald for his time and driven away. That evening, five pots of fresh honey were left on Oswald’s doorstep, and Oswald had to admit that it was probably very fine honey indeed, although he could only judge it by the smell, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to eat any.
Those were the kinds of encounters that local people had with the Cut: unanticipated, generally polite but distant, and rarely repeated. And on every such occasion, those who were not of the Cut would return to their homes overcome by a terrible unease, and would sleep poorly that night, and be tense and short-tempered with their loved ones, even as they tried to hold them close and keep them within whatever protection was offered by walls and fences.
The people of the Cut were not like them. They belonged to an older dispensation.
Guyer’s Crossing stood at the western edge of the Cut, Mortonsville to the east. The other nearest towns were Turley, the county seat, to the south, and tiny Deep Dell to the north. Looked at on a map, it might have appeared that the Cut was surrounded, a relic of old times trapped in the new, but to its neighbors it seemed that it was they who were at the mercy of the Cut. It squatted like a cancer in the heart of Plassey County, a permanent source of potential threat, and they would not be aware of the metastasis until the bodies began dropping.
In defense of the Cut and its population – should they have needed any to speak out on their behalf, which they did not – much of the mythology surrounding it came from centuries earlier, when the first inhabitants of the Cut, who had colonized the place before other settlers, and fought the Shawnee to a guarded truce in order to maintain their claim on the land, clashed with speculators and new European immigrants.
The Cut folk – a mix of Scandinavians, Scots, and various mongrels – had been distrusted from the start. Their relations with the Shawnee were regarded as too close to make them good white men, an impression heightened by the system of communal land ownership that they practiced, itself learned from the Shawnee, for whom the idea of an individual having exclusive use of a piece of land was regarded as entirely alien. In 1774, the Cut had also declined to participate in what was known as Cresap’s War, when a land speculator named Michael Cresap led a group of volunteers on a punitive mission against Shawnee villages in response to native attacks against new settlements. The Cut shared the Shawnee view that the rapid growth of the settlements constituted a threat to their own way of life, and when family members of the peaceful Mingo chief known as Logan were slaughtered by Cresap’s forces, it was said that the Cut gave shelter to the rest. In return, when Logan’s warriors began killing settlers in retaliation, the Cut was spared.
But the whispers around the settlements suggested that it was not only the Shawnee who had murdered white men and women, and the Cut had used the conflict to remove the more troublesome of its neighbors and extend its sphere of influence. Two entire families were put to the knife, including women and children, with a savagery that had not been seen even in the predations of the Shawnee. The rumors became so persistent that they reached the ears of the Earl of Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, and when Dunmore rode out to deal with the Shawnee under the chief named Cornstalk, he did so with the intention of curbing the activities of the Cut as well.
Dunmore had planned a pincer movement on the Shawnee, dividing his force into two armies, one led by himself and attacking from the north, the other advancing from the south with the speculator Andrew Lewis at its head. Lewis was a particular thorn in the side of the Cut, and it was said to be at the Cut’s instigation that the Shawnee ambushed Lewis by the meeting of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers. The result was heavy losses on both sides, with the Shawnee being beaten into a retreat, and eventually forced to sign the Treaty of Camp Charlotte in which they relinquished their claim on the land south of the Ohio River. This soured relations between the natives and the Cut, with the result that, during the Revolutionary War, when the natives sided with the British, the Cut and its people found themselves aiming guns at their former allies. It says much about them that they did not hesitate to pull their triggers.
By then, the nature of the settlers in the Cut had been established: they did not mix, they did not cooperate with the institutions of government beyond the minimum required, and their existence was one of interdependence and mutual support. As the decades went by, and the eighteenth century became the nineteenth, then the twentieth, it was inevitable that the Cut would find its insularity threatened, as well as have some engagement with the modern world forced upon it. Men of the Cut fought in the Civil War, and later in the two world wars. Some even went to Korea and Vietnam. But they always held themselves apart from their comrades, and shared little of their lives back home.
In the beginning, the Cut was based around a core of twelve families, each living within sight of at least one other dwelling. A series of fences and walls, supplemented by thorny hedgerows and ditches, formed what were, in effect, ringed fortifications around a central compound known as the Square. Outsiders were not welcome, and rarely progressed beyond the first or second ring before being spotted and turned back.
Of course, some who trespassed were more than simply curious. There were rumors that the Cut was a source of silver and gold, and those who lived in the settlement used this secret wealth to support their lifestyle, a tale that was never confirmed despite various efforts at unlawful exploration.
Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, there rose talk of devil worship and child sacrifice, much of it inspired by a revivalist preacher named Wilbur Torey, a student of Lyman Beecher, the co-founder of the American Temperance Society. Torey pitched his tent in Mortonsville, and attempted to gain access to the Cut in order to determine which form of religious belief, if any, was being practiced by the majority of its population, since then, as now, only a handful of the Cut worshipped alongside the county’s established congregations. Torey was run off by members of the Lydell family, who occupied the easternmost area of the settlement. When Torey tried another point of entry, he was turned back at gunpoint, and warned that the next time he trespassed, he’d be shot. Humiliated, and perceiving the Cut as an evil to be remedied before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Torey began to preach against it, and to sow fear and discontent among those who lived on its borders.
On the night of January 23, 1855, Wilbur Torey vanished. A search warrant was obtained for the Cut, the first great intrusion into the preserve since the earliest skirmishes of the previous century. The families of the Cut were held at gunpoint over a period of days while sweeps were made of the area by men and dogs, but no trace of Torey was found, and eventually the search was abandoned. It was only a century later that a body discovered in woods near Grantsville, in Calhoun County, was identified as that of Wilbur Torey. All the fingers on his right hand were missing, and a heat-related fracture was evident in the temporal bone of the head, along with fragments of a soot-like ash in his mouth, and blackening to the interior of the skull. No other signs of damage by fire were found on the remains. It was concluded that Torey’s mouth had been filled with some form of flammable material which had then been lit, causing the staining and fracturing of the skull. The presence of ash in the mouth indicated that this had been done while Wilbur Torey was still alive.
The search of 1855 was the last time that the outside world, and the forces of the law in particular, had interfer
ed in such a manner with the life of the Cut. The senior families determined that no cause would be given for any further such incursions, and great care was taken to avoid obvious confrontations that might lead to local, state, or federal forces taking an interest in its activities. But the people of the Cut did not simply turn the other cheek: instead, they methodically set out to make clear to their neighbors that the Cut was to be left untroubled, and any clashes with it would end badly for the other parties involved. Pets would disappear from yards; beatings were delivered by masked individuals; cars, houses, even businesses were burnt out; and, in the most extreme circumstances, a handful of others went the way of Wilbur Torey, vanishing, never to be heard from again.
And although it was never spoken aloud, it was understood that this was the work of the Cut.
As will sometimes happen when a potential source of harm cannot be eradicated, and instead a way found to coexist with it, the four main communities in Plassey County grew adept at stepping carefully around the Cut and, for the most part, simply ceased openly to acknowledge its existence. There were even some advantages to doing so, for the Cut, in order to ensure its seclusion and discourage the attentions of law enforcement, took it upon itself to deal with those whose criminality threatened to undermine the peace of Plassey County. No biker gangs made inroads, and no meth labs flourished: meth producers, even the low-level shakers and bakers, were quickly put out of business under threat of going into the ground, and a brief attempt by The Pagans to establish a foothold had ended with one of their leaders being drowned in a quarry, anchored to the bottom by his Harley. Even crimes against property were the lowest in the state. If one didn’t look too hard, one might almost have been able to convince oneself that the Cut was a peculiar force for good, enforcing order in return for solitude.
But the people of Plassey County knew better.
Oberon moved through the Cut’s central plaza in the early-morning light. His last name was Olhouser, although it was so rarely used that he had almost ceased to connect it to himself. It was also probably not the name that his ancestors had brought to the New World, which was now lost to all: Olhouser – meaning ‘the dweller by the old house’ – was derived from the Cut. It had originally referred to the foundations of a ruined cabin discovered by Oberon’s forefathers on this land, one that the natives claimed had been built centuries before by a man with pale skin who carried a longsword. What happened to him, they could not say. Tribal lore claimed that he had simply vanished one day, leaving his dwelling to fall into ruin.