Ormsby spoke.
‘If you keep making noise, you’ll force me to hurt you,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to hurt you. Keep quiet and listen to me.’
The child stopped moving. He could see the sacking inflating and deflating where it was closest to her mouth. She was sobbing.
‘I’m going to help you out of the car. If you struggle, you risk falling, and the floor here is hard. Also, if you try to lash out at me, you’ll make me strike you, and I hate striking children. Nod if you understand.’
There was a pause, and then he saw the girl nod.
‘Good. Now I’m going help you out of the trunk.’
He leaned in carefully, still wary of her, and he was right to be. As soon as she sensed him drawing close, she tried to swing at him with her legs, hoping to catch him on the head with her knees or her feet. Objectively, he had to admire her spirit, but he couldn’t risk incurring a broken nose, or even a bruise to his face. Any injury might be enough to raise suspicions, even in the case of harmless Roger Ormsby.
He stepped back.
‘I warned you,’ he said. ‘Now you’re going to make me do something that I didn’t want to do.’
The girl began wailing and writhing. Ormsby was just drawing back his hand to give her a sharp slap on the head when the doorbell rang.
Ormsby listened. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He could try to ignore the bell, and hope that whoever it was went away. On the other hand, if one of his neighbors had seen him pull into the garage they’d know he was home, and if he didn’t answer they might begin to worry. The last thing he needed was for the police to be called.
And what if it was the police? Suppose he had been seen? The street had appeared to be empty and unwatched, but one could never be sure …
The bell rang a second time. Ormsby struck the girl once to subdue her before he closed the trunk again. He moved through the house, turning on a lamp as he entered the hallway. He saw a shape through the glass fan of the door: a tall figure.
Ormsby paused when he was still five feet away.
‘Who is it?’ he called, but received no reply.
Ormsby shuffled his feet and tried again.
‘Who’s there? What do you want?’
Finally, the voice spoke. It sounded to Ormsby like that of a black man.
‘Delivery for Mr Cole.’
Ormsby relaxed.
‘You have the wrong house,’ he said. ‘Cole lives in fourteen thirty-seven, across the street. This is fourteen thirty-six.’
‘You sure? Says fourteen thirty-six on the slip.’
‘Well, your slip’s wrong.’
‘Shit,’ said the man, and Ormsby saw his shape ripple as he took in the street. ‘Don’t look like anybody’s home over there. Maybe you could sign for it, save me a wasted trip.’
Ormsby experienced a creeping sense of unease.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I don’t open my door to strangers after dark.’
‘It’s not dark yet.’
‘Even so.’
‘Shit,’ said the man, again. ‘Okay, you have a good evening.’
He went away. Only when Ormsby heard his footsteps moving down the path did he slip into the living room and ensure that he had departed. The caller was wearing a jacket, and didn’t look like any delivery man Ormsby had ever seen, but as he paused at the sidewalk, Ormsby saw that he was holding a box. The man hung a right, and was lost behind the tall hedge that marked the perimeter of Ormsby’s property. Ormsby waited, but he did not reappear.
Ormsby returned to the garage and opened the trunk of his car.
The sack lay limp and flat on the rubber matting.
The girl was gone.
3
Let us leave Roger Ormsby for now, staring into the empty trunk of his clean, well-maintained car, in his big, anonymous house with its many unused rooms, the whole surrounded by a pretty garden with beds that flower throughout the year, for Ormsby prided himself on his plants, and they flourished thanks to his care and attention, the addition of copious amounts of old coffee grounds …
And human ash.
It was one month earlier, and the town of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, had witnessed the final exodus of its summer tourists. The boardwalk concessions had closed, along with those bars, restaurants, and stores that relied exclusively on the season for their income. Here and there rainbow flags still flew, for Rehoboth was as gay-friendly as such towns came, and anyway, the pink dollar was only pink in a certain light. Once it arrived at the bank, it was as green as any other.
In the bathroom of a house at the edge of the town limits, the lawyer Eldritch was shaving, working at his sparse whiskers with an old straight razor. His was the only room with a mirror, and even then it was barely large enough to enable him to see his own face. Beyond the bathroom was his bedroom, and downstairs was his home office, where he continued the work of reassembling the records he had lost in the explosive fire that had destroyed his original business premises in Lynn, Massachusetts, some years earlier. Eldritch had almost entirely recovered from the physical injuries he received in the blast, but he remained frailer than before. His right hand shook slightly as he cut swaths through the shaving foam.
Beside him was a window that gave a partial view of the sea through some trees. A man stood smoking on the lawn, his back to the house. This was Eldritch’s son, although the old lawyer had long conceded that he was his son in name only. At the moment of his birth, something had colonized his being: a wandering spirit, an angel, a demon. Call it what you would, but it was not human.
The doctors were surprised that the child had lived: his umbilical cord had become wrapped around his neck during delivery, asphyxiating him. The boy had, in fact, been born dead, and only the swift actions of the attending staff had resuscitated him. Eldritch and his late wife – who barely lived long enough to see her boy begin to walk – had feared brain damage or some other disability, but their son appeared to be entirely healthy, if unusually quiet. Eldritch could only remember him crying, really bawling, a handful of times, and he had slept for seven hours a night throughout his infancy. Other fathers told him he was blessed. Mothers too.
But he was not blessed: his son had died, and just as his soul left his body another force had taken its place, one that had only gradually revealed itself to Eldritch as the years passed. Even now, after many decades, it remained something of an enigma to him. As it grew and matured, so too did it alter Eldritch’s own nature, so that a once ordinary attorney with the usual slate of minor civil and criminal work became an examiner of the consciences of men, an assembler of evidence of base acts, and he presented his records to this being, who decided if action should be taken. The man now smoking on the lawn was an instrument of justice, although of whose justice Eldritch was uncertain.
Eldritch had been raised Lutheran, but his faith quickly became a half-remembered matter irregularly indulged, like the expensive coat he only wore to church for his biannual attendances at Easter and Christmas. Then, as the creature that hid itself in the guise of his dead son became manifest, the reality of a world beyond this one concretized for Eldritch, but it was not a realm that bore any resemblance to the paradise of which the preachers spoke. From the little that Eldritch could glean, the being responsible for the creation of the universe had been silent for millennia. For all anyone knew, He might even be dead. (Perhaps, Eldritch’s son had suggested, spurred into an astonishing blasphemy by a rare indulgence in alcohol, He had killed Himself in despair at what He had created.) God, to give the entity a name, might have been unheard and unseen, but other creatures were waiting, and listening, and it was best not to draw their attention through loose talk.
Kushiel: when Eldritch had asked his son for his true name, that was the one he gave, but he did so with a crooked smile, as though this, too, were part of some great cosmic joke to which Eldritch was not privy.
Kushiel: Hell’s jailer.
But to those he hunted, he wa
s the Collector.
Eldritch finished shaving and washed away the remains of the foam. Just as his son stank of nicotine from the cigarettes that had stained his fingers a deep ochre, so, too, could Eldritch smell his own mortality. His body odor had changed, and no matter how clean he kept himself, or how much cedarwood aftershave he used, he could still detect it. It was the stink of his physical form in decline. It was the reek of the mud in the bottom of the pond of existence, and flies buzzed around it. He wondered how much time he had left. Not long. He felt it in his bones.
He carefully turned the mirror, so that its reflective surface faced the wall. The Collector – let Eldritch think of his son as others did – was strict about this. He had a distrust of mirrors. He had once described them as ‘reflecting eyes’. Eldritch had thought it a superstition, until an incident involving a dead child killer named John Grady. The Collector had retrieved a mirror from Grady’s former home, and, just before he removed it from Eldritch’s presence, he had turned it toward the lawyer. Eldritch had seen his own features and, behind them, those of another: the terrified face of John Grady, who, in death, had somehow sequestered himself in a reflected version of his house, wandering through it with the ghosts of dead children, believing himself to be immune from justice until the Collector proved him wrong.
But Eldritch knew that the Collector had seen other faces looking back at him from polished surfaces, and one face in particular, for behind the surface of mirrors moved the Buried God, the God of Wasps, the one whom even the Collector feared. If God slept, the Buried God did not. The Buried God watched, and waited to be found.
Eldritch entered his bedroom and put on a clean shirt. He was going to see a movie, and later he would have a quiet dinner in one of the local bars that remained open. He was rereading Montaigne’s Essays. He found a kind of consolation in them.
He went downstairs and called from the open back door to say that he was leaving. He received only a slight wave of the hand in reply, but the Collector did not turn around. Even six months before, it would not have been possible for Eldritch to leave the house in this way, because the Collector would not have permitted it. They were being hunted by the detective named Charlie Parker and the men who stood with him, all of them seeking revenge for the death of one of their friends at the Collector’s hands. But a truce of kinds had been declared, and they were safer now, although Eldritch knew that the Collector remained wary of Parker.
Sometimes, Eldritch thought, I think he fears Parker almost as much as he fears the Buried God.
Eldritch got in his car and drove onto the road, turning right for Rehoboth. He didn’t even know what movie he’d go see. They all started at the same time, more or less. And they were all the same, more or less. It would be enough just to sit in the darkness and forget, for a while.
The Collector took another drag on his cigarette, and listened to the sound of his father’s car fading away. There was a new moon in the sky. He tracked the progress of a dying insect, its flight erratic, until it finally fell by the feet of the man who was holding a gun on him.
‘I knew you’d come,’ he said, as Charlie Parker emerged from the shadows.
4
The Collector had not seen Parker in more than a year, and was astonished by the changes in him. It was not simply the physical alterations wrought by his suffering, although his injuries, and his ongoing recuperation from them, had left him thinner than before, and his hair was speckled with white where the shotgun pellets had torn paths through his scalp. No, this was a man transformed within as well as without, and the unease that the Collector had always sensed in Parker’s presence, a glowing ember of concern, suddenly exploded into flame. Parker had died three times in the hours following the shooting, and each time he had returned, like some biblical prophecy made real. Now he was no longer as he once was: he burned with conviction. The Collector could see it in his eyes, and feel it as surely as a static charge.
The Collector had never been in as much danger as he was at this moment.
‘Are your confederates with you?’ he asked.
He stared past the detective, expecting to witness the emergence of Angel and Louis, the men who walked with Parker, but the woods remained undisturbed.
‘I’m alone.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘I sniffed you out.’
The Collector’s right arm twitched once in response, for he understood that the detective’s reply contained a truth both literal and metaphorical. Somehow, he had tracked him down, and not through Internet searches or the words of informants. No, Parker had hunted him by following unseen trails. The Collector would never be able to hide from this man again, assuming he was permitted to survive this encounter.
‘They gave me their word,’ said the Collector. He had struck a bargain with Angel and Louis, although perhaps he had been naïve to expect it to be honored. ‘If I helped them find the ones who attacked you, then you would leave my father and me in peace.’
‘Had I been in a position to advise them, I’d have told them to kill you along with those who hurt me.’
Something remained unspoken.
‘But?’ asked the Collector.
‘It would have been a mistake.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Because I may have a use for you.’
The Collector managed to laugh.
‘You, use me?’ he said. ‘And what makes you think I would even countenance such an arrangement?’
Parker’s expression did not alter, and neither did the gun waver in his hand.
‘Because you’re a dog, and all dogs need a master. I’m about to bring you to heel.’
The cigarette in the Collector’s hand had burned down almost to his fingers. He let it drop, and carefully moved his right foot to crush the butt.
‘What did you see,’ he asked, ‘during your time between worlds?’
‘I saw a lake,’ the detective replied. ‘I spoke with my dead child, and the ghost of my wife whispered to me.’
‘And what did she say?’
A flicker of the eyes, caught by the Collector.
‘That’s none of your business. It’s enough for you to know that this world is altering, and your purpose will change along with it. And I’m tired of looking over my shoulder, tired of wondering if your blade is about to flash in the darkness.’
‘I have no intention of killing you. I don’t believe I ever had.’
‘Nevertheless, I don’t care much for you walking in my footsteps, or those of my friends. I’ve found you once, and I can find you again. You’ll come when I call, and you’ll do as I say.’
‘Or?’
But the word held no real defiance. It was the response of one who has already surrendered, and is simply seeking to salvage some dignity from the terms.
‘I’ll feed your father to the FBI as an accomplice to murder, and then I’ll help them to track you down. You’re a mystery to them, but they suspect your existence. I’ll confirm it. But it’ll be me who puts an end to you, and whatever you are, or whatever lives inside you, will wander in darkness. You won’t return. I guarantee it.’
‘You don’t have that kind of power.’
‘Don’t I?’
The Collector swallowed.
‘And if I agree?’
‘You can go about your work. I don’t have the time or inclination to chain you up in a yard just to feed you scraps, but you’ll come when I summon you.’
The Collector watched the scudding of clouds. He felt a tightness at his neck, as of a restored collar tightening.
‘May I have another cigarette?’
‘Go ahead.’
He moved his left hand very slowly to the pocket of his coat and retrieved the pack and his matches. He put a cigarette between his lips and lit it. He inhaled deeply, but it both smelt and tasted wrong. He removed the cigarette and looked at it in disappointment.
‘All this,’ he said, ‘because of a brush with death??
??
‘No,’ said the detective. ‘All this because a god has awoken.’
He reached into one of his own pockets, withdrew a cell phone and tossed it to the Collector.
‘When it rings, you answer. When I call, you come.’
He lowered his gun. He had no more need of it that night. He turned his back on the Collector and returned to the shadows.
5
Although he did not yet know it, Roger Ormsby’s current dilemma was a direct consequence of that confrontation at Rehoboth Beach, and of others less recent. Not that the revelation, when it came, would be of any comfort to him.
Quite the contrary, in fact.
For the moment, all he could do was pick up the empty sack from the trunk of his car, as though expecting some shrunken version of the child to be displayed beneath it. He then checked under the car, and found the space there unoccupied. The gap between the frozen garage door and the floor was too small to have permitted the girl to escape through it, and there were no hiding places in the garage itself, which meant she had to be somewhere in the house. In her situation, he would have made straight for the front door, so he must have passed her as he was returning after the conversation with the delivery man, probably as she was hiding in the kitchen, or in the interconnected living and dining rooms.
Ormsby grabbed a pistol from under his tool rack and hurried from the garage. He half expected to hear the sound of breaking glass: the front door was locked and the windows secured, so the only way the child could get out would be by shattering a pane. He glanced into the kitchen, but it was empty. He didn’t even bother checking the stairs, or consider the possibility that she might be in one of the upstairs rooms: it would make no sense for her to go up.