It was Oberon who had determined that the Cut would no longer engage in the same degree of criminality that had sustained it until the second half of the last century. Larceny, burglary, kidnapping, bank robbery, and the targeting of rival organizations and the sequestration of their assets, usually at gunpoint and occasionally with associated fatalities, had been the Cut’s methods for most of its existence. But the world had changed, and such activities were no longer worth the risk, although the recent killings of Killian and Huff had netted $48,000, after Lucius and Benedict, Zachary Bowman’s fool son, had convinced them that they could buy their lives if they handed over all the money they had and promised never to set foot in West Virginia again. Once the cash was theirs, Lucius and Benedict had shot the two men, and then mishandled the disposal of the bodies.
Lucius, aided by his younger brother, Marius, and their comrade Jabal, had also later mishandled the killing of Harpur Griffin. Oberon had not sanctioned Griffin’s death, but he should not have been surprised that Marius chose to revenge himself upon Griffin after all these years. Only the public nature of Griffin’s murder angered him. It was unnecessary, and risked drawing attention.
Cassander’s sons had returned from Maine earlier that day. Marius and Jabal instantly vanished, leaving Lucius to relay the details of what had happened in Maine, and then explain why he and Benedict had not buried Killian and Huff deeper, and farther from the Cut. Oberon blamed Lucius for the mess, because Lucius was the elder of the two. But then Lucius had always been unreliable; it came with his propensity for violence, which was useful on some occasions. Not everyone in the Cut had the stomach for what sometimes needed to be done.
But what Lucius told him had simply added to Oberon’s worries. Lucius said that they’d had to rush the job of burial because he’d seen Charlie Lutter’s boy – Perry, the idiot – walking through the woods, and if Perry came across them with the bodies they’d have a bigger problem, because something would have to be done about him.
‘You should have come clean with me when it happened,’ said Oberon, as Cassander watched and listened, one hand on his son’s left shoulder in a gesture of support. My blood, wrong or right, thought Oberon.
‘We didn’t want to get Perry in trouble,’ said Lucius, but that wasn’t the reason, and Oberon knew it. He had just decided to keep quiet about the possibility of a witness until the discovery of the grave had forced him to be honest.
It was then that Benedict spoke up.
‘The grave wasn’t so shallow,’ he said.
‘What?’ said Oberon.
‘I helped dig it, and we put those bodies nearly three feet down. I even had time to put stones on them before we covered them up with dirt.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lucius, and his sullen expression changed as Benedict threw him a line that might enable him to escape Oberon’s anger. ‘Hey, I remember that!’
‘It didn’t stop an animal digging it up,’ said Oberon.
‘What animal?’ asked Lucius.
Oberon thought. His informant had been detailed, and quite specific, in his description of the scene.
‘Fox tracks.’
‘No fox could have uncovered those bodies,’ said Benedict.
Cassander spoke.
‘If not an animal, then who was it?’
But Oberon already had an answer, and it made him feel tired and old: Perry Lutter.
The deer moved off, ears and tails flicking. Oberon was still angry with Lucius and Benedict. They hadn’t handled the situation well, even if, as they claimed, they’d been forced to shoot Killian and Huff earlier than anticipated after Killian made a grab for Benedict’s gun. That left them with two bodies to bury, and they didn’t want to risk being pulled over for any reason with corpses in the bed of their truck, so they’d made a judgment call and buried them at dusk close to Charlie Lutter’s land. They believed themselves to be in the next county, but they were mistaken.
The question was: had Perry Lutter simply stumbled upon the disturbed ground, and out of curiosity begun to dig, or had he witnessed the burial? Perry might not have been about to join Mensa anytime soon, but Oberon had enough experience of his ways to recognize that he possessed an innate cunning. He liked the woods, and was known to wander many miles from home while always finding his way back again, unless he was given a ride by someone from the county, because everyone knew Perry.
He saw a lot, but he gabbed a lot too.
Officially, the police had not confirmed the identity of the person who found the burial site, but even without his sources it wouldn’t have been hard for Oberon to guess that it might have been Perry Lutter, and Henkel hadn’t denied it when Oberon mentioned Perry’s name at the diner. Except now it appeared that Perry might not simply have stumbled across the grave accidentally. Oberon would have to talk with him, and away from his father and mother, who were as protective of their son as bears with a cub.
Then there was the private investigator, the one who had confronted Lucius and Jabal in Portland, necessitating the killing of Griffin in order to ensure that he didn’t talk, as well as satisfying Marius’s blood urges. With luck, Griffin’s death would mark an end to his inquiries, but Oberon decided that he would look into this man Parker, just in case. The Cut did not have Internet access, just as it did not have cable TV, or use any but a handful of the most basic burner phones that were replaced every two weeks. Oberon would have to visit an Internet café outside the county to research Parker.
Which left the matter of Sheriff Edward Henkel. Oberon wanted him gone, but had resigned himself to waiting until the election. Henkel was well liked in the county, and had easily won his first term. It had rapidly become clear, though, that he was no friend of the Cut. Still, serious confrontations had largely been avoided in the early days, but recently Henkel was becoming markedly more hostile, and Oberon had decided that he didn’t want him working against them for another four years. He had already put together a list of influential individuals who were to be targeted with polite requests, bribes, and what could be viewed – depending on how one took them – as threats in order to ensure that a less proactive sheriff was installed in Plassey County.
But the discovery of the bodies of Killian and Huff was the most immediate threat to the Cut. Following his meeting with Henkel in the diner, Oberon was convinced that the sheriff would exploit any opportunity offered by the investigation to direct its resources toward the secretive community at the heart of the county. He might already be doing so, for who knew to whom he might be speaking, or what kind of friends he had at the state or federal level? It wasn’t hard to kill a sheriff – Russ Dugar had learned that, in his last moments – but it was a whole lot harder to deal with the consequences.
Oberon didn’t believe that the sheriff’s department, or anyone else, had enough evidence to secure a warrant to search the Cut, not yet, but he had made a couple of calls in an effort to muddy the waters. It would buy them some time, at least, and divert resources. If county, state, or federal forces were about to make a move on the Cut, he would almost certainly be given some warning. He would set out a plan of action, and share it with Cassander and the other elders. Each would be assigned a task to carry out in the event of an impending raid. In the meantime, he would find Perry Lutter, and try to establish what he had or had not seen on the night that Killian and Huff were killed.
But there was one loose end that he could take care of right away.
Oberon returned to his home. The whole house smelled of vinegar as Sherah, his wife, and their daughter, Tamara, were preserving tomatoes, cucumbers, and capers for the winter. Sherah was his second wife. He had married her a decade to the day after his first wife, Jael, died of pneumonia. Sherah was Jael’s younger sister, and both were daughters of Zachary. In a close-knit community like the Cut, such second unions were not unusual. Gideon had been born to another woman between his marriages, and it was this woman whom Oberon blamed for his son’s deficiencies. She, like their troubled off
spring, was now dead.
He picked up Tamara and raised her high above his head. She was four years old, and one of the youngest of the children in the Cut. He had hoped for a boy, but had grown to dote on Tamara. He continued to be surprised by just how much love he felt for her. He thought he might even love her more than he had Jael, and certainly more than he loved Sherah. He still wanted another son, but so far Sherah had not conceived again.
‘Have you finished your work for the day?’ Sherah asked him.
‘No, I have one more task to complete.’
‘Will it take long?’
‘It shouldn’t, but I’ll have to wash when I’m done.’
He did not take his eyes from his daughter’s face during the entire conversation. Sherah did not mind. She was used to her husband’s ways. She knew that she was little more than a replacement for her sister, and new breeding stock for her husband. She wanted to give him the son he desired. She enjoyed the process of trying, and she thought Oberon did too, but she did not know whose body was failing them.
Oberon put his daughter down, and went to his private office. When he returned to the kitchen, Sherah saw that he had added to his belt a long knife in a scabbard. She did not comment on it, nor did she do more than pause for a moment in the pouring of vinegar when she saw him take a spade from the shed, and a sealed green bucket, the one in which he stored the quicklime.
‘Where is Daddy going?’ asked Tamara from her perch on the chair by her mother.
‘He has something he needs to finish.’
‘Can I help him?’
Sherah pulled her daughter to her and kissed her on the crown of her head.
‘Maybe when you’re older.’
51
Cassander was crossing the Square to his house, one of his dogs trotting alongside him, when he saw Oberon approaching, the spade in his left hand, the knife hanging against his right leg. Cassander knew that knife. Oberon used it only on meat.
Cassander opened his mouth to speak, but Oberon threw the spade in his direction before he could say anything. Cassander caught it, and registered the expression on Oberon’s face. It boded well for no one.
‘Tell Lucius to dig the hole,’ said Oberon, without pausing in his stride. ‘And make sure that it’s deep this time.’
Henkel received the call shortly after four p.m., from a buddy in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, an investigator named Scott Stokes. According to Stokes, the investigation into the deaths of Killian and Huff had taken a new turn, based on intelligence received from a CI, a confidential informant. It now looked likely that they’d crossed one of the four cartels – most likely Sinaloa, which controlled eighty percent of the meth trade in the United States, largely through its aggressive policy of combining high purity with lower prices.
‘That’s bullshit,’ said Henkel. ‘Sinaloa doesn’t have a cell in West Virginia.’
‘They’re in Ohio, and that’s close enough, in case you haven’t looked at a map since high school. And Killian and Huff were out of Columbus, which DEA says is simmering nicely for Sinaloa.’
‘No, you have to listen to me here, Scotty. This is local business. It’s tied to the Cut.’
‘DEA says otherwise, and they’re all over this one. They were convinced Huff in particular would lead them to Sinaloa’s door. They figured he was ripe for the turning.’
‘Aw, damn it …’
‘Look, if you find anything solid that says otherwise, then let me know and I’ll run it up the chain. I don’t understand why you’re getting all hot and bothered about this anyway. Nobody here is complaining about the DEA taking two corpses off our hands.’
‘Yeah, well that’s where we’re different, I guess.’
‘Come on, don’t get all sanctimonious on me.’
‘I think you’ve been in Charleston too long, Scotty. You’re becoming citified.’
‘And you’ve been out there with the hillbillies for too long. You need to try living somewhere with a hard road. If the mood takes you, come on down here for an evening and I’ll feed you something better than hoecake.’
Henkel told Stokes that he’d think about it, and hung up. He was furious, but there was no point in taking it out on Stokes, and Henkel wanted to remain on good terms with him. He sat back in his chair and dug a pencil into the wood of his desk until the point snapped. A CI? Maybe he’d been mistaken about the Cut’s involvement, but he didn’t think so. Someone was baiting a hook, knowing that the DEA would bite.
Oberon. It had to be.
Jerome Burnel was blinded shortly after he was brought to the Cut. It had been a simple thing to do – two flicks of a blade – but it made the Dead King’s influence more profound. Still, before Oberon had taken away his eyes he’d permitted him to catch a glimpse of the king, just so Burnel would understand the nature of the entity with which he had been imprisoned.
By now, Burnel was as good as insane.
He was chained to a stake that was anchored in concrete set into the floor of the blockhouse. He slept on dirt, and was fed only water and grits. He stank of his own filth, and no longer tried to speak, reason, or bargain with his captors. Instead he lay flat on the ground, and emitted a low keening. His head barely turned at the sound of Oberon entering the blockhouse.
Oberon knew how the voice of the Dead King sounded. It was unsettling to hear, like small bones rattling in a sack. It spoke in no intelligible tongue, and yet those familiar with its voice held no illusions about its needs and desires. They were unceasing, and foul. Even after all these years, Oberon tried to limit his exposure to the Dead King.
Burnel had been alone with it for days.
The original dead king was almost as old as the Cut, a relic from another age and culture brought to the New World by the earliest Nordic settlers. But the Dead King, the force that now inhabited it, was older than worlds.
Oberon lit a lamp that hung from one of the lower tree branches that ran through the interior. The lamp cast its illumination over Burnel and the Dead King. Its chatter came clearly to Oberon, rendered only slightly more bearable by the fact that it was directed at Burnel.
Oberon knelt beside the blinded man, and drew the knife. In all the time that he had been here, no one had confirmed to Burnel the one thing he surely wanted to know above any other:
Why?
Oberon could have told him, and now, at the last, he decided to do so, although he was not certain that Burnel, in his madness, would understand. He grabbed Burnel by the hair and raised his head. Burnel’s ruined eyes stared up, unseeing. His mouth hung open, and Oberon saw that part of his tongue was missing. He had chewed it off. Oberon wondered if the Dead King had told him to do it. Probably, just as it had encouraged him to draw out his fingernails with his teeth and pile them in a cairn by his water bowl, and pluck the hairs from his head, one by one, leaving him with scattered bald patches like a mangy hound.
‘They were my sons,’ Oberon whispered. ‘All of this is because you killed them, and it will still never be enough. But it’s over now. Your time of torment is done.’
He had intended simply to cut Burnel’s throat, but at the final moment he turned the knife and stabbed him in the chest, and once the first wound was inflicted he found that he could not stop, and so Oberon struck at the dying man over and over – jabbing, slicing, tearing – until he knelt in a pool of blood and flesh, his head filled with the chittering of the Dead King.
Oberon regained consciousness by the mutilated body of Jerome Burnel. He did not know how much time had passed, only that the light was different, and the lamp had gone out. The Dead King was now talking to itself.
Oberon left the blockhouse. He walked down to the river, laid his bloodstained clothes by the bank, and immersed himself in its depths, the blood indistinguishable from the darkness of the water as it flowed around him. When eventually he emerged, he was shivering with cold and shock. He put on only his trousers, and used the end of his shirt to clean most of the blood from
his knife. He returned to the Square to discover Cassander seated on the grass by his house, smoking a cigarette, the spade at his feet. The porch light caught him, revealing the dirt on his hands and clothes. He rose as he saw Oberon, took the fleece from his upper body, and placed it on the shoulders of the older man. He didn’t need to ask if it was done.
Oberon glanced at the spade, and the mud on Cassander’s skin.
‘I told you to get Lucius to dig that hole.’
‘I couldn’t find him, so I dug it myself.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’
It was a lie, but Oberon did not call him on it. The two brothers, Lucius and Marius, were plotting somewhere, now that they had returned to the Cut. Maybe even Cassander did not realize how dangerous they really were.
Oberon glanced back over his shoulder. The blockhouse was not visible from where he stood.
‘You’ll need a sheet of plastic to carry him in. It’ll have to be burned after. The quicklime is still up there somewhere.’
‘I’ll take care of it.’
‘There’s a lot of blood. If they come—’
‘I told you: I’ll take care of it.’
He walked Oberon to the door of his home, where Sherah was waiting for him, but Oberon did not eat, and later he did not sleep, for he had spent too long in the blockhouse, and the voice of the Dead King was in his head. Instead he watched the darkening of the Cut, and felt the cold air from the north creeping into his bones.
52
Jennifer drifted through her father’s house, aware of him as he slept upstairs, but not daring to approach his room, much as she loved to be close to him. He was acutely sensitive to her now; sometimes, even when she watched him from a distance, or silently from the shadows, she would find him turning as if to catch a glimpse of her, the expression on his face that of one who simultaneously wishes to see yet is fearful of seeing.