And if she had to be, why was she feeling these new pressures, these strange urges. Seeing things all the time. The baby, then Mike, the visions. How could nature have made her this way, have filled her with these revolting needs, and then torture her with such profound and inescapable self-loathing for what she had no choice but to be?
Rose wasn’t like other people—would never be—and she had come to a grudging peace with that fact. But if that was true, then she shouldn’t have to live her life controlled by the same needs as everyone else. A man, a family. Not her! It was impossible, ridiculous. She may as well have been a wolf let into the pasture, and then told to starve to death.
She tried to picture the life with Mike Clover, but it came out like something from TV. Her and Mike sitting in a living room in matching recliners, reading the Sunday Times, drinking coffee from matching mugs that read #1 MOM and #1 DAD in happy pink letters. A child, a boy, playing with wooden blocks on the floor. Some insipid daytime talk show playing on the television.
Ha!
But her anger grew and she felt it getting away from her.
“Stop the car,” she whispered, fists clenched.
The man, Pablo, didn’t hear.
Rose was shaking. “Stop the car,” she repeated, louder, and this time Pablo swiveled his head to look.
“Que?” he said, a kind smile on his face, a smile that vanished quickly when he saw Rose’s expression.
“Dios,” he said, and whipped the car onto the side of the road, brought it to a screeching halt. Rose opened the door and climbed over the sleeping boy, stepped out of the car, closed the door behind her. Pablo was staring out the window at her, waiting for something, waiting, perhaps, to see what he could do to help. His kindness made Rose even angrier.
“Get away,” Rose said, “before I kill you and your children.”
Pablo may or may not have understood, but he jammed his foot down on the gas and the car took off.
The rage abated quickly once she was alone, and after a few minutes, she started thumbing at passing cars.
* * *
Rose had walked for a half hour or so when she saw the sign.
CHARLOTTE 21 MILES.
Hunger for the hunt, for the kill, stabbed at her stomach, but it wasn’t bad yet.
She’d kill someone when she reached the city.
Chapter 13
When John woke up the next morning, he showered, dressed, and ate a bowl of cereal, and then headed into school to complete the first of his errands, picking up his planner, some books, and some other odds and ends before he left for West Chester, a drive that would take him about ten hours.
Though he felt fine for the most part, John had struggled to fall asleep the night before. Where he would normally nod right off, he’d found it all but impossible to stop thinking about what Mary Ann Shaw had told him in the park.
And then, once he had finally drifted off, his dreams had been disturbing. There were no murders this time, but at one point he had found himself in the back seat of a car, nestled between sleeping children, aching to tear their throats out with his teeth. He had an appointment later in the morning with Dr. Barnes and was hoping she could help him get control of his racing and scattered thoughts.
Trying to shake off his fatigue, John parked his car in his usual spot in the teacher lot and went inside. The visit did not go as he’d hoped.
* * *
He arrived near the end of second period. The halls were oddly quiet and empty; even the air seemed still, and as John stood in the second floor hallway, looking down toward the huge picture window that overlooked the athletic fields, he could see particles of dust hanging almost motionlessly in the wide beams of sunlight filtering through the clouds on the horizon. The feeling the sight inspired in John was familiar, but in a way he couldn’t immediately identify. Only as he started to walk down the hall toward his classroom, the rubber soles of his sneakers squelching softly on the black and white tiled floor, did he place it. This was the way he’d felt upon returning home to his apartment after his stay in the hospital—the feeling of being a stranger in a place where he used to belong.
A loud sound exploded near John’s head and he recoiled before realizing, with a sheepish cringe, that it was just the bell signaling the end of the day’s second period. It was a noise he’d heard every fifty-five minutes of every school day for the past decade of his life, and one that he rarely even noticed when it had gone off over that time, but a few weeks away had rendered it unfamiliar. Funny the way the mind worked. The sound died down, and, after a delay of perhaps two seconds—as long as it took for the kids to shoot up from their desks, grab their books, and reach the door—the halls flooded with students.
Ten or twelve came over to him and said hello, but none of them offered a hug or a hand, not the way they had always done before. The looks on their faces were appraising and careful. It’s not that they considered him dangerous, he knew. It was just that he hadn’t turned out to be what they’d always thought he was, and kids had a hard time dealing with that. Adults did, too, of course, but they were so used to being lied to that they actually came to expect that people weren’t what they seemed. What had happened with Kyra was just one step in the lifelong pattern of disillusionment these kids would experience, but John hated being a part of it.
When the kids had headed off toward their next classes, John turned toward his room, which was located near the end of the hall.
“Mr. B!” he heard a girl’s voice yell, and then Monica Rourke was hugging him.
“Hey, Mon,” he said, putting his arms around her and giving her a quick squeeze back. “How you doin’, kiddo?”
Monica stepped back, blushing. “I’m okay,” she said. “Wish you were still here.”
“Yeah,” John said, “me, too. Speaking of which, how’s my sub doing? I was just on my way down to find out.”
Monica frowned, then tilted her head to the side, then smiled. “Permission to speak frankly?”
“Granted,” John said. This was an old routine for them, and it was comforting to John to know that not everything had changed.
“She’s a Nazi,” Monica whispered, leaning closer to John so none of the students who were milling all around them would hear, “and she’s a little slow, if you know what I mean. Like today, we were talking about Macbeth and I asked, ‘So why do you think Macbeth sends hired killers to bump Banquo off?’ She looks at me like I’m an idiot for a second, then says, ‘Monica, sometimes great men need to learn how to hand certain duties off to the little people.’ It was the funniest thing I ever heard. Honestly.”
“You didn’t laugh, did you?”
Monica smiled, her eyes gleaming. “I said I had to go to the bathroom and then laughed my butt off for about five minutes.” Her eyes took on a sudden serious cast. “Have you seen Kyra?” she asked, her voice low.
“Not yet,” John said. “How is she?”
Monica shrugged. “Fine. She placed third in the cross-country meet against Corinthian Prep a couple of days ago.”
A horrible thought suddenly occurred to John, something vague, centered around Stephen King’s book Pet Sematary and an old story he’d read as an undergrad at UVA in a course on the uncanny in literature. “The Monkey’s Paw,” he thought, the one where the dead boy comes back.
“But how is she?” John asked, holding Monica’s gaze, trying to communicate to her something that he couldn’t bring himself to put into words. And what do I mean? he thought. Does she stumble around, always just a little off-balance? Is there a smell about her, something you can’t quite place, something earthy, fetid, rotting? Is there a distant, not-quite-dead look in her eyes, something hateful?
“She’s fine, Mr. B, really. She’s just the same as she always was, ditsy and flirty. Don’t worry.”
John felt a load lift off his shoulders and he exhaled a breath that he now realized he’d been holding for a week. “Thanks, Mon,” he said, feeling suddenly very near to tears
. “Look, I’ve got to go get some things from my room, but I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Sure,” she said, favoring him with a smile, “I’ve got to get to geometry anyway. Bye, Mr. B.”
* * *
John was walking out of the school half an hour later when he saw Kyra Metheny sitting on the grass with Peter Travis, a sophomore John had come to like a lot over the past two years. For the briefest of moments he entertained the idea of going over to say hello to both of them, but then the moment passed. No need to remind her, he thought. Hasn’t she been through enough? She looked normal, though. There was no sign of what she’d been through. As he watched, Kyra laughed and leaned into Peter’s shoulder and pecked him on the cheek, then giggled once again.
When John reached his car he looked back at the school, its faded brick mutedly red against the lush green grass that surrounded it.
A voice inside his mind, one he didn’t know or particularly like, spoke.
You’ll never see this place again.
It wasn’t a voice he liked, but it wasn’t one he questioned, either.
John unlocked his car and dropped his armful of books onto the back seat, took one last look at the school, an ache low in his gut, and then climbed in behind the wheel.
* * *
John’s appointment with Iris Barnes started at ten. He made it to her office a little early and spent twenty minutes in the waiting room leafing through an old issue of Garden and Gun magazine.
He was reading an article about window treatments when Barnes opened her door, leaned out, and said, “John?”
* * *
She started it off a little differently.
“We’ve been talking all this time about your dreams and your problems, but I just realized, I don’t really know anything about you. Tell me about yourself,” she said, then leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. She was dressed in a black pantsuit, an electric blue blouse underneath her crisply-pressed jacket, and she radiated an air of calm confidence that John could feel setting him immediately at ease. She wasn’t here to study him, or to probe at painful places for the sake of doing so; Barnes was here to help, and he could tell that she knew he was here to be helped. It was a reassuring thought.
“What do you want to know?” He sipped from a Styrofoam cup of coffee Barnes’s secretary had brought for him.
“Anything,” Barnes said. “Whatever you think is important.”
“Important.”
“You know, vital to the essence of who you are. Tell me what makes you you.” A slight smile.
“Oh. Well.”
“What’s the problem?”
A good question. What was the problem? “Just don’t know where to start, I guess. That’s a big question. What if I turned it around? Who are you?”
“I’m the daughter of an Iowan bricklayer and a Montessori school teacher who was originally from Montreal but moved with her family to the States when she was nine. I went to Johns Hopkins undergrad, then Harvard, where I met my husband. I have two kids, Kimberly and Douglas, both in college, and two dogs, a sheltie and a black lab. The lab I love, the sheltie I could do without. I like reading, thunderstorms, and long walks on the beach. Two thirds of that last is true; I’ll let you figure it out.”
“Cute,” John said. “But that doesn’t make it any easier.”
“Try the beginning. Where were you born?”
“Pennsylvania,” John said. “In a town called Springfield, not too far outside Philadelphia.”
Barnes nodded, made a note on the pad in her lap. “What about your childhood? What was it like?”
“Happy. I don’t know. Fine. Typical. Bikes, football, games of guns in the woods with my friends.”
“Where did your family live?”
“In the country,” John said. “West Chester. They own a farm, raise cattle and some chickens. Some horses. They used to grow and sell mushrooms to local stores. I’m headed back up there later today for some r and r.”
Barnes clicked her pen. “Why ‘they’? Not ‘we’?”
John straightened in his chair, felt a little hot all of a sudden. He found himself wanting to yank at his collar but didn’t. “What?”
“Talking about your family just now, you said ‘they,’ not ‘we.’ I was just wondering why.” She’d been leaning back, but now she sat forward, her eyes sharp and inquisitive, like a college kid with a crush on the professor.
He sighed, put his hands to his face, laughed ruefully. “You don’t miss much.”
“That wouldn’t do, would it? Not when I have patients lying out their asses to me all day.”
“I guess not.” Blowing air out, he slapped his knees, then said, “I’m adopted. Was adopted. Whatever. My birth mother died during delivery.”
“Who adopted you?”
“This’ll getcha. The doctor who delivered me.”
She looked confused. “I thought you said you were raised on a farm.”
John nodded. “My dad stopped practicing medicine when he and my mother took me in. He bought some land, read some books, and basically started a completely new life.”
“Any idea why he quit medicine?”
“I never asked,” John said. “And he never brought it up. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been a farmer. His father was a farmer, too. I guess he figured he’d had enough of doctoring and wanted to do something he felt really connected to. I just don’t really know.”
There was a moment’s silence, then Barnes asked, “Any difference between your childhood bad dreams and the ones you have now?”
“Yes and no. The ones now are more intense, I guess, and when I was a kid, they weren’t nearly as frequent. Maybe once a month, sometimes not even that often. Not as vivid. But still, similar, I guess. There was always that sense of violence. Maybe that’s why these new ones didn’t alarm me so much.”
“What about the anxiety? This new sense of foreboding you’ve been feeling?”
He shook his head. “No, that’s recent. Like I said, my childhood was, as far as I can tell, pretty normal. Playing with my friends in the woods, too much candy. No tears of blood dripping from my eyes, no stigmata on Easter or Christmas.” He meant for the last to sound joking, but it came out harder than he’d intended.
But Barnes just grinned. “Defensive much?”
He felt himself flush.
“Funny,” she continued, “people don’t tend to be defensive about things that they think are unimportant. You might consider that. But back to your childhood. Nothing ever happened that might have foreshadowed what happened with Kyra Metheny?”
John paused for too long and knew immediately that if he lied, she’d know it. Shit.
“Shit,” he muttered.
Barnes raised an eyebrow, said, “Well, let’s hear it.”
For the next couple of minutes, he sketched out for her what had happened all those years ago with Mary Ann Shaw’s cat.
He left out that he had met with her.
When he was done, Barnes thought for a moment. “If she’s seen the stories in the paper, she might remember what you did back then and try to contact you.”
He was silent and thought to himself: I am an open fucking book.
“John?” Barnes, waiting for him to respond. “Did she get in touch with you?”
He gave a guilty shrug. “Maybe.”
“What exactly does ‘maybe’ include nowadays? Phone conversation? Face to face meeting?”
“Both.”
“And?”
“And she told me some things.”
“Just random things, or was there a common topic?”
“Oh, Christ,” he said. Though his conversation in the park with Mary Ann had gone a long way toward convincing him that her interpretation of his life might be legitimate, the prospect of relating Shaw’s story to Dr. Barnes made him feel childish and gullible. Still, he also knew that his main reason for keeping this appointment with Barnes was a hope that she would talk him out
of buying the bill of goods Mary Ann had so convincingly pitched the day before, so he braced himself and quickly filled Barnes in on everything Shaw had related to him. When he’d finished, she was still looking at him evenly.
“Shouldn’t you be laughing your ass off right about now?” he asked.
“Why?” she said. “Is the existence of a ‘life-taker’ any more difficult to accept than the existence of a healer?”
“I should have known.”
“John,” she said, “there’s a commonly accepted world-view which explains that nothing proves the existence of anything so undeniably as the existence of that thing’s diametric opposite. In other words, you are, so it, your opposite, must be. If you’re a fan of math, think of it in terms of an if-then statement. If a healer, then a…well, let’s call a spade a spade…if a healer, then a vampire, a thing that depends on taking lives to remain alive.”
He felt his eyes narrow with skepticism. “What’s with you?”
She sighed. “Nothing is with me, John. I’m just trying to help. You can’t work your way through issues you won’t even admit exist, and you are refusing to do that.”
“That’s not true,” he said.
“No?”
“No.”
“So now you think you’re a healer? You’ve accepted the fact that you can heal wounds and even take back death?”
John shrugged, found himself squirming in his seat. “Well, it just sounds stupid when you say it like that.”
“But you think it’s a possibility.”
John sighed. “If I say yes, are men in white coats going to burst through the door, put me in a straight-jacket, and trundle me off to some asylum?”
Barnes shook her head. “Of course not. No one wears those coats anymore.”
John chuckled ruefully. “Okay then, yeah, after talking to Mary Ann and after thinking about it for a while, I’m not willing to say that all of this is just…”
“Bullshit?” Barnes volunteered.