Knock once and go on in. I closed my eyes, saw that staircase again, the landing at the top and the open doorway just to the right; heard the bottles on the dressing table clicking together, the headboard slapping the wall, rattling everything in the room. I felt sick, like I had that day, a cramping, churning feeling deep in my bowels, as if someone had pushed their fingers through the skin below my navel, worked them deeper until they were inside me up to the wrist, curled around my intestines, twisting, crushing and yanking them free in one slimy, bloody mess. “No,” I said softly. “You’re not.”
“The dark loves denial. Broken memories. Buried memories.”
“So that’s where it started then?” I asked. “With his mother?”
“Where’d she go when she got pregnant with Bernard?” she asked. “And where did Bernard go when he lied about joining the Marines? New York City. Think that’s a coincidence? Think maybe he went there to see the same crowd his mother knew? The same crowd she was running with when she got pregnant with him? Think maybe it was a homecoming? Think maybe that’s where he learned to do what he ended up doing so well?” Claudia slid the cigarette behind her ear. “There were lots of killings there, especially back then, lots of activity, lots of history. Destroyers walked there, fed the streets. Fed them with blood. That’s what they do; they want blood flowing in the fucking streets. It goes in cycles, and with every wave there’s a destroyer, a beast. The rest of them, they’re just gone, dead or vanished. Fucking poof, like they were never there.”
“But wait,” I said. The heat was so thick I was having trouble breathing. “He attacks Julie Henderson when he’s thirteen years old, does nothing else for five or six years then goes to New York City and suddenly becomes a killer?”
“How do you know he did nothing else for five or six years?”
“Even if he did other things we don’t know about, he goes to New York and he starts to kill—maybe these, whatever the hell they are, his mother fell in with, taught him or helped him—and he slaughters two young women inside of a year. Then he stops as suddenly as he began, moves back to Potter’s Cove with the Marines story and doesn’t kill again for nearly two decades? Serial killers can’t just stop killing once they start.”
Claudia actually chuckled. “Is that what you think Bernard was, a serial killer who killed at random and couldn’t stop? His murders were ritual killings, you understand? And besides, he didn’t stop after New York and only start up again right before he died. There were others.” She rubbed her eyes with her palms and sighed. “We were in his car once, headed up to the Cape for a couple days.” She brought her hands down; her eyeliner had smudged. “He told me one day they’d find them scattered along that highway, back in the scrub brush, in the woods. He told me he’d left a lot of them there.
“I was high. I laughed. Crazy motherfucker. Maybe he was telling the truth, maybe not. Didn’t know, didn’t care. And in the end it didn’t mean shit anyway, because it was all practice for those last killings he did in the months before he offed himself. Everything led to that. Those bodies they’re finding in Potter’s Cove now? He meant for them to be found.”
“How many are there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t—”
“I don’t fucking know, I said. You think I went with him, watched, helped?” This time when Claudia put the cigarette in her mouth she lit it. “I knew his plan, I was around, I listened—that’s it.”
I took a step away from the kitchen table and toward the back door. I needed to be closer to the sunshine. “Fine, you knew his plan. What were the rituals?”
Claudia took a drag on her cigarette, exhaled and picked a flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. “It’s all about the blood.”
“The victims in Potter’s Cove were bled,” I told her. “They were killed somewhere else and dumped. The same was true of the two unsolved homicides Donald came across in New York.”
She nodded. “The strongest spells—the darkest—always involve human blood. Blood holds life. Some believe the soul travels through the blood. It’s an ancient ritual. Kind of like back in medieval times, if someone was sick or possessed they believed you could bleed disease and evil out of them. And they weren’t that far off. You take the blood and you steal the soul, the life. From there, ain’t no telling what you can do with it if you’re powerful enough. At least that’s what a lot of those types believe.”
“Do you know where he did it?”
“No.” Claudia smoked her cigarette quickly, and after a few hard drags it was reduced to a butt she tossed into the sink along with the last. “You’re the one with the visions, man, not me.”
“That factory down in the south end,” I said.
She slowly shook her head in the negative. “He didn’t know the city well enough, it wouldn’t have been there. He would’ve done it where he felt safe, where he knew his way around, in and out.”
“Then why did that woman appear to me and lure me there?”
“They say the underworld don’t fit together exactly like this one does,” she said. “Sometimes it’s all representational, know what I mean? What’s the word—symbolic?”
I moved closer to the back door. “There’s a bunch of old abandoned factories in Potter’s Cove, too.”
Claudia shrugged.
“And why is this woman coming to me?” I asked. “Why me?”
“All the victims were single mothers.”
“I knew that much.”
“No.” She slid down the counter a bit, closer to me. “You have to do more than know, you have to understand.”
“But I don’t even know who the hell she is.”
“The victims were single mothers, all of them with sons. Just like Bernard and his mother. He was lining them up to join him on the other side, no doubt, but what he was doing was symbolic too, see? He wouldn’t be what he was without his mother, so in a way, he was killing her, killing the one who provided him with life, again and again and again. Then, near the end, he went one better. That’s how the rituals go, he would’ve taken it another step and not just killed the woman who represented his mother—life—but he’d kill the life itself. The child, the son who represented him.”