“Recompense?” I tried to hide the disgust in my voice, but I could not. “You’re talking about your daughter, not some…used car that gave out on you a mile from the lot. This isn’t about her. It’s about you. You want to lash out at someone. She’s just your excuse.”
The anger flared again, and once more I was reminded of the similarities between Frank Merrick and Andy Kellog, of the rage always bubbling away beneath their exteriors. Merrick was right: he and Kellog were like father and son, in some strange way.
“You shut the fuck up!” said Merrick. “You got no idea what you’re saying.”
The gun shifted hands again, and his right fist was suddenly poised above me, the knuckles ready to smash down upon me. And then he seemed to become aware of something, for he paused and looked over his shoulder, and as he did so, I sensed it too.
The room had grown colder, and there was a noise from the hallway outside my door. It was soft, like the footsteps of a child.
“You alone here?” said Merrick.
“Yes,” I replied, and I couldn’t tell if I was lying.
He turned around and walked slowly to the open door, then stepped swiftly into the hallway, the gun held close to him in case someone tried to knock it from his grasp. He disappeared from view, and I could hear doors opening, and closets being searched. His shape passed by the doorway again, then he was downstairs, checking that all of the rooms were quiet and unoccupied. When he returned, he looked troubled, and the bedroom was colder still. He shivered.
“The hell is wrong with this place?”
But I was no longer listening to him, because I smelled her now. Blood and perfume. She was close. I thought Merrick might have smelled her too, because his nose wrinkled slightly. He spoke, but he sounded distant, almost distracted. There was an edge of madness to his voice, and I thought then that he was going to kill me for sure. I tried to move my lips to pray, but I could remember no words, and no prayers would come.
“I don’t want you meddling in my affairs no more, you understand?” he said. His spittle landed on my face. “I thought you was a man I could reason with, but I was wrong. You’ve caused me enough trouble already, and I need to make sure you don’t trouble me again.”
He returned to the satchel on the floor and withdrew a roll of duct tape. He laid the gun down, then used the tape to cover my mouth before binding my legs tightly together above the ankles. He took a burlap sack and draped it over my head, securing it with more tape wrapped around my neck. Using a blade, he ripped a hole in the sacking just beneath my nostrils, so that I could breathe more easily.
“You listen to me, now,” he said. “I got to put some harm your way, just to be sure that you got your days filled without worrying about me. After that, you mind your business, and I’ll see that justice is done.”
Then he left me, and with him some of the chill departed from the room, as though something was following him through the house, marking his progress to ensure that he went. But another remained: a smaller presence, less angry than the first, yet more afraid.
And I closed my eyes as I felt her hand brush against the sackcloth.
daddy
Go away.
daddy, i’m here.
A moment later there was another in the room. I felt her approach. I couldn’t breathe properly. More sweat fell into my eyes. I tried to blink it away. I was panicking, suffocating, yet I could almost see her through the perforations in the sack, darkness against darkness, and smell her as she came.
daddy, it’s all right, i’m here.
But it wasn’t all right, because she was approaching: the other, the first wife, or something like her.
hush
No. Get away from me. Please, please, leave me alone.
hush
No.
And then my daughter went silent, and the voice of the other spoke.
hush, for we are here.
Chapter XXIII
Ricky Demarcian was, from all outward appearances, a loser. He lived in a double-wide trailer that, for the early years of his occupancy, had left him freezing in winter and gently roasted him alive in summer, basting him in his own juices and filling every space with the stench of mold and filth and unwashed clothes. The trailer had been green once, but the elements had combined with Ricky’s inept painting skills to take their toll upon it, fading it so that it was now a filthy, washed-out blue, like some dying creature at the bottom of a polluted sea.
The trailer stood at the northern perimeter of a park called Tranquility Pines, which was false advertising right there because there wasn’t a pine in sight-no mean feat in the grand old state of Maine-and the place was about as tranquil as a nest of ants drowning in caffeine. It lay in a hollow surrounded by scrub-covered slopes, as though the park itself were slowly sinking into the earth, borne down by the weight of disappointment, frustration, and envy that was the burden carried by its residents.
Tranquility Pines was filled with screwups, many of whom, curiously, were women: vicious, foul-mouthed harridans who still looked and dressed the same way they did in the eighties, all stone-washed denim and bubble perms, simultaneously hunters and hunted trawling the bars of South Portland and Old Orchard and Scarborough for ratlike men with money to spend, or muscle-bound freaks in wife-beater shirts whose hatred of women gave their temporary partners a respite of sorts from their own self-loathing. Some had kids, and the males among them were well on their way to becoming like the men who shared their mothers’ beds, and whom they themselves despised without understanding how close they were to following in their footsteps. The girls, meanwhile, tried to escape their family circumstances by creating families of their own, thereby dooming themselves to become the very women they least desired to emulate.
There were male residents at the Pines too, but they were mostly like Ricky had once been: wasted men regretting wasted lives, some on welfare and some with jobs, although what work they had seemed mostly to involve gutting or cutting, and the smell of rotting fish and chicken skins acted as a kind of universal identifier for the park’s residents.
Ricky used to have one of those jobs. His left arm was shriveled and useless, the fingers unable to grip or move, the result of some mishap in the womb, but Ricky had learned how to cope with the damaged limb, mainly by hiding it and forgetting about it for a time, until that moment in each day that life threw a curveball at him and reminded him of how much easier things would be if he had two hands to make the catch. It didn’t help Ricky’s employment prospects much either, although, even if he had boasted two functioning arms, his lack of, in no particular order, education, ambition, energy, resourcefulness, sociability, honesty, reliability, and general humanity would probably have ruled him out of any labor that didn’t involve, well, gutting or cutting. So Ricky started on the bottom rung at a chicken-processing plant that supplied meat for fast-food joints, using a hose to spray blood, feathers, and chicken crap from the floors, his days filled with the sound of panicked clucking; with the casual cruelty of the men operating the line who took pleasure in tormenting the birds, adding extra agony to their final moments by breaking wings and legs; with the fizz of the current as the chickens, dangling upside down on a conveyor belt, were briefly immersed in electrified water, the action sometimes successfully stunning them but often failing, since the birds were so busy squawking and squirming that their heads frequently missed the water entirely, and they were still conscious when the multibladed slaughtering machines slit their throats, their bodies jerking as superheated water defeathered them, leaving their steaming carcasses ready to be chopped into bitesized pieces of flesh that, raw or cooked, tasted of next to nothing.
The funny thing was, Ricky still ate chicken, even chicken from the plant in which he had once worked. The whole affair hadn’t bothered him unduly: not the cruelty, not the casual attitude to safety, not even the foul stink as, truth be told, Ricky’s own personal hygiene was unlikely to win him any prizes, and it was only a matter of getting used to a whole new array of odors. Still, Ricky recognized that being a chicken mopper was somewhat less than the mark of a successful, fulfilled life, and so he went looking for a less ignominious way to make a living. He discovered it in computers, for Ricky had a natural aptitude for the machines, a talent that, had it been recognized and cultivated at an earlier age, might well have made him a very wealthy man indeed, or so he liked to tell himself, disregarding the many personal failings that had led to his current, modest status amid the pine-free and untranquil surroundings of his trailer park. It began with Ricky’s acquisition of an old Macintosh, then progressed through night school and computer books stolen from chain stores, until eventually he was downloading technical manuals and devouring them in single sittings, the disorder surrounding him in his daily life standing in stark contrast to the clean lines and ordered diagrams taking form in his mind.