“That’d be the Watts kid?”
“Yeah…”
“And?”
The detective slung back his beer. “There weren’t any more notes. Not after he took Georgie Watts. The notes just stop.”
* * *
The notes just stop.
Carter thought about it while he walked back to Hill’s Books with his purchases. Why would they just stop? Why would the assiduous note taker stop taking notes? He was still active, after all. He took one more victim. No, not really a victim. More like bait. He’d never intended to harm Thiago Mata, just to provoke the police into finding him quickly and to kill him. Hell of a thing. Suicide by cop. Suicide.
Why by cop? Why at all?
Carter shook his head slightly, an outward expression of inward exasperation. It wasn’t his case. Suydam had claimed one last victim—somehow—in Charlie Hammond. That was it; Carter was done, done with all that.
The bookstore was as he had left it. He muffled the bell with his hand on entering, and found himself thinking of electronic alternatives. Specifically ones that could be turned off when they weren’t needed. Then he realized he was thinking about the long-term operations of the store, and smiled to himself.
When he took his hand from the bell, it rang quietly and maybe even reproachfully. Carter was becoming fanciful, and he knew it. He put it down to the effect of the store upon him; being surrounded by all that fiction had to have some sort of effect on a man, didn’t it? He was also beginning to like the place. Maybe he would keep it going as a concern, deal Emily in, and be a silent partner.
The ceiling above him creaked.
It was probably nothing, just an old building settling in the cool evening after a sunny day. Probably nothing, but Carter put down his shopping quietly, drew his pistol, and—having checked that the store front and rear were empty—made his way slowly up the stairs. This time he remembered the creaking step and made it to the top in near silence.
The studio apartment was unoccupied.
Carter swore under his breath. He was
trying
to like the place, but it kept putting him on his guard like this. He’d just have to get used to it.
There it was again, a definite belief that he would be involved in the store in the future. He thought of Ken Rothwell then, a man born with a mouthful of silver spoons, just saying he’d like to buy it, discussing it like it was a secondhand car. Fuck Rothwell and his money. Carter would give Emily a share in the store because she deserved it.
He went to his car to pick up the overnight bag he kept in the trunk for eventualities like this, and returned to prepare himself for the night. He stripped off the bed’s plastic covering and checked the mattress closely, fully aware of how absurd it was. He found nothing, as he knew he would. He cut the navy blue foam bedroll out of its wrapping and ran it down the right-hand side of the bed, the side he found himself preferring even when sleeping alone. Then he laid the sleeping bag on it. Belatedly he realized he didn’t have a pillow, but found one in a store cupboard. It was musty with age—the cupboards not having had Emily’s regular eye upon them—so he stuffed it inside the cloth sack the sleeping bag had come in, shaped it with his hands, and laid it at the end of the bedroll. Not exactly five-star accommodations, but he’d slept in enough cars and even on a couple of concrete floors in his life to make him appreciate sleep anytime it involved lying down on a surface that conformed to the shape of the body.
It was already dark outside, and an Atlantic weather system had come ashore, bringing with it a steady, penetrating rain. Carter stood by the window and watched the cars go by through the blurred glass, traces of light against wet asphalt.
He should have felt alone, but he did not. There was an atmosphere in the apartment, as if it had risen up from the store below. Nothing malign, and nothing to stress his already oversensitive sense of self-preservation, but just the aura of a well-lived house. He gauged the place to have been built in the 1920s, maybe a decade or so earlier. There was something jaunty about it, even in its old age. If it had been a man, it would have worn a straw boater and sung in a barbershop quartet. Perhaps that wasn’t the store’s personality, though. Maybe that was Alfred Hill shining through.
Carter looked at the bookshelves for something to read while he wound down for sleep. These were Hill’s personal books, he guessed. At least, none of the few he flicked through bore prices in soft black pencil on the flyleaves. He’d also noted that the stock downstairs contained—very old-school—a simple substitution cipher of the price the store had paid, a real hangover from decades before. He’d heard of such systems, but had never actually seen one used. It was strange to see the odd little characters there, refugees from a time before electronic points of sale, bar codes, and JIT management.
Hill’s own collection was clear of any such markings, though. There were a lot of them, but Carter started skimming the titles after only reading the first few as he began to realize that Hill’s interests did not coincide with his own.
There were a lot of books of mythology, folklore, and the occult. None of them sported lurid covers. Instead, they were revealed by a riffle of the thumb to be dry, academic volumes. Carter hadn’t realized it was possible to make satanic orgies boring, but one of the books he took down managed it.
Another shelf carried fiction, but it was all fiction involving mythology, folklore, the occult. He didn’t recognize any of the writers—Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, Frank Belknap Long—but the titles were as lurid as the academic books had been dry. He flicked through a volume of the Dunsany, nearly gagged on the violet prose, and put it back. No, there was nothing to read there, either.
Finally, and feeling a cliché for doing it, he went down into the store and picked a novel from the shelf of detective stories. He decided to at least not go for anything hardboiled, and picked up something British instead,
The Moving Toyshop
by Edmund Crispin. Carter liked impossible crime stories—he used to love reruns of
Ellery Queen
and
Banacek
when he was a kid—so a novel about a whole toy store vanishing looked like it might work for him.
He took the book upstairs, put it by the bedside, brushed his teeth, stripped to his underwear, and climbed into the sleeping bag.
The book … well. Quite quickly, Carter didn’t know what to make of the book. He knew it was British, but he hadn’t been expecting it to be quite
that
British. He read of Richard Cadogan, the famous but impoverished poet, who liked pistols but was a lousy shot. He read of Spode, Nutling, and Orlick, “publishers of high-class literature.” But there was only a Mr. Spode, as Nutling and Orlick were fictional even within the novel. He read of a journey to Oxford, and realized he had no idea where most cities were in the United Kingdom. He could place London, and that was all. When Cadogan ended up marooned in Didcot, he could have been on the moon, for all Carter knew. Crispin threw in literary references, too, none of which meant a single damn thing to Carter.
Carter felt himself slowly being overwhelmed by the effects of a long day, travel, events, and now a book that was better than him, and knew it. He got as far as Cadogan’s first sight of the eponymous toyshop and decided he’d buy the book in the morning and read it when he was more alert. He returned it to the nightstand, beat the makeshift pillow back into shape, and switched off the light.
Carter rarely dreamed, and when he did, he didn’t enjoy it. Even as a child, he had avoided “I had the weirdest dream last night” conversations. His friends dreamed of catching buses that traveled so long that they forgot where they were supposed to be going and started living on the bus instead. They dreamed of it being their birthday, but every present was empty because friends and relatives had decided to wrap the boxes before going out and buying the gifts, because it was more efficient that way; look, here they are, in the garage the whole time. They dreamed of schtupping that girl in class who nobody liked because she had personality issues, but she was really nice in the dream.
Carter always said he never remembered his dreams. If pressed, he’d make something up. Late for school. Being locked out. Typical, boring anxiety stuff.
Carter didn’t usually remember his dreams because, at an early age, he learned how to forget them. He didn’t dwell on them. He didn’t talk about them. The idea of a “dream diary” made him panicky. If he avoided every thought of them, derailed every train of thought that took him back to them, then they faded after a little while. It wasn’t just the best thing to do. It was the only thing to do.
Over the years he had gotten very good at it, both the forgetting of his dreams and the lying about them.
Soon all that was left was the lingering dread of just how fucked up his unconscious mind was, and how much it wanted to destroy him. He managed to hide that, too. From the outside world, at least. As far as he knew, he’d aced every psych assessment, and he didn’t take the skills of the department psychiatrist lightly.
That lingering dread, though, that was always there, and manifested in small ways. He disliked open spaces. Not real agoraphobia, but just a sense of vulnerability when he was outside in an open area. The sea, too, troubled him. He couldn’t understand why anybody would want to go on it for shits and giggles. It was dangerous. He didn’t panic if he had to go on the ferry, though. The idea of the ferry sinking while he was aboard didn’t bother him any more than it would bother anyone else. That wasn’t the nature of the dread—and it was an apprehension rather than a fear. It was something altogether bigger than just a morbid fear of drowning.
Until the deaths of Martin Suydam and Charlie Hammond, Carter had never had a dream he couldn’t erase from his memory with a little mindful neglect, and Carter had
never
had a dream he had known was a dream as he dreamed it.
* * *
Tonight, he knew he was dreaming. He didn’t know how, because nothing felt wrong or partially formed. He was in Union Street, actually standing in the middle of the street, right in front of the precinct house. Union Street wasn’t wide, lined with redbrick tenements opposite the station all the way along but with gaps on the other side, like kicked-out teeth. One of the gaps was occupied by the precinct house itself, a brown brick building with a blue-tiled frontage.
Carter wasn’t worried about standing in the street. There was no traffic, only parked cars. There were no people, either. He listened, but couldn’t hear anything. No traffic sounds, no music, no aircraft, not even birdsong.
He went in because he was a cop, and why else would he be standing in front of the precinct house unless he meant to go in? He only remembered he wasn’t a cop anymore much later. All the vehicles parked out front were patrol cars, which was odd. He’d never seen more than three or four out there before, but there was a shining row of twelve black-and-whites. They looked new. When Carter walked between two to get to the sidewalk, he was wary of touching them. It wasn’t smearing their pristine wax jobs that worried him. It was that they were there at all, gleaming and reeking of newness. That wasn’t the 76th Precinct he remembered.
He entered and the place was empty. No. Silent, he realized; not empty.
Lying by the public counter was a uniform cop. Carter saw the spray pattern on the wall, and knew before he even reached him that the man had been shot through the head. The face was untouched. Carter didn’t know him and thought he must have started in the precinct after Carter left. That he still believed himself to be a police officer didn’t glitch for him at all. The back of the skull was missing, a section of skull the diameter of a clenched fist blown out by the passage of a bullet. The dead man had his gun in his hand, so at least he hadn’t died without trying to retaliate.
His gun was a S&W Model 5946. Carter knew it wasn’t just any 5946; it was Charlie Hammond’s. He didn’t know how that was possible, or how he knew it from any other, but he was sure. He had a half thought that maybe the precinct reissued the handguns of dead cops. Now that its new owner was dead, too, would they reissue it again?
Carter went to the detectives’ bullpen to find somebody to report the death to, but it was silent there. Every detective sat at their desk, every one of them was dead, every one of them had been shot through the mouth, every one of them held Charlie Hammond’s gun.
Carter saw a flight of wooden stairs and climbed them, though no such stairs existed in the 76th Precinct house.
* * *
He was in the house of Martin Suydam. As he broached the top of the staircase, he walked through a length of crime scene tape that tore like gossamer.
Nobody else was there. Dark stains showed, soaked into the wooden boards and bare plaster by the wall where Suydam had died and in a wall spray where Charlie Hammond had emptied his skull. Now Carter felt he shouldn’t be there, no longer convinced even within the warp of the dream that he was still a cop.
Suydam’s psycho wall was still up. Carter thought that this was wrong, that somebody had specifically told him that everything had been taken away in preparation for the site to be razed, but he couldn’t quite catch the memory slipping eel-like through his recollection. He went through into the side rooms from where he’d made the call, and stood by the window. Outside was a patch of woodland. Beyond it, he thought he could see the sea. Above him, the great sky. The wind sighed. He couldn’t see a single building out there, just a green wilderness. As the wind blew, the sky seemed to bulge as if it were a diaphanous sail. The great blue arc of it seemed as insubstantial and flawed as a tangled cobweb, as deformed as Suydam’s tracery of yarn on his psycho wall.
At the edge of the world, the sea rose to meet the sky, and it was coming closer. The sea rose, the sky fell, forming a shattered horizon that came toward Carter like an avalanche, a cave-in under the vault of heaven.