The Sleepless (58 page)

‘And if I don’t? Or if I
won’t
?’ 

‘Mr Hillary’ carried on stroking Patsy’s curls for a while, and then raised his head, and the expression on his sharp, handsome face was terrifying. ‘You know what we feed on. You know how we get it.’ 

One of the lily-white boys, Joseph, let out a high, rustling laugh. 

Michael said, ‘All right. It seems like you’ve got me where you want me. I’ll agree to that. John O’Brien and his family died by accident. Now, please will you let my wife and my son out of those blindfolds and out of those goddamned gags.’ 

‘Mr Hillary’ gave Joseph and Bryan a cursory flap of his hand, and they immediately took out knives and began to cut Patsy and Jason free. When Bryan untied her blindfold, Patsy stared up at Michael and burst into tears, even with her mouth still gagged. Bryan ripped off the sticking-plaster and she sobbed out, ‘Michael, thank God! I thought they were going to kill us!’ 

Michael stepped forward to take hold of her, but ‘Mr Hillary’ gave him a look which warned him to stay back. Jason was untied, too, and promptly started to sob. ‘Dad, my wrists hurt!’ 

‘I hope you’re pleased with yourself,’ Michael said to ‘Mr Hillary’. He was so filled up with rage that he could hardly speak. ‘All you had to do was have a quietly threatening word with me – you didn’t have to terrorize my family.’ 

Patsy sobbed, ‘They said they were going to cut us open ... they said all kinds of terrible things.’ 

‘All right,’ said Michael. ‘Are you satisfied now? I’ll finish my report on O’Brien tonight and I’ll have it on Mr Bedford’s desk first thing tomorrow.’ 

‘Mr Hillary’ smiled archly. ‘Oh, come on, Michael, don’t be so angry. I was only protecting my own little brood. No harm done. No skin broken. Not yet, anyway.’ 

‘What do you mean – “Not yet, anyway”?’ 

‘You didn’t believe that I was simply going to let you walk out of here, and drive off home?’ 

‘Then what?’ Michael demanded. ‘What else do you want?’ 

‘Michael ... you don’t seem to know what you are, even now.’ 

‘Maybe not. But I sure as hell know what
you
are.’ 

‘Mr Hillary’ ran his hand through his silky white hair, as if he were an actress. ‘You have no idea what I am. You have no idea what I was originally, and you have no idea what I am today.’ 

‘I saw what you did to Victor Kurylowicz. I saw what you did to John O’Brien and his family. I saw the victims of the Rocky Woods air disaster. Anybody who could do things like that is a maniac and a sadist, and that’s what you are.’ 

‘Mr Hillary’s’ red eyes flared with anger. 

‘I was a pilgrim and a being of total purity. I was a messenger of God. In those days, the messengers of God could openly walk amongst men, which they are too afraid to do today. Then I was caught by those superstitious and ignorant Levites and chosen to atone for all of their sins; and my purity was corrupted, and my innocence was stained as black as blood. Do you think your friend Victor suffered? Do you think that Sissy O’Brien suffered? Or any of those people who died at Rocky Woods? You have no conception of suffering, Michael. You have no conception of what it is like to carry the evils of a whole nation within you.’ 

He paused, and wiped his lips with his fingertips. ‘For twenty years I lived as an outcast, in a hell-on-earth. Nobody would accept me, nobody would take me in. But one morning, as I walked toward the sun, I found that somebody was walking beside me. And the next day, another joined us, a little distance off. After a week, there were many of us. 

‘They were the Seirim. The most primitive of Semitic tribes called the goat-demons, and used to offer them burnt sacrifices. Of course they were not really goat-demons, but
these
people, the white-white men, the lily-white boys. The bastard sons of those beings that you would understand as angels. Sleepless and corrupt The Seirim, too, were outcasts. They, too, were scapegoats. There had been a time when Rehoboam appointed priests for them – but with the coming of Moses and Aaron, they were hunted and reviled, and Josiah destroyed their encampments and their places of worship.’ 

‘Mr Hillary’ spoke even more softly now. ‘They are my family; they are my tribe. They took me in when nobody else would take me in; and they walked beside me when everybody else turned their backs on me and made the sign of the evil eye. 

‘We lived together and the Seirim took wives, and their wives had children. The blood of the lily-white boys runs through many people’s veins, Michael. Anybody who dreams of me, anybody who knows that death nestles like a grey spider in the back of his mind, they are descended from the lily-white boys. 

‘John O’Brien had dreams of me; and so do you. Because I can tell you what you are, Michael, you are a distant descendant of one of these people. It could be Joseph, it could be Bryan. It could be Thomas. But that blood which is dripping from your hand is our blood, too.’ 

Michael was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘What are you going to do with us?’ 

‘Mr Hillary’ gave him his snarling smile. ‘I am going to show you what it is like to atone for your sins, and for the sins of other people. I am going to give you the joy of exquisite suffering.’ 

Eighteen 

Thomas was still finishing his breakfast when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and wedged it under his chin, and said, ‘Boyle,’ with a mouthful of muffin. 

‘Sorry to call you so early, sir.’ It was Sergeant Jahnke, sounding unhealthily enthusiastic and boyish. 

‘What’s the problem, David?’ asked Thomas. Megan came into the room and lifted the coffee pot, silently offering him more coffee, but Thomas shook his head. 

‘I came in this morning and there was a fax waiting from the Plymouth police department, in Vermont. They’ve been tracing James T. Honeyman, DMD, MDS, and Mrs Honeyman – the people who rented the house on Byron.’ 

‘Have they made any progress?’ 

‘It looks like it. Mr and Mrs Honeyman’s house at the Hawk-Salt-Ash resort community was purchased not by Mr and Mrs Honeyman but by White Mountain Resort Investments, whose registered offices are at Manchester, Vermont. Actually, this isn’t surprising because the records of the US Dental Association show that there
is
no James T. Honeyman, DMD, MDS.’ 

‘That’s not too much of a surprise,’ said Thomas. 

‘Ah, but there’s more,’ said Sergeant Jahnke. ‘The chairman of White Mountain Resort Investments is Mr A. Z. Azel, whose address is given as P.O. Box 335, Nahant, Massachusetts. I called the Nahant post office a few minutes ago and they told me that the gentleman who collects the mail from P.O. Box 335 lives in the decommissioned lighthouse on Goat’s Cape.’ 

‘ “Mr Hillary”,’ Thomas breathed. 

‘Just thought you’d like to know, sir,’ said David Jahnke, smugly. 

‘Good work, David. And send my heartfelt thanks back to Plymouth. Tell Warren Forshaw that I owe him a box of cigars.’ 

‘I surely will, sir. You want to put a search warrant in train?’ 

‘You bet your sweet posterior. I’ll be down at headquarters in ten minutes.’ 

He put down the phone and clenched his fist and said, ‘Gotcha, you bastard.’ 

Megan, wheeling herself back into the room, couldn’t help smiling. 

‘Which bastard is this?’ 

‘ “Mr Hillary”,’ he said. ‘The prime suspect for the Elaine Parker and the Sissy O’Brien homicides. David’s come up with legal justification for searching his house. His
lighthouse,
rather, up on Goat’s Cape.’ 

Megan’s face drained of colour. ‘What are you going to do?’ 

‘Megs – I’m going to bust the bastard, that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t know what time I’ll be back. I’ll call you later.’ 

‘Thomas –’ Megan began. But how could she explain about the self-induced hypnotic trance that she and Michael had entered into? How could she tell him what she had seen and what she had felt, and what had happened between them afterwards? It still made her cheeks burn to think of it. She still fantasized that they might do it again, his ejaculation falling on her face like warm summer rain. 

‘Be careful!’ she called to Thomas, as he left the apartment. She sat in her wheelchair waiting until she heard the sound of his car starting up. Then she pushed herself across to the phone, and leafed through the notebook that Thomas had left beside it, until she found the jotting that she was looking for. 

She punched out the number and edgily waited while it rang. Supposing he wasn’t at home? What was she going to do then? 

But after a while, a cautious voice said, ‘Hello? Who is this?’ 

‘Mr Monyatta?’ said Megan. ‘This is Megan Boyle – Lieutenant Thomas Boyle’s wife. Mr Monyatta, I badly need your help.’ 

Michael was dreaming. He dreamed that he was jostling his way through a crowd of people. They didn’t move like ordinary people – they moved as if somebody was pushing and pulling them from side to side. They moved as if they could scarcely stand up. 

Through the crowd, inching his way toward him, came a smiling man in a suit. When he saw Michael he held out his hand and said,
‘Pleased to meet you – glad you could make it.’
 

Michael twisted away from him in panic. But the lifeless crowd kept pressing him closer. He was carried forward against his will, his feet barely touching the ground. 

‘Don’t come near me!
’ he screamed.
‘Mr President, don’t come near me!
’ 

He woke up, sweating and shaking. It was morning, and the room was flooded with sunlight, so bright that it was almost like a dream of heaven. 

He was lying on a narrow divan bed in a cramped whitewashed room. There was no other furniture in
the
room except for a small table with two candlesticks on it, and a faded engraving on the wall of St Christopheros, the Christ-Bearer. Christ was perched on St Christopheros’s shoulder in the strangest way, almost as if he were flying rather than sitting, and his face had been darkened by an ink-stain. 

Michael stiffly sat up. Through the half-open window a steady sea breeze was flowing, and he could hear the sound of the surf and the crying of the sea gulls. He was wearing his shorts and nothing else, and there was no sign of his clothes. He couldn’t even remember what had happened last night. Jason had been taken away to sleep in another room, while he and Patsy had sat on the couch in the recreation room, guarded by Joseph and Bryan. 

Joseph and Bryan had played cards on the table-tennis table and said nothing at all. As the night wore on, Patsy had fallen asleep against Michael’s shoulder, and the monotonous slapping of the cards on the baize table-top had made Michael feel drowsy, too. But he had been determined to stay awake – if only to see for himself that the lily-white boys never slept. 

As far as Michael could remember, they had kept on playing silently and tirelessly until four o’clock in the morning. Not only hadn’t they slept, they hadn’t even blinked. 

Michael could remember thinking: I hope to God they don’t hurt Patsy or Jason. Please God, don’t let them. But that was all. The lily-white boys must have carried him here and undressed him, and he hadn’t even stirred. 

He stood up, and as he did so, the narrow wooden door opened. It was Joseph, wearing a loose black-silk shirt. He smiled and beckoned and said, ‘ “Mr Hillary” is ready for his breakfast now.’ 

‘Tell “Mr Hillary” to screw himself. Where are my clothes?’ 

‘You won’t need clothes, Mr Rearden.’ 

‘Either you give me my clothes or else I’m staying put.’ 

Joseph’s smile began to fade like someone’s breath on a cold winter window. ‘Mr Rearden, your lovely wife is downstairs already. I think for her sake it would be a very good idea if you came down to join her.’ 

‘If you so much as touch her –’ 

‘Loving and touching, Mr Rearden. Loving and touching. They’re all part of the same wonderful experience.’ 

Michael reluctantly followed him out of the door, and along a narrow whitewashed landing, with an oak-boarded floor. Every now and then, Joseph glanced back at him over his shoulder, and grinned. 

They passed three windows, and Michael looked out across Nahant Bay and the breeze-blown beach. He could see his car, still parked where he had left it, facing north, in case he needed to make a getaway. No hope of that now. 

Joseph led the way down the staircase, and back into the library. There, in his high-backed chair, sat ‘Mr Hillary’, his legs idly crossed, his hair brushed back and tied with a leather thong into a pony-tail. His blood-red eyes were wide and staring, as if he were working up an appetite; and his lips were stretched back, revealing his teeth. 

Behind him – as if they were posing for a family portrait – stood eight or nine of the lily-white boys, some of them dressed in black leather, some of them dressed in black Armani suits, some of them dressed in black brocade waistcoats and black rubber shirts. Black – with white faces, and blood-filled eyes.