Eldritch arrived in Maine early on Monday morning, accompanied by a younger man who had the distracted yet slightly desperate air of an alcoholic who has forgotten where the bottle is hidden. Eldritch allowed his companion to make all of the running in petitioning the judge, contributing only a few words on behalf of his client at the end of the submission, his soft, reasonable tones conveying the impression that his client was a peace-loving man whose actions, born out of a concern for the well-being of his lost child, had been cruelly misinterpreted by an uncaring world. Nevertheless, he gave a promise on Merrick’s behalf, for Merrick did not speak, to adhere to all conditions of the court order about to be served, and requested, with all due deference, that his client be released forthwith.
The judge, whose name was Nola Hight, was no fool. In her fifteen years at the bench she had heard just about every excuse known to man, and she wasn’t about to take Eldritch at face value.
“Your client spent ten years in jail for attempted murder, Mr. Eldritch,” she said.
“Aggravated assault, Your Honor,” Eldritch’s young assistant corrected. Judge Hight glared at him so hard his hair started to singe.
“With respect, Your Honor, I’m not sure that is relevant to the matter before the court,” said Eldritch, attempting to smooth the judge’s ruffled feathers through tone alone. “My client served his time for that offense. He is a changed man, chastened by his experiences.”
Judge Hight gave Eldritch a look that would have reduced a lesser man to charred flesh. Eldritch merely wavered where he stood, as though his brittle form had been briefly buffeted by a gentle breeze.
“He will be chastened for the maximum term allowable under law if he comes before this court again in connection with the matter in hand,” she said. “Am I making myself clear, counsel?”
“Indisputably,” said Eldritch. “Your Honor is as reasonable as she is wise.”
Judge Hight debated finding him in contempt of court for sarcasm, then gave up.
“Get the hell out of my courtroom,” she said.
• • •
It was still early, barely after ten. Merrick was due for release at eleven, once his paperwork had been processed. When they let him out of the Cumberland County lockup, I was waiting, and I served him with the court order forbidding further contact with Rebecca Clay on pain of imprisonment and/or a fine. He took it, read it carefully, then slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. He looked crumpled and tired, the way most people did after a couple of nights in a cell.
“That was low, what you did,” he said.
“You mean setting the cops on you? You were terrorizing a young woman. That also seems kind of low. You need to reconsider your standards. They’re all screwed up.”
He might have heard me, but he wasn’t really listening. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at a spot somewhere over my right shoulder, letting me know that I wasn’t even worthy of eye contact.
“Men ought to deal with each other like men,” he continued, red rising into his face as though he were being boiled from below. “You set the hounds on me when all I wanted to do was talk. You and missy both, you got no honor.”
“Let me buy you breakfast,” I said. “Maybe we can work something out.”
Merrick waved a hand in dismissal.
“Keep your breakfast and your talk. The time for talking with you is done.”
“You may not believe this, but I have some sympathy for you,” I said. “You want to find out what happened to your daughter. I know what that feels like. If I can help you, then I will, but scaring Rebecca Clay isn’t the way to go about it. If you approach her again, you’ll be picked up and put back behind bars: the Cumberland County lockup if you’re lucky, but Warren if you’re not. That could be another year out of your life, another year spent not getting any closer to finding out the truth about your daughter’s disappearance.”
Merrick looked at me for the first time since we’d begun talking.
“I’m done with the Clay woman,” he said. “But I ain’t done with you. I’ll give you some advice, though, in return for what you just gave me. Stay out of this, and maybe I’ll be merciful the next time our paths cross.”
With that he pushed past me and began walking toward the bus station. He looked smaller than before, his shoulders slightly hunched, his jeans stained from his time behind bars. Once again, I felt pity for him. Despite all that I knew about him, and all that he was suspected of doing, he was still a father seeking his lost child. Perhaps it was all he had left, but I knew the damage that could be caused by that kind of single-minded intensity. I knew because I had once wrought it myself. Rebecca Clay might be safe from him, at least for the present, but Merrick was not going to stop. He would keep looking until he found out the truth, or until someone forced him to desist. Either way, it could only end with a death.
I called Rebecca and told her that I didn’t believe Merrick would trouble her for the time being, but there were no guarantees.
“I understand,” she said. “I don’t want men outside my house any longer, though. I can’t live that way. Will you thank them for me, and bill me?”
“One last thing, Ms. Clay,” I said. “If the choice was given to you, would you want your father found?”
She thought about the question.
“Wherever he is, he made the choice that brought him there,” she said softly. “I told you before: I think sometimes about Jim Poole. He went away, and he never came back. I like to pretend that I don’t know if it was because of me, if he vanished because I asked him to look for my father, or if something else happened to him, something equally bad. But when I can’t sleep, when I’m lying alone in my room in the darkness, I know it was my fault. In the daylight, I can convince myself that it wasn’t, but I know the truth. I don’t know you, Mr. Parker. I asked you to help me, and you did, and I’ll pay you for your time and your efforts, but we don’t know each other. If something were to happen to you because you asked questions about my father, then we’d be bound by it, and I don’t want to be bound to you, not like that. Do you understand? I’m trying to let it go. I want you to do the same.”
She hung up. Maybe she was right. Maybe Daniel Clay should be left wherever he was, either above or below ground. But it wasn’t up to her, or me, not any longer. Merrick was out there, and so was the person who had instructed Eldritch to bankroll him. Rebecca Clay’s part in this might have been over, but mine wasn’t.
• • •
When the Maine State Prison was based in Thomaston, it was hard to miss. It stood slap bang on the main road into town, a massive edifice on Route 1 that had survived two fires and, even after being rebuilt, renovated, extended, and occasionally updated, still resembled the early-nineteenth-century penitentiary that it had once been. It felt like the town itself had developed around the prison, although in truth there had been a trading post at Thomaston since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the prison dominated the landscape of the community, both physically and, perhaps, psychologically. If one mentioned Thomaston to anyone in Maine, the first thing that came to mind was the penitentiary. I wondered sometimes what it was like to live in a place whose principal claim to fame was the incarceration of human beings. It might have been that, after a while, you just forgot about it, or failed to notice the effect it had on the people and the town. Perhaps it was only those who visited Thomaston who immediately felt that an oppressive miasma hung over the place, as though the misery of those locked behind the prison’s walls had seeped into the atmosphere, coloring it with gray, weighing it down like particles of lead in the air. Then again, it certainly kept the crime rate low. Thomaston was the kind of place where there was a violent crime once every two or three years, and its crime index was about one-third of the national average. It might have been that the presence of a huge prison on the doorstep made those tempted by a life of crime reconsider their career options.
Warren was different, though. The town was a little larger than Thomaston, and its identity was not so bound up with the penitentiary. The new state prison had grown gradually, beginning with the opening of the Supermax, then the Mental Health Stabilization Unit, and finally the transfer of the general population from Thomaston to the new facility. Compared to the old prison, it was a little harder to find, squirreled away on Route 97, or at least as squirreled away as a place with a thousand prisoners and four hundred employees can be. I drove along Cushing Road, past the Bolduc Correctional Facility on the left, until I came to the brick and stone sign to the right of the road announcing the Maine State Prison, with the years 1824 and 2001 beneath, the first commemorating the founding of the original prison and the second the opening of the new facility.
Warren looked more like a modern industrial plant than a prison, an impression reinforced by the big maintenance area to the right that appeared to house the prison’s power plant. Bird feeders made from buoys hung on the lawn outside the main entrance, and everything looked new and freshly painted. It was the silence that gave away the true nature of the place, though; that, and the name, white on green above the door, and the razor wire on top of the double fencing, and the presence of the blue-uniformed guards with their striped trousers, and the beaten-down look of those waiting in the lobby to visit their loved ones. All told, you didn’t have to look too hard to figure out that, whatever cosmetic adjustments had been made to the façade, this was still as much a prison as Thomaston ever was.
Aimee Price had clearly pulled some strings to get me access to Andy Kellog. Visitor clearances could sometimes take up to six weeks. Then again, Price was entitled to see her client whenever she chose, and I wasn’t exactly unknown to the prison authorities. I had visited the preacher Faulkner when he was incarcerated at Thomaston, an encounter that had been memorable for all the wrong reasons, but this was my first time at the new facility.
It wasn’t a complete surprise, therefore, to see a familiar figure standing beside Price when I eventually cleared security and entered the body of the prison: Joe Long, the colonel of the guards. He hadn’t changed much since last we’d met. He was still big, still taciturn, and still radiated the kind of authority that kept a thousand criminals on the right side of respectful. His uniform was starched and pressed, and everything that was supposed to gleam did so spectacularly. There was a little more gray in his mustache than before, but I decided not to point that out. Beneath his gruff exterior, I sensed there was a sensitive child just waiting to be hugged. I didn’t want to hurt his feeling, singular.
“Back again,” he said, in a tone that suggested I was forever bothering him by knocking on the door at all hours of the day and night, demanding that I be let in to play with the other kids.
“Can’t stay away from men in jails,” I said.
“Yeah, we get a lot of that here,” he replied.
That Joe Long. What a kidder. If he was any drier, he’d have been Arizona.
“I like the new place,” I said. “It’s institutional, but homey. I can see your hand at work in the decor: the institutional grays, the stone, the wire. It all just screams you.”
He allowed his gaze to linger on me for just a moment or two longer than was strictly necessary, then turned smartly on his heel and told us to follow him. Aimee Price fell into step beside me, and a second guard named Woodbury brought up the rear.
“You just have friends everywhere, don’t you?” she said.
“If I ever end up in here as a guest, I’m hoping he’ll look out for me.”
“Yeah, good luck with that. You ever find yourself in that much trouble, make a shank.”
Our footsteps echoed along the corridor. Now there was noise: unseen men talking and shouting, steel doors opening and closing, the distant sound of radios and TVs. That was the thing about prisons: inside, they were never quiet, not even at night. It was never possible to be anything but acutely aware of the men incarcerated around you. It was worse in the dark, after lights out, when the nature of the sound changed. It was then that the loneliness and desperation of their situation would hit prisoners, and the snores and wheezes would be interspersed with the cries of men enduring nightmares and the weeping of those who had not yet learned to accommodate themselves to the prospect of years in such a place, or who would never reach that accommodation. Tween had once told me that during his longest stretch inside—two years of a three-year B&E sentence—he did not get a single undisturbed night’s sleep. It was that, he said, that wore him down. The irony was that, when he was released, he was unable to sleep either, unaccustomed as he was to the comparative silence of the city.
“They’re transferring Andy from the Supermax to a non-contact room for our meeting,” said Aimee. “It’s not ideal, and you won’t get any sense of the Max for yourself, but it’s the best that I could do. Andy is still considered a risk to himself and others.”
Price excused herself to use the bathroom before we sat down with Kellog. That left just me and Joe Long. Woodbury kept his distance, content to stare at the floor and the walls.
“Been a while since we’ve seen you,” said Long. “What is it, two, three years?”
“You sound almost regretful.”
“Yeah, almost.” Long straightened his tie, carefully brushing away some flecks of lint that had had the temerity to affix themselves to him. “You ever hear tell what happened to that preacher Faulkner?” he asked. “They say he just plain disappeared.”
“That’s the rumor.”
Long finished with his tie, examined me from behind his glasses, and stroked his mustache thoughtfully.
“Strange that he never showed up again,” he continued. “Hard for a man like that just to vanish, what with so many people looking for him. Kind of makes you wonder if they’re looking in the wrong direction. Up, so to speak, instead of down. Above ground instead of below.”
“I guess we’ll never know,” I said.
“Guess not. Probably for the best. The preacher would be no loss, but the law’s the law. Man could find himself behind bars for something like that, and that wouldn’t be a good place for him to be.”
If Long was expecting me to break down and confess something, he was disappointed.
“Yeah, I hear it hasn’t been good for Andy Kellog,” I said. “He seems to be having problems adjusting.”
“Andy Kellog has a lot of problems. Some of them he makes for himself.”
“Can’t help macing him in the middle of the night and tying him naked to a chair. I think someone in this place missed his vocation. There we are, spending taxpayers’ money flying bad guys to Egypt and Saudi Arabia to be softened up, when we could just put them on a Trailways bus and send them here.”
For the first time, there was a flicker of emotion on Long’s face.
“It’s used for restraint,” he said, “not torture.”
He said it very softly, almost as if he didn’t believe what he was saying enough to enunciate it loudly.
“It’s torture if it drives a man crazy,” I replied.
Long opened his mouth to say something else, but before he could speak, Aimee Price reappeared.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see him.”
The door across from us was opened by Woodbury, and we entered a room divided in two by a thick pane of Plexiglas. A series of booths, each with its own speaker system, allowed a degree of privacy to those visiting, although it wasn’t required that morning. Only one prisoner stood on the opposite side of the glass, two guards hovering stony-faced behind him. He wore an orange jumpsuit and a collar-and-tie arrangement of chains that kept his hands cuffed and his legs manacled. He was shorter than I was, and unlike a lot of men in prison, he didn’t seem to have put on any excess weight because of the diet and the lack of exercise. Instead, the jumpsuit seemed too big for him, the sleeves hanging down almost to the second line of knuckles on each hand. He had pale skin and fine black hair, cut unevenly so that the fringe sloped downward from left to right across his forehead. His eyes were set deep in his skull, overshadowed by a narrow but swollen brow. His nose had been broken more than once and had set crookedly. His mouth was small, the lips very thin. His lower jaw trembled, as though he were on the verge of tears. When he saw Aimee, he smiled widely. One of his front teeth was missing. The others were gray with plaque.
He sat when we sat and leaned into the speaker before him. “How you doing, Miss Price?” he said.
“Good, Andy. And you?”
He nodded repeatedly but said nothing, as though she were still speaking and he were still listening. Up close, I could see bruising beneath his eye and over his left cheekbone. His right ear was scarred, and dried blood was mixed with wax in the entrance to the canal.
“I’m doing okay,” he replied, eventually.
“You been in any trouble?”
“Uh-uh. I been taking my meds, like you asked me to, and I tell the guards if I’m not feeling good.”
“Do they listen?”
He swallowed and seemed about to look over his shoulder at the men behind him. Aimee caught the movement and addressed the two guards.
“Could you give us some space, please?” she asked.
They looked to Long for confirmation that it was permissible. He assented, and they retreated out of our line of sight.
“Some of ’em, the good ones,” continued Kellog. He pointed respectfully at Long. “Colonel Sir, he listens, when I get to see him. Others, though, they got it in for me. I try to keep out of their way, but sometimes they just rile me, you know? They make me angry, then I have problems.”
He glanced at me. It was the third or fourth time that he’d done it, never staring long enough to catch my eye, but nodding to me each time in acknowledgment of my presence. The niceties over with, Aimee introduced me.
“Andy, this is Mr. Parker. He’s a private detective. He’d like to talk to you about some things, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all,” said Kellog. “Nice to meet you, sir.”
Now that the introductions had been made he was happy to look me in the eye. There was something childlike about him. I didn’t doubt that he could be difficult, even dangerous under the wrong circumstances, but it was hard to understand how anyone could have met Andy Kellog, could have read his history and examined the reports of experts, and not have concluded that here was a young man with severe problems that were not of his own making, an individual who would never truly belong anywhere but still did not deserve to end up in a cell or, worse, tied naked to a chair in an ice-cold room because nobody had bothered to check that his meds were in order.
I leaned closer to the glass. I wanted to ask Kellog about Daniel Clay, and about what had happened to him in the woods near Bingham, but I knew it would be difficult for him, and there was always the possibility that he might clam up entirely or lose his temper, in which case I wouldn’t get the chance to ask him anything else. I decided to start with Merrick instead and work my way back to the abuse.
“I met someone who knows you,” I said. “His name is Frank Merrick. You remember him?”
Kellog nodded eagerly. He smiled, exposing his gray teeth again. He wouldn’t have them for much longer. His gums were purple and infected.
“I liked Frank. He looked out for me. Will he come visit me?”
“I don’t know, Andy. I’m not sure he’ll want to come back here, you understand?”
Kellog’s face fell. “I guess you’re right. When I get out of here, I ain’t never coming back here neither, not ever.”
He picked at his hands, opening a sore that immediately began to bleed.
“How did Frank look out for you, Andy?”
“He was scary. I wasn’t afraid of him—well, maybe I was at first, not later—but the others were. They used to pick on me, but then Frank came along, and they stopped. He knew how to get at them, even in the Max.” He smiled widely once more. “He hurt some of them real bad.”
“Did he ever tell you why he looked out for you?”
Kellog looked confused. “Why? Because he was my friend, that’s why. He liked me. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to me.” Then, as I watched, the blood began to pump into his face, and I was reminded uncomfortably of Merrick, as though something of him had transferred itself into the younger man while they were imprisoned together. I saw his hands form fists. A peculiar clicking sound came from his mouth, and I realized he was sucking at one of his loose teeth, the socket filling with spittle then emptying again, creating a rhythmic ticking like a time bomb waiting to go off.
“He weren’t queer,” said Kellog, his voice rising slightly. “If that’s what you’re saying, I’m telling you now that it’s not true. He weren’t a fag. Me neither. ’Cause if that’s what you’re trying to say—”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Long make a gesture with his right hand, and the guards quickly swam into view behind Kellog.
“It’s all right, Andy,” said Aimee. “Nobody’s suggesting anything of the kind.”
Kellog was shaking slightly as he tried to keep his anger in check. “Well, he weren’t, that’s all. He never touched me. He was my friend.”
“I understand, Andy,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest anything different. What I meant to ask you was if he ever gave you any sign that you might have something in common. Did he ever mention his daughter to you?”
Kellog began to calm down, but there was a gleam of hostility and suspicion in his eyes. I knew it would take a lot to make it go away.
“Yeah, some.”
“This was after he began to look out for you, right?”
“That’s right.”
“She was a patient of Dr. Clay’s, wasn’t she, just like you were?”
“Yeah. She disappeared while Frank was in jail.”
“Did Frank ever tell you what he thought might have happened to her?”
Kellog shook his head. “He didn’t like talking about her. It made him sad.”
“Did he ask about what happened to you up north?”
Kellog swallowed hard and looked away. The clicking noise came again, but this time there was no anger with it.
“Yes,” he said softly. Not “yeah,” but “yes.” It made him sound younger, as though by raising the subject of the abuse I was propelling him physically back into his childhood. His face grew slack, and his pupils shrank. He seemed to grow even smaller, his shoulders hunching, his hands opening out in an unconscious gesture of supplication. The tormented adult faded away, leaving behind the ghost of a child. I didn’t need to ask what had been done to him. It played out on his features in a series of trembles and winces and flinches, a dumb play of remembered pain and humiliation.
“He wanted to know what I saw, what I remembered,” he said. It was almost a whisper.
“And what did you tell him?”
“I told him what they done to me,” he said simply. “He asked me if I’d seen their faces or heard a name spoke, but they wore masks, and they never spoke no names.” He looked straight at me. “They looked like birds,” he said. “All different. There was an eagle, and a crow. A pigeon. A rooster.” He shivered. “All different,” he repeated. “They always wore them, and they never took them off.”
“Did you remember anything about where it happened?”
“It was dark. They used to put me in the trunk of a car, tie my arms and my legs, put a sack over my head. They’d drive for a time, then carry me out. When the bag came off I’d be in a room. There were windows, but they were all covered up. There was a propane heater, and storm lamps. I’d try to keep my eyes closed. I knew what was going to happen. I knew, ’cause it had happened before. It was like it was always going to happen to me, and it wasn’t never going to stop.”
He blinked a couple of times, then closed his eyes as he relived it over again.
“Andy,” I whispered.
He kept his eyes closed, but he nodded to let me know that he’d heard.
“How many times did this happen?”
“I stopped counting after three.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about it?”
“They said they’d kill me, and then they’d take Michelle and do it to her instead. One of them said they didn’t care if they did it to a boy or a girl. He said it was just different for each, that was all. I liked Michelle. I didn’t want nothing bad to happen to her. It had been done to me before, so I knew what to expect. I learned to block some of it out. I’d think of other things while it was happening. I’d imagine that I was somewhere else, that I wasn’t in me. Sometimes, I’d be flying over the forest and I’d look down and see all of the people, and I’d find Michelle and I’d go to her and we’d play by the river together. I could do that, but Michelle, she wouldn’t have been able to do that. She’d have been there with them, all the time.”
I leaned back. He had sacrificed himself for another child. Aimee had told me as much, but to hear it from Kellog himself was another matter. There was no boastfulness about his tale of self-sacrifice. He had done it out of love for a younger child, and it had come naturally to him. Once again, I was aware that here was a boy trapped in a man’s body, a child whose development had ceased almost entirely, arrested by what had been done to him. Beside me, Aimee was silent, her lips clasped so tightly shut that the blood had drained from them. She must have heard this before, I thought, but it would never get any easier to listen to.
“But they found out, in the end,” I said. “People discovered what was happening to you.”
“I got angry. I couldn’t help it. They brought me to the doctor. He examined me. I tried to stop him. I didn’t want them to come for Michelle. Then the doctor asked me questions. I tried to lie, for Michelle, but he kept tripping me up. I couldn’t keep all the answers straight in my head. They brought me back to Dr. Clay, but I didn’t want to talk to him no more. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so I kept quiet. They put me away again, but then I got too old and they had to let me go. I fell in with some people, did some bad things, and they put me in the Castle.”
The Castle was the name given to the old Maine Youth Center in South Portland, a correctional facility for troubled youths built in the middle of the nineteenth century. It had since closed, but it was no great loss. Before the building of the new youth facilities in South Portland and Charleston, the recidivism rate for young inmates had been 50 percent. It was down to 10 or 15 percent, largely because the institutions now focused less on incarceration and punishment than helping the kids, some as young as eleven or twelve, to overcome their problems. The changes had come too late for Andy Kellog, though. He was a walking, talking testament to everything that could go wrong in the state’s dealings with a troubled child.
Now Aimee spoke. “Can I show Mr. Parker your pictures, Andy?”
He opened his eyes. There were no tears. I don’t think he had any left to shed.
“Sure.”
Aimee opened her document case and removed a cardboard wallet. She handed it to me. Inside were eight or nine pictures, most done in crayon, a couple in watercolor paint. The first four or five were very dark, painted in shades of gray and black and red, and populated by crude naked figures with the heads of birds. These were the pictures that “Bill” had told me about.
The rest of the artwork depicted variations on the same landscape: trees, barren ground, decaying buildings. They were crude, with no great talent behind them, yet at the same time a great amount of care had been lavished on some of them, while others were angry smears of black and green, still recognizably a version of the same locale, but created in a burst of anger and grief. Each picture was dominated by the shape of a great stone steeple. I knew the place, because I had seen it depicted before. It was Gilead.
“Why did you draw this place, Andy?” I asked.
“That’s where it happened,” said Kellog. “That’s where they took me.”
“The second time, the bag slipped while they were carrying me in. I was kicking at them, and it nearly came off my head. That’s what I saw before they pulled it back down again. I saw the church. I painted it so I could show it to Frank. Then they moved me to the Max, and they wouldn’t let me paint no more. I couldn’t even take them with me. I asked Miss Price to take care of them for me.”
“So Frank saw these pictures?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you could remember nothing of the men who took you there?”
“Not their faces. I told you: they wore masks.”
“What about other marks? Tattoos maybe, or scars?”
“No.” He frowned. “Wait. One of them had a bird, here.” He pointed to his left forearm. “It was a white eagle’s head, with a yellow beak. I think that was why he wore the eagle mask. He was the one who told the others what to do.”
“Did you tell the police this?”
“Yeah. I never heard nothing more, though. I guess it didn’t help.”
“And Frank? Did you tell him about the tattoo?”
He screwed up his face. “I think so. I don’t remember.” His face relaxed. “Can I ask a question?” he said.
Aimee looked surprised. “Sure you can, Andy.”
He turned to me. “You going to try to find these men, sir?” he asked. There was something in his voice that I didn’t like. The boy was gone now, and what had taken its place was neither child nor adult but some perverse imp straddling both. His tone was almost mocking.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’d best hurry then,” he said.
Now the smile was back, but so was that hostile light.
“Because Frank promised to kill them. He promised to kill every one of them once he got out.”
And then Andy Kellog stood and threw himself face-first at the Pleixglas barrier. His nose broke immediately, leaving a smear of blood on the surface. He rammed it again, opening a wound on his forehead just below his scalp. And then he was shouting and screaming as the guards descended on him, and Aimee Price was calling his name and begging them not to hurt him as an alarm sounded and more men appeared and Andy was submerged beneath a mass of bodies, still kicking and shouting, inviting new pain to drown the memory of the old.