Henry Genz carried his leather-bound King James Bible to the fire-damaged room, where he opened it at random, feeling the Lord would guide him to the passage most appropriate to his current situation. The tang of loitering smoke offended his nostrils. He’d prepared an egg salad sandwich but was too exhausted to take a single bite. He left the plate on the windowsill and sat there in the oyster light emitting from the window. His gaze returned to the ruined bed; the black star scorched in the carpet. The Egyptian eye—he couldn’t stand to look at it, but neither could he look away.
Resting the book across his knees, he parted the covers, allowing the crinkly pages to fall of their own accord. The wind under the eaves played strange flutes. Its song wormed inside his head. Unconsciously, he hummed along.
The firemen’s hoses had soaked the carpet. Henry could smell the wet subflooring underneath. His shoes squished. The damp air saturated his bones, as if to crumble them from within. He rubbed his neck. But the pain only tightened. The Word—he’d find his balm there.
Poor dead Sheba, his best companion. He hoped she hadn’t suffered much. To think of her last minutes fanned his anger ...
Leaning over the page, licking his lips, he began to read aloud.
“And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, and
overcame them , and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded —"
“How are you, Henry?” a voice asked.
Henry thought he might be hearing the Devil himself. So soft came the utterance. Yet, familiar to his ears. When he lifted his gaze, the speaker was standing before him like a living inkblot. Black lenses dancing with refracted colors. Hands folded, though not in prayer.
“You,” Henry said.
“Long time. Have you read anything good lately?”
Whiteside slipped the Bible from Henry’s lap.
“Give me that!”
“Certainly,” Whiteside said.
The doctor handed the volume over. He’d kept his finger tucked between the pages, saving Henry’s place, and now reopened them to newspaper clippings.
Henry looked. His face paled. He was cold-sweating, shouting.
“What have you done?”
“Why, I’ve done nothing. Don’t you enjoy reading about yourself in the newspaper?”
The front-page photos. Broken glass littered the ground. Gaping holes where the windows had blown out in the explosion. In the background shadows, blood and prone bodies. The Pie Stop. Lower on the page were the grinning headshots of the victims. And set apart, above and left, the portrait of a soldier.
Henry’s brother, Jesse.
“This is my favorite,” Whiteside said. He tapped a headline.
MISSING SHOOTER? COP CLAIMS SECOND GUNMAN
Henry tried to say something, instead his throat constricted.
“Glad I can still leave you speechless. Let’s talk facts, Henry. Fact is I need a place to stay. I like it here. Always have. I need a base of operations. I’ve decided the Totem Lodge is perfect.”
“Get out.”
“That isn’t going to happen.”
“I won’t... help you hurt anyone else.”
Henry’s doughy face stayed low and focused on the carpet.
“Are you afraid of me?”
Henry gazed up. He was confused.
“How can you look younger than before? After twenty years?”
“You’re the one who gets older, Henry. I never change,”
A small pistol appeared in Whiteside’s hand. Maybe it had been there all along. It was an antique. The kind gamblers hid up their sleeves on riverboats in days gone by. A derringer, that’s what they’re called, Henry thought. He concentrated on the word. He didn’t want to fall apart. To cower in front of this evil man. He knew his weakness though. The pistol waved. Henry stared down the tiny double barrels—a child’s fingers could plug them. Decorative metalwork etched the tarnished silver: petals and curlicues. The grip was inlaid ivory, a surface networked with pits and fractures, like two sides of a dead moon. Whiteside touched the pistol under Henry’s chin, and used it to raise him up.
“When you look for your soul, what is it you find?” Whiteside asked.
The derringer probed Henry’s Adam’s apple.
Henry opened his mouth.
Whiteside pushed the pistol in.
“God’s not here. Is He, Henry?”
That voice was like poison dripping in his ears.
The pistol eased out.
“I... I don’t know,” Henry said.
“Let me assure you because I do know. I’ve looked for the good in people. I’ve looked for the godliness in them. And what I’ve found is holes. Emptiness. Voids within voids. I sense foulness. Life degenerates as the universe winds down. I think that’s what I smell. The rot. We are a rotten species. When I was a boy, I experienced my first vision. I’d fallen off the roof of a shed where my parents kept rakes and other tools. I hit my head on the ground. Lost consciousness, the doctors would say. But I say different. I was awake. It was after supper. Dusk. I lay there staring at the first, faint evening stars. I tried to make them move. I was a child.
I did not understand moving stars was outside the boundary of my powers. I just tried it. And I failed. I tried again. A bird hopped over to my shadowy place in the grass and cocked its head.”
“A bird?” Henry asked, in amazement.
“Hello there, I thought with my childish mind. I felt my thought penetrate the bird’s consciousness, like a straight pin thumbed into a sponge. Hello, little one. The bird skipped and skittered around me, never taking her eyes off me. I knew that she was a female. Using the pins I pushed in, I drew things out. This bird lived in a heating duct on top of the yellow house next door. Her nest was fashioned of lint, string, and twigs. It was a warm spot. Safe and dark. The opening onto the outside world, the dangerous world where I lived, was small. The duct resembled a long metallic box. I knew something about living in a box. My mind was a box. I was climbing out. Suddenly I saw through the bird’s feathers and skin. A thimbleful of blood circulated round and round inside her body. She’d eaten that morning—seeds left on a white plate with bacon suet and a scoop of crunchy peanut butter. I tasted the peanuts on her breath. I tried to make her blood stop.”
The black lenses flashed red like playing cards shuffled in a dealer’s hands.
“What happened to the bird?”
“My mother found me. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t even call out to my own mother. She picked me up in her arms. I was bleeding from my scalp. As she carried me into the house, I lifted my head and saw a dead sparrow on the grass.”
Henry went deeper into the blackness. A man spirals down a well.
“I learned something that day, Henry. So in the future I could be a teacher to others. Like Jesse. Like you.” The voice was a hand propelling him forward.
Whiteside put the pistol away.
“Come, Henry. Lie on the bed.”
Henry stood and walked across the wet carpet. He did not
want to, but he could not stop himself. His body responded, like muscle memory. And he had real memories, too, of the first time he met Whiteside at his parents’ farmhouse.
“He’s done it to me before ,” Jesse said. “Like I told you .. . about that weekend at Fort Riley? He did a bunch of us. We felt indestructible, like gods.
“Now you feel like shit. Wanting to kill yourself. You ever think he did that to you, too? Put that awfulness inside you, so he could take you back whenever he wanted?”
Jesse shook his head.
“He says I’ll feel that way again. He’ll make it permanent. Whiteside can do anything he says he can. I’ll ask him if he’ll do it to you, too . . .”
Henry lay down on the soaking-wet bed. He smelled the burned mattress. Bare springs dug into his spine. He looked at the ceiling.
“Explain to me how he’s doing it?”
“I don’t completely understand it, Hen. But he puts you in a trance. It doesn’t hurt or anything. It’s peaceful.”
“He hypnotizes you?”
“Sure, you could call it that, but there’s more to it. It has to do with the words. There’s a special way he says them ... look, he’s a conduit for something bigger than you and me, that’s what it is, bigger and older than all of us.”
“Black magic?”
“Black magic, white magic . . . oh, who gives a damn? I’m telling you it’s the best I ever felt in my life. I wrote him a letter and told him so. And now he’s here in American Rapids visiting me. That’s special. Don’t you want to feel what I felt? So much power inside . . .”
He and Jesse reclined on two couches in the dimness of the parlor. Whiteside sat between them on a kitchen chair, just talking to them, slowly, his words forming a rhythm, telling them he could make them better than other men, stronger, fearless. They would be godlike warriors when he finished.
“Take deep breaths, Henry. You remember this part. Don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“See the mind muscle. It is contracted into a knot.”
“I see it.” Henry’s energy drained away. He sank into the bed.
“We will loosen the knot together. Can you do it?”
“Yes.” His willpower followed the energy flowing out of him.
“Let’s begin. Imagine dilation. Releasing the knot to open the mind ...”
A man spirals down a well. And every time he hits the bottom, a new bottom replaces it further into the depth of slick tubular walls. The dizziness is too much for the man. As he’s falling, he closes his eyes. He remembers falling down this well before. He remembers and he sleeps. A man spirals down . ..
Henry climbed the stepladder and removed the false ceiling tiles above his office. He poked his head up into the hole. The raincoat was right there. Inside a dusty Kmart bag bound with duct tape. All those years ago, he’d thrown away the pistol. The one he used to cover Jesse during the attack inside the restaurant. The one he shot Wyatt with in the back. Later, he wired the trigger guard to a cinderblock and heaved it into the Rainy River. Lights from the girders of the International Bridge leading to Canada sparkled on the water. He heard a loud splash. A chain of bubbles surfaced in the shadows. Then only shadows.
He snatched the raincoat from its secret hiding place. He turned inside the attic hole. Careful not to lose his footing on the ladder, he peered into the unlit space. Where was it?
There.
A pump shotgun, chopped down to a wicked handgrip.
And a full box of shells.
He grabbed them and climbed down.
Whiteside had left the lodge. Henry wasn’t sure where he went. He only knew that he would return. Henry had given him the keys to the place after all. He’d told the current guests that the morning
fire had damaged the sprinkler system and they would need to check out immediately. It wasn’t safe to stay. That much was true. The least Henry could offer was to save a few from death.
For others he would be the executioner.
There was nothing he could do about it.
He loaded the shotgun.
Then he tore through the Kmart bag and unrolled the old raincoat.
He put it on.
He’d gained weight over the last two decades. The coat wouldn’t button. It fit snugly around his shoulders. He left it hanging open. Coattails spread at his sides. Slack wings. Whiteside once told him the coat would render him invisible.
He was stuffing away extra shells when he felt a small hard object deep in the raincoat’s right pocket. No bigger than a fisherman’s lead sinker. He retrieved the object and rolled it between his fingers.
He’d almost forgotten.
The forgetting was a kind of gift from Whiteside, too. Only it wasn’t really forgetting. More like a temporary amnesia. The horrors of the past lingered off-stage. Henry was aware of them. Occasionally he caught glimpses in the corner of his eye. When the purpose suited him, Whiteside ushered the horrors out, front and center. He threw a hot spotlight on them. See? He insisted Henry look. The worst things that happen never go away. Never retreat. They were here the whole time. Waiting for you , Henry. Sleeping inside you like a disease.
Henry rummaged around a desk drawer until he found a felt- tip marker.
The task at hand was difficult. A constant struggle of will. Requiring total concentration. Whiteside had programmed him for a mission. Search and destroy. Any deviation was pure hell. His body came alive with pain. Whiteside had put triggers in his brain. Pain or pleasure. It was up to Henry to decide.
After he had finished with the marker, he was sweating. The
sensation of a blowtorch licked up and down his back. Nails pounded into his insteps. The skin on his belly shredded to ribbons. His muscles seized. Teeth gritted. He dropped the uncapped marker on the floor. He surrendered completely to the commanding voice of Whiteside.
The pain washed away.
Soothing relief replaced it.
Henry became a cool blue ... killing machine.
He ripped the cord from the office blinds. He tied a sling and hung the loaded shotgun out of sight underneath his arm.
Tears fled down his cheeks. The last of what was human in Henry was saying good-bye. Saying good-bye to the world he lived in, the goodness he had done here. The beauty he’d known. He bid farewell to himself, too.
As he walked out the door, he noticed a firefighter’s ax sealed inside an emergency case in the lobby. Blood was dripping from the blade. He knew it wasn’t real. The blood wasn’t there. Not yet. But it would be soon.
He didn’t cry anymore.
The feeling part of him had been locked away forever.
The ax was no longer a tool for breaking down doors and rescuing people. Only a weapon appeared before him, with a wedge of blade and a pointed pick head. Using a miniature hammer on a chain, he shattered the glass.
Blood ran down the yellow fiberglass handle.
He hefted it.
The pleasure triggers clicked furiously.
A smile broke.
Yes, tonight was going to be a lot of fun.