There is a subset of serial killers called the “visionary killers”: men and women who kill not out of greed or hunger or vengeance or lust or anything else that drives us, but because they believe that a higher power told them to. David Berkowitz, better known as the Son of Sam, was one of these. He killed eight women in New York City in the summer of 1976. He believed that his neighbor Sam was a demon, sending messages through a dog, forcing Berkowitz to kill. He didn’t want to—he sent letters to the police begging them to stop him—but what else was he going to do? The dog told him to kill, so he killed. There was nothing he could do about it.
Another visionary killer was a man named Herbert Mullin, who heard voices telling him that the Earth needed blood sacrifice to prevent a devastating earthquake. He called this “singing the die song,” and believed that some of the voices came from his father, some from heaven, and some from the victims themselves. He didn’t want to kill, but if he didn’t then the whole continent would fall into the ocean and millions more would die instead. When the voices told him to kill, he killed. And there was nothing he could do about it.
And now a man had tried to kill me.
What if the Dark Lady my attacker had talked about was Rain? What if she was a Withered with some kind of mind control, who drowned people not through some crazy, impossible, supernatural method, but simply by telling this man to drown people in the canal, and then return them to their homes? Why? Who knows? Obviously they gained something valuable by doing so. The problem that made Withered so hard to hunt was that the things they gained were so different, and through such different means, than a regular human. The first one I’d met, my neighbor Mr. Crowley, had been replacing his failing body parts by stealing them from other people. How was a police officer with no knowledge of the supernatural supposed to figure that out?
And how did the fire fit into it? My backpack had two perfect handprints burned into it, a right and a left, but the man who attacked me had never grabbed my backpack with both hands—his left hand had always been solidly on my neck. The man who’d used two hands had been one of my rescuers. Had I been saved from one Withered by another one? Had he known what he was doing? Had either of them known who I was? Then why hadn’t he identified himself? Or was it all some implausible coincidence?
I needed to find them. I’d gotten a brief look at my attacker, at least from a distance, and I’d seen all four of my rescuers up close. Was only one of them a Withered, or were they all working together? What in the bloody hell was going on in Lewisville?
I couldn’t just run off and spend the day looking. I had a job now, and I needed to keep it if I wanted to maintain my access to the dead bodies that were sure to start appearing all over the city. I had to keep Margo happy, and that meant I had to be a model employee.
One of the two doors in my side room led outside, and the other led into the mortuary. I let myself in early the next morning and showered in the back room before getting dressed and showing myself around. It was hard to move after the last night’s beating, but my bruises were all covered by clothes or my longish hair, so at least I wouldn’t have to answer any hard questions. The mortuary had a different layout than the one I’d grown up in, but even so, it was achingly familiar. The chapel, the embalming room, even the supply closet was a tangible, almost delectable reminder of my life growing up, and the times I’d spent in silence and solitude, carefully grooming the dead on their way to whatever awaited them beyond the grave. I hoped it was nothing, because that was exactly what I longed for: silence, blackness, and peace. An end to all trouble.
I pulled Kathy Schrenk’s body out of the refrigerator and examined it, looking for any evidence I could find of how she had died, or that suggested a Withered might have done it, but I didn’t see anything. I double-checked everything, just to be sure, even going so far as to cut a few slits on the body’s back to take a look at the pooled, dead blood, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. I shook my head and put her back in the fridge. It was almost time for the workday to start, and there was no sense being caught messing with corpses on my very first day on the job. I found the custodial closet, neatly arranged, and got to work in the embalming room, wiping down all the counters and scrubbing all the tools until they shined. I washed the tables, the walls, and the handles on the doors, and was halfway through a meticulous mopping of the floor when Margo arrived.
“Morning, Robert.”
“Morning,” I said.
She surveyed the spotless room and nodded, obviously satisfied but seeing no apparent need to state it out loud. “When you’re done in here, help me out in the chapel. Kathy’s funeral’s at noon.”
We vacuumed the chapel and dusted the pews and curtains, and when Jasmyn arrived she and I washed the windows while Margo finalized and printed a stack of paper programs, folding them in half with a ruler for a crisp, perfect edge. Harold arrived at 10:30 with flowers, and Kathy’s family a few minutes later—no husband or children, as she’d had none, only the one sister, just as single as Kathy had been. Carol Schrenk. They’d been twins, like my mom and my aunt, and I helped as she and Margo gave the final, reverent touches to Kathy’s hair and makeup and clothing. At eleven I went back to my room to change into my suit, only to realize that I’d still been wearing it when the Dark Lady’s acolyte had thrown me into the canal, and it was still torn and muddy. I found my best jeans and my only other collared shirt and hoped that Lewisville was enough of a redneck town for that to count as fancy clothes. Margo frowned when she saw me, but nearly half of the men who arrived for the funeral were wearing the same, so I fit in well enough.
“I don’t want you to fit in,” said Margo, taking me aside. “You’re an employee of my mortuary, and I want you to stand out as a formal and respectful representative of that business.”
“My suit got a little messed up,” I said. “First paycheck I get, I’ll buy a new one.”
“I can find you a new one,” she grumbled. “Just next time give me some warning.”
Jasmyn and I stood in the back while Carol gave a tepid eulogy, and then an ancient friend of Kathy’s stood up to give a warbling rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” At the end, Margo stood up to give some closing remarks, which apparently she never does. Jasmyn’s jaw practically dropped to the floor.
“I suppose you could say that most of these funerals are for friends of mine,” said Margo. “I probably shouldn’t get up and talk at any of them, but Kathy was an employee, and a good one, and I respect that.” She held the sides of the lectern—not tightly, like she needed it for support, but firmly, almost as if the lectern needed her. “Kathy never missed a day of work when it counted. She had a way of knowing, like some kind of sixth sense, exactly when we’d be busy and when we wouldn’t, and somehow she managed to be healthy on all the right days. Kept your friends and neighbors looking pretty for their funerals. She was here when you needed her.” Margo looked out over the audience, and I thought she might be searching for somebody specific. She didn’t find the person, and sighed. “But all things have to end eventually, I guess. We just do the best we can until it happens.” She paused again. “Thanks for coming. We’ll see you at the cemetery.”
In the movies it’s always raining at the cemetery, and everyone’s dressed in black with big black umbrellas. We drove there in the scorching Arizona sun and stood by the grave while the wind whipped curled flurries of dust around our feet. The open grave was surrounded by green carpets of fake grass and topped with a lowering device: an open metal frame with a pair of straps across the middle to support the casket. My mom always used to make fun of the name—couldn’t they come up with something better than “lowering device”—but it never bothered me. What else were they going to call it? It was a device that lowered caskets. A few feet away, the cemetery had set out twenty or thirty folding chairs, and the small crowd of mourners sat in the sun and the wind while a local pastor said some basic stuff about life and death, and then ended with a prayer.
Why do we do graveside services? We just got out of the funeral literally fifteen minutes ago; we’ve said all the same things, spouted all the same trite homilies, invoked all the same blessings of all the same deities. It’s unnecessary, but I suppose that’s not the same thing as being pointless. We’re human beings—we need ceremony. We need to commemorate things. Just as I liked to brush a dead body’s hair, trim its nails, and prepare it for the end, other people liked to stand by the grave and bid the body farewell.
The pastor prayed, and the sister cried, and Jasmyn put her hair into a bun with a pen from her back pocket, and the groundskeeper waited about forty yards away, leaning on the side of a faded yellow backhoe and sipping a soda from a fat white cup from a gas station. The wind blew, and the clouds moved, and somewhere in the distance trucks hurried down a highway. The graveside service ended, the mourners trickled away, and I cranked the lever on the lowering device so the bars in the frame turned, and the straps unspooled, and the casket lowered into the cement box waiting at the bottom of the hole. When it reached the bottom we disconnected the straps from one side of the frame and pulled them out the other side; the casket sat on raised bumps in the box, so the straps could slide out easily from underneath it. We stowed the lowering device and the folding chairs in a flatbed truck, and pulled away the green carpets to expose the bare dirt around the top of the grave. I rolled them carefully, keeping the dull red dirt from smearing the clean top surface. The groundskeeper brought the backhoe, lowered the lid of the cement box down into the grave, then threw his empty soda cup in after it and started filling the hole with dirt. Harold and Margo rode home in the hearse while Jasmyn drove me in her car. We never said a word.
At the mortuary Harold handed me a black suit, used, but clean and my size. “Margo said you needed this.”
“Thanks. That was fast.”
“I live to serve.” He tipped an imaginary hat, and we cleaned up the chapel again.
* * *
I went back to the bar where my rescuers had taken me the night before, but without their company or any ID, the bartender wouldn’t let me in. I told him I wanted to reward the men for saving my life, which he thought was a nice gesture. Since it was still too early for any real crowd, he stood in the doorway and answered my questions. He could remember most of the men, as they were regulars, but one in particular was new. I focused on that one.
“Do you know the man’s name?”
The bartender shook his head. “Nope.”
“What do you call him, then?”
He tucked his shaggy hair behind his ears. “I just call everyone ‘boss,’ then I don’t have to know their names.”
“Okay. Do you know how long he’s been in town?”
“Three, four days at the most. He’s probably coming back tonight if you want to leave him a message.”
“Do you mind if I just hang out here in front and wait for him? For all of them?”
The bartender shrugged. “Long as you don’t do drugs or anything that’ll get me in trouble.”
“Scout’s honor.”
“Thank you, boss. Good luck.”
He shook my hand and went back inside. I sat on the bench by the front door for a few minutes, waiting, then decided to walk back down the road a bit to the place where the visionary killer had tried to drown me. I couldn’t find it. I’d thought maybe I might be able to identify the spot by some damage to the fence, or to the weeds on the slope, but it all looked the same in the light. I walked back to the bar and waited, and as each man came to the door I thanked him and shook his hand, and asked if he could remember anything about the man who’d attacked me. None of them could recall his face, though they all remembered the coat pretty clearly. One of them identified it by make and style—it was a popular choice among local ranchers, apparently—but that was the best they could do.
Around eight o’clock, as the sky was just darkening to twilight, the last man arrived at the bar. The out-of-towner. He was about as tall as I was, but stocky and hairy, with a long black beard and a head of long hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a black T-shirt with what I assume was a band logo, but I didn’t recognize it. I stood up and shook his hand, introducing myself as the kid from last night.
“Oh, hey,” he said, and shook my hand vigorously. His hand was warm, and I felt a sense of sudden terror that I would burst into flames at his touch. “How you doin’?”
“I’m fine,” I said, “thank you. I wanted to say thank you again for helping me out.”
“It’s no problem,” he said, and gestured toward the door. “You want a drink?”
“No thank you,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
He looked longingly at the door, but shrugged. “I guess not. What can I do for you?”
I had a handful of methods I could try, hoping to get information from him, but I decided to start with the simple one first: “Did you see the guy who attacked me? His face, I mean?”
The man leaned against the wall and puffed out his cheeks as he talked. “Not really. Balding, but not all the way—he had some hair back there. Blond, mostly, but darkish blond. Not Swedish blond or anything, you know? Kind of stubbly beard, too, but I think that might have been coming in red, like they do sometimes—one color up top, different color on the face.”
That was more detail than anyone else had given me. “What about his coat?”
“Yeah, I think he had a coat on.”
I nodded, wondering what his vastly different recollections of the event might mean. If anything. “What else can you remember?”
“Why do you ask? You’re not going to go looking for him, are you?”
That was also strange—the other men had assumed I had come to my senses and was getting ready to approach the police, and so I was trying to put together a mental image to give a good description. This guy thought I was taking matters into my own hands. Did that mean anything? Did any of it?
I tried a new tactic. “I, um, want to give you guys a reward. Not something fancy, because I can’t afford much, but still a little something, just like a … thing. Is it way creepy of me to ask for your address, so I have somewhere to take it once I get it?”
“Probably,” he said, laughing. “But I don’t have an address. I don’t live here, I’m really just passing through.”
“Me too,” I said. “Hitchhiking?”
“No,” he said, “I’ve got a car; I just don’t really have much of anything else.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “What brings you through Lewisville, then? I’m only here because I couldn’t get a ride anywhere else.”
“Got a friend in town.”
That had to be Rain. “What’s that address?” I asked. “I could bring the thing there.”
“You can just bring it here,” he said. “That’s fine.” He straightened up from his slump against the wall. “I’m glad I could help you, man, but I’m gonna head inside.”
Crap. I had to pull out the big guns. “What’s your name?”
He opened the door. “Saul.”
“I mean your real name,” I said, and then I threw all caution to the wind. “The one Rain used when she called you.”
He stopped, turned, and looked at me.
I looked back, trying to be brave. Nothing I’d ever seen suggested that the Withered could sense each other’s presence.
“Rain?” he asked.
“That’s the only name I know her by,” I said. “I assume she used to have a different one, because we all did, but … I honestly can’t even remember mine.”
He studied me for a moment and then spoke softly. “Meshara?”
That was Elijah’s name—a Withered with no memory. I shook my head. “No, he died in Fort Bruce.”
“That’s what I figured,” the man murmured.
There was only one Withered I could reasonably fake. “I’m Nobody,” I said. I’d hunted her for weeks and lived with her, through Brooke, for over a year. I swallowed and watched the man’s reaction, hoping he’d believe me.
“Been a while since you took a boy,” he said at last.
I nodded, trying not to show my relief that he believed me. “I know.” I hadn’t actually known that Nobody had ever taken a male body, but it was a safe guess. Ten thousand years is a very long time.
He looked at me a while, then nodded, as if satisfying some mental checklist that I was indeed an ageless, bodiless monster. “I’m Assu. The God of the Sun. Let’s go inside and get a beer.”