Midnight Read online

  the receiver and said, ” Shaddack here.”

  The caller breathed heavily, raggedly into the phone but said nothing.

  Frowning, Shaddack said, “Hello?”

  Just the breathing.

  Shaddack said, “Mike, is that you?”

  The voice that finally responded to him was hoarse, guttural, but with a shrill edge, whispery yet forceful, Peyser’s voice yet not his, strange: “… something wrong, wrong, something wrong, can’t change, can’t … wrong … wrong …”

  Shaddack was reluctant to admit that he recognized Mike Peyser’s voice in those queer inflections and eerie cadences. He said, “Who is this?”

  “… need, need … need, want, I need …”

  “Who is this?” Shaddack demanded angrily, but in his mind was another question: What is this?

  The caller issued a sound that was a groan of pain, a mewl of deepest anguish, a thin cry of frustration, and a snarl, all twisted into one rolling bleat. The receiver dropped from his hand with a hard clatter.

  Shaddack put his own phone down, turned back to the VDT, tapped into the police data system, and sent an urgent message to Loman Watkins.

  51

  Sitting on the stool in the dark third-floor bedroom, bent to the eyepiece, Sam Booker studied the rear of Callan’s Funeral Home. All but scattered scrims of fog had blown away on the wind, which still blustered at the window and shook the trees all along the hillsides on which most of Moonlight Cove was built. The serviceway lamps were extinguished now, and the rear of Callan’s lay in darkness but for the thin light radiating from the blind-covered windows of the crematorium wing. No doubt they were busily feeding the flames with the bodies of the couple who had been murdered at Cove Lodge.

  Tessa sat on the edge of the bed behind Sam, petting Moose, who was lying with his head in her lap.

  Harry was in his wheelchair nearby. He used a penlight to study a spiral-bound notebook in which he had kept a record of the unusual activities at the mortuary.

  “First one—at least the first unusual one I noticed—was on the night of August twenty-eighth,” Harry said. “Twenty minutes to midnight. They brought four bodies at once, using the hearse and the city ambulance. Police accompanied them. The corpses were in body bags, so I couldn’t see anything about them, but the cops and the ambulance attendants and the people at Callan’s were visibly … well … upset. I saw it in their faces. Fear. They kept looking around at the neighboring houses and the alleyway, as if they were afraid someone was going to see what they were up to, which seemed peculiar because they were only doing their jobs. Right? Anyway, later, in the county paper, I read about the Mayser family dying in a fire, and I knew that was who’d been brought to Callan’s that night. I supposed they didn’t die in a fire any more than your sister killed herself.”

  “Probably not,” Tessa said.

  Still watching the back of the funeral home, Sam said, “I have the Maysers on my list. They were turned up in the investigation of the Sanchez-Bustamante case.”

  Harry cleared his throat and said, “Six days later, September third, two bodies were brought to Callan’s shortly after midnight. And this was even weirder because they didn’t come in a hearse or an ambulance. Two police cars pulled in at the back of Callan’s, and they unloaded a body from the rear seat of each of them, wrapped in blood-streaked sheets.”

  “September third?” Sam said. “There’s no one on my list for that date. Sanchez and the Bustamantes were on the fifth. No death certificates were issued on the third. They kept those two off the official records.”

  “Nothing in the county paper about anyone dying then, either,” Harry said.

  Tessa said, “So who were those two people?”

  “Maybe they were out-of-towners who were unlucky enough to stop in Moonlight Cove and stumble into something dangerous,” Sam said. “People whose deaths could be completely covered up, so no one would know where they’d died. As far as anyone knows, they just vanished on the road somewhere.”

  “Sanchez and the Bustamantes were on the night of the fifth,” Harry said, “and then Jim Armes on the night of the seventh.”

  “Armes disappeared at sea,” Sam said, looking up from the telescope and frowning at the man in the wheelchair.

  “They brought the body to Callan’s at eleven o’clock at night,” Harry said, consulting his notebook for details. “The blinds weren’t drawn at the crematorium windows, so I could see straight in there, almost as good as if I’d been right there in that room. I saw the body the mess it was in. And the face. Couple of days later, when the paper ran a story about Armes’s disappearance, I recognized him as the guy they’d fed to the furnace.”

  The large bedroom was dressed in cloaks of shadow except for the narrow beam of the penlight, which was half shielded by Harry’s hand and confined to the open notebook. Those white pages seemed to glow with light of their own, as if they were the leaves of a magic or holy—or unholy—book.

  Harry Talbot’s careworn countenance was more dimly illumined by the backwash from those pages, and the peculiar light emphasized the lines in his face, making him appear older than he was. Each line, Sam knew, had its provenance in tragic experience and pain. Profound sympathy stirred in him. Not pity. He could never pity anyone as determined as Talbot. But Sam appreciated the sorrow and loneliness of Harry’s restricted life. Watching the wheelchair-bound man, Sam grew angry with the neighbors. Why hadn’t they done more to bring Harry into their lives? Why hadn’t they invited him to dinner more often, drawn him into their holiday celebrations? Why had they left him so much on his own that his primary means of participating in the life of his community was through a telescope and binoculars?

  Sam was cut by a pang of despair at people’s reluctance to reach out to one another, at the way they isolated themselves and one another. With a jolt, he thought of his inability to communicate with his own son, which only left him feeling bleaker still.

  To Harry, he said, “What do you mean when you say Armes’s body was a mess?”

  “Cut. Slashed.”

  “He didn’t drown?”

  “Didn’t look it.”

  “Slashed … Exactly what do you mean?” Tessa asked.

  Sam knew that she was thinking about the people whose screams she had heard at the motel—and about her own sister.

  Harry hesitated, then said: “Well, I saw him on the table in the crematorium, just before they slipped him into the furnace. He’d been … disemboweled. Nearly decapitated. Horribly … torn. He looked as bad as if he’d been standing on an antipersonnel mine when it went off and been riddled by shrapnel.”

  They sat in mutual silence, considering that description.

  Only Moose seemed unperturbed. He made a soft, contented sound as Tessa gently scratched behind his ears.

  Sam thought it might not be so bad to be one of the lower beasts, a creature mostly of feelings, untroubled by a complex intellect. Or at the other extreme … a genuinely intelligent computer, all intellect and no feelings whatsoever. The great dual burden of emotion and high intelligence was singular to humankind, and it was what made life so hard; you were always thinking about what you were feeling instead of just going with the moment, or you were always trying to feel what you thought you should feel in a given situation. Thoughts and judgment were inevitably colored by emotions—some of them on a subconscious level, so you didn’t even entirely understand why you made certain decisions, acted in certain ways. Emotions clouded your thinking; but thinking too hard about your feelings took the edge off them. Trying to feel deeply and think perfectly clearly at the same time was like simultaneously juggling six Indian clubs while riding a unicycle backward along a high wire.

  “After the story in the paper about Armes disappearing,” Harry said, “I kept waiting for a correction, but none was printed, and that’s when I began to realize that the odd goingson at Callan’s weren’t just odd but probably criminal, as well and that the cops were part of it.�
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  “Paula Parkins was torn apart too,” Sam said.

  Harry nodded. “Supposedly by her Dobermans.”

  “Dobermans?” Tessa asked.

  At the laundry Sam had told her that her sister was one of many curious suicides and accidental deaths, but he had not gone into any details about the others. Now he quickly told her about Parkins.

  “Not her own dogs,” Tessa agreed. “She was savaged by whatever killed Armes. And the people tonight at Cove Lodge.”

  This was the first that Harry Talbot had heard about the murders at Cove Lodge. Sam had to explain about that and about how he and Tessa had met at the laundry.

  A strange expression settled on Harry’s prematurely aged face. To Tessa, he said, “Uh … you didn’t see these things at the motel? Not even a glimpse?”

  “Only the foot of one of them, through the crack under the door.”

  Harry started to speak, stopped, and sat in thoughtful silence.

  He knows something, Sam thought. More than we do.

  For some reason Harry was not ready to share what he knew, for he returned his scrutiny to the notebook on his lap and said, “Two days after Paula Parkins died, there was one body taken to Callan’s, around nine-thirty at night.”

  “That would be September eleventh?” Sam asked.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no record of a death certificate issued that day.”

  “Nothing about it in the paper, either.”

  “Go on.”

  Harry said, “September fifteenth—”

  “Steve Heinz, Laura Dalcoe. He supposedly killed her, then took his own life,” Sam said. “Lovers’ quarrel, we’re to believe.”

  “Another quick cremation,” Harry noted. “And three nights later, on the eighteenth, two more bodies delivered to Callan’s shortly after one in the morning, just as I was about to go to bed.”

  “No public record of those, either,” Sam said.

  “Two more out-of-towners who drove off the interstate for a visit or just dinner?” Tessa wondered. “Or maybe someone from another part of the county, passing on the county road along the edge of town?”

  “Could even have been locals,” Harry said. “I mean, there’re always a few people around who haven’t lived here a long time, newcomers who rent instead of own their houses, don’t have many ties to the community, so if you wanted to cover their murders, you could maybe concoct an acceptable story about them moving away suddenly, for a new job, whatever, and their neighbors might buy it.”

  If their neighbors weren’t already “converted” and participating in the cover-up, Sam thought.

  “Then September twenty-third,” Harry said. “That would have been your sister’s body, Tessa.”

  “Yes.”

  “By then I knew I had to tell someone what I’d seen. Someone in authority. But who? I didn’t trust anyone local because I’d watched the cops bring in some of those bodies that were never reported in the newspaper. County Sheriff. He’d believe Watkins before he’d believe me, wouldn’t he? Hell, everyone thinks a cripple is a little strange anyway—strange in the head, I mean—they equate physical disabilities with mental disabilities at least a little, at least subconsciously. So they’d be predisposed not to believe me. And admittedly it is a wild story, all these bodies, secret cremations… .” He paused. His face clouded. “The fact that I’m a decorated veteran wouldn’t have made me any more believable. That was a long time ago, ancient history for some of them. In fact … no doubt they’d hold the war against me in a way. Post-Vietnam stress syndrome, they’d call it. Poor old Harry finally went crackers—don’t you see?—from the war.”

  Thus far Harry had been speaking matter-of-factly, without much emotion. But the words he had just spoken were like a piece of glass held against the surface of a rippled pool, revealing realms below—in his case, realms of pain, loneliness, and alienation.

  Now emotion not only entered his voice but, a few times, made it crack “And I’ve got to say, part of the reason I didn’t try to tell anyone what I’d seen was because … I was afraid. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I couldn’t be sure how big the stakes were. I didn’t know if they’d silence me, feed me to the furnace at Callan’s one night. You’d think that having lost so much I’d be reckless now, unconcerned about losing more, about dying, but that’s not the way it is, not at all. Life’s probably more precious to me than to men who’re whole and healthy. This broken body slowed me down so much that I’ve spent the last twenty years out of the whirl of activity in which most of you exist, and I’ve had time to really see the world, the beauty and intricacy of it. In the end my disabilities have led me to appreciate and love life more. So I was afraid they’d come for me, kill me, and I hesitated to tell anyone what I’d seen. God help me, if I’d spoken out, if I’d gotten in touch with the Bureau sooner, maybe some people might have been saved. Maybe … your sister would’ve been saved.”

  “Don’t even think of that,” Tessa said at once. “If you’d done anything differently, no doubt you’d be ashes now, scraped out of the bottom of Callan’s furnace and thrown in the sea. My sister’s fate was sealed. You couldn’t unseal it.”

  Harry nodded, then switched off the penlight, plunging the room into deeper darkness, though he had not yet finished going through the information in his notebook. Sam suspected that Tessa’s unhesitating generosity of spirit had brought tears to Harry’s eyes and that he did not want them to see.

  “On the twenty-fifth,” he continued, not needing to consult the notebook for details, “one body was brought to Callan’s at ten-fifteen at night. Weird, too, because it didn’t come in either an ambulance or hearse or police car. It was brought by Loman Watkins—”

  “Chief of police,” Sam said for Tessa’s benefit.

  “—but he was in his private car, out of uniform,” Harry said. “They took the body out of his trunk. It was wrapped in a blanket. The blinds weren’t shut at their windows that night, either, and I was able to get in tight with the scope. I didn’t recognize the body, but I did recognize the condition of it—the same as Armes.”

  “Torn?” Sam asked.

  “Yes. Then the Bureau did come to town on the Sanchez Bustamante thing, and when I read about it in the newspaper, I was so relieved because I thought it was all going to come out in the open at last, that we’d have revelations, explanations. But then there were two more bodies disposed of at Callan’s on the night of October fourth—”

  “Our team was in town then,” Sam said, “in the middle of their investigation. They didn’t realize any death certificates were filed during that time. You’re saying this happened under their noses?”

  “Yeah. I don’t have to look in the notebook; I remember it clearly. The bodies were brought around in Reese Dorn’s camper truck. He’s a local cop, but he was out of uniform that night. They hauled the stiffs into Callan’s, and the blind at one window was open, so I saw them shove both bodies into the crematorium together, as if they were in a real sweat to dispose of them. And there was more activity at Callan’s late on the night of the seventh, but the fog was so thick, I can’t swear that it was more bodies being taken in. And finally … earlier tonight. A child’s body. A small child.”

  “Plus the two who were killed at Cove Lodge,” Tessa said. “That makes twenty-two victims, not the twelve that brought Sam here. This town’s become a slaughterhouse.”

  “Could be even more than we think,” Harry said.

  “How so?”

  “Well, after all, I don’t watch the place every evening, all evening long. And I go to bed by one-thirty, no later than two. Who’s to say there weren’t visits I missed, that more bodies weren’t brought in during the dead hours of the night?” Brooding about that, Sam looked through the eyepiece again. The rear of Callan’s remained dark and still. He slowly moved the scope to the right, shifting the field of vision northward through the neighborhood.

  Tessa said, “But why were they k
illed?”

  No one had an answer.

  “And by what?” she asked.

  Sam studied a cemetery farther north on conquistador, then sighed and looked up and told them about his experience earlier in the night, on Iceberry Way. “I thought they were kids, delinquents, but now what I think is that they were the same things that killed the people at Cove Lodge, the same as the one whose foot you saw through the crack under the door.”

  He could almost feel Tessa frowning with frustration in the darkness when she said, “But what are they?”

  Harry Talbot hesitated. Then: “Boogeymen.”

  52

  Not daring to use sirens, dousing headlights on the last quarter mile of the approach, Loman came down on Mike Peyser’s place at three-ten in the morning, with two cars, five deputies, and shotguns. Loman hoped they did not have to use the guns for more than intimidation. In their only previous encounter with a regressive—Jordan Coombs on the fourth of September—they had not been prepared for its ferocity and had been forced to blow its head off to save their own lives. Shaddack had been left with only a carcass to examine. He’d been furious at the lost chance to delve into the psychology—and the functioning physiology—of one of these metamorphic psychopaths. A tranquilizer gun would be of little use, unfortunately, because regressives were New People gone bad, and all New People, regressive or not, had radically altered metabolisms that not only allowed for magically fast healing but for the rapid absorption, breakdown, and rejection of toxic substances like poison or tranquilizers. The only way to sedate a regressive would be to get him to agree to be put on a continuous IV drip, which wasn’t very damn likely.

  Mike Peyser’s house was a one-story bungalow with front and rear porches on the west and east sides respectively, nicely maintained, on an acre and a half, sheltered by a few huge sweet gums that had not yet lost their leaves. No lights shone at the windows.

  Loman sent one man to watch the north side, another the south, to prevent Peyser from escaping through a window. He stationed a third man at the foot of the front porch to cover that door. With the other two men—Sholnick and Penniworth—he circled to the rear of the place and quietly climbed the steps to the back porch.

  Now that the fog had been blown away, visibility was good. But the huffing and swirreling wind was a white noise that blocked out other sounds they might need to hear while stalking Peyser.

  Penniworth stood against the wall of the house to the left of the door, and Sholnick stood to the right. Both carried semiautomatic 20-gauge shotguns.

  Loman tried the door. It was unlocked. He pushed it open and stepped back.

  His deputies entered the dark kitchen, one after the other, their shotguns lowered and ready to fire, though they were aware that the objective was to take Peyser alive if at all possible. But they were not going to sacrifice themselves just to bring the living beast to Shaddack. A moment later one of them found a light switch.

  Carrying a 12-gauge of his own, Loman went into the house after them. Empty bowls, broken dishes, and dirty Tupperware containers were scattered on the floor, as were a few rigatoni red with tomato sauce, half of a meatball, eggshells, a chunk of pie crust, and other bits of food. One of the four wooden chairs from the breakfast set was lying on its side; another had been hammered to pieces against a counter top, cracking some of the ceramic tiles.

  Straight ahead, an archway led into a dining room. Some of the spill-through light from the kitchen vaguely illuminated the table and chairs in there.

  To the left, beside the refrigerator, was a door. Barry Sholnick opened it defensively. Shelves of canned goods flanked a landing. Stairs led down to the basement.

  “We’ll check that later,” Loman said softly.

  “After we’ve gone through the house.”

  Sholnick soundlessly snatched a chair from the breakfast set and braced the door shut so nothing could come up from the cellar and creep in behind them after they went into other rooms.

  They stood for a moment, listening.

  Gusting wind slammed against the house. A window rattled. From the attic above came the creaking of rafters, and from higher still the muffled clatter of a loose cedar shingle on the roof.

  His deputies looked at Loman for guidance. Penniworth was only twenty-five, could pass for eighteen, and had a face so fresh and guileless that he looked more like a door-to-door peddler of religious tracts than a cop. Sholnick was ten years older and had a harder edge to him.

  Loman motioned them toward the dining room.

  They entered, turning the lights on as they went. The dining room was deserted, so they moved cautiously into the living room.

  Penniworth clicked a wall switch that turned on a chrome and brass lamp, which was one of the few items not broken or torn apart. The cushions on the sofa and chairs had been slashed; wads of foam padding, like clumps of a poisonous fungus, lay everywhere. Books had been pulled from shelves and ripped to pieces. A ceramic lamp, a couple of vases, and the glass top of a coffee table were shattered. The doors had been torn off the cabinet-style television set, and the screen had been smashed. Blind rage and savage strength had been at work here.

  The room smelled strongly of urine … and of something else less pungent and less familiar. It was, perhaps, the scent of the creature responsible for the wreckage. Part of that subtler stink was the sour odor of perspiration, but something stranger was in it, too, something that simultaneously turned Loman’s stomach and tightened it with fear.

  To the left, a hallway led back to the bedrooms and baths. Loman kept it covered with his shotgun.

  The deputies went into the foyer, which was connected to the living room by a wide archway. A closet was on the right, just inside the front door. Sholnick stood in front of it, his 20-gauge lowered. From the side Penniworth jerked open the door. The closet contained only coats.