Caller unknown, p.18
Caller Unknown, page 18
If you do not confront demons, they will devour you.
He took a deep breath, drawing into himself all of this night, the moon, his eighteen years, the dark path ahead. He was in the Lot and the Lot was in him.
He went between the rusted gates and up the old, rutted track through the woods.
This was, after all, the last place anyone would come looking for him.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Under the trees, Ed was almost blind. Nine years’ new growth of saplings, ferns and fallen branches blocked his way. No one had been this way since the FBI had abandoned their investigation. He still feared to use his flashlight. The monster must have no warning of his coming. The moonlight reached through the branches and trunks in spectral fingers.
He paused at each switchback and first looked back at the silhouettes of the undulating mountains of northern Maine and the moon now falling chin first into them, then up the dark way, trying to see the top of the mountain. But there were just the trees leaning over the barely discernible track, nothing more. Had the way been this long that day in June ’70 when the school bus had come down it? He couldn’t recall the journey. The way seemed as long as the night, as time.
He stopped looking up for the end of the track. The walk was endless; he might scale the height of a hundred Everests and not reach the summit of the cursed mountain. This was Typhon’s punishment for those who refused the sacrifice: this endless track…
Exhaustion by now had numbed him so much that when he was next conscious of thought he found, without realizing it, he had stopped walking and stood upon an open space of weed-choked gravel. In front was the second fence. Rusted and fallen in parts, the “Danger Unexploded Munitions” sign hanging upside down, the gates lurched drunkenly open.
There was only 400 yards left, no more. He went forward as a zombie.
His dying shadow walked before him. His feet crunched down on something. It felt like brittle bone, but he saw it was a charred piece of timber, scattered by the long-ago explosion. The ground was littered with other such blackened debris. He was very close now.
He turned the final corner of the track and saw the mouth of hell, the black hole where the cabin once stood.
Dead silence still. Not a breath of wind. Not the call of an animal. All of creation feared to be heard in this place.
Just then the light went from behind him and he knew the moon had set: suddenly all was dark. An ice-cold spear fell from his mind and down his spine. The constellations faded as the darkness edged in, the lens contracting, and he only saw with an inner eye.
In the darkness the ghosts came. First the children, silent, as always—Mrs. Frome could not abide a raised voice. The dead ones came up slowly from the dark pit: blond-haired Hope and saturnine Kevin; Carl, the blood still running from his mouth. They drifted off like thistle seeds into the night, without a sound. Then came others, many others. One drew his attention. He drifted to the north and, unlike the others, looked behind him at Ed: dark hair, dark eyes, darker complexion. He smiled sadly. Then his wraith dissipated into smoke-like wreaths and was gone.
Ed fell to his knees. He may have fainted in that kneeling position. When he came to, the night sounds had returned. The wind soughed in the top of the spruce and birch, crickets chirped in the Johnson grass, the night was suddenly busy with noises. The light of the stars had returned. The contrail of an airplane bisected the sky high overhead. He remembered how the children had called the vapor trails the chalk marks of God.
He looked across the yard. Memories cascaded. The past seemed only yesterday. Before tonight the Fromes had been only names: names of dead people burned to nothing in this very place. But here they were again in his mind’s eye as they had been: she of the cold face and cold blue eyes, and that accent, which only now Ed, reaching back through time, recognized as Irish; he, the hulking, malodorous bully with his full beard and shrike eyes and meaty fingers like blood sausages. The memory of them had gone with the crucifix swinging in the June evening of nine years ago. He remembered that now, the drugged juice afterward…
All those hours of therapy and all he had needed was to return here and see this place for it to all come back again.
His mind was suddenly too full to process thought. He had to sleep.
The shed where Frome had kept the school bus still stood, one side blown in and charred by the explosion. But there was a V-shaped crawl space where the wall had fallen against the opposite one. He stumbled over to it and found a dry spot under Frome’s old workbench, pulled his parka tight around him. He was asleep in five seconds.
The basement came again, just as at the waterfall. The heavy oak chairs; leather restraints on the arms and legs; leather and metal helmet fastenings at the back like the restraints in the execution room on death row; bodies in spasm; backs arched; silver neon skulls lit up from within. The children singing, always singing, eager to obey Typhon, the greatest overbearing, indomitable force in the universe.
And he woke and saw that it was the first crack of dawn. He had survived the night. He crawled out from under the workbench. Frome’s tools were still laid out on it, but the wrenches and oilcans were now brown with rust.
He looked to the east. It was going to be a fine day.
Wheelerville was nearly 800 miles away. He had to get going. But though his whole being screamed for him to leave this place, there was something tying him here—something he must find.
He walked to the edge of the pit where the cabin had stood and stared down into it. It was a mess of mud, charred wood, and metal fragments. The Feds no doubt had fine-sieved it after they found the bones down there.
He turned to the east and, as he did so, the sun peered over the shoulder of Round Mountain five miles away and a faint gleam came off an object lying on the rubble edge of the pit.
Ed walked over to it and picked it up. It was a plastic toy eye with a rolling black pupil under a plastic dome: he knew it, somehow, to be Bear.
He closed his fist over the eye and slipped it into a pocket. “I cannot die,” he whispered.
And then he walked toward the eye of the sun, now free of Round Mountain. There was a rock to the east of the cabin from which, as kids, he and Shannon had gotten their only glimpse of the outside world.
The massive lump of granite reared from the mountainside like a bald, frowning head. Though the spruces grew a foot or two every year, their growth rate died off after they reached around sixty feet and this area had not been logged since Eriksson’s time. A small stretch of Realty Road showed like a brown slash through the ever-stretching forest in the distance. Just beyond it, the blue eye of Carr Pond sat in the undulating green.
There was a large crack in the rock on the eastern side. He looked into the cleft. It was only some four feet high. Even so, the space seemed to have shrunk. There, scratched on the rock, were their initials. E and S. This was as close as they had ever gotten to freedom.
The inner perimeter fence stood a little way down the boulder-strewn slope. It, too, had turned to rust, but looked as unbreachable now as it had twenty years before.
Even though he was some 100 yards from the site of the log house, there was still fragmentary evidence of the explosion down here: charred wood beams and shingles and bits of random metal and plastic twisted by the heat. A little way down from the hiding place he noticed an anomaly: a gray object was stuck in a tight gap between two rocks just short of the fence. It took him five minutes to pick his way down to it.
It was a gray binder. Somehow the FBI had missed it. The boards were scorched brown by fire and peeled by exposure to the elements. He pulled it out of the gap and opened it. The inside pages were protected by plastic document sleeves. Nevertheless some damp had found its way into the outer pages, rotting them. But some of the pages toward the middle were intact. There was a list. He recognized Mrs. Frome’s hand. The ink had run but the writing was in part legible:
David VIAL
Kevin VIAL
Edward VIAL
Shannon VESSEL
Hope VESSEL
Catrine VIAL
Carl VIAL
He started teasing apart other pages but could read only fragments. Formulas for the inoculations, Bible quotes, brainwashing techniques… He had seen enough. He unclipped the page with the children’s names from the binder and stuffed it into his pocket.
The insects began to chirp in the grass. The day was warming. The long road lay ahead. A journey of a thousand miles and a first step to start it…
He breathed in the depth of the air. He was free: he had returned to Typhon’s lair, but the monster had not taken him.
He went down the track to Realty Road. In daylight its menace was gone. When he reached the logging road he began walking east.
There were no trucks on the road that September day. There was a mysterious calm in the woods. He reached the Texaco station at midday.
So much was as it had been in June 1970. The calls of the white-throated sparrow and the cicadas, the white flowers swaying in the wind, the cast-iron red star on its pole, scarred by shot and rust.
The station office was boarded up, but one of the boards over the entrance had been ripped out. Darkness within. He could just discern in the thin beams of light that made their way through the cracks in the boards a counter with an old metal cash register on it. The cracked glass display showed a pop-up “No Sale” sign. The store display shelves had been toppled on their sides.
He circled out to the back lot. Here were the restrooms, an air pump, a pile of moldering tires, and a rusted dumpster. The woods crowded in. Small saplings had begun to grow in the cracks in the asphalt. Random bits of trash left over by visitors were caught in the sapling branches and against the walls of the office. One piece caught his eye. The glimpse of a cartoon dog: white face, long pointy snout, and black button nose. Cracked by long exposure to the weather, but the plastic, though degrading and gray, was still intact. He knelt. His breath caught. Shannon’s coat. He looked up, almost expecting to see her nine-year-old self standing there by the yellow bus.
He draped the coat over the air pump. The next blizzard would carry it far into the woods.
A jarring new sound came over the noise of the forest. A helicopter. Far in the distance. His heart started to beat hard; he was suddenly in hunted mode.
He set off quickly toward Ashland, keeping to the part of the road shaded by the trees. For now, he only heard the chopper at a distance, coming in and out of earshot as if it was following a search pattern; further, then nearer. Toward ten he saw the forestry checkpoint ahead. He took a detour through the woods and rejoined the road at a lumber mill a few hundred yards past it. A mile or two further on, the first farm clearings appeared, and a little later some clapboard farmhouses. For the first time since leaving Seboomook he felt there were sufficient witnesses around to risk going openly. He got out on the side of the road and stuck out a thumb. Fifteen minutes later an old farmer on the way to Highway 11 stopped and offered him a lift in his battered pickup.
The old man seemed satisfied with Ed’s explanation that he was a hiker coming back from a Labor Day expedition, though even to Ed’s ears it was unconvincing. He had no tent or other equipment, just a medium backpack. But the old guy seemed distracted by something up in the sky. He pointed up with a gnarled finger.
“Well, look there,” he said. “That chopper’s been up since dawn. Some poor sap lost over to Eagle Lake or Chamberlain, I’d be guessing.” With that he wound down his window and ejected the wad of baccy he had been chewing.
A half-hour later, Ed was hitching south on Highway 11 on the first leg of a journey that would see him become another person.
PART TWO
MIAMI
1979–1989
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Thanks to Jim’s Marine buddy, George Dumfries, he became Martin Jose Cruz. It was the name of a two-year-old child who had died in an automobile accident in Minnesota in January 1963. At least that was what Dumfries had told him. He hadn’t sought any more information. As it was, being Cruz was like living with someone else’s transplanted heart—that name never sat right with him.
Dumfries had been all that Jim had promised. Maybe more. He had taken pity on the poor, bedraggled kid who had turned up in the rain in the Adirondacks that September of ’79; fed and housed him for a month while he worked on the papers that would turn Edward Burns Constance into Martin Jose Cruz. And in the end Dumfries had only taken $200 for his trouble, much less than Jim had told Ed to expect.
Ed was now a ghost person, with a fake passport, social security card and driver’s license. The remaining money from Stu’s safe would give him time, wherever he ended up.
As the leaves changed, he’d headed south on the Greyhound. He’d read the newspapers every day. This far south, news of the month-old disappearance of a freshman on the first day at Northeastern didn’t make the pages. Nor did the investigation into the suspicious death of Stuart Constance, prominent Brookline developer, though the disappearance of the fatal weapon and the deceased’s adopted son on the same day must surely have excited the interest of the police and, by now, the FBI.
As he traveled from New York City he shed everything that tied him to his previous life: his old clothes, the Timex watch, every last bit of paper… it went into trash cans and dumpsters on stops on the route: all that remained were the Constance Bible, the Woolworth’s notebook, and the page he had rescued from the gray binder at the Lot. And the precious dollars, all 9,800 of them. He kept the last three items wrapped in some taped sheets of newspaper under his shirt. He kept the Bible open on his lap the entire journey. Fellow passengers avoided conversation with him, suspecting him to be some religious nut.
When he reached Miami he hid in plain sight. His unknown parentage helped him. From April to October 1980, 125,000 Cubans arrived at Key West in the Mariel boatlift. Miami was swamped. A new outreach center of Miami Dade College was built in Hialeah. Soon 70 percent of the students of the college were Hispanic. His faked high school diploma was perfect. The college authorities did not seek any further testimonials; they were too busy with the flood of immigrants. He was swiftly admitted.
Over the next four years he changed physically. He was barely recognizable as the gawky young man who had arrived at Stetson East in the fall of ’79. His hair had grown out, he had a moustache, his olive skin was further darkened by the years of Florida sun. His dress went from preppy to beach chic. He was, in the eyes of God and man (but not himself), Martin Jose Cruz.
Stu’s money had only gone so far. Other work was required to maintain his one-room apartment in a former social housing block in Overtown. He ended up doing bar work at the Over and Under in the DuPont Building on East Flagler Street. He kept his interaction with the clientele on a strictly professional level. There was only a million-to-one chance someone from his past would stumble on him, but it was still a chance.
His fellow students said he had a trick memory. But his memory had been trained in the basement of the Lot by means they could never imagine. Like a Mormon missionary, he could quote whole chapters of the Bible. Learning by rote was as easy for him as it was impossible for the average student. He took the LSAT in August three years on. The results arrived three weeks later. Martin Jose Cruz had ended up in the top ten percentile of all students in the country that year, way above the median for acceptance at Miami School of Law, not quite enough for the one-in-a-thousand shot at Harvard Law—a shot he would never have taken even if his scores had been good enough. A return to Massachusetts would have been insane. Miami was all he wanted, and with good grades he would certainly find an associate position at a Florida law firm afterward.
But even though he tried to stay beneath the radar, he attained notoriety of sorts: his score earned him a dean’s merit scholarship, further easing the pressure on his vanishing dollars, but now the new face of Ed Constance was there in the university yearbook, grinning out at all who cared to look. Would anyone recognize the young man who had disappeared from Northeastern four years before?
By December ’84 all was settled. One more semester and then law school. He could dump the bar job and concentrate on his law degree.
Then everything changed. The Over and Under was not busy that December day. The counter was fifty feet long, with four bartenders. His was the last workstation. A young woman entered from the sunlit exterior, and the three other bartenders who had been chatting to one another paused and looked as she walked past them toward Ed. He felt a frisson of uneasiness as she approached.
Not having much money of his own, Ed had nevertheless begun to appreciate the finer things in life, many of them worn by the better-off clientele of the Over and Under. The new arrival looked to be in her early twenties but her getup wasn’t studenty, more like someone on an expensive date. She came to a stop in front of Ed and laid down her purse on the bartop. It was a Chanel clutch with the two interlocked gold Cs on its flap. She seemed to levitate without apparent effort onto a bar stool, then smiled at him. He began to notice things then: principally what she looked like but also that he had been holding his breath, and that his three fellow barkeeps were observing both of them from down the bar.
“Nice bag,” he heard himself say. He had no idea why.
She didn’t seem to mind. “It’s not mine,” she answered. “I borrowed it from a friend.”
“Special occasion?” he asked. Curiously, he found he was hoping it wasn’t.
“Maybe,” she said. “Why don’t you fix me a drink while I find out?”
“Sure.” He felt his face flush. He never blushed. He hoped it wasn’t noticeable in the dim interior light. “What’ll you have?”
“White wine spritzer.”
“Coming up.”
While he fixed the drink, details about her that he had noticed earlier but had immediately repressed began to reregister. Her hair was in a bob. She had a delicate chin and high cheekbones. Like him, she had an olive complexion; hers was like a luminous dust. Her brown eyes appeared fathomless. Before she sat down, he had taken in her willowy figure, accentuated by a black swing dress; a small choker showed off the delicate pillar of her neck. Despite her borrowed bag she looked expensive. Or maybe the entire getup was borrowed?
