The Tenth Circle (23 page)

Asheville, North Carolina

But it wasn’t a boy at all, just a trick of the moonlight’s reflection in the falling night. He was looking at his own face, the features warped and distorted by the broken glass. All the same, the illusion sent his heart racing, down now to just a splotchy flutter as Rule approached the cottage entrance.

This was the very cottage in which he’d been forced to hang from the steam pipes, the cottage he’d returned to in later years as a counselor himself. The big heavy door had splintered away, just chunks left at the hinges where it looked kicked in, probably by local kids out for an adventure or adults in search of more to salvage and pawn. Rule entered out of the chilled air into something even more cold and dank. Because there was something for him here at Black House, in this very cottage; something he needed to know, something he had left behind that was a mystery even at this point of the journey.

His cheap flashlight made enough of a dent in the darkness for Rule to see the cottage as it had been fifty years ago. He looked up through the collected dust and cobwebs to find the steam pipes, from which he’d once hung by his fingers, were gone, torn from the walls so their generally worthless steel might be salvaged for something. The irony of trying to find any value in this place was striking. Rule took a deep breath and the air flooding his lungs felt rank and spoiled.

Suddenly, he smelled the sweat of unwashed bodies and urine festering on underwear that went weeks without being laundered. Rule shined his flashlight upward to find the steam pipes suddenly restored amid the dull glow. More than that, he saw a young boy hanging from one, gritting his teeth against the inevitability of falling. Beneath him stood a glowering, grinning counselor, poking at the boy with what looked like a garden stake found amid the tended areas of the grounds.

Poke, poke, poke …

The boy grimacing each time the stake left him swaying again, the blisters on his hands starting to pucker and pop. It was hard for Rule to watch, even in his mind, hard to watch himself suffer as he had so all those years ago.

Only the vision conjured by his mind wasn’t of him at all. The boy starting to lose his purchase on the steamy tin had light hair, while his had been dark. A straw-colored mop of waves, with tangles and cowlicks sticking up this way and that. Being prodded and poked with a stick by a counselor with hair cropped military close on the sides and bunched tight on top.

And then the younger boy fell, in motion so slow that Jeremiah Rule could now see the iron bed frame against which his head slammed. The crunch was sickening and by the time the boy hit the floor, his eyes were rolling back in his head and he was making guttural wheezing sounds that ceased in the midst of a final exhale. His features locking blankly in realization, resignation, and perhaps relief. Dead.

The smell of urine became more potent, that of something like old, stale farts added to it.

“You don’t remember.”

Rule swung about in search of the voice, a boy’s voice, taunting him. Then turned back to watch the counselor shed his garden stake and grasp the boy by the shoulders, shaking them in a futile attempt to revive him. The counselor swung Rule’s way, seeming to regard him, to plead for help through timelines stitched together. The reverend recognized the counselor, knew him all too well.

Because it was
him.
As a teenager. A battered boy turned batterer. It was the way Black House worked and thrived.

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

Rule followed the boy’s voice back outside, trudging along an overgrown path. He’d known those paths so well back then, knew them that well again now. And when he looked down, he was wearing cracked and torn sneakers instead of shoes, the dead boy now grasped in his arms growing stiff as foul air fled his anus. Rule shook the illusion aside, but the path remained, a destination programmed into his mind.

“It ain’t too much further now.”

He didn’t even know how far he’d walked. But there was a thicket of brush shrouded by dead elm trees, their leaves all shed to show only skeletal branches frozen over the scene. Rule looked down to see hands caked with mud and blood from cuts in the flesh and one nail mangled from digging.

“Here I am, right here.”

The ground had been soft that night, Rule shoveling his hands through it to forge a hole deep enough to pass as a grave. The dead boy would be reported missing, a token search conducted while proper reports were made out to the police. They’d pass his picture around for a time, maybe staple his likeness to the walls of a few local businesses, and then everyone would forget. His bunk would be taken by another from the waiting list who would sleep on the same stale and dirty sheets.

Rule didn’t need his cheap flashlight to see the world before him anymore. He closed his eyes and smelled the fetid mud, felt it churning through his hands until an occasional rock blocked his fingers and bent them backward. Felt his nail crack and splinter on one of the rocks.

The body was stiff and cold, sightless eyes still open, when Rule finally lowered the boy into the hole and covered him in the piles of dirt, replacing it as best he could.

“It was just an accident.”

The dead boy’s voice again, only now his ghost was standing by Rule’s side gazing down at the resting place for his remains.

“You didn’t mean to kill me no more than you meant to kill that other boy. But you didn’t bury him like you buried me.”

Rule wanted to speak, wanted to respond, but there were no words and barely enough breath to form them anyway.

“Come on.”

Rule looked down to see the ghost had taken his hand in fingers draped in mud that left Rule’s cold and matted together. No way to get all that mud off no matter how much he washed and rinsed, as he’d learned as a counselor just short of his sixteenth birthday forty years before.

“I’m still there. Nobody done ever found me. Hey, did you ever find my coloring book? I could sure use it to help pass the time. And a couple crayons if you think of it
.
”

Rule’s mouth dropped but no words, not even any air, emerged.

“I know about that other boy you killed. Maybe did him a favor as much as you did me. Not much hope in life for either of us. Life ain’t about much else and you more than made up for it
.
”

“I have?”

“For sure, yes. All them people you helped. Gave them what nobody could ever give me or that other dead boy
.
”

“Hope?”

“Yup.”

“What’s ahead? Can you show me that?”

“You don’t need me to show you nothing anyway. You already know what’s down that road. Just gotta open your eyes to see it, like you’re seeing me. Killing me helped make you who you are, just like killing that other boy did. But if you don’t do the right thing now, we’ll both be stinking up the ground for nothing
.
”

“I’ve preached the Lord’s word, invited Him to speak through me so others may know Him too.”

“It’s not about what you said as much as what you gotta do, what you gotta finish. And don’t ask me what it is either, ’cause I don’t know. Just know there’s something
.
”

The boy took his hand again and Rule shuddered.

“And you know what that something is as sure as sure be. I’m in the ground now ’cause of what you were becoming even back then. Now the reason for that’s getting clear as day
.
”

Rule realized the boy wasn’t holding his hand anymore, starting to drift away.

“Don’t leave.”

“Got to.”

“Please.”

The boy kept drifting.

“Let me, let me …”

“What, Reverend?”

“Let me take you with me.”

“You mean it?”

Rule nodded and looked down at his hands, wondered what they might find after all these years if they churned through the soft ground of the boy’s makeshift grave anew.

“There’s a way,” he told the ghost.

Branson, Missouri

The steel and brick carcass of Celebration City amusement park rose on the outskirts of Branson like a ghost town. It had been conceived and built as a kind of mini–Disney World to celebrate Americana with elegantly reconstructed small-town streets layered between rides like a log flume and vintage wooden roller coaster. Over thirty of them that could be enjoyed through the day, then topped on a nightly basis seasonally with a laser and fireworks show. But the developers’ ambitions greatly exceeded the demand for such an attraction in rural Missouri and the park had gone belly up just a few years after it was christened.

“I want the boy, Eddie,” McCracken had said to Edward Harm back at CenterPointe Hospital in Saint Charles. “Simple as that.”

“It’s never that simple and you know it.”

“Whatever Carroll and the others are up to, whatever they’re planning, ends here and now.”

“And what does Mr. Carroll get for such a generous gesture on your part?”

“He gets to live. That good enough for you?”

“It’s not up to me.”

“Then get the man it is up to on the phone.”

McCracken was talking to Robert Carroll on Harm’s cell phone in the hospital lobby minutes later.

“You are one goddamn pain in the ass, McCracken.”

“Something works for me, I stick with it.”

“Seems like we got ourselves a dilemma, doesn’t it?”

“Well, you do—that’s for sure.”

“But I also got this kid you want so badly.”

“How do I even know he’s really alive, Mr. Carroll?”

“Guess we have to meet up face-to-face.”

“Guess we do.”

“Hash the rest of this out like the professionals we are.”

“Suits me just fine.”

“Leave that big Indian of yours home.”

“Exactly my intention.” McCracken paused long enough for Carroll to take his next breath. “That way, if this goes bad, you’ll know that you and whoever else is involved won’t be long for this world.”

“Have you ever actually listened to yourself, son?”

“No, Mr. Carroll, I haven’t. But you better.”

And now here Blaine was, entering the debris-riddled mausoleum that was Celebration City through what was left of the steel gate. He could smell rust and rotting wood. The rides still towered over the scene, some stripped bare of iron and copper, while others creaked in the wind, looking ready to topple under the force of the next gust.

He turned right down a once-elegant recreation of an old-fashioned, small-town street from a simpler time, neatly paved and complete with the rusted husks of ancient cars stripped of tires and rims with bird nests sprouting from where their upholstery had once been. The elm and oak trees rising out of the smoothly layered sidewalks were still alive in stark contrast to the boarded-up windows of the movie house, emporium, and general store that once sold souvenirs, its empty shelves filled only with dust.

McCracken stopped halfway down the street and looked back over his shoulder to see two men armed with submachine guns had stepped out behind him. Before him, meanwhile, another pair accompanied Robert Carroll from inside the fabricated town hall set in the glistening sun. A third man pushed a wheelchair with the dazed form of Andrew Ericson slumped in it. His hair was disheveled and he looked dazed, but alive. Looking at the boy made Blaine think of Andrew’s father, the first time he’d seen him playing rugby at the Reading School at a point he still believed Matthew Ericson to be his son.

Blaine found the boy just as a teammate gave him a perfect pass on the run and Matthew Ericson streaked down the far sideline like a champion thoroughbred. A deft stutter step stranded one opponent in his tracks, and a fake pass to the side left him with a clear path to the goal line. The boy ran with graceful, loping strides, propelled by a high leg kick that tossed mud behind him off his soggy cleats. His hair was straight and longish, curled at the ends now from the dampness.

Andrew was a spitting his image of his father from that day; he was even wearing a rugby shirt that looked sodden and soiled. One blanket covered him at the shoulders in the cold air, another draped over his legs.

Blaine started walking again, conscious not only of the pair of men at his rear falling in step, but also of eyes sighting down on him from the second- and third-story windows overlooking the imitation Main Street. A dozen at least, probably more.

Robert Carroll was taking no chances.

Almost to the town hall, one of Carroll’s men signaled him to stop while another came forward and performed a cursory frisk, lingering briefly on the pouch wound through Blaine’s belt and then shaking his head Carroll’s way when he found no weapon.

“You’ve made a hell of a mess, McCracken,” Carroll told him from just fifteen feet away.

“I’ve heard that before.”

“And yet you keep doing it, long after most have hung up their guns.”

“Unlike men like you, who just have other people pulling the trigger for them.”

“It’s a new world, McCracken.”

“Hardly. Men like you just want to think that it is to justify the kind of shit you’re trying to pull now.”

“I’m pulling the plug, that’s what I’m pulling, if it’s any comfort to you.”

“It’s not,” Blaine said, his gaze dipping to meet the boy’s, which looked dazed and terrified. “How long have you had him?”

“Since EMTs pulled him off the bridge after the blast. The car he was in never even went into the water.”

“Neat trick.”

“It pays to think ahead, in this case to your potential involvement.”

“I scare you that much?”

“Because you can’t be reasoned with.”

“You mean controlled, Carroll, don’t you?”

Carroll backed off. “Take the kid and get out of here.”

“That simple?”

Carroll shrugged.

“Because it occurs to me having to maneuver a dazed boy in a wheelchair would make it a lot harder for me to deal with those gunmen you’ve got covering the whole street from the windows.”

Carroll said nothing.

“Ever get your own hands dirty?” Blaine asked him. “Ever served or seen combat yourself?”

“Never had the opportunity.”

“Is that what you call it? Maybe if you had served yourself, you’d think differently about the way you do business, how you view life and death.”

Carroll stiffened, looked up at the windows lining both sides of Main Street. “Make a move on me and you’ll be dead before you take a second step.”

“As opposed to waiting a few minutes more, when I’ve got a kid in a wheelchair to get out of here with me.”

Carroll smirked. “Free passage, McCracken. I told you, the plug on this is getting pulled.”

“Something go wrong, Carroll? Something in your grand scheme to murder innocent people in the name of whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish?”

“You mean, save this country from itself? No worries; I’ll just find another way, while you go about yours. Maybe next time you’ll choose the right side. Now, take the kid and get out of my sight.”

The man at the rear of Andrew’s wheelchair shoved it forward. McCracken stopped it with his foot and came slowly around to take the handholds.

“Have your men throw down your weapons, Mr. Carroll, the ones in those windows included. Then tell me who else I need to pay a visit to and you get to walk away from this. Free passage.”

Carroll frowned, the expression morphing quickly into a grin. “Man, you really are a piece of work, aren’t you? How is it we’ve never met before?”

“Guess I’m just lucky. You should keep that in mind.”

Carroll grinned again and shook his head. “A damn shame, McCracken. We’re really not as different as you think.”

“Yes, we are. Last chance, Carroll. Make your choice.”

The man just stood there.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Blaine said, squeezed the boy’s shoulder tenderly and started the wheelchair down Main Street.