Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

“What we need to do here, we need to buy ourselves some wriggle space. Unload Mark and get the others back in the zone, so if the news is bad and he tries anything, it won’t gain traction. Get me?”

Thirty seconds before, Sam had been on his knees, now he was wheeling and dealing. I liked him better this way, but both seemed equally real to him.

“So the question is how we do that,” he continued, still pacing. “Here’s the deal. We get everyone together in the hall. I announce that Mark has rebelled and fallen from grace and that you’ve replaced him as Ore, my spiritual son. Then to clinch it, we have a big ceremony where you’re reunited with your son.”

I felt my hands contract into fists, the nails digging painfully into my palms.

“So he’s here?” I breathed.

Sam looked confused.

“Who?”

“David!”

He laughed.

“You think you were seeing things? Of course he’s here!”

He shook his head.

“Man, the trouble we went to! First we had to follow you guys around for a month, work out what the deal was. Then Melissa and two of the guys had to move out there, get one of the kids here into that school, touch base with all the parents, buy a car, rent a place … It cost us a fucking fortune! But that time I talked to you in the bar, I knew that was the only way. You needed to be broken before you could heal. I still remembered the way it used to be back at that house, the two of us studying Blake together and rapping about everything under the sun. Those rimes were precious to me, Phil, but you’d retreated into this prison of work and family That sickened me! And I swore then and there that I’d free you, whatever the cost.”

I fought to control my anger. That wouldn’t save David.

“So where is he?” I asked.

Sam waved vaguely.

“You’ll see him soon enough. It’ll look better if you don’t meet until we do it in front of the others. It’ll come across as more genuine, know what I mean?”

This was too much to take. The rifle was still lying on the bed where he’d left it. I grabbed it and pointed it at Sam.

“Where is he?”

His eyes seemed to glaze over.

“I thought you were with me,” he murmured.

“I want my son! Now!”

Sam stood staring down at the floor. His expression had become infinitely weary.

“Then go find him,” he said.

I stabbed the rifle at him.

“Tell me where he is, you asshole!”

Sam sighed deeply.

“Guy was killed, I was in Vietnam?” he said. “Best buddy of mine. Had a Purple Heart he got leading a patrol to rescue a downed aircrew deep in Cong territory. Know how he went out? Another guy went out on the toot one night, came back to barracks and started fooling around with his MK-16, making like it was a guitar, dig? And it went off and this guy gets one through the spine. Since then I never keep loaded weapons around.”

We looked at each other. He took a step toward me, reaching for the rifle. I pulled the trigger. There was a dull click. Sam took the gun from my unresisting hands. He opened a drawer in the chest and took out a metal pack which he clipped to the underside of the rifle. Then he turned to me, holding the weapon loosely.

His eyes did not leave mine. The barrel of the rifle moved languidly up and to one side, crossing over my body, until it was pointing at the wall. There was a shattering noise, a burst of explosions, maybe four or five. The air convulsed briefly and a sleet of splinters fell all over the room. I looked at the wall behind me. The bullets had passed straight through the solid tree trunks, gouging out a huge crater.

I turned back to Sam. The gun was now pointing directly at me.

“What do you think would happen if I pulled the trigger now?” Sam mused quietly.

I gazed back at him, my heart racing. The organ itself suddenly felt absurdly vulnerable, lodged right there at the front of the chest in its cage of fragile bone.

“That’s what you should be asking yourself, Phil,” Sam continued. “The answer to that question is the answer to all questions. Think about it.”

I nodded, as though we were having a normal conversation.

“OK, I will,” I said.

Leaving that room was one of the most difficult things I had ever done. Sam held the gun on me the whole time, and I had no way of knowing whether he would use it or not. It felt as though I was learning to walk all over again after a stroke. Every movement had to be planned and willed and then painstakingly executed.

Dusk was drawing in, filling the empty reaches of the hall with darkness. The fire had gone out and the air was cold and damp. I walked across to my room, the floorboards squeaking underfoot. My brain was awash with a mixture of fantasies with a factual solidity and facts which I would have dismissed a few hours earlier as fantastic. Which was harder to believe, that David was alive or that Sam had engineered his kidnapping? That my son and I might soon be reunited, or that we were both in the hands of a God-intoxicated maniac and his wayward gang of followers?

At first I was inclined to dismiss the whole thing as a cruel trick. After all, the kidnap victim had been selected at random. Each child chose his or her own colored thread, and only one led out of the room. Then there was the question of David’s clothing, drenched in his own blood. I’d only seen the child on the rock for a brief moment. Maybe Sam had just dressed up one of the kids to look like David. His picture had been in all the papers.

But I soon realized that these factors did not really create a problem. The kidnappers could easily have had another bag of threads which were all the color of the fatal trail, and simply substituted this for the other when David came to make his choice. If it had been obvious that he’d been targeted, I might have suspected Sam earlier. As for the blood, they could have drawn off some of David’s and used it to soak the clothing. Sam had told me that Melissa used to be a junkie. She would be good with needles.

I switched on the light and looked around my room. My overnight bag was where I had left it, all packed and ready for my abortive departure. On top of it lay a piece of paper neatly folded in two. I picked it up and opened it. On the inside was a rough plan of the compound, showing the hall and the shacks all around. Most of this had been done in blue ballpoint, but one of the houses, the furthest downhill, had been drawn in red. There was no message and no signature.

I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Just a few hundred yards away, on the island across the strait, normal people were getting on with their normal lives. There were telephones and TVs, cars and ferries, police and mail carriers, schools and libraries, stores and bars. Just a few hundred yards, but it might have been another continent, even another century.

I picked up the paper and looked at it again. Maybe there was a message after all. I put on a coat and went outside, taking the map with me. So far I hadn’t explored the cluster of buildings to the east of the hall. This area had a slightly raffish, run-down, shantytown air. The cabins had all been made from scratch, using a mixture of roughly trimmed tree trunks and a few planks and boards which looked like they’d been recycled from earlier constructions. The roofs were mostly corrugated metal, but a few consisted of a simple sheet of canvas thrown over a timber frame. One even had a turf roof, where wild plants had seeded themselves, put down roots and sprouted happily.

The house marked in red on the chart stood slightly apart from the others beside a huge first-growth cedar which had been left standing at the fringes of the clearing, where the zone of stubbly scrub began. The house was in fact partly supported by the tree, to which it was lashed by two rusty metal cables. It was a ramshackle structure made of boards and beams, some of which, judging by their smoothness, had been scavenged from the beach. The roof was hard to make out in the fading light, but seemed to consist of mottled camouflage canvas which might have started life as a piece of army equipment. A dim light was visible inside. Then something touched my back, and I whirled around.

It was Andrea. Without a word, she led the way along the side of the shack and opened a badly hung door made out of what looked like a cut-down Ping-Pong table. We went inside, stooping under the low door frame. The furniture consisted of the bed, an old outdoor table and a green metal chest which might well originally have served as packing for the canvas which sagged from its rudimentary supports overhead. An oil lamp was burning on the table. Andrea blew out the flame. She sat on the bed. I remained standing.

“I’ve been waiting behind that tree for over an hour,” she said. “I didn’t know who might come. I didn’t dare leave a message in case one of the others read it. I just hoped you’d understand.”

“How do I know this isn’t another setup?” I demanded.

She sighed.

“You’ll just have to believe me.”

“Why should I? You lured me down to the pool so that Sam could stage that little dramatic tableau. There’s no use denying it! Sam has admitted the whole thing.”

She stood up, facing me. I couldn’t make out the expression on her face in the gloom, but she sounded angry.

“Has it ever occurred to you that I might not be a free agent? Has it ever entered your head for a second that you might not be the only person in Sam’s power? Do you have any idea of the risk I took in leaving that map in your room?”

I shook my head.

“Well, let me tell you what happened to one of the other women,” she said in a hard tone. “She went along on a shopping trip with Lenny and Rick, and tried to sneak off. Said she had to go to the bathroom, then climbed out the window. They found her trying to hitchhike out of town and brought her back here. Sam had her stripped and tied to the wall-bars in his room. They left her hanging there by her arms for three days, taking turns raping her. When they finally cut her down she couldn’t move her arms for a month. She’s still in pain, even now, but they won’t let her see a doctor.”

I sat down on the metal chest and buried my head in my hands.

“But this is crazy!” I exclaimed. “He can’t keep all these people locked up here against their will!”

“Yes, he can. Anyway, most of them want to be here. They believe everything Sam tells them.”

“What, this shit about Blake? Studying his poems like they were the Bible or something?”

“That’s what they believe they are. They believe that William Blake was divinely inspired, and that his work is the word of God. They believe that Sam is the prophet Los, the second coming of Jesus. They believe that the world will come to an end soon and that they will be the only ones to survive. I thought you knew all this! I thought you believed in it too. Why else would anyone come here? That’s why I was so afraid this morning. I thought Sam was testing me, using you as a spy to find out if I could be trusted.”

She shivered. There was no heating in the cabin, but I didn’t think it was just a matter of the temperature. I went over and sat beside her, taking her hands in mine. Her thin, bony fingers were as cold as a corpse’s.

“What about you, Andrea?” I asked. “What are you doing here? Why didn’t you leave after Lisa drowned?”

“Because I saw it happen.”

“So?”

She was silent a moment.

“What did Sam tell you about it?”

“That Lisa tried to swim across to that other island and didn’t make it.”

“Did he say why?”

I shrugged.

“He said she was a good swimmer, only this time she overreached herself.”

Andrea stood up and moved away into the shadows.

“Lisa was a good swimmer. A champion. We were at UW together, and she was on the Huskies team. But she was also far too smart to try and swim across to Orcas. The water around here is icy and the currents are fierce.”

“So why did she do it?”

She emerged from the darkness and stood in front of me.

“She didn’t. Sam did.”

“Did what?”

“Drowned her.”

I stared up at her.

“She and I were swimming down at that pool,” Andrea went on. “After a while the boat appeared. Sam was at the wheel. He called to Lisa. She swam out and climbed aboard. Sam took the boat out into the middle of the strait and threw her overboard.”

I was silent.

“That’s why he’ll never let me leave,” Andrea went on. “He made me write a letter home saying that I was going to Nicaragua. One of the guys who was going to Texas mailed it from there. When they didn’t hear any more, my parents eventually came looking for me here. Mark took me up into the woods while Sam talked to them. I don’t know what he said, but he can be very persuasive when he wants. They haven’t been back.”

I stood up.

“But what about the others?” I said agitatedly. “You can’t just make all these people disappear without someone getting suspicious!”

“Sure you can, if you pick them right. There are a million homeless kids in this country. It’s no problem to find someone with no roots, no hope, no paper trail. A couple of the guys go out recruiting every so often. They befriend these kids, give them some money and a big line about Sam having all the answers. If they decide the guy’s no good, they let him go. All he knows is that some religious nut tried to get him to sign up. If they decide to take him, then he has to write a letter the same way I did. Sam always quotes that line from the Bible about leaving your parents and brethren and wife and children for the kingdom of God’s sake. Most of these people weren’t getting much return from those things anyway, so giving them up in exchange for board, lodging and the secret of eternal life is not a big deal for them.”

“Did he try and convert you too?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“I have to pretend to go along with it, but they don’t really care what the women think. It’s basically a guy thing. The women aren’t initiated into the Secret. They just have to turn up for the lectures, take care of the scutwork, and spread their legs whenever Sam asks them to.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and I didn’t particularly want to. If what Andrea had told me was true, then the situation was far more dangerous than I had ever imagined.

“OK, you’ve told me your story. Now hear mine. My child was kidnapped and apparently murdered. As a result, my wife killed herself. Sam now tells me that he masterminded the whole thing because, quote, I needed to be broken before I could heal, unquote. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. I only saw that boy for a moment, and from a distance. It might have been some other child, dressed up to look like David. Sam could have got all the other details from the newspaper stories at the time. I don’t know what to believe. I feel like I’m going crazy.”