Nightjack Read online

  “This is your house, Will,” Dr. Brandt repeated. When the lady got a hard thought in her head, she couldn’t let it go. Talk about neurotic.

  “No, it’s not.” He tried not to take offense at her compulsion to call him Will, always with the Will. “I’ve never been here before.”

  “You knew you had a place to go to, but you didn’t know how to get here. But you knew the address and where to find the key. You’ve already separated from yourself again, Will. Distancing yourself from your emotions and personal history. That’s why you’re not healthy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So it is yours.”

  “No, it’s not,” he repeated. Saying it like he was a little sad for her, that she just couldn’t understand. She’d never be able to understand, which was why she was such a lousy shrink.

  He knew she wished she had a tape recorder on hand. Even after two years in Garden Falls she hadn’t come close to getting to the bottom of him. Any of him, any of them. He remembered her sitting there writing and making him talk into a video camera.

  He’d talked for hours and days and months and he wasn’t sure if he’d told a single lie, or a single truth. About himself or anybody else, even though so much of it was honest even while everything contradicted itself.

  Hayden had his notepad out and was writing to his mother again.

  “All this time,” Faust said, sounding a little amazed and crestfallen, “and you still know so little about us, Dr. Brandt.”

  “True dissociative identity disorders are extremely rare, Faust. You’re all quite unique.”

  “Perhaps even more so than you know, doctor.”

  That got her attention. She took on the professional air again, ready to analyze, to diagnose. “How do you mean?”

  “Yeah,” Hayden said. “This I gotta hear.”

  Pia jumped into a wicker seat. “I am all ears.”

  “Perhaps we’re not suffering from DID at all.” The scar on Faust’s forehead looked pink and raw, like it was ready to give birth. “Let me submit, doctor, that we are not creating personalities within ourselves due to traumatic experiences which have fractured our psyches.”

  “Then what?”

  “That we are instead actually channeling these other individuals, entities, and beings. Drawing them in from other dimensions, through time and space across the cosmos. Gathering them to us. Them, and the souls of the departed. These others do not originate organically from within. They consume and subsume and the worst of them devour. We are simply the beacons. We are the vessels. We are the conduits. We are the possessed. Our father who art infinite.”

  Dr. Brandt licked her lips and something inside Pace bucked. She took a moment to gather her thoughts. When they came, they were worthless. “Even you don’t believe that.”

  “You might be surprised at what I believe, doctor.”

  “No, Faust, I wouldn’t. I’ve heard it all before, from each of you over the years you were in therapy. But your alternate personalities are nothing more than inventions of an afflicted psyche.”

  “I’m hurt,” Hayden said. “You sound like you don’t like us anymore.”

  “I care greatly for each one of you, but you’re all ill. You need help.”

  “You keep saying that,” Faust said. “Isn’t repetitive actions and speech the sign of an afflicted mind?”

  “In certain circumstances.”

  “Do you eat paste?” Hayden asked.

  “No.”

  “Don’t eat paste!”

  Pia stood and fluttered around the room. “Maybe it’s just the fact that some badass wants to do unholy things to me, but I haven’t felt this good in years.”

  “I agree,” Faust said. “This newfound independence, fueled by anxiety and tension, is quite an electrifying experience. Although I was terrified when that shotgun went off in the apartment, I was also quite thrilled. Piqued.”

  Saying it but his eyes shifting left and right, back and forth, seeing two sword-wielding angels in the room.

  “Are you being visited by your two friends again?” Dr. Brandt asked.

  “They’re not my friends,” Faust said. “You know that.”

  “They’re not real either.”

  “Of course they are. They’re a part of me, and I’m real. The twin angels Sariel and Rimmon are no different than emotions or memories. My hopes, fears, and phobias. None of us can fully control ourselves. If we could, we wouldn’t be human.”

  Behind him to the left, Faust always saw a fallen angel named Sariel. Wingless, looking much like a man. One of the seven honored masters in command of a heavenly host, who guides the progress of the world. Issuer of new bodies to the dead, who after the great war in heaven descended to earth to cohabit with mortal women. Sariel was the chief of the repentants, who removed his own crown on Golgotha as Christ died in the world. Possessor of the four keys to the four corners of the earth. Who will, when instructed by God, re-open the gates of Eden, which were locked after the fall of humanity and are guarded by the damned.

  Directly to his right stood Rimmon, who grants success and good fortune. Governor of the first order of seraphim, angel of lightning and fire. The only seraph successful in fighting envy. Ruler of the 196 divisions of heaven, commanding 29,000 legions of burning choirs. The angel whose sword set fire to the bush that brought clarity to Moses. One of the nine who will reign over the end times.

  Pace saw them too, very clearly now, the angels watching him from across the room, their swords sheathed.

  “Arf!” Crumble barked happily. The pug ran forward and started humping Pace’s leg. He patted the dog, scratching the deep furrowed wrinkles.

  Dr. Brandt glanced over, her gorgeous face as austere as stone. “Hayden, my God, stop that!”

  “Arf!”

  “Good boy,” Pace said.

  Pia moaned and licked her lips. Twin angels, fallen and divine, moved to her, their golden locks flowing across their shoulders.

  Weeping, Daedalus stared out the window and looked over the waters, searching the sea for his fallen son.

  ten

  “Our forefathers’ forefathers have walked here in this house,” Faust said. “Can’t you feel it? There are graves beneath this floor. The soil is heavy with bonemeal. Stillborn children have been denied names and interred without benefit of prayer.”

  “Thanks for that, Captain Happy,” Hayden said. “You know, living with the mongoloids was a lot more fun than dealing with you, man, even with all the dribble and headgear. Shit, they sure knew how to throw a party.” He kneeled and took pieces of firewood and kindling from two neat stacks and loaded them into the fireplace. “Hey, I have a question. Do we have any idea what the hell we’re doing yet? What the plan is? If we’re all in agreement on our options? Our chances? If we have any?”

  “No,” Pace said.

  “To all of the above? Jesus Christ.”

  Pia entered one of the bedrooms and said, “It’s very homey. People were very happy here once.”

  “Anybody see any knives?” Pace asked.

  “No,” Faust said. “Not in view anyway. Why don’t you search the sideboards and dressers?”

  “Because it’s not my house.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  The man Pace had been this morning was no longer the man he was now. He was already somebody else. That’s the way it worked. He could become a new person by millimeters and instances and degrees, each small change allowing him to become someone else.

  He turned and the others were gone. He heard them upstairs, opening doors, rummaging around. Pia tittered loudly and so did Dr. Brandt, which was a strange sound. You could get used to a lot, but there’d always be something chilling when you heard the laughter of a person who didn’t laugh.

  He sat in a rattan love seat and shut his eyes, wondering if any of this was real or if he was still in the hospital tied down to a bed with a huge needle jammed in his neck. He only opened his eyes when
somebody moved past him, the floor creaking loudly.

  It was Sam Smith, the private eye that Pacella had hired to help him find the torcher of the restaurant, right before Jack broke loose.

  Sam seated himself beside Pace, smoking a three-inch cigar butt. He wore a black slicker and a fedora with a little plastic covering around it. Rain ran heavily off the brim.

  “It’s a bad night out,” Sam said.

  “I know, thanks for coming.”

  You could always count on Sam. The man was closing in on sixty but still went two-fifty of nearly solid muscle. Shaking his hand was like squeezing a steel pipe. He’d been one of the last ones out of Saigon in ‘75 and still bore the scars of an 81mm mortar shell down the left side of his face and neck, where the scars rose and twisted like knots on a log. He carried a .38 in a shoulder holster under his left armpit. You looked at him and you saw your father, any of your many fathers who’d protect you through the ugliest situation on any backstreet. You knew nothing could take P.I. Sam Smith down.

  Sam was the researcher. It was perhaps his greatest skill. He could find out anything. He’d tried to teach Pacella the rudiments of shadowing somebody and casing a house, how to break into computer systems and check bank accounts, but Pacella was too busy going out of his mind.

  He never picked up on it and only listened with one ear. It turned out to be Jack’s ear, and that turned out to be enough.

  Sam said, “There’s a laptop stowed away on the top shelf of the foyer closet. Bring me that and we can get to work.”

  “Finding the torcher?”

  “That job’s already been completed,” Sam said. “Now come on, I got a lot of cases I need to get to, let’s hurry this along, yeah?”

  “Wait, tell me who—”

  Sam gave Pace the eye, a father brooking no opposition. “There’s no time to go through all of that again.”

  All right, moving along.

  Pace went to the foyer and got the laptop out of the closet, sat down again. The house was set up for wireless. Sam Smith booted it up, got on the Internet, and started typing rapidly.

  “Let’s start with Cassandra Kaltzas,” Pace said. “Nobody will tell me much. Can you breach the security on the Garden Falls computers, get into the files?”

  “There’s no need to, we’ve already got access.”

  “We do?”

  “Sure, with Maureen Brandt’s password. It’s P-S-Y-C-H-E, yeah? In the Greek myth, it’s the name of a human girl and means ‘soul.’ She was abandoned by Eros—that means love—and left all depressed. Finally driven into the underworld. Eros is the god behind vulnerability. He’s the one who cuts deepest. He exposes all of mankind—through love, betrayal, and cruelty—to the inseparable blend of pain and pleasure.”

  “Damn,” Pace said, “you really are a good detective, Sam Smith!”

  “Yeah. We private eyes like to give our clients their money’s worth.”

  He tapped a few more keys and came to a patient video log that unfolded as if you were actually turning pages in a folder.

  Cassandra Kaltzas. Daughter of shipping magnate Alexander Kaltzas, living in New York City and attending New York University. An art history major but with an eye toward abstract expressionism. Some kind of a break occurred between her and her father, and she refused to allow him to pay her way. She worked part-time as a waitress in a west Greenwich village café called the Galleria Buffet, a tiny place sandwiched between two small art galleries. Her second semester she began to suffer from a growing sense of derealization. Seeing walls, buildings, and other objects changing in shape, size, and color. She was given to panic attacks. Originally she was misdiagnosed by a school psychiatrist with a borderline personality disorder. They thought she was bipolar and working too hard on her abstract paintings. The meds they prescribed did nothing.

  “Is there a photo of her?” Pace asked.

  Smith punched a few more keys and the video pages flipped until they came to a dark-haired girl only slightly older than Pia. She had sharp aquiline features, black eyes as cold as quartz. There was strength and independence there. Her expression was reserved and remote, and she seemed to be at the point of realizing the burden might be too heavy, the consequences too severe. He could almost see how she was beginning to buckle, like Psyche driven down into the underworld by love.

  Pace didn’t recognize her. He read on silently while Smith read aloud, saying how she eventually failed to recognize friends, teachers, and co-workers and was as admitted into Garden Falls. She scored high on the Dissociative Experiences Scale screening test and was noted as a schizophrenic. A few months later she was found beaten on the ward. After a thorough investigation by the police and the hospital personnel, there was no forensic evidence found and still no primary suspects, although three escapees were being sought for further questioning.

  “Try to find the sexual predator in a facility filled with four hundred lunatics,” Smith said.

  “Only thirty-five on the ward, not counting alternates,” Pace told him. “But her father decided it had to be one of us three, aided by Pia and Maureen Brandt. Why? Were we really the most violent?”

  “Despite your circumstances, you were in under a voluntary committal. The cops had nothing on you. You attacked a couple of guards once in treatment.”

  “He’d have heard about Nightjack though.”

  “Sure.”

  Upstairs, it sounded like baby rhinos were running around. “What can you find on Kaltzas himself?”

  “Not much that matters. For one of the richest men in the world, he’s kept a pretty low profile. Alexander Limnos Kaltzas. Fifty years old. Industrialist. Shipping tycoon. Munitions dealer. Archeologist. His father, Demes, bucked the Nazis in the big one. Drove the Italian fascists out when they attacked from Albania in 1940. German troops overcame the insurgents and invaded Athens in ’41. He saw a lot of blood. The Greek government was in shambles by then. Their leaders were fleeing the country or offing themselves left and right. He could’ve run but he stuck it out. Famine followed along with intense guerilla resistance. The worse a war gets, the tougher and harder the resistance gets.”

  Sam seemed to be thinking about Nam again. “The old man was a leader in the National Liberation Front. Hardcore, living in the frozen mountains for months so they could cut supply lines. Routed the Germans in ’44, and then came civil war to control what was left of the country. He started dealing with Albania, Bulgaria, Turkey, even Great Britain, making his fortune in the post-war cleanup of rebels. Made a killing in the black market when Truman came in and initiated his doctrine, offering military and relief supplies. Settled in on Pythos and never left.”

  Sam Smith was good at the keyboard, his fingers moving gracefully so there was hardly any sound at all. “No mention of Kaltzas’s mother or any siblings. The old man died when Alexander was twenty, studying at the University of Athens. The fortune passed down to him, but he didn’t return to the island until he finished interning at the Byzantine Museum and the Acropolis.”

  “Old school,” Pace said, “ancient school. His daughter studying abstract expressionism must’ve pissed him off.”

  “Yeah. Met his wife, Catherine, also a trained archeologist, at the university. She died during an excavation on Pythos ten years ago, when Cassandra was ten. Part of a tomb wall collapsed. Cassandra was there and saw it.”

  “The start of her fracture,” Pace said.

  “Maybe. After her breakdown in New York and the troubles at Garden Falls, Kaltzas pulled her back to the island. He was already pretty much a recluse. Very little media coverage, and nobody gets on the island without his say so. He’s got a private army protecting him. After she came home, he really fell out of sight. There hasn’t been a word printed about him.”

  “And now he beckons us to his home.”

  “He wants to make sure he’s getting the right person,” Sam said. “He’s deliberate and careful. Sounds dangerous and dramatic too, but I bet when he aims at a target,
he’s accurate. Probably comes from living with those relics, all that stone. His old man would’ve just used a howitzer and killed a hundred people to make sure he got the right one. This Kaltzas, he’s got a flair for the flamboyant but he’s incisive. You been practicing the moves I taught you, yeah?”

  “Yes,” Pace said, because he, or someone else, had been. Pacella had once thought a man had to be highly trained to efficiently kill someone with his bare hands. He’d been amused and revolted at how easy it actually proved to be. The simple killing strokes. Forearm to the throat. Heel of the palm to the sternum. The strangler’s hands holding on. Easing the blade in under the heart. Incisive.

  When Pace looked at P.I. Sam Smith again, the man had blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. Sam didn’t seem to be in any pain as he coughed and brought up black fluid that dripped down his chin. He gasped twice, his lungs bubbling, and then his head sank back against the edge of the couch and the little plastic wrapper around his hat flopped off.

  Pace reached over and put a hand to Sam Smith’s chest but there was no movement.

  Then Pace was alone on the love seat, with the laptop on his knees.

  That’s right, he thought, Sam Smith had been murdered three weeks after taking the job from William Pacella. He was found shot to death in his office, a couple of months after he started investigating the Ganucci family’s possible connection to the death of Jane Pacella.

  The screen had more information about Pythos and Pace scanned it quickly, learning a little more about the archeological digs that had gone on, what might be expected at Greek shrines. It felt as if time was running out, and he tried to absorb what he could, even though the facts kept skittering away from him.

  Pace glanced up and saw Pia gliding down the stairs, pixie arms out and waving as if she might fly. Hayden slid along the rail in perfect time with her. Dr. Brandt was making her angry mama face as she followed, stomping down stair by stair.