“The truth is, I’d prefer not to be here myself,” I said. “I don’t want to face Faulkner again, not until the trial.”
The two men exchanged a look. “Rumor is that this trial has all the makings of a disaster,” said the warden. He seemed tired and vaguely disgusted.
I didn’t answer, so he spoke to fill the silence.
“Which, I guess, is why the prosecutor is so anxious that you should talk to Faulkner,” he concluded. “You think he’ll give anything away?” The expression on his face told me that he already knew the answer but I gave him the echo he expected anyway.
“He’s too smart for that,” I said.
“Then why are you here, Mr. Parker?” asked the colonel.
It was my turn to sigh.
“Frankly, colonel, I don’t know.”
The colonel didn’t speak as he, along with a sergeant, led me through 7 Dorm, past the infirmary where old men in wheel-chairs were given the drugs they needed to maximize their life sentences. The 5 and 7 Dorms housed the older, sicker prisoners, who shared multibed rooms decorated with hand-lettered signs (“Get Use To It,” “Ed’s Bed”). In the past, older special prisoners like Faulkner might have been housed here, or placed in administrative segregation in a cell among the general population, their movements restricted, until a decision was made about them. But the main segregation unit was now at the Supermax facility, which did not have the capacity to offer psychiatric services to prisoners, and Faulkner’s attempts to injure himself appeared to require some form of psychiatric investigation. A suggestion that Faulkner be transferred to the Augusta Mental Health Institute had been rejected by the attorney general’s office, which did not want to prejudice any future jurors into making a pretrial association between Faulkner and insanity, and by Faulkner’s own lawyers, who feared that the state might use the opportunity to discreetly place their client under more elaborate observation than was possible elsewhere. Since the state regarded the county jail as unsuitable for holding Faulkner, Thomaston became the compromise solution.
Faulkner had attempted to cut his wrists with a slim ceramic blade that he had concealed in the spine of his Bible before his transfer to the MCI. He had kept it, unused, until almost three months into his incarceration. A guard on routine night rounds had spotted him and called for help just as Faulkner appeared to be losing consciousness. The result was Faulkner’s transfer to the Mental Health Stabilization Unit at the western end of Thomaston prison, where he was initially placed in the acute corridor. His clothing was taken away and he was given instead a nylon smock. He was placed under constant camera watch, as well as being monitored by a prison guard who noted any movement or conversation in a logbook. In addition, all communication was recorded electronically. After five days in acute, Faulkner was transferred to sub-acute, where he was allowed state blues to replace his smock, hygiene products (but no razors), hot meals, showers, and access to a telephone. He had commenced one-on-one counseling with a prison psychologist and had been examined by psychiatrists nominated by his legal team, but had remained unresponsive. Then he had demanded a telephone call, contacted his lawyers and asked that he be allowed to speak to me. His request that the interview should be conducted from his cell was, perhaps surprisingly, met with approval.
When I arrived in the MHSU, the guards were finishing off some chicken burgers left over from the prisoners’ lunches. In the unit’s main recreation area, the inmates stopped what they were doing and stared at me. One, a stocky, hunched man, barely five feet tall with lank dark hair, approached the bars and appraised me silently. I caught his eye, didn’t like what I felt, then looked away again. The colonel and the sergeant sat on the edge of a desk and watched as one of the unit’s guards led me down the corridor to Faulkner’s cell.
I felt the chill while I was still ten feet away from him. At first, I thought it was brought on by my own reluctance to face the old man, until I felt the guard beside me shiver slightly.
“What happened to the heating?” I asked.
“Heating’s on full blast,” he replied. “This place leaks heat like it’s blowing through a sieve, but never like this.”
He stopped while we were still out of sight of the cell’s occupant, and his voice dropped. “It’s him. The preacher. His cell is freezing. We’ve tried installing two heaters outside, but they short out every time.” He shifted uneasily on his feet. “It’s something to do with Faulkner. He just brings the temperature right down somehow. His lawyers are screaming a blue fit about the conditions, but there’s nothing we can do.”
As he concluded, something white moved to my right. The bars of the cell were almost flush with my line of sight, so that the hand that emerged appeared to have passed through a solid wall of steel. The long white fingers probed at the air, twitching and turning, as if they were gifted with the sense not only of touch, but of sight and sound as well.
And then the voice came, like iron filings falling on paper.
“Parker,” it said. “You’ve come.”
Slowly, I walked toward the cell and saw the moisture on the walls. The droplets glittered in the artificial light, gleaming like thousands of small silver eyes. A smell of damp arose from the cell and from the man who stood before me.
He was smaller than I remembered him, and his long white hair had been cut back close to his skull, but the eyes still burned with that same strange intensity. He remained horribly thin: he had not put on weight, as some inmates do when they switch to a diet of prison food. It took me a moment to realize why.
Despite the cold in the cell, Faulkner was giving off waves of heat. He should have been burning up, his face feverish, his body wracked with tremors, but instead there was no trace of sweat on his face, and no sign of discomfort. His skin was dry as paper, so that it seemed he was on the verge of igniting from within, and the flames that emerged would consume him and leave him as burned ash.
“Come closer,” he said.
Beside me, the guard shook his head.
“I’m good,” I replied.
“Are you afraid of me, sinner?”
“Not unless you can pass through steel.” My words brought back that image of the hand seemingly materializing in the air and I heard myself swallow hard.
“No,” said the old man. “I have no need of parlor tricks. I’ll be out of here, soon enough.”
“You think?”
He leaned forward and pressed his face against the cold bars.
“I know.”
He smiled and his pale tongue emerged from his mouth and licked at his dry lips.
“What do you want?”
“To talk.”
“About what?”
“Life. Death. Life after death; or, if you prefer, the death after life. Do they still come to you, Parker? The lost ones, the dead, do you still see them? I do. They come to me.” He smiled and drew in a long breath that seemed to catch in his throat, as if he were in the early stages of sexual excitement. “So many of them. They ask after you, the ones whom you have dispatched. They want to know when you’re going to join them. They have plans for you. I tell them: soon. He’ll be with you real soon.”
I didn’t respond to the taunts. Instead, I asked him why he had cut himself. He held his scarred arms up before me and looked at them, almost in surprise.
“Perhaps I wanted to cheat them of their vengeance,” he replied.
“You didn’t do a very good job.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. I’m no longer in that place, that modern hell. I have contact with others.” His eyes shone brightly. “I may even be able to save some lost souls.”
“You have anyone in mind?”
Faulkner laughed softly. “Not you, sinner, that is a certainty. You are beyond salvation.”