He’s old, thought Bowen, older than he looks, older than any of us could have imagined. He has to concentrate to hold himself together. That’s why his skin is the way it is, why he walks so slowly, why he keeps himself apart. He has to struggle to maintain this form. He’s not human. He is-
Bowen took a step back as the figure reconstituted itself, until once again he was staring at a man in coveralls with blood on his gloved hands.
“What’s wrong?” asked Kittim, and even in his confusion and fear Bowen knew better than to answer truthfully. In fact, he couldn’t have told the truth even if he wanted to because his mind was doing some pretty rapid work to shore up his threatened sanity and now he wasn’t sure what the truth was. Kittim couldn’t have shimmered. He couldn’t have changed. He couldn’t be what Bowen had thought, for an instant, he might be: a thing dark and winged, like a foul, mutated bird.
“It’s nothing,” said Bowen. He stared dumbly at the gun in his hand, then put it away.
“Then let me get back to work,” said Kittim, and the last thing Bowen saw was the fading hope in the eyes of the young man on the ground before Kittim’s thin form blocked him from view.
Bowen brushed past Carlyle on his way back to the car.
“Hey!” Carlyle reached out to grasp him, then drew back and allowed his hand to fall as he saw Bowen’s face.
“Your eyes,” he said. “What happened to your eyes?”
But Bowen didn’t reply. Later, he would tell Carlyle what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen, and in the aftermath of what was to come Carlyle would tell the investigators. But for now Bowen kept it to himself and his face registered no emotion as he drove away, not even when he stared into the rearview mirror and saw that the capillaries in his eyeballs had burst, his pupils now black holes at the center of red pools of blood.
Far to the north, Cyrus Nairn retreated back into the darkness of his cell. He was happier here than outside, mingling with the others. They didn’t understand him, couldn’t understand him. Dumb: that was the word a whole lot of people had used about Cyrus throughout his life. Dumb. Dummy. Mute. Schizo. Cyrus didn’t care too much about what they said. He knew that he was smart. He also, deep down inside, suspected that he was crazy.
Cyrus had been abandoned by his mother at nine and tormented by his stepfather until he was finally incarcerated for the first time at the age of seventeen. He could still recall some details about his mother: not love or tenderness-no, never that-but the look in her eyes as she grew to despise what she had brought into the world in the course of a difficult, complicated birth had remained with him. The boy was born hunched, unable to stand fully upright; his knees buckled as if he were laboring constantly beneath some unseen weight. His forehead was too large, overshadowing dark eyes, the irises nearly black. He had a flattened nose with elongated nostrils, and a small, rounded chin. His mouth was very full, the upper lip overhanging the lower, and it remained slightly open even in repose, making Cyrus appear always to be on the verge of biting.
And he was strong. There was thick muscle on his arms and shoulders and chest, tapering down to a narrow waist before exploding again at his buttocks and thighs. His strength had been his salvation; had he been weaker, prison would have broken him long before now.
The first sentence was handed down for aggravated burglary after he had entered the house of a woman in Houlton, armed with a homemade knife. The woman had locked herself in her room and called the cops, and they’d caught Cyrus as he tried to escape through a bathroom window. Through signing, Cyrus had told them that he was just looking for money to buy beer, and they’d believed him. He’d still pulled three years, though, and served eighteen months.
It was in the course of an examination by the prison psychiatrist that he was first diagnosed as schizophrenic, exhibiting what the psychiatrist told him were classic “positive” symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, strange patterns of thinking and self-expression, hearing voices. Cyrus had nodded along as all of this was explained to him through a signer, although he could hear perfectly well. He simply chose not to reveal the fact, much as it seemed that he had chosen, one night a long, long time before, no longer to speak.
Or perhaps the choice had been made for him. Cyrus was never entirely sure.
He was prescribed medication, the so-called first-generation anti-psychotics, but he hated their debilitating side effects and quickly learned to disguise the fact that he was no longer taking them. But more than the side effects, Cyrus hated the loneliness that came with the drugs. He despised the silence. When the voices resumed, he embraced them and welcomed them as old friends now returned from some faraway place with strange new tales to tell. When he was eventually released, he could barely hear the standard patter of the guard processing him over the clamor of the voices, excited at the prospect of freedom and the resumption of the plans they had so carefully rehearsed for so long.
Because for Cyrus, the Houlton affair had been a failure on two accounts: In the first place, he’d been caught. In the second, he hadn’t gone into the house for money.
He’d gone in for the woman.
Cyrus Nairn lived in a small cabin on a patch of land that his mother’s family had owned, close by the Androscoggin River, about ten miles south of Wilton. In the old days, people used to store fruit and vegetables in hollows dug into the bank, where the temperature would keep them fresh long after they’d been plucked or dug up. Cyrus had found these old hollows and strengthened them, then disguised the entrances using bushes and timber. The hollows had served as his retreat from the world when he was a boy. Sometimes, it almost seemed to him that he had been created to fit into them, that they were his natural home. The curvature of his spine; the short, thick neck; his legs, slightly bent at the knees: all seemed expressly designed to enable him to fit into those places beneath the riverbank. Now, the cold hollows hid other things, and even during the summer, the natural refrigeration meant that he had to go down on his hands and knees and sniff the earth before he could catch a hint of what lay beneath.
After Houlton, Cyrus had learned to be more careful. Each knife he made was used only once, then burned, and the blade buried far from his own property. In the beginning, he could go for a year, maybe more, without taking one, satisfying himself by crouching in the cool silence of the hollows, before the voices got too loud and he had to go a-hunting once more. Then, as he grew older, the voices became more insistent, their demands coming closer and closer together, until he tried to take the woman in Dexter, and she screamed and the men came and beat him. He got five years for that, but now the end was in sight. The parole board had been presented with the results of Cyrus’s Hare PCL-R evaluation, the test developed by a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia that was now widely regarded as the standard indicator of recidivism, violence, and the subject’s response to therapeutic intervention, and the board’s reaction had been positive. Within days Cyrus would be free to go, free to return to the river and his beloved hollows. That was why he liked the cell, the darkness of it, especially at night when he could close his eyes and imagine himself there once again, among the women and the girls, the perfumed girls.
He owed his release in part to his natural intelligence, for Cyrus, had the prison psychiatric services studied him further, would have provided some support for the theory that the genetic factors that contributed to his condition had also endowed him with a creative brilliance. But Cyrus had also received help in recent weeks from an unexpected source.