Page 69 of The Furies

“If someone has sneaked a kid in somehow, I’ll sort it out,” he said. “But I still think you’re mistaken.”

“Just get it done,” said Hardiman. “I need to sleep. I got business to conduct in the morning.”

Sure you do, thought Bobby. Maybe I should call ahead to Warren, tell them to have your usual cell ready.

Hardiman hung up. Bobby found a flashlight, just in case he had to go poking in any unlit corners, of which the Braycott boasted an abundance, and left his sanctuary. This required him to unlock the security door and step out from behind his protective plexiglass shield. As was inevitable in a business, differences of opinion sometimes arose with customers. Since the nature of any number of the Braycott’s guests tended toward the abrasive, it was best to maintain a line of separation from them.

Bobby peered into the elevator, but it was empty and hadn’t moved from the first floor since the last guest had returned shortly before midnight. As a precaution, Bobby disabled it with his key and took the stairs to the fourth floor, giving the second and third a once-over along the way. He could hear snoring from at least one room, music playing from another, and one side of a telephone argument from a third, but the hallways themselves were empty. Even at night, a certain element of noise was part and parcel of the Braycott’s ambience, but few guests ever made a fuss about it. Bobby knew this was because anyone who had spent time in stir grew used to sleeping with the accompaniment of clamor, and often struggled to rest soundly without it. If there really was a kid in the building, that might explain why Hardiman had been woken: it wasn’t so much the disturbance as the fact that it was so incongruous, a sound unfamiliar from prison.

But Bobby remained convinced that Hardiman was imagining things.

He reached the fourth floor. Hardiman’s room was at the far end, close to the north window. The other guests on that floor currently occupied room 29, over by the south window. They had registered as Lyle Pantuff and Gilman Veale, and paid in cash for three nights, of which this was the first. They’d requested a room with two beds, which probably meant they weren’t queer, although one could never be sure. Bobby Wadlin didn’t have any problem with gays so long as they kept their paws off him. He might not have been a conventionally handsome man, but he had something. He was pretty sure of it.

Pantuff and Veale, on the other hand, were grown-up versions of the shitheads who had made Bobby’s school days a misery. Pantuff, the older of the two, had a reddish-blond bowl cut that ended just above the ears, with the rest shaved close. Combined with the dark sockets of his eyes, and thick pink lips fixed in a joyless grin, as though the nerves had been damaged during botched surgery, he resembled a clown, but not one at whom a sane person might have been inclined to laugh. Bobby Wadlin was used to dealing with men who had done time, and Pantuff had that vibe about him. But experience had also taught Bobby to categorize ex-cons according to their likely offenses—the thieves, the pushers, the grifters, the killers—and the years had only heightened his acumen. He figured Pantuff for, if not a sex criminal, then a criminal who liked to sweeten his jobs with sex. If you woke to Lyle Pantuff burgling your home, someone was likely to get raped.

Veale was younger and darker, like he might have some Black in him from back down the line, Bobby guessed. He looked more normal than his associate, although next to Pantuff a visiting alien would have blended into the scenery, but if you examined Veale’s face more closely, the eyes were gray and insensate. Pantuff brimmed with malevolence, but at least it was energy, an animus. Veale’s gaze, by contrast, was entirely without luster, so that his soul might have been excised by God at birth along with any interest in ordinary humanity. Persons like Veale, Bobby thought, had probably tended the ovens at Auschwitz. Their lives were a constant exploration of depths of cruelty in order to evoke a feeble emotional response deep inside them, as a scientist might increase the voltage on a dead animal until a muscle spasmed.

Bobby padded softly to their room and listened at the door, but could hear no sound from within. If they were sleeping, they were sleeping quietly, like the dead. If there was a child with them, it, too, was now silent; but as Bobby had already decided, these were not men to harbor children in their hotel room, or not for long. He left Pantuff and Veale to their rest and began moving from door to door, investigating each empty unit for signs of a child, and finding, as anticipated, none. He proceeded to do the same with the remaining two floors—exploring unoccupied rooms, pressing his ear to the doors of those with guests—before concluding that Phil Hardiman had indeed been mistaken, which confirmed for Bobby that it would be best if Hardiman stopped taking drugs, began taking them, or altered the dosage of whatever he was on, because the status quo just wasn’t cutting it for him.

Bobby returned to the front desk. He thought about calling Hardiman’s room to inform him that the inspection had proved inconclusive at best, but decided to let sleeping users lie. With luck, Hardiman would have forgotten about the whole palaver by morning, but on the off chance that he wasn’t aurally hallucinating, and one of the guests had managed to introduce a child into the Braycott Arms, Bobby would instruct housekeeping to keep an eye out for evidence of unauthorized occupancy.

By now Bobby was fully awake and feeling resentful about it. He might not have slept much as a matter of course, but he both needed and enjoyed the little rest he did get, and Phil Hardiman and his fancies looked set to deprive Bobby of it for one night. Still, he wasn’t defeated. He heated a saucepan of milk, opened a box of Lorna Doones, cranked up his old VHS player, and inserted the expanded widescreen edition of Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp. Bobby figured if that didn’t put him to sleep, nothing would.

CHAPTER III

It might have interested Bobby Wadlin to learn how close he’d come to being killed that night, because his fruitless search for what was most likely a nonexistent child had not gone unnoticed. When he’d put his ear against the door of room 29, listening for noise and finding none, the barrel of a suppressed Beretta M9 had been leveled at his head from the other side, because when it came to sleeping, lately Gilman Veale made Bobby look like Rip Van Winkle.

As Bobby moved away from the door, Veale monitored his progress through the peephole. Veale wondered what the hayseed from the front desk was looking for. It didn’t strike him that the reason for Bobby Wadlin’s presence in the hallway might be connected to his own inability to sleep.

Because Gilman Veale was being haunted by a child.

Once Veale was satisfied that he and Pantuff did not appear to be of specific interest to the manager, he returned to the chair by the window and placed the gun on the table by his right hand. Over on the far bed, Pantuff was sleeping soundlessly. Pantuff could sleep anywhere, almost instantly settling into deep slumber. Veale thought that, given his druthers, Pantuff would opt to sleep his entire life away. When he was awake, he was pure mean, but he was also sufficiently self-aware to recognize his own poisonousness. In idle moments, Pantuff even brooded on it. It wasn’t guilt, exactly, more a sense of his ongoing debilitation, like a man given a terminal cancer diagnosis who becomes obsessed with the unseen progress of the disease. The only times Pantuff wasn’t tormented were when he was inflicting suffering on another human being, and when he was unconscious. He never moved during the night, and would always wake in precisely the same position in which he’d begun.

Pantuff couldn’t hear the child. He thought Veale was imagining it, which was odd because Veale had no imagination. To possess an imagination required a creative intelligence, which Veale lacked, along with anything resembling serious emotional engagement with the world. He had always been that way, even as a boy. His parents were ordinary working-class people, and would probably have loved him had he responded to them with any kind of feeling at all, even hatred, but they couldn’t cope with his inability to engage. Veale had been examined by doctors, who, having speculated on some previously undiagnosed brain injury or hidden emotional trauma, were disappointed to discover neither, and instead settled for variations on autism and alexithymia, or “emotional blindness.” Therapy was attempted, but if Veale had no interest in interacting with his mother and father, he had minus interest in speaking about himself with a stranger.

Gradually, though, he did commence a private exploration of his situation, based around provoking negative emotional and physical reactions in others and reflecting on the results. He started out with animals—cats, stray dogs, even rats if he could catch them, although it was hard to deduce a lot from the responses of a rat—before progressing to human beings. He also experimented with self-harm before deciding there wasn’t a great deal to be learned from inflicting pain on himself, beyond the fact that it was uncomfortable and therefore better avoided. Hurting others, on the other hand, didn’t give him pleasure either, but it didn’t actively displease him, and he found exhibitions of fear, rage, and grief curious. He was interested in causing others to feel these emotions because it enabled him to bathe in their heat, so that what he lacked he was able to experience vicariously. This made Veale very employable in specialist circles, although it had also rendered him a marked man elsewhere: one could only inflict torment for so long, sometimes on the wrong people, before attracting a level of negative publicity, leading to a quiet consensus that the world might be better off without one’s presence in it.

A similar conclusion had been reached about Lyle Pantuff, although in his case it was a result of his taste for sexual violence. These changes in their professional circumstances had forced the two men together, and they now functioned as a single, very effective unit. They worked for others only selectively, preferring to operate on their own initiative. They picked their targets carefully, specializing in larceny and extortion. Veale had moderated Pantuff’s behavior to an appreciable degree, encouraging him to keep his sexual proclivities separate from his work whenever possible. Pantuff, in turn, had enabled Veale to explore the concept of companionship, because the former seemed actively to enjoy his society. Veale did not understand why this was—even Pantuff struggled to explain it—but he was prepared to concede that he might register Pantuff’s absence if he wasn’t around, which was as close as he’d ever come to caring about another human being.

Veale sniffed the air. The Braycott was more sanitary than he’d anticipated, but it reeked of desperation and neglect nonetheless. Still, that wasn’t what Veale was trying to detect. The sound of the child—Veale didn’t care to think of it as “him” or “her,” since he wasn’t yet prepared to admit that it actually existed—was accompanied by a particular redolence, a mix of healthy perspiration combined with what might have been talcum powder and chocolate. Veale had smelled it just a few minutes earlier, but now it was gone. It was an odor that was strangely familiar to him, perhaps from his own childhood. Objectively he considered the possibility that he might be haunting himself, and the child, which had so far revealed itself only as sound and scent, represented a sensory manifestation of some deeper psychological disturbance: a breakdown, for want of a better word.

Veale didn’t like to think that he could be experiencing the initial stages of a larger collapse. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he was unusual, although he was aware that those familiar with him and his work might have preferred to categorize him as aberrant, even insane. Whatever the diagnosis, Veale was prepared to accept that the internal mechanisms that permitted him to function effectively in the world were potentially fragile. Were they to weaken further, he was not sure he would ever fully recover. Sometimes he visualized his inner self, his animating principle, as a transparent box of black bugs crawling over one another in an endless cycle of birth, reproduction, fighting, and dying. Should the walls of that box be ruptured, Veale himself would be consumed.

He waited a few minutes longer to be certain that the hallucination, phantasm, derangement—call it what you will—had ceased for the time being before climbing back into bed. He closed his eyes. He had always dreamed, and never pleasantly, but since he had begun hearing and smelling the child his dreaming had ceased, or if it had not, he woke with no recollection of it. This added to his concern that he might be flirting with derangement, and that the barrier between his sleeping and waking lives had been irreparably breached. If that was the case, he could soon end up wishing to become more like Pantuff, and seek escape in oblivion. Should the disturbance persist, Veale decided, he would probably be forced to kill himself so that he could sleep forever. The prospect was vaguely consoling, and thus he drifted into insensibility.

* * *

VEALE WOKE TO THE sound of the TV news. Pantuff was awake, crouched like a gargoyle at the end of his bed. His skin was so pale that it almost glowed in the dark, and in a certain light approached translucence. Naked, he presented as less than human, evincing a greater genetic commonality with certain predatory creatures of the deep than with mankind.

Pantuff looked at Veale as he sat up.

“It feels like the end of the world,” said Pantuff. “Fucking Chinese. I never even liked their food.”

“Any change?”

“Sounds like the city of Portland could issue a stay-at-home order sometime soon.”

“How strict?”

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