Page 15 of The Bad Weather Friend

Benny tended to trust people until they gave him a reason not to. Sometimes he continued to trust them until they gave him two or even three reasons to distrust them. When you couldn’t trust people, it wasn’t easy to like them, and Benny wanted to like people. Liking people was a big part of who Benny was—and who he wanted to be.

Life had taught him that people who didn’t like people were unhappy and angry. His father, his grandmother Cosima, a certain weeping butler, and various curious individuals at Briarbush Academy were unhappy and angry and, in select cases, flat-out bug-shit crazy.

Closing the dead video card and putting it aside, Benny made a conscious decision to continue trusting Clerkenwell until he had concrete evidence that his trust wasn’t warranted.

His smartphone was on the island, where he’d left it earlier. He stared at the dark screen for a while. Then he picked it up and switched it on. He’d received no text or phone messages. The lone email was from Bill Palmyra at Bank of America.

Being a banker, Bill trusted no one, but he nevertheless liked people, which wasn’t an easy trick. He said he could distrust people but still like them, even love some of them, because he understood the tragic nature of the human condition.

In addition to being—or having been—a real-estate agent with a full measure of hustle, Benny had bought and remodeled and flipped two houses for which Bill Palmyra provided short-term mortgage loans. The banker was old enough to be Benny’s father, distrusted him as much as he distrusted anyone else, but admired his ambition, and mentored him with what seemed like genuine affection. Benny sought neglected houses in desirable middle-class neighborhoods, properties that could be improved and turned around on a tight schedule. He flipped the first in nine months, taking a profit of 16 percent, the second in six months for a 12 percent gain. He was currently in escrow on a third residence that promised to be the most lucrative flip yet.

The email from Bill was a boilerplate notice that the mortgage application had been reviewed and the loan denied. Noexplanation. No mentoring. It was addressed to Benjamin Eugene Catspaw and signed by E. William Palmyra, as if they never had any success together or never laughed at each other’s jokes, as if this was just another pathetic scene in the dismal human tragedy.

Benny placed a call. Jennifer, Bill’s secretary, to whom he’d often spoken, asked him to spell his last name. Jennifer knew how to spell it as surely as she knew how to spell her own. Benny spelled it for her anyway. She asked him to hold. He held. After a long wait, he was sent to voice mail.

SOMETHING HUNGRY

Benny was stressed. He knew that prolonged stress contributed to stomach ulcers with dangerous internal bleeding, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, neurodermatitis, high blood pressure, heart disease, insomnia, migraine headaches, and sexual dysfunction, all of which Grandma Cosima had explored with enthusiasm and graphic videos during the period she homeschooled him. Since adolescence, to counterbalance his ambition and hard-work ethic, Benny practiced stress-control techniques. He meditated, attended Pilates classes, took instruction in tranquility breathing, and in general strove to go with the flow, remain laid back, hold fast to a que-sera-sera attitude. Recent events were testing his resolve.

Physical activity was a reliable way to relieve stress, but he didn’t want to go back in the garage and use the circular saw to cut the crate lumber into smaller pieces. Inevitably, he’d dwell on the weirdness of what had happened, with one leery eye fixed on the casket-size container, and in no time at all, a burst capillary in his stomach would start spurting enough blood to accessorize a John Wick movie.

As he was already in shorts and sneakers, he chose instead to go for a bracing one-hour walk. The October day was warm, but a gentle and refreshing onshore flow brought with it the crisp scent of the sea. The fronds of queen palms and phoenix palms swayed in the breeze, pepper trees sighed, and live oaks issued dry whispers. Red roses, white roses, lantana bright with yellow flowers, purple bougainvillea: Nature brightened the day with a full crayon box of colors. All was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, and in the interest of ameliorating his stress,Benny said as much aloud as he walked with vigor, said it again and again. He passed a tall blonde with seriously inflated breasts and plumped lips who, withdrawing two Neiman Marcus bags from a Porsche, regarded him as if he had two heads. She said, “That must be some Jesus weed you’ve been smoking,” a snarky comment that, these days, could have gotten her killed in a slightly less refined neighborhood. In the interest of avoiding being killed himself, he did not react to what she said, but thereafter he chanted silently.

At the end of an hour, when he returned home and let himself into the house with the intention of getting a cold bottle of water from the refrigerator, he wasn’t entirely stress free, but at least the heebie-jeebies had faded, and the fine hairs on the back of his neck were lying down. Until he walked into the kitchen. He had left the place as clean as a surgery. Now it was a chaos of debris. An empty chocolate-milk carton lay on the floor, along with an empty almond-milk carton, plastic Ziploc packages that once contained slices of provolone and Havarti, a pepperoni pizza box sans pizza, an empty Ritz cracker box, as well as numerous saltines that had been trampled underfoot. The island was littered with Ritz crumbs, an overturned jar of peanut butter that had been full but was now half-empty, a jar of strawberry jam cleaned out so completely that it appeared never to have held any jam, and a drooling squeeze bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. The island sink contained a broken jar of jalapeños and a torn package of dry-bouillon cubes.

The front door had been locked when Benny returned. He crunched through saltines to the back door and found it locked. Unless the intruder had entered and departed through a window, he must still be here. Nobody would break into a house just togorge himself. After satisfying his appetite, he’d probably gone in search of valuables. As Benny considered the quantity and variety of food that had been consumed, he decided there might be more than one burglar. A team. Maybe a gang of three.

He stood very still, listening. Silence.

HELP!

When Benny shifted his weight, the silence was broken by the subtle sound of saltines splintering under his sneakers.

He didn’t own a gun. When he was seven, he’d seen his father shot to death. When he was thirteen, after being sent to Briarbush Academy, he’d been deeply affected by the news that Mordred Merrick, his former tutor at the Catspaw mansion in Beverly Hills, had shot nine girls between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, killing three. The attack had occurred at a boy-band concert, after Merrick posted a manifesto in which he declared“such bubblegum music is mental colonialism via entertainment, enslaving girls and hypnotizing them into becoming lifelong consumers of the music of oppression and grooming them to be mere sex toys for pretty-boy singers who think they’re cool, when they’re not one-tenth as cool as intellectuals with convictions, who would be much better for those girls if given the chance.”

Instead of a gun, Benny took a small aerosol can of Sabre pepper spray from a drawer in the kitchen island. It had a twelve-foot range and was an extra-potent unit of the kind used by police, one of several provided by Robert “Fat Bob” Jericho. Keeping in mind that events of the past two days had repeatedly tested his steadfast optimism, Benny began upstairs, proceeding with caution from room to room, closet to closet, and then he searched the ground floor.

No windows had been violated. He found nothing suspicious until he came to the laundry room. On the door between the house and the garage, the oblong thumb turn of the deadbolt was vertical instead of horizontal. He’d engaged the lock when he came into the house, after taking apart the crate, but someonehad somehow unlocked it. Blood glistened on the stainless-steel door handle. When he looked closer, he was somewhat—but not entirely—relieved to discover that the blood was in fact strawberry jam.

He was less afraid than offended that some slob had violated his home, gorged on his food, and left behind a mess. The situation in his kitchen was like one of those cockroach-pleasing disasters that Big Al now and then had created when he was high on a combo of pot and beer, at once famished and queasy. At least in this case, the spilled food wasn’t laced with puke.

Benny turned on the garage lights and opened the door. He crossed the threshold with his index finger on the discharge button of the pepper spray. No one assaulted him. An intruder could have been hiding in the Ford Explorer or crouching on the far side of it, but Benny felt sure that he was alone.

When he walked around the front of his SUV, he discovered that the thousand-pound steel container, which could be moved only with a forklift, had vanished. In its place rested a meticulously crafted wooden box of the same size, ornately carved and decorated with colorful, exquisitely rendered illustrations. It might have been an artifact once displayed in a sideshow tent in one of the carnivals that used to travel the nation from spring through autumn, during a time before Americans had drowned in a flood of entertainment that washed into every nook and nanosecond of their lives and swept away the simpler pleasures of previous generations. Considering the enchanting quality of the art that flowed across the lid and down the sides of the container, a prosperous but eccentric individual might have commissioned this to serve as his casket. If it was in fact a sideshow attraction that had been displayed standing on end, some barker would haveclaimed it came from ancient Egypt or from a crypt in a lost valley shadowed by the beetling mountains of Bosnia or from a planet other than Earth, whereupon the lid would probably swing open and a genuine or faux freak would spring forth, yellow toothed and bloody eyed, to make the rubes shriek and shudder.

However. However, the mural encompassing the box was of such quality that it sanctified the object. Moment by moment, Benny found it harder to believe that this panorama was created for any purpose as base as a carnival sideshow. The artist offered numerous complex scenes in miniature, each segueing seamlessly into the next, all marvelously detailed, as if Hieronymus Bosch had collaborated with Andrew Wyeth—high fantasy rendered with meticulous attention to detail, presenting a hypnotic narrative. Street scenes melted into natural settings, bleak cities into fantastical jungles festooned with flowering vines, snowy mountain meadows into desert highways, and in all these places, men and women appeared to be in panicked flight from something. Here, three men descended the steps of the nation’s capital as if pursued, their twisted shadows preceding them. And here, a desperate man swam through a river toward the safety of shore—as a dark leviathan rose under him.

Some nights, when Benny lies on the edge of sleep, an image of one thing or another comes into his mind—perhaps a lion or an old house—and as he loses consciousness, the lion bears down on him with flaming eyes or the house opens a door through which he enters, and a mere image becomes a dream full of movement and event. Exactly that now happened as he leaned closer to the painted box; suddenly, though awake, he fell away into a scene of a dimly lighted alleyway in an eerily silent city. When two men appeared, running toward him, he feared being attacked, but theyseemed not to see him and passed to either side, their eyes wide with fright. Then the alley became a staircase of many flights and landings; as Benny climbed, three men and two women—each alone—descended as if Death himself pursued them with the razor-sharp arc of his scythe, and each time Benny pressed his back to the stairwell wall to avoid being knocked down. He was fully within the vivid cascading mural, a Gothic cyclorama filled with movement all around him as he pivoted into scene after scene, hurrying through a train yard full of long lines of boxcars waiting for locomotives, through a moonlit cemetery crowded with rows of gravestones and mausoleums, through a field of corn grown taller than any man. Wherever this vision took him, Benny met fear-stricken people fleeing in the opposite direction. And he sensed what he could not see—a presence of terrifying aspect and power that could, if it so wished, cause the earth to tremble with its footfalls and speak louder than the loudest thunder, moving always just out of sight among a maze of boxcars, concealed equally by the darkness and moonlight of the graveyard, screened by richly leafed and tasseled stalks of corn, but so close and coming closer, closer, until it spoke to him in a voice as cold and hard as ice calving off the face of a glacier,“I’ve come for you.”

Those four words triggered a trapdoor, and Benny fell out of the vision into reality, where he discovered that his hands were pressed to the images on the casket, if it was a casket. The people and things in the miniature scenes moved under his palms and spread fingers. The voice spoke again, from within the artifact—“I’ve come for you”—and Benny let out a wordless cry of alarm as he shuddered backward. He expected the lid to fly open and something to arise out of the box, something that would put an end to him.

He hurried into the laundry room. He locked the door between the garage and house. He realized that he’d dropped the canister of pepper spray, but he had no intention of going back for it. He went into the dining room, grabbed a chair, brought it to the laundry room, and braced the door to the garage. He hurried to the kitchen and tramped through the debris and snatched up his phone and pressedCONTACTSand called Robert Jericho. When the detective answered, Benny said, “Help. I need help.”

Fat Bob said, “Benny?”

“I got a thing here,” Benny said.

“A thing?”

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