Dark Specter

16

I shoved my way past Andrea, sprinted across the cove and hurled myself at the rock face. It was almost sheer, with very few holds. After three vain attempts, bruised and bloodied, I gave up.

“What is it?” Andrea was shouting at me. “What’s the matter?” I ran back to her and looked up at the rock ledge. There was no one there. I pushed past Andrea and climbed back up the way we had come down. The outcrop where David had been standing was about fifty feet away. Trees and thick undergrowth grew right down to the point where the rock surface fell away to the cove.

I forced my way through the prickly shrubs and around the trees, the branches whipping my face and tearing my clothes. At one point I lost my footing and almost slipped over the edge, but I managed to clamber back, driven on by the knowledge that my son was alive and somewhere close by. At last I reached the spot where I had seen him a few minutes earlier.

There was no sign that anyone had ever been there. Searching the undergrowth all around, I discovered a path leading off into the woods. I raced off along it. The path was obviously disused, but the vegetation had not yet reclaimed the central strip. I must have run for at least fifteen minutes, up and down hills, around zigzags and hairpin turns, on and on, always expecting to see the diminutive figure I sought just around the next bend or at the top of the next rise. When I could run no more, I trudged on for another ten minutes before finally collapsing, near tears, on a tree stump I had tripped over.

The path ran around the coast of the island, just above the shoreline. Because of its tortuous course, caused by the uneven terrain, it was a lot longer than the trail I had taken on my first day there, but I eventually discovered that the two were connected by the network of overgrown paths which I had been tempted to explore then. Convinced that David was somewhere on the island, I now beat my way up and down every single one of them. I didn’t find David, but my persistence was not wasted. On the contrary, the knowledge I gained during those hours was eventually to save my life.

By the time I finally returned to the compound, Sam’s Blake lecture was in full swing. Even at some distance from the hall, I could hear his urgent, bellowing delivery, every word in italics, every line a punch line, every stop an exclamation mark. It sounded even more brutal and peremptory than the harangue I had witnessed the day before. But I did not hesitate. Lecture or no lecture, I was going to have this out with Sam there and then. He had my kid and I was going to get him back.

I strode in through the open door of the hall, and stopped dead. The huge space was deserted. The voice I had been hearing came from the television, where an image of Sam strutting his stuff was playing to an empty room. The emanations of his screen image were printed all over the walls and ceiling, the sound boomed and echoed in every nook and cranny, but there was no one there.

I switched off the TV and opened the door leading to Sam’s quarters.

“Sam!” I called. “It’s Phil. I need to talk to you.”

There was no reply. I went to the next room. Besides the pool table, there was an exercise machine, various weights and a set of wall-bars. The door to the bedroom was closed. I knocked. There was no answer. I opened the door and stepped inside.

“How are you doing, Phil?”

He lay sprawled on the bed in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, reading the Erdman edition of Blake’s works. On one side of him was the Fender guitar, on the other a rifle. Then I spotted the cellular phone, on a chest of drawers by the window. I strode over and picked it up.

“I’ve seen David,” I told him. “I’m going to call 911 and get the police out here.”

Sam turned back to his book. I switched on the phone and dialed. Nothing happened. I tried again.

“OK, what’s the deal?” I asked Sam.

He set down the volume of poetry.

“There’s a code number you have to enter to enable it. Prevents unauthorized use.”

“What is it?”

“Well, I don’t actually give it out, Phil. The rates they charge for airtime, it would cost me an arm and a leg if-”

I threw the phone at him.

“Don’t fuck with me, Sam!”

In one movement he rolled up off the bed and leveled the rifle at me. The muzzle looked enormous, like a tunnel. Neither of us spoke for what seemed like a very long time. Then Sam slowly lowered the rifle and heaved a sigh. I realized that he’d been holding his breath all along.

“Sit down, Phil,” he said. “I think it’s time we had a little talk.”

I edged backward to a leather armchair. Sam perched on the end of the bed. The bedroom was at the back of the hall, and had a large picture window overlooking the strait. The setting sun had tinted the clouds with a delicate pink wash.

“I’m not going to give him up,” I said. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

“I thought he was dead,” Sam replied.

“You know about that?”

“I saw it in the papers. We get them once in a while. I figured you probably didn’t want to talk about it.”

“He’s not dead. I saw him just now, down by that pool you took me to yesterday. That’s why you set up that meeting with Andrea, isn’t it? That’s how she knew I could find it.”

Sam looked at me expressionlessly.

“Did Andrea see anything?” he asked.

“She claimed she didn’t, but she has to be lying.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

He sighed.

“But I have to say, Phil, a lot of people, listening to you, would think you were just plain crazy. I imagine that’s what the police would think.”

“I’m willing to take that chance,” I retorted.

He shook his head slowly.

“It’s too risky, Phil. We aren’t too popular with the locals. They’d love to have an excuse to give us a hard time. Plus I’ve got problems of my own right now.”

“I’m not leaving without David,” I snapped.

Sam put down the rifle and walked over to the window.

“You’re not leaving anyway,” he said.

He took a pair of binoculars from a hook and scanned the view outside.

“What do you mean by that?” I demanded.

“No one can leave. Mark and Rick have taken the boat over to Friday. They’re worried about Pat and Russ, the guys who’re gone. They haven’t been in touch, and Mark thinks that something might have happened to them.”

“I don’t care about that!” I shouted, standing up.

Sam whirled around.

“Well, you’d better start fucking caring!”

He glared at me.

“I had high hopes for you, Phil. I’ve been running this whole thing single-handed for years now. Do you have any idea of the strain I’ve been under? The only person I’ve been able to confide in is Mark, and he’s got shit for brains. They all have. You’re the only person who ever really understood me, the only one I could talk to as an equal.”

He gripped my shoulders.

“Just say you’re with me, Phil! That’s all I ask, that leap of faith. Only you can make it, but once you do, everything else will come right!”

His eyes bored into mine. He was crazy, of course, but that didn’t matter. As long as there was the slightest chance that David was still alive, I had to play along.

“All right,” I said. “I’m with you.”

He stared at me, blinking. His eyes had filled with tears.

“Really?” he said in an almost inaudible voice. “You really are?”

I nodded. He let go of me abruptly and moved away, rubbing his head.

“I can’t believe this, Phil! It changes everything.”

He fell to his knees suddenly, hands clasped together, trembling with tension, head bowed in silent prayer. I felt a surge of nauseated terror. Whatever Sam was up to, this was no scam. He believed.

“OK, here’s the deal,” he said, getting up. “You saw the hall, right? No one there. It’s the first time that’s ever happened. Mark’s turned them all against me.”

He measured me with his eyes for a moment. I tried to look sincere.

“What happened,” he went on, “the last time some of our guys left the island, one of them didn’t come back. That created problems, and now they’ve gotten worse. Andy, the guy who went along that time, told Mark what really happened. Mark told the others, and now they’re all freezing me out.”

“What did happen?”

He shook his head impatiently.

“I can’t explain all that right now. Just trust me, all right?”

He clapped his hands together and began striding up and down the room.

“What we need to do here, we need to buy ourselves some wriggle space. Unload Mark and get the others back in the zone, so if the news is bad and he tries anything, it won’t gain traction. Get me?”

Thirty seconds before, Sam had been on his knees, now he was wheeling and dealing. I liked him better this way, but both seemed equally real to him.

“So the question is how we do that,” he continued, still pacing. “Here’s the deal. We get everyone together in the hall. I announce that Mark has rebelled and fallen from grace and that you’ve replaced him as Ore, my spiritual son. Then to clinch it, we have a big ceremony where you’re reunited with your son.”

I felt my hands contract into fists, the nails digging painfully into my palms.

“So he’s here?” I breathed.

Sam looked confused.

“Who?”

“David!”

He laughed.

“You think you were seeing things? Of course he’s here!”

He shook his head.

“Man, the trouble we went to! First we had to follow you guys around for a month, work out what the deal was. Then Melissa and two of the guys had to move out there, get one of the kids here into that school, touch base with all the parents, buy a car, rent a place … It cost us a fucking fortune! But that time I talked to you in the bar, I knew that was the only way. You needed to be broken before you could heal. I still remembered the way it used to be back at that house, the two of us studying Blake together and rapping about everything under the sun. Those rimes were precious to me, Phil, but you’d retreated into this prison of work and family That sickened me! And I swore then and there that I’d free you, whatever the cost.”

I fought to control my anger. That wouldn’t save David.

“So where is he?” I asked.

Sam waved vaguely.

“You’ll see him soon enough. It’ll look better if you don’t meet until we do it in front of the others. It’ll come across as more genuine, know what I mean?”

This was too much to take. The rifle was still lying on the bed where he’d left it. I grabbed it and pointed it at Sam.

“Where is he?”

His eyes seemed to glaze over.

“I thought you were with me,” he murmured.

“I want my son! Now!”

Sam stood staring down at the floor. His expression had become infinitely weary.

“Then go find him,” he said.

I stabbed the rifle at him.

“Tell me where he is, you asshole!”

Sam sighed deeply.

“Guy was killed, I was in Vietnam?” he said. “Best buddy of mine. Had a Purple Heart he got leading a patrol to rescue a downed aircrew deep in Cong territory. Know how he went out? Another guy went out on the toot one night, came back to barracks and started fooling around with his MK-16, making like it was a guitar, dig? And it went off and this guy gets one through the spine. Since then I never keep loaded weapons around.”

We looked at each other. He took a step toward me, reaching for the rifle. I pulled the trigger. There was a dull click. Sam took the gun from my unresisting hands. He opened a drawer in the chest and took out a metal pack which he clipped to the underside of the rifle. Then he turned to me, holding the weapon loosely.

His eyes did not leave mine. The barrel of the rifle moved languidly up and to one side, crossing over my body, until it was pointing at the wall. There was a shattering noise, a burst of explosions, maybe four or five. The air convulsed briefly and a sleet of splinters fell all over the room. I looked at the wall behind me. The bullets had passed straight through the solid tree trunks, gouging out a huge crater.

I turned back to Sam. The gun was now pointing directly at me.

“What do you think would happen if I pulled the trigger now?” Sam mused quietly.

I gazed back at him, my heart racing. The organ itself suddenly felt absurdly vulnerable, lodged right there at the front of the chest in its cage of fragile bone.

“That’s what you should be asking yourself, Phil,” Sam continued. “The answer to that question is the answer to all questions. Think about it.”

I nodded, as though we were having a normal conversation.

“OK, I will,” I said.

Leaving that room was one of the most difficult things I had ever done. Sam held the gun on me the whole time, and I had no way of knowing whether he would use it or not. It felt as though I was learning to walk all over again after a stroke. Every movement had to be planned and willed and then painstakingly executed.

Dusk was drawing in, filling the empty reaches of the hall with darkness. The fire had gone out and the air was cold and damp. I walked across to my room, the floorboards squeaking underfoot. My brain was awash with a mixture of fantasies with a factual solidity and facts which I would have dismissed a few hours earlier as fantastic. Which was harder to believe, that David was alive or that Sam had engineered his kidnapping? That my son and I might soon be reunited, or that we were both in the hands of a God-intoxicated maniac and his wayward gang of followers?

At first I was inclined to dismiss the whole thing as a cruel trick. After all, the kidnap victim had been selected at random. Each child chose his or her own colored thread, and only one led out of the room. Then there was the question of David’s clothing, drenched in his own blood. I’d only seen the child on the rock for a brief moment. Maybe Sam had just dressed up one of the kids to look like David. His picture had been in all the papers.

But I soon realized that these factors did not really create a problem. The kidnappers could easily have had another bag of threads which were all the color of the fatal trail, and simply substituted this for the other when David came to make his choice. If it had been obvious that he’d been targeted, I might have suspected Sam earlier. As for the blood, they could have drawn off some of David’s and used it to soak the clothing. Sam had told me that Melissa used to be a junkie. She would be good with needles.

I switched on the light and looked around my room. My overnight bag was where I had left it, all packed and ready for my abortive departure. On top of it lay a piece of paper neatly folded in two. I picked it up and opened it. On the inside was a rough plan of the compound, showing the hall and the shacks all around. Most of this had been done in blue ballpoint, but one of the houses, the furthest downhill, had been drawn in red. There was no message and no signature.

I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Just a few hundred yards away, on the island across the strait, normal people were getting on with their normal lives. There were telephones and TVs, cars and ferries, police and mail carriers, schools and libraries, stores and bars. Just a few hundred yards, but it might have been another continent, even another century.

I picked up the paper and looked at it again. Maybe there was a message after all. I put on a coat and went outside, taking the map with me. So far I hadn’t explored the cluster of buildings to the east of the hall. This area had a slightly raffish, run-down, shantytown air. The cabins had all been made from scratch, using a mixture of roughly trimmed tree trunks and a few planks and boards which looked like they’d been recycled from earlier constructions. The roofs were mostly corrugated metal, but a few consisted of a simple sheet of canvas thrown over a timber frame. One even had a turf roof, where wild plants had seeded themselves, put down roots and sprouted happily.

The house marked in red on the chart stood slightly apart from the others beside a huge first-growth cedar which had been left standing at the fringes of the clearing, where the zone of stubbly scrub began. The house was in fact partly supported by the tree, to which it was lashed by two rusty metal cables. It was a ramshackle structure made of boards and beams, some of which, judging by their smoothness, had been scavenged from the beach. The roof was hard to make out in the fading light, but seemed to consist of mottled camouflage canvas which might have started life as a piece of army equipment. A dim light was visible inside. Then something touched my back, and I whirled around.

It was Andrea. Without a word, she led the way along the side of the shack and opened a badly hung door made out of what looked like a cut-down Ping-Pong table. We went inside, stooping under the low door frame. The furniture consisted of the bed, an old outdoor table and a green metal chest which might well originally have served as packing for the canvas which sagged from its rudimentary supports overhead. An oil lamp was burning on the table. Andrea blew out the flame. She sat on the bed. I remained standing.

“I’ve been waiting behind that tree for over an hour,” she said. “I didn’t know who might come. I didn’t dare leave a message in case one of the others read it. I just hoped you’d understand.”

“How do I know this isn’t another setup?” I demanded.

She sighed.

“You’ll just have to believe me.”

“Why should I? You lured me down to the pool so that Sam could stage that little dramatic tableau. There’s no use denying it! Sam has admitted the whole thing.”

She stood up, facing me. I couldn’t make out the expression on her face in the gloom, but she sounded angry.

“Has it ever occurred to you that I might not be a free agent? Has it ever entered your head for a second that you might not be the only person in Sam’s power? Do you have any idea of the risk I took in leaving that map in your room?”

I shook my head.

“Well, let me tell you what happened to one of the other women,” she said in a hard tone. “She went along on a shopping trip with Lenny and Rick, and tried to sneak off. Said she had to go to the bathroom, then climbed out the window. They found her trying to hitchhike out of town and brought her back here. Sam had her stripped and tied to the wall-bars in his room. They left her hanging there by her arms for three days, taking turns raping her. When they finally cut her down she couldn’t move her arms for a month. She’s still in pain, even now, but they won’t let her see a doctor.”

I sat down on the metal chest and buried my head in my hands.

“But this is crazy!” I exclaimed. “He can’t keep all these people locked up here against their will!”

“Yes, he can. Anyway, most of them want to be here. They believe everything Sam tells them.”

“What, this shit about Blake? Studying his poems like they were the Bible or something?”

“That’s what they believe they are. They believe that William Blake was divinely inspired, and that his work is the word of God. They believe that Sam is the prophet Los, the second coming of Jesus. They believe that the world will come to an end soon and that they will be the only ones to survive. I thought you knew all this! I thought you believed in it too. Why else would anyone come here? That’s why I was so afraid this morning. I thought Sam was testing me, using you as a spy to find out if I could be trusted.”

She shivered. There was no heating in the cabin, but I didn’t think it was just a matter of the temperature. I went over and sat beside her, taking her hands in mine. Her thin, bony fingers were as cold as a corpse’s.

“What about you, Andrea?” I asked. “What are you doing here? Why didn’t you leave after Lisa drowned?”

“Because I saw it happen.”

“So?”

She was silent a moment.

“What did Sam tell you about it?”

“That Lisa tried to swim across to that other island and didn’t make it.”

“Did he say why?”

I shrugged.

“He said she was a good swimmer, only this time she overreached herself.”

Andrea stood up and moved away into the shadows.

“Lisa was a good swimmer. A champion. We were at UW together, and she was on the Huskies team. But she was also far too smart to try and swim across to Orcas. The water around here is icy and the currents are fierce.”

“So why did she do it?”

She emerged from the darkness and stood in front of me.

“She didn’t. Sam did.”

“Did what?”

“Drowned her.”

I stared up at her.

“She and I were swimming down at that pool,” Andrea went on. “After a while the boat appeared. Sam was at the wheel. He called to Lisa. She swam out and climbed aboard. Sam took the boat out into the middle of the strait and threw her overboard.”

I was silent.

“That’s why he’ll never let me leave,” Andrea went on. “He made me write a letter home saying that I was going to Nicaragua. One of the guys who was going to Texas mailed it from there. When they didn’t hear any more, my parents eventually came looking for me here. Mark took me up into the woods while Sam talked to them. I don’t know what he said, but he can be very persuasive when he wants. They haven’t been back.”

I stood up.

“But what about the others?” I said agitatedly. “You can’t just make all these people disappear without someone getting suspicious!”

“Sure you can, if you pick them right. There are a million homeless kids in this country. It’s no problem to find someone with no roots, no hope, no paper trail. A couple of the guys go out recruiting every so often. They befriend these kids, give them some money and a big line about Sam having all the answers. If they decide the guy’s no good, they let him go. All he knows is that some religious nut tried to get him to sign up. If they decide to take him, then he has to write a letter the same way I did. Sam always quotes that line from the Bible about leaving your parents and brethren and wife and children for the kingdom of God’s sake. Most of these people weren’t getting much return from those things anyway, so giving them up in exchange for board, lodging and the secret of eternal life is not a big deal for them.”

“Did he try and convert you too?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“I have to pretend to go along with it, but they don’t really care what the women think. It’s basically a guy thing. The women aren’t initiated into the Secret. They just have to turn up for the lectures, take care of the scutwork, and spread their legs whenever Sam asks them to.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and I didn’t particularly want to. If what Andrea had told me was true, then the situation was far more dangerous than I had ever imagined.

“OK, you’ve told me your story. Now hear mine. My child was kidnapped and apparently murdered. As a result, my wife killed herself. Sam now tells me that he masterminded the whole thing because, quote, I needed to be broken before I could heal, unquote. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. I only saw that boy for a moment, and from a distance. It might have been some other child, dressed up to look like David. Sam could have got all the other details from the newspaper stories at the time. I don’t know what to believe. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

Andrea gave a deep sigh.

“I’ll tell you what I know. Melissa left the island for a while, a couple of months back, I guess. I lose track of time. When she got back, she had a child with her. We were told he was her son, and that one of Melissa’s sisters had been looking after him all this while. No one thought anything of it.”

“Did you meet this boy?”

“Of course. He came to my classes.”

“How did he seem?”

She shrugged.

“Normal enough. He used to have coughing attacks, that was the only thing. Sometimes he seemed to find it hard to breathe. But after a couple of weeks here that stopped. Plus he used to ask when he’d see his mother and father again. Melissa told us that he’d been with her sister so long he thought she and her boyfriend were his parents.”

“And where is he now? With this bitch Melissa?”

“I don’t know. The day you arrived, he disappeared. When I asked why he hadn’t come to class, Sam warned me not to talk about it.”

“Well, I’m going to find out!”

I tried to push past her, but she blocked me with her body.

“No,” she said decisively. “I will.”

We stood there in the darkness, holding each other.

“They won’t tell you anything,” Andrea went on. “They might talk to me.”

She released me.

“You’d better go,” she said. “And be careful. If you’re seen leaving here, we’ll both be in serious trouble.”

“Do you have any children, Andrea?” I asked.

“I missed out on that.”

Her tone was flat, almost flippant.

“You must still be young enough,” I said.

“That’s not what I meant. I haven’t set foot off this island for what seems like a lifetime, and the breeding stock here doesn’t impress me. Now go. Tomorrow morning I’ll tell you what I’ve been able to find out.”

She accompanied me to the door. Outside, the darkness was now complete. I found Andrea’s hand, squeezed it one last time and slipped away toward the fringes of the clearing.

Back in my room, I began to have doubts about the wisdom of trusting her. For all I knew, Andrea might be reporting back to Sam even now. Or perhaps he had set up this meeting too, to gain time, or work on my emotions in a different way. But this, I knew, was what Sam wanted, what he stood for. He reveled in obscurities and ignorance, in dysfunctional behavior and doubt. If I allowed them to overwhelm me, he had already won. I had to have faith, not in his hallucinogenic theology but in my own experience, and in the irreducible reality of another human being. Losing on those terms would be less destructive than winning on Sam’s.

My thoughts turned to David. Was he warm enough? Had he been properly cared for? Would he recognize me again? How could I ever explain to him what had happened, and break the news of his mother’s death? Above all, I wished I could do something. I felt so helpless. Everyone on the island, except maybe Andrea, was my enemy. There was nothing to be gained by single-handed heroics. I turned off the light and tried to sleep.

I awoke shortly after dawn to find a figure standing beside my bed.