The Chain(61)

The young man recognizes the album as Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, which was one of Alicia’s favorites.

As they climb the stairs, the music gets louder. They enter a large master bedroom at the bit where “Sister Morphine” transitions into “Dead Flowers.”

They find Alicia, a young blond woman, naked with another young woman and a red-haired man with a ginger beard. They are in a large, old-fashioned four-poster bed. Alicia and the bearded man are tripping. The other woman appears to be deeply asleep.

The old man kneels down next to Alicia, slaps her on the cheek, and tries to get her to respond. “Where are the kids, Alicia?” he asks, but she doesn’t answer.

The young man shakes her and asks her the same thing, but she doesn’t respond to him either.

Eventually he gives up asking.

The old man grabs a pillow and gives it to the young man.

The young man looks at the pillow and shakes his head.

“Only way to be safe,” the old man says. “Lawyers will give them back to her.”

The young man thinks about it for a while, nods, and then, reluctantly at first, but then with growing anger, starts smothering Alicia with the pillow. Alicia struggles, scratching at the young man’s hands, thrashing her legs.

The bearded man comes to and sees what’s happening.

“Hey, man!” he says.

The old man takes out the revolver and shoots the bearded man in the head, killing him instantly.

The young man drops the pillow and takes out his .38.

“Tom?” Alicia gasps.

The old man shoots her in the head too.

Despite all the commotion, the other young woman hasn’t woken up, or perhaps she is pretending to be asleep. The old man shoots her anyway.

Feathers are flying and the sheets are drenched with blood.

The bathroom door opens and a naked young man enters the room holding a roll of toilet paper.

“What’s going on?” he demands.

The old man takes careful aim and shoots the perplexed young man in the chest. It’s a heart shot and it probably kills him, but the old man crosses the room and double taps him in the head anyway.

“Jesus, what a mess,” Tom says.

“I’ll take care of this while you look for the kids,” the old man tells him.

Ten minutes later Tom finds Moonbeam and Mushroom playing in the dirt behind the barn. He takes them to the station wagon.

With a bowie knife, the old man has cut off four fingers on Alicia’s left hand—the four fingers that scratched the young man and got his DNA on them.

He finds a jerrican of gasoline and trails gas all through the farmhouse. He wipes the jerrican with a handkerchief, goes to the kitchen sink, and pours himself a glass of water. He drinks the water and wipes the glass clean of prints.

He steps through the screen door, holds the door open with his foot, lights a book of matches, and throws it onto the kitchen floor.

A line of scarlet flame races across the linoleum.

The old man joins Tom back at the station wagon.

They drive away from the commune, the old man at the wheel, Tom in the back with the kids.

They don’t meet any other cars on the narrow road that leads away from the farm—which is fortunate for everyone.

Tom looks through the rear window to see the farmhouse erupting in flames.

They drive for forty minutes, until they encounter a reservoir. The old man stops the station wagon, gets out, cleans both pistols and the bowie knife with a handkerchief.

He adds the bowie knife to the paper bag containing Alicia’s fingers. He pokes a hole in the bag and throws the bag and both pistols into the glassy water.

They sink immediately.

Three sets of ripples in the pond intersect briefly like the triple spiral one finds at the entrance to passage graves in Neolithic Europe.

The spirals fade and the black water is still again.

“Come on,” the old man says. “Let’s go.”





44



A blizzard. Cold. The bundles at her feet are birds who have frozen and fallen from the trees. Snow stings her face but she can barely feel it. She is here and not here. She is watching herself in a cinema of confession.

All she’s trying to do is get back to the house from the mailbox. But she can’t see through the white translucent depths of Old Point Road.

She doesn’t want to take a wrong turn and wander into the marsh. She walks gingerly in her bedroom slippers and her robe.

Why is she so underdressed? Underprepared? Unready?

The marsh waits for her to fill an absence. You owe the void a life because you got your daughter back.

On the water ducks raise an alarm. Something is lurking out there on the edge of the tidal basin.

The wind swirls the snow in front of her. What possessed her to come out in weather like this?

The whiteness darkens into the shape of a creature. A man. The curve in the hood of his coat makes it seem like he has horns.

Maybe he does have horns. Maybe he has the body of a man and the face of a bull.

He comes closer.

No, it is a man. He is wearing a long black coat and he is carrying a gun. The gun is pointed at her chest. “I’m looking for Kylie O’Neill,” he says.

“She’s not home—she, she, she went to New York,” Rachel stutters.

The man raises the gun…