The same question was still on Graves’ mind the next morning as he sat at his usual booth in a nearby diner. Across the street, two men stood beneath a tattered awning. Both wore dark green coveralls with the words “Progressive Plumbing” stitched in white across the front. In most cases, their outfits alone would be enough to get them inside an apartment, the current occupant opening the door to them with little concern that they’d come to do anything more than find the leak that was, the men claimed, dripping into the apartment directly below.
Graves took a sip of coffee, now studying the men in the way Slovak would, searching for the odd gesture or article of clothing, the piece that didn’t fit, and thus signaled a vast deception. One of the men carried a bulky metal toolbox, he noticed now. It was the sort that had accordion shelves inside, slots for drill bits, screwdrivers, hacksaws with then small metal teeth, trays for lead pipes and electrical cord, a vast supply of items that could be used for their work. Or put to other use.
Even as he continued to focus on the men, Graves could feel other sights returning to him, images from his lost boyhood. Gaslight New York had once protected him from them by drawing him into the distant past. Modern New York had served the same purpose by immersing him in its endless river of noise and movement. But recently both walls had begun to weaken: Graves now felt more vulnerable than he had at any time since fleeing the South.
One of the men had sunk his hands deep into the pockets of his coveralls. He was swaying gently, his lips moving to a song inside his head. Watching him, Graves suddenly recalled how Gwen had sometimes swung her hips right and left as she stood washing dishes at the kitchen sink, her voice occasionally stopped in a weepy break, imitating Connie Francis. Abruptly, he heard another voice, hard, cruel, brutally demanding. Sing, bitch!
Graves flinched. He turned from the men. Desperately trying to block the backward drift of his mind, he fixed his gaze on a tall man at the far end of the diner. But it did no good. Instantly, he was a thirteen-year-old child again, strapped to a chair in the sweltering farmhouse. Gwen peered at him beseechingly, her arms streaked with blood as she lifted herself from the wooden table, repeating his name as she staggered toward him, her voice barely able to carry beyond her swollen purple lips, Paul, Paul, Paul. He saw Sheriff Sloane staring at him, heard his own child’s voice answer the older man’s insistent questions, I didn’t see anything, Sheriff. I went to sleep in the field. I stayed there all night. Then, the next morning… It was the story he’d repeated over and over until the words themselves had finally stopped coming from him altogether, along with all other words, his year of silence abruptly begun.
Graves was still sitting in the diner ten minutes later, a third cup of coffee growing cold before him as he gazed out the window, surveying the passing crowd, a river of anonymous faces. He knew that it was his desire for this same anonymity that had drawn him to Manhattan. He’d wanted to lose himself in the great multitude, dissolve into its faceless mass. Before that, during the four years he’d continued to live in North Carolina following Gwen’s death, he’d been perhaps the most conspicuous person in the county, a boy who’d been dreadfully unfortunate, losing first his mother and father, then his only sister, but weirdly lucky as well, since, as people noted, he’d not been in the car in which his parents had burned to death nor in the house when his sister had gone through the long ordeal of her murder. “You’re a dark angel, Paul,” Mrs. Flexner had once told him. “Cursed the same as blessed.”
It was Mrs. Flexner who’d taken him in. She’d persuaded her husband, Clifford, that with their own boy now grown-up and moved away, it was only right to give his vacant room to a little boy who’d lost his whole family. Mr. Flexner had been reluctant, as Graves later learned. Flexner had not had a particularly close relationship with his own son, and therefore doubted that he’d do any better with a thirteen-year-old boy he scarcely knew. Yet, over time, Graves had grown fond of Mr. Flexner. At least enough to enjoy fishing with him in the creek or walking the broad fields together as night fell, the two of them silently watching as vast numbers of starlings made their homeward way across the evening sky. There was a solitary quality about Clifford Flexner, a sense of something sad and never spoken, and even as a young boy Graves had been able to detect a silence at his core, like the closed room of an ancient tragedy.
It was Mrs. Flexner who’d actually told him what that tragedy was, relating the story idly as she hung clothes on the line. Clifford was a twin, she said, his brother Milford “a spitting image.” They’d been very close, the way twins often were, and one August afternoon, when they were only four, the two boys had gone out into a field to play. Clifford had snatched a box of matches from a drawer in the kitchen, and as he was showing his brother how to strike them, he dropped a lighted flame into the parched grass. The flames shot up instantly, and Clifford began to run away, back toward the house. He was halfway there when he stopped and saw Milford still standing in place, either confused or mesmerized by the swelling tongues of flame. At that moment a gust of wind swept over the field, spreading the fire across Milford’s bare feet, Clifford watching helplessly some twenty yards away. “It started with the cuffs of his britches,” Mrs. Flexner said. “Then the fire just shot up his pants and leaped onto his shirttail and then flew up to his hair.” By that time Milford had begun to flail about, spinning wildly, as she described it, “like one of them little dust devils you see in the fields during summer, only it was a boy on fire.” She’d pinned the last of the clothes to the line by the time she uttered her last line: “That’s what Clifford thinks about when you see him mooning around. That little brother of his that burned up way back then.”
Later that same night, as he’d lain in his bed in the room he’d been given in Mrs. Flexner’s house, Graves had seen it all like a movie in his head: a small blond boy standing in a pale yellow field, the line of fire slithering toward him, twisting as it came, like a flaming snake. “Milford,” he’d whispered. It was the first word he’d uttered in a year.
Still, for all the horror of the story she’d told him, it was also Mrs. Flexner who’d undoubtedly done the most to help Graves get back to normal after his sister’s murder. She’d never insisted that he turn off the light in his bedroom, and she’d been willing to sit up with him during the long black nights when he could not sleep, playing Parcheesi with him at the kitchen table. She’d taken him to the local swimming hole, and said nothing when he’d refused to go into the water. She’d taken him to the county fair as well, and watched with him as other kids trustfully clambered into metal rocket ships or lined up for the Haunted House, taking risks Graves would not take, seemingly eager to know fear because they’d never known terror.
But more than anything, Mrs. Flexner had never once during his long year of silence pressured Graves to speak. She’d always seemed quite confident that one day he’d talk again, that given time and patience, his shattered heart would mend.
It was this simple faith in his ultimate recovery, Graves supposed, that had made Mrs. Flexner finally insist that Sheriff Sloane stop making periodic visits to question him.
Graves had been sitting in the old wooden swing when the sheriff came that last time, close enough to hear what he said to Mrs. Flexner as the two of them stood together in the front yard:
Martha, the fact is, what was done to Gwen Graves was the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen.
I don’t doubt that, Sheriff.
She was hung, ma’am. Hung from a beam and cut open. Like an animal. Yes, I know.
And it’s been almost a year, and right now I don’t know one bit more than I did when I started. There’s just one thing I know for sure. Whoever it was, he’s still out there somewhere. Free as a bird. Looking for some other young girl.
I know, Sheriff.
That’s what’s so frustrating. The fact that I don’t have a thing to go on. Just car tracks in the driveway, that’s all. The boy, there, he’s the only thing I got that’s even close to a witness.
But if Paul wasn’t at the house, what good can he do you?
Not much, I reckon.
Well, back when he was talking, he said he hadn’t seen a thing. Said he never came to the house that night. Said he slept in the field a mile away.
Yes, I know he said that.
Then what’s the good of keeping after him?
Graves had always remembered how Sheriff Sloane’s eyes had slid over to him when he gave his answer:
Well, if he didn’t go home that night, then what about the hoe?
The hoe?
Why wasn’t it with him when we found him in the field?
Where was it?
Inside the house. Near where his sister hung.
A shadow suddenly spread across the diner’s speckled Formica table top, startling Graves, jerking him back into the present.
“Will there be anything else, sir?”
Graves glanced up. The waitress had long, straight hair, and for an instant she seemed to hang above him, swinging slowly, suspended by a cord but still alive, her hands clawing at the rope, red and raw, blood flowing down her arms in gleaming rivulets.
“How about a warm-up?”
Graves shook his head. “No, nothing else.” His voice was a whisper.
She nodded and moved away, leaving him in the booth, the thick white coffee cup squeezed tight in his fingers. He could see the two men in green coveralls as they began to saunter toward the far corner of the street. He was still watching when they reached the end of the block. Then a truck swept by, blocking his view. Once it passed, the pair was gone.
He finished the last of his coffee, rose, and headed out of the diner.
Normally, he would have gone back to his apartment after having breakfast. But the thought of returning to his typewriter, to a scene in which Slovak stood on a narrow ledge, staring hopelessly into Kessler’s triumphant eyes, did not appeal to him. Instead, he decided to take a stroll, observe the great spectacle of the city on a bright summer morning.
He’d arrived in New York in the fall, only a month after his eighteenth birthday. He’d had nothing but the meager money he’d gotten from the sale of the family farm, but it had been enough to buy a bus ticket, rent an apartment, and keep him fed and clothed until he’d found a job. He’d never been in doubt as to why he’d come to New York. He’d seen it portrayed countless times in movies and magazines, a dense cityscape that was the exact opposite of the wide fields and empty woods and remote farmhouses of rural North Carolina, all of which filled him with a panicky sense of dread. The sheer density of the place, its teeming crowds, answered his need to surround himself with high walls, to walk streets that were never deserted. Once in the city, he’d moved into the most crowded neighborhood he could find, into the largest building on its most congested street, and in that building had chosen the apartment that had the thinnest walls. He would never again live in a place where screams could not be heard.
It was a tiny studio that looked out over the southwest corner of First Avenue and Twenty-third Street, and at night Graves took comfort in the proximity of his neighbors, the sounds they made as they came and went from their apartments. Morning and evening were best, but regardless of the hour he overheard a steady stream of life, people padding up and down the narrow corridor, chatting or bickering as they went. It never mattered what they said, only that they were so close. He needed only to feel their nearness, their vigilance, their eyes upon him, their ears listening. For he knew that the greatest evils required isolation. They were carried out in distant woods, deep basements, lonely farmhouses. Places out of sight. Out of reach. Where nothing stirred but the will to harm. Never to be entirely alone, that was the only safety. He had concluded that such nearness was the only protection against what others might do to you. Or what you might do to others.
It was nearly noon by the time Graves returned to his apartment. He made a ham sandwich and ate it at the wrought-iron table on the terrace. It had little taste, as all things did to him. He felt textures, the gristle in the meat, the slosh of what washed it down. All else was mere gruel.
After eating, Graves returned to his typewriter and once again sought a way out for Slovak. But once again, nothing came. And so after an hour of futile striving, he lay down in his bedroom, hoping a short nap might refresh him, or that a solution might suddenly present itself in a dream.
He’d been asleep for nearly an hour when the phone rang. He rolled over and plucked the receiver from its cradle.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Mr. Graves? Allison Davies. I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I wanted to know if you’d looked at the photographs I sent you.”
“Yes, I did.”
“And have you reached a decision about coming to Riverwood?”
Graves realized that, in fact, he had made his decision, that while he’d slept, his imagination had played a scene for him, one that existed in none of his books. In the scene, Slovak crawls through a dank, dripping tunnel to find the decomposed body of a little girl. Even as he crawls, he knows that her body has been decaying for days, that nothing is left but slime and maggots. And yet Slovak goes on, dragging himself through the stinking muck because he knows that this pile of rotten flesh was once a blue-eyed child, one whose mother still waits for him to bring her murdered daughter home.
“Mr. Graves?”
“Yes, I’m here,” Graves answered. In his mind’s eye he could see the photographs Miss Davies had sent him. They were still spread across the table in the adjoining room, Mrs. Harrison’s letter resting forlornly in their midst.
“Well, will you do it, then?”
He heard Slovak whisper in his ear. Sometimes you must do a thing because your own darkness will overwhelm you if you don’t.
It was a line he’d written years before, written in his first book. But now it seemed like nothing less than the old detective’s solemn admonition, the dying wish of someone Graves had long ago created and now come to revere, his weary, wasted questioner of Cain.
“Will you come to Riverwood?” Miss Davies asked.
He gave his answer achingly, like someone beaten into submission, the word dropping from his mouth like a broken tooth.
“Yes.”
Thomas H. Cook
Instruments of Night