Текст книги "The Wolf in Winter"

Автор книги: John Connolly

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

36

Founded in 1794, and located on the shores of Casco Bay where the Androscoggin River flowed into the sea, Bowdoin College was routinely ranked among the top colleges in America. Its list of alumni included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the explorer Robert Peary, and the sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Unfortunately, it did not appear to include Prosperous’s own Pastor Warraner. An early morning call to the Office of Alumni Relations produced no record of a Michael Warraner among its former students, and a similar inquiry left at Bangor Theological Seminary also drew a blank.

While I was still sucking on a pencil and trying to figure out why Warraner would bother to lie about something that could so easily be checked, I received a follow-up call from a secretary at Bowdoin. Apparently one of their associate professors was interested in meeting with me. He was free that afternoon, in fact, if I could find the time to ‘pop up’ to the college.

‘Did he really say that?’ I said.

‘Say what?’ said the secretary.

‘“Pop up”?’

‘That’s how he speaks. He’s from England.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes. Ah.’

‘Please tell him that I’d be delighted to pop up.’

Somewhere in Bowdoin’s Faculty of Religion, the name ‘Warraner’ had set a small alarm bell ringing.

* * *

Professor Ian Williamson looked exactly how I always believed most academics should look, but rarely did: slightly disheveled – but not so much as to raise too many concerns about his mental well-being – and fond of waistcoats and varieties of tweed, although in his case the potential fustiness of the cloth was offset by his choice of Converse sneakers as footwear. He was youthful, bearded, and cheerfully distracted, as though at any moment he might catch sight of an interesting cloud and run after it in order to lasso it with a piece of string.

As it turned out, Williamson was a decade older than I was, so clearly the academic life agreed with him. He’d been at Bowdoin for more than twenty years although he still spoke like a weekend visitor to Downton Abbey. Frankly, if Professor Williamson’s accent couldn’t get him laid in Maine, then nothing could. He specialized in Religious Tolerance and Comparative Mystical Traditions, and his office in the lovely old faculty building was filled equally with books and assorted religious bric-a-brac, so that it was somewhere between a library and a market stall.

He offered me coffee from his own personal Nespresso machine, put his feet up on a pile of books and asked me why I was interested in Michael Warraner.

‘I could ask you the same thing,’ I said, ‘given that he doesn’t appear to be one of your alumni.’

‘Ah, fencing,’ said Williamson. ‘Right. I see. Excellent.’

‘What?’ I said, not seeing.

‘Fencing.’ He made a parrying gesture with an imaginary foil, and accompanied it with a swishing noise, just to make certain that I got the picture. Which I didn’t.

‘Sorry, are you challenging me to a duel?’

‘What? No. I meant verbal fencing – the old thrust and parry. Philip Marlowe and all that. I say, you say. You know, that kind of thing.’

He stared animatedly at me. I stared less animatedly back.

‘Or perhaps not,’ said Williamson, and a little of his enthusiasm seemed to leach away. I felt as though I’d kicked a puppy.

‘Let’s say that I’m curious about Prosperous,’ I said. ‘And I’m curious about Pastor Warraner. He seems like a strange man in an odd town.’

Williamson sipped his Nespresso. Behind him on his otherwise empty desk I noticed a trio of books with their spines facing toward me. All related to the Green Man. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that they were displayed so prominently.

‘Michael Warraner entered Bowdoin as a liberal arts student when he was in his mid-twenties,’ said Williamson. ‘From the start, it was clear that his focus was on religious studies. It’s a demanding regimen, and tends only to attract students with a real passion for the subject. A major consists of nine courses, a minor five, with two required: Introduction to the Study of Religion, or Rel. 101, and Theories about Religion. The rest are comprised of various options from Asian Religions, Islam and Post-Biblical Judaism, Christianity and Gender, and Bible and Comparative Studies. Clear enough?’

‘Absolutely.’

Williamson shifted in his chair.

‘Warraner was not the most able of students,’ he said. ‘In fact, his admission hung in the balance for some time, but he had influential supporters.’

‘From Prosperous?’

‘And elsewhere. It was clear that efforts were being made on his behalf. On the other hand, we were aware that space existed in courses for dedicated students, and …’

‘Yes?’

‘There was a certain amount of curiosity among faculty members, myself included, about Prosperous. As you’re no doubt aware, it is a town founded by a secretive religious sect, the history and ultimate fate of which remain nebulous to this day. By admitting Warraner, it seemed that we might be in a position to learn more about the town and its history.’

‘And how did that work out?’

‘We got what you might refer to as “the party line”. Warraner gave us a certain amount of information, and we were also permitted to study the church and its environs, but we really found out very little about Prosperous and the Family of Love that we didn’t already know. Furthermore, Warraner’s academic limitations were exposed at a very early stage. He struggled to scrape up credits and D-minus grades. Eventually, we were forced to let him go.

‘Pastor Warraner, as he subsequently began to style himself, was later readmitted to this college as a “special student”. Special students are people from the local community who, for whatever reason, desire to resume their education on a part-time basis. While they’re assessed on their academic record, non-academic achievements are also considered. They pay course fees, and no financial aid is available to them. Their work is graded, and they receive a college transcript, but they are non-degree candidates, and therefore cannot graduate. Pastor Warraner took ten such courses over a period of about five years, some more successfully and enthusiastically than others. He was surprisingly open to issues of Christianity and gender, less so to Asian religions, Islam, and Judaism. Overall, my impression was that Warraner desired the imprimatur of a college education. He wanted to say that he had been to college, and that was all. You say that he also claims to have a Masters from Bangor?’

I tried to remember Warraner’s precise words. ‘I believe he told me that he’d majored in religion at Bowdoin, and studied as a Master of Divinity at Bangor Theological Seminary.’

‘I suppose, if one were being generous-spirited enough, those statements might offer a certain latitude of interpretation, the latter more than the former. If you asked around, I bet you’d find that he approached Bangor at some point and was rebuffed, or tried to sit in unofficially on seminars. It would ft with that desire for affirmation and recognition.’

‘Any other impression that he may have left upon you?’

‘He was a fanatic.’

‘Doesn’t it come with the territory?’

‘Sometimes. Warraner, though, could rarely string together more than a couple of sentences without referring to “his” god.’

‘And what kind of god does he worship? I’ve met him, and I’ve seen his church, and I’m still not sure just what kind of pastor he is.’

‘Superficially, Warraner is a variety of austere Protestant. There’s a bit of the Baptist in him, a sprinkling of Methodism, but also a healthy dose of Pantheism. None of it is particularly deep, though. His religion, for want of a better explanation, is his church, the bricks and mortar of it. He worships a building, or what that building represents for him. You say that you’ve seen it?’

‘I got the grand tour.’

‘And what did you think?’

‘It’s a little light on crosses for my tastes.’

‘Catholic?’

‘Occasional.’

‘I was raised in the Church of England – Low, I should add – and even I found Warraner’s chapel positively austere.’

‘The carvings apart.’

‘Yes, they are interesting, aren’t they? Unusual here in the United States. Less so, perhaps, among the older churches of England and certain parts of Europe, although Warraner’s are quite distinctive. It’s a Familist church, of that there can be little doubt, but a Familist church of a particular type. This is not the element of the sect that fed into the Quakers or the Unitarians, infused with a spirit of peace and gentleness. It’s something harsher.’

‘And Warraner: is he still a Familist?’

Williamson finished his coffee. He seemed to be considering making another, then thought better of it. He put his cup down.

‘Yes, Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘I believe that not only is Warraner a Familist, but Prosperous remains a Familist community. To what end, I couldn’t say.’

‘And their god?’

‘Look again at those carvings inside the church, if you get the chance. My suspicion is that, somewhere along the line, the link between God – the Christian deity – and the rule of nature has become lost to Warraner and those who share his religious convictions. All that’s left is those carvings. For the people of Prosperous, they are the faces of their god.’

I stood to leave. As I did so, Williamson handed me the books from his desk.

‘I thought these might interest you,’ he said. ‘Just pop them in the post when you’re done with them.’

There he was again, ‘pop’-ing and putting things in the ‘post’. He caught me smiling.

‘Did I say something funny?’

‘I was just wondering how many dates you’d gotten in the United States because of that accent of yours.’

He grinned. ‘It did seem to make me very popular. I suspect I may even have married out of my league because of it.’

‘It’s the residual colonial admiration for the oppressor.’

‘Spoken like a history major.’

‘No, not me, but Warraner said something similar when I met him. He drew an analogy between detection and historical research.’

‘But aren’t all investigations historical?’ said Williamson. ‘The crime is committed in the past, and the investigation conducted in the present. It’s a form of excavation.’

‘Do you feel a paper coming on?’

‘You know, I might do, at that.’

I flicked through the first of the books. It was heavily illustrated with images and drawings.

‘Pictures, too,’ I said.

‘If you color any of them in, we may be forced to have a long talk.’

‘One last question?’ I said.

‘Go right ahead.’

‘Why are so many of these faces threatening or hostile?’

‘Fear,’ said Williamson. ‘Fear of the power of nature, fear of old gods. And perhaps, too, the early Church found in such depictions a literal representation of a metaphorical concept: the radix malorum, the “root of all evil”. Hell, if you choose to believe in it, is beneath our feet, not above our heads. You’d have to dig deep to find it, but it wasn’t difficult for Christians with ancient links to the land to conceive of the influence of the malefcent in terms of twisted roots and clinging ivy, of faces formed by something buried far beneath the earth trying to create a physical representation of itself from whatever materials were at hand. But the god depicted on the walls of the Prosperous chapel has no connection with Christianity. It’s older, and beyond conceptions of good and evil. It simply is.’

‘You sound almost as though you believe in it yourself.’

‘Perhaps I just sometimes find it easier to understand how someone could conceive and worship a god of tree and leaf, a god that formed as the land around it formed, than a bearded figure living on a cloud in the sky.’

‘Does that count as a crisis of faith?’

He grinned again. ‘No, only a natural consequence of the study of every shade of religious belief, and of trying to teach the importance of being tolerant in a world in which tolerance is associated with weakness or heresy.’

‘Let me guess: you and Michael Warraner didn’t exactly see eye to eye on that subject.’

‘No. He wasn’t hostile toward other forms of religious belief, merely uninterested.’

‘When I see him again, should I pass on your good wishes?’ I said.

‘I’d prefer if you didn’t,’ said Williamson.

‘Frightened?’

‘Wary. You should be too.’ He was no longer distracted, no longer smiling. ‘One of the challenges I like to set my students for their first class is a word-association game. I ask them to list all of the words, positive or negative, that come to mind when they think of god. Sometimes I get pages of words, at other times a handful, but Warraner was the only student who ever wrote just one solitary word. That word was “hunger”. He and those like him worship a hungry god, Mr ‘Parker, and no good can ever come of worshipping a deity that hungers. No good at all.’

37

Idrove back to Scarborough, but stopped off at Bull Moose Music’s massive warehouse store on Payne Road and browsed the racks for an hour. It was part pleasure, part displacement activity. I felt that I’d reached a dead end as far as Prosperous was concerned, and my talk with Williamson had only served to confirm my own suspicions about Prosperous without opening any new avenues of inquiry.

I was no closer to finding Annie Broyer than I had been when I started out, and I was beginning to wonder if I might not have been mistaken in assuming that everything I had learned over the past week was useful or even true: an elderly couple, a blue car, a passing reference to a job in Prosperous made to a woman with the mental capacities of a child, and a homeless man’s obsession with the carvings on an ancient church. Every piece of information I had gathered was open to question, and it was entirely possible that Annie Broyer might turn up in Boston, or Chicago, or Seattle over the days and weeks to come. Even Lucas Morland’s passing reference to Annie as an ‘ex-junkie’ could be explained away if he had made a simple phone call to Portland or Bangor after my first visit to the town. In the eyes of some, I had already violated the primary commandment of an investigation: don’t assume. Don’t create patterns where there are none. Don’t conceive of a narrative and then force the evidence to ft it. On the other hand, all investigations involve a degree of speculation, the capacity to bear witness to a crime and imagine a chain of events that might have caused that crime to be committed. An investigation was not simply a matter of historical research, as Warraner had suggested. It was an act of faith both in one’s own capacities and in the possibility of justice in a world that had made justice subservient to the rule of law.

But I had no crime to investigate. I had only a homeless man with a history of depression who might well have hanged himself in a ft of desperation, and a missing girl with a history of narcotic and alcohol abuse who had drifted for most of her life. Was I fixating on Prosperous because its citizens were wealthy and privileged while Jude and his daughter were poor and suffering? Was I marking Warraner and Morland for simply doing what a pastor and a policeman should do, which was to protect their people?

And yet …

Michael Warraner wasn’t quite a fraud, but something potentially much more dangerous: a frustrated man with a set of religious or spiritual principles that reinforced his inflated opinion of himself and his place in the world. It was also clear from the way Morland reacted to my unauthorized visit to the church that Warraner had a position of authority in the town, which meant there were influential individuals who either shared his beliefs or didn’t entirely discount them.

What all that had to do – if anything – with the disappearance of Annie and the death of her father, I did not know. Prosperous just felt wrong to me, and I’d grown to trust my feelings. Then again, Angel and Louis might have asked if I ever felt right about anything, and if I’d learned to trust those feelings too. I could have countered by replying that nobody ever asked for my help when there wasn’t a problem, but I then found myself growing annoyed that I was having arguments – and more to the point, losing them – with Angel and Louis even when they weren’t actually present.

I headed into Portland, where I caught a movie at the Nickelodeon and then ate a burger at The Little Tap House on High Street. The building had once housed Katahdin before that restaurant’s move to Forest Avenue. A tapas place had briefly occupied the location in the aftermath of the move, and now The Little Tap House had carved out a niche for itself as a neighborhood bar with good food. I drank a soda and tried to read a little of the books with which Williamson had entrusted me. They traced the development of foliate sculpture from at least the first century AD, through its adoption by the early Church, and on to its proliferation throughout Western Europe. Some of the illustrations were more graphic than others. My server seemed particularly concerned at a capital in the cathedral at Autun which depicted a man disappearing into the jaws of a leafed face. Many of the carvings, such as a thirteenth-century mask from Bamberg cathedral, had a kind of beauty to them, which rendered them even more sinister.

I did find a source for Williamson’s Latin reference: the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus, in which Satan was described as radix omnium malorum, root of all evil, alongside a picture of a tricephalos, a three-faced demon from the façade of San Pietro in Tuscany, Italy. Coiling tendrils pushed through the mouths of the demons, extrusions from the original root, and the text described them as ‘blood-suckers’ in the context of another fifteenth-century head from Melrose Abbey. Here, too, there was a reference to the relationship between the human and plant elements in the masks as essentially hostile or parasitic, although the general consensus seemed to be that they represented a type of symbiosis, a long-term interaction and mutually benefcial relationship between two species. Man received the benefits of nature’s fruits, or the rebirth wrought by the changing of the seasons, and in return—

Well, that last part wasn’t so clear, although the cathedral at Autun with its images of consumption offered one possible realm of speculation.

I closed the books, paid my tab, and left the bar. The weather had warmed up a little since the previous night – not by much, but the weathermen were already predicting that the worst of winter was now behind us for another year, prematurely, I suspected. The sky was clear as I drove home, and the saltwater marshes smelled fresh and clean as I parked outside my house. I walked around to the back door to enter by the kitchen. It had become a habit with me ever since Rachel and Sam moved out. Entering by the front door and seeing the empty hallway was somehow more depressing than going in through the kitchen, which was where I spent most of my time anyway. I opened the door and reached out to key in the alarm code when my dead daughter spoke to me from behind. She said just one word

daddy

and it contained within it the prospect of living and the hope of dying, of endings and beginnings, of love and loss and peace and rage, all wrapped up in two whispered syllables.

I was already diving to the floor when the first of the shotgun blasts hit me, the pellets tearing the skin from my back, the hair from my skull, the flesh from my bones. I burned. I found the strength to kick at the door, knocking it closed, but the second blast blew away the lock and most of the glass, showering me with slivers and splinters. The floor was slick with my blood as I tried to rise, my feet sliding in the redness. I somehow stumbled into the hallway, and now pistol shots were sounding from behind me. I felt the force of their impact in my back, and my shoulder, and my side. I went down again, but as the pain took hold I found it in myself to twist my body to the left. I screamed as I landed on the floor, but I was now halfway across the doorway of my office. My right hand found the corner of the wall, and I dragged myself inside. Again I kicked a door closed, and managed to seat myself upright against my desk. I drew my gun. I raised it and fired a round. I didn’t know what it hit. I didn’t care. It was enough that it was in my hand.

‘Come on,’ I said, and blood and spittle sprayed from my lips. ‘Come on!‘ I said, louder now, and I did not know if I was speaking to myself, or to whatever or whomever lay beyond the door.

‘Come on,’ I said a third time, to the approaching darkness, to the figures that beckoned from within it, to the peace that comes at last to every dead thing. Above it all sounded the wailing of the alarm.

I fired again, and two bullets tore through the door in response. One missed.

The other did not.

‘Come—’

The wolf looked up at the men who surrounded him. He had tried to gnaw his trapped paw off, but had not succeeded. Now he was weary. The time had come. He snarled at the men, the fur around his mouth wet with his own blood. A sharp bitter scent troubled his senses, the smell of noise and dying.

He barked, the final sound that he would ever make. In it was both defiance and a kind of resignation. He was calling on death to come for him.

The gun fired, and the wolf was gone.

‘Hold him! Hold him!’

Light. No light.

‘Jesus, I can’t even get a grip on him, there’s so much blood. Okay, on three. One, two—’

‘Ah, for Christ’s sake.’

‘His back is just meat. What the fuck happened here?’

Light. No light.

Light. No light. Light.

‘Can you hear me?’

Yes. No. I saw the paramedic. I saw Sharon Macy behind him. I tried to speak, but no words would come.

‘Mr Parker, can you hear me?’

Light. Stronger now. ‘You stay with me, you hear me? You stay!’

Up. Move. Ceiling. Lights.

Stars.

Darkness.

Gone.