Dark Rivers of the Heart

Harris had to ask Darius for change. Then he got out of the Microbus and went to the telephone alone.

Through the windows of the pizza parlor, he saw people eating, drinking beer, talking. A group at one large table was having an especially good time; he could hear their laughter above the music from the jukebox. None of them seemed to be aware that the world had recently turned upside down and inside out.

Harris was gripped by an envy so intense that he wanted to smash the windows, burst into the restaurant, overturn the tables, knock the food and the mugs of beer out of those people’s hands, shout at them and shake them until their illusions of safety and normalcy were shattered into as many pieces as his own had been. He was so bitter that he might have done it—would have done it — if he hadn’t had a wife and two daughters to think about, if he had been facing his frightening new life alone. It wasn’t even their happiness that he envied; it was their blessed ignorance that he longed to regain for himself, though he knew that no knowledge could ever be unlearned.

He lifted the handset from the pay phone and deposited coins. For a blood-freezing moment, he listened to the dial tone, unable to remember the number that had been on the paper in the redhead’s hand. Then it came to him, and he punched the buttons on the keypad, his hand shaking so badly that he half expected to discover that he had not entered the number correctly.

On the third ring, a man answered with a simple, “Hello?”

“I need help,” Harris said, and realized that he hadn’t even identified himself. “I’m sorry. I’m…my name is… Descoteaux. Harris Descoteaux. One of your people, whoever you are, she said to call this number, that you could help me, that you were ready to help.”

After a hesitation, the man at the other end of the line said, “If you had this number, and if you got it legitimately, then you must be aware there’s a certain protocol.”

“Protocol?”

There was no response.

For a moment, Harris panicked that the man was going to hang up and walk away from that phone and be forever thereafter unreachable. He couldn’t understand what was expected of him — until he remembered the three passwords that had been printed on the piece of paper below the telephone number. The redhead had told him that he must memorize those too. He said, “Pheasants and dragons.”

* * *

At the security keypad, in the short hallway at the back of the barn, Spencer entered the series of numbers that disarmed the alarm. The Dresmunds had been instructed not to alter the codes, in order to make access easy for the owner if he ever returned when they were gone. When Spencer punched in the last digit, the luminous readout changed from ARMED AND SECURE to the less bright READY TO ARM.

He had brought a flashlight from the pickup. He directed the beam along the left-hand wall. “Half bath, just a toilet and sink,” he told Ellie. Beyond the first door, a second: “That’s a small storage room.” At the end of the hall, the light found a third door. “He had a gallery that way, open only to the wealthiest collectors. And from the gallery, there’s a staircase up to what used to be his studio on the second floor.” He swung the beam to the right side of the corridor, where only one door waited. It was ajar. “That used to be the file room.”

He could have switched on the overhead fluorescent panels. Sixteen years ago, however, he had entered in gloom, guided only by the radiance of the green letters on the security-system readout. Intuitively, he knew that his best hope of remembering what he had repressed for so long was to re-create the circumstances of that night insofar as he was able. The barn had been air-conditioned then, and now the heat was turned low, so the February chill in the air was nearly right. The harsh glare of overhead fluorescent bulbs would too drastically alter the mood. If he were striving for a roughly authentic recreation, even a flashlight was too reassuring, but he didn’t have the nerve to proceed in the same depth of darkness into which he had gone when he was fourteen.

Rocky whined and scratched at the back door, which Ellie had closed behind them. He was shivering and miserable.

For the most part and for reasons that Spencer would never be able to determine, Rocky’s argument with darkness was limited to that in the outside world. He usually functioned well enough indoors, in the dark, although sometimes he required a night-light to banish an especially bad case of the willies.

“Poor thing,” Ellie said.

The flashlight was brighter than any night-light. Rocky should have been sufficiently comforted by it. Instead, he quaked so hard that it seemed as if his ribs ought to make xylophone music against one another.

“It’s okay, pal,” Spencer told the dog. “What you sense is something in the past, over and done with a long time ago. Nothing here and now is worth being scared of.”

The dog scratched at the door, unconvinced.

“Should I let him out?” Ellie wondered.

“No. He’ll just realize it’s night outside and start scratching to get back in.”

Again directing the flashlight at the file-room door, Spencer knew that his own inner turmoil must be the source of the dog’s fear. Rocky was always acutely sensitive to his moods. Spencer strove to calm himself. After all, what he had said to the dog was true: The aura of evil that clung to these walls was the residue of a horror from the past, and there was nothing here and now to fear.

On the other hand, what was true for the dog was not as true for Spencer. He still lived partly in the past, held fast by the dark asphalt of memory. In fact, he was gripped even more fiercely by what he could not quite remember than by what he could recall so clearly; his self-denied recollections formed the deepest tar pit of all. The events of sixteen years ago could not harm Rocky, but for Spencer, they had the real potential to snare, engulf, and destroy him.

He began to tell Ellie about the night of the owl, the rainbow, and the knife. The sound of his own voice scared him. Each word seemed like a link in one of those chain drives by which any roller coaster was hauled inexorably up the first hill on its track and by which a gondola with a gargoyle masthead was pulled into the ghost- filled darkness of a fun house. Chain drives worked only in one direction, and once the journey had begun, even if a section of track had collapsed ahead or an all-consuming fire had broken out in the deepest chamber of the fun house, there was no backing up.

“That summer, and for many summers before it, I slept without air-conditioning in my bedroom. The house had a hot-water, radiant-heat system that was quiet in the winter, and that was okay. But I was bothered by the hiss and whistle of cold air being forced through the vanes in the vent grille, the hum of the compressor echoing along the ductwork…. No, ‘bothered’ isn’t the word. It scared me. I was afraid that the noise of the air conditioner would mask some sound in the night…a sound that I’d better be able to hear and respond to…or die.”

“What sound?” Ellie asked.

“I didn’t know. It was just a fear, a childish thing. Or so I thought at the time. I was embarrassed by it. But that’s why my window was open, why I heard the cry. I tried to tell myself it was only an owl or an owl’s prey, far off in the night. But…it was so desperate, so thin and full of fear…so human…”

More swiftly than when he had been confessing to strangers in barrooms and to the dog, he recounted his journey on that July night: out of the silent house, across the summer lawn with its faux frost of moonlight, to the corner of the barn and the visitation of the owl, to the van where the stench of urine rose from the open back door, and into the hall where they now stood together.

“And then I opened the door to the file room,” he said.

He opened it once more and crossed the threshold.

Ellie followed him.

In the dark hallway from which the two of them had come, Rocky still whined and scratched at the back door, trying to get out.

Spencer played the beam of the flashlight around the file room. The long worktable was gone, as were the two chairs. The row of file cabinets had been removed as well.

The knotty-pine cupboards still filled the far end of the room from floor to ceiling and corner to corner. They featured three pairs of tall, narrow doors.

He pointed the beam of light at the center doors and said, “They were standing open, and a strange faint light was coming out of them from inside the cabinet, where there weren’t any lights.” He heard a new note of strain in his voice. “My heart was knocking so hard it shook my arms. I fisted my hands and held them at my sides, struggling to control myself. I wanted to run, just turn and run back to bed and forget it all.”

He was talking about how he had felt then, in the long ago, but he could as easily have been speaking of the