Dark Rivers of the Heart

Above all, what overcame him was an unexpected reverence, as he might have felt at any place where the innocent had perished: from Calvary to Dachau, to Babi Yar, to the unnamed fields where Stalin buried millions, to rooms where Jeffrey Dahmer dwelt, to the torture chambers of the Inquisition.

The soil of any killing ground isn’t sanctified by the murderers who practice there. Though they often think themselves exalted, they are as the maggots that live in dung, and no maggots can transform one square centimeter of earth into holy ground.

Sacred, instead, are the victims, for each dies in the place of someone whom fate allows to live. And though many may unwittingly or unwillingly die in the place of others, the sacrifice is no less sacred for the fact that fate chose those who would make it.

If there had been votive candles in those cleansed catacombs, Spencer would have wanted to light them and gaze into their flames until they blinded him. Had there been an altar, he would have prayed at the foot of it. If by offering his own life he could have brought back the forty-one and his mother, or any one of them, he would not have hesitated to rid himself of this world in hope of waking in another.

All he could do, however, was quietly honor the dead by never forgetting the details of their final passage through this place. His duty was to be witness. By shunning memory, he would dishonor those who had died here in his place. The price of forgetfulness would be his soul.

Describing those catacombs as they had been in that long-ago time, coming at last to the woman’s cry that had roused him from his paralytic terror, he was suddenly unable to go on. He continued to speak, or thought he did, but then he realized that no more words would come. His mouth worked, but his voice was only a silence that he cast into the silence of the room.

Finally a thin, high, brief, childlike cry of anguish came from him. It was not unlike the one cry that had jolted him from his bed on that July night or the one that, later, had broken his paralysis. He buried his face in his hands and stood, shaking with grief too intense for tears or sobbing, waiting for the seizure to pass.

Ellie was aware that no word or touch could console him.

In glorious canine innocence, Rocky believed any sadness could be relieved by a wagging tail, a cuddle, an affectionate warm lick. He rubbed his flank against his master’s legs and swished his tail — and padded away in confusion when none of his tricks worked.

Spencer found himself speaking again almost as unexpectedly as he had found himself unable to speak a minute or two ago. “I heard the woman’s cry again. From down there at the end of the catacombs. Hardly loud enough to be a scream. More a wail to God.”

He started toward the last door, at the end of the catacombs. Ellie and Rocky stayed with him.

“Even as I moved past the dead women in these walls, I was remembering something from six years before, when I’d been eight years old — another cry. My mother’s. That spring night, I woke hungry, got out of bed for a snack. There were fresh chocolate-chip cookies in the kitchen jar. I’d been dreaming about them. Went downstairs. The lights were on in some rooms. I thought I’d find my mom or dad along the way. But I didn’t see them.”

Spencer stopped at the painted black door at the end of the catacombs. Catacombs they were and always would be to him, even with the bodies all disinterred and taken away.

Ellie and Rocky stopped at his side.

“The kitchen was dark. I was going to take as many cookies as I could carry, more than I would ever be allowed to have at one time. I was opening the jar when I heard a scream. Outside. Behind the house. Went to the window by the table. Parted the curtain. My mom was on the lawn. Running back to the house from the barn. He… he was behind her. He caught her on the patio. Beside the pool. Swung her around. Hit her. In the face. She screamed again. He hit her. Hit and hit. And again. So fast. My mom. Hitting her with his fist. She fell. He kicked her in the head. He kicked my mom in the head. She was quiet. So fast. All over so fast. He looked toward the house. He couldn’t see me in the dark kitchen, at the narrow gap in the curtains. He picked her up. Carried her to the barn. I stood at the window awhile. Then I put the cookies back in the jar. Put the lid on. Went back upstairs. Got into bed. Pulled up the covers.”

“And didn’t remember any of it for six years?” Ellie asked.

Spencer shook his head. “Buried it. That’s why I couldn’t sleep with the air conditioner running. Deep down where I didn’t realize it, I was afraid he would come for me in the night, and I wouldn’t hear him because of the air conditioner.”

“And then that night, all those years later, your window open, another cry—”

“It reached me deeper than I could understand, drew me out of bed, out to the barn, down here. And when I was walking toward this black door, toward the scream…”

Ellie reached to the lever-action knob on the door, to open it, but he stayed her hand.

“Not yet,” he said. “I’m not ready to go in there again yet.”

…barefoot on icy stone, I approach the black door, filled with the fear of what I have seen tonight but also with the fear of what I saw on that spring night when I was eight, which has been repressed since then but all at once comes bursting up from within me. I’m in a state beyond mere terror. No word is adequate for what I feel. I’m at the black door, touching the black door, so black, glossy, like a moonless night sky reflected in the blind face of a pond. I’m nearly as confused as I am terrified, for it seems to me that I’m both eight and fourteen, that I’m opening the door to save not merely the woman who made bloody birds on the vestibule door but to save my mother as well. Time past and time present melt together, and all is one, and I enter the slaughterhouse.

I step into deep space, infinite night around me. The ceiling is ink-black to match the walls, the walls to match the floor, the floor like a chute to Hell. A naked woman, half conscious, lips split and bleeding, rolling her head in listless denial, is manacled to a burnished-steel slab, which seems to float in blackness because its supports also are black. A single light. Directly over the table. In a black fixture. It floats in the void, pin-spotting the steel, like a celestial object or the cruel beam of a godlike inquisitor. My father’s wearing black. Only his face and hands are visible, as if severed but alive in their own right, as if he’s an apparition struggling toward completion. He’s extracting a gleaming hypodermic syringe from thin air — actually from a drawer beneath the steel slab, a drawer invisible in its blackness-upon-blackness.

I shout, “No, no, no,” as I plunge at him, surprising him, so the syringe drops back into the thin air from which it came, and I drive him backward, backward, past the table, out of the focused light, into blackest infinity, until we crash into the wall at the end of the universe. I’m screaming, punching, but I’m fourteen and slender, and he’s in his prime, muscular, powerful. I kick him, but I’m barefoot. He lifts me effortlessly, turns with me, floating in space, slams me back-first into the hard blackness, knocking the wind out of me, slams me again. Pain along my spine. Another blackness rises inside me, deeper than the abyss all around. But the woman cries out again, and her voice helps me resist the inner darkness, even if I can’t resist my father’s far greater strength.

Then he presses me to the wall with his body, holding me off the floor with his hands, his face looming before mine, locks of black hair falling across his forehead, eyes so dark that they seem to be holes through which I’m seeing the blackness behind him. “Don’t be afraid, don’t, don’t be afraid, boy. Baby boy, I won’t hurt you. You’re my blood, my seed, my creation, my baby. I’d never hurt you. Okay? You understand? You hear me, son, sweet boy, my sweet little Mikey, you hear me? I’m glad you’re here. It had to happen sooner or later. Sooner the better. Sweet boy, my boy. I know why you’re here, I know why you’ve come.”

I’m dazed and disoriented because of the perfect blackness of that room, because of the horrors in the catacombs, because of being lifted bodily and pounded against the wall. In my condition, his voice is as lulling as fearsome, strangely seductive, and I’m nearly convinced he won’t harm me. Somehow I must have misunderstood the things I’ve seen. He continues speaking in that hypnotic way, words pouring out, giving me no chance to think, Jesus, my mind spinning, him pressing me to the wall, face like a great moon over me.

“I know why you’ve come. I know what you are. I know why you’re here. You’re my blood, my seed, my son, no different from me than my reflection in a mirror. Do you hear me, Mikey, sweet baby boy, hear me? I know what you are, why you’ve come, why you’re here, what you need. What you need. I know, I know. You know it too. You knew it when you came through the door and saw her on the table, saw her breasts, saw between her spread legs. You knew, oh, yes, oh, you knew, you wanted it, you knew, you knew what you wanted, what you need, what you are. And it’s all right, Mikey, it’s all right, baby boy. It’s all right what you are, what I am. It’s how we were born, each of us, it’s what we were meant to be.”