Dark Rivers of the Heart

didn’t mean anything.”

She was too understanding and forgiving. In this blighted world, those who were too forgiving paid a cruel price for a Christian bent.

“So, I came back through the catacombs, with the dead all around me in the walls, with the memory of my father’s blood, and still with the feel of her breasts in my hand. The vivid memory of how rubbery her nipples had felt against my palm—”

“Don’t do this to yourself.”

“Never lie to the dog,” Spencer said, with no humor this time, but with a bitterness and rage that frightened him.

A fury welled in his heart, blacker than the door before him. He was no more able to shake it off than he had been able, that July, to shake from his hand the remembered warmth and shapes and sensuous textures of the naked woman. His rage was undirected, and that was why it had been intensifying in his deep unconscious for sixteen years. He’d never been sure if it should be turned against his father or against himself. Lacking a target, he had denied the existence of that rage, repressed it. Now, condensed into a distillate of purest wrath, it was eating through him as corrosively as any acid.

“…with the vivid memory of how her nipples had felt against my palm,” he continued, but in a voice that shook equally with anger and with fear, “I came back here. To this door. Opened it. Went into the black room…. And the next thing I remember is walking away from here, the door falling shut behind me….”

…barefoot, walking back through the catacombs, with a void in my memory more perfectly black than the room behind me, not sure where I’ve just been, what’s just happened. Passing the women in the walls. Women. Girls. Mothers. Sisters. Their silent screams. Perpetual screams. Where is God? What does God care? Why has He abandoned them all here? Why has He abandoned me? A magnified spider shadow scurries across their plaster faces, along the looping shadow of the light cord. As I’m passing the new niche in the wall, the niche prepared for the woman in the black room, my father comes out of that hole, out of the dark earth, splattered with blood, staggering, wheezing in agony, but so fast, so fast, as fast as the spider. The hot flash of steel out of shadows. Knife. He sometimes paints still lifes of knives, making them glow as if they were holy relics. Flashing steel, flashing pain across my face. Drop the gun. Hands to my face. Flap of cheek hanging off my chin. My bare teeth against my fingers, a grin of teeth exposed along the whole side of my face. Tongue leaping against my fingers in the open side of my face. And he slashes again. Misses. Falls. He’s too weak to get up. Backing away from him, I pull my cheek in place, blood streaming between my fingers, running down my throat. I’m trying to hold my face together. Oh, God, trying to hold my face together and running, running. Behind me, he’s too weak to get off the floor but not too weak to call after me: “Did you kill her, did you kill her, baby boy, did you like it, did you kill her?”

Spencer still could not look directly at Ellie and might never be able to look directly at her again, not eye-to- eye. He could see her peripherally, and he knew that she was crying quietly. Crying for him, eyes flooded, face glistening.

He couldn’t cry for himself. He had never been able to let go and fully purge his pain, because he didn’t know if he was worthy of tears, of hers or his own or anyone’s tears.

All he could feel now was that rage, which was still without a target.

“The police found the woman dead in the black room,” he said.

“Spencer, he killed her.” Her voice trembled. “It must have been him. The police said it was him. You were the boy hero.”

Staring at the black door, he shook his head. “When did he kill her, Ellie? When? He dropped the scalpel when we both fell to the floor. Then I ran, and he ran after me.”

“But there were other scalpels, other sharp instruments in the drawer. You said so yourself. He grabbed one and killed her. It would only have taken seconds. Only a few seconds, Spencer. The bastard knew you couldn’t get far, that he’d catch up with you. And he was so excited after his struggle with you that he couldn’t wait, shaking with excitement, so he had to kill her then, hard and fast and brutally.”

“Later, he’s on the floor, after he slashed me, and I’m running away, and he’s calling after me, asking if I killed her, if I liked killing her.”

“Oh, he knew. He knew she was dead before you ever came back here to free her. Maybe he was insane and maybe he wasn’t, but he was sure as hell the purest evil that ever walked. Don’t you see? He hadn’t converted you to his way, and he hadn’t been able to kill you, either, so all that was left for him was to ruin your life if he could, to plant that seed of doubt in your mind. You were a boy, half blind with panic and terror, confused, and he knew your turmoil. He understood, and he used it against you, just for the sheer, sick fun of it.”

For more than half his lifetime, Spencer had tried to convince himself of the scenario that she had just painted for him. But the void in his memory remained. The continued amnesia seemed to argue that the truth was different from what he desperately wished had happened.

“Go,” he said thickly. “Run for the truck, drive away from here, go to Denver. I shouldn’t have brought you here. I can’t ask you to come any farther with me.”

“I’m here. I’m not leaving.”

“I mean it. Get out.”

“No way.”

“Get out. Take the dog.”

“No.”

Rocky was whining, shaking, huddling against a column of blood-dark brick, in torment as racking as any Spencer had ever seen.

“Take him. He likes you.”

“I’m not going.” Through tears, she said, “This is my decision, damn it, and you can’t make it for me!”

He turned on her, seized handfuls of her leather jacket, all but lifted her off the floor, frantically trying to force her to understand. In his rage and fear and self-loathing, he had managed, after all, to look her in the eyes one more time. “For Christ’s sake, after all you’ve seen and heard, don’t you get it? I left part of myself in that room, that abattoir where he did his butchering, left something there I couldn’t live with. What in the name of God could that be, huh? Something worse than the catacombs, worse than all the rest of it. It has to be worse because I remembered all the rest of it! If I go back in there and remember what I did to her, there’ll be no forgetting ever again, no hiding from it anymore. And this is a memory…like fire. It’s going to burn through me. Whatever’s left, whatever isn’t burned away, it won’t be me anymore, Ellie, not after I know what I did to her. And then who’re you going to be down here with, down here in this godforsaken place alone with?”

She raised one hand to his face and traced the line of his scar, though he tried to flinch away from her. She said, “If I was blind, if I’d never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.”

“Oh, Ellie, don’t.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Ellie, please.”

“No.”

He couldn’t direct his rage at her, either, especially not at her. He let go of her. Stood with his hands at his sides. Fourteen again. Weak with his outrage. Afraid. Lost.

She put her hand on the lever-action door handle.

“Wait.” He withdrew the SIG 9mm pistol from under the waistband of his blue jeans, disengaged the safety, jacked a bullet into the chamber, and held the piece out to her. “You should have both guns.” She started to object, but he cut her off. “Keep the pistol in your hand. Don’t get too close to me in there.”

“Spencer, whatever you remember, it’s not going to turn you into your father, not in an instant, no matter how terrible it is.”

“How do you know that? I’ve spent sixteen years picking at it, prying and poking, trying to dig it out of the