I didn’t count the DVDs. I couldn’t bear to. I’m sure there were more than 150.
I wondered where those other bodies were. I hoped never to find them.
I wanted to set the cabinet on fire. I figured that I knew what was on those discs: each woman alive and afraid, then what he did to her to amuse himself, and finally how he killed her, maybe with Victoria watching as she said he sometimes allowed her. I didn’t think anyone should watch those women in their terror, as they were humiliated and degraded. Not even cops or prosecutors, or juries.
They were gone, and maybe it didn’t matter, but it wasn’t right. These demented home movies reduced each woman’s life to the ordeal in which she was least herself, in which she was broken. And they would all have been broken emotionally and mentally, for Cloyce had so much experience in the tactics and techniques of terror that he would keep at each of them until he succeeded. He had all the time in the world to strip from his victim everything that was essential and momentous about her, and leave her diminished to the point that death would be a relief. All the time in the world.
The DVDs were evidence. Until they would not be needed in order for justice to be done, I could not destroy them.
As I accepted the fact of that, I knew what it meant: To ensure that there would be no need for the filmed evidence, I would have to deliver ultimate justice to everyone in Roseland except the boy, to the women as well as to the men. Seven deaths were warranted.
Subconsciously, I must have known what would be required of me the moment that I’d seen the preserved corpses in the subcellar of the mausoleum. But now I could no longer repress the awareness that my role here was to be a scourge, that I could not merely free the boy and leave with him. I could not restrict my killing to self-defense or to the defense of the child.
My legs felt weak. I sat in a nearby chair.
As usual, the house was hushed. No sound arose to distract me from my grim train of thought.
To spare Cloyce’s victims further indignities to their memory, I must be a scourge. To prevent others from perhaps being infected by Cloyce’s depravity by watching him at work, I must be a scourge. To prevent the time-management technology from falling into the hands of authorities who, if not already corrupt, would be corrupted by it, I must be a scourge.
Scourges aren’t heroes.
I had never imagined myself a hero, but never had I imagined that I would be this.
Scourges assume authority they don’t possess. I assumed the right was mine to spare the memory of the dead women from stain, and I assumed I had the authority to decide that time-management technology inevitably would be used for evil purposes if I didn’t wreck it and destroy those who knew about it.
Scourges transgress against social and sacred order. Prince Hamlet wasn’t the hero of Hamlet. His mission was to be a minister of Truth and perhaps also a scourge. But he couldn’t entirely believe in the first half of that mission, while in the end he embraced the role of scourge.
Scourges always must be scourged themselves.
Hamlet did not survive Hamlet. Moses, having scourged three thousand people, never lived to see the promised land.
A killer like Cloyce was a murderer, killing for wrong reasons but compelled to do so.
A scourge went into darker territory than that. A scourge was not compelled to kill by mental imbalance or emotional confusion or selfish desire. A scourge made a carefully reasoned decision to kill in numbers that exceeded what was absolutely necessary to ensure self-preservation and the defense of the innocent. Even if he killed for a right reason, he was in rebellion against social order and commanding authority.
Who scourges will be scourged. In fulfilling this dark role in Roseland, I would bring about my own death.
Yet I knew that I would not retreat from my decision.
I sat there under the glassy-eyed animal heads, reluctant to get up and go on with it.
I got up and went on. The last of Constantine Cloyce’s private quarters was the bedroom with en-suite bath.
Thirty-nine
ALTHOUGH THE BEDROOM LOOKED ORDINARY, IT might have been where he tortured and killed them over the years. I couldn’t know unless I watched some of the DVDs, but I would never play them.
His bed was stripped of linens. I suppose those sheets were in the laundry that I had not permitted Victoria Mors to finish.
Opposite the bed, in high contrast to the antique furniture, a large plasma-screen TV hung on the wall. I could imagine what he most liked to watch at night as he waited for sleep to overtake him.
Then I realized that before he did anything to a new captive woman, he might preview for her what she could expect by playing a couple of his favorite DVDs.
The day in Pico Mundo when I lost Stormy will forever be the worst day of my life, although since then each place I go seems in one way or another to be darker than the place before it.
I shivered and could not stop shivering.
On a counter in the spacious bathroom stood several antique apothecary jars with glass stoppers so well made that they seated as tightly as rubber plugs. The jars contained white powders of subtly different consistencies.
I have never considered escaping the weight of my gift through the buoyancy of drugs. I see enough strange things without teasing hallucinations from my mind. And I have witnessed others demonstrate by their addictions that chemically induced euphoria is subject to something quite like the law of gravity: What goes up must eventually come crashing down.
Although I would not be able to tell by smell or by taste which of the powders was cocaine, which heroin or something else, I didn’t doubt they were drugs. For one thing, on a silver tray beside the jars was a short silver straw of the kind with which the more stylish users of coke inhaled it. Also on the tray were a deep-bowled spoon, a half-melted candle, and hypodermic syringes in sealed packages.
Cloyce was such an imposing figure, always with the posture and the carriage of an aristocrat who expected to be noticed and admired, so square-shouldered and muscular, so sharp-eyed and keenly alert, that I wouldn’t have imagined that he might be a heavy user of drugs. But if by some simple act he could, at will, use Tesla’s machine to roll back the years and be as young again as he wished, then perhaps he could also reverse the long-term debilitating effects of heroin and such.
If they could periodically undo all consequences of destructive drug use, maybe all seven of them were junkies. Self-imprisoned in Roseland, determined to escape death but with ever less experience of life to fill their time, they would have every reason—and no reason not—to pop pills, snort coke, or shoot whatever into their veins. Ever less given to travel, the trips they made were courtesy of narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens.
In the medicine cabinet were numerous bottles of prescription drugs. None of them appeared to be for the treatment of any disease or medical condition. They were for recreational purposes.
The chill of which I couldn’t rid myself grew colder, until I felt as if I must have bits of ice in my blood.
Considering that these people were without moral inhibitions, that they expected to live for centuries, that they had divorced themselves from all human sympathies, that they believed there would be no consequences for anything they did, considering that their potential for brutality was not that of mere men and women but that of the heartless gods whom primitive men had first imagined, they would be unspeakably vicious and relentless in pursuit of their darkest desires.
To all that, add the effect of drugs, and their cruelty would make the pitiless predations of vampires seem genteel. By comparison, the people of Roseland were surely greater monsters than the freaks that Kenny called porkers.
What I had imagined the DVDs contained would be a fraction as horrendous as what actually had been recorded on them.
And suddenly I knew that Victoria had lied to me when she said that, although the others assisted Cloyce in acquiring women for his pleasure, they did not share his intere
st in torture and murder. If they didn’t participate in Cloyce’s bloody revelries, it was because they had horrific desires of their own to fulfill.
I had thought the secrets of Roseland were at last known to me, but now I understood that there were more and worse to be uncovered. I wouldn’t search for them. I didn’t need to know. I couldn’t stand to know. Witnessing things demonic too intimately for too long would be to invite madness and worse into my heart.
Stepping out of the bathroom, I thought that I was finished here, but I found myself drawn across the bedroom toward a corner desk on which stood a computer. Intuition cast a line, hooking me and reeling me toward a sheaf of papers lying on the desk.
They were facedown, and when I turned them over, I saw that they were printouts of news stories that Cloyce had gotten off the Internet. Not recent news. They concerned the young fry cook who had brought down the killers committing mass murder at a mall in Pico Mundo, California, more than eighteen months earlier. Forty-one were wounded. Nineteen died. The police said that if the young fry cook hadn’t acted, hundreds would have been killed. The so-called hero did not think himself a hero and wouldn’t talk to the media. The only picture of him in the press reports was his high-school yearbook photo in which he looked foolish and clueless.
Cloyce had thought he needed to know me.
Knowing me, he suspected Victoria’s disappearance must be my handiwork.
Now that I was known and being sought as surely as they were seeking Victoria, freeing the boy and escaping from Roseland would be just this side of impossible.
A hand clasped my shoulder, and I thought I felt my hair turn white. But it wasn’t Cloyce. It was Mr. Hitchcock. He gave me the OK sign, as if to assure me everything would be all right.
I said, “Well, I hope so.”