The Lovers

I flicked on my little Maglite, its beam hooded with masking tape so that it would not attract attention if someone happened to look at the back of the house. Anmael’s mark had been removed from the wall, probably in case reporters or the terminally curious took it upon themselves to take surreptitious photographs of the kitchen. The position in which Mickey Wallace had been found was still marked, and the cheap linoleum was stained with his dried blood. My beam picked up the kitchen cabinets, more modern than those that had been in the house when I lived there, yet also cheaper and flimsier, and the gas stove, now disco

But sometimes it is not places that are haunted, but people. I knew then why they had returned, those remnants of my wife and daughter. I think I had understood from the moment that Wallace’s body was discovered here, and I sensed that he might not have been alone and uncomforted in his final moments, that whatever he had seen, or thought he had seen, while prowling around my property at Scarborough had come to him here in a different form. There was a sense of expectation about the house as I passed through the kitchen, and when I touched the handle on the door my fingertips tingled, as though a small electrical charge had just run through them.

The front door had been taped from the outside, but only the door lock and the security dead bolt held it closed from the inside. I opened them both and left the door slightly ajar. There was no wind, so it stayed as it was. I climbed the stairs and wandered through the empty rooms, a ghost among ghosts, and wherever I stopped I re-created our home in my mind, adding beds and closets, mirrors and pictures, transforming it from what it now was to what it once had been.

There was the shadow of a dressing table against the wall of the bedroom that Susan and I had once shared, and I brought it back, filling its surface with bottles and cosmetics, and a hairbrush with blond strands still caught in its bristles. Our bed returned, two pillows hard against the wall, an imprint of a woman’s back upon them, as though Susan had only just absented herself. A book lay with its cover exposed on the bedsheet: lectures by the poet e. e. cummings. It was Susan’s comfort book, Cummings’s descriptions of his life and work interspersed with a selection of poems, only some of them written by the poet himself. I could almost smell her perfume on the air.

Across the hallway was another, smaller bedroom, and as I watched, the vibrancy of its colors was restored, the dull, scarred walls becoming a clean vista of yellow and cream, like a summer meadow ringed with white flowers. The walls were covered mostly with hand-drawn pictures, although there was one large painting of a circus above the small single bed, and another smaller painting of a girl with a dog that was bigger than she was. The girl’s arms were curled around the dog’s neck, her face buried in its fur, and the dog stared out from the frame as if daring anyone to interfere with its charge. The bright blue sheets on the bed were pulled back, and I could see the outline of a small body against the mattress, and the dent in the pillow where, until seemingly only moments before, a child’s head had rested. The carpet beneath my feet was a deep blue.

This was my home on the night that Susan and Je

I heard a sound from downstairs and stepped into the hallway. The light in our bedroom flickered and then went out. Something shifted inside. I did not stop to see what it was, but I thought I saw, in the shadows, a figure moving, and a hint of scent came to me. I stopped at the top of the stairs, and I heard a sound from behind me, as of small, bare feet ru

I descended.

At the bottom of Z Ahe bottom the stairs, a poinsettia stood upon a small mahogany table, sheltered from drafts by the coatrack. It was the only houseplant that Susan had been able to keep alive, and she was immensely proud of it, checking it daily and being careful to keep it watered just enough so as not to drown it. On the night that they had died, it had been knocked from its stand, and the first thing that I saw when I entered the house was its roots lying amid scattered earth. Now it was as it had always been, cared for and loved. I reached out for it and my fingers passed through its leaves.

There was a man standing in the kitchen, close to the back door. As I watched, he moved forward a step and the moonlight filtering through the window caught his face.

Hansen. His hands were hidden in the pockets of his overcoat.

“You’re a long way from home, Detective,” I said.

“And you couldn’t stay away from yours,” he replied. “Must have changed a lot since then.”

“No,” I said. “It hasn’t changed at all.”

He looked puzzled.

“You’re a strange man. I never understood you.”

“Well, I know now why you never liked me.”

But even as I said the words, I felt that something was wrong. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Hansen didn’t belong here.

A puzzled look came across his face, as if he had just realized the same thing. His body stretched, as though he were feeling a twinge at his back. He opened his mouth and a trickle of blood spilled from one corner. He coughed wetly, and more blood came, a cloud of it that sprayed the wall as he was pushed forward, collapsing to his knees. His right hand fumbled at his pocket as he tried to withdraw his gun, but his strength failed him and he fell flat on his stomach, his eyes half closed, his breathing growing shallower and shallower.

The man who had attacked him stepped over his body. He was in his midtwenties: twenty-six years old, to be exact about it. I knew, because I had hired him. I had worked alongside him in the Great Lost Bear. I had seen his kindness to customers, witnessed his easy way with the line chefs and the waitstaff.

And for all that time, he had kept his true nature hidden.

“Hello, Gary,” I said. “Or do you prefer your other name?”

Gary Maser held the sharpened machete in one hand. In the other was a gun.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They’re just names. I’ve had more of them than you could imagine.”

“You’re deluded,” I said. “Somebody has been whispering lies to you. You’re a nobody. You cut up Jimmy, and you killed Mickey Wallace in that kitchen back there, but that doesn’t make you special. You’re barely human, but that doesn’t mean you’re an angel.”

“Believe that if you like,” he said. “It’s of no consequence.”

But my words sounded hollow to me. I had chosen this place in which to confront what had been hunting me, transforming it in my mind to what it once was, but something in Gary M Z Ang in Garaser seemed to sense that, and respond to it. For an instant, I saw what my father had seen on that night in Pearl River before he pulled the trigger. I saw what had concealed itself within Maser, eating away at him until, at last, there was nothing left of him but an empty shell. His face became a mask, transparent and temporary: behind it, a dark mass moved, old and withered and filled with rage. Shadows curled around it like black smoke, polluting the room, fouling the moonlight, and I knew in my heart that more than my life was at risk here. Whatever torments Maser might inflict upon me in this house, they would be nothing compared with what was to come when my life was ended.