‘That’s right. I’m also prepared to compensate you for your time. You can put the money toward a new truck, perhaps one with a more subdued sense of ornamentation.’
Billy grinned. ‘Seems to me that you might be up to no good here. Are you a bad man?’
Quayle smiled back, and the lights of the bar gleamed like dying stars in the void of his eyes. ‘Trust me when I say that you have no conception.’
Billy’s smile faded.
‘What kind of retaliation did you have in mind?’ he asked.
‘Parker took something from you that you valued. I suggest you do the same to him. A little bird told me that he owns a vintage Mustang. He’s very fond of it. Why not burn it?’
Billy knew the car. He’d seen it around town. Burning it seemed like a very good idea. It wasn’t worth as much as his truck, but Billy was prepared to make allowances for sentimental value.
‘I have a friend outside,’ said Quayle. ‘She’s quite an expert at destruction. Why don’t I introduce you to her? After all, no time like the present …’
100
Leila Patton powered up her laptop.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘These are some of Rackham’s original illustrations for the 1909 edition.’
They were not what Parker had anticipated. He was, he supposed, more familiar with the pictures that featured in young children’s collections of fairy tales, with their bright primary colors, their knights on horseback and wolves in bonnets. Rackham’s work bore no relation to that tradition beyond the thematic. Here the colors were muted, the characters sensual, and an ambience of the ethereal, the sinister, infused all, particularly the depictions of forests and trees, their trunks like hides, their branches the limbs of grasping, emaciated creatures.
‘Impressive, right?’ said Leila.
‘They’re beautiful. Unsettling, but beautiful.’
‘You haven’t even started being unsettled yet.’
She pulled up a Rackham illustration from the tale of ‘Snow-White and Rose-Red,’ in which the two young women of the title stood beside a great fallen tree with twisted, exposed roots, facing a dwarf trapped by the weight of the trunk. The rendering of the scene reminded Parker of Karis Lamb’s gravesite.
‘Okay,’ said Leila, ‘you should be able to find the equivalent illustration in the book.’
Parker flipped through it until he found the correct plate.
‘I’ve got it.’
‘Now compare it to the one on the screen.’
He did. They appeared similar, apart from a slight blemish to the background of the plate in the book, where Rackham had faded the forest into darkness.
‘They look alike.’
‘Hold on.’
Leila went to a closet beside the piano and removed a magnifying glass from one of the drawers. Parker suddenly felt very old. Apparently he now needed a magnifying glass to identify what a twentysomething could see with the naked eye. His despair obviously showed on his face, because Leila told him not to feel too bad.
‘I had trouble spotting some of them at the start. And they also change. Like I said, it’s been a while since I opened the book.’
Parker took the glass and held it over the blemish. Staring back at him from the depths of the forest was the mutilated child glimpsed back in Portland. Its face was half hidden, and only a suggestion of its body was visible in the murk, but it was the same figure.
‘I’ve checked so many versions of the plate on the Internet,’ said Leila. ‘That … thing is not in any of the others, only this one.’
Parker looked at the illustration again. It seemed that more of the child was visible now – he could see its head more clearly, and part of its right leg – except its position had altered, and it was now closer to the fallen tree before it.
Leila was watching him.
‘You can say it,’ she said.
‘It gives the impression of movement.’
‘That’s a very noncommittal way of putting it.’
‘It could be that I find the alternative unappealing.’
Leila took the glass from him and used it to peer at the plate, although she remained careful not to touch the book itself. Parker regarded the figure once more before turning the page and hiding it from view.
‘And you never discussed this with anyone else?’ he said. ‘You never felt the urge to seek help?’
‘With what, the illustrations in a book? I don’t think you can dial 911 for a literary emergency.’ She was smiling, but Parker could tell she was close to tears. The secrets she’d kept hidden were slowly being revealed, and the effect was like lancing a boil. ‘And I’ve been scared for so long. I was afraid I was going insane, and that was bad, but then I realized I wasn’t, which was worse. I wish I’d never agreed to keep the book.’
‘Why did you?’
‘Because Karis said that if Vernay managed to track her down, she didn’t want him to get everything. I think she hoped the book might be a way of bargaining, if worse came to worst. You know: it would be returned to Vernay if he let Karis and the baby go.
‘And because I thought it was just a book, an ordinary book. It didn’t matter what some child-fucker believed. It was a collection of fairy tales with a couple of extra pages sewn in, and they were blank. If having it stolen screwed up his life, then good.
‘But to be safe, Karis also asked Dobey to find her a decoy copy. She didn’t put it that way, and she didn’t tell him why she wanted it. She just needed him to track down a similar edition, and quickly, so he did. I remember it was couriered overnight. He cut some deal for it, but it was still expensive. Karis paid, though. She insisted on it.’
‘And she took the decoy with her when she left Cadillac?’
‘Yes, although Dobey thought she took both versions. He would never have agreed to my holding on to the original, and I don’t think he’d have wanted to hold on to it himself either. But then, he knew more about Vernay than I did.’
Parker was turning the pages of the book before him while Leila spoke.
‘Does every plate contain an extra element?’
‘Most of them.’
‘Show me.’
Leila did. She had to take a break to help her mother to the bathroom, and afterward to prepare a fresh pot of tea, but by the end Parker was under no illusions about the strangeness of the book. Hidden among Rackham’s illustrations were hybrid beings reminiscent of the nightmares tempting St Anthony in the works of Grünewald and Rosa; of the tormenters in Signorelli’s Damned Cast into Hell; of the haunters in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
And as the intruders in the plates took form beneath the magnifier, Parker began to feel this might be no coincidence, and that these earlier artists had stumbled upon elemental images buried deep in the human consciousness, a shared memory of that which might seek to hunt us in the final darkness, a glimpse of all that observed humanity from behind the glass, waiting to devour.
But the beasts that moved through the pages of the book in Parker’s hands were more imminent than any visions captured by artists. They were not simulacra, but neither were they real; rather, they represented the potential usurpation of one reality, its slow infection by another. Parker was very glad Leila Patton had given him gloves with which to hold the book; he also believed she was wise to have hidden it away, and not to have looked at it too often. To expose oneself to it was to risk contamination – and ultimately, perhaps, one’s own corruption.
But the book held one more surprise for Parker, and an unwelcome one. The illustration accompanying ‘The White Snake’ showed a servant in conversation with a fish, a forest of white birch as the backdrop. From among the trees, a blurred face of yellow and black stared out at them.
‘Uh, that’s new,’ said Leila. ‘What’s wrong with its face?’
Parker positioned the magnifying glass, but already he had a premonition of the answer. It was a head formed entirely of insects.
‘Wasps,’ said Parker.
And the God of Wasps appeared to blink.
In the garden of her grandparents’ home, Sam spoke to Jennifer.
‘What is Daddy searching for?’
the child
‘No, there’s more.’
what do you see?