52
They did not immediately descend on Prosperous. Instead Louis and Angel waited, and they planned.
An apartment on Eastern Promenade in Portland was rented in the name of one of Louis’s shelf companies. At the Great Lost Bear, Dave Evans turned a blind eye as a succession of meetings took place in his office, until eventually he resigned himself to doing his paperwork in a booth by the bar. Prosperous was visited by a pair of Japanese businessmen and their wives, who endeared themselves to everyone they met with their courtesy and enthusiasm. They took a lot of photographs, but then that was to be expected of tourists from the Far East. They even accepted it in good spirits when they were prevented from entering the cemetery that surrounded the old church. The ground was unsafe, they were told, but plans were being put in place to mark a route through the gravestones to the chapel itself. Perhaps next time, if they returned.
And one evening, shortly after Angel and Louis’s arrival in Portland, Ronald Straydeer came to the Great Lost Bear. Ronald had rarely frequented the city’s bars when he did drink, and now that he had given up he had no cause to visit them at all, but Angel and Louis preferred to conduct their business away from their apartment, for the fewer people who knew about it, the better. The meeting with Ronald had been arranged through Rachel Wolfe, as Ronald did not know of any other way to contact the two men whom he sought. He had left a message for her at the hospital where the detective still lay in his coma. Ronald’s short note requested simply that Rachel call him. Rachel had met Ronald on a couple of occasions while she was still living in Scarborough, so she knew who he was, and was aware of the mutual respect that existed between him and her former lover. She asked no questions when he told her that he wanted to be put in touch with Angel and Louis, but simply passed the message on to them. When Angel eventually called, Ronald had said only this: ‘I saw something happen in Prosperous, something bad.’
And Angel knew that they were about to be handed another piece of the puzzle.
Over coffee in the back office, Ronald told Angel and Louis of what he had witnessed: a girl swallowed by the earth in the shadow of an old church while a group of older men and women, accompanied by a pastor and a policeman, stood by and watched. If the two men were surprised by his tale, they did not show it. If they were skeptical, Ronald could detect no trace.
‘What do you think happened to her?’ said Louis.
‘I think something pulled her underground,’ said Ronald.
‘Something?’ said Louis.
It seemed to Ronald to be the first expression of any doubt, but he was mistaken. It came to him that these men had seen and heard things stranger even than this.
‘It’s not enough,’ Louis continued. ‘We need more. We can’t go in blind.’
Ronald had thought on this too. He had ransacked his memories of tribal lore – the Cherokee worship of the cedar tree, based on the belief that the Creator had imbued it with the spirits of those who had perished during the times of eternal night; the Canotila or tree dwellers of the Lakota; the Abenaki’s tale of the creation of man from the bark of ash trees; and the forest-dwelling Mikum-wasus of his own Penobscot people – but he could find no explanation in them for what he had seen. He had a vision of a great tree growing upside down, its leafess crown far below the ground, its trunk extending upward to roots that twitched and groped, breaking through the earth to the air above; and at its heart, surrounded by the husks of dead girls, was an entity that had come from far away, a spirit that had infused the stones of an old church, travelling with it as it crossed land and sea before retreating into the new ground in which the foundations of that church were laid, creating a form for itself from wood and sap. But the question that consumed him most was its nature, for he believed that men created gods as much, if not more, than gods created men. If this old god existed, it did so because there were men and women who permitted it to continue to exist through their beliefs. They fed it, and it, in turn, fed them.
Ronald took from his jacket a sheaf of photocopied pages and laid them before Angel and Louis. The images upon them were undated, but they depicted the carved heads that could be seen both inside and outside the Chapel of the Congregation of Adam Before Eve & Eve Before Adam. He had found the pictures buried in the archives of the Center for Maine History, and then, unbeknownst to himself, had followed a similar research path to the detective, staring at images of the foliate heads to be found on the churches and cathedrals of Western Europe. The English had called it the Green Man, but it predated that name by more than a millennium, and its spirit was older yet. When the first men came it was waiting for them among the trees, and in their minds it formed itself in their image: a human face rendered in wood and leaf.
‘It may be that it looks like this,’ said Ronald.
Angel picked up one of the pictures. It was the face of winter, the bleakest and most hostile of the visages from the Prosperous church. He thought of what Ross had said to them back in Brooklyn. It didn’t matter whether a thing existed or not. What mattered was the trouble caused by those who believed in its existence.
‘You talked of roots,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Ronald. ‘I think roots drew the girl down.’
‘Roots and branches,’ said Angel. ‘Wood.’
‘And what does wood do?’ said Louis.
Angel smiled as he replied.
‘It burns.’
The killings in Asheville had not gone unremarked in Boston, for Garrison Pryor’s people had been following trails similar to Angel and Louis, albeit a little more discreetly. The deaths of William and Zilla Daund simply confirmed what Pryor had begun to suspect: that the attack on the detective had been ordered from the town of Prosperous. This indicated that the decision to leave the Believers’ mark at the scene had also been taken there, which meant, finally, that all of Pryor’s current troubles could be laid at the town’s door.
Prosperous had rarely troubled Pryor until now. It was a community unto itself, and he saw no reason to interfere with it as long as it was discreet in its activities. Now the town’s very insularity – its refusal to recognize its relationship to the larger world and the possible impact of its decisions upon those beyond the town’s boundaries – and the commitment of its protectors to its preservation, at any cost, had disturbed this state of equilibrium.
Prosperous, by its actions, had made retribution inevitable.
The call came through to Angel’s cell phone, its ID hidden. Louis felt that he should have been more surprised when Angel handed the phone to him and he heard the Collector’s voice.
‘Very impressive,’ said the Collector. ‘To be honest, I had wondered if Cambion might not have been right to bet everything on them, but clearly they weren’t quite as accomplished as he believed them to be.’
‘I think killing homeless men had blunted their edge,’ said Louis.
‘Oh, they’ve killed more than homeless men, but I won’t disagree. They swam in a small pool.’
‘How did you know about them?’
‘A process of elimination. I asked questions and found out that Parker had been nosing around in Prosperous’s business. It was possible that Prosperous might not have been involved, but Cambion sealed it for me. He’s long been interested in the town’s pet husband-and-wife killers.’
‘You could just have told us. You could just have given us the name of the town.’
‘But where would be the sport in that? And I know you, Louis, perhaps better than you know yourself. You’re meticulous. You want to fill in the blanks. What did the Daunds give you? Prosperous, or more? Wait, names: they gave you names. You wouldn’t have left without them. Am I correct?’
Louis put down his glass of orange juice. He’d just been settling into the business pages of the Times, but now he recognized that any interest he might have had in the newspaper or, indeed, the orange juice had largely dissipated.
‘A name,’ he conceded. ‘The woman gave me a name.’
‘Hayley Conyer.’
‘Shit.’
‘Oh, she wouldn’t like to hear you swear like that. She’s a god-fearing woman. That’s “god” with a small “g”, incidentally.’
‘You interested in her? Looking for a date?’
‘She’s very old.’
‘Begging your pardon, but I don’t believe you can afford to be particular.’
‘Don’t be facetious. She’s an interesting woman, and Prosperous is a fascinating town. You’ll like it.’
‘Is she on your list?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘So why haven’t you taken her?’
‘Because it’s not just her, but the whole town. And generations of it. To do the sins of Prosperous justice, I’d have to dig up centuries of bones and burn them on a pyre. The whole town would have to be put to the torch, and that’s beyond my capabilities.’
Louis understood.
‘But not beyond ours.’
‘No.’
‘Why should we destroy an entire town?’
‘Because it colluded in what happened to the detective, and if you don’t wipe it from the earth it will continue its traditions into future generations, and those traditions are very, very nasty. Prosperous is a hungry town.’
‘So you want us to do your dirty work for you? Fuck you.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ said the Collector. ‘You’ll enjoy it, I guarantee it. Oh, and pay special attention to that church of theirs. Flames won’t be enough. You’ll have to dig much deeper, and tear it apart with something far stronger.’
Louis sensed that the conversation was coming to a close.
‘Hey, since we’re being all civil and all, you find your friend Cambion?’
The Collector was standing in the premises of Blackthorn, Apothecary. He held a blade in his hands. Upon it was just a hint of blood.
‘I’m afraid he seems to have made his excuses and left before we could become better acquainted.’
‘That’s unfortunate.’
And he meant it.
‘Yes, it is,’ said the Collector, and he meant it too.
Seconds passed.
‘You told me that he lived here with someone else,’ said the Collector.
‘Yeah, big man. Dressed in yellow. Hard to miss.’
‘And no other?’
‘Not that I was aware of.’
‘Hmmm.’
The Collector stared at the tattered, partial wreckage of a human being that lay on a gurney before him. The man had no eyes, no ears, and no tongue. Most of his fingers and toes were also missing. Stitches marked the site of his emasculation. The Collector had killed him as an act of mercy.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I believe I may have discovered Mr Cambion’s missing physician. Be sure to send me a postcard from Prosperous.’
The Collector hung up. Angel looked up at Louis from over the Portland Press Herald.
‘Are you two, like, all buddies now?’
Louis sighed.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes I wish I’d never heard the name Charlie Parker …’