A Cup Full of Midnight (30 page)

Getting tired of Angel Face? Looking for someone younger and less jaded?

Had Chase Eddington received a letter? Or Benjy Savales?

If there was a letter, it was probably at Keating’s. I thought about the Great Brain Fuck. Maybe Keating hadn’t been as sorry as he claimed. Maybe he and Razor had never stopped playing their nasty little game.

I looped around to the north of town and the small Nashville suburb known as Madison. From there, I turned onto a two-lane highway that was once an old bison trail, past the Tennessee Christian Medical Center, and then onto the smaller road that led past the hospital and to the tree-lined suburban street where Alan Keating’s gray brick house huddled against a backdrop of oak and evergreen. A fat, tinseled fir tree draped with multicolored lights peeked through a gap in the living room curtains.

No sign of his Skylark.

I climbed out of the truck and glanced around. The street was empty, the neighbors driven indoors by the cold. A wooden privacy fence surrounded the backyard. I got out and tried the gate. Locked.

I didn’t peg Keating for an animal person. Both times I’d seen him, his suits had been spotless, not so much as a stray cat hair to tarnish his image. Still, I tapped on the gate and listened. No barking, yapping, or snarling, so after another quick glance around, I scaled the fence and dropped into the yard on the other side.

Even in the dead of winter, Keating’s backyard was as kempt as the rest of him. The grass was brown but trimmed, and the flower-beds were covered. The back door was a heavy wooden one with three vertical squares of leaded glass. No sign of an alarm.

Flexing my fingers inside my gloves, I thought about the consequences of what I was about to do. Jail, maybe. The loss of my license. Then I thought of Byron lying in a hospital bed, of Keating’s connection to Razor, the Great Brain Fuck, and the empty secret compartment in Razor’s closet.

I took a deep breath and punched through the glass with my gloved fist. It was no harder than breaking a cinder block in half at the dojang. Inside, shards of glass tinkled to the floor.

Careful not to cut myself on the jagged edges, I reached through and unlocked the door. Keating would know he’d had a break-in. But I was willing to bet he wouldn’t call the cops.

The house, like his yard and his office, was impeccable. Dark leather furniture, gleaming glass-topped coffee table, polished wood bookcase filled with leather-bound books, and beside it a wooden sculpture of what might have been an eagle. Lots of swooping curves, abstract paintings, and high-priced free-form sculptures.

The kitchen was open and airy, with walnut cabinets and an unopened bottle of Dom Pérignon on the counter.

The guest room bed was made but rumpled, as if someone had been lying on top of the covers. Byron’s jacket hung over the bedpost, and a set of hand weights and an exercise band lay on the floor beside the bed. The room stank of bile, and a pool of vomit oozed into the carpet on the floor at the end of the bed. A few half-dissolved tablets were identifiable in the puddle. A few feet away was an envelope addressed to Byron and forwarded to Keating’s house. I picked the envelope up by one corner and looked at the handwriting, the same sprawling script that had been on Josh’s. There was no return address, and the postmark was dated less than a week ago.

A week ago, Razor was already dead.

There was no letter inside. Maybe Keating had taken it. I put the envelope back where I’d found it and moved on to Keating’s study.

Bookshelves lined three of the walls. More psychology texts, philosophy, religion, sociology, anthropology, history. There were books by Steven Hawking and Khalil Gibran. Like my brother, Keating apparently had no use for fiction.

A teakwood desk held a PC and printer on one side and a stack of leather-bound notebooks on the other. I picked one up. It said,
The Parker Principle:An Experiment in Human Emotion.

There were eleven volumes in which Razor had recorded his experiment. Compelled, perhaps, by the same pathological need to preserve or justify that had made the Nazis put their crimes in writing. Beginning with the exercises in manipulation and betrayal he and Keating had begun in college, Razor had filled three volumes with raw notes for his thesis, then carried his obsession off-campus and continued to dip out his cup full of midnight.

Five months after his expulsion, Razor began Volume IV of the Great Brain Fuck.

Today, I met a man who calls himself Barnabus, a narcissistic personality with a coffin in his bedroom and custom-made porcelain fangs. He is a living caricature, fascinated by Darkness and enthralled by my vampire persona. I’m not sure there are any limits to the things I can persuade him to do . . .

Between entries, he delved into the psychology of his “subjects” in language that slipped from overblown to conversational to psychobabble and back again. I skipped ahead.

I’ve assembled a small collection of misfits. Some are very young—pimple-faced Dark Knight and the porcine Absinthe—but that’s for the best. Young minds are very pliable, and these have such fragile egos, I believe I could tell them anything, and they would believe it. As for Medea the psychotic and Barnabus the sociopath, I find them fascinating, all id and no superego to speak of. I know I’m not a vampire in the traditional sense, but if the essence of the vampire is his ability to peer into men’s souls and bend them to his will, perhaps I am a vampire after all . . .

And later:

. . . I believe Absinthe would die for me if I asked her to. There is something precious and fragile in her devotion to me. I adore her for it, but I also can’t help despising her weakness. She brought me a gift today, though she doesn’t know it, a beautiful dark-haired boy named Benjy Savales.

I looked up from the book and took a deep breath. I’d promised Benjy’s mother I would find out what had happened to him, but was it better to know, beyond all doubt, that there was no hope? If it were my son, would I prefer to tell myself he’d been taken by a kindly couple and was living a good life in a cozy home a couple hundred miles away?

Hell, no. I’d want to know.

I looked back at the book. Skipped ahead again until I found November third, the day Benjy Savales walked off the edge of the earth.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

T
he journal read:

Barnabus has grown into his fangs. I knew he would be the first, but it was Benjy’s fault. His imbecile mother convinced him to end our relationship. I called and told him I had a few of his things and would like him to come and get them, intending to get him here and then persuade him to reconsider. But he was completely unreasonable and threatened to have me arrested if I ever came near him again.

Naturally, this was not acceptable.

Not acceptable. The same words he’d used just before persuading Barnabus and Dark Knight to rape Judith Hewitt.

We were all there: Barnabus, Absinthe, Dark Knight, Medea. When Benjy started for the door, I cried out, “Stop him!” Barnabus picked up the crystal ball and bashed Benjy in the back of the head with it. There was hardly any blood, but Benjy dropped like a sack of wet sand and didn’t move.

He was still breathing, but at that point, it no longer mattered. Once Barnabus had hit him, we had to kill him. So I ordered Barnabus to cover Benjy’s face with one of the sofa pillows. He held it there until Benjy was finally dead.

Absinthe began to blubber and pound Barnabus with her fat fists. Dark Knight and I had to hold her down with our hands over her mouth until the deed was done. For the next half hour, all she did was weep. I was terribly disappointed in her.

I thought of the marks on Absinthe’s doorjamb. Too clumsy for Elgin. Razor and Dark Knight were dead. But Barnabus and Medea had reason to silence Absinthe. A broken Absinthe confessing to murder was no threat to them; an Absinthe free of the law and free of the coterie was another story. No wonder Barnabus hadn’t been surprised by the news of Dark Knight’s death. He’d seen the bodies when he followed Absinthe to the Knights’ duplex.

I felt a stab of pride and pity for Absinthe. She’d tried to save Benjy, and that was something. But the feeling was tempered by the knowledge that she hadn’t gone to the police. Or even extricated herself from Razor’s murderous little group. No wonder she’d felt guilty enough to confess to Razor’s murder.

The journal went on:

I have mixed feelings about all of this. Regret, because after all, I did care for Benjy, in my way. Chagrin at Barnabus because his actions put us all in danger and deprived me of the chance to win back Benjy’s loyalty. And, of course, elation. Because, on my word alone, one human being has actually killed another. The Ultimate Expression of the Parker Principle. Only one thing dims my excitement: there was hardly any challenge to it at all. Like a scorpion that is bound to sting, Barnabus was destined to kill. It was only a question of who and when.

To make someone who is not a murderer at heart kill—now, that would be a wonder.

I sank down on the bed, the journal’s leather cover clammy in my sweating hands. All the times Josh had crept out to see Razor. They might have killed him any time, just for the fun of it. I forced myself to read the rest.

I told the others we were all guilty of Benjy’s death—that the police would never believe we had not all been a part of it. I told them this was a fortuitous accident, as I had recently learned a new ritual, one that would show their commitment to Darkness and Undeath, honor Benjy, and bind us all to one another.

We all sliced our palms and squeezed a small amount of blood into the dragon claw goblet. We added some of Benjy’s blood to the mixture. Then I invented the Ritual of Transformation to the next level of Consciousness, what I called the Second Ring.

Absinthe balked until I reminded her that, in the eyes of the law, we were all culpable in Benjy’s death and that if she ever spoke of this, we would all swear that it was she who had murdered Benjy. That shut her up. She drank from the communal cup, and the thing was done, though, of course, I could not allow her to be Transformed. Not after such treachery.

They’d wrapped the body in garbage bags and carried it out to Barnabus’s hearse. Then, while Absinthe and Medea took Benjy’s car to the Greyhound station, the men bought garden tools at Walmart and cruised the outskirts of the city, looking for the perfect place. It took them most of the night to find what they were looking for, an out-of-the-way cemetery with a freshly dug grave. They buried Benjy in the grave and replaced the sod so no one would notice. Razor thought it was a fine joke. He even wrote down the name on the tombstone.

I committed the name to memory, then found the rest of what I was looking for.

Last week, Chase’s parents forced him to sever all ties with me. This was unacceptable, as, by controlling his life, they were trying to control mine as well. Chase is mine, now and forever, and I crafted a letter telling him so and inviting him to spend eternity with me. Yesterday, he opened up his veins, proof that my influence over him was stronger even than that most basic human instinct—survival. I didn’t expect it to work. I just wanted to see what he would do. Maybe it’s true what they say. We really do have the power to cloud men’s minds.

Ten more pages. Twenty. When I got to the part where he talked about Josh, I had to steady the book against my stomach. I skimmed through Judith Hewitt’s rape, pausing only long enough to verify with a sense of relief that Razor’s version meshed with Josh’s.

. . . I am disappointed in Joshua. I sent him The Letter over a month ago and he still fails to act on it. Maybe my success with Chase made me overconfident . . . Perhaps I should send another.

Blood hammered in my ears, and my chest felt tight.

We’d come so close to losing Josh.

Eyes burning, I flipped forward and looked at the date on the final entry, a rambling treatise about the beauty of death and the hypocrisy of love. It had been written the morning of Razor’s murder.

So how had the notebooks ended up in Alan Keating’s study?

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

T
ennessee Christian Medical Center was less than a mile from Keating’s house, which had probably been a lucky thing for Byron.

I passed under an awning shaped like an artist’s palette into a circular lobby with a round marble fountain in the middle. The receptionist’s desk was off to one side, and behind the desk, a woman with a graying Prince Valiant haircut looked up and smiled. I asked for Byron’s room number, and she tapped something into her computer and said, “He’s still in Critical Care. I’m afraid only family is allowed in the room, but you’re welcome to wait in the visitor’s area.”

I followed the signs until I found the Critical Care waiting room, a cramped ‘L’ with floral-patterned upholstered chairs along three walls and a soft drink machine hulked in one corner. Beside the drink machine, a television set mounted on wall brackets played a black-and-white western with the sound turned off.

Keating slumped in a green vinyl recliner that looked out of place among the florals. His tie was askew, his suit rumpled, as if he’d slept in it. It was the first time since I’d met him that he wasn’t pressed and starched.

He looked up at me with tired eyes but didn’t extend his hand. “Mr. McKean. Come to pay your respects?”

“How is he?”

“Stable. If he keeps improving, they’ll move him to the psych ward later this afternoon.” He rubbed his chin, where a sooty stubble had begun to sprout. “Guess he needs a real psychologist.”

“I thought you were a real psychologist.”

He looked down at his tie, tugged it straight. “So did I.”

“How’d you get Child Services to let you have him, anyway?”

His lips quirked upward in a sardonic smile. “He’s not a ward of the State. I contacted his mother and asked if he could stay with me. She was happy to be rid of him.”

“Where is she now?”

“Who knows? She put in an appearance earlier. Now I imagine she’s in some bar crying crocodile tears to some brawny bruiser who will buy her a beer and smack her around.”