The Binding (2 page)

Nothing but the boom of the wind outside.

What was John up to? He felt a little fissure of concern. Maybe he should give the guy a—

DDDDDRRROOOOMMMM.

A huge metal tone boomed through the hall, then sank lower. Nat ducked and wildly looked up. He had forgotten how deep and melancholy the clinic bell was. Scared the hell out of him.

Nat hurried back, taking the steps two at a time. He walked into the clinic office, leaned over the desk, and shot a look at the
security monitor. There was a man standing there, waiting outside the door in a dark green slicker and narrow-brimmed hat.

Nat’s heart froze. The man . . . he had no face. Beneath the dark cone of light was a completely featureless expanse of blank skin. A wave of repulsion swept over Nat as he stared, horrified, at the eyeless and mouthless oval.

Then he looked again and let out a long breath.
Jesus Christ, get a hold of yourself.
The visitor was turned away from the camera and the sharp relief of darkness under the brim wasn’t his face but the back of his bald head.

But somehow Nat kept thinking of it as a face—a
no-face
.
He stared at the back of the man’s head, but the guy didn’t move. Rain splashed off the top of his hat and the shoulders of his slicker, danced briefly in the light, and then disappeared. Odd.

Nat walked out of the office and turned left toward the outside door. As uncanny as it was, that image of the faceless man faded as he headed down the darkened hallway. It had been replaced by a thought that disturbed him even more:

Why the hell is he
watching the woods?

CHAPTER TWO

N
at hurried upstairs and turned left again at the corner. The heavy gray metal door was twenty yards in front of him, down a hallway with cupped lights set high in the wall. The man was still out there, the plunging gloom of the forest behind him. He didn’t seem to have moved.

Maybe it really is about his face
, Nat thought.
Maybe he doesn’t want me to see it? Like he’s missing a nose or has a terrible deformity?

Between Nat and his visitor was a fire door with metal-threaded, double-paned security glass, nearly soundproof. No-face wasn’t going to get in unless Nat allowed it. Regulations. He walked quickly to the door and pressed the intercom button.

“How can I help you?”

The man didn’t move. Up close, he was about six foot two, a couple of inches taller than Nat, and his body seemed tense, as if he were on alert.

Nat thumbed the button again. “Sir?” He could hear his voice boom out into the rainy night.

No-face remained staring at the woods. Nat felt a wave of revulsion crawl over his skin. The man was spellbound.

Slowly, Nat approached the safety glass. He felt he was approaching a captive lion at a zoo; he knew the lion couldn’t get to him, but he didn’t quite
believe
it.

The raindrops danced off the man’s shoulders, sparking in the overhead light.

Come on
, Nat thought, and a surge of anger went through him. He knocked firmly on the glass.

The man’s head now rose, and he turned crisply to face the window. Nat felt a shock, as if a wave of heat had passed through the metal-threaded glass and swept over him in the cold hallway.

The visitor was in his sixties and had a long, angular face, dark skin with deep creases running from the edges of his cheekbones to the corners of his mouth, and thin red lips that seemed fixed in a sneer.

Nat met his eyes. They were . . . He searched his brain for a description.
Diseased
, he finally thought. They pushed out slightly as if some internal pressure were forcing them slowly from the sockets. The whites were the color of an old tobacco stain—yellowed, dingy. They were shot through with red veins, and the irises were a flinty blue and intense. He looked like some army colonel who’d gotten a gutful of viruses in the tropics and had come home to die right on this goddamn doorstep. But not from a wasting disease, not malaria or a dose of yellow jack.

No, something that drove you crazy with fits. Lunatic energy.

Nat’s eyes instinctively twitched down to the visitor’s right hand. No weapon there, he was relieved to see. Just a big bare hand dripping with rain.

What had John said again? Reports of what?

Nat went to the intercom. “Can I help you?” rang out on the other side of the door.

The man just stared at him, studying the lines of his face. Then he met Nat’s gaze and mouthed something, two fast words, but through the glass Nat only heard a smear of an urgent bass voice.

“What?” Nat asked.

No-face said it again, baring his teeth on the second word. He looked enraged, or frantic that Nat wouldn’t let him in.

Nat pointed to the left side of the door. “Use the intercom,” he said.

The man’s pencil-thin lips—the only real color in the whole scene framed in the window—opened, and he stepped closer to the window, the dark eyebrows beetling over the sick eyes. Nat took a step back, then jerked his finger down toward the intercom. Finally the guy understood. He reached his right arm over to the bell.

“SHE’S SLEEPING” boomed into the hallway and echoed past Nat into the area upstairs.

Nat waited for more, but the man only drilled him with his gaze.

“Okay . . . ,” Nat said, pressing the button. “What’s your name, sir, and how can I help you?”

The guy looked angry now.

“You can open the door for me,” he said through the intercom.

Nat frowned.
This is my rodeo, Sally.
Protocol said the patient had to tell the psych what the problem was before entering. Especially when people were being murdered in the general vicinity.

“State your name and business, Mr.—?”

The raindrops danced off the man’s shoulders.

“Prescott, Walter Prescott. And I need to talk to you about my daughter.”

Satisfied, Nat reached over and hit the buzzer. Prescott reached out and grabbed the handle. The little rubber gasket around the metal door popped, and a gust of cold air rushed over Nat. As Prescott came forward, Nat stepped back to give him room. The man’s frame blocked out the light for a second in a blot of shadow, and then suddenly he was standing in the hallway, dripping.

Walter Prescott smelled like old medication. Stale but sharp somehow, like a piece of old gauze with a spot of fresh ruby blood at the center.

“Mr. Prescott, is your daughter in need of immediate medical attention?” Nat said. That one was state law.

“Med—?” Prescott said, worry lines bunching on his forehead. “No, no, nothing like that.”

“Okay then. My office is one floor down. After you.”

Nat held his arm out, headwaiter-style, toward the stairs at the end of the hall. It was something you learned your first year of residency. Let the crazies go first. Self-preservation.

Prescott frowned, then started toward the stairs.

“I assure you, Doctor—?”

“Thayer.”

“
Thayer?
”
Prescott stopped. “An old Northam name.”

The voice was more formal, more cultured, than Nat had expected.
He sounds like a historian giving a talk at the local women’s club. The voice doesn’t match the eyes.

Prescott smiled, a hideous thing of yellow teeth.

“I assure you, Dr. Thayer, it’s not me you have to fear.”

“Well, that’s a relief. Straight ahead, please.”

The two men walked single file down the stairs to the basement. Nat pointed right to the little glow outside his office. Prescott walked to it slowly, as if Nat were nosing him into a trap, then entered the office and set his dripping hat on the desk. Nat followed, walking around the desk and looking with distaste at the wool hat. A small puddle was forming around it.

Nat pulled open a drawer and fished out some heavy paper napkins.

“Let me get that,” he said. He wiped the desk clear of water, went back to soak up the last drops, then tossed the napkins in the wastebasket. Then he sat down.

Prescott folded himself into the bare metal chair that sat in front of Nat’s desk but said nothing.

Nat studied him for a moment. “You came out on a hell of a night, Mr. Prescott.”

The old man pursed his lips. “Your family,” he said finally. “You’re one of James Thayer’s sons?”

Nat took a breath, then gave Prescott a look and let it hang there for a second. Were they really going to play Old Yankee Social Call?

“No. Nathaniel’s.”

“Ah.” Prescott’s eyes sought the desktop. “A tragic story.”

In the South, Nat had heard, they will offer condolences four decades after a “tragedy.” In New England, you get one year maximum, and then it becomes town history, and any stranger can discuss it in front of your face as casually as if he were talking about the fat dude on
American Idol
.

Nat sat back in the cheap business chair that the town fathers had provided and gave the situation another couple of beats. He was an employee of the state of Massachusetts. He was contractually obligated to give Walter Prescott a hearing. He didn’t, however, have to exchange family histories.

Prescott merely stared. Now that he was inside and had Nat’s attention, he seemed in no rush for psychiatric outreach. Finally Nat broke the silence.

“But . . . not one we’re here to discuss, is it, Mr. Prescott? Let’s talk about what’s bothering you.”

The look, sickness—and what else?—returned to his eyes.

“It’s my daughter.”

Nat nodded.

“She’s sleeping now. I felt it was safe to come away.”

Prescott talked like someone out of the books Nat had read in high school.
The Scarlet Letter
, maybe? It was interesting enough. He’d gotten his wish of company for the night.

Prescott then stood and went to the window, just staring and saying nothing. The clock on the wall ticked away. Nat steepled his fingers in front of his face and waited.

He was familiar with the problem. Something drives a man like Walter Prescott to Nat’s office. The man goes there full of hope, as if Nat has a cure sitting in the corner. Big old jar of Thayer’s Fear
Killer. Lozenges specially formulated to melt away your childhood terrors. Jumbo shots of Thayer’s Anti-Bad-Mother Medicine. But when the patient arrives, he finds a six-foot dark-haired stranger waiting for him. A man not warm by nature who lets the patient do most of the talking. Then he has to admit the demon is inside him, and he is afraid to speak its name.

Nat’s phone buzzed, startling them both. Nat reached over, gave the screen a quick look—another message from John—and flicked the side switch to silent mode before sticking it in his pocket.

“Your daughter, you were saying?”

“Becca. Yes.”

Nat continued waiting. The ticking of the clock. The sound of rain. Prescott’s view out the office window was of the west corner of the Raitliff Woods where it met Main Street, and a street lamp whose yellow was, Nat saw, vibrating in a gust of wind.

The radiator knocked.

“Becca is the last of my children.”

Nat
mm-hmm
-ed, glancing at the old man’s profile. Prescott’s right eye had a faraway look.

“Perhaps you’ve heard part of the story,” he said, turning to look at Nat with a hint of disdain.

Nat spread his hands wide. “No, Mr. Prescott, honestly I haven’t.”

The man swiveled back to the window, too fast for Nat to see if he was disappointed or relieved.

“My eldest boy was named William. He was in his junior year at Amherst when he came home for the summer six years ago. I could see that he was . . .”

Something seemed to have gotten caught in Prescott’s throat.

“Changed,” he said finally.

Jesus Christ, were they going to do the whole family?

“I thought you came here about Bec—”

“Her story is
their
story,” Prescott said, and there was a note of steeled anguish in his voice.

Nat frowned.
Buenos Aires
, he thought,
Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Buenos . . .

“Changed how?” he said.

“His spirit was gone. He was a rower, rowed lightweight at Amherst. Debate club, treasurer at Chi Psi, he was a joiner.” Prescott dropped his head, as if he were reading off his son’s résumé. “Glee club even,” he said, his voice almost embarrassed.

Is that his way of saying William was gay?
Nat wondered.

“But when he came back that summer, he seemed like he didn’t have an ounce of energy left in him. He walked around the house in a daze. He didn’t have to get a job, but I would have preferred it. Both summers previous he’d worked in a Boston law firm . . .”

Something in his throat again.

“He was losing weight. Wasn’t eating right, or eating at all, and he couldn’t sleep. I’d hear him roaming around the house late at night, just walking from room to room. I even heard him banging his head on the doorpost upstairs one night. Scared me to hell.”

Prescott looked at Nat; then his gaze fell to the floor.

“And then, one day in August, when he should have been getting his things together to go back to school, he came to me in the kitchen . . . and he told me . . .”

Silence. Five more ticks of the clock.

All you can do is wait them out.

Prescott gave Nat a ghastly smile.

“He told me that I wasn’t his father. And that his siblings were not what they appeared to be. We were all imposters.”

A name flitted in the back of Nat’s mind, a French name from his postgrad course in psychoses. But he couldn’t quite remember it.

Prescott paused.
Oh, don’t stop
now,
Nat thought, suddenly interested. Every psychiatrist is a prospector. And what Prescott was describing was gold. Rare, extremely rare.

Prescott continued. “He insisted we weren’t his real family, and what’s more is that he didn’t appear to be shamming. He truly believed that we were strangers to him. I’d catch him studying my face from the side, as if he was
trying
to recognize me, actually wanting me to be his father. You see, William was a dutiful boy, never gave me trouble.”