LITMIR.BIZ

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– barring the hours he spent with Lori or Decker, none of which seemed to coincide with murder nights – he was alone, and without alibi. By the end of the fourth day the case against him began to look very persuasive.

      ‘Enough,’ he told Decker. ‘We’ve done enough.’

      ‘I’d like to go over it all one more time.’

      ‘What’s the use?’ Boone said. ‘I want to get it all finished with.’

      In the past days – and nights – many of the old symptoms, the signs of the sickness he thought he’d been so close to throwing off forever, had returned. He could sleep for no more than minutes at a time before appalling visions threw him into befuddled wakefulness; he couldn’t eat properly; he was trembling from his gut outwards, every minute of the day. He wanted an end to this; wanted to spill the story and be punished.

      ‘Give me a little more time,’ Decker said. ‘If we go to the police now they’ll take you out of my hands. They probably won’t even allow me access to you. You’ll be alone.’

      ‘I already am,’ Boone replied. Since he’d first seen the photographs he’d cut himself off from every contact, even with Lori, fearing his capacity to do harm.

      ‘I’m a monster,’ he said. ‘We both of us know that. We’ve got all the evidence we need.’

      ‘It’s not just a question of evidence.’

      ‘What then?’

      Decker leaned against the window frame, his bulk a burden to him of late.

      ‘I don’t understand you, Boone,’ he said.

      Boone’s gaze moved off from man to sky. There was a wind from the south-east today; scraps of cloud hurried before it. A good life, Boone thought, to be up there, lighter than air. Here everything was heavy; flesh and guilt cracking your spine.

      ‘I’ve spent four years trying to understand your illness, hoping I could cure it. And I thought I was succeeding. Thought there was a chance it would all come clear …’

      He fell silent, in the pit of his failure. Boone was not so immersed in his own agonies he couldn’t see how profoundly the man suffered. But he could do nothing to mitigate that hurt. He just watched the clouds pass, up there in the light, and knew there were only dark times ahead.

      ‘When the police take you …’ Decker murmured, ‘it won’t just be you who’s alone, Boone. I’ll be alone too. You’ll be somebody else’s patient: some criminal psychologist. I won’t have access to you any longer. That’s why I’m asking … Give me a little more time. Let me understand as much as I can before it’s over between us.’

      He’s talking like a lover, Boone vaguely thought; like what’s between us is his life.

      ‘I know you’re in pain,’ Decker went on. ‘So I’ve got medication for you. Pills, to keep the worst of it at bay. Just till we’ve finished –’

      ‘I don’t trust myself,’ Boone said. ‘I could hurt somebody.’

      ‘You won’t,’ Decker replied, with welcome certainty. ‘The drugs’ll keep you subdued through the night. The rest of the time you’ll be with me. You’ll be safe with me.’

      ‘How much longer do you want?’

      ‘A few days, at the most. That’s not so much to ask, is it? I need to know why we failed.’

      The thought of re-treading that bloodied ground was abhorrent, but there was a debt here to be paid. With Decker’s help he’d had a glimpse of new possibilities; he owed the doctor the chance to snatch something from the ruins of that vision.

      ‘Make it quick,’ he said.

      ‘Thank you,’ Decker said. ‘This means a lot to me.’

      ‘And I’ll need the pills.’

      2

      The pills he had. Decker made sure of that. Pills so strong he wasn’t sure he could have named himself correctly once he’d taken them. Pills that made sleep easy, and waking a visit to a half-life he was happy to escape from again. Pills that, within twenty-four hours, he was addicted to.

      Decker’s word was good. When he asked for more they were supplied, and under their soporific influence they went back to the business of the evidence, as the doctor went over, and over again, the details of Boone’s crimes, in the hope of comprehending them. But nothing came clear. All Boone’s increasingly passive mind could recover from these sessions were slurred images of doors he’d slipped through and stairs he’d climbed in the performance of murder. He was less and less aware of Decker, still fighting to salvage something of worth from his patient’s closed mind. All Boone knew now was sleep, and guilt, and the hope, increasingly cherished, of an end to both.

      Only Lori, or rather memories of her, pricked the drugs’ regime. He could hear her voice sometimes, in his inner ear, clear as a bell, repeating words she’d spoken to him in some casual conversation, which he was dredging up from the past. There was nothing of consequence in these phrases; they were perhaps associated with a look he’d treasured, or a touch. Now he could remember neither look nor touch – the drugs had removed so much of his capacity to imagine. All he was left with were these dislocated lines, distressing him not simply because they were spoken as if by somebody at his shoulder, but because they had no context that he could recall. And worse than either, their sound reminded him of the woman he’d loved and would not see again, unless across a courtroom. A woman to whom he had made a promise he’d broken within weeks of his making it. In his wretchedness, his thoughts barely cogent, that broken promise was as monstrous as the crimes in the photographs. It fitted him for Hell.

      Or death. Better death. He was not entirely sure how long had passed since he’d done the deal with Decker exchanging this stupor for a few more days of investigation, but he was certain he had kept his side of the bargain. He was talked out. There was nothing left to say, nor hear. All that remained was to take himself to the law, and confess his crimes, or to do what the state no longer had the power to do, and kill the monster.

      He didn’t dare alert Decker to this plan; he knew the doctor would do all in his power to prevent his patient’s suicide. So he went on playing the quiescent subject one day more. Then, promising Decker he’d be at the office the following morning, he returned home and prepared to kill himself.

      There was another letter from Lori awaiting him, the fourth since he’d absented himself, demanding to know what was wrong. He read it as best his befuddled thoughts would allow, and attempted a reply, but couldn’t make sense of the words he was trying to write. Instead, pocketing the appeal she’d sent to him, he went out into the dusk to look for death.

      3

      The truck he threw himself in front of was unkind. It knocked the breath from him but not the life. Bruised, and bleeding from scrapes and cuts, he was scooped up and taken to hospital. Later, he’d come to understand how all of this was in the scheme of things, and that he’d been denied his death beneath the truck wheels for a purpose. But sitting in the hospital, waiting in a white room till people worse off than he had been attended to, all he could do was curse his bad fortune. Other lives he could take with terrible ease; his own resisted him. Even in this he was divided against himself.

      But that room – though he didn’t know it when he was ushered in – held a promise its plain walls belied. In it he’d hear a name that would with time make a new man of him. At its call he’d go like the monster he was, by night, and meet with the miraculous.

      That name was Midian.

      It and he had much in common, not least that they shared the power to make promises. But while his avowals of eternal love had proved hollow in a matter of weeks, Midian made promises – midnight, like his own, deepest midnight – that even death could not break.

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