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He s old, thought Bowen, older than he looks, older than any of us could have
imagined. He has to concentrate to hold himself together. That s why his skin
is the way it is, why he walks so slowly, why he keeps himself apart. He has
to struggle to maintain this form. He s not human. He is
Bowen took a step back as the figure reconstituted itself, until once again he
was staring at a man in coveralls with blood on his gloved hands.
What s wrong? asked Kittim, and even in his confusion and fear Bowen knew
better than to answer truthfully. In fact, he couldn t have told the truth
even if he wanted to because his mind was doing some pretty rapid work to
shore up his threatened sanity and now he wasn t sure what the truth was.
Kittim couldn t have shimmered. He couldn t have changed. He couldn t be what
Bowen had thought, for an instant, he might be: a thing dark and winged, like
a foul, mutated bird.
It s nothing, said Bowen. He stared dumbly at the gun in his hand, then put
it away.
Then let me get back to work, said Kittim, and the last thing Bowen saw was
the fading hope in the eyes of the young man on the ground before Kittim s
thin form blocked him from view.
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Bowen brushed past Carlyle on his way back to the car.
Hey! Carlyle reached out to grasp him, then drew back and allowed his hand
to fall as he saw Bowen s face.
Your eyes, he said. What happened to your eyes?
But Bowen didn t reply. Later, he would tell Carlyle what he had seen, or what
he thought he had seen, and in the aftermath of what was to come Carlyle would
tell the investigators. But for now Bowen kept it to himself and his face
registered no emotion as he drove away, not even when he stared into the
rearview mirror and saw that the capillaries in his eyeballs had burst, his
pupils now black holes at the center of red pools of blood.
Far to the north, Cyrus Nairn retreated back into the darkness of his cell. He
was happier here than outside, mingling with the others. They didn t
understand him, couldn t understand him. Dumb: that was the word a whole lot
of people had used about Cyrus throughout his life. Dumb. Dummy. Mute. Schizo.
Cyrus didn t care too much about what they said. He knew that he was smart. He
also, deep down inside, suspected that he was crazy.
Cyrus had been abandoned by his mother at nine and tormented by his stepfather
until he was finally incarcerated for the first time at the age of seventeen.
He could still recall some details about his mother: not love or
tenderness no, never that but the look in her eyes as she grew to despise what
she had brought into the world in the course of a difficult, complicated birth
had remained with him. The boy was born hunched, unable to stand fully
upright; his knees buckled as if he were laboring constantly beneath some
unseen weight. His forehead was too large, overshadowing dark eyes, the irises
nearly black. He had a flattened nose with elongated nostrils, and a small,
rounded chin. His mouth was very full, the upper lip overhanging the lower,
and it remained slightly open even in repose, making Cyrus appear always to be
on the verge of biting.
And he was strong. There was thick muscle on his arms and shoulders and chest,
tapering down to a narrow waist before exploding again at his buttocks and
thighs. His strength had been his salvation; had he been weaker, prison would
have broken him long before now.
The first sentence was handed down for aggravated burglary after he had
entered the house of a woman in Houlton, armed with a homemade knife. The
woman had locked herself in her room and called the cops, and they d caught
Cyrus as he tried to escape through a bathroom window. Through signing, Cyrus
had told them that he was just looking for money to buy beer, and they d
believed him. He d still pulled three years, though, and served eighteen
months.
It was in the course of an examination by the prison psychiatrist that he was
first diagnosed as schizophrenic, exhibiting what the psychiatrist told him
were classic positive symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, strange patterns
of thinking and self-expression, hearing voices. Cyrus had nodded along as all
of this was explained to him through a signer, although he could hear
perfectly well. He simply chose not to reveal the fact, much as it seemed that
he had chosen, one night a long, long time before, no longer to speak.
Or perhaps the choice had been made for him. Cyrus was never entirely sure.
He was prescribed medication, the so-called first-generation anti-psychotics,
but he hated their debilitating side effects and quickly learned to disguise
the fact that he was no longer taking them. But more than the side effects,
Cyrus hated the loneliness that came with the drugs. He despised the silence.
When the voices resumed, he embraced them and welcomed them as old friends now
returned from some faraway place with strange new tales to tell. When he was
eventually released, he could barely hear the standard patter of the guard
processing him over the clamor of the voices, excited at the prospect of
freedom and the resumption of the plans they had so carefully rehearsed for so
long.
Because for Cyrus, the Houlton affair had been a failure on two accounts: In
the first place, he d been caught. In the second, he hadn t gone into the
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house for money.
He d gone in for the woman.
Cyrus Nairn lived in a small cabin on a patch of land that his mother s family
had owned, close by the Androscoggin River, about ten miles south of Wilton.
In the old days, people used to store fruit and vegetables in hollows dug into
the bank, where the temperature would keep them fresh long after they d been
plucked or dug up. Cyrus had found these old hollows and strengthened them,
then disguised the entrances using bushes and timber. The hollows had served
as his retreat from the world when he was a boy. Sometimes, it almost seemed
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