It isn’t a surprise. She suspected something like this. She touches the track lines and then, gently, kisses him.
“If you’re going to stay here, you’ll need to be clean,” she says.
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“No, Pete, I’m serious. You gave Amelia the wrong food. You gave the gun to Mike Dunleavy. You need to be off that shit.”
Pete can feel the force of her gaze.
He’s ashamed of himself.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. You’re right. You deserve it and Kylie deserves it. This isn’t just about me anymore. I’ll get clean.”
“You need to promise me, Pete.”
“I promise.”
“Chemo isn’t the same thing, but I got through some hard times. I’ll be there to help.”
“Thank you, Rach.”
“What happened last night in East Providence? In Seamus Hogg’s house? You were high?”
“No. Not high, but…”
“What?”
“On the tail end. I just wasn’t thinking when I gave Mike Dunleavy that gun. I’m sorry. He could have killed us.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No.”
She climbs onto his chest and looks him in the eye.
“I couldn’t have done this without you, Pete. I mean that.” She kisses him on the lips.
“It was you, honey, it was you who saved your family,” Pete insists. “You did it. You can do anything.”
“Ha! I’ve felt like such a failure these past few years. Waitressing and all those menial jobs so Marty could study for the bar. Even earlier. You know that when I was coaching Marty for the LSAT, I got one seventy on the practice test. He got one fifty-nine. I had all this potential, Pete. I blew it.”
“You’ve turned everything around, Rach. It’s amazing what you did, getting Kylie back,” Pete tells her.
She shakes her head. It’s a miracle that Kylie is back with them, and you don’t congratulate yourself for a miracle.
Rachel puts her hand on his chest and feels his heart beating. Calm, slow, deliberate. He has three tattoos: an ouroboros serpent, the Marine Corps logo, and the Roman numeral V.
“What’s the V stand for?” she asks.
“Five combat tours.”
“The ouroboros?”
“To remind myself that there ain’t nothing new under the sun. People have survived worse.”
She sighs and kisses him again and feels him stirring underneath her. “It would be nice if this moment could last forever,” Rachel says.
“It will,” Pete replies happily.
No, Rachel thinks, it won’t.
Part Two
The Monster in the Labyrinth
43
A muddy hippie commune in Crete, New York, sometime in the late 1980s. It’s a morning in early fall, gray and drizzling. The community is built around a series of decrepit farm buildings. It’s been a going concern since the summer of 1974, but no one recruited since then has evidently had much competence in animal husbandry, agriculture, or even basic maintenance.
The name of the commune has changed several times over the previous decade and a half. It’s been called the Children of Asterion, the Children of Europa, the Children of Love, and so on. But the name isn’t important. When what takes place that particular fall morning makes it into the New York Daily News the attention-grabbing headline will simply read “Upstate Drug-Sex-Cult Massacre.”
But for the moment all is peaceful.
A toddler maybe around two, a little boy named Moonbeam, is outside with his twin sister, Mushroom, and an assorted bunch of other toddlers, older kids, chickens, and dogs. They are playing in a muddy field behind the barnyard without adult supervision. The kids seem happy enough although they are all damp and dirty.
Inside the barn, a dozen or so young adults are sitting in a circle tripping on Orange Barrel and Clear Light LSD. At the end of the seventies, there would have been thirty or forty people in here, but that was the heyday for this kind of experiment in alternative living, and it was a long time ago. The eighties have a very different vibe and the commune is slowly dying.
The events of today will be its grisly final chapter.
A station wagon pulls up at the edge of the farmyard. An old man and a young man get out. The two men look at each other and put on ski masks. Both men are armed with ugly snub-nosed .38 Saturday-night-special revolvers.
The men walk into the barn and start asking the tripping young adults where Alicia is.
Nobody seems to know where Alicia is or even, indeed, who Alicia is.
“Let’s try the house,” the old man says.
They leave the barn, walk by a rusting tractor, and enter the massive old farmhouse.
The place is a maze, an obstacle course. Mattresses, furniture, clothes, toys, and games are strewn everywhere. The men draw their weapons and clear the rooms on the first and second floors.
The men look up the stairs to the third floor. Somewhere up there, music is playing.
The young man recognizes the album as Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, which was one of Alicia’s favorites.
As they climb the stairs, the music gets louder. They enter a large master bedroom at the bit where “Sister Morphine” transitions into “Dead Flowers.”
They find Alicia, a young blond woman, naked with another young woman and a red-haired man with a ginger beard. They are in a large, old-fashioned four-poster bed. Alicia and the bearded man are tripping. The other woman appears to be deeply asleep.
The old man kneels down next to Alicia, slaps her on the cheek, and tries to get her to respond. “Where are the kids, Alicia?” he asks, but she doesn’t answer.
The young man shakes her and asks her the same thing, but she doesn’t respond to him either.
Eventually he gives up asking.
The old man grabs a pillow and gives it to the young man.
The young man looks at the pillow and shakes his head.
“Only way to be safe,” the old man says. “Lawyers will give them back to her.”
The young man thinks about it for a while, nods, and then, reluctantly at first, but then with growing anger, starts smothering Alicia with the pillow. Alicia struggles, scratching at the young man’s hands, thrashing her legs.
The bearded man comes to and sees what’s happening.
“Hey, man!” he says.
The old man takes out the revolver and shoots the bearded man in the head, killing him instantly.
The young man drops the pillow and takes out his .38.
“Tom?” Alicia gasps.
The old man shoots her in the head too.
Despite all the commotion, the other young woman hasn’t woken up, or perhaps she is pretending to be asleep. The old man shoots her anyway.
Feathers are flying and the sheets are drenched with blood.
The bathroom door opens and a naked young man enters the room holding a roll of toilet paper.
“What’s going on?” he demands.
The old man takes careful aim and shoots the perplexed young man in the chest. It’s a heart shot and it probably kills him, but the old man crosses the room and double taps him in the head anyway.
“Jesus, what a mess,” Tom says.