A Time of Torment Read Free Page B

mirror, so that its reflective surface faced the wall. The Collector – let Eldritch think of his son as others did – was strict about this. He had a distrust of mirrors. He had once described them as ‘reflecting eyes’. Eldritch had thought it a superstition, until an incident involving a dead child killer named John Grady. The Collector had retrieved a mirror from Grady’s former home, and, just before he removed it from Eldritch’s presence, he had turned it toward the lawyer. Eldritch had seen his own features and, behind them, those of another: the terrified face of John Grady, who, in death, had somehow sequestered himself in a reflected version of his house, wandering through it with the ghosts of dead children, believing himself to be immune from justice until the Collector proved him wrong.
    But Eldritch knew that the Collector had seen other faces looking back at him from polished surfaces, and one face in particular, for behind the surface of mirrors moved the Buried God, the God of Wasps, the one whom even the Collector feared. If God slept, the Buried God did not. The Buried God watched, and waited to be found.
    Eldritch entered his bedroom and put on a clean shirt. He was going to see a movie, and later he would have a quiet dinner in one of the local bars that remained open. He was rereading Montaigne’s Essays. He found a kind of consolation in them.
    He went downstairs and called from the open back door to say that he was leaving. He received only a slight wave of the hand in reply, but the Collector did not turn around. Even six months before, it would not have been possible for Eldritch to leave the house in this way, because the Collector would not have permitted it. They were being hunted by the detective named Charlie Parker and the men who stood with him, all of them seeking revenge for the death of one of their friends at the Collector’s hands. But a truce of kinds had been declared, and they were safer now, although Eldritch knew that the Collector remained wary of Parker.
    Sometimes , Eldritch thought, I think he fears Parker almost as much as he fears the Buried God .
    Eldritch got in his car and drove onto the road, turning right for Rehoboth. He didn’t even know what movie he’d go see. They all started at the same time, more or less. And they were all the same, more or less. It would be enough just to sit in the darkness and forget, for a while.
    The Collector took another drag on his cigarette, and listened to the sound of his father’s car fading away. There was a new moon in the sky. He tracked the progress of a dying insect, its flight erratic, until it finally fell by the feet of the man who was holding a gun on him.
    ‘I knew you’d come,’ he said, as Charlie Parker emerged from the shadows.

4
    T he Collector had not seen Parker in more than a year, and was astonished by the changes in him. It was not simply the physical alterations wrought by his suffering, although his injuries, and his ongoing recuperation from them, had left him thinner than before, and his hair was speckled with white where the shotgun pellets had torn paths through his scalp. No, this was a man transformed within as well as without, and the unease that the Collector had always sensed in Parker’s presence, a glowing ember of concern, suddenly exploded into flame. Parker had died three times in the hours following the shooting, and each time he had returned, like some biblical prophecy made real. Now he was no longer as he once was: he burned with conviction. The Collector could see it in his eyes, and feel it as surely as a static charge.
    The Collector had never been in as much danger as he was at this moment.
    ‘Are your confederates with you?’ he asked.
    He stared past the detective, expecting to witness the emergence of Angel and Louis, the men who walked with Parker, but the woods remained undisturbed.
    ‘I’m alone.’
    ‘How did you find me?’
    ‘I sniffed you out.’
    The