The Binding Page 6

  The only other house visible on the street was a hundred yards away. Who called 911 to begin with? Nat wondered, remembering John’s story about Chase Prescott. Who could hear the dog screaming?

  He rang the bell, and it seemed instantly that the double-wide door opened and a figure stood in the half darkness. Nat recognized the general shape of Walter Prescott, though the light was so bad his head was wrapped in a kind of gray murk.

  “Mr. Prescott?”

  “Yes?”

  Prescott’s features slowly swam into view. He stood there, staring at Nat, as if he had no idea who the psychiatrist was but was too afraid to ask him to leave. The old man’s eyes darted uncertainly.

  “It’s Dr. Thayer.”

  Nothing.

  “You asked me to come by?”

  With this, Prescott’s eyes found Nat’s and stared at him in terror.

  “To come by? Whatever for?”

  Nat lowered his head, as if to say, Are you serious, man? “To talk to Becca. Your daughter?”

  Prescott’s lips moved soundlessly, as if he was repeating to himself what Nat had just said, or translating it from some other language. Then he looked up.

  “Oh, Dr. Thayer. Of course. Come in.”

  Prescott pulled the door wide, and it swung back soundlessly. Nat walked into the echoing foyer, whose ceiling was lost above him in the gloom. There were no lights on in the first floor as far as he could see. The gleaming dark hardwoods of the foyer had patches of dusky light playing over them, illumination that came from a small stained glass window to the right of the door in the shape of a diamond. In front of Nat, there was a long hallway, with only a few feet of floorboards visible before they merged into blackness. To his left, a stairway with an elaborately carved railing zigzagged up to the second floor.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Nat said, turning to Prescott.

  Prescott shuffled around Nat in halting steps and reached out to the front door. When he closed it, the resulting sound boomed through the foyer and into the house’s interior, a kind of sonic echo that revealed passageways Nat couldn’t even see in the dimmed light. He’d never heard a house sound so dead, as if there were no furniture, no stuffed leather to reflect the sound waves as they traveled through the darkness.

  Nat heard locks slam shut and the screeching of metal. Prescott was sliding a large metal rod along its sleeve. He forced the head of it through a circular iron latch that was bolted to the black door frame. When Prescott was done, he turned to Nat, his yellow teeth visible.

  “I . . . I just woke up. I was up all night last night.”

  “Everything okay?”

  Prescott was staring at Nat, who had the odd impression that the old man was afraid he was going to attack him, his entire body ready to flinch if Nat made any sudden gesture.

  “We haven’t had visitors here since Chase . . .”

  Nat waited. “Yes. Since Chase . . .”

  “Since Chase . . .”

  Prescott’s lips worked, and the eyes seemed to protrude even farther out of their sockets. He dropped his head quickly and whispered something to himself. It didn’t sound like died, but a word or two full of soft sibilants. Whatever it was, it seemed to end the thought adequately for him, because he immediately headed left toward the stairs.

  “Can we get some light?” Nat said. “Don’t want to fall and break my neck. My insurance sucks.”

  Nat heard, rather than actually witnessed, the old man stop. Then Prescott came back out of the darkness and whispered to Nat, leaning over to make himself heard. “I don’t, usually.” His eyes were pleading.

  “Can I ask why not?”

  “It . . . attracts attention.”

  “From whom?”

  The old man smiled, as if Nat knew the answer. “Whoever might wish this place harm.”

  With that, Prescott went for the stairs, passing beyond one ray of sunlight and disappearing into the darkness except for a pale smudge and the sound of his feet whisking up the few first steps. Nat stumbled after the ghostly figure.

  His foot kicked on the bottom of the stairs, and the darkness rose up in front of his face as he pitched forward. He caught the railing with his right hand before the polished wood knocked out his front teeth, then straightened up, took a deep breath, and slowly brought his next foot up. He reached a wide landing after three slow steps, then turned right with the railing and started up again.

  The darkness slowly thickened as Nat climbed the stairs. He could hear the sound of Prescott’s feet above him and then silence as the old man reached the top and moved off down the second-floor hallway into the interior of the house.

  This is bananas, Nat thought. It was as if the house were weighing on Prescott, as if he were afraid of the wood and glass that made it up.

  Nat hurried after him, suddenly afraid to be left alone in that echoing, malevolent house. When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw a light glowing dimly at the end of the hall. He started down it unsteadily, distance and depth seeming to have been altered in the murkiness. When he took a step, he wasn’t sure if he would land on a plank of wood or drop downward into the basement. As he shuffled on, the light ahead seeming to grow no brighter, Nat felt ahead with his left hand. He could make out . . . things on the walls next to him, but he felt an urgency to get down the hall and only glanced once to his left. Through the dimness he perceived something, a paleness, welling up at him. He stopped and stared, and then the features came clear and it was a face, a chalky face with long, flaccid white cheeks and eyes that seemed blacker than the gloom. The eyes regarded him accusingly, and the face seemed to hang in the air, disembodied, no throat below it and only the hint of a hat perched above the severe brow.

  A painting, of course, a family portrait of some kind, with a beady eye at the center that was not beautiful but recriminating, with some kind of white bonnet above it. Nat moved away uneasily from it and kept on toward the light and the profile of Prescott, head down, lost in his own thoughts.

  Finally, after what seemed like a few minutes but could only realistically have been ten seconds, Nat was standing next to Prescott. The light fixture next to the old man’s face was screwed to the wall at about six feet, the glass yellowed and rimed with dirt.

  “This is Becca’s room.”

  “Well, let’s go in.”

  Prescott shook his head. “I can’t.”

  Nat looked at Prescott. “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “I can’t bear the way she looks at me. She claims she doesn’t know me, Dr. Thayer. If you ever have children, I hope you’ll never experience that look of . . . distaste. I find it unendurable.”

  Prescott reached up and turned a key, then snapped a sliding lock across with a sound that exploded like a rifle shot in the passageway. Then another.

  “Mr. Prescott, you can’t lock your daughter up.”

  “Nobody is locked in here.”

  “Then . . .”

  “These are to keep things out. Protection from outside is what is needed here. Becca is free to go wherever and whenever she wants. She only has to knock.”

  Prescott now seemed to have come fully awake. Genuine emotion worked in the old man’s face. Nat remembered that he was here to treat his daughter for a nasty little mental quirk and decided to cut the guy a break.

  “Okay, then. But I have to ask her about all this.”

  Prescott stood back.

  “You do remember coming by last night, don’t you? I wasn’t dreaming?”

  Prescott laughed thinly, but his eyes were uncertain. “What are you talking about?”

  Nat stared at him. “When you came to the door, you didn’t seem to recognize me.”

  Prescott’s eyes went dead. “Of course I did,” he said. “My mental faculties aren’t in question here.”

  Nat studied him
, then said: “I’ll talk to you after I’ve had a chance to meet Becca. You’ll be here, right?”

  Prescott stared, then leaned in and lowered his voice. “Where else would I go, Doctor? Where else would I go?”

  Prescott suddenly walked away and was swallowed up by the gloom, with only the sound of his shuffling feet coming back to Nat as he traversed the hallway.

  Nat reached for the door. It was unlocked. He pushed it open and entered Becca’s room.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Nat found himself in the typical room of a certain kind of teenage girl. More precisely, the kind who loves books. Rows of them were lined up in a white five-shelf bookcase to Nat’s right, and more were packed onto shelving that lined walls covered in light green wallpaper. There were no posters of movies or bands or anything like that, but there on the pale cream-colored wall opposite him was a painting that might have done by a nineteen-year-old girl: a landscape with dark jagged mountain ranges and what appeared to be a man walking along a fringe of forest and entering the tree line at the bottom of the hills. There were two sconces on the wall, throwing light out into the small room, and two amber-colored candles on the windowsill, unlit. There was an old quilt on the wrought-iron bed and many pillows. Two stuffed animals—a zebra and a bear—looked down at the pillows from the window shelf. If Becca opened the window regularly, the bear and the zebra would have been moved somewhere else. So, like the curtains, the window remained closed.

  The room smelled sweet, as though she’d sprayed rose water into the air sometime before he’d opened the door.

  Becca was sitting at a small antique desk, the right side of her face in half profile. She didn’t move, only stared ahead at the book she was reading.

  “Becca?” Nat said.

  She turned slightly in the chair to look at him. Her eyes were widely spaced, brown, and fixed on Nat with a kind of repressed urgency. Her nose was slightly flat and dented in the middle—like a young Ellen Barkin, Nat thought—her skin pale and her face oval-shaped. Becca was attractive, even if she was almost severe-looking, especially with her brown hair pulled back. She was wearing a white turtleneck and a pearl gray skirt that reached to the knees. She appeared . . . oddly composed, Nat thought. Not what he’d expected.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Nat breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t display the usual psychotic or schizophrenic affect, or appear to be entranced or possessed or zombified either. She was a nineteen-year-old girl whose brothers had committed suicide and whose father had lost himself in grief.

  Nat Thayer’s insta-diagnosis? A girl raised under sad circumstances.

  “I’m Dr. Thayer. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Her eyes seemed to blaze up for a few seconds, then calmly searched his face. She got up and moved to the bed, leaving the desk chair for Nat.

  “Thank you,” he said, sitting down. “I’m not sure if your father—”

  She shook her head.

  “He didn’t mention I was coming?”

  “No,” Becca said. “I mean, he’s not my father.”

  She said this with an unforced conviction, as if she were stating something so obvious that it almost didn’t warrant mentioning.

  “Okay, we can talk about that later,” said Nat. “I came by to see how you were doing. I talk with a lot of people, and I’m able to help some of them.”

  She didn’t ask, Help with what?—she just watched him. Her hands were pressed together and placed on her lap.

  “So,” Nat said, smiling. “How are things with you?”

  Her gaze was steady and deep. “What do you mean?”

  “How are things going? Do you feel happy with . . .” Nat spread his hands and looked around. “Your situation.”

  “How can I be happy?”

  Nat frowned. “Well, we’re happy when we feel that we’re enjoying life, I guess.”

  “But that’s just it,” she said, and her pained smile said, You’ve blundered right into it.

  “Just what?”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “Let’s talk about that.”

  Her eyebrows arched, as if she was going to mention something a bit sad, though she didn’t mean for it to be that way.

  “I can’t enjoy life,” she said quietly, “because I’m dead. I died three weeks ago.”

  Nat felt a chill go through him at the matter-of-factness in her voice. Behind it, he heard the hum in his ears, the echoing low buzz of dark electricity in the house. But what frightened him was the look in Becca’s eyes. A look of serenity.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “That I died?”

  “Ye-es.”

  She brought her right hand up and smothered a laugh. Nat saw that the nails were bitten to the quick, and the pinkie finger was painted with a black cross.

  Why are you horrified by this? her expression seemed to say.

  Nat had come expecting a clinically depressed teenager. But there was something about Becca’s confidence that unnerved him more than he could describe. For a second he believed her, and felt a little lunatic laugh run up his own throat. She thinks she’s met death and it’s nothing to be afraid of, he thought, before getting control of himself.

  “That’s a very serious thing, Becca. Death. Not something people usually find amusing.”

  “Isn’t it, Dr. Thayer?”

  Nat frowned and looked away. “I suppose it can be. I suppose it’s even good to laugh at death. But in this—”

  “Ah!” Becca said. “I see. Because my brothers died, I should be more respectful when talking about it.”

  “I’m not telling you how to feel, Becca.”

  Her eyes were mischievous. “Thank you, Doctor. But, you know, they weren’t my brothers.”

  Now her eyes grew serious.

  “If only they were my brothers. I would’ve loved them. I’ve dreamt about having brothers, to throw me in piles of leaves out on the lawn”—she pointed at the closed curtains—“and to go Christmas caroling with. To defend me.”

  There were tears in her eyes now, and her voice had a slight warble of hysteria in it. Nat watched her, unable to get a word out.

  “But I never had one.”

  Something about Becca’s maturity made Nat trust he didn’t have to play games with her. And the fact that he was seeing her furtively—outside of his office, after the doom-laden visit from her father—tempted him to be unorthodox. It had always been a weakness of his. I’m not saying you’re not concerned about the patients, his mentor, Dr. Francesci, at BU had once told him. It’s just that you like to make it interesting.

  All true. So let’s make it interesting, then, he thought.

  “So tell me, when did you die?” Nat said.

  Becca seemed delighted by this. Her eyes were liquid in the gloom, and her head tilted slightly to the right, as if she was trying to recall, and then stopped. “December twenty-first, 2011.”

  “And what did you die of?”

  Her eyes searched his face. She leaned toward him. “I was murdered,” she whispered.

  Nat felt the chill again. How had he come to be having this conversation with a nineteen-year-old girl? The still depths of her voice, the calmness of those eyes. It was eerie.

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps you can be my detective and find out.”

  “Perhaps I can. What happened on December twenty-first?”

  For the first time, she hesitated. Her lips formed into an unhappy shape, and tears rimmed her eyelids. “I was in my bed. I dreamt I was choking, and when I woke up a man had his hands around my throat. So I believe it would be called manual strangulation.”

  Nat glanced at the turtleneck, and suddenly a memory came floating back to him from his childhood. When he was a young boy, six or seven, his father used to play
a record for him, an old 78 in a cream-colored paper sleeve from a children’s collection called Scary Tales for Littl’uns. It had been handed down from his grandfather, along with the upright record player with the musty webbed speakers that pulled out from the feet of the contraption on thin brown wires. Nat would sit in their basement, his ear close to the dusty speakers, and listen.

  This particular record featured a story told by a male narrator in a rich baritone, about a beautiful woman who wore a black velvet band around her throat. The woman never took the band off, not even when she bathed or slept. She grew up with it around her neck, had her portrait painted with it on—the family had money. When she turned eighteen, she met a man who became her lover, and at first he was intrigued by the velvet necklace, but eventually he grew annoyed by it and asked her to take the band off once so he could see the lovely lines of her ivory throat. She said no. This made the lover angry. As time went on, he became consumed with fury, more and more obsessed by the velvet band. He demanded she remove it. No, the woman told him lovingly. If you love me, ask me anything except this one thing. He insisted; she begged him to forget the velvet band. Finally, driven to a kind of madness, he screamed at her to take it off or he would do it himself. She said something debonair and eerie, something like Very well, my love, and with a smile, she reached up to her neck and pulled the band away.

  And . . . off . . . came . . . her . . . head! shouted the narrator through the hisses and skips of the record needle.

  Nat seemed to hear a faraway echo of the narrator’s voice now, distinctly, in his head.

  He shifted in the chair.

  “But,” he said, composing himself and raising an eyebrow at her, “I can see that you’re breathing. If I feel your pulse, I bet I’ll feel your heart beating.”

  The enigmatic smile again. “Yes. I’m aware that I appear to be living, but I’m telling you that it’s an illusion. I can’t explain how I’m still here when I should be in my grave.”