Page 36
Story: The Angel Maker: A Novel
Katie picked up the bottle of vodka and poured herself a second shot. Then she sipped the liquid, relishing the burn in her throat. There was something grounding about the sensation, and she needed that right now. Her thoughts seemed to be whirling high above her.
“So this man,” she said. “Alan Hobbes. You’re telling me he turned up on the street one day, out of the blue. He rescued Chris and paid for him to go through rehab? All like some kind of…”
She trailed off. The phrase that came most naturally to her felt wrong but what other would do?
“Guardian angel?”
Alderson nodded.
“Yes. Except the way Chris told it, it didn’t seem to be out of the blue. He couldn’t really explain it, but he said it was like Hobbes had known where he would be that day, and that he was going to need help.”
“Like this Hobbes guy knew the future?”
She tried to inflect some sarcasm into her voice, but Alderson didn’t seem to notice.
“Yes.”
“And then what happened?”
“After Chris stopped using, Hobbes gave him a job at his estate. Nothing shady. Shopping. Cleaning. Looking after him. The whole thing seemed more like an excuse for Hobbes to have him around than anything else. Most of the time, the old man just wanted to talk. He was old, and he was dying. I think he just wanted company.”
“What did they talk about?”
Alderson considered that.
“Lots of things. I mean, Chris didn’t always tell me. But he liked Hobbes, especially once he got to know him better. Said he was a good guy. And he was generous too. On top of the salary, there was the apartment. Hobbes owned that, and we were living there rent-free.”
That was certainly very generous, which made Katie wonder exactly what had been in it for Hobbes. As a business relationship, it didn’t make much sense to her.
“Until the other day, you mean,” she said. “Until the two of you went on the run.”
“I suppose.”
“Because someone was watching the apartment.”
“Yes.”
“Who did Chris think that was?”
“He didn’t know. There were just times when he thought he was being followed. Well—times when he was sure of it. And it wasn’t just his imagination either, because I felt it too. And I saw things. There was a car that kept turning up on the street.”
“A red car?” Katie asked quickly.
Alderson shook his head.
She leaned forward. “Was it Michael Hyde he was scared of?”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, I know why you asked about a red car. But the one I saw was big and black. Expensive. That’s why I noticed it in the first place, because it seemed so out of place in the neighborhood.”
She leaned back. Once again, she remembered there hadn’t been any photographs of Chris pinned to the wall in Hyde’s house. It seemed to have been her family Hyde was stalking. But if that was the case, who had been hunting Chris and James Alderson?
Someone who enjoyed doing really bad things to people.
She shivered a little.
“Seems extreme to have gone on the run,” she said.
“It was Hobbes who told him to,” Alderson said. “Chris mentioned it to him when they were talking, and he said the old man went white. Then Hobbes got angry with himself, as if he’d forgotten something important. He told Chris the two of us had to get out of our apartment. We packed up and have been sleeping at my studio for the last few nights.”
Katie sipped the vodka, trying to process what Alderson was telling her. If Hobbes had told Chris to run, perhaps it was something he was mixed up in and nothing to do with her brother at all. But that still left the question of Hobbes’s motivation for helping Chris in the first place. And also what had happened to her brother now.
“What about the book?” she said.
Alderson took a deep breath and then poured himself another drink. Katie waited for him to take a swallow before he continued.
“Right,” he said. “Jesus. So Hobbes had what you might call a collection.”
“Of what?”
“That’s the weird thing. Chris told me Hobbes was a nice guy. Gentle, kind, interesting. He’d been a philosophy professor once, and he had a library full of old books. But there was also something else. Hobbes had collected a lot of stuff connected to this horrible guy. This killer.”
“Jack Lock?”
“Right. I read up on him, and there’s too much to get into there. Let’s just say that Lock was an absolutely awful human being. He claimed God had shown him the future, and then he killed a bunch of kids because it was God’s will. A proper nutcase. Hobbes had a lot of Lock’s writing, along with other things that had belonged to him. Some of it was worth real money, but apparently the most valuable thing of all was a notebook.”
It’s supposed to tell the future.
“And this was what Chris was trying to sell?” Katie said.
“Yeah.”
“He stole it from Hobbes?”
“No.” Alderson shook his head quickly. “Hobbes told him to take it. This was a few days ago. Hobbes said he was dying and wouldn’t be able to employ Chris anymore. He gave Chris instructions on what he needed to do on his last day. He was to come in at a certain time, take the book, disconnect a camera in the room. Then leave and never look back. And that’s exactly what Chris did. He felt like he owed it to him after everything he’d done for him.”
Katie sat in silence for a moment.
“Why did Hobbes want Chris to take the book?”
“I don’t know. Chris thought it was maybe because it was worth a lot of money—that it was kind of severance pay. But we had no idea how to sell it or anything. And then this guy phoned us. He said Hobbes had told him to get in touch about it. And so Chris made him an offer.”
“And this is who Chris went to meet at the café?”
“Yeah. He wouldn’t give his name, and the money was almost too good to be true, so not taking the book along was meant to be an insurance policy. I was supposed to turn up with it once Chris had had a chance to feel him out and see if he was genuine. But then…”
Alderson trailed off helplessly. The guilt he felt over not going with Chris was obvious, and Katie could see him doing the same thing she had done once. Wishing he’d done things differently. Hammering on a door even though he knew it was sealed shut behind him.
“Where’s the book now?” she said.
Alderson nodded toward Chris’s backpack.
She put her glass on the table, then reached down and opened the cords sealing Chris’s bag.
“Hey—” Alderson started.
But she ignored him and began to discard the clothes packed at the top. About halfway down the backpack, her fingers brushed against plastic, and she felt a jolt of electricity. Her hand recoiled as though it had burned her, but then she forced herself to reach in and pull it out.
An old notebook, wrapped in protective plastic.
She turned it around in her hands, her fingertips still tingling slightly wherever they touched it. The covers and spine were made of black leather, and there was a thick wedge of well-preserved pages between them.
The silence in the room began singing slightly.
It’s just a book, she told herself.
Which was true. That was all it was—just a horrible relic from the past. No matter what anyone else chose to believe, it contained nothing more than the deluded justifications of a child killer. And yet the book felt heavier to her than it seemed it should have, as though whatever scrawls of ink had been added to the pages inside had somehow doubled it in weight.
“Have you read it?” she said.
“God, no.”
“What about Chris?”
Alderson shook his head. Then he frowned.
“Are you…?”
Katie looked down at the book.
Without realizing it, her fingers had begun absently toying at the seal.
“No.” She put the book down quickly on the bed beside her. “I’m not interested in it.”
Then she began rummaging through her brother’s backpack again.
“What are you looking for?”
“Chris’s phone.”
“He had that with him.”
Of course he had; she wasn’t thinking. She looked up at Alderson and held out her hand.
“Give me yours.”
He hesitated, but the reluctance on his face only held for a couple of seconds. She could tell that a part of him wanted to take care of this himself, but the fact remained that he had called her. He was the same age as Chris, and right then Katie felt very much like the older sister. The one who took charge and sorted things out.
The one who looked after people.
When he passed her his phone, she flicked through until she found the contact number for Chris and then dialed it. The call went to voice mail.
“His phone is turned off,” she said.
“I already tried.”
“So I’ll send him a message.”
Alderson sounded alarmed. “Don’t read—”
“I’m really not interested.”
She opened up the SMS conversation between Alderson and Chris. Her brother’s phone might have been turned off right now, but if whoever had taken him wanted the book that badly, then perhaps they would switch it back on again at some point.
I have the book, she typed. We need to talk.
She hesitated for a moment.
And then decided to be forceful.
Hurt him and I’ll burn it.
She pressed send and put the phone on the table beside her. Alderson stared at it, as though thinking of asking for it back, then clearly decided it was better to let her handle this.
Katie wished she felt half as confident about that as he did.
“So now what?” he said.
“Now,” she said, “we wait.”
Which is what they did.
Every now and then she checked the phone, but there was no response to the text she’d sent. At one point, Alderson asked if it was safe for him to go outside for a cigarette. She thought about it and decided it probably would be: if anybody was going to find them here, it wouldn’t be because they randomly spotted him skulking outside. He was gone awhile, but she wasn’t worried. She figured he was probably chain-smoking—loading up for the night—and being alone gave her a chance to think. Not just about everything he’d told her, although she was still trying to make sense of that, but about her life up until now, and how the events of the past few days had knocked it off course and brought her here.
To this hotel room. To this situation.
And while she didn’t properly understand those thoughts either, they gave her an odd, incongruous feeling. She was frightened, yes. She was scared for her family. And she also knew she was in real trouble after running from the police. But there was also a strange kind of relief. It was like a lever had been pulled that had unexpectedly released her from rails she had been dutifully following without even realizing.
Like she had a chance to put something right before it went wrong.
Alderson hooked the chain on the door when he came back, for all the good that was likely to do them. Then he lay down on his bed with his hands beneath his head and stared up at the ceiling.
“I just want Chris back,” he said quietly.
“I know.”
“I keep kicking myself. If only I’d done this. If only I’d done that.”
I know the feeling, Katie thought. He sounded so despondent that she wanted to console him, but she knew there was nothing she could say that would make him feel better. The past was sealed away. All you could do was your best in the world it had brought you to.
Which reminded her of something.
“I liked your painting, by the way,” she said.
“My painting?”
“The one of you and Chris. The one made up of lots of smaller paintings. I know it wasn’t quite finished, but I thought it was lovely. And maybe that’s something to cling to, you know? That while you might have made some mistakes along the way, you also made lots of right decisions too.”
He was silent for a time.
“Thank you,” he said finally. “But actually, you’re wrong about one thing. The painting was finished.”
“What about the empty spaces?”
“You got what the picture meant, right?”
“I think so. It was you and Chris in the present, made up of people and places from your pasts. The things that made you both you. All the things that brought you together.”
“That’s right. And do you know what I was going to call it?”
“Unfinished?”
He laughed despite himself.
“No,” he said. “Hope.”
She left it a couple of seconds.
“Go on.”
“Hope that actually you’re more than just that.” He shook his head against his hands. “The strange thing is I actually started the painting before I read about Jack Lock. But when I did, everything there chimed with me. The whole idea of determinism. If every detail of the past is set then everything in the future must be too. It’s the laws of physics. And so life just…” He trailed off.
“Continues down its set track?” she said.
He nodded, still staring at the ceiling.
“When I started the painting, I was planning to fill every single one of those spaces. All the things in the past—good and bad—that brought Chris and me to being happy now. But then I thought: how depressing is that? The idea that everything we are, everything we have, has all just been set out for us. That there’s no free will or room for chance in what happens. That everything has been preordained from the beginning of the universe.”
She didn’t reply.
“And so that’s why I left the empty spaces,” he said. “I wanted to cling on to a belief that things could have been different. That we actually have some kind of power or control over what happens in the future. The ability to change our paths. Because otherwise… I mean. What’s the fucking point?”
Again, she remained silent for a moment. She had no answer to his question. But it raised one of her own. Talking about the painting reminded her that the mystery of Nathaniel Leland had been coded into it, and while that might not have been her mother’s story to tell, perhaps James Alderson was close enough to her brother for it to be his.
“There was a little boy there,” she said. “In Chris’s part of your painting. Nathaniel Leland. Who is he?”
Alderson stared at her for a moment.
And just as he was about to answer, his phone vibrated on the table. They both started at the noise, and then Katie snatched it up quickly. It was a message sent from Chris’s phone, appearing beneath the threat she’d sent earlier.
I will be in touch. Talk to the police and I’ll kill him.
She stared at that for a moment, her heart beating a little harder.
Then the phone vibrated again as a second message arrived directly below.
Burn the book and I’ll kill you too.
Table of Contents
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- Page 36 (Reading here)
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