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By the time the streetlights came on, the inside of Herbert’s car had time to grow cold. It was a novelty, feeling the chill work its way up from his fingers and the tip of his nose to burrow down into the softer, fleshier parts of the body. He had not been cold for a very long time; the few months he’d spent in Arizona after the trial burned into his memory as dry, unbearable heat, even within the thick walls of prison, though worse on the concrete-lined courtyard. It was far from the worst complaint Herbert had had about that institution, but now, as he took a sip of his already-cold, stale coffee from a gas station, he tried to summon some of that scorch. It would be another half hour before Cain showed up.
Routine was what betrayed Cain, in the end. Divorces, publicly available court proceedings. Four of them, so far—no new marriage to note, Herbert had observed with an undue amount of spite from a public library in Kansas. He had felt grimy after three hours on the bus, a mildewed, dirty scent clinging to his shirt from the inadequate dryer at the last laundromat, but the knowledge that Cain had not found the idyllic white picket fence he had been chasing after warmed him through. Cain had followed his instincts, trailing after women time and time again, with no clear idea on the follow-through; though, it seemed that without Herbert’s intervention, Cain had tried to make the flings official, thus leaving a clean trail of breadcrumbs for Herbert to follow.
It could be that there was already another woman that Cain was orbiting, but Herbert doubted it. The house Herbert had spent the past week parked across the street from had only a single vehicle stop by it; only one figure ever exited the car. But the car was not due to arrive for another hour—Herbert confirmed this with a glance at his watch, still ticking after so many years. He’d written it off during the stint in Arizona, but the private prison he moved to after had been far more lax with personal affects. It was a wonder what a little bribe could provide: a clean cell, access to research materials, some amount of personal dignity. But either way, it was only nearing eight p.m.; though this far north, the sun had set a long time ago, Cain was not due home yet. Routine: Cain left the office at five p.m. sharp, then spent at least another two hours at the dingy, deserted bar that Herbert had not dared to step foot in, and then loitered in the parking lot, likely to ostensibly sober up. Dan had used to be a good driver. Careful to the point of paranoia, the Chevrolet crawled along the muddy road of Christchurch at a snail’s pace to not strain its ancient suspension with the mud and rocks. It had used to drive Herbert mad. But Cain had racked up three DUIs since his last divorce the previous fall, public records told Herbert.
The house, besides, bore no feminine touches. Herbert was no expert in the matter of aesthetics, but even he could tell that it was a means of survival barely worthy of being called a bachelor pad. It was a one-story, squat thing with plastic siding that grinned crookedly in rows of dirty cream laminate. No white picket fence in sight. Even the front yard was little more than a littered dirt patch, now covered in a thin, crispy sheet of March frost, like mold blooming on cheese. Located in what could barely be called suburbia of a small town, it sat next to an undeveloped plot with a blindingly brightly lit banner that demanded passersby repent. Hell was real, apparently. Even through the closed windows, Herbert could hear it flapping in the wind.
No, Herbert was quite sure, Cain was alone; it seemed as if for all his complaints about Herbert being the reason for his romantic and social failures, Cain could do no better on his own. The thought sent a thrill of sardonic joy through him, but it was not quite enough to warm Herbert's chilled fingers. It was shaping up to be another miserable night. He'd better not spend it in the car again.
With another gust of wind, the banner flapped aggressively, the unsecured cord cleaning against the metal frame like the tolling of a church bell. Herbert wrinkled his nose on instinct, took another sip of his coffee to chase the sour disapproval from his mouth. Hell was real, maybe, but Herbert would not find himself in it if he simply did not die. He needed just one last push; he just needed another pair of hands to unearth what he’d buried, to complete the work.
This time, Herbert would not let his own optimism and tenacity blind him. He would be prepared, tactical. He now knew just what kind of tool Cain was, what he was capable of and what was best left out of his hands. The job was relatively simple, but it would go far quicker with another pair of hands to help him—hands that Herbet could dirty rather than this own, both in the metaphorical and literal senses. All those years back, while Cain had been busy with his women and his angsting, Herbert had stayed busy. A new strain, a different avenue, something that haunted him every restless night for the past thirteen years. When he laid awake In the dark of his cell, listening to the clanging of the pipes in the wall, he would imagine the notes, buried in their lockbox coffins like the faithful awaiting the rapture, biding their time in the dark just like he was. Buried like the perfect subjects, untouched by rot and degradation, buried like seeds. Now was the time to unearth them; Cain would serve as a midwife to his new work.
That Cain was familiar with the Christchurch house was a principal advantage, and so was his familiarity with the theory and practical application of Herbert's kind of work; working with Phillips had required much instruction and correction of misunderstandings, for which Herbert had found himself ill-tempered. But that was just it: Cain was a good assistant, and a good assistant is what Herbert required. Herbert had no need for Cain-the-man. Even looking through the list of divorces (and so, through the marriages that preceded them) and seeing flashes of those sharp features around town aroused no feelings in Herbert, other than the same thrum of impatience to get started on what acutally mattered—the work—that had haunted him since childhood. It was an exceptionally comfortable state to find himself in. Cain had no more hold on him: not as a soft spot, tender to the touch like a bruise, not as a brilliant, beautiful thrill, not even as a loathed adversary. The anger and hurt had evaporated a long time ago, and if Herbert was still given to an occasional fit of gleeful shadenfreude at Cain's misfortune... Well, Herbert had always had a petty streak. It would bear no impact on his treatment of Cain.
He would use any advantage he had to get Cain to understand, to join him again. He did not anticipate this to be difficult: Cain was currently employed as a filing clerk at a logistics company, a job so dull and dead-end that Cain would not cling to it. From his past week of observation, Herbert doubted whether Cain had anyone close to him, other than possibly the bartender at the dive he'd frequent. No, Herbert thought; this was a life so small as to be claustrophobic, bleak and numbing. Although Cain had been given to fits of prolonged, agonal fits of melancholia, this had never impeded his distractability. A new woman, a new patient, a new opportunity (and, sometimes, all three combined into one) would draw his eye like a shiny trinket to a magpie. Cain ought to jump at this opportunity. If not, Herbert was prepared to bargain, to play into old debts, even older affections, and Cain's undoubtedly-lingering guilt. Herbert would get this done and over with, no matter what.
Herbert needed this to be quick, and efficient; no extravagant risks allowed. In his youth, he had often felt stifled and trapped; his tutors had borne the spat moniker of prison guard with little more than thinned lips, though the bioethics committee at his pre-med program had not been so restrained. Herbert was still of the mind that they had been cowardly, short-sighted fools; but as he laid in ambush for another cowardly, short-sighted fool, he thought that his youthful assessment had been wrong. Actual prison was so much worse than what his wounded adolescent pride could had conjured.
Routine had once been Herbert’s dearest friend. Routine let him function on rote, perform perfect stitches and identify pathologies in the microscope slides at barely a glance; the body took over, freeing the mind to do the more productive work of perfecting theories and running hypotheses. When the noise got to be too much, when the subjects became too unruly, when yet another institutional sycophant made not-so-empty threats about Herbert’s career prospects, he knew that beyond the big picture, the details would remain the same. He would wear the same cut of shirt (white or a pale cornflower blue, classic cut with a button-down collar), use the same soap (Irish Spring, bar, bought in bulk every six months), and start his morning with a bowl of the same iron-enriched cornflakes. There was a structure here; he could not control everything, not yet, but the scaffolding remained solid. Even when the nights and days bled into each other in a sickly neon haze and thirty-six hour shifts, he could keep the time by the spaces between injections (biweekly, preferably taken first thing in the morning).
That had changed sharply in prison. For the first year, in the state institution in Arizona, he watched it be twisted and turned, the steel rebar support turning into yoke. No longer was the routine his own; no, then, he was at the mercy of a remote lights-out switch, his place in the shower queue set by the pecking order of the week. His research had to be done in snatches, always looking over his shoulder like a thief. Even once he escaped Arizona with its sun-baked concrete yard and its perpetually sweat-stinking beds, the private institution fared no better in that aspect. He had more freedom, but routine no longer came to him gently, like a tamed animal. It was a snare, though subtler, more permissive. Herbert had been allowed accommodations, scraps of dignity. It was a wonder how far money could take you: a private bathroom, the right kind of soap (before Arizona, Herbert had had no idea that there was something cheaper, more utilitarian than Irish Spring), the right kind of breakfast. He had even been allowed some research materials; nothing sufficient to complete his new work, but enough to keep his mind sharp.
And yet, the prickly, cold-sweat sensation of being watched had remained; and so did the jitter in his hands as he scribbled his notes. Even as he fled north, carried at first by the same impulse that moves all migratory birds to complete their yearly trek, he could not bring back the balance of his youth. He woke randomly; worked through the night only to sleep through the day, getting used to the smells of gas station bathrooms and the motion of a car with eighty thousand miles on it and a steering wheel that pulled perpetually right; he ate whatever he could find at convenience stores, dressed in clothes as nondescript as he could. But bucking routine on the run was good. It would make him harder to track, to pin him down and trap him again. He could not allow it, not now, not when he was so close to his goal. Unbalanced, dry-mouthed and with a perpetual headache lurking at the periphery of his vision not unlike an aural migraine, he had made his way up north, swearing all the time that he would not be trapped like this again.
And so, an assistant was necessary to his work—efficiency, and, should the worst come to pass, a body to leave to be arrested in his stead. Even if said assistant seemed to be in much rougher shape than he’d left him in. But that was all that much better, perhaps. What would Cain have to lose? Just how much worse could Cain’s life really get?
As if on cue, a car rolled down the pot-hole filled asphalt, coughing and clanging as the wheels struggled on the uneven ground. A beat-up red Toyota, laughably easy to follow around town—the front bumper was dented and taped over; scratches ran parallel to the side doors, paint threatening to chip. Nonetheless, as if on rote, Herbert checked the license plate again. In a spare notebook, reserved for future research, he’d taken to scribbling down Cain’s comings and goings, any risks or potential dangers. The car checked out. It stuttered past Herbert, hidden in the shadows, blind to being watched, and then the engine died with a cough inches away from the garbage bins.
Cain had never been the most cautious of men; he had been affable, bright, but in some ways, utterly naive. He would talk to the police, put on the charm even as his palms sweat, even as he slipped up time and time again. He would take his women to their house, senseless and blinded by the promise of a good time. Even with him, it had taken time for Cain to harden, to start hiding things, to muffle the crying. And then, it still got out, like a wound seeping through a bandage, in fits of rage and despair, in accusations and protestations. The clearest memory Herbert had of Cain was with his pointer finger raised, square jaw tense and straining, eyes shining with sharp-edged hurt. Herbert had used to hate it, the guileless openness, and even now, when it worked to his advantage, he could not help but harbor a sliver of resentment for Cain remaining this way: blind to the world, taking things as they came, coasting on other people’s good will that had never been granted to Herbert, not for all the money and familial reputation Herbert could call on.
Cain stumbled out of the car, knees cotton-soft. He grabbed onto the roof of the car, scraping the car keys along the metal in a screech. Herbert had not approached him a single time in the past week, as if he was still set on respecting the no-contact order given by the court a decade and a half ago, and his skin rippled with the excited gooseflesh of anticipation. The waiting, thirteen excruciating years of it, measured one sleepless night at a time, was finally over. With the coming spring thaw, his work would sprout anew.
***
Something was moving in the dark. Dan had given up any claims to surgical precision years ago, along with his medical license, but the other part of his instinct that had been honed under Herbert’s not-so-tender tutelage was alive and well: the ability to tell that something, somewhere was lurking in the dark and ready to hurt him. The sharp spike of fear didn’t come—he had beaten it into submission with an indestructible padding of a Valium taken at five p.m. sharp, for the panic attack he had about a shadow passing by the office windows, which he’d then chased with liquor—but he could still tell that something was there, and that he ought to do something about it. The conviction knocked against the base of his skull, right at the base, reptilian instincts, but he could not summon up the strength to make the move. That was, Dan thought dazedly, far too often the case in his life.
The pull-out couch-come-bed he found himself sinking into had three broken slats. On the best of days, he struggled to get up from it, and today had not been the best of days, to say the least. It wasn’t even the alcohol that was weighing him down today, but the pinching sting radiating from his lower back—probably between L1 and L3. An old injury, from way back when he could get no work other than warehouse stocking. The couch was not doing much to help, other than providing a horizontal surface to prostrate himself on, but much like with whatever was lurking in the dark, he found himself powerless to fix it. Though in this case, it was less a lack of willpower or cowardice or any of the other flaws he could hear echoing around his head in Herbert’s contemptuous hiss, and more so the fact that Dan was flat broke, and his ex-wife took the bedframe in the divorce.
And yet, he had to try. His head spun as he wobbled sideways, hoping to outsmart the gravitational well of the couch. Sour bile gathered at the back of his throat, stomach clenching in sharp protest, so he fell limp again, face-first into the sheets to get a noseful of his own fermented sweat and cigarette smoke. He closed his eyes and wished for cocaine. Cocaine would have balanced out all the well whiskey he’d poured into himself, put a fire under his ass to move.
Stimulants, in retrospect, were one thing Herbert had been right about for sure. They really did make life easier, made him feel like a well-maintained Swiss watch of a mechanism rather than something as old and beat up as his car. Dan’s second ex-wife introduced him to cocaine, and in those brief few months of marriage, sped-up all the more by stimulants, he had felt like he had control over his life for the first time since… God. Pre-med, probably. That only made him feel worse. But Dan had no money for cocaine, even the kind that would have been mostly baby powder and laxatives, and he still felt that meth was beneath him. He may not have been doing great, but he at least stuck to the normal, classy drugs. The kind of drugs that people he’d gone to med school would barely raise an eyebrow at. He was still a respectable, educated man. He had been able to keep a house plant alive all by himself for the past eight months. If he tilted his head just so, he could kind of see it, a vibrant, lush green even in the near dark of the room. That had to count for something.
Thus reassured, Dan flipped himself onto his back, away from the sinkhole in the middle of the couch, and, excruciatingly slowly to avoid aggravating the injury in his back, sat up. As if to acknowledge his effort, the dark rippled and split around a glint of light reflecting off glasses. For all Dan cared, it was as bright as a lightning strike, enough to make the hairs on his arm stand up. Peekaboo, good job, Dan, you caught on early for once.
“Herbert,” Dan said, even if he couldn’t be sure, not in the half-darkness, not with his brain drowning in the beaten-down, quicksand couch. But Herbert used to make him feel like the drop of a rollercoaster, weightless and unpleasantly physical at the same time, always on the verge of something that would not be undone, a nausea altogether different from juvenile butterflies or the stomach-turning of whiffed formaldehyde. Dan might had never gotten his sea legs, but at least he knew the signs. “Have you come here to kill me?”
For the past month, the thought had dogged him, eating away at his stash of Valium. The court mandated no contact, and yet, Dan had still kept tabs on Herbert, guided by what remained of his sense of self-preservation. The prison break news had disclosed no names, but Dan had known, instinctually, just as he now knew that the figure lurking in the dark was Herbert. In the slow moments at work—of which there were many as a filing clerk—he fantasized about the moment that Herbert would find him again. Herbert would kill him, surely. Swiftly, because Herbert probably still was fond of Dan to some degree; that much he was owed. Sometimes, after the Valium he had taken for the cold-sweat and short breath that the first fantasy elicited, the fantasies would turn stranger. They took on the tone of religious fervor of overwhelming, complete redemption, Herbert cradling his aching shoulders as tenderly as he had in the morgue, telling Dan that he had forgiven him, that he loved him, that they were meant to be together after all. That Herbert would fix Dan’s mistake of confessing to the police, that it was all going to be as if they had never been parted. Not in these exact words, of course; Dan’s Valium-swaddled brain was incapable of stringing something together beyond an amorphous, overwhelming sense of comfort and mercy, and in the sober moments, the thoughts were too mortifying to bear.
But instead, Herbert laughed—because it was Herbert, undeniably so as he stepped into the glowing triangle of light coming from the kitchen—and that nausea turned Dan inside out. He had to see—had to make sure— But of what? Herbert was real, that much was obvious; Dan had never been prone to full-bodied hallucinations. He could not check him over for injury, and had little desire to do so. And yet, he had to see for himself, clearly, to know that Herbert was—here. Here was a sufficient explanation. Wavering, Dan staggered to his feet and threw himself at a table lamp, fumbling sweaty-palmed with the switch.
In a click, Dan’s messy day room flooded with light. Dan clutched at the cabinet the lamp stood on, still swaying with vertigo, mind scrambling to take in all the details it could. Aged, but unbroken, as sharp as Dan could remember: sharp in the angles of his black coat, sharp in the new, square glasses, sharp in the dark eyes. Herbert’s lips were flat and disapproving as he took in the surroundings; an expression painfully familiar to Dan, one that Herbert had worn when assessing the capabilities of the Miskatonic staff. It cut through the gossamer-thin fantasies Dan’s mind had spun up like a brush mercilessly disposing of cobwebs. But that was good, Dan reasoned; there was no use in going in with inflated expectations again.
“Kill you?” Herbert repeated. “Why on Earth would I do that, Cain?”
He cocked his head, curious and bird-like, like he was genuinely wondering. The lenses of his glasses caught the light, flashing to obscure the eyes beneath. Dan felt cold sweat break out on the back of his neck. Oh, Dan had a list; a long, even if still non-exhaustive one, repeated like a litany of repentance. He had cheated Herbert, had lied to him and he’d betrayed Herbert and the work, which Herbert probably considered a sin bigger than any personal trespass. His attention had strayed from what mattered; he had idled, letting his mind and hands rust. Herbert had killed for less. Hill, the cop whose name Dan had long forgotten by now, memory filling up with all the other lieutenants and sergeants and chiefs whose hands he’d passed through, even Alan Halsey. But that’s not it.
“Because you could.” The words pressed into his mouth, trembling with nerves, before Dan could stop them. Most importantly, Herbert could kill him simply because he was there, weak and vulnerable, and Herbert needed a fresh subject.
That makes Herbert laugh again, deep in his chest, the same kind of deranged chuckle that he’d let out every time he managed to catch Dan unaware, jumping out from shadows or dropping a severed limb right onto Dan’s work table. Dan’s heart pounded. Herbert was toying with him. That was a good sign, probably; Herbert was not one to toy with his victims, at least when murder was concerned. He could be frighteningly efficient when it was necessary.
Dan’s sweaty palm slipped off the ledge, elbow banging painfully against the cabinet. He hissed as electricity raced up his arm, bones—humerus, ulna, and radius, Dan recalled foggily—lighting up like a lightning rod. He rubbed at it uselessly, cheeks smarting with shame. Murder and violence and noble revenge, he could bear; but embarrassment was too much. Before, Herbert had carved him down into this pitiful form, stripped him of all dignity. To not be allowed the grace of pretending to have built himself back up, into something working, something worthy, something simply better was too much.
“No, I have no intention of killing you. There’s work to be done. New work. Something you’ve never seen before,” Herbert said. While Dan was still reeling, he moved, crossing the room in three quiet steps. And then there was a cold hand on Dan’s wrist, callused fingers digging in, stripping the muscle upwards and down, wringing the pain out. It did not feel good; in fact, it felt rather awful. Herbert had never been too tender and it seemed like their time apart hadn’t softened him any. But Dan’s body didn’t know the difference at this point, too starved for anything other than the bleak nothingness. His breathing sped up, long forgotten connections for hope and trust in his brain firing once more. “I need your help, Danny.”
Dan groaned, head lolling back. There it was, the fucking line that would always get him. He hadn’t been needed, hadn’t been useful in so long. That made it all the more intoxicating. The words ran through him, hooking at the bottom of his ribcage and pulling up. Herbert kept on talking about the genius of it; about the notes, hidden in the half-delapidated house in the Christchurch Cemetery; about the theory, Latin twisting around Dan like a noose. It would be stupid to go along with it; an execution by another name. Dan had survived the first round of working with Herbert through sheer miracle, or maybe through divine intervention deciding that having to live with it would be a worse, more painful punishment.
But the cold hand stayed clasped around his forearm, and, really, was there anything left in this life for Dan to cling to? His forehead dropped onto the shoulder opposite him, nose flaring with the wet dog scent of damp, rained-on wool. Was there anything else that would steady him like this? A new work. Something fresh, something untainted, lying dormant in the nutrient-rich gravesoil of Christchurch. Something that could redeem him still.
The moment stretched as Herbert’s voice droned hypnotically in his ear. Out of the corner of his eye, above the black stretch of Herbert’s shoulder, Dan could see his current barren life: chipping wallpaint, a huddle of prescription bottles necessary to make his existence bearable, a broken pull-out couch. The green plant, crammed into the corner, incongruously vibrant. His proudest achievement in the past year, sticking out like a sore thumb among the beige wasteland. The only proof that Daniel Cain could still manage to do something right.
“Wait a minute,” Dan mumbled, slipping out of Herbert’s grasp. “Just… give me one second.”
Unsteady on his feet, he approached the doorway. Herbert’s shoulders tensed, but this had nothing to do with him, so Dan ignored him. This was about Dan. He fell to his knees, blinking the haze out of his eyes. The leaves shone a dark, lush green. Emerald. The substrate in the pot was still damp, but not wet; Dan had been careful with the watering schedule, tracking it more ardently than his own water intake. It was nothing short of perfect. Too perfect. Dan had never had a green thumb. With a shaking hand, he reached out, stroking along the leaves. Stiff, smooth. Digging deeper, into the stems; sharp-edged, but not thorny. Sharp-edged like the unsanded seams of something that came out of a plastic mold. His head spun and a desperate laugh wheezed past his teeth. His crowning achievement: watering a fake plant for six months. Oh, dear God. The cold hand reappeared at his nape, petting and squeezing. Dan licked his lips, tasting salt. He had been weeping without realizing it.
Here, nothing would grow. Here, nothing could even decay right. He would stay frozen, wearing himself down. He would not sharpen like the edge of an old knife at a grindstone, but crumble into nothing like brittle limestone. The new shape he took on would not be better, not more useful, not even more pleasant; whatever it was now, and whatever it would be, was no more than pure chance, the directionless tugging of fate.
“Okay,” Dan whispered. Whatever Herbert wanted him to do—whatever atrocity would follow—that, at least, had a purpose. Maybe a terrible, awful purpose, something bloody and ugly and mean; maybe the road to get there would leave him broken and bent and then discarded, once Herbert had no more use for him. But it was a purpose anyways, and wasn’t it better to break for something rather than for nothing at all? “Okay, Herbert. I will hear you out.”
Herbert practically purred, “Of course you will. You always were very bright.”
Relief burst under Dan’s tongue. Singing off his life again was much easier than he had expected.