The Pressure of Darkness Read online

  "Didn't he attend medical school at some point in his life?"

  "In his twenties, on scholarship. He was way ahead of the class. He hated it, or so I was told. He dropped out from sheer boredom."

  "And the writing?"

  "His writing began as a lark, or so he claimed. He'd always liked anagrams, word games, crossword puzzles, things like that. And he loved to read. Then he happened upon a collection of stories by an alcoholic journalist named Ambrose Bierce, who was an employee of William Randolph Hearst in the eighteen hundreds. Bierce enjoyed writing and publishing very disturbing fiction. My father was inspired by a rather bleak and cheerfully sadistic story called 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.' He adored the surprise ending and immediately set about writing a derivative story of his own. With his typical lack of humility he sent it out to a magazine. It was, of course, rejected.

  "Mr. Burke, one simply did not say no to my father. He flew into a rage. I remember, I was perhaps nine at that time—he actually threatened to buy the magazine just to humiliate and fire the editor. Father immersed himself in horror fiction at that point. He began with the masters, Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stoker, Mary Shelley, and Saki. He moved to the modern best-selling authors, such as King, Straub, Koontz, Anne Rice, and Robert McCammon.

  "He educated himself for more than a year. Then he sat down at his computer and tried again. He produced a somewhat derivative novel about an abandoned tenement in a New York City slum that was actually the gate to another, and quite evil, dimension. The book, Passageway, won a Bram Stoker award from the Horror Writers' Association. It then sold to a paperback house and went on to be a bestseller and a film of the same name. The money and accolades poured in. I recall how my father reveled in it all. Of course, now he had even less time for me than before."

  "And the author Peter Stryker was born."

  "Yes."

  Burke absorbed her words greedily, with every fiber of his consciousness. It was easy to do; Nicole was beautiful in the steadily dimming light, sitting like a fakir, her face obscured by shadow. His eyes were half closed and heavy. It took him a moment to realize she had stopped speaking. He shook himself awake. "May I ask a few things now?"

  "Of course."

  "What was your father's real name?"

  "Peter Philbin. He was an English teacher when he met my mother. As I heard the story, her car broke down in the rain near a small town in New England. Her driver walked off into the storm in search of assistance. My father happened upon the limousine and offered to assist her. She was intrigued by the fact that he was a medical student at the time. She later invited him to a party at the mansion. They went outside for a drink and a chat. I'm told she was initially just trying to be polite, but then they fell in love."

  "How did her family feel about this?"

  Nicole Striker chuckled in a low and throaty voice. Burke felt the short hairs on his neck flutter. "My mother's family despised Peter Philbin, Mr. Burke, especially once they heard that he had dropped out of medical school. They hated him even more after my mother's untimely death. My father inherited a fortune, but never their goodwill. In fact, they never spoke to him again."

  "Didn't they want to know their grandchild?"

  Nicole hesitated. "Not according to my father. If they tried to send birthday cards or telephone, I never heard about it. In fact, they are dead to me."

  Burke breathed slowly, allowed his mind run over what she had already revealed to him, and looked for any unspoken threads. Finally he said: "So now he has money and fame to go along with what you described as a lust for power. How did all that affect him?"

  "He continued to write," Nicole replied. "And each book became more successful than the last. Did you know that all but one was made into a movie, and that all of those films topped two hundred million dollars in domestic box office?"

  "No, I don't read much horror fiction."

  Nicole seems to read his mind. "Perhaps you have seen a few too many horror facts?"

  "Perhaps."

  "Well, my father made sure everyone else knew about statistics like that. He would drop those figures at every opportunity. Fame made him even vainer, Mr. Burke, even more insufferably self-centered. Each novel became darker than the last, too. More visceral, more explicit and disturbing. As you noted, he had a medical background and he took great pride in shocking people."

  "That seems appropriate for his chosen profession."

  "Of course. But in order to stretch the boundaries he also had to research extensively. He read a great deal about witchcraft, human sacrifice, torture, the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition. The list goes on and on. To be honest, I remain convinced that such material eventually warped his mind."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Father began to lock himself in his study for hours on end, and sometimes I would hear him screaming and crying. He would vanish for days or weeks, always without warning. He was gone most of my high school years, but suddenly ceased flying a few years ago. He became completely phobic about air travel after September 11th and never rode on another plane. He turned to comparative religion and devoured eastern thought. Nonetheless, his fear of the finality of death became overwhelming."

  Burke focused more energy and gathered a deeper sense of the man they were discussing. He did not like the resultant feeling. "You are describing someone very capable of killing himself."

  "I know. But hear me out."

  Burke shrugged. It's your money. Nicole Stryker shifted into a standing position, so effortlessly his pulse raced. She moved away from the tinted window, buttocks rolling smoothly, back to the bar to refresh her drink. Burke was both amused and unduly baffled by this young woman. He shook his head slightly. "Go on."

  The tinkling of ice in a glass. "As I said, my father was terrified of death. The more he read about it, and those who explore and worship it, the more frightened he became. If his many fans had realized how pathetic a figure he was in real life, they would have abandoned him in droves. In the last few years his fame was a curse. He could not go out in public without being asked for his autograph. He learned to disguise himself."

  Burke smiled. "You're not suggesting that's why he . . ."

  "Yes, that's why he began to wear women's clothing. To go out in drag. According to my father, it was the only way he could escape the house without being troubled."

  Cross-dressing for privacy? It read as total nonsense. Burke could not tell if she believed her own rationalization, so he said nothing.

  "And by the way," Nicole continued, "even discussing the themes he wrote about began to give him anxiety attacks. A supreme karmic joke, wouldn't you say?"

  "It sounds that way," Burke replied. "May I have a glass of water, Nicole?"

  The fact that he had used her first name increased the static dangling in the air. Burke rose and strolled over to the bar. He moved to the other end and reached out with his right hand. Nicole Stryker poured club soda into a crystal goblet, added ice, and slid it down the bar so their fingers would not touch. It was clear that she felt something, too.

  "Was he on medication for these attacks?" Burke was thinking of drugs like Ativan and their sedating effect, also how dangerous they were when combined with alcohol.

  Nicole Stryker shook her head. "Not in the way you're thinking," she says. "He saw a psycho- pharmacologist named Markoff at UCLA and was prescribed an anti-depressant."

  "Do you recall which one?"

  "No."

  Burke searched his memory bank. "An SSRI, like Lexapro?"

  "I've forgotten. That sounds right. Whatever it was, it didn't make him further depressed. In fact quite the opposite. He became more agitated."

  "Did your father do recreational drugs of any kind?"

  "Not that I know of, but it wouldn't surprise me. My father . . . experimented with life, Mr. Burke."

  "That prescription you mentioned? I would like to know what it was." Burke drank the club soda. The fizz tickled his upper lip.

&n
bsp; "If it isn't in the police report I will find out."

  Nicole reached into her pocket and slid a set of keys across the bar. Burke let them sit on the polished wood. He arched an eyebrow. "The keys to his house and home office," Nicole said. "The police were far more concerned about the crime scene and said they'd get there tomorrow. I doubt you will have any trouble going through his things tonight."

  "Okay."

  "Search all you want." Nicole Stryker seemed weary. "Remember that this was a man who loved scary stories and secret passageways, so be vigilant. You may find books, women's clothing, religious artifacts, and all manner of strangeness, Mr. Burke. Do not be distracted from your primary purpose. I want to know what really happened up in that hotel suite. And why."

  SIX

  The premium coffee shop was furnished in forest green colors with silver metal bars and extended from the outer wall of a large-chain bookstore like some stark, metastasized growth. Jack Burke was seated at a corner table with a long yellow note pad, a sharpened pencil, and a stack of paperback books written by Peter Stryker. Burke was a speed-reader, and some college girls at a nearby table watch in awe as his eyes and practiced fingers raced through the pages.

  "You take lessons to do that?"

  "Huh?" He shook his head. There were two of them. One was a lanky blonde in cut-off jeans and a red halter top, the other a plump and slightly busty brunette in a blue pants suit. They were likely students at nearby Cal State Northridge or one of the other colleges. Burke wondered, not for the first time, why pretty girls always seemed to have another, less attractive female along for company. Perhaps so they could have an audience as they exercised their power. The blonde was trying to flirt.

  "The reading thing?" She coaxed him with body language, leaning forward so her breasts were accentuated.

  Burke allowed her a thin smile. "I was in the service for a while. I always read a lot, but they had a course in speed-reading and I took it twice."

  The blonde widened her eyes, batted those lashes. "Oh, I do love uniforms." Scarlet O'Hara came to mind. Her friend seemed embarrassed.

  "That so?"

  "I'm serious." She extended her hand like a princess. "My name is Tiffany."

  But of course it is, Burke thought. And this is 'mysterious older man day.' He took her hand. "Kevin O'Brien." He gave the name of a long-dead cousin.

  The girl moved in for the kill. She edged her chair closer. Her friend sought shelter in a make-up mirror and doodled in the foam of a latte. To her credit, she appeared mortified. Meanwhile, the blonde purred. "And what did you do in the service, Kevin?"

  Burke's eyes were slate, face leaden. "Oh, I killed people, Tiff," he said. "Sometimes civilians. Quite a few, in fact."

  Her smile froze and soon wavered. She eased away from him, mouth working furiously, like an anal retentive housewife who just found a roach in her broth. Her friend snorted and leapt to her feet. A man at a nearby table struggled not to laugh. Burke looked down and resumed reading. He did not give the girl another thought.

  Burke found Passageway a pile of crap. It was easy material to speed through. He could see the so-called scary moments coming a mile away. Stryker's first novel was flat and derivative, although the author did have a decent flair for language. Burke finished the book in a few minutes, put a few reminder notes and page numbers on the pad, and started on the next book. It was marginally better, but junk nonetheless. The author tried to write about Native American rituals but got many of his facts wrong. The characters were almost laughably cardboard, the ending cinematic in the worst sense of the word. As Burke read, the real world faded away.

  He was on his third coffee when he started the next-to-last novel. It had more depth of characterization and a lighter writing style, and something had begun to resonate deeply within the structure. It was existential angst, something with which Burke was quite familiar. The author had a macabre preoccupation with concepts like the existence of random chance, and the fact that life may have no intrinsic meaning. Even speeding through these pages, Burke found them disconcerting. Not only did the lead character confront an utter pointlessness to his life and the failure of feeble attempts to be moral and courageous, but evil forces won out at the conclusion. The book was well done, and profoundly disturbing.

  As Jack Burke put the book down, he was suddenly cloaked in a gray, weighted melancholy. Peter Stryker may have started out a hack, but he ended his life as a novelist of considerable talent.

  Burke had one book to go, the latest and last novel. He turned the book over in his hands. The title was A Taste for Flesh. He studied the needlessly inflammatory copy on the back, which described TERROR UNLEASHED and a DEPRAVITY BEYOND DESCRIPTION. The print size and color seemed reasonably restrained, but the jacket hyperbole reminded him of a B movie poster from the 1950s. Despite that, Burke knew that this book was likely to be far better than it appeared.

  "Sir?"

  The coffee shop was crowded. Burke set the book on the table. A pimple-faced kid in an apron festooned with dancing coffee beans was doing his best to be assertive. "Sir, you've been sitting here for a long time, and there are others waiting for a table."

  After a brief flash of irritation, Burke sighed and got to his feet. To his dismay, the kid was spooked by his size and backpedaled rapidly, bumping into a pair of customers still standing in line. Embarrassed, Burke took the final novel but left the others on the table. He walked away.

  "Sir, you forgot your books?" The kid was so frightened he made a statement of fact a question, the sentence rising in pitch at the end.

  "Thanks. You can keep them."

  Burke strolled down the crowded Ventura Boulevard, mildly surprised to find the day coming to a close. He found a parking ticket on his vehicle. He tore up and tossed it away. The car would change owners several times before the city had registered the existence of the citation, might even be out of the state. Tony Monteleone would take care of it.

  Burke drove down Ventura to Hazeltine and turned north. He left his car in the lot of the Trader Joe's store and jogged over to the park around the corner. Hispanic children were laughing and throwing water balloons at a nearby birthday party. Their lips were red or purple from cheap snow cones. Other children hung from the bars of the jungle gym. The sun would soon be setting, but Burke figured he had just enough time. He scribbled notes on the yellow pad, brief thoughts on the tone of the previous work, more to have something to do than from necessity.

  He sat beneath the canopy of a sickly elm and opened Stryker's magnum opus. The main character in A Taste for Flesh was a middle-aged loner whose life was fading fast. He was being passed over for promotions. His wife had left him for another, much younger man. The beaten-down protagonist elected to take a long vacation in Europe. He wandered east, into the former Soviet satellites. Although he loved the art and culture, the protagonist found the economic and social circumstances depressing. Soon he was drinking too much and seriously contemplating suicide. Burke was pleasantly surprised. The novel had proven to be far more literate than pulp, at least to this point. Indeed, it was well conceived and deftly written. Burke had momentarily forgotten the author's reputation and found himself absorbed by both the telling and the tale.

  And that's when Stryker went for the throat, quite literally: the protagonist was bitten by a wolf. His story turned on a dime and became a lurid tale of the mythical and the lycanthropic, the hero as a troubled werewolf. Yet Burke still found the novel compelling, for while the man descended into madness, he also began to re-discover his archetypal masculine power. The man becomes the wolf as the wolf becomes the man. To be sure, both did murder in a plethora of crimson ways. The violence was blunt, to the point, and decidedly messy, but as Burke himself knew all too well, so was violence in real life. It was the subtext that was most gripping; a hint of Nietzsche, lightly seasoned with Joseph Campbell.

  He read on. Much weight was given to the ramifications of anthropophagy, the devouring of human flesh, and its
varied implications. The protagonist, as the novel progressed, slowly moved from an attitude of revulsion to one of spiritual reverence. This odd concoction was then half-baked in recycled Stephen King imagery, but worked nonetheless. At the end of the novel, the protagonist had become something of a God to the peasants in the countryside and a hero to himself again. His inevitable physical death, therefore, was of very little consequence because his spirit lived on.

  The acknowledgments made reference to a Dr. Theodore Merriman. Burke decided on the spot to pay the man a visit.

  He lowered the book and rubbed his weary eyes. The park was flooding with long, cool shadows and most of the picnicking families had gone home. He watched three males of indeterminate age as they tossed a football in a long, triangulated pattern. Their voices, shrill with enthusiasm and ribald humor, stroked his weary brain. He envied them their laughter.

  Later, Burke stopped at a nearly empty restaurant for a plain chicken breast and a salad. He sat alone at a table near the front window, listening to Vivaldi with half an ear, weary eyes on the rush hour traffic, a sea of headlights, tail lights, street lamps all reflecting and refracting light. Meanwhile a gentle mist of rain, unseasonable but welcome, stroked moist ribbons of color down the clear glass. Burke paid for the meal in cash. He needed no receipt. Over a double espresso, he examined his notes one last time, then left and drove home.

  The rain stopped. As Burke pulled into his driveway and got out of the car, he noted the damp, erotic odor of satiated plants. A motion detector flipped on the porch light. He let himself in, double-locked the door behind him and set the alarm for the night. He went into the Spartan bedroom and stripped to his shorts, then took his laundry to the garage. He started the washing machine, grabbed a glass of soda water from the kitchen, and moved into his office.