John Connolly - The Reapers

THE REAPERS

ALSO BY JOHN CONNOLLY

Every Dead Thing

Dark Hollow

The Killing Kind

The White Road

Bad Men

Nocturnes

The Black Angel

The Book of Lost Things

The Unquiet

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2008 by John Connolly

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

ATRIA BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Vision and Prayer (excerpt) by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright 1946 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The Heaven of Animals (excerpt) by James Dickey, from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1992 by James Dickey and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Connolly, John, 1968
The Reapers : a thriller / by John Connolly.1st Atria Books hardcover ed.
p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-7005-9
ISBN-10: 1-4165-7005-5

1. MurderersFiction. 2. AssassinsFiction. I. Title.

PR6053.O48645R43 2008
823'.914dc22 2008005500

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For Kerry Hood,
without whom I would be very lost indeed,
even with a map.

THE REAPERS

PROLOGUE

All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.

HERACLITUS (C. 535475 B.C.)

SOMETIMES, LOUIS DREAMS OF the Burning Man. He comes to him when the night is at its deepest, when even the sounds of the city have faded, descending from symphonic crescendo to muted nocturne. Louis is not even sure if he is truly asleep when the Burning Man comes, because it seems to him that he wakes to the sound of his partners slow breathing in the bed beside him, a smell in his nostrils that is familiar yet alien: it is the stink of charred meats allowed to rot, of human fats sizzling in an open flame. If it is a dream, then it is a waking dream, one that occurs in the nether-world between consciousness and absence.

The Burning Man had a name once, but Louis can no longer utter it. His name is not enough to encompass his identity; it is too narrow, too restrictive for what he has become to Louis. He does not think of him as Errol, or Mr. Rich, or even Mr. Errol, which is how he had always addressed him when he was alive. He is now more than a name, much more.

Still, once he was Mr. Errol: all brawn and muscle, his skin the color of damp, fertile earth recently turned by the plow; gentle and patient for the most part, but with something simmering beneath his seemingly placid nature, so that if you caught him unawares it was possible to glimpse it in his eyes before it slipped away, like some rare beast that has learned the importance of staying beyond the range of the hunters guns, of the white men in the white suits.

For the hunters were always white.

There was a fire burning in Errol Rich, a rage at the world and its ways. He tried to keep it under control, for he understood that, if it emerged unchecked, there was the danger that it would consume all in its path, himself included. Perhaps it was an anger that would not have been alien to many of his brothers and sisters at that time: he was a black man trapped in the rhythms and rituals of a white mans world, in a town where he and those like him were not permitted to roam once dusk fell. Things were changing elsewhere, but not in this country, and not in this town. Change would come more slowly to this place. Maybe, in truth, it would never come at all, not entirely, but that would be for others to deal with, not Errol Rich. By the time certain people started talking aloud about rights without fear of reprisal, Errol Rich no longer existed, not in any form that those who once knew him could have recognized. His life had been extinguished years before, and in the moment of his dying he was transformed. Errol Rich passed from this earth, and in his place came the Burning Man, as though the fire inside had finally found a way to bloom forth in bright red and yellow, exploding from within to devour his flesh and consume his former consciousness, so that what was once a hidden part of him became all that he was. Others might have held the torch to him, or sprayed the gasoline that soaked and blinded him in his final moments as he was hanged from a tree, but Errol Rich was already burning, even then, even as he asked them to spare him from the agonies that were to come. He had always burned, and in that way, at least, he defeated the men who took his life.

And from the moment that he died, the Burning Man stalked Louiss dreams.

Louis remembers how it came to pass: an argument with whites. Somehow, that was often how it started. The whites made the rules, but the rules kept changing. They were fluid, defined by circumstance and necessity, not by words on paper. Later, Louis would reflect that what was strangest of all was the fact that the white men and women who ran the town would always deny that they were racist. We dont hate the coloreds, they would say, we just all get along better when they keep themselves to themselves. Or: theyre welcome in the town during the day, but we just dont think they should spend the night. Its for their own safety as much as ours. Curious. It was as hard then as it was now to find anybody who would admit to being a racist. Even most racists, it seemed, were ashamed of their intolerance.

But there were also those who wore such an epithet as a badge of honor, and the town had its share of such people as well. It was said that the trouble started when a group of local men threw a heavy pitcher filled with urine through the cracked old windshield of Errols truck, and Errol responded in kind. That temper of his, that fury that he kept bottled inside of him, had erupted, and he had tossed a length of two-by-four through the window of Little Toms bar in reprisal. That had been enough for them to act against him, that and their fear of what he represented. He was a black man who spoke better than most of the white people in the town. He owned his own truck. He could fix things with his handsradios, TVs, air conditioners, anything that had a current flowing through itand he could fix them better and cheaper than anyone else, so that even those who wouldnt allow him to walk the towns streets at night were happy to let him into their homes to fix their appliances during the day, even if some of them didnt feel quite as comfortable in their living rooms afterward, although they werent racists either. They just didnt like strangers in their home, particularly colored strangers. If they offered him water to slake his thirst, they were careful to present it to him in the cheap tin cup set aside for just such an eventuality, the cup from which no one else would drink, the cup kept with the cleaning products and the brushes, so that the water always had a faint chemical burn to it. There was talk that maybe he might soon be in a position to employ others like him, to train them and pass on his skills to them. And he was a good-looking man, too, a nigger buck as Little Tom had once described him, except that, when he said it, Little Tom had been cradling the hunting rifle that used to hang above his bar, and it was clear what being a buck implied in Little Toms world.

So they hadnt needed much of an excuse to move against Errol Rich, but he had given them one nonetheless, and before the week was out, they had doused him in gasoline, hanged him from a tree, and set him alight.