Free Instruments of Night by Thomas H. Cook

deep basements, lonely farmhouses. Places out of sight. Out of reach. Where nothing stirred but the will to harm. Never to be entirely alone, that was the only safety. He had concluded that such nearness was the only protection against what others might do to you. Or what you might do to others.

    It was nearly noon by the time Graves returned to his apartment. He made a ham sandwich and ate it at the wrought-iron table on the terrace. It had little taste, as all things did to him. He felt textures, the gristle in the meat, the slosh of what washed it down. All else was mere gruel.
    After eating, Graves returned to his typewriter and once again sought a way out for Slovak. But once again, nothing came. And so after an hour of futile striving, he lay down in his bedroom, hoping a short nap might refresh him, or that a solution might suddenly present itself in a dream.
    He’d been asleep for nearly an hour when the phone rang. He rolled over and plucked the receiver from its cradle.
    “Hello.”
    “Hello, Mr. Graves? Allison Davies. I hope I’m notdisturbing you, but I wanted to know if you’d looked at the photographs I sent you.”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “And have you reached a decision about coming to Riverwood?”
    Graves realized that, in fact, he
had
made his decision, that while he’d slept, his imagination had played a scene for him, one that existed in none of his books. In the scene, Slovak crawls through a dank, dripping tunnel to find the decomposed body of a little girl. Even as he crawls, he knows that her body has been decaying for days, that nothing is left but slime and maggots. And yet Slovak goes on, dragging himself through the stinking muck because he knows that this pile of rotten flesh was once a blue-eyed child, one whose mother still waits for him to bring her murdered daughter home.
    “Mr. Graves?”
    “Yes, I’m here,” Graves answered. In his mind’s eye he could see the photographs Miss Davies had sent him. They were still spread across the table in the adjoining room, Mrs. Harrison’s letter resting forlornly in their midst.
    “Well, will you do it, then?”
    He heard Slovak whisper in his ear.
Sometimes you must do a thing because your own darkness will overwhelm you if you don’t.
    It was a line he’d written years before, written in his first book. But now it seemed like nothing less than the old detective’s solemn admonition, the dying wish of someone Graves had long ago created and now come to revere, his weary, wasted questioner of Cain.
    “Will you come to Riverwood?” Miss Davies asked.
    He gave his answer achingly, like someone beaten into submission, the word dropping from his mouth like a broken tooth.
    “Yes.”

PART TWO
    Oh, please, please, please. .
    —Paul Graves,
Uncommon Prayer

CHAPTER 7
    T he next morning Graves did his laundry, threw away the few perishables that had accumulated in his refrigerator, then arranged for Wendy, the young woman who lived next door, to pick up any mail he might receive while at Riverwood. She hadn’t bothered to look through the peephole before she’d opened it, and for a long time after he returned to his own apartment, Graves found himself considering the things that might have been done to her had some other man been at the door, pressed his dusty boot against it, then pushed it open. He’d even briefly envisioned Sykes at work while Kessler sat nearby, barking orders—
Use that. Stick it there
—delighted by the horrors he could instruct another to perform.
    To escape the mood such visions called up, Graves busied himself with the last of his chores, then packed a single suitcase—the same one he’d brought from North Carolina over twenty years before—and placed it beside the door. He put his typewriter in its carrying case and placed itbeside the suitcase. That was it. There was nothing more to do. No plants to water. No animals to care for. No friends to notify of his move to Riverwood. He had nothing to nurture,