The Monster Was Made

"No one is born with a blueprint. Someone has to draw it for them."

Sunday, 11:04 PM.

The tape began with a click, and then the sound of a room.

Not this room. A larger one, with a hollow ring to it. A pipe ticking. Far away, a faint metallic drip. The hiss of the blank leader ran for eleven seconds, and Lauren knelt on the green concrete with the cassette player in her lap and her fingers locked around its plastic edges.

Then a voice.

"For the one who finds this."

It was low, and measured, and very young. It was a voice that had been trained to carry no more than it had to. She had never heard it before. She had only watched its owner's mouth move, through the lens of a pair of binoculars, across a crowded campus.

She had never heard it say what it said next.

"My name is Julian Thomas Frost. I was born on October fourteenth, two thousand four, in Worcester, Massachusetts. I am telling you this because the first thing you will want to know is whether I am who I say. You may check the records. They are accurate."

A pause. The rustle of fabric.

"I am recording this at a quarter past three in the morning. It is the twenty-first of October. I would like to say, before anything else, that I know what the Bureau has called me. I know what you have called me. I am not asking you to change it. I am asking you to listen for forty minutes, and to take notes, and to look at what is in the box."

Lauren's lips moved. She said it without sound: the box.

"Please photograph everything before you move it. Please log the chain of custody. If you are a police officer, you will already know why it matters, and if you are not, it matters because this will need to survive a trial. I have tried to make it easy. I have not lied to you. I do not intend to."

The voice stopped. A single breath, drawn through the nose, like a man putting down something heavy and picking it up again.

"I'll begin on the fourteenth of September of last year, at ten minutes to seven in the evening, outside the Boston Public Library."

Lauren set the player on the floor between her knees. She pressed her palm over her mouth.

She listened.

"It was raining. I had a library book under my coat and no umbrella. He had one. He had a very good one, a black one with a wooden handle. He said, You look like the kind of student who forgets. I laughed. That's the thing I think about, still. I laughed.

"He was kind. He asked what I was reading. It was a book on the psychology of dissociation. He said he had a friend at the university who taught the subject, and offered to introduce me. He had a car. It was parked around the corner. He said, Let me drive you to the station, it's no trouble.

"I'm not going to describe the next part. You'll find what you need in the notebooks. I'll tell you that I woke in a room with no windows. I'll tell you that it was this room. I'll tell you that the first thing he said to me, when he saw that I was awake, was my name."

The hiss ran for a while. Lauren heard her own breath coming louder than she meant it to.

"He had been following me for two months. He had read my letters. I had written to forty-one inmates in eleven prisons that spring for Dr. Whitcombe's research project, asking about childhood, about patterns, about what it was like inside. Marcus Brody was not an inmate. But he had read the letters I'd posted on a forum for students of criminal psychology, and he had decided that I would do."

A long silence.

"Do for what?" said the voice, mildly, as if to someone sitting across from it. "That was the question I asked for the first fortnight. He answered, in the end. He said I was going to be his student."

Lauren closed her eyes.

Sunday, 11:25 PM.

"I want to be precise about this part," the voice said, "because precision is the only thing I have to offer you.

"I was in this room for ninety-one days. For the first twenty, I fought him. I will not describe how that ended. For the next twenty, I did not speak. I counted the marks. I invented a system for the marks. By the fortieth day, I had worked out that he needed an audience. Not a victim. He had had those. He needed someone who would listen while he explained."

The reel hissed.

"He explained a great deal. How the human body gives up its secrets. Which chemicals, in what order. Where in New England the ground stays frozen until April, and where the soil drains. He had a method. He called it that. He wrote it in a notebook with a black cover and a cracked spine, in a hand that I had copied, by the sixtieth day, so closely that I could not tell the difference. He called me, at the end, his apprentice. His successor. I let him call me that.

"I need you to understand that I did not agree with him. I need you to understand that I agreed with everything he said. These are both true. The first was in my head. The second was on my face. I learned, in that room, to keep them in different places."

Lauren found that she had begun to rock, very slightly, forward and back.

"There were other people, Captain."

She stopped.

The voice had said it without emphasis, as if it were any other sentence. She did not at first understand what had happened to her body. She was on her knees on the green paint, with a gun in her holster and a flashlight in her fist, and every hair on her arms had risen.

Captain.

"I'm sorry. I should have said. I'm told that the police officer who finds this will be you. I believe I'm right. You've been very good, and you were always going to be. If I'm wrong, I apologize, and the rest of this is for whoever has taken your place."

A long, shaky breath that was almost a laugh.

"There were three women. Tessa Moreno. Hannah Brandt. Claire Donnelly. They were here before me, in the autumn, one at a time. They were here while I was. I heard them. I was not allowed to see. I heard them, for twenty nights, through the wall. I am not going to describe that either, except to say that I tried. I tried to do something, once. It was the night of the first of November. It is why my left wrist does not turn all the way."

The reel hissed. Somewhere in it, very faintly, she thought she heard the sound of a man swallowing.

"Their remains are not in the mountains. The mountains are for something else. Page forty of the notebook, the black one, lists where they are. It is the place he called the Quarry. You'll want to take their mothers there. I'd like them to be taken there by someone gentle."

Lauren put her fist against her teeth and bit down until the knuckle bled.

"I'm not telling you this for sympathy. I want that on the record. I'm telling you because on the sixteenth of December he let me go. He looked at me across that table, and he said, You have the gift, Julian. You've always had it. I'll give you three months to find your feet, and then we'll start. He believed me. He had been teaching me for ninety-one days, and he believed that he had made a monster in his own image. I stood there in his coat and I said, Yes, sir. I took the notebook from his pocket on my way out. He never noticed.

"I'd like you to understand that I have thought, every single day since, about how easy it would have been to walk into a police station. I did not. I want you to know why."

The tape hissed for nine seconds.

"Because they would have asked for proof. And I had none. A nineteen-year-old orphan with a gap in his enrollment and no marks on him that a doctor would call anything but old. A respected man, an analyst, a man whose mother mails him pies. A man who, if they had come to his apartment in January, would have opened the door in a cardigan and offered them tea."

Another pause.

"I had a notebook. Not enough. I needed a body. I needed the room. I needed him to be found, and for the finding to be unmistakably his. I needed it to be so clean that no one could say I'd invented it."

Lauren raised her head slowly.

He needed it found.

She heard it on the tape, and she heard it in her own head, in the very same instant, as if two bells had rung together.

"I'm going to stop here, Captain. This is the end of the first part. Please look at the box. Please read the notebook. When you've finished, you'll want to find me. I'd like it if you did. But you'll have to decide something first."

The leader hissed.

"You'll have to decide whether you want the truth, or whether you want your daughter. I think you can have both. But I want to be honest with you, and I don't know yet which one you'll choose."

There was a click.

The reels spun on, empty, for thirty seconds. And then they stopped.

Sunday, 11:48 PM.

The black notebook lay at the bottom of the footlocker.

She had known it at once, by the cracked spine. It was the twin of the one she had seen in a chemist's shop under a flickering neon tube. A black, bound ledger, narrow, with a ribbon marker and a brown rubber band, and on the first page, in a hand like a row of falling trees, a single line.

A Method.

She did not open it with her bare fingers. She took the pair of gloves from her coat, the same blue nitrile she had worn in Room Three, and pulled them on, one finger at a time. Her hands were shaking so hard that it took her three tries.

The pages were thick and creamy. The writing was small and upright and absolutely regular. Columns, ruled in pencil. A date, a place, a compound. A weight in grams. A short instruction.

March 15. Potassium cyanide. 200 g. Subject 4.

March 16. White Mountain NF, NH. Station 1. Forearm and hand.

April 18. Bleach.

April 19. Green Mountain NF, VT. Station 2. Trunk.

She went down the page with her gloved finger. May, June, July. Every line she had seen in a ledger in a plump man's shop. Every mountain on her wall, in order, with its coordinates, with its season, with its soil.

Station 5. Berkshires. Head. Terra-cotta pot. Sand.

Station 6. Crawford Notch. Waste.

At the bottom of the page was a line that she read, and then read again, and then sat staring at with her mouth slightly open.

Subject 4: M.B.

The hand changed there.

It was a small difference. A different pen, a blue so dark it was almost black. A different pressure. The letters leaned very slightly further to the right. The M had a curve in the first stroke that Marcus Brody's Ms did not have.

Subject 4. The old hand had written those words. The new hand had written the initials after them. Lauren turned back a page, and another, and saw it everywhere: the old script in black pencil, and over it, in careful blue ink, a different name inserted into every blank.

She understood at last what she was holding.

It was a blueprint. It had been a perfect one. The sequence for the disposal of a human being across six sites in three states, with chemicals and seasons and times, so well considered that no police force on earth would have found it. Marcus Brody had drawn it up over years, for the day that he would need it. A plan for someone else.

And the apprentice had taken the master's plan, and carried it out, line by line, in the master's order, on the master.

The monster's blueprint, she thought. And the monster's own body.

A single, cold laugh escaped her. It was an awful sound. She clapped her hand over her mouth to stop it.

She turned the page to forty.

Three columns. Three names. Tessa Moreno, Hannah Brandt, Claire Donnelly. Beside each, a date in the autumn of last year and, in the black pencil, three sets of coordinates for a place that was not a mountain. Beneath them, in blue ink, in the new hand, a single line:

Tell their mothers.

She laid the notebook down in her lap.

For some time, she did not do anything at all.

It was the stillness of a woman at the bottom of a very deep well. Above her, a long way up, there was a small circle of light, and in it she could see the shape of everything she had believed. A monster. A boy. A predator who had fastened on a child.

It had been the wrong picture, and it had been the right one, and the two had been laid on top of each other so tightly that she could not tell them apart.

He is what I thought he was.

And Marcus Brody made him.

"Captain Vance!"

The voice came from far away, above her, down the long stone stairwell. Danny Reyes, hoarse and breathless. Then a second voice, deeper, flatter, shouting a name. A clatter of boots.

She looked at her watch.

Twenty-two minutes past midnight. Her delayed message had been sent fifty-two minutes ago. They had broken every speed limit to get here.

"Down here," she called. Her own voice sounded very strange. "Danny. Hendricks. I'm down here. Don't touch the door."

The boots came faster.

She did not rise. She sat where she was, on the cold green floor, in front of the open footlocker, with the black notebook open on her knees and the cassette player at her feet. And as the beams of three flashlights came sweeping along the corridor and swung into the doorway of the hidden room, lighting the foam and the dust and the swinging cuffs and her own white face, she looked up into them and said, in a perfectly level voice:

"He did this on purpose."

"Lauren?" said Hendricks, from the doorway. He had stopped dead. He was looking at the bed. "Lauren, what is this?"

"It's the reason," she said. "It's why he's doing it. It's why he's done every single thing."

She held up the cassette between two fingers, blue ink glistening on the label.

"And he left it here for us to find."