Pulse Read online

  Epigraph

  Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

  MOBY-DICK

  Herman Melville

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part I: 1970

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part II

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part III

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  An Excerpt from Brighton

  Prologue: 1971

  Part One: 1975

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Harvey

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  1970

  1

  HEAVY HANDS pull him from a skim of sleep, a blind scramble for the door handle and the backseat of the car, vinyl rough on his face as he’s dragged across it. He wriggles like bait on a hook, cold air pimpling bare skin, the mouth of the trunk grinning wide and deep. And then he’s dropped inside, a blur of features flashing at the edge of the frame before the lid slams shut and the voices recede and he huddles against a spare tire, smelling the cold rubber and grease, retreating into the womb while the radio gets turned up and the voices rise and fall, bubbles of laughter giving way to a gentle rocking in the springs, low moans in rhythm, building.

  He hears his mother’s sigh, long and circling down, whispering her pleasure, whispering her sadness, whispering her fear, whispering apologies to the son she’d never see again. A second voice breaks the surface, a man’s, muscular and pulsing, calling Daniel’s mother by her first name as he wraps his hands around her throat and claims her life.

  “Easy now, Violet.” The man speaks like he strangles, in smooth, velvet strokes. “Little more, little more. That’s it. Now, down you go.”

  And then it grows still. A rattle of keys and the dry cough of an engine. The car begins to roll, picking up speed as it tumbles forward. Daniel pulls up his legs and kicks at the wall of the trunk with both feet. As the car goes airborne, the eight-year-old is birthed all over again, this time into the backseat of a ’58 Buick.

  * * *

  Daniel Fitzsimmons opened his eyes and scanned the bumpy terrain of the schoolyard, the fall of the gulley that led to the street, faces in the windows of a bus as it toiled past. When you’re different, really different, you know it. You wear it like a second skin, one you’d give anything to slip even if just for a moment. But you can’t. You’re inside the game and the game’s inside you and it runs your head and messes with your mind and there’s no way back, no way forward, no map to “normal.” No matter what anyone tells you. At least not in this life.

  He’d known all this before he was ever capable of knowing. It worked in his blood like a fever, surging and ebbing, keeping him off-balance, at odds, adrift in a sea of shifting depths. Then his mother died. And no one suspected the truth but him. No one ever would. And now he was ten.

  He’d never been much of a talker. After the crash and the hospital and the rest of it, his world shrank to a single point—just him and his brother. Barely a word for well-meaning foster parents, cow-eyed teachers and counselors. Not a scrap for any of the kids in any of the schools. It wasn’t a surprise then that he had no friends. And if you had no friends on a schoolyard in Dorchester, you sure as hell had enemies.

  Joey Watts was older. Thirteen, fourteen. Big, dumb as a hog, hard in the chin and eyes. Suspicious, greedy, scared of the world, and pure bully. He came up behind Daniel as he sheltered against a wall, waiting for the bell that would take them into class. Daniel could feel the bully’s approach, tracking it in his head in some way he didn’t yet understand. Watts stopped a few feet away, measuring. Then he stepped forward and popped Daniel’s cap off his head. Watts snickered. Three of his pals were watching and snickered as well.

  “Freak,” the bully said.

  “Fitzsimmons the freak,” his friends echoed.

  Daniel bent for the black-and-gold Bruins cap. His hand found a rock, hard and smooth, shaped to a purpose. Daniel gripped it and felt its curve while something stirred in his chest, something ancient and evil, blessed and sublime. The young warrior in him wanted to strike out even as the old man within counseled patience. The enemy still lay hidden, not yet ready to be named.

  Daniel let the rock slip from his fingers and picked up the cap. As he straightened, Watts lashed out again, catching Daniel in the ribs with a boot. He fell forward, pulping his face against the pavement and splitting his lip to the meat. He tasted blood rich in his mouth and heard his mind whisper as it whirred, spinning fast, stopping at the nexus of a certain time and a certain place. The pale sun shifted behind some clouds and the air grew bitter. Daniel wiped his face and raised his eyes to his tormentor, piercing him to his essence, fixing him to his fate.

  “You drowned her. You didn’t mean it. You were just being mean. But you did it.”

  In a stroke, Daniel had slipped inside Joey Watts, two now one. He saw the bully as a boy, in the summer of his eleventh year, standing nipple deep in the cold waters of the Quincy quarry, pushing down on the head of nine-year-old Jeannie Jameson. Daniel watched her mouth fill as she went under for the last time, felt the grim thrill that coursed through Watts’s body as the little grub thrashed and kicked and her life streamed away in a string of tiny bubbles. And then everything blurred, a final fingernail scratching the back of Watts’s wrist before her limbs went soft and sloppy and sank.

  “You watched them try to revive her on the rocks,” Daniel said. “And then you left with your pals.”

  He reached out to touch Watts, but the boy reared back, nostrils flaring, a wild look in his eyes. And then he ran, the others with him. No shame was so great they couldn’t bear, anything to be distant from those eyes and the god-awful truth that lived therein.

  Twenty years distant, Joey Watts would climb over a railing on the upper deck of the Tobin Bridge during rush hour, take one look at the pale-ribbed water below, and jump like a motherfucker. In his studio apartment, the cops would find a woman dead in a bathtub along with a note about Jeannie Jameson and that summer day at the quarry. They’d also find Daniel’s initials scrawled all over the walls. No one would ever make heads or tails out of that part of it. No one ever could.

  The playground in Dorchester was empty; the wind stilled. A bell tolled, calling Daniel to class. By the time he slipped
into his seat, he’d chalked up the whole thing with Joey Watts to his imagination. The lead in his belly, however, told a different tale. Whatever had taken hold of him was still there, submerged in the blood, waiting.

  Six years later, it would resurface.

  2

  1976

  THE APARTMENT was above the Rathskeller, a Kenmore Square dive known to the locals as the Rat. If he’d been older, the name might have given him pause, but Daniel was all of sixteen and the price was right. So he pulled the index card off the window, tucked it in his gym bag, and trudged up a staircase decorated with trash that looked like it had blown in off the street. At the top of the stairs was a plain wooden door with no name, no mailbox, and no doorknob. Daniel banged on it with the heel of his hand only to hear an audible click as the door swung in.

  The apartment was a surprise—old-school Victorian with waxed floors that smelled like cut lemons and heavy, double-pane windows framed in their original woodwork and finished with brass fittings. A clock ticked away the time on a wall, its hands reading ten o’clock even though it was well past two in the afternoon. Nearby a silvered cat with one eye of cobalt blue and the other glassy white stared out from a shelf. The cat flexed his long back and leaped through a ribbon of sunlight, landing noiselessly on a desk before winding his way through stacks of paper and disappearing behind a pile of books. An old-fashioned turf fire smoldered in a blackened fireplace. The reeky smell mingled with a hint of pipe smoke, giving the room the feel of Galway or Mayo circa 1880. A shabby couch and soft leather chair completed the picture, huddling for warmth around the hearth while a table to one side held the fixings for tea and coffee.

  Daniel moved tentatively to the center of the room. He was as awkward as a teenager got, tall and scrawny with pale oversized features, a scattering of acne, and long brown hair curling at the ends and trailing out over a hooded gray sweatshirt that had BOSTON LATIN printed across the front in boxy purple letters. He turned once in a circle, taking in the layout before drifting over to the desk and picking a piece of paper off one of the many stacks.

  “Can I help you?”

  Daniel could have stood in the room until day gave way to night and never noticed the person who spoke. So perfectly had he painted himself into the contours of the wall he was leaning against that it wasn’t until he moved before the boy could actually put form to voice. Or, rather, shadow to voice.

  “The door was open.” Daniel pulled out the index card with pieces of Scotch tape stuck on each corner. “I’m here for the room.”

  The shadow moved like, well, a shadow. The voice seemed to be everywhere. “Your name?”

  “Daniel. Daniel Fitzsimmons.”

  “Irish?”

  “Yes. Does that matter?”

  “Course not. Take a seat.” An open hand directed Daniel to a chair. He sat while his host moved behind the big desk and settled, steepling his fingers and holding the tips to his lips. By the muted light of the window, Daniel got his first good look at the man. If he’d been more self-aware, or not so self-aware, Daniel might have noticed the man’s eyes, pulling energy from whatever they touched, or the skin around the edges of his face, like butter someone had smoothed over with a knife.

  “My name is Simon Lane,” the man said. “But you can call me Simon.”

  “Okay.”

  Simon gestured impatiently at the index card Daniel still held in his hand. He slid it across and watched two veins that crisscrossed in the man’s forehead.

  “You want the room?”

  “If it’s still available.”

  “I wouldn’t have left the card up if it weren’t. Hmmm, maybe you won’t do.”

  “Do for what?”

  “You go to Latin School.”

  It was more of a statement than question so Daniel didn’t respond.

  “Not as old as I’d like.” Again more statement than question, but this time inviting a response.

  “I’m eighteen.”

  Simon held up a finger, crooked at the middle knuckle. “Lie.”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Won’t do. Won’t do at all.”

  “I’m sixteen. I know, it’s young.”

  “To a person who dies at fifteen, it’s an eternity. Did you think I wouldn’t give you the room because of your age?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Are you a runaway? No, of course not.” Simon nodded at Daniel’s sweatshirt. “Where is Latin School, by the way?”

  Daniel pointed vaguely out the window. “In the Fens. Avenue Louis Pasteur.”

  “Yes. And what year was it founded?”

  “Sixteen thirty-five.”

  “And what book must every sixie read? And when you answer, please preface by explaining to me what a sixie is.”

  “A sixie is a seventh grader at Latin. He’s got six years to go before he graduates. And the book we all have to read is called Breeder of Democracy. It’s the history of Latin School.”

  “Boring as sin, right?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “See, your bona fides is established. Not a runaway. Just a local seeking a place to sleep. The rent is fine?”

  The room had been advertised at fifty dollars a month. Incredibly cheap.

  “The rent’s great.”

  “Yes, it would be. Any questions for me?”

  “How old are you?”

  “I thought you’d ask to see the room.”

  “That, too.”

  “I’m twenty-three years older than you, Daniel. Give or take.” Simon opened a desk drawer, then another, mumbling to himself as he rummaged. Daniel half expected him to come out with a runny candlestick, holding it aloft like some moth-eaten character from a Dickens novel. Instead, it was a flashlight.

  “Out here by the windows isn’t bad, but once we get into the hallway, the lights are hit or miss. Come on.” Simon led the way toward a kitchenette tucked into the back of the room. There was a sink, a stove, a refrigerator, and a butcher-block countertop with two stools. Daniel saw a couple of plates and mugs in an open cabinet.

  “Do you cook?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “The refrigerator’s there if you want to use it. Just leave me some space.”

  They reached a door cut into the wall next to the sink. It opened to a long, narrow hallway that smelled of damp. Simon snapped a light switch up and down to no avail. “I’ll fix that.” He clicked on the flashlight and moved it along the passage. At the far end were two more doors.

  “Those are my rooms. I work in one and sleep in the other.” Simon pointed at each door with the light. “You’re at the other end. Bathroom’s between us. This way.”

  For fifty bucks a month, Daniel didn’t expect much, and he wasn’t disappointed. Bed, dresser, mirror, and a tiny window that looked out onto the redbrick face of a building across the alley.

  “All right?” Simon poked the light at Daniel, who held up his hand and squinted.

  “Does the electricity work in here?”

  Simon grunted and reached up to pull on a cord. A naked bulb dropped on a wire from the ceiling cast a wavering glow over the room.

  “How’s that?”

  “Great.”

  “So you want it?”

  Daniel shrugged. Of course he wanted it. They made their way back to the main room and took their seats again at the desk. Daniel noticed white threads running wild through Simon’s dark head of hair.

  “Where’s your stuff?” he said.

  “I don’t have much. Maybe I can bring it over later?”

  “Fine.” Simon produced an envelope from the top drawer. “Two keys. The gold opens the door downstairs. Usually you can just push it in, but sometimes the lock works. The silver opens the front door to the apartment.”

  “There’s no doorknob.”

  “Just push that one in as well. Don’t look so horrified. I’ve got a deadbolt on the thing.”

  “How do I leave?”

  “There’s a lit
tle handle on the inside. Works fine. You thinking of moving in tonight?”

  “Probably. When do you need the rent?”

  Simon waved at the notion. “Whenever. I’ll get a bulb for the hall. You want tea? Good. Let’s sit over here.”

  Simon directed Daniel to a seat on the couch next to the fireplace and walked back to the kitchenette, where he filled a kettle with water. The man was tall, big hands, knotted muscle for forearms. Not someone who worked out a lot, but possessing a natural strength that would serve him well should he ever need it. He put the kettle on a burner and returned to the main room, settling in the easy chair and once again studying Daniel over tented fingers.

  “I work mostly at night in the rooms you saw at the end of the hall. That’s my private area, just as your room is private. We’ll share this common space. Fair enough?”

  “Sure. If you don’t mind me asking, what do you do? For work, I mean?”

  “I’m a professor at Harvard. Well, I used to teach there. Theoretical physics.”

  “I’m taking physics now.”

  A dry smile flitted across Simon’s lips. “You like science?”

  “I guess. What’s that?”

  To one side of the fireplace was a small easel with a sketchpad on it and some pencils. Simon brought the pad over.

  “I dabble. Chalk, pencil, the occasional acrylic. This is a beach at night. It’s half finished.”

  The sky was the color of pitch, with a moon dipped in red and hanging low, casting pale bars of light across wet sand and sheening the hard, black water. A tarred road wound up from the beach, dotted with snarled trees and tufts of dark weeds. Vague white lumps grew out from the road here and there like soft tumors. The sketch still needed to be shaped and left Daniel uneasy. He was happy to hand it back to its owner.

  “It’s not very good,” Simon said.

  “I like it.”

  “Really?”

  “Kind of creepy, but maybe that’s what you’re going for?”

  “Maybe. If you want, I’ll give you a look when it’s done.” Simon flipped the pad to a blank page and returned it to the easel. The kettle had begun to whistle. He went back to the kitchen and fixed them each a cup. Daniel’s was the way he liked it, strong with milk and three sugars. He took a sip and set the cup down on a low table next to a folded copy of the Boston Globe. Simon moved the Globe to one side and picked up a copy of the Harvard Crimson that was tucked underneath. The article he showed Daniel was from last summer, a preseason piece about the Crimson’s All-Ivy running back, Harry Fitzsimmons.