The Straw Men
Michael Marshall's unique voice adds a chilling intensity to the serial-killer plot, combining dazzling narrative, a white-hot pace and a deeply disturbing backdrop of conspiracy.Sarah tries to struggle, but the man holds her. The scream never makes it out of her throat. 'Nobody watching,' the man says with hateful calm. 'I made it this way. I can walk where nobody sees.’Sarah Becker is the fifth girl to be abducted by this maniac. Judging from the state of the bodies that have been found, her long hair will be hacked off and she will be tortured. She has about a week to live.Former LA homicide detective John Zandt has an inside track on the perpetrator – his own daughter was one of his victims two years ago.But the key to Sarah's whereabouts lies with Ward Hopkins, a man with a past so secret not even he knows about it. His parents have just died in a car accident, but they leave Ward a bizarre message that leads him to question everything he once believed to be true.As he begins to investigate his own past Ward finds himself drawn into the shadowy, sinister world of the Straw Men – and into the desperate race to find Sarah, before her time runs out.
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MICHAEL
MARSHALL
THE STRAW MEN
For Jane Johnson
We are too late for gods
and too early for Being. Being's poem, Just begun, is man. Martin HeideggerLanguage, Truth, Thought Translated by Albert Hofstadter
Palmerston is not a big town, nor one that can convincingly be said to be at the top of its game. It's just there, like a mark on the sidewalk. Like all towns, it has a past and once had a future, but in this case that future turned out to involve little but getting dustier and more sedate, nudged ever further from the through lines of history: a stiff old faucet at the end of an increasingly rusty pipe, that someday is going to leak so badly that no water makes it to the end at all.
The town sits on the Allegheny River, in the shade of muscular hills, and has more trees than you could shake a stick at unless you had a lot of time and were unusually demented. The railroad used to pass close by, just the other side of the river, but in the mid 70s the station was closed and most of the track lifted up. Little remains of it now apart from the memory and a half-hearted museum, which not even the schoolkids visit much any more. Every now and then a few tourists will wander in, peer with bemused indifference at grim photographs of the long-dead, and then elect to get back in the car and make time. Though it's been thirty years, long-term residents (and in Palmerston, they're all long-term, and vaguely proud of it) still feel the absence of the railroad, like an amputated limb that itches from time to time. For some there were petitions and town meetings, bumper stickers and fundraisers; for others the change came quietly, numbly accepted as part of history's entropic progress in some other direction. Were the town a little bigger and more boisterous, the overgrown track might make a good place to buy drugs or get mugged. In Palmerston it's used mainly by earnest parents to trek children down at weekends, for pointing at birds and trees; and equally earnestly, a few years down the line, for those same kids to get each other pregnant in order to exchange one style of confinement for another.
The town is built around a T junction, the shape of the letter obscured by side streets that seem unsure of their purpose. The upright is littered with gas stations, a car wash, a video store, two small motels and a minimart with a rack of cheap CDs of the Marshall Tucker Band's Greatest Hits. An old wooden church stands at the intersection with the cross stroke, paint peeling now, but still picturesque against a cold blue sky. The right fork takes you up into the hills towards New York State and the Great Lakes.
If you take a left, as you would if you were heading west on Route 6 to go look at the Allegheny reservoir â and that's pretty much the only reason that you'd be passing through â you get onto Main Street. Here you find a few banks and stores, the windows of the former mirrored and anonymous; those of the latter in need of cleaning, and framing antiques of limited worth. Something about the desultory arrangement of the displays suggests that the objects will have plenty more time to accrue value in situ. There are two small movie houses, one of which tried to show art movies ten years ago and was rewarded by attendances so low that it closed in a fit of pique and never reopened; the other still steadfastly toeing the party line of popular culture, hawking unrealizable dreams to popcorn junkies. On the southern side of the street, in a large plot all by itself, sits a beautiful Victorian house. It has lain empty for some years, and though most of the windows are intact, it's peeling a good deal worse than the church and some of the boards are beginning to slip.
If you're hungry, chances are you'll find yourself in the McDonald's a little further up the street, just along from the Railway Museum. Most people do. Palmerston isn't a bad place. It's peaceful, and the people are friendly. It's a pleasant part of the world, low on crime and close by the Susquehannock State Forest. You could be born, raise kids, and die there, without feeling you'd been especially short-changed by fate.
There just isn't much to do in between.
At lunchtime on Wednesday, 30th October 1991, the McD's was crowded. Most of the tables were already occupied, and four lines straggled out from the counter. Two little girls, four and six years old and out for a treat with their mother, clamoured vehemently for Chicken McNuggets. Everyone else gazed at the menu boards with the reverence they deserved.
