He tried, once, getting in touch with Stephanie. She had moved away from the area; many had, after the disaster. The effort to rebuild Red Rock Falls was admirable, but superficial. Tom knew it was not the kind of wound that healed fast, no matter how many doctors and surgeons were in attendance, it was just something that took time, lots and lots of time. It had inspired him to call her up, to talk to her about what had happened. He knew he could only convey so much — explaining himself or explaining the world had never been his strong suit. It was a good thing anyway, not to burden her; she would only be able to understand so much. And he also knew that it would be a fruitless effort to try and reunite with her.
In the end, Stephanie had seemed genuinely pleased to hear from him. She was married and living in Montana. Brian was attending the university in Helena. She wished Tom well. Tom thanked her for her glassware, the crystal grails, and she told him she was happy to have left him something for his kitchen, and that she hoped he would use everything and look after himself with good healthy meals.
After some more time, Elizabeth was moved from Mount Sinai. The family, whom Tom had never met, save for the sister, Serafina, didn’t leave any word as to where they had taken their daughter. Tom hoped that it wasn’t to a place where she would be taken from the world before her time; he knew she was still doing work, somehow, and that she needed time to heal, like the town did. That was also the way things were.
Tom got a dog. A chocolate lab that he named “Crook.”
Jared Kingston was sent to prison for life. Tom never visited, but he spoke to Jared on the phone twice a year, at Christmas and on Jim Cruickshand’s birthday. Something about keeping in touch with his old friend’s killer seemed oddly right, and Tom felt it would have pleased the big state trooper who Tom had known since boyhood. He did this with dedication, making sure not to slide.
The clear thinking, that electric feeling Tom had gotten a few times during the great ordeal that spring in the Adirondacks, had somehow remained. It would tune in and out, like AM radio, but Tom could hang onto it. He was learning to control it by handling it with kid gloves. He thought if Jim had still been alive he would’ve liked to have talked about it.
All of man’s notions about the nature of the world, the earth, the elements, the animals, the universe, it all came, of course, from his own unconscious understanding of himself. This Tom had learned. Everything was personified — not some things, all things. Nothing came from a man that didn’t carry his mark, as part of the expression of his own soul.
And you know now, old Jim. You know.
Because Jim did know. Because Jim was gone. The name was gone, the particular function was gone; a thing had run its course. But the energy of Jim was still in existence. There was nothing that Tom Milliner was more concretely, absolutely positively assured of in that moment. More than he had ever known anything in his whole life, Tom knew that Jim’s energy was still in existence, in its triumvirate expression; chemical, thermal, electromagnetic, because everything that once was still was — nothing ever went away and nothing ever existed that hadn’t been. There was an everywhere, and there was an everywhen. All things existed, always. If not, the sudden absence would collapse the entire system.
The true absence of a single thing would destroy everything that was.
As the village of Red Rock Falls lay in ruins, the outskirts, namely, the Acres, went up in market value. In only four years, Tom’s house doubled in value. He thought once, drinking coffee in the Blazer, sitting in the garage, chewing gum and itching at his now totally bald head, that he would someday leave it. He had retired, and often spent his days at St. Eustace Rehabilitation Center, where he talked to recovering alkies and junkies in a way he’d never been able to talk to any other people alive. This fulfilled and enlivened him, but only while he was at the center. Back at home, with as much company as Crook gave him, the days were lonely, the nights even lonelier. Rarely would twenty-four hours pass without haunting visions of Jim, sitting in the Caprice, staring out through the windshield at Tom, or of the girl with her goop-covered eyes, helpless while those horrid birds with their curved sucker-beaks and sidewinding tongues flapped away with her, carrying her to a land of rock and ash.
After two more years, providing seller-financing that made the realtors cry in their sleep, Tom sold his home at quadruple its value from only six years before.
Tom left Red Rock. It was a liberation. It was deserved. Tom was a slave who, even at the ripe old age of sixty-eight, had been emancipated. He might have grown accustomed to his life, he might have even grown to love it, but now he would enjoy his freedom. He would travel the one last time.
He left word for Maddy, who had returned to her job. She had been so busy during the months following the disaster that they had hardly seen each other. They’d made plans to talk, many plans, but the moment had never arrived. So, he left word. He had finally learned how to use the computer, and he’d sent her an email. In it he described one of his more satisfying days at the St. Eustace Center, and then told her where he was headed. He ended the note with the words, Ride Captain Ride.
And as much as it pained him, there was some kind of relief that Maddy never came.
But someone else did.
Tom lived for another fourteen years. During that time he read the paper, he switched from nicotine gum to regular gum (though the coffee kept coming) and he walked with Crook on the beach. He made a few friends, and eventually became close with one of them, a woman, Stella, who had a daughter, Hanna, and he shared a few things with Stella about his life, but mostly he just wanted to live where he was, in the here and now.
Tom Milliner died in his sleep, Crook on the floor by the side of the bed, Stella in the condo less than a quarter mile away, who found him in the morning; she wasn’t too upset, either. She had first felt faint, but then she smiled and put the grapefruit juice on the end table next to him and went and made the coffee downstairs and fed Crook, before calling anybody.
***
When Caleb came to visit Tom in his home in Florida, he was a young man. He stood in Tom’s sun-spangled kitchen. Tom’s first thought was that he looked like his father. He even stood like him.
“Hi,” said the young man, and Tom searched his face for traces of that baby boy. He found them. “Is this okay that I’m here?”
“Of course.”
For a moment, Caleb remained standing like that in the kitchen. He was wearing cargo shorts and a t-shirt. He looked sinewy and healthy. His eyes shone with clarity. Tom motioned them out to the lanai, where they sat across from one another.
“You’ve grown.”
Caleb smiled. He had a charming smile, and a guileless expression.
“I have.” He studied his fingers for a moment, which he interlaced between his knees. Then he looked at Tom. “How have you been?”
“You know what they say about retirement. It’s the perfect job.”
Caleb smiled. A moment passed. “I want to thank you.”
Tom felt his face flush and he looked down at his own hands. “Well . . . I don’t know what I did.”
“What you did was not give up on me. On us. You believed in us, you believed in helping us, even when it was dark, even when you might not have known why.”
“Well, I guess there’s lots of things I didn’t know. If I only acted when I knew exactly what was going on . . .” Tom shrugged. He wasn’t sure how to finish.
Caleb looked at him gently, intently. “Which is why I want to tell you a couple of things.”
Tom looked at the young man who gazed steadily back. “How is Christopher? I was out of it there, for a while. Recuperating, like everyone else, I guess. I lost track of you two. I never asked. I was afraid that . . .”
“It’s okay.”
Outside, a Gulf breeze blew. It came in through the open windows of the lanai, bringing the scent of salt and earth. The air was warm, and only a little humid. A perfect day.
“You did just right,�
�� said Caleb. “Just right.”
It was strange to hear the young man talk this way, thought Tom. He had remained a baby boy in Tom’s memory, and dreams. Just the fact of his existence was fascinating.
“I wanted to tell you: we did well. My dad — Christopher — and I, we’ve done well. And we’re not nearly finished yet.”
He searched for the next words.
“There is no one event. There are all sorts of predictions about this time in history. And they’re all there for a reason. There are no accidents; that’s what I know.”
“Do you remember it?”
Caleb looked up at Tom.
“Some things. Images, feelings. All that water.”
He put himself back on track.
“There is no ultimate end, but one. One day. And not like people think. Not at all like people think. These other things, these ideas of apocalypse, of end times, they’re growing pains.”
“Pretty major growing pains.”
“Yes they are. But that’s not . . . what I wanted to tell you, Tom, is that my mother woke up.”
Tom sat up straighter, feeling a brightness wash through him. “That’s wonderful. How is she?”
“She’s doing well. She lost a lot of time, but she’s making up for it. Doctors say she’s a hundred percent.”
“Caleb that’s . . . that’s just so great. I’m happy for you.”
“I thought you’d like to hear. It’s tough having things unresolved...”
Tom nodded, wondering if Caleb was inviting him to bring something up. He could, of course, think of something — a familiar twinge. It wasn’t alarming as much as it was a kind of nostalgia. It had been over a decade since he’d heard the term the young men had used to describe themselves, and years since he’d even thought it.
“There’s a story about Judas betraying Jesus for twenty pieces of silver,” Tom said. “During all that craziness, I was in the car with Maddy — you remember her — and I was theorizing that wagerers were a part of that story. Am I crazy?”
“You’re not crazy at all. It’s a great and powerful representation, a story describing something that has occurred in ways which we can only understand a little at a time.”
Tom, waited, sensing Caleb wasn’t finished.
“I don’t mean people are too unintelligent to grasp it, that’s not what I mean. On the contrary, people are very clever. These things are closer to them than they may realize. Just there beneath the surface. Sometimes those are the hardest things to see, because we’re so close.”
Tom absorbed this. He added, “I was thinking that, you know, when this happened, as the story goes, after Judas died, he went into purgatory. He was forgiven, but his action filled him with such guilt, such remorse, that he’s been paying for it ever since. Actually paying for it. You know? The coins.”
“Yes, the coins.”
Tom paused, thinking, then continued, “It’s his way of interceding, trying to right his wrong.”
Tom shifted in his seat. He felt a little of the old investigator-blood beginning to course through him.
“But then I was thinking, if Judas can repurpose someone like this, to take young people who have . . . gone the wrong way, and use them, it sounds like necromancy. Like something not good or saintly.”
“It does sound that way, yes. But I promise you, Tom, it’s not that. Nobody has been raised from the dead. There would have to be a definitive ‘dead’ in order for that to be the case, and there isn’t, because death is only something conceived by the living.”
Caleb was silent for a moment. Again the breeze wafted in, and Tom could smell the sea air riding on it.
“So,” he said, “How’s my theory?”
Caleb smiled. “There is a holy man called Padre Pio. Padre Pio said that without God’s mercy we would see demons blocking out the sun. That this world we live in, that the beauty of it, is given to us. But that there is, yes, evil we are spared seeing.”
Tom felt he knew what Caleb was going to say next.
“Wagerers, and defectives, too, they’re people who can see those demons, whose sun is often blocked. Defectives are overcome, taken. This can happen even after they’ve been returned to provide succor to those in need.”
Tom thought of the burning man outside his old home in the Acres. He could hear the faint ringing in the air, the pop and hiss of the nuclear reaction. He took a deep breath, and listened as Caleb finished.
“Wagerers choose life anyway. Knowing what they know, they still move forward, they still work towards good. They’re imperfect, like we’re all imperfect. We’re fragments, approximations always seeking completion, seeking the ultimate form, the ultimate answer. And we can find it, even in the face of our nightmares, we can find it. And so the wagerer places his bet that, in the end, life is still worth living, and still worth fighting for.”
“And this is somehow what Judas, or some entity, wants?”
“The story of Judas doesn’t need to be taken literally. The world is a very big place. I like to think that God transcends the limitations we impose. There are stories that better suit one occasion or another; I’d say yours is apt.”
Tom frowned. “There are people who would say that it’s only through strict interpretation, rigorous discipline, that we get the most value from the stories.”
“What I’m saying, Tom, is that what you think about what happened, what happened in your life, what your life is, is right. It’s right, period. The clarity you felt then, and sometimes still do, that comes from your openness. Sometimes through that rigid interpretation, a person can distance themselves from true meaning. Reality is emergent. We’re learning and growing and changing constantly. We’re works in progress.”
Caleb smiled again, and Tom saw pure peace in his face, no condemnation or judgment. Caleb sat back against the padded wicker. He looked out at the rustling palm trees.
After some time he said, “It’s nice here.”
“It is,” said Tom.
Caleb stood up. A look had come over him that suggested he had to be going. Tom got up.
“Will you be seeing your father today?”
“I will. We have a lot to do.”
“I’ll bet. Please pass him my regards.”
“I will. He’s always liked you, Tom.”
“And I liked him,” said Tom. He added, “You look like him.”
Caleb smiled. He held out his hand and Tom took it. Then Caleb brought Tom closer, and hugged him. Tom could smell that same scent on the young man — the fragrance of the fresh mountain air, the pine and the mineral-rich streams. Tom pulled back from the embrace, and his heart felt full and light.
Caleb’s eyebrows knitted together, and he smiled again. In that moment he looked like his mother, too.
THE END
May 9, 2014
Elizabethtown, NY
TJB
Follow T.J. Brearton on twitter @BreartonTJ
Further novels by Brearton are scheduled for release in 2014/2105 by Joffe Books
OTHER NOVELS AVAILABLE NOW BY T.J. BREARTON
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A young woman, Rebecca Heilshorn, lies stabbed to death in her bed in a remote farmhouse. Rookie detective Brendan Healy is called in to investigate. All hell breaks loose when her brother bursts onto the scene. Rebecca turns out to have many secrets and connections to a sordid network mixing power, wealth, and sex. Detective Brendan Healy, trying to put a tragic past behind him, pursues a dangerous investigation that will risk both his life and his sanity. Habit is a compelling thriller which will appeal to all fans of crime fiction. T.J. Brearton amps up the tension at every step, until the shocking and gripping conclusion. This is the first book in the Titan Trilogy.
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Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the making. Thanks to Tom Gnagey, for helping me to ruthlessly hunt for the truth in the story. Thanks to early readers for their support and encouragement – Jennifer Bulkley, Mary Buzzell, Jennifer Person Beiring, Adam Gardam, Joseph Hardy, and Gail Brill.
Many thanks go to Jasper Joffe and Joffe Books. Jasper’s expert counsel and guidance have helped define the tone of this book and shine the details. With Jasper, I know the work is in safe hands. I couldn’t ask for more from a publisher and editor.
I’ve saved Dava Clement for last, because she was the one to champion this book all along, to cheer me on when I wavered. To borrow a phrase from author Robert Ellis, “It takes a special kind of woman to live with a writer.” Imagine marrying one. Your support has made all the difference, Dee.
You were right.
Thank you for reading this book. If you enjoyed it please leave feedback on Amazon, and if there is anything we missed or you have a question about then please get in touch. The author and publishing team appreciate your feedback and time reading this book.
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A selection of our other titles you might enjoy:
PRETTY GIRLS MAKE GRAVES by John Yorvik
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HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Page 36
