I felt whole and real and human again. I shifted on the mattress, saw the sheets of neon-orange paper scattered across the bed and over onto the carpet. I remembered reading Ethan's story, though I couldn't be sure how much of what I remembered had actually been written into his manuscript. I remembered searching the rocky grasslands along the banks of the Allt a' Mhuilinn for cloudstones, and I was sure that had not been part of the story.
I had fulfilled my promise. Finished the manuscript. Even if I had waited too long to do it. And that was okay. I'm not sure that it would have made any difference. I sat up on the mattress and rolled my shoulders to work out the knot that had formed there. A light glowed warmly through the half-open door to the bathroom. I had left it on. I remembered doing that. Reinforcements.
I smiled, and turned to the thick blackout curtains at my right. They remained drawn over the doors, and I remembered doing that too, but now I saw a faint white line falling across the carpet at the foot of that curtain. I stared at it for nearly a minute. Then I eased to the edge of the mattress, climbed off the bed, crossed the room.
I drew in a cool breath, then I drew the drapes aside. The breadth of Prophecy Creek sprawled out a mile away. Glistening mist clung to the town, casting a drowsy grey light. The Speaker Tree broke through the billowy fog, and a beacon glowed within the restored commentator's tower at the Camlann Fields Baseball Park. I stared out down the rolling hill behind the Motel, breathing on the glass.
And I smiled. Because the morning had come. I slid the glass door open, stepped out onto the balcony. Bracing April air washed across my face. I folded my arms across my chest to hold in some warmth. The deck was nothing but a cement rectangle with a rusting metal railing.
A cracked plastic chair squatted to my left. The chair where John Doe 83 had died fifteen years ago. I nodded to it, because all at once I knew, in the same irrefutable way that all accidental prophets know the future. I had looked into the eyes of John Doe 83, and seen that they were the color of brushed chrome. His eyes were the color of my own, but older, and I knew that he had known.
I laughed at that. It was a light, transcendent sound in my own ears, and it made me smile as I looked back out over the dreaming little borough of Prophecy Creek.
The grey light of morning brightened to white. The sun erupted from the far side of the world, turning the sky to blue fire. I blinked against the rising of the day. I stood on the cramped balcony where the body of John Doe 83 had been discovered all those years ago, and I considered what an abysmal human being I had turned out to be.
I had failed my family. I had failed my friends. I had failed everyone who had ever mattered to me, and many who didn't. But as the sun scorched the sky and burned away the glistening mist over my town, I smiled.
Because I could make things right. Of course I could. I was my father's son, and I was not my father. I was my his greatest mistake, and his last chance for absolution.
I was the author of my own life. And I didn't even have to wait until tomorrow. Because I could start today.
Absolutely.
I turned my back on the breaking day and stepped back through the doorway into Room 16.
A stink of sweat and madness hung inside the room. I left the door open to let the cold morning filter in and drive out that stagnant air. I rounded the foot of the bed, turned off the television. Spun toward the wall above the head of the mattress. Saw the bedsheet draped over the frame that hung there, fluttering in a bitter breeze. Almost like some inexpressible thing was breathing on the other side. An image shimmered in the distance of my memory.
A painting. Not just a print, but an actual painting. An ordinary urban sidewalk in downtown Philadelphia. Billy Penn towering over the skyline. I was sure of that. And I was sure that I had seen something unspeakably wrong in that picture last night that I couldn't describe in the sane light of the morning. I thought of abandoned subways, and inescapable catacombs. Of marmoreal flights leading to incomprehensible caverns and hideous forests.
I shook my head. I had lived through the night, even if I might never know what had happened. That would have to be enough. But looking at that fluttering sheet draped over the corners of an intricate wooden frame, I thought that maybe I understood a little bit about this room.
I spent an hour gathering up the neon-orange pages of Ethan's manuscript, getting them back in order. Most of the sheets had sprawled across the carpet. Some tumbled like dead leaves under the table and the bed. Those lying scattered across the mattress had fared worst. I smoothed them all out and straightened the stack as best as I could, counted through them three times to make sure that I had collected all 716 sheets, and opened my bookbag.
I felt the weight of that document in my hand, and the subtle texture of the life it contained. I looked down at the cover page, at the words Cecilia's Song in large, plain font. I smiled. I knew that I would have to read the manuscript at least once more. Just to figure out what had actually been part of the story and what I had imagined.
But that would be a job for another day. I had done all I had come here to do, and I had come away from it with the parting gift of my own sanity. For all the lives this room had taken, it had given one back on this bitter Spring morning, and that was a good start. For both of us.
I crammed the stack of pages back into my bookbag. I closed the main compartment, and the bag banged against the tabletop with the sound of metal on wood through cloth, and I remembered. The Smith & Wesson.
I turned the bag to unzipper the smaller compartment, almost reached my bare hand inside, and thought better of it. I opened the main compartment again, dug under the nest of paper, and pulled out my batting glove. I slipped it on, reached into the side pocket, closed my fingers around the revolver, and removed it. It was a machine designed by humans to make themselves into dark gods, and it wanted blood. But it would not have mine.
I held the gun in the palm of my gloved hand. It seemed to weigh nothing at all. Like an illusion out of a feverish nightmare. I looked at this thing that took life, that destroyed, that was fury and hatred and violence. I looked at this thing that was death. I felt its dark pulse.
I considered turning in the revolver to the authorities. I could drop the little five-shot into a manila envelope, with a note explaining the weapon's origin, and mail it to the Prophecy Creek Police Department. I knew that I should do just that. But I also knew that I couldn't.
The gun would certainly get to the police in time. But not yet. Because my work in this room was done, but the snubnosed Smith & Wesson had one last job to do. And my part in its story had come to an end. I had taken it away from the heartless bastard that Amber had called Hank and brought it across the water to this rundown little motel hunched alongside a barren stretch of Route 119 inside the eastern border of Prophecy Creek.
I had served my purpose.
The revolver lay buoyant in my hand, absently pleasing to the touch. Cool jasper pressed against my breastbone. There was only one more thing to do, and so I did it. I slid the drawer out from the underside of the table, and laid the gun down next to the Gideon's Bible inside.
I looked at the two, side by side. It was an appropriate choice. Neither option was correct. Not for me. I nodded, and closed the drawer. I reached across the table, opened the drapes to let in the fresh light of the morning.
Then I pulled my bag over my shoulders, and left.
CODA
Half-an-hour later, I twisted the steering wheel to the right.
The Jeep Wagoneer rolled around the corner, down the curving two-lane driveway, into the student parking lot of Prophecy Creek High School. The blacktop was filling up at just after seven in the morning, and I rolled past toward the faculty parking section at the front of the building.
I pulled into a space at the front of the cement forecourt and stared through the windshield. The flag flew at full staff. It had all week. I watched it snap curtly in the bitter breeze that sliced across the open grounds, then shut down the
engine, grabbed my bookbag out of the passenger side footwell, and climbed out of the car. I crossed the wide concourse, passed through the double doors into the foyer, and entered the main lobby outside the cafeteria.
I saw no one. No one saw me.
I made my way along the corridor, through a bay of lockers, around a corner to the Creek Reader newsroom. I pushed through the heavy door and find the room empty. I grinned. The assignment board on the wall opposite the door had been entirely filled in. All of the space on all of the pages accounted for. I saw the block in the middle of the bottom of the board reserved for the movie review page, and saw that Ethan's name was still scrawled next to the title of Section Editor. He had done the layout work for the April issue, and we had all agreed by silent consent to acknowledge his efforts one more time.
After the April issue, things would change. The staff would discuss whether to discontinue the movie review page or assign it a new editor. Dr. Lombardi would ask for volunteers to take over for Ethan. And looking up at that assignment board, I knew that I wanted the job. I had lost the Senior Editor's position to Gale last June, but I would not lose this position next week. I wanted the page.
And I knew what my first editorial action would be. Later today, I would calculate how much space remained in Ethan's layout after Ben's Avalon Rising review was excised. I would spend the evening editing my own article to fill the spot. I wouldn't leave the school tonight until it fit. I would do exactly what Ethan had asked me to do.
Ben wasn't going to like that. Not even a little.
I laughed, crossed the room to the back wall. I opened my locker and heaved my bag inside. It tumbled over and thumped to the floor of the narrow compartment. The side pocket that had once held a five-shot Smith & Wesson now contained the wad of bills that I had reclaimed from the scruffy man with Steven Arendell's deep-set eyes. He had looked away from the small television on the counter when I had walked into the office of the Gateway, staring at me like he didn't believe that I was entirely human.
I had told him that I had passed Go, and had come to collect my two hundred dollars. He had laughed at that as if it had been the funniest thing he'd heard in a long time. Maybe it had been. He had pulled the binder out from under the counter, and pulled the bills out of the front pocket, and handed back the cash with a regretful little grin. I had tucked the money into the empty side pocket of my bookbag, and had told him that he should probably have that painting removed from Room 16.
"What painting?" he had asked. I still didn't know if he was serious. But I had known that it was time to go.
I closed my locker and left the newsroom. I headed back toward the main lobby, angled short of the entrance doors, and entered the main stairwell instead. I climbed the steps and crossed the landings and I did not hurry.
I pushed through the third-floor doorway, and turned down the corridor behind the balconies that overlooked the auditorium. For the last thirty hours, I had looked into an abyss that had looked unflinchingly back into me, and when looking had no longer been enough, I had crawled down into its oily entrails and smeared myself with its greasy blood. I had gone all the way to the bottom of my own fractured psyche, and I had gone all the way back to the beginning of my own story. I had gone all the way to the parking garage of the Carter Medical Center.
And after all the miles, I had come home again.
In the serenity of this hour, before the machinery of the world started itself up again, I wanted to savor the solace of the empty places one more time. Because that was the one place I knew I could always find myself. And I had a feeling that nothing else was going to be the same.
So I climbed the four metal stairs to the far door, hit the bar at the center, and spilled out into the morning.
I crossed the roof toward the rampart above the courtyard.
And then I paused. The girl stood with her back to the door, looking out over the industrial landscape. Waiting. I shook my head. I couldn't expect anyone to wait for me. Not this morning. I should have been surprised to find her here, but I wasn't. Not really. Not after everything that had happened. After everything that had changed.
My footsteps crunched through the gravel rooftop. Amber didn't react. She made no move as I approached, and I made no attempt to catch her attention. I didn't need to. She knew I was here. She had always known.
The door clicked shut behind me. I reached the wall to her right, and leaned against the parapet, and looked out over the parking lot as it slowly filled with cars. I saw a Nissan Sentra, and a lowered Dodge Neon, and a dark BMW with a vanity plate reading DUKE419. I saw Mrs. Chandler's Mazda MX-5 parked near the gym.
I saw the twelve-foot-tall Scots Pine standing in the brick island between the courtyard's two stone staircases. Where nothing but weeds should ever have grown.
I wanted to see Amber, but I didn't dare to look. I didn't know what I could possibly say to her, so I said nothing, and waited for her to speak. We stood there for minutes that stretched like eternity, and I had almost worked up the courage to break the silence when Amber said, "Ethan told me that whenever he had a problem he couldn't solve, he would come up here to think."
I smiled. He had told me the same thing once. Long and long ago. But I didn't say so, because Amber wasn't done. "He said the answer would usually come to him."
Now she looked at me. And though it terrified me to do it, I turned toward her, because I wanted to see her face, to look into her eyes. I wanted to give her that much. She deserved it. She watched me for a moment with caramel eyes that were as frostbitten as a January moon.
"You left," she told me. The uninflected observation felt like an accusation. Because that's what it really was, and both of us knew it. She stared at my brushed-chrome eyes for several seconds, waiting for an answer I wasn't ready to give. Then she turned away, looked out over the wall. She shook her head, and said, "You just left."
I didn't look away from her. There was no reason. There was nothing else worth looking at. A bitter breeze threw her dark hair across her forehead as she squinted against the dazzling light beyond the borders of the world. I had no answer, so I told her, "I came back."
She didn't react. A meaningless note from a car horn pierced the sky from below us. Somewhere in another life. I ignored it. Amber said, "I don't know if that's enough."
That was fair. I couldn't expect anyone to wait for me. Better she learn this ugly truth now than have to pretend that it's not true later. "It's the best I can give you."
She shook her head again, and glanced down toward the courtyard tables. "After what happened to Ethan…" she said, and sighed. She didn't need to finish.
I nodded. "I know," I whispered, because I did.
She might not have heard me over the bitter breeze. She turned her face back up to let the fierce sunlight splash across her skin. Her eyes glittered like splintered glass thrown across a snowbank. She stood poised at a point where two roads diverged into a yellow wood, looking down each as far as she could, to where they bent into the undergrowth. I waited on one of those roads. I didn't know which. Her choice made all the difference.
Then I felt cool jasper lying against my breastbone, and my heartbeat slowed inside my throat. I drew in a long breath, and let it out. I stood away from the parapet, took two steps across the gravel to close the distance between us. I told her, "There was something I had to do."
I reached to my collar and lifted the thin steel chain that hung around my neck. The cool blue stone carved into the Italian horn slid out of my shirt as I pulled the chain over my head. Amber turned to me. She started to speak, perhaps meaning to ask what had been so important that I had disappeared in the middle of the night to do it.
But then her eyes found the cornicello dangling from its thin steel chain. And whatever she had meant to say came rushing out in a long, sighing breath. That bitter breeze carried all of her unsaid words off into the troposphere, where they became one with all things and lost forever.
Amber's eyes softe
ned. That unforgiving frostbite thawed, and she looked up at me. I took one last step to her, moving in so close that our foreheads almost touched, and unhooked the clasp on the chain. She said nothing as I reached around the side of her throat and under her hair, fastening the clasp again at the back of her neck. I glanced down to see the blue stone lying delicately above the cleft of Amber's breasts. Then I looked back up at her.
And I told her, "I'll always come back." Because I knew at that moment that it was the truth. My truth. The only truth that had ever really mattered at all.
A thunderstruck look bloomed across her face. Her throat worked and her lips moved. She tried to speak, but the wind whipped the words out of her mouth again, and all I heard was the name Ethan. It was enough. She closed her mouth, swallowed, and started again.
"Ethan said you would," she said in a hoarse whisper. "The night at the Morris. Just before." She searched my brushed-chrome eyes, and I could see how important it was to her that she make me understand this. "He said he needed someone to help him keep an eye on you."
She laughed then, and tears streaked down her cheek. "He called you a full-time job. Said you were capricious and maybe a little undependable. He said it was because you were a Libra, but also because you were still finding your way out of a creeping darkness all your own."
She laughed harder at the absurdity of it all, and so did I. Icy tears stung my skin, and I left them there. I could give her that much. She had waited for me, after all. Now she turned those caramel eyes on me as she told me, "He said you've got miles to go before you sleep, but no matter how far you wander, you'll always come back."
Tears ran down to her lips. "That's just what he told me," she said, and her knowing smile looked so much like Ethan's that it broke my heart. "'He'll always come back'."
Ethan had known long before the rest of us. I smiled. Then I laughed. And tears streamed down my face. Of course Ethan had known. He had written the story.
The Danger of Being Me Page 30
