by Dale Bailey
“Be along in a minute,” he called. “Hang on.”
He turned to peer once more into the dark.
Something down there.
He sensed it somehow, he didn’t know how, and not for the first time he found himself pondering his grandfather’s tales about these old mines. Haunted, he had said. That’s why old Holland shut em down in the first place. Cavanaugh had always dismissed those tales as an old man’s fancy. As a rule, his mind possessed the imaginative capacity of a cast-iron skillet. Just lately, though, he hadn’t been sleeping well. Every night he woke brimful of terror and awe from dreams of tunnels and light—crashing tides of light, vast combers of radiance so bright and cold he could hardly bear to look upon them. Now, half a mile below the daylit surface of the world, the balance tipped imperceptibly toward terror.
He turned to go, suddenly anxious to catch up with his gang. That was when he heard it. A man could afford a touch of deafness on Perry Holland’s wage, but by God, there were limits to self-delusion, and he heard something. He heard something. His bowels felt hot and loose suddenly, and he strained to see something—anything—in all that dark. But there was nothing there. Nothing at all.
Well, it was done, he thought. Or nearly so. Another day or two to clear out the last of the rubble and shore the top up, and it was done.
So he turned to go.
But all the long way back, he had it in his mind. That sound. A whisper like wind through faraway hills, the stir and feather of an ancient wing.
Emily had dozed in the early afternoon, weary of the odors of ammonia and nursing home food, the incessant babble of the television from the lounge down the hall. Weary of everything, not least of all herself. Sleep had brought no surcease. She had dreamed of Henry and her mother both. Now, waking, she found herself remembering his face as he had stood there on the porch, staring after her. None of it was his fault, yet she had blamed him somehow, held him responsible, as if he had betrayed her into seeking something for herself.
The phrase caught and rattled around inside her head, like a stone in a dry gourd. Something for herself. Just once, something for herself.
She glanced at the bed, her mother so shrunken that Emily could hardly recognize her anymore. She touched the old woman’s arm, loose and marbled with veins, and then she went to the window, brushing dark hair from her forehead. Thick clouds hugged the ridges, not moving much despite the wind harrying a scrap of newsprint across the parking lot.
Snow coming. A lot of it, according to the nurses. She ought to run home, throw some things in a bag—
“Emily—”
She turned. The old woman had shifted in the bed. Her eyes flickered open, gray, unseeing.
Emily felt a moment of choking guilt—
—something for myself—
—as she poured a glass of water from the pitcher and held it to her mother’s lips. The old woman drank greedily before letting her head fall back to the pillow. She seemed to go away for a while. Emily watched everything—animation, expression, color—drain from the seamed face as it relaxed into sleep.
She was still clutching the glass, her mind drifting, when suddenly the eyes snapped open once again. This time they were alert and aware, glimmering with the force of personality. The old woman’s hand closed around Emily’s arm in an iron grip, spilling water across the counterpane.
“Em,” she said urgently. “Em—”
And this time she collapsed into something more than sleep.
Knowing it was too late, Emily punched the call button. Then she lowered her face to the old woman’s bed and wept. She hadn’t moved when the nurses got there a moment later.
With Sleep gone, Crawford fumbled blindly for his chair and collapsed into it, staring at the stapler like a man in a trance. Picking it up, he turned it in his hands. Time seemed to slip around him, and for a split second, he found himself once again across the desk from Henry Sleep, the moment as it might have been.
Kill him, Delbert Grubb hissed, and as if in a dream Crawford watched his arm lash out. A polluted surge of elation washed through him as it smashed into Sleep’s face, breaking teeth. Sleep stumbled, his expression comically dismayed, and Crawford caught him a glancing shot to the temple. After that everything blurred together—his crazed scramble over the desk as Sleep crumpled, the stapler heavy as a chunk of primordial stone, the dull thud of flesh beneath each thunderous blow, Del Grubb’s little litany—
—kill him kill him kill him—
—singing in his head.
And then, abruptly, the vision faded.
Bile flooded his mouth. The stapler slipped from his nerveless fingers. He was going to be sick.
Lurching to his feet, he stumbled into the outer office. “Sheriff—” Abby said, but he thrust his way past her. The corridor reeled before him, and then he was in the rest room, the door swinging shut as he leaned over the sink and emptied his guts, once, twice, a third time.
In the heaving, breathless moment that followed, he fumbled at the faucet, flushing away the stench of vomit. He rested his head against the icy porcelain.
“Please,” he whispered, an entreaty, an appeal, but he could not say to whom. The God of his father’s Book, maybe, the God who had abandoned him. The God who mocked his agony. Crawford felt a rush of righteous anger at the thought, a raw hunger for vengeance.
He lifted his face to the mirror.
“Come to me,” said Delbert Grubb.
The figure in the mirror beckoned, and Crawford stepped forward to welcome the embrace, the Judas kiss. A final dam crumbled within him; a black tide took him out.
He was drowning.
Outside, the snow began to fall.
The Storm
The Present
Chapter 18
Voices. His head was full of voices.
On the sidewalk outside the courthouse, Henry lifted his face to the sky and felt the snow against his skin, a benediction. But it could not cool the debate raging inside him. It could not still the voices.
It’s time, his father had said. Come home.
So he had come home. Home to death and mystery and love resurrected, home to dreams and portents. Home to madness.
Get away from here. Get as far away as you can—
Another voice.
And why not? he thought suddenly. Why not just get in the car and drive away? Away from the empty house on Widow’s Ridge, from the mess he’d made of things with Emily and the madness Benjamin Strange believed to be the truth. Away from the town and away from the dreams. Away from the past. He owed no allegiance to the dead.
He knew this voice. He’d been listening to it all his life it seemed.
Get away, it said.
With trembling fingers, Henry took out his keys. He got in the car, letting his gaze slip down the arc of the Stone Bridge to High Street, the windswept curve of lake, Holland House atop its wedge of stone.
Somewhere in the town spread out before him, a church tower chimed out the hour of five. Night was coming on.
I got used to you running away a long time ago, Emily Wood said inside his head.
He started the car and backed out into the street.
He wasn’t running anymore.
Sprawling and many-gabled, Holland House stood fast and mute against the ridges.
Henry got out of his car.
Wind plucked at him, spilling across the promontory to the water three hundred feet below. Spring would green the sculpted acres, but for now Holland House loomed up from its fallow grounds in all its wintry austerity, impervious and proud, less a house than a craggy outcropping of the hills themselves. Two long wings curved like entrapping arms from the central four-story core, alone lighted, the windows of the library blazing out above him.
As a boy, Henry had visited the house only once. Yet it had made a vast impression on him, hushed and huge as a medieval cathedral, dwarfing every sound. He could not imagine living in such a place, entombed in all those fathoms of silenc
e. He could not imagine growing up here.
He rang the bell.
He waited for a moment, shivering, and then the door swung back. Perry Holland’s mother stood within, frail and avian, unchanged. Even as a boy, during that single visit, Henry had sensed something haunted about her, as if the weight of history in the house, its generations of Holland men, willful and unremitting, had rendered her a shadow, without substance, nameless. Had he ever known her name? Perhaps not, yet he remembered her anyway, the lines of her face, the expression of mute inquiry in her flat, indifferent eyes. None of it had changed.
He shifted uncomfortably. Wind clawed at his back.
“I’d like to see Perry,” he said. “If I could.”
The old woman swung the door wider, admitting him into an enormous hall paved with flagstones. Glass display cases lined the walls—antiquated mining tools, he saw, as exquisitely mounted and lit as museum pieces. On either side, broad staircases curled gracefully to a second-floor gallery.
“He’s in the library, I imagine,” she said. “I’ll fetch him for you.”
“Wait—”
She turned, her face hawklike.
“Do you remember me, Mrs. Holland? My name is Henry Sleep. When I was a boy, I came here once—I was a friend of Perry’s.”
Her expression softened. “Perry had no friends. He was a sweet child, but he became an unhappy boy.” She came closer. “Are you unhappy?”
He said nothing, at a loss for words.
“Was that your father I read about in the paper?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then you must be, I suppose.” She hesitated, as if she wanted to say something else, but just then a voice sounded from the gallery above.
“Henry Sleep.”
Henry looked up. Perry Holland leaned over them, his arms crossed on the gallery railing. He wore jeans, a billowing shirt of red silk. Brushing a lock of black hair from his forehead, he descended, his boots ringing in the vast space. “Henry Sleep,” he said again, his voice neutral, an acknowledgment, nothing more. “Mother, take his coat.”
Henry watched him as the old woman collected his coat. Close up, his narrow, patrician face triggered a flash of memory: the rain-lashed mountainside, the vast and echoing dark. Old guilt stirred within him.
“Hello, Perry,” he said.
They stood in silence, taking measure of one another.
“Well,” Perry said at last. “Come up to the library.”
They climbed the stairs without speaking, leaving the old woman below. As they slipped through a door on the gallery, Henry glanced back at her, clutching his coat and staring after them, her face forlorn. He thought of Zachary Holland for a husband, taciturn and coldly handsome, with eyes that gave nothing away, and felt a dart of pity for her. What had she been before she came here? And what had Perry—delicate and feckless Perry, so much his mother’s child—become with such a man for a father? But he had died, Henry recalled, and he said it aloud—“Your father died”—to fill the space.
“That’s right.” Perry gave him an inscrutable glance. “Rather suddenly, actually,” he added as they mounted a second set of stairs, emerging into a broad corridor. “An aneurysm, that’s what they tell me.”
Through wide-flung double doors, Henry saw the high, book-lined library, running the length of the central facade. The chandelier sparked reflections in the fanlight windows, a dizzying labyrinth of books and walls, winding away into the storm-darkened evening.
“I’m sorry,” Henry said.
“I am, too. I didn’t think I would be. We never much cared for each other, my father and I, but I’m sorry all the same.”
They faced each other in the doorway.
“It’s no easy thing, this losing a father,” Perry said.
“Your father was a good man,” Perry said when they were seated. “When I was a boy, I used to envy you your father.”
“He was a little remote, I thought.”
Flames snapped in the fireplace, summoning lustrous reflections from the depths of the furniture, heavy old mahogany, polished to a fathomless gloss. The pleasant aroma of wood smoke enfolded them.
“Well, there are worse things than being remote,” Perry said. “My father, he was bitter his whole life. I think he resented the fact that by the time he became master of Holland House so little remained to be master of. Hollands used to run this town, he always said. And I think that’s what he always secretly wanted. So he lived a long, bitter life.”
“How old was he?”
“Eighty-one. People hang on in the Run, don’t they? They just hang on and on. My grandfather lived to be ninety years old and they say old Titus Holland—my great-grandfather—he lived to be well over a hundred. He went out shooting on the day he died. Or so the story goes.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“It’s funny. I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
“There seems to be a fair bit of that going around.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.” Perry stared into the fire, his features veiled in flickering shadow. After a moment, he said, “What was your word? Remote? Well, my father was … cold, I guess. It’s the best word I can think of, anyway. I don’t think he cared for anyone very much, though he hid it well enough. But you could sense it about him. He had the capacity to be monstrous, and occasionally he was. From the time I was old enough, I always pitied my mother.” He looked up suddenly, and fixed Henry with his gaze. “I guess that’s all beside the point, though, isn’t it? Somehow I don’t think you’re here to rekindle our friendship. So why are you here, Henry?”
“I’ve been looking into my father’s death,” he said. “Certain names keep coming up—yours, Asa Cade’s, Harold Crawford’s.” He paused, but Perry said nothing. “The mines keep coming up, as well.”
“Well, you’ve been busy, haven’t you?”
“What are you doing up there, Perry? I hear things, but they all conflict.”
Perry stood and paced to the long row of windows. “I don’t make a very good conspirator, I’m afraid.” Abruptly he turned to look back at Henry. “It all comes back to our little adventure up there, you know. Do you remember much about it, Henry?”
“No.”
“Nor did I. Oh, I remembered some things well enough—what happened before we went into that hole, the sheer terror of being lost down there, lost and alone. But the heart of it—well, it was all distressingly vague.”
Henry stared at his feet, suddenly unwilling to meet Perry’s eyes. The words he’d used with Emily—
—I never should have abandoned him—
—swam up from the depths of his mind. He swallowed, his mouth suddenly bone dry. “Look, about that—”
“I was afraid of the dark as a kid—did you know that?”
“No.”
“Terrified,” Perry said. “I felt it closing in around me, suffocating me. I refused to sleep with the lights off. I wept. A sniveling cunt, that’s what my father called me.” He laughed. “Dad always had a gift for color.”
“I was angry,” Henry said. “Going in there, it was an act of defiance, a way of letting it out, that anger. You were crying, I remember that, and so—”
“So you left me there. Because you were angry. And maybe you had a right to be. That must have been the worst summer of your life. But it wasn’t my fault, your anger. It had nothing to do with me. Can you imagine what it was like for me, alone in all that dark? I suppose you can’t. It’s always about Henry Sleep with you, isn’t it?” Perry paused. “I used to have nightmares about wandering those tunnels.”
Henry looked up sharply. “So when your dad died and you took over the family affairs, you decided to look into them.”
“What if I did?”
Henry got to his feet. Night had closed in and Perry stood with his back to the uncurtained windows, framed in darkness. So he had been wrong, Henry thought. There was some Holland in Perry after all—he could see it in the obdurate set
to his face, the cold anger in his eyes.
“It was all so long ago,” Henry said. “Can’t we put all that behind us? I need your help.”
“Where were you when I needed you, Henry? I could have died down there. We both could have died. And you left me.”
The fire popped in the stillness.
Henry said, “Why did you have Raymond Ostrowski blast a tunnel you had just finished opening?”
“You really have been busy.”
“Here’s what I think,” Henry said. “Whatever it was that haunted you, that haunted your dreams, you found it. But Harold Crawford found you, and Harold Crawford is dangerous. How am I doing so far, Perry? Have I got it about right?”
But Perry said nothing.
“So you went back to Ostrowski. You had him blast that tunnel, to protect whatever you found down there, to buy you some time to think about what to do with Crawford. Did you tell him it was a slate fall? Is that what you told him?”
“You tell me. You seem to know everything else.”
“There’s a lot I’m not sure of. Like what’s down there, or why Asa and my father got dragged into this, or why my father had to die. But, yeah, I’m guessing you told Crawford there’d been an accident, a delay. And he kept the pressure on to reopen the tunnel. So now you’re running out of time again, and you still haven’t figured out what you’re going to do.” He stepped closer, his hands outstretched. “Maybe I can help, Perry. Why don’t you let me try?”
“I don’t need your kind of help, not after last time.”
“Goddamn it, I deserve to know what my father died for.”
“I don’t know what you deserve, Henry. You’re the one that excels in passing judgment, remember? That, and running away. All I know is that I’m done speaking with you. You can find your own way out. Just like I did, all those years ago.”
He wheeled around to look out the window and squared his shoulders. A dismissal. Henry waited for a long moment, and then he turned to leave. But at the door, he paused to look back. “And your dreams, Perry? Now that you know?”
