The house stood all around him, calm, motionless, awaiting his decision.
Scott turned around and slowly started walking back in the direction he’d come. It didn’t take long. Twenty steps later, he stood in the doorway looking into the dining room where his laptop and the pages of his father’s manuscript still sat.
The air mattress was empty.
The sleeping bag lay on the floor.
The body was gone.
And the oak door in the corner of the dining room, which he had gone through before and come running back and slammed shut upon return, was open.
Just a crack.
HE THREW THE FRONT DOOR open and stumbled outside, not feeling the cold.
On a purely physical level, he felt nothing at all. In fact it felt as though the entire sensory component of his brain were switched off, blown out, NO SERVICE AVAILABLE. All that mattered was the ground beneath his feet and the distance he could put between himself and the house.
He knew the rental car was somewhere up the road, and he was now convinced that he could push it out of the snowdrift himself with his bare hands if necessary. His vision had struck its own deal with the night, swallowing leagues of blackness in exchange for a murky but adequate view of the terrain. He trundled across the landscape like a machine, a thing comprised solely of pistons and levers, incapable of experiencing exhaustion. Even if it cost him some irreplaceable measure of humanity, he planned to just keep running.
Five minutes later, his cell phone rang.
He wavered, gasping, yanking it from his coat pocket, whirling around to look back at the house where it still shone dully through the trees in the distance, all lights on, calling him back to it like a beacon. Fumbling for the baby’s fingernail of a button, he wheezed out something that didn’t sound remotely like words.
“Scott?” It was Sonia. “Scott, are you there?”
He produced another garbled sound.
“Are you okay?”
He staggered, reeling with the question, the glow of the phone hovering before him like some luminescent deep-sea creature. “No.”
“Where are you?”
“That road—by the highway—”
“I’m coming out.”
“Road’s blocked off.”
“Get as close as you can to the highway,” Sonia said. “Wait for me, you understand? Don’t go anywhere.”
And she was gone, leaving him once more to his own devices. The cold was finding its way into his joints now, his shoulders and knuckles and knees, filling them with silver. Scott stuffed the phone back in his pocket, balled his hands into fists, and broke back into the night, disregarding the sandpaper rasp of his lungs, ignoring everything but the path that lay ahead. He told himself he could run forever if it meant being away from the house and whatever was inside.
Up ahead, something crackled in the woods, loud enough that he could hear it even over his parched breathing. Dry pine branches snapped and popped as if the thing might be uprooting entire trees. Scott could make out the rough shape of it, and it was too big to be a deer, standing upright, watching him.
My eyes, playing tricks on me.
As if on cue, his eyes began to water, clearing, and for a stinging instant, he saw with absolute clarity the outline of a figure hunched in the road ahead of him. The man was squatting in the snow like an animal, his pants around his ankles. After a moment, he stood up, and Scott saw that he was a giant, probably seven feet tall. His pants were still down, and his enormous uncircumcised penis dangled between his pale legs like a length of rope, perhaps a foot long from root to head. Scott’s mind whirled, coming close to madness, and he thought absurdly of all the legendary penises of history, John Dillinger’s, Napoleon’s. Let us now praise great penises, he thought, and startled himself with a croak of near-hysterical laughter.
The man glanced up at where Scott was standing and grinned furiously, as if sharing the joke. He turned to look down proudly at the enormous bloody pile he’d left steaming on the ground, then scooped up a handful of snow and wiped himself, threw it into the woods and pulled up his pants. As he stood there in the road, his grin did not change. But other parts of him seemed to be in constant motion: His limbs, even his trunk and torso, appeared to shimmer and roil as if his flesh were packed with maggots.
Watching him, Scott could feel the outline of the man’s form wavering, becoming transparent.
The wind swirled, taking the vision with it.
Beyond it was his car.
IT LAY SLABLIKE and half submerged, a metallic gorgon gone to sleep just below the mantle of white. He opened the passenger door, whooping for air, and fell inside, rubbing his hands together. It was just as cold in here, but simply getting out of the wind was an improvement. The keys were still in the ignition—it took his frostbitten fingers three tries just to take hold of them—but even then, the engine made only a surly growl and refused to catch. Scott kept turning it anyway, flooring the gas until he was afraid he’d flood the engine, and then gave up.
He opened the glove compartment in hopes of a flashlight, perhaps placed there as a courtesy from the rental agency; of course there was nothing, no road flares or even matches he could use to guide him the rest of the way. Once he’d caught his breath and beaten some dull semblance of feeling back into his fingers, he forced himself to climb out again.
He thought about the tall man in the road, hunkered down over the pile of bloody shit, grinning up at him.
I can walk, he thought again. I can walk FOREVER if I have to.
He passed the old iron gates, the ones that had first caught his eye when he’d had Sonia drive out to the spot where his father had crashed.
Five minutes later, he was standing at the side of the highway, waiting.
SCOTT LOST TRACK OF TIME. He had absolutely no sense of how long he’d been standing out here with his bare hands clamped under his arms, stomping his feet for warmth, shivering until his ribs ached and the muscles in his abdomen felt shredded by fatigue. No cars passed, and nothing stirred except him and the indifferent shine of dying starlight a million miles away. There was only him and the lonely road, as lifeless as history. After enough time passed, he almost considered going back to the car, trying the engine again to see whether he could at least get the heater going, but he was afraid if he did that, he might miss Sonia.
And he was afraid of what he might see in the woods.
Finally, after what felt like a lifetime of waiting, a pair of headlights scratched the distance, brightness gathering and becoming stronger, making new shadows across the road. The engine howled closer, pulling up alongside him. Behind the wheel, Sonia sat wearing a black knit cap, a few strands of hair sticking out. She stared at him wide-eyed like a woman stopped at an accident.
“Scott? You look awful.”
He tried to speak but couldn’t—he was shivering too badly and his voice was gone. Dropping into the passenger seat, he felt only warmth, and for that instant, all the night’s horrors were eclipsed by a surge of primordial gratitude.
“There’s coffee. Here.” She took a chrome thermos from between the seats, unscrewed the cap, and poured him a cup. Still shivering, Scott brought it to his lips and sipped until the hot, strong liquid began to thaw the ice from his throat. His murmur of appreciation sounded like an obstinate nail being pulled out by an iron pry bar. Slow, methodical pain had already begun creeping into the joints of his fingers. The dashboard clock glowed 1:14 A.M.
“We got stuck leaving the bar,” Sonia said. “I had to get out and shovel us out.”
“Us?”
“I had Henry with me. I took him to my father’s house. Earl’s watching him.”
“Where’s my brother?”
She glanced at him: It might have been a shrug—her heavy coat made it hard to tell. “I’m really not sure.” Beneath the strands of hair, her eyes searched him, their questioning depth breaking something open in him that the coffee hadn’t been able to touch. Without further p
rovocation, Scott felt the words spilling out. He told her everything—finding the black wing and Colette’s body, and then hearing her voice on the phone. He made his report with a minimum of inflection, a detached unfolding of events whose emotional component was still as numb as his body’s core temperature.
When he finished, Sonia said slowly: “What’s happening to you, Scott?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” He slid his cell phone out. “I’m losing my mind.”
“Who are you calling?”
“The sheriff.”
Sonia reached out and took the phone from his hand, a gesture so surprising that he just let go of it.
“Wait,” she said.
He frowned. “Why?” For the first time, he noticed that they were following the highway north instead of south. “Why aren’t we going back to town?”
She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, over a span of several seconds. When she spoke again, her voice sounded different, the way people sometimes didn’t sound like themselves when they were driving at night, their faces not wholly visible.
“There’s something you have to see.”
“Where?”
“Your father came into the bar one night,” she said. “This happened a year or so ago—last winter, when it was just the two of us sitting there. He stayed for hours, and he … he told me some things. He made me promise I’d never tell anyone—especially not you or Owen.” She spoke with great slowness and almost painful deliberation. “But I don’t think I can do that anymore after what you told me.”
“What is it?”
“I just have to show you. It’s a good distance away.”
“How long?”
“Up north,” she said. “You should try to get some sleep.”
“I can’t.”
He put his head back against the seat and shut his eyes. Exhausted or not, he thought there was no way he’d be able to fall asleep. Yet somehow, he did.
WHEN HE AWOKE, it was still very dark, fat scissor-cut snowflakes spilling through the yellow cones of the headlights. Sonia was driving, talking on her phone in a voice too low for him to understand, and they were pulling up to a large gray building that he didn’t recognize. He looked at the clock. It was 4:05 A.M.
Scott coughed, and his wind-burned hands gave a harsh bark of pain. “Where are we?”
“Pine Haven.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s about a hundred and forty miles north of Milburn.” She parked and got out. “Follow me.”
Back into the cold, but it was much worse, the increasingly northern climate clattering through his unprepared half-conscious mind like a pile of loose tin and scrap iron. Being asleep had made it worse, and part of him longed for the huddled unconscious state of dreamless oblivion that had carried him north, the warmth and mindless vacancy of it.
Instead, he crouched forward against the bitter wind, hands tucked in his coat, following her blindly along the side of the huge building beneath a buzzing sodium arc light. The very length and configuration of the building seemed to make the wind worse, shaping and honing it like a blade until his joints felt as if they were on fire. Through bleary eyes, he saw a button with a sign that said:
PRESS FOR ENTRY
Sonia thumbed the button and waited. After a moment, the gray door unlatched and swung open to reveal a hospital corridor, industrial green walls, and a worn tile floor beneath long fluorescent tubes. Despite the promise of warmth and light, Scott felt himself hesitating, held back by the smell of commercial cleaning supplies and floor wax that barely covered the compounded mixture of body odor, sweat, urine, and excrement that had accumulated inside over the years.
“This is going to be hard for you,” Sonia said.
On the other side of a bare metal desk, a towering black man in hospital blues met them without a word and walked in his silent rubberized shoes down the green hall. Scott followed. The hall was very long, and he realized there were echoes here, other voices, perhaps a great many of them—someone crying or laughing, a sudden shout, a groan of uncertain provenance, voices bounding back and forth like noises in a public pool. The space gave the noises a weirdly distorted resonance. Up ahead, another door—this one steel mesh—waited for them. The orderly brought out a key on a long spring-loaded wire, unlocked it, and ushered them through. The door closed behind them with a clang.
Here the orderly stopped, and Scott understood that he meant for them to go forward alone.
“She’s down at the end,” the orderly said. “Last on the right.”
Scott moved forward on feet that didn’t feel like his own. He came to a final door, heavy-gauge steel with a reinforced glass window and a slot beneath, big enough to accommodate a tray of food or the passage of small instruments.
He looked through the smeared glass.
The woman on the other side gazed back at him. Her drab gray hair lay flattened against her face; beneath it, Scott could see the puckered scars of old burns from her forehead down to her chin. Her eyes were a watery shade of violet, like broken stained glass—so different, but so familiar. When she saw him standing there, she raised one hand slowly to the glass, her eyes staring out at him in frank disbelief, and touched the window lightly as if afraid that it might break.
Scott felt his airway pinch shut so that he could hardly breathe, let alone speak. “Mom?”
She continued to look at him, the crookedness of her mouth becoming more pronounced, until he realized that she was actually trying to smile but had forgotten how. Scott felt tears welling up in his eyes, helpless to hold them back. As if embarrassed by his reaction, his mother’s flicked her gaze above his head, over and around, as if she were following the path of some flying insect that she alone could see. Her finger tapped the window, made a little scribbling gesture.
“Here,” the orderly said, reaching past him to slip a pad of paper through the slot in the door, along with a soft-looking black crayon. She took the pad awkwardly in her incomplete right hand and gripped the crayon with her left, like a child, hunching over it to create a series of slow, deliberate lines, then holding it up to the glass:
My name is Eleanor
Scott just shook his head, wiped his tears, but more were coming, a perpetual river, it seemed. Finally he found his voice. “Mom, what … what are you doing here?”
The sad, crooked smile returned as she took the tablet back. The black crayon slithered over the bottom of the page, moving faster in a quick, irregular scrawl. Reading upside down, Scott could already make out the words:
Do I know you
“Yes. Mom, it’s me. It’s Scott.”
She nodded patiently, waiting with the crayon.
“I don’t understand.” Scott looked around, back to the steel mesh door, where the orderly stood leaning against the wall next to Sonia. “Let her out of here. I want to talk to her.”
The orderly shook his head. “She can’t speak.”
“Open this door.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, it’s against the terms of her stay.”
“The terms of her …?”
“It’s a court-ordered program,” the orderly said. “You want her out, you’re going to need to talk to a judge in the morning.” He cast a glance back at Sonia, where she waited at the far end of the hallway. “You’re not even supposed to be back here this time of night.”
“Mom …” Scott looked back through the glass. “Dad said you died in the fire. He told us that you didn’t make it—” He wanted to say more, but his voice went hoarse. On the other side of the glass, his mother was writing again, faster now, the page crowded with words, starting out big and shrinking as she ran out of space.
I remember you were there in the Theater when the Fire started—is your name Owen?
“It’s Scott,” he said. “I’m Scott, Mom.”
Were you in the Fire?
“No,” he said. “I was away at sc
hool. I wanted to come home but I was too busy. I tried to come home, but I couldn’t make it.”
She was nodding along with him, listening, the crayon moving diagonally across the paper, taking up space and leaving crumbs of wax in its wake.
There was a Fire and I couldn’t get out. That’s why I’m here so they can take care of me and if there’s a Fire they can protect your father and Owen and me
The orderly grunted, reading the note over Scott’s shoulder. “She’s getting agitated, seeing you here.”
“There has to be someone I can talk to,” Scott said. “Some way of getting her out until we get some answers.” Turning back to the face in the window. “Mom, I—”
She was holding up the same sheet of paper, jabbing at the words Fire and father and Owen, eyes widening, sharper now.
“Dad died, Mom. He died a few weeks ago. That’s why I’m here. Owen’s—all right.” By force of will, he mastered his voice, drew back his tears. “Did Dad—Is he the one that put you here?”
She nodded beatifically, and her smile held, deepening into a kind of grimace, and one hand came up to rub at her temple, almost of its own accord.
“Why?”
His mother flipped the paper over, wrote:
Safe here
“Safe from what?” he asked, but she just pointed at those two words. “I can take care of you.” Even now, he was unable to overlook the massive irony of that statement. He couldn’t even take care of himself.
She shook her head, writing again:
I don’t want to go anywhere. Please don’t make me go away. I like it here. This is my home now. They protect me from
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