Jacqui’s smile disappeared.
“More of the same,” I said.
“Yeah.” She flipped the magazine onto the table. “The nurses came by to take his vitals and change his IV pack.” She pointed at the bulging new bag of clear fluid. “It’s shift change coming up.”
I was getting to be almost as familiar with the hospital’s routines and schedules as she was. “I thought maybe I would read him a bit of his story.”
She almost smiled as she stood up and edged past the bed.
This was taking a toll on her. Jacqui’s face was hollow and etched with deep lines of worry. She hadn’t been eating, and she looked like she’d lost weight.
“Half an hour?” she said.
“Sure, that’ll be fine.”
I watched her as she walked away, then sat down.
My watch read 7:50. Just about our usual storytime. A little less than twenty-four hours since his last seizure. I studied him carefully. Was he flexing harder, longer, now than he had been earlier in the day? It was impossible to be sure.
“Hey there, sport,” I said as I looked for the page where we had left off. I hadn’t marked it: superstitiously, perhaps, I couldn’t bring myself to move the bookmark from where he had left it in the back of the book.
“It’s about that time,” I continued. “Are you ready for bed? Are you ready for your story?” Observing the rituals, imagining his answers.
I found my place and started to read.
Within seconds I wanted to look up, to check on what effect, if any, the reading was having on him, but I forced myself to keep going, to give him several minutes of pure, uninterrupted listening.
When I finally did look, David was perfectly still, his eyes unmoving, his face loose, his arms limp at his sides. I felt both relieved and vindicated. As I watched, his eyelids sank shut.
“You like that, don’t you?” I asked him. “It does something to you. This book.” I held it up, as if he would be able to see it.
I closed the book and set it on the bed in front of me, then reached for the magazine Jacqui had abandoned on the table. I flipped it open, turned toward the back to the review section.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said quietly. “But I have to check.”
I started to read the review out loud. I wasn’t paying attention to the words at all, and after less than a minute of reading, David’s eyes were flickering, his fists clenching. Slowly, at first, but the motion grew more intense as I watched, his forearms flexing and pushing against the restraints, the muscles in his neck drawing and contracting, his lips pulsing and wavering. His back started to arch, his head jerking from one side to the other.
I threw the magazine back on the table and fumbled for our place in the book. I was out of breath as I read the first few lines, but I slowed and paced myself, calmed my voice.
Within a few lines, David began to settle again. His body seemed to sigh as it sank back into the bed.
By the time Jacqui got back, everything was disturbingly normal: just the two of us enjoying the nightly ritual. She stood silently at the end of the bed as I finished reading.
When I closed the book, she whispered, “How did it go?” as if afraid of waking him.
I gestured vaguely at the bed. I didn’t want to lie to her outright, but I knew that there was no way I could tell her about the book again without it turning into a fight.
“He seems pretty relaxed now,” I said.
David lowered his torch to look at the Sunstone, but he kept a safe distance, wary of it still. His hands shook.
“It doesn’t make any sense for me to be trapped here. For any of us to be trapped here,” he said as he leaned in closer to the wall. There were carvings, faint, above the silver circle that held the stone. “There’s something there,” he muttered.
“But the Sunstone …” Matt said.
David took a half-step forward, trying to make out the markings.
“David.” Matt sounded frustrated. “What are you going to do?”
He wasn’t sure how to explain it. At best, it was only a guess. “We all got here by reading the same book, right?”
“Right.”
“We’ve got to get back into the story. I think that’s the only way to get out. To go through the book, all the way to the end.”
“For you,” Matt said sadly.
“What?”
“You said ‘we,’ but we can’t. We’ve tried to get out, to escape, but we can’t set foot on the stairs. It’s like there’s a wall holding us in. If you’re right …” He seemed to sigh, and David looked past him at the other shades, hanging limply in the still air. “Only you can get to the end.”
“I’m sorry,” David said quietly.
Matt’s shade turned to look at the others, then back to David. “Maybe if you make it through …”
“If the Queen gets the Sunstone,” David added.
“If you can make it to the end, maybe … maybe it will be a happy ending for all of us.”
David could feel his eyes burning with tears. His voice cracked when he said, “I hope so.”
Pulling into the driveway, Jacqui turned off the engine and sat in the silence. She stared up at the faint glow in the window above the garage. It was well past midnight: was he hard at work, head bent over one of his notebooks, pen in hand? Or had he fallen asleep in his reading chair again, his book falling to his lap, the way it always used to, back when …
Her hands were shaking as she punched the numbers on her cell phone. It took him a couple of rings to answer, and with each passing second she fought the desire to hang up.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, without saying hello.
She imagined the worry on his face.
“No, no. Everything’s fine. David … there were no problems.”
“That’s good.”
Then they both waited in silence. Jacqui imagined that she could see his faint shadow on the curtains, but it was probably a trick of the light.
“I came home,” she said faintly.
“I heard the van.”
“There was nothing … He’s stable, and …” She wasn’t sure if she could actually hear him moving over the line, but a moment later the curtains parted and he was leaning toward the window, cupping one hand against the glass.
“Did I wake you?” she asked. “I wasn’t sure if I should—”
“I was just getting ready for bed.”
“That’s good.” She looked from his window to the front door of the house, then back to his window. It was hard to see his face with the light behind him, but she imagined their eyes meeting. “Do you—Would you like to sleep in the house? Tonight. With me?”
He was silent for so long she wondered if they had been cut off. She almost hoped they had.
“Just to sleep,” she said, rushing in to fill the space between them. “I just—”
“Sure,” he said, with a quiet intimacy and understanding that stirred a deep part of her.
Her hands were shaking harder as she opened the van door.
David bent low, as close as he dared to the Sunstone. In the wavering torchlight, the symbols carved into the wall were difficult to see.
“I can’t quite read it.”
“Let me try,” Matt said, as he drifted past David. “Hold the torch closer.”
Instinctively, David reached out to keep him back. “Matt, don’t.” His hand slid through the grey mist, no more substantial than cold morning fog.
“I think I’ll be all right,” Matt said. “It can’t kill me again, right?”
David extended the torch until it was almost touching the wall. “What does it say?” he asked excitedly.
“Hang on a sec,” Matt said. “It’s pretty faint.”
David leaned in closer, despite himself.
“Okay, it’s like a little poem:
WITH MY TOUCH I FORSAKE ALL CLAIM,
AND TO YOU I FREELY GIVE.
FOR YOUR GLORY I GIVE MY HEART.
/>
FOR YOUR STRENGTH I GIVE MY STRENGTH.
FOR YOUR LIFE, I GIVE MY LIFE.”
David waited for him to continue.
Instead Matt straightened up and slid back. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s all there is.”
“But what does it mean?” David asked.
“You’ve got me.”
“It sounds like an oath. The sort of thing the captain might say.”
Matt nodded thoughtfully. “It does. But it doesn’t really help you, does it?”
“No,” David said, disappointed. He rubbed his hands together, trying to psych himself up. There was no point in delaying.
V
JACQUI FELL ASLEEP WITH ME holding her, lying on my back as she nested into me, her head resting on my shoulder, my arm loose over her, the smell of her hair, her skin, enfolding and enveloping me. I lay there as she drifted into sleep, and as she unconsciously rolled away, back to huddling on her side of the bed, the way she preferred to sleep.
I spent most of the night awake, listening to her slow, steady breathing.
When the numbers on the clock radio changed silently to 4:00, I slipped out of bed. Jacqui didn’t move or even sigh as I stood up and took my clothes out to the hallway to dress.
The next few minutes all unfolded like a memory, or a dream. The silent walk through the darkened house. Lifting the doorknob on the back door a little as I closed it to dull the sound of the lock clicking shut. Smoking a cigarette on the back walk, looking into the dark mystery of the yard and at the second floors of the neighbouring houses, all that was visible over the cedar fence. The ritual of letting myself into the office, turning on the lights, making a pot of coffee.
It was the way my life had been, once.
When I turned on the desk-lamp, any illusion of normalcy vanished at the sight of the stacks of medical texts, the black notebook I was using to keep track of information, writing to make sense of my thoughts.
I flipped idly through the notebook, hoping for some lightning flash of inspiration to strike, some arc of connection, of synchronicity, to pull it all together.
It didn’t happen.
I logged on to the laptop and went back to LazarusTook.com. The biographical essay had been thorough enough that I was disappointed to find that the rest of the site was fairly pedestrian: a few covers, an excerpt from each book.
No luck with the author; what about the publisher?
Searching “Alexander Press” brought no hits. Adding Took’s name, then Belden, Oregon, didn’t help any. A search for “Took Publishers” didn’t work.
I tried Sprite Press, the house that had published the four paperbacks I had read at my grandmother’s house.
Sprite Press—Founded in 1949 by Trevor Williams following the success of Penguin’s expansion of the paperback market, Sprite focused primarily on science fiction and fantasy reprints. Although never as successful as Ballantine or DelRey, the house’s peak years came in the 1960s with the widespread interest in its specialty genres. At the height of its success, following the publication of JM Chadwick’s The Grail Travellers, Williams sold his company to Davis & Keelor, where he continued to operate it as a specialty imprint until 1983. Williams died in 1986.
Williams’s name was a link, but his Biography page made no mention of Took, unless one considered the inclusiveness of the phrase “republication of mid-level British genre writers.”
I scratched a few notes into the black notebook.
The mention of Davis & Keelor was probably a dead end. With the publication of the four novels coming decades before the sale of Sprite, the books were probably long out of print, rights reverting to Took’s estate. Still, it was something to pursue.
I checked my watch—not even nine-thirty in New York. No point in calling.
I brought up the D&K website and hit the link for General Information. The Contact Us button opened a new email window.
Good morning,
As a freelance journalist in Victoria, Canada, I have recently begun writing a feature piece about “forgotten” writers from the 1940s and 1950s. I was wondering if you could provide me with any information with which to contact the estate of Lazarus Took, a writer who was published by Sprite Press in the 1960s. I realize that this was prior to Sprite’s purchase by D&K, but I’m hoping
I leaned back in my chair. What was I doing?
The publisher wasn’t going to be able to tell me anything, and even if they could connect me with Took’s estate, what could I possibly ask? I was grasping at straws.
It was just a book, that’s all.
What the hell was I thinking?
I finished the note with a few half-truths about hoping to get in touch with some of the authors I was writing about, and hit Send. A wave of exhaustion washed over me, and I closed my eyes just for a moment, the book resting in my lap.
“David! Remember what happened last time,” Matt said, alarmed. “You can’t touch the Sunstone.”
As if David would ever be able to forget that.
That wasn’t you, he thought to himself. That was Dafyd. None of this is real.
But it was. David knew that this was as real as the life he had left behind.
“Of course I remember,” he said. “But I have to try. It’s the only way to get out of here, to make the story keep going. Can you think of any other way?” He tried to sound confident and strong, tried not to let on just how much the thought of touching that stone again terrified him.
Even though he couldn’t see Matt’s eyes, David could feel him looking at him for a long moment, before the mist slid, slowly, out of his path.
The Sunstone shimmered in the silver plate. He held his breath, his gaze never wavering as he steeled himself and reached out.
One of the nurses shook her finger at me good-naturedly as I hurried away from David’s room, pulling my ringing phone out of my jacket pocket.
“Chris? It’s John.”
The voice was gruff, familiar, though I rarely heard it. My editor at the Vancouver Sun usually e-mailed.
“John,” I said. “How are you?”
We exchanged pleasantries. I didn’t volunteer anything. Jacqui and I had decided to keep the news of David’s “condition”—as she called it—close, at least until we had more information to give.
“Any problems with your e-mail?” There was a bemused tone to his voice.
“Not that I know of.”
“Then is there any chance I might get your column sometime soon?”
At first I didn’t really understand what he was asking. Had I committed to an extra column? Was there a special—?
And then it hit me. “Oh shit,” I muttered. “It’s late.”
“Only if you believe in press deadlines and that sort of thing,” he drawled, teasing me.
“Sorry, John,” I said. “I completely lost track of time.”
“Must be nice to be a freelancer.”
“No, it’s … it’s been a bad couple of days. David’s in the hospital.”
“Jesus, Chris, why didn’t you say something?” All trace of amusement had vanished. “What happened?”
As I explained about David’s seizures and collapse, I was sharply aware of myself crafting the story, constructing the narrative. We had told only a few people what had happened—Dale, David’s school. Jacqui’s parents and sister, my mother and brothers, all lived too far away to be here right away, but we’d been on the phone with them regularly since early Sunday morning. I became aware, as I was talking to John, that I was structuring what would become the official version of what had happened.
“Jesus,” he repeated. “Last thing you should be worrying about is a newspaper column.”
“No—”
“We’ll run something off the wire,” he insisted. “Run a cutline saying that you’re away for a few weeks.”
For years, I had filed a column every week. Even when we were on vacation. It was practically a ritual. Reluctant as I was to let my obligati
on slide, it was like having a weight lifted from me.
“Thanks, John. I appreciate it.”
“All right,” he said, gruff again. “Listen, give your wife a kiss for me. Tell her I’m thinking about her. If I can do anything, you just let me know.”
“I will.”
David braced himself and took a deep breath. He had no choice. He couldn’t face Bream and Loren without the stone. And he couldn’t ask for their help: this was his quest, right down to the handprints on the wall.
Dafyd’s quest.
He let his fingers brush against the stone.
There was no spark, no shock, just the cool, smooth surface of the gem, and the sound of his breath escaping from him.
He turned to Matt. “Nothing happened.”
The mist figure smiled.
David turned back to the wall. The blood-red stone was set into the silver plate, the centre point of a complex geometrical design. It was firmly embedded: David tried to pull it free, but it didn’t move. He shook his head. No tools, no way to get the stone loose. Then he took a closer look at the silver disk.
“It looks like there are some grooves here,” he said, and Matthew drifted back toward him. “Do you see?”
He pointed at two half-moon indentations carved into the stone wall at the edge of the silver disk, where the 1 and the 7 would have been on a clock face.
“I wonder …” Stretching his hand, he could just manage to slip the tips of his thumb and forefinger into the two grooves.
“It’s very thick,” he said. “I’m just gonna …” He gripped the edge of the disk, holding it tight, and pulled.
To his surprise, it slid forward about an inch, then stopped with a sharp click.
“Dammit!” He shook his fingers for a moment, sore from the effort, then tried again, but the disk didn’t budge.
“It’s stuck.”
“Try turning it,” Matt suggested.
The disk extended far enough from the wall now that David could get a better grip. “Lefty loosy,” he muttered as he started to twist.
The disk turned easily in the wall.
“It’s working,” he said excitedly. He kept his grip tight, expecting the silver plate to pop free at any moment, but it just kept turning, protruding farther and farther from the wall with every revolution.
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