Chapter 40

1

They drove the same route Trevor had taken the day before. The cornfields to the north were solemn and still, observing the Acura as it looped on the gravel road. Maybe the crops knew and understood what would happen on this day. Maybe this was their way of saying goodbye.

            The farmhouse was a brooding splinter on the horizon, the trees cuffed to the west like a collar or threshold breaking this part of the world from what was normal. At least that’s what Adam thought. The roof is moving. As they pulled up closer, plowing over some growth and weeds so that they tickled the car’s undercarriage, Adam saw the crows.

            There were hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands. Perched on the pitched gables, their black feathers glistening in inky streaks, their eyes like countless beads watching the car’s approach with curiosity.

            “Jesus,” Cole said.

            “Something’s not right,” Adam whispered from the backseat. He’d climbed toward the center console to have a closer look through the windshield. Some of the crows were stretching their wings, fluttering them, and it reminded him of the spontaneous wave that sometimes erupted in big crowds. Often when he’d gone to Fenway and the Sox required a little momentum from the Boston faithful. The roof of the old house looked liquid, dynamic, a current of obsidian streaking and he could hear the caws now even over the car’s engine, over the squall of the brakes as his father slowed down.

            “What do you mean?” Cole turned around to look at him. Adam thought the man had kind eyes. But he knew the man found him questionably insane. He didn’t blame him. This trip was what his dad would call a fact-finding mission, because adults were all predictably the same. Grampa had stated, in no clearer words, just who he thought Grimwood might be, and when Adam first read the letter, he had to skim through it again, to pause at certain sections, because as part of every enlightenment, no matter one’s age, there was always going to be a level of disbelief. But Mr Cardston, his old Language Arts teacher, used to say reading between the lines was what defined comprehension. Adam wouldn’t know the word as subtext, but he had gathered enough to understand grampa believed Grimwood was something other than a man. And Adam believed he had to be. Because to reconcile his belief in magic with the things Grimwood knew and could do would require he turn the man into something greater.

            “The birds. They’re…they’re alive.”

            They were. Alive and numerous.

            “I don’t understand,” Cole said as Trevor pulled between the same pick-up trucks on cinders where he’d been startled from what he thought was a dream (or daymare) by the man they were coming to see.

            “The clearing at the front of the house,” Trevor said, turning to Cole as he killed the engine. “It was like an open ground graveyard for animals. Like they came from all around. Miles away. Just to die here.”

            “What?”

            Trevor nodded. “We had the detail put up cameras around the farmhouse, in it. But their lines were always severed. There was never any redeemable footage. We thought it was vandals. Holdren assumed it could have been a by-product of the plant, but he didn’t know. I don’t think we were supposed to know. Grimwood terminated surveillance here because the animals weren’t dying from what we were doing, what might have been going on in Reedy Creek. No, I think they came here to die. To find peace.”

            “To see the Grim Reaper. Because you…you invited him here. That’s the gist of it…” The tone of Cole’s voice was still shrill with disbelief, even a tinge of sarcasm, but Trevor’s face never broke. Adam knew he would grow to love the man, but the old fears arose when he saw his father’s face because it represented the cold rationality of the man who’d ignored him for so long. Adam touched the opened pack of cigarettes in his pocket and clutched his grampa’s letter. Two pieces of the man he’d left behind for his best bud. “Then the symbolism here, it’s relevant. Palpable. Crows. Black like death. Black as death.” Cole opened the door and stepped out.

            The sound of the crows was muffling; the chitter of so many echoes, of repeated noise, the ambiance of a large gathering, of people stuffed together lost in the throes of their own conversations but aware of the murmur of voices around them. Adam stood in the dirt patchway and stared up at the birds. They stared back at him. Gauging him. They know who you are. They can likely see Grimwood’s mark on you, if that’s even a thing. I think it is. I think each of your friends has the same mark, the same aura. Whatever that new age shit says. Because you came here when it was right, when it was different, when the animals were dead, and you survived. You did. Because he sent for you. His gaze was on you before you even knew about this place, and for that reason I think you were chosen. Chosen maybe to help protect Reedy Creek.

            “It’s a little ridiculous, Trevor. The assumptions you guys have. You’re prescribing beliefs in, what, fairy tales?”

            “Then this is normal?” Trevor gestured to the roof. Adam only watched the adults bicker. His father was on Adam’s side now, believed him, believed in what was happening, but he was still an adult, beholden to those pretensions.

            “They’re crows. Birds.”

            “Maybe they work with Grimwood. For him,” Adam said. He didn’t think the idea sounded nonsensical. “Like, like his eyes. His surveillance.”

            A few jettisoned from the roof and circled above, calling out to one another. Adam thought he could hear the house shifting under their weight, the beams creaking, the twisted trusses torqueing. Cole only watched them and said nothing in return. Because Adam thought he was scared. When adults were scared, they tried to belittle what they didn’t understand. It was their normal.

            They walked around to the front of the house where the stoop spanned the elevation and once housed earlier settlers who likely sat on rockers and watched the sunset over the trees, disappearing into the murk of a lonely darkness. Back when it was only them, before the Creek had a Burger King and Hobby Shop. Back when times were simpler.

            There, lying alone in a cone of golden sunlight, was a deer that had rested peacefully in the arc of the farmhouse’s clearing. The crows had not come to eat the body. It lay alone in the grass, its eyes open and blank, watching the windows above—

            The windows. They were the first things Adam had ever noticed. That prompted he ever return to this place, convincing his friends that they had to investigate, that what they made together, what they built, relied on the discovery of what they’d come across here. Even then he’d been drawn by the magic of this place. They were new windows then. Brand new. Contrasted against the dilapidated shiplap and clapboards, the bifurcated railing along the stoop and the splintered stairs, sheening and inviting against the ominous pall of the house itself. Its glamour, perhaps. Now the windows were broken. The windows on the upper floor were the victims of boys like Adam finding the right stones to throw, pretending they were outfielders in the last inning of a tie game catching up to a ball in the warning track with a runner rounding second looking to score the winning run. The large window next to the front door, the one he and his friends peered through to see the kitchen, to see the extent of the staircase and corridor through the foyer, was mostly scummed with age and the far right pane was cracking from the shifted weight of the house as the header sagged. It’s not the same house. He knew that was not true, but the feeling that came from it, the sense of adventure that prompted he come back had dissipated. It was only abandoned now. It was not a treasure trove, not something Pug might turn into an exploratory story one day, because the enticement had drifted away. If this had been the house you came across after taking Guidry’s pitch yard, you would have never come back.

            “This is where Paul’s security detail was housed? And he didn’t see any red flags?”

            Trevor only looked at the house. He’d noticed the same things as Adam. “It’s different. Even from yesterday, when I came. The windows, they were…well, they were brand new.”

            “Doesn’t look like it,” Cole said, inspecting the deer in the grass and then testing the risers up to the stoop. The rocker chair sat empty, the cords from the camera in the rotten soffit hanging loose; a single glass sat on the table next to the chair, its surface stained with the patina of many years and dust storms turning its crystal finish into a dyed antique. But there was ice inside. Ice that hadn’t melted, and Adam could smell lemonade. He could.

            He walked by Cole toward the rocker, in front of the window that had been new days ago when he’d come to the farmhouse after grampa died; he looked into the glass and saw the citrus residue absorbed into the ice, could somehow taste it, and for a moment he could picture the man in the fedora rocking back and forth, holding the glass, the clear glass, and tipping it to his mouth as the deer frolicked the clearing, and when he was finally done, he’d set down the empty glass with the audible click of the ice cubes rattling, and he went to the deer to tell her that the bugs she could see and feel burrowing into her chest were the disease that would never let her leave this clearing again. And he thought the deer was okay with that, that she had actually come a long way to find this place for that answer. Adam touched the dirty old glass; it was still cold, and he could even sense the condensation that had left beads of water dripping down its surface.

            He looked at his father and Cole as they went toward the front door, both of them talking, Cole disbelieving and his father confused. He picked up the old glass that still felt new. It felt wet and current.

            And his father was gone. Cole was gone.

            It was dark. The porch light was on and buzzing. It was night time and Adam Kramer saw his grampa.

2

The kid with the scarred face is sitting on the rocker with a smoke in his mouth. A smoke of the variety those goddamn hippies blazed because opening one’s mind is all about expanding it. Lew puts the gun Allen Webster loaned him against the back of the boy’s head, and though he knows he won’t be pulling the trigger, that this is more or less just a tit for a tat since the shit put his own metal to Lew’s head in the front seat of his car, his old car, since gone now to that great junkyard in the sky, he still holds it with conviction.

            “Don’t move,” Lew says.

            “Can I finish my drag?”

            He speaks to Lazarus. At least that’s what the gossip mill’s turned the boy into. Because of his face, the scars. Because rumor has it the poor kid put a gun in his mouth with every intention to die and he failed. So here he is now in a world that only sees his mistake. And though Lew once had his own version of Lazarus, a guy named Earl Cloven, he feels a suspicious remorse in what he is doing, and maybe even guilt in how he’s turned this kid into the same thing people expect of him. Because one’s identity is often not something one has any control over.

            But Lew isn’t here for the boy. He’s here for Vasily. Or the man similar to Vasily, though Lew suspects even that assumption is wrong because Vasily Blokhin, the infamous executioner in Stalin’s brigade, is a man and the Boss he’s hoping to speak to, the Boss he’s hoping to arrange a trade with, is something more.

            “You here to save Reedy Creek from itself?” Lazarus asks, that shit-eating grin on his face that might have once made the boy handsome. Comely. Somebody he could imagine Barb dating, had she not gotten the inclination to adorn herself in the revolutionary garb of Trevor Kramer’s idealism.

            Lew shakes his head. He thinks of the crows he saw fall dead from the sky. That’s when he knew. “I’m here to make a trade.”

            Lazarus nods his head. “Yeah, he figured you’d say that too.” The boy taps his face, the untouched side, the handsome side. As if revealing a secret. Lew doesn’t care. The boy just opens the front door, smiles once more, and walks into the farmhouse, away from the stink of those rotting animals, the product of proximity, Lew figures.

            He walks into the house, feeling its age, and he remembers his own home growing up; he remembers the old oak hardwood his father helped install, filling in the fastener holes with chunks of hewn, polished oak to make the surface seamless, and back then Lew thought it was. Up until the man died of lung fever and the coughing finally stopped. He remembers then how the crows sometimes came by the farm. How they perched on the roof and watched him in the yard. How they spoke to him when he was alone, and he sometimes thought he could understand them. But he was just a boy. Childish. And that’s what boys did. They imagined things. But his house was just like this one. Laid out the same, he thought, trying to picture his mom in the kitchen, wearing her apron and whistling; he often heard her whistling when he was outside doing his chores, and he always thought she could do something with that voice of hers, that she could move them all to California and get into the pictures.

            “He probably won’t want you holdin’ that,” Lazarus says, breaking Lew’s thoughts. He is gesturing to the gun still dangling from Lew’s fingers.

            “I keep the gun,” he says. He tucks it into his pants, feels its bulge against his thigh. He doesn’t like it, but at the same time he feels like it is important. Beyond getting this meeting. That he was supposed to get the gun for something else. He lets that thought dissipate when they come to the door under the stairs, where he remembers his old cellar from years ago, and the coal chute and the spiders he’d find in the rafters that were sometimes as big as his hand. He feels a hum in the pit of his gut, whirring in through his bones and he asks what it is.

            “It’s fuckin’ power, old timer.”

            And the door opens. Lew sees the grand staircase, the stone and the cavernous details of something far larger than simple farmhouse stairs; he thinks about the castles in England, their grandiosity and the brilliance of their architecture, built with so few modern tools, and he wonders if the farmers had dug out something larger by hand, had taken a community of like-minded men to haul away tonnes of dirt to create an underground city. He considers this doesn’t feel right. This wasn’t done by the farmers but something else. Because it didn’t feel connected to the house. It didn’t feel the same. It was the sound of that hum, of that power; it was like the strum of God’s guitar, and the plucky vibrations were revolving and moving everything.

            “He’s down there,” Lazarus says.

            And Lew walks down those stairs, emerging into something far away. He can feel it on his skin, that this place down here is away from Reedy Creek, is a part of something else. Somewhere else.

            There is a wide corridor that stretches for what looks like miles, its complexity, its outright magnificence something Lew cannot comprehend. Because in his many years, the development beyond childhood wonder has left the stretches of his mind where once magic might have existed into the formal codas of accountability.

            “Hello Lewis. It is nice to see you again.”

            He hears the voice and realizes the man he’s come to see is behind him. And maybe he always was. Maybe he followed him down the stairs, or was waiting behind the door. But Lew discovers he doesn’t believe that line of logic because it is rational; he finds that another part of him, the part that had him dreaming of Betty in the train, considers that this man has just appeared behind him, that he can really be anywhere he wants. He doesn’t look the same. No, but Lew thinks he is the same, because feelings of familiarity are sometimes the strongest affectation.

            “It is you. Isn’t it?”

            The man with the fedora smiles. “Many years and many faces, my friend. The same could be said of you.”

            Lew remembers the dream; he remembers being in the train in Korea and looking at his reflection in the window and seeing an old man, watching his youth waste away, and he understands that time is inextricably linked to everything, that his memories, his experiences, and what he is now are separated truly by how different he’s become as a result. He cries. And the man takes him in his arms for a moment and Lew remembers his father. He remembers the man taking him into his arms as a boy; he remembers how stern the man could be, but how loving. And he smells his father on this man. He smells the sweat and dirt, smells his mom’s soft perfume, and he smells the flowers she once grew outside the kitchen so she could watch over them. He is transported there and he remembers just how comfortable the feeling is. How comfortable this man, this stranger, can be.

            “Why are you here?” Lew asks. He looks at the face beneath the brim of the fedora. He does not recognize it. But he knows the eyes. They once peered over a surgeon’s mask; they once brooded beneath a finely combed head of hair in the face of a handsome banker who had just the right words for a young boy. “Are you here…for me?” Lew feels like that boy again.

            “In a way, maybe I am,” the man says. “Coincidence has always appeared to me the forces of nature ensuring connectivity. Fate. Someone familiar would have to be here to ground Reedy Creek.”

            “I don’t understand?”

            “There is something unnatural happening here. A sickness. I suspect you are here to remind me of humanity’s goodness, Lew. A break in the shadows.”

            Lew cocks his eye. He figures it will always be riddles. Always. “I know who you are. I think I always did. But…but I saw the crows die. They fell dead right from the sky when I saw you in the window. I remembered Betty. I remembered the war.” Lew is smiling. He is not sure why.

            “I’ve lingered here longer than I should. There are always effects.”

            “My daughter…it’s my daughter. She’s why I’ve come. All these years I thought maybe…maybe it works like a negotiation, that what we are, what we have, it’s like currency. That you deal in…in…us…” He does not know what to say beyond that and only touches his chest. “All of these years I wondered if I could have bartered with you to save my wife’s life. If I could have traded…”

            “Traded?”

            Lewis nods. “Yes. Me for her. I’ve wondered that for so long now it’s overshadowed her memory. My Betty. My daughter is sick now. I think she’s…she’s dying. It’s her secret to tell. I used to dream about Betty. About the bugs…the bugs that would eat into her while she slept, and they would look at me as they…as they consumed her. I think, even then, I knew. I knew because you came to me when my daddy died. I knew because I remembered you. And that leaves a mark. I think…I think it’s only fair that you let my little girl live. I’d like to offer myself in exchange for her. Can you…can you take the bugs out of her? She doesn’t deserve to go. Not for what she will be leaving behind.”

            “And it would be okay for you to leave the same behind?”

            Lew is crying again now. He does not remember when he started. “No,” he says. “But it will…it will have to be.”

            “You would give that much?”

            “I would give anything,” Lew whispers. “If it means my grandsons have a mother. If it means they don’t have to watch her die like Barb watched Betty die…because I was too goddamn selfish to barter with you then.” He is suddenly so furious he wants to pull the gun. He does. But it is momentary; the casual and causal reaction of one speaking into the abyss.

            “You are a very special man, Lewis. Like your grandson and his friends: a single spark in the darkness. Perhaps that’s why I came to you when you were a boy. Not because your father was so angry for having to leave. But because you never disappeared into your misery when he did. You were never inclined to surrender. You took up his mantel and gave your family a reason. Your spirit always gave me great pause. It was such a shame when your wife succumbed. To see you despair. It was like watching a flame flicker out.”

            “Would I have saved her if I gave you my life?”

            “I cannot answer for the past.”

            “Please,” Lew pleads.

            The man in the fedora is silent. His eyes studious and curious.

            “Then my little girl. My baby girl. She deserves the chance Betty never got. I am trying to answer for the future!”

3

—The basement was gone. His grampa and Grimwood with it.

            Adam felt his father holding him under his arms, hoisting him, and when he did open his eyes, he realized the old glass he’d been clutching was shattered on the stoop and his legs were wobbly. He could see the deer through the blurred haze, could see her eyes and they were focused on him with unblinking intensity, and somewhere above he could hear the crows, could hear them squawking down at him, watching him. He tasted something like copper on his tongue, could feel the pressure of experience, of magic in his skull, and he somehow knew he had gone someplace now, that he’d been given the touch to remember his grampa’s memory.

            “Adam…are you okay? What happened?”

            It was his father’s voice. The man was still holding him. Adam couldn’t find his balance; when he closed his eyes he could see the place beneath the farmhouse, that long and endless place where the power hummed, and he could see his grampa down there, offering his life. Offering his life for his—

            “Muh—mom was sick. She was dying…why didn’t you tell me?”

            “Adam, what are you—”

            “Grampa came here…he came here and he saw Grimwood. I saw him. Just right here. Right on this spot.” He could stand on his own now and he went toward the rocker.

            “Did he hit his head?” Cole asked.

            “Grampa came here and he…he already knew who Grimwood was. He knew who he was. And I could feel it. I don’t know how. But I could see what grampa was thinking. It was warm and it tasted nice. Like the taste of a great memory, of cold lemonade…if that makes sense. I’m not sure if it does.” Adam was stammering, trying to catch his breath. “And I saw grampa when he was a little boy. I could see him because he thought this place…that it was the same as his house when he was a kid.”

            “Adam, are you okay?” Trevor asked, stern now. “You took quite a fall there, kiddo. And the glass, it broke underneath you. Did you cut yourself?”

            Adam ignored him. He was talking through it, because remembering it was important. It was a combination of the letter, of the cigarettes. It was one of grampa’s last gestures or gifts, something he was supposed to see. A part of the power still left here. And he wasn’t surprised at all when he did look up to find many of the crows had scattered into obsidian whorls in the sky, likely startled by his fall but also of the power he unleashed when he discovered what his grampa left, the pieces of his memory. “Grampa saw Grimwood when he was a little boy. Younger than me. But…but Grimwood was different then. He was young too. His eyes were the same. I saw him and I knew it was him. I did. The same way I’d know a pic of grampa when he was young just by looking at his eyes. And grampa…he was so damned mad that he didn’t think of making the trade when gramma was sick, when she was dying. He wanted to fix that. That’s why he came here. That’s why he came to see Grimwood. So he could…so he could fix mom…because he knew mom was sick…was sick here.” Adam turned to his father and touched his chest. Touched it where his mom had found a lump. Trevor bit his lower lip. “Is it true, dad? Was she…was mom dying?”

            “I don’t know,” Trevor whispered. Cole watched with an expression of fascination and dumbfounded confusion. “If she was, Adam, she isn’t anymore.”

            Adam smiled. “Grampa saved her.” He moved past Cole and went into the house; the front door was unlocked. It could not lock. If Reedy Creek officials had once padlocked this old place, and Grimwood had given it a new, or at least antiquated lever and bolt, both were long gone now. A chunk of the front door had been wasted away, as if by shotgun blast, but Adam figured a rock could have done the same considering the wood was so split and ancient the red paint that had once likely been welcoming now looked like mummified blood.

            What he found inside was different as well. His father would discover the same thing. Trevor had gone into that house yesterday to speak to Grimwood, and instead he’d been drawn to the upper floor where the floral wallpaper was peeling, to the doorway at the end of the hallway where he could hear the water. But that would not have been possible now. No. Because most of the stairs were gone, the victims of age and vandals, of explorers and salvagers; the enormous newel post that must have once been something of an ornament, a tawdry display of possibility, had been hacked out of the floor, and most of the railing had sagged and clattered, now only chunks of old oak that had been nibbled by rats.

            Trevor could only exhale. Because he’d walked up those stairs. He had. He knew he had. Every fiber in his body believed he had. And if it was a possibility that he’d actually come into the house yesterday, come in and climbed those stairs when he heard Mr Spigget sloshing around old bathwater, he figured he would have fallen through one of the holes, the chasms, and broken his back in the cellar.

            “This can’t be,” Trevor finally whispered. Adam had already gone toward the doorway that had once hummed the tune of some powerful generator, the door that when you set your hand upon it would speak through your bones. That door was gone leaving only an open socket and something like a ladder leaned against its sill; he could smell coal and dust, could smell age, and that hum, the hum that to Trevor was almost sexual, provocating, had sifted into the ether with what once was. As if like magic. “All of this, it was still…it was still whole.”

            “This place is a relic. Stripped. And you say Grimwood set his operations here?”

            “It was functional. You could hear the…the generator through the floorboards. He called the place Backdoor. Because nobody knew about it.” Trevor looked up the stairwell, at the wallpaper, at the floor liner. The water damage had left the peeling veneer indecipherable and black with mold, and the ceiling was rotted through enough so that he could see some of the truss spans in the wavering beams of lights. “It’s like he made us see it the way he wanted us to.” It was almost a whisper. But Adam had to agree with his dad. Because this was not the same farmhouse in which he and his chums found the tapes; the same farmhouse where they’d met Grimwood at the opened steel door after following Lazarus through the woods. No, once the magic left, the real house stood as it always has. It was a somber thought, but he knew it was true.

            “Adam…Adam wait. Be careful.”

            Adam looked up at his dad. He’d already climbed down the old wooden ladder, its top rung half a foot below the doorsill. The stone arcade and stairway, the one that reminded Danny of the subway, was gone. Like it never existed. But Adam knew this was right. He wasn’t sure why, but he knew if grampa had left pieces here like the letter, like the smokes, then whatever came next was down here. Because that’s where his memory took you. His experience.

            He could smell the earthen musk, the packed dirt floors and the old pile of coal that had once sat in a cone beneath the chute but was mostly picked to scraps now; there was no furnace, no boiler, just the stacked stone foundation walls and the tamped clay, the ghosts of history and regret that what once must have been so impressive had fallen to decay with nothing left of its legacy but the illusion of what was so temporarily made of the place while Grimwood kept residence. His father had climbed down and Cole after him.

            “That’s it? You’re going to have me believe…and excuse my language, but with the entire goddamn network of cameras in this town, you’re going to have me believe this was the nexus of surveillance?” Cole had gone over toward an old table that sat against the far wall. Adam was surprised it hadn’t been taken when the thieves had come to ransack this place. But it wasn’t a part of the original home. No. Because sitting on its top was a Commodore computer. There was no power to it, but Adam recognized it. It belonged to Steve or Bernard, and for just a moment he thought he could smell cigarette smoke. He went to the table next to Cole. There were television monitors on the floor, none of them plugged in, a few of their screens shattered and the picture tubes inside exposed like ancient bulbs. And sitting next to the computer, but already filled with silt that had shifted and fallen from the beams above, was a coffee mug that Adam remembered. It was one of theirs. One of Steve’s or Bernard’s. It was real. What you saw. He knew it was.

            Trevor looked at Adam, pondering the computer and television screens as well. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

            Adam didn’t know. But he nodded his head anyway. And he saw what he must have come down to find. What drew him. The photograph had fallen off the table, its edges curled, partially covered by crumbled dirt; it was a picture of a woman a part of him remembered. A distant part. A part that had been there, that had seen her this way, a part that only remembered her this way, but whose youth could somehow conceal the memory. The picture was of his grandma. Betty. The way she looked at the end. The way she looked when Adam had last seen her, had last sat on his mommy’s lap and looked into this woman’s eyes and knew and understood the love he saw but was afraid of the stony certainty as well, the conviction. Because she knew just as well as Adam that it would be the last time they’d ever see each other. “You be the best boy for your mommy, dear Adam. You promise me that.” She had smiled, and the frailty showed in her face, in the way her brow scrunched, the way her eyes only echoed from their sullen pockets. That woman was in this picture. And she was smiling that same smile. Perhaps her last smile. Adam bent down and he understood in that moment what grampa’s scrapbook actually was: a reminder. A trail of breadcrumbs. And he realized if he never came here, if the inclination never struck his father to confess his sins, this photo would have been in the scrapbook, on its last page perhaps. Because grampa’s pieces went where they had to go.

            Adam grabbed the picture and—

            He heard the thunder again, heard the patter of rain against the window and the sound of his brother crying.

            And he heard the knock on the door. His door. His front door. And he knew where he was now. He knew why he’d come. Grampa had invited him to see what happened the night he died.

4

The photo is the last one he ever took of Betty. He told her then it was to prove how beautiful she still was. That she radiated it. That she would see for herself when he had the picture processed. But the photo was mostly for himself as a scale of measurement, as a means to give him another week with his wife when a part of him kept dreaming of the bugs, of the bugs inside her organs marching their destructive path. Because the time between taking the photo and printing it existed as a metric of intervals. Like Betty. She was between now. Here and there.

            She would never see the picture, and he looks at it now, listening to the thunder outside, sitting on his bed with the scrapbook next to him. Her smile is brave and strong, her eyes lit with an affirmation of life, but in the end death is always stronger. Death always is. He brushes the photo with his finger and sets it on the book’s cover. She is in the hospital bed that would be her coffin. Lew is crying. He has spoken to Barb already, taken her hand in his, and he’s told her how much he loves her. He could see in her eyes something different than he’d seen in Betty’s. He saw relief. The despair was his now. That was the trade.

            The thunder is loud, shaking the house. He knows what the storm is. What it will bring. He’s made his deal, and he is afraid. It is only natural that he should be. He’s finished his letter to Adam, and he stares at the envelope. He hasn’t addressed it yet. No. Because that would make it real. This is the only way he thinks he can say goodbye. He picks up the envelope and takes a pen from the bureau. He writes a brief message on its front, decides he likes it, that it is perfect. If there were effects to having this strange presence in Reedy Creek, maybe he could use them.

            Another long stretch of guttural thunder stretches the town like elastic and he waits for the world to spring back. He hears a knock on the front door. But it isn’t just a knock. It is something he remembers, a beat, a percussion, a tune, something he recalls from when Barb was a little girl, when she would run to the door to answer it knowing just who it would be because it was their special knock. The Forsmythe knock. Two quick taps, pause, then one more. Like a heart skipping its beat.

            The memories come flooding and he understands what it means. He understands just what his friends were saying in the utter throes of war, while the ratatatat of machine gun fire, of mortars exploding surrounded them in a canopy of mechanized discontent; he understands that his friends were not just calling for their wives or girlfriends, their mothers or fathers because of fear but because of the memories, because of what came streaming. The experiences. What you are and how you came to be. That was life. And life is family, life is love. As he goes to the front door, listening to that knock, that familiar knock, he sees life.

            He opens the door and he does not see the storm. He hears it. Hears the thunder like mortars, but past the threshold there is something like a light, something like a string or beam of what he thinks is gold, a path of sunlight. But it isn’t light, no it’s only what he sees first, because it becomes something else. It changes. The light isn’t its final form.

            Hi babe.

            Her voice. So clear. So resolute.

            Lew cries. It’s all he can do. Because the last time he’s seen her, the last time he’s taken her in his arms, is when she could barely lift hers, when they were strung up in the marionette strings of her IV being puppeteered by the cruelty of nature.

            “Bets,” he whispers.

            She is there, standing in a pocket outside the storm, standing in a memory. The way she looked in the garden, her shoulder straps slipping down the slope of her arms, the sticky glisten of her flesh, her hair so full and streaming like grand ribbons and the sullen shadows of anguish that so marked her expression dissolved to the glamour of his earliest years with her; he smells her perfume and it triggers more and more information. He remembers everything with a clarity he’s never known, like scraping the frost off a windowpane to finally see the horizon. She smiles. It is an ironic smile. Sarcastic. It is Betty. The woman he’s always known. The woman he’s always remembered, that he’s kept inside of him since she left.

            You’re crazy, babe. You’re nuts if you think I want to do what I’m supposed to.

            “I have to.” He wants to hold her, to take her in his arms but a part of him knows he can’t. Not yet.

            I know. I understand that now. You’re doing this for our baby girl, Lew, you are, and for that I have to respect your choice. I don’t have to like it. But respect, sure. And respecting you was never easy.

            Lew laughs. Or wants to. He can hear her voice, it is real, but at the same time it is in his head, the way it had been since she died in 1979. It was the way he kept her, memorialized her, because it was their conversations that meant the most. Her beauty reeled him in, but it was her wit that nailed him to the floor.

            Lew brings Betty with him. Away from the foyer. He is trying to be hospitable, in part because he’s forgotten how to be chivalrous; he’s forgotten what it means to be a husband.

            “Is it really you?” These words are out loud. He knows because he hears them perfectly. He speaks them perfectly.

            I wouldn’t let anyone else take you.

            Lew smiles. They are in the family room now. Lew stares at her. Betty stands near the fireplace, looking around. There is a glow to her, but he can’t tell if it’s real, a part of that light, or if it’s her beauty. Because beauty, he’s learned, has that power. “Oh Christ, Bets, I’ve missed you.” His voice is choked back but she hears him. She offers a demure smile and he thinks about all the times he’s seen that same smile while they lay in bed, after they’d made love or prior to. It is the seduction of memory and beauty.

            You’ve been so lucky to have this time with them. With our girl. And with our Adam. I wish I could have met Patty, Lew. I think I met a part of him. Over there. Before he came here. But I would have loved to hold him in my arms. I always loved the way Trevor looked at his kids at the beginning. I always hoped that was the man he’d keep.

            “I’m scared, Bets.”

            You’re so brave. You are. A sacrifice is only worth as much as it rends. And you’re giving our baby girl a chance. You’re giving Adam and Patty a mommy.

            “Is this real? Or is it a dream? I’ve dreamed about this, about you, so many times I don’t think I can separate the truth anymore.” There is thunder and lightning; the room is lit with the achromic sear of the flash, but Lew doesn’t really hear it. This world, its affectations, they are only hums, like the sound of Grimwood’s guitar string underground, that circuitous machine hidden somewhere that powered everything. That powered him.

            You’re sounding sentimental in your old age.

            “Or lonely.”

            You were anything but lonely, Lew. Look at what you were given. Look at what you had.

            “It could only fill what you left.”

            Oh honey, what I would have given for just a few more months. A few more years. But a wish like that is slippery, cause I would have stayed forever if I could. Whatever void I left, I took with me as well. You bring your memories with you, Lew, and you always hold your regrets. But the love is always real.

            “I tried to be good by you, Bets. I am what I am because of you.”

            And I couldn’t be prouder of you for it.

            Betty smiles and comes toward him, the swish of her dress between her milky white legs soundless and fluid. Hypnotic. He wants to touch her, to hold her, but a part of him understands that when he does, what comes next will happen. That his trade will have been made, and he would give anything just to stay here and talk to her.

            I’m going to hold you, baby. I’m going to hold you the way we used to hold each other when we made love. We will go together.

            “Will it hurt?”

            Did it ever hurt with me?

            “Only when you left.”

            She hikes her dress up over her knees and he sees the red flourishes on her flesh, the striations of her muscles and the prickle of skin that has been touched by coldness; it is sexual and beautiful, and he feels her weight as she climbs onto his lap as he falls back into the couch with a violent anticipation. He can feel the spring of her hamstrings, can feel the plush warmth of her buttocks, and she reaches up to pull him closer to her, her hands soft and precise on the back of his neck; he remembers her eyes from the first time he ever told her he loved her, as they walked under an awning away from the rain, both of them wet, and he looked at her then just as he looks at her now.

            “I love you,” he whispers. There are tears in his eyes. He is afraid. He cannot deny that. But the feeling of her body on top of his is real. And he cannot deny that.

            Oh baby, I never stopped.

            She leans toward him and presses her lips against his, so plump and red, and he tastes the memories. He feels her hair wash over his fingers, feels the warmth of it, the smoothness, and he cups the nape of her neck to guide her mouth against his, and for just that moment he is young and rigorous, the pains of arthritis, of age, wilting to the strange sensation of a growing strength. And he knows in that moment what he can do here. What he can leave. He knows even what will happen. He can see a sickness like scarred tissue knotting its course through the middle of Reedy Creek like a splinter. And he knows Adam and his friends are like the twine around a baseball. The strings of compression in a world that is ripping apart.

            And he knows the pieces he can leave. He knows how he can imprint what is necessary. There are rules. But Grimwood has left a lingering effect. The rules are different right now.

            He glides his young hand down the arch of Betty’s spine, feels the perch of her hips, touches the bare flesh of her thigh. Treasures the memory of that sensation.

            “I love you Betty. In this world and the next.”

5

Adam woke up. He was still in the basement, and he could feel the photograph clutched in his fist. His father and Cole were kneeling over him, both worried.

            “There you are,” his dad said, an expression of relief washing over his face. Adam liked to see it. It meant the man cared.

            “You fainted. What happened?” Cole asked. He was on his knee. Adam could feel the cloistered dampness of the basement, how closed in it truly was; he looked up into the rotting beams where light caught on strands of cobweb and where the shadows were the only witness to what might have actually gone on at this house.

            But Adam was a witness to it now too, wasn’t he? That last piece afforded him something, afforded him a view of everything. As if that veil between what his grampa called here and there became thin enough to clarify the blurred edges; he saw his grandma as she once looked, and even with the memory of seeing…somebody enter through the door, he couldn’t quite qualify the description to aptly turn the figure into anything concrete. No, all he had was the smell of perfume, and even that was connected to the deepest memories of a three-year-old boy still on the cusp of fully grasping language, and thus outside the bubble of that part of childhood that continued to develop and change as one watched the years peel away, measured only by summer vacations. He saw Grandma Betty the way his mom remembered her, before the cancer, and she was beautiful and alluring, the sort of woman most little girls aspired to become. And he could feel the love his grampa had for her and her for him; it was like a warm current of air buffeting his face as he stood with them now, inside their magic little pocket, able to hear them, hear her as she spoke into his mind, and he understood this final piece wasn’t just a memory but an ability, part of a loophole ol’ Lew had discovered because Grimwood had stayed far longer than usual to play a part in this town. And because he had, grampa could show Adam something. The hint of something. Like tracing the outlines of a drawing through a diaphanous sheet of paper thin enough to show the colors inside the contours.

            It’s chaos.

            And he knew. He knew what it meant. He looked at his father, at Cole, and he knew they had to go.

            “My God,” Adam whispered. “It’s today. It’s happening today.”

            “What?” Cole asked.

            His father only helped Adam to his feet again for the second time this morning.

            “The end,” he only whispered. The convergence. This voice was in his head, but he knew where they had to go. And he knew what he had to find.

            “I don’t…” But then his father understood. Maybe only part of it, but his eyes rounded with a horrified certainty.

            “We have to go home. Now, dad. We have to go.”

            “What is it?” Cole asked, suddenly afraid. Able to feel the haunting of this place. To sense it.

            “They are a part of this, too. I think…I think grampa knew.”

            “Who?” his father asked, but Adam was convinced the man already knew.

            “The Low Breed. They found us.”