by Andrew Pyper
Come, Danny.
Ash pulls me down to where the water hardens into stone. Holding me in place.
Come . . .
And I do.
Not toward her, but into her.
The thing with me in the darkness—the warm thing, unnamed, alive—tells me to open my eyes. And when I see my sister I push forward.
Wrap my arms around her like a drunk. Use my height, my long legs, to set her off balance. Backstepping.
What are you doing?
I’m thrashing at air. Drowning in darkness. Eyes closed against it for the same reason I refused to open my eyes when swimming underwater: there may be something there, something unexpected and monstrous. Except this time I know if I were to look there would be an immense nothingness, and it would be more terrifying than any imagined creature.
But I’m kicking at it anyway. Cutting the dark with my fingernails. Resisting.
Danny?
Because there’s another down here with me that isn’t Ash. A something to her nothing.
Look at me, Brother.
I squeeze my eyes tighter until they hurt. Two entry points where knitting needles have found a way through, a pair of probes looking for a brain. To deny them, to deny her, I try to summon the unnamed thing I remembered a moment ago.
I thought of it as something. But really it was things. Voices, faces. The way they speak and laugh and touch.
People.
There were people in the past, and they’re there now, in the present. Two in particular. Summoning me just as I summon them. Some call it prayer. And as with all prayers, it comes down to either asking someone else to fight for you, or asking yourself to fight.
Stop it, Danny. Stop it now!
Ash’s voice is the pain in my head. It’s the knitting needles. It’s a disease of the bone marrow, malignant and enflamed.
But that’s not what’s important now.
What’s important is to not stop. To push deeper into my twin, the space inside her, thrash and kick at her borders.
Look at ME!
The shattering glass sounds like rain. A downpour that attacks every surface, a symphony of concussions.
We’re through the office window, the two of us cycling and tumbling. The rain replaced by the howling rush of air.
LOOK!
I look.
And there is my twin, tumbling away faster than me, as if her density exceeds mine. As if the earth wants her more.
Danny!
The same voice, the exact same pleading as when I looked down at her in the house’s burning cellar.
DON’T LEAVE ME HERE!
Now, just as then, I reach for her. And now, just as then, she’s too far.
I reach down to my sister, and she reaches up. But the only thing we touch is air.
DANNY!
They look like stars.
Behind Ash’s spinning form the ice is a night sky buckshot with points of light. The river a Milky Way of distant systems, summoning from an uncrossable distance.
But they are only the faces of the dead. Coming into detail as we hurtle toward them. They see us, too. Fingers scratching at the ice’s rough underside, desperate to be the first to pull us down.
They aren’t people under there. Not spirits or souls, either. They are a collection of all the horrors they have created in others and themselves, nameless and distilled. A bottomless current of fear.
The ice swings up fast. In the next breath we’ll hit it. We’ll be through.
I find Ash’s face and see how this was the vision she had when she died the moment she was born. It terrifies her. But she resists it even now. Does her best to appear defiant, even calm.
Don’t leave . . .
She does it for me.
My sister, offering comfort. Shushing away a nightmare from her bed across from mine when we were kids even when my nightmare was of her. Telling me she will always be here, there is nothing to be scared of other than being without her, that no matter what, in life or death or the places other than these I have yet to see but she knows awaits us, she will never let me go.
PART 4
* * *
Within the Flames Are Spirits
47
* * *
My eyes open and I’m certain of two things.
I’m alive.
And someone else’s heart is inside me.
As soon as I can make my mouth work right I ask one of the nurses the same thing over and over as she sponges my crotch, changes the sheets from under me. A nurse with strong, expert arms covered with dark hair and moles that someone should probably take a look at.
“Whose heart?”
“You’ll have to speak up a bit, sunshine. These ears aren’t what they were.”
“Whose heart did I get?”
“Oh, we’re not supposed to talk about—”
“I won’t tell.”
She neatly folds the end of the sheet over my chest, smooths it flat. It gives her the time to decide to break the rules.
“Car accident,” she says. “Brain injury we couldn’t do anything about, but the rest of her barely even scratched. What we call an ideal donor.”
“Her?”
“It was a girl,” she says, the smile dropping, the big teeth smothered by big, downy lips. “A sixteen-year-old girl.”
WILLA HAS TAKEN TO RELIGION. It was all the praying she did in the hospital chapel, asking for her son and husband to be returned to her. The promises she made if they were.
“Never was much of a churchy girl,” she says. “But I guess I’ve got to be now, right? A deal’s a deal.”
I tell her we can go every Sunday, every day of the week if she wants. Anything she wants to do, we’ll do.
“I want to go home and be normal for a while,” she says when I ask.
“That’s it?”
“Have you been following current events around here, Danny? That’s a lot.”
She wheels Eddie in to see me on the second or third day after I came back. I ask her to give us a moment alone together and she raises her eyebrows but slips out without any questions.
“We can talk about it all you want, or we never have to talk about it again,” I say. “But I need you to know that you were there with me on the other side. You saved me. Do you remember any of that?”
Eddie glances over his shoulder, confirms we’re alone in the room. “I asked, but the doctors said you can’t dream in a coma.”
“This wasn’t a dream.”
“I know that. I’m just saying nobody else will believe us.”
“Nobody else matters.”
He doesn’t remember everything, but he remembers enough.
Searching for me through an empty city, knowing I was alone and needed help, following my voice. And when he found me there was something after me, something he knew if he looked at he wouldn’t be able to move or think, so he looked at me instead. Let the thing come after him so I could get away.
“I’m so sorry I let her do that to you, Eddie. It was wrong for me to get you involved at all. I should have stayed alone.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. She did. And nobody should be alone. Besides, you took care of her, right?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Was it bad? For her, I mean. Did it hurt?”
“It was bad for her. And it hurt something awful.”
“Good,” Eddie says, not needing to hear anything more than this. “Then we’re even.”
THE CARDIAC SURGEON I LIKE is the one who led the team that did the transplant procedure on me. Not that I was aware of it as it happened, but knowing it was him removing my dud of a ticker and ladling a stranger’s heart into the space it left behind is an immense reassurance, as if the intimacy of these elements—my heart, her heart, our two fist-sized slaves to life—is most appropriately handled by friends.
“Well, well. Seems you’ve got another book to write, Mr. Orchard,” he says the first time I’m conscious when he comes by my
bed.
“Don’t think so. This time, the secret stays with me.”
“That good, was it? Don’t want the wife knowing about all the heavenly virgins offering themselves to you up there?”
“Something like that.”
He checks my pulse, blood pressure, reads the chart. Shakes his head.
“You’re in unbelievable shape, aside from looking a little hungover,” he says.
“You look a little hungover yourself.”
“That’s because I am.”
I thank him. It takes a while. Trying to tell him all the ways what he’s done for me will change not just my life but others, as many as I can help in as many ways as I can. How it may not mean anything to him but I promise I won’t squander the extra time I’ve been given. I ask what his first name is—Steven—and assure him that if Willa and I have a child together, if we give Eddie a dog, if I ever buy a boat, we’re naming it after him. He grins at all this, having seen versions of it before. The magical outcomes that come along among the more usual disappointments, the inability to make any difference, the fadings away.
“I’m just the mechanic around here,” he says. “You found a way back, Danny, not me.”
“What can I say? I like it here.”
“You should. Here is pretty damned good, most of the time,” he says, and steps closer, lowers his voice to a more serious register. “So let me ask you this. If you’re so attached to this mortal coil, why’d you take a sprint into the Public Garden? Some guy with a knife after you? Trying to make last call at the Four Seasons?”
I don’t want to lie to this man. And something tells me that, if I told him the truth, he would get it, or at least see that I believed it even if he didn’t. But how far do you go in telling a story like mine? Too little, and it won’t make sense. Too much, and he might sign me up for a psych ward evaluation.
“I had something to take care of over there,” I say in the end.
“I take it you mean over there there, and not over there on Boylston Street.”
“If it was Boylston Street, I would’ve taken a cab.”
He seems halfway satisfied by this. He doesn’t ask anything more about it in any case. Just shakes his head again in that agreeably baffled way of his and steps away from the side of the bed, signaling the serious moment has passed.
When I ask him when he thinks I might be getting out of here, he makes a face of mock gravity.
“Well, we have at least one other test to run,” he says. “Rather unpleasant, I’m afraid.”
“Okay. What is it?”
“Rectal exam.”
“Why?”
“To see if we can find the horseshoe you’ve got stuck up there.”
EVENTUALLY, ONCE THEY GET PERMISSION from her parents, a hospital administrator tells me the name of the girl who was in the car accident, the one whose heart now beats inside me.
Nadine.
For the rest of my time in recovery I write a letter addressed to Nadine’s mother and father and family “and All Who Loved Her.” History’s most inadequate thank-you note. But I include a postscript that I hope might provide real comfort. The promise that wherever Nadine is now, it’s a good place. The best day of her life forever.
When it’s finished I fold the pages and, along with a copy of The After, lay them in the bottom of a FedEx box. Before I seal the flaps and give it to Willa to send to the address they gave me, I take the Omega off my wrist and slip it in.
I LIED TO THE CARDIAC doctor when I told him I had no plans to write another book.
The fact is, after only two months at home, I’m deep into something new. An account of the After from the perspective of someone who’s been to the place we worry might exist, that might be where we end up if it does. The place Violet Grieg spoke of and that Lyle Kirk said made her an Underworlder. Which means I’m an Underworlder now, too.
It’s about what happened to my mother and father, about a burning house, about Ash. It’s about the fates we’re born with and the ones we make for ourselves. A true story that tells of solitude and hauntings and finding unexpected ways to be happy even when happiness seems to lie on the other side of an uncrossable river.
I’m calling it The Damned.
The tricky part is going to be the ending.
There are some questions I don’t know the answer to, as there always are about the future. Willa and Eddie and the lives I wish them to have. How long Nadine’s heart will carry on with its duties in its new home. Whether Ash will ever come back or not.
But you know what I know and you hold as close to the present as you can. Keep your eye on what’s certain.
Ash went through the ice and I didn’t.
She’s somewhere lower than Detroit, a place where she’s fixed in water hard as stone. A place so distant from the world of light it would be impossible to rise up and find me in it, though she’ll try.
She’s something else now, something I hope to never see, but she’ll always be my sister.
Which means she’ll never stop trying.
Acknowledgments
First, thanks to my editor, Sarah Knight, who has talked me off ledges and pushed me to the edge of some of those same ledges, always brilliantly and productively. My gratitude also to all at Simon & Schuster, Simon & Schuster Canada, and Orion who’ve had their hands on this book: Carolyn Reidy, Jonathan Karp, Marysue Rucci, Richard Rhorer, Kevin Hanson, Alison Clarke, David Millar, Kate Gales, Molly Lindley, Elina Vaysbeyn, Amy Jacobson, Amy Cormier, Michelle Blackwell, Jonathan Evans, Joshua Cohen, Lewelin Polanco, Jason Heuer, Jon Wood, Kate Mills, Jemima Forrester, Gaby Young, and Graeme Williams. Additional thanks to Anne McDermid, Stephanie Cabot, Peter Robinson, Jackie Levine, Howard Sanders, Sally Riley, Monica Pacheco, Martha Magor, Chris Bucci, Jason Richman, and Danny Hertz.
In researching The Damned, I read many books about Detroit, but would like to acknowledge in particular the excellent Made in Detroit by Paul Clemens, Detroit: A Biography by Scott Martelle, and Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff.
Finally, thanks to my wife, Heidi. There’s no one I love being caught in a brainstorm with more than you.
About the Author
© HEIDI PYPER
ANDREW PYPER is previously the author of six novels, most recently The Demonologist, a #1 bestseller in his native Canada and winner of the International Thriller Writers Award. His other novels include Lost Girls (winner of the Arthur Ellis Award and a New York Times bestseller), The Killing Circle (a New York Times Crime Novel of the Year), and The Guardians (a Globe and Mail Best Book). The Demonologist is currently being developed for feature film by Oscar-winning producer and director Robert Zemeckis and Universal Pictures. He lives in Toronto. Visit him at www.andrewpyper.com.
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ALSO BY ANDREW PYPER
The Demonologist
The Guardians
The Killing Circle
The Wildfire Season
The Trade Mission
Lost Girls
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Pyper Enterp
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition February 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pyper, Andrew.
The damned : a novel / Andrew Pyper. — First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pages cm
1. Future life—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Twins—Fiction. 4. Suspense fiction. 5. Ghost stories. I. Title.
PR9199.3.P96D36 2015
813'.54—dc23
2014016217
ISBN 978-1-4767-5511-3
ISBN 978-1-4767-5513-7 (ebook)