The second visitor came the next night as he was lying in bed, struggling with his old man’s insomnia, trying to will himself to sleep. Random witching-hour thoughts capered through his mind, and Page eventually grew weary of fighting them off. He sighed, rolled over, and opened his eyes to check the alarm on the nightstand. He had gone to bed at twelve-thirty and expected the clock to read one o’ clock, maybe one-fifteen. But he was horrified to see that it was already two-twenty. He had been lying there, sleepless, for nearly two hours.
He sighed again and closed his eyes, but they snapped back open immediately.
There was someone standing in the far corner of the room, faintly illuminated by the weak glow of the nightlight down the hall. For a moment he thought it was Jarrod Walsh again, but then realized that he was looking at a much younger man, a man whose hair was not white but blond. There were no bells or light bulbs, no familiarity at all, until he noticed that the man was wearing a dark-colored tee-shirt. In the poor light he could not see what color it was, but he knew. It was red. And not just any red. Crimson. Harvard crimson. The reason he knew was because of the bold white letters emblazoned across the front of the shirt: YALE BULLDOGS TAKE IT UP THE ASS. As far as Page knew, there was no slogan like that in common usage and no shirts bearing those words. Except on one person, his character Adam Winthrop, and in one place, his novel Dead Water.
As soon as the realization came to him, he saw that Winthrop was not there anymore. The corner of the room was empty.
It was then he decided that he was losing his mind, but the thought was not disturbing at all. Why should it be, really? After all, his mind was not the only thing that was on the way out. His body had his brain beaten by a considerable margin. Based on the deterioration of his health over the past few months, he would be dead long before his gray matter deserted him completely.
There was another issue, too. A much bigger issue.
For the past three days he had been writing in a way he had not written in… well, let’s be honest. Years. Decades, perhaps. It had started as soon as he arrived home from his encounter with Walsh and the sighting of Franklin Hill. He had brewed a pot of coffee, sat down at his computer, and written without pause for the next six hours. When he finished, he scrolled up and down the screen several times, checking and double-checking the word count and page numbers at the bottom, and was finally forced to admit that the impossible had happened. He had written fourteen pages of brand new copy.
And that was just the beginning.
Yesterday he had churned out seventeen pages. Today fifteen.
Along the way, he had somehow managed to complete part two of his novel – a segment he had started at least five or six years ago and had long ago despaired of ever finishing – and surged right on ahead into part three.
He could not comprehend where these newfound bursts of physical and creative energy had come from. Honestly, he was afraid of examining that question too closely, for fear of jinxing things, chasing away the stamina and inspiration before they had fully taken hold. But he had not been able to resist calling Roger and telling him about it. Roger was the one person left in his life who would understand and appreciate the miracle that was taking place. Roger, who had bought several of Page’s stories for a small press magazine he edited in the early 1990s. Roger, who went on to collaborate with Page on two novellas, an anthology project, and an aborted science fiction novel. Roger, who had struggled with his own bouts of creative drought in recent years.
Unfortunately, after Page finished happily babbling about his creative good fortune, he made the mistake of venturing into far shakier territory, and for a reason he could not now explain, he told Roger about the visitations.
“I don’t expect you to be amused,” Roger said now. “But you ought to be grateful. Don’t you find it sort of – I don’t know. Reassuring?”
“How so?” Page asked softly, gripping the receiver tighter and biting the inside of his cheek to keep from saying something he might regret.
“It’s like a homecoming,” Roger said, chuckling. “Old friends coming back to the place they were born. A reunion. So what if it’s all in your head? You’re connecting to your past, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Old farts like us, sometimes that’s all we have left. And you can’t argue with the results.”
“Results?”
“Look at what you’ve done since the girl showed up. In the past five years, how much new material have you written? A few thousand words? Three-thousand? Ten-thousand? And what have you done in the past few days? Sounds like about twelve-thousand, maybe more. That’s nothing to shake a stick at, buddy boy. It sounds to me like your imagination is sparking for the first time in a long time. Is it a little weird? A little flaky? Okay, sure, maybe. But think of the guys who always write in their lucky socks or can’t do a page unless they have their favorite coffee cup next to them or can’t turn out a coherent sentence if their chair isn’t facing exactly north-northeast. Is what’s happening to you any stranger than that? So it’s weird. So what? Be weird, John. Be flaky. Who the hell cares, as long as it works?”
He talked to Roger a while more, and later, after midnight, walked back down the hall to his office. He lowered himself into his chair with a grunt, woke up his computer, and read again what he had written that afternoon. He didn’t know what he expected to find – absolute dreck, most likely. But what he discovered instead was something quite different. Almost all of it qualified as good, solid, passable prose. Some of it even approached the realm of first-rate material. And while there were a few spots that he’d chosen an awkward word or noticeably struggled to reach the end of a sentence, those problems could be easily fixed. As a matter of fact, he could fix them right now.
That was his last conscious thought for a very long time.
When he next became aware of his surroundings, the little clock in the computer task bar read 4:47 a.m. and the page count had grown from 286 to 319.
He looked up to see weak, gray, pre-dawn light filtering through the window. He also caught sight of his reflection – drawn features, mouth slightly agape, and wispy white hair standing up at severe angles, making him look like a troll that had just crawled out from its lair far beneath an ancient bridge.
But he only noticed that for a split second. Then he saw what was beyond his reflection, out in the yard.
There were dozens of them out there, filling the hillside between the house and the woods. Male and female. Young. Old. He recognized quite a few, among them Clarissa Berman and Jarrod Walsh, who were standing not far from each other, near the old fire ring. Others did not look familiar at all, but he knew who they were, what they were. They stood alone or in small groups. Some were wandering about aimlessly. Others were looking toward the trees near the creek or off to the east, where they could see the overgrown meadow and the horizon beyond. Some looked down at the dirt, while others looked toward the sky. Still others were gazing directly at the house, at him. He could actually feel their stares like physical touches, reaching him across the distance.
Page’s heart did a strange, heavy double-thud, and the half-light through the window seemed to grow dimmer. He glanced from the milling multitudes to his computer monitor, where the cursor was still flashing steadily halfway down page 319. He groped for the mouse, intending to save and close the file, perhaps, but he badly misjudged the distance and his arthritic fingers closed around empty air.
“Why –” he began, unsure what he was meaning to say. Then his voice was silenced as the gray light faded quickly to black.
****
The next twelve hours passed in a dreamlike fog.
Page woke up just seconds after losing consciousness and discovered that his yard was empty, as if no one had been out there just a few moments before, as if no one had ever been out there.
There was a terrible feeling in his chest, far worse than the usual discomfort. He was aware of a dreadful constriction, a crushing weight that seemed to be pressing do
wn on his ribcage, and a bright pain in his shoulder and neck. Even the shallowest breaths had become an excruciating exercise.
He called the Kingston Mills Urgent Care Clinic, hoping for understanding from Mike Schrader, a physician who sometimes took pity on him, offering advice and even the occasional prescription over the phone. This time, however, the doctor would have none of that. Page had barely begun to describe his symptoms before Schrader had the volunteer ambulance on the way. They arrived in less than fifteen minutes, but stayed much longer. It took nearly an hour, two phone calls between the EMTs and various doctors at the hospital, and Page’s signature on three separate documents before they finally accepted the fact that he was refusing treatment and would not be going for a lights-and-siren thrill ride that day.
During much of the time the medics were in his house, Page had an oxygen mask strapped to his face and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around his right bicep. He grudgingly admitted that the O2 made him feel a little better, but he still insisted that they disconnect the apparatus and leave him in peace. They finally did, in exchange for one small concession on his part – swallowing the baby aspirin they had been trying to get him to take from the moment they’d arrived.
To Page’s surprise, Schrader himself pulled into the driveway thirty minutes later, doing his best to hide his concern and appear disgruntled instead. He made Page lie down on the living room couch for a round of poking, prodding and listening. He then repeated the whole procedure, and finally announced that Page had almost certainly had a heart attack. There was no way to know for sure, of course, not without hospitalization and tests, but all signs pointed to an infarction. He launched a detailed explanation that included a discussion of arrhythmias and blockages and valves that did not quite open and close the way they were supposed to. There were other things, too, some of which Page couldn’t follow and others that he might have followed, had he cared enough or had the energy to do so. He did recognize many of the specific terms Schrader used, including congestive heart failure, a diagnosis Page had first received nearly a year ago now.
“So do you want to pack your bag, or should I do it for you?” Schrader asked, and a weary Page was about to concede, about to say that he would be happy to pack his own bag if Schrader would only give him a hand up off the couch. But he stopped with the unspoken words still in his throat.
She was standing a foot or two behind the doctor, dressed the same way she had been dressed that day in his yard, faded jeans, red jacket. There was something in her hands, and he saw that it was a copy of Black Stones. His eyes darted to the shelf and the gap in his collection where the book had been removed.
Clarissa Berman held the book out to him and smiled shyly. The smile sent a completely new sensation fluttering through his chest. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before, a feeling of sudden expansion, of light and heat, of air, of lilting flight, and Page thought, somewhat nonsensically, This is what it feels like. This is what it feels like when the heart sings.
Later, after he’d dispatched a genuinely disgruntled Schrader back to his clinic, Page shuffled down to the hall to his office and got back to work. Despite all that had happened since that morning, it took him no time at all to relocate the rhythm and recapture the forward momentum. The words flowed like water now, spilling in an effortless cascade from mind to fingertips to keyboard to screen in a way he could not recall experiencing in many years, perhaps ever. During his lengthy, inexorable decline he had often recalled the days of his youth, how exciting the writing had been back then, how it had made him feel, how strong, how vibrant, how vital. He remembered marathon sessions at the typewriter, ten or twelve hours at a stretch, during which the stack of pages grew and grew as if by magic. He remembered the invulnerability he’d felt at those times, the fiery desire to conquer the world with words, the absolute certainty that he could do it.
Even that had not felt like this.
He had not eaten in more than twenty-four hours, but he was not hungry. He had not slept in nearly two days, but he was not tired.
At some point Clarissa returned to him, still holding the copy of Black Stones she had taken from his shelf. She approached his desk slowly, tentatively, coming close enough that he could feel the soft brush of her arm against his. She laid the book down next to his monitor and stepped back, giving him that gentle smile again and making his heart take flight.
The hours went by and the cascade still flowed. He was amazed, overwhelmed at the way the story was taking shape and racing toward its destined conclusion. This story that had fought him for so many years, that had resisted every attempt to mold and shape it, to rouse it and kick it to life, was suddenly coming to life on its own.
His heart was pounding, his breath coming in tight, ragged spurts. He stared at the screen with avid, bulging eyes, great beads of sweat dotting his forehead.
The words flowed onto the page, afternoon flowed gently into evening, and one by one by one they came to him, all of them, every last one, the monsters and the lovers, the parents, the children, the believers and the skeptics, the curious, the oblivious, the seekers and the sought, the takers and the taken, the lost, the found. One by one by one they approached, carefully and cautiously, as Clarissa had. His desk slowly filled with their sacred offerings, the magazines and chapbooks, novels, anthologies, hardcovers and paperbacks and a few messy manuscripts that had never seen print. They formed a pile that became a stack that became a teetering mountain range – the disordered geography of his creative life.
They came to him and presented their gifts, but they did not leave. They merely stepped back to make room for the next, moved aside and filled the room behind him, spilling out into the hallway, down to the kitchen and the living room beyond, out the front door and down the driveway and who knew how far beyond that. The world was full of them, alive with them.
He turned only once and looked at the assembled throng. It was odd, he thought, for someone who had been alone for so long, who had come to love the isolation, who had accepted and even embraced the inevitability of living alone, dying alone – it was odd for someone so comfortable with solitude to feel comfort from such a mass of souls and spirits as these. Just the thought of it made him smile and laugh out loud, a sharp, jagged sound that became a hacking cough.
He could scarcely remember the time, just a few days ago now, when these beings had frightened him. How foolish that had been. There was nothing to fear. Not from them. Not for him. For him there was only gratitude.
He met their eyes and smiled, and it did not matter that his vision was beginning to fade. He could feel them smiling back at him, radiating warmth and love.
He turned back to the keyboard where the story was waiting, eager for the race to the end.
This is what it feels like when the heart sings, he thought again.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “Thank you, all. Thank you so much.”
His fingers, free at last of stiffness and pain, danced across the keys.
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 27