Except … Dawn knelt and picked the black crayon off the floor. She straightened and looked over toward the counter near the door. There were two other crayons there now. Hadn’t there been three before?
She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure enough, anyway.
She saw that there were no longer any pictures on the blackboard. Moving in a calm and sedate manner, and electing to leave any stray crayons wherever they damned well were, Dawn left the classroom.
She locked the door and walked toward the lot without a glance back.
She sat in the car for ten minutes before turning the ignition. By then she’d worked it all out.
She was pregnant. Duh. Everybody knew the hormones screwed with your head. She knew damned well that she’d seen the pictures—but there was seeing and seeing. You saw things in daydreams and imagination, too. It didn’t mean they’d actually been there. If the pictures were no longer in the classroom, then they could not have been there in the first place.
Weird. Yes. But … explained.
She’d tell David about it, of course—but not right away. He’d been very twitchy since he got back from New York, a lot more Eddie Moscone than usual. Dawn wasn’t sure how he’d react to the reveal that pregnancy hormones might be messing with his wife’s head more than was probably normal.
Not to mention that when the time came for a big talk, there was something else they needed to discuss, something a lot more concrete. She didn’t want that water muddied with this.
She breathed out, a hard and active exhale. She started the car feeling shaken but confident that the world was broadly okay, and hurrah for that.
She didn’t realize that all the time she’d been tidying the classroom, three people had been there with her—two men, one woman, all of them thin and very tall, sometimes watching from the edges of the room, sometimes behind her, sometimes right up close, surrounding her, grinning, peeking down her blouse.
And she also didn’t know that all three of them were now sitting in the backseat of her car.
Chapter 59
As David sprinted up the road toward the school, he saw Dawn’s car coming the other way. He jumped into the street and waved, trying not to look too frantic, trying to make this look like it was a normal thing to do. He could see Dawn through the windshield staring into the middle distance, mind on something else; then he saw her clocking the fact that some idiot was in middle of the road, then finally that the idiot was her husband.
She braked, too hard. The wheels spun and the car skidded toward him. David got his arm out between his body and the car, sidestepping out of the way at the last moment.
He yanked open the passenger door. “Are you okay?”
“What are you doing, David?”
He got in. “Has anything weird happened?”
“I could have killed you.” He kept staring at her. “David … what? Why are you here? And why are you looking so weird? You’re scaring me.”
“Are you sure nothing strange has happened to you? Or around you?”
“David—what’s this about?”
“Didn’t you hear about Talia?”
“Heard what, David? I’ve been in the classroom all day, and the last two hours I’ve been marking and …”
She broke off. David kept trying to work what was strange about her. The atmosphere in the car felt wrong, as if there was something that wasn’t being spoken about.
“What?” he said. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing. What’s the big deal?”
“Talia’s dead.”
“What ?”
He pulled his seat belt tight. “Drive.”
“Drive? Where?”
“New York.”
“New York? Are you joking?”
He looked at her. “Dawn, do I look like I’m joking?”
She drove.
He told her everything.
At first, just what had happened in the days after their trip to the city. Bumping into the man outside Bryant Park and in the train station. The matchbook left outside their house in the night, the same day she’d come back from school to find a pile of small change on the step. The meeting in Kendricks.
Dawn kept trying to interrupt, but he pleaded with her to let him speak until he got it all out.
Then it got harder, because he moved into the realm of lies. He had to start telling her about things he’d misled her over, or hidden by omission. The fact that when he’d hooked up with the guy in the city, it hadn’t been a simple case of meeting an old friend. That this was the same guy who’d bumped into him and come to their town to talk. That David hadn’t come home from the city to make sure he was there in time for the scan, but because very weird shit had started happening.
“But …” Dawn interrupted finally. She was piloting the car quickly but with care. That’s why David usually let her drive. She possessed a sense of being in control—of a car, of herself, of life—that he’d never felt. “Who is this guy? I thought you said he was a friend.”
David hesitated. Could he tell her this? Could he tell the woman who was carrying his child—children—that he believed a phantom from his childhood had somehow come back into his life?
“It’s difficult to explain,” he said.
“Wait.” She concentrated for a moment, negotiating the car into the fast-moving traffic on the freeway. Then she glanced at him. “Do you love me?”
“Of course,” he said, baffled. “Why do you ask that?”
She told him what had just happened in the classroom. He felt his stomach lurch. He’d known something had happened as soon as he opened the car door. That explained the atmosphere, the sense of things unsaid. He hoped it did, anyhow, though her telling it hadn’t dissipated what he was feeling.
“So,” she said. “Am I going nuts?”
“No,” he said. “But what else?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“No.” She seemed irritable. “But there’s something you’re not saying.”
“I’m getting to it,” he snapped. This was going wrong. He could feel it curdling, but he didn’t understand why. He felt a nonspecific crankiness, bad temper, a pervading sense of something dark and broken, a desire to nurture conflict out of curiosity, to see how far it could go—or be pushed. It felt like something black and gleefully bad was creeping up behind, something that wanted nothing less than his misery for all time.
“I know about the manuscript,” Dawn said.
She had decided to see if there was anything she could do to help, she said. She knew he was busy, caught up in the new book. It was the way their relationship always worked—her marshaling the real world, him standing on the ledge outside the window, bringing home the dreams.
So she’d gone upstairs and had a look through his boxes. Pretty quickly it had become clear that he’d want to keep most of it, and he had to decide where it went (because the obvious and only acceptable answer would be “in your study, dude”). By the time she got to the third box she’d lost focus and was peering into it with little more than mild curiosity.
When she spotted the pile of paper, she’d snapped back to attention. How cool, she thought—the manuscript for David’s novel. That shouldn’t to be hidden away in a box. That should be … well, not actually on display (a pile of paper was never going to look acceptable in the living room) but at least safely stowed. She pulled it out and leafed through the first few pages, smiling, before realizing there was something strange about it.
Yes, it was the book, but it was different. Not only in the way a first draft will always be different—the raw material, hacked like a block of stone out of the quarry of random words and events, ready to be shaped into meaning by subsequent drafts—but wholly different. David’s handwriting was all over it, in pencil and ballpoint pen, hundreds of corrections and changes. But the stuff underneath, the typed material, not to mention the very paper it was typed on
…
“What was it, David? Where did it come from?”
David had been listening without any attempt to speak, eyes on the growing traffic through the windshield, as they came into Newark. He looked down at his hands. Lying hands, hands that …
“It was my father’s,” he said.
“What?”
“The place where I grew up wasn’t very different from Rockbridge. It was called Palmerston, in Pennsylvania. There was a weird shooting there back in the 1990s, but otherwise it was your regular small town. My parents lived there all their lives. They loved each other, but they argued. A lot. Viciously sometimes. One of the things they used to argue about was a little room my father used as his study. It was a hobby. He …”
David found he couldn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Dawn already knew, and she said the words for him. “He wrote the book I found.”
“Yes.”
“But it wasn’t finished,” she said “There was only half a novel there, and the prose was terrible, and …”
“He was still working on it when they died, I guess. He tinkered with it for years. Maybe he would have finished it, maybe not. When I packed up stuff to bring to Rockbridge, I found the manuscript. I didn’t think about it for a long time, but one day I wondered whether I should try to do something with it. At first it was supposed to be something for him, a way of getting to know him better, or … But as I worked at it and changed it and added things and took stuff out, I stopped seeing it as his book and started seeing it as mine. And when I finished it and gave it to you and you said you loved it … I didn’t want to admit it hadn’t been.”
“David, you could have told me.”
“I know. I fucked up. And … I wonder whether Maj coming back into my life has to do with all of that. He bumped into me on the day I met with my publishers for the first time. That can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“David, who is Maj?”
“He was the first thing I ever wrote, my first big make-believe. I just made him up a little too well.”
Chapter 60
When Golzen got to the club he found the street door ajar. From that moment he realized that things were running differently, that something was afoot. Maybe he even started to hope tonight was going to be the night. You follow the signs, unclear though they may be.
Follow signs, until Jedburgh appears.
There was no one behind the bar, though cold blue light shone from the bulbs behind the bottles. Chalk up another hint that all was not business as usual. By now tattooed staff would normally be checking that the beer fridges were stocked, racking backup spirits on the high shelves. Golzen walked across the big empty space to the office.
Reinhart was waiting, arms folded, leaning back against the desk. Golzen noticed immediately that the phone was not in its customary place, but lying in six pieces against the wall and over the floor.
“What happened to that?”
“It broke.”
Reinhart spoke as if the event had nothing to do with him, as though whatever cataclysm had befallen the device had occurred at its own hands and been its own fault. Though trivial—Golzen had seen the man do far worse to foes both inanimate and animate—he found this disquieting. It reminded him of the kind of thoughts that sometimes needled at him from the cloudy depths of his own mind: the thoughts that said everything was a game, and the darker and bloodier it got, the better. The ones that said there was no responsibility, no fault, no damage, no rules. The thoughts that didn’t have the slightest understanding of what those words even meant.
“Who was it?”
“The priest. I don’t know how he got this number, but he’s crazier than usual tonight. Ratfuck insane.”
“Something happened over in Chelsea an hour ago, in the street near his church. One of the friends canceled herself out. She was very popular. A lot of people are upset. He’s probably one of them.”
Golzen considered mentioning that Lizzie had been very close to Maj, too, but elected not to. Since the encounter the day before, Reinhart had been silent about Maj. Golzen was content to let that remain so.
“Whatever. The priest has gone past the point of no return. He needs dealing with.”
“He’s not our only problem.”
“I’m aware that other people are trying to make our business their business.”
“Don’t we need to do something about them, too?”
“I will. Have no doubt. But they’re no threat.”
There was something wrong here. It was as if Reinhart had turned some part of himself up. Some not-good part. “To you, maybe. But to us. These people know who we are, what we are. They may try to do something.”
“Let them. When the enemy comes at you, the smart tactician does not retreat. He doesn’t even stand and fight unless absolutely necessary. You know why?”
“Why?”
Reinhart smiled serenely. “The enemy is at their weakest at the moment when they advance. They’re off balance, head full of plans and impulses and leaping ahead to their victory … instead of watching what you’re doing. That makes it the ideal time to vault straight over them in the direction you were already going.”
Golzen blinked, feeling caught out, as if he couldn’t keep up. “But … what direction is that?”
“You don’t get it. That’s why I am me and you are you. You don’t even realize who the enemy is. It’s not these new people, the tough guy and his witchy girlfriend. We kill them, they’re gone. But that’s not the end of it. The enemy is everyone, my friend. You must start at your own front door, but after that, there is no end to it. That’s who we’re fighting all the time, and today is Day Zero of the new deal.”
“You mean …”
“Yes. We’re doing it. Right now.”
Golzen’s heart leapt. “We’re leaving for Perfect?”
“Not us, no.”
“But you said …”
Reinhart shook his head. “I said nothing. You didn’t listen properly and so you heard things that were never said. Nobody’s going anywhere.”
“We’re going to Perfect,” Golzen said stubbornly.
“Perfect isn’t a place. It’s a state.”
“Like … Colorado?”
“No, you dumb asshole. A state of being. You can’t change anything by altering where you are. You have to change what you are. That option is unavailable to you because of the situation with your own friend. You should have had the presence of mind to do something about that way back in the day. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t look remotely sorry.
“I’m not going?”
“No one’s going anywhere. Are you even listening?”
“What are you … Perfect is a place.”
“Jesus. So tell me—where do you think this place even is? Utah? Texas? Fucking California? You think you were going on some Mormon adventure, prancing off into the wilderness to find the promised fucking land?”
Golzen stared at him. That’s exactly what he’d thought would happen, what he’d believed lay in his future and destiny since the night many years ago when he dreamed of a place where they could all live like normal people. Perfect had been Reinhart’s name for it. In Golzen’s dream it had been announced to him as Jedburgh, and in the confines of his head he still thought of it that way. He’d thought Reinhart believed in it too, but now he was saying something else … and Golzen couldn’t even work out what it was.
“So … what is going to happen? When?”
Reinhart bounced off the desk and strode out into the main club room. Golzen hurried after him.
“It’s already started,” Reinhart said. “A broadcast was passed to all available Cornermen”—he checked his watch—“nearly forty minutes ago. It won’t happen all at once. It depends when the chosen happen to get the message. That’s okay. That’s the other secret to success in battle, my friend. No events. Only evolution.”
“I don’t … understand.”
“No, you don’t. Let
’s leave it at that.”
Golzen became aware of someone coming toward them out of the shadows. “Wait up,” said a girl’s voice.
“Hey,” Reinhart said. “You ready?”
It was the girl Golzen had brought to Reinhart—the ditzy teen he’d turned a few days before. She looked different, though. She was dressed the same, was still the kind of random hoodie girl that no one would look twice at in the street, but there was a new confidence about her. She looked like she had a destination now.
She grinned. “You bet.”
Golzen glared at her. “What’s she doing here?”
“I always liked your idea of there being twelve initial warriors,” Reinhart said. “It has a ring to it, you know? Twelve holy ghosts, ha-ha. So she’s doing this thing in your place.”
“What?”
“She’s got what it takes. Fingerskills and an accessible friend. You have neither. Maj would have been perfect, of course. He’s a weapon already. He took the step long ago. You’re no good for this.”
“But … but she’s nobody.”
“Screw you,” the girl said with amusement. “My name’s Jessica. Or it’s gonna be.”
Reinhart laughed. “That’s my girl. Go and be.”
He tossed something to her. She caught it deftly in one hand and held it up in front of Golzen, taunting him.
A matchbook.
“Later,” she said, and walked quickly toward the street. By the time she got through the door, she was running.
Reinhart chuckled. Then he stopped, just like that, as if tiring of doing an impersonation of a normal person. His face darkened. “There’s a thing I’m going to do,” he said. “Then we need to talk. The fun starts here, but we have much still to do, my friend.”
Golzen’s head was buzzing. He felt sickened, disgusted with himself. Christmas day had come and there was nothing under the tree. There never had been. There wasn’t even a tree. Just lies. Always lies.
We Are Here Page 35