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Someone once said that it’s the still-living ghosts that haunt. That wasn’t true for Sebastion. For him, the dead ones still did the talking. Riley Fischer, who had an affinity for Jim Croce’s Bad Bad Leroy Brown, was gone, a victim of the sky, a victim of himself. He had been haunted by a ghost with a pulse.
On Monday morning, far away from the city’s fringe and speeding still further from it, Zeb had no idea. But what he was starting to understand was his father’s point of view. And the dangling cords that had ensnared his dad’s ankles and wrists for years.
Zeb knew that John Merridew, his father’s boss and a bastard of the Nth degree, had always been accused of improprieties. Pointing fingers hovered around him like flies buzzing about decaying garbage. But he shrugged them off, and charges never followed the complaints. If they did, Zeb thought on occasion, Merridew had been able to buy his way out of them. Like Fischer, he seemed able to buy his way out of nearly anything.
Had Oliver heard something, or greater yet, found something that would make the powers that be, the ones with the pointiest fingers of all, come around and knock on Merridew’s door a little harder? Maybe Oliver had access to that same stack of photos Riley had brought into the office a few years after all this had really begun. Did pop confront his boss? And did that confrontation spark something that would eventually get utterly out of control? Oliver had a conscience. Money was king to him, Zeb knew, but there was morality in him. There was work ethic,and from that grew the branches of what must have been his morality. Were the accusations of Merridew’s account skimming or about the little boys seen arriving at his downtown condominium actually provable back then? Oliver might have pointed his finger at John Merridew only to have the bastard point back. I-I did it for y-you, Oliver had said. And his son had scoffed at that. For me? Yeah, right. But now the phrase had some salt in it. The idea had some bite. With Sadie gone and Merridew threatening that Oliver would lose his job—or worse—the notion that he might keep quiet and pay up seemed more plausible. Not likely, but conceivable. Is that why Zeb’s charcoal drawing of his battered aunt raised so many flags for Oliver? If Oliver was taking advantage of girls like Daniela or even his own son, eyebrows would lift. And an absent mother spelled the worst. Where would Zeb go if his father was found guilty of such things? Foster care? Worse?
You fall in line, or your kid goes hungry. The illusion-strings, which Zeb had first become witness to on that night he sped through the city in his father’s passenger seat had been completely genuine. As the old man ranted, his son saw the dark lines pulled taught, not just in his mind, but around the real flesh-and-blood man called Oliver Redfield.
I fall in line or I go away.
In his memory, he heard those words said with coolness and composure. And also fear. Merridew and Oliver were two little boys playing in the dirt, Zeb thought, waiting for moms to call them in for lunch, bargaining with their truckloads of dirt. Trading dirty secrets. My pile is bigger than yours. But you have more to lose. So pay up. Fall in line. Oliver just didn’t know—mustn’t have—that Merridew’s truck would always be bigger. Or maybe he always did know. Maybe it was that knowledge that put him in line.
I-I did it for y-you, Oliver had said. I did it for you.
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Zeb knew that loosening your grip on something meant that it would become yours more than ever before. There are things that you remember and there are things you might forget. But there are also things, bet the house and your oldest’s college fund, that will always remember you. Ever after.
Oh, yes, you remember things. And they remember you.
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He wound the car up to nearly two hundred, just to see what it could do. Just to see what he could do. The other cars he passed were a victory march. A whizzing procession of blips and dashes without distinguishable drivers, all of it just for him. And he sped through that morning like it threatened to be his last. Like it promised itself as his first.
By the time he arrived in Edan, the day was a full, strong, proud one. But there were no trumpets to mark his arrival. The streets, as he never remembered them to be, were an empty gorge, with empty voice. There weren’t even cars on Main Street. It was a rough skating rink marked by pebbles and a skiff of blue-white snow. Funny, he thought, how snow looks in certain light. Most often the shadows of it, the dark parts, the depth, will appear as a distinct shade of pale blue. Yet no one—no one—would ever describe snow as anything but white in color. Funny how snow is always white. Always.
Malin had pressed him to go. She had said that it was important for him—it was originally her suggestion to leave for a place that held a warm room in his memory. But she had also said that it might be crucial that he left for other reasons. What those where she did not clarify with specificity. He needed to be in a place where no one could find him. He needed to disappear. Just in case there was more turmoil ahead.
Zeb wanted to know what sort of turmoil she had been alluding to. And in those moments when the police cruisers rounded the corner onto his lane in Vaughan, she had not said anything more. Only that it would be better for him to find a quiet spot to begin painting again, and stay out of the world’s eye.
Lake Charlemagne, she had asked, is it somewhere no one knows you’ll be? Go where no one knows you’ll be.
She then asked, in a contrast that might have come off quite droll had neither of them nearly taken an early stage exit just a little while earlier, how she would be able to find him. He wondered quickly, but with no time to really consider, if she had tried to imply an undertone within the breezy chill of the late Sunday afternoon.
But he took it as its face suggested: the heed of a new friend, or the offer of lifeline and solace to someone by shared humanity. Or by shared circumstance. As he eased into the Beemer Ci, he told her that finding him would be easy.
Drive north on four hundred, he had said to her through the unrolled passenger window. Then it’s east on one-eleven, then north again, this time on thirty-five. She was bent at the unrolled window and was holding her hand, partially wrapped in her coat sleeve, on the window ledge. Got that? he had asked her. Four hundred, one-eleven, then thirty-five, right to Edan township. Then find Edan’s Main Street and go north on it until you come to the intersection where four giant stone churches all stare at the sky, reaching for it in quietly amicable competition. Then turn down the street that runs east between the two with the major peaks. The Roman Catholic and the Protestant, if you lose track of your east and your west.
Zeb stood at that intersection now, gazing up at the seemingly omniscient towers. Still the street remained empty. He climbed back in the driver’s seat of the car and headed east, following the directions he had given Malin.
He drove among the trees of front yards and alongside narrow asphalt sidewalks. Punched into the blankets of snow in front of some houses were narrow purple signs on plastic that read in white letters Vote YES On February 14th! Edan township NEEDS a New Recreation Center.
Other than those energetic words the town was asleep. Midday but snoozing soundly. A rural resort town on the edge of a lake in winter. The deadest place on earth. No one wants to be reminded of good times in summer when snow and cold is pressing against the casement instead.
Still bowing down before the car window with her shiny dark hair bothering her eyes in the tight wind, Malin had asked if there was an address. Not one that he knew. The roads out there, past Edan, he said to her, did not even have names. At least they did not in his memory. That’s good, she had said then, as if such a detail was important. He thought that there was a hint of lavender and rain on the air as it blew a little into the cab of the car. But he wondered how he would have been able to smell anything but car exhaust for a while. The lavender, the rain—both must have been his imagination.
But when you drive east on that road, he continued, between the two churches and past the border of the township, take it until you think you have obvious
ly driven much too far. You’ll go past smaller and smaller, fewer and fewer buildings. The lane will narrow. It will climb hills and fall, will wind through trees, come out near the edge of water and then the water will recede again. Lanes and driveways will branch off further to the north to the heavy brush and towering trees, but don’t turn off. The road will become grid. And the Redfield cottage is the last one. All the way at the end.
The lake, Charlemagne Lake, will come up nearly to the road, with only a patch of mucky gravel and weeds to separate you and it. And before you will be the gates. Iron and black. The gates are the end of the road.
I’ll leave them open for you.
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Sadie loved the summer house. She had begged Oliver to get it when she discovered it would be going at auction. Apparently the previous owners had divorced after a declaration of bankruptcy and the house at the end of the gravel lane would fetch a cheap price because of its remote location and the fact that it was on the other side of the lake.
Zeb’s mom had grown up taking swimming lessons and going to summer camp with her little sister across the water and her memories of those times were breathtaking, particularly next to those in winter when her dad, Samuel, was up to no good. Only a twenty-minute drive from the farm north of Eden——where she and her sister dreamed of who they would marry some day—the run-ins with her father seemed a far-flung place to this one. Here the most magical pieces of her childhood lived. And to recapture that—even a hint of that—she told Oliver, would be the greatest gift he could ever give her. And Zeb.
Disgruntled, but still set to please her at that time in their life together, Oliver set out to make bids and figure a way to tackle the down payment. The summer house became theirs when Zeb was five and Sadie thought it would solve everything.
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Zeb drove on that east road, out of town, past thick tangles of dark leafless branches and stems, a flourish of life never maimed by fleshy human hands. Contrasting snow clung to the tops of scores of black twigs in long, impossibly delicate lines of fine powder. Thousands of angled pin holes of light twinkled and flashed from a staggeringly complex display of layered sunlight. As he passed, it came at him in a manner so dazzling and logic-defying that he was certain no artist could hope to capture it with brush and tinted oil.
But he decided that he would try.
Unlike the three notorious snapshots previously locked into him, and combined with a new fourth and a new fifth memory from recent events, he was sure that this day would go down in his personal history as a monumentally good one. For the light. And for that decision.
The drive was immediately identical to one from a few years before. Despite the snow—there had been none yet that last time—it felt the same, like some things can.
He was different but the trip was the same.
That one had been to restore what had been lost, his connected sensations. The color blue. The sounds and the value. This trip was for the same purpose. But grander. Larger in scope.
Before that one, the last trip out here was during the summer when he was nine, late August, still hot. Dad was driving and mom was in the passenger seat staring at the lake water as it came and went. They were each silent. He sat in the back seat, humming, looking at the same branches but they had been filled with thriving green and faded browns then. The light, however, had pleased him nearly as much. He would not learn the tune to the song with no title for a few years yet.
What had he called this place? The house at Charlemagne Lake. He had a name for it, one that he had invented when Sadie and Oliver had first bought it...what was it? He was five or six and their first summer out here on weekends was the most enchanting thing he could remember, aside from blue on an oak table. But what was that name? Sadie had delighted in it. She used it all the time. Zeb, we’re packing up to head out for—what had he called it, the name she loved so much?—so get your crayons and your paper. It was the name she loved so much, but on that day, late in August, the summer when he was nine, she didn’t use it. She didn’t say anything as they drove.
That was the trip when Merridew and his wife came, unexpectedly bringing their exchange ‘daughter’, Daniela, the striking girl with pale hair and porcelain skin.
The knowledge of that, though Zeb never understood why exactly, caused an argument. Oliver had wanted things to go smoothly. Smooth sailing, Sadie-babe, this weekend needs to go smooth, he had said. And she had gotten upset. Silence always came after one of them got upset. But usually it was Oliver who was upset. Not mom.
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Go where no one knows you will be. Malin’s statement sounded daunting in retrospect. Once Zeb got past the whole gnawing history of the last short while—if he could somehow get past it—that was a decidedly strange thing for Malin to have said.
It was standing in the shadow of the church towers that brought the first realization of how hasty the exit from his house and the city had really been. Hastiness but a pressing hastiness. There was a lunatic chained, Malin had said, to his mother’s kitchen stove. Screaming and befouled with pepper spray. There was a bloody carpet, a vacant front doorway, and a broken lock on his dad’s garage door. Yet Zeb had simply driven off. If that wasn’t madness he did not know what would be a better definition.
But Malin had everything under control. She insisted so. Looking after the unstable—Fairweather, the Druid, in this instance—was her corner of expertise, not his. She had been following this one for, what, three years or more. She had his bell rung.
And it was the Druid chained there, with his leg’s metal brace scraping insolently against the linoleum. But he was not a simple unstable. In Zeb’s mind that moment, Druid was a product—or worse, a purveyor—of a vital sort of evil. He, it, existed and Zeb confronted the understanding that he actually had stood face to face with that kind of malevolence. The showdown had taken place in his bedroom and in a made-up landscape on the other side of this one.
There was an elderly truism settling somewhere in the space cuddled behind his eyes: If you believe in the ultimate evil you must believe in the ultimate good. There was not one without the other. Two sides of a coin, they were.
Standing with breath like a thin cloud, he teetered there for a moment, in the middle of the deserted street where the blurry-edged shadows of two towers fell to either side of him at a diagonal and across the dusted road. They were thick dark bars of nothingness elongated out of their own will to be seen. The other two, the Roman Catholic tower and the Protestant one, stood in his vision and called to mind the cold-to-touch wall and the equally chilled breath under the bed opposite the wall. That was the cusp. That little space he was in, too narrow to even lay all the way flat, that had been the edge of it all.
It was unnerving to stand there on your own rubber plug of mortality while the blessed waters of sanctity runneth over. Having some stranger yank at the stopper’s metal and lissome chain attached beneath your feet brings you face to face with the demons, every last one of them. You want to stare them down and become their master. You want to make amends with them. Is that what he was doing? In the hotel, on the roadway that stretched to this spot, was he reaching out for amendment?
The realness of what had happened, despite his insistence that other things, things with dad and mom that could be amended, was more troublesome. The realness could not be forgiven. It could not be held up to the light as an experience from which one grows stronger overnight.
When he woke up in that hospital bed, pinging and dry, there was a vague understanding swarming beneath the browns and oranges of his eyelids. Zeb had come out the other side of hell with just a bit of soot on his face. Hey, move forward. Keep breathing. That’s all. And, perhaps a bit like the months before, he had begun accepting what had happened with acquiescence. Then, it and all the rest came back like overlord flood waters. But still, standing there in a head to head standoff with the dark skinned stranger had been a stroke of inopportune luck, a vast and ridiculous
coincidence. A faulty bit of statistical chance. That icy precipice where madness incarnate nearly forced him over—whether there was anger in those eyes or not—had been borne from an immense misunderstanding. It was just a thief who wanted something. He had, in a moment of hubris, stumbled across Zeb and not somebody else. To make amends with that kind of circumstance would be next to godliness.
But Malin’s details...the man in Stoughton with his family, stabbed with a knife from his own dinner table. The other one who fell from his bathroom window at the hands of the first. And the one before and all the others since. The names weren’t his but they were close. That said it wasn’t just a simplistic thief. That said the Druid, who actually did exist and was the creator of the precipice, didn’t just want to steal something. No, the Druid hadn’t wanted to take from him.
He had wanted to be him.
Go, Malin had said.
Go where no one knows you will be.
III. A Soothsayer’s Recompense
Oh God no. Malin stood in the empty kitchen. Blood smeared the floor and down the front of the white stove. An overturned drawer of steak knives, forks and a turkey baster lay in the uncongealed puddles of red and near short plastic splinters that used to be tan in color. There was an empty set of petite regulation handcuffs hanging slack from the oven handle.
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