“Listen, I only have moments left.” Nicole coughed up blood. “Continue to protect the chair as you have done. Know that God is for you, who can be against you?”
“Don’t leave.”
“You were strong.” Nicole gasped for air and her eyes closed. “You didn’t tell him the true location of the chair.”
Corin shook his head.
“Good, good. I knew you wouldn’t.” Her head settled to the side and the brightness in her blue eyes dimmed.
He blinked back tears. “Don’t die.”
She smiled. “I am going to the arms of the One who will never let me go, Corin.” She pulled in another raspy breath. “Stay true to the path He has shown you.” Her grasp on his fingers went limp.
“Stay with me, Nicole.” Corin leaned in.
As her eyes fluttered open, she said, “Forgiveness. For both.”
“Both who?”
“Remember, the chair is only a conduit for His healing power. Healing comes from inside you and from the Maker of the chair. Both. Give it to both.” Nicole’s head settled to the side, her eyes closed and she didn’t open them again.
He kissed her on the head, then slumped to the floor. His body heaved as sobs of sorrow tore their way to the surface from the deepest part of him. Ages later as his tears slowed, Corin stared at Tesser’s endless bookshelves and wished he could torch them all with superpowered heat vision, as if that could subdue the pain of the old man’s brutal betrayal.
FOR ANOTHER AGE Corin sat at the base of the chair he had made, the chair Nicole had died in. The sorrow and anger faded and all he felt was emptiness.
“Excuse me.”
He looked up through his tear-blurred eyes. The lead man of the rescue team stood over him, hands on his hips.
“I know this is a brutal moment for you, but I want to let you know I just called the police and they’ll be here in five to ten minutes.”
“You’re not going to stay?”
“I’ll be watching from a safe distance to make sure nothing happens between now and the time they arrive, but no, we’re going to stay out of having to give the police any reports.” The man winked. “Or an explanation of who we are.”
“But they’ll want me to give them a full explanation.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
Corin nodded, grasped the chair, and hauled himself to his feet.
“Who are you?”
“Friends.” The man wiped his forehead with the back of his black gloved hand.
“But who sent you? How did you know we were here?”
“That will be explained to you.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“By who?”
“The man who hired us.”
“Who hired you?”
The man smiled. “Don’t worry; he’ll be in touch.”
“Tonight?”
“Like I said, soon.”
TWO HOURS LATER Corin drove away from Tesser’s house feeling like his body had been shot full of a local anesthetic. His arms, legs, and especially his mind were numb.
Where did he go from here?
He drove to Woodmoor Lake and sat for three hours, not thinking, not crying, not fearing anything, just feeling the chill of the afternoon seep into his heart.
On his way home an image of the chair shot into his mind. What had Nicole said? The chair would bring joy and great sorrow. No kidding. But the scales were severely out of balance. Ninety-nine percent sorrow, one percent joy. A. C., his brother, Nicole . . . the good news was there wasn’t anyone else he cared about that the chair could destroy.
As he pulled into his driveway he spotted Tori’s car and her standing next to it. He puffed out a disgusted laugh. The laugh made his ribs ache. They weren’t broken but they would be tender for a while.
Okay, not everyone had been devastated. But something told him the circle was about to be completed.
CHAPTER 48
Tori stood tapping her fingers on the roof of her car, a somber look on her face.
“Hey, I’ve been meaning to call you,” Corin said as he got out of his car.
She nodded but said nothing.
Corin stared at her. She didn’t move around her car toward him. She stood with her car between them, her face pale and she blinked as if she was in a storm cloud of dust.
“Are you all right, Tori?”
“I’m great, and you?”
She wasn’t great, wasn’t even good based on the look in her eyes. Something was wrong. Wonderful. Probably another weight to add to his backpack full of grief.
“How am I? Life has been better.” Corin slammed his car door shut. “Nicole is gone.”
“Gone?”
“Dead.”
Tori circled around to the passenger side of her car and leaned against the door. “I figured she was the one they were talking about on the radio. When I heard Tesser was arrested I assumed the worst. I’m so sorry, Corin. You’d become close to her, hadn’t you?”
Corin nodded and folded his arms.
She looked down on the frost-hardened ground. “I know my timing isn’t great, but I need to talk to you about something.”
A lump of granite instantly formed in Corin’s stomach. Here it comes.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s what isn’t going to be going on anymore.”
“And what won’t be going on anymore?”
“We’re done.” Tori wiped her nose. “I wanted to tell you to your face.”
“Why?”
“I’ve seen it all my life. You’re turning into a Jesus Freak.”
Corin coughed out a bitter laugh. “You’re wrong. After today I’m so done with the chair and anything and everything to do with God. Both have brought me nothing but pain. I’m going to get rid of the thing.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“Call me when it’s gone.” Tori shoved her hands into her blue and black North Face jacket and shook her head. “No, that’s not fair to you. Don’t call me.”
“I just told you—”
“No. It’s not you, Corin. It’s the whole thing. Too much of my past. Too much has been stirred up and thrown in my face.”
“I told you, I’m done with the chair. It’s over for me.”
“And it’s over for us.”
CORIN SPENT THE rest of the day numbing his mind watching Tobey Maguire spin his way through Sam Raimi’s three Spider-Man movies. If only it were as easy to heal his world as Spidey healed his. The flicks did little to dull the pain seeping into every crevice of his soul. Toward midnight as the credits rolled on the third movie, he told himself to look at the bright side.
His life couldn’t get any worse.
It couldn’t.
He staggered into his bedroom, flopped onto his bed, and closed his eyes.
Sure it could.
CHAPTER 49
Corin was only asleep for what seemed like seconds before his cell phone shattered his dreams. He glanced at his alarm clock. One a.m. He fumbled for his phone and squinted against the light coming from it and looked to see who was on the other end.
Adrenaline shot through him and in an instant he was awake. Shasta. Was it possible? Was he healed?
Corin rubbed his eyes and tried to remember how long it had been since his brother sat in the chair. Three days? With Brittan, A. C., and him the healing had come within twenty-four hours, so there’d been plenty of time for it to work.
Please.
“Shasta?”
He heard the faint strains of the soundtrack from Gladiator playing through the phone.
“Shasta, you there?”
“Yes, I’m here.” His brother paused. “Are you well?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“How does it feel, to be ‘fine’?” Shasta’s voice sounded like ice.
No.
Corin stumbled to his feet.
“How does it feel to have sensation in your toes, your feet, you
r legs, your fingers, your arms, your shoulders? Tell me, brother, what is it like to be fine? I’m dying to know.”
“Don’t do this, Shasta.”
“I think it needs to be done. Because you had me. Really. Did you know that? I was convinced this was the time. Miracle city. When you told me that kid had been healed, I thought it was possible.
“When you told me A. C. had been healed, I called him. Did you know that? After talking to him I believed even more. Then the coup de grâce, telling me you’d been healed. In that moment I swallowed every worm on your hook.”
Shasta’s slow, labored breathing reverberated in Corin’s mind like a windstorm.
“Congratulations on ripping open a hope I’ve been trying to bury for ten years. Well done.”
“Shasta—”
“If you ever contact me again for anything, I will find a way to destroy you. No talking to Robin, no more presents for Sawyer, no e-mails, no Christmas cards, nothing.”
“I didn’t—”
“Do we understand each other?”
“Don’t do this.”
“You did it, not me.”
“I thought—”
“No, you rarely have ever thought, just acted.”
Corin dropped to his knees.
“Good-bye, Corin.”
He let his cell phone slide out his hand and clatter to the floor.
Then his despair twisted and morphed into an anger that lifted him to his feet, a burning in his mind that formed into a crystal-clear vision of what needed to be done.
He strode to his garage, his whole body on fire, and flung open the closest hiding all his old sports gear. He dug through the pile, flinging hiking gear, basketballs, his tennis racquet, his golf clubs, not turning or caring when the sound of them smacking into his car filled the garage.
Where is it?
There.
His baseball bat. The perfect instrument for the song he was about to play. A bat he’d crafted himself in junior high school after seeing that old movie The Natural about a player who’d made his own bat when he was a kid. The bat lay at the bottom of the pile, its surface still gleaming from the finish he’d put on it twenty years ago.
He lifted it out of the pile and ran his hand over its smooth surface.
He’d picked the perfect piece of northern white ash to construct the bat. The perfect choice for slugging homers off John Vanos in high school.
He stepped back and swung the bat as hard as he could. The perfect tool to bestow on it what had been bestowed on him.
Something inside tried to rise in protest, but he ignored the message and whipped the bat through the air again, the familiar swoosh filling his garage.
He’d lost little if any of his bat speed.
This was it. Payback time.
CHAPTER 50
Corin strode over the frost-bitten lawn of his backyard, his breath filling the air with clouds of gray rage. Before he reached the bunker he pushed the remote and the earth slid back, the stairs dark in the night’s shadows.
He staggered down the concrete steps, slid his key into the massive Master Lock padlock, and flung open the door, its momentum crashing the knob into the concrete wall of the bunker and echoing through the night like a gong.
Moonlight streamed into the room through the tiny skylight in the far corner of the room. One side of the chair was bathed in radiance; the other side cast a shadow that reached the wall. Light and dark. Yin and yang. Demon and angel.
He was about to be the former.
Corin’s gaze moved from the chair to the moon framed by the skylight. Was the man in the moon smiling? Or laughing? At him, with him. It didn’t matter.
Man in the moon. Man in the chair. Man of despair.
His stare returned to the chair as he strode into the room and stopped a foot in front of it, wishing he had Superman’s heat vision to simply incinerate the chair instantly.
No, this way would be better.
“It’s time to end this.” Corin smacked the bat into his palm. “Are you ready? I certainly am.”
Would God stop him? Freeze him in place, or make his muscles turn into syrup till someone arrived who would keep the chair from annihilation?
He angled around the right side of the chair on the balls of his feet as if he were a famished lion ready to pounce.
“You destroyed me. You destroyed everything and now I am going to return the favor.”
Corin spun back and crossed in front of the chair back the way he’d come, the drumbeat of the bat smacking his palm in rhythm with his footsteps. The anger inside him surged like a strobe light going on and off, on and off, with each flash his rage growing brighter. He was going nova.
The bat felt as heavy as a sledgehammer and time slowed as he stopped pacing, lifted it straight over his head, and brought it down on the seat of the chair, his muscles straining to deliver all his strength.
Would the chair turn into something made of steel like the time he took a sliver from it? Would it protect itself? It wouldn’t matter. He would find a way to destroy it.
The first blow crunched halfway through the seat, the second sent splinters spinning to the floor, the third—a full level baseball swing from his heels—tore the back of the chair apart and launched it into the air with a twisting spin till it crashed into the left wall.
Indestructible?
Hardly.
He tightened his grip on the bat as a voice in the back of his mind again asked, Why are you doing this?
He closed his eyes and squeezed tighter.
“Shut up.”
Why?
“Shut up!”
Corin’s eyes fluttered open, he screamed, then leaped toward the chair, bat high again in his hands, his grip so tight now his fingers ached.
Muscles taut, he rained another ten thousand blows onto the olive wood, each crunch of bat on chair fueling his rage.
“You took my life away!”
Another blow.
“Why couldn’t you heal my brother?”
Another.
“Any hope of Shasta and me gone!”
Another.
Sweat seeped from his hands onto the handle of the bat.
“How does it feel!”
Two minutes later he slumped against the far wall gasping for air. The bat slid out of his damp hands and clattered to the floor as he braced himself with his palms and gazed at the pieces of the chair.
None was more than a foot and a half long and three inches thick. The inside of the wood was the same color as the outside, as if the years on the outside had seeped into the inside giving a uniform color to the whole chair.
It lay in a pile, not moving, not speaking out against what had just been done.
Corin shook his head and grunted out a laugh. What was he thinking? This wasn’t a person. It wasn’t a talisman—it was a plain, ordinary chair!
He expected his rage to subside as he stared at the wood, but the intensity of his anger grew.
“We’re not done.” He stumbled forward on his knees and reached out to grab the pieces of the chair. Smaller. The pieces needed to be reduced to splinters. The air felt thick, as if he were pushing his hands through Jell-O to reach the pieces. Harder. C’mon grab them. There! He snatched up a handful of pieces and dropped them a second later.
Hot. Burning hot. Corin rubbed his hands on his sweatpants and blew on his palms. He looked at his hands expecting to see blisters forming.
Nothing.
Hot? Impossible. It was just his imagination.
He grabbed the pieces again—now almost cool—and brought them down hard across his knee.
Pain streaked through his leg and he groaned. It was like slamming pieces of iron across his quad. “What the . . . ?”
He grabbed a piece the size of a letter opener and tried to snap it in two. Steel. Corin let go and it rattled onto the concrete floor. He kicked the shattered wood at his feet and staggered out of the room, swiping at the door with his heel to shu
t it. The door didn’t close more than halfway and he glanced back for one more look at the remnants of the chair.
They lay, not moving, not glowing, just a pile of wood with no magic in them.
As he stepped back to his house all emotion left him and an overwhelming emptiness rushed in to fill the vacuum in his heart.
He shoved his back door open and slammed it shut behind him as the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed one thirty.
Corin trudged toward his living room, then glared at his reflection in the full-length mirror at the end of the hall. The look in his eyes surprised him. It wasn’t relief, fear, or anger; it was sorrow.
Sorrow? Sure. Sorrow he hadn’t destroyed the chair sooner. For a moment he embraced the thought. In the morning life would begin again. No, life had begun the moment he’d picked up the bat and took his first step toward the bunker.
What had Nicole said about the chair? Destined to be in his family for generations? Sure. Why not? He’d give one piece each to the hundreds of kids he wouldn’t be having someday.
He glanced at his watch: 1:35. Tori wouldn’t be up, but he didn’t care. He wrenched his phone free of his pocket and dialed. Two rings. Four.
“Wondering what I’m doing? I’m wondering what you’re doing, so leave me a message. I’ll call you back and hopefully we’ll both get what we’re looking for.”
“It’s me. I’m wondering if you’d reconsider us. Just wanted you to know it’s over. The chair is gone and I’m free.”
He set the phone down and tried to believe the words he’d just spoken.
A few seconds later another emotion joined his pleasure. Horror. As if he stood on the edge of the beach as a tsunami was about to strike with nowhere to escape to.
Deep down he knew the chair was real. Knew the healing he’d experienced wasn’t a mind game he’d played on himself. Same with A. C. Same with Brittan Gibson.
Instantly his living room filled with a brilliant light with so much power he gasped. Then an overwhelming peace swept him up and spilled over him like forty-foot waves.
A moment later the light vanished and the peace was gone.
The Chair Page 28