At the hospital in Mammoth Springs, Jessica had received telegrams, flowers, and cards from well-wishers, friends, relatives, colleagues, and strangers. With hands heavily bandaged, she had a nurse open them all for her. One enormous flower arrangement had been waiting for her in her room, brought in moments before she'd come up from the ER. The arrangement's size and beauty, twenty-four mixed-colored roses, had her believing that it must be from James. A nurse read the card to her, saying, '' 'Thank you for sending that murdering pervert straight to Hell.' Signed 'Frank.' And there's a.. a sizable check made out to you, Dr. Coran."
"Check? Let me see that." She looked at the amount. It was a stunning one-hundred-thousand-dollar check. She hoped that Frank Lorentian had finally found some closure in the horrid death of his daughter. Obviously, his answer to everything in life was wrapped in green. In the meantime, he had bought and paid for one FBI agent who'd subcontracted out to a once-reputable medical examiner already. And Karl Repasi planned an early retirement on royalties from a book that promised the unvarnished truth in the Phantom case. Enough was enough, Jessica concluded, and asked the nurse, ' 'Would you please give these flowers out among all the other nurses on the floor? And make arrangements for me to see whoever's in charge of accepting donations for your burn center? I'll be wanting to make a sizable donation."
That'd been a week before, and now Jessica was back on her feet, so to speak, with the help of a pair of crutches she hated. Jessica now hobbled from the lodge on crutches she was tiring of. She breathed in the fresh air of this morning, the sun bright in a cartoon-blue sky set off by milk-white clouds whipped up only in Wyoming. It took her considerably more time to get out to the hot pools on crutches than the last time she'd been here, but she made her way out to Hellsmouth, and now she stood over the bubbling repository and stared down at the spot where she and Dorphmann had combated for life. Nothing, not so much as a finger bone belonging to Dorphmann had been given up by the monster hot pool. The hot-pool watch for signs of Dorphmann's remains had eased off somewhat by now, most rangers and staffers of the opinion that Hells-mouth wasn't in the mood to return any fragment of its catch.
Clouds of sulfur, white and shapeless, rose up to greet Jessica, taunting her with their silent, unending parade from out of the depths of this place. She agreed with the rangers: Nothing of Feydor Dorphmann would ever be found here, and what little of him that might be coughed up would quickly be covered over by layers of silicified mud and rock, in which case the only way to recover his skull or teeth or bones would be to launch a bizarre archaeological dig here. Not likely, she conceded. Not at the expense of time and money and energy required to cover the entire lip of the searing hot pool that stretched away from her in an irregular circle with roughly a hundred-yard diameter.
Alone now for the first time since Feydor Dorphmann had attempted to drag her into the Inferno with him, Jessica stared deep and long into the blistering, watery abyss that had claimed Dorphmann. With the sun at her back, Jessica's shadow rippling atop the pool, this place didn't look as frightening and fearful as it had in the dark. She could see the pretty blue eye of the burning cauldron; she could see into the winding depths of the pool, the epicenter that appeared to reach down into Dante's Inferno, to the River Styx, the City of Dis, where suicides wandered the Forest of the Dead. She imagined the hot spring as the liquid eye of Satan himself, ever glancing upward into the world of man, ever anxious to make of man a monster after his own failed angel's heart. She saw the allure of the pool here beneath the sun, God's eye.
Somehow no one else, no matter how close, not J. T., not Eriq, not even Jim Parry would ever completely understand what had happened here between her and this man she had never known before his first contact with her. The others did, however, understand her need to be alone for a while, that she needed time and space and aloneness, something only mystics, seers, and old wise men in Hawaii and a few other places on the globe understood. Still, J. T. and the others, and even James, who'd called on hearing of her hospital stay, understood and respected her privacy.
She needed peace. She needed to sort out things.
She needed to face her own devils and hopefully come away a better, more enabled person and not the shattered creature that Feydor Dorphmann had become.
She leaned a little toward the pool and spit into it. "Damn you!" she shouted into the pool. "Damn you, Dorphmann, and all your kind!"
A large, gaseous bubble arose in response, sending a flume of sulfuric acid skyward and near Jessica's face.
"Tit for tat, heh?" she asked the natural formation, which seemed to mock her.
Overhead she heard the wild, free cry of an eagle, and she looked upward to see it disappear into the sun. Still leaning on her crutches, she felt one of them give way as it slid off the boardwalk, almost sending her over the side. She regained her balance, gasping and kneeling before the fiery pool.
She felt weak, helpless before the enormity of the evil she felt dwelling here, spouting its venom into the atmosphere. She had only destroyed a man who'd been touched by this evil via birth, the brain, the DNA perhaps. She hadn't begun to destroy the evil itself. She knew it would return with a vengeance, a vengeance directed at her, again and again.
"Pardon me, miss," came a voice to her left, "but suicide is no answer to anything."
She'd gone to her knees, attempting to retrieve the lost crutch. She looked up at an elderly man in jogging fatigues offering her a hand.
"No, you misunderstand," she told him. "I… I just dropped my crutch." Her hands, wrists, and feet had healed well, as she'd been told by the Mammoth doctors, but the bandages made her look like the leftover result of a previous suicide attempt. It was not surprising that the old man thought so, too.
"Of course," the man replied, "how clumsy of me to suggest-"
"Could you reach my crutch?"
The man obliged, actually stepping off the boardwalk to retrieve the crutch. "Be careful," she pleaded.
"There's something odd here," he said.
"What's that?"
"Something down here, below the walkway."
Jessica leaned in and stared below the walk to see a discarded black case, Dorphmann's case, the case he'd been carrying that night. Why had no one else found it?
"Can you reach it?" Jessica asked the stranger.
He used the crutch to lift the case handle and inch it from below the walk, under which all manner of strange green growth flourished atop the lunarlike surface of the silicified earth here. In a moment, both crutch and briefcase clattered noisily onto the boardwalk. "What's in it?" asked the curious jogger now.
Jessica itched to open the case. It had to be Dorphmann's legacy. Who else might have left it at this exact spot?
''Quickly, open it,'' said the stranger as he climbed back onto the boardwalk.
Her fingers held over the clasps. Maybe there is a reason why I'm here, she thought, conversing with herself. Why the killer brought me to this place, and perhaps I just found it.
"Open it up!" insisted the man, a gleaming curiosity filling his green eyes, his white beard showing his agitation as it bobbed.