Suddenly, she raised the shotgun and pointed it directly at her father, openly weeping. “You’ve murdered five people. And that’s all you want to do now — kill again. Oh, my dear God, what kind of position have you put me in? What choice have you given me? No choice at all!”
The moon was now fully covered by clouds; Madder’s Gorge was reduced to a blue-black outline, illuminated by the palest ivory haze. As Logan watched, the madness in Feverbridge’s eyes seemed to waver and lessen. The mahogany hue of his skin began to shrink, grow paler. Maybe now I can get through to him, he thought. Maybe now he will listen. Laura had the shotgun trained on her father, but she seemed unable — or unwilling — to pull the trigger.
“Dr. Feverbridge!” Logan shouted.
After a minute, Feverbridge turned from Laura to him.
“We know the truth now — all of it. This can’t go on. Will you let us help you? Can you stop yourself, work to undo what you’ve become? Or are you going to keep on killing innocent people to satisfy an ever-growing bloodlust? Or… are you going to force your own daughter to kill you?”
As Logan spoke, Feverbridge stood motionless, like a statue. The red light died away in his eyes. The sense of wrongness, of nature perverted, that Logan had sensed emanating from him eased. He seemed to be wrestling with a deep inner conflict. He opened his mouth, but it was a low whine, not words, that came forth. He turned back toward Laura, her shotgun still pointed, tears streaming down her face, and his expression softened. He lifted one hand, reaching for her almost tenderly. At the same time, he took one quick step backward, then another — and then disappeared over the face of the cliff.
41
“Father!” Laura cried. The shotgun dropped from her hands, clattering forgotten onto the stones, and she turned and began scrambling down the path along the edge of the cliff. Even in the dim light, Logan could see that she was dashing along the trail at an almost suicidal pace, taking desperate chances as she leapt over rocks and fissures in an attempt to get to the bottom of the waterfall as quickly as possible. He rose to his feet and — doing his best to ignore the sharp pain in his shoulder — followed. By the time he reached her, she was at the edge of a little pool at the base of the cliff, water cascading all around, cradling the battered body of her father in her arms. She bent her head over him, weeping more loudly now.
With the absence of moonlight, Chase Feverbridge had reverted to his normal self. Gone was the thick hair from his limbs; gone were the hoary, oversized nails. The battered form was once again the bemused, charismatic scientist he had first met in the secret lab, mere weeks before.
Looking on, he understood what had just happened. Feverbridge had seen the unmistakable pain in his daughter’s eyes. He must have realized he was a lost soul. What he was doing was unpardonable — but it was something he could not stop, a murderous obsession that was only growing worse. Whether his daughter would have managed to shoot him, nobody could now say — but rather than force her to live with doing so, and knowing he could no longer change, he’d saved her from the terrible choice by taking his own life, falling from the top of the cliff — ironically, dying in exactly the way Laura said he had half a year earlier.
Logan pulled out his cell phone, dialed 911 — it took three tries before he managed to keep the call from dropping — and gave them the location, as best he could, of where Albright could be found. Then he knelt beside her. She was rocking her father’s head in her arms now, the weeping reduced to racking sobs.
“How did you know to come here?” he asked her gently.
It took her some time to answer. “I couldn’t think where else to go.”
He waited, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, for the sobbing to stop. There was nothing more to say. Finally, he put a hand on her shoulder. “Come on. I’ll take you back to the camp. Then we’d better call Krenshaw, turn ourselves in before he makes his move on the Blakeneys.”
At this she looked at him for the first time since he’d come up beside her. “Turn ourselves in? You’ve done nothing wrong. If anything, you were the one who came here tonight and showed me the truth. If it wasn’t for you, he’d have killed again. And again, and again. I’m the one — the only one — at fault. I wanted to believe him. I thought I did believe him. But deep down, I guess I always wondered — was he really there, locked in that room of his, on the nights of the full moon? Why was it that our research kept running into blind alleys? I should have asked myself those questions directly. Despite his pleas for privacy, to respect his affliction, I should have looked in on him those nights when the moon was full. I realize now the reason I never did was because I didn’t… didn’t want to know the truth.” She sniffed. “I thought I could cure him. But all I did was prolong his murderous obsession. And now, because of me — directly or indirectly, it doesn’t matter — four more people have died.”
And with this she laid her father’s head gently on a rock, rose, turned, and began walking back in the direction of the fire station. Logan watched her receding form for a minute until it was nothing more than a phantom, gray against black. And then he, too, rose from the gurgling pool and, moving slowly and painfully, began to follow.
EPILOGUE
Two months later, Logan was scheduled to attend a conference of medieval historians in Quebec. At the last minute, he canceled his flight and decided to drive instead — although it was now December, the weather was warm and no snow was expected. As he drove up the Northway — and then, well before the Canadian border, took the exit that led to NY Route 73—he was aware of two distinct and very different memories of this particular trip: the ones he’d taken with his wife years before, and the very different one he had made this past October.
He did not want that latter memory to be the one that remained uppermost in his mind. And so he very purposefully made the drive past Keene, Lake Placid, and Saranac Lake, turning first onto Route 3, and then 3A, reliving events both new and old. Save for the stands of pine, the trees were completely bare now, and even in the densest woods he could see the clear blue sky above. The secondary roads were as bad as ever, and just occasional patches of snow could be seen here and there as he drove on deeper into the forest.
“Don’t worry, Kit,” he murmured. “Two hours, tops, and then we’ll be back on the freeway again.”
As he steered the Elan around the curves, he allowed himself — gingerly — to get a sense of the woods around him. There was no longer a feeling of malice, or a perversion of the proper order of things. The Adirondacks remained imperially indifferent to the little humans who hiked and worked and moved within them, but it now felt like a benign indifference to Logan. Man would come and till the fields and lie beneath, but nature would go on regardless.