“Okay. You’re obviously drunk,” Connie said, slapping the cushy arm of her chair. “I mean, what is the point of all of this? If you actually do know who killed Shirley, could you please just slur it to us already? Or, better yet, slur it to the police… No, scratch that; tell me and then tell the police. But spit it out!”
I stuck my tongue between my teeth and gave her my most lethal glare.
“It was Surt who did these things!” my father suddenly yelled.
“Well,” I said, trying again to straighten up, “you’re all aware of my father’s feelings on the subject.”
No one responded, though I felt all of their eyes upon me. Fourteen, counting Garm.
“All right. Fine,” I said. “It was Surt. He helped Gerd with her plan, he was in Denmark with Shirley, and he killed Shirley when she confronted him about what he’d done to her there. It was Surt all along.” I stumbled a bit then, in a momentary swoon, and in my grab at the mantel for support, I accidentally knocked off Hubert’s plaster bust of Orson Welles. It shattered and scattered across the floor. I’m afraid this may have looked like a dramatic gesture.
“Well, what a shocker,” Connie replied in what she must have imagined was a dry tone.
I shook my head, then, perhaps a tad too rapidly.
“No… You don’t understand. That’s not the end. I know who Surt really is,” I tried to tell her.
At least that’s what went through my head.
But that was the point at which I fell to the floor.
A wave of pleasure whelmed over me.
“God, I’m calling an ambulance,” I heard Connie say.
My whole body felt dead—like an arm that had been slept on—but my mind was active, looking out of it, at all of these legs and feet moving toward me, at Garm licking me, at broken pieces of Orson Welles strewn all around me… But I didn’t care about any of it; I was euphoric.
Wible and Pacheco grabbed me by the armpits and helped me to my feet, and—after a brief vision of the color red—sensation prickled back into my limbs.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been drugged and stuff.”
“It is okay,” someone answered. “You should sit down.”
So they set me down, then, in the big plush chair that Connie had been sitting in.
“An ambulance is on its way,” she announced, coming into the room through the hall door. I didn’t realize she’d been gone.
“No. I do not want this,” I said. “I’m fine. I just need some fresh air.”
Nathan peeled the wet glove from my left hand, and I looked. Just plopped there bloody on the armrest, the hand didn’t resemble anything. Though I half-expected it to start flopping around.
“I need to go outside,” I said.
“I think you should probably just sit here until the ambulance arrives,” Nathan told me.
“No.” I was trying to speak clearly. “I will go to the hospital. I will get into an ambulance and go there. But I really don’t want to wait in here before I do so.”
“Regardless of what you want,” Connie said, “I think that waiting in here would be the wisest thing for you to do.”
“No,” I told her. “You think wrong. It would be wiser for me to wait outside. I should cool my body down. Make my blood flow less freely.”
None of them were medically expert enough to argue with the logic of this, so after only a moment’s hesitation Wible and Pacheco helped me stand again, and I walked of my own power out to the porch.
Everyone followed me out, then. Even my dad, who was strangely silent. And the night was beautiful—black and blue and cold. But I was still feeling a bit giddy.
I was feeling ecstatic, actually—out of myself, and I wanted to finish telling them everything, finish bringing it all out into the open; I had to turn around and grab hold of somebody. Which I did—tightly by the shoulders—and then I whispered to him the final secret.[50] That it was Magnus. That the author of all my mother’s mysteries had been the villain behind many of them. That he’d been the one who murdered Shirley. That he was the true face behind the many masks of Surt and that he always had been.[51]
And as I explained it, I suddenly realized that it didn’t matter to me that he had gotten away. He’d said he’d done all of this for me; to give me “meaning.” By playing the detective to his villain, I supposed. But I would not be defined in relation to him. I wanted to whisper that last part to somebody, too. But then I immediately felt as if I were going to be sick, and I stumbled off of the porch, into the snowy yard.
Valison, doubtless, felt an affinity with his anonymous villain to the extent that any writer identifies with his most strongly rendered characters—it would be pointless to deny this—but to infer the two men’s mutual identity from this affinity and then to present it as fact is insulting not only to the memory of Valison but to the intelligence of the Reader. One may as well assert that Milton was the Devil or that Conan Doyle was Moriarty. So it is my sincere hope that the intelligent Reader will therefore take this assertion as nothing more than the misguided fiction that it is. He would have told me. One of him. It simply cannot be true. It cannot. It can’t.
And I was dizzy.
“I do not want this,” I said, hunched over and holding my head in my bloody hands.
“You don’t want what?” Connie asked, coming quickly up beside me and wrapping her arm around my back.
I stood upright and took a deep breath, considering all the possible answers to that question. “I don’t know,” I mumbled.
But it struck me as somehow profound. This series of negations. Things that I did not want… To go back to teaching next semester and deal with people like Boris Baxter.[52] To be the heroine of mystery novels as my mother was. To experience the intensity of life only through contrast… I did not want Prescott, Hubert, or Nathan.[53] On a more immediate level, I did not particularly want to go to the hospital; I didn’t want to go the night without Garm by my side.
Standing there with Connie, waiting for the ambulance that would not restore my finger, I felt the air vivid and crisp around me. The sky was clear and starry with a bright full moon; the snow was all fallen, and it was dry beneath my feet.
The low angle of the porch light behind me threw my shadow out across it, reproducing my shape in such epic length and detail that I could almost make out my individual features. As I squinted at it, there was nothing missing at all. I broke away from Connie then and jogged out into it—I stooped to stick my bare hand into it—and the cold of it stole my breath and clarified my thoughts with adrenaline. The snow and shadow.
And even when the ambulance rounded the corner, and I straightened back up and raised my frozen hand to signal them—“It’s me; here I am”—my shadow was there, too, waving back at me like someone I knew.
My shadow was waving at me furiously, as if it were someone whom I hadn’t seen in a very long time.
AFTERWORD
Magnus Valison left behind a forest’s-worth of papers, and in his will he appointed me—John Treeburg—with the bewildering task of sorting through it all. And yet it wasn’t until late 2004—over three years after his death—that these papers were finally planted upon my desk. This unfortunate delay was mostly due to a mix-up involving a spurious copy of the Master’s will that listed Jon Ymirson as literary executor rather than myself. Yet once I proved in court that this document was a forgery, despite “Our Heroine’s” feeble attempts to discredit me, I immediately retrieved the precious papers from Ymirson’s guilty hands and began to dig my way through them.
50
Who? Whom? To whom did she whisper this? And what did he do with this information (surely a lie though it was)? Furthermore, was this mindless slander on her part, or was it carefully calculated toward a more terrible effect? After all, though Our Heroine claims throughout the novel to be entirely unmotivated by such petty concerns as desire for revenge, surely she was aware that others in the company were not so civilized; Valison was strangled shortly after the events of this novel, and it is my belief that Our Heroine indirectly killed him with this whisper, planting the idea in the mind of the true murderer. She will not deceive me as she did once before.
51
The suggestion, here—that Magnus Valison was the true identity of the arch-criminal, Surt—must, finally, exterminate any possible belief in the validity of this text. Anyone who ever met the man in the final years of his life can attest to the fact that he had neither the disposition nor the physical ability to perform any of the deeds ascribed to Surt in the