They had a child. Their greatest joy. Micah wept the day Petty was born. When she got sick as an infant, he sat up all night beside her crib, rocking her when she cried. And if, as she got older, Petty sensed a distance from her father, well, he was distant with everybody except her mother. He was not cold or unloving with Pet, and he was wildly protective of her—just, he seemed unable to open himself to her completely, as other fathers might. He carried an inarticulate sorrow that a man of few words was incapable of expressing.
Then one morning Micah’s wife, Petty’s mother, didn’t wake up.
Micah rose that morning to find her still sleeping. He got up to make breakfast. He found it strange that she would be asleep, as she was usually up before him. When he came back, she had not woken. He laughed under his breath—he was not a man for laughter, but Ellen could provoke it in him for almost no reason at all—and ate his breakfast alone. Petty woke and dressed and ate and went outside to play. Micah watched her run through the field, the crisp morning light falling through her spread fingers.
He went into the bedroom. Ellen was still sleeping. Her chest rose and fell; her eyeballs zipped around under her lids. There was something profound about her sleep. A seam of worry split Micah’s mind. He gripped her shoulder gently.
“Ellen?” He shook her. “Ellen?”
Her eyes opened then. Relief washed through Micah. But it soon faded. Ellen’s eyes were open, yes, but her chest rose and fell with the rhythm of sleep. Her body was warm and vibrating like a tuning fork that had been struck moments ago.
Their long waking nightmare began that day. Ellen’s eyes would remain open, often for days at a time—but she would not wake up. The doctor tried the standard techniques: loud noises, pinching the flesh between her thumb and forefinger. Nothing. A coma, or something like it. Locked-in syndrome: Micah heard the doctor speak this phrase over the phone. The doctor asked questions: Had they been out of the country recently? Had she been bitten by anything? Suffered a bad fall? Eaten some foreign delicacy for the first time? No, no, no, no, no.
Specialists came next. Sleep-disorder doctors and nerve-disorder doctors and doctors who administered to maladies Micah had never conceived. All useless. Ellen slept with her eyes wide open. She got thinner and thinner. The doctors plugged feeding tubes into her. She developed bedsores; they swelled and burst. Micah dressed them and turned her over often to prevent them from festering. As she rarely blinked, Ellen’s eyes would get as dry and tacky as peeled grapes. Micah had a specialist create moisturized eyeball shields made out of breathable fabric; he would put them over Ellen’s eyes and keep them wet with a special solution squeezed from an eyedropper.
Ellen’s sister and Nate moved to the nearest town. There wasn’t much they could do. They sat by Ellen’s bed and talked to her. They read books out loud; Nate would record himself reading books on cassettes, which Micah would play on the tape player in her room. The doctors said that might work; they said that Ellen might follow a familiar voice up out of the fog.
He slept beside her at night. Sometimes she turned to him, one of the moisture pads slipping off the convex of her eyes. Staring at him in the moonlight bleeding through the curtains—the light’s on, but nobody’s home. Or was somebody home? Was Ellen behind those eyes, trapped inside her own skull, screaming to be let out? She did not make a noise on those nights—except sometimes, in a whisper so hushed he could barely make it out, she would say: “Please, no. Please stop.” Those words iced his heart. What was happening inside her head? What horrors was she living through? He whispered to her: “Please wake up.” But he knew, in a complex chamber of his heart, that she would not—because of him. He had wished this upon her.
My dearest love will never leave me.
Had that been it? His wish? It must have been something like that, if not those words exactly—it hadn’t been anything expressible in words, anyway, and the creature hadn’t needed him to say it. It had simply reached into his heart and plucked it out.
You’d go to pieces… Never leave me.
And the creature had delivered, hadn’t it? Oh yes, in full. He wanted Ellen to be with him forever, never leaving his side. That had been his cowardly, heartsick wish. And so he’d gotten it. Lock, stock, and barrel.
“I am so sorry,” he whispered into her ear. “I never wanted this.”
And yet he had done it. His wish had put her there in that bed, beyond all remedy.
He thought about it. Going to the black rock. Asking that thing for Ellen’s release. But he had his daughter to consider, and he sensed it didn’t work that way. He had to wait. Suffer, as Ebenezer and Minerva were surely suffering. That was part of it. Perhaps the most crucial part. The suffering.
So they lived there—a man and his daughter and the woman they both loved—on the edge of some greater catastrophe that never quite arrived. But Micah understood that someday it would come to drag him back into the fray.
And then, one lonely night when the stars shone especially bright, the black thing’s henchman had come and taken his daughter.
Which is when it began all over again—because such things never truly ended, did they? The wheel went around and around. You rode along and it changed you. You didn’t change the wheel. It kept turning and turning until it was time to take that final spin.
3
FIRE IS THE GREAT PURIFIER.
The woods came back. The flames died down and the ashes nourished new life. It was not long before green shoots were pushing through a crackling layer of slag.
The shoots became trees and shrubs; the forest thrived as it had before. The woods climbed the hillsides and filled out the valleys in crisp chlorophyll green. Long alleys of undergrowth cast sprawling shadows so dense that it was chilly in their shade on even the warmest summer days. Wildflowers scattered knolls between sweeping boughs of oak and cottonwood; foxgloves and bracken shone redly in the broad sunshine. Deep thickets and spongy undergrowth sprang up; bramble and buckthorn and tangled knots of poison oak lay over the ground in heavy abundance, dank and choking.
The animals returned in time. The woods teemed with the smallest forms of life at first. The industry of ants, the scuttling of beetles. Then the chirp of birds and the scamper of rodents. Soon the animals that made a meal of those lower orders of life returned, too—the foxes and opossums and lynxes and wolves. Everything grew and spread and became whole again. The shadows stretched, and in them, life went on as it always had.
The black rock was there, too. It had been there forever.
No living creature approached its sheer cliffs. The animals and even the insects steered clear—something warned them off. Nothing grew upon the rock, or even near it. In the deepest hour of night, a sound could sometimes be heard emanating from it. A prolonged sigh. Was it of contentment, or of unspeakable pain? Impossible to tell.
The black rock stood within itself, brooding and implacable.
It waited as it always had. For that wheel to come round again.
PART EIGHT
THE RETURN