There was that. Yes. People who trekked up into the hollows to nose around where they didn’t belong, and never came out again. Or one group taking such a dislike to another they decided they could no longer abide living side by side. The population had always been sparse out here, and he supposed there was a time when not a lot could come of rumor and a mass of unmarked graves.
Especially if the dead were . . . different.
And if there was a sole survivor, killers left them for all manner of reasons, by accident or as reminders or to soothe their consciences that what they’d done wasn’t actually genocide.
God damn. Will Senior had sensed it simply from listening once in the dark. It’s like some kind of lamentation. There’s sorrow in it. Sorrow and rage.
Young Will trudged across the cellar and slumped onto the steps, heedless of the dust, then shot a baleful look at the statue. “A lifespan like that? The way she looks in the photo? This thing did that to them?”
Clarence couldn’t bring himself to agree. Not out loud. Not to Will. Impressionable Young Will. “Do you hear yourself, what that sounds like?”
“Well, I’ve sure as shit spent my life hearing what she sounded like.” He turned his gaze on Clarence, no less spiteful. “That thing’s not natural, not one bit. There’s something coming through it. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it. I can see it in your face. You’re the worst liar I ever met.”
Clarence approached the stairs while Paulette watched as if she suddenly feared both of them blocking the only way out. Nobody could fight like brothers.
“Come on. Let’s go,” Clarence said, as gently as he could. “We’re not going to learn anything more here. We’ve already learned more than we ever wanted to.”
Will fixed him with a look that nailed his feet to the floor. “He’s not even dead. You realize that, don’t you? I’ll bet you anything he’s not. He could still be alive even without that thing’s influence. He’d be, what, around ninety? It’s no big deal to hit that anymore. All this time we’ve taken it for granted he would’ve come home if he could, but what if family didn’t mean as much to him as everyone assumed it did. We never even met him, you and I. But think about it. Doesn’t it sound like home just turned into a place for him to plan the next trip? And songcatching, maybe that was only the surface of what he was really out looking for.”
Clarence’s first impulse was to argue, until he realized he had nothing to wield. He’d bought it all on faith. He’d never considered this alternative. Not seriously. He’d swallowed the easier story to accept and let it dictate his life.
Maybe it was Willard Chambers all along who had made sure his car was never found, and that his Nagra and his camera were. If he didn’t need them anymore, maybe they’d prove more useful as circumstantial evidence of death.
“He loved Mom,” Clarence whispered. “He loved Grandma. He loved Aunt Jane and Uncle Terry. He did.”
“And then he found something that meant more.”
Will stood up, finally, as around them, the storm cellar grew thick with the weight of eons.
“I was named for a deserter. Mom hung that on me.” His face curled with the disgust of betrayal and a life of self-told lies. “He may have done his duty in war, but back home? He was a deserter.” Will nodded, confirming it to himself. “But there’s a side of me that can’t totally blame him for it.”
When he looked at the statue again, his anger was all but dissipated.
“It must’ve been worth it.”
He shouldered past, and when Clarence hooked a hand around his arm, Will whirled. Next thing Clarence knew, he was sprawling across the hard-packed earth with a dull, throbbing ache in his cheek, as somewhere out in the blur, Paulette gave a startled cry of warning that plunged into sorrow.
When his vision cleared, he saw Will gripping the statue with splayed hands, tense as a cable but motionless, until his head tipped slowly, ecstatically, back and he made a reedy sound that seemed to come from a much older man. His bladder let go in a spreading dark stain.
Though sunk in the earth and surrounded by walls, the statue had brought its own climate. Clarence felt it deeper than skin, a gust of particles and waves, the solar wind from a black sun. Outside was August, but down here was a numbing gust of absolute zero, the point where every molecule froze, everything but thought, and the invitation beckoned: Come . . . join with it . . . step outside the boundaries of time. It only burns for a little while.
His instinct, still, was to intercede, the way he’d always done. It was what big brothers did, pulling their little brothers out of traffic when they stepped off the curb, and out of the deep water when they fell in over their head. Maybe he could do it without harm, and Will was not yet a conduit for whatever was coming through that timeless chunk of shrapnel from the cataclysm that birthed the worst among gods.
And maybe he couldn’t. But it had always been expected of him to try.
Then Paulette was at his side, clutching his wrist, levering his arm down again. He’d never have dreamed he could let her do it so easily. He knew she was going to join Will before she seemed to realize it herself. As their eyes met, and from a place beyond words she urged him to let his brother go, he saw the conflict play itself out, then the resolution: that she preferred the vast unknown to a life she didn’t want to go back to, as long as she didn’t have to do it alone.
For all he knew, Will had even been counting on it.
They stayed down in the cellar a long time, long after Clarence had made it up the steps. He sat with his back to the hole some twenty paces away and shivered in the August sun. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to listen. Yet he didn’t want to drive away without knowing what, exactly, he would be driving away from. If there was a chance, the slightest chance, he still had a brother he recognized.
And when their shadows fell across him, long and distorted, he had time to wonder if he hadn’t made the last mistake of his life.
It didn’t seem particularly lucky that there would be time for many more.
“I don’t think I’ll be going home for a while,” Will said. “You probably guessed that already.”
He knew their names. Will. Paulette. He knew their faces. He knew their clothes and the sound of their voices and the smell of them after a long, hot day. He just didn’t know who they were. To see them now was like looking with one eye off-center. The halves of the image didn’t quite line up.
“What am I supposed to tell Mom?” he asked.
“You can tell her whatever it takes. I haven’t lived at home home for years. How different will it be?”
“Except for the part where you call every day.”
“I could still check in from time to time.” He looked down at the dirt with a murky little smile, as if it had whispered a joke. “It won’t matter that long, anyway.”
This from a son who could barely be coaxed into admitting his mother had two years, at best, to live.
Then Will held out the camera, the well-traveled Leica that had led them here, full circle after half a century. Its last shot from earlier, around front — Clarence didn’t know if he could ever bring himself to get it developed. Until Will took him by surprise, so he would have no choice.
“Go on, shoot one more. Both of us,” he said. “Show Mom I’m okay. Show her that we’re happy.”
Clarence steadied himself and shot it, the camera alien in his hand, like someone else’s heart. It had passed to him, but it wasn’t his. It would never be his. Behind them, these imposters in familiar skins, the hovel sat as it always had, slumping into itself year by year, as patient as decay, and the land stretched empty for miles.