“Where’s Jackman?” asked Angel.
“Northwest. Next stop Canada.”
“And what’s in Jackman?”
“We are, as of tomorrow, or the next day. Jackman’s the closest piece of civilization to Gilead, and Gilead, or somewhere near enough to it, was where Andy Kellog was abused, and where Clay’s car was found. Kellog wasn’t abused outdoors either, which means that someone had access to a property in the area. Either Merrick was up there already, and he didn’t have any luck, so he was forced to keep yanking Rebecca Clay’s chain back down in Portland, or he hasn’t made the connection yet. If he hasn’t, then he soon will, but we can still be one step ahead of him.”
The bulk of the Black Point Inn loomed up before us, lights twinkling in the windows. They asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner, but I wasn’t hungry. What I had seen in the cellar of that house had deprived me of my appetite. I watched them ascend the steps into the main lobby and vanish into the bar, then reversed the car and headed for home.
According to a note from Bob, Walter was over with the Johnsons. I decided to leave him there. They liked to go to bed early, even if Shirley, Bob’s wife, never slept straight through due to the pain of her arthritis, and could often be seen reading at her window, a little night-light attached to her book so that she wouldn’t wake her husband, or simply watching the darkness slowly turn into daylight. Still, I didn’t want to risk waking them just so I could have the dubious pleasure of giving my dog a bonus walk on a winter’s night. Instead, I locked the doors and put on some music: part of a Bach collection that Rachel had bought me in an effort to broaden my musical parameters. I made a pot of coffee and sat at my living room window, staring out at the woods and the waters, conscious of the movement of every tree, the swaying of every branch, the shifting of every shadow, and wondered at the ways of the honeycomb world that could have led my path and the path of the Collector to cross again. The mathematical precision of the music contrasted with the uneasy quiet of my home, and as I sat in the darkness I realized that the Collector frightened me. He was a hunter, yet there was something almost bestial about his focus and his ruthlessness. I had thought of him as a man unconcerned with morality, but that was not true: instead, it was more correct to say that he was motivated by some strange morality of his own, but it was rendered debased and unsavory by the assemblage of souvenirs that he had accumulated. I wondered if he liked to touch them in the darkness, remembering the lives that they represented, the existences ended. There was a sensuousness to their appeal for him, I thought, a manifestation of an urge that was almost sexual in nature. He took pleasure in what he did, and yet simply to call him a killer was incorrect. He was more complex than that. These people had done something to bring him upon them. If they were like John Grady, then they had committed some sin that was intolerable.
But intolerable to whom? To the Collector, yes, but I sensed that he believed himself to be merely an agent of another power. He might have been deluded in that belief, but nevertheless it was what gave him his authority and his strength, perceived or otherwise.
It was clear that Eldritch was a key, for it was Eldritch who sourced properties for him, bases from which he could move out into the world and do the work for which he believed he had been appointed. The property at Welchville had been acquired long before the possibility of Merrick ’s release became apparent. True, in the interim he had intervened in the Grady case and retrieved the mirror that now sat in the cellar closet, reflecting a distorted view of the world that might well have matched the Collector’s own, and the other items in his trove suggested that he had been busy elsewhere, too, yet none of this explained why the Collector made me so uneasy, or why he caused me to fear for my own safety.
Eventually, I left my chair and went to bed, and it was only when sleep threatened to take me that I understood my fear of the Collector. He was always looking, always searching. How he came by his awareness of the sins of others I did not know, but my fear was that I might be judged as others had been judged. I would be found wanting, and he would visit my punishment upon me.
That night, I dreamed the old dream. I was standing by a lake, and its waters were burning, but otherwise the landscape was flat and empty, the earth hard and blackened. A man stood before me, corpulent and grinning, his neck swollen by a great purple goiter, but his skin otherwise pale, as though no blood flowed through the veins beneath, for what need have the dead of blood?
Yet this foul thing was not quite dead, for he had never truly been alive, and when he spoke, the voice I heard did not match the movements of his lips, the words spilling forth in a torrent of old languages long lost from the knowledge of men.
Other figures stood behind him, and I knew their names. I knew them all.
The words poured out of him in those harsh tongues, and somehow I understood them. I looked behind me, and saw myself reflected in the burning waters of the lake, for I was one with them, and they called me “Brother.”
In a quiet township some miles away, a figure ascended a gravel drive, approaching the modest house from the road beyond even though there had been no sound of a car’s engine to signal his arrival. His hair was greasy and slicked back from his head. He wore a threadbare dark overcoat and dark trousers, and in one hand there glowed the ember of a burning cigarette.
When he was steps from his house he paused. He knelt and ran his fingers across the gravel, tracing some half-seen indentation, then rose and followed the wall of the house to the garden at the rear, the fingers of his left hand gently brushing the woodwork, the cigarette now discarded among the weeds. He reached the back door and examined the lock, then took a set of keys from his pocket and used one of them to open it.
He moved through the house, his fingers always searching, touching, exploring, his head slightly raised as he sniffed the air. He opened the empty refrigerator, fanned the pages of the old Bible, stared silently at the marks in the dust of what was once a dining room, until he came at last to the cellar door. This too he unlocked, descending into the last place, his place, yet giving no sign of anger at the trespass that had occurred. He brushed his fingertips against the handle of the broom, stopping when he found the point at which strange hands had gripped it. Again he leaned down, smelling the traces of sweat, picking out the man’s scent so that he might know it again. It was unfamiliar to him, as was the second that he had encountered at the cellar door.
One of them had waited there. One waited, while two descended.
But one of those who had descended…
At last, he moved toward the great closet in the corner. He turned the key in the lock and opened the doors. His eyes took in his collection, ensuring that nothing was missing, that no item had been displaced. The collection was safe. He would have to move it now, of course, but it would not be the first time that part of his trove had been uncovered in such a way. It was a minor inconvenience and nothing more.
The face of the ruined mirror found him, and he stared at his partial reflection for a moment, only his hair and the edges of his temples visible in what remained of the glass, his own features replaced by bare wood and fused glass. His fingers lingered on the key, caressing it, feeling the vibrations that coursed through it from deep, deep below. He drew in a final breath, as at last he recognized the third scent.
And the Collector smiled.
Chapter XXII
I awoke. It was dark and the house was silent, but it was not an empty darkness, and it was not an easy silence. Something had touched my right hand. I tried to move it, but my wrist shifted only an inch or two before it was brought up short.