Now she was beautiful once again, but her eyes were distant, focused elsewhere, as though my presence here had called her from more pleasant business and she wished to return to it as quickly as possible.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘For what?’
‘For leaving you. For not being there when he came for you.’
‘You would have died with us.’
‘I might have stopped him.’
‘No. You weren’t as strong then, and he had so much rage. So much rage …’
Her nails dug into my shoulder, and I was transported with her, back to our home, and I watched with her as the Traveling Man had his way with her and our daughter. As he worked, another version of my wife stood behind him, her face a blur of blood as her head and body shook. This was the one whom I had seen before. This was the wife who walked through my world.
‘Who is she?’ I asked. ‘What is she?’
‘She is what remains. She is my anger. She is all of my hatred and my sorrow, my hurt and my pain. She is the thing that haunts you.’
Her hand stroked my cheek. Her touch burned.
‘I had a lot of anger,’ she said.
‘So I see. And when I die?’
‘Then she dies too.’
The remains of our daughter were stretched across her mother’s lap. Jennifer was already dead when he began cutting. It was, I supposed, a mercy.
‘And Jennifer?’
I felt her hesitate.
‘She is different.’
‘How?’
‘She moves between worlds. She holds the other in check. She would not desert you, even in death.’
‘She whispers to me.’
‘Yes.’
‘She writes upon the dust of window panes.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Close.’
I looked, but I could not find her.
‘I saw her here, in this house, once before.’
I had been stalked through these rooms years after their lives were ended, hunted by a pair of lovers. But my daughter had been waiting for them – my daughter and the creature of rage she tried to control, but which on that occasion she was content to unleash.
‘I’d like to see her.’
‘She’ll come, when she’s ready.’
I watched the Traveling Man continue his cutting. There was no pain.
Not for me.
We were back at the lake. The cracks and fissures were repaired. The fragile world was undisturbed. I stood by the shore. The water did not lap. There were no waves.
‘What should I do?’ I asked.
‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.
‘I think I want to die.’
‘Then die.’
I could not see my reflection, but I could see Susan’s. In this world, it was she who had substance, and I who had none.
‘What will happen?’
‘The world will go on. Did you think that it revolved around you?’
‘I didn’t realize that the afterlife had so much sarcasm in it.’
‘I haven’t had cause to use it in a while. You haven’t been around.’
‘I loved you, you know.’
‘I know. I loved you too.’
She stumbled over the words, unfamiliar in her mouth, but I sensed that speaking them aloud caused something deep inside her to thaw. It was as though my proximity reminded her of what it had once been like to be human.
‘If you stay here,’ she said, ‘events will play out without you. The world will be different. You will not be there for those whom you might have protected. Others may take your place, but who can say?’
‘And if I go back?’
‘Pain. Loss. Life. Another death.’
‘To what end?’
‘Are you asking me your purpose?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘You know what they seek. The One Who Waits Behind the Glass. The God of Wasps. The Buried God.’
‘Am I supposed to stop them?’
‘I doubt that you can.’
‘So why should I go back?’
‘There is no “should”. If you go back, you do so because you choose it, and you will protect those who might not otherwise be protected.’
She moved closer to me. I felt the warmth of her breath against my face. It bore a trace of incense.
‘You wonder why they come to you, why they’re drawn to you, these fallen ones.’ She whispered the words, as though fearful of being overheard. ‘When you spend time close to a fire, you smell of smoke. These things seek not only their Buried God. They are looking for a fire that they wish to extinguish, but they cannot find it. You have been near it. You have been in its presence. You carry its smoke upon you, and so they come for you.’
She stepped away from me. Her reflection receded, then disappeared. I was alone. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, my daughter was beside me. She put her hand in mine.
‘You’re cold,’ said Jennifer.
‘Yes.’ My voice broke on the word.
‘Would you like to go for a walk, Daddy?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like that very much.’
51
The Battery Park Book Exchange stood in the center of Asheville, North Carolina. It sold rare and used books, to which Louis had no objection, and wine and champagne, to which, if possible, he had even fewer objections.
The woman named Zilla Daund was taking part in a book club in the store. She and four other women were discussing Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra over sparkling wine and the kind of single-mouthful treats that passed for food where thin, attractive women were concerned. Louis sat with a glass of pinot noir by his right hand, and a copy of Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg on his lap. He had picked up the Berg book because Perkins had edited Thomas Wolfe, probably Asheville’s most famous son, and Louis, who couldn’t stand Wolfe’s writings, was trying to understand why Perkins had bothered. As far as he could tell from reading the relevant sections in Berg’s biography, the only reason that Wolfe’s debut Look Homeward, Angel was even marginally tolerable was because Perkins had forced Wolfe to remove over 60,000 words from it. At Louis’s rough estimate, that still left Look Homeward, Angel – which, in the store’s Scribner edition, came to about 500 pages – at least 499 pages too long.
Zilla Daund looked like the kind of woman who took reading books very seriously without actually understanding how the act could be enjoyable as well. Her copy of Cleopatra was marked with narrow Post-it notes of different colors, and Louis felt certain that the interior was marked with words such as ‘Interesting!’, ‘Agree strongly!’ and ‘VIP!’, like a high schooler in freshman year working her way through The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. She was slim and blond, with the build of a long-distance runner. She might even have been considered good-looking had she not prematurely aged herself through a probable combination of excessive exposure to the elements and a steely determination that had left her brow permanently furrowed and her jaw set in a thin rictus, like a serpent about to strike.
Louis had been watching Daund for the past thirty-six hours, but this was as close as he had yet come to her. It was his way: begin at a distance, then slowly move in. So far, from his brief exposure to her routine, she seemed like an ordinary suburban housewife living a moderately comfortable existence. She’d gone to her local gym that morning, training for an hour before returning home to shower and change, then leaving shortly after lunch to come to her book club. The day before she’d eaten a late breakfast with some friends, shopped at the Asheville Mall, browsed the aisles at Mr K’s Used Books at River Ridge and had dinner at home with her husband and their younger son – their older son, a sophomore at George Washington University, being currently absent. The younger son was just sixteen, but he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner anytime soon. At that precise moment, he was in the back of a van being driven deep into the Pisgah National Forest by two men whose faces he had not even glimpsed before he was snatched. He was probably terrified, but the boy’s terror didn’t concern Louis. He wanted something to use against the Daunds if they proved unwilling to talk.