admittedly: find and retrieve the dead—or half-dead—from darkest limbo.
And then there is the matter of not having any idea how to begin.
I stand under the shower fully clothed. Feel the bookish references and snippets of poetry slide off me like oil. Soon there is nothing left.
Except for the feeling I’m not alone.
My eyes open against the spray of hot water. Steam fills not only the glass-walled shower stall but the whole bathroom, so that the room is alive with billowing fog.
Nothing there. But I stare into it just the same.
And watch Tess come out.
Shaking with hunger, with fear. Her skin bruised by cold. Reaching out to me but stopped by the glass. Her palms as darkly lined as ancient maps.
“ Tess! ”
She opens her mouth to speak just as a pair of arms slips around her and pulls her back into the fog.
Arms too long, too grotesquely muscled to be a man’s. Blackened by hair thick as fur. Their claws soil-stained as a beast’s.
9
O NCE I’ VE CHANGED INTO CLEAN CLOTHES AND AT LEAST PARTLY cleared my head, I get the digital camera the physician gave me in Venice and download the footage I recorded of the man in the chair onto my laptop. The reason I do this occurs to me only after I’m done.
This is important.
I don’t know why yet. But it was the one thing the physician insisted on. For you. So whoever was giving him his instructions wanted me to have it. To train the lens on the man in the chair and record what he said, what he did. Why else give me the camera at all?
So what did the man do and say?
I watch the recording on my laptop’s screen. Its reality pulses out at me in the way that even the most vivid news clip or documentary has never done before. A physical blow to my chest that forces me back on the sofa. And it’s not just the disturbing sounds and images that do it. There is something about the effect the recording has that is distinct from its content. How to put it? An aura of the pain from which it originates. A subliminal glimpse of chaos. A Black Crown.
There are the voices, the words, the tortured writhings of the body. But the only thing I write down in my notebook is the list of cities and numbers the voice said would be of relevance on April 27th. The day after tomorrow.
New York 1259537
Tokyo 996314
Toronto 1389257
Frankfurt 540553
London 590643
The presence offered this as a piece of what is to come. A snapshot of the imperceptible future that, if correct, would prove its skills, its power. Its reality.
As the recording continues, I close my eyes when the man’s face changes into my father’s. It doesn’t prevent me from hearing the old man’s voice.
It should have been you.
As awful as it is to interpret his words, I can’t help feeling he means something even worse than his wishing I’d drowned instead of my brother.
Rewind. Again. Eyes open this time.
I watch his image on the screen and know, inarguably, that it is my father speaking to me from wherever he went after we buried him. And he is revealing a secret that I can’t fully understand yet. An invitation to seek him out, nearly as irresistible as Tess’s.
When the recording is finished replaying, I close the laptop and return it to its leather travel bag. Then I wrap the camera in an old jewelry bag of Diane’s and put them both inside a briefcase. I think of simply placing it on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, but something tells me it requires more care than that. There is no hiding place in the apartment good enough.
I start out with the briefcase, with the absurd idea of going to a pawnshop and getting a pair of handcuffs so that I might attach the handle to my wrist. As I walk, however, I come up with somebetter ideas. What I need to do is stash it where even I won’t be able to access it until after the 27th, when the prediction it contains can be proven true or false without any question of my tampering with it.
Do they have safe deposit boxes big enough for a briefcase?
And then there is the matter of not having any idea how to begin.
I stand under the shower fully clothed. Feel the bookish references and snippets of poetry slide off me like oil. Soon there is nothing left.
Except for the feeling I’m not alone.
My eyes open against the spray of hot water. Steam fills not only the glass-walled shower stall but the whole bathroom, so that the room is alive with billowing fog.
Nothing there. But I stare into it just the same.
And watch Tess come out.
Shaking with hunger, with fear. Her skin bruised by cold. Reaching out to me but stopped by the glass. Her palms as darkly lined as ancient maps.
“ Tess! ”
She opens her mouth to speak just as a pair of arms slips around her and pulls her back into the fog.
Arms too long, too grotesquely muscled to be a man’s. Blackened by hair thick as fur. Their claws soil-stained as a beast’s.
9
O NCE I’ VE CHANGED INTO CLEAN CLOTHES AND AT LEAST PARTLY cleared my head, I get the digital camera the physician gave me in Venice and download the footage I recorded of the man in the chair onto my laptop. The reason I do this occurs to me only after I’m done.
This is important.
I don’t know why yet. But it was the one thing the physician insisted on. For you. So whoever was giving him his instructions wanted me to have it. To train the lens on the man in the chair and record what he said, what he did. Why else give me the camera at all?
So what did the man do and say?
I watch the recording on my laptop’s screen. Its reality pulses out at me in the way that even the most vivid news clip or documentary has never done before. A physical blow to my chest that forces me back on the sofa. And it’s not just the disturbing sounds and images that do it. There is something about the effect the recording has that is distinct from its content. How to put it? An aura of the pain from which it originates. A subliminal glimpse of chaos. A Black Crown.
There are the voices, the words, the tortured writhings of the body. But the only thing I write down in my notebook is the list of cities and numbers the voice said would be of relevance on April 27th. The day after tomorrow.
New York 1259537
Tokyo 996314
Toronto 1389257
Frankfurt 540553
London 590643
The presence offered this as a piece of what is to come. A snapshot of the imperceptible future that, if correct, would prove its skills, its power. Its reality.
As the recording continues, I close my eyes when the man’s face changes into my father’s. It doesn’t prevent me from hearing the old man’s voice.
It should have been you.
As awful as it is to interpret his words, I can’t help feeling he means something even worse than his wishing I’d drowned instead of my brother.
Rewind. Again. Eyes open this time.
I watch his image on the screen and know, inarguably, that it is my father speaking to me from wherever he went after we buried him. And he is revealing a secret that I can’t fully understand yet. An invitation to seek him out, nearly as irresistible as Tess’s.
When the recording is finished replaying, I close the laptop and return it to its leather travel bag. Then I wrap the camera in an old jewelry bag of Diane’s and put them both inside a briefcase. I think of simply placing it on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, but something tells me it requires more care than that. There is no hiding place in the apartment good enough.
I start out with the briefcase, with the absurd idea of going to a pawnshop and getting a pair of handcuffs so that I might attach the handle to my wrist. As I walk, however, I come up with somebetter ideas. What I need to do is stash it where even I won’t be able to access it until after the 27th, when the prediction it contains can be proven true or false without any question of my tampering with it.
Do they have safe deposit boxes big enough for a briefcase?
Similar Books
