Shimmer: A Novel (43 page)

“What should we do with those?” Gideon said, pointing to the two corkscrew horns resting side by side on a muslin cloth on Ambrose’s mahogany desk. “I’d suggest incineration.”

“That they remained in our world after Carnifex’s death and disappearance would seem to indicate that they deserve further study.”

“Knock yourself out,” Gideon said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He glanced sideways through the office doorway. “It’s been two weeks. Has Liana noticed any change in Thalia’s condition?”

“None, I’m afraid,” Ambrose said, rubbing his jaw as he continued to examine the horns. “No worse than before Fallon’s healing, but no better.”

“Could Fallon try again?” Gideon asked. “Maybe it will—I don’t know—stick the second time.”

“Perhaps,” Ambrose said. “Considering the circumstances of her father’s recent passing, I’ve waited to ask her. My hope is that, given time, she will approach us.”

“And Logan?”

“He’ll come around,” Ambrose said. “He performed admirably under pressure, but this… this was the worst incursion he’s ever seen.”

“Goes for all of us,” Gideon said bitterly.

“Quite,” Ambrose said. “Tragedy has a way of haunting you. I doubt any of us will fully recover from this incident. There is that in Logan, as well, but I also sense he doesn’t believe it’s over. Considering the nature of his dousing talent, we would be wise to assume he is again a credible harbinger of doom.”

“I’d certainly feel better if those horns had vanished.”

“In themselves, the horns should pose little threat,” Ambrose said, patting them almost reverently. “But they may provide valuable insight into what is to come.” He cleared his throat and returned his attention to Gideon. “Have you spoken with Chief Grainger lately?”

Gideon shook his head. “No. I think he’s had his fill of Walkers for a good long while. But, I have to admit, he was a real asset out there. ”

“And yet it would be wonderful if we never again required his assistance.” Reserving the riddle of the bones for another day, Ambrose rolled the corkscrew horns up in the broad sheet of muslin. “But there are no guarantees.”

“Oh, Thalia, why won’t you come back to us?” Liana asked her sister. “Why can’t you come back?”

Thalia had returned to her attic studio, wearing her smock once more as she painted a scene from the mall, or at least her interpretation of it. Oil on canvas. Above the fallen, crumbling Carnifex, a shimmering oblong in the air, and a woman’s face emerging from that depiction of the rift. Liana’s face. Thalia was obsessing over the details of the face. And the light around the face shone like a halo.

The others had told her about Thalia’s mind resurfacing. Miraculously, she’d come back long enough to help defeat Carnifex and to aid in Liana’s return. But the moment she knew Liana was safely home, Thalia had slipped back into her personal darkness, her mind once again a frightened jumble of fear. Liana thought bitterly,
A miracle with an expiration date.

“I’m here, Thalia,” Liana said, standing beside her. She reached out and touched Thalia’s free hand and felt it twitch in her light grasp. “I miss you. And I wasn’t here for you when you came back.” She sighed in frustration and regret. “Now you’re so far away again. Wish I knew what to do. Won’t you come back again? For me?”

The camel hair paint brush slipped from Thalia’s hand and plopped to the bare wooden floor. A solitary tear coursed down Thalia’s cheek, but her gaze remained distant and unfocused.

“I know, honey,” Liana said and hugged her sister fiercely. “I’m sorry.” She patted her back. “I know you need me. And I’m here for you now. Never forget that.”

Hal Conrad switched off the engine of the silver rental Taurus. In his mid-forties, Hal was trim but watching his weight as his metabolism slowed. He lived on the west coast where everyone he met seemed health conscious and youth obsessed to a fault. He had a light youthful spray of freckles across the bridge of his sharp nose, but his sandy hair exhibited an advanced case of male pattern baldness that seemed to add a few years to his age. Nevertheless, his return to the east coast was temporary. Long enough to inventory the contents of the house, to decide what they would keep and what they would discard. Once that was done, they would sell the house and never come back again. He’d promised her.

Taking a deep breath, Hal turned to his daughter and said, “You don’t have to do this. You can wait in the car.”

Chelsea Conrad shook her head, raised a trembling hand to her face, and brushed a strand of dirty-blond hair from her brown eyes. Those eyes rarely shifted or focused on what was in front of her. They seemed turned inward, obsessed with images they could never forget, atrocities that had scarred her retinas as well as her mind. “You won’t know,” she said plaintively. “What I want to keep.
I
won’t know…until I see for myself.”

“All right, Chelsea, but if you need to leave, at any time, for any reason, let me know and I’ll bring you back outside. I won’t leave you alone in there. Okay?”

She nodded.

“Okay, then,” Hal said, slapping the thighs of his Dockers before climbing out of the car. From the backseat he grabbed an empty suitcase and a legal pad. They would take some items, jewelry mostly, with them. The paper was to make a list of what they would place in storage and what they would try to sell or simply leave for the new owners.

Hal tucked the pad under his arm and reached for Chelsea’s hand. He was almost surprised when she took it. She hadn’t held his hand since grade school. One look at her distraught face and he thought maybe he should have come alone after all. “You okay?”

She gulped, nodded slowly.

They walked toward the sprawling Tudor home as if the front yard concealed landmines. A local contractor had replaced the damaged door and doorjamb, but the wood remained unpainted. Hal set the suitcase down and released his daughter’s hand to fish the key out of his right hip pocket. He fitted the key to the Schlage lock, but paused to look over his shoulder. “We’ll make this quick. I pr—”

Numb fingers slipped off the inserted key. His heart raced, thudding hammer blows in his chest. His mouth was dry. He’d only released her hand a moment ago. “Chelsea? Chelsea, what is it? What’s wrong?”

Her eyes had rolled back in their sockets. He saw only the whites. A line of drool slid down from the right corner of her mouth, dangling from her slack chin. She stood with her hands at her sides, utterly silent, swaying slightly as he watched in horror.

“Chelsea, no! What’s wrong?”

He rushed to her side, grabbed her arms. Her head lolled to the side. A weak sigh escaped her lips a moment before her legs buckled. Moaning in dismay, he supported her weight, lowering her gently to the ground, kneeling beside her and speaking rapidly, “Chelsea, wake up, honey. Don’t do this, baby. Chelsea, come back to me. Wake up. Wake up now…”

School was over. Graduation was past. That simpler rite of passage had come and gone with little fanfare. Summer had arrived. The days were becoming longer, but the nights offered little hope of restful sleep. Logan felt as if he was marking time, stuck in an emotional winter and no suitable companion for the current season.

He found her at the cemetery, kneeling before the fresh grave, the rectangular plot of dirt marking her father’s final resting place. Logan placed the bouquet of flowers he’d brought next to hers at the head of the grave before joining her at the foot, sitting quietly together on the grass. Logan respected her silence, waiting to see if she wanted to talk. And although he wanted to take her hand, he waited to see if she wanted to be touched, especially by him, under the present circumstances.

After a long time, she said, “Stupid beer run, you know. The one thing I couldn’t do for him.” She sniffled lightly. “Police thought he was DUI. Because of the beer bottles in the truck.”

Logan shifted uncomfortably. “I didn’t know that.”

“They were wrong,” Fallon said defiantly. “His blood alcohol level was way under the limit. But I doubted him. Thought maybe he had been drinking and driving too fast. That his drinking was almost responsible for a child’s death.” She wiped fresh tears from her eyes. “I was actually
relieved
that he was only drunk enough to kill himself. Isn’t that awful of me? I’m a rotten daughter for thinking that.”

“No,” Logan said. “It’s one thing to pay for our own mistakes. Another when those mistakes affect innocent people. What happened to your father is horrible, but it could have been worse. You recognized that.” The same sentiment applied to the mall tragedy. Though many had died, Logan kept reminding himself how much worse it could have been. But Barrett had been right. There are no acceptable losses. Only losses we learn to accept.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Fallon said. “He was happy again. We finally had a reason to be happy. He had a job lined up and he could imagine the future again. I know he—he really wanted that. He was ready to live again…” She reached out, fumbling for Logan’s hand and held it tight. Instead of the swoop and tingle, he felt her raw emotion wash over, waves of grief and despair. “Why, Logan? Why did this have to happen?”

“It’s the worst lesson to learn, Fallon,” he said, tears brimming in his own eyes now. “Life isn’t fair. Sometimes the innocent suffer. No rhyme or reason.” He raised her hand to his mouth and gently kissed her fingers, watching her through blurred vision and desperately wishing he could take away her pain.

“No, not fair at all,” she said. “I’ve lost them both. I’m an orphan now. An eighteen-year-old orphan, so maybe that just makes me a big baby.” She chuckled bitterly. “I have no one else now.”

“You know that’s not true, Fallon.”

She squeezed his hand and nodded. “He was happy, at least.”

“Yes,” Logan said softly. “It’s probably cold comfort, but…”

“What?” she asked, searching his eyes for some sign of what he hesitated to say. “That he was happy before he died?”

“Ambrose always says,
‘Anima spes est.’
Life is hope,” Logan told her. “And your father was filled with hope at the end… think how much better that is, than to have been overwhelmed by despair.”

She smiled slowly, enabling a gradual transformation of her stricken features, as the sun slips out from behind the shadow of dark thunderheads. “You’re right,” she said. “But I still feel awful.”

“I know.”

“I imagine you do, Logan,” she said. “More than I realized. And I haven’t been there for you lately, have I?”

“Understandable,” Logan said. “There’s been so much loss lately. We find our own ways to cope. But, with each passing day, we move back toward balance. The pain is always there, but eventually it stops defining us.”

Fallon placed her free hand against the warm ground at the foot of her father’s grave and whispered, “Good-bye, Dad. Our lives were hard…” Her fingers pressed into the soil. And her tears fell, splashing the bare ground around the imprint of her hand. “But I’ll never forget the happy times. At the end, you made me remember. I’ll always love you, Dad.”

She turned to Logan and tucked her face against the side of his neck. Her fresh tears were hot against his skin; her fading sobs were the tremors of loss, early steps in a long passage to acceptance. Finally, she looked up, and though her eyes were moist she displayed a brave smile.

“C’mon,” she said, rising abruptly and tugging on his hand to help him stand.

The adjoining plot, covered with grass, and marked by a flat granite headstone, belonged to her mother. Fallon paused there a moment. “Mom,” she said, her voice constricted by regret, “I wish you could have unraveled the mystery of your life in time. So you could have understood and accepted how special you were. I hope, at least, that you knew you were special to Dad and me. Life has never been the same without you. But I hope you’ve found peace. Love you, Mom.”

She sighed and turned to Logan. “Feel like going for a walk?”

“Sure. Any particular destination in mind?”

After a moment’s consideration, she shook her head. “No. For now, just walking is enough.”

“Just walking is fine.”

Hand in hand they strolled in companionable silence along the winding tree-lined path of the cemetery. As they emerged from the shade of one particular stately elm, Fallon said, “So, what you do think? Any hope for someone like me?”

“You asked me that once before.”

“And you never answered.”

Logan smiled. “No?”

“Nope,” she said lightly, “not a peep.”

“Yes.”

“That’s it? I waited all this time for a simple ‘yes’?”

Logan stepped in front of her, taking both of her hands in his, and looked into her lovely jade green eyes. “The first time I saw your face across that crowded classroom, I couldn’t see anything else but hope. In so many ways, you represent hope to me.”

“I do?”

“You give me hope that life is worth living.”

She grinned, and had that familiar twinkle in her eyes. “Ooh, good answer!”

For Logan Walker, it was the only answer that mattered.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Passarella won the Horror Writers Association’s prestigious Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel for the coauthored
Wither
. Columbia Pictures purchased the feature film rights to
Wither
in a prepublication, preemptive bid. Barnesandnoble.com named the paperback edition of
Wither
one of horror’s “Best of 2000.” At Amazon.com,
Wither
was an Editor’s Choice and a horror bestseller.

John’s other novels include
Wither’s Rain: A Wendy Ward Novel
,
Wither’s Legacy: A Wendy Ward Novel
,
Kindred Spirit
and the original media tie-in novels
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ghoul Trouble
(a
Locus
bestseller),
Angel: Avatar
, and
Angel: Monolith
.

An active member of the Horror Writers Association (www.horror.org), the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (www.sfwa.org), the Authors Guild (authorsguild.org), and the Garden State Horror Writers (www.gshw.net), John Resides in Logan Township, New Jersey, with his wife and three children.