The Wanderer in Unknown Realms (13 page)

But what of those burrowing creatures, or the exploded thing in the hallway of this very house? What of the deformed children that had followed me through the streets, or the gray wraith at the study window? What of days—weeks—lost, according to Fawnsley? What of—

Everything?

For there was a third narrative, was there not?

IT WAS
late afternoon. Mrs. Gissing had not appeared, nor Willox. I left the Maulding house, my possessions in my overnight bag, and walked to the station. The train to London was due. I would return there. I would go to Quayle. Whatever answer he gave me, I would accept. If a cell and a noose waited at the end of it, that could be no worse than this.

Nobody was at the ticket office when I reached it, and I detected some sounds of confusion from the platform. I followed the noise and found the stationmaster remonstrating with prospective passengers, his assistants beside him, all of them looking troubled.

“What's happening here?” I asked of no one in particular.

“The train from London didn't arrive this morning,” said a portly woman. “The train to London came and went, right enough, but nothing from the city.”

She indicated the stationmaster.

“Old Ron here is as ignorant as the rest of us, but I have to get to London. My daughter's about to have her first child, and I swore to her that I'd be with her to help her through it.”

I was bigger and taller than the rest of those gathered, and eased my way through the crowd until I was face-to-face with the stationmaster. He was nearing the end of his time: gray-haired,
overweight, and with a handlebar mustache that increased his resemblance to an old walrus.

“Explain,” I said to him, and something in my tone silenced those around me and brooked no opposition from the old man.

“It's like I've been telling these people, sir: we've had no trains come through since this morning, and all the lines are down. I can't get through to anyone to find out what's going on. I sent one of the lads down to Norwich on his bicycle to see if he could find out anything, but he hasn't come back yet. I can tell you no more.”

I stood on the platform and looked to the southwest. It might have been a trick of the light, but it seemed that the sky was darker down there, and tinged with red, even though it was not yet sunset. It resembled a great conflagration seen from a distance. I glanced at the station clock and watched the minute hand move.

“The clock,” I said.

“What about it?” said the stationmaster.

I continued to stare at the clock face. It was coming up to noon but, instead of inching closer to twelve, the minute hand had just slipped down a notch toward eleven.

“It's running backward,” I said.

I LEFT
them and returned to Bromdun Hall. I have closed the shutters and barricaded the doors. I have food here, and water. The sky is darkening, and it will not be light again. There are noises coming from upstairs and from the grounds. I have closed the door to Lionel Maulding's secret study. From behind it, I can hear the splintering of reality, like ice cracking on a frozen lake.

It is the coming of the Not-God.

I have three bullets.

I will wait.

For more from John Connolly, read on for a chilling preview of the latest in his Charlie Parker series, THE WRATH OF ANGELS

Avaiable at your favorite eBook retailer.

John Connolly Wrath of Angels

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape
—
the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

—Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009)

A
t the time of his dying, at the day and the hour of it, Harlan Vetters summoned his son and his daughter to his bedside. The old man's long gray hair was splayed against the pillow on which he lay, glazed by the lamplight, so that it seemed like the emanations of his departing spirit. His breathing was shallow; longer and longer were the pauses between each intake and exhalation, and soon they would cease entirely. The evening gloaming was slowly descending, but the trees were still visible through the bedroom window, the sentinels of the Great North Woods, for old Harlan had always said that he lived at the very edge of the frontier, that his home was the last place before the forest held sway.

It seemed to him now that, as his strength failed him, so too his power to keep nature at bay was ebbing. There were weeds in his yard, and brambles among his rosebushes. The grass was patchy and unkempt; it needed one final mow before the coming of winter, just as the stubble on his own chin rasped uncomfortably against his fingers, for the girl could not shave him as well as he had once shaved himself. Fallen leaves lay uncollected like the flakes of dry skin that peeled from his hands and his face, scattering themselves upon his sheets. He saw decline through his window, and decline in his mirror, but in only one was there the promise of rebirth.

The girl claimed that she had enough to do without worrying about bushes and trees, and the boy was still too angry to perform even this simple service for his dying father, but to Harlan these things were important. There was a battle to be fought, an ongoing war against nature's attritional impulse. If everyone thought as his daughter did, houses would be overrun by root and ivy, and towns would vanish beneath seas of brown and green. A man had only to open his eyes in this county to see the ruins of old dwellings suffocated in green, or open his ears to hear the names of settlements that no longer existed, lost somewhere in the depths of the forest.

So nature needed to be held back, and the trees had to be kept to their domain.

The trees, and what dwelled among them.

Harlan was not a particularly religious man, and had always poured scorn on those whom he termed “God-botherers”—Christian, Jew, or Muslim, he had no time for any of them—but he was, in his way, a deeply spiritual being, worshipping a god whose name was whispered by leaves and praised in birdsong. He had been a warden with the Maine Forest Service for forty years, and even after his retirement his knowledge and expertise had often been sought by his successors, for few knew these woods as well as he. It was Harlan who had found twelve-year-old Barney Shore after the boy's father collapsed while hunting, his heart exploding so quickly in his chest that he was dead within seconds of hitting the ground. The boy, in shock and unused to the woods, had wandered north, and when the snow began to descend he had hidden himself beneath a fallen tree, and would surely have died there had Harlan not been following his tracks, so that the boy heard the old man calling his name just as the snow covered the traces of his passing.

It was to Harlan, and to Harlan alone, that Barney Shore told the tale of the girl in the woods, a girl with sunken eyes, and wearing a black dress, who had come to him with the first touch of snow, inviting him to follow her deeper into the woods, calling on him to play with her in the northern darkness.

“But I hid from her, and I didn't go with her,” Barney told Harlan, as the old man carried him south upon his back.

“Why not, son?” said Harlan.

“Because she wasn't a little girl, not really. She just looked like one. I think she was very old. I think she'd been there for a long, long time.”

And Harlan had nodded and said, “I think you're right,” for he had heard tales of the lost girl in the woods, although he had never seen her himself, unless bad dreams counted, and he prayed to his god of air and tree and leaf that he might be spared the sight of her. There was a time, though, when he had felt her presence, and he had known as he was searching for the boy that he was once again drawing close to her territory.

He shuddered and thought carefully before he spoke.

“If I were you, son, I wouldn't mention the girl to anyone else,” he said at last, and he felt the boy nod against him.

“I know,” he said. “They wouldn't believe me anyway, would they?”

“No. I reckon they'd think you were suffering from shock and exposure, and they'd put it down to that, most of them.”

“But you believe me, don't you?”

“Oh yes, I believe you.”

“She was real, wasn't she?”

“I don't know if that's the word I'd use for her. I don't reckon that you could touch her or smell her or feel her breath upon your face. I don't know that you could see her footprints indented in the snow, or discern the stain of sap and leaf upon her skin. But if you'd followed her like she asked I'd never have found you, and I'm certain that nobody else would ever have found you either, alive or dead. You did well to keep away from her. You're a good boy, a brave boy. Your daddy would be proud.”

Against his back began the convulsions of the boy's sobs. It was the first time he had cried since Harlan discovered him. Good, thought Harlan. The longer it takes for the tears to come, the worse the pain.

“Will you find my daddy too?” said the boy. “Will you bring him home? I don't want him to stay in the woods. I don't want the girl to have him.”

“Yes,” said Harlan. “I'll find him, and you can say goodbye to him.”

And he did.

Harlan was already in his seventies by then, and had a few more years left in him, but he was no longer the man he once had been, even though he, and he alone, had found Barney Shore. Age was part of it, that was for sure, but so too were the losses he had endured. His wife, Angeline, had been taken from him by a cruel alliance of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's one year before Barney Shore spoke to him of predatory girls. He had loved her as much as a man can love his wife, and so nothing more need be said.

The loss of his wife was the second such blow that Harlan would receive in less than a year. Shortly after she passed away, Paul Scollay, Harlan's oldest and closest friend, had sat on a bucket in the little woodshed at the back of his cabin, put his shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. The cancer had been nibbling at him for a while, and now had got a taste for him. He put an end to its feeding, as he had always told his friend that he would. They had shared a drink earlier in the day—just a beer or two at the pine table beside that very woodshed with the sun setting behind the trees, as beautiful an evening as Harlan had seen in many a year. They had reminisced some, and Paul had seemed relaxed and at peace with himself, which was how Harlan had known that the end was near. He did not remark upon it, though. They had simply shaken hands and Harlan had said that he would see Paul around, and Paul had replied, “Ayuh. I guess so,” and that was the end of it.

And though they spoke of many things in those final hours, there was one subject upon which they did not touch, one memory that was not disinterred. They had agreed years before that they would not talk of it unless absolutely necessary, but it hung between them in the last of their time together as the sun bathed them in its radiance, like the promise of forgiveness from a god in whom neither of them believed.

And so it was that at the time of his dying, at the day and the hour of it, Harlan Vetters summoned his son and his daughter to his bedside, the woods waiting beyond, the god of tree and leaf moving through them, coming at last to claim the old man, and he said to them:

“Once upon a time, Paul Scollay and I found an airplane in the Great North Woods. . . . ”

F
all was gone, vanished in wisps of white cloud that fled across clear blue skies like pale silk scarves snatched by the breeze. Soon it would be Thanksgiving, although it seemed that there was little for which to be thankful as the year drew to its close. People I met on the streets of Portland spoke of working second jobs to make ends meet, of feeding their families with cheap cuts of meat while their savings dwindled and their safety nets fell away. They listened as candidates for high office told them that the answer to the country's problems was to make the wealthy wealthier so that more crumbs from their table might fall into the mouths of the poor, and some, while pondering the unfairness of it, wondered if that was better than no crumbs at all.

Along Commercial Street some tourists still wandered. Behind them a great cruise ship, perhaps the last of the season, loomed impossibly high above the wharves and warehouses, its prow reaching out to touch the buildings facing the sea, the water supporting it invisible from the street, so that it seemed a thing discarded, marooned in the aftermath of a tsunami.

Away from the waterfront the tourists petered out entirely, and at the Great Lost Bear there were none at all, not as afternoon melted into evening. The Bear saw only a small but steady stream of locals pass through its doors that day, the kind of familiar faces that ensure bars remain in business even during the quietest of times, and as the light faded and the blue of the sky began to darken, the Bear prepared to ease itself into the kind of gentle, warm mood where conversations were hushed, and music was soft, and there were places in the shadows for lovers and friends, and places, too, for darker conversations.