“Don’t answer my question with a question, damn it. I said, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’”
I cringed.
“I found some things at the Drake house—a letter from the CIA, a photo of the Russian. I don’t know what they mean, baby. I don’t know what to do. But I know that Drake didn’t kill those people, and he doesn’t deserve whatever Hell my dad’s got planned for him. I… I know… I know someone who might be able to help me. I need to talk to him. And then I have to go to The Brink.”
“Who’s ‘him?’” she asked.
And here it was, in the most honest terms I could muster:
“An… an old friend. Someone who believes in the Dark Man.”
Silence.
“You’re not going to tell me any more, are you?” she asked.
“I will, if we’re on the edge,” I said. And despite the misery that would come, I would. “Are we?”
She sighed. “What’s with you, Zach? Are you trying to ruin us? Didn’t we just cover this?”
“That’s why I’m telling you what I can. That’s why I’m asking if you trust me.”
“You know I trust you.”
“Then can you live with not knowing? At least for right now?”
“Damn it, that’s not fair and you know it.”
I was rushing toward the exit for Claytonville. I reached for the turn signal out of habit—preposterous, considering the Saturn was the sole car on this stretch of blacktop—but pulled my hand away. This, this moment, was important.
No. This was the most important moment.
“I know,” I whispered.
“You’re so in the red, kiddo,” Rachael said. “Go. Go do your thing and come home safe. We’ll fight and then we’ll fuck and you’ll cook dinner for the next month. And maybe, when we’re both ready, you can tell me about this. Deal?”
I loved her more than anything right then. I truly did.
My fingers flipped the turn signal. I merged left.
“Deal.”
I shambled through Claytonville’s atrophied limestone halls like the bloodied, filth-covered zombie I undoubtedly resembled. Even this prison’s most jaded corrections officers performed bug-eyed double takes at the sight of me: one part of my brain thought I should be proud of that; it was hard to shock the guards in a facility that housed homicidal lost causes—who now happened to be cleaner and better-dressed than me.
The last time I was here, I’d trembled with dread, anxiety, anger and a need… a need to know. Now, I was too broken, too spent, to feel any of those things. I’d been through an emotional atomsmasher. I needed a friend who understood.
“Lemme guess,” said the barrel-chested guard as we walked toward the visitor’s room. He looked me over and winked. “I should see the other guy. Right?”
I grunted. “I was the other guy.”
“Ouch.”
“Brother, I’ve got ’ouch’ on speed dial.”
The rusted door screeched open and in I stepped, alone again in the wide room with its row of semi-private nooks, panes of floor-to-ceiling shatterproof glass, and security cameras. I moaned as I sat, again reminding myself of a George Romero movie refugee. The ghostly reflection staring back at me in the glass was—sweet Christmas—worse than I imagined.
Walking dead, pardner. Brainnnns.
“Hush,” I hissed.
And, like two days ago, a fire-alarm bell trilled for a moment… and then my uncle emerged from the open door beyond the glass. The same guard followed him. Henry sat down across from me. The guard announced that we had ten minutes, and stepped backward, watching us.
Henry gazed at me, his gray eyebrows furrowed with concern. His face did not twist in revulsion as the others’ had; I supposed he’d seen worse during his twenty years here.
“What happened?” he asked.
“The path found me,” I deadpanned.
Henry’s bearded face crinkled into a slight smile. He started to speak again, but I waved my hand: It’s cool, we’re cool, let me finish.
“The man the newspapers call Martin Grace drew a map that sent me to his son’s home,” I said. “I was sent there to find something. His son did… well, he did this.” I shrugged, self-conscious. I remembered the cameras, and didn’t want to incriminate myself any more than I already had. “I fought back, took him down. But I did the right thing. Called 911 from the pay phone in the lobby. I think he’ll be okay.”
“They’re resourceful when they’re curious,” Henry said. “Trace it back here, check with visitor logs.”
I nodded. “And if the county lush cares to press charges, I’ll happily take my licks. But I don’t think he’ll do that. He’s like his father; it’s just not in him to heal. He’s lost enough already.”
I leaned forward and stared into his blue eyes.
“I saw it.”
Henry’s face was solemn. “I can tell. You don’t fall into the black and come away completely whole.” He raised his finger, as if to explain. The charms on his bracelet jingled. “I don’t mean physically. There’s a very large, sometimes very frightening, world just beside—and beneath and above—this one. That world scraped against you, Zach. It changes you. Like it changed you twenty years ago.”
“Yes.”
The silence lasted no more than five seconds. It felt like a day.
“Drake said I was marked,” I said. “Me and Lucas and Dad. And my girlfriend.”
Henry’s eyes ticked across my body. He squinted. He nodded very slowly.
“Did you find,” he asked, “what you were sent to find?”
“I… I don’t know. I think so, but it doesn’t make sense. A photo and a letter from Big Brother. The monster was protecting them, like a watchdog.”
I shivered then, recalling the Dark Man’s fingers shredding my skin.
“And why doesn’t that make sense?” Henry said.
“Because what I found basically nullified the only thing going for me in the Drake case. I thought someone else murdered all those people. A Russian. Why did Drake send me there? I didn’t gain anything. Poof, there’s the proof, not true.”
Henry squinted. “It had a vested interest in protecting them. Maybe there’s more power in what you found.”
“And maybe Drake sent me there to die,” I said. “He knew his son would be there, knew the Dark Man would be waiting and hungry. I was ‘marked,’ after all. Double cross, kill the threat. I’m the only one, perhaps ever, who’s gotten this close to… to curing him.”
I sighed. “I think… I think I beat it,” I said. “It saw the photo of the Russian, the man who’d vowed vengeance against Drake. It should’ve killed me, but it vanished.”
Henry took a deep breath and exhaled. He shook his head as slowly as he’d nodded a minute ago.
“Know this, son. Things like the Dark Man are never ‘beaten.’ There’s nothing in this world that can beat them. They’re hired guns. They leave when they’ve done their job.”
“You said you were there, back then, when the Dark Man killed Mom. You told me we were under attack. You saved Lucas, you said. It was beaten. It left. How?”
“It did what it was told to do. It took a beloved of Will’s, just as Will had…”
He stopped.
“Zach, if it’s gone, then you found its secret and put it to rest. Whatever was in that house was the key. The Dark Man has absolutes. It must do what it was born to do. The powers that control these monsters, the terms that govern when an unholy contract has been fulfilled—those are rarely absolute. If it’s gone, its contract was fulfilled. You did it. I’m proud of you.”
I scrubbed my face with my damaged hands, exasperated.
“But I don’t know what to do now,” I said. “Everything I’ve done to help Drake has had… heh… catastrophic results. And now he’s getting pulled from The Brink. I’ve got—”