Sweeney tried to calm his breathing and failed. He stood up slowly and, though the swamp was dim, lit only by a sliver moon, he could see dozens of figures floating just beneath the water. And he knew they were all patients from the Peck Clinic — Honey Lieb and Tara Russell and Ginny Oliphant and all the others.
“Can they breathe under water?” Sweeney asked Danny.
But Danny just said, “I’m cold, Dad. Are we almost home yet?”
Sweeney’s answer was to begin walking again. When they cleared the swamp, they could finally see home. Only it wasn’t the house in Cleveland exactly. And it wasn’t quite the Peck Clinic. And it wasn’t entirely the Limbo fortress of the evil Dr. Fliess. It was, instead, some horrible and unlikely amalgam of all three structures. And it was looming above them from the edge of a cliff, a haunted Gothic castle, with handicap ramps and awnings, neon red crosses and enormous wooden shutters.
And looking up at it, Sweeney understood that it was the last place he wanted to be. That he’d rather spend the rest of his life in the swamps than in any room of this stone palace.
Danny sensed his father’s hesitation.
“You have to, Daddy,” he said. “You’ve got to bring me home.”
Sweeney shook his head, felt the brush of the feathers.
“That’s not your home, Danny,” he said.
“It’s my home now,” Danny said. “I’m late, Dad. And Mom’s worried.”
“Mom doesn’t have to be worried,” Sweeney said. “You’re with me.”
“She’s worried about you too, Dad. She’s worried about both of us.”
“But all those rocks,” Sweeney said. “I don’t know how to get up there.”
“I know a way,” Danny said. “I’ll show you.”
Sweeney stood for a minute looking up at the structure, then turned to look back toward the swamp. He started to say something about going back to the factory but was bitten on the hand by a green-headed fly. The sting and the after-burn were severe. He brought the hand to his mouth and sucked on it.
Danny said, “There’ll be millions of them in a little while.”
And so Sweeney started for the boulders without argument and began to climb. The stones were as big as cars, some of them larger, and they were slick with moss. Danny locked his arms around his father’s neck and asked questions as Sweeney tried to find his footholds and pull them upward.
“Do you think someone could lift one of these?” he asked. “How much do they weigh? What’s underneath the rocks?”
Sweeney replied in a monotone, “I don’t know.”
He slipped once, went down hard on his knee. The higher they rose, the steeper the rocks became. Had he been climbing alone, he would have had more options, but with Danny on his back he couldn’t make use of the crevices between stones. At one point while he was trying to get a purchase somewhere on the sheer face of a wall that stretched to twice his height, Danny asked, “What’s that say, Dad?”
“Danny,” Sweeney yelled, “I’m trying to climb here.”
His head was aching and his knee was throbbing and the boy was choking off some of his air. But when he heard the crying and felt the trembling against his back, he stopped attempting to pull them up and leaned his head back against Danny’s face.
“I’m sorry, son,” he said. “Dad’s really sorry. But this is very hard.”
“I just wanted,” Danny said through hitching breath, each word standing on its own, “to know what it meant.”
Sweeney looked up and backward now, to an outcropping of rock that formed a lip off the top of the cliff. Somehow, someone had spray-painted Freaks Die on the underside of the ledge.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Sweeney said and instantly regretted it.
“It says something,” Danny said.
“It’s in another language,” Sweeney said and turned back to the cliff wall and began to climb.
The rest of the way up they moved in silence. When they got to the top and Sweeney pulled them to level ground, they found freshly laid sod, a yard of meticulously clipped turf, too green to look natural. There was a brick walkway running through the center of the yard and it led to the oversized doors of the castle.
Sweeney sat on the grass, catching his breath and studying the doors. Danny sat next to him, imitating his father’s pose and demeanor.
“They’re not locked,” Danny said.
Sweeney looked from the doors down to his son. The feathers seemed less strange now. But the mouth appeared even more beaklike, harder and more protruding.
“Have you been here before, Danny?”
The boy looked down in his lap and nodded.
“What am I going to find inside, son?”
Danny looked up and said, “Everything’s going to be all right, Dad.” But the voice and the tone and the body language gave it away as a lie.
“If I go inside,” Sweeney asked, “will I wake up again?”
Now Danny looked genuinely confused.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“I’m asking you,” Sweeney said, “if the dream will end.”
Danny shook his head and said, “This isn’t a dream, Dad.” Then he stood up suddenly, extended his hand to his father, and said, “I’ll show you.”
They walked up the path to the doors, which parted as they approached. Candles mounted in holders high on the walls lit the interior foyer. Father and son stepped inside and Sweeney took a moment to let his eyes adjust.
It was partly the Peck Clinic. It was partly the St. Joseph in Cleveland. And there were touches of the old house back home — an endtable that had been in their bedroom, the framed print that Kerry had bought on a trip to San Francisco. But mostly the castle was Dr. Fliess’s Gothic laboratory, straight from the pages of Limbo.
In a corner of the foyer was an ornate, oversized grandfather clock, the same piece Sweeney had seen in the Peck residence. As soon as he looked at its face, the clock began to chime. And as soon as it chimed, as if it were a signal of some kind, Danny broke away from his father and sprinted up the center staircase to the second floor.
Sweeney yelled after the boy and started to run, but stopped when he heard his name called. He stood still, listened and heard it again, and followed the call into a parlor to the right of the stairs. The room was high Victorian, enormous but crowded with dark and heavy furnishings. Two wing chairs were positioned before a fireplace where a pile of logs was blazing. Someone was sitting in the nearest chair. He heard a crisp page being turned, smelled the cigarette smoke, and walked across the room to sit in the empty chair.
Nora Blake didn’t look up but she held out the hand that braced her cigarette to indicate she’d be with him in a minute. He looked up at the painting hanging above the mantel — a depiction of the Limbo freaks done in the same somber style of the Peck ancestral portraits. Danny was the centerpiece of the work. The rest of the troupe was fanned behind him.
Nora closed the book, sighed, and heaved it into the fire. Embers flew and she shook her head, plugged the cigarette into her mouth, and sucked until her cheeks caved in.
Sweeney looked at the book as the flames consumed its title—The Diary of a Young Chicken Boy.
He said, “You didn’t like it.”
“I’m done with fiction,” Nora said.
“Was it a pirate book?” Sweeney asked.
Nora shook her head, knocked some ashes onto the carpet.
“A love story,” she said and he knew it was a lie. “Really frivolous. I just don’t have the time or the patience anymore.”