Thalo Blue (53 page)

“‘August twenty-fourth. All three branches grow from the same tree: greed.’”

Then he hopped up onto the couch and stood there with his sock feet making large dimples in the white-cloaked cushion. He raised his voice.

“‘September eleventh. For everything that happens there is a reason lurking around somewhere behind it; held in the shadows and pulling the strings with elaborate patience and an almost unearthly will.’”

On the tailgate of those words which broke the silence, as his mind trailed off in infinite serenity, she arrived; he heard her but did not see her. The footfalls came bounding up the steps onto the deck. She came like a mad woman who was late for an important and life-altering event.

Finally, her shadow broke across the pair of front windows in the living room. Startled at not having seen movement in two days—other than the fox, a crow, and some other wildlife—Zeb’s heart jumped. Then he jumped. He dropped the tan book aside and ran to the front door, letting it fling open, nearly as if he was again nine years old.

“
Malin! You made it
—”

“Sebastion...” She sounded out of breath, like she had run the whole way. But her car, the rental from before, sat in the driveway behind his dad’s Beemer. “I found you,” she said, “
...and you’re safe.
”

“—
Why? What are y
—” Zeb frowned. His voice became new and entirely stolid. “—
What’s the matter?
”

“The Druid. He’s gone.”

Zeb felt the wind fall out of him. His hand felt weak and the door which he pressed it against now threatened to fall shut on him, despite holding it open. The wound that the derringer’s bullet had made stung so badly, out of nowhere, like the burn on his arm would do sometimes. He wanted to scratch it, wanted to scratch his whole chest beneath his shirt, and up his scalp. Deep and with his fingernails, digging into the flesh. Like the relief of it was now suddenly the only thing he needed.

She was wearing sunglasses, though the mid-afternoon light was no longer overwhelming. The sun’s halo sat somewhere just beyond the peak tip of the middle triplet, an uneven pulse of yellow-white bleeding out from behind the frosted triangle. Looking directly at it would leave orange and multicolored burn marks temporarily behind one’s eyelids. But the sky was now placating to the eyes anywhere else across the landscape. It was approaching that muted late afternoon time which always filled Zeb with a pithy mood of impending emptiness. The day was sliding away and would never be young again.

“
What?
” He blurted, then tried to remain calm. “Come in.
Come in.
It’s chilly out there.” Despite his unexpected weakness and the burning of his scalp and chest, he still managed a smile when she brushed past him, bringing with her a cold rush of air and some snow from her dark boots. He closed the heavy oak door behind him and she whirled around in the foyer, in front of the stairs, to face him. Her hair hung limp, without scent, and her look was unreadable behind the dark glasses. His was worry, where a second before it was exuberance. It felt like knowing her had been ten years earlier, like lying in that ergonomic bed with the hard plastic rails had been unreal. And yet here she stood in his childhood place—an impossibly far away place from everything that had happened. It was like he had been re-incarnated into a new life and a soul from his previous time and place long before, inexplicably, impossibly, unknowingly, arrived on the doorstep of his new one.

“
I came for you.
” She said, urgency in her voice. “You have to get your things
and we have to go.
”

<> <> <>

She managed to settle herself down some, but would not sit. He went to the kitchen to pour some bottled water into the kettle. She needed some tea, and to calm down.

He stood by the sink, facing away from her as she paced in the living room. Usually she was so untouched. He remembered her peaceful voice and quiet understanding the day after he had woken up in the hospital. He felt himself smiling like an idiot on that day, soothed by just her presence. He didn’t understand this. Even inside the car, when they were coughing and inhaling exhaust, she seemed to have it all together. He only saw her lose it briefly. And that had been when she started yelling through the glass of the Beemer at Fairweather.
Christ, Fairweather
. If knowing Malin and being in the hospital felt like ten years past, then that whole thing with Fairweather felt like at least five ago.

He needed to give Malin some hot tea, sit her down, and have her explain this to him. How could Fairweather have escaped? Where would he have gone? He wouldn’t know to come here. Zeb felt himself threatening to shiver. It was, perhaps, just the cool handle of the tea kettle in one hand and the cold bottle of water in the other. His hands quivered and a stream of water ran down the side of the kettle, past the spout and onto a small rug which was positioned at the foot of the counter. Not wanting to spill more, he moved closer to the counter top. His fist was entwined with the old, dull, fraying cord of the kettle and he tipped the metal pot downward so the drops of water dribbled off into the sink, instead of onto the floor.

He heard—
and sensed
—Malin behind him. Her pacing on the living room rug had ended and, as the tiny hollow sprinkles of water quit making sound in the bottom of the metal sink, he caught the minute padding of her shoes on the tile floor of the foyer, just in front of the stairs. There was another sound then, as well:
Tinktink-tinktinktink
.

That noise was outside, on the other side of the window. He glanced up and, through the glass, he saw a small yellow crow, bright like a highlighter marker, cocking its head this way and that. The bird moved tenderly on the metal railing of the deck which started at the back door and ran around to this, the west side of the cabin. His claws on the cold metal were distinct and apparent.

The look on the bird’s face was empty, but then, do birds really have differing looks? Differing moods? Transposed on the sight of the bird was a vision of Malin behind him. On the glass her dark hair was a sheet standing out against the whiteness of the trees and the yard and the little yellow harbinger. Her arms looked like they were raised—

Faraway, faraway, faraway. Sonofabitch.
Like the lock of a door clicking into place, Zeb’s mind fell across sick-inducing realization.

The gut
, Malin herself had said,
was more right than wrong. More correct than the head, a lot of the time.

Without even thinking, without even putting the pieces together in their entirety, he whirled around. That kettle, half-full of bottled water, swung into the air in a wide arc. It clanked across Malin’s scalp—
the Druid’s scalp
—and those sunglasses flew off, hitting the front of the stove and then falling to the floor.

She let out a holler and the half-empty bottle of water fell from Zeb’s hand into the sink’s basin:
plop-glug-glugglug
. He saw her eyes for the first time since she had arrived, and they were, he already knew it,
not
hers.

The tea kettle clanged on the floor, with the frayed cord trailing it down. The collision of it on the tile sent a spray of water up across his arm’s old scar and across his face. Both the sound and the sensation of the cold spurt of water were like an instantaneous wake-up call. They were the snap of reality hitting his mind, the realization that this was all happening. Zeb, in that instant of epiphany, was past her as she cringed back from the blow, falling.

He had his hands on the BMW’s keys which had been sitting on the kitchen table, but arms like tentacles wrapped around him and he felt himself shoved forward, past the front oak door, spilling the keys on the tiles. With a new weight on top of him, he fell forward to the carpeted threshold of the living room with a padded thump. Here the light was faded further than even a few minutes before.

Malin was on top of him and her latch around his midriff felt impossibly strong. She screamed at the room, screamed that her chin dimple was gone and that it was never coming back. Then she started muttering, mocking, low, like the sardonic growl of a wild dog: —
like a little piece of me is in everything you do
—
like a little piece of me is in everything you do
—
like a little piece of me is in everything you do you do you do YOU DO
—

With sweating hands and face, he tried pulling away from her, letting out a grunt of effort. Her breath was on the back of his neck like a shallow escape of gas from a sewer. It was hot and nothing like he had felt it before.
This was not Malin.

He reached out with desperation, looking back only once on those empty eyes. And then, trying to pull himself forward, away from her, he caught sight of those two living room windows, the sickly one and the healthy one which was shadowed by the triplet pines. Beyond them was a white front yard of snow, scoured in dark bodies of birds.

Crows. Hundred of crows.

They were mulling about, flapping wings and moving among one another. Some swooped up into treetops, others swooped down. They lined the front deck’s railing, the deck itself, the hoods and roofs of the Beemer and of Malin’s rental car in the drive. They went outwards from the front of the house, fanning like a concentrated sheet of black particles, writhing and moving on an underlay of white softness, finally seeming to dissipate near the gate and the water’s eventual edge.

But they were silent. Zeb heard no squall of dueling caws, and no troubled cries from the front sprawl of land. Only some odd, intermingled wing-flappings, and those were deceptive among the brushings of carpet and the grunts of he and the Druid.

His face was filled with fright, fury, and confusion. The processing of too much information and no outlet for comprehension. He strained forward, further into the room, still with the
Druid—Malin
creature attached to him, trying to scrape her way further on top of him. An arm reached out,
his
, flailing for the leg of a chair or the couch but he came up short, groping awkwardly instead on one of the two-by-four legs on his makeshift easel. Previously a soft blonde and now a bright putrid yellow, it toppled backwards resting on the couch which lay under an equally vile-shaded drop-cloth. The sheet that Zeb had pulled over the canvas fell away, revealing the finished portrait of Malin. The surprise was ruined, but the Druid’s eyes didn’t even find it, didn’t even care. Zeb looked back and saw those eyes that were not hers. Her tormenting mutters had turned to screams: —
You love me
—
And that means I can get away with anything
—
You love me
—
I CAN GET AWAY WITH
anyTHING—

Near the spot where the easel had stood, Zeb’s palette knife fell to a rest on the carpet. It had been sitting on the lip with the canvas and had been knocked loose. He reached out for it, snagged it, then thrust back with an uncomfortable and hesitant swipe of its dull blade. Not meant for cutting anything, but only scraping paint in a flat draw across a surface, the thrust did hardly anything. But it did draw blood from a blunt slash on the Druid’s arm. She flinched back, her screams gone from the air, and that was enough for Zeb to pull free and squirm to his haunches further away from her. She got to her feet in a more controlled motion than his scramble and she was now in the middle of the room facing Zeb with a ready-stance that made her look like she would leap at him any second. Both Zeb and she were conscious of the crows’ thousands-strong shadows thrashing against the light on their faces and the walls behind them. Even the painting of Malin’s beautiful face was a swarm of otherworldly movement.

The instinct to flee was rising. But he held on to that palette knife with a hand that trembled in a tight, moist fist.
Maybe she can still come back. Maybe she’s not really gone. Maybe Malin is still in there somewhere.
His thoughts were a scourge of desperation, making the idea of bursting forward and slashing her skin further seem impossible. He just couldn’t.

With his palette knife arm outstretched he encircled her, around the back wall of the living room where the couch was. Towards the stairs. Once there, he didn’t know what he would do. Lunge forward to the door, bend down and pick up the keys? But that would give her the opportunity to dive at him again. And he knew the Druid to be irrational.

Resting his fisted right hand on the newel post, he contemplated how hard that movement would be: moving forward, reaching down to snag the keys that he could almost now see on the floor by the door, then turning the knob, then pulling it open and thrusting out onto the deck, down the steps, and to the car. He would never get there before she leapt on him again. It seemed illogical.

Their eyes were locked. Down her cheek, from a spot nestled in her dark and shiny hair, there was a line of blood which caught the stray light. His body was drained of power and he felt shaky, hesitant of any movement he might try, sure that his body would give way when he tried to grab those keys. He could see the tips of them now, as his point of view rounded the corner of the door’s threshold. He was at the stairs, unsure of where she was going to go. Her weight was shifting and her face was strained. Her look changed. Her eyes left his. She caught sight of the painting across the back of the couch.

She screamed, and that made him flinch enough to abandon his plan and scramble up the stairs, sure she would be on him, clutching his legs as soon as he made his attempt.

But she didn’t move.

She kept screaming.

And the screams turned to giant, wrenching sobs.

<> <> <>

Nevermore is what’s in store.

Sadie Nadine stood at the blobby, misshapen left-hand panel of glass in the living room. She stared beyond her own reflection towards the closed gate and the lake water where her husband Oliver and the other men were trawling away from the edge in a path of white wake.