Revival

The stacked stormclouds were moving away to the east, throwing down random forks of lightning as they went; soon the streets of Brunswick and Freeport would be flooded, the storm drains temporarily clogged with chips of hail, but between those dark clouds and the place where I stood, a rainbow bent its many-colored arc over the entire breadth of Androscoggin County. Hadn’t there been rainbows on the day Astrid and I had come here?

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, we used to sing during our Thursday-night MYF meetings, while Patsy Jacobs swayed on the piano bench and her ponytail swung from side to side. A rainbow was supposed to be a good sign, it meant the storm was over, but looking at this one filled me with fresh horror and revulsion, because it reminded me of Hugh Yates. Hugh and his prismatics. Hugh who had also seen the ant-things.

The world began to darken. I realized I was on the verge of fainting, and that was good. Perhaps when I woke up, my mind would have blotted all this out. That would be even better. Even madness would be better . . . as long as there was no Mother in it.

Death would be best of all. Robert Rivard had known it; Cathy Morse had, too. I remembered the revolver then. Surely there was a bullet left in it for me, but it seemed like no solution. Perhaps it would have, if I hadn’t heard what Mother said to Jacobs: No death, no light, no rest.

Only the Great Ones, she had said.

In the Null.

My knees unhinged and I went down, leaning against the side of the doorway, and that was where I blacked out.

XIV

Aftereffects.

Those things happened three years ago. Now I live in Kailua, not far from my brother Conrad. It’s a pretty coastal town on the Big Island. My place is on Oneawa Street, a neighborhood quite distant from the beach and an even longer stretch from fashionable, but the apartment is spacious and—for Hawaii, at least—cheap. Also, it’s close to Kuulei Road, and that’s an important consideration. The Brandon L. Martin Psychiatric Center is on Kuulei Road, and that’s where my psychiatrist hangs out his shingle.

Edward Braithwaite says he’s forty-one, but to me he looks like he’s thirty. I’ve found that when you’re sixty-one—an age I will reach this August—every man and woman between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five appears to be thirty. It’s hard to take people seriously when they look as if they’re barely past their Terrible Twenties (it is for me, anyway), but I try hard with Braithwaite, because he’s done me quite a lot of good . . . although I’d have to say that the antidepressants have done more. I know that some people don’t like them. They claim the pills muffle both their thinking and their emotions, and I can testify that they do.

Thank God they do.

I co

I’ve told Dr. Braithwaite everything you’ve read in these pages. I held back nothing. He doesn’t believe much of it, of course—who in his right mind would?—but what a relief in the telling! And certain elements of the story have given him pause, because they are verifiable. Pastor Da

I am not in an asylum; when I finish my sessions at Martin Psychiatric, I’m free to leave and go back to my silent, su

And for fifty minutes every Tuesday and Thursday, between two o’clock and two fifty, I talk.

How I do talk.

 • • •

On the morning after the storm, I woke up on one of the couches in the lobby of the Goat Mountain Resort. My face hurt and my bladder was bursting, but I had no desire to relieve myself in the men’s room across from the restaurant. There were mirrors in there, and I didn’t want to glimpse my reflection even by accident.

I went outside to piss and saw one of the resort’s golf carts crashed into the porch steps. There was blood on the seat and the rudimentary dashboard. I looked down at my shirt and saw more blood. When I wiped my swollen nose, a maroon crust flaked off on my finger. So I had driven the golf cart, and crashed it, and bumped my face, although I could remember doing none of that.

To say I didn’t want to go back to the cottage near Skytop would be the understatement of the century, but I had to. Getting into the golf cart was the easy part. Driving it back down the path through the woods was more difficult, and every time I had to stop and move fallen branches, it was harder to get going again. My nose was throbbing and my head was thumping with a tension headache.

The door was still standing open. I parked, got out of the cart, and at first could only stand there, rubbing at my poor swollen nose until it began to ooze blood again. The day was su

There’s nothing to worry about, I told myself. Nothing will happen. It’s over.

Only what if it wasn’t? What if the something was still happening?

What if she was waiting for me, and ready to reach with that claw made of faces?

I forced myself up the steps, one at a time, and when a crow cawed harshly from the woods behind me, I cringed and screamed and covered my head. The only thing that kept me from bolting was the knowledge that if I didn’t see what was in there, Mary Fay’s deathroom would haunt me for the rest of my life.

There was no pulsing abomination with a single black eye. Charlie’s Patient Omega lay as she had when I last saw her, with two bullet holes in her nightgown and two more in the sheet around her hips. Her mouth was open, and although there was no sign of that horrible black extrusion, I didn’t even try to tell myself I had imagined it all. I knew better.

The metal band, now dull and dark, still circled her forehead.

Jacobs’s position had changed. Instead of lying on his side next to the bed with his knees drawn up, he was propped in a sitting position on the other side of the room, against the bureau. My first thought was that he hadn’t been dead after all. The terror of what had happened in here had brought on another stroke, but not an immediately fatal one. He had come to, crawled as far as the bureau, and died there.