Just the bodies of Henry and Suzanne, with no apparent wounds upon them, expressions blank and more haunting because of it. He recoiled from them, crawled away from them, staring. In the shadows there might have been what looked like the limp, desiccated remains of a plant, but he had no desire other than to leave that space.
He clambered up the ladder.
A figure in silhouette stood in front of the open door to the railing. A figure with a gun.
Impossibly, it was Henry.
“I thought you’d be gone longer, Saul,” Henry said, in a distant tone. “I thought you might not even come back tonight. That maybe you’d go over to Charlie’s, except Charlie is out fishing—and Gloria’s staying with her father. Not that she would be out this late anyway, or be of much help to you. But just so you know where we stand.”
“You killed Suzanne,” Saul said, unbelieving even now.
“She wanted to kill me. She didn’t believe in what I found. None of them believed. Not even you.”
“You killed yourself.” Your twin. Knowing that even if it made a difference, he couldn’t reach the flare gun in time, or even make it two steps into a headlong flight down the stairs before Henry would shoot him, too.
“A strange thing,” Henry said. Where before he had been indistinct, hurting, in need of succor, now he had snapped back into focus. “A strange thing to kill yourself. I thought maybe it was a kind of wraith. But maybe Suzanne was right instead.”
“Who are you?”
Ignoring him: “I found it, Saul, like I said I would. Or it found me. Only, it wasn’t what I thought. Do you know what it is, Saul?” Almost pleading.
There was no good answer to Henry’s question.
He took two steps toward Henry, as if he were watching someone else do it. He was an albatross, floating motionless in a high-above trough of air, gliding beneath the clouds with their dark underbellies, a coordinate of shadow and light that kept moving, a roving latitude and longitude, and far, far below, stood Saul and Henry, in the lantern room.
Saul took a third step, the plant a beacon in his head.
A fourth step and Henry shot him in the shoulder. The bullet penetrated and passed through, and Saul didn’t feel a thing. Saul was still floating far above, intent on navigation, on riding thermals, an animal that hardly ever came down to land but just kept flying and flying.
Saul rushed Henry, rammed his bleeding shoulder into Henry’s chest, and the two of them staggered, grappling out the door and toward the railing, Henry’s gun spinning out of his hand and across the floor. So close, staring into Henry’s eyes, Saul had the sense of the man being at a remove, a time delay—a gap or distance between receipt, acknowledgment, and response: a message coming to him from very far away. As if Henry were dealing with some other, completely different situation … while on some level still able to appraise him, to judge him. When you hide your face, they are terrified; when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.
Because Henry was drawing them both to the railing. Because Henry had a firm grip on him and was drawing them both to the railing. Except Henry was saying to Saul, “What are you doing?” But Saul wasn’t doing it, Henry was and didn’t seem to realize it.
“It’s you,” the albatross managed to say. “You’re doing it, not me.”
“No, I’m not.” Henry beyond panic now, writhing and trying to get loose, but still leading them to the railing, fast now, and Henry begging him to stop what he could not stop. Yet Henry’s eyes did not send out the same message as his words.
Henry hit the railing—hard—and Saul a second later, swung to the side by momentum, and then they both went over, and only then, when it was too late, did Henry let go, the wind ripping screams from his throat, and Saul plummeted beside him through the cold empty air—falling too fast, too far, while a part of him still looked down from above.
The surf, like white flames surging and questing across the sand.
I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?
The awful thud and crack when he hit.
0025: CONTROL
There came to Control in that moment of extremity—almost unable to move, unable to speak—an overwhelming feeling of connection, that nothing was truly apart in the same way that he had found even the most random scrawl in the director’s notes joined some greater pattern. And although the pressure was increasing and he was in a great deal of pain, the kind of pain that would not leave him soon, if ever, there arose a powerful music within him that he did not fully understand as he slipped and slid down the curving stairs, pulling himself at times, his left arm useless by his side, his father’s carving clenched in a fist he could no longer feel, the brightness welling up through his mouth, his eyes, and filling him at the same time, as if the Crawler had accelerated the process. He was slipping in part because he was changing, he knew that, could tell that he was no longer entirely human.