Disappearance at Devil's Rock (36 page)

The chair and end table are not coming with them to the condo. Elizabeth donated them. She would light this bedroom on fire if she could.

The last stop of the last tour is Tommy's room. His room is completely empty. They stand crowded together in the doorway. They both exhale at the same time and share a nervous smile. Kate is crying now, silently, and wipes at her eyes with her free hand.

Kate says, “You need to say something, Mom.”

The memories and emotions swell, and in the shadow of this world-destroying, two-thousand-foot-tall monster wave, there is horror and
awe, and privilege, and a sweet, aching melancholy of wonder, of
I was here when he was here
, as the wave breaks over her and will continue to break over her.

She says, “This room is still his, isn't it? Even empty.”

“Yeah.”

Elizabeth says, “We will spend the rest of our lives saying something about how much we love and miss Tommy. And how much of him is us. And how it all sucks. Sucks hard.”

That last part makes Kate laugh a little, and the laugh turns into a shared cry.

Still holding hands as they walk through the hallway toward the front door, Kate lets go, pulls up, and says, “Oh my God. I almost forgot. There's one more thing we have to do, Mom. Is it okay? Just one more?” Kate sounds nervous, and like a kid fighting to not go to bed.

“Okay, yeah. What is it?”

“I left it in the truck. I'll go get it. It'll take me two seconds.” Kate doesn't wait for permission and runs out the door, leaving it open.

Elizabeth walks out onto the front stoop and watches her daughter sprint to the truck and then back again, holding something against her chest.

Kate stomps past Elizabeth and into the house, out of breath. “Come on. Back in. Just for a minute. I know this is going to seem weird, but I talked about it with Dr. Jennifer and when I explained it to her she thought it was okay, and I hope you do too because like I really want to do this. It'll mean a lot to me.” She has two pieces of folded paper in her hands. The paper is yellow tinted.

“Where did you get the paper?”

“They're from one of Tommy's sketchbooks.”

“What's written on them?”

“Nothing.”

Kate hands Elizabeth a page, unfolds it, and it is indeed blank.

“What are we going to do with these?”

“We're going to drop them on the floor and leave them here.”

“What?”

“We're not leaving Tommy behind, just like you said in his room, he's us, and that's why there's none of his drawings on the pages because it means we're taking him with us. And it means no more secrets. That's what we're leaving behind us. The secrets.”

Despite the new levels of honesty between Kate and Elizabeth, they've spent the last ten months not talking about notes or Tommy's diary pages. They have not discussed the last notes they found, the crumpled ones, and how it was they got to be pinned underneath the avalanche of Tommy's comic art book.

Elizabeth is both proud and terrified of what her daughter said and of what she's proposing they do with the empty pages. This doesn't feel like a good idea.

Kate grabs Elizabeth's hand and squeezes it. “We'll do it together, at the same time. Please, Mom?”

Elizabeth's hands are sweating. The paper sticks to her pinched fingers. “Okay. Slow down, give me a second. Okay, um, do we need to count down or anything?”

“No, let's drop them when we're ready.”

Leaving these two empty sketchbook pages feels wrong, feels sadder than leaving behind an empty house, but it doesn't matter what she thinks, because if it's important to Kate, if Kate needs to do this to be able to go on, then that's what they're doing.

Elizabeth says, “No secrets. I'm not ready. Um, okay, jeeze, I think I need a countdown.”

Kate counts to three and they drop their empty pages to the floor. There's a slight rustling sound as they land.

“Thank you, Mom.”

Already she regrets the act. It's all she can do to not reach out after the pages, scoop them up and clutch them. Instead, she wraps up Kate in a hug, and then Elizabeth kisses the crown of her head. She should say something but she can't, and the thought of more words—spoken or written—makes her dizzy.

They walk out of the front door arm in arm, and it's too bright outside. She closes her eyes but light fills her head anyway, and it's too much, there can be too much light, and suddenly her need to go back into the house, her house,
their
house, to hide and hunker down at least until it's not so bright out anymore, is a compulsion.

Elizabeth lets Kate go ahead a few steps toward the rental truck as she stops walking altogether. She regrets having to tell a lie, and she hopes it's one that Kate won't catch her in. It could ruin everything between them again, but she has to go back into the house and she has to do it alone.

“Kate. I'll be right out. I have to go pee. Like wicked bad.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. I had two iced coffees. I'll be right out.”

Elizabeth is afraid that Kate will follow her back inside the house, so she runs inside and closes the door behind her. Everything is quiet. There's nothing more melancholy than a lived-in, hollowed-out, empty house. She sidesteps the pieces of blank paper they dropped on the floor moments ago and then jogs down the hallway.

Tommy's empty room is a rectangle, half as wide as it is long. The windows have no curtains. Dust floats lazily in the fat sunbeams. The blue walls have nicks and scars and stray pen and pencil marks. Elizabeth is aware of the closet to her left, open just a crack, and aware of the darkness inside it. If she opened the closet door, would the darkness all spill out and cover up the two folded pages in the middle of the Tommy's bedroom floor?

The pages are yellow but not an old yellow. The paper is thick, or
matted; not regular paper on which you'd scribble lists and reminders. This is serious paper. Special paper.

Elizabeth drifts into the room, so slowly she could get caught in the amber of the sunlight, in the amber of time. Did she hear Kate shutting the truck door? Does that mean she's now sitting in the truck cab, or did she climb out to come back into the house? Either way, Elizabeth knows she can't linger here for as long as she wants to, which is the rest of her life.

She picks up the pages with shaking hands. Their folds feel as thick and formidable as book spines. There is writing on the pages, not much, but it's there, the dark ink bleeding through the backs of the pages. Maybe there's only one line, one small sentence on each page. She's afraid to read the pages, because she thinks she already knows what they have written on them.

She could keep the pages like this, folded and unread, and keep them hidden, and then bring them to the new condo, their new home, the one that isn't a home yet and might not ever feel like one, and then late one night she could drop the pages on her bedroom floor, pretend that Tommy followed them there and would always follow them and would always be with them.

She could open these pages later, sometime later, when she needs to. When she has to.

Elizabeth unfolds the pages and starts to read.

Thank you to my family for their love, patience, and understanding.

Thank you to my editor, Jennifer Brehl. She is simply the best. I leaned on her heavily with this book. Or, more accurate, she carried me through the edits of this one. I cannot thank her enough for her support, her levelheadedness, her guidance, and her uncannily keen insight.

Thank you to the whole team of amazing folks at William Morrow. Go team!

Thank you, as always, to my friend and agent, Stephen Barbara, who has been by my literary side for ten years now.

Thank you to writers and friends John Mantooth and John Harvey for being beta readers. Beta reading is not easy, and their input was invaluable. It's not the first time they've helped me, and hopefully not the last, and no, I am not sharing them with anyone else.

Thank you to all my friends and colleagues who've supported and helped in large ways and/or didn't tell me to shut up when all I was doing was blabbing and stressing out about this book. Laird Barron, Edward Baker, JoAnn Cox, the Dixons, Jack Haringa, the Ferrandizes, Stephen Graham Jones, Andy Falkous, the Gagnons, Nick “The Hat” Gucker, Sandra Kasturi, John Langan, Sarah Langan, Jennifer Levesque, Stewart O'Nan, the Purcells, John Ryan, Dave Stengel, the Stones, Brett Savory, and Dave Zeltserman.

PAUL TREMBLAY
is a multiple Bram Stoker Award finalist and the author of
A Head Full of Ghosts
,
The Little Sleep
, and
No Sleep Till Wonderland
. He is a member of the board of directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
and numerous year's-best anthologies. He has a master's degree in mathematics and lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
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A Head Full of Ghosts

Swallowing a Donkey's Eye

In the Mean Time

No Sleep Till Wonderland

The Little Sleep

C
OVER DESIGN BY
J
ESS
M
ORPHEW

C
OVER PHOTOGRAPHS
: © K
RYSTALLENIA
B
ATZIOU
/ A
RCANGEL
I
MAGES
(
SKY
); © D
AVID
L
ICHTNEKER
/ A
RCANGEL
I
MAGES
(
TREE
)

T
ITLE PAGE AND CHAPTER OPENER PHOTOGRAPHS
© J
ESSICA
S
HATAN
H
ESLIN.

H
ANDWRITTEN ART IN
“E
LIZABETH
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL'S ROCK
. Copyright © 2016 by Paul Tremblay. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Protomartyr for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Devil in His Youth,” words and music by Protomartyr © 2015.

FIRST EDITION

Epub Edition JUNE 2016 ISBN 9780062363282

ISBN 978-0-06-236326-8

ISBN 978-0-06-247995-2 (International Edition)

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