Salvage (36 page)

On the path up the small rise to the Crouch house, he saw two of the others, whom he recognized from the photograph he'd shared with Constable Selkie: the chubby woman in the sundress, and the skinny woman with the sour countenance and pantsuit. Both women now wore the same white garments as the others. They sat in a porch swing, swaying gently back and forth, wearing the smiles of children, their feet resting on stones. But as he drew nearer, Owen realized with a sudden shock that their footrests were not rocks at all: Dink Deakins and Pete Jebson had been buried up to their necks beneath the women's bare feet. The men wore identical silent screams.

Owen swam quickly by, heading for the house, not looking back at the strange, ghastly scene. Fear gripped him, but it was much too late to turn back. He had a terrible feeling that, if he tried, he'd only become lost in the darkness, swimming in circles without ever finding the surface.

Howie Lansall sat on the porch steps, whittling something, by the look, and he threw Owen a smiling wave as he approached the house. Owen waved back, unable to return the smile through the regulator, but smiling with his eyes, glad to see Howie had been spared the same fate as Dink and Jeb, though it was likely no picnic seeing the two men slowly tortured.

Owen pointed to the chunk of black wood in Howie's palm, the rusty old blade carving it. Howie held it out for him to see, a quite realistic frog. Howie nodded toward it, gesturing for Owen to take it from him. Since he couldn't figure out how to politely decline without words, Owen took the wooden frog, nodded gratefully, and tucked it into his fanny pack. He patted Howie on the shoulder. Howie smiled, showing teeth. The sight unnerved Owen, somehow. He supposed a part of him still expected to see bubbles emerge from Howie's mouth.

Owen left Howie behind and swam up toward the second floor window, where he pulled himself along the porch roof and climbed into his childhood bedroom. The mirror where he'd seen Crouch now reflected his own anxious gaze. Without Crouch to distract him, Owen noticed words etched around the mirror's edges, and he wiped them clean with a glove.

THAT ALL MEN MAY KNOW HIS WORK

This is
my
work
, he thought.
Dealing with Crouch. Laying the Blessed Trinity to rest. Howie, Jo, and my sister. The rest of them. This is no place to spend an eternity.

Owen opened the bedroom door, imagining the creak of its hinges in the deep silence of this watery tomb. He hesitated only a moment before swimming out into the hall. Nothing here jogged his memory: the walls with their exposed boards, black with rot; the carpet, so sodden and littered with mucky plaster it was impossible to recognize what color it had once been. He came to some photo frames hung from jutting nails. Wiping one clean, he saw a blond boy with a cherubic smile he only vaguely recognized.

That's me
, he thought with a shiver of pleasure. Aside from the photo Howard had given him, he'd never seen another picture of himself before the age of five. In it, he stood in front of the church in a child's black suit.

The door to his old bedroom faced a set of stairs leading down into a deeper gloom. At the far end of the hall was an open door, the room behind it hidden in darkness. Owen swam toward it, wanting more than ever to remember, desperate to discover the Mystery that awaited him and him alone.

Owen shined his light into the room, which had apparently been an office, looted of everything but the furniture: a desk, a rolling desk chair, a bookshelf, and a straight-backed chair so old, the fabric had been torn away to stuffing and coils.

Crouch sat in the chair, a ruined throne for a ruined king in his empire of death, bathed suddenly in Owen's ghostly green light. His pallid face was unsmiling, hands clasped in his lap.

Owen hesitated in the doorway. Alone in the presence of his father, he couldn't go on. Jo had said he could trust him, that it was Woodrow who wanted him dead—but hadn't Crouch tried to drown him twice already? And wasn't it just as likely that Woodrow held Jo in his sway, too? The scene on the front lawn looked like some sadistic game Woodrow might have dreamed up, a way for his sheep to pass eternity—what had Dink Deakins and Pete Jebson done to deserve such a fate? Was it because they'd been exiles? Because they'd abandoned the others in their hour of need? And what fate did Woodrow have in mind for Owen, Crouch's prodigal son?

Crouch smiled up at his son from his throne.

A hand fell on Owen's shoulder. He wheeled around, expecting to find Woodrow standing beside him, smiling his twinkling-eyed smile. The LED threw menacing shadows along the walls until it came to rest on their visitor.

Lori
…

She smiled at him, gave his shoulder a tender squeeze. If not for the regulator, he would have cried out her name. He gave her a questioning look, felt fresh tears sting his eyes. She held out her arms and he fell into them, embracing her. Her soft white robe billowed around the both of them like the wings of an angel. Hugging her was not like it had been with Jo; he felt none of the physical warmth radiating from her, but a heat began to spread from inside his chest, as if being with her again was filling up the hole she'd left in his heart with unimaginable joy.

After a long time—not long enough—Lori broke the embrace, and held out a hand toward the chair, toward his father. She urged him forward with a smiling nod. He turned to face the room, to face the past.

Crouch stood beside the ruined chair now, one hand at rest on the seatback, the other directing Owen to sit. Owen approached, trying to decipher the expression on his father's face, a face he now recognized was very similar to his own: the flat bridge of their noses; the ridged, high forehead; the hairline receding in the same way. Looking at his father was like looking into a warped mirror at himself. They even looked to be about the same age, aside from some gray above his father's ears; the resemblance wasn't a man and his twin, but a man and his brother. The biggest difference between them was the white scar that severed Owen's eyebrow, and since he didn't remember the incident, Owen often forgot it was there.

He turned to Lori, but the doorway was empty. She had slipped away without him noticing. His father nodded toward the chair.

Owen sat. He waited. Nothing happened for maybe ten seconds, and he looked up expectantly at Crouch.

Black rivulets poured from his father's eyes, from his nose, mouth, ears, and fingertips. The tendrils gathered in front of him like a cloud of black soot, and in a moment of revelation Owen understood what he was seeing—
this was Crouch's Mystery
. What he'd seen, what he'd smelled, what he'd heard and touched, this black cloud was not filth or poison, but
memories
. It was the story of the Blessed Trinity Mission's final days. He wasn't certain how he knew, but the feeling was unshakable.

His father had never meant to hurt him. He'd only ever wanted to show Owen what had become of the Blessed Trinity and its people.

The cloud flowed toward him. The urge to rid himself of his diving equipment overpowered reason. He peeled back his hood, and took off his gloves. The tendrils reached out toward him, wispy black tentacles. He shrank away, hesitating for a moment, like a child reaching out to pet a spider. Regaining his courage, he tore the mask off his face, relieved to take the pressure off the throbbing wound on his forehead, and let it settle on the floor beside him. Before removing the regulator from his mouth, he looked up at his father for approval.

The dead man nodded weakly, seemingly drained, as if unburdening himself of his memories had taken all his strength. Owen pulled out the mouthpiece last, and let it fall to his lap. He held his breath a moment, then inhaled.

Crouch's memories flooded into him, darting toward his fingers, filling his ears with the roar of rushing water, filling his eyes with darkness, clotting out his breath.

4

There was a void.

From out of the void came light, pinpricks at first, then steadily growing until he could see the space around himself. His father sat in the chair, though in this memory—if that was what it was—sunlight spilled in through the windows. There was no water. Photos of his family hung on the walls, the same photos that had always hung there, since there'd been a family to have photos of—the boy, the wife, the husband. In many of them he was smiling. In others, a darkness had already begun growing within his father, his eyes clouded, and his smile grim.

Crouch blinked, and sat up groggily. A runner of drool had crusted from his lips to his chin, and he wiped it away with slight disgust. Somehow, the way he sometimes knew things in dreams, Owen knew this was a childhood shame his father had long hoped to have left behind. Crouch's mother had tried to make him stop, but some habits stick no matter how hard you try to rid yourself of them.

Every man has two selves
,
in constant battle with one another
. Crouch's thoughts came to him like the voiceover in a film
. The man who is, and the man he's meant to be. I suppose I'm just meant to be a drooler.

Crouch glanced at his watch lying on the table. "Blast!" he cried, and peered out the window at the afternoon sun. "One o'clock?
Lord, Lord, Lord,
" he said anxiously, rising from the chair, which squeaked as he lifted his weight.

Late. Got to get to the church on time, or Woodrow will be upset.
He put on the watch and hurried out, not wanting to think about Woodrow, passing by the shelf full of books and out into the hall.

The hall was bright, the carpet patterned with First Nations glyphs in pine green and burnt red. Photos lined the flocked wallpaper that never failed to remind Everett of his mother's house in Peterborough, where she had lived with her two dogs until all three of them had passed. Now she lived in the House of God, and her dogs, Blackie and Bozo, were buried in a backyard belonging to someone new.

The house was silent. No clatter of toys—
Blasted things
, he thought—from downstairs, nor the sound of Margaret's piano.

"Owen?" Everett called out. "Maggie?"

No cheerful voices returned his call. He felt like the lonely loon, howling out into the dark on Mushkoweban Lake. Thinking of this reminded him of the dam, and Satan's Pimps, and the Good Work he and the others would do today once he got them all to the church on time.

"Owen?" He peered into the boy's room, shook his head at the silly
Battlestar Galactica
bedspread Margaret had bought him in the city, at the opened toy box vomiting plastic spaceships and dolls. The boy was always filling his head with nonsense, when he should be filling it with the wisdom of the ages.
The time has come to do away with childish things
, he thought, and the thought felt poisonous.

I ought to give the boy some slack
, he thought, but this thought felt wrong, too.

Crouch walked across the braided rug and peered into the mirror, the only thing in the room that retained something of his influence over the boy. The phrase from Job, THAT ALL MEN MAY KNOW HIS WORK, had been arranged in a square around the empty place in the glass where Everett's face peered back at him. Hair graying at the temples a little. His moustache needed tweezing, but it could wait until after the Miracle, he supposed. His gaze left his eyes for only a moment, but when they returned, they were not his own eyes looking back at him, and this was not his face in the mirror…

He jumped back, startled and dismayed.

It was
Woodrow
.

"
You
," he said, pointing at the bearded man in the mirror, and who pointed back at him with as much accusation. "Haven't you taken enough from me? Why can't you leave us alone! Aren't I doing everything God asked of us?" Woodrow's lips curled up in a sneer. "Why don't you
speak
?"

"'Why is light given to those in misery,'" Woodrow responded in his faux-Southern twang, "'and life to the bitter of soul, to those who long for death that does not come, who search for it more than for hidden treasure, who are filled with gladness and rejoice when they reach the grave?'"

"What is your obsession with Job?" Everett snapped.

"A wife is bound to her husband so long as he lives," the voice of Woodrow said back, "First Corinthians 7:39."

"Don't quote scripture to me. You think I don't know that?"

Sometimes the voices had spoken to him from the radiators, and often from the faucets, the showerhead, and drains. Woodrow's voice, however, had always emanated from within Everett's own mind—and there was always a curious familiarity to it, though he was certain he'd never heard it before the day he met the man himself. When Everett returned his gaze to the mirror, the bearded pastor had vanished. All he saw looking back at him were his own desperate brown eyes. He wiped sweat from his forehead and turned to the hall.

Where are they?
he wondered, growing more concerned as he came downstairs and found the living room just as empty.

"Maggie?" Desperation cracked his voice. He rushed into the kitchen: empty. The backyard: empty. Shouting their names now—"MAGGIE! OWEN!"—certain that they had abandoned him, forsaken him.

In the instant he touched the front door handle, a horn sounded—
BWAAAAAAA!
—louder than any human instrument, a deep bass rumble that rattled Crouch from head to toe. The man pulled back his hand as the door handle rattled, and the sticky, fleshy wall jostled, and the floor shook beneath him.

The flood
, Crouch thought.
The sirens must have woken me
.

The sound died away. Crouch reached out again, and twisted the handle.

The door blew inward, tearing off its hinges and flinging into a dazzling oblivion, a blinding light shining out from the open doorway. When his vision cleared, a screen slid open, revealing the lattice of a confessional booth, hung with a crucifix and rosary, and beyond it, the silhouette of a man—a priest. The boy sitting there, about nine or ten years old, made the sign of the cross.