The City of Mirrors (96 page)

Authors: Justin Cronin

Tags: #FIC000000 Fiction / General

BOOK: The City of Mirrors

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The woman doesn’t answer. The murmuring has returned. Not murmuring, Logan realizes: humming. Mysterious notes, almost tuneless but not quite.

“Did Anthony send you?” she asks.

Once again, Logan looks at Nessa. Her face says that she, too, has made the connection: Anthony Carter, the third name on the stone.

“I don’t believe I know Anthony,” Logan tenders. “Is he around here?”

The woman frowns at the absurdity of this question, or so it seems. “He went home a long time ago.”

“Is he a friend of yours?”

Logan waits for more, but there is none. The woman takes a single rose between her thumb and forefinger. The petals are fading, brittle and brown. From the pocket of her dress she removes a small blade and clips the stem at the first tier of leaves and drops the wilted bloom in the pail.

“Amy,” Logan says.

She stops.

“Is that you? Are you … Amy?”

With painstaking, almost mechanical slowness, she swivels her face. She regards him for a moment, expressionless, then frowns as if puzzled. “You’re still here.”

Where would they have gone? “Yes,” says Nessa. “We came to see you.”

She shifts her eyes to Nessa, then back to Logan. “Why are you still here?”

Logan senses a deepening presence in her gaze. Her thoughts are taking clearer form.

“Are you … real?”

The question stops him. But of course it makes sense that she would ask this. It is the most natural question in the world, when one has been alone so long.
Are you real?

“As real as you are, Amy.”

“Amy,” she repeats. It is as if she is tasting the word. “I think my name was Amy.”

More time goes by. Logan and Nessa wait.

“Those suits,” she says. “They’re because of me, aren’t they?”

It surprises him, the thing he does next. Yet he experiences not the slightest hesitation; the act feels ordained. He removes his gloves and reaches up to the clasp that holds his helmet in place.

“Logan—” Nessa warns.

He pulls the helmet over his head and places it on the ground. The taste of fresh air swarms his senses. He breathes deeply, enriching his lungs with the scents of flowers and the sea.

“I think this is much better, don’t you?” he asks.

Tears have risen at the corners of the woman’s eyes. A look of wonder comes. “You’re really here.”

Logan nods.

“You’ve come back.”

Logan takes her hand. It is nearly weightless, and alarmingly cold. “I’m sorry it took us so long. I’m sorry you have been alone.”

A tear spills down her weathered cheek. “After all this time, you’ve come back.”

She is dying. Logan wonders how he knows this, but then the answer comes: his mother’s note. “Let her rest.” He has always assumed she was speaking of herself. But now he understands that the message was for him, for this day.

“Nessa,” he says, not breaking his gaze from Amy, “go back to camp and tell Wilcox to gather his team and call for a second lifter.”

“Why?”

He turns his face to look at her. “I need them to leave. All their gear, everything except a radio. Deliver the message and then come back. I would be very grateful if you could do that for me, please.”

She pauses, then nods.

“Thank you, Nessa.”

Logan watches as she passes through the flowers, into the trees, and out of sight. So much color, he thinks. So much life everywhere. He feels tremendously happy. A weight has lifted from his life.

“My mother dreamed of you, you know.”

Amy’s head is bowed. Tears fall down her cheeks in glistening rivers. Is she happy? Is she sad? There is a joy so powerful it is like sadness, Logan knows, just as the opposite is also true.

“Many people have. This place, Amy. The flowers, the sea. My mother painted pictures of it, hundreds of them. She was telling me to find you.” He pauses, then says, “You were the one who wrote the names on the stone, weren’t you?”

She gives the barest nod, grief flowing, rising out of the past.

“Brad. Lacey. Anthony. Alicia. Michael. Sara. Lucius. All of them, your family, your Twelve.”

Her answer comes in a whisper. “Yes.”

“And Peter. Peter most of all. ‘Peter Jaxon, Beloved Husband.’ ”

“Yes.”

Logan cups her chin and gently raises her face. “It was a world you gave us, Amy. Do you see? We are your children. Your children, come home.”

A quiet moment passes—a holy moment, Logan thinks, for within it he experiences an emotion entirely new to him. It is the feeling of a world, a reality, expanding beyond its visible borders, into a vast unknown; and likewise does he believe that he—that everyone, the living and the dead and those yet to come—belong to this greater existence, one that outstrips time. That is why he has come: to be an agent of this knowledge.

“Will you do something for me?” he asks.

She nods. Their time together will be brief; Logan knows this. A day, a night, perhaps no more.

“Tell me the story, Amy.”

Dramatis Personae

(In chronological order)

B.V., Ohio, Cambridge, and New York

Timothy Fanning,
a student

Harold and Lorraine Fanning,
his parents

Jonas Lear,
a student

Frank Lucessi,
a student

Arianna Lucessi,
his sister

Elizabeth Macomb,
a student

Alcott Spence,
a ne’er-do-well

Stephanie Healey,
a student

Oscar and Patty Macomb,
parents of Elizabeth Macomb

Nicole Forood,
an editor

Reynaldo and Phelps,
police detectives

A.V., Texas Republic

Alicia Donadio,
a soldier

Peter Jaxon,
a laborer

Amy Bellafonte Harper,
the Girl from Nowhere

Lore DeVeer,
an oiler

Caleb Jaxon,
adopted son of Peter Jaxon

Sara Wilson,
a physician

Hollis Wilson,
her husband; a librarian

Kate Wilson,
their daughter

Sister Peg,
a nun

Lucius Greer,
a mystic

Michael Fisher,
an explorer

Jenny Apgar,
a nurse

Carlos and Sally Jiménez,
expectant parents

Grace Jiménez ,
their daughter

Anthony Carter,
a gardener

Pim,
a foundling

Victoria Sanchez,
president of the Texas Republic

Gunnar Apgar,
general of the Army

Ford Chase,
president’s chief of staff

The Maestro,
an antiquarian

Foto,
a laborer

Jock Alvado,
a laborer

Theo Jaxon,
infant son of Caleb and Pim Jaxon

Bill Speer,
a gambler

Elle and Merry (“Bug”) Speer,
daughters of Kate Wilson Speer and Bill Speer

Meredith,
partner of Victoria Sanchez

Rand Horgan,
a mechanic

Byron “Patch” Szumanski,
a mechanic

Weir,
a mechanic

Fastau,
a mechanic

Dunk Withers,
a criminal

Phil and Dorien Tatum,
famers

Brian Elacqua,
a physician

George Pettibrew,
a shopkeeper

Gordon Eustace,
a lawman

Fry Robinson,
his deputy

Rudy,
an Iowan

The Possum Man’s wife,
an Iowan

Rachel Wood,
a suicide

Haley and Riley Wood,
her daughters

Alexander Henneman,
an officer

Hannah,
a teenage girl, daughter of Jenny Apgar

A.V., Indo-Australian Republic

Logan Miles,
a scholar

Nessa Tripp,
a reporter

Race Miles,
a pilot, son of Logan and Olla Miles

Kaye Miles,
a teacher, wife of Race Miles

Olla Miles,
ex-wife of Logan Miles

Bettina,
a horticulturalist, partner of Olla Miles

Noa and Cam Miles,
twin sons of Race and Kaye Miles

Melville Wilcox,
an archaeologist

Acknowledgments

About the Author

J
USTIN
C
RONIN
is the
New
York
Times
bestselling author of
The Passage, The Twelve, The City of Mirrors, Mary and O’Neil
(which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize), and
The
Summer
Guest.
Other honors for his writing include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writers’ Award. A Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Rice University, he divides his time between Houston, Texas, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.