The Ferryman (42 page)

The feeling took her by surprise, but she relished it.

Inside, the sound system filled the store with lilting old blues riffs. The song was one she recognized. “Trouble No More,” it was called. Annette smiled at the refrain.

She took her time roving through the new releases and the mystery section, but in the end she felt the need for a change. The book she plucked off the shelf was
Lonesome Dove,
a Pulitzer Prize winner by Larry McMurtry. It was over a thousand pages long, and it was a Western, and if anyone had ever told her that she would someday read such a book, Annette would have laughed right out loud.

But the title drew her, and the images in her head of men off on the range somewhere, in a simpler time when people had the courage to shake off the tragedies that befell them and soldier on.

What a strange choice of words,
she chided herself.
Soldier on. This isn't a war. It's your life.
And yet sometimes it did feel a little like a war. An eternal struggle against the passage of time and the shadows that lingered in the corners of life, a fight to find some way to endure, someone to endure with.

Annette took the book to the counter and bought it, along with a cappuccino of enormous proportions. The woman who made the cappuccino was a fortyish redhead who offered Annette a tired smile when she handed the enormous mug and saucer over to her.

“There you go,” the woman said. “Nice to see you in here again. Don't be a stranger.”

“Huh?” Annette mumbled, surprised. It took her a moment to replay the words in her mind, so distracted had she been, and when she did, a smile spread across her face.

“Don't worry,” she said. “I can't stay away from here for long.”

They both smiled politely and then Annette took the cappuccino and her book to an inside table—none of that sidewalk café stuff for her until summer finally arrived.As she began to read the first few pages of the book, she was warmed again by the woman's kindness to her. There wasn't anything to it but courtesy, a pleasant demeanor, but still it touched Annette. She had been recognized here, and she was welcome.

A tiny thing, but it made her feel just the slightest bit less alone.

On the way back through Medford she took a detour, and drove down toward David's house to the spot on the Mystic River where it had all come to an end. Annette parked on the soft shoulder, but she did not get out of the car. Instead she merely sat and stared out at the river flowing by and she let the tears come again.

She hoped that if she cried now, she could be strong for Janine.

After perhaps twenty minutes she pulled away from the shoulder, turned around, and then drove out to Oak Grove Cemetery.

 
The gathering was small, and Janine was glad. Her mother's funeral had taken place two weeks before in Scarsdale, and she had been in-undated with sympathy from what seemed to be hundreds of people she had never met but who somehow thought they knew her. Clients and coworkers of her mother's, relatives of her stepfather's who clung to her as though it had been their mother who had drowned.

If only it had been as simple as that.

Janine had been as patient with the mourners at her mother's wake and funeral as she could manage, if only because she had to be strong for Larry. Other than his work, Ruth had been everything in his life, and he admitted to Janine in the funeral home after everyone else had left the wake, with her mother's body only a few feet away, that work was going to be hollow now without her there.

For the first time since her mother had married him, Janine found that she loved Larry Vale. The irony was cruel, but she took the result for the precious gift it was. She would keep in touch with Larry now, would check in with him regularly, would take care of him one day if it came to that. He was really the only family she had.

Now, weeks later, they stood in another cemetery. Larry stood to her left, eyes rimmed with red but grimly fighting back tears, trying to be strong for her. Annette was with him, her arm linked through his, and Janine silently thanked her.

Annette had always been the strongest among them.

David stood on her right, his arm tightly around her shoulder, stiff in his black suit. He held her firmly enough to let her know that she could turn to him if she needed to, if she wanted to rest her head or hide her eyes or simply be lost in his love for her.The day of her mother's funeral, she had done just that. But now, today, she was all right.

The grief was in her, a cold hollowness just at the pit of her stomach, a hesitation in the back of her throat. It was something she would carry with her always, the burden of her mourning, the loss of her child. But she would heft that burden and carry on, knowing that when she grew tired, there were people who would willingly volunteer to share it.

Tom Carlson was there, along with some of the other teachers from Medford High. The principal from St. Matt's, Sister Mary, stood with Lydia Beal and Clark Weaver from her own faculty. There were a handful of other people, but Janine had been very specific about whom she wanted to know about the service.

Hugh Charles stood over the grave where two months before her son's remains had been laid beside her father's bones. The priest had always carried himself with great dignity and ceremony, but there was a grace about him now that gave Janine comfort.

Father Charles had endured a great many questions from police about the vandals who attacked David's house, and the stalker who the authorities believed had killed Ruth Vale, as well as Detective Kindzierski and Spencer Hahn. The cops looked into students from both schools who might have had a grudge against one or both of the teachers, but came up with nothing. Which made them very grumpy. Yet Father Charles had committed a great many sins of omission, even outright lied numerous times, in order to protect them.

It was, he said, simply the right thing to do.

Janine gazed with open admiration at Father Charles as he blessed the grave of her dead child. Silently she thanked him for the solace he had given her.

And yet she knew that, in the end, despite all the love and support she received from her friends, even from David, the modest peace she had achieved was something all her own.

“Amen,” murmured the gathered mourners.

Father Charles gazed at Janine and she nodded a silent thank-you. The priest raised his hands to thank the people clustered around the grave on her behalf, and then they began to depart in twos and threes.

Janine looked up at David. All through the memorial service she had avoided doing that. He would give her every ounce of strength and courage and love he had if she needed it. David had said as much, but even had he not, Janine saw it every time she looked into his eyes.

But she did not want it. Janine knew, if they were to survive together, that she could not look to him for those things. Strength and courage and love, yes, but only if she returned it in equal doses. To do that, she had to find them within herself.

She would.

After what they had been through together, nothing would ever be the same. Not in the way they saw the world around them, or the things they believed in. But the key was that they did believe. In life. In living. In each other.

The day had grown even warmer, and a trickle of sweat ran down her back as she turned to walk across the grass toward the line of cars. All around them the earth was alive again and the wind carried the odor of freshly mowed grass and the scent of lilacs and jasmine in bloom.

A piece of her heart would always lie in the grave behind her, but with David beside her and her friends around her, Janine could not help but believe that this was not an end to things, but a beginning.

She had faith.

“Hey,” she whispered to David.

He glanced down at her.

“No more cemeteries for a while, okay?”

David only smiled. He loved her too much to lie to her, but Janine knew that for her sake, he would pretend. Time and again, in their lives, they would return to these granite and marble fields, until at last they came and never left.

Meanwhile, though,
Janine thought, and she smiled to herself. She liked that word, and all it entailed.

 
 
A
s a writer, I'm jealous of Christopher Golden.

He's so damn productive that his body of work seems to grow by a new book every month or so. And I'm not one of those people who believe that a quickly written book is intrinsically not as good as one that has taken a couple of years to write. Books have their own lengths and writers have their own schedules. There's no right or wrong way or length of time to write a novel. It's whatever works for that writer to produce the best book that he or she can.

All of which is well and good, but I'd still like to be able to write them as quickly as Chris does, because there are so many stories to tell, and there's so little time in which to tell them. But you play the balls as they lie on the table; you don't get to set them up as you'd like them to be. And that brings me to:

As a reader, I'm glad that Chris is prolific as he is, because that just means there are so many more opportunities to settle down with one of his books and be taken away to that wonderful place where the story swallows the reader.

Of course I love his original novels. But while I'm not really a fan of franchise novels (books set in an already established universe such as
Hellboy
and the like), Chris has won me over with his work on them as well—mostly because he treats them like real books, rather than just the poor cousins of what you might see on the screen. In fact, I sometimes find his franchise work to be more adventurous and fun than the source.

But that's the kind of writer Chris is. It doesn't matter whether it's an original novel, a comic book script, a franchise novel, or even a piece of nonfiction: he's always thinking outside of the box. He's always taking us someplace we didn't really expect to go, but, man, do we enjoy the ride.

Consider the book in hand.

In
The Ferryman
we're introduced to Janine Hartschorn, who has lost her baby in childbirth. During the traumatic ordeal, she has a dream of a dark river with a boat upon it, guided by a cloaked man holding a lantern. She knows he wants her on that boat, but she flings the coins she finds in her hand into the river and escapes.

She doesn't know it (though the reader picks up on it quickly enough), but she's has just had a close encounter with Charon, the legendary ferryman of Greek myth. Worse, she wasn't dreaming. And while she's able to forget the “dream,” the ferryman doesn't forget her.

Cut to teacher David Bairstow, Janine's ex-boyfriend. When he comes back into her life, his own takes on a surreal quality. He's plagued first with visions of ghosts who have reason to hold grudges with him, and then with physical attacks by the spectral dead. Needless to say, we soon discover the connections to Janine's encounter with the ferryman.

Laid out like that, this might sound rather run-of-the-mill for a horror novel, but the book itself isn't remotely that cut and dried. There's an extra spark here that kept me reading long into the evening on more than one night.

Reading
The Ferryman
reminded me why I like this sort of book as much as I do. Unfortunately, not every writer has Chris's skill set. So, while I've always enjoyed a good spooky and suspenseful novel, over the past few years I've found that I've lost a lot of my interest in the horror field.

Too many books I've sampled are mean-spirited and forget to concentrate on the characters, or don't give us even a likeable one. Their idea of plot appears to consist of constantly upping the ante in terms of gore and grue and general unpleasantness to the degree that all I come away from the book with is a negative feeling.

Now, some might say that's what the horror field is all about: a catharsis in the sense that we can experience the worst that the world (the supernatural as well as our own) has to offer, without the actual dangers.

But I want more from my reading, and I don't find grotesqueries and gore either entertaining or amusing. I can accept their presence in a book, but there needs to be a balance. I don't necessarily mean a happy ending. But I do mean more than simply pulling back the curtain and showing us the horror in all its detailed carnage and fury.

Chris delivers what I'm looking for: good, old-fashioned storytelling with a contemporary sensibility.There's no lack of tension, and he doesn't back away from the consequences of the darkness he has set upon his characters. But neither does he wallow in them.

I love his deft touch with his characters, his crisp prose, and how he lets the story unfold. I like the fact that the Catholic priest called in to help is a good man with an open mind. And I especially like the relationship Chris builds between his characters—how they maintain their faith in, and their trust and love for, one another through some very trying circumstances.

We should all be so lucky as to have such friends.

 
If you were new to Chris's work, you now know how good
The Ferryman
is. If you've already read the mass market edition, then, just like me, you'll be happy to have a fresh new trade paperback edition for your library shelf.