The Hawley Book of the Dead (44 page)

Simon Magus was slipping through the web of his own making. He clawed at the ropes, but couldn’t gain a purchase. He heard the cries of women, then a voice said, “I’ll cut the string now, Caleigh. Don’t be afraid.” He reached once more, into thin air. Then he fell. Before he hit the stage floor, he heard the voice again, using his own magic word against him.
“I-undias!”

Voss’s hand gripped my ankle, but still I soared. I felt weightless and powerful, as if the wind held me, kept me from harm. I soared over Hawley, saw it all laid out before me. I saw the first Revelation in this New World, this New England, her long hair trailing behind her, her eyes blazing, holding a sword up. My sword. The blue snakes on her wrists writhed like living things. I saw Hawley as it was, like the mural on our dining room wall, all the old houses and barns resurrected, lights burning in the windows. I saw Grace and Fai on their horses, Queen Anne’s lace in their hair, riding through Hitchcock Meadow. I flew between the worlds.

I landed softly in a swell of snow. Only a few flakes drifted down. The clouds parted, and the full moon cast her lemony glow on Hawley Five Corners, on dying Rigel Voss. His hand flapped, reaching for me. He gripped my arm, and I knew everything. Even without the Book, I knew it all.

In the days after Maggie’s death, Rigel Voss tried to be normal, tried to make sure Alice wouldn’t suspect anything. But he was distracted, couldn’t sleep, and when he did, he had dreams that shook him to the core. He would wake drenched in sweat, panting. Once he woke up yelling, he didn’t know what. Alice smoothed his hair, wiped the sweat from him with a cool washcloth. She didn’t ask, but he could tell by her silence that she knew something was horribly wrong.

He still dressed in his suits and went to “work.” He would drive to another town, sit in a library, and scan the local newspapers for mention of his terrible deed, then find a dark bar where he could drink the afternoon away. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t make a plan, had no idea what to do, except try to protect Alice from the truth while he waited for the torrent of discovery and punishment to break over him. It didn’t matter that he’d never meant to kill the girl. He played the scene over and over in his head, how it would be when Alice found out her husband was going to prison and she’d have their child alone. But it didn’t happen that way. She never did find out what he’d done, yet the reality was worse than anything Rigel Voss could have imagined.

Five days after he’d killed Maggie Hamilton and dumped her body, he returned home to find his old friends Rivera and Lindley sitting in an unmarked car outside his house. His heart started racing, like a marathon was pounding through his chest. Alice was on the screened porch, as usual. She waved to him as he pulled up. He thought of driving around back, ignoring the agents, but they saw him and stepped out of their car. He had no choice but to park behind them, greet them.

“Rigel, good to see ya.” Rivera didn’t take off his sunglasses. Neither did Lindley. Voss didn’t like not being able to see their eyes.

“Looks like you got a pretty good gig.” Lindley patted him on the lapel. “Still wearing the nice suits. What, you get consulting to Monsanto, GE? I hear the pay’s kickin’.”

Voss forced a pale smile to creep over his face.

“Yeah, it’s a shame we didn’t come here to shoot the breeze. I could go for a cold one.” Rivera was a bullish man, ugly and smart, smarter than Lindley, who’d gone to Princeton but was languid as melting butter. Voss wondered if Rivera had been promoted, if he had Voss’s old office now. It was the last thing that mattered, though. Rivera wasn’t here for congratulations.

“We hate to trouble you and the missus.” He nodded toward Alice, who had opened the screen door, taken a few steps out toward them, now stood at the top of the stone steps. “It’s about that college kid. Maggie Hamilton. She’s gone and disappeared. Have to ask you a few questions. Hunter wants to know can you come to Springfield.”

It was bad. Worse than he thought. They wanted him to come in. He turned toward Alice. He could see her fingers plucking at the ribbons of her dress, knotting and unknotting them. A pink cotton maternity dress, the white ribbons at the collar fluttering in the breeze where she’d loosened them. He said, “Let me tell my wife.” The words were thick in his throat.

He slogged up the steps, knew their eyes were following him. When he got to her, he saw her face was white, the freckles like dark constellations. “Honey, I have to go back to work. Only for a little while.”

“Rigel, you were just
at
work.” She nodded toward Rivera and Lindley.
“They’ve been sitting out there for the last two hours. Didn’t they know where you were? I brought them Cokes, asked them to come in, but they wouldn’t. Just said they’d wait for you in the car. What’s going on?”

He was hot all over. He scraped the sweaty hair from his forehead. “It’s … nothing. Glitch in a surveillance. They need me back there. Please, Alice, just go in the house. I’ll be back soon.”

She folded her arms, scrunched them over her breasts. “Not till you tell me what’s really going on.” She narrowed her eyes at him, and it was like she read his mind. She could do that, he knew. He just wished she wouldn’t do it now. “You didn’t go to work, did you? That’s why they came here. You weren’t at Bay State, or at the field office. You haven’t been going, have you?”

He couldn’t look at her. He looked at the flat blue slice of river.

“Shit,
shit
. How are we going to live, Rigel? This baby could come any day. What about the insurance, tell me that? Do we still even have health insurance?”

He didn’t know what to say. This was only the beginning, and he wished she wasn’t so upset now, because it was only going to get worse. He reached out to her, to comfort her, but she spun away, tripped, and she started falling. He saw the surprise on her face. He leapt to catch her, but his foot caught the iron railing and he fell hard on the stones. By the time he got to his feet, he saw Rivera and Lindley running, and Alice’s body still tumbling, her head lolling and hitting each stone, her hair dark and wet with blood.

He never was questioned about Maggie. That day and the days until the funeral were a blur to him. He remembered Rivera bringing him coffee at the hospital, which he drank because it was there in his hand. He remembered a doctor with a pale meaty face explaining that they’d tried to save the baby. He remembered falling into their bed that night, waking in his bloody clothes. Although he didn’t remember cradling Alice’s shattered head to him, that’s what he must have done. Her sister, Emily, came out for the funeral, with their mother. He didn’t remember where they stayed, or what they said. He remembered the graveyard, and someone pressing a clod of dirt into his hand, hearing the thump as it dropped on the coffin.

He remembered most clearly the day after the funeral, when he packed a bag, unplugged every appliance, got in his car and drove. His first stop was a house just off the common in Amherst. It was a grand house, Victorian, not as old as some but you could tell it was owned by someone wealthy. He went up the walk, didn’t bother to knock, just opened the door and stepped into the sunny foyer, stopped and reached for his Glock. He listened until he heard the buzz of a coffee grinder. He followed it, found his way into the kitchen, where a black-haired man in a blue bathrobe was standing at the sink. Voss stepped lightly up to him, stuck the gun in his back, whipped his hand over the man’s mouth. The coffee cup clattered, but the man didn’t make a sound. Didn’t even struggle. Maybe he’d been expecting something like this, someday.

“Okay, Professor,” Voss said into his ear. “You’re not going to try to get away. You’re going to walk with me to your study, turn around, and lock the door.” The man did as he was told. As soon as he’d thrown the bolt, Voss let him go. “Sit down,” he told the man, who sat in an expensive leather armchair. Voss kept the gun to his head. “All you need to do is tell me all about the experiments, everything you know. I won’t hurt you. I’ll go away and you’ll never hear from me again. Unless you tell anyone I was here. Or you tell me lies. Do you understand?”

The professor did understand. He told Rigel Voss everything. The scientists had a big government grant to study this man, to test whether he truly had the power to communicate with the dead, to bridge the gap between the worlds of the living and the dead. He told the scientists amazing things, things he could know only by this ability. It was uncanny, what he had told about their dead mothers, uncles, brothers, wives. He told them he could go there, to where the dead were. When they’d hooked him up to an EKG, the results were really quite remarkable. Unfortunately, just a few days since, the man had escaped. Nowhere now to be found. Poof. Abracadabra.

Were there photographs of this man? Any way to trace him? Unfortunately not. They never knew his real name, it turned out. And curiously, all the photos they had taken of him had vanished.

No, he had no knowledge of any red-haired girl. A girl
had
been seen in the tunnels, as Voss himself knew. But no one at the university knew
who she was. She might have been involved in the escape. Another thing the man had told them, under duress, was that there were more beings like him. That was really all he could tell Voss. But for Voss it was more than enough. It gave him something to hope for, even beyond avenging his wife.

The professor accompanied him to the door, as if they were old friends. He shook his hand and wished Rigel Voss good luck in his endeavors. Then he’d said a word in parting that Rigel Voss didn’t understand and never could remember.

From that day, he called himself by many names. Only once again by the name of a star, when he had the opportunity to kill off his old self, to be resurrected as anybody and nobody. But the day after Alice’s funeral was the day Rigel Voss truly disappeared, began his quest to find the red-haired girl, who must either know how to speak to the dead, or knew the man who could. Rigel Voss had never seen the man’s face. But he had seen the red-haired girl. He would find her. He would find out how to do it, how to go to his own dead, to his Alice. He would hold her again, tell her he loved her beyond everything. He would keep her from all harm, in between the worlds, where they might be together, forever.

I knew he’d never get up again. Blood bubbled between his speaking lips. I bent to hear the words. “How,” he whispered. “Just tell me … 
how
.” Rigel Voss was insane, he was obsessed. And now I knew beyond a doubt that he was enchanted. Who knew where the insanity stopped and the enchantment began? It had brought him to his death, and he still couldn’t let go. But I knew that kind of crazy. I thought of his wife, his Alice, falling. I thought how he had loved her.

I leaned in, whispered back. “I’m sorry.” His eyes dulled. Snow melted on his cheeks and forehead, on the dark stain of blood that ran from thigh to ankle.

I was going to tell him I didn’t know how it was that I could walk between the worlds, how I could visit with my dead again. Then I realized I
did
know.

I told dying Rigel Voss, my compatriot in grief, “It’s magic.”

I knelt by the dead man in the bloodied snow. I didn’t feel the cold anymore. The Book was still in my pocket. I opened it, felt myself falling from the wintry landscape of Hawley Five Corners, through time or space to land on the Sea Road, among the yellow blooms of gorse. This time I ran to the end of the path, to the seawall, threw myself into Jeremy’s arms, pressed into his mackintoshed shoulder.

“If I had died, if he had killed me, would I be here with you now forever?”

He took my face in his hands, gazed at me, his eyes the color of sea. “It couldn’t have happened that way. We wouldn’t have let it. You have things to do in your world, Reve. And we both know it isn’t my world anymore. So now, you have to let me go.” He pulled me close then, hummed in my ear, a song we both knew. David Bowie’s “Golden Years.” The band had played it at our wedding. We swayed together, our bodies melded. We danced on Kilcoole Beach, danced one last time, while Jeremy sang the familiar words to me, until the sun dropped below the Irish Sea.

In the last of the light, when I felt Jeremy slipping from me, the beach dissolving around us, I grabbed his hands, held them as tightly as I could. I felt the golden band of his wedding ring, wrapped my fingers around its substance, felt his flesh turn to air, cold air. I opened my eyes to the falling snow of Hawley. I was back. Rigel Voss lay near me. I thought of all he had gone through to assuage his longing for Alice, his dead wife. In my palm lay Jeremy’s wedding ring, that circle of gold we had buried with him. It felt different, changed. The outside of the band was no longer smooth. I turned and went to the house, to the light.

When I examined the ring, I found our initials, and the date of our wedding, which we’d had engraved inside the band. There was an inscription now on the outer side of the ring as well, words I knew would be Jeremy’s last gift to me:
HEARTS HOLD MAGIC
.