I touched the corner of his elbow, and he jerked it away from me; then he removed the fist from his wounded eye.
It shocked and pained me to see that it was dark, and he regarded me with only the one brilliant slit.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, unsure of how stupid a question it was.
Okay, he echoed, almost as if he wasn’t sure what it meant.
“You’re hurt,” I tried to clarify. “Do you need help?”
Then I did feel silly. Whatever he was, he’d just absorbed or ignored a full barrel’s worth of bullets, and the only damage done appeared to be a partial squint.
With a surprising gentleness, he pushed me away and turned to look over the side of the Tower. I joined him.
Below, the fog had consumed whatever fell through it, and the spirits were swarming over the spot where the man had landed. I couldn’t see what they were doing, but it probably didn’t matter. It was not the sort of fall that a man would survive.
Or that’s what I hoped, even if it was wrong of me.
The Sentry looked up and past me then, and I wondered why until I heard the human voices rise. “They’re coming,” I said, but he already knew.
I will stay here.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want.”
The dead are my children. I will watch over them, so they can rest. They will need no wings to the kingdom.
Over one shoulder, I saw Jamie being coddled by Benny and Dana. Over the other, the police were rallying—drawn by the shockingly loud sound of a body falling so many stories onto the rocky, grassy ground.
“Thank you,” I said, because nothing else seemed appropriate.
I couldn’t tell if he understood. I didn’t know if he was replying in kind or only echoing me when he said, a moment before vanishing,
Thank you.
18
Winding Down
“I just have one question, then,” Dave said, pulling his hands back behind his head and reclining against the couch.
“One?” Lu and I said it together.
Benny groaned, and rose from his seat beside Dave. “I’ve got dozens, but I don’t think we’re ever going to know the whole thing.”
I had more answers than I probably deserved, but there were still holes that would likely never be patched. Mostly, all I had was a lot of speculation buttressed with a handful of facts. Together with Jamie, Dana, and some help from Pete Buford’s confused and brokenhearted uncle the pieces had fallen into something like a whole.
Pete had broken his neck on the hard Georgia clay. So far as the authorities knew or cared, he’d toppled during a struggle with me and Dana. We’d pushed his arm up. He’d fired those rounds into the air, and we were not hurt.
Of my own group of friends, Jamie had gotten the worst of it: He’d cracked his collarbone and dislocated his shoulder when he fell halfway down the stairs while he was being shoved up them by Pete. He’d thrown a fit about going in the ambulance. I’d almost had to sit on him to make him shut up and go.
He’d caught up to his date at the hospital. She’d received a few stitches and been turned loose, not having been hurt as badly as anyone feared; but she’d waited for him once she heard he was coming. I resigned myself to the idea that I might be forced to get to know her, as he seemed inclined to keep her around.
Or maybe that was just his painkillers talking.
Dana had collected her husband’s body and returned to Carolina, but not before offering Benny and me jobs working with her crew. I had thought Benny was going to explode from sheer bliss at the prospect. Money for art supplies and a job in the paranormal—it was as if the mothership had called him home.
At first it had annoyed me, the fast and opportunistic way he leaped at the chance to flee the valley. Everyone here talks about wanting to leave Chattanooga. Everyone complains about how much it sucks, and how little opportunity there is; and everyone daydreams about going somewhere else. But few people do. It’s a sucking vortex of a place.
When we argued about it, he told me I was being selfish, and that I didn’t understand. He told me that it wasn’t the same for people who didn’t live on the mountain, and didn’t have educations or trust funds.
I was shocked to hear the frantic delight in his words. I don’t think I ever really grasped how trapped he’d felt all this time. I was also a little shocked at how disappointed I was to know he was going.
I told him that he’d be back. He said I was probably right, but he hoped I wasn’t.
I, however, declined Dana’s offer, using school as an excuse. I was thinking about going back and finishing up that history major, or maybe even going in for some psychology somewhere. There was a lot about the world I didn’t understand—a lot about people, anyway.
I really was tempted to leave with Dana, but the time wasn’t right yet—or perhaps I was a bigger coward than I liked to think. So I stayed. Just for the time being. I told her I’d keep it in mind, though, and that I was open to the idea of the occasional collaboration. She told me to take my time.
Speaking of understanding people, I tried to go back and visit Kitty, but the nurses and orderlies were reluctant to let me see her. They said she wasn’t doing well. I thought that was odd. I’d figured that once Green Eyes had gone away, she’d return to whatever state of normal had suited her best all these years.
But that’s not how it happened. They’d been medicating her a lot lately. She’d been temperamental and unpredictable.
I suggested to the nurse that maybe she just needed someone to talk to, but she wouldn’t go against the doctor’s recommendation of solitude. Give the meds time to work on her, and see if it brought her back around—that’s what they told me.
I had a feeling it wouldn’t work.
She was a Russian doll of isolation. She lived in Chattanooga, where social and economic stagnation is the norm; was imprisoned in an asylum on a peninsula; locked in a small room; and driven to distraction by the voices in her head.
No pill or injection on Earth could change that.
I’ll keep trying to reach her, though. I have to. Harry and Dave and Lu were right—I need to know that there’s someone else who understands and believes. And I need to remember what happens if I forget and go at it alone.
And I swore to keep an open mind. I didn’t have any choice. Every time I think the universe is beginning to make sense, something crazy knocks it all down and I have to start over, reconstructing my worldview as I go.
If I can’t stay flexible, I will surely crack.
“All right. What’s your one question?” I asked, tossing a pillow at Dave and joining Benny in the kitchen, where he was collecting snack food, as had become downright traditional.
“It’s this—that Pete guy was looking for Confederate gold, right? Well, if he’d been left alone, or at least not caught, do you think he would’ve found it?”
Lu shook her head, answering for me. “Darling, there is no way at all to know whether or not he’d have found what he was looking for out there.”
“And even if it was there,” I added. “Who knows if it would’ve led him to amazing riches? His uncle said he was looking for a watch that would lead him to someone’s body in the hope that the body would also have a ledger that led to Confederate gold. But that’s just a big fat rural legend.”
“A rural legend?” Benny asked. He passed me a jar of guacamole from the fridge.
“As opposed to an urban legend, yes. There’s no Confederate gold out there. I mean, come on. Someone would’ve found it by now. Someone would be sitting pretty in Mexico, or out in Texas where the war didn’t do much damage. Pete was just a deluded old redneck with the world’s wackiest get-rich-quick scheme.”
Benny shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe he just lived here too long, and he wanted out.”
No trace of the Sentry had ever been found. There was nothing to indicate he’d ever existed, or that he’d ever made a stand at the Wilder Tower. Within a week, the park reopened and visitors roamed with freshly morbid curiosity.
Dana was worried that he’d run amuck with too much freedom, and maybe she had a good reason to be concerned; but so far, so good. I haven’t heard any reports of hair-covered humanoids trashing cars and knocking heads together, so I hope he’s struck his own balance between discretion and duty.
The stories are leaking out again—not the gesticulating ghosts, but the older stories, the ones about a sentinel who watches, and waits, and does not sleep. The boogeyman has returned, and the dead are at peace.
And everywhere around the valley, parents tell warning tales about him again. They frighten their little ones by dropping their voices and waving their fingers as they talk about the giant monster who walks the fields at night.
If I had a child, I would tell her stories too.
But I would tell her about a tower and a knight covered in hair instead of shining armor. I would tell her how hard it is to run in the dark, and how tricky it is to climb hundreds of stairs up into the night. I would remind her that not all heroes are easy to understand, and that there are bigger reasons to rise to the occasion than the rescuing of princesses.
And if she’s any kid of mine, I expect she’ll understand.
I told myself that this stop would be easier in the morning, in the bright orange light before the sun got too high. I zipped down the mountain in my freshly repaired Death Nugget, and went out to the main drag of a north Chattanooga suburb.
I turned off Dayton Boulevard and drove down a winding two-lane road beside a cemetery. A pond full of ducks flapped to excited attention as I puttered past.
Off to the right, a narrow strip of pavement veered up a hill. I followed it. Even farther to the right, an even narrower band of half-paved road squeaked between fluffy arches of bright green foliage.
It seemed there was nowhere to go—the road was swallowed by the forest. I couldn’t see beyond ten feet in front of my hood.
But I kept going, creeping slowly, with my foot off the gas, but off the brake too. My car crawled over the gravel, over the rocks, over the branches that had fallen or toppled or been blown over the path.