Asher is pleased by this speech, which is so brilliant that of course the boy can think of nothing to say as they arrive at the church door. This might be the first time in his miserable life that he’s been told the truth, and it pierces him like a needle, sews shut his lips, secures his tongue to the floor of his mouth.
“Lie facedown,” Asher commands, and after a hesitation the boy obeys, prostrate on the church stoop.
Asher produces the key and disengages the deadbolt and pushes open the door.
The woman, Ophelia, is somewhere in the cloistered gloom, no doubt quaking in a far corner, afraid that he has come to kill her.
“Slither like a worm, Colson Fielding. Slither inside as if you’re just another worm like all those feeding on the dead in the room below.”
Prodded into motion by the shotgun barrel, the debased and humiliated boy pulls himself across the threshold, into the pale blade of light—a light of false hope—that the day thrusts through the doorway.
Asher is excited by this performance, achieving a satisfaction that is the most intense feeling he can experience now that he has denied himself the thrill of seminal release. Colson’s every wriggle and hitch causes Asher to shiver with pleasure.
When the boy is across the threshold, Asher closes the door and locks it. He stands there for a moment in a post-rapture bliss, eyes closed and face upturned, basking in the noon warmth, imagining the day when the sun will never again shine on any human face and Earth will be restored.
35
The Ford Explorer that Joanna Chase rented in Billings was equipped with a navigation system, but even twenty-four years after leaving Montana for New Mexico, she required no map or guide. A two-hour drive brought her to the river-rock posts flanking the private lane that turned off the public highway. She passed under the sign that bore the name of the ranch and a silhouette of a running horse.
The house was not visible from there. Gripped by sudden doubt, before she might be seen by whoever currently lived here, she braked to a stop and sat listening to the engine idling.
Evidently the summer had been blessed with ample rain. The fields were lush and green, the upward-rolling land as sensuous as she remembered it. Scattered wildflowers jeweled the meadows: topaz yellow and sapphire blue and coral pink. More than a mile ahead, the first grove of willows clustered where the land plateaued, green cascades that screened the stables and the manager’s bungalow from view.
Curiosity vied with a nameless anxiety, wistfulness with a cold sense of an unspecified threat. She hadn’t anticipated the intensity or complexity of her emotional reaction to Rustling Willows. A guilt she could not explain contested with a childlike joy that she found likewise inexplicable. A pang of grief surely related to the deaths of her parents, but it also arose from another loss that hovered just beyond the limits of memory.
She’d been as much harried back here as she had been lured by vivid repetitive dreams, by some power taking control of her cars and her TV, by the woman on the phone with the vaguely familiar voice. Jojo, I am spiraling into Bedlam. The big dark sky. The terrible big dark sky. Only you can help me. Everything that had recently happened supported one inescapable conclusion: that she didn’t know the full truth of her childhood; that back in the day, she’d had secrets she kept from her parents, from everyone; that around the time Auntie Kat had taken her away to Santa Fe, someone had somehow washed from her memory those same secrets.
Perhaps everyone entertained a story of his or her childhood that to one extent or another was a colorful reimagining of what had actually occurred, smoothing away the bigger fears and errors with a plaster of nostalgia. If so, they could be content with an alternate history because they believed it to be the complete and sparkling truth.
However, Joanna now knew that her memories—from the age of six until she left Rustling Willows before her tenth birthday—had been creased and shaped as if by an origami master, until the truth was hidden in the many folds of the new construction. Even if she had not been a novelist with an obsessive inquisitiveness, she would have been unable to live in ignorance of what had occurred in those years of her youth. Regardless of what risks she might be taking, what dangers might await, she had no choice but to go forward.
She took her foot off the brake and drove toward the plateau, toward the lake in which her mother had died, toward the fields beyond the house, where her father had been thrown from his horse and attacked by a grizzly bear, toward all the long-ago days when Jimmy Two Eyes had found his voice for only her, when no one else was near enough to hear.