Chapter 93
I picked up two coffees and a bag of donuts at Jimmy’s on my way back to the Motor Inn.
Sabine Drew’s car was parked in the lot when I pulled in.
She knocked on my door a couple of minutes later.
I handed her a coffee and gave her a choice of donuts.
I sat on the bed, my back against the headboard, while Sabine took the room’s only chair.
“How did your visit to Spero go?” she asked.
“I poked a stick through the bars,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s what I’m being paid to do.”
“I thought you were being paid to investigate Scott Theriault’s death.”
“That too, but poking sticks through bars is fun.”
“You’re a strange man.”
“Says the woman who talks to the dead.”
Sabine’s eyes softened, transforming her face, so that features severe in repose, like a medieval fresco of a saint, were closer to handsome.
“Says the man who also talks to the dead. That makes us quite the pair.”
“Except it seems I have competition for your affections. Who is he?”
“Tim Sadlier.”
“The same Tim Sadlier who works at Spero?”
“Yes.” Now it was her turn to spot a change in me, but it was a tempering, not a softening. “Why does that bother you?”
I saw again the branded bags from the Smiling Seed Company, in the toolshed that served as Sadlier’s den.
“Everything about Spero bothers me,” I said.
“Tim has agreed to speak with you. He’ll tell you what he can.”
“Okay,” I said neutrally.
“Okay,” Sabine echoed. “But we have a lot to talk about before we get to him.”
“Where do you want to start?”
“With what’s out there in the woods.”
Sabine had set aside her coffee. When she was animated, she used her hands to communicate as much as her voice. The cup was getting in the way.
“Death is inconsistent,” she said, “or better to say that it is consistent in its action but less so in its consequences. What persists after, if anything, is not a consciousness entire but fragments, mainly feelings: hurt, anger, confusion, sadness—and fear.”
I thought that Scott Theriault’s grandfather, with his theories of death and persistence, might have understood, but I said nothing. I wanted to listen.
“You can’t conceive of how frightened the dead are,” Sabine continued.
“Or perhaps you can; others, less so. The transition from this life to the next is like standing on the edge of an abyss and being told to step off, with no guarantee that the alteration in your circumstances will constitute an improvement. Fear is the most natural response.
“So they have all these emotions, but without a capacity for reason. The dead can’t be reasoned with, only comforted, so I try to provide reassurance before sending them on their way.
It needs to be done quickly before they become trapped in a cycle, where the dominant feeling becomes so overwhelming that it occludes all else.
Have you ever seen an animal in a zoo repetitively pacing its cage because restriction has driven it insane? The dead might empathize.”
She pointed to the window, and the river beyond.
“The day I arrived here,” she said, “I saw a woman standing by the shore of Big Island with part of her head missing. The wound was very neat, as if her skull had been marked into quarters before one was excised with a blade. She’s been out there for a long time, and when the sun eventually dies and our world comes to an end, she may still be present to bear witness, she and those like her.
In the moments before the earth is engulfed by the sun, only the dead will stare.
“But the woman on Big Island has a form, and that’s not always so.
What remains after death is so primal and concentrated, yet so abstract, that it may not be able to hold a shape.
What I encountered in the woods was formless, but composed of emotions from more than one person.
How long have people been dying out there in the wilderness?
Thousands of years, I expect. It’s not surprising that facets of them might remain.
What is unusual is that they should conjoin, because that’s another thing about death: It’s lonely.
We die alone. And when the dead come searching, it’s for the living, not for those like themselves.
“What I’m telling you is that I’ve never before come into contact with a congregation of the dead, bound together with hostile purpose, not like this one.
A family, yes, or members of a community—unity in life reflected after—but not disparate souls, some dead for centuries, others barely in the grave, forced together.
And in that residue, I sensed Scott Theriault, or the vengeful part of him. The rest is gone—”
I interrupted her for the first time.
“What about Mallory Norton?”
Sabine shook her head.
“Only through Scott.”
“What does that mean?”
“Something of her drives his hate—it was fleeting, but it was there—though nothing of her endures.”
“Why?”
“Who can say? Because if she’s dead, her passing was sudden and relatively painless? Or the opposite: it was drawn out and agonizing, and she was grateful when the hurting came to an end.”
Sabine picked at donut crumbs, wetting a finger to lift them to her mouth.
It was such a quotidian act in the midst of an odd conversation, and I was reminded that she lived ceaselessly with what she spoke of, and so the extraordinary had become as common to her as the salvaging of the final flakes from a pastry.
“I said that some aspect of Mallory Norton was fueling Scott’s hate,” she resumed, “but that hate has been weaponized by an outside force, the same force that’s binding together the lost dead of the Kennebec.
It’s using them for its own ends—and to amuse itself, because I also felt that from it—but it’s not part of those woods.
It’s trapped in them, but it’s learned to reach out from its prison to manipulate its environment, and that reach is extending all the time.
It’s filled with memories, but it moved so fast that I had an impression only of agelessness.
But just as one can identify familiar faces in a crowd, I picked up on names from it.
Among them was yours. Another was that of your friend Louis. ”
“What does it want?” I asked.
“An end to its suffering.”
“And does it have a name?”
“Yes,” said Sabine. “It calls itself Brightwell.”