CHAPTER 25 ALL THINGS MUST END
ALL THINGS MUST END
The pain hasn’t reached my brain yet but I know it’s coming.
It’s like a train approaching from a distance.
When it hits me I can’t even scream. I just lie on the ground wondering if this is what death feels like and how—if I somehow manage to survive—I’ll never lie to anyone again by telling them that death is peaceful.
I try to roll over but find that I’m still maybe a foot off the ground. Turning my head just a little farther hurts like hell, but it’s then that I realize I’ve landed on top of the monster. I scramble off him as he lies face down in the snow.
“Meka!” my dad’s voice cries out. He’s looking down on me from the window three floors above.
My body begins to register my injuries. My ankle is shattered but now there’s a blooming pain over my ribs on the right side. A coppery taste fills my mouth. I groan and try to stand but it’s impossible now. A wave of nausea overtakes me and the world tilts.
Suddenly a figure stirs in the snow and I realize with a sudden stab of panic that Noah has tumbled out of the window, too, and without the benefit of having anything to land on. I scramble over to him, pulling myself through the snow, ignoring the pain.
Noah’s left leg is broken at the thigh and it juts out at a ninety degree angle from the rest of his body. His hand, which was barely holding on anyway, has come loose and is lying in the snow several feet away from him.
“Noah!” I scream. “Noah, get up!”
“I can’t,” he says.
“No, I know,” I say, resting my head against his chest. “Your leg is broken.”
Noah looks down the length of his body and shakes his head at the exposed bit of bone sticking out of his leg. “Oh, man. We’re gonna have to fix that.”
A rustling sound draws my attention. Like the slasher at the end of some shitty horror movie, the monster is attempting to get up one final time.
I scramble back, knocking my ankle into Noah and sending a new jolt of pain through my body.
The monster’s torso shifts as he lifts his arms to push himself up but as he does, his head tumbles back down into the snow.
I scream. I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried.
The head rolls forward, then stops with its eyes fixed on me.
I’d put the knife in at the back of his neck and the force of the fall must have pushed the blade all the way through.
The silver point of it is sticking up out of the snow near the monster’s lower body, which is now feeling around on the ground in front of it.
By sheer will I draw myself up, trying desperately to not put any weight on my ankle.
The monster captures his own head and sets it atop his severed neck where a portion of the spinal column is exposed.
He spears his own head, using the spine as a pike.
The head sits at the wrong angle, but its gaze finds me again.
He lunges forward and I have to throw myself into the snow to get away from him.
I scramble across the frozen ground on hands and knees. When I look back, he’s readjusting the angle of his own severed head to find me again. He lurches through the snow as I pull myself up and stagger back.
“Get away from me!” I scream.
The monster bounds forward and catches me in a bear hug, lifting me off the ground. He smiles as he presses me close to him. I can’t smell him because I can’t inhale, he’s squeezing me too tight, but I can feel the rot on him.
Shapes dance around the edges of my vision when suddenly there’s a flurry of footsteps and a loud thwack!
The monster’s head flies away from his body and my dad stands panting, gripping a plank of wood like a baseball bat.
The monster’s hold loosens, and I wriggle out of his arms. My dad slams the board against the backs of the monster’s knees.
They buckle and the body collapses into a kneeling position.
“Finish it, Meka,” Noah shouts. “Hurry!”
I hop through the freezing snow and grab the knife.
The monster’s arms strike out, missing me by just a few inches.
I hold the knife in my trembling hand, dragging my crushed ankle behind me as I find the monster’s head.
I look into his eyes, eyes that were maybe human once but not anymore.
I reach down and shove the head toward Noah who shrieks but corrals it near him as my dad and I shove the monster’s body flat against the ground.
I remove the monster’s arms and legs from his torso.
Cutting through the rotted flesh, it’s clear to me that this abomination had no one of any skill to care for him.
His body is in all stages of decay all at once.
The newer flesh stinks and in his lower limbs maggots have made themselves at home.
I vomit into the surrounding snow twice before we’re done.
The head continues to blink and the mouth moves as if the monster is trying to speak but can’t. When the terrible work is finished, the monster lies in six separate pieces, all of them squirming and wriggling together.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“We take it back inside,” my dad says. “And then we burn this whole goddammed place to the ground.”
I help move Noah to the hallway just inside the door, and then my dad and I carry the dismembered pieces of Dippel’s monster—Frankenstein’s monster—back into the bowels of the castle.
I am in so much pain my vision blurs but we have to do this.
Camille is still there with Roger and what is left of Morris and Langan.
They are still as corpses and none of them speak or move as we work.
We pile the pieces of the monster on the raised platform in the center.
The head tries to bite me as I arrange it alongside the other body parts so I quickly remove the lower jaw, breaking it off at the joints, and toss it away.
I consider taking out the eyes with the knife but I worry my dad and Noah will think I’ve lost my mind.
Maybe I have. All of this feels like a terrible dream.
Mom watches, her gaze far away as my dad kneels down next to her. She turns her face toward him. “You have to destroy the book so that this can never happen again.”
“No,” my dad says, shaking his head. “I won’t do that.”
“No, Dad,” I say. “That’s a good idea. We should get rid of it. I don’t want this—this—whatever this is to go on. If we destroy the book, nobody can ever bring back some monster from the dead.”
“You don’t understand,” my dad says. “I—”
There’s a shuffling noise from the top of the stairs. Noah has managed to drag himself down to the lower level. I limp up to him and help bring him the rest of the way down. He sits next to my mom.
My dad glances at me, then my mom, then Noah. “I lied,” he says. “About the unmaking ritual. It exists but not in the way they thought.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “We can unmake them?” The wriggling pile of limbs is visible out of the corner of my eye. “Let’s do that, then.”
My dad shakes his head. “The unmaking is simply the destruction of the book. It holds the names of all the reanimates. We destroy the book, we destroy them. All of them.”
I look to my mom, to Noah. I’m about to say something when my mom grabs my hand and holds it tight.
“Meka, baby, I need you to listen to me,” she says.
“No,” I say. I don’t want to hear it. I can’t. This isn’t going to happen. We will find another way.”
“Listen,” my mom says sternly. “What your dad did, it was done out of grief. I don’t fault him for it. I probably would have done the same thing.”
I try to pull away from her but she holds me. My dad puts his hand on my back.
“I wanted us to have more time,” my dad says quietly. “I didn’t think about what it meant for your mom. I wanted her with me, with us, and I—I was wrong.”
“No,” I say. I can’t form any other words. “No.”
“Yes,” Mom says. “I don’t regret it. I don’t regret being here with you all these years.
I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but look at me, Meka.
Really look at me. I am literally falling apart.
I am tired. Exhausted, if we’re being honest. Every day is like a race to keep my body from decaying and I am losing. I have been for a while.”
“I—I couldn’t tell,” I say as the tears stream down my face. “You’re always perfect to me.”
My mom pulls me closer and I lie on her chest.
“You have to let me go,” she says.
“No,” I say. “I can keep you alive. I can make you stay.”
“That’s not what I want,” my mom says firmly. “This is the way it should have been all along. We have been living on stolen time. It’s okay to let me go, baby.”
I don’t want to even though I know that makes me selfish.
Maybe I’ll be selfish. It’s better than this pain that’s threatening to choke the life from me.
I stare at my mom. She’s suffering and I want her to continue to suffer because I love her?
I want her to stay even though that’s not what she wants?
No. No, that can’t be right. I lift my head and stare into Noah’s face.
He doesn’t have to say anything for me to know he agrees with my mom.
“I wish I could stay with you forever, Meeks,” Noah says. “That’s really all I ever wanted anyway.” He holds out his good hand and I take it. “Burn the book. Tell my mom I’m sorry. I know she didn’t know what would happen, but I need her to know I’m not mad.”
I can only nod.
“I love you, Meeks,” he says. “I wish I had told you sooner. I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s okay,” I say through a torrent of tears. “I know now. That’s all that matters.”
My dad sobs openly as he embraces my mom.
I pull Noah closer to me and kiss him, breathe him in, touch his face and his hair.
This must have been what my dad felt when he knelt by my mom’s body on the road that night.
This is the grief, the longing that drove him to do what he did.
I don’t think I fully understood until this moment.
“I wish we had more time,” Noah says. “We were supposed to have more time.”
When I let him go, I turn back to my mom.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you,” she says. “More than anything in this world.”
My dad takes the book and sets it on the floor. Roger cradles Camille and it’s then that I realize Langan’s body had been torn into multiple other pieces. From the blank expression on Roger’s mangled face, I think he might have been the one who did it.
Noah sits next to my mom. They put their arms around each other and then, I can’t watch anymore. I close my eyes.
I hear my dad remove one of the torches from its place on the wall, his hollow footsteps, a soft whoosh, and then a wave of heat breaks across my body.
When I open my eyes, the book is nearly disintegrated and Mom, Noah, Camille, Roger, Morris, and the jumbled mass of dismembered reanimate parts that used to be the monster lie still. They’re all gone.
I collapse into a heap and my dad comes to me and wraps me up. We stay this way for what feels like forever until my dad takes my face in his hands.
“We need to go home,” he says. “And we need to take Mom and Noah with us. They don’t deserve to be here with these—these monsters.” He casts an angry glance at the pile of body parts.
We move Mom and Noah to the snowcat one at a time.
A somber procession performed in complete silence.
Then I help my dad tear up a pile of wooden planks from the upper floor and haul them down to the sublevel.
We make a bonfire of the boards and of the monster parts.
My dad empties three cans of gasoline that had been stored for the snowcat and tosses a torch into the center.
We rush outside and wait for everything inside to be engulfed before we finally get into the snowcat and leave the castle, the monster, and the horrors of our strange family tree behind us.
We don’t have a funeral for my mom. People around me think she died after a brief illness, and we let them come to the house to offer condolences. There is no wake. No burial.
Later in the week, after my ankle has been set and put in a cast, I take the small box that contains her ashes and scatter them into the waterfall by my house.
I think that’s what she would have wanted.
Not only to always be in a place that was so beautiful but to know, without any doubt, that if somehow the book were to be recreated, if me or my dad found that we could read from it again, that there was no way of bringing her remains back.
That’s how it should be. Death is meant to be final.
The period at the end of a sentence. Her death had been more like a comma, with more yet to say.
I think she’s at peace now and I can’t be anything but grateful that we had the time we did.
I miss her every second of the day, but she’s never far from me. Not really.
Noah’s second funeral is small. Just me, my dad, and Miss Cliff.
Nobody knows why we all decided to gather at the Cliff family tomb on a random Wednesday morning, but I think they’ll probably say it is grief and that visiting the place is how we cope.
The second visit which occurred only four days later would probably have been harder to explain so I just hoped no one would ask.
In the process of prepping for Noah’s second funeral, we realized that in our haste to get the bodies of my mom and Noah away from the castle we had left Noah’s dismembered hand in the snow.
My dad and I had to travel back to Roscoe to reclaim it, which was a task in and of itself because the entire property had been cordoned off after the blaze.
After some searching and damn near getting frostbite on my own hands, we found Noah’s missing piece and brought it to the cemetery to be reinterred with him.
I couldn’t stand the thought of removing his casket and opening it again so we simply removed the facing stone and placed the hand just inside before sealing it back up.
We didn’t invite Miss Cliff along for this small ceremony.
It seemed like a little too much for her to handle.
One night, in the weeks after, as my dad and I settle into our new normal, I wake from a dream in the dead of night. The nightmare memories are gone but are now replaced with a vision of Noah standing at the end of a dark hall, his hand outstretched.
“I wish we had more time,” he says. “Just a little more. You could do that for me, Meeks. You could bring me back.”