Chapter 12
Darlington pushed the low gate open. The front yard was little more than winter mud, but the stone path had been swept clean and a mat on the front porch read, Life is better at the beach!
They’d prepared as best they could, but the puzzle box would be a last resort.
If Kittscher was a demon, trapping him inside the Voynich Coffin meant they wouldn’t get to question him.
They had no idea how to extricate individuals and cracking the whole thing open would mean tangling with far too many monsters at once.
Alex raised her hand to knock, then hesitated. She didn’t look at him when she said, “Reiter was stronger. Even with a Gray inside me, I almost didn’t get away.”
“Do you remember what I did to Golgarot? What I did to the thing pretending to be Hellie?”
He could tell she was fighting a smile. “Yeah.”
“Whatever is behind that door isn’t stronger than me.”
“I like Tough Guy Darlington.”
“Please don’t remind me that I’ve been relegated to the muscle.”
“If that means I’m the brains, we are definitely screwed.”
She knocked, and a moment later, the door swung open.
Through the screen, the mop-headed boy said, “What can I do for you?”
He was slightly breathless, in a T-shirt and jeans, and he’d exchanged his boots for fuzzy slippers. Up close it was clear whoever this might be he was not the man in that photograph.
“Hi,” Alex said, smiling. “I’m sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for Thomas Neumann.”
The young man cocked his head to the side. “Whatever you’re selling, we’re not buying.”
“Sorry, I know this is weird. Could you just tell him we’re from Lethe?”
“From where?”
“Lethe. At Yale.”
“Oh! An alumni thing. Rudy … Mr. Neumann isn’t at his best these days. I can try, but he isn’t always lucid. Do you mind waiting?”
“Happy to,” said Darlington, offering his most responsible New Englander head nod. “We have identification if you need it.”
“It couldn’t hurt.”
They produced both their student IDs. They’d thought about lying or using a cover story, but the reality was that Yale and Lethe had a better chance of getting them into the house than anything else.
“Rudy,” Alex whispered when the door shut, leaving them to wait on the stoop. “Not Thomas.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s our Rudolph Kittscher. It could be a middle name the family uses.”
The Subaru was parked only a block away, but it seemed small and distant and the glare on the windshield made it look empty, as if when they’d shut the car doors, Dawes and Tripp had simply vanished.
“I wish the street was busier,” Alex said.
“I know.” He hated seeing her scared, but he wasn’t going to start saying things like Don’t worry or It will be all right. They’d been through too much for that game of pretend.
“Do you think this guy knows he’s babysitting a man over one hundred and twenty years old?” Alex asked.
“We don’t know that yet.”
She surprised him when she said, “This place has a nice feel to it. This whole street does. Welcoming.”
“Life is better at the beach. I read that somewhere.”
What might have been a smile ghosted over her lips.
A moment later the door opened and the mop-headed young man shoved the screen door open too.
“Sorry to make you wait in the cold. I just have to be cautious. When you get to Rudy’s age, folks sometimes try to take advantage.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Darlington said. “It’s nice he has someone looking out for him. I’m Daniel. This is Alex.”
“Theo.”
“Are you and Mr. Neumann related?” Neumann hadn’t had kids, but he did have a sister. Theo could be a grandnephew.
“No, I’m with Rhode Island Care. We provide in-home nursing and senior care. I’ve only been with the company a few months.”
Darlington wasn’t sure what he had expected, but the house was classic New England in a way that had always appealed to him—knotted rugs, mismatched furniture, ruthlessly inoffensive watercolor seascapes and polished oars hanging on the walls.
The bookshelves were packed with a few of the usual beach-read paperbacks and thrillers, but the rest were thick with Heidegger, Hegel, Lacan, St. Thomas More, texts in German, Italian, Greek.
This was definitely Rudolph Kittscher’s house.
“I was just making Rudy’s lunch,” Theo said. “He likes to spend mornings here, where it’s cozy.”
The sunroom was lined with windows and looked out at the ocean waves and the curve of sand. There was a wildness to the landscape, despite the line of neatly kept houses with their weathered decks. Outside, the seagrass bowed in a ragged wind, but inside, all was still and warm.
Rudolph Kittscher sat in a wheelchair that had been positioned next to a round table set for lunch.
The plates were quality china, possibly Bernardaud, and Theo had set vibrant red sourwood branches in a vase beside the salt and pepper.
A nice gesture, but there was a tomb-like quality to all of it.
The collection of books and souvenirs, the crystal drinking glasses, treasures arranged for a desiccated pharaoh staring listlessly out at the sea.
He was swaddled in a thick cardigan, a blanket over his lap, his sparse white hair combed back from his wrinkled forehead.
“He doesn’t look bad for being a hundred and twenty,” whispered Alex as Theo bustled into the kitchen and returned with half a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of chicken noodle soup on a tray that he placed before the old man.
He tucked a cloth napkin into Kittscher’s collar and Darlington felt a pang of memory for his grandfather in those last days when he’d been too frail to eat but they’d gone through the ritual of dining together anyway.
“Have a seat,” said Theo, and Alex sat down across from Kittscher.
Darlington pulled up a chair. Had the journey to hell prolonged Kittscher’s life or had he made the classic failed bargain: eternal life without eternal youth?
His eyes were clear without any of the rheumy gloss of old age, no clouding of cataracts.
But his cheeks were hollow, his skin papery and deeply pleated, his neck hunched forward.
Darlington searched his features for some sign of the promising young man in that old photograph, but time had stolen away all detail.
“He doesn’t have a strong appetite these days,” admitted Theo. That much was obvious. Kittscher was gaunt to the point of emaciation. “If I push the issue, he gets agitated.”
“How are you feeling today, Mr. Neumann?” Alex asked.
There was caution in her voice, and Darlington couldn’t blame her, but if there was a threat here, he couldn’t see it.
“He doesn’t get much company,” Theo offered by way of explanation. “His sister moved her family to the West Coast before she passed. Her kids do call, though.”
No relatives, no family, stuck in his wasting body, surrounded by his books, with a beautiful view of an ocean he was too weak to dip his toes into.
“He was quite a scholar,” Theo said. “He used to write every morning, and he still likes to hold forth on his good days.”
“But this isn’t a good day, is it?” Alex asked, reaching forward to pick up a fallen sourwood leaf. Her hand brushed the salt cellar, and it tipped on its side, scattering a cascade of white crystals across the surface of the table.
“I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed. But Darlington knew the move was deliberate. She was testing Kittscher’s reaction. A demon would have recoiled from the salt—purifying, boundary making. The old man hadn’t moved an inch.
Theo waved the blunder away. “Don’t worry about it. We have all kinds of spills here. Keeps the day interesting.” He leaned forward and lifted the spoon. “Can you manage a little soup today, Rudy?”
Darlington felt helplessness tugging at him, as if it had rolled in with the sea, a wave of defeat.
They had no idea who the other pilgrims were or if they were even alive, and Linus Reiter certainly wasn’t going to help them.
They had hoped Kittscher could share what wasn’t in his diaries, and Darlington could admit, for the sake of honesty and honor, that it wasn’t just the hope of eliminating the threat of Golgarot and his legion that had driven him here.
He wanted to know what Lethe had been like, what those first pilgrims had dreamed before they so carelessly dared, what they had learned, and how they had built the Gauntlet in the first place.
Staring at Kittscher sitting motionless, wet brown eyes empty of everything but a dull, pleading misery, he couldn’t even see the ghost of the young man who had once argued so passionately in the Daemonologie.
All that knowledge, all those stories, gone.
“Where are his glasses?” Darlington asked.
Theo sighed. “He broke them. We have a new pair on order. He gets frustrated when he can’t read or express himself the way he used to.”
“How long has he been this way?” Alex asked, dragging her finger idly through the mess of salt.
“Since before I came. I have the old records, but I don’t think I can share them without contacting the company. There’s medical information and—”
“Not necessary,” she said, and Darlington knew she was feeling this same despair. The trickery with the board to gain access to the hidden records. The hope they’d pinned to this man. They’d wasted weeks in pursuit of nothing.
Is this how I’ll end? If the demon didn’t claim him entirely, if Darlington found a way to be a man once more, was this what he had to look forward to?
It was one thing to cling to books and learning as a refuge when the body inevitably lost its war with time, but to lose the pleasures of the mind?
To forget how to think, how to reason, to have first conversation stolen then thought itself?
He had never feared the future, but maybe he’d never had the courage to look it squarely in the eye before.
His grandfather had died at Black Elm, tethered to it just as surely as he’d been bound to his IV line.
In hell, Darlington had been unable to break away from that pile of old stones. Was he any more capable in this world?
“We should go,” he said. He didn’t want to bear witness to this any longer, though he wasn’t sure what action to take next.
He knew he should be seeking a new plan, that they should dig back into the old diaries, take a fresh look at the research.
But what was the point? All he wanted was to sit and watch the ceaseless sighing of the sea.
“Not yet,” Alex said. “Not until good ol’ Rudy gives us some answers.”
“Alex.” Darlington couldn’t keep the disapproval from his voice. “That isn’t kind.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex replied, though she didn’t sound sorry at all. “I forget my manners when demons feed on my friends. You know what that’s like, Rudy.”
But she wasn’t looking at the old man. She was looking at Theo.
Theo laughed nervously. “Sorry, I don’t follow.”
“No? Let me spell it out for you: Stop fucking around or I’m going to drag you down to the ocean and see if a demon can drown.”
Theo smiled. His grin was wide and thick with teeth.
Darlington tried to rise, to get between the monster and Alex, but he was too slow. His legs felt loose and weak. He stumbled forward, his thoughts cloudy. As if he’d been fed upon.
Theo lunged, impossibly fast, impossibly strong—then simply stopped.
He was staring at the table, fascinated. In the spilled salt, Alex had drawn a careful pattern: a Solomon’s Knot formation. She hadn’t been trying to reveal the old man. She’d been building a puzzle to distract a demon.
“Clever, not smart,” Alex said as she clapped salt cuffs on the real Rudolph Kittscher and the demon began to howl.