Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
The dark man fled across the snow and Arthur Oakes followed.
They each had a job to do, although Arthur was only vaguely aware of what was expected of the others—music and courtiers for
the King, a proclamation to announce his arrival, incense to honor the royal presence. Arthur was required to prepare the
King’s meal, which meant catching the dark man who was carrying it. It didn’t look like he was carrying anything, but he had
it on him, Arthur knew it.
He had tried to run him down at first, had run shouting—Wait, wait, motherfucker, shit!—but the dark man could run too and didn’t seem to get tired. When Arthur slowed to a walk, so did his quarry. Instead, Arthur
decided to try and gain on him in subtle increments.
He had gone outside in his sneakers, without a coat, and by the third trip around the house, he was very cold. That was part
of it, he thought. He wasn’t allowed to go back inside and get a coat. If he did, the fleeing man would escape. And so the
dark figure—who he was fairly sure was Enoch Crane himself—walked and Arthur followed in the deadly chill.
Their path took them in a rough ellipse around The Briars, through a stand of birch, past a family graveyard, over hillocks,
along a narrow path through bunches of wild thorns armored in ice. Fairy tale country, Arthur thought.
His winding course took him past the open French windows.
The library within was lit up like a theater.
Colin sat on a purple pillow with a water bong, facing the stone patio and blowing smoke rings, looking like Alice’s caterpillar.
Allie hunched over the piano, mechanically banging out “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The keys were smeared with blood.
She meant to play it until her fingers were smashed down to the bone.
Arthur could distantly glimpse Van and Donna sitting on the floor across from each other.
It looked like they were playing cards. You aren’t Cady Lewis, sis, Van said, and somehow Arthur thought he already knew who she was.
Cady Lewis was the reason Donna thought sex offenders
should be executed by firing squad.
And Gwen? Arthur didn’t know what task she had been given. Please let her be all right, he thought. Don’t let her get hurt because I dragged her into this.
Colin saw him passing. He exhaled three fat, trembling rings, then called out, “Keep going, Arthur! The King will expect a
hot dinner after his long cold journey!”
The dark man fled across the white desert and Arthur followed.
A little hill led up to a stand of birch on the southern edge of the property. That was where the dark man slipped for the
first time and went to one knee. When he rose, Arthur had shaved at least twenty feet off the distance between them . . .
close enough to see his quarry was shirtless. Arthur had thought he was wearing some kind of crude, ugly tunic, but now he
could see his arms were bare, and there was something wrong with his back, some very precise disfigurement. A broad square
of glistening darkness rose from the small of his back to midway up his shoulder blades.
The disfigured man limped on. He stumbled again, coming out of the icy thicket of blackberry bushes, a thorny snare hooking
his arm and half turning him, causing him to reel. By the time he recovered, Arthur was close enough to hit him with the toss
of a football. Close enough to realize the other man was barefoot. Arthur almost pitied him.
They circled the house again. “Puff the Magic Dragon” was still playing, but when Arthur glanced through the French windows this time he saw Allie dancing to it, head down, hair in her face, arms waving over her head, so who the hell was playing?
No one sat at the piano. He was still trying to figure that out when he heard Donna cry: “Dragon! Dragon and that’s game!
” She leapt up from her card game with Van, who held a fistful of cards.
He threw them into the air and they exploded in a shower of flames.
The dark man fled across the cold desert and Arthur Oakes followed.
He felt as if he would be chasing Enoch Crane for the rest of his life. Arthur’s breath exploded from his lips in a white
smoke. When he checked the sky again it seemed the moon was stuck in place, couldn’t sink to the horizon and disappear, not
until they finished the spell.
“Come on, man,” Arthur told him. “Aren’t your feet cold? Let’s get this over with.”
“I can bear it a while longer. My feet ha’ been cold since I struck the end of a rope in the year of your Lord 1789.” Crane’s
voice was a raw, deep slur from another century.
“I can do this all night, brother. It’s no skin off my back. Which is more than I can say for you.”
When Arthur next crossed the flagstones behind the house, Colin’s rings of smoke hung improbably still in the air. Colin blew
another smoke shape from his bong: a dragon, no larger than a kitten. It opened its wings and began to fly, darting through
each ring of smoke. Colin lifted his head to watch it go, and as he did, a storm of butterflies poured from the open doors,
following the smoke dragon up into the stars. Gwen appeared behind Colin, staring after them.
“Go on!” Gwen called. “Fly to the land of Honalee and bring him back!”
Crane was limping now. He had slipped again in the snow and gone down hard on one knee. Arthur thought he had twisted the
leg. It pleased Arthur to run him to earth—he felt the simple murderous joy of the hawk falling on the hare.
When they were on the narrow, winding trail in the frozen-over blackberry thicket, Arthur began to run. The path twisted and
meandered and Crane could not see him closing in. When Arthur burst from the bushes, the dead man was not ten feet away. He
tried to put on some speed, but it was too late. Arthur lunged and took Crane around the waist, carried him down into the
snow.
Crane didn’t struggle as Arthur flung him onto his back.
He had a patchy beard and bad teeth and the flesh of his chest had been peeled off as well, in a square that reached from nipples to navel.
Where there should’ve been a cage of bloody ribs there was, instead, a walnut cabinet with an ornate dragon carved in the center of a Celtic labyrinth.
Arthur should’ve felt surprise or wonder or horror, but instead, at the sight of this cabinet, he was gripped with a euphoric, wordless triumph.
There was only a single word in the entire English language that could express that feeling: mine.
“Aye,” Crane said, as if Arthur had spoken aloud. “Yours. A meal fit for a king and help yourself to it. Mark me, though.
What you claim now is but an appetizer. He’ll have your anguish for his mains. See if he don’t.”
Arthur opened the cupboard door in Enoch Crane’s chest to discover a Cabinet of Curiosities within. Its wooden shelves and
cubbies held all kinds of clutter. Arthur saw an airplane ticket on one shelf, with Allie’s name printed on it. There was
a sand dollar, as white as a bleached bone, a bloody thumbprint stamped upon it. At the sight of it he thought of Donovan.
There was a paperweight showing the Twin Towers in New York City. For some reason, they were both spilling clouds of smoke
like some homage to King Kong, when the big ape had scaled the towers carrying Jessica Lange. There was a postcard of a mossy stone bridge in a green country—the
sight of it made Arthur’s heart ache, and he was gripped with a sudden urge to apologize to Gwen Underfoot, although he could
not have said what for.
And on a shelf in the upper right corner of the cabinet was a human heart. Enoch Crane’s heart. It was beating furiously until
the moment Arthur removed it, coming free at his touch, cold as a raw steak from the fridge.
“He promised me ’e’d have it,” Enoch Crane said. “And ’e’ll have yours too, Arthur. One way or another: ’e’ll eat it or he’ll
stop it. Either way, King Sorrow wins.”
Arthur closed the cupboard. The heart in his hand stained his palm with blood but did not drip.
He stood too quickly and darkness squeezed his vision from either side.
He needed to throw his head back and fill his chest with air to keep from falling.
He glanced at the night sky, feeling lightheaded.
A vast black shape flitted across the stars.
When he looked down, Crane was gone, leaving behind a dirty, man-shaped indentation in the snow, stamped with a square of blood.
He lowered his head, feeling the cold, and started walking again. The butterflies returned from the Long Dark as he crossed
the flagstones to the French doors. Only now they were burning—a flurry of billowing, flaming confetti, spreading an ugly
stink.
As Arthur entered the library, the overhead lights flickered, brightened, then went out. The music was over, the room still,
the silence loud with suspense. That silence was a roar. He approached the card table, holding a man’s heart, and when Gwen
saw what he carried she left the room. She returned a moment later with a gold-edged platter. Fine china for a king. Arthur
set the heart upon it and sat at the card table, Gwen on his left, Van on his right.
The upside-down helmet, filled with water, was rocking in the center of the table, the water slapping one side of the steel
basin and then the other. The helmet rocked this way and that and abruptly flipped in the air, as if someone had struck the
rim. It landed right-side up, its contents soaking the table. The front of the helmet bent upward slightly, like a lip lifted
in a sneer. Beneath was darkness.
“What’s this?” came a voice from inside the helmet: deep, plummy, resonant, good-humored. “Is it a party? Oh, loverly. Will
there be fun and games? I hope so. In fact,” King Sorrow told them, “if we put our minds to it, I think we can have a bit
of both.”