Chapter 17
He knew exactly what he was going to see when he looked into Wolf Messing’s helmet, brimming with cold water. Colin knew when
he looked into the water he wouldn’t see his reflection at all, and he was right.
The face that stared back at him was thin and long, a little horsey, with mussed hair the color of straw and a shimmer of
black scratches where his eyes belonged. It was the face of a sly shitkicker, a face he had never seen before and knew at
once belonged to Corporal Elwood Hondo. The sight thrilled and exalted Colin, drove the breath right out of him. Hondo leered,
lifted a cigarette to his mouth, inhaled—the tip of his butt was a bright orange eye flashing in the water—and blew a series
of three smoke rings.
Music crashed from the piano. The doors to the patio slammed shut. Colin looked away in time to see Arthur padding out into
the snow. The twins sat across from each other on the floor, Donovan dealing them each a pile of cards for a game of War.
When he looked back to the card table, the helmet was gone and he found himself holding a silver hand mirror that had belonged
to a murdered Russian princess. A Y-shaped crack, a bright silver fracture, ran up the middle of the glass. There was a different
image on either side of the crack. On the left, he saw Donovan McBride scramble up a flight of concrete steps to a high landing
in a cement stairwell. Van shot a last wild look out a small window . . . then turned to the banister and tipped himself over
it, fell into darkness. On the right-hand side of the crack, Arthur twitched and quivered as someone—Colin couldn’t see who,
they were beyond the mirror’s edge—pushed a three-foot blade through his torso.
Colin flinched, looked away. When he had recovered enough to look again, there was a new future-movie playing in the two halves of the mirror. To the left,
Donna was limp and broken in a pile of rock and books, face powdered palest white with concrete dust. Allison was under a
scarred wooden table, just beyond her, and as Colin watched, the table was buried in a great collapse of enormous stone blocks.
On the other side of that jagged silver fracture line, Gwen was coughing blood and lying in an inch of it. As he watched,
a great forked tongue, as long as a man’s arm, lapped across her cheek, delicately tasting her life’s blood. The tip of a
green tail spilled in from the other side of the image to offer her a gentle caress.
“No,” Colin said, watching Gwen Underfoot die, watching that serpent’s tongue lick the blood off her. He shut his eyes again,
counted to three before he opened them.
Now, on one side of the Y-shaped crack, he saw his own face on the cover of Forbes magazine.
He was dramatically lit in close-up, half his face in darkness.
The headline read: sacrifice and adversity—how colin wren turned grief into strength and built the future.
In the right-hand side of the broken mirror, Colin saw himself on a stage in a nineteenth-century theater. He wore black
robes and humbly bowed his head as an elderly woman draped a medal around his neck. The face on the medal appeared to be the
calm, bearded visage of Alfred Nobel.
A wave of wooziness rolled over Colin, and he had to put the mirror down and grip the edge of the card table. Allie was bashing
out “Puff the Magic Dragon” for the fifteenth time. Gwen had climbed up onto a chair and was taking down Llewellyn’s framed
and matted butterflies. Donna was winning at cards. Outside, the moon turned the pitted field of snow into a lunar landscape.
A dark man fled across it and Arthur followed.
A telephone burred, and when Colin looked down at his hand, clapped to the table, it no longer contained a mirror at all.
The Russian hand mirror had been replaced by the bleached Aztec conch from his grandfather’s collection, the one that had famously been featured in acts of human sacrifice.
The conch rang again with a call from the Long Dark.
Slowly, hesitantly, Colin lifted it to his ear.
“We don’t have long to talk,” Elwood Hondo told him.
“I don’t want my friends to get hurt,” Colin said.
“Everyone gon’ die, boy,” Hondo said. “But some people get to die for something beautiful. Don’ you dare take that away from
them.”
“I didn’t see how I’d die,” Colin said.
“When that gloomsome day finally comes, a long time off, someone who loves you will be holding you close, as you take your
last breath. Now that’s a promise.”
“What’s so beautiful it’s worth all of them being killed?”
“When they go—and don’t go buryin’ ’em just yet, Colin, good buddy, they got a whiles—they’ll be dying for you. For you and thousands of others. Ruling beside King Sorrow, you can make sure no one ever hurts you again, the way your
momma hurt you by being weak, and your daddy hurt you by killing her, and your granddaddy hurt you by getting some evil fuckin’
diz-ease. You can stop the wicked and the cruel and the undeserving before they can hurt anyone. Think on all the lives you’ll save and all the people you’ll help. Think of what you can build when ain’t no one can step
on you or stop you or say no to you anymore. It’s up to you, boy, but if you ask me, I think your friends would be glad to
give their lives for all the good we both know you’ll do.”
A dimness surged at the edge of his vision, accompanied by a feeling of lightheadedness so strong, he had to grip the edge of the card table with his free hand to steady himself.
Even then, he heard things in Elwood Hondo’s offer that he knew were unwholesome.
It was all well and good to talk about stopping the wicked, but what was that about stopping the undeserving?
Undeserving of what? It was noble (Nobel?) to imagine his friends dying so thousands of others might live.
It was another to expect them to die so that no one could ever say no to Colin Wren.
But it was hard to think. He had smoked a lot of pot and swallowed a fair bit of Scotch, and every time he closed his eyes he saw the blade going through Arthur again, saw it so clearly—the mirrored edge was wet and red as it came out of his guts—he might’ve been pushing it through his friend himself.
“How do I know you’re not blowing smoke up my ass?” Colin said.
“I’m not the one blowin’ smoke,” said the voice in his ear, the voice of the dead hillbilly who had killed over a dozen men
in the 1950s. “That’s gotta be you, son. You need to send up a few smoke signals, show King Sorrow where to find you. Go on
now. Get some of that good weed of yours and get puffin’. Make a path in the sky and he’ll follow it back to you, Colin. I
promise it, as his envoy and ambassador. You kneel to him, and the world will kneel to you. He may be the King, but in every
way that matters, you’ll be the one wearing the crown.”
There was a click and a dial tone. Colin lowered the conch. Allie began “Puff the Magic Dragon” again. She had been smashing
the keys so hard, she was getting blood on the ivory. Gwen was on the floor, pulling silver pins out of dead butterflies.
Outside, Arthur stalked past again, no closer to the dark figure he pursued. Donna and Van played on. Van never seemed to
win a single trick and never seemed to run out of cards to play.
Colin went around the couch and found the glass bong. He opened the French doors and sat cross-legged on the stone, facing
the night. The air was bitterly cold and cleared his head, while he packed fresh blue ganja into the bowl. The stars flashed
in the deep and velvety dark, like little shattered flecks of mirror. Colin held a lighter to the bowl, put his lips to the
glass, and inhaled. His chest filled with smoke, and he was lit up with the sweet, intoxicating sense of burning inside. He
supposed it felt much the same to be a dragon.
Colin exhaled and the first rings of smoke rose into the night, reaching toward the Long Dark and the future that waited just
beyond.