Interlude 4 Gwen, Under Attack #4
“Colin could never be punished for it. Nothing could ever be proved against him. But there are other ways to deal with him.
I get scared thinking about what it would take to make sure he can’t hurt anyone else. If I had to, though. If I was sure.”
The thought had trailed off there.
“Gwen,” Robin had said, “you don’t want to do anything stupid. You don’t want to, you know, attack him and get yourself arrested.”
“No.” Gwen had shook her head. “Trust me. I wouldn’t attack him.”
Her finger close to the mark. I wouldn’t attack him. No. She wouldn’t need to, would she?
He circled his bedroom again and paused at the floor-to-ceiling windows for another peek outside, and yes, there she was.
He had been expecting her. Gwen herself was out there, in her daddy’s old pickup, plowing out his driveway. She had taken
over the care of the grounds not long after old Mr. Underfoot dropped dead of a colossal stroke. The plow came grinding up
the drive, throwing a prow-wave of bright white snow, then paused, halfway around the circle. She had seen him looking.
She lowered the driver’s-side window and waved, a half-smile on her face and her gaze studiously blank. He waved back . . .
and then turned away, dissolving into laughter. Three days now, she had known, and here she was to plow his drive. He walked
back to his laptop and sat down.
Donna groaned again. Her eyes were squeezed shut. She had a finger looped around the dull chain around her neck, an old key hanging off one end. She had worn it ever since Colin draped it around her throat.
“Did Gwen really have to plow us out at the crack of dawn?”
“It’s ten,” Colin said.
Donna pulled a pillow over her head. Colin put his headphones back on and resumed watching the video. He thought it was best
to review everything Gwen and Robin knew before he spoke to Donna. He was already working out what to tell her, how to shape
the narrative, so when she expressed her opinion, it would be one that suited him. He was good at molding her reactions to
things. He had been doing it for years. Not that her opinion mattered.
In the end, she’d leave it up to him—she always did—and he had already decided what to do.
4.
Gwen stopped the truck when she saw Colin watching her from upstairs. She rolled down her window and stuck her arm out and
waved to him, this friend of twenty-five years who had murdered Arthur in a grubby hole in the ground. Ran a sword through
him and watched him bleed to death and then lied about it. She forced a smile onto her face.
“He might not be guilty of anything,” Arthur said, leaning across her to peer out the driver’s-side window.
“He’s guilty of plenty. We all are.”
“But you don’t know he stabbed me in the back.”
“Well, did he? Why don’t you just tell me?” she asked, but only in her mind, without opening her mouth, and Arthur didn’t reply because
he wasn’t really there, on account of being dead.
Arthur often joined her when she was out on a drive. They talked as much now as they ever had. More, really. It was always a relief to be alone with him and to know she could tell him anything. That was one thing about the dead: they were naturally great listeners.
She was in no sense delusional, knew the Arthur who kept her company existed only in her mind. And yet it was somehow wrong
to insist he was imaginary when she knew that ghosts were as real as sound waves, as real as ice on the moon. Once upon a
time, Donna and Van had pretended they shared a secret twin language. It turned out, in the end, that they had. Love was the
secret language of twins. It was the private code of a husband and a wife. It was the telegraph system of best friends. When
you had it, a glance could suffice for ten minutes of talk. When you loved someone enough, you did not simply remember them.
Some part of them was copied into you forever and so when they were gone they weren’t gone. She did not need him physically
there to hear his voice, to take his advice, to smile at his jokes. And that was a ghost, as much as any Philip. Like a Philip,
the Arthur in her head couldn’t know anything she didn’t know herself. He could still surprise her, though. He wasn’t an invention,
wasn’t an imaginary friend. He was more like the deep-buried roots of a tree after the trunk has been cut down. She could
feel them still, grown deep into the soil of her own being, her everyday experience of the world.
She was another twenty minutes plowing the driveway, and in all that time she was alone. But when she got out and began to
push the snowblower, Arthur joined her again, yelling to be heard over its clatter and roar.
“What do we know about Stu Finger? He’s a troll! What do trolls do?”
“Trolls gonna troll,” Gwen said.
“That’s right!” Arthur pounded his mittened hands together. “What the hell is a Black man doing this far north? Ninety-eight
percent of the Black people on this planet are too sensible to live somewhere this cold.”
“What are you complaining about? You’re dead.”
“Yeah, well, ninety-eight percent of Black people are too sensible to haunt somewhere this cold.”
“What’s with the statistics? You’re sounding like Allie. Don’t be Allie. I need you to be you.”
By the time she rounded the corner to the patio, the snowblower roaring, she had lost him. It was always a mistake to remind
a ghost he was dead. It startled them off.
Not that it mattered. He had made his point. Just because Finger had said it didn’t mean it was true. In fact, the opposite
held. Something was even less likely to be true if Finger insisted on it. She needed to know for sure before she could take the next step. Not that she
knew what the next step was.
She went on, pushing the snowblower ahead of her, circling the problem of Colin in her mind. Then it struck her the problem
might not be Colin alone, because there was Donna too. Would Donna have gone along with it, even encouraged Colin to strike
Arthur down? Gwen didn’t want to think so and couldn’t quite rule it out. Arthur wanted to take King Sorrow away, wanted to
strip them of their power to punish the wicked, and what had Donna told her after Black Cricket? I say all hail the King.
Their relationship with the dragon did not trouble Donna, and of course Colin loved it. He relished drafting his yearly menu of enemies and selecting one to sacrifice to their pet iguana each year. He had
always loved it, although he performed regret and reluctance, because regret and reluctance made him more acceptable to his friends.
Perhaps he told himself that what they did was necessary, had moral value. They only killed people who had it coming.
Didn’t they?
Gwen’s insides crawled, a sensation like a bellyful of live ants.
Of all the questions she had asked herself in the last three days, this was the one she was least eager to examine.
Because, in truth, she had long since stopped caring who Colin fed to King Sorrow.
It had ceased to seem relevant to her, in the years after Arthur descended into the earth with Stu Finger and didn’t return.
She chose for herself, when it was her turn, and that was enough.
She volunteered Sunday afternoons at St. Daniel’s Hospice, which was just a short walk from the campus of Rackham College, in sight of both Rackham’s chapel and library.
Twice in the last ten years, she had eased someone’s passage, as she had eased Llewellyn’s, using the tears she had won by stumping King Sorrow with a single stupid joke.
It took only a sip to kill, and even after Llewellyn was gone she had nearly eight ounces of the stuff.
In 2009 Gwen had assisted Rose Ellroy, a former English professor at the college—her specialty had been the Romantic poets—suffering
from the rapid onset of Alzheimer’s. Rose had wanted to die before she forgot Shelley. She drank the tears from Gwen’s thermos
with a small smile on her lips.
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains,” she said, with a certain satisfaction, sparks flying from her lips, “my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,” clutching Gwen’s hand as her bright eyes slowly dimmed.
In 2013, Gwen had offered the thermos to a broad-shouldered, long-haired Native American named Eddie Knockwood, dying of emphysema
and diabetes, who wanted to find the exit before they amputated his legs. In 1989, he had placed twenty-third in the Boston
Marathon. At some point in the nineties, he had actually won the Lidingoloppshelgen in Scandinavia. He wanted to run into
the afterlife on his own two legs, wanted to run to his wife, who had died thirty years before. He had never remarried.
Gwen asked him what he felt, when Eddie sipped the tears and began to breathe smoke, and like Llewellyn he said, I think my soul just caught fire.
That doesn’t seem good, she said.
He gave his head a shake and showed her a sly, confident smile. Feels good. Then he lifted his shaggy eyebrows and said, It could burn a hundred thousand years and not even come close to burning out. Maybe that’s all a sun is. A single soul, burning
itself up, bright enough to light worlds.
As for the others King Sorrow had taken?
Colin chose for himself . . . but he also chose when it came around to what would’ve been Arthur’s turn.
That had been acceptable to all of them.
Arthur had always examined every new Enemies List with care and attention.
He wouldn’t have been himself if he shirked the homework.
But in the end, he always signed off on Colin’s recommendation anyway.
And when they came around to what would’ve been Van’s turn—well, Colin chose in Van’s place as well. It should’ve been Donna’s
choice, but Donna didn’t care anymore. Something had gone out of her after Black Cricket; after the man who murdered Cady
Lewis killed himself. She often seemed distracted, listening for some faraway sound only she could hear. She wasn’t any less