Chapter 26
On the night of the nineteenth, Garrett arrived back in Boston from The Briars, with everything Colin had asked for in a cardboard
box.
It was late, well past visiting hours, but when you were rich enough to buy the hospital a new pediatric cancer wing, people
made exceptions.
Garrett was a veteran of Afghanistan, a big man, head shaved, all except for a low, bristly mohawk. The tattoo of a Spartan’s
helmet had come off his arm years ago. When he entered the hospital room, Colin saw him about to flip the light switches on
with his elbow.
“Don’t,” Colin told him, and Garrett stopped himself just in time.
Colin couldn’t bear the light anymore. Even the overhead fluorescents hurt, felt like being stabbed through the eye sockets.
The cardiologist had him on digoxin for now, to ease the strain on his punctured heart, and photophobia was one of the more
common side effects. Colin could only just bear the monochrome monitors stacked to the side of the bed, with their green digital
readouts.
“The Cabinet was open?” Colin asked.
“Yeah. Lock sitting on the desk, key in it.”
“And Donna?”
“I didn’t see her around. You want, we can go get her.” He mentioned this possibility—abducting a well-known podcaster with
two and a half million followers on Twitter—as if offering to pick up a bag of groceries.
Colin smiled at that. “You could try. Put the box next to the bed, please? And close the door behind you when you go?”
Garrett did as he was told. Colin called to him again when he was about to step back into the hallway.
“Garrett? I don’t want to be disturbed. No doctors. No nurses. If you hear me talking with someone, don’t give it a thought.
I have to make a few calls. I have to speak to an old friend. If I want you, I’ll call for you by name. Otherwise, best not
to open that door, no matter what you hear.”
Garrett’s brow furrowed at that . . . but after a moment he nodded. He shut the door gently behind him.
Colin reached for the bedside table—his hand moving past the cardboard box to grasp his phone. Even extending one arm produced
a trembling feeling of weakness, a soreness at the core of him. He could put on a good face for Garrett, but he had never, in all his life, felt so overcome with a single
emotion . . . and that emotion was dread. He woke from every doze covered in flop sweat. Sometimes, as he started to fall
asleep, a sensation would come over him like he was tipping backward off a high ledge, and he’d lurch awake with his heart
fluttering weakly and desperately in his chest.
He had thought his heart would be on the mend by now. He had thought to see Donna, with St. Helen’s blood. When she did not
return the day after her visit, he texted to ask if there had been a holdup. She did not reply. He figured she was drunk—an
irritation, but she would sober up eventually. He tried her again the next morning, and again in the afternoon.
Where is the blood, Donna?
She didn’t get around to answering his question until the third day.
I poured it down the fucking drain.
A reply that had made him dizzy with fear again. Fear! Of all things! It turned out fear of a significant intensity had symptoms not unlike flu. When he calmed himself, he sent her a laughing emoji and asked when she was bringing it to the hospital.
I’m not. It’s gone. But you’re right, I didn’t pour it down the drain. I tried some on my foot to see if it worked. My ankle
is good as new. I was so happy with the results I drank the rest and now my tits look like they did when I was twenty.
Donna, with apologies, I’m not finding this witty or clever. I could still die. Without St. Helen’s blood, I’ll never be myself
again.
But that would be a good thing, Colin. If you were never yourself again. If you didn’t have the strength to be you anymore.
You want to know what I really did with it?
I gave it to Gwen.
He had gone short of breath at that, had needed to wait for his heart to stop slamming erratically in his chest before he
could reply.
That’s another joke and it isn’t funny.
The joke, Colin, is that I ever believed you when you said Gwen meant to use King Sorrow against us. If she wanted me dead,
Colin, tell me this? Why did she cover me with her own body when the shooting started? Even if she DIDN’T want me dead . . .
why would she try and protect me? After everything I’ve done. After the life I’ve lived. There’s a riddle even King Sorrow
couldn’t answer. Neither can I. If I knew the answer, maybe I’d be more like her and less like you.
I can’t be your person anymore, Colin. If you want a friend and a confidant, try Elwood Hondo. He’s more your speed anyway.
I think you two are cut from the same cloth exactly.
His thoughts raced. His thoughts stood still.
It was another ten hours before he could articulate a plan to himself.
It frightened him, how hard it was to work out a single line of reasoning.
It was like trying to catch a handful of spiders—a notion that reminded him horribly of the spiders crawling all over him down in Finger’s cave.
Colin had summoned Garrett, who oversaw his security team, and told him to go to The Briars. He said there were things he
wanted from his Cabinet of Curiosities. He told him what. Then he said he was probably going to need Donna’s help—that the
Cabinet would only open with the key she wore around her neck.
“Or two swift kicks,” Garrett had said.
“Without the key, that Cabinet is more likely to kick you.”
“Some kind of booby trap?”
“Just do it my way,” Colin had said.
“You bet, boss,” Garrett told him. “You’re writing the checks.”
In the end, though, Donna hadn’t come into it, and he had what he wanted, the conch and Wolf Messing’s helmet. He would’ve
liked the cracked mirror too, but the police or Donna or Gwen had it now. Not that it mattered. He had learned the night they
summoned King Sorrow that if you had even one of the divination tools, you had them all.
He was a few minutes preparing himself. He set the helmet on the bedside table, upside down, and emptied a bottle of Poland
Spring into it. He placed the conch on the bed by his side. He unlocked his phone and pulled up his private videos. Colin
had long ago transferred the Elwood Hondo movie to a digital file. He placed a slim hospital pillow in his lap, rested the
phone against it, and played his grandfather’s old film with the sound down low.
When Llewellyn and the others began to cheer Elwood Hondo on, Colin cheered with them.
“Come on, Elwood,” Colin said. “Talk to me. Go ahead and call collect from the Long Dark. I’ll accept all charges.” As he
said it, he was listening to the Aztec conch, hoping for a whisper, hoping for a voice.
But his arm was weak and trembling. It was hard for him to hold the conch to his ear.
There was a grinding ache in his chest. He used his free hand to flick the trigger on his morphine feed, give himself a blast of relief.
He was running the video full screen . .
. but had not expected the brightness of the image to hurt his eyes so.
He turned his face away, shut his eyes, and when his arm started wobbling, he put the conch down.
He gasped, his heartbeat stammering, felt the warm trickle of fresh piss into the bag against his leg.
It was awful to be so weak, to feel so helpless, and the easiest thing in the world was to slide away from it, into sleep.
The crash of folding metal chairs brought him awake again with a jerk. He had nodded off in his seat to Llewellyn’s left.
They were singing, the whole crowd of them at the long folding card table, under the map of Cuba. They sang, Nooooo time for loooosers!
Llewellyn sat on Colin’s right, looking trim and well in his burgundy turtleneck. He was almost Colin’s own age precisely.
His face shone with sweat, as if he were trying to lift some immense weight, but he was grinning. His teeth were yellow and
crooked under his fey mustache. He had always had bad teeth.
Across the room, a 16mm camera whirred away on a wooden tripod, recording everything, while folding metal chairs jumped from
one wall and fell crash-crash-CRASH. One of those chairs opened and closed, opened and closed, doing an ecstatic, palsied jig across the floor. A reel-to-reel
recorder stood on a shelf almost directly behind Colin, the spools turning with a plasticky rasp, and Colin understood that
he had not just come awake inside the film, but that he had always been in the film, had always been one of the out-of-focus figures sitting at the table with Llewellyn.
Colin looked to his left, where a broad-shouldered, middle-aged lady with Mary Tyler Moore hair was rising to her feet. An
instant later, Colin found himself rising with her. He had to. The table was pulling itself off the floor, and all of them
had to stand to keep their fingers pressed to it. Colin laughed, breathlessly, humorlessly; it was either laugh or shout in
alarm.
The table thudded down an instant later.
One of the other women screamed. Colin’s heart leapt like a deer.
All his life, he had longed to be here with his grandfather when they brought Elwood Hondo into the world, but now that he was, he couldn’t enjoy it.
A heart wasn’t supposed to do what his heart was doing, bounding in his chest the way it was. Llewellyn laughed hysterically.
“What’s so funny?” Colin asked him.
“I was just thinking,” Llewellyn said, “that everyone around this table is dead now. We’re not bringing Elwood to us—he brought
us to him.” And when Colin looked at his grandfather again, he saw black scribbles covering his eyes, scratches clawed impossibly right
into the air.
Colin felt a scream rising in his chest. He had never screamed in terror in his life, but that terrible cry was building up
inside him, a ragged, aching pressure behind his breastbone. Something slammed behind him. He twisted his head around and