The Big Dark Sky (41)
Where they had come from, what drew them here, what purpose they had, he couldn’t imagine. They seemed otherworldly, especially the immense bulls with their velvet-covered antlers, heads held high and black nostrils flared. They issued no cries, came in silence but for the clopping of their hooves.
By the time he reached the main residence and climbed the steps onto the veranda, the herds arrived. They streamed past the west side of the house, as though heading to the forested hills beyond this grassy slope, but instead they circled the building, reappeared around the east side, and trotted back the way they’d come, along the lane and through the meadows that flanked it.
Although Liam O’Hara had not mentioned elk, this extraordinary spectacle was similar to another of a far more threatening nature, involving wolves and coyotes, which had frightened the billionaire and his family into departing the ranch.
A pickup or an SUV appeared in the distance, and at the sound of the engine, the herds moved faster and converged on the vehicle.
A white Ford Explorer. The driver slowed to a stop. After a hesitation, the SUV advanced slowly.
The elk surrounded the Ford and accompanied it as if they were an honor guard, as if the occupant were a royal personage to whom they had sworn an oath of fealty.
34
Asher Optime is living his manifesto, casting no shadow as he walks behind the boy at high noon.
Dr. Fielding, the self-important historian, lies dead in the street, a fitting end for him.
“History,” Asher tells the wretched boy, “is one of the instruments with which humankind deceive themselves into believing the story of their species is of consequence, a long and noble march during which they supposedly acquire ever more knowledge, leading to enlightenment, truth, transcendence. In fact, though they remember what they learn, they forget the meaning of it. Every period of enlightenment is followed by a new and more efficient barbarism. They preach the necessity of truth even as they flee from it. Some believe in immortality through technology, while others believe in the transcendence of the spirit. They cling to their faith on the way to death and the void, while fouling the world in their passing. The past is a lie, and the future is only the past that hasn’t yet happened. Your father, the historian, was a prince of liars. In a few days, in this church of the dead, in the rising stench of rotting flesh, as you become dehydrated for lack of water, you’ll grow restless and dizzy, endure excruciating abdominal cramps. And you’ll come to see all the ways that he lied to you. When you’ve lost all hope, when you’re ready to curse his name and piss on that picture of your parents, then I’ll relieve your suffering.”
Asher is pleased by this speech, which is so brilliant that of course the boy can think of nothing to say as they arrive at the church door. This might be the first time in his miserable life that he’s been told the truth, and it pierces him like a needle, sews shut his lips, secures his tongue to the floor of his mouth.
“Lie facedown,” Asher commands, and after a hesitation the boy obeys, prostrate on the church stoop.
Asher produces the key and disengages the deadbolt and pushes open the door.
The woman, Ophelia, is somewhere in the cloistered gloom, no doubt quaking in a far corner, afraid that he has come to kill her.
“Slither like a worm, Colson Fielding. Slither inside as if you’re just another worm like all those feeding on the dead in the room below.”
Prodded into motion by the shotgun barrel, the debased and humiliated boy pulls himself across the threshold, into the pale blade of light—a light of false hope—that the day thrusts through the doorway.
Asher is excited by this performance, achieving a satisfaction that is the most intense feeling he can experience now that he has denied himself the thrill of seminal release. Colson’s every wriggle and hitch causes Asher to shiver with pleasure.
When the boy is across the threshold, Asher closes the door and locks it. He stands there for a moment in a post-rapture bliss, eyes closed and face upturned, basking in the noon warmth, imagining the day when the sun will never again shine on any human face and Earth will be restored.
35
The Ford Explorer that Joanna Chase rented in Billings was equipped with a navigation system, but even twenty-four years after leaving Montana for New Mexico, she required no map or guide. A two-hour drive brought her to the river-rock posts flanking the private lane that turned off the public highway. She passed under the sign that bore the name of the ranch and a silhouette of a running horse.
The house was not visible from there. Gripped by sudden doubt, before she might be seen by whoever currently lived here, she braked to a stop and sat listening to the engine idling.
Evidently the summer had been blessed with ample rain. The fields were lush and green, the upward-rolling land as sensuous as she remembered it. Scattered wildflowers jeweled the meadows: topaz yellow and sapphire blue and coral pink. More than a mile ahead, the first grove of willows clustered where the land plateaued, green cascades that screened the stables and the manager’s bungalow from view.
Curiosity vied with a nameless anxiety, wistfulness with a cold sense of an unspecified threat. She hadn’t anticipated the intensity or complexity of her emotional reaction to Rustling Willows. A guilt she could not explain contested with a childlike joy that she found likewise inexplicable. A pang of grief surely related to the deaths of her parents, but it also arose from another loss that hovered just beyond the limits of memory.