Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(115)
I tried to follow my mental map of how I’d gotten there in the first place, and reverse engineer it back to the surface; it was trickier than it should have been, for now things were not quiet and dark, but loud and dark—and crowded, too. Where did they all come from? How many were there? I couldn’t tell, for they were all dressed alike and all had powder-pale faces that were hard to distinguish one from the next, and there was light now—a little, here and there. Someone had a lantern, and someone had some matches, and all the fun of running about in the dark was well and truly over. For me, and for all of them, indistinguishable in the half-light and chaos.
Until I saw him.
He was swooping toward me, not recognizing me (I don’t think), but running with fury toward the Holiest of Holies, which was no doubt collapsed upon itself by then—if the rocking, thundering, grumbling cacophony could be believed. But then he saw me, and he drew up short. He tried to draw up short, anyway. The motion of the ground flung us both around, and neither one of us was steady at all.
He reached into his robe. Was he going for a firearm? I believed so at the time. He’d already murdered my friend James Coyle, and he’d been prepared to sacrifice his own daughter to the machinations of this church that was never a church.
Would he have killed me? Yes, given half a chance. So it was self-defense, you see, and a matter of timing, that’s all. I was holding my gun already. He had to fish his free from the drapes of something ceremonial and impractical.
I did not honestly expect to hit him. I was on the verge of doubling over from exhaustion, and the pain in my left hand was plenty distracting, too. Even if the floors weren’t shaking and the walls weren’t leaning inward, the odds of me making that shot couldn’t have been good.
Would it be preposterous to suggest that I had help?
I might have had help. Before I pulled the trigger there was a chill around my ankles that crept up my side and up to my wrist and fingers. It happened in less than a second, but it steadied me. It was as if some other hand was holding on to mine, and giving it the stability I required to shoot Edwin Stephenson square in the face.
Because that’s what happened.
I don’t really have to put this here. It’s tantamount to a murder confession, and an unnecessary one at that—since they never recovered much in the way of corpses from Chapelwood, least of all his. I suppose I’m including it because I want this to be a complete accounting of what occurred, even if I am not cast in an entirely positive light. If anything, should this account become public, perhaps the reader will only assume I’ve gone mad. Or, in a more just world, this fictional reader will correctly judge that Edwin Stephenson had it coming, and I was simply the method by which it arrived.
Regardless.
It’s done. He’s dead. His face exploded and I was stunned, but not for long enough to second-guess myself.
I ran.
I kept running.
And when I reached fresh air again, there at ground level, I ran back to the car. It was still there, as I suspected it would be. Lizbeth wasn’t there, and neither was Ruth—but I didn’t expect them to be. I wished with all my heart that they were well away from that place by then, and that they’d met Chief Eagan at the road, as planned.
The earth rolled and wobbled . . . and sank. A foot or two at a time, then a yard, then a great collapse that began at the center. I scarcely had time to start the car and put it into gear, and even with all my haste—never mind my broken hand—I escaped that place with one tire at the edge of the abyss as it blossomed beneath the earth, swallowing everything behind me, an acre at a time until I finally ran out of running room.
In the middle of that stupid dirt path which passed for a road, someone had abandoned a truck. There was no way around it. There was no one in it, though when I exited my own vehicle and took a quick look, I saw blood on the hood of the thing—and I tried not to consider the implications. (I would later learn from Ruth that this was Nathaniel Barrett’s truck, and that she’d last seen Lizbeth there.)
The world was still falling away behind me, after all. The back half of my car was sinking, the front end rising up like a ship about to slide underwater after a long and terrible sinking.
I had no time to consider the implications.
I only had time to trade one set of wheels for another, and praise be—the keys were still in the truck’s ignition. For that matter, the thing was still running, so whoever had abandoned it had done so in great haste.
It was my turn for great haste.
The tires spun behind me, peppering the nearby trees with dirt and rocks, but those trees were disappearing anyway, falling over and falling down and falling away, like everything else.
I made it to the road, and found Chief Eagan with Pedro Gussman. Most of the rescue party had left the road already, heading back to town to escape whatever unnatural disaster was taking place at Chapelwood—now that Ruth had been found. She was wrapped in a blanket staring at the trees when I emerged in my borrowed truck, and for a moment her eyes lit up. Then they went dark again.
She and Pedro and the chief were the last ones remaining. They’d stayed despite the quake, the thunder, the violence from the shattering, sinking earth, hoping that Lizbeth would emerge from Chapelwood.
But she never did.
Gaspera Lorino
ST. VINCENT’S HOSPITAL DECEMBER 25, 1921