Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(48)

In his hand he held a Bible, opened to what passage I could not tell.

He closed the book and left it lying across his knees.

He wore glasses, thin-framed ones, like the inspector’s—but with lenses that were markedly thicker. They looked to be roughly the density of a good serving platter, so I shuddered to consider how poor his vision must be without them. They left an indentation across his nose and the top of his cheeks.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Lorino,” I told him with a smile.

He smiled back, but said nothing.

Simon Wolf stepped forward to introduce himself. “I’m Inspector Wolf, from Boston—and this is Miss Andrew. Your sister told you we were coming, did she not?”

He nodded.

“Do you mind if we take a seat?” I asked, and when he did not object, I went to the edge of his bed and perched there, facing him. Wolf declined to join me on the quilt, but he stood beside me all the same.

I wasn’t sure where to begin, but that was all right—the inspector had a plan, as usual. Not that it did him a great deal of good. He launched into his explanations: “Mr. Lorino, we’re here about—”

The man in the rocker interrupted quickly. “You were sent by the stars, I know. It’s about the church in the trees, and a blade on a stick, and the men in white—except when they’re in black. You’re here, and I knew to expect you. They told me you’d come.” He spoke far faster than I’d expected he might, the words rattling out of his mouth one atop the other in a rapid rush.

“Your sister told you we’d come,” Wolf insisted calmly.

“She doesn’t know anything. She thinks you’re here because of the gray lady, but that was only the cause, not the reason. It was only a piece, only a note. A telegram from the solar system, and from the cosmos beyond it.”

I realized I’d have to dive right into the fray if I wanted to get a word (let alone a question) in edgewise. “But I am here because of the gray lady. That’s what you called her, the woman in the picture you drew.” I fished it out of my bag and, while I unfolded it, I continued. “I’m missing her. I’ve been missing her for years.”

I held it up and showed it to him, but he stared right past it, at me instead. “And you’ll miss her for all the years you have left. I’m sorry, but that’s what the patterns tell me. Her image was only a lure. Through her and through the old doctor you touched the in-between place; you engaged it, you battled it—yet you returned with your life, and your sanity. You are the middle point between then, and now. Between that, and this. The patterns request your assistance. They have recalled you from the middle distance to do battle again.”

My throat tightened. “The . . . the patterns?”

“In the stars. Good ones and bad ones, I’d say . . . but they say that’s not true. They say there are only patterns that align with our interests, and those which do not. I do not know how much the will of humanity can sway them, or adjust them, or deflect them. That’s the great question of the age, not the small ones—not the small patterns, small wars waged by Shapley and Curtis. Theirs is only a war of semantics, in the grand scheme—an argument between big and bigger with no idea how much bigger the biggest has biggened.”

“I’m sorry . . . I don’t understand. I only wished to ask you about this drawing.” I still held it aloft, but it was drooping toward my lap.

“Ask whatever you like. I don’t know her, and never did.”

“Is she alive?” Wolf broached suddenly. It’s the question I would’ve presented, had I gotten the chance.

“She is gone from this world.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Mr. Lorino frowned, and the left edge of his mouth twitched. “But I can’t answer the question you asked. She is gone, that’s the best I can tell you. She’s gone, and she won’t be back.”

“Have you ever seen her before? In person?” I tried. Maybe the right arrangement of words would make the question better, or tease more information from him—since semantics seemed to matter.

“Only in the bladed night, in my dreams after the axe.” He sighed. “Never in life, Miss Andrew. The drawing was only a little bait, a little candle in the darkness. They wanted you here. Or something wants you here, someone does. Someone wishes to fight blades with blades, to confront esoteric knowledge with esoteric experience—yours, and his.” He nodded at the inspector. “Someone. Something.”

Wolf said, “I am the one who invited her.”

“No,” he insisted stubbornly. “They did. They want you, too,” he added with a nod. “They want all the help they can get, because a pattern has been . . . bent.”

“Bent?” The conversation was getting away from me. It had been steered well away from Nance, at least, and it looked like it was going to stay aimed in some other direction. I let the paper lie in my lap, but I held it almost for comfort, as if it could ground me while the strange tide of this man’s words worked to sweep me off my feet.

“Bent. Manipulated. Forced out of balance. That’s a better way to put it,” he muttered to himself. “Balance, that’s a more correct term. There is balance in the universe—it was left in the wake of the old things. They left it behind, not that they meant to. It was only a happenstance, an unintended consequence of their leaving. Their upheaval was so great, so unprecedented, that everything they left behind, everything they failed to consume . . . it all aligned in favor of entropy, as a matter of self-preservation, you might say.”