Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(86)

I threw my hands up, or I thought I did. Again, heaven knows what I was really doing, with my real body, back in the real world. Maybe it looked like I was having some sort of fit. Maybe that’s what they were saying about me, on the sidewalk outside the drugstore. I tried to push it all out of my head. I asked him, “Why should I do that? Why should I listen to some murderer?”

“Because I mean to help.”

“Help who? Me?”

“Everyone. The world is at stake, Ruth Gussman, and maybe more than that.”

“Well, I’ve got to be real honest with you, Leonard: I don’t much care about what happens to anything outside of this world.”

“But you should. There are worse things beyond the stars and under the oceans than you could ever imagine, and there are worse men on earth than you could ever believe—because they want to bring the terrible things home to us, to mate our world with theirs. These men are wrong, oh, you have to believe me,” he insisted, and those nicely groomed eyebrows were all wrinkled up with worry. “They’ll destroy everything you’ve ever known and loved—everything you might ever know, everyone you might ever love—and they’ll use your blood to do it.”

“Why me?” I demanded.

“Why anyone? They used my formulas—my own research!—and chose stepping-stones, human breadcrumbs . . . they would have killed them all anyway, and each death would’ve pried the door between our worlds open that much farther. I stalled them, that’s all I could do,” he protested, and it looked like he might cry, if he were alive. And I knew, I understood from the bottom of my soul, that just like Father Coyle . . . he wasn’t. “But this is all my fault, you understand? I gave them the means to decode the words of God, and when they did, when they chose their sacrifices . . . I was forced to choose them, too. It’s as if I damned them all twice over.”

“So are you dead? Are you in hell? Is that where we are?”

“Hell isn’t a place.” He said it offhandedly, as if this were the least important question I could possibly ask. But this was too much, too confusing. I was drowning, and I didn’t know the right word for “rope.”

“Then where are you?”

“I’m gone, that’s all that matters. I’m gone, and you’re not—so there’s still a chance. You can see and hear the dead, and maybe the dead can help. But you have to get away from Chapelwood and the Reverend Davis, and you have to stay away from them both, forever. They will never stop looking for you, and if they catch you, you must end yourself on the spot.”

“You’re telling me to go spend the rest of my life in exile, and be prepared to slit my own wrists at the drop of a hat. Is that the gist?”

“It sounds awful when you put it that way.”

“It sounds awful no matter how anybody puts it. If you’re trying to reassure me, or . . . or encourage me . . . you’re doing a shit job of it, Leonard.”

He shook his head, and looked both weary and annoyed. “I’m not trying to encourage you. I’m trying to motivate you to run or die before they can catch you and kill you. I know, it’s not the most reassuring or optimistic of motives, but you’re on borrowed time anyway. Everyone is, when you think about it—but you? You might have died months ago, but I didn’t kill you then—and I can’t kill you now. You have nothing to fear from me, not anymore.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I couldn’t stop the reverend, but you can. I want you to stop him.”

“How?” I asked, and it probably came out sadder and more desperate than I wanted. “I can’t stop anyone from anything, not even when I try, and I know what I’m doing.”

“You have to evade them, in life or death. They can’t open the final lock without you, that’s what the numbers tell me.”

“Numbers? What numbers?”

He didn’t answer my question. “The old chairman, he told you the truth—you should go, and go far. As far away as you can. Know that, and know this: If you fall into their hands, they’ll use you to destroy the world.” His face tightened in a frown, and his wrinkly eyebrows went even more crooked. His eyes had gone all vacant . . . he stared off into nothing. “Oh dear . . . I’m too late. I haven’t helped at all. That’s one thing we have in common, then—neither one of us could ever save anyone . . .”

I was losing him.

“Would you stop running your mouth about nonsense, and tell me what to do?” I tried to get his attention, tried to make some demands—anything to bring him back around—but he wouldn’t look at me anymore. He was looking through me, or past me, at something else.

“Get up. Get up and fight,” he said, and it was easy enough to understand, but his voice was starting to sound all far away like yours did just before you left me. “Fight them, and run. Run and die. Or everyone will.”

The last word was hardly a whisper. I started to say something back, but it was too late for that already, I could tell. I could feel that old tug, the sense of falling through absolute darkness, at a terrible speed, toward something I couldn’t see. The tug became a yank, and then a hard draw—all the tension and strength of a heavy weight being spun around and around and then let go.

I couldn’t see Leonard anymore. I couldn’t see anything, not the stars and comets and moons. I was falling headfirst, down and backward, down and backward, all the way back to earth, to Birmingham, to my body.