Devoted(40)

38



In the vividly imagined high redoubt of Castle Wyvern, lying on a bed of reeds, Woody stared at the glassless panes of the southern window, which was where the sign always appeared, the bluebird or the soft-furred white rat, to certify that he’d suffered enough for his errors. Iron-dark clouds scudded fast across the sky. Waves of lightning throbbed through those curdled masses without thunder, the forces of these heavens as silent as the boy who conceived them. If he’d done even worse than he thought, if he’d drawn the murderers out of the Dark Web and all the way here to Pinehaven, if they were even now in transit, no amount of penance could earn forgiveness or safety, and he would be condemned to this tower room forever.

Then a sound came that he’d never heard before, a curious whine followed by a sigh and a series of heart-wrenching whimpers.

When he lowered his gaze from the southern window to the floor, he saw a golden retriever curled in a ball and sleeping, whimpering because it was caught in a bad or perhaps sorrowful dream.

Nothing like this had ever happened before, and Woody didn’t know what to make of it. Might the dog be a sign, like the bluebird and the white rat, a sign that he had atoned for the mess he’d made and could now leave the castle to rejoin his mother in their cozy house?



While that question remained unanswered, an unseen presence spoke to him, the disconnected words whispering along the stone walls of the tower: “Smile for Dorothy . . . dear, sweet Kipp . . . my special boy . . . my mystery . . . Mysterium . . .”

Woody sat up on the thick bed of reeds and surveyed the chamber, where shadows hung that, with each pulse of lightning, billowed as draperies would when disturbed by a draft. The speaker, a woman, remained invisible.

A harder, scary male voice was almost a snarl. “I know . . . your kind . . . teach you . . . a lesson.”

Three oil-burning sconces flamed and smoked where none had been, because he willed it so, and in the dancing light no other presence but the dog revealed itself.

A third voice, another man. “Never . . . never hit a dog. Clover . . . cancer . . . eating her alive . . . the hardest thing . . .”

And now all three voices issued forth: “Teach you a lesson . . . cancer . . . Clover . . . Dorothy . . . my Kipp . . . my special boy . . . special boy.”

The oil-fired sconces ceased to exist, and shadows stirred by the storm light shivered into the room. Woody rose to his feet as the sleeping dog became as transparent as golden glass and then vanished.

Somewhere a piano played “Moon River.”

As surely as Castle Wyvern was of Woody’s creation, so were the bluebird and the white rat that came as signs to free him from his self-imposed isolation. He knew this. The bird and the rat were expressions of his conscience when he felt that he had done enough penance for his offenses. And he knew as well that the beautiful dog was definitely not his invention, that it had been inserted into his fantasy by . . . someone else. The voices had not been his, and the words had not originated with him. He didn’t understand how that could be or what it portended, but it seemed to him that this was the first real sign that he had ever received. A gladness overcame him, and he was greatly relieved of his fear that denizens of the Dark Web would find him and his mother.



He didn’t need to throw open the massive bolts on the door of the high redoubt, did not need to descend the tower stairs and make his way through the inner ward and raise the portcullis and exit the inner gate. He merely turned in a full circle, and in his turning, the medieval chamber became his modern room, where he stood beside a bed not made of reeds.

The familiar, haunting melody rose from the piano downstairs, and as always it spoke to him of all the things he would never do. He would never travel as free as a flowing river, would never be crossing it in style someday. He would never be “off to see the world,” because the world in its immensity and complexity was too much for him. Although the lovely melody encircled Woody as surely as did the fence of his autism, he didn’t find it to be a sad song. Quite the contrary. The song endorsed the value of dreaming of doing things when actually doing them wasn’t possible, and for all of his limitations, Woody was a dreamer of the highest order.

He crossed the room and opened the door and stepped into the upstairs hall, where the music called him back to a world he knew and with which he could cope most of time, to the house in the pines and the mother whose graceful hands made beauty from all that she touched.





39



Although Shacket does not intend to sleep in Megan’s bed, the sensorial treasure that she imparted to the sheets merely by lying between them overwhelms his increasingly acute senses, an intensely fragrant erotic sachet that inspires vivid visions of the bitch’s naked form that are arousing and yet strangely soporific. Though at first awake, he is floating in a sea of lascivious images, like a pubescent boy swept into a dream that will end in a night emission—the swell of full young breasts, smooth thrusting buttocks, silken limbs encircling him—a thrilling suffocation of flesh. He can smell the particles of skin she’s shed in sleep, the moistness that her labia imparted to the cotton during her dreams of gratification, the faint traces of colostrum that, though she is not pregnant, have for some reason leaked from her nipples, as if she has anticipated him and is readying herself to feed him as her own. He can smell the place on her pillow where, in sleep, a thread of drool has unraveled from a corner of her ripe lips, and he works the luxurious fabric with his tongue to lick up the taste of her mouth. In his fantasies, her elegant hands caress her curvaceous body, offering its pleasures to him. He wants to suck her fingers, lick the delicate webs between them, and bite the thenar eminence, the plump ball of the thumb. His senses are sodden with lust, so he cannot think, and this sensory overload, this incogitant drowning in sensation, is a kind of sedation that sends him sinking into sleep as whiskey might a dizzied drunkard.