Author: Clive Barker
Date: 2014-01-31T08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Time Travel; Clive Barker; dark fiction; Medieval
Description: Welcome to the world of Chiliad, an astonishing two-part novella by the incomparable Clive Barker. A brilliantly composed narrative filled with unforgettable images, this visionary meditation on time, history, and human suffering is surely one of Barker’s most distinctive—and distinguished—creations.
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Rights: Copyright © 1997 by Clive Barker.

Chiliad: a Meditation

Copyright © 1997
by Clive Barker.

All rights reserved.

Dust jacket and interior illustrations

Copyright © 2014
by Jon Foster.

All rights reserved.

Print interior design

Copyright © 2014
by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

ISBN

978-1-59606-596-3

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

subterraneanpress.com

In my mind, the river flows both ways. Out toward the sea, toward futurity; to death, of course; to revelation, perhaps; perhaps to both. And back the way it came, at least at those places where the currents are most perverse; where vortexes appear, and the waters are like foamy skirts on the hips of the rocks. I have made my spying places at those spots. Rough hides on the muddy banks, sometimes nests of sticks and blankets in the embrace of branches, from which vantage points I can surreptitiously study the river as it contradicts itself, setting the details down in my notebook for subsequent analysis. On occasion I have even ventured into the tumult: once intentionally, once by accident (a branch broke beneath me and I almost drowned, knocked back and forth between the rocks like a shuttlecock). It was far from pleasant, believe me. Don’t trust what you may hear from shamans, who tell you, with puffy eyes, how fine it is to bathe in the river. They have their mutability to keep them from harm. The rest of us are much more brittle; more likely to bruise and break in the flood. It is, in truth, vile to be in the midst of such a commanding torrent: not to know if you will be carried back to the womb—to the ease of the mother’s waters—or out into cold father death. To hope one moment, and be in extremis the next; and not to know, half the time, which of the prospects comforts and which arouses fear.

But as long as I am safe on the bank, merely a witness, it is a fine place to meditate. And sometimes the proximity of the waters—perhaps their spray, which mists the air, perhaps their roar, which makes the heart tremble—induces visions.

Once, for instance, sitting in my hide spying on the river, I imagined myself abruptly removed to a hillside. The scene before me was that of a patchwork of fields in which men and women labored. There was much about the sight that put me in mind of a medieval illumination. The backbreaking work of the peasants, the absence of any sign of modernity—a vehicle, a telegraph pole—but more than these, a flatness about the whole panorama that made the cerulean sky and the rolling horizon and all that was laid between my hillside and that horizon—hedgerows, paths, fields, and cottages—appear to lie in the same plane of vision; all in perfect focus, and in perfect relation to one another. It seemed to me that this world existed somewhere between actuality and design. It was part document, part decoration.

My gaze became fixed upon a plowman who was working a little distance from me. He was digging up corpses, I saw; the motion of his spade uncovering the dead, one by one. Was this a cemetery? I wondered. I could see that there were markers in the ground, but they did not resemble gravestones; they were simply stripped twigs, driven into the earth to show the whereabouts of the cadavers, which had been buried at regular intervals all across the field.

And then I realized my error. There was movement among these corpses. They were turning over in their wormy beds so as to look at the sky, stretching their pale, naked limbs like sleepers stirred from slumber. Some were sitting up; standing now, still doubting the reliability of their limbs. They were most of them old: faces wizened, breasts empty, eyes blind, or rheumy. And yet they were happy in their condition. They capered as they grew to trust their legs and their good fortune, greeting one another with toothless smiles. Then they proceeded to make their way down the much-rutted road to the cluster of huts that lay a little distance from their field, their gait growing steadier as they went. I saw the doors of the huts flung wide, and the dead welcomed over the thresholds as though they were expected. Fires were lit to warm them; stew, bread, and wine were set before them. They ate, they dressed, then they sat and listened to their hosts’ children, who talked to them with great gravity, as children do.

After a time, they began to live; to get about the duties of men and women who have purpose and appetite. And as they did so—as they thatched and fished and prayed and sat contemplating the sky—I saw the toll of years steadily removed. I saw their hair thicken, and their flesh grow ruddier; I saw the women’s breasts become lush, and their haggard faces become smooth; I saw the men strengthen, and their gums get teeth, and the sexes turn glittering eyes on one another, and marry.

I understood the vision more clearly now. These were people who were born from the grave, and were living backwards toward the womb. No wonder they’d listened so attentively to the infants when they’d first returned; they were attending to the wisdom of their elders.

I longed to hear what passed between them: to ask them, if we had a tongue in common, what it felt like to be born from the grave. But that was not to be. The crop of couples I’d seen unearthed by the man in the field was by now reduced to treasured childhood, the oldest of them carried as babes-in-arms, shrinking still, until they were little more than red worms in the palms of their protectors, in which state they were taken back to the ground from which they’d come, and with great irreverence—much laughter, much drinking—buried. Several of the women stripped naked and danced a stamping dance on the earth to pack it tight upon the heads of these seeds. Then the crowd returned to the village. There it waited for sun, rain, and the goodness of God Almighty to raise another generation.

That was my vision, had on the riverbank. I’ve been warned more than once about looking for significance in these dreams. They come, many people say, simply to distract us from the simple verities of a life lived for pragmatic purpose. But I don’t believe this, at least not entirely. Though I cannot myself see the meaning of this vision, or any other I may tell, that is not to say it cannot be profitably trawled for wisdom.

II

In my mind the river flows both ways. Forward, to the explanation of things; to a destination which will justify the agonies of travel. And back, back to a time when the river was real, and those who wandered along its banks had little interest in visions.

...

This man, for instance, coming between the trees now, his boots dusting the frost off the grass, his eyes on the bank, and on the waters: he hasn’t come here looking for revelation. He only wants sight of the woman with whom he has shared his filthy shack, some half a mile upstream of this spot, for the last four years. Her name is Agnes. His name is Martin, but she, for some reason he does not remember, dubbed him Shank, and Shank he is. He is also, let it be said, the ugliest man in this shire of England; his face a mass of lumps and tics, his beard, which he seldom trims, matted.

It is a day short of a thousand years since the year zero, and most of the God-fearing men and women who live along the river have gathered at the church in the village of Tress to give thanks for their Redeemer. But Shank has only one hope of redemption: his Agnes, who dared his ugliness and his violent soul to share her life with him; his Agnes, who went out in the early dawn saying she had to make water, and did not come back to their bed beside the hearth; his Agnes, who told him once that she did not believe in paradise, but that to share eternity in a common grave with him, to molder side by side, would be quite sufficient. He had not let her see how much it had moved him to hear this. Only later, alone by the river, had he heard an animal sound close by and realized that it was the growl of his own grateful tears.

Agnes is no more loved by those who live along the river than Shank. Though she is bighearted and wide-hipped, her body is strangely made between her legs; she has something of a man’s anatomy there and something of a woman’s, oddly configured. Shank doesn’t care; in truth he takes comfort in the fact that for all the sheen of her black, black hair and the fierceness of her eyes, no man would take her to wife. So what if she can never give him children; he hates children. He hates everything, except Agnes and the river.

It is not a life that could ever be called civilized. They do not speak endearments to one another. They do not pray. They do not converse about anything abstract: they talk only of food, fire, and the roof over their heads. They fuck sometimes, though neither has a great appetite for it. Sometimes, alone in the woods, Shank masturbates. Occasionally, he violates an animal. But they live in a kind of marriage, nevertheless; a marriage stripped, to be sure, of every superfice of civilization; but bound to one another as surely as any couple who had spoken vows at an altar.

...

But now Agnes has gone, and Shank is filled with fear. These are lawless times; it is not unheard of for women here along the river to be attacked and raped by men who come down from the hills, and then, their crime committed, return there, leaving little chance for retribution. And stranger things than this he’s heard. Men who were not quite men, but took at certain times the forms of animals, who carried off children and devoured them. One man, only the previous summer, found outside his own house, glutted on blood and baby flesh, and the cradle inside empty, the swaddling clothes shredded. This creature, at least, was hanged, and at the tree had claimed that the Old One had come into him, and told him: At the passing of a thousand years the Son of God will come back into the living world, and my power over men will be passed, so I must do my worst.

Shank did not believe this story when he heard it, but now he wonders if it could be true; there is something strange about the day, something he cannot name. He takes out his hunting knife and carries it at his side as he proceeds. He will be ready for whatever comes his way: man, beast, or the two in one.

III

In my forty-fourth year a malaise crept upon me, and took me in its jaws, as Shank fears the wolfman will take him. But I had no knife. I had gone without caution into my middle years, and was unprepared for what felled me. My limbs turned to lead, my chest ached with the weary duty of breath, all I had made in my life, and all I had sought to make, seemed worthless. I was thrown by this beast into a chasm so deep and so dark I could not see the sky. And there—my body useless, my mind stupid with its own circlings—I lay. On good days, I felt enough to weep.

The conventional solutions were proffered by those who cared for me: I was simply enduring the familiar crisis of a middle-aged man, they said; I had lost faith with my purpose in life, and would have to find another. I had run out of joy, run out of certainty, was reduced, in the midst of popularity and plenty, to despair.

This despair was the reason I forsook all the places I called my own in happier times (they reminded me too much of what I had lost; of who I no longer was) and found myself a new place to sit. I went to the river. I had been there before, once or twice. But I’d never made a study of its motion the way I did now, never watched the waters so closely, or let my mind go with them, upstream and down.

Inevitably, a story came into my head. Tales had kept coming, even in the chasm, like invitations to parties I could not bear to attend, cracked and disfigured as I was. This one, however, seemed to speak to me more tenderly than the others. This one was not like the stories I had told in my younger days: it was not so certain of itself, nor of its purpose. It and I had much in common. I liked the way it curled upon itself, like the waters in the river, how it offered to fold itself into my grief, and lie there a while if necessary, until I could find a way to speak. I liked its lack of sentiment. I liked its lack of morality.

I think it was the presence of this tale that induced the first vision: that graveyard, and the souls that were born out of it. I set the vision down; and once my hand began to move over the paper, I felt the lethargy relieved a little, as though the very motion was soothing me with its familiarity. The words began to come. I saw Shank along the river; poor, deserted Shank. I found, in my dictionary, a title I liked. Chiliad: the period of a thousand years. Also Chiliasm, a doctrine which postulates Christ’s reappearance on Earth, in visible form, and the establishing of a theocratic kingdom. I did not know, when I began to write, if Christ would come into my story. I still don’t know. Perhaps, in the end, this will be a story of the anti-Chiliasm: of a time when Christ does not come, when the doors of Heaven are not thrown wide, and in lieu of God’s infinite beatitudes we have only the comfort of our own inventions; a time when the lights seen in the sky are only the reflections of starlight off the sickened stratosphere, and the miracles of healing that occur in holy places turn out to be merely force of will, and are reversed when the witnesses look the other way; when the mathematicians tell us that on further reflection their calculations were wrong, and that nothing knits us together, nothing connects, nothing shows the least sign of elegance or sublimity.

...

There is in our natures a calamitous hunger for consummation. Having begun, without a choice in the matter, we want to be sure we have some hand in the conclusion. We want to mark it, on the calendar of the ages. There we began. Here we end. And if at our demise there is a universal ending, would that be so bad? If we leave only filth and dead seas to those who come after us, would that be so bad?

Mark me, though this wretched appetite is only confessed by hysterics—by the maverick messiah who leads his shabby flock onto the mountain in readiness, counting down the hours to his Armageddon (which is postponed by their prayers)—it is a universal desire. We all count the hours. We all look for completion, even if we fear it. We long to be consumed. I long to be consumed. If I were to meet Shank along the river I would be hard-pressed not to put myself in the way of his knife.

IV

And now he sees her. There she is, in the mud, facedown in the mud. She is not naked, but her dress has been pushed up by the waters that lap against her, exposing her buttocks. Her flesh is voluptuous, even in the flat December light, its paleness vivid against the dark mud. The first thing Shank does when he gets to the body is to pull the coarse, sodden fabric back down over her nakedness, so that the sky and the river will not see her this way. Only then does he pull her face out of the mud and roll her over. The wounds that took her life are at her neck, but there are many other, smaller cuts on her arms and hands, where she attempted to fight off her murderer, and a few on her breasts, which hurts only become apparent when Shank washes her face and upper body with handfuls of icy water from the river. There is very little blood; most of it has been washed away; the wounds are just flaps of skin from which pinkish fluid oozes. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth is open a little; her lips are bluish. At last, he brings himself to look between her legs, and finds that the strange formations of her sex have been horribly cut and dug out, so that her groin, which more than once he doted on while she slept, is an unrecognizable mass of tattered flesh. He does not hope for much, but he hopes she was dead when this was done.

Back to the river he goes, wading in a few yards to be sure he has the clearest water to wash her with, and tenderly, more tenderly even than the bathing of her face, he bathes her groin. Oh now he weeps; he weeps and weeps; and perhaps a poet would say he adds his tears to the waters with which he washes her sex; and if tears could heal, as sometimes in poems they do, if grief could perform miracles, as sometimes in fiction it must, then she would be returned with this devotion into her strange wholeness. But of course she is not. And finally he can weep no more.

He lifts her up and carries her into the trees, laying her weight down on pretty pillows of frosted grass. Then he thinks: If I take time to attend to her any longer, the man who did this will certainly be gone, back to the hills. I can bury her later. But I can only catch him now. And whatever she suffered, he will suffer so much worse, so much worse. However loudly she cried, and begged him to stop, her murderer will cry out more loudly.

He becomes—in this moment—another thing: he becomes death-in-life, the man whose knife is his only expression. He is not angry now; knives are not angry. He is not tearful now; knives are not tearful. He is simply sharp and keen and inevitable.

Do not be comforted by this, though it’s hard, I know, not to enjoy the momentum he owns as he weaves between the trees; hard not to take pleasure in the simplicity of what he has become.

...

Two miles away, in the church at Tress, the priest, Father Michael, having served his congregation a healthy slice of sermonizing, and seen them from his door, retires to his tiny cottage and drinks a glass of sour wine. He has an iron constitution, though he looks old for his thirty-two years. He hopes he will not live long, however; they will have a new priest very soon, these people who sit gob-eyed in his pews, barely comprehending a word he says. Somebody who loves them better than he.

He pours himself another glass of wine, and thumbing a hole in the frost-flowered window, looks out on the churchyard. God help him, he does not want to be buried here; nor does he even deserve it. The bodies locked in the frozen dirt outside are those of men and women too ignorant to know the true meaning of sin, whereas he has no such defense. He does not deserve to lie at peace among them. The question is: what does he deserve?

He turns from the window, drinks his wine, and muses on this a little while. What punishment does Hell have in mind for him? He studied the tenets of his faith under a man who could recite the architecture of the Pit by rote: the spits, the vats, the wastes. Each had its purpose, created to remind the sinner of the sin for the span of his punishment. This same tutor, now a bishop, also reminded his students often that however terrible these torments might seem, they were insignificant beside that of the soul’s loneliness if separated from God. Michael tried to believe this, but he never could. It was a theological pretension. Why, the merest sting of a bee, or a cut on the thumb, could make him cry out: bodily suffering on the scale that his tutor had described surely surpassed any loneliness. He was lonely now, Godless now, and it was bearable. Wine took the hurt away, if it was imbibed regularly enough.

So, what agony awaited him? Some terrible device, designed for him and him alone? Some private rack which would deliver upon his person torments a thousandfold worse than any he could suffer in this world?

Well, the longer he stayed out of its embrace, the better. Perhaps, after all, he wouldn’t die young. He would pickle himself in bad wine and outlive Methuselah; deny the Devil the pleasure of his pain a few decades, and maybe, just maybe, find himself salvation in the meantime.

...

I pity Father Michael, in his cups. I would like to send Christ to him, right now. I would like to describe how—as Michael poured himself another glass of wine—he heard the sound of doves in the churchyard oaks and set his glass down and went to the door and saw his Redeemer there, sitting beneath the trees, which had miraculously blossomed. Michael would drop his glass, stumble out into the wintry light, fall to his knees and repent his sins. And Jesus would lay a bloodied palm upon his head, and softly tell him that he need not fear the Pit, for he was saved.

But I cannot find the Man of Sorrows today. Last night, sitting at my desk planning the day’s work, I thought I might have Christ close enough to describe. But there is too much fog today; I cannot see the Son; so how can I deliver Him in that song-sweet place beneath the oaks? Oh, you say, invent Him; that’s what writers do. Sometimes indeed that’s true; but not here, not now. This morning, I have a clear vision of Father Michael, meditating on the terrors of Hell while he swills his wine; but his Redeemer is nowhere to be seen.

...

The doctor tells me my depression has made me anhedonic; in other words I cannot experience pleasure in things. This is particularly acute in the business at hand: writing. He asks me how long I’ve felt like this, and I tell him I don’t know. Have I ever felt pleasure in the exercising of my craft? There’s some small sensual thrill in the motion of pen over paper, I suppose, some puritanical satisfaction to be taken in seeing the pile of filled pages climb. But pleasure? As in the act of love, or of eating chocolate? No.

Which leads me to wonder if my work has not been all these years a form of self-castigation; if I am not like Father Michael in his cell, looking out through the tiny hole he made to see the world through, and then, despairing of the sight, returning to his meditations on suffering.

(Later, I think: why should I even expect pleasure from the work I do? Pleasure is a reward, given to the human system by evolution in return for services rendered to the preservation and increase of the species. I serve nothing natural in the business of making stories. It does not advance the race a jot that a writer tells tales of doubt and darkness and revelation. Why should I be rewarded with pleasure? I think the truest evidence of the divine in our dealings is the fact that our imaginations are indulged at all, that we are not simply breeding machines, programmed to procreate. The queer in his sterile heat, the anchorite in her sealed cell, the scientist measuring the distance between unreachable galaxies, and the poet agonizing for want of a syllable, are all living lives that serve no evolutionary purpose. Is the divine not most visible in our lack of practical application? Our dreaminess, our resistance to the imperatives of egg and sperm and family?)

V

There is a man called Oswald, who lives with his family on the edge of the woods, within sight of the village. He is the only man in the vicinity who has any regular dealings with Shank. A thick-necked, bald, and willful man, Oswald likes to laugh, especially when news is bad. His neighbors find this disconcerting, and on occasion wonder behind their hands if Oswald’s entirely sane, but there is in him a kind of common sense that’s hard to gainsay. When the most productive of his four cows died, and he was found laughing beside the corpse, he could only remark that she looked funny with her stiff legs akimbo, and what was he to do about it anyway: he couldn’t resurrect her, so why weep?

Today Shank finds Oswald outside his hut, sitting on a log. His wife has thrown him out, he says, until he stops annoying her with stupid games. Shank tells him what happened to Agnes, and for once Oswald does not laugh.

“There’s been three hillmen through here,” he tells Shank. “Only an hour since. I spoke to them myself, and one of them was a bad fellow to be sure.”

Shank asks him what this villain looked like, and Oswald tells him: small man, red hair, with the face of a shaved pig. This makes Oswald laugh.

“Shall I come with you, to take him?” he says.

Shank says no, this is his work and his alone. Oswald tells him he’ll gladly hang the man; he’s done it before, when justice required it, and he likes the duty, especially when they kick; that always wins his laughter.

Finally, as Shank leaves, he offers to bury Agnes. Again, Shank tells him no.

“At least let me fetch the body to your house,” Oswald offers, “or else some animal may take her.”

Shank conveys his gratitude, as best his lumpen vocabulary allows, and tells him yes, he’d like Oswald to take Agnes’s body to the house. Then he leaves, in pursuit of the shaved pig.

...

I need not tell you much about this man, whose blade allegedly worked such terrible work upon Agnes. You need only know that he is innocent, at least of the crime he is soon to die for. He has committed other acts, almost as terrible (Oswald is not wrong to see malice in him); so perhaps there is some justice in what he is about to receive. But being—at least today—a man who does not expect to be stalked, and keeping the company of two other men (one his half-brother) who are feeling equally blameless this late afternoon, the man makes no attempt to cover his tracks. Shank finds evidence of the trio quickly enough, and soon begins to close on them. Once he is near enough to see them, however—which is at dusk—he hangs back and waits. The trio have made a little fire among the trees, and are cooking a rabbit one of them caught; they will go no farther tonight. Shank can afford to squat on his haunches against a tree, and watch the stars come out above, until the men sleep. Then he will take them, one by one. There is no question in his head as to whether he should spare the killer’s companions: their proximity condemns them. All three will die for the crime of one.

...

In Tress, the congregation returns for the evening service, and files into the little church to give thanks for another day lived without harm; but though Father Michael’s flock waits for its priest to appear, it waits in vain. At last, somebody gets up and looks for Father Michael. He is not to be found.

(No, that’s not true. I can find him for you. He’s sitting high, high in the branches of the largest of the oaks in the churchyard. Though it’s night, his form is discernible as an absence of stars. Nobody thinks to look up as they file out, shaking their heads at the strangeness of all this. Why would they? Nobody expects to see their priest perched in a tree.)

...

Oswald, meanwhile, has gone to fetch Agnes’s body to a place of safety. He is not, by the standards of his age, a particularly superstitious man. If a creature, half-man and half-wolf, were to lope past him now, he would certainly believe the evidence of his eyes, but he does not anticipate such a horror appearing. He doesn’t mutter prayers or old rhymes to himself as he goes, to keep evil from crossing his path; he doesn’t have a talisman in his pocket, or a cross. But as he makes his way along the riverbank to the spot that Shank described where he will find the body, an uneasiness creeps over him. It is nothing to do with the grisly prospect before him; he’s seen the worst that the world can do to human flesh in his time. What makes him slow down and study the trees a little more carefully is the strange fullness of feeling that has arisen in him. He wants to weep, and he does not know why. His eyes sting, and his nose runs, and for a moment he has to stop and wipe the snot from his moustache and the tears from his cheeks. When he has done so, and he raises his head, he sees a sight that will be the most peculiar of his long life. A little distance from him, a man has appeared on the banks of the river. He has his back to Oswald, but it seems the stranger is carrying some kind of light, because his figure is delineated by a pale glow. There is something calming about the sight. The light is as pretty as the light of a spring moon, and as steady. Though the wind has risen since Oswald began his journey here, the lamp the man carries does not so much as flicker. Nor is there anything about the silhouette that gives Oswald reason to think the man is dangerous to him. Indeed there seems to be something almost insubstantial about him; the clearer Oswald’s gaze becomes, the more it seems to him the light the man carries seeps through his body here and there, as though he were only half-solid.

Oswald knows what the dead are reported to look like when they are glimpsed by the living: how they strive for corporeality, and fail. Is this, then, a dead man he sees? If so, why does Oswald feel such serenity? Why does he want to approach the man and see him better?

He does not analyze his instincts for more than a heartbeat, but follows them, approaching the ghost without any attempt at concealment. And as he gets closer, the mystery of the man’s appearance deepens. He is dressed in clothes quite foreign to Oswald’s eye: sleek, pale clothes that might befit a nobleman from some unknown country. He carries no weapon that Oswald can see, nor is there any sign that he has companions. He is simply standing there among the trees, bathed in and pierced by the light he carries.

Only as he comes within a stone’s throw of the man does Oswald see what lies at the fellow’s feet: Agnes’s body.

Oswald stops, his thoughts suddenly chaotic. Is this Agnes’s slaughterer; some phantom she encountered by the river, who took her life and then came back to gloat over the body? If so, Shank will revenge himself upon the wrong man, which in other circumstances might make Oswald laugh—he’s taken pleasure in the absurdity of misplaced murder before—but gives him no such pleasure now. He is of half a mind to turn back and try to intercept Shank on his mission, but in the moment of indecision the phantom senses his presence and turns to look at him. And oh, the face Oswald sees between the trees—the look in the spirit’s eyes, the mournful expression—takes all hope of laughter from him. After this moment, Oswald will not laugh again—not ever. He will grow old, very old by the standards of the time, but it will be a life lived in a state of sorrow.

The phantom speaks. This is not my wife, he says. And then, after a long time, Who is she?

Oswald doesn’t want to exchange words with the spirit. The less contact he makes, he reasons, the better. Let the ghost quiz some other wanderer who comes here.

He starts to retreat, step by stumbling step, keeping his eyes on the dead as he does so.

Who is she? the phantom demands again, his voice as ragged as his substance.

Oswald finds it hard to resist replying, the face of the ghost is so pitiful. But he wills himself to look away from it, and lays his eyes upon the light in the man’s hands. It is not, he sees, a lamp; no, nor any kind of light Oswald recognizes. It is as if the man is carrying a nugget of the moon itself, steady and serene. It is the light that calms him, he knows; and perhaps it is a fatal calm, a calm that will make his heart quit beating if he doesn’t turn from it now, quickly, quickly, while he still can. Clammy and gasping, he comes at last to his hut; to the stump where he was sitting when Shank came along. He sits upon it, and does his best to compose himself. He doesn’t want to frighten his children. At last, the door opens and his wife appears, asks him where he got to, and what did he bring back with him? He went nowhere, he says; he brought back nothing. She doesn’t believe him, of course. She knows him too well. (Or at least so she thinks. After tonight, she will not know him as well as she had. Her laughing husband is gone from her, and somebody she cannot love so well has taken his place. She will die two winters hence and on her deathbed ask him what she dare not ask now, because now she sees the look in his eyes: she will ask him what happened to him. And he will try to tell her, and while he stumbles over the words, she will pass away.)

VI

And now to Shank, who has watched his quarry for many hours, waiting patiently for a chance to do his worst. The hillmen have three times stoked the fire, so that it burned bright as they drank and talked and drank again. But their ale has taken its toll, and they have laid their heads down to sleep, letting the fire burn low. It’s only embers now; and by its fitful light Shank can make out the faces of the three men, inert beneath their tatty furs.

He has his plan: he will take the one closest to him first, who is also the biggest, and therefore the most dangerous to him. Or so he assumes. In fact Shank is just moving from his hiding place when the third man (not the giant, not the murderer) rises groggily and, with much grunting and throat-clearing, staggers a little way from the camp. Shank assumes the man is going to piss, which suits his purposes. He will kill the man while he’s occupied emptying his bladder. He moves quickly and quietly around the edge of the camp to the darkness into which the man staggered, and comes upon him suddenly, no more than a body’s length from him, squatting with his back against a tree, taking a shit. He’s constipated; he grunts and swears. Shank is upon the man before he knows it, and deftly cuts the fellow’s throat from ear to ear. The hillman’s last breath whistles out of his throat and he sits down in his own excrement, slumped against the tree.

Shank looks back toward the other two men. Neither has stirred from their stupefied sleep. He doesn’t give the dead man a second look, but moves quickly back to the fireside so as to stab the second of the killer’s companions. He’s quick. The knife is raised, and down it comes, straight into the man’s chest. But there is a greater thickness of fur on the body than Shank thought, and it keeps the blade from doing its fatal duty. The man rises, roaring, with his fur pinned to his chest by Shank’s blade. He throws Shank toward the fire, but unlike his victim Shank is not the worse for ale, and he’s back at the man in a heartbeat, pulling the knife out of the hillman’s flesh. The fur falls away. The man looks down at his chest, to see blood coursing. In that moment Shank takes him again, this time driving his knife into the man’s belly and drawing it up and up, dividing flab and muscle and meat. When he pulls his knife out the contents of the man’s belly come with it: his innards, his dinner, his ale. The man looses a sobbing sound, and falls down on the fur. Shank doesn’t wait to watch him die. He is after the man Oswald called a shaved pig, the man he will make suffer over and over for the death of Agnes.

The third man is awake, of course, and up from the ground. But he has no intention of fighting; his best defense, he has decided, is to run. Shank has the benefit of his frenzy however. His lungs draw in heroic drafts of air, his limbs are swollen and throbbing with the passion of the moment; he feels an exhilaration that he cannot ever remember feeling before. He catches hold of the pig by the hair, puts the gutting knife to the man’s neck, and cuts him there, a finger-length cut, no more, but enough, enough that the man knows he’s dead if he attempts to struggle. Then Shank hauls him to the fire and pushes the man’s face down toward the flames that here and there spring from the embers.

“You killed my woman,” he says, close to the man’s ear.

Despite his terror, the pig protests: no, no, no, he says, he did nothing. One of the others maybe, but not him. He swears, on Christ’s holy blood, he did nothing.

Shank pushes his captive’s face closer to the fire. The curls of the hillman’s ragged beard catch fire, and go up, quick and bright. He says again that he’s blameless, but with every word of protest he’s pushed closer to the heat. His beard is on fire now; the hair around his ears is withering, his fringe and eyelashes the same. He starts to panic; struggles to shake free of Shank. His words of denial have become yells. He flails, and some of the embers fly, but he cannot free himself from his tormentor, who suddenly tires of torture and pushes the man’s face down into the remnants of the fire. Oh, the pig squeals, and fueled by agony his flailings redouble, growing strong enough to throw Shank off. He pulls his face from the embers, his beard and hair alight, and, getting to his feet, he reels around, screaming. Shank is momentarily frozen, fascinated by the spectacle before him. He wishes he had somebody here to share it with, Oswald perhaps; yes, Oswald would be laughing until tears ran.

Then, suddenly, the man is off, still burning, staggering away between the trees. Shank picks up his knife, which he dropped in the struggle, and follows him. The quarry’s not hard to find: his head is a bright ball weaving through the darkness.

And then, Shank hears the river. The hillman’s led him to the river. He can see the waters glistening ahead; he can even see his quarry staggering into the foamy flood, throwing himself down to extinguish his agonies. The flames go out, but Shank is wading across the frozen mud now; he can still see his victim quite clearly. He throws himself into the water in pursuit, and catches hold of the man, roaring over the roar of the river. They have come into the river where the flood runs fast and white, and in their exhausted, wounded states they are neither of them the equal of the current. Shank’s victim is first to be thrown off his feet, and Shank takes advantage of the fact, pushing the man’s head under the water. He will not drown the man, he’s decided; simply weaken him sufficiently to make him compliant. Then he’ll drag him back onto the bank, and start to cut him, and cut him, and keep cutting him for as long as his sobs last. Only then, when the man has no more sounds of suffering to make, will he stab him through the eyes and consider Agnes’s death revenged.

But first he has to get the man out of the water, and that’s proving difficult. Though the pig’s head has been down a while, he still claws at Shank’s face, plowing his cheek. Shank pulls the man to the surface—getting a glimpse in the moonlight of the way the fire blistered him—then beats at the red-raw face with his fist. Still the man won’t give up the fight. He reaches for Shank’s neck and pulls him down into the water. This time it’s Shank whose legs are swept out from under him by the current. Locked together, they are carried away downstream, thrown against rocks in places, caught in a raft of detritus (the boughs of trees, excrement, a dead goat) in another. Shank has the breath beaten out of him by the violence of their passage, but he will not relinquish his hold on his quarry. It is a doggedness that will undo him. The man’s body gets heavier, it seems, and as he sinks he pulls Shank with him. Shank inhales water, sputters, spits, inhales another draft, then sinks below the surface.

Only now does he realize that the man who seems to have such murderous purpose is already drowned. It’s simply a trick of the hillman’s constricted muscles that makes him hold on to Shank the way he does. The rest—the motion of his body, the way he seems to willfully drag Shank down with him—is all the river’s work. It’s too late, however, to give up his struggle. He could not now disengage himself even if he wanted to: the water and its dead agent have him fast. Down and down he goes, the last of his breath escaping him in a shoal of silvery bubbles.

...

Much later, a trick of the eddying water separates the bodies. Shank’s victim is carried out to sea, but Shank himself is washed up close to the mouth of the river. The mud here is thick, and though a few people come wading through it in the next few days, searching for crabs, even dead fish, to supplement their meager supplies of food, Shank’s body goes unnoticed. The crabs, however, are not so careless of his presence. They come to the corpse like pilgrims, sidling over its mounds, crawling into his clothes, into his mouth, into his belly cavity, to have every edible shred of him. His bones go into the mud; and the sun never shines on him again.

VII

In my mind, the river comes at last into the hut where Agnes and Shank lived together. It takes four years—four years in which nobody goes near the place, out of superstition—but one February a sudden spell of warm weather melts the heavy snow, which so swells the waters that they rise higher than they have in living memory, and the river comes into the hut. It is like an uninvited guest, throwing open the door and turning the place upside down. It beats the few pitiful pieces of furniture to splinters; it sluices the last of the ashes out of the hearth; it takes the skulls of animals Shank had collected, and the smooth, creamy pebbles Agnes used to bring in now and again from the riverbank, and called her children; it takes some wooden cups, a flask, a knife or two, the rotted furs under which they slept; takes it all and washes it away.

The walls of the hut itself survive another season, but in the heat of the following summer the place suddenly collapses upon itself. The next winter, when the flood comes again, it carries the remnants away, and in spring grass grows where the hut had stood.

VIII

Nothing of significance will change here for almost a thousand years. The river will flow on, year after year, sometimes coming close to freezing in the bitterest winters, in the hottest summers reduced to a muddy stream, but essentially unaltered. Oh, it’s carving a fresh path for itself, to be sure, eating away at one bank and depositing silt upon another. But these changes are so subtle the passing of a chiliad is not enough to make them visible.

The trees along the banks grow lusher, of course. They cast down their seeds, and when the parent trees perish of disease or antiquity, those seeds are sustained by the warm rot of timber and leaf, and they flourish. Some years the undergrowth is virtually impenetrable; then there’s a small fire, which clears the dead wood, and a new cycle of growth begins.

I can tell you very little about the human stories that unfold here. No doubt there are countless goings-on in such a place: acts of seduction and devotion; little kindnesses, little cruelties. Nothing of note, however, except for this: In the summer of 1850, the painter John Everett Millais comes here, looking for a river scene that he can use in a painting he has planned. The subject is to be that of the drowned Ophelia, floating away with her garland of flowers. Millais stays for a day studying the curves of the river. But after a time he rejects it. He wants to find a place that better matches the details of Shakespeare’s text; this river has no willows. He finally chooses the Hogsmill River, in Surrey, and paints his masterpiece there the following year.

It is not until 1940—with the end of the millennium approaching—that the landscape undergoes any significant change. In September of that year a lone Luftwaffe bomber, crippled by antiaircraft fire as it crosses the English coast, drops a full payload of bombs intended for London, and several fall in the vicinity of the river. One of them fails to explode, and—lost in the undergrowth—will not be discovered for another seventy years or so. A second explodes just north of the village, killing some cattle. It is the third bomb that concerns us, for it blows the church at Tress to smithereens, evacuating from their graves the many good Christians who were laid there in the belief that they would not see the sky again until Judgment Day.

When, after the war is over, the church is rebuilt, an artist who first came to the river because he was a devotee of Millais, and erroneously thought this was where the Ophelia painting had been made (and who so fell in love with the tranquility of the place he moved his family there the following spring) is commissioned to design four stained-glass windows. Only three of the four designs are delivered and executed. They are glorious; the triumphs of his career. One depicts John the Baptist, standing in a river, with a congregation of happy acolytes waiting to be blessed. A second shows Christopher, bearing the child Jesus on his shoulders across another river, this one wilder than that in which John stands. The third is of Christ the Redeemer, walking on the waters, while fish leap around His wounded feet. In case anyone should think these waters were Galilee’s, the artist made certain the fish were river trout.

The fourth window was reputed to depict the Second Coming, when the river would flow back against itself, and the sun, moon, and stars all shine at the same hour, and Christ, and the frightened soul who carried Him, and the shaman who baptized Him, would come together in glory to forgive the sinners and share with them the secret of bliss. But the artist dies of a heart attack before he finishes his great work, and the fourth window is instead made of plain glass, through which the congregation sees only sky.

Again, by the river: I dreamed a dream of the Coming. This is what I set down when I woke.

In the last dark days, I wrote, even in the hours before everything changed forever, even in the moments that preceded the Moment, most of the people on the planet denied what they knew. They buried their attentions in a million trivial tasks. (Of course every task was trivial then, from the baking of bread to the dispensation of power: all of it would be as nothing very soon.)

But the rest of the world was not so willful. Domestic animals for instance, even the loyalest, left their kennels and leapt their gates to go and sniff the open sky. Cattle in the slaughterhouse gave up their fear and lowed with pleasure, even as the fatal blow descended. Every bird fell silent, waiting for a finer music. Every raindrop twitched as it fell, eager to climb again, and have a glimpse of Heaven’s bounty before the eyes of humankind.

The Pantheons made themselves apparent in the blink of an eye; perhaps less. At one instant the planet was a place of faith, doubt, and godlessness, the next there was room for none of these. Who needed faith when the senses confirmed all? As for doubt and godlessness, they were absurdities now that every deity that had ever appeared in human consciousness (and some several hundred thousand who had never made it) had manifested themselves. The Coming was indiscriminate; it made no distinction between great divinities and small. There were vast and transformative powers abroad, deities that brought with them fleets of angelic vehicles and all manner of divine paraphernalia, but there were also threadbare local gods, guardians of painted rocks, spirits of bamboo groves; presences that healed sores and brought lovers, demons who haunted empty roads and forsaken hotels. A world of yearning and need was suddenly a place of surfeit; and the end of mankind began, for there was nothing left invisible, or unknowable, and therefore nothing left to hope for or desire.

That’s what I wrote, sitting by the river, and conceived from this beginning a book about the days after the Moment; a book in which I would indulge my passion for deities. It would be, I decided, encyclopedic. I would create a pilgrim, after Bunyan, whose progress would not be marked by tests of faith and fortitude but by the horrors of certainty and the despair brought by limitless horizons. His excitement and his piety would quickly wither. He would sate his senses and his curiosity without fear of censure, and by degrees sink into a trough of complete indifference. I pictured him wandering through the city besieged by revelation. In the early hours, there would be packs of wild gods loose on the streets, howling their wisdom against the lightening sky. A few minutes after dawn the thoroughfares would be impassable, the number of people on the planet having swelled thanks to a universal state of resurrection. (There was a certain competitiveness among the deities as to who could raise the greatest number of dead souls; with all human graves empty, and all human ash recombined, the competitors were obliged to raise cows, and horses; soon it would be sheep and pigs; later, they would stoop to fowl.)

So the day would go, a chaos through which my bewildered pilgrim would make his weary way, his energies depleted wonderment by wonderment, glory by glory, until at last, on the outskirts of the city, he finds a hill, and lies down, closing his eyes against the thronged clouds. There is a pleasant darkness behind his lids, a restful absence. He wants to go into it forever. But how may he achieve such bliss? If he kills himself here on the hill, some eager messiah will surely find him, and raise him up like Lazarus. He must find a place to die where his corpse will not be discovered. Sighing, he gets to his feet and climbs to the crest of the hill. The landscape before him gives him no greater comfort than the city he has left. Every grove has its local god, every crossroads the same; every stump, every pebble. Is there a mote of dust that some god or other does not exalt, he wonders. Is there any place he can be alone? That becomes his pilgrimage then. With a heart unbearably heavy he goes on his way, looking for a place where resurrection will not find him.

It would not have made a good book, I think. It would have been a folly. Its best telling was in these paragraphs: they contain all the ironies a tome would have contained, and waste less ink. Now I’m free to turn my hand back to the death at the river.

II

In my mind, the river runs both ways; but you know that. And I must commit myself to it, sooner or later, let it sweep me where it will. Perhaps I’ll drown; perhaps I’ll be pressed back against the shore. Perhaps I’ll find love in the flood. Perhaps, from the rush of water, I will see the world as only saints see it. Until then—until I have the courage to go back into the tumult—I can only watch, and hope that I’ll be able to finish what I began, though the beginning and the end may seem very much alike.

...

The man’s name is Devlin Coombs, and he was until yesterday a married man of forty-one, happily unrenowned. He worked at a small insurance firm in the city, where he’d been a claims adjuster for a decade. Tuesdays and Thursdays he attended night school, studying ceramics. He has made three pots of which he could say: these I like. He has no children. He likes Beethoven and eel pie. At least, he did. He will not take pleasure in eel pie again; nor will he play a Beethoven sonata without weeping so uncontrollably he must turn it off. He will make no more pots; nor will he make love to Mary Elizabeth, for last night, his beloved wife’s body was washed up by the river. It was the twenty-sixth of December, nineteen ninety-nine, five days before an auspicious day, five days before the millennium, when prophets of doom promise the end of the world. They were wrong by almost a week, Devlin thinks as he walks along the river: or else the world ended early, for what is the world worth without Mary Elizabeth?

All he could do now is mourn her, mourn her and wonder, while he mourned, how she had come to such an end. How was it possible that a woman of such upright morality, a woman who had never strayed from the path of the righteous, had lost her life to murder?

He had to identify the body, of course, and was not expecting from the police—for whom he had a nervous liberal’s concealed contempt—any degree of delicacy in the business. He was right. There was none. He was brought in to a badly disinfected room and presented with the pitiful shape of her, laid out on a table of chipped white enamel. There was a sheet covering her from head to foot. He asked that it be taken off entirely. Here, at least, the detective showed some degree of empathy, telling him very quietly that he didn’t feel this to be a wise idea.

“She’s in a terrible way below the neck,” the man said.

Devlin replied that he was ready for that. He wanted to see her all. And when the man drew back the sheet he did not regret his decision. She was indeed in a terrible way, her body horribly plowed. But the inertness of her bulk was more certain proof to him of her absence—the sense that she was gone, completely, or else she would not have allowed this wretched unveiling—that made the whole scene more acceptable. He would not know this woman again. All he could know now—the only mystery he could solve—was the identity of the man who had taken her life.

...

The police told him nothing—only reassured him that they knew their business, and that he could serve them best by first answering their questions, which he did, and then leaving them to work without demanding to know their progress every moment. This he found more difficult. Given that he was not a suspect (at the time of Mary Elizabeth’s murder he had been a hundred miles away, helping his addled mother through the horrors of her third Christmas with Parkinson’s disease; so she testified, though in truth she didn’t know one day from the next) it followed that there were two classes of suspect. The first: somebody Mary Elizabeth knew—a friend, or a colleague at work. The second: a psychotic stranger whose path she had been unlucky enough to cross. The first was to Devlin’s mind unlikely, even absurd. Mary Elizabeth had a small circle of friends, mostly women sliding into genteel middle age, and at work a few pleasant folks, most of whom he himself had met at company picnics and the like. There was not a one he would not have trusted. Which left his second hypothesis the only plausible explanation. His wife had met death by chance, because she had wandered its way. And with every hour the police delayed their pursuit of her murderer, asking asinine questions of men and women who were entirely blameless in the matter, the greater the chance that the guilty party would escape them, and forever. Unthinkable! that his beloved could be taken this way and the thief not be punished. But as the days went by (and the nights: he didn’t sleep, didn’t even want to sleep, with the bed empty beside him), the more frustrated he became, and the more certain that if justice was to be served in this matter, he would have to be the man to mete it out.

III

Devlin has a dentist whom he avoids visiting, but has recently become a near neighbor. He meets the man, one Edward Littlefield, as he goes to his car to drive down to the place where Mary Elizabeth was found. Littlefield’s a wide-faced, gap-toothed, pithy man, whose response to having one of the world’s less glamorous professions is to ride it for all it’s worth. But today he makes no jokes about oral hygiene. He’s heard the news, of course, and remarks that he found Devlin’s television interview the previous evening, complaining about the lack of police activity, very moving.

“You have to take these things into your own hands,” he says, and explains that he speaks from experience. His son went missing when the boy was six, and was never found.

“To this day,” Littlefield says, “I wish I’d trusted the police less and my instincts more. I could have found the kid myself if I hadn’t just sat at home and believed every damn thing they were telling me.” His gaze slides off down the street, as though even now he thinks he may see his son—gone now nineteen years—playing hide-and-seek between the sycamores. “My wife met a woman a couple of years ago who said she could have helped us, and I thought: dear God, where were you when I needed you?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow. Who was this woman?”

“My wife was the one who had the really involved conversations with her. I don’t know—” He recalls his gaze from the distance and looks hard at Devlin. “—Are you a believer?” he asks softly.

“In what?”

“In that kind of thing. Paranormal stuff. Psychic phenomena…”

“I don’t know.”

“But you’d be willing to give it a try?”

“Well the police are certainly no damn good to me. And I’m afraid—” He breaks off, stares at the ground.

“Spit it out,” Littlefield replies, as is his wont.

“I’m afraid if I don’t find out who did it…I mean, ever…I’ll just go crazy.”

Littlefield nods. Again, he’s looking down the street. “I know how that feels,” he murmurs. “Not having a way to finish. Like a book with the last few pages missing. And you know they’ll always be missing. However hard you look; however much you pray. I used to pray every night, as hard as I knew how: Dear God, tell me where my son is buried. You get to that point. Just tell me where he’s buried.”

Devlin keeps his silence a long moment, embarrassed by Littlefield’s vulnerability. If he could walk away at that moment, he would do so, but he needs more information from the man: the name of the psychic, and her whereabouts. He doesn’t have to ask. Littlefield needs only to glance back at Devlin’s face, and he has his wallet out, and a card from the wallet, and he’s scrawling a name and a number. “Funny,” he says as he writes, “how you remember some telephone numbers and not others. I could never remember my mother-in-law’s number; never; even though I must have dialed it hundreds of times. But this”—he hands the card to Devlin—“I remember this without ever having to think about it.”

They part. Devlin doesn’t pocket the card. He carries it in his tightly knotted fist and calls the woman the moment he gets home, though as soon as she picks up the phone and he hears her voice it is as if she did the calling, and all he has done is answered her summons.

...

So it is he comes to the unremarkable house in Camberwell, with its neat lawn and its blue door, and is invited into a place so utterly unlike its exterior it’s as though he had stepped out of waking reality into a dream. His guide’s name is Shirley Dunbar. She’s fiftyish, recently blond, and might have been quite a beauty a hundred pounds ago. She has prepared a snack for them both: ham sandwiches, Christmas cake heavy with fruit and rum, and glasses of Scotch. Enjoy it, she says, as they sit in the dark parlor, its plaster walls covered with hundreds of small scraps of linen upon which incoherent signs are scrawled; this is the last you should eat or drink for twenty-four hours. You can have a little water, but nothing solid. You need to clean out your system before you go.

“Go where?” says Devlin.

“Back to see what happened,” Shirley replies. She has made a mulch of cake and whiskey in her mouth, and savors it as she speaks. “You’ll take the light and back you’ll go.”

“I thought you…”

“Me?”

“…I thought that’s what psychics do. You go…I don’t know…to talk to your spirits or whatever.”

“No, not me.”

“…but I don’t…”

“What?”

“I don’t know anything about any of this.”

“You know your wife,” Shirley replies. “I didn’t. You saw her dead. I didn’t. You’ve probably been to the place where she was found—”

“Yes.”

“—I haven’t. You see, I’m just here to facilitate.”

“So you never…?”

“Travel?”

“Yes.”

“No. Not if I can help it. In my younger days, well, yes, on occasion I’d go. I was more interested then, I suppose. I thought there was more to know than there was.”

“More to know?”

“The grand scheme of things,” Shirley replies, her pudgy hands describing a ragged circle in front of her. “But of course you learn…”

“What?”

“That there’s nothing. There’s only us wanting it, you know, and wanting isn’t really enough, is it? I mean, in the end. It’s just not enough.”

Devlin’s not certain how much of this he’s really understanding, but he decides not to ask any more questions, which is fine by Shirley, who can pin thoughts together without need of prompting. She tells him, by way of a bewildering series of fragments, her life story. Born in Belfast, married at seventeen, lost all her children to disease; discovered her gifts when her husband (Mr. Dunbar she calls him throughout) ran away with “a lady-friend,” and she was left in an empty house dallying with insanity. She has a gift, perhaps from her mother—a way of piercing the veil, as she puts it, that hangs between us and the dead. Once she’d grasped the nature of her talent, she says, there was no looking back. It was as if the woman she’d been until then simply evaporated. Indeed she keeps the name Dunbar—rather than reverting to her maiden name—as a way of reminding herself that she was once an ordinary married woman.

At last she comes to the crux of her monologue. “You’ll be wondering,” she says, “where all this is leading.”

“Well…” Devlin begins.

“Trust’s important,” she replies. “I mean, here am I and here’s you, and there’s got to be trust hasn’t there, when we’ve been brought together this way.”

“You think we were brought together?”

“Oh, yes, you were destined to come here, Devlin,” she tells him. Devlin wants to ask how this faith in predestination sits beside her dismissal of any grand scheme, but he decides not to break her flow, just lets her talk. “I’ve had things in this house…” she says, “…things you wouldn’t find in Rome or Jerusalem. And you know, it’s funny, I think they’re better off here than they’d ever be in a fancy reliquary. Most holy things are humble at heart, aren’t they? A nail, a lock of hair, a stone…” Her voice has become softer as she speaks of these treasures, and every last scrap of doubt has left Devlin’s heart. He watches her whiskey-ruddied face, and knows this is no performance. She speaks of common scraps of matter raised by their association with the miraculous to a state of exaltation. And if that’s possible for a stone or a nail, he thinks, why not for a man? And so thinking, feels the first trace of hope he’s felt since he was told he’d lost his wife.

He cannot help speaking now; he feels empowered.

“I want to begin,” he says. “Please. I want to begin.”

“You’ve already begun, don’t you see?” she says to him. “You began the moment you heard my name. But I want you to understand the consequences of this journey.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should,” she tells him sharply. “This isn’t a matter of life and death. That’d be easy. No. This is…this is…”

“…what?”

“It’s hard to find the words,” she replies. Then, after a pause to think them through, “I understand your grief, and I want to help soothe it, but there is only one object in this house that can truly aid you in your search. It’s a flame.”

“A flame?”

“Of sorts. You’ll see for yourself. As I say, it’s a flame. But…it’s a lot more than that. It was brought here in the first year of my…what shall I call it?…my second life. The man who brought it wanted to be rid of it, and gave it to me.”

“What does it do?”

“It will illuminate the way, back to your wife. Back to the moment when she died, if that’s what you want to see.”

“That’s what I want to see.”

“That and that alone?”

“Yes.”

“You swear?”

“Yes.”

“This is very important, Devlin.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Well I’ll tell you. Holy things have minds of their own. Unholy things the same. They have…intentions. Not all of them. Some of them are just what they seem to be. But this flame—”

“Intentions to do what?”

Shirley shrugs, pouring herself another ample whiskey. “I’m only warning you to be sure of what you want.”

“I want to know who killed my wife,” Devlin replies. “What could be plainer than that?”

IV

She tells him to return at dusk the following day. She tells him that what he wears should be cotton or silk, his shoes leather—no man-made materials. She repeats her instructions about not eating. He asks her what he should expect. She tells him she doesn’t know. Every case is different, she says. This isn’t an exact science, she says. We’re dealing, she says, with the stuff of our souls, and only a fool would say they understood it. Then she tells him to leave, which he does, returned into the real world with his perception of things more than a little changed. As he drives home he has to stop a dozen times at least, because his mind simply drifts off. He finds himself wondering how much of the world around him is charged with significance. Is every inch of asphalt beneath the wheels of his car, every dead moth spattered on the window, a shard of some vaster mystery? Is there power in the dead matter of his fingernails, or the dried spittle at the corners of his mouth? If so, what a world this is; and how much, how very much, he wished he could tell Mary Elizabeth about it.

...

The next dusk he comes back to Shirley’s house, as arranged. His stomach rumbles, his skin itches a little, he feels light-headed. He stands on the doorstep and talks to himself, saying: Be calm. You’re the master of your body and your mind. This is what you wanted, after all. Be calm. Then he knocks on the door. It swings open at his touch, and he enters, calling Shirley’s name. There’s no reply, but nor does there need to be. He’s only a yard down the hallway when he sees a flickering light from the living room, and knows that he is expected. He doesn’t hesitate now, but goes into the parlor, a smile on his face. If Shirley is there to see the smile, she is not in sight of him, but then nothing draws his gaze other than the flame. It hovers in the air close to the hearth, giving off a silvery light. As he approaches it he feels its touch on his face and hands; he turns up his palms and feels them pricked. Does he need to announce his desire? he wonders. No, no; the light knows. It’s in his skull, brightening the darkness, comforting him.

He cups his hands around it, gently, just as he would if he were taking hold of a dandelion, or a butterfly. It responds to his care in kind: seeping into him through his pores. His flesh responds with shudders of pleasure, as though his system had been parched, and the light comes through its dusty channels like a long-delayed rain. Only when he has accustomed himself to its presence does the scouring power of its flow make itself known, and by then he’s too exhilarated by the transformation he feels to care. That is its business, and he has no wish to deny it. Nor indeed would he be able. It has thrown off any pretense to gentility now, and comes full bore, piercing him, sluicing him, a spiritual emetic which leaves him shuddering where he stands.

And just as it seems his whole body will be washed to pieces, it stops its violent cleansing, is suddenly still in him.

He waits, expecting Shirley to appear and offer him some words of instruction. But she doesn’t come. Ten minutes pass; fifteen, twenty; still he waits. At last he resigns himself to the fact that he’s not going to get any guidance, from Shirley or anyone else. He’s on his own in this endeavor.

“Well then…” he murmurs, almost as though he’s expecting a dialogue with the light. “Shall we…?”

He was going to say: Shall we go to the river? but he never finishes the sentence. The light shifts—he feels it move in him, momentously—and in a strange blur he passes out of the house into the street. He isn’t aware of his limbs’ motion; he isn’t aware that he expends any effort whatsoever. He is simply transported, and on his way to realize his desires.

...

(Perhaps a word about Shirley is appropriate here. She is in the house that Devlin has just left, sprawled on the bathroom floor, where she has been incapacitated by a massive stroke. It will prove fatal in the next three hours. She will struggle to reach a phone, but fail. She will pray, but be granted no reprieve. At last, she will give thanks, lying in a pool of urine, her body dying around her, for a life lived with some measure of purpose. And as she gives thanks, she forgets herself; or at least she forgets her present condition. She’s back on the streets of Belfast, at the age of nine. Blissful nine, innocent nine. Before she knew what sex was; before she lost faith with God and Father O’Connor, before her mother grew weary and white-haired. A summer’s day, and she on Galway Street, wandering dreamily, smelling the green off the hills.

That’s where she’s living when she dies: in a moment that she has not remembered for decades, but that surrounds her now like an embrace, and soothes her into death.)

V

Devlin finds himself beside the river. He does not remember passing through the streets to get here, though he assumes he must have done so. All he remembers is the calm, the blissful calm, being in and of the flame.

He knows the spot he’s come to. It is several hundred yards upstream of the place where Mary Elizabeth’s body was found, not far from the church, with its three glorious windows and its one of plain glass. He wonders if the speed of thought will take him the rest of the way to the murder site. But no, his body’s apparently back under his own volition. He wills himself to walk, and his muscles oblige him, carrying him along the bank. And as he goes, the sky starts to brighten. Dawn already? he thinks. The night has barely begun. No, he sees, this isn’t New Year’s Day, dawning stride by stride; he’s walking back into the afternoon in which Mary Elizabeth’s life was lost.

A little girl runs past him, whooping. She makes no sign that he’s visible to her, though perhaps she was too intent on her pursuit, or flight, to notice him. He watches her race away, her din receding. When he looks back along the bank his body starts to tremble, because there—less than thirty yards from him—is Mary Elizabeth. He had not anticipated the effect seeing her again would have upon him. His trembling is so violent it’s almost like a fit; he has to will himself to stay on his feet. Tears come, and they carry refractions of the flame up out of his heart, blinding him momentarily before they spill down his cheeks.

Oh God; he hopes he can speak to her. Just a few words, nothing fancy, just to tell her how much she’s loved.

But before he can get close enough to make an attempt, he sees her turn; sees a man running between the trees in pursuit of her. Oh Christ, he thinks, not so soon! Don’t let it happen before I have a chance to—

But wait. What’s this? She’s laughing at the man, not cowering in fear, and the expression on the stranger’s face isn’t one of malicious intent, but foolish. He crosses his eyes, he sticks out his tongue, all for her entertainment. And God knows, though it’s a puerile exhibition, she’s mightily amused. When he reaches her she doesn’t push him away; she simply shakes her head, like a loving parent with an antic child. And that’s not so far from the truth; her companion is half her age: a twenty-year-old at most, with the pimple scabs barely healed. Devlin thinks, vaguely, that she’s spoken of him; pointed him out, perhaps, in a photograph of an office party. He isn’t of consequence to her; or at least he’s never had any suspicion that this might be so. Now he has reason to wonder, seeing the way she lets his hand stray to her shoulder, to her neck; oh now to her breast. She does not resist him; at least, not entirely. Again, there’s that look of indulgence; a raised finger, a slight shake of the head, as if to say: don’t be naughty; not here; not here. The attempt at discipline is ignored however; the lover capers in front of her, leering and caressing, blocking her way along the path.

She’s dallying with death, Devlin knows. At some point along the way she’s going to say or do something that irritates this youth, and the smiling will vanish and the capering will stop, and the bloodletting begin. She has pressed him aside now, so as to continue on her way, though she does so coquettishly. He walks beside her, whispering something that makes her blush, makes a gleam come into her eye. Devlin knows that twinkle. Time was he was the one who received it; and what a glorious gift it was, promising all kinds of intimacies. Now this damnable boy gets the look, and the promise, gets the kisses and the touches, gets the fucking, no doubt, when the teasing’s over, gets her body under him in the backseat of his car—

“Oh God,” Devlin murmurs.

And as he speaks she seems to hear him. At least she looks in his direction, and there’s concern in her face.

“What is it?” her companion asks.

“I thought I heard…” She shakes her head, dismissing the thought. But even in the moment of dismissal she changes her mind. “He’s here,” she says.

“Who?”

“My husband.”

“Don’t be daft,” the youth replies fondly, and to reassure her he kisses her on the lips. She doesn’t object to his solace, but kisses him back.

Oh God, Devlin sobs again, Oh God. This time, if Mary Elizabeth hears him, she makes no sign of it. She’s allowed her lover to unbutton her coat, and he’s fumbling down the front of her dress. Devlin is appalled: she’s letting him tease her breast out into view, right here in the open. Her nipple is hard in the cold air; he warms it in his mouth, and she closes her eyes in delight at the sensation.

Oh you whore, Devlin thinks. To do this, to cheat me of the love you owe me as a spouse—to turn your back in bed telling me it’s not what you want anymore—when it is, it is! Look at you, bitch, with your hand on his trousers, with your tongue in his mouth! Devlin feels sick to his stomach; he wants to look away, but he can’t take his eyes off the scene. Surely they’re not going to do it here and now; surely they’re not so hot for one another they could fuck on the icy ground? The youth’s whispering to her now, idly working her tit with his palm, and she’s laughing, her cheeks flushed. How long since he saw that look on her face? Five years at least since she lay on the pillow all puffy with lust, all red and ripe and ready to receive him.

And never again. This is the last time he’ll see her this way, forever and ever—

As his mind shapes this thought, some instinct tells him to look back over his shoulder. He does so, and sees there a second witness to his wife’s infidelity. The mesh of undergrowth and the shadows of the trees keep the man’s face from view, but there’s something about the manner of his approach that makes Devlin believe he will know the voyeur when he comes into view. Devlin’s suspicions, it seems, were twice misplaced: first in thinking Mary Elizabeth had died at the hand of a passing stranger, then ready to blame the youth at her side for the crime. This is the killer, here; Devlin’s more certain of the fact by the moment. His heart quickens; his breath becomes ragged. Why does he feel such a terrible excitement? And then; and then…

…the leaves cease their concealment, the mesh of branches are divided, and there’s the face of the man who will take Mary Elizabeth’s life. At the sight of it he remembers how fine he felt, as he came between the trees, how righteous in his wrath, how strong, how joyful; yes, joyful, to have the doubts finally swept away, and the sight of her before him gasping as she was fingered.

He had put the deed out of his head completely once it was done; hidden himself from himself, so as not to lose the shreds of his sanity. But there’s no denying it now.

I did this. I did this, I did this, I did this.

And all he can do is watch. All he wants to do is watch. He can’t stop this scene being played out; it’s already history. He came here only to discover the guilty party, and there he is, in all his vengeful glory, wielding the knife with such speed the lovers don’t have time to run. He stabs the youth in the lower back, and down he goes. He’s not dead, but he’s too badly wounded to go very far. Then Devlin starts on Mary Elizabeth, who is sobbing that she’s not to blame, not to blame; he took her by surprise—

Devlin simply says: I’ve been watching you. Then he cuts her, across the neck. It isn’t a wound meant to kill. Blood comes, of course, but only a little. He goes for the same place, to cut her again, but this time she puts up her arm to protect herself, and her hand is sliced, and gushes. She shrieks, and as if the sound were a cue, Devlin starts to slash and stab at her wildly.

Watching himself at work, Devlin remembers everything, his mind speeding ahead through the horrors to come. He will keep stabbing her long after she’s fallen to the ground and has given up her pleas for help. He’ll cut her breast. He’ll open her blouse and doodle on her belly. He’ll open his pants and try to urinate on her, but failing, he’ll turn his attention to the lover, who has crawled a few yards from the murder site and there collapsed from blood loss. He is in a delirious state when Devlin gets to him; he looks up at his undoer and smiles, as though he’s thinking he’s in the crib, and this is his father, come to kiss him good-night. Devlin doesn’t stab him, but moved by some perverse desire he picks the youth up in his arms and carries him down to the river. Even now, the lover doesn’t understand his jeopardy. He continues to look up at Devlin dreamily, and is still doing so as Devlin drops him into the waters, which instantly close over his head. The youth has no strength in his limbs; he cannot even flail to keep himself afloat. Down and away he goes, lost to the sea.

Devlin watches himself return to his wife’s body. His face is horribly slack; like the face of an imbecile. But hers is slacker still. Was she ever as lovely as he’d believed her to be? he wonders. There is no objective evidence. She always looked a little plain in photographs; almost as though she were rehearsing for the portraits that will soon be made here, while she lies in the grass. Nobody could see the luminosity that he’d seen in her (perhaps her young lover had seen it, too, but he wouldn’t be writing any paeans to her beauty now); no, it would be a part of this mystery nobody would ever solve, because nobody living would know how it felt to be in her thrall.

It was that thought more than any other that troubled him. She was dead by his unruly hand, and that was terrible. But more terrible still, that nobody would understand her power.

Still hiding? he hears somebody say.

He holds his breath; looks around. There’s nobody here but him, him and the dead.

Still he listens, and the voice comes again, up out of his own mouth. The words have light in them. You can’t blame her beauty, he murmurs to himself. You came here to understand. So look. Take the light with you and look.

He doesn’t need to ask where. There’s only one place to seek the root of this unforgiving rage: in the soul of the man before him.

And so thinking, the light takes his phantom body across the grass to the spot where his bloody-handed other sits.

Ask your question, the light says, and dutifully he does so. How did this begin? he demands, as loudly as he can. The man makes no sign of having heard the question; but he draws a deep breath as he prepares to rise, and on the instant Devlin is gone, as if the inhalation was all the cue he needed to go into himself. The world vanishes, leaving him in darkness. It is a pale darkness, though such a thing should not be possible: its negritude a function more of its uncanny unfixedness than of its tone. There is nothing for the eye to hold on to, in any direction. Devlin does not panic, however. The light still bestows its calm upon his heart. Things will come clear, he thinks, if he will only be patient.

...

How long does he wait, suspended in this nowhere? It’s impossible to say. But by and by the gray begins to coagulate in front of him, like a thing that was melted remembering its previous form, and gathering itself back into meaning. He sees before him a window, and through it a tree. He can smell spring now. He can feel the breeze that’s gently stirring the blossom-laden branches moving against his face. Somewhere in the house behind him a door slams, but he doesn’t turn to look. He knows what house this is, what window, what tree. He even knows what he will see when he goes to the window, though he has put the moment from his mind for more than thirty years.

I am me, he thinks. I am in my memory.

And what does he see looking down from the window through a mesh of branches and leaves? He sees a man and a woman, coupling, locked together in the most intimate fashion. The breeze rises; the canopy churns and eclipses the sight. He is frustrated; he wants to see more. He waits, and is granted another glimpse, and another, but he sees too little to answer his curiosity. He turns from the window and races through the house. All the windows are open, and everything the wind can find to move, it moves. Drapes gyrate, papers fly, a pot of geraniums is overturned. He’s down at the back door now, looking out onto the dappled grass beneath the tree. There’s his sister—thirteen years his senior—with her dress up almost over her face, so that the bottom half of her body, which is entirely unclothed, looks as though it’s protruding from a lace-lined sack. She sobs and sighs, while a man the young Devlin does not know, his body entirely clothed (except for his phallus, which hangs out, half-aroused), fingers the tenderness between her splayed legs. Now the lover applies his mouth to that place, hooking his hands beneath the girl’s knees and hoisting her feet off the ground so as to better devour her. She sobs more loudly, and calls his name. Oh, Stephen, she says, that’s so nice, oh yes, that’s so nice.

The boy Devlin can see more than he wants to see, but that doesn’t mean he can look away. The pinkness of his sister, the wetness of his sister, the little knot of her anus, where her lover now applies his tongue; the little knots of her hands, as she squirms beneath him.

Could he run now? No; never. Even though he can feel in his belly the approaching disaster; though he can see, almost in slow motion, the frills of her dress riding down, like a dropped veil; even though he knows he will be seen here, seeing, and the consequences will be terrible, he cannot run from what is certain to happen.

And then it does. His sister’s eyes come into view, first going to her devotee’s face, and then, the instant after, to the face of her brother. She is crying out now, alerting Stephen to the presence of a spy, pushing him away as she flails to cover her nakedness.

The lover has risen, and his phallus wags before him like a fat, forbidding finger. He is at the boy in five or six strides, and starts to beat him so hard Devlin’s on the ground in a few moments, puking as the world goes white. His sister’s up now, her outrage at the presence of a witness turned to terror as the blows continue to rain down.

“Don’t kill him!” she cries. “Oh Stephen, no—”

She’s moving now to catch hold of her lover’s arm, to check the fist before it cracks Devlin’s skull like a tender egg, and for her troubles she earns a blow herself, hard, hard, across her face. It’s followed by another, and another, which she answers with blows of her own, and curses, though when she spits them they come more blood than words. She falls to her knees, and seizes hold of Stephen’s phallus, which is still hard. Does he fear she intends to tear it off? Or is he simply aroused to a new fever by her violence, and lets it erupt without care to the consequence? She cannot speak now; her face is too broken. And yet she holds on to his manhood, absurdly, while the blows break her further still.

And in the haze of his pain, Devlin feels the calm of the light come over him; feels the visitor he is slip out of the victim he once was, and move inexorably toward the man disfiguring his sister.

“I want to go back to the river, please,” he says to the light, but he knows, even as he speaks, his journey has only just begun. He went in search of a guilty party, but having discovered his own culpability, the search cannot end there. If Devlin the man killed for the wounds Devlin the boy suffered, then what of the one who wounded him? Whence came his brutality?

And into Stephen’s flesh he goes, like a candle flame at noon, invisible yet capable of igniting conflagrations.

VI

You know what happens next. The parable is perfectly transparent. But I have to tell you; I have to believe that my meaning resides not in the gross motion of the tale, but in the tics of syntax and cadence. If not, every story may be boiled down to a few charmless sentences; a sequence of causalities: this and this and this; then marriage, or death. There has to be more to the telling of stories, just as there must be more to our lives.

So now; Devlin is lodged in the memory of the man who brutalized him. And there he sees a dirty room, and a dirty bed. Somebody has shat on the bed, prodigiously, wiped excrement on the pillows, even on the wall against which the bed is pushed. The stench is ripe.

His borrowed gaze goes to the mirror, in which he sees reflected for an instant a man with a belt, who comes to the bed and pulls out from hiding beneath it a toddler of three or four, and starts to thrash the child without mercy. This is the Shitter, no doubt; his buttocks are caked with the stuff. But the punishment far exceeds the crime. In a few minutes the child’s sobs rise to such a pitch Devlin-in-Stephen starts to scream hysterically. He instantly regrets his din. The shitting infant is cast aside, and the punishment comes Stephen’s way instead: more blows, more cries.

And even in the heat of the assault, the calm of the light comes again, and again Devlin’s moving away, out of one memory into another; into the mind of the man with the belt. Is it all so simple then, he thinks as he goes: is it all only rage making itself over in its own image, down the generations? Is that the whole sorry story, forever and ever?

He’s no longer in Stephen’s head, but in the head of the man—is he a father, or a stepfather?—who beats him. He feels the man’s heavy body around him, and heavy soul, and he sees before him not the wailing Stephen but a bare-chested boy, carrying a smile and a little knife. There is blood on the blade, and on its wielder’s hand: the blood of the victim. And behind the boy with the knife, a cluster of grubby faces, enjoying the spectacle. This is what the man beating Stephen is remembering when he wields his belt: a time from childhood when the local bully entertained his cronies by pricking the defenseless boy. Devlin can hear the child’s sobs; they are not so different from Stephen’s, or his own.

I get the message, he says, hoping the light understands him. He doesn’t need to follow the receding procession any further: the principle’s perfectly clear. Please, he says, you can let me go now. But he’s begun something he has no power to halt. He feels again the rush of his first inquiry, of his fierce desire to know who had taken love from him. It carries him forward, into the body of the youth before him. And there, with sickening inevitability, he finds the cruelty that made this soul brutal. A memory of the youth’s mother, coming from the kitchen where she’s been cutting meat, coming with the smell of dead flesh on her hands, and oh-so-casually cuffing him for some misdemeanor. It doesn’t matter what. He gets half a hundred such blows from his mother every day; they don’t leave bruises. But he hates her for the ease of her indifference. One day, he swears, he’ll have the will to pick up the meat knife there on the counter, and stab her through her thoughtless heart—

Enough! Devlin cries again. But no, of course; he’s already slipping into the bloody-handed housewife, into this sad woman who thinks nothing of pain, given or received, who is dead to it, dead to it, watching her uncle skin an animal whose heart is still beating, and then smiling up at her with a look in his eyes she knows means he’s aroused by his wretched work: by the agony of the animal, and the vulnerability of his little girl, not yet ten and sweeter naked even than the skinned body twitching on the rock. He will have his fingers in her very soon, and she will wish she were dead—

—and so does he, in the very moment of the deed. Wishes he were the dying animal, guiltless in its suffering, instead of the man he cannot help being, in all his wretchedness. He never sees himself more clearly than in the moment of violation, while she sobs for him to be quick, please Uncle, please Uncle—

—in his youth he knew a man of the cloth, who had told him that guilt and grief were as the salt of the soul, preserving us from the worm of contentment, and keeping us wholesome, so that God might devour us into paradise at the end of time. These words have haunted him, over the years: filled his head with images of his body laid on God’s Table, along with all the other bodies of guilty souls like himself. And thinking of being devoured, he would be aroused, and in his arousal, think of children, and how he might bring them to that table with him, how he might have company on Judgment Day.

He sees the priest in his mind’s eye now, as he steps away from the rock, leaving the raped girl to cover herself up. He sees tears rolling down the man’s face. And the search goes on, into the priest’s head; into a memory within a memory within a memory…

The priest had lost all hope of his own innocence during a little war, in Europe, in which he had fallen in love with a soldier. They had never touched, except to shake hands; nor even exchanged a word of affection. But the priest had been certain his tender feelings were reciprocated, and on the last day of the war he had gone to declare his feelings to the man. He found him, after much searching, among a heap of corpses. There was an old soldier rolling the bodies into a mass grave, and seeing the priest staring at his beloved’s face, he asked: Did you know this man?

The priest had been ashamed of what he felt, and replied that no, he didn’t know the man, he was merely meditating on the absolute authority of death. The gravedigger pretended to be convinced, but he was not. He hated priests—their cant, their smugness—and saw here an opportunity to discomfort the man before him. If it’s inspiration you’re looking for, he said, beckoning the priest closer to the soldier’s corpse, then look no further than this, and so saying he uncovered the soldier’s hips, which had been blown open to the shattered bone,

—and watching the priest reel and sicken and run howling from the sight, the gravedigger laughs, though there is no humor in his laughter.

He had loved deeply in his own youth, and lost the objects of his devotion: two sisters, with whom he had lived in godless bliss for five years, until a plague took them both, along with the six children they had given him, all in the space of a week.

And the plague had been spread to the women by a man who knew he was carrying death in his touch, and was passing it along even as he chucked the children under the chin and grazed the cheeks of the women with his thumb. He had got this plague in Africa, where he had gone as a mercenary, and had seen such cruelties visited upon innocents, and became so maddened by all he witnessed that he came to think of his plague-spreading as a kindness.

And so on; and on; mind within mind, harm within harm.

Devlin doesn’t weep anymore. He is already inured against the harms that he’s witnessing. He doesn’t remember his purpose here; he doesn’t even remember who he is. He only flies and flies, through a catalog of loss and cruelty, innocence punished and guilt rewarded, suffering unexplained, death undeserved. Sometimes he’s in the body of a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes a child. He feels their forms changing around him, as the light carries him on down the line of deeds and doers. He vaguely grasps that this journey will deliver him at last into some primordial state: that he’s journeying back to some first cause. But the notion is too difficult for him to hold on to for more than a moment; it’s gone the next, and he’s like a witless cargo dispatched into the past, his mind like a sleeper’s mind, grasping only the vague forms of dreams.

VII

And on the riverbank, the birds grow silent. The cold air vibrates; it shakes silvery motes of frost from the tiniest blades of grass. Something is imminent.

The river is too mighty to be influenced, of course. It rushes on, its course unchanged. Some distance downstream of this spot, Shank is looking for the hillmen who he believes killed his beloved wife; in a matter of hours he will be dead himself, and in the river’s heart, carried away. Now the shaking of things increases, and a form appears between the trees: lit by its own strange light.

Not far from the place, Oswald has come to fetch Agnes’s body off the riverbank; and encounters there what he takes to be some kind of spirit. It isn’t. It’s just our poor, lost Devlin, wandering. He has come to the riverbank and seen the corpse there, and the sight has been enough to shake him back into some sense of his purpose. He remembers being in Shirley’s house; he remembers the grief and incomprehension that drove him there. And, of course, he remembers the deed that he had hidden from himself: his sweet Mary Elizabeth, bleeding before him.

Seeing this other woman—a more pitiful corpse (if that were possible) than that of his wife—lying in the mud, he is restored to a terrible sanity. That is to say: he is himself again. But he does not understand the symmetry of the events. He thinks he is seeing his own wife’s corpse, somehow transformed. He goes to look at it more closely. No, this is not remotely his Mary Elizabeth.

Who is she? he asks the river. The river roars on, offering up no reply.

He turns his head away from the sight of her, and sees—there between the trees—a figure, dressed in animal skins, watching him. Is this the murderer, he wonders, caught in the act of flight? What a pitiful sight he is: a shadowy thing, that can never have peace.

And he starts to weep, thinking of that. Not of the man before him, who may not even be responsible, but of himself, who is lost on a search that has no conclusion, at least until he gets back to the first crime, to the Edenic sin: and how will he keep his sanity on a journey of that magnitude? Impossible.

He asks the man between the trees: Who is she? not really expecting a reply. He’s not surprised then that the man takes flight and is gone, off between the trees, leaving Devlin alone beside the river, his heart too full for him to be able to shape questions. What is it full of? Oh, nothing pure, nothing that will bring the story to a nicely moral close. He does not feel a scouring remorse for what he will do a thousand years hence, on the bank of the river; he has not found a deeper comprehension of how the human heart works. He has only learned in his journey here what he already knew—that cruelty breeds cruelty. So what? So what if he was shaped by the hands of others to do harm with his own hands? There’s no beauty in such repetition, no deeper meaning. Shirley was right; there is no grand scheme.

So, where now, he wonders. Must he move on, and on, resigning himself to this terrible descent? He has no choice in the matter, it seems. He is resigned to losing all meaning of himself as he moves on, down the millennia, weaving through lives that are not his, and yet are, because he is their consequence: the grotesque summation of all their sufferings and their harms.

If he could turn to me, if he could find me in my shack by the river, what, I wonder, would he ask of me, who has control of his destiny?

I’m imagining him now, coming to the threshold, ducking his head under the mossy bough that makes the lintel of the door, looking at me and saying: Are you my maker?

I tell him: Yes, I am.

You brought me here? he says.

I tell him: Yes, I did.

And where will I go now? he asks.

Well, I tell him. The choices are simple. The river—

—flows both ways, he says, a little irritably; Yes, yes, so I’ve heard. So it’s either forward or back, that’s what you’re telling me.

I shrug. In short, I say.

Well I like neither option, he replies. If I go back, what’s there for me? I give myself up to the police, claim insanity, and take my chances in the courts? Not a very attractive idea. And if I continue on my present path, I’ll end up an ape. The first sinning ape, that’s what I’ll be. I don’t like that either.

So tell me what you want, I say to him.

I want a way out, I want a chance at redemption. I want—

He pauses in mid-sentence, looks back.

What is it? I ask him.

I heard—

What?

—somebody crying.

That’s not so unusual, I tell him. Maybe somebody in the river—

Drowning, you mean?

It’s happened, I reply.

And you just sit here? he says, making no attempt to disguise his disgust at my passivity.

Again, I shrug. If they threw themselves in and then regret it, that’s their problem, I tell him.

But if it was an accident, he says; if they were just walking by the river, and they lost their footing, and slipped, and didn’t mean—There are tears in his eyes now. If they weren’t able to control themselves—

Like you? I say softly.

He glares at me. But the tears do not stop. They fill up his eyes, then spill down his cheeks. I wish I could undo everything. I wish I could go to her grave and wake her up.

I had a vision once—

Of what?

People living backwards. A man was digging these corpses out of the ground—

There’s that cry again, he says, turning away from me. Somebody’s out there—

Wait, I haven’t finished telling you my vision.

Fuck your visions, he says; they’re no use to me now. You’re as lost as I am.

So saying, he leaves me in my hide, and the imagined conversation is at an end.

And yet I hear him still. Even though he was never with me, even though I have always been alone here at the river, waiting for a story to come and find me, I hear him out there, over the sound of the water.

Wait, he is saying. Wait.

Here’s a new twist, I think to myself. The man acts as though he has a measure of self-determination: as though he can step away from me and still live, somehow. It’s impossible, of course. I conjured him in service of my story; he can have no existence beyond my dream of him; he can take no journey that I do not first imagine.

And yet as I rise from my place in the shadows I know I am about to be proved wrong, and the thought exhilarates me. Devlin has gone where I have not yet looked. All I can do is follow, strange though that may be.

I step out into the twilight, and look for him. There he is, not twenty yards from the hide, moving off between the trees. The flame he carries flickers in him, spilling out upon the grass, and the trunks of the trees, and the bare branches over his head. I watch him, enchanted. So, too, does the man whose weeping called Devlin out here: Father Michael. He kneels beside the body of Agnes, the blade with which he did her such harm clutched in his hand. He has lifted up his robes, exposing his genitals. He intends, I think, to mutilate himself here, beside her, to render his sex as unrecognizable as he did hers, so that when he’s bled to death his body will look not unlike hers below the waist.

But the sight of Devlin puts such thoughts out of his head. He drops the knife, and his weeping ceases.

My Lord, he murmurs, meaning no profanity. The man moving between the trees toward him does indeed resemble his long-absent Saviour. The light that comes from his very substance; the sweet calm of his countenance; and most of all, the way he reaches out toward Father Michael, as if to forgive what until this moment had seemed unforgivable.

What should I do? Should I intervene to dissuade him of his error? Tell him that the man from whom he is hoping to receive forgiveness is just as guilty as he; just a sinner, lost in time beside the river? No; that would be just another cruelty to add to the catalog; it would serve no purpose, except perhaps to salve my envy at the comfort he feels.

I move a little closer, in the hope of hearing what passes between them, but I’m not quick enough. By the time I get within earshot they’ve already finished exchanging those few words they wished to say, and Father Michael is rising from beside Agnes’s body, dropping the knife with which he was going to unman himself. He reaches toward his Redeemer, and as he does so—tears of gratitude running down his face—Devlin opens his arms, It isn’t an embrace he offers; he’s simply giving the repentant Father sight of the flame, which to my eyes at least seems to have taken up residence in Devlin’s chest. It flutters to the rhythm of his heart, its incandescence being steadily pumped through his system. I can see its spreading presence, even through the weave of Devlin’s shirt and trousers: it’s as though he’s being consumed by the flame from the inside out. I don’t discard the possibility that this is indeed the case. Didn’t Shirley observe that holy things have intentions all their own?

Whatever the significance of this sight, it has entranced Father Michael: no doubt it further reinforces his belief that the man before him is some divinity. He reaches out to touch his lighthearted Saviour, and as his fingers make contact the flame grows suddenly ambitious, and in a shocking moment it consumes the flesh and bone of Devlin Coombs entirely (along with the clothes that covered that flesh and bone) leaving only a glorious filigree of light-filled veins standing there, with a flaming heart at its core. Devlin makes no sound as he is burned away. It is as though the light has simply recalled the illusion of his substance into itself; as though he had been the flame’s invention all along, rather than mine.

(There’s a thought: that the flame is all that exists here, the rest of us simply shadows it casts on a page, myself included. I thought I was indulging Devlin’s delusions, letting him believe he was self-willed; but perhaps I am in my turn indulged by the flame, which allows me to conceal its omnipotence in a fiction.)

Father Michael has given up weeping; this is too tremendous for tears. He watches, wearing a small smile, like that of an enchanted child, while the flame does what he was surely hoping it would do: it moves along his fingers, and into his own body. The pattern of veins that sketched the last of Devlin follows its maker, and goes where the flame goes. Father Michael starts to say thank you, not once but half a hundred times. Does he expect the fire to burn him out of his impure state? If so, he is disappointed. His body envelops the light, utterly, sealing it up. When it’s gone into him there’s nothing, not the least glimmer, to show that he has been blessed by its presence. There is only the darkness of the wood, and the rushing of the river, and a woman, dead in the grass.

Father Michael doesn’t look at her again. He walks perhaps ninety yards from where she lies, finding a place where he has sight of the sky, and there he lies down himself, arms outstretched.

It’s only after several hours that I realize what he intends to do. He intends to do nothing, except to lie there in the grass and let his body die.

It is not a quick business, believe me. He stays alive for five days, lying in the same place, the stink of his evacuations drawing the attention of wild animals, who are startled, when they come too close, to realize this piece of human flesh still breathes.

On the second morning of his martyrdom, two men from the village come with Oswald and collect Agnes’s body. Plainly Oswald has warned them that this is a haunted place, and they do not linger, but pick up the corpse and bear it away quickly. None of them sees Father Michael; nor does he make any attempt to draw their attention.

The short hours of those first days of the year One Thousand pass, and the long, cold nights, one of which brings a light flurry of snow. I hear the priest’s teeth chatter now and then; and on the fourth night he slips into a delirious state, in the throes of which he sometimes prays in Latin, sometimes talks, as though to an invisible companion. More than once I am tempted to go and sit beside him and listen. But I resist. This is his time. He’s earned his solitude.

Just before midnight, on January the fifth, his breathing becomes quick and shallow, then it stops entirely. I feel lonely, once he’s gone, though I knew these men, this two-in-one, less well than I had assumed. In fact, to be honest, scarcely at all. Perhaps on reflection it’s not loneliness I feel. Perhaps it’s envy, that they found one another, and redeemed their souls with faith and flame and were so comforted by what they believed they could die a wretched death and count themselves blessed.

...

After a time, I go and watch the river.

And after another time, I set these last words down, lay my notebook where I hope it may be found, and, discovering a place where the waters are so tumultuous that there is little chance I can resist them, I wade in.

I cannot tell you if John of the Desert, dressed in his coat of goatskins, awaits me there, his hands spilling baptismal water; or if Christopher the Giant will come to set me on his shoulders, calling me Chylde; or if Christ may come, trout leaping at His heavy hem, eager to strew their rainbows before His pierced feet.

Or if I will be only carried away, looking through the plain glass of my eyes, hoping to see before I drown sun, moon, and stars hanging in the same firmament.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Part One
- Part Two