The Fallen: A Novel Read online

  Slowly, blessedly, the dream had abated yet again, once a week, once a month, at last nothing.

  Yet here if was, and strangely altered, too, a new element. He saw the apparition again, felt that icy caress.

  It’s time. Come home.

  Henry switched on the lamp with shaking fingers. He glanced at the clock as he pulled on jeans, a discarded T-shirt. 5:47. There would be no more sleep tonight.

  In the kitchen, he sipped instant coffee. You can never escape the past, he thought, staring blindly at a table scarred by dozens of short-term renters. It reaches out for you, if only in your dreams. There was so much he could not remember. Just shadows, just glimpses, just dreams.

  At nine thirty, the telephone rang. Henry recognized the voice at the other end: Asa Cade, his father’s oldest friend.

  “Henry? Is that you?”

  “Yes, Asa, it’s me,” he said. “Is there something wrong at home?”

  Asa Cade sighed. Henry heard the snick of a cigarette lighter, a labored inhalation, and these sounds, so familiar, sparked an image in his imagination: Asa in shirt-sleeves and suspenders, bony fingers cupped below his craggy face in the posture of a longtime smoker, the half-rim glasses he affected tilted precariously at the end of his nose. Henry had seen it a hundred times.

  “Hell, son,” Asa said, “I’m just an old country doctor. I don’t know how to go about these things.”

  “What is it?”

  Asa exhaled, and when he spoke again, he sounded bone weary. He sounded old. “It’s a terrible thing.”

  Henry did not speak. He felt abruptly as if the earth itself had ground to a halt, the world still beyond mere stillness, as if everything everywhere had simultaneously paused. For a single irrational moment he felt sure that if he were to stand and walk to the window, he would gaze out at a world mute and frozen: cars arrested headlong in their plunge through winter-blighted streets, windblown trash forever harried in a single changeless eddy, birds suspended midflight.

  And then he found his voice. “Dad?”

  “Yeah,” Asa said. “Yeah. I stopped by for coffee this morning, same as always. He was in the study. Jesus, Henry, he—I don’t know how to say this. He killed himself. With a gun.”

  Henry rocked back in the chair. He closed his eyes.

  “Was there a note?”

  “They haven’t found one, not yet.”

  “Why? You have any idea why?”

  “Who the hell knows, son. I was hoping you could tell me.” Asa cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I know you had your differences.” He hesitated. “You will be coming home, won’t you?”

  “Of course I will,” Henry said. “Give me a day, I have a few things to wrap up.”

  But for a long time he could not bring himself to move. So he would have to go back. He would have to face Sauls Run, he would have to face Emily, he would have to face the dreams. And his life here? A cheap apartment and rental furniture, a teaching schedule he had already grown to hate? Well, it would wait. And if it wouldn’t, there were always other jobs. He had some money, enough to see him through the spring. After that, he could improvise.

  He sipped at his coffee again, but it had gone cold. It was time to go. He had a lot to do. He showered and dressed and stood before the mirror to shave, and that was when he saw the enflamed spot on his left cheek. Unbidden, his hand came up to caress it. Like a burn, the imprints of the dead man’s fingers.

  Chapter 2

  And so, at twenty-nine years old, a narrow-framed man with the delicate features of a mother he barely remembered, Henry Sleep came home. He came on a frost-heaved ribbon of state road that twisted northwest through chinks in the barren January hills, and as the Appalachians drew up around him, as mute and hostile as a convocation of petrified giants, he felt the old midnight terror sweep over him, an icy tide shot through with currents of fresh anxiety, the bone-stark chill of his father’s death—

  Suicide, he corrected himself. His father’s suicide.

  He intended to face the thing squarely, if he could, just as he intended to face the rest of it—the house, the dreams, even Emily, if it came to that.

  At twilight, he guided his ’83 Volaré—bald tires and a chassis more bondo and primer than original metal—into a scenic overlook high above the Run. He studied the folded ridges for a long time, gradually letting his gaze slip past the long-abandoned mines of Holland Coal—their rusty tipples towering like dinosaur skeletons among the trees—to Crook’s Hollow, a tangle of cramped streets north of the incorporated limits of the town. Just looking at the clapboard houses reminded him of Emily—dark-eyed, small-boned Emily—and that made him feel a bit like a dinosaur himself, fragile as a museum piece strung together from shards of a half-remembered past. A flicker of emotion—guilt? regret?—forced his gaze away, to the town itself, twilight-jeweled in its narrow cleft of hills.

  He took a deep breath, clenched the wheel, thumbed the heater up a notch. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. Not the black mirror of Stoney Gap Lake, not Holland House and not the courthouse, grandiose relics of another age, staring solemnly at one another from their perches at the opposite ends of High Street. From this distance, even High Street itself looked the same, a stretch of Depression-era brick and glass culminating in the Stone Bridge, arcing high above Cinder Bottom, the old rail yards. Widow’s Ridge stood beyond, a purple smudge behind the courthouse. He tried to pick out the house where he had grown up, but it was too far away, lost in sun and shadow, in time.

  He could remember it well enough, though: a good house, burdened with memory, the hard years after his mother’s death. And now this new emptiness, the vacuum of another death. His father’s death.

  Henry winced and closed his eyes.

  He opened them again just as the last blazing crescent of sun slipped past the far ridge. For a single spectacular moment, coppery light flooded the sky, kindling everything it touched. Each molecule of air seemed to erupt, each singular tree to burn so fiercely that he might have mistaken them for women, hair aflame against the purple sky. He watched as the conflagration consumed the ridge—as flames leaped from tree to naked tree and finally to the town itself, solitary within the steep-walled valley.

  Then everything was plunged into dark.

  When Henry reached up to put the car into gear, his hands were shaking.

  Fifteen minutes later, he pulled up before his father’s church. It stood at the intersection of Front and Holland, a thick, graceless brick building with a massively earth-bound steeple. An illuminated brick sign read:

  FIRST-CHRISTIAN CHURCH REV. QUINCY SLEEP

  On the white placard below, plastic black letters proclaimed:

  FELLOWSHIP SUPPER SATURDAY JANUARY 21—EVERYBODY WELCOME!!!

  The surrounding streets wound away into darkness, relieved here and there by the bright windows of houses.

  Wind gnawed at him as he crossed the street and tugged on the heavy oaken doors of the front entrance. Locked. He wondered what else he had expected. Turning, he walked down the sidewalk by the chapel, a long shrub-lined building with tall stained-glass windows, pictures from the Gospels, three crosses black against a setting sun, Lazarus stumbling blindly from his tomb. Even now, it all came back to him: shattered rainbows of sunlight lancing through those windows, somehow miraculous after the endless weeks of rain and flood; the smell of oiled sandalwood and flowers; his mother, still and pale and dead in her casket before the altar.

  His father had quoted the Twenty-third Psalm, had proclaimed that Lily Sleep had gone to a better place, a shining, peaceful realm. Henry, twelve then, alone in a pew with Asa and Cindy Cade, wondered if his father really believed that. He desperately wanted to believe it himself, but the sickroom stink of urine and bed sores still polluted his nostrils.

  No God could allow such pain. Certainly not the one his father had believed in.

  Afterward, Henry and his father rode to the cemetery in the privacy of the funeral home limousine. In the backseat
, behind the protective panel of smoked glass that separated their compartment from the driver, Henry’s father reached out and clasped his hand.

  “We can’t see it, Henry,” he had said, “but your mother’s death is part of a larger design—it contributes to some higher purpose. You have to believe that it’s part of God’s plan.”

  Henry, angry suddenly, had tugged his hand away. “God can go to hell for all I care.”

  Now, as he remembered, these words struck Henry as cruel and unnecessary. But where another man might have struck him, Quincy Sleep had merely sighed. Neither of them had said a thing, not then, not ever, but the words had been there all the years since, poisonous as an unlanced boil.

  Henry paused now to gaze the length of the sanctuary. The steeple reared dumb against the night. The sky was gray, the moon just climbing into view. Briefly, he remembered the optical illusion he had seen at twilight—the whole town burning, burning—but then he blinked his eyes, and that was gone, too.

  He turned away. It was time to go home.

  Full dark had closed in by the time Henry parked the Volaré on Widow’s Ridge, a hundred yards south of the driveway. He got out and stood wearily, gazing through a patch of barren woods at the house—white, ivy-trellised, smaller than he remembered; like the Run itself, or his father’s church, reduced somehow, however large it loomed in memory.

  The years had a way of doing that to you.

  It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

  Henry closed his eyes, watching for maybe the fiftieth time that day the grim little movie his mind had spliced together after Asa Cade hung up the phone: the ice-blue barrel of the revolver between his father’s lips, his knuckle blanching around the trigger, the white-hot bludgeon of the bullet.

  And for the fiftieth time, he tried to believe it.

  But he could not—could not square the image with the man he remembered, remote and taciturn, but strong. Like old wood or weathered stone, asking no quarter of the world, expecting none.

  Henry glanced up the winding street. The Richardson place, elaborate and well lit, loomed beyond the modest profile of his own boyhood home, its windows dark among the trees. Here and there other houses glimmered from spacious lots, spinning out gray wreaths of smoke.

  Henry turned to open the door of the Volaré.

  At the same moment, the light in his father’s study came on.

  Henry stood there, breath suspended in his lungs while he ticked off explanations in his mind. Option one was clear enough: Asa Cade had dropped in to feed Aquinas, the rangy black tom who had strayed in during Henry’s last summer in the Run. So was option two: the police had returned to wrap up some loose end. Candidate number three took him by surprise.

  He’s back, a sly voice whispered inside his head, and almost before he had the chance to ask himself the obvious question—

  —Who?—

  —the voice answered him:

  The man who murdered your father.

  Henry paused to consider this final thought, realizing suddenly that the possibility—

  —murder—

  —had been there all along, the jagged rock just under the opaque surface of his conscious thoughts.

  The second voice, the sensible one, started up, saying, Don’t be absurd—

  But Henry was already moving.

  He left the car and ducked into the woods, raising an arm to ward off unseen branches. A car swept by, headlights shattering the murk like prison searchlights. It disappeared beyond the curve, trailing a dopplered wake of country music, as he emerged at the edge of the lawn.

  He surveyed the long, tree-screened yard, the street beyond. The driveway—empty—circled back on itself, throwing a spur toward a basement garage. Suddenly, he felt vaguely embarrassed—

  —Told you, the sensible voice hissed—

  —like an overgrown child playing army in the lawn.

  Yet the light had come on, hadn’t it?

  He hesitated a moment, then crossed the moonlit lawn and mounted the steps of the covered porch that ran the length of the house. A cold blade slid along his spine.

  Beyond the screen, the door stood slightly ajar.

  Henry released the latch and opened the screen. He pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside, easing the screen into its frame with an almost imperceptible click.

  He stood in a small foyer, dark except for a wedge of light below the study door at the far end of the hall. Hoping his eyes would adjust, he delayed momentarily, but the light at the end of the corridor seemed only to enhance the darkness elsewhere. He envisioned the space in memory: the foyer with a coat-tree in the corner to his left and a narrow, mail-cluttered table of knick-knacks to his right. Beyond that, the house opened in three directions, the living room to his right, the dining room to his left, the stairs just ahead, parallel to the hall.

  He stepped forward and peered into the living room, hardly daring to breathe, but saw only blackness, broken by the pale intervals of windows, the gray unblinking eye of the television screen. He sensed, rather than saw, the heavy masses of furniture along the walls.

  And something else. In there, in the dark.

  Movement.

  His hands knotted. He forced himself to swallow. The entire house contracted into the concentrated range of his perceptions. Blackness. A musty odor, dry heat and something else, something ripe and unpleasant. And once again that sense of movement in the living room, an almost physical intuition, a subtle disturbance in the air.

  No.

  He was imagining things. He had to be.

  The darkness swarmed with luminous motes, counterfeit perceptions. He glanced down the hall at the thin wedge of brightness, razor-edged against the shadows. He drew a long breath, listening as the two voices argued inside his mind. The sensible voice won out.

  Asa, he thought. It has to be Asa.

  “Hey, who’s there? Asa?”

  So there. It was done.

  Henry stepped forward more confidently, nothing to lose now, probing for the Persian runner that extended the length of the hall. Something crunched underfoot, and he felt a sick weight swing loose inside him. In the same instant, the study light snapped off. A glittering arc of broken glass sprang into view, jeweled by the moonlight filtering through the open door. He glanced sharply over his shoulder, at the narrow vertical windows set to either side of the door. The lower pane on the left-hand side had been punched out.

  Christ.

  Henry turned back toward the porch.

  Too late, he sensed movement again. Close. He took a panicky step, felt something swift and silent under foot—

  —Aquinas—

  —and stumbled. He threw out his hands to catch his balance and lurched forward, his palm skating across the foyer table as he went down. Something fell with a crash.

  Aquinas yowled, coiling through Henry’s twisted legs. Henry caught a single glimpse of the startled tom—glowing yellow eyes, a glimmering white breast in a field of sable fur—and then he was gone, his claws beating a faint tattoo against the hardwood as he raced upstairs.

  The study door banged open as Henry heaved himself to his feet. Disoriented, he turned, fumbling for the door handle. A dark figure loomed up, shambling, tall. He caught a snatch of labored breathing and then a bomb went off against his skull. He stumbled, reeling.

  “Wait,” he grunted, but somehow he was falling again.

  His fingers closed on something—a sheaf of papers?—but the intruder tore them away.

  The screen door slammed. Silence filled the house.

  Chapter 3

  “Terrible thing, him being a preacher and all.”

  The sheriff took off his hat and nodded solemnly into the study, and Henry was struck once again by how little he had changed, how little everything had changed. Fifteen minutes ago, climbing out of his police cruiser, the sheriff had introduced himself—“It’s Harold Crawford, Mr. Sleep. Remember me?”—but he needn’t have bothered. Henry had remember
ed him all right, had remembered his sleepy way of moving, had remembered his bulk—less like a bodybuilder now, more like a prize-fighter gone to seed. He had remembered the sheriff’s eyes, too, there in the dim radiance of the porch light—eyes so lightly blue as to be almost without hue. Eyes the color of rain.

  “So you’re the boss, now?” Henry had said, opening the door.

  “That’s right. Ever since old Dean Blaylock retired and moved to Florida. That was what? Ten years ago, now, I guess. Doesn’t time fly, though?” The big man stepped inside, extending his hand. “Doc Cade tells me you’re a professor. Down North Carolina way. That right?”

  “Something like that. Asa’s a tad generous, maybe.”

  “I recollect you when you were a boy. How old were you when your mom died, son? Eleven?”

  “Twelve.”

  They were silent a moment, remembering.

  “Thing about this job,” Crawford said, “you never forget the tough ones.” He hunkered down to study the glittering spray of glass on the hardwood floor, and then he glanced up at the broken windowpane. “The world don’t let up, does it?” He shook his head. “First your daddy and then something like this. I mean who does something like this? It’s just a hell of a thing.”

  Now, surveying the study and tapping his hat against one fleshy thigh, he said it again: “It’s just a hell of a thing. I’m awful sorry, Mr. Sleep.”

  “So am I.” Henry paused in the doorway. The faint odor he’d noticed in the hall—like apples at the edge of rot—was worse in here, stronger. The room was lined with books on three sides, the desk facing the windows on the far wall. He stepped inside, glancing over a row of Victorian novels—Dickens, Trollope, Collins. He could catalog the shelves from memory: science, history, theology, a map to his father’s mind. Neither of them said anything for a moment. In the silence, Henry could hear two deputies talking quietly in the foyer. He turned to face the sheriff.