He was right about that. God help him, he was.
Always assuming He's there, of course.
*
Even with a change of planes in Cincinnati, I was back in Denver the next day before 1 PM--when it comes to time travel, nothing beats flying west in a jet plane. I woke up my phone and saw I had two messages. The first was from Jenny. She said that she had locked the door of Astrid's bedroom last night before turning in herself, but there hadn't been a peep from the baby monitor, and when she got up at six-thirty, Astrid was still conked out.
"When she got up, she ate a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast. And the way she looks . . . I have to keep telling myself it's not some kind of illusion."
That was the good message. The bad one was from Brianna Donlin--now Brianna Donlin-Hughes. She'd left it only minutes before my United flight touched down. "Robert Rivard is dead, Jamie. I don't know the details." But by that evening, she'd gotten them.
A nurse had told Bree that most people who went into Gad's Ridge never came out, and that was certainly true of the boy Pastor Danny had healed of his muscular dystrophy. They found him in his room, dangling from a noose he'd made from a pair of bluejeans. He left a note that said, I can't stop seeing the damned. The line stretches forever.
XII
Forbidden Books. My Maine Vacation. The Sad Story of Mary Fay. The Coming of the Storm.
About six weeks later I got an email from my old research partner.
To: Jamie
From: Bree
Subject: FYI
After you were at Jacobs's place in upstate New York, you said in an email that he mentioned a book called De Vermis Mysteriis. The name stuck in my head, probably because I took just enough Latin in high school to know that's The Mysteries of the Worm in plain English. I guess research into All Things Jacobs is a hard habit to break, because I looked into it. Without telling my husband, I should add, as he believes I have put All Things Jacobs behind me.
Anyway, this is pretty heavy stuff. According to the Catholic Church, De Vermis Mysteriis is one of half a dozen so-called Forbidden Books. Taken as a group, they are known as "grimoires." The other five are The Book of Apollonius (he was a doctor at the time of Christ), The Book of Albertus Magnus (spells, talismans, speaking to the dead), Lemegeton and Clavicula Salomonis (supposedly written by King Solomon), and The Grimoire of Picatrix. That last one, along with De Vermis Mysteriis, was supposedly the basis of H. P. Lovecraft's fictional grimoire, called The Necronomicon.
Editions are available of all the Forbidden Books EXCEPT FOR De Vermis Mysteriis. According to Wikipedia, secret emissaries of the Catholic Church (paging Dan Brown) had burned all but six or seven copies of De Vermis by the turn of the 20th century. (BTW, the Pope's army now refuses to acknowledge such a book ever existed.) The others have dropped out of sight, and are presumed to be destroyed or held by private collectors.
Jamie, all the Forbidden Books deal with POWER, and how to obtain it by means that combine alchemy (which we now call "science"), mathematics, and certain nasty occult rituals. All of it is probably bullshit, but it makes me uneasy--you told me Jacobs has spent his life studying electrical phenomena, and based on his healing successes, I have to think he may have gotten hold of a power that's pretty awesome. Which makes me think of the old proverb: "He who takes a tiger by the tail dare not let go."
A couple of other things for you to think about.
One: Up until the mid-seventeenth century, Catholics known to be studying potestas magnum universum (the force that powers the universe) were liable to excommunication.
Two: Wikipedia claims--although without verifying references, I must add--that the couplet most people remember from Lovecraft's fictional Necronomicon was stolen from a copy of De Vermis which Lovecraft had access to (he certainly never owned one, he was too poor to purchase such a rarity). This is the couplet: "That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die." That gave me nightmares. I'm not kidding.
Sometimes you called Charles Daniel Jacobs "my old fifth business." I hope you are done with him at last, Jamie. Once upon a time I would have laughed at all this, but once upon a time I thought miracle cures at revival meetings were bullshit.
Give me a call someday, would you? Let me know All Things Jacobs are behind you.
Affectionately, as always,
Bree
I printed this out and read it over twice. Then I googled De Vermis Mysteriis and found everything Bree had told me in her email, along with one thing she hadn't. In an antiquarian book-blog called Dark Tomes of Magick & Spells, someone called Ludvig Prinn's suppressed grimoire "the most dangerous book ever written."
*
I left my apartment, walked down the block, and bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time since a brief flirtation with tobacco in college. There was no smoking in my building, so I sat on my steps to light up. I coughed out the first drag, my head swimming, and I thought, These things would have killed Astrid, if not for Charlie's intervention.
Yes. Charlie and his miracle cures. Charlie who had a tiger by the tail and didn't want to let go.
Something happened, Astrid had said in my dream, speaking through a grin from which all her former sweetness had departed. Something happened, and Mother will be here soon.
Then, later, after Jacobs had shot his secret electricity into her head: There's a door in the wall. The door is covered with ivy. The ivy is dead. She waits. And when Jacobs asked who Astrid was talking about: Not the one you want.
I can break my promise, I thought, casting the cigarette away. It wouldn't be the first one.
True, but not this one. Not this promise.
I went back inside, crushing the pack of cigarettes and tossing it into the trash can beside the mailboxes. Upstairs, I called Bree's cell, prepared to leave a message, but she answered. I thanked her for her email and told her I had no intention of ever seeing Charles Jacobs again. I told this lie without guilt or hesitation. Bree's husband was right; she needed to be finished with All Things Jacobs. And when the time came to go back to Maine and fulfill my promise, I would lie to Hugh Yates for the same reason.
Once upon a time, two teenagers had fallen for each other, and hard, as only teenagers can. A few years later they made love in a ruined cabin while the thunder rolled and the lightning flashed--all very Victoria Holt. In the course of time, Charles Jacobs had saved them both from paying the ultimate price for their addictions. I owed him double. I'm sure you see that, and I could leave it there, but to do so would be to omit a much larger truth: I was also curious. God help me, I wanted to watch him lift the lid on Pandora's box and peer inside.
*
"This isn't your lame-ass way of telling me you want to retire, is it?" Hugh tried to sound as if he was joking, but there was real apprehension in his eyes.
"Not at all. I just want a couple of months off. Maybe only six weeks, if I get bored. I need to reconnect with my family in Maine while I still can. I'm not getting any younger."
I had no intention of going near my family in Maine. They were too close to Goat Mountain as it was.
"You're a kid," he said moodily. "Come this fall, I'm going to have a year for every trombone that led the big parade. Mookie pulling the pin this spring was bad enough. If you went for good, I'd probably have to close this place down."
He heaved a sigh.
"I should have had kids, someone to take over when I'm gone, but does that sort of thing happen? Rarely. When you say you hope they'll pick up the reins of the family business, they say 'Sorry, Dad, me and that dope-smoking kid you hated me hanging out with in high school are going to California to make surfboards equipped with WiFi.'"
"Now that you've got that out of your system . . ."
"Yeah, yeah, go back to your roots, by all means. Play pat-a-cake with your little niece and help your brother rebuild his latest classic car. You know how summers are here."
I certainly did: slower than dirt. S
ummer means full employment even for the shittiest bands, and when bands are playing live music in bars and at four dozen summerfests in Colorado and Utah, they don't buy much recording time.
"George Damon will be in," I said. "He's come out of retirement in a big way."
"Yeah," Hugh said. "The only guy in Colorado who can make 'I'll Be Seeing You' sound like 'God Bless America.'"
"Perhaps in the world. Hugh, you haven't had any more of those prismatics, have you?"
He gave me a curious look. "No. What brought that on?"
I shrugged.
"I'm fine. Up a couple of times every night to squirt half a teacup of pee, but I guess that's par for the course at my age. Although . . . you want to hear a funny thing? Only to me it's more of a spooky thing."
I wasn't sure I did, but thought I ought to. It was early June. Jacobs hadn't called yet, but he would. I knew he would.
"I've been having this recurring dream. In it I'm not here at Wolfjaw, I'm in Arvada, in the house where I grew up. Someone starts knocking on the door. Except it's not just knocking, it's pounding. I don't want to answer it, because I know it's my mother, and she's dead. Pretty stupid, because she was alive and healthy as a horse back in the Arvada days, but I know it, just the same. I go down the hall, not wanting to, but my feet just keep moving--you know how dreams are. By then she's really whamming on the door, beating on it with both fists, it sounds like, and I'm thinking of this horror story we had to read in English when I was in high school. I think it was called 'August Heat.'"
Not "August Heat," I thought. "The Monkey's Paw." That's the one with the door-pounding in it.
"I reach for the knob, and then I wake up, all in a sweat. What do you make of that? My subconscious, trying to get me ready for the big exit scene?"
"Maybe," I agreed, but my head had left the conversation. I was thinking about another door. A small one covered with dead ivy.
*
Jacobs called on July first. I was in one of the studios, updating the Apple Pro software. When I heard his voice, I sat down in front of the control board and looked through the window into a soundproof rehearsal room that was empty except for a disassembled drumkit.
"The time has almost come for you to keep your promise," he said. His voice was mushy, as if he'd been drinking, although I'd never seen him take anything stronger than black coffee.
"All right." My voice was calm enough. Why not? It was the call I had been expecting. "When do you want me to come?"
"Tomorrow. The day after at the latest. I suspect you won't want to stay with me at the resort, at least to start with--"
"You suspect right."
"--but I'll need you no more than an hour away. When I call, you come."
That made me think of another spooky story, one titled "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."
"All right," I said. "But Charlie?"
"Yes?"
"You get two months of my time, and that's it. When Labor Day rolls around, we're quits no matter what happens."
Another pause, but I could hear his breathing. It sounded labored, making me think of how Astrid had sounded in her wheelchair. "That's . . . acceptable." Acsheptable.
"Are you okay?"
"Another stroke, I'm afraid." Shtroke. "My speech isn't as clear as it once was, but I assure you my mind is as clear as ever."
Pastor Danny, heal thyself, I thought, and not for the first time.
"Bit of news for you, Charlie. Robert Rivard is dead. The boy from Missouri? He hung himself."
"I'm shorry to hear that." He didn't sound sorry, and didn't waste time asking for details. "When you arrive, call me and tell me where you are. And remember, no more than an hour away."
"Okay," I said, and broke the connection.
I sat there in the unnaturally quiet studio for several minutes, looking at the framed album covers on the walls, then dialed Jenny Knowlton, in Rockland. She answered on the first ring.
"How's our girl doing?" I asked.
"Fine. Putting on weight and walking a mile a day. She looks twenty years younger."
"No aftereffects?"
"Nothing. No seizures, no sleepwalking, no amnesia. She doesn't remember much about the time we spent at Goat Mountain, but I think that's sort of a blessing, don't you?"
"What about you, Jenny? Are you okay?"
"Fine, but I ought to go. We're awfully busy at the hospital today. Thank God I've got vacation coming up."
"You won't go off somewhere and leave Astrid alone, will you? Because I don't think that would be a good id--"
"No, no, certainly not!" There was something in her voice. Something nervous. "Jamie, I've got a page. I have to go."
I sat in front of the darkened control panel. I looked at the album covers--actually CD covers these days, little things the size of postcards. I thought about a time not too long after I'd gotten my first car as a birthday present, that '66 Ford Galaxie. Riding with Norm Irving. Him pestering me to put the pedal to the metal on the two-mile stretch of Route 9 we called the Harlow Straight. So we could see what she'd do, he said. At eighty, the front end began to shimmy, but I didn't want to look like a wuss--at seventeen, not looking like a wuss is very important--so I kept my foot down. At eighty-five the shimmy smoothed out. At ninety, the Galaxie took on a dreamy, dangerous lightness as its contact with the road lessened, and I realized I'd reached the edge of control. Careful not to touch the brake--I knew from my father that could mean disaster at high speed--I let off the gas and the Galaxie began to slow.
I wished I could do that now.
*
The Embassy Suites near the Jetport had seemed all right when I'd been there the night after Astrid's miracle recovery, so I checked in again. It had crossed my mind to do my waiting at the Castle Rock Inn, but the chances of running into an old acquaintance--Norm Irving, for instance--were too great. If that happened, it would almost certainly get back to my brother Terry. He'd want to know why I was in Maine, and why I wasn't staying with him. Those were questions I didn't want to answer.
The time passed. On July Fourth, I watched the fireworks from Portland Promenade with several thousand other people, all of us ooh-ing and ahh-ing as the peonies and chrysanthemums and diadems exploded overhead and were doubled in Casco Bay, where they swayed on the waves. In the days that followed, I went to the zoo in York, the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport, and the lighthouse at Pemaquid Point. I toured the Portland Museum of Art, where three generations of Wyeths were on view, and took in a matinee performance of The Buddy Holly Story at Ogunquit Playhouse--the lead singer/actor was good, but no Gary Busey. I ate "lobstah" until I never wanted to see another one. I took long walks along the rocky shore. Twice a week I visited Books-A-Million in the Maine Mall and bought paperbacks which I read in my room until I was sleepy. I took my cell with me everywhere, waiting for Jacobs to call, and the call didn't come. On a couple of occasions I thought of calling him, and told myself I was out of my mind to even consider it. Why kick a sleeping dog?
The weather was picture-perfect, with low humidity, innocent skies, and temperatures in the low seventies, day after day. There were showers, usually at night. One evening I heard TV weatherman Joe Cupo call it "considerate rain." He added that it was the most beautiful summer he'd seen in his thirty-five years of broadcasting.
The All-Star game was played in Minneapolis, the regular baseball season resumed, and as August approached, I began to hope that I might make it back to Colorado without ever seeing Charlie. It crossed my mind that he might have had a fourth stroke, this time a cataclysmic one, and I kept an eye on the obituary page in the Portland Press Herald. Not exactly hoping, but . . .
Fuck that, I was. I was hoping.
During the local news on July 25th, Joe Cupo regretfully informed me and the rest of his southern Maine viewing audience that all good things must end, and the heatwave currently baking the Midwest would be moving into New England over the weekend. Temperatures would be in the mid-
nineties during the entire last week of July, and August didn't look much better, at least to start with. "Check those air-conditioning units, folks," Cupo advised. "They don't call em the dog days for nothing."
Jacobs called that evening. "Sunday," he said. "I'll expect you no later than nine in the morning."
I told him I'd be there.
*
Joe Cupo was right about the heat. It moved in Saturday afternoon, and when I got into my rental car at seven thirty on Sunday morning, the air was already thick. The roads were empty, and I made good time to Goat Mountain. On my way up to the main gate, I noticed that the spur leading to Skytop was open again, the stout wooden gate pulled back.
Sam the security guard was waiting for me, but no longer in uniform. He was sitting on the dropped tailgate of a Tacoma pickup, dressed in jeans and eating a bagel. He put it carefully on a napkin when I pulled up, and strolled over to my car.
"Hello there, Mr. Morton. You're early."
"No traffic," I said.
"Yeah, in summer this is the best time of day to travel. The Massholes'll be out in force later, headed for the beaches." He looked at the sky, where blue was already fading to hazy white. "Let em bake and work on their skin cancer. I plan to be home, watching the Sox and soaking up the AC."
"Shift over soon?"
"No more shifts here for any of us," he said. "Once I call Mr. Jacobs and tell him you're on your way, that's it. Job over."
"Well, enjoy the rest of the summer." I stuck out my hand.
He shook it. "Any idea what he's up to? I can keep a secret; I'm bonded, you know."
"Your guess is as good as mine."
He gave me a wink as if to say we both knew better, then waved me on. Before I went around the first curve, I watched in the rearview mirror as he grabbed his bagel, slammed the Tacoma's tailgate shut, and got in behind the wheel.
That's it. Job over.
I wished I could say the same.
*
Jacobs came slowly and carefully down the porch steps to meet me. In his left hand was a cane. The twist of his mouth was more severe than ever. I saw a single car in the parking lot, and it was one I recognized: a trim little Subaru Outback. On the back deck was a sticker reading SAVE ONE LIFE, YOU'RE A HERO. SAVE A THOUSAND AND YOU'RE A NURSE. My heart sank.
"Jamie! Wonderful to see you!" See came out she. He offered the hand not holding the cane. It was obviously an effort, but I ignored it.