Dead Echo

  *

  He had fled.

  In the end he had taken what he dared and fled like some fucking refugee. He had met the face of his enemy and declined the invitation. But only after his wife had paid with her life. Oh, now it was easy to remember all the conversations they’d held, talking scarcely louder than second graders in the library. And always his reasoning, his fucking logic. They couldn’t make their investment back; they couldn’t run like children from ghost stories. Nope, they couldn’t do anything like that (not in the face of how the world ran on hard facts) and they had stayed. Even as Debbie had slowly slipped into madness (he knew that now, could see it on his own face in the darkness of night or the early morning light of morning, when the truth was plain) he had held to his guns and denied that there were stranger things in the world than have been imagined. Only now he knew: everything that could be imagined was only a small token of all things that were already in existence.

  The police and the paramedics had come, taken them both to the hospital and he’d been the only one to leave. A day later. He had walked out unaided and his wife had been transferred to the morgue, shut up in one of those stainless-steel drawers, and left until he came up with arrangements. He could hardly recall the funeral. It was simply when the darkness had descended so deeply around him he could no longer focus on anything but breathing, moment by sucking moment. But it had passed as all things do and since he hadn’t died he moved forward also. He never spent another night in the house. For a solid month he lived in motels and only ventured inside that black place during the heat of day when the sun was at its most powerful. He spirited his journals out during these times, piecing together the scrapbook he’d left in the attic when he was finally done.

  But he’d since found out. He wasn’t done. Not by a long shot.