Owls under studio.
It was everywhere, on every page, just like the K-names in the telephone book. A kind of monument, this one built — I was sure of it — not by Sara Tidwell but by Johanna Arlen Noonan.
My wife passing messages behind the guard’s back, praying with all her considerable heart that I would see and understand.
On page ninety-two Shackleford was talking to Drake in the prison visitors’ room — sitting with his wrists between his knees, looking down at the chain running between his ankles, refusing to make eye-contact with Drake.
FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 92
only thing I got to say. Anything else, fuck,
what good would it do? Life’s a game, and I
lost. You want me to tell you that I yanked
some little kid out of the water, pulled her
up, got her motor going again? I did, but
not because I’m a hero or a saint . . . ‘
There was more but no need to read it. The message, owls under studio, ran down the margin just as it had on page nineteen. As it probably did on any number of other pages as well. I remembered how deliriously happy I had been to discover that the block had been dissolved and I could write again. It had been dissolved all right, but not because I’d finally beaten it or found a way around it.
Jo had dissolved it. Jo had beaten it, and my continued career as a writer of second-rate thrillers had been the least of her concerns when she did it. As I stood there in the flicker-flash of lightning, feeling my unseen guests swirl around me in the unsteady air, I remembered Mrs. Moran, my first-grade teacher. When your efforts to replicate the smooth curves of the Palmer Method alphabet on the blackboard began to flag and waver, she would put her large competent hand over yours and help you.
So had Jo helped me.
I riffled through the manuscript and saw the key words everywhere, sometimes placed so you could actually read them stacked on different lines, one above the other. How hard she had tried to tell me this . . . and I had no intention of doing anything else until I found out why. I dropped the manuscript back on the table, but before I could re-anchor it, a furious gust of freezing air blew past me, lifting the pages and scattering them everywhere in a cyclone. If that force could have ripped them to shreds, I’m sure that it would have.
No! it cried as I grabbed the lantern’s handle. No, finish the job!
Wind blew around my face in chill gusts — it was as if someone I couldn’t quite see was standing right in front of me and breathing in my face, retreating as I moved forward, huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf outside the houses of the three little pigs.
I hung the lantern over my arm, held my hands out in front of me, and clapped them together sharply. The cold puffs in my face ceased. There was now only the random swirling air coming in through the partially plugged kitchen window. ‘She’s sleeping,’ I said to what I knew was still there, silently watching. ‘There’s time.’
I went out the back door and the wind took me at once, making me stagger sideways, almost knocking me over. And in the wavering trees I saw green faces, the faces of the dead. Devore’s was there, and Royce’s, and Son Tidwell’s. Most of all I saw Sara’s.
Everywhere Sara.
No! Go back! You don’t need no truck with no owls, sugar! Go back! Finish the job! Do what you came for!
‘I don’t know what I came for,’ I said. ‘And until I find out, I’m not doing anything.’
The wind screamed as if in offense, and a huge branch split off the pine standing to the right of the house. It fell on top of my Chevrolet in a spray of water, denting the roof before rolling off on my side.
Clapping my hands out here would be every bit as useful as King Canute commanding the tide to turn. This was her world, not mine . . . and only the edge of it, at that. Every step closer to The Street and the lake would bring me closer to that world’s heart, where time was thin and spirits ruled. Oh dear God, what had happened to cause this?
The path to Jo’s studio had turned into a creek. I got a dozen steps down it before a rock turned under my foot and I fell heavily on my side. Lightning zigged across the sky, there was the crack of another breaking branch, and then something was falling toward me. I put my hands up to shield my face and rolled to the right, off the path. The branch splashed to the ground just behind me, and I tumbled halfway down a slope that was slick with soaked needles. At last I was able to pull
myself to my feet. The branch on the path was even bigger than the one which had landed on the roof of the car. If it had struck me, it likely would have bashed in my skull.
Go back! A hissing, spiteful wind through the trees.
Finish it! The slobbering, guttural voice of the lake slamming into the rocks and the bank below The Street.
Mind your business! That was the very house itself, groaning on its foundations. Mind your business and let me mind mine!
But Kyra was my business. Kyra was my daughter.
I picked up the lantern. The housing was cracked but the bulb glowed bright and steady — that was one for the home team. Bent over against the howling wind, hand raised to ward off more falling branches, I slipped and stumbled my way down the hill to my dead wife’s studio.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
At first the door wouldn’t open. The knob turned under my hand so I knew it wasn’t locked, but the rain seemed to have swelled the wood . . . or had something been shoved up against it? I drew back, crouched a little, and hit the door with my shoulder. This time there was some slight give.
It was her. Sara. Standing on the other side of the door and trying to hold it shut against me. How could she do that? How, in God’s name? She was a fucking ghost!
I thought of the BAMM CONSTRUCTION pickup . . . and as if thought were conjuration I could almost see it out there at the end of Lane Forty-two, parked by the highway. The old ladies’ sedan was behind it, and three or four other cars were now behind them. All of them with their windshield wipers flopping back and forth, their headlights cutting feeble cones through the downpour. They were lined up on the shoulder like cars at a yard sale. There was no yard sale here, only the old-timers sitting silently in their cars. Old-timers who were in the zone just like I was. Old-timers sending in the vibe.
She was drawing on them. Stealing from them. She’d done the same with Devore — and me too, of course. Many of the manifestations I’d experienced since coming back had likely been created from my own psychic energy. It was amusing when you thought of it.
Or maybe ‘terrifying’ was the word I was actually looking for.
‘Jo, help me,’ I said in the pouring rain. Lightning flashed, turning the torrents a bright brief silver. ‘If you ever loved me, help me now.’
I drew back and hit the door again. This time there was no resistance at all and I went hurtling in, catching my shin on the jamb and falling to my knees. I held onto the lantern, though.
There was a moment of silence. In it I felt forces and presences gathering themselves. In that moment nothing seemed to move, although behind me, in the woods Jo had loved to ramble —
with me or without me — the rain continued to fall and the wind continued to howl, a merciless gardener pruning its way through the trees that were dead and almost dead, doing the work of ten gentler years in one turbulent hour. Then the door slammed shut and it began. I saw everything in the glow of the flashlight, which I had turned on without even realizing it, but at first I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing, other than the destruction by poltergeist of my wife’s beloved crafts and treasures.
The framed afghan square tore itself off the wall and flew from one side of the studio to the other, the black oak frame breaking apart. The heads popped off the dolls poking out of the baby collages like champagne corks at a party. The hanging light-globe shattered, showering me with fragments of glass. A wind began to blow — a cold one — and was quickly joined and whirled into a cyclone by one which was warmer, almost hot. They rolled past me as if in imitation of the larger storm outside.