Arc d'X

23

IN HIS LAST HOUR inside the Arboretum, lying in a heap in the transformed flat where he’d lived with Mona, from a stupor he saw three more visions. Even he knew the first wasn’t real.

It was Mona, standing before him, looking as she’d always looked. She was naked as she’d always been naked, and wet, her golden hair in strands on her bare shoulders as though she’d just climbed from the bottom of the sea. She stood in a pool of water. Even in his stupor he remembered it had been many years since she’d gone. Her head tilted to the side and she smiled, of course, and even though he knew she wasn’t really there, when she held out the stone to him, he reached for it. He closed his eyes and then opened them again and she was gone and his hand was empty. Dimly he nodded to himself.

At first, he didn’t think the second vision was real either.

It was Sally Hemings again, as he’d seen her in another part of the Arboretum. He closed his eyes and said her name, expecting she’d disappear as Mona had, and only the echo of her name would be left in the room with him; but when he opened his eyes, she was still there. “I’m not Sally,” she shook her head, “Sally was my mother.”

He narrowed his eyes and tried to think. “Was?”

“I’m looking for a man,” the girl went on, and now Wade could see she was indeed younger and fairer than Sally. “His name is Etcher. He wore thick glasses and had black hair …” and he laughed until the effort of laughing exhausted him, and he passed out.

He immediately knew the third vision was real. Three men stood before him; one had half a face. Where the other half had been, his mouth curled in a massive scar upward, the face having revolted against its own nature that it might grow back together. Through the hole in the middle of the face came a smudge of words. “Well well well,” he said.

It had taken so much effort before that Wade wasn’t sure he had it in him to laugh anymore. But he couldn’t help it. Stupefied, besotted and trapped like a rat, looking up at the man with the hole in his face, he figured he might as well let it rip from down deep. “You don’t look so good, Mallory,” he guffawed from the floor where there was no floor.

Mallory kicked him savagely in the head.

Wade came to in time to see the sky above him, bearing down on him like the wave of the world as the three cops dragged him to the car. “Only the night,” he cried, “damn the light!”