The Killing Kind

EPILOGUE

THIS IS A HONEYCOMB WORLD, each hollow linked to the next, each life inextricably intertwined with the lives of others. The loss of even one reverberates through the whole, altering the balance, changing the nature of existence in tiny, imperceptible ways.

I find myself returning again and again to a woman named Tante Marie Aguillard, her impossibly tiny child's voice coming to me from out of her immense form. I see her lying on a mountain of pillows in a warm, dark room in western Louisiana, the smell of the Atchafalaya drifting through the house; a shining, black shadow among shifting forms, heedless of the boundaries between the natural and the man-made as one world melts into another. She takes my hand and talks to me of my lost wife and child. They call to her, and tell her of the man who took their lives.

She has no need of light; her blindness is less an impediment than an aid to a deeper, more meaningful perception. Sight would be a distraction for her strange, wandering consciousness, for her intense, fearless compassion. She feels for them all: the lost, the vanished, the dispossessed, the frightened, suffering souls who have been violently wrenched from this life and can find no rest in their world within worlds. She reaches out to them, comforting them in their final moments so that they will not die alone, so that they will not be afraid as they pass from light into dark.

And when the Traveling Man, the dark angel, comes for her, she reaches out in turn to me, and I am with her as she dies.

Tante Marie knew the nature of this world. She roamed through it, saw it for what it was, and understood her place in it, her responsibility to those who dwelt within it and beyond. Now, slowly, I too have begun to understand, to recognize a duty to the rest, to those whom I have never known as much as to those whom I have loved. The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another's pain as one's own, and to act to take that pain away. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness. I am a flawed man, with a violent past that will not be denied, but I will not allow innocent people to suffer when it is within my power to help them.

I will not turn my back on them.

I will not walk away.

And if, in doing these things, I can make some amends, some recompense, for the things that I have done and for all that I have failed to do, then that will be my consolation.

For reparation is the shadow cast by salvation.

I have faith in some better world beyond this one. I know that my wife and child dwell within it, for I have seen them. I know that they are safe now from the dark angels and that wherever may dwell Faulkner and Pudd and the countless others who wanted to turn life to death, they are far, far from Susan and Jennifer, and they can never touch them again.

There is rain tonight in Boston, and the glass of the window is anatomized with intricate veins traced across its surface. I wake, my knuckle still sore from the treated bite, and turn gently to feel her move close beside me. Her hand touches my neck and I know somehow that, while I have been asleep, she has been watching me in the darkness, waiting for the moment to arrive.

But I am tired, and as my eyes close again,

I am standing at the edge of the forest, and the air is filled with the howling of the hybrids. Behind me, the trees reach out to one another, and when they touch, they make a sound like children whispering. And as I listen, something moves in the shadows before me.

“Bird?”

Her hand is warm upon me, yet my skin is cold. I want to stay with her, but

I am drawn away again, for the darkness is calling me and a shape still moves through the trees. Slowly, the boy emerges, the black tape masking the lens of his glasses, his skin white. I try to walk to him but I cannot raise my feet. Behind him, other figures drift but they are walking away from us, disappearing into the forest, and soon he will join them. The wooden board has been discarded but the burn marks from the rope remain visible at his neck. He says nothing but stands watching me for a long, long time, one hand gripping the bark of the yellow birch beside him, until, at last, he too begins to recede,

“Bird,” she whispers.

fading away, moving deeper and deeper,

“I'm pregnant.”

down, down into the depths of this honeycomb world.