The Tower

Chapter 61

With his lower body wrapped in a hardened cast, one leg in traction, stitches threaded through his left cheek, and an incessant hammering in his temples and ears, Jade looked at the bare white walls of his room and the single plastic tray before him, and wondered why he was alive.

So far, his only happiness during his days in the hospital had come from his recollections of the case. He had heard the shattering of Allander's skull, he had felt it in every muscle of his body, and he still heard the gory crunch and felt the dull vibration in his dreams and his drugged hours awake.

He knocked the tray across the room with a hand wrapped in a soft bandage and winced in pain as it clattered on the tiled floor.

This room was his new home, it seemed. He pictured his house sitting empty, an occasional breeze blowing through the back screen and shaking the pictures taped to the walls. It seemed so far away.

He thought that Travers had come to see him, but now he wasn't sure if it had been a dream. It had seemed real; he thought he remembered her oddly sad face looking at him, the lingering touch of her fingers across the scar on his cheek.

She had smiled at him, though her eyes remained sad. "You beat yourself up pretty good, Marlow. Guess you don't need me around to do it for you."

And he had tried to answer her, but his voice had been thick with sleep and drugs. It was so hard for him to turn to face her, to shift out of the indentation his body had pressed into the mattress. After what seemed an eternity, he made the words come out: "Maybe I didn't handcuff you just to piss you off."

But having spoken, he realized that the room was empty, that Travers had left long ago, maybe hours, maybe days, and for the first time that he could remember, he felt like crying.

He gazed through the metal screens that guarded his window, looking out at the night sky and the trace of a moon-the same moon upon which he and Allander had once fixed their eyes. It seemed that a lot of time had passed since the dance, and now more time would pass with him here alone, trapped with his thoughts and with Allander in the shadows.

Full fathom five

He saw Allander's grown face on a child's body, popping out of a jack-in-the-box and dancing around the room. Allander sang to him through red-painted lips that stood out starkly against the pasty white of his cheeks.

Full fathom five thy father lies

He skipped around the room and Jade saw that he was dressed in the baggy pants of a clown. Big red suspenders with large buttons stretched across his skinny, little boy's chest.

Jade's bed creaked as he shifted his body. His right-lower eyelid twitched slightly. It was just from the pain and the painkillers, the nurse had said, and it would go away when he got better. When he got better.

The boy-Allander stopped at the foot of the bed and stretched out an arm, a disproportionately large, white-gloved hand directing Jade's eyes to shift to where he pointed. Jade followed the arc of the hand and looked at the bare tiles of the floor, and as he watched, they dissolved into a garden scene. A small group of people stood before a rectangular hole in the ground: a man and a woman with their arms around each other, and a row of people sobbing into handkerchiefs.

Alone, under a tree on the far side of the grave, stood a boy in an awkward black suit with a cap worn backward on his head. He looked angry; he looked mean. The parents did not look to him and no one stood near him. He did not cry.

The boy-Allander stepped into the scene on the tiled floor and walked past the open plot in the ground to stand next to the lone boy under the tree. Taking the boy's hand in one white glove, he led him slowly away from the other people. They did not look back, and gradually, they faded from view.