Cohen led the way into the funeral home, and a strange authority seemed to transfer from Than and Hippie to him. It happened as quickly and subtly as the breath of wind that stirred the sycamore branches. They fell in behind him, and he could sense them there, their presence, their eyes looking over his shoulder.
He held the gun in his hand. It seemed to go from heavy to no weight at all, a nothing sort of thing, and he had to look at it and look at it again to make sure it was there. And it was, the cold steel glinting in the glare of the streetlights shining through the glass doors.
The storm grew heavy again, and swirling snow crowded frantically against the glass. Outside, the sound of the sirens was distant. Than aimed the flashlight around Cohen without walking in front of him, and the light caught Cohen’s body, projected his shaky shadow across the room and up onto the walls and the ceiling. He was a giant walking. Standing behind the flashlight, Hippie and Than left no shadows, no mark of themselves.
“Wait,” Cohen said.
Hippie paused without making a sound. Than took a few extra steps so that he was almost beside Cohen, and the three of them stood still, their breath rising around them. The room was cold, colder than it should have been. The coffins sat quietly in the darkness. The door at the back, the one that led into the stairwell and up to the apartment, was slightly open. The door at the right side of the funeral home’s main level, the one that led into the chapel, was closed.
Than stared straight into the shadows, leaning his head to the side as if straining his ears to hear something, anything. Cohen glanced at Hippie. She gave him a kind look, the shadow of a smile, and he nodded back at her. Behind her, a single car drove south on Duke through the snow, moving at a turtle’s pace, but the sound of it didn’t pass through the glass. Only the light. Only the image of it moving, like in silent movies. Everything else was resting under a heavy stillness.
“Look,” Than whispered, aiming his flashlight over at the door to the chapel, keeping the beam low. There was a light under the door, thin as a piece of yellow thread on a black suit.
Cohen nodded, filled with fear and uncertainty and a strong desire to get to the end, whatever that might mean. He was ready for the search to be over. He was ready to get rid of the Beast and see Than and Hippie out and climb back into his bed. He wanted to sink into the mattress, pull up the covers, and sleep until evening came the next day, then roll over and sleep another night through. But there remained this one thing.
“Let’s go.”
The light under the door didn’t fade, and it took them only a few moments to glide over to it. They stood there for a long time, and Than turned off his flashlight. They stared down at the glow, the light that seemed to reach out toward their feet. They looked at the black tar on the frame around the door, the trail the Beast had left behind. Cohen clenched his jaw, raised his hand to push open the door. This would be it. This would be the end of the thing.
Cohen paused. He looked at Than and felt an unexpected friendship there. Another car went by, and the speckled light slid over Hippie’s face. He stared hard at her. She reached up and touched his face with two fingers, running them down along his jawline. They were cold, and her touch was so slight. He closed his eyes for a split second, sighed, and turned from both of them. He opened the chapel door and walked in.
There was an unexpected brightness to the room, and at first Cohen couldn’t look directly at it. A light at the front of the chapel—one of the overhead lights above the pulpit—shone down like a spotlight.
The shadows in the room started to gather, pooling together, running like liquid from every corner, until out of the floor at the front of the room rose the Beast, as tall as the chapel, a shimmering, moving space of nothingness.
Cohen raised the gun, pointed it at the center of the darkness. His hand trembled. The room smelled like someone had vacuumed it recently, and Cohen also caught the scent of the pine cleaner, but the Beast brought its own smell, metallic and primal.
That’s when Cohen heard Than shout, “Cohen!” followed by a short, piercing scream.
Hippie.
Cohen looked back through the door, back into the display room, but they were gone. He raised the gun toward the darkness.
“Where are they?” Cohen said, his voice wavering.
The Beast seemed to turn to face Cohen, and he could tell it was tired, haggard, drawn down. The Beast seemed to expand for a moment, filling the front of the chapel, and Cohen wasn’t sure, if he decided to shoot, where exactly he should aim.
They are gone.
He realized these words were coming to him from inside his head. He somehow knew the words originated from the Beast, but they weren’t connected to any voice. They were pieces of information that sprang up out of nowhere. The Beast didn’t talk, not out loud, but he communicated with Cohen, and those three little words came through clearly.
They are gone.
Cohen’s hands trembled, the gun shaking up and down. “No, they’re not.”
They are gone.
“No!”
His voice echoed over the empty chairs, against the front chapel wall, and back to him again. The wall of darkness that was the Beast seemed to diminish for a moment. It seemed to pull in on itself, and that was when Cohen noticed the pooling shadows at its feet. A rivulet of it crept toward him, a narrow thread of the purest darkness he had ever seen. It shone like oil.
Yes. There was mourning tangled up in the Beast’s words, and anger, and a seismic fissure that went all the way down. Yes. They are gone. They died in the fire. I did it. It was me. I came here because I wanted to see them one last time. But they are gone.
“No,” Cohen whispered. His hands holding the gun lowered ever so slightly. In the silence between their words he could hear the accumulation of small things, the buzz of the light above the pulpit, the stirring of the air as the heat turned on. Behind the Beast there was nothing, at least nothing to be seen, but Cohen could feel what was there behind it, in the great shadow it left: eternity and darkness and death.
Cohen was suddenly cold. His clothes were wet with melted snow. His feet were heavy, his toes numb at the tips, and whether it was from standing in a pool of the Beast’s darkness or simply from running through the cold night in the city, he didn’t know.
The Beast teetered from one side to the other, bumping the pulpit, knocking over a chair. It was a boat taking on water, listing in the storm, further with each wave. Then it was down.
They are gone. This was the last thing Cohen felt from the Beast. The words came like sobs, and the Beast began to diminish faster, somehow shrinking and taking a more solid form. Cohen watched, horrified, as the darkness and the shadows and that huge, tilting thing transformed into a dead man lying there, flat on the floor, his head leaning against the side chapel wall at a sharp angle. He had a week’s worth of beard on his face and disheveled, graying hair and a tired, mean face. The black shadows were suddenly a deep red, and Cohen knew the wound was where he had shot the man the night before, in the trailer, with Hippie and Than.
“Cohen!” a voice shouted. “Is that you? Are you back?”
Behind him the door creaked open. He turned, and there stood Ava in the doorway, her mouth gaping.
“Ava,” he whispered. “What are you . . .” But the look on her face stopped him. She was staring at the dead man, at the pools of blood. Even in the dim light, she could see it all. She could see the man’s stubble, his stained clothes. Even in the darkness, she could see the glint of metal in Cohen’s hand. The gun.
She backed away, the look on her face never changing. Cohen moved to follow her, and he would have, except for Hippie and Than.
Hippie and Than.
He threw the gun to the floor and it was absorbed by the carpet. He fell to the floor and screamed their names.
“Hippie! Than!”
But they were not there, and he no longer expected to find them. He crawled on all fours to the Beast, now only a man, and stared at him. With every ounce of bravery that remained he moved in close and checked for breathing—a moving chest, air stirring from his mouth—but there was nothing. The man’s skin was still warm, and his jaw was loose and pliable, and Cohen couldn’t hate him anymore, even though he tried. How he tried!
He thought back through everything, every little conversation and moment he had spent with them, especially with Hippie. He thought of the day they first met, the day they fought the Beast in the funeral home, their hike along the train tracks and sleeping in the cave. He thought of how she had reached up and touched him only moments ago, her cold fingers on his jaw. He reached up and rubbed that spot, tried to feel any part of her she might have left behind. He had loved her, he knew that. How could this be?
He thought about Ava. He imagined her searching for him in the city, her eyes shining in the light, lifting those “Missing” posters and stapling them to each and every pole and tree, the staples sometimes catching and sometimes bending on staples already there from other signs posted by other people.
He imagined his father, maybe walking the city, staring into Cohen’s printed eyes. He thought of his father waiting in the funeral home, perhaps drinking, perhaps falling back to sleep, but always waiting.
Waiting for him.
Cohen stood. He was soaked through from sweat and the snow, and there was blood on his clothes, he knew that now. He paused. Had the snow fallen on all of them? Had they left footprints in the mud, in the snow? Or had it been only him all along? He wanted to go out and look, but he was scared of what he might find. Or not find.
Weariness pressed on him like a lead blanket. He walked back through the dark funeral home, all the way to the stairs, and up he went one step at a time, his dirty soles making gritty sounds on the floor. He climbed up out of the dark into the lesser dark, and there he sat in the apartment, staring out the window onto Duke Street. A far-off siren wailed. The snow no longer fell. The sky was dark and clear.