chapter nine

Ever since last summer, after coming back from his stay with George, Fane had kept a road atlas with the locations of both their houses circled on it. He’d lie awake at night and take out the map from under his mattress and put his finger on the circle that represented George’s house. There was a smaller circle to the right, like an orbiting moon, where Fane estimated the cave to be. He had no real way of knowing. But when he looked at the circled places, he could make himself travel to them somehow, in his dreams. And he’d think: Once I can drive, I can go to George anytime I want.

Now he can drive, but feels poisoned by the freedom. When he looks at the atlas he finds every space filled with a cold, unwelcoming darkness, blackest of all over George’s house.

Why didn’t he stop himself?

This question has filled up the hollow weeks since the return from New York, making him regret his moment on the floor when his eyes watered not from sorrow but exultation. He had disturbed the Universe and the Universe liked it, and light burst across the cosmos. Fane had not counted it would be as brief as it was bright. Now it is summer again, the coldest he has ever known regardless of the thermostat’s reading. He reads in bed during the day, his mind absorbing none of the words as he dwells on recent memories: George’s silence, George’s disdain. George even shoved him aside once. It was like that every day at Fowler following New York, up until the last day, when all the boys departed with their families. He and George stood beside each other, and Fane thought at last amends were to be made. He waited for George to say, “Mates?” But it never came. George’s parents arrived first, he got into their car and left.

That was the moment of true, intense hurt—the moment he realized George was out of his life forever, and the coming summer would be a personal winter. George would not be inviting him over during the summer. In fact, he’d overheard George confirming to Dooley that his parents were going to Europe.

He can only assume George is with them.

Despite this, Fane dreams of going to George’s house, stepping onto the porch and peering through the windows. Then he’ll knock on the door. Then, when he’s satisfied it’s empty, when he knows George is gone, he will go down to the pond and sit awhile, watching ghosts catch fish.

In late June, he lies to his parents, telling them George invited him over for a weekend visit. His own audacity shocks him, and he is upset over the reason why they eventually grant permission: because they trust George. His mother loved everything about George after finally meeting him. His father even seemed to hold his son in higher esteem at having somehow secured such a boy as his best friend. It was almost like he wanted to clap his son on the back and say, “I never knew you could achieve so much.”

Only his mother frets a little about the distance of the drive, especially since her son is not experienced behind the wheel. “I just never thought Adam would be driving more than five or six miles away from here, not until he went off to college. Is his car safe for such a long distance?”

“It’s not so far,” his father says. “It’s probably a shorter drive than we take to reach Great Aunt Etty’s place. Just make sure you call us as soon as you arrive, Adam, and as soon as you leave.”

Fane smiles. “I’ll be okay, Mom.”

“Besides, George will take care of him,” his father says. “That boy has a fine head on his shoulders.”

Fane keeps smiling until his lips hurt.

The next day, he sets off with some money from his dad and a small suitcase packed with clothes and his poetry anthology, just to complete the illusion. He tosses the book in at the last moment like a good luck charm, though it’s been nothing but a catalog of pain since New York. There were no more readings in the woods after they came back. His real charm is the black rock George gave him. It’s now a totem, a tangible reminder that George once liked him and might like him again. Somehow staring into its deep blackness does not make him despair of eternal night.

We’re not friends anymore, he thinks.

He’s refused to fully entertain such thoughts until now. But the drive, as if it’s straight into the sun, obliterates any shadow of doubt. George hates him. Something inside his mind breaks with the cleanness of bone. He cries so hard he can’t see the road and pulls over crookedly, leaving too much of the car still in the road. A car horn blasts as a driver veers to avoid him. Fane remembers how the traffic in New York sounded as he listened to it in the early morning, his forehead pressed to the hotel room window, his penis stiff in his underwear, his tongue moving side to side, desperate not to relinquish a taste that was mysterious and miraculous to him. He remembers turning back to look at George sleeping on his side, and feeling so sure of himself and the future. Why shouldn’t he after what had happened? Then Fane left the window and got into bed with George, hesitant only moment, thinking perhaps he should ask permission. But surely after the last two hours, permission had been granted, now and forever more.

How wrong he was, and how hard Fane cries now at his mistake.

At least half an hour passes before he gets himself together. When he directs the car back onto the road, the world feels strange to him, and the steering wheel seems huge and overwhelming and beyond his control. Still, he drives on, hunched forward, battling the car and the road and himself, until he reaches the turnoff to George’s house. The house is easy to spot in its relative isolation, with the forest stretching behind it and no immediate neighbors. He steers up the long driveway, and then he’s parked in front of it, George’s house. How can he be here? What is he to do?

I forgot to call home, he thinks. I’ll have to double back to the last gas station I saw and telephone from there.

As the impracticalities of his plan reveal themselves to him, he decides not calling is for the best. If he calls, he’ll have to spend the weekend here in the car. But if I come home today, he think, there’ll be just as many questions. They’ll wonder what happened between—

George and me.

Fane moans as fresh tears run down his cheeks. He wipes his eyes, and looks ahead at the house. Then he goes cold.

George stands on the front porch staring down at him.

Fane gapes at him, certain he’s seeing a phantom. If George is here, then his parents must be here too. That means George lied about going to Europe. Who else is here? Who else from Fowler? He grips the steering wheel with both hands, going white-knuckled. Neither he nor George move for more than a minute.

Fane takes the first step, opening the car door.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Fane says.

“So you just show up at someone’s house uninvited?”

Fane looks down. He has only the same answer. “I don’t know.”

“Go away, Fane.”

George turns for the front door. “Wait,” Fane says, reaching out with his right hand. “Please don’t leave! I—”

“You what?”

Fane smiles stupidly. “I don’t know.”

George slams the door. Fane retreats to the car, certain George’s father will be coming out to yell at him. He turns the key in the ignition, the engine roars to life.

And abjectly he turns the key back. Let George’s father come. Let him yell. Fane knows he deserves it.

The front door opens again. It’s George.

“You leaving or what?”

Fane shakes his head.

George comes down, opens the car door and pulls Fane out. He grabs Fane by the shirt and shoves him against the car. “I don’t want to see you. You got that?”

The pressure George exerts increases. Fane’s feet kick for traction, and suddenly something pops in his right leg. He screams with such genuine pain, even George relents, letting him fall to the ground as he backs off.

Now Fane gasps on his side, looking at the undercarriage of the car. George’s shadow falls over him, and he tries to curl into a ball, certain he’s about to get pummeled worse than anything Dooley or Thompson ever did to him. And Fane knows he deserves it, for loving in a way he should not love. If George demands a thrashing to end his hate, Fane welcomes it and prays it will come. It will not be worse than the pain in his leg now, an agony like ice in his kneecap.

But the beating never materializes. George just sounds weary as he begs Fane to leave.

“I don’t think I can drive. My leg’s really hurt.”

“Your leg. All you ever talk about is your damn leg.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not. As long as it gets you the attention you want—”

“I want it to be normal.

“It’d be the only thing normal about you if it was. Now get the hell out of here. I have stuff to do.”

George heads back toward the house. Fane rolls over, expecting to see George’s parents standing at the door. They must wonder what’s going on, after all. But the door is open and no one’s there. If George closes the door behind him now, he senses, it will be the last time.

“What are you doing? Maybe I can help.”

George just laughs but stops on the porch and turns. “You’re a strange one, Fane. Why don’t you take off now? Maybe we’ll catch up back at school.”

“But that’ll be months—”

“The summer’s always too short.”

“Not to me. Every day’s too long when you’re lonely.”

George appears unmoved by this plea. Fane gets to his feet. His right leg is sore but not impossible. He looks at his car. It’s time to go. It’s time to face the fact that he’s unwanted here. But he can’t. Didn’t he promise himself he’d go down to the pond and remember better times? How can he leave without doing so?

He leaves the car and starts limping around the back of the house.

“Where are you going?”

“Down to the pond.”

“You think you can just stroll about on my property?”

Fane shrugs and lets his feet take him where they will. The reasons for his own actions elude him. Does he want to kill whatever lingering affection George might have for him? He feels like a ghost seeking a place to haunt, and when he reaches the water’s edge he sees his reflection, pale and ghastly. Yes, a ghost: a ghost before his time. Should he drown himself? Is George watching? Would George rush down in panic if he sees Fane taking the plunge? His thoughts run so deep, he doesn’t hear George charging at him until it’s too late—until George has yelled, “Adam Fane, the merman!” as he shoves him into the pond.

Submerged beneath the brown water, for one horrific moment, he imagines all those fish George caught and threw back swarming around him, changed from trout into piranha. He thrashes for the surface. As he does, the water clears and expands. The temperature drops from cool to icy, and there is no sign of a surface anywhere.

Then a force seizes him, an undertow like two arms that snatch him through the water at a fantastic speed, taking him up and down and sideways, twisting him through nauseating corkscrews and dizzying feats of acrobatics. He shrieks his last reserve of air in a gargle.

Somehow he’s still conscious in this new universe. There’s someone with him, a distant figure. Closing in, Fane sees a naked man, his arms and legs flailing. He’s beautiful, as handsome as George except for a deformed foot. The force that’s captured Fane now stops, holds him in front of the man. They float staring into each other’s eyes.

The man cries out in gargling pleas—

“Who are you? Why do you show me these horrors?”

A splash from overhead disturbs the water, and twin dark figures kick toward them. Arms wrap around the man’s torso and tug him up. Other arms wrap around Fane. In the next instant he breaks the surface. The man is gone. The water’s brown again.

The pond. This is the pond.

He sputters, coughing and hacking water as George pulls him to the shore. He drapes Fane there and lies beside him panting.

“You’re not even good for a joke anymore. I shove you into the pond and you’re supposed to get up and be mad at me. Instead you just let yourself sink. Do you want to die or something?”

Fane continues gulping air as he struggles to understand what just happened to him. Who was that man? He sits up and stares at the water. Where had he just been? It couldn’t have been the pond. He touches his head. The image of the man fades against his will. Already he seems like a vague hallucination.

George clears his throat and spits. Fane turns to him.

“Your parents didn’t go to Europe?”

“They sure did.”

“And they let you stay here by yourself?”

George shrugs. “It’s just two weeks.”

“I can’t imagine having that much freedom. My parents would never—”

“Well, your parents aren’t mine.”

“What if something happened to you while they’re gone?”

“What could happen, Fane?”

He tries to think and can’t think of a single danger. There must be hundreds. But George is invincible.

“You could have called me if you wanted some company,” Fane says.

George laughs. “Must be nice to have a car and license. You can just invite yourself to any place you want.”

“I’ll leave right now.”

“Why are you even here?”

“I just had to see you.”

“Congratulations.”

Fane draws his left leg up to his chest. His right leg won’t bend at all. Putting his forehead against his left knee, he tries to detect any possible sign of forgiveness from George. It doesn’t come.

“You hate me, don’t you?”

He’s crying before he even finishes the question. George moves away from him as if the tears might be scalding. Fane’s body shakes. All his fantasies of reconciliation go up in flames.

“Adam—”

“I can’t stand it that you hate me.”

“Adam, I do hate you. Sometimes. Not all the time.”

“Because of what happened in New York?”

“Don’t talk about it. Don’t ever bring that up.”

Fane sniffles. “If I don’t, will we be friends again?”

“I don’t know. You shouldn’t have come here. If we could have put the whole summer between us, maybe it’d be back to normal in the fall.”

“But you wouldn’t want to room with me next year.”

George blanches. “Not a chance, Fane. Don’t want to walk in every night and see you hugging my underwear to your chest.”

George gets to his feet and Fane looks up at him through a new glaze of tears. Despite all that’s been said, he can’t help admiring how George’s wet t-shirt and shorts cling to his body, revealing contoured muscles.

George must notice, because he looks down at himself and shakes his head. “You make things so hard, Adam. That’s the worst part of all this. There’s a world full of girls out there, and I already know that none of them will ever look at me the way you do. Maybe none of them will even feel for me like you do. I don’t understand it, but I did love you as a friend. Loved you enough to wish...to wish I could feel the same.”

“In the hotel, you did.”

George grimaces. “I don’t know why I did that.”

“You’re the world to me, George. Even that’s not big enough to say how I feel. You’re my universe.”

He sees so much in George’s face. Regret, confusion, anger—surrender.

George pulls his shirt off and tosses it to the side. He just stands there and Fane stretches a hand toward him. It’s not like it was in New York, when he reached out and grabbed. This time his hand comes slow like a supplicant’s, like a beggar’s. All of George’s being is Fane’s alms. His fingertips press against the tautness of George’s skin and the firm underlying muscle. George’s stomach constricts and he flinches, but there’s a slight smile on his face. Fane has tickled him.

George kicks off his shoes. Fane opens his eyes very wide. Now the socks. Now the shorts. Can this be happening?

There’s only a few seconds of visible, complete nakedness before George becomes a blur diving into the pond. Fane stands up faster than he ever has before, too excited to countenance any pain in his leg or anywhere else. As George’s head breaks the surface, Fane’s never felt so jealous of water.

“Coming in—mate?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Why not? You’re already soaked, right?”

He looks down at his wet clothes. Then he smiles and starts toward the edge.

“Are you going to jump in wearing your clothes?”

Fane stops again. “Like you said, they’re already wet.”

“No, Adam. It doesn’t work that way. In this pond, you skinnydip.”

“I can’t.”

George offers him a faint smile. It’s maddening and makes his shirt feel like a straitjacket. Fane tears it off and then drops his pants. And then—he can hardly believe it—his underwear.

He jumps into the water. When he comes up, he says, “I’ll do anything you ask.”

George laughs and begins swimming powerfully toward the little dock at the end of the pond. “Enjoy the swim, Fane.”

Stunned, Fane begins kicking, pleading for George to wait. George hoists himself onto the deck and walks over to his clothes, pulling his shirt on. Fane swims harder but the water conspires against him. It’s like the pond doesn’t want to release him.

George is fully dressed by the time Fane gets to shore and walks to his clothes knob-kneed with his arms crossing over his body. George stands there smiling and watching.

“Feel better, Adam?”

“No. You’re the cruelest person in the world. Even Thompson and Dooley wouldn’t have done that to me.”

“It was a joke, Fane. I had to get even with you.”

“For what?”

“Everything.”

He lunges at George. For perhaps the first time in their friendship, George seems truly caught off guard physically. Fane doesn’t knock George to the ground. He doesn’t tackle him. He grabs George’s shoulders and kisses him on the lips. Wild, careering thoughts about the end of the world go through his mind. His hands now sweep over George’s back as if searching for a magic button on his body that, if pressed, will make George love him. He knows it does not exist and he sees his future in grim, realistic detail. Nothing so dramatic as the end of the world. Just him driving back home and falling into a lonely summer and then a lonelier fall, his bleak days accruing into the isolated years of an old man who wishes he died in his youth.

He breaks the kiss and steps back. George touches his lips, and his eyes brim with tears.

“I know our friendship is over,” Fane says. “It was over before it started.”

He starts back to the house and the driveway. George grabs his arm.

“I looked in your car before I came down. I saw the suitcase. Are you running away?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s in there?”

“Things that remind me of you. The poetry anthology. Do you remember the rock you gave me?”

George nods slowly, as if he’d rather not recall.

“That’s in there, too.”

“No clothes?”

Fane shrugs. “I’m sure there’s a shirt or two.”

“Part of me wouldn’t mind joining you—if you were running away.”

Fane stares. Is George serious? It hardly matters. Fane knows he’s not running away. He’ll drive home. But maybe they can run away in a sense. Briefly. To a special place.

“Take me to the cave again.”

“What, right now?”

“Why not?”

“We’re wet.”

“We’ll dry on the way.”

“I’m busy, Adam.”

“Busy doing what?”

“Getting ready—for company.”

“What company?”

George steps back as Fane leans into him. “It’s none of your business, is it?”

Now he heads for the house. Fane limps along beside him. “Is it someone from Fowler?”

“That’s right.”

“Who?”

“Guess away.”

“Don’t make me do that. Just tell me!”

They reach the driveway. George claps him briskly on the shoulder. “Goodbye—again—Adam.”

“Is it Dooley? You hate Dooley.”

“Why? Because you hate him?”

So that’s why George didn’t stop them. He was always friends with Dooley. That’s why he just sat there and watched while they—

“Just tell me it’s not Dooley!”

“Adam, please, please go.”

“Not until you tell me!”

He falls to his knees and waits.

Luke began talking during it.

“I had a dream, which was not all a dream.”

Gordon’s hand snapped back from his son’s waist and he retreated, almost tripping in the dark room. The jolt made him blink and look around, asking himself how he got here, telling himself he didn’t know where here was.

That was a lie.

Of course he knew.

Luke was awake, the realization of Gordon’s worst fear. There’d been a dim certainty in Gordon’s mind that Luke was always awake during it, but his son never opened his eyes and never spoke—an unspoken agreement between them, the boy’s introduction to the art of negotiating for his own innocence.

“The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars”

Gordon strained over his own pulse to hear and understand Luke’s words, which had devolved into a whispered chant. As he realized Luke wasn’t awake, his shoulder muscles unclenched and the squeezing pain in his neck relented. He ran his fingers through his hair. That was close, he thought. That’s it. I’m done. Whatever it takes, I’m never doing this again. It’s like an addiction or something and I’m going to fight it.

“And men forgot their passions in the dread of this their desolation”

“Gordon?”

Startled, he spun toward the door. He’d closed it to the narrowest crack without shutting it, so he wouldn’t have to mess with the knob or deal with the click of the jamb, which always seemed an explosive sound in the late night quiet of the house. He could not believe Amber was standing there, a thin dark figure framed by a faint yellow glow from the nightlight in the hallway. It was after one in the morning and he’d checked in on her before heading upstairs. She continued to sleep on the couch in the living room, her favorite place these last few months, her body making less and less of an indentation in the deep, yielding cushions. Had she faked being asleep? He was certain he hadn’t made a sound as he climbed the stairs, his penis hard as he anticipated the uninterrupted moments to come.

This must be God giving me a chance, he thought. If Luke hadn’t started talking in his sleep, Amber might have caught me.

“Hey,” he said, keeping his voice low. He stepped toward her and then stopped, afraid of the slight light from the hallway. Fright had not taken all of his erection, still quite evident in his underwear, and he could not explain it if she saw.

“What’s wrong, Gordon?” She limped in with an overreliance on her cane. He saw the barest outline of her head, realized the red towel she liked to keep wrapped round it like some memory of hair had fallen off. She must have really hurried to get up the steps. To catch me, he thought.

“The palaces of crowned kings—the huts, the habitations of all things which dwell, were burnt for beacons”

She stopped, her shaded face turned to the bed. Now feeling safe, Gordon went to her.

“Luke’s talking in his sleep. I heard it and thought there might be something wrong. I thought it might be the nightmare again.”

“Be quiet, Gordon. Just let me listen.”

“And men were gathered round their blazing homes to look once more into each other’s face”

“It’s weird, Amber. I don’t know what he’s saying.”

“Shhh.”

“Quit telling me to be quiet.”

Her next words were hissed: “Just shut up.”

Gordon gritted his teeth. Sometimes Amber considered her PhD to be in everything, like she could stand here listening to Luke’s gibberish and make a hundred insightful diagnoses.

“A fearful hope was all the world contained”

They listened side-by-side. Luke’s speech was increasing its pace. The words sounded antiquated to Gordon’s ears and impossible for his son to know, but Amber seemed able to anticipate them. She even said a few fragments in tandem with Luke, causing Gordon to study her in the dark.

“What is it?”

“Poetry.”

“You’re serious?”

“I remember it—vaguely.”

“Doesn’t sound like poetry to me.”

“Because you’re such an expert on it.”

He shoved her—shoved her and lurched forward to catch her almost in the same motion, even as she cried out, her frail grip on the cane overwhelmed by her husband’s force. She slipped from his grasping hands, hit the carpeted floor, and at once Gordon was there, apologizing, snugging his large body against her diminishing one, almost spooning with her. He rocked her in his arms. Above them, from the bed, Luke continued his strange chant.

“The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect, as by flashes the fits fell upon them”

“God, I’m sorry, Amber. I’m so, so sorry. You know I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.”

“What do you have to be—”

Then he understood and grunted. She was sorry she’d married him. Sorry she’d risked so much for him. In a flash, he remembered their life together, the eager early mornings of waking beside her as her skin blushed with the dawn light, the scent of her body like spring rain, her taste like honey. In those mornings only the bedroom’s quiet was out of place and unwanted, as all he wanted was to talk to her. Their conversations had been endless; sex was just a different form and forum for talking, their bodies bursting into Braille for the sweep of each other’s fingers. Laying like they were now, unable to even see each other, the room’s only sound a third voice fashioned from the two of them, Gordon wondered if he’d ever find such Braille on Amber again, the only communication left to him in the dark.

“And looked up with mad disquietude on the dull sky, the pall of a past world”

Luke’s voice became harsher, the tone accusatory. He went on for a few more minutes. Gordon understood the images but not the sense of the words. The tension in Amber’s body told him she understood both.

“Darkness had no need of aid from them—She was the Universe.”

Luke stopped speaking. It took Gordon a moment to realize this. He heard and felt Amber sobbing. Had the poem upset her? In all the years he’d known her, Gordon could not recall Amber being so moved. It had always fascinated him. She loved poetry, she was excited about it, but her attitude was not at all like his father’s. Dad had read poetry as if he sought to hurt himself. Amber treated it like a Sudoku puzzle, a fascinating game pregnant with cultural and political codes. The idea of her shedding a tear even over a horrific poem seemed impossible—except when the words were coming from her son’s mouth.

Luke stirred. “Dad? Mom?” He sounded lost.

Gordon rose first and helped Amber to stand. Luke gasped like he was having a heart attack. “It’s okay, Luke,” he said, imagining how much two dark forms suddenly rising up must have terrified his son.

“Why were you on the floor?”

“We tripped,” Amber said. “We heard you talking and came in to check on you. We didn’t want to turn on the light.”

“I was talking?”

“Yeah, buddy, you were.”

“I was having a bad dream. A man was writing.”

Amber moved closer, finding the bed with her cane. She settled down on the edge of the mattress. “What was he writing, Luke?”

“What I told him to. What I saw.”

Luke began to sob. This spurred Gordon into action, but as soon as he got close, Luke shoved him away and cradled close to his mother. Gordon stood very still, wondering if Amber had noticed.

“Gordon, why don’t you leave us alone for a bit? I know you’re tired.”

“You’re the one who’s—” He sighed. “Okay. Goodnight, Luke. I love you.”

He lingered long enough to make sure his son did not intend to respond. Then he slipped out of the room, remembering how cold he’d been to his own father in the times after Mom died, wanting to hurt with silence and not knowing what compelled him, except to say the loathing he felt was like some instinct—the way prey identify predators. Gordon started toward his bedroom and then pivoted to the stairs, placing his heels on the very edge of the top step. He descended this way, trying to coax fate. Please let me fall, he thought. Please let me slip and break my spine so my arms never work again.

But he was too athletic. He balanced by nature.

He found himself in the downstairs bathroom with the lights on, staring at his mother’s copper soaking tub. As he bent over to look into it, a few tears beaded in the basin.

Luke’s been awake every time. He just endures it, Gordon thought.

He got down on his knees and turned on the cold water. He thrust his head under the spigot and shivered.

He’d tried so hard to resist. He really had. He had to beat this sickness.

He’d gone to bed at ten, feeling confident in his mastery over the compulsion. It’d been two weeks since he last surrendered to it. Then he woke up a little after midnight. He woke from a dream that stubbornly defied recollection but lingered bodily in the sensation of being stroked by invisible fingers. He bit back the urge to shriek at this thing that had stalked him for so long, that came and went without reason, first making him horrified of being touched, and now demanding he touch his son. The urge was most overwhelming when it felt like a voice calling from within his own flesh and from within Luke, as if some creature with the same voice had been split in half and demanded unity.

Gordon pulled his head away from the icy water and gasped. He’d been holding his breath. Shutting off the water, he got up and groped for a towel as frigid streams streaked his torso. All he found was a washcloth which he rubbed against his chest and hair before propping himself along the counter on his elbows, shoulders sagging.

He looked at the ceiling. What was happening upstairs? Amber suspected something. She had to, and getting him out of Luke’s room seemed the best way to get Luke to talk. When would the hammer fall? Was it descending even now? He cringed and whimpered. He’d been in jail once. In some ways he thought he’d never left it. More often these days he wished he hadn’t.

Minutes passed with him just standing and waiting. Gordon heard no movement at all in the house. At last he could take it no more. To his surprise, he found Amber at the kitchen table, her face bathed in the blue glow from her laptop—the only light in the room.

“You’ll hurt your eyes reading like that.”

She looked up, expressionless for a moment. Then she started to giggle. It was horrible to hear. He swallowed. Her attention returned to the screen.

“Did Luke...say anything?”

“He doesn’t remember much.”

“Well, what does he remember? Sorry, Amber—I’m just worried.”

“Oh, I know you’re worried, Gordon.”

His heart was beating very fast. Her tone sounded so casual in the dark. Was she taunting him?

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for the poem Luke was saying in his sleep.”

“Did you find it?”

“Just now.”

He stepped closer. “What is it?”

“It’s called ‘Darkness.’”

He repeated the title to himself. “Who wrote it?”

“Lord Byron.”

“I’ve heard the name before.”

“Of course you have,” she said. “In his time, he was the most famous poet that ever lived.”

“No, I mean I think you mentioned him before. I don’t remember. Back in class, maybe.”

She shrugged. “I never cared for Byron. There’s not much complexity in his work as far as I’m concerned.”

For a moment, Gordon thought the conversation was going to turn entirely to literature, as their talk often did in earlier times. He would have welcomed that.

Instead she said, “The question is, why is Luke reciting this poem in his sleep?”

“Maybe he read it.”

“I’m quite certain he’s read it, Gordon.”

“I mean he’s read it a lot. He’s like Dad. They’d both read the same poem so many times they can quote it. Sometimes I look at Luke and think this is what would happen if you and my father had a child together.”

“Gross.”

“My dad’s not gross.”

Amber closed her computer, leaving them in darkness. “I’m going back to the sofa.”

“Do you need any help?”

“No. I can fall onto the cushions without any assistance from you.”

Gordon went to her anyway, and she did not resist. The kitchen chairs had no armrests and always gave her the most trouble.

“I bet the poem’s in one of the anthologies Luke’s always carrying around.”

“He could have read it anywhere. It doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe it does,” he said as they entered the living room. “He must have read it a bunch of times if he can say the whole thing in his sleep.”

“I guess.”

“Well, damnit, doesn’t that bother you? I don’t like the idea of him reading something so—awful.”

She began her method of nestling herself into the deep sofa, letting the cane fall to the floor, while she put both her hands on the center cushion and tumbled over, leading with her left shoulder. Usually, this settled her onto her back without disturbing the cushions, though sometimes her shifting weight knocked them out of place. When that happened, Gordon would lift her body a little and readjust them. Tonight Amber gave no indication she needed his help.

Now on her back, she said, “Don’t worry about it. Kids Luke’s age are always attracted to Dystopian literature. Their world is constantly going to hell, so they like to read books that reflect that opinion. Byron’s poem fits a need.”

“You’re right,” Gordon said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I didn’t say that.” She spoke through a prolonged yawn.

She was asleep almost at once, as if the enveloping cushions had siphoned off the last of her dwindling energy. Now she seemed very ill to him. She was very ill. Bursts of anger fueled stretches of vitality, but how much longer could that pattern continue? Gordon lingered a moment, dead on his feet but not ready to surrender to it. Was she really asleep? He’d been tricked once tonight into thinking she wouldn’t wake up.

He left her, but went to the kitchen rather than climbing the stairs to their bedroom. Leaving the light off, he groped for her laptop and raised the cover, blinking as light sprang out like a jack-in-the-box, blinding him. He squinted until his eyes adjusted. The website she’d been on showed a long column of poetry. He recognized the first line, which was seared into his consciousness when Luke suddenly started talking. Darkness. Gordon sat down and read. A strange familiarity swept through him, a nauseating déjà vu. He thought the words must seem familiar because he’d just heard them all from Luke. But the sensation was different and far more jarring. The images the words conveyed rather than the words themselves were what seemed so eerie, so real—so experienced. But how could that be? Maybe a movie had been made from the poem. Pictures ran through his head like scenes from a film. But it was a film he starred in. He and Amber, John-Mark—

Gordon got up, doubling over from a hot stabbing pain in his guts, as if a fire alarm had gone off inside him. Wincing, he started to close the computer only to realize her browser had another tab showing the words Child & Adolescent Counseling. Gordon froze, his pain forgotten. He clicked on the tab. Amber had been researching child psychiatrists. She obviously meant to take Luke to one behind Gordon’s back. He straightened and looked toward the living room. Lying bitch. She’d acted like the poem meant nothing. She knew better. She suspected more than she would ever let on.

God only knew what the specialist would discover.

It’s for the best, he thought. I deserve to get caught. Take him, Amber. It can’t happen soon enough.

But you’re still a lying bitch.

The next morning, after only three hours of sleep, Gordon practically dragged himself back to the kitchen. Luke had gotten up on his own and sat eating cereal. Amber, regardless of her condition, usually made a point to be awake before Luke went to school. The last several months had seen a series of small surrenders in her willpower, from a promise to be awake and energetic before Luke himself got up, to a promise to at least make him breakfast, to a promise to at least be awake when he walked out the door to catch the bus. Gordon looked in on her, checking for the usual shallow rise and fall of her chest. She would hate him for not waking her.

He entered the kitchen. Luke turned his head toward him and his chewing visibly slowed. They looked at each other. Gordon could not hold his son’s gaze. He hurried past and poured cereal for himself. When he looked up, he found Luke was still staring at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Gordon held tight to the bowl, which suddenly felt like a squirming wet fish. “What—what are you sorry for, champ?”

The boy’s eyes shifted to the left, as if reading some internal script. “For waking you up last night. I know you’d rather sleep.”

“Luke, buddy, don’t apologize for that. Don’t apologize for anything.”

He took the bowl of dry cereal and sat down at the table across from his son. Hunched forward, he picked at a few flakes and put them into his mouth. Softening in the spit on his tongue, they had an ashy taste.

“I’m sorry,” Luke said.

“I said you don’t—”

He stopped, seeing something like a watery grave in the wide, dark eyes of his son. The lower lids brimmed with tears, perched precariously there like coffee sloshing about the rim of a mug filled too high. But they did not spill over the side.

“You want to tell me more about that dream you had? About the man writing?”

“No,” Luke said.

“It doesn’t sound like such a horrible dream.”

The boy looked down at his bowl. He stirred his cereal twice with the spoon before letting both hands fall into his lap. A sob hitched his chest and Gordon got up and knelt beside him.

“I want to see Grandpa. I haven’t seen Grandpa in over a month.”

“Sure,” Gordon said.

“I want to read to him.”

“I think he’d like that. You know, Dr. Reynolds says Grandpa’s making a lot of improvement.”

Gordon felt pressure on his right wrist. He saw Luke gripping it. “I need to see Grandpa right now.”

“You have to go to school, and I have to go to work.”

“No!”

The shout was so loud, Gordon put his hand over Luke’s mouth by reflex. “Your mom’s trying to sleep. Grandpa will wait.”

Luke stared at him, his gaze intense as Gordon took back his hand. “Dad,” he said, “if you take me to school, I’ll run away. I’ll run all the way to where Grandpa is.”

His son’s tone of voice was so matter-of-fact Gordon believed it. He rubbed his eyes. After last night, after so many other nights, he owed Luke. What harm could it do to miss one day of school? Dad wouldn’t be around forever, after all.

Better to keep Luke close anyway.

“Okay.”

Luke got up. “I’ll get my book.”

Gordon almost laughed. “Now wait a minute—we’re not leaving right this very second. Give it a few hours.”

“You swear?”

“I do.”

Amber also was too tired to raise an objection when she woke an hour later. Luke gave her a big hug with his left arm. He had a poetry anthology tucked under the right. Gordon had never seen it before.

“Can I see that, Luke?”

Luke surrendered the book with some reluctance. Gordon studied the cover. The title was simply The Romantics: An Anthology. It was stamped with the local public library’s seal. He opened it and flipped through the table of contents. It didn’t take long to confirm what he suspected. Smiling, Gordon returned the book.

“Grandpa is going to be really surprised when we show up in his room.”

“Let’s go,” said Luke.

Thunder wakes Byron from a light slumber and he sits up calling for Loukas. The fifteen-year-old boy stands across the room, splashing his chest and face with water from a marble basin. He turns toward Byron but otherwise he does not move except to look up as more thunder shakes the ceiling. Byron does not know who owns the house here in Missolonghi—some Greek aristocrat agitating for independence and willing to dare the wrath of the Ottomans. Just four hours ago militia marched up and down the streets to boisterous cheers, the revolutionaries dressed smartly in uniforms financed by Byron and armed with weapons likewise purchased with his coin. Off shore, a naval fleet of seven ships refitted at Byron’s expense fired celebratory cannons. Enrapt, it seemed to Byron the people thought they were already free. They looked like cave dwellers just discovering the sunshine. Then he saw young Loukas amid the marchers and they traded smiles. Byron thought: I am happy. Then in an instant, the sun went out and darkness fell, and the screaming people scrambled for cover. Someone lit a torch. Or so it seemed to Byron for a moment. In reality, the first of many encroaching storm clouds had covered the sun, followed by a peel of thunder almost drowned out by the naval volleys. The throngs in the street had not dispersed at all.

Even now the vision from Lake Leman persists in his head. He thought he had escaped it by coming to Greece.

“Loukas, it is only thunder. Come here.” He pats half the mattress still dimpled from the boy’s weight.

Loukas does not know English. He curses, cries out, and weeps in Greek. Byron does not know Greek. As he found for a time with Teresa in Italy, foreign tongues make for better lovers, as guesswork lends all conversations an amiable ludicrousness. The fighting comes later, when comprehension allows for the translation of anger. Perhaps, he considers, if Claire had spoken only Chinese he might not have found her advances back in the summer of 1816 to be so...tedious.

Loukas trembles. The dark windows fill with bursts of white lightening and send him crouching in a corner.

Byron shakes his head at this. He knows the courage and passion of the boy when it comes to his country. This young man would charge into a redoubt of Turks with nothing but a sword in hand. Yet a storm makes him quake? Under other circumstances this pitiful sight might prove amusing, even seductive.

But not tonight.

“I need light, Loukas. I need the light of Greece. I need you to be my sun and burn forever. But you cannot burn forever, can you?”

The question seems to linger in the air like a physical thing departing Byron’s lips. Since the night of prophecy eight years ago, he sometimes finds himself in quiet moments looking up at the sun and asking that very question:

You cannot burn forever, can you?

Swinging his legs off the bed, careful to make sure his right foot goes straight from the concealment of sheets to the security of its special boot, Byron grimaces. “Loukas, for the love of God, at least look at me.”

Responding to his name, the adolescent lifts his trembling head to meet Byron’s gaze and mutters something that sounds hostile. Byron flinches as he stares. Maybe it is the low light in the room, or because dread has paled the boy’s olive complexion against his frame of black hair: but suddenly Loukas looks like Shelley when they first met by the waters of Lake Leman.

It rained then too.

Another flash of lightning illuminates the room. The lightning and the boy’s face combine to stir a memory of one of Shiloh’s better poems.

“What is this world’s delight?” he begins, standing. The floorboards creak. “Lightning, that mocks the night, brief even as bright.”

He hobbles toward Loukas. Tempting boy. But is Loukas a temptation? Can that be the right word now they have consummated their relationship? Once a temptation has been had, is its continued presence still temptation—or indulgence?

He reaches the boy and gently puts his fingers into his dark, thick tangles, wet now with sweat and water. Virtue, how frail it is! Friendship, how rare! Love, how it sells poor bliss for proud despair!

“Oh Shiloh. Shiloh, Shiloh,” he says, still feeling Loukas’ hair. “Shiloh, did you write those words to mock me? How many times must I confess the same thing to your ghost? How many times must I say you were right and I was wrong? And how many times after those confessions will I wake up from a nightmare that sends me to the window to see if the sun exists? How shall I make myself believe you were right? Shall I step inside a church and pray? Can a man pray a lie?”

Loukas flinches away, almost tearing his hair. He says something else in Greek. Byron translates it through the separate actions of his body: You are insane and I fear you. But as Byron turns away to hobble back to the window and watch the storm, he is almost tripped by the boy lunging for his feet. Loukas on his knees clutches Byron’s legs and looks up in shivering submission.

“Oh God, Loukas, why have I come to Greece? You and your people seem to think me a general. Did I come here to play a soldier? Perhaps I came here to worship. I would worship you among the other gods collecting dust in the ruined temples on the hillside. You will forgive me for not being a monotheist. In my ripe old age of thirty-six, I find polytheism and pantheons afford more comfort. Surely it is better not to put the Eggs of Faith in one basket, even one as fine as yours.”

Loukas touches his forehead to Byron’s right kneecap. This supplication, this reliance spurs arousal. He stiffens and feels the boy’s hair again.

“Help me, Loukas. Help me find sunlight. For you the sun is easy—it will rise in a few hours. It always does for youth. But I won’t see it or feel its light on my face when it does. God, may you never grow so old that the shadows in your life have names. Shelley, Allegra. At least my little Ada lives. I think you would like her, Loukas. Perhaps if she were a few years older, you might even... I’ve got a lock of her hair, you know. It is golden like the sun, not dark like yours and mine. Sleeping together, your heads would look like night and day. You—”

He feels his face flushing and calls for Fletcher. But his faithful servant is in another house two miles away, sent there by Byron himself to leave him alone with Loukas. The storm prevents his return. Byron shakes his head, wondering why he is even thinking about Fletcher. It must be because he is growing older. His younger self would still have Loukas in bed, not sitting around pondering his manservant. Is he so tired after one joust? Could he actually be jealous of his own daughter, imagining her to be a more satisfactory partner for the boy? Now Loukas taps Byron’s calf, his gaze on the ceiling. Byron looks up as the boy scrambles away. It is as if he thinks the ceiling will collapse. A moment later, water begins to drip, though Byron detects no crack.

“It is nothing,” Byron says, laughing, before discovering the boy shivering in the corner, knees drawn up to his chest. This is when he realizes Loukas is too young to be a soldier—or a lover.

Why am I here? Byron asks himself. Why does Loukas stay? What am I to him, and what do I want to be?

The thunder increases. Byron imagines the entire Mediterranean roiling. Sharp lightning flashes reveal the world outside and within. Loukas grinds his forehead against his arms. This trembling stirs Byron to even greater sympathy and shame; watching Loukas is so very much like seeing a young animal peering out from a burrow flooding from rainwater. In these desperate times, with fear and treachery everywhere, the whole world seems to be gazing skyward—the young sailor’s mother from the door of her house, the sailor-son from the deck of his ship; the dissolute gambler from some stinking gutter; the poor from their ramshackles; the aristocrats from their stables; members of Parliament, members of Congress, members of tribal councils in all the untamed places of the Earth whose people starve and thirst, whose ears ache to hear prophetic words. Their eyes search the dark sky, and what does it matter if the sun refuses them and the cold embraces them? The darkness is only a chance for lesser stars to shine. If the faintest light in the heavens lends these people any speck of hope...

Byron straightens his back.

I know why I’m in Greece, he tells himself. I came here to die. But now I find I came here to live.

“Come to me, Loukas.”

The boy stays in his place.

Byron goes to him and lifts him to his feet. The act stresses his right foot, forcing a wince. He sees the boy look to its source. They have not been entirely naked with each other. Byron has never been entirely naked with anyone. He has always found some way to hide the deformity—a wrap, some waddled cloth, the convenient sheet, even wearing the boot in bed. The time is right for revealing. If he did not come here to die but live; if he did not come here for darkness but for sunlight; if he came here seeking a different vision, a different prophecy, then can he abide any further shadows? Looking down at the boot, he considers how the foot has tormented him, its preferred path on the margins of life. But what joy is to be found in the margins? It is not for him. He is a poet, not an annotator.

Sweating a little, he limps to the bed with the boy in tow and sits on the edge of the mattress. His gaze never leaving the boy’s face, Byron works off the special boot, the accommodating prison for malformed flesh and bone. After the boot drops away, Byron removes the last coverings, not unlike a soldier unwrapping gauze from a wound for his own inspection, and bending forward he grips his leg and presents the foot for viewing.

The boy’s face scrunches up a moment, threatening to convulse away. This injures Byron more than he’d dare admit. What did he expect though? Does he deserve less? But in the end Loukas does not turn. He does not cry or smile. He stares steadily at the ruined appendage as if memorizing cruelty and regret so he’ll know its visage later. His silence is a Greek silence, deep and contemplative even in a boy. Then he reaches out a tentative hand and strokes the top of the foot, his fingers going up and down the flippered length. Byron gasps. No one has ever touched the foot. It has brought him pain. He did not know the nerve endings there could possibly feel pleasure.

Suddenly, outside the window, the darkness ends, subsumed in glorious yellow. Byron cannot believe it. How can the sun—in the middle of the night—

And he begins to laugh.

“Thank you, Loukas. You have given me a new vision. I will be your prophet. I will be Greece’s prophet.”

The storm, of course, has not subsided. In an eyeblink, the outer dark returns to the window. Loukas clings to Byron’s foot as if it is a strange charm against the weather. Byron lets himself be held even when a second leak in the ceiling happens, spilling faster drops of water onto the middle of the bed. He leans back and opens his mouth. It is not until he’s swallowed deeply that he realizes the water’s taste is awful, as if there might be something very wrong with it.

Not until you tell me.

Fane hears his own words in another man’s voice and becomes dizzy. He closes his eyes and rubs them and when they open again he’s old and on a reclining bed. His back aches and his throat is terribly dry. He senses he’s been talking a long time.

The man in the adjacent hair looks meditative and thoughtful with his attention on the tablet computer in his hands. Fane knows the man but has trouble placing his name until he notices the badge on his shirt. Dr. Gary Reynolds. Below that are the words Geriatric Psychiatrist.

“Adam?”

“Yes.”

“You’re having a very good memory day. Do you think you can continue?”

Fane studies Dr. Reynolds. He’s a younger man, perhaps fifty with hair just a bit more salt than pepper. That device of his is recording everything Fane says. I remember that, he thinks. He remembers much more. His memory is very clear now, frighteningly so.

“I don’t want to go on.”

“Not even a little more? We’ve been trying to piece it together for so long now. We’d all like to know who George is. I think I’m understanding a bit now.”

“Understanding my past isn’t any of your business.”

Dr. Reynolds accepts the rebuke without any sign of malice. “What about Gordon? He just wants to understand his father. That’s all any son wants. If you’re worried about what he might think, I’m pretty confident when I say—”

“Go away.”

Dr. Reynolds sighs a little but surprises Fane by getting up. “Perhaps another time.”

“No. You’re done. As am I.”

“We’ll see, Adam.”

“Doctor Fane.”

“What?”

“Doctor. I’m one too.”

Dr. Reynolds smiles. “I can’t believe how lucid you are. This is really quite remarkable and exciting.”

“Because of some drug?”

“That’s right. We’ve been trying a new drug, in combination with—”

“Stop it. Stop the drug treatment.”

The smile fades. “Adam—Dr. Fane—why would you want that? You were practically in a catatonic state before we began working with you. You didn’t even know when your son was in the room.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t often.”

“But it was! Do you know his name, Dr. Fane?”

“It’s Gordon.”

“And the name of your grandson?”

The answer is almost instantaneous. “Luke.”

“He’s a fine boy. He reads to you. You enjoy those readings, Dr. Fane. Quit the therapy now and you’ll lose all of that. Fast.”

“If it means losing certain memories, I’ll accept it.”

“I’m sure that no matter what happened between you and George it couldn’t be worth sacrificing cognition—”

“It’s my decision to make,” Fane says.

“We’ll talk about it later. I’ll leave you alone now.”

Fane’s gaze follows the doctor until he shuts the door behind him. His eyes water as he concentrates on the room’s stillness. Dr. Reynolds is right: his memory is very good just now, not confused in the least. He looks to see if the tablet was left on the table, but the doctor took it with him. If he talks now, there’ll be no electronic Boswell recording his words. Might the doctor be lingering on the other side of the door? As Fane makes his decision, he hopes Reynolds has stayed to eavesdrop. The poor man must consider Fane a jigsaw puzzle with a crucial few pieces missing.

Looking at the door, he says, “I told George I intended to go into the cave and die. I opened the car and took out that little, pointless suitcase and started for the woods. George yelled at me. He had a higher pitch to his yells just as his laughter was actually quite a bit higher pitched than his speaking voice. But I kept going. I told myself I was calling George’s bluff. I had no clue where I was going. The only time I went to the cave, we started on a trailhead that lasted about half a mile. After that, George guided us by compass.”

He pauses, wondering again about Dr. Reynolds. Is his Thisbe there to hang upon his words?

“George relented and caught up to me on the trailhead. He was really a good-hearted boy, though certainly not the hero I worshipped according to my nature. Needless to say, I was already exhausted when he found me. My leg hurt very badly, and I was chafing from the wet clothes. I even had a feverish chill. I remember that very well, plus the sensation that I was going to throw up at any moment. But when George came to me yet again, I lost every feeling except the desire to be with him. I begged him to come, said I would never bother him again if he made this one indulgence. He agreed. Partly, I think he simply couldn’t go back to the house and do anything while the possibility of me being lost in the woods was on his mind. But it was more than worry that convinced him to come along. ‘Why do you want to go there?’ he said, and I swear the immediate answer in my head was, To live.

“The answer I actually gave was generic. ‘I just do.’ George was not complicated in his thinking. ‘Just because’ was a very respectable philosophy to him. So he went with me, and I have no memory of the trip. It is not a fault of age: I have never had a memory of it, and I believe that during our journey we somehow mutually ceased to exist. We were not two boys who’d formed a friendship at a school we both hated. We were not two boys who’d been in the cave before. We were not two boys who experienced each other in New York. But we were passing through time, because when we reached the cave my wet clothes were completely dry—as were my lips.

“We reached the familiar outcropping of rock. I still had the absurd suitcase in my hand. It had caused me nothing but immense pain in my leg. George started laughing. ‘Are you going to take that damn thing into the cave with you? Adam Fane, the big tickle.’ I put it down and opened it up, taking out the one thing in the case that might matter. ‘I’m not going to sit around listening to you read poetry,’ he said. Neither of us had a flashlight anyway. I told him I was going to take the anthology with me and leave it there. I said I was done with poetry. These statements were supposed to impress him. They only made George laugh.”

Fane rubs his chin, his attention still on the door. He imagines Dr. Reynolds salivating on the other side, one ear pressed into the wood.

“We made the ascent to the opening and then climbed down. George said it would be the last time he’d come to the cave. He was certain next year he’d be too large to squeeze through. He probably would have been right about that. I had a much slighter frame and even I had some trouble with the passage. But then we stood side by side in the darkness. Neither of us had a flashlight, but we knew where the string was. We knew we could let it guide us safely to that chamber. I found the string and began to move.

“‘You’re out of your mind, Fane!’ Yet still he followed. His friendship was perfect, even when he despised me. Did he love me? Was he aroused in the darkness? I had to know, and turning to where he had to be, I groped for him. His body was very solid, very firm, and I moved my hand up it, dropping the anthology to the floor. I touched him for a minute before I realized I was not touching him at all. I was feeling up part of the rock face, and George snickered at me.

“Suddenly his face appeared, terrible to behold. He had a flashlight after all and he stuck it under his chin before turning it on. I don’t know where the flashlight came from. Perhaps it was already in the cave, stashed there by George in case of an emergency. I screamed and lashed out by reflex. George had taught me not to make a roundhouse swing, but to jab. His lesson was more effective than I could have imagined.”

Fane swallows, staring at the door, willing it to open.

“And that’s all you’ll ever know about what happened.”

They drive twenty miles to the Memory and Aging Center where Gordon’s father had been a patient for several years. Patient, guinea pig—at some point the lines of experimental medicine blurred. Gordon could still recall the day his father had his first collapse. He’d even see his father in the Westervelt quad, limping along with his cane. Was Dad trying to find me? The possibility had occurred to him before, in the nights he sat in jail with his memories playing out before him. Hadn’t there been just a moment when he saw his father calling to him? The attitude seemed impossible to him now, but back then, almost twenty years ago, he feared being associated with his dad. He’d even changed his last name to make sure no one knew they were father and son. If he had really seen Dad calling to him that day, he would have been cold to him. He would have pretended the great Professor Fane did not exist.

He parked crookedly in the Center’s lot, running the front tires over the concrete bumpers. The car lurched and something in the body cracked. Gordon gripped the wheel tight and looked about in confusion. Shaking his head, he put the car into reverse. Before he could hit the gas, however, Luke unfastened his seat belt and opened the door.

“What the—”

Luke ran off without shutting the door, leaving Gordon to stare dumbly at his son’s fleeing figure.

“What the fuck’s wrong with him?”

Gordon finished parking and got out, closing both doors. He was not quick to follow his son inside, instead loitering around the car like a man finishing a cigarette. Last night’s anxieties were distant, a curious feeling he chalked up to knowing Luke’s location and company. Let the boy read poetry to his Grandpa. No harm could come from it.

To anyone.

He went inside. The Center had a comfortable lobby anchored by a single receptionist station. The woman working it, Tanya, all of twenty-three, had made a pass at Gordon five months ago. She was quite chubby and reminded him of a girl he’d slept with by mistake. It was a long time ago. Still, Tanya’s play for his attention reminded him he could still be seen as desirable.

That, too, had seemed a long time ago.

“Hey, Gordon,” she said, no trace of awkwardness in her tone. “I buzzed Luke through. He’s really growing fast.”

“Yes, he is.” With an unintended sigh, Gordon signed both their names into the visitor’s registry.

“Are you doing okay?”

“I am. Thanks for asking, Tanya—especially today.”

God, am I about to break down in front of her?

Her look of concern was evident, but she chose not to engage further and pressed the button to let Gordon proceed. He stepped into the facility’s main hallway, and here the Center lost the lobby’s mask of comfort.

He was in a hospital and a research facility.

His father’s room was on the fourth floor—the top floor—and Gordon headed for the elevators. Dr. Reynolds intercepted him before he reached them.

“Gordon,” he said, sounding very excited.

“Hey, Gary. I was on my way up to see Dad. Luke’s already there.”

“I know. That’s why I hurried down to meet you. We have to talk.”

“Could it wait? I want to make sure Luke’s getting along okay.”

Dr. Reynolds looked disappointed, but nodded. “Let’s go up together.”

In the elevator, Gordon said, “I’m sorry I haven’t been around as much. I hope you understand.”

“It’s been fine. In a way, it’s been the best thing that could have happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“We used to think the best memory triggers were friends and family. With some people, they are. But the human brain is a perplexing thing. Consciousness is even more complex. Most medical treatments are subjective to an extent, requiring small tweaks for each patient. But your father’s case is one of extraordinary subjectivity. Your presence might actually have proven to be a hindrance.”

“Not very comforting.”

“I suppose not. But he’s not a very comforting man. You of all people might realize that.”

“He wasn’t that bad a father,” Gordon said.

“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I meant only in his formidability. There’s a strong will there, and a curious one too. If I thought it were even possible for him to do so, I’d say some part of him actually embraces mindlessness and resists our efforts.”

Gordon stared at him. “My father was damn proud of his mind.”

“Of his intellectual abilities. But the mind is more than that. There’s a lot more in there. Lots of bad memories. Dark things.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said. “I know.”

They exited the elevator and walked down a shorter hall, past several closed doors. The last one opened to his father’s room. Both men stopped and listened. There seemed to be a play being staged inside. Gordon heard Luke almost shouting the lines from “Darkness.” His father was speaking them too, his gruff, familiar voice stronger than it’d been in years. At first, he spoke the words behind Luke, following his lead, so that each line had an echo. His father’s reading sped up, and at “All earth was but one thought—and that was death,” their voices merged and synched, and Gordon stumbled back as if punched in the gut. Someone—someone else—was talking too. A third voice joined his father and son’s chanting. He heard it plainly from the other side of the door and looked at Dr. Reynolds for confirmation. But Dr. Reynolds had turned his attention to Gordon and seemed both surprised and alarmed, holding Gordon by the shoulders and looking into his eyes. Gordon ignored him, concentrating his attention on the three voices in the room. Who was it? Who could it be? Was a nurse in there with them?

All three voices ceased. The poem was done.

“Who was that?”

“What?”

“The third voice,” Gordon said. “Who was in there with them saying the poetry?”

Dr. Reynolds raised his eyebrows. “The only other voice was yours. You started reciting along with them.”

“Me?”

“Why—why don’t you come and sit down. I’ll get you some water.”

“But Luke and Dad—”

“Let me check in on them. I’m sure they’re fine. You know where my office is, right?”

Gordon nodded.

“Go have a seat. Please.”

“Take Luke out if he’s bothering Dad. Or if you think there’s something wrong.”

“I will. I’ll see you in a few minutes, Gordon.”

A few minutes became ten, then fifteen, and then half an hour. When the door opened at last, it was a nurse and not Dr. Reynolds who entered. The nurse brought him a large glass of water with ice. Gordon took a cube into his mouth and crushed it between his jaws.

“Where’s Dr. Reynolds?”

“Oh, Dr. Reynolds is fine,” the nurse said.

“Not exactly what I asked. Where is he?”

Was the nurse nervous?

“He was talking to your father and your son. They were showing him some poetry they liked, but then he got called away to another patient. He’ll be back very soon and told me you needed water. Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah. I’m going to go see Dad now.”

“Dr. Reynolds really wanted to meet you in his office. Please just wait here.”

“No, I’m—”

The nurse left without closing the door behind her. If she had, Gordon would have opened it and left. But the door being left open eased him a bit. He chewed another two pieces of ice. Condensation beaded the outside of the cup. He wondered which was dewier, the glass or his forehead?

He got out his phone. Nearing noon—no wonder he felt hungry. Frowning, he decided to check his email. If Dr. Reynolds wasn’t back by the time he finished, Gordon would go to Dad’s room and tell Luke they had to leave.

He had no Internet connection. No signal at all.

Great.

Dr. Reynolds came in, all smiles. “Really sorry about the delay, Gordon. You still feel okay?”

“Yeah. I just realized the time. I haven’t had anything to eat today, and I was up late last night.”

“Do you often have problems sleeping?”

Gordon laughed. “I’m not your patient—thank God.”

Dr. Reynolds’ cheeks flushed, but he smiled. “My wife says I can’t even have a casual conversation with anyone. I always speak like a doctor. I didn’t mean to sound clinical.”

“It’s fine. I’d like to see Dad now. Just a quick check-in, then I really need to get going.”

“Sure, sure. But before you do, it’s really important that you see this.”

He handed Gordon a tablet computer. Gordon saw his father’s case file there. Blinking, he scrolled through several screens. Too much medical jargon met his eyes.

“Can you give me the short version? What’s so important?”

“Of course—sorry, I should have taken you straight to the interesting stuff. It’s funny you should say the short version. If your dad’s file were printed, it’d be about three hundred pages long. It’s been said there’s a novel in everyone. In a way, I guess that’s what we’re trying to recover here. Unfortunately for us, the novels in our patients are closer to Ulysses than anything else—disjointed, obscure, hard to follow. Your dad’s story, while not complete, is decidedly unique.”

“I have trouble imagining that.”

“I think most kids do when it comes to their parents.”

“My dad was an English professor his entire life. Pretty much at the same school.”

“Even adult characters had childhoods, Gordon. So, of course, did your dad. His memories are strongly centered around his adolescence.”

“Okay.” Gordon looked back at the screen.

Dr. Reynolds leaned forward. “It’s not complete. There are memories your father seems determined not to give up. But I think we’ll get them in time.”

Gordon glanced up, suddenly unsettled. Nothing about Dr. Reynolds’ tone of voice was threatening, yet Gordon suddenly thought of him as an interrogator. And it was Gordon, and not his father, under the harsh light.

He pushed the tablet aside and got up. “I’m going to see Dad, get Luke, and go.”

“Wait—”

“I’m done waiting.”

He left the office and returned to his father’s room. Dr. Reynolds did not pursue him. Inside, Gordon found his father propped in bed with his grandson’s poetry anthology open in his lap.

“Where’s Luke?”

“Gordon,” his father said. “Come in.”

Gordon stepped nearer and repeated his question.

“Gone. Getting something from the vending machine.”

Gordon grunted and wearily pulled up a chair. His father’s body seemed less frail, like an echo of his improved mind.

“What are you reading?”

“A poem.”

Gordon leaned forward to see it. “‘Darkness.’ I heard you and Luke reading it together.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“Dr. Reynolds and I both heard you through the door.”

“So the door isn’t sound-proof?”

Gordon thought this a strange question. “I guess it isn’t when people are shouting. You seemed to be. You and Luke.”

He watched his father’s gaze fall back to the book.

Gordon sighed. His father didn’t even remember reading the poem with Luke, and that was forty-five minutes ago. Guess I shouldn’t expect miracles after all, he thought.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay, Dad. Luke and I have to go home, but I promise to come back a lot sooner next time.”

“You won’t be coming back.”

“What? Why would you say that? Of course I will.”

“Sit down, Gordon. Let me talk—listen to me. My mind is very clear, and I understand why.”

“The drugs have been working wonders—”

“No,” he said as a strange, almost serene smile touched his lips. Gordon had never seen his father with such an expression. “That’s not it at all. Medicine does not explain the cure because the illness was not medical in nature. That is to say it was not biological.”

Gordon raised his eyebrows and waited for an explanation.

“I’ve been like a phone receiving two signals,” his father said.

“Dad, you’re really not well. I’m sorry.”

“When a phone receives two signals, a certain amount of static is produced. Strange voices overlap one another. This is what I think has been happening to me, and for quite some time. The symptoms may resemble dementia, perhaps, but I am certain that is only an effect of the crossed signals—increasing, maddening static.”

“Okay,” Gordon said, since there was nothing to do but humor his father. “So what explains your sudden clarity?”

His father glanced down at the book again. His fingers touched the open pages. “The second caller finally hung up.”

Gordon swallowed and looked at the floor, and felt sorrier for his dad than he ever had before. Had Dr. Reynolds came through the door just now, he would have grabbed him by his coat and shook him for daring to act like his father was somehow better. So what if he could speak in coherent sentences if what he said was schizophrenic nonsense?

“Gordon,” his father continued, “I have committed a terrible crime.”

Gordon sighed again, more exasperated. “No, Dad, you didn’t. Whatever it is, it’s just in your head.”

“I broke a school rule. A grievous one. It’s what I was trying to tell you on that day. You remember it, don’t you?”

They stared at each other.

“I do.”

“I was coming to tell you that I broke Westervelt’s most important code. 75-130-b.1.”

Gordon shook his head, though he had the barest sense of hearing this string of numbers and letters before.

“It is the rule forbidding teacher-student relationships. Specifically ones of a sexual nature.”

Gordon fought hard to keep his expression from becoming an inappropriate, immature grin. The idea of his father having sex with any of his students was more bizarre than any talk of crossed connections and certain amounts of static. A sudden comic surrealism shot through him.

“Well,” he said, talking slow, “it’s okay, Dad. It was a long time ago. No reason to beat up on yourself. You’re a guy, and Mom was dead. A lot of cute girls went to Westervelt. You must have been—”

His father closed the book with a sound like a mini-explosion.

“You were the student, Gordon.”

Gordon stared at him for several seconds, not sure if he’d heard correctly. Then he knew he had.

Then he knew everything.

The feasting has begun.

Unable to move, almost numb to the many leeches now attached to his body, Byron stares at the ceiling and the little crack in the plaster that let in the rainwater a few weeks ago. How had so much water come in from such a dark little fissure?

“Loukas,” he says, shocked by the feebleness of his voice. Fletcher comes to him instead, and the look on his face informs Byron the boy will not be making an appearance.

The room appears and disappears. Sometimes it becomes another room, a strange room with people he has never seen before. When it is his own room again, however, he also finds it peopled with unknown faces. Greek militia men, Greek aristocrats, the grubby and the clean. Doctors of different sorts. Despite their variations, these medical men are alike in their suggestion.

Apply more leeches.

He wonders if there might be one doctor in existence with a different solution to Byron’s sudden illness, and concludes there was: Pollydolly. Dear, dead Polidori, whose favorite prescription was a slap to the face. How Byron wishes for his company now. Realizing he wishes so, he sinks deeper into the certainty he is losing his mind before his pulse.

I shall not write again, he thinks.

The thought stirs some vitality in him, some will to resist. If only the leeches could take certain of his memories for food and and leave the rest of him intact. But they are greedy. He feels them drawing the words and ideas from his body, siphoning away the reservoir of creativity at his fingertips. This is true death, and Byron brings his right arm to the left side of his face, feels for the leech and tries to tear it off.

“No, milord,” Fletcher says, rushing from whatever corner he keeps his vigil.

“It is too much blood. Too much.”

“I shall go ask Dr. Millingen, milord.”

Dr. Millingen must be miles hence, for Fletcher does not return. The room’s existence becomes as precarious as a candle flame in the wind. The candle goes out, the room is dark. A different candle is lit, and the second room is revealed. Who are these people around him? What is the weight in his lap? His eyes glance down to find an open book. He lifts it to see the pages and finds—and finds—

Byron sobs. The second candle is snuffed. The first candle lights again. Dr. Millingen stands over him, shaking his head, his aspect grave.

“Loukas?”

“Lord Byron speaks a name. Who is Loukas?”

Fletcher is there to whisper in Dr. Millingen’s right ear. Dr. Millingen’s eyes go very wide as he listens.

He cannot lift his arms. The skin of his face and torso feels unburdened. The leeches have been removed. He looks out at the window and sees darkness. It must be night.

The ghost hour is upon him.

The first ghost comes: his mother. They have nothing to say to each other, and she departs through a wall.

The second ghost is Claire. She has only laughter, which Byron hasn’t the strength to return. But Claire understands. He knows she does.

Shelley comes then, tall, severe, dripping seawater.

Shiloh, he thinks. Stay with me. Stay.

Polidori comes. People he has hated and loved, desired and disdained all come.

Why this silence? Are there no words in the afterlife?

The ghosts disappear with the morning. The sunlight beams bright within the room, warming everything but Byron’s body. Chills add to his misery.

Dr. Millingen is back with the leeches.

“Lord Byron’s fever continues. His blood has an excess of bad humor to it—we must drain it off.”

With fading eyesight, Byron looks to Fletcher, ever faithful, in attendance with water and sponge and stoicism. A weak motion of Byron’s hand draws the servant closer.

“Whatever it is,” Byron whispers, “the leeches will not take it from my body.”

Now Fletcher weeps. He is inconsolable.

Something is said in Italian or Greek. Fletcher is taken from the room.

Everyone leaves me, thinks Byron. But I have left everyone first. Ada, Shiloh, Allegra. Ada. He has no feelings for the child at all. Ada. A name, just a name, absent of true meaning. How can he feel for her? It has been years. If she walked into this very room right now, he would not recognize her, his daughter.

Millingen applies the leeches and squints as he inspects their work.

“I’m dying,” Byron says after several painful swallows.

Millingen, not unkindly, nods his head. Truth at last. Byron smiles.

“Did you know I was a prophet?”

“Now is not the time to talk. Marshal your strength, milord.”

“All men can be,” Byron says. He does not know how successful he is. All he can hear is his own wheezing.

“Rest, milord.”

Byron struggles for one more burst of strength. He twists his clubfoot to the right as far as it can go under its own power. That faithful villain still has bile. Pain shoots through him, enlivening the senses.

“Men need only shout out, One day I shall die! and they will be prophets.”

His respiration hitches and his heart pounds. Blood courses down his face and limbs and collects like thick syrup in bowls.

The first candle goes out.

The second candle does not light.

He is floating through the void, falling toward a world engulfed in flames. But the fires are waning. Darkness is winning. Across this vast world, Byron applies his gaze and finds but two men, and they are enemies. They fight each other to see who will be fuel for the other’s pyre. The fight does not last long. Byron watches the first man throw the corpse of the second onto a dwindling flame. The survivor sits down with a book he finds on the ground, most of its pages already charred and unburnable, but with a few leafs spared. They too must feed the fire. But before that fate, the victor, naked and starving, decides to read aloud from the unspoiled pages by the light of his enemy’s burning body. His is a wonderful voice, deep and sonorous, cadenced for the world’s end. Byron finds the words familiar as he drifts away in the darkness—

So we’ll go no more a roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as—

“Jesus Christ.”

Gordon took one step toward his father’s bed, then two back, see-sawing in panic. A surge of the creepy-crawly feelings in his thighs made him cry out and slap at his legs. He lost his balance and fell to the floor and sat there, leaning to the right, supported by both palms, his legs splayed to the side, useless and insensate as a cripple’s.

His father managed to swing his own legs off the mattress. Gordon stared at them. Both were shriveled now, the healthy leg having deteriorated to match the other’s deformity.

“There was a boy. He meant everything to me. He was my world in every sense of it. Then he was lost to me. Then I thought he was found again—in you.”

“Sick bastard,” Gordon said through an eruption of sobs. He barely registered his father’s words, and wasn’t sure what they meant. What he did understand was the renewed, almost explosive feeling of invisible fingers on his inner thighs. And as he slapped at his own body, he knew these awful sensations were linked to what his father was saying.

“Luke told me what you are doing to him.”

He gaped up at his dad, his entire body trembling.

“No. No.”

“It’s my fault, Gordon. Whatever compulsion you have, it comes from what I did to you. That’s why I told Dr. Reynolds. I understand he has called the police.”

Gordon got to his feet, though his legs wobbled. “Where’s Luke? Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Safe from you. Safe from me.”

There were many sounds in the hallway now. It sounded like many people rushing toward them.

The door rattled under a sharp knock.

“Gordon Fane. Are you in there?”

Gordon looked at his father, who met his stare with piteous eyes. Despite everything, despite his disgust and horror, despite his fear, Gordon softened for just a moment.

“It’s okay, Gordon,” his father said, whispering as he reached for his son’s hands. Gordon watched as his father brought them to his own thin throat. But his father could not make Gordon’s fingers open and close around his windpipe. Gordon did that himself.

They stared at each other.

“You might as well add patricide to the charges, George.”

The door burst open. Guns entered the room in the outstretched hands of three police officers. Dr. Reynolds was there. So, he saw, was Amber. In the next few mad, slow seconds he wondered if she’d somehow managed to drive herself, or if the police had picked her up along the way. Would the police have done that? She looked perversely vital, her eyes filled with rage. “You fucking bastard,” she said.

Then her expression changed. The guns lowered. All eyes turned to the room’s only window.

Father and son’s eyes were the last to turn.

The panes were dark. Screams filtered through it—distant, plentiful.

“Is it an eclipse?” Dr. Reynolds said, coming forward. Gordon watched him and the rest—even Amber—crowd around the window and press their faces to the glass. “But it’s day!” someone said. “Where is the sun?” Gordon saw one of the officers who’d come to arrest him slap at the pane as if he blamed it for hiding the light.

Then he heard a sharp gasp and he alone turned his attention from the window. His father’s back was arched, as if jolted by electricity. His right hand beckoned Gordon closer, and despite himself Gordon stepped over. His father’s mouth was open wide, as were his eyes, which seemed fixed on something very distant. As Gordon bent nearer, he felt his father gripping his wrist. The old man was struggling to make a sound. He spoke a single word into Gordon’s ear, and then his grip went slack and so did his face, and Gordon pulled back knowing his father was dead. He repeated the word to himself. Why did his father say that? What could it mean? Then he stifled a laugh, hand over his mouth. He felt like the victim of a joke, and as his gaze returned to the dark window and the people huddled in front of it, he realized his father had given them all the punchline.

“Bright.”

acknowledgments

I have many people to thank for bringing Lord Byron’s Prophecy to the public. First and foremost, my publisher Steve Berman—without you I’m not sure where I’d be, and I’m humbled by your faith in me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Second, my editor, Hal Duncan, whose incisive comments and dedication to this novel will forever humble and amaze me. (And folks, if you haven’t read Hal Duncan’s own stories, what are you waiting for?) Many thanks are also owed to Alex Jeffers, for designing the book’s interior, and to Matthew Bright for his outstanding cover art. And what would I do without that special group of friends who make up my writer’s group? Ed Bryant, Carter Wilson, Linda Anderson and Dirk Anderson critiqued the original manuscript over the course of 18 months, providing valuable advice in shaping the story (and while I’m at it, let me just add that if you haven’t read the works of Ed Bryant and Carter Wilson, you should pick them up after you get done reading Hal). Additionally, I’d like to thank my parents and my brother Brian and sister-in-law Lena for their love and support.

about the author

Originally from Kentucky, Sean Eads is a reference librarian living in Denver, CO. His first novel, The Survivors, was a finalist for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award. He has a Masters degree in literature from the University of Kentucky, where he read an awful lot of Byron. His favorite writers include Bradbury, Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. You can find him online at seaneads.net.