Matthew Owen strained against her. The light wavered. His face was inches from Alex’s now.
“I tried to eliminate Aldiss first,” Owen said. “If the brain dies, then the body will fall. When he was at Rock Mountain I was in charge of treating him, of controlling the seizures. But I didn’t go far enough. I missed my chance and he gave Fallows to you on a silver platter.” A shadow passed across his face. “So I worked with what I had. A struggling cop. A few phone calls, the suggestion that Aldiss was searching for him. He put his revolver in his mouth. Easy.”
Daniel. Goddamn him.
Owen smiled, and in the coldness of the gesture Alex saw for the first time. She saw how it had happened, the brutal series of events that had led her to this black hallway. Owen had murdered Michael Tanner, had drawn them all back to the campus, and then—
“Lewis,” she said, her voice tight. Choked. “How? You were there, at the memorial service.”
“No, Alex. You thought I was there. I had run back to the house for Stanley’s pills and found Lewis all alone.” His voice quickened. “Afterward, Melissa and I slipped away.”
Alex willed her mind to come back on, her eyes to open. Where? she thought. Wherewherewhere? Owen read her thoughts. “Do you want to see what I did with him?”
She nodded.
Then he was yanking her by the hair down the hallway. They were descending stairs, the temperature plummeting. A heavy steel door opened and Owen pushed her into a room.
She looked up to see that she was in the place where it had all begun. In the basement classroom of Culver.
There were student desks arranged here in the same pattern they had been in the night class. And at the front was Richard Aldiss. He had been stripped and beaten and lashed to a chair. Owen had carried in his flashlight, and he pointed it at the man. The puzzle tattoo was revealed: Aldiss’s entire body was a jigsaw puzzle, his chest and arms and legs. Owen made a sound, disgusted with the sight of the professor, then he swung the light back into Alex’s face.
“Alive?” he said. “Not alive? It makes no difference now.”
Alex hung there in the man’s arms. Her throat was raw, bloody.
“Everything I did,” Owen said, “was because of the manuscript. Getting close to him in Rock Mountain, going back to school, getting that job at another prison, poring over Austen, Eliot, Dostoyevsky—I was probably the only guard at Oakwood who could talk to Lewis Prine about the Modernists.”
Alex startled. You set Lewis up, you bastard. You set all of us up. I’ll kill you with my bare hands.
Owen continued, “It was all because of the third Fallows.” He saw her confusion, and when he continued his tone was more deliberate. He wanted her to see, to understand exactly. “I mastered the first two novels through the Procedure. Found their open doorways, Alex. Walked around inside them. And when I heard that an unpublished Fallows existed, I knew I had to find it. Whatever it took.”
Alex shivered, more alert now. “A game?” she said. “All of this—setting Aldiss up, murdering my friends—was because of a fucking game?”
“You don’t understand. You can never understand. The Procedure is no more a game than the printing press is a machine. What I was doing, Alex, was understanding Fallows. Reaching inside his mind. You couldn’t learn him through books, through your innocent little night class. The only way to plumb those novels was through the Procedure. It was how one became enlightened.”
Keep him talking, Alex. Find out how he did this, then turn him on himself. You can do this. She urged her voice to life. “I don’t understand, Matthew. When did you find the manuscript? How did you beat us to it?”
He raised an eyebrow. “There were always whispers that a third Fallows existed, and at Rock Mountain I deduced that Aldiss must have found it. But I couldn’t find where he hid it, no matter how often I checked his cell. After his release I continued my search. I was desperate, hungry to continue the game, and there seemed only one place to go. You’re beginning to catch on, I see.”
Alex nodded. The boxes labeled ALDISS in Fisk’s study. Fifteen years ago, it was all right there.
“Yes, I knew that Stanley was a frequent correspondent of Aldiss’s. Knew he’d sent boxes and boxes of documents over the years to Rock Mountain. And I suspected that if Aldiss had entrusted the manuscript to anyone it would be Fisk.” He paused. “After I was hired by the college it took me only a few months to find the manuscript in his mansion. I read it and saw, immediately, what Aldiss had done. He’d been playing a game as well—nine victims in the manuscript, nine students in the night class. It was his clever way of continuing the Procedure from his prison cell. But I knew a better way. A purer way.”
Alex turned her eyes to the wall. She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t bear to follow his story any longer. But Owen reached out, dipped his hand inside the light, and took her face. He turned her gaze toward him and held her there, her cheeks squeezed painfully, so that she could see him as he spoke. Could see how exactly how it ended.
“You erased Fallows,” he said. “Aldiss led you to him and you destroyed the legend to the map. All we had then were the doorways the Procedure opened. When I found the manuscript I searched for those doorways. And when I found them I began to see. I saw how I could bring the Procedure to life.”
A line from the manuscript flashed through her mind: Perhaps he had been going backward, taking his plan from the end. There was something about those words, something that might allow her to escape from this hell. Yes, it was right there in front of her now, the connection that Owen had failed to make all along. The end . . .
“Fallows is dead,” she said defiantly, holding her eyes on him. “You’ve failed.”
Owen smiled pityingly. “You still don’t understand, Alex. I’ve gone farther than Fallows. I’ve outdone him. Through the Procedure I got inside the beating heart of his manuscript. It was like . . . ecstasy. An epiphany.” He hesitated, his eyes cast back toward the slumped shape of Aldiss. “I don’t need Fallows. I became him.” Owen closed his eyes briefly at the thought, and a smile passed across his face.
Alex knew what she had to do.