The moments passed. The house was silent around him. The fog gathered in the backyard. Tom knew his time was running out and yet second after second, he sat where he was, staring at his closed fist.
Find the truth, and the truth will set you free.
All right. Good advice. But how did he do it? How could he find the truth? Where did he begin?
Come on, he told himself. You’re the steely-eyed, big-brained reporter. Figure it out, bro.
He shook his fist as he went on gazing down at it. To find the whole truth, he needed to know who shot him—who shot him, and why. And hey, how hard could it be to get that information? He had been shot in the chest, after all. The person who shot him must have been standing right in front of him. He must have seen the person at the time it happened. He must already know who it was. So, as Lisa said, the answer must be here somewhere, somewhere inside his mind. But where?
Well, his memory, that’s where.
Being in a coma and all, being trapped inside his own imagination, there were obviously things he couldn’t remember. So to find those things, somehow he had to get from here, from his imagination, to his memory. But where was that?
Go to the monastery, Tom. That’s where the answers are.
He almost heard Marie’s gentle voice speak the words. Marie had told him to go to the monastery. That must be the way, and yet . . .
And yet, it didn’t make sense to him. The way to his memory should be through the things he remembered. But he didn’t remember being in the monastery. He didn’t remember that at all.
There was something else, too. The man in the computer. The Lying Man who had told him that the monsters were gone and it was safe to go out into the hall. The Lying Man had told him to go to the monastery, too. The Lying Man had also told him that’s where the answers were. Now, okay, maybe the Lying Man had told him the truth about the monastery just to trick him into leaving his bedroom. But Tom had a feeling that the Lying Man never told the truth, not really. Tom had the feeling that everything the Lying Man said was either an outright lie or some other kind of deception.
As he thought about that, an image came into his mind. It was the image of Marie, sitting right here, right in the kitchen, at this very table. He remembered the way she reacted when he wanted to answer his phone. The way she tried to stop him when he wanted to go downstairs to see his brother on TV. Why would she do that? Why would she try to stop him from seeing Burt? Why didn’t she want him to answer the phone?
It’s not that he didn’t trust Marie, he told himself. That would be crazy. Why wouldn’t he trust her? It was just that . . . well, he didn’t want to do anything the Lying Man told him to do, that’s all. That’s all.
So where did that leave him?
The seconds passed. He went on sitting there, gripping the necklace, shaking his fist as he thought it through. And a fresh idea came to him. He wanted to get from here to his memory, right? So where was the borderline between the two territories? The border of his memory must be marked by the things he almost remembered but couldn’t remember completely. If he could find his way to something he almost remembered but couldn’t quite bring back, then he knew he could find his way from there to the rest of it, the things he had forgotten completely or had blocked out.
What do I almost remember? he asked himself.
The answer came to him at once. The woman in the white blouse. The woman who had called him on the phone and tried to talk to him through the static. She was the one who had called him back from the brink of death, trying to reach him, trying to tell him something. He knew who she was—sort of—but he could not quite place her, could not quite call her identity to mind.
But he knew where to find her, didn’t he? He knew where to start at least. She had told him herself.
The office of the Sentinel in the basement of the school. He had written her address down on a piece of paper there. That was where the memory trail began. If he could find that address, he could find the woman in the white blouse. If he could find her, he knew somehow that he could find his way back to the rest of it, to everything.
Tom let out a long, unsteady sigh and opened his fist. His hand was empty. Lisa’s necklace was gone. He didn’t mind. He knew Lisa herself was still there, still nearby, sitting by his bed, praying for him, waiting for him.
You’re not alone, Tommy.
He looked up. Looked out the window. The fog was now rolling in across the far edges of the backyard. Already, the hedges that marked the Laughlins’ property had vanished beneath a pillowy whiteness. Already, Tom could see hulking, limping shadows moving in that whiteness. The malevolents. Coming back for him.
He stood up, the chair scraping the floor beneath him. He had to go. He had to find his memory, find the truth. He had to get to the school, to the Sentinel’s office.
And that meant he had to leave the house and go out into the fog.