Unknown

IN JULY OF 1994, the year after my father died, my mother, youngest sister, and I went to Greenock, Scotland, from which my parents had emigrated to the United States almost thirty years before. Mom and Mackenzie flew over for a month; I joined them two weeks into their trip. The three of us stayed with my father’s mother, who owned a semi-detached house set near the top of a modest hill. From the window of its front bedroom, on the second storey, you could look out on the River Clyde, here a tidal estuary, which had allowed the region to become a center for British shipbuilding for over two centuries. Two miles across, the river’s far shore was layered with green hills, the Trossachs, long and sloping, the markers of geological traumas ancient and extreme.

I actually arrived a day late, because of a mechanical difficulty with my plane that was not detected until we were ready to pull away from the gate. The pilot’s intimation of it in his message to the passengers caused a woman seated ahead of me to start shouting, “Oh my God, I had a dream about this last night. We’re going to crash. The plane is going to crash. We can’t take off.” Fortunately for her—and possibly, for the rest of us—we were removed from the plane and bused to one of the airport’s hotels, where we were put up overnight.

I spent part of that time trying to phone someone on this side of the Atlantic who could call my relatives overseas to let them know not to go to the airport for me. I had no luck, and passed the remainder of the night restless from the knowledge that I would have to be up early if I didn’t want to miss the return bus to the terminal. I wasn’t certain why I had taken the time off from the optometrists’ office I was managing for this trip. Obviously, it had to do with the loss of my father, with an effort to address the gap his death had left in my life by returning to the place of his birth and early life, by spending time with the members of his family who still lived there, as if geography and blood might help to heal the edges of what remained a ragged wound. Already, though, my plan seemed off to a dubious start.

The sleep I managed was troubled. I fell into a dream in which I watched my father as he sat with a handful of other men in the back of a van speeding along a narrow street that ran between high brick walls blackened by age. Overhead, what might have been the gnarled branches of trees peeked down from the tops of the walls. My father looked as he had during my later childhood, slender, his hair already fled from the top of his head. He was dressed in a denim work shirt and jeans, as were the rest of the men. Although he did not look at me, I was certain he knew that I was watching him, and I waited for him to turn to me and say something. He did not.

III

Despite my concerns, I woke in plenty of time, and had an uneventful flight across the ocean, and was met at the airport in Glasgow by one of my older cousins and my mother and sister. They had checked the flight information before leaving for my original arrival, learned of the alteration to my trip, and saved themselves the earlier run to the airport. Although the ride to my grandmother’s wasn’t especially long, I was still feeling the effects of my night in the airport hotel (I was too much of a nervous flyer to have napped during my time in the air), and I struggled to hold open my eyelids, which felt weighted with lead. I had a confused impression of stone and steel buildings, of cars and trucks flowing around us, of a strip of blue river speeding by on my right. When we arrived at my grandmother’s house, I succeeded in greeting her and one of my aunts and a couple of my cousins, but it wasn’t long before I climbed the stairs to the front bedroom, assuring everyone that I just needed a little nap, and slept straight through to the next morning.

Somewhere deep in that sleep, I dreamed I was standing at the picture window overlooking the Clyde. It was night, but the sky shone silver-white with the gloaming, casting sufficient light for me to see that the river was dry. Its bed was a wide, muddy trench bordered by rocky margins draped with seaweed. At points further out in the mud, boulders sat alone and in clumps. Thousands, tens of thousands of fish lay on the mud and rocks, their long, silver bodies catching the light. Most of them were dead; a few still thrashed. All along the riverbed, a great line of people walked downstream, towards the ocean. Male, female, old, young, tall, short, fat, thin: they were as varied a group as you could assemble. As was their dress: some were in their work clothes, some their pajamas; some in formal wear, some in hospital gowns; some wearing the uniforms of their professions, some stark naked. The only detail they shared was their bare feet. They trudged through mud that sucked at their ankles, that slurped at their shins, that surged around their thighs. If they were closer to shore, they stumbled on seaweed, slid on rocks. They trod on fish, kicked them out of the way. It seemed to me that there was something I wasn’t seeing, a presence weighting the scene in front of me. It was waiting at the corners of my vision, huge and old and empty. Or, not empty so much as hungry. There was no sound from the crowd, but overhead, I heard a high-pitched ringing, like what occurs when you run your damp finger around the rim of a wineglass.

The following morning, I came downstairs to the smells of the breakfast my grandmother was cooking for me, fried eggs and bacon, fried tomatoes, buttered toast, orange juice, and instant coffee. She had insisted to my mother and sister that she was going to make breakfast for me, and that she wanted us to have some time alone. Mom and Mackenzie had removed themselves to my Aunt Betty and Uncle Stewart’s house, a short distance along the road.

I wasn’t certain what my grandmother wanted. While we had seen my father’s parents during our previous visits to Scotland, it had seemed to me that we spent more time with my mother’s mother, who had come to stay with us in America (though I didn’t remember her visits). The most I had spoken to my father’s mother was immediately after his death, when I had done my best to console her over the phone, assuring her that he had been suffering and was at least out of pain, and she had said, “It’s like it’s himself talking to me.”

Now, she sat down with me at her small kitchen table and said, “Tell me about your dad, son.”

I didn’t know what to say. Her question should not have caught me off guard. My father had been his parents’ acknowledged favorite—as one of his younger brothers had told me, their mother’s golden boy. Although Mom, my siblings, and I had visited Scotland only every few years, for a good part of my childhood, Dad’s job with IBM had necessitated regular international travel, to Paris and Frankfurt, and he was usually able to arrange an extra couple of days’ stay with his parents. Despite his geographical distance from them, he had been able to maintain a close relationship with his mother and father; whereas myself, my brother, and my sisters knew our paternal grandparents mostly as names Dad and Mom discussed now and again. Occasionally, my father would mention his father as the source of an old song he was singing, or relate an anecdote about my grandfather’s days in the shipyards, when he’d argued with his fellow workers against unionizing. He didn’t say much about his mother; though his affection for her was palpable. For her to want me to tell her about him now was no surprise. Quite reasonably, she assumed that he was what we had in common, and she assumed that I felt about him the way she did.

This was not exactly the case. I loved him, fiercely, the way I had as a small child. For almost as long, though, that love had been complicated by other emotions, ones that, at twenty-five, I was nowhere near reckoning with. There was fear, of him and the temper that could ignite without warning, and for him and the heart whose consecutive infarctions during my eighth grade school year had left me in constant dread of his mortality. There was anger, at his stubborn insistence on his point of view, at his tendency to cut short so many of our more recent arguments by threatening to put my head through the wall if I didn’t shut up. There was embarrassment, at the prejudices that had trailed him from his upbringing, against everyone who was not white, Catholic, and Scottish, at his tendency to point out the flaws even of people he was praising. And there was guilt (as some comedian or another said, the gift that keeps on giving), at my inability to love him as simply, as straightforwardly, as did my siblings. In the year or so leading up to his death, he and I had seemed to be moving, slowly, tentatively, toward some new stage in our relationship, one in which the two of us might be less on guard around one another, more relaxed, but his two months in Westchester Medical Center, his death, had forever kept us from reaching that place.

None of this could I say to my grandmother. Eyes wide behind her glasses, lips pressed together, she inclined ever-so-slightly toward me, her attitude one of anticipation, for anecdotes and details that would allow her son to live again in her mind’s eye. So that was what I gave her, a morning’s worth of stories about Dad. I couldn’t not talk about his final stay in the hospital, the open heart surgery from which he had never fully recovered, becoming steadily weaker, until testing revealed that he had late-stage cirrhosis, his liver was failing, and the situation roared downhill like a roller coaster whose brakes had sheared off. But I could balance that story with others, most of them focusing on his pride in my brother and sisters. I told her about the cross-country and spring track practices and meets he picked them up from and drove them to. I narrated his help with and participation in their assorted science projects (including letting Mackenzie wake him throughout the night in order to assess the effects of an interrupted sleep schedule on his ability to perform a set number of tasks). I shared with her his delight in my brother’s acceptance to medical school, and his pride in Christopher’s commission in the Navy. I expressed his admiration for my middle sister, Rita, who managed a schedule that included teaching dance classes at the school at which she was a student, playing guitar with the church folk group, and working a part-time job at an optometrist’s office, all the while completing high school. I considered it an achievement that, not once during our extended breakfast, did my grandmother ask about my father and me.

The remainder of the day consisted of a visit to my aunt and uncle’s house, a few hundred yards up the road, for a loud and cheery dinner of meat pies, sausage rolls, bridies, chips, and beans, with Irn-Bru to drink. We were joined by Stewart and Betty’s children and children-in-law, and their grandchildren, who were fascinated by my American accent and kept asking me to pronounce words in it. Uncle Stewart promised to drive me around to see the local sights; one of my cousins and his wife invited Mackenzie and me to watch a movie at their place; another of my cousins said that my sister and I had to come fishing with her and her dad another night. Oh, and there was a fair down by the water next weekend.... In a matter of two hours, my schedule for most of my remaining time in Greenock was arranged. I didn’t mind. I had grown up without much in the way of extended family nearby; really, it was just Mom, Dad, my brother, sisters, and me. During the months after my father’s death, when the flood of calls and visitors that had swept over us in the immediate aftermath of his passing diminished to a stream, then a trickle, then dried completely, I had felt this lack acutely. To be here, taken into the bosom of Dad’s family, was like being gathered into an incredibly soft, comfortable blanket. I loved it.

VII

Later that night, though, as I was sitting up in bed, trying to read by the astonishing late light, I found myself unable to concentrate on my book. Had Mackenzie been awake, I would have talked to her, but I could hear my sister snoring in the back bedroom, which she was sharing with Mom. I could have checked on my mother, but even if she was awake, I was reluctant to disturb her with what was on my mind. It concerned my father, and his final stay in the hospital.

The morning after he emerged from surgery, the nurses propped him up in bed and gave him a pen and pad of paper with which to communicate. (He was, and would remain, intubated, his breathing assisted by a ventilator.) Due to the ICU regulations, only three of us could visit him at a time, so my sister, Rita, and I waited and sent Mom, our brother, and Mackenzie in first. Rita and I made small talk for five or ten minutes, then Chris and Mackenzie came out to trade places with us. I had seen my father in the hospital before, many times, and the sight of him in his hospital gown, the top of the white ridge of bandages visible at its collar, below the trach tube, was not shocking. What was strange, off, was the expression on his face, his brows lowered, his jaw set, a look of concern tinted with anger. Rita and I crossed the ICU cubicle to him and embraced him, both of us delivering deliberately casual greetings, trying to act as if everything was fine, or was going to be fine. He returned our hugs, then turned his attention to the pad of paper propped on his lap. He took his pen and carefully wrote a sentence. When he was finished, he held the pad up for my inspection.

The line he’d written was composed of characters I didn’t recognize. There was what might have been a square, except that the upper right corner didn’t connect. There was a triangle whose points were rounded. There were parallel lines drawn at an angle, descending from right to left. There was a circle with a horizontal line bisecting it, an upside-down crescent, and a square whose bottom line turned up inside the shape before connecting with the line on the left, and which continued to turn at ninety-degree angles within the square, making a kind of stylized maze. I stared at the symbols, and looked at my father. My lack of comprehension was glaringly obvious. I said, “Um, I’m sorry—I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

In response, he underlined the strange sentence several times and showed it to me again.

“Dad,” I said, “I don’t understand. I’m sorry. I can’t read this.”

His eyebrows raised in frustration. Although he was on the respirator, I could practically hear him blowing out his breath in exasperation. Employing the pen as a pointer, he moved it from symbol to symbol, as if taking me slowly through a simple statement.

I could feel my face growing hot. I shook my head, held up my hands.

He glared at me.

“Let me see,” my mother said, leaning over from the other side of his bed. She didn’t have any more luck with what Dad had written than had I. He was irritated with both of us—Rita refrained from looking at the pad—but his annoyance with me felt as if it had a particular edge, as if I, of all people, should understand what he was showing me.

After that, it was time to go. When we returned for the next visiting session, two-and-a-half hours later, Dad was surrounded by several nurses, all of whom were focused on preventing him from leaving his bed, which he was trying to do with more vigor than I would have anticipated from a man who had just had his chest cracked open. Mom talked to him, as did the rest of us as we came and went from the room, but though the sound of her voice, and ours, calmed him slightly, it wasn’t enough to make him abandon his efforts. This led to him being given a mild sedative, then put in restraints. For the next two weeks, he struggled with those restraints daily, pulling at the padded cuffs buckled to his wrists. His features were set in a look of utter determination; if any of us spoke to him, he regarded us as if we were strangers.

My mother was afraid he had suffered a stroke, one of the possible complications of the surgery about which she and Dad had been warned. In the notes to his chart, the nurses described his new condition as a coma. Neither diagnosis seemed right to me, but where was my medical degree? All I knew was, he wasn’t there, in that writhing body—or maybe, we weren’t there for him, he was seeing himself in surroundings foreign and frightening. Finally, at the end of fourteen days of watching him wrestle with his restraints, one of the doctors realized that Dad might be having an allergic reaction to a drug they had been giving him (we never learned which one) and ordered it stopped. With the cessation of that drug, he returned to normal within a day. The restraints were removed, and although he only left his room for follow-up X-rays and further surgery, at least he was himself.

Those symbols, though, I had not forgotten. The most likely explanation was that they were an early product of my father’s drug allergy. Had any of my siblings, my mother, asked me about them, I would have offered this rationale myself. Yet on some deeper level, I didn’t buy this. He had exhibited too much focus in writing them. Had he ever been well enough to be removed from the ventilator, I would have asked him about them. Since that hadn’t happened, they remained a mystery. I might be transforming the scribbling of a mind frightened and confused into a coded message of great import, but I could not forget the expression on my father’s face as he showed me what he had set down.

After all, during the surgery, his heart had been stopped, and although a heart-lung machine had continued to circulate and oxygenate his blood, who could say what state he—his self, his soul—had been in for that span of time, how far he might have wandered from his body? Sometimes, I imagined him, waking from his surgery to find himself in an unadorned room with a single chair and a single door, and being told by a man in a drab suit that this was where he had to wait until the operation was completed and the doctors found out whether or not they could restart his heart. I imagined the man offering him a newspaper, its headlines the row of symbols he would copy for me.

To what end, though? I recognized the scenario I had invented, the speculation that prompted it, as magical thinking of the most basic kind, driven by longing for my father to have been involved in something more than the slow and painful process of his death. In his writing, I hoped for clues to another state of being, evidence of the place he had entered when he died.

I sat my book down on the nightstand. I eased out of my bed and crossed to the large window that gave a view of the Clyde and its far shore. In the late light, the river was the color of burnished tin, the Trossachs purple darkening to black. My father had not lived in this house—one of his mother’s cousins had bought it for her after my grandfather died. But the river it surveyed had shaped his life as definitively as it had the land through which it flowed. The shipyards on its banks had brought my great-grandfather here from Ireland. A younger son of a farming family, disqualified from inheriting the farm by his order of birth, he had booked passage across the Irish Sea to find work as part of the industry building the vessels with which the British Empire maintained its quarter of the globe. Beyond that, I didn’t know much about the man. I presumed he had obtained my grandfather’s job in the shipyards for him, which I knew had consisted at one point of painting the hulls of ships. I wasn’t sure why my father hadn’t followed him in turn, unless it was because my grandfather (and probably, grandmother) had wanted something else for him, an office job, which he eventually found with IBM. All the same, Dad had courted Mom on the Esplanade that ran along the Clyde on the eastern side of town, and he kept newspaper clippings about the river that his relatives mailed to him folded and tucked within the pages of his Bible. I wasn’t any closer to knowing what I expected from this trip. But gazing out at the river, the hills, felt strangely reassuring.

VIII

That night, my dreams took me down to the Clyde. A chain link fence kept me from a flat, paved surface above which cranes rose like giant metal sculptures. I turned to look behind me, and almost toppled into a chasm that dropped a good twenty feet. The gap ran parallel to the fence, to the river beyond. Maybe ten feet across, its walls were brick, old, blackened; although its bottom was level—a road, I realized when I saw a white, boxy van drive up it. At once, I knew two things with dream certainty: my father was in that van, and there was something at my back, on the other side of the paved lot. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled at it. Old—I could feel its age, a span of years so great it set me shivering uncontrollably. I did not want to see this. I shook with such intensity, it jolted me from sleep. Awake, I could not stop trembling, and wrapped the bedclothes around me. I took a few minutes to return to sleep, and once I did, it was to a different dream.

Once he was home from work the next day, Uncle Stewart made good on his promised tour of the area. Mackenzie came, too. The three of us squeezed into his car, a white Nissan Micra whose cramped interior lived up to its name, and off we went. A soft-spoken man, Stewart kept a cigarette lit and burning between his lips for most of the drive. He worked for a high-tech manufacturer who had moved into one of the old shipping buildings. He was what my parents called crafty, which meant he had a knack for artistic projects. Fifteen years before, when he’d been laid off his job at the shipyards and unable to find another, he had turned his efforts to building doll-sized replicas of old, horse-drawn traveler’s trailers. He’d gifted one to my parents, who placed it in their bedroom, where my siblings and I went to admire it. The detail on the trailer was amazing, from the flowered curtains hung inside the small windows to the ornaments on the porcelain horse’s bridle. (He bought the horses in bulk from a department store.) Stewart had sold his trailers, first to family, then to friends, then to friends of friends, then to their friends, the money he earned helping to keep his family afloat until he found a new job.

He was also a repository of local knowledge, some of which he shared with Mackenzie and me as he steered the Micra up and down Greenock’s steep streets. He showed us the house our father had grown up in, the apartment where our mother had been raised by her mother, the church where our parents had married. He drove us down to the river, to the Esplanade, and along to where a few cranes stood at the water’s edge like enormous steel insects. He drove us east, out of town, towards Glasgow, so that he could show us Dumbarton Rock across the Clyde, a great rocky molar whose ragged crown stood two hundred feet above the river. A scattering of stone blocks was visible at the summit. Nodding at the rock, Stewart said, “There’s been a castle of some sort there forever,” the words emerging from his mouth in puffs of cigarette smoke that his open window caught and sucked out of the car. “Back when the Vikings held the mouth of the Clyde, and the islands, that was the westernmost stronghold of the British. Before that, the local kings ruled from atop it. Like the castle in Edinburgh—Sterling, too. There’s a story that Merlin paid the place a visit, in the sixth century.”

“King Arthur’s Merlin?” I said.

“Aye. The king at the time was called Riderch. They called him ‘the generous.’ King Arthur’s nephew, Hoel, was passing through, and he was injured. Fell off his horse or the like. King Riderch put him up while he was healing. When Riderch’s foes learned he had King Arthur’s nephew under his roof, they laid siege to the place. Riderch had a magic sword—Dyrnwyn—that burst into flame whenever he drew it, but he and his men were pretty badly outnumbered. There was no way he could get word to King Arthur down in Camelot in time for it to do him any good. It looked as if Arthur’s nephew was going to be killed while under Riderch’s care. So was Riderch himself, but you see what I’m saying. It would be a big dishonor for Riderch, alive or dead.”

Stewart steered toward an exit on the left that took us to a roundabout. He followed it half-way around, until we were heading back toward Greenock. As he did, he said, “This was when Merlin showed up. He’d been keeping an eye on Hoel, and he’d seen the trouble Riderch was in for his hospitality to Arthur’s kin. He presented himself to the King, and offered his assistance. ‘No offense,’ says Riderch, ‘but you’re one man. There’s a thousand men at my front door. What can you do about a force of that size?’

“‘Well,’ says Merlin. The King has a point. He is only one man, and although his father was a devil, there is a limit to his power. ‘However,’ says he, ‘I have allies I can call upon for help. And against them, no force of men can stand.’

“‘Then I wish you’d ask those friends for their aid,’ says Riderch.

“Merlin says okay. He tells the King he needs a corpse, the fresher, the better. It just so happens that, earlier that very day, Riderch’s men caught a couple of their enemies attempting to sneak over the castle wall. He has his men bring them before him, and right on the spot, executes the pair. ‘There you go,’ he says to Merlin. ‘There’s two corpses for you.’

“‘Good,’ says Merlin. He has the King’s soldiers carry the bodies right outside the front gate. It’s going on night time, and Riderch’s foes have withdrawn to their tents. Merlin instructs the soldiers to dig a shallow grave, one big enough for the two dead men. Once it’s been dug, he has them lay the corpses in it and cover them over. Then he sets to, using his staff to draw all manner of strange characters in the soil. He was a great one for writing, was Merlin. If you read some of the older stories about him, he’s always writing on things, prophecies of coming events, usually. King Riderch watches him, but he doesn’t recognize the characters Merlin’s scratching into the dirt.

“When he’s done, Merlin steps back from the grave. Pretty soon, the earth begins to tremble. It moves from somewhere deep below them, as if something’s digging its way up to them. Over in the siege camp, a few of Riderch’s enemies have been watching Merlin’s show. As the ground shakes, more of them run to see what’s causing the disturbance. The soil over the grave jumps, and a great head pushes its way through the dirt. It’s a man’s head, but it’s the size of a hut. The hair is clotted with earth. The skin is all leathery, shrunk to the skull. The eyes are empty pits. The lips are blackened, pulled back from teeth the size of a man’s arm. The arms and legs of the bodies the King’s men buried hang out over the teeth, the remainder of the corpses inside the huge mouth. It’s a giant Merlin’s summoned, but no such giant as anyone there has ever heard tell of. It’s as much an enormous corpse as those it crunches between its teeth. It keeps coming, head and neck, shoulders and arms, chest and hips, until it towers above them. You can imagine the reaction of Riderch’s foes: sheer panic. The King and his men aren’t too far away from it, themselves. Merlin touches his arm and says, ‘Steady.’ He points to the siege camp and says to the monster, ‘Right. Those are for you.’

“The giant doesn’t need to be told twice. It takes a couple of steps, and it’s in the midst of the enemy fighters, most of whom are trampling each other in their haste to get away from it. It leans down, sweeps up a handful of men, and stuffs them into its mouth. It stomps others like they’re ants. It kicks campfires apart, catches men and tears them to pieces. A few try to fight it. They grab their spears and swords and stab it. But that leathery skin is too tough; their blades can’t pierce it. Soon, the giant’s feet are covered in gore. Its lips and chin are smeared with the blood of the men it’s eaten. There’s no satisfying the thing; it continues to jam screaming men into its mouth. In a matter of a few minutes, Merlin’s monster has broken the siege. In a few more, it’s routed Riderch’s foes. Some of them flee to the ships they sailed here. The giant pursues them, smashes the prows of the ships, breaks off a mast and uses it as a club on ships and men alike.

“King Riderch turns to Merlin and says, ‘What is this thing you’ve brought forth?’

“‘That,’ says Merlin, ‘is Corpsemouth.’

“‘Corpsemouth,’ says Riderch. ‘Him, I have not heard of.’

“Merlin says, ‘He and his brethren were worshipped here many a long year ago. He was not known as Corpsemouth, then, but what his original name was has been lost. He and his kindred were replaced by other gods, who were replaced by newer gods than those, and so on until the Romans brought their gods, and now the Christians theirs. All of Corpsemouth’s fellows went to the place old gods go when men are done with them, the Graveyard of the Gods. Corpsemouth, though, refused to suffer the same fate as his kin. Instead, he lived on their remains. If any men stumbled across him, they were his. As later generations of gods came to the Graveyard, so Corpsemouth had them, too. Down through the ages he has continued, losing hold of everything he used to be, until all that remains is his hunger.’

“Riderch watches the giant crushing the last remnants of his enemies. He says, ‘This is blasphemy.’

“‘Maybe,’ Merlin says, ‘but it saved King Arthur’s nephew, and it saved you, too.’ Which Riderch can’t argue with.

“Once the last of the enemy fighters is dead, the giant, Corpsemouth, turns in the direction of Merlin and the King. Riderch puts his hand on his sword, but Merlin tells him to keep it in its sheath. He points his staff at the hills behind Dumbarton Rock. Corpsemouth nods that great, gruesome head, and walks off in that direction. That’s the last Riderch sees of him, and of Merlin, for the matter. I don’t suppose he was too upset about either.”

Stewart’s story had taken us all the way back to his front door. He pulled the parking brake and turned off the engine. “And that,” he said with a grin, “is a wee bit of your local history.”

Mackenzie and I thanked him, for the story and for the tour. While we were walking up to the house, my sister said, “Where did Merlin send the monster—Corpsemouth?”

Our uncle paused at the front door. “The story doesn’t say. Maybe north, to the mountains. That’s where many terrible and awful beasts were said to dwell. I’ll tell you what I think. A few miles east of Dumbarton Rock, there was an old burial place unearthed in the 1930s. It was the talk of this part of the country. I remember my father speaking about it. The fellows who dug it up said they found evidence of an ancient temple there. ‘Scotland’s Stonehenge,’ the papers called it.”

“What happened to it?” I said. “Can you visit it?”

“They put a pair of apartment buildings over the spot,” Stewart said. “The war interrupted the excavation, then, when the war was over, another group of scientists said the chaps who’d discovered the place had overstated its significance. There were a few rock carvings that were of interest, they said, but as long as they were removed and sent to the museum in Glasgow, they saw no reason not to build the high rises there. So the men from the museum came and cut out the pieces of rock to be preserved and the rest became part of the foundation for the new construction. My father was upset about it, about all of it, but especially about the carvings being taken away. ‘There’s folk put they things there for a reason,’ he says, ‘and yon men from the museum would do well enough to leave them be. There’s no telling what trouble they’ll stir.’ I suppose he had a point. Although,” Stewart added, “I’ve yet to see any giants prowling the hills. But if you ask me, that’s where Merlin told Corpsemouth to go.”

That night, I lay in bed thinking about Stewart’s story, wondering what my father would have made of it. Mackenzie was sleeping over at Stewart and Aunt Betty’s house, or I might have asked her. My mother was long since unconscious. I was sure Dad would have enjoyed Stewart’s tale as entertainment. He was a great fan of adventure stories of all stripes, with a soft spot for horror narratives, too. Mostly, he watched them as movies and TV shows; although he might read a book like Firefox or Last of the Breed. Whenever he saw a new movie, especially if it had been on TV too late for me and my brother, he would describe it to us the next day, in a scene-by-scene retelling no less detailed than the story Stewart had told. In this way, I knew the plots to most of the Connery and Moore James Bonds, a number of Clint Eastwood thrillers, and an assortment of films focused on mythological figures, such as Hercules. He would have appreciated the way Stewart’s tale blended the historical with the horrific; though he might have preferred a different, more dramatic end to the monster, blasted by Merlin’s magic, say, or set alight by King Riderch’s fiery sword.

I was less sure how he would have dealt with the story’s pagan elements, especially the idea that gods came and went over time. I knew he’d been interested in mythology. Exploring the basement as a child, I had found stacked in the shelves near the furnace a half-dozen issues of a magazine called Man, Myth & Magic, whose title had appealed to me instantly but whose pages, full of reproductions of old woodcuts and classical paintings, not to mention articles written in a dry, academic language, left me confused. I’d wanted to ask him about the magazines, but had the sense that I shouldn’t. There was a reason they were in the basement, after all. Plus, puzzle me though they did, I didn’t want to lose access to them, which I might if he realized I was paging through them. So I kept quiet about the magazines, but I noticed that, whenever I brought up stories from the Greek or Norse myths I was reading, he usually knew them; though he tended to downplay his knowledge.

I wasn’t sure to what extent this was because he was a devout Catholic, his faith fire-hardened from having grown up in a Protestant culture of institutionalized religious prejudice. He was leery of anything that might contradict the Church, his faith threaded through with a profound anxiety about Hell. Occasionally, he spoke about the Passionist fathers who visited his local church when he was a boy to deliver terrifying sermons on the fate of the damned. (I wondered if this was part of the attraction horror films had for him, their glimpses of the infernal.) The standard by which a soul would be judged after death was a source of concern, even worry, for him. We had discussed the apparition of the Virgin Mary to the children at Fatima, during which, she had told one of the boys to whom she revealed herself that he was destined to spend a great deal of time in Purgatory. While Purgatory was not Hell, neither was it a place to which you would have expected a young child to be sent. What could he have done, Dad said, to merit such a punishment? With the perspective of the last year, it had become clear to me that his questions about my church attendance during the two years I lived in Albany, his concern about my dating a girl who wasn’t Catholic, were rooted in an honest desire to keep me out of Hell, whose smoky fires burned low and red in the corners of his mind.

I didn’t believe my father had anything to fear from eternal damnation. I wasn’t sure there was anything for him to be concerned about, one way or the other. During my youth, I had been as devout as my father. To be honest, I had loved my religion, which was full of all manner of marvelous stories, those in the Old and New Testaments, yes, and those in the lives of the saints, too. I shared some of dad’s nervousness at the threat of Hell, but I grew up in the post-Vatican II Church, when the rewards of salvation were emphasized over the torments of damnation. Once I entered adolescence, however, the joys of the opposite sex became vastly more compelling than the strictures of faith. If I was hardly original in this—indeed, compared to the rest of my high school classmates, I was the latest of late bloomers—I roamed off the beaten path in my growing intellectual disagreement with the Church. I found its positions on most social matters riven by contradiction; nor did it help that so many of the men who pronounced them did so with an air of self-righteousness that set my adolescent teeth on edge. The ritual of the Mass, and its central conceit, the intersection of the numinous with the mundane, continued to speak to me, albeit, in a more figurative sense than I was sure my father would have approved. Religion in general seemed to me increasingly figurative, less a description of some ultimate reality than, at best, another human invention to help us through the struggle of living. At worst, it was another way for a small group of men to hold sway over a significantly larger group of people, politics with more elaborate costumes. Either way, it had nothing to do with any life after this one.

To be sure, I had taken comfort from the Church and its rituals during the days and weeks after Dad had died. By the following winter, though, my attendance at Mass had lapsed almost entirely. Even when my work schedule permitted me to take my mother and Mackenzie to church, I sat through the service listening with one ear, especially when the priest stood to deliver the sermon. Sometimes, I thought that I could have been a better Catholic if I lived in a country whose language I did not speak, so that I wouldn’t realize the priest was summarizing a Peanuts comic to explain God’s love for us. I missed the faith I’d had in my childhood, and I regretted its loss because it had been so important to my father, and had remained so for the rest of my family. Its loss filled me with a kind of terror, because it had taken with it my father, consigning him to a void in which I and everyone else I knew would, in the end, join him.

No surprise: that night, I dreamed of Corpsemouth. I was standing on the shore of the Clyde. It was the same, twilit time I’d encountered in all my recent dreams. In front of me, the river was at low tide, exposing an expanse of waterlogged sand studded with rocks of varying size. Behind me, the Battery Park, Greenock’s riverfront park, stretched flat and green. Beyond where the water lapped the sand, a wall of yellowish fog sat on the river, veiling the opposite shore. From within the fog, I heard the slosh of water being parted by something large. Goosebumps raised on my arms as the air chilled. An enormous silhouette loomed through the fog. Fear filled me like water bubbling into a glass. The fog churned at its edge; waves splashed the beach. A leg taller, far taller, than I pushed into view. The color of brackish water, its flesh was dried and wrapped around enormous bones. There were figures tattooed on the skin, but the creases and folds from its withering rendered them indecipherable. A second leg appeared, carrying the rest of the monster with it, but I didn’t wait to see any more of it. I turned and ran for the edge of the park, which had receded almost to the horizon. Sand grabbed at my feet. I slipped on a rock and fell into another. When the giant hand closed on me, I wasn’t surprised. I woke as it lifted me into the air, my heart pounding, relieved that I didn’t have to see the old god’s face, its terrible mouth open for me.

XII

The following day, my cousin, Gabriel, and his wife, Leslie, drove me, Mackenzie, and our mom to Glasgow. Gabriel was Uncle Stewart and Aunt Betty’s second oldest, which made him five years older than I was. The times my parents had taken my brother and sisters and me to Scotland when we were growing up, Gabriel had always been the kindest of my cousins, willing to talk to my brother and me as equals about all manner of serious subjects: nuclear war, the fate of the human race, life on other planets. He worked for the railroad, in what capacity I wasn’t clear. Leslie was an elementary school teacher; she and Gabriel had been married for eight years.

After we found a parking spot, Leslie, Mom, and Mackenzie set off for Sauchiehall Street and its assorted shops, Gabriel and I for the West End Museum, a sprawling, Victorian extravagance in red stone whose center was crowned by a selection of turrets that suggested a fairy-tale castle full of treasure. The museum, I had learned from a follow-up conversation with Uncle Stewart, was where the engraved rocks removed from the burial site east of Dumbarton Rock had been sent and were currently on display. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to see them; it might have been for no more complicated a reason than that my uncle had told me about them. I hadn’t shared my objective with my cousin, but he was happy to accompany me across the museum’s wide, green lawn.

Inside, we traversed a large, echoing gallery to the stairs to the third floor, where the exhibit on Scotland’s Ancient Cultures was located. The display was at the far end of the level. It had been organized around a half-dozen modest display cases, each of which contained a handful of relics of the country’s oldest-known inhabitants. Large photographs of the Scottish countryside, each seven feet high by five feet wide, had been hung in the midst of the cases. Gabriel strolled over to a display case showing the rusted blade of an old sword. In front of a picture of a shallow brook running at the base of a snow-topped mountain, I found what I had come to see.

The only thing in its case, the piece of grey stone was rectangular, larger than I had anticipated, the size of a small table. The white lettering on the glass cover identified it as having been unearthed in 1933 on Gibbon’s Farm in Dunbartonshire. The description pointed out the pairs of concentric circles visible on the stone’s upper right quadrant, as well as the U-shape directly below them, which I thought resembled a horseshoe. The approximate date given for the stone was 500 CE. I crouched to get a closer look at the stone, which brought me level with its base. From that position, I noticed a series of marks in the rock. At first, I took them for the scrapes and scars left by whatever tools had been used to extricate the slab. Then they came into focus, and I was looking at a row of characters. A rough square whose upper-right corner didn’t connect was followed by a triangle with rounded ends, which was succeeded by a pair of parallel lines slanting from right to left. Fourth was an approximate circle with a line through its center, a crescent like a frown fifth. Last was another square, only this one’s edges failed to connect in the lower-left corner, instead turning inside in a series of right angles to form a stylized maze.

It was as if I were looking at the figures through a tunnel. Everything except that patch of rock was dark. I could hear the steady click and sigh of my father’s respirator, the faster, high-pitched beep of the heart monitor, the intermittent beep of a machine keeping track of some other function. I could smell the antibacterial foam we applied to our hands every time we entered his room. I could feel the thin blanket we helped him pull up because the room was too cold. My heart fluttered in my chest. I went to stand, and fell onto my butt. I looked up, and still saw the symbols on the stone. I remembered the expression on my father’s face when he showed them to me, the frustration.

Gabriel’s hand on my shoulder brought me back to myself. “What happened?” he said. “Are you okay?”

“Lost my balance,” I said, pushing to my feet. “I squatted down to get a better look at the exhibit, and I fell right over. I’m fine.”

“So you wanted to see this, eh?” Gabriel gestured at the stone. “Let me guess: Dad told you his Corpsemouth story, didn’t he? Including the part about the mysterious graveyard whose sacred stones were removed. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“You know he made up all of that.”

“Not this.” I nodded at the display case.

“No, but it’s only a piece of rock with a couple of circles on it. There’s nothing magical about it.”

I was surprised by his bluntness. “I don’t know,” I said, “it’s kind of cool. We don’t have anything like this in New York.”

He shrugged.

“What about the figures on the end, there?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“These ones,” I said, pointing to the half-dozen characters on the stone’s base.

He bent to inspect them. “Looks like someone was playing with their penknife. What’s the display say about them?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s your answer, then.”

I was tempted to tell Gabriel about the last time I’d seen these same figures, but saying that my late father had written them on a piece of paper for me after emerging from surgery during which his heart had been stopped sounded too lurid, too melodramatic. Instead, I said, “I suppose you’re right. Why don’t we go see what the ladies have been up to?”

XIII

On the way to our meeting spot on Sauchiehall Street, though, past shop windows full of high-end clothes, shoes, and liquor, I asked my cousin if he truly believed his father had invented the story of Corpsemouth. “Not completely,” he said. “Dad reads all kinds of books; I’m sure he’s run across something like his monster in one of them. The king that’s in the story, Riderch, he was real, and had his castle at Dumbarton Rock.”

“But no Merlin,” I said.

“Actually, there is a story about Merlin showing up there,” Gabriel said. “What is it they say? If you’re going to tell a lie, make sure to fit as much of the truth into it as you can manage.”

“It’s not exactly a lie,” I said, “it’s a story.”

Gabriel didn’t answer.

XIV

For the rest of our excursion, which ended with dinner at Glasgow’s Hard Rock Café, and for the return drive to Greenock, which took us past Dumbarton Rock, those symbols floated near the surface of my thoughts. As far as I could remember, my father hadn’t taken us to visit the West End Museum during any of our family trips to Scotland. Nor, as far as I knew, had he gone to the place on his own; although this was difficult to the point of impossible to be certain of. He’d never mentioned it, and he’d had no trouble telling us about his visit to the Louvre, while he’d been in Paris on one of his business trips. I asked my mother about it during our dinner at the Hard Rock, delivering my question at the end of a short appreciation of the museum. “There was a lot of fascinating stuff in it,” I said. “Did you and Dad ever go there?”

A year past his death, Mom’s eyes could still shine with tears, her cheeks blanch, at the mention of my father, of their life together. She reached for her napkin, dabbed the corners of her eyes. “No,” she said, returning the napkin to the table. “I think I went on a school trip there—I don’t remember how old I was. Just a girl.”

“What about Dad?” I said. “Did his school visit the museum, too?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “They probably did, but he never mentioned it to me.”

“Oh,” I said. “I was wondering. Because, you know, you guys took us to a lot of museums when we were young.” Which was true.

“That’s what happens when you’re traveling with children,” she said. “No, in our younger days—BC, we used to say, Before Children—Dad and I went on picnics, or out dancing.”

So perhaps my father had been to the museum as a boy, and perhaps on that occasion he had seen the weird symbols carved on the base of the rock. And perhaps his brain had tossed up that memory as his anesthesia wore off. The last perhaps, however, seemed one too many. Yes, the mind was a complex, subtle organ, and especially after a dramatic experience, who could predict its every last response? Yet this felt more like special pleading to me than admitting that something strange had happened to my father, and whatever its parameters, it had left him with a message for me written in characters I couldn’t read.

Back in Greenock, we dropped Mom, Mackenzie, and Leslie off at Stewart and Betty’s. Gabriel and I drove back to his house, in order, he said, for him to initiate his American cousin into the mysteries of the single malt. He and Leslie lived on a steep street that gave a view of the Clyde. The houses along it sat on a succession of terraces, like enormous stairs descending the hillside. He parked in a short gravel driveway, and led me first into his and Leslie’s house, to deposit her day’s purchases on the living room couch, then out a pair of French doors, into the back garden. A brick path took us through rows of flowering bushes to a wooden hut whose door was flanked on the right by a large window. A hand-painted sign over the door read gabe’s horn; under the name, the artist had drawn a simplified trumpet from whose mouth alcohol poured. My cousin opened the door, flicked a light switch within, and ushered me into the building.

To the right, a short bar stood in front of a shelf lined with bottles of Scotch, with some better varieties of vodka and bourbon to either side of them. Behind the bottles, a mirror the length of the bar doubled the size of the room. To the left, a quartet of chairs surrounded a round table. Beyond the table, a chrome jukebox stood against the wall. Posters and pennants of the local soccer team, the Greenock Morton, decorated the walls, with framed photographs of Gabriel and Leslie in assorted vacation settings among them. Gabriel made for the bar, which he slipped behind to survey his selection of whisky.

There were a couple of tall stools in front of the bar. I settled onto one of them and said, “This is great.”

Gabriel glanced over his shoulder at me. “Do you think so? It’s just something Leslie and me put together in our spare time.”

“It’s fantastic,” I said.

“We like to come out here after a day at work, or if we’re having friends over.”

“It reminds me of a place my dad took me to,” I said. “There was a guy who was a friend of his—through work, but he was from Scotland, too. One night, Dad had to go over to his house—to pick up something for work, I think—and he brought me along with him. I was thirteen or fourteen. This man led us down to his basement, which he had set up as a bar—though not as nice as this one. He passed my dad a glass of something—I don’t know what it was, but Dad told me afterwards that our host had not been stingy with his booze. I had a ginger ale, which he gave to me out of one of those specialized dispensers you see in real bars, with the hose and all the different buttons on top of it. I was thoroughly impressed. The guy had been in the RAF during the war—he had a couple of big pictures of planes on the wall. The three of us sat around talking about that for an hour. I felt so grown up, you know?”

“Aye.” Gabriel nodded. He had picked three bottles and set them on the bar. “I have some ginger ale in the refrigerator, but I think it’s time for something a wee bit more mature.” From under the bar, he produced a pair of whisky glasses, along with a small pitcher of water. He opened one of the bottles and tipped respectable amounts of its amber contents into both glasses. To each he added a literal drop of water. I picked up the one closest to me, and raised it to my nose. The odor of its contents, sharp, threaded with honey, was the smell of I couldn’t count how many family parties. It was me playing waiter to my father’s bartender, gathering drink orders from whichever guests were there for the latest First Communion, or Confirmation, or Graduation, and conveying them to Dad, who had opened the liquor cabinet in the kitchen and stood ready to dispense its contents. It was me returning to those guests with one or two or three glasses in my hands, delivering them to their recipients, and hurrying back to the kitchen for the next ones. It was me carrying to a particular friend a liquor my father had secured specifically for them, making sure to let them know Dad had said this was something special for them.

“Cheers,” Gabriel said, lifting his glass to me.

“Cheers,” I said, repeating the gesture to him.

The whisky flared on my tongue, and flamed all the way down my throat to my stomach, where it detonated in a burst of heat. Eyes watering, I coughed, and set the half-empty glass on the bar.

“You said you’re not much of a Scotch drinker,” Gabriel said.

“Not much as in never,” I said. “Which is strange, considering it was the drink of choice at family get-togethers.”

“Try sipping it,” Gabriel said. “You want to be able to savor a good single malt.”

“Okay.” I took a more measured drink, and tasted honey mixed with something woody, almost bitter. I described it to Gabriel. “That’s the peat,” he said. I nodded, trying more. The flavor was not what I was used to: it filled the mouth, asserting itself as did none of the mixed drinks I’d previously had. I’d never been much of any kind of drinker, and I felt the liquor’s potency before I was finished with the glass. My cousin’s bar and its contents softened, their edges slightly less defined. Something inside me loosened. I said, “All right. What’s wrong with your dad’s monster story?”

Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “You mean Corpsemouth?”

“Yes,” I said, “that. In the museum, I had the impression you were less than enchanted with it.”

“Ach, it’s fine,” he said. “Dad’s always been a great one for the stories.”

“Mine, too,” I said.

“That story—the Corpsemouth one—you know what it’s really about, don’t you?”

“A giant monster?”

“It’s death,” Gabriel said. “It’s a way of picturing death, of representing the way death feels to us.”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s like—there’s a line in one of Stephen King’s books—I think it’s Salem’s Lot—this kid is asked if he knows what death is, and he says yeah, it’s when the monsters get you.”

“Aye,” Gabriel said, “that’s what I’m trying to say.”

The second Scotch my cousin served tasted less of honey and more of smoke, and something peppery. The knot within me that had started to loosen slid away from itself. Gabriel leaned across the bar and said, “So. How’re you finding it, being here?”

The row of strange symbols flickered behind my eyes. “It’s different than I was expecting,” I said.

“It’s bound to be.”

“Yeah. It’s funny. I thought that coming here would let me feel more in touch with my dad. Granted, it’s only been a few days, but so far....”

“You don’t.”

“I don’t.”

“How could you? You didn’t know him here. You knew him in America. It’s okay.”

“Maybe you’re right. If that’s the case, then what am I doing here?”

“You’re with family.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t have much of that when I was growing up, you know? It was just the six of us. It’s kind of nice.”

The third and final Scotch Gabriel poured was thinner, the peat combining with a briny flavor to give the liquor an astringent taste so blunt it was oddly appealing. “Thank you,” I said to my cousin, speaking with the deliberation of someone whose tongue was heavy with alcohol. “I appreciate you sharing your expertise with me.”

“I’m hardly an expert,” Gabriel said.

“Regardless. You know what’s funny?”

“What?”

“I can picture my dad enjoying the whole Corpsemouth story. It reminds me of movies we watched when I was a kid, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans, Dragonslayer—these stories about heroes fighting enormous monsters.”

“I suppose,” he said.

“Well, you two appear to be having a merry time,” Leslie said. She was standing in the open doorway to the bar.

“We were talking about monsters,” I said.

“I’m sure you were,” she said. “Stewart gave me a lift home. I’m not rushing you out, but he says if you want, he can run you back to your Gran’s.”

“That is probably a good idea,” I said. “I’m fairly confident I’ve reached my limit for alcohol. Honestly, I think I passed it a while ago.”

I thanked Gabriel for his generosity with his spirits, and him and Leslie for having squired my mother, sister, and me around Glasgow, today. “We’ve got to have you back for another tasting before you leave,” Gabriel said.

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” I said.

XVI

Outside, night had fallen, the last of the gloaming retreated to the horizon. Stewart was waiting in his Micra at the end of the driveway. I lowered myself into the front passenger seat. He’d been listening to a news program on the radio; as I buckled my seatbelt, he turned it off. “And how was your education?” he said.

“Great,” I said. “Gabriel introduced me to some quality stuff.”

“Aye, he’s a great one for the single malt, our Gabriel.” He released the parking brake and reversed into the street. “Are you up for a wee jaunt?”

“Sure.”

“Good man.” He shifted into first and started downhill.

“Where are we headed?” I said.

“The river.”

“Oh.”

The whisky I’d consumed made the steep road seem almost vertical, the Clyde below rather than ahead of us. Retaining walls raced toward us and swerved right and left. The river grew larger in fits and starts, as if it were a series of slides being snapped into view. The car’s engine whined and growled as Stewart worked back and forth among the gears. If not calmer, I was at least less terrified than I would have been without the Scotch insulating me.

At the foot of the hill, the street leveled and ran straight to the river. One hand on the steering wheel, Stewart depressed the car’s lighter and fished a cigarette from the packet in his shirt pocket. Rows of squat apartment houses passed on either side. Stewart lit his cigarette and drew on it till the tip flared. Exhaling a cloud of smoke, he said, “Did you see that stone in the museum?”

“I did,” I said.

“Not much to look at, is it?”

“I don’t know. When you think about what it represents—how old it is and everything…I’m glad they have it at the museum, but it’s kind of a shame they couldn’t leave it where it was.”

“Aye.”

“The exhibit said no one’s sure exactly what the symbols on it mean. Maybe images of the sun.”

“They’re for binding,” Stewart said.

“Binding?”

“Aye, for keeping a spirit or a creature in one place. You bind them by the sun and the moon. That’s why there’s two sets of circles on the stone. It’s a very old rite.”

“What was bound there?”

Stewart shot me a sidelong glance. “I told you and your sister yesterday.”

“Corpsemouth? For real?”

He nodded.

“I thought that was....”

“A story?”

“Yeah. No offense.”

“There was something called up at Dumbarton Rock when Riderch was king. It was older than ancient, and it was terrible. Maybe it was summoned to help the King against his enemies. Maybe it was summoned to fight Riderch. Maybe someone was playing around and opened a door that should’ve been left shut. It took a powerful man to send the thing back where it belonged, and lock the gate after it. That stone was part of the locking mechanism.”

“Wait. You’re serious.”

“I am.”

“But....”

“That’s impossible? Ridiculous? Insane?”

“I’m sorry, but yeah.”

“It’s all right. I wouldn’t expect you to believe it, even with a few drams in you.”

We had crossed the major east-west highway through town and come to a short road, which passed between an inlet of the river on the left, and a couple of apartment buildings on the right. Stewart drove to the end of the road, where a chain link fence sectioned off a stretch of pavement that went another twenty yards to the river. He parked the car and exited it. I followed. This close to the water, the air was cool bordering on cold. While Stewart popped the trunk, I surveyed the fence, which continued to the right, guarding the edge of a much larger paved area, which was filled with large metal shipping containers, some of them sitting on their own, others stacked two and three high. In the near distance, a trio of cranes faced the Clyde, weird sentinels looking out over the dark water. Tall sodium lights gave the scene an orange hue that made it appear slightly unreal.

Behind me, Stewart shut the trunk. He was carrying a pair of metal poles, each about a yard long, one end wrapped in duct tape. “Here,” he said, handing one to me.

I took it. The pole was hollow, but heavy. “What’s this?”

“Protection.”

“From what?”

“Come this way.” He set out to the right. I hurried after. Together, we walked the fence for a good hundred yards, until we came to a wire door set in it. The entrance was locked, but Stewart withdrew a ring of keys from his trousers, which he thumbed through until he arrived at one that slid into the lock and levered it open. The door’s hinges shrieked as he pushed it in. I cringed, expecting the angry shout of a security officer. None came. Stewart stepped through. I pushed the door closed behind us, to minimize suspicion.

Keeping to the shelter of the containers, Stewart and I made our way across the paved expanse, he moving quietly, gracefully, I with the exaggerated care of someone contending with too much alcohol. We headed steadily in the direction of the river. A light mist floated around us, waist-high. This close, the cranes were gigantic, monumental. Stewart stopped, raised his hand. “Do you hear that?” he said quietly.

“What?”

“Listen.”

Ahead and to our left, on the other side of a pair of stacked containers, something scraped over the pavement. Holding the metal pole in both hands, the tip low, as if it were a sword, Stewart crossed to the metal boxes. I kept a few steps behind, in a half-crouch. He moved right, to one end of the containers. The sound continued in alternating rhythm, a short scrape followed by a longer one. Before continuing to the other side of the boxes, Stewart stopped and ducked his head around for a look at whoever was there. He jerked back. Closing his eyes, he inhaled, then blew out. He murmured something I couldn’t hear, raising and lowering the end of the pole while he did. As the light played up and down the metal, I saw writing on it: the symbols I had seen in the Glasgow museum, on a piece of paper in my father’s hospital room. Heart lurching, I straightened. I tilted the pole I was holding back and forth, and sure enough, there were the same half-dozen characters cut into it. In an instant, I was sober, the effects of Gabriel’s drinks swept away by the sensation of standing within the current of something immense and strange.

“Right,” Stewart said. “There’s something coming up to the end of this box. When it reaches us, I’ll step out and see to it. You shouldn’t need to do anything. This one isn’t big. If it gets past me, though, you’ll have to slow it down. Go for its legs, but mind its hands. Here we go.”

The scraping was right next to us. Stewart moved out into the alley formed by our containers and one beyond them. As he did, he pivoted, slashing the pole from right to left at whatever was still hidden from me by the edge of the container. There was a heavy crunch, a sharp clang, and the pole flew out of Stewart’s hands, ringing on the pavement to his right. A wooden club swung at him from his left. He ducked, but it caught him high on the shoulder with sufficient force to knock him from his feet. He landed hard.

I took a deep breath and stepped out from the container, in front of Stewart’s opponent. I couldn’t bring myself to strike someone I hadn’t seen, but I held the pole up in what I hoped was a menacing fashion. I intended to shout, “That’s far enough!” What I saw, however, stilled the voice in my throat.

It was as big as a large man. At first, I thought it was a man, dressed in a bizarre costume. Much of it was mud, thick, dripping with water. Its surface was clotted with junk, crushed beer cans, shards of broken glass, saturated cardboard and newspaper, pieces of plastic, metal, wood. Here and there, rocks studded with barnacles tumored its skin. In other spots, clumps of mussels clustered black and shining. Seaweed draped its shoulders, to either side of a head fashioned from the broken skull of a cow or horse. The lower jaw was missing, the mouth a hole gaping in the muddy throat. The thing advanced, the scraping I’d heard the debris in its flesh rasping the pavement. I retreated. The club with which it had struck Stewart was in fact its right arm, a single piece of driftwood. Its left arm was a mannequin’s, wound in rusted wire and strands of seaweed.

This was not a man in a suit—which was impossible, and hurt to think. It swept the wooden arm at me. I leapt back, just out of reach. Stewart was on his hands and knees, grabbing for his weapon. I jabbed at the thing, trying to keep its attention. The wooden arm held straight, like a spear, it lunged at me. I sidestepped, swinging my improvised sword against the arm. With a flat clank, arm and pole rebounded from one another. The creature turned, whipping the wooden arm back at me. I went to duck, slipped, and fell. The arm struck the container behind me with a gong. This close, the smell of the thing, a stink of sodden flesh and vegetation, made my eyes water. Swiveling on my butt, I chopped its right leg with the pole, hammering the approximate location of its knee. The leg buckled inward, tipping the creature toward me. I scrambled away from it. Attempting to maintain its balance, it propped itself on its wooden arm, but Stewart hit its other leg from behind with a blow that sent the creature crashing on its back. Before it could recover, he brought the pole down on its head like an executioner swinging his axe. The animal skull rattled across the pavement. The rest of the thing, however, continued to move, doing its best to raise itself on its broken legs, dropping mud and bits of glass, pebbles, on the ground. My stomach churned at the sight. Ignoring the body, Stewart strode to the skull. He struck it twice with the pole, cracking it into several large fragments, which he stomped underfoot until they were unrecognizable. As if it were an engine running down, the body gradually ceased its motion.

Stewart dropped the pole and crossed to the creature’s remains. Careful of its rusted wire sleeve, he caught the mannequin arm at the elbow. “You take the other side,” he said.

Leaving my weapon, I did as he instructed. The wood was slimy, as if it had sat underwater for a while.

“Into the river,” he said, nodding toward the end of the alleyway.

Together, we hauled the heavy form to where the pavement ended at a concrete ledge. Ten feet below, the Clyde lapped at the wall. “On three,” Stewart said. “One, two, three!” I threw so hard I almost overbalanced myself into the water along with the creature’s body. Stewart caught my arm. “Steady, lad.” What was left of the thing struck the water with a considerable splash. It sunk quickly, leaving clouds of mud in its wake.

“What about the rest—the skull?” I said.

Stewart shook his head. “Leave it there. It’s better to keep it separate from the rest.”

Adrenaline lit my nerves, rendering everything around me painfully sharp. “I cannot believe I am standing here having this conversation with you,” I said. It was the truth. Had Stewart said to me, “You’re not. This is a dream,” I would have had little trouble accepting his words.

Instead, he shrugged, turned, and started in the direction of the gate we’d entered.

I joined him. “What was that?” I said.

“Corpsemouth,” he said, stooping to retrieve his weapon.

“I thought he was supposed to be taller,” I said, picking up mine.

“In his proper form, he is,” Stewart said. “Fortunately for you and me, enough of the old binding remains to keep him from appearing that way. What he’s able to do is put together versions of himself, avatars, out of whatever’s lying around. We call them his fingers.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“A group of concerned citizens. We came together after the war. That was when Corpsemouth first made himself known, again, once the binding stone was removed. No one knew what they were doing. It had been too long since anything like this had happened. A couple of the founders were able to lay their hands on a few old books that gave hints of how to confront the monster, but a lot of it was learn as you go.”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Does Gabriel know about any of this? What about the rest of the family?”

“No, that isn’t how it’s done,” Stewart said.

“How is it done?”

“Why? Are you interested in being part of it?”

“No,” I said. “No, this was more than enough.”

Stewart smiled thinly.

“Was my father part of this?” I thought of those old issues of Man, Myth & Magic.

“No,” Stewart said. “Though I wondered a few times if he wasn’t aware of more than he let on.”

“Does this—tonight—does this kind of thing happen often?”

“More than I’d like.”

As we walked, the mist thickened around us, rendering the shipping containers, the cranes, faint, ghostly. It didn’t affect Stewart’s sense of direction. He continued forward.

“What about this?” I said, holding up the pole. “Not the pipe, I mean, the writing on it.”

“That depends on who you ask,” Stewart said. “There’s some who say that those are connected to old gods. Not as old as Corpsemouth, but not too far off. When they were young and strong, he wasn’t of much concern to them. As they grew older, though, and saw themselves being supplanted by newer powers, their strength ebbed and his hungry mouth became a worry. They thought that if they gave up their divinity, the monster wouldn’t want them. So they put their godhood into these symbols, and ever since, anyone who uses them has been able to draw on their power.”

“Did it work? Did they escape?”

“No one knows,” Stewart said. “I doubt it. Corpsemouth eats gods, but he’s happy to consume whatever he can get his claws on.”

Overhead, a lamp lit the mist orange. Somewhere in the distance, I heard voices, faint, indistinct.

“That’s one explanation,” I said. “What’s the other?”

“You’re sure you don’t want to be part of this?”

“Is that why you brought me with you?”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Nor you mine,” I said.

“Some folk say the symbols come from a fabulous city, one on the shore of a black ocean, where they were the inhabitants’ most closely guarded treasure.”

“That’s interesting,” I said, “but it’s not the question I meant.”

“I know,” Stewart said.

Through the mist, the gate swam into view. Stewart pushed it open and walked out. I went to follow, but before I could, a shout drew my attention to the left. No more than twenty yards away, through a clearing in the mist, a white van was parked. At the sight of it, my heart knocked. I knew this vehicle, had watched it drive through my dreams. For this to be the same van was impossible, of course, but on a night such as this one had proved to be, it could be none other. I was suddenly sick with dread and grief. To walk to the van was terrifying, but to remain in place, let alone, to leave, was worse. Legs shaking madly, I stepped toward it. Stewart said something, but whatever it was didn’t register.

The mist was full of yells and calls whose locations I couldn’t pinpoint. Was one of those voices my father’s? I wasn’t sure. The mist muffled the sounds, as if I were hearing them from the other side of a thick wall. I was almost at the van. Its interior was dark. Was it empty? Half-expecting my hand to pass through it, I reached for the handle to the driver’s door. It was solid to the touch, and when I pulled, it clicked and the door opened. There was no one behind the wheel. Kneeling on the seat, I leaned into the van.

It was empty. There was no evidence of its passengers left behind; although, for a second, two, I caught the faintest odor of dried sweat and laundry detergent, the scent I’d breathed whenever I’d rested my head against my father’s chest at the end of the day, when I wished him good night. Then it was gone.

I exited the van, closing the door. Stewart was standing behind me. “Is…,” I started, and paused, unable to utter the remainder of the question.

“Aye,” Stewart said.

“Where is he?”

He tipped his head toward where the mist was thick. “Out there.”

“So if I go there, I’ll find him?”

“You might,” he said, “or you might not. You could spend an hour searching this lot, or you could wander off someplace else, and be lost.”

Without warning, I was crying, tears streaming down my cheeks. I felt every bit as bad as I had the night my father had died, when it seemed a spear had been driven straight through my chest, as if his death were a pin that had fixed me forever in place. To see him one more time, to speak to him, to tell him I loved him and was sorry I hadn’t been a better son, was a prospect almost too much to bear. To fail, though, to walk away and not return, was not something I could do to my mother and sister. I turned from the van and headed for the gate.

The shouts and calls persisted. “What’s happening?” I said to Stewart. “What are they doing?”

“The same thing we were.”

“Corpsemouth?”

“It’s not just our world he wants to break into. There are folk on the other side who do their best to keep him out of there, too.”

“Can he hurt them?”

“Oh aye, he eats the dead same as anything else.” Seeing the expression on my face, he added, “But your dad was always a capable fellow. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

XVII

After the night’s events, I did not anticipate sleeping. Almost the instant I settled onto my bed, though, my arms and legs grew heavy, my eyelids struggled to stay open, and I slid into unconsciousness. For an indeterminate time, I drifted in a blank, not unpleasant place. Slowly, a long, black cord came into view. It corkscrewed around and around, the way the cord on our old telephone had. It faded, and was replaced by the interior of the white van.

This time, it was full of the handful of men I’d seen in it a few days ago. My father was among them. All of the passengers looked worse for wear, their shirts and pants torn and dirty, their arms and cheeks cut and bruised. Dad was leaning forward, a black telephone receiver held to his ear. I couldn’t hear every word he was saying, but I understood enough to know that he was saying he was okay.

With a start, I realized he was speaking to me. For the dream’s brief duration, he continued to reassure me, while I said words he could not hear. The connection, it seemed, was one way. Then the call was finished, and I was awake—though not before a last glimpse of the white van, speeding along through high, brick walls black with age, carrying my father to the next stop on his long, strange death.

For Fiona