When survival’s at stake, the mind can deceive. Accept what is real. Recognize the lies. Cast them aside.
—PA ABNER
A pleasant warmth bathed Keech’s skin. He took a deep breath, and the familiar scents of pine needles, honeysuckle, and wild onions filled his lungs. He opened his eyes to find he was lying on a quiet riverbank drenched in sunlight. The soil beneath him was soft and dark. Confused, Keech sat up and looked around. He recognized the place. The river flowing before him had long been a beloved haunt for him and Sam.
He was sitting on the bank of the Third Fork River.
“What in blazes?” he muttered.
The obvious answer was that touching the Char Stone had returned him home to Missouri. Except, Keech couldn’t bring himself to believe such a hopeful notion.
This vision had to have meaning. Perhaps a clue that could help him defeat the Reverend Rose. Determined to keep his eyes open, Keech examined the world around him. High-pitched birdsong trilled in the nearby forest. Above, the sky was blue, and a cool breeze brushed at his hair. The steady tumble of the river’s lazy run reminded Keech of the morning he and Sam played Grab the Musket.
Somewhere along the riverbank, he heard a man’s voice singing a low tune.
The sound was haunting, perhaps even dangerous. Straining to better hear the song, Keech caught a flavor of weary melancholy that filled him with a curiosity he couldn’t fight. He walked downstream, heading toward the voice. His path wound back and forth, following the movement of the Third Fork River.
“Not real,” Keech told himself. “It’s a vision. A dream.” Yet the world around him felt authentic. He was on the river. He was back home.
Pushing through branches along the bank, Keech pressed on toward the music. The fellow ahead had an agreeable singing voice, baritone and wistful. His anthem rolled over the river like an empty boat.
“How happy the soldier who lives on his pay,
And spends half a crown on six pence a day;
He fears neither justices, warrants, nor bums,
But pays all his debts with a roll of the drums…”
Keech stepped up his pace, slogging through ankle-high mud to reach the singer. Rounding a small curve in the river, he raked back a handful of branches and caught a glimpse of the man’s back. The fellow was hunched over on the bank, grasping his knees as he faced the sun-kissed water. He wore a long black overcoat and black boots, and his greasy black hair was drawn tightly into a ponytail.
“With a row de dow,
Row de dow, Row de dow,
And he pays all his debts with a roll of his drums.”
Keech staggered backward, losing his bowler hat in the limbs of a dogwood. “Bad Whiskey!” he cried.
Halting his song, the one-eyed desperado glanced over his shoulder. His one good eye squinted at Keech as if confused. “No one here,” Bad Whiskey muttered. “Ain’t no one here.” He turned back to the river and resumed his phantom tune, rocking in the mud as he sang.
A mix of determination and anger erupted in Keech. He pushed forward. “What are you doing here, Bad? Rose’s crows killed you dead in Bone Ridge.”
The outlaw paused his song again. “I live here, little pilgrim. Have for many years.” With a chortle, Bad Whiskey returned to his melody. He appeared to stare into the depths of the river at some kind of sparkling ring, a circle shining up from the bottom like a lost penny catching a sunray.
“What is that?” Keech asked.
“Don’t know,” mumbled Bad Whiskey. “It appeared not too long ago. Somethin’ happened to the Stone, I reckon. I wonder what it is but don’t dare go in the water. Souls get lost in the water.”
Peeling his gaze away from the disk of light, Keech said, “This place ain’t real, and you’re not here.” To prove it to himself, he reached out and touched the outlaw’s shoulder.
Bad Whiskey swung around and seized Keech’s wrist—an assault that felt real enough. Keech tried to pull back, but the desperado’s grip was merciless.
“Yer wrong,” Bad Whiskey snarled. “It’s as real as can be, pilgrim. Two kinds of folk live here. The dead who rise, and the ones who touch the Stone. Look for yerself.” The outlaw pointed across the Third Fork, where a field stretched toward the forested hills.
Keech knew the pasture well. Pa Abner had often taken the orphans there during autumn days to hunt quail. Only now the meadow stirred with a multitude of strange people—hundreds, maybe thousands of men and women stumbling about in confounded circles, like wanderers stranded in the wilderness.
A passage from Doyle’s journal, something the Reverend Rose himself had said to the Enforcers, struck Keech’s memory. The most essential portion of our being is the soul, for the essence of a soul fuels the energies of both the world we see and the one we cannot. “The immaterial realm,” Keech murmured. “A place where souls live … like smoke captured behind glass.” He stepped closer to the river’s edge to fetch a better look at the wandering souls.
Among the rabble was the one-legged bandit, Tommy Claymore. He looked to be chattering at a gopher hole in the ground. Nearby stood another familiar man, a leather-coated fellow named Rance, and behind him both the skeletal outlaw, Scurvy, and the monstrous brute with the gold nose ring, Bull.
He turned back to Bad Whiskey. “Those are your men!”
The desperado rattled his head. “Not no more, pilgrim. Not in here.”
All around the meadow, Keech spotted the faces of other outlaws who had once plagued the Lost Causes. He spotted a timid fellow named Cooper whom Pa Abner had shot on the front porch of the Home, as well as several goons Keech had seen in the town of Wisdom, killers raised by Ignatio and under the command of Big Ben Loving.
All of them had one thing in common.
“They were thralls,” Keech said to Bad Whiskey. “Like you.”
“Once upon a time, yes,” the outlaw muttered. “We all got raised from the muck and the blood. Now we’re jus’ dead souls tucked away in the Stone.”
Feeling fear creep into his heart again, Keech turned away from the river and marched up the muddy bank. His ears picked up a new sound—mirthful, child-like giggles off to the south. Keech left Bad Whiskey to swaying in the mud and singing. He hurried off through the woods, following the distant laughter.
A short time later, he peeled back a final branch and saw it.
The Home for Lost Causes.
The farmhouse stood on Pa Abner’s property as it had for most of Keech’s life—a sturdy rampart against the encroaching wilderness. The gabled rooftop pointed with fortitude up to the blue sky, and the windows glinted in the sun like sets of eyes winking deep secrets. The youthful giggles came from inside the house. Keech hurried across the front yard and past the rickety shakepole fence.
He tossed open the front door, feeling a fine breeze rustle over the threshold. “Granny! Everyone! I’m home!” he shouted. “I made it back!”
He couldn’t decide if he believed his own words or not, but the truth no longer mattered, because he was standing in his long-lost home, touching Pa Abner’s handmade furniture and inhaling the wonderful smells of pine and cedar and freshly baked bread.
Crying out for joy, Keech dashed to the kitchen, expecting to find Granny Nell by the cast-iron stove. Only, the kitchen was empty.
“Granny?”
There were place settings on the dining table—one for each orphan—but no one came in to join him.
The child-like laughter came again, this time rolling down the stairwell. Spinning on one bootheel, Keech scurried toward the stairs and bounded up the steps two at a time. “Patrick, I hear you!” he yelled.
Except that when Keech reached the bedroom that Patrick shared with Little Eugena, he found no laughing children inside. No one hiding under the bed, no one concealing themselves behind Granny’s curtains.
Keech was alone. Yet the haunting laughter continued.
Time slipped from his grasp like a handful of sand. The sunlight in the windows faded to a dark evening. Frightened, Keech sank to his knees at the foot of the stairs and clutched the banister. “When the mind deceives, recognize the lies,” he muttered.
Then from outside there came a pounding noise—the familiar thwack of a hammer striking wood. Keech couldn’t hear the laughter anymore, only the hammering, the persistent music of carpentry.
“Pa Abner!”
Keech hurried out the back door and bolted to the woodshed, skidding to a stop when he saw a bearded, heavyset man with a shiny bald head. Pa hunched over his trusty worktable. He was tinkering with a wooden box, a container small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. Pa was securing a tiny lid with a metal latch.
“Pa, it’s me! I’ve made it home!”
Pa Abner didn’t speak at first. Only after he finished securing the lid did he turn around. “Hello, my boy,” Pa said, his voice gentle and unsurprised, as if he might have been expecting Keech.
Unable to hold back, Keech hugged the big man with all his might. He tried to speak his fears, his hopes, his anger, but all that seemed to come out of his mouth was a garble of choked noises.
Pa Abner patted his back. “There, there, Keech. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Keech stepped back. “Pa, what is this place? And why are you here?”
“It is a cursed place, my boy, a snare for the deepest parts of our being. When Bad Whiskey used the Prime to raise me as a thrall, the Char Stone captured a part of me, my soul, and trapped it here.”
Keech glanced around in fascination, seeing only his home, the place where he’d been raised after his parents died. To think it was all the ruse of a cursed relic was mind-boggling. “Is there a way to escape?”
Pa Abner didn’t answer; he simply sat on his stool and fiddled with the little box he’d built. He chewed at the whiskers around his lips, then finally looked up. “Truth be told, I don’t know how to get out. There may be no way. When I first came, I searched everywhere, but I finally had to give up.” He then held out his wooden box to Keech. “Instead of trying to leave, I made this.”
Keech took the box and scrutinized it. “What is this thing?”
“It’s something I’ve dreamed about, night and day. I don’t rightly understand it, but I believe it’s a cage.”
Keech blinked. “It could barely hold a penny!”
Pa Abner scratched at the stubble on his neck, then turned away, distracted, as if he’d heard something in the distance. “Time for supper. You best be on your way.” He waved his hand, shooing Keech off.
Keech wanted to feel anger toward Pa’s sudden dismissal, but instead he felt only a burdensome grief, a profound sorrow for all the happiness lost to the Reverend’s malice. Wiping at fresh tears, he said to Pa, “I want you to know something. I saw what happened to my folks, and I don’t blame you. You’re a good man, Pa, and after Ignatio’s curse took them, I know you did your best. So I just want to say…” Keech hesitated, searching for the words he should have said months ago in Bone Ridge Cemetery, when Pa Abner was slipping away. “Thank you for saving me. For the life you gave me, and for teaching me to stand tall.”
Smiling, Pa Abner kissed his dusty palm and touched it to Keech’s forehead. “My boy, you knew how to stand tall well before I came along. You are the son of Bill and Erin Blackwood, and you’ve made them proud from the first day you drew breath. Now”—Pa Abner glanced up at the sky, then back to Keech—“it’s time for you to run along.” And he pointed to the little box in Keech’s hand.
Before stepping away, Keech said, “One last thing. They’re alive, Pa. The entire family. Granny Nell and Patrick and Little Eugena and Robby. Sam told me. He’s waiting on the other side of the Stone. You protected them all.”
Upon hearing the news, Pa’s eyes filled with a light that Keech had never seen on the man’s face before. He said nothing, but Keech understood that Pa’s heart was too full to let the response come.
A single word finally fell from the man’s lips: “Go.”
With Pa’s little box in hand, Keech turned and realized he was no longer standing in the shed, but was back in the woods. He now stood in a thicket of red buckeye trees, and the orphanage was no longer in sight. A strange sound touched Keech’s ears. A nervous voice, muttering. He walked toward the noise, pushing back the buckeye branches.
A tall figure in a fancy suit stood alone inside a circle of fieldstones. He held a tattered scroll of papyrus in his hands and was poring over the writings. Words spilled from his mouth in a running stream of gibberish.
Keech stepped into the circle. As his boots scraped over the stones, the man wheeled about, his eyes wide with surprise.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” he snapped.
“I’m Keech. I think I’m lost.”
“We’re all lost.” The figure waved his hands at the buckeye trees around them. “We are in the wilderness of nowhere, and we cannot go forth or back.” The fellow rubbed his swollen eyes. “How are we supposed to learn the secrets of the scroll if we can’t study them in proper peace?” He jabbed a finger at the papyrus. “How can I ever decipher the codes under these conditions?”
The man’s left hand was missing three fingers. He was gaunt, his cheeks sunken and flat, but he was still quite handsome. His brown hair was raked back and long so that it touched his shoulders. Like Bad Whiskey’s, his garments were black from head to toe, except for a white collar around his neck. A priest’s collar.
“You’re the Reverend!” Keech said.
The slender fellow blinked at him. “I don’t recognize you, boy. How have you heard of me?”
Keech almost answered, but instead he asked, “What are you doing with the scroll?”
The Reverend grinned—a smile full of malice and cruelty. “I am learning the secrets of Enoch, the path to immortality. But I can’t seem to see the words correctly.” He squinted at the papyrus. “They dance away from me! The meaning refuses to stand still. If I can just read the words, I can get back in.”
“Back in where?”
“My body, of course! I can finish the ritual. I can live forever.”
Fresh anger burned through Keech’s veins. “Don’t you realize? The ritual is finished, Rose. You’ve awoken in the Palace. You’re fighting to get free.”
The Reverend laughed. “Not I, foolish boy. The Char Stone pulled me out of my body, and something else entered from the other side. But once I decipher Enoch’s words, I’ll go back to claim the power that’s rightfully mine. I’ll be a god among men!”
Keech fisted his hands. “Even here, you’re insane.”
But the Reverend didn’t seem to hear the insult. His eyes had fallen on the wooden box in Keech’s hand. He tilted his head. “What do you have there?”
“My pa Abner made it for me.”
“Your pa.” The Reverend spoke the words as if they pained him, as if he suddenly remembered who Pa Abner was. “Give it to me.”
Keech flinched away. “Not a chance.”
“It must contain the secret, the answer to Enoch’s cipher! Isaiah figured it out!” Without warning, Rose lunged like a rattlesnake and crashed into Keech. The sudden attack surprised him and he stumbled backward, his boots slipping on the fieldstones. The tiny coffer tumbled out of his hand and landed at Rose’s feet. Keech reached for the box, but he was too slow.
Rose picked up the container and unlatched the top. Grinning madly, he opened the lid, reached a finger inside—
—and vanished.
The box dropped to the fieldstones.
Bewildered, Keech picked up the wooden case. The lid was shut, the hook latched. The vessel felt warm in his hand. He shook it, but it sounded empty. And yet Keech knew that Rose was trapped inside, caught within the box.
It’s something I’ve dreamed about, night and day. I don’t rightly understand it, but I believe it’s a cage.
Keech’s mind reeled as he realized the box’s true purpose. “To hold the Reverend’s soul,” he muttered.
Once again, the lonely dirge of singing touched Keech’s ears. With the box in his grasp, he turned and walked again toward the voice. A moment later, he pushed through more buckeye branches and found himself back on the muddy banks of the Third Fork River.
Squatting beside a feeble campfire, Bad Whiskey looked up. “Welcome back, little pilgrim. Come on over and we can sing a fine duet, right here on the bank.” Closing his one good eye, the desperado crooned his old tune:
“With a row de dow,
Row de dow, Row de dow,
And he pays all his debts with a roll of his drums…”
As Bad Whiskey sang, Keech walked to the river’s edge and peered again at the strange spark of light beneath the water’s surface. He glanced at the box in his hand, then back at the submerged light, and he promptly realized what he must do.
“Sorry, Bad, I got somewhere to be.” Keech took a broad step into the frigid waters of the Third Fork.
Bad Whiskey jumped to his feet. “Get back! There’s only death in there!”
“I’ve made a bundle of mistakes,” Keech replied, not looking back. “But if I’ve learned anything in my travels, Bad, I’ve learned that when a wretched outlaw tells you what to do, you do the opposite.”
Ignoring Bad Whiskey’s curses, he dived into the water.
For most of his life, Keech had played in the Third Fork and knew the river to be shallow. Yet the tributary was now a bottomless crater. Keech felt himself sinking into obscurity, and his stomach lurched. He searched for something to grasp, but the darkness reached in all directions. Even above him, the water seemed to take on endless depth, stretching upward for miles and miles. A past dream in which he was drowning under the ocean struck his memories, and Keech spun desperately in the cold.
A violent hand landed on his shoulder, clawing at his shirt.
Keech whirled around to see Bad Whiskey pulling at him, tugging him back toward the riverbank. The thrall’s eye glared madly at Keech in the murky waters. A flurry of air bubbles poured out of Keech’s mouth as he screamed. He kicked at the desperado, but Bad Whiskey refused to turn loose.
Suddenly, a human-shaped creature with emerald-green eyes swam up behind Bad Whiskey and seized the outlaw’s arms. Bad Whiskey bellowed with rage as the spectral figure of Saint Peter yanked him away.
Keech suddenly recalled how Coward had touched the shape-shifter with the Char Stone at the top of Skeleton Peak. Saint Peter had collapsed and faded into the ground. Now Keech knew his soul had been captured by the Stone.
Because he was underwater, Keech couldn’t offer proper thanks other than a nod, but Saint Peter saw the gesture and smiled. A curious but gentle voice murmured in Keech’s mind—Keep going, it said, you’re nearly there—and he realized he was hearing the Kelpie.
Kicking with all his might, Keech turned and stared down into the opaque waters.
A vibrant spark flashed through the darkness—the same glow Keech had seen from the riverbank. He swam toward it. Within seconds, he arrived at the bottom. Smooth pebbles littered the riverbed, and in the midst of Keech’s field of vision, the circle of light beamed like the world’s brightest lantern. He reached for it.
The moment his finger pierced the illumination, Keech tugged at the opening. There was no more breath in his lungs, but he slipped more fingers into the light and pulled.
The glowing disk widened.
With a howling, wind-like sound, the waters around him poured through the light. Keech tugged harder, and the light ripped open even farther, till the glowing space was the size of a barrelhead. The water continued to gush down into the hole, as if the cork had been removed from a washbasin, and Keech felt himself being pulled toward the opening.
Before he could slip through, Saint Peter swam past, his emerald hands still clutching a furious Bad Whiskey. Both figures plunged through the glowing hole and winked out of view.
No sooner had they vanished than others followed, coursing through the water and toward the glow like swarms of fireflies fluttering through the mouth of a jar. All the faces that glided past Keech belonged to thralls, the departed men and women whom Rose and his cursed ilk had raised over the years.
Then Pa Abner himself drifted past, a contented look on his face, and Keech understood.
He had pulled open a breach in the Stone, and the souls within were escaping.
Except for one.
The tiny lockbox Pa had given Keech remained in his hand.
Keech could no longer fight the persistent force of the water. He flowed into the glowing disk, following the deluge of souls, riding the fierce momentum as if he were swimming over a waterfall. He tumbled till energy and light and pure, unbridled joy surrounded his being. And he let himself go.