From the Journals of Joe Gardner, when he was twelve:
It wasn't just me, it was all of us. I could feel it. I don't know what it was. It touched me and seemed to read my mind and make what I was thinking come true, almost. I don't get it. But Hopfrog was part of it, and Melissa, too.
I think we slew a dragon.
Joe had some fight still in him. He had belief in the universe at his back, faith that the cosmos was good, that love survived even death. He found strength in these thoughts. With my family back, my boy, my daughter, my beautiful, wonderful wife with me again... They made a big funeral pyre with most of the bodies of the dead; they didn't want to take the risk that there was still a spark of the vampire in any of the corpses. Some of the other bodies were left where they were. There was time enough for the authorities to come down over the Malabar Hills and deal with what had happened.
Jenny was strong. Joe wasn't sure if he had expected that or not. Later, they would both deal with the horror and the grief. Virgil, in his hunt for the children, had found Jenny and the kids huddled together in the sacristy of the St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. There were others, hidden, too, in places where there were crosses and symbols and concrete expressions of man's beliefs. The Night Children attacked his mother's house, his mother fought bravely, Jenny said, but she was attacked before Jenny could help her. Jenny had gotten Aaron and Hillary out of the house and had made it the three blocks to the church. Jenny had no faith, no religion, but she instinctively knew to go someplace where others had beliefs and creeds. She told Joe she would've gone to a synagogue or a mosque, or even a tent revival, if any of them had been within the town limits, but St. Andrew's was the nearest incarnation of religion she could find. "I took them there because I didn't know where else to go," she said.
Joe didn't bury his mother, but left her remains in her bed, covered with his grandmother's quilt, as if she were just taking a nap and might awaken at any moment. He thought: She still lives in my dreams, so I have not lost her, only her body which had become ravaged with ill health and the markings of some alien being.
Virgil Cobb, who Joe recognized after all these years as a man who loved his mother deeply, stayed at the house with her.
"I'll be fine," he said, "I just don't want to leave her alone, even now. You go get some help, send some people over here to clean this place up. I'll make some tea, and wait."
"I know that you loved her," Joe told him, feeling his anger dissolve about the affair his mother had with this man. In its place, he felt kinship, as if both held the flame of her memory.
As he and his family left Anna Gardner's house, he thought he heard his old buddy Hop wishing them all well. There was something in his benediction that was like a soft touch on the shoulder, a nudge from a friend to continue to go up that road, to care for and protect the living, because somehow the dead would get along just fine.
The rain mixed with snow kept coming 'til noon.
They gassed up at Cally's ValCo Gas. It was less strange than Joe had thought it would be to steal fifteen bucks worth of premium unleaded.
He looked at the town, at Colony, and saw nothing but the markers of time in the form of stone and wood and steel. It was like viewing a corpse, a loved one who has died, and knowing that she is not there, not in that shell, that the one you loved had already moved on in her journey to some distant land. So, too, Colony had vacated its shell, and the ghost town that remained seemed as slight as a pile of leaves waiting to turn into debris.
In the car, back on Main Street, Becky and Tad fell asleep in the backseat. Aaron snoozed a little, but seemed to start with fear every time the car hit a bump in the road. Hillary was fairly calm—Joe doubted that she was even aware of what she had experienced. Jenny said, "Maybe we should keep hunting them. Maybe we didn't stop all of them."
Joe shook his head. "There was only one. The rest were the dragon's hands and eyes and teeth. I believe it's gone. It's done." He was not sure if this were true, but for that moment, he knew it was more important to get the hell out of Colony than to debate the finer points of the unknown.
They drove out of town, along River Road, and took the turn off to Lone Duck Road.
Here, the rain turned to snow. Joe was worried that the Skylark might not make it if the road were to freeze over. But the tires, bald as they were, cleaved to the road.
The storm seemed to calm.
When they were almost to the Paramount Bridge, Becky gasped, waking.
She pointed ahead. "It's gone."
Through the wipers, slicing across the windshield, Joe saw what she meant.
The Paramount Bridge was still there, at least skeletally, but edges of it had been struck by lightning and were blackened and smoldering.
Joe pulled over and parked in front of it. He stepped out of the car. Becky and Tad also got out. Jenny stayed back with her children. Joe looked at them and shook his head. "Something has always kept me from crossing that bridge to get out of town."
Tad said, "Maybe that's good. Maybe we've always needed you here. I know Dad did."
Joe looked at that boy and could not help but hug him. They walked to the edge of the road, right where the blackened and smoking bridge began.
Snow on face, eyes, lips, Joe sat down and tossed a stone into the river. The water was running high and fast, just as if it were oncoming spring instead of oncoming winter.
He turned to Tad, who sat down beside him, and said, "Would you look at that."
Snow was in his hair. The rain had stopped. Nothing but the whiteness of snow slowly blanketing the dead-grass hills and frosting the ridge and banks of the far shore.
"Would you look at that river," Joe said. He could not laugh, or cry. "It's so clean, that water, right now. You can drink that water."
Tad said, "No, you can't. It's polluted."
"Not right now. Not anymore."
They sat there a long time. Becky went and got a jacket from the Buick and wrapped it around Tad. Jenny and the kids came over and sat beside Joe. He clung to Hillary, kissing her forehead. It was so silent.
As the day grew long and the snow began to stick, Jenny said, "Let's go. We can head south and take the road up the Malabars. I saw some others taking that road."
"It'll be slick. The Buick won't make it. We can go steal someone's four-wheel drive, I guess."
Aaron piped up. "I know where a truck is."
Tad looked at Joe and whispered, "I know I shouldn't be scared, but I don't want to ever go back there."
"Oh," Joe said. "There's nothing back there anymore. Nothing like what happened. It's gone."
Tad said, "I don't know. I can hear my father, Joe. I can hear him."
Tad began shivering.
Joe hesitated before asking. "What's he saying?" He glanced at Becky. She had a concerned look on her face beyond the exhaustion.
Tad said, "My dad says we should wait here. He says we should watch the skies. He says it may come back."
"No," Joe said. "We need to go before the snow blocks the roads. Once we're out of the area, we can find somewhere to call someone—I don't know who yet, maybe the police—and try to tell our story."
Joe took him by the hand. They walked back to the car. Tad didn't object; if anything, he was overly compliant. Joe was shivering just as much as the boy. They all got back into the Buick, and drove to town, parking in front of the Gardners' house. Jenny, Aaron, and Joe went to the back, to the garage.
Joe slid open the old garage door, and as the light of day skimmed the place, he saw another miracle.
His old Ford truck, yellow and still shining, as if kept just for this moment.
His mother, all those years, had kept it clean, had made sure it was in good shape. Just waiting for him to come home again. He found a particle of joy in the midst of the tragedy of that week: that love survives even the wrecks and mangles of life. He loved them all, my mother, my wife, my two beautiful children (no, three, for my baby Paul had died a few years before). Melissa, Hopfrog, Patty Glass—a tremendous and profound love was born in him at that moment. He realized then that he would lose everything he ever loved in life, and yet love would not die in him because of it: I believe this. He hugged his son against his chest as if he could absorb and keep him safe in his bones; then, he let go. His mother was with him; he could feel her presence. Not in a garage with a bright and well-oiled machine, but in his heart, in the place she had never left.
He checked the tires, started it up after a bit of fooling around under the hood, and then they squeezed in, packed like sardines, children on laps, Jenny squeezed so close to him it almost felt as if they were one person. They drove up the side of House Mountain and took the route over the Malabar Hills, until they came to Stone Valley.
Joe got two connecting rooms at the local motel, all of them falling asleep, almost as soon as they touched the beds.
When Joe awoke, before dawn, he looked out at a white snow morning, a silent world, and laughed out loud when he saw a child on the icy street, rolling snow around to make a snowman, breaking the cut-crystal silence with a shout to his friend that there was no school today.
The light came up, and he went about the business of the living.
* * *
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