Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

Silence. The same silence which began as I stepped back into time and looked down at dear Dick’s ripped and bloody corpse, and dearer Hat’s pale and bleeding face .

Oh, Serge, Serge, why have you deserted me? In all the other dialogues, I heard you, sometimes faint, sometimes loud and clear, always unmistakably you. In this one I have invented words, for you, for all of them, hoping like a nurse giving the kiss of life, that eventually my breath would give you strength once more to take your own .

But here I sit in what used to be Dick’s chair, with all those old wordmen staring down at me from the walls, and I know that I am alone. Except for my memories .

Such memories .

How can I live with them?

I am of course mad by any normal standard of judging sanity .

And will be mad in my own judgment if I conclude that this has all been delusion, all done for nothing .

The questions I put into Geoff’s mouth need to be answered .

Perhaps others will answer them for me. Even if the police are so blind that they let me get away with this, theirs are not the only eyes that I have to fear .

Through the open door into the library, I can see Charley Penn sitting at his table, looking towards me with a gaze by turns speculative and sceptical and accusing, and always angry .

Beside him is that strange young man, Franny Roote, who whenever he catches my eye gives me a small, almost complicitous smile .

Or is it guilt that makes me see these things?

Something else that I can see through my open door is real enough, nought realler .

The twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary sitting proudly on its high shelf .

I set out on a path signposted by the forty words on those twenty volumes .

Haswed has brought me up to the end of Volume VI .

What of the other fourteen? Do I really need to labour over that long and tortuous path to discover the truth of it all? Must I press on into Volume VII?

Or have the six brought me to my destination?

Is this silence your final message to me, my beloved Serge, saying that I need no longer strain my ears to have a dialogue with the dead because I now at last have a sufficient dialogue with one of the living?

It’s very important to know. And not just for me .

I look at the first word of the two defining the limits of Volume VII and my heart aches with love, and with fear .

For I know I have to decide very soon whether those three simple letters signpost a direction, or a destination .

Hat Hat Hat Hat

Is this the start of a new game?

Or is it simply The End?