John Connolly - Dark Hollow

"Down on your knees," he said.

The pain in my side surged as I knelt. Billy moved in front of me, Walter's gun tucked into the waistband of his pants and a Remington shotgun in his hand, then stepped back so that he could keep both Caleb and me in view.

Caleb Kyle looked upon him with admiration. After all that had happened, after all that he had done, his son had come back to him.

"Kill him, boy," said Caleb. "He killed your half brother, shot him like a dog. He was kin to you. Blood calls for blood, you know that."

Billy's face was a mass of confusion and harsh, conflicting emotions. The shotgun moved toward me. "Is that true? Was he kin to me?" he said, unconsciously adopting the phrasing of the older man.

I didn't reply. His nostrils flared and he brought the butt of the gun down in a glancing blow across my head. I fell forward and from in front of me I heard Caleb laugh. "That's it, boy, kill the sonofabitch." Then his laughter subsided, and dazed as I was, I could see him move forward a step.

"I came back for you, son. Me and your brother, we came back to find you. We heard you was lookin'. We heard about the man that you hired to find me. Your momma hid you away from me, but I came lookin' for you and now the lamb that was lost is found again."

"You?" said Billy, in a soft, bewildered tone I had never heard from him before. "You're my father?"

"I'm your daddy," said Caleb, and he smiled. "Now you finish him off for what he did to your brother, the brother you never got to meet. You kill him for what he did."

I rose to my knees, my knuckles supporting my weight, and spoke: "Ask him what he did, Billy. Ask him what happened to Rita and Donald."

Caleb Kyle's eyes glittered brightly, and spittle shot from his mouth. "You shut up, mister. Your lies ain't going to keep me from my boy."

"Ask him, Billy. Ask him where Meade Payne is. Ask him how Cheryl Lansing and her family died. You ask him, Billy."

Caleb sprang onto the steps and his right foot kicked me hard in the mouth. I felt teeth break, and my mouth filled with pain and blood. I saw the foot come forward again.

"Stop," said Billy. "Stop it. Let him be." I looked up and the pain in my mouth seemed as nothing to the agony etched in Billy Purdue's face. A lifetime's hurt burned in his eyes; a lifetime of abandonment, of loss, of fighting against a world that was always going to beat him in the end, of trying to live a life that had no past and no future, only a grinding, painful present. Now a veil had been pulled back, giving him a glimpse of what might have been, of what might still be. His daddy had come back for him, and all of the things he had done, all of the hurt this man had inflicted, he had done for love of his son.

"Kill him, Billy, and be done with it," said Caleb, but Billy did not move, did not look at either of us, but stared into a place deep inside himself, where all that he had ever feared and all that he had ever wanted to be now twisted and coiled over each other.

"Kill him," hissed the old man, and Billy raised his gun. "You do as you're told, boy. You listen to me. I'm your daddy."

And in Billy Purdue's eyes, something died. "No," he said. "You ain't nothin' to me."

The shotgun roared and the barrel leaped in his hands. Caleb Kyle hunched over and tumbled back as if he had been struck hard in the pit of his stomach, except now there was only a dark, spreading stain in which viscera shone and from which intestines protruded like hydra heads. He fell over and lay on his back, his hands raised to try to cover the hole at the center of his being, and then, slowly and agonizingly, he hauled himself to his knees and stared at Billy Purdue. His mouth hung open and blood bubbled over his lips. His face was filled with hurt and incomprehension. After all that he had done, after all that he had endured, his own boy had turned on him.

I heard the sound of another shell being jacked into the gun, saw Caleb Kyle's eyes widen, and then his face disappeared and a warm, red hand obscured my vision, winter light dancing through it like thoughts through the mind of God.

From Dark Hollow the sound of sirens came, carrying on the cold air like the howls of wounded animals. I looked at my watch. It was 12:45 a.m., on the twelfth of December.

My wife and child had been dead for exactly one year.

It is December twentieth. Soon Christmas will be here. Scarborough is a place of ice cream fields and sugar-frosted trees, with colored illuminations at the windows of the houses and holly wreaths at the doors. I have cut a fir in the yard, one of a crop my grandfather planted in the year that he died, and have placed it in the front room of the house. I will add small white lights to it on Christmas Eve, as an act of remembrance for my child, so that if she is watching me from the darkness among the trees she may see the lights and know that I am thinking of her.

Above the fireplace, there is a card from Walter and Lee and a small, gift-wrapped box from Ellen. Next to it is a postcard from the Dominican Republic, unsigned but with a message written by two different hands: "This communicating of a man's self to his friends works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves." The quotation is not attributed. I will call them when they return, when the interest in the events that took place in Dark Hollow has begun to recede.

Finally, there is a note. I recognized the handwriting on the envelope when it arrived and felt a kind of wrench in my heart as I opened it. The message said only: "Call me when you can. I miss you." Beneath this line, she had written her home telephone number and the number of her parents' house. She had signed it: "Love, Rachel."

I sit by my window and I think again of the winter dead, and of Willeford. He had been found two days before, and I felt the news of his loss with a sharp pain. For a time, after he disappeared, I had half suspected the old detective. I had done him an injustice, and I think, in a way, I had brought death upon him. His body had been buried in a shallow grave at the back of his property. According to Ellis Howard, he had been tortured before he died, but they had no indication of who might have been responsible. It could have been Stritch, I thought, or it could have been some of Tony Celli's crew, but I think, deep down, that he died because of the old man, Caleb Kyle, and I guessed that maybe it was Caleb's son Caspar who had killed him.

Willeford's name had been attached to the search for Billy Purdue's parents. It was his number that the old woman, Mrs. Schneider, had called. If she could find him, then so could Caleb, and Caleb would have wanted to know all that Willeford knew. I hoped that the alcohol had dulled his pain, had made him a little less frightened as the end came. I hoped that he had told all that he knew as quickly as he could, but I knew that was probably a false hope. There had been something of the old honor, the old courage, about Willeford. He would not have given up the boy so easily. I had a vision of him, sitting in the Sail Loft, his whiskey and his beer before him, an old man adrift in the present. He thought that it was progress that would spell his end, not some demon from the past that he had raised by doing a good turn for a lost, troubled young man.

And I think of Ricky, and the grinding noise that the trunk of the car made as it was opened, and the sight of him huddled beside the spare tire, and of how he had tried to save Ellen in the last moments before he died. I wished him peace.

Lorna Jennings left Dark Hollow, and Rand. She called me to tell me she was leaving for Florida to spend Christmas with her mother before looking for a new place to live. The machine took the message, although I was in the house when she called and could hear her voice against the soft whirring of the tape. I didn't pick up. It was better that way, I thought.