Justin Cronin - The Passage

“You know what people say about your tea, Auntie?” He was frowning into his cup, like the answer he was looking for might be floating in there.

“What’s that now?”

“That it’s the reason you’ve lived so long.”

More minutes passed, a weighty silence pressing down. At last he took a final sip of tea, grimacing at the taste, and returned it to the table.

“Thanks, Auntie.” He climbed wearily to his feet. “I guess I better be going. It’s been nice talking to you.”

“Ain’t no bother.”

He paused at the door, one hand poised on the frame. “It’s Jimmy,” he said. “Jimmy Molyneau.”

“I know who you are.”

“Just in case,” he said. “In case anybody asks.”

The events that began with Jimmy’s visit to Auntie’s house were destined to be misremembered, beginning with the name. The Night of Blades and Stars was, in fact, three separate nights, with a pair of days between. But as with all such occurrences-those destined to be recounted not only in the immediate aftermath but for many years to come-time seemed compressed; it is a common error of memory to impose upon such events the coherence of a concentrated narrative, beginning with the assignment of a specific interval of time. That season. That year. The Night of Blades and Stars.

The error was compounded by the fact that the events of the night of the sixty-fifth of summer, from which the rest descended, unfolded in a series of discrete compartments with overlapping chronologies, no single piece being wholly aware of the others. Things were happening everywhere. For instance: while Old Chou was rising from the bed he shared with his young wife, Constance, propelled by a mysterious urge to go to the Storehouse, across the Colony, Walter Fisher was thinking the same thing. But the fact that he was too drunk to get out of bed and lace his boots would delay his visit to the Storehouse, and his discovery of what lay there, by twenty-four hours. What these two men had in common was that they had both seen the girl, the Girl from Nowhere, when the Household had visited the Infirmary at first light; but it was also true that not everyone who had encountered her firsthand experienced this reaction. Dana Curtis, for instance, was wholly unaffected, as was Michael Fisher. The girl herself was not a source but a conduit, a way for a certain feeling-a feeling of lost souls-to enter the minds of the most susceptible parties, and there were some, like Alicia, who would never be affected at all. This was not true of Sara Fisher and Peter Jaxon, who had experienced their own versions of the girl’s power. But in each case, their encounters had taken a more benign, if still troubling form: a moment of communion with their beloved dead.

First Captain Jimmy Molyneau, lurking in the shadows outside his house at the edge of the glade-he had yet to appear on the catwalk, a cause of considerable confusion for the Watch, leading to the hasty deputizing of Sanjay’s nephew Ian as First Captain pro tem -was trying to decide whether or not to go to the Lighthouse, kill whomever he found there, and turn the lights off. Though the impulse to perform such a grave and final act had been building in him all day, it was not until he had gazed into his teacup in Auntie’s steam-fogged kitchen that the idea had crystallized into a specific shape in his mind, and if anyone had happened upon him standing there and asked what he was doing, he wouldn’t have known what to say. He could not have explained this desire, which seemed both to originate from some deep place within him and yet not be entirely his own. Sleeping inside the house were his daughters, Alice and Avery, and his wife, Karen. There were times in the course of his marriage, whole years, when Jimmy had not loved Karen as he should have (he was secretly in love with Soo Ramirez), but he had never doubted her love for him, which seemed boundless and unwavering, finding its physical expression in their two girls, who looked exactly like her. Alice was eleven, Avery nine. In the presence of their gentle eyes and tender, heart-shaped faces and sweetly melancholy dispositions-they were both known to burst into tears at the slightest provocation-Jimmy had always felt a reassuring force of historical continuum and, when the black feelings came, as they sometimes did, a tide of darkness that felt like drowning from within, it was always the thought of his daughters that would lift him from his gloom.

And yet the longer he stood there, skulking in the shadows, the more his impulse to douse the lights seemed wholly unrelated to, and hence beyond the reach of, the idea of his sleeping family. He felt strange within himself, very strange, as if his vision were collapsing. He stepped away from his house and by the time he reached the base of the Wall, he knew what he had to do. He felt an overwhelming relief, soothing as a bath of water, as he ascended the ladder, which connected with Firing Platform Nine. Firing Platform Nine was known as the odd-man post; because of its location above the cutout, an irregularity in the shape of the Wall to accommodate the power trunk, it was not visible from either of the adjacent platforms. It was the worst duty, the loneliest duty, and this was where Jimmy knew Soo Ramirez would be tonight.

Though her emotions had yet to consolidate into anything more specific than a nameless dread, Soo as well had been feeling troubled all night. But these feelings, of something vaguely not right, were diffused by other, more personal recriminations: the array of disappointments brought about by being asked to step down as First Captain. As Soo had discovered in the hours since the inquest, this was not an entirely unwelcome development-the responsibilities had begun to take their toll-and she would’ve had to step down eventually. But getting herself fired was hardly the way she wanted to do it. She’d gone straight home and sat in her kitchen and cried for a good two hours. Forty-three years old, nothing ahead of her but nights on the catwalk and the odd dutiful meal with Cort, who meant well enough but who’d run out of things to say to her about a thousand years ago; the Watch was all she had. Cort was in the stables like always, and for a minute or two she wished he was at home, though it was just as well he wasn’t, since he probably would have just stood there with that helpless look on his face, not moving to comfort her, such gestures being completely beyond his powers of expression. (Three dead babies inside her-three!-and he’d never known what to say even then. But that was years ago.)

She had no one to blame but herself. That was the worst part about it. Those stupid books! Soo had come across them at Share, idly sifting through the bins where Walter kept the stuff nobody wanted. It was all because of those stupid books! Because once she’d cracked the binding on the first one-she’d actually sat down on the floor to read, folding her legs under her like a Little in circle-she’d felt herself being sucked down into it, like water down a drain. (“Why, if it isn’t Mr. Talbot Carver,” exclaimed Charlene DeFleur, descending the stairs in her long rustling ball gown, her eyes wide in an expression of frank alarm at the sight of the tall, broad-shouldered man standing in the hallway in his dusty riding breeches, the fabric smoothly taut against his virile form. “What ever could you intend, coming here while my father is away?”) Belle of the Ball by Jordana Mixon; The Passionate Press, Irvington, New York, 2014. There was a picture of the author inside the back cover: a smiling woman with flowing handfuls of dark hair, reclining on a bed of lacy pillows. Her arms and throat were bare; atop her head was perched a peculiar, disklike hat-a hat not large enough even to keep the rain off.

By the time Walter Fisher had appeared by the bin, Soo had read to chapter three; the sound of his voice was so intrusive, so alien to her experience of the words on the pages, that she actually jumped. Anything good? Walter asked, his eyebrows lifting inquisitively. You seem pretty interested. Seeing as it’s you, Walter went on, I can let you have the whole box for an eighth. Soo should have bargained, that’s what you did with Walter Fisher, the price was never the price; but in her heart she’d already bought them. Okay, she said, and hoisted the box off the floor. You’ve got yourself a deal.