The Heavens Rise

either direction.

It’s corralling me. Son of a bitch, the damn horse is corralling me!

His right heel hit something hard, and then his ass landed on the house’s back steps with a hard thump, like a little boy who’d been cast into the nearest empty chair by the hand of an angry father.

The horse whined, an awful, piercing sound he didn’t know a horse was capable of making. Then the creature’s hind legs bent at the knees, and bile rose in Shire’s throat as he realized the monster was about to lunge at him.

Then the horse’s head exploded.

The animal’s skull seemed to give way down the center, as if an invisible sledgehammer had struck it in just the right spot. The jawbone slipped free from the collapsing skull in a single piece. After it came the brain matter, a slick, corded tumble the color of mud laced with red wine. And even as it all hit the earth with wet smacking sounds, the horse remained standing, and Shire realized that explosion wasn’t the right word for what he was witnessing. It was as if some congenital weakness inside the animal’s skull had picked that exact moment to trigger a total collapse. And as the seconds passed, as the horse remained standing, it looked as if the animal had just offered up its brain matter to Shire as a welcome present.

Then the animal keeled over and landed on one side so hard its legs bounced, and Shire was left with his own desperate gasps, the same sounds his pal Bobby Hurwitz had made after they all hurled him into the shallow end of the Audubon Park pool when they were kids and he’d been hauled to the surface, goggle-eyed and wheezing, too stunned to gasp for a complete breath. That’s what Allen Shire sounded like right now; a little boy who had been slammed into a wall of unforgiving concrete.

Then he took in the sight of the rest of the yard. It was not a patch of mud he had fallen into a few seconds earlier. He had, in essence, separated the remains of a deer’s head even further from its lifeless body and the stains all over his pants and arms were too red to be pure mud. The yard was littered with them, animal carcasses; skunks, possums, a few bobcats and snakes, plenty of goddamn snakes, and all of them had suffered the same fate as the horse from hell; their heads had been reduced to molten-looking piles of snapped bones and dung-colored brain matter. He’d been too busy trying to get a peek through the house’s windows to realize he was shooting pictures over a grotesque, open-air slaughterhouse.

Invisible hammer. Invisible hammer. These were the two words he couldn’t get out of his head; he thought if he kept thinking them over and over again they would bring him to a logical, earthbound explanation for what he was witnessing. No, it’s not an invisible hammer that did in these poor little critters, you silly fool, it was actually a . . . But his mind wasn’t filling in the blank, and there was blood over his clothes and hands, and the smell was worse here, much worse than it had been on the other side of the yard.

He was on his feet suddenly, because now the only thing that mattered was getting the bloody mud off his hands. Not just off his hands. Off his flesh. He spun around and knocked into the glass door at the top of the steps. Inside there would be water. Inside there would be a sink and soap and paper towels and maybe some of that new white tea–scented soap that always put him in a good mood because it reminded him of the redhead in Biloxi who’d kept it in her bathroom, one of the only decent one-night stands he’d ever had in his life.

He closed one gore-smeared hand around the doorknob.

Marshall Ferriot stared back at him from the other side of the glass. The kid was sitting upright in a motorized wheelchair. And he was smiling at him, and the smile was growing, his chapped lips curling into a leer that seemed to take up his entire emaciated face.

Hello, there.

He had mouthed the words so clearly Shire could read his lips. Then he cocked his head to one side and his leer softened into a smile that was less eager, and more self-satisfied.

Shire was still wondering how the doorknob had managed to dissolve in his grip when suddenly the entire world was wiped away as if with one quick swipe of a giant hand.

12

CHAMBERLAND ISLAND

The darkness gained texture. Fading sunlight glinted off the floorboards between his bloody sneakers and the foot of the bed across the room. For a few delirious seconds, Allen Shire thought it possible that the animal slaughterhouse and the stallion from hell had been the components of some terrible dream, and that he was really back in the Renaissance Concourse Hotel, watching flights to Paris, Los Angeles and—oh, please, God, yes!—New Orleans take to the air outside his window.

The blood on your sneakers is plenty real, jackass.

Nylon rope secured his legs to a dining table chair that was all cherrywood slats, but for some reason his hands were free. The chair wasn’t that heavy. He could probably make a run for it if he hoisted the thing up onto his back and pumped his legs with all his might. But he wasn’t alone. There was a woman sitting on the floor nearby, and she wasn’t moving.

His eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, and he knew that if he looked away he would spare himself some soul-searing, unforgettable sight. But he couldn’t. In the corner of the room, Elizabeth Ferriot leaned against the wall, legs splayed, head rolled forward on her neck so that her dirty blond tresses looked like frozen icicles framing her downturned face. The bloody meat cleaver she’d apparently gutted herself with rested precariously in one lifeless hand, and on the white wall above her head, part of a word had been smeared in blood— her blood, her blood, her blood, a shrill voice screamed inside Shire’s head—across the wall: E L Y S

Every profanity he’d ever learned came hissing out of him in a wild rush of desperate whispers.

Across the room, a single paper trembled slightly in Marshall Ferriot’s slender hand as he set it down on the tray table in front of him. The tray table was attached to his wheelchair, and his wheelchair was the high- backed kind designed to accommodate a patient capable of almost no upper body movement. The kid was fully conscious but barely capable of getting around on his own. So how in the name of God had Shire’s file end up on his tray table?

“You’ve read this?” Marshall asked, holding up one page of the file in his trembling fingers. Shire nodded. “Fascinating,” Marshall whispered. His voice was still raspy from years of disuse. “Do you believe what you read? You really think I was trying to kill myself that night?”

“I d-don’t know . . . Really. I—”

“I mean, there are far easier ways to kill yourself, aren’t there?”

“I guess . . . yeah . . .”

“I didn’t, Mr. Shire. I didn’t try to kill myself that night. What happened was something else altogether. The same thing that’s happening to you.”

“I don’t under—”

“The bank sent you? Daniel J. Stevens—he’s the trustee?”

Shire felt his lips moving, but there was nothing coming out. No sound, no breath. Marshall looked up from the papers in front of him, and maybe it was just a trick of the fading sunlight, but he looked surprisingly calm and patient for a man who had just returned to the world after eight years of darkness.

Shire nodded; it was the best he could do.

“And he sent you after us because she took me out of some place called Lenox Hill?”

Shire nodded again. His Adam’s apple felt like a cue ball inside his throat.

“Why?” Marshall Ferriot asked.

“Wh-whad d’y do . . . you . . .”

“Why did she take me out of Lenox Hill, Mr. Shire?” he asked with what sounded like strained patience.

“One of the nurses, she tr-tried to k-kill you.” This earned the young man’s undivided, wide-eyed attention.