To Cammy, Grady said, “I’ll grab a jacket. Collar Merlin for me. We can use flashlights when we’re so far into the woods no one here can see them, but for some distance, when the branches are too thick to let the moonlight in, we might need Merlin on a leash to lead us. He knows the paths that way, it’s one of our favorite walks.”
Cammy slipped into her jacket, collared Merlin, and clipped the leash to the collar.
Standing at the door, ready to open it, Lamar Woolsey said, “Too bad I don’t have time to run a probability analysis on this plan of yours. I have a nasty feeling, there’s chaos brewing in it.”
Puzzle said, “What is leads to what will be, and all will be well if we do what is right.”
Lamar nodded. “If you say so.”
“She did,” Riddle told him. “She said so. And she’s right. Never fear the future. Whatever happens, the future is the only way back.”
The novelty of hearing them talk was probably years away from wearing off, and Cammy listened, rapt. “The only way back to what?”
“Back to where we belong forever,” said Riddle. “The future is the one path out of time into eternity.”
Grady returned with three flashlights. “Are we ready?”
“Absolutely,” Lamar said. “The coach just gave us a pep talk, and we’re in gear for action. I’ll scout the way.”
Lamar stepped onto the back porch, leaving the door open, and after a moment motioned for them to follow him.
In Jim’s cramped study, Henry Rouvroy put down the hand grenade, looked over the books on the shelves, and removed the volume of his brother’s haiku.
The noise in the attic faded away. He took no comfort in the silence. He knew the rapping-out of meter on a ceiling beam would soon resume.
Or the torment would take another form. His tormentor had not finished with him yet; and would not be finished until he thrust in the knives, thrust again and again.
Restless, Henry walked the house, back and forth, around and around, carrying the hand grenade in one hand and the book in the other, reading haiku, thumbing pages.
He didn’t know why he felt compelled to read Jim’s haiku. But intuition told him that he might be rewarded for doing so.
When he found the harrier poem, his breath caught in his throat:
Swooping harrier –calligraphy on the sky,talons, then the beak.
Henry’s keen intuition served him well, and his classes in logic at Harvard prepared him to reason his way quickly to the meaning of this discovery.
The poem left on the kitchen notepad was not a new composition. Jim had written it long before Henry’s arrival, not just hours ago.
Therefore, the poem could not possibly refer to the harriers in the sky moments before Henry murdered Jim. The poem had nothing to do with Jim’s murder and nothing to do with Henry’s, either.
Not that he had believed for a minute that Jim had returned from the dead to compose verse and threaten him with it. Henry was not a superstitious person, and even immersion in the primitive culture of these rural hills could not so quickly wash away the education and, indeed, enlightenment that he received in those hallowed halls in Cambridge. But at least finding the haiku in this book confirmed his certainty that his tormentor must be someone pretending to be Jim.
Or did it?
Jim didn’t need to copy a haiku out of a book. Having written it, he would remember it. Remembering, he would see how useful it could be in the current circumstances.
No. Jim was not alive and was not one of the living dead. Jim was, damn it, as dead as—
In the attic, someone rapped out a few lines of iambic pentameter, then a few lines of dactylic heptameter.
After more than thirty-one years, Tom Bigger remembered the way home as clearly as though he had left it only a month before. The street canopied with alders that were old even when he’d been a boy, the cast-iron street-lamps with the beveled panes, the grand old houses behind deep lawns all stirred in him a time when he was a boy, preadolescence, before he became so angry, before he was made angry by ideologies that now seemed insane to him and alien.
Like some others, his parents’ house had not been restored so much as remade into a greater grandeur than it originally possessed. Nevertheless, he could recognize it, and the sight of it thrilled as much as it saddened him.
The time had arrived to say good-bye to Josef Yurashalmi, and Tom fumbled for words to adequately express his gratitude.
But as the old man parked in front of the house, he said, “You don’t know they still live there, Tom. All these years … And though it pains me to say it, the way you look, you won’t inspire the confidence of whoever might live there now. If maybe your folks have moved and if maybe the people here know where they’ve gone, you’ll be more likely to learn their whereabouts if I’m at your side when you ring the bell.”
“You’ve done too much already. You should be heading home to Hannah, she’s not—”
“Hush, Tom. I’m an old man trying to do a gemilut chesed, and if you care about my soul, you’ll stop arguing with me and let me get it done.”
“Gemilut chesed? What is that?”
“An act of loving kindness, which I guess you haven’t seen much of in your years of rambling. At this time in his life, any old Jew like me starts wondering if he’s done enough of them.”
Humbled, Tom said, “I don’t think I’ve done any.”
“You’re young, you have time. I’m sorry if my slippers might embarrass you, but let’s go see if your tata-mama are waiting for you.”
The street was quiet, but Tom’s heart was not. Walking with Josef toward the front door, he lost courage step by step. He had rejected them, had spoken of despising them and their values, and after all this time, they would be justified in despising him.
“You can do it,” Josef said. “You need to do it. I’ll stay as long as it takes for the three of you to be comfortable. But your folks are my age, Tom, so I probably know how they think better than you know. And how they’ll think about this – they’ll thank God you came back, and they’ll kiss you and cry and kiss you some more, and it’ll be like none of it ever happened.”
On the veranda, Tom took a deep breath and pressed the doorbell.
With Puzzle and Riddle looking into the very bottom of the night, they found ways around three guards at different stations. The escapees made their way boldly toward the line of mobile laboratories, between two of them, south and then west toward the end of the yard, into the meadow.
From there they had to double back toward the north to find the entrance to the woods and the path that Merlin knew as well as any dray horse, in older times, knew and could follow its route without its driver’s direction.
Under the interlaced branches of the trees, the moonlight flickered and eventually went out. The way before them became black and forbidding. But Cammy knew that Merlin saw well in darkness, and his