* * *
It is October 4, 2017.
Alan Hobbes puts the pen down and then leans back in his chair, taking a few seconds to massage a wristbone as large and swollen as a knuckle.
A slight breeze wafts through the room.
Even from a distance of sixty years, he can still clearly remember what awaited him that day in his father’s inner chamber. The darkness in the room. The silence that seemed to coil in the air. Is that someone there? He had been certain he had felt a presence, and yet the room had been empty when he stepped inside, any possible source for the sound he had heard absent. But somehow there had been a faint light in the room, and it had drawn him across to a wooden desk against one wall. And it was there that he had found his father’s notebook, resting neatly in the center, its pages laid open toward the middle.
Hobbes looks down at it now.
He no longer thinks of Jack Lock as his father. His father is a good man named George Hobbes. Approximately eighteen years before this moment, George Hobbes is dying, and Alan is holding tightly on to his hand, telling him how much he loves and admires him. But Jack Lock is his biological father, and the notebook before Alan now is filled with the man’s life work.
The dense black scrawl of Lock’s spidery handwriting fills every page from top to bottom and side to side. It has always been all but illegible, composed of language that is familiar but somehow unrecognizable. You need to look at it from just the right angle to decipher what has been written—and even then you can’t quite be sure, as though the words might take on different meanings for different readers. The pages are not numbered, and the tales it tells occur out of chronological order, as though Lock simply picked a page at random to write in, gradually filling in the whole as he went. There is no index. But Hobbes’s experience is this: if he flicks through the book without trying, the story he is searching for finds him rather than the other way around.
He does so now. And as he concentrates as best he can on the passage before him, he pictures his brother, older now, walking down a corridor toward a truth so awful that no man should ever have to face it.
Which is Alan’s fault.
He picks up the pen again.
Edward.
Hobbes is aware of how much pain his brother has caused to others over the years: the lives he has taken and the damage he has done. But while Hobbes despises him for that, he can’t escape a feeling of sadness too. He sometimes finds himself wondering about the scatterings of cause and effect that have taken the two of them from the exact same past to such very different presents. But, of course, while they are both products of their upbringings, much of Edward’s life has been wholly constrained by it, and the same cannot be said of Hobbes.
But even so, they both know the terrible pain of losing a child.
Hobbes glances behind him toward the far corner of the room.
Then he turns back to the book before him. And as he continues to write, the quiet scritching sound of his pen whispers in the room.
Nine
The nightmare was always the same.
Edward Leland spent a few minutes lying still, listening to the soft instrumental music that had been programmed to wake him. The dream itself never did. And as always, it lingered now: a memory from thirty years earlier that played out as a series of jerky and indistinct images in his mind, as though he were watching newsreel footage from the distant past. Some mornings, he even fancied he could hear the rattle of film in an old projection wheel.
The quiet trick of his footsteps on the tiled floor of a long corridor. A single bright window far ahead. The police officer walking on one side of him; the nurse on the other. The nurse could sense his grief and loss and wanted to put a consoling hand on his shoulder, but she resisted, perhaps sensing something else about him as well.
The open door far ahead.
Are you sure you’re ready for this, Mr. Leland?
Yes. I need to be sure.
And then the sight that awaited him inside that room.
He had stood there for some time, gradually becoming aware of a terrible sound building in the air. It had made no sense at first, but then he had realized the noise was coming from him. It was something between a scream and a sob, and it grew louder and more desolate as he stood there, staring down at the thing—he could no longer think of it as a child—that was lying before him.
Finally understanding what had been done to his son, Nathaniel.
That was a long time ago now, of course.
Leland slid out from beneath the silk sheets, then walked a little stiffly across the heated floorboards. Lights set into the ceiling bathed the room in calm blue light. At the bedroom door, he slipped on the robe that was hanging there, knotted it tightly at the waist, then stepped through into the chamber beyond, the music following him and gradually wafting away the last traces of the nightmare.
A freshly delivered tray of toast and coffee was waiting for him on the table, along with the usual pile of carefully folded morning newspapers. A clean suit and his laundered gym clothes were hanging on the oak wardrobes that filled one wall. He sat on the leather couch, ate his breakfast, and then drank orange juice and coffee as he worked his way through the papers.
The business news first, of course.
His gaze moved steadily over columns of figures, lists of stocks and shares, reports of market fluctuations and boardroom restructuring. That whole world moved so quickly that most of the information was better gleaned online, but to Leland that always felt like watching a video that never paused. He preferred to start his day by studying individual frames. Frozen moments.
After the business pages, the general news.
Political stories interested him vaguely. While patterns of power could occasionally be discerned between the lines, nothing truly important would be reported here; newspapers were, after all, designed for the cattle’s consumption. The photographs could sometimes be worthwhile. Every now and then, he recognized a face in the background, usually caught by accident behind whatever politician or adviser was the intended focus of the shot. They always reminded him of the pictures you saw of innocent, smiling subjects, the photographer failing to notice the predator lurking in the bushes behind.
Finally, he moved on to the crime stories.
Even after so many years, Leland was not dead to the effect of these. There was always a trace of excitement as he flicked through the pages. For some reason, the reports of war and associated atrocities held little appeal. It was the smaller, everyday items to which he gravitated, and over which he lingered. Today’s news brought a familiar list. A teenage boy stabbed in a park; a man found deceased in woodland; a woman beaten to death by her boyfriend. The papers rustled quietly as he worked his way through them. Tragedy was its own unending video, and there was satisfaction to be had in concentrating on individual frames here as well.
The terrible things that happened because they were meant to.
Because God had written them.
He found only a single mention of Alan Hobbes. It was a short column in the local newspaper, and it gave very little detail. A former university professor and businessman—not even named yet—had been found dead in his home. Police had opened an investigation but were not making further comment on the situation at this time. The scarcity of information did not particularly surprise Leland. Even in death, men like Alan Hobbes—and indeed himself—were adroit at staying out of the public eye.