As God has written.
And now he sees her.
Charlotte is on the far side of the room, not dancing but standing by one of the buffet tables, a glass of champagne pressed to her chest. By chance, she is wearing the same red dress as the first time he saw her, and she glows so brightly that it seems impossible it took him so long to spot her.
She throws her head back in laughter at something someone has said—
One, two, three.
—and then she is away to one side of him, out of sight now.
He tenses slightly. She has never responded to him like that.
Who is she talking to?
One, two, three.
He finds himself resenting Eleanor’s hands on him now, not just because she is not Charlotte, but because it feels as though she is leading him away—holding him back—and he has to resist the urge to turn his head and stare across the room.
One, two, three.
And then there Charlotte is again.
She is still laughing. Beside her is a handsome, smartly dressed man, who is leaning in closer to her than is appropriate, smiling at the reception his remark has received. Leland’s gaze moves to the man’s face—and then he freezes.
Because even after all these years, he recognizes his brother.
“Ow!”
Leland releases his grip on Eleanor, and the two of them come to a halt in the middle of the room. The sea of dancers continues to swirl around them, obscuring his view of Charlotte and Alan. But Leland can sense the two of them over there, and for a moment he feels as powerless as he did as a child, watching Alan disobey their father and disappear down that corridor.
Eleanor is looking at him.
“I apologize,” he says.
“It’s all right.” She hesitates. “Maybe we should get a drink?”
Leland considers it. He can feel fury building in him.
“Yes,” he says. “I think so.”
He takes Eleanor home with him that night but feels absent during the sex and then lies awake in the darkness afterward. She snores gently. It feels out of place having her beside him in the bed, to the point that he has to keep reminding himself of her name. It is as though he has woken up in a place he doesn’t recognize and which he has no recollection of arriving at.
Something has gone wrong.
For a while, the sight of Alan—rich, successful, and dressed to the nines in finery—is impossible for him to process. It makes no sense. Alan was destined for nothing; Edward for everything. The world has tilted off its axis somehow, and now everything is crooked and sliding. Alan had no business being there at all—and especially no right to be talking to the woman who belonged to Leland. And yet there he had been. And there had been Charlotte, laughing with pleasure at his joke.
Leland rolls onto his side.
It is unacceptable.
It is wrong.
And it is in the early hours of the next morning that the only possible explanation for this wrongness occurs to him. The understanding makes him shiver. He remembers the last time he saw his brother.
You can’t do this.
It’s not allowed.
And yet Alan had. He had gone into their father’s study and taken his sacred notebook. In doing so, he had stolen teachings and revelations that belonged to Leland by right. And while the thought is almost too abhorrent to comprehend, he realizes now that a man prepared to transgress so shamelessly in one way is surely capable of doing so in others too.
First against his father.
And then against God himself.
* * *
It is October 6, 2017, again.
Leland turned and stopped.
Lost in his memories, he had not noticed the slight change in the light. The door at the far end of the room was open now, and Banyard was standing there, waiting patiently. The man’s face was illuminated by the images flashing across the screen on the wall. The footage was an old black-and-white recording, plagued by static, but that was standard for the quality of home video available when it had been filmed, and the quality was still good enough to see what was happening to the woman there.
Leland maintained his frame, his arms extended.
“Yes?”
Banyard remained impassive. “He has just left, sir.”
One of Leland’s lawyers.
“And what did he have to say?”
“He can arrange the withdrawal of the funds you requested, but for such an amount, it will be tomorrow afternoon.”
It never ceased to surprise Leland how cautious these people could be. They had their checks and their procedures to follow, of course, but the money was such a small amount—next to nothing in the grand scheme of things.
In fact, he had almost felt embarrassed for Christopher Shaw when the boy had named his price for the book. On the other hand, he supposed that made Shaw clever. A reasonable offer was likely to be accepted quickly. And, of course, money had volume. Leland knew from experience that the amount Shaw had requested was the approximate limit of what could be packed into a large briefcase. Bank transfers left tracks and traces, after all; Shaw wanted to be able to sell the book and disappear.
But Shaw did not know the true nature of the transaction. He had no understanding of what had gone wrong.
And no idea what was necessary to put it right.
“That will be fine,” Leland said. “Will you take care of the other matter?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Thank you, Mr. Banyard. Please close the door on your way out.”
The man gave a curt nod and did so.
One, two, three.
With a thrill running through him, Leland began dancing again. And as he continued to waltz around the empty room, bathed in the flickering light of the handheld atrocities playing out on the screen, his arms no longer seemed quite as empty as they had before.
It felt more than ever like a ghost was there dancing with him.
PART THREE
Twenty
Light from the old projector flickers around the lecture theater. Ahead of him, curved rows of seating rise toward the door at the back of the room. The black shapes of students are dotted here and there in the darkness.
It is October 26, 1984, and Alan Hobbes has the devil at his back.
He glances behind him at the painting displayed on the screen: Tartini’s Dream, by Louis Léopold Boilly. It depicts Giuseppe Tartini in his bed, asleep but responding with visible reverence to music played by the devil, who is perched half on the bed and half on a plume of smoke. When the composer woke, he was inspired to write his Violin Sonata in G Minor—the Devil’s Trill—and then spent his life frustrated by the disparity between his own composition and the perfect music he had once heard in a dream.
Hobbes always uses the picture for this lecture.
He turns back, and his voice echoes around the auditorium.
“There are many objections one can raise to Laplace’s demon,” he says. “We have already discussed possible difficulties created by quantum theory and thermodynamics.”
He pushes his glasses back up his nose.
“But. We should note that neither objection helps with the problem of free will. On that level, you are still—and forgive me for using obscure scientific terminology here—completely screwed.”
A ripple of laughter goes through the theater. Hobbes pauses to allow it, enjoying it, but a moment later his attention is drawn to the back of the room. He watches as the door opens and a figure enters the room, silhouetted against the light there for a few seconds before quietly taking a seat in the back row.