Bedtime Story (25 page)

David waited for him to continue.

Instead Matt straightened up and slid back. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s all there is.”

“But what does it mean?” David asked.

“You’ve got me.”

“It sounds like an oath. The sort of thing the captain might say.”

Matt nodded thoughtfully. “It does. But it doesn’t really help you, does it?”

“No,” David said, disappointed. He rubbed his hands together, trying to psych himself up. There was no point in delaying.

J
ACQUI FELL ASLEEP WITH ME
holding her, lying on my back as she nested into me, her head resting on my shoulder, my arm loose over her, the smell of her hair, her skin, enfolding and enveloping me. I lay there as she drifted into sleep, and as she unconsciously rolled away, back to huddling on her side of the bed, the way she preferred to sleep.

I spent most of the night awake, listening to her slow, steady breathing.

When the numbers on the clock radio changed silently to 4:00, I slipped out of bed. Jacqui didn’t move or even sigh as I stood up and took my clothes out to the hallway to dress.

The next few minutes all unfolded like a memory, or a dream. The silent walk through the darkened house. Lifting the doorknob on the back door a little as I closed it to dull the sound of the lock clicking shut. Smoking a cigarette on the back walk, looking into the dark mystery of the yard and at the second floors of the neighbouring houses, all that was visible over the cedar fence. The ritual of letting myself into the office, turning on the lights, making a pot of coffee.

It was the way my life had been, once.

When I turned on the desk-lamp, any illusion of normalcy vanished at the sight of the stacks of medical texts, the black notebook I was using to keep track of information, writing to make sense of my thoughts.

I flipped idly through the notebook, hoping for some lightning flash of inspiration to strike, some arc of connection, of synchronicity, to pull it all together.

It didn’t happen.

I logged on to the laptop and went back to LazarusTook.com. The biographical essay had been thorough enough that I was disappointed to find that the rest of the site was fairly pedestrian: a few covers, an excerpt from each book.

No luck with the author; what about the publisher?

Searching “Alexander Press” brought no hits. Adding Took’s name, then Belden, Oregon, didn’t help any. A search for “Took Publishers” didn’t work.

I tried Sprite Press, the house that had published the four paperbacks I had read at my grandmother’s house.

Williams’s name was a link, but his Biography page made no mention of Took, unless one considered the inclusiveness of the phrase “republication of mid-level British genre writers.”

I scratched a few notes into the black notebook.

The mention of Davis & Keelor was probably a dead end. With the publication of the four novels coming decades before the sale of Sprite, the books were probably long out of print, rights reverting to Took’s estate. Still, it was something to pursue.

I checked my watch—not even nine-thirty in New York. No point in calling.

I brought up the D&K website and hit the link for General Information. The Contact Us button opened a new email window.

I leaned back in my chair. What was I doing?

The publisher wasn’t going to be able to tell me anything, and even if they could connect me with Took’s estate, what could I possibly ask? I was grasping at straws.

It was just a book, that’s all.

What the hell was I thinking?

I finished the note with a few half-truths about hoping to get in touch with some of the authors I was writing about, and hit Send. A wave of exhaustion washed over me, and I closed my eyes just for a moment, the book resting in my lap.

“David! Remember what happened last time,” Matt said, alarmed. “You can’t touch the Sunstone.”

As if David would ever be able to forget that.

That wasn’t you, he thought to himself. That was Dafyd. None of this is real.

But it was. David knew that this was as real as the life he had left behind.

“Of course I remember,” he said. “But I have to try. It’s the only way to get out of here, to make the story keep going. Can you think of any other way?” He tried to sound confident and strong, tried not to let on just how much the thought of touching that stone again terrified him.

Even though he couldn’t see Matt’s eyes, David could feel him looking at him for a long moment, before the mist slid, slowly, out of his path.

The Sunstone shimmered in the silver plate. He held his breath, his gaze never wavering as he steeled himself and reached out.

One of the nurses shook her finger at me good-naturedly as I hurried away from David’s room, pulling my ringing phone out of my jacket pocket.

“Chris? It’s John.”

The voice was gruff, familiar, though I rarely heard it. My editor at the
Vancouver Sun
usually e-mailed.

“John,” I said. “How are you?”

We exchanged pleasantries. I didn’t volunteer anything. Jacqui and I had decided to keep the news of David’s “condition”—as she called it—close, at least until we had more information to give.

“Any problems with your e-mail?” There was a bemused tone to his voice.

“Not that I know of.”

“Then is there any chance I might get your column sometime soon?”

At first I didn’t really understand what he was asking. Had I committed to an extra column? Was there a special—?

And then it hit me. “Oh shit,” I muttered. “It’s late.”

“Only if you believe in press deadlines and that sort of thing,” he drawled, teasing me.

“Sorry, John,” I said. “I completely lost track of time.”

“Must be nice to be a freelancer.”

“No, it’s … it’s been a bad couple of days. David’s in the hospital.”

“Jesus, Chris, why didn’t you say something?” All trace of amusement had vanished. “What happened?”

As I explained about David’s seizures and collapse, I was sharply aware of myself crafting the story, constructing the narrative. We had told only a few people what had happened—Dale, David’s school. Jacqui’s parents and sister, my mother and brothers, all lived too far away to be here right away, but we’d been on the phone with them regularly since early Sunday morning. I became aware, as I was talking to John,
that I was structuring what would become the official version of what had happened.

“Jesus,” he repeated. “Last thing you should be worrying about is a newspaper column.”

“No—”

“We’ll run something off the wire,” he insisted. “Run a cutline saying that you’re away for a few weeks.”

For years, I had filed a column every week. Even when we were on vacation. It was practically a ritual. Reluctant as I was to let my obligation slide, it was like having a weight lifted from me.

“Thanks, John. I appreciate it.”

“All right,” he said, gruff again. “Listen, give your wife a kiss for me. Tell her I’m thinking about her. If I can do anything, you just let me know.”

“I will.”

David braced himself and took a deep breath. He had no choice. He couldn’t face Bream and Loren without the stone. And he couldn’t ask for their help: this was his quest, right down to the handprints on the wall.

Dafyd’s quest
.

He let his fingers brush against the stone.

There was no spark, no shock, just the cool, smooth surface of the gem, and the sound of his breath escaping from him.

He turned to Matt. “Nothing happened.”

The mist figure smiled.

David turned back to the wall. The blood-red stone was set into the silver plate, the centre point of a complex geometrical design. It was firmly embedded: David tried to pull it free, but it didn’t move. He shook his head. No tools, no way to get the stone loose. Then he took a closer look at the silver disk.

“It looks like there are some grooves here,” he said, and Matthew drifted back toward him. “Do you see?”

He pointed at two half-moon indentations carved into the stone wall at the edge of the silver disk, where the
1
and the
7
would have been on a clock face.

“I wonder …” Stretching his hand, he could just manage to slip the tips of his thumb and forefinger into the two grooves.

“It’s very thick,” he said. “I’m just gonna …” He gripped the edge of the disk, holding it tight, and pulled.

To his surprise, it slid forward about an inch, then stopped with a sharp click.

“Dammit!” He shook his fingers for a moment, sore from the effort, then tried again, but the disk didn’t budge.

“It’s stuck.”

“Try turning it,” Matt suggested.

The disk extended far enough from the wall now that David could get a better grip. “Lefty loosy,” he muttered as he started to twist.

The disk turned easily in the wall.

“It’s working,” he said excitedly. He kept his grip tight, expecting the silver plate to pop free at any moment, but it just kept turning, protruding farther and farther from the wall with every revolution.

“How thick is this thing?” he muttered.

Without warning, the disk froze into place again with another click. Gripping with two hands now, he pulled.

The disk slid from the wall easily and smoothly. What he had thought was a silver plate, a setting for the Sunstone, was actually the top of a silver cylinder, a shiny tube about the size of a large soup can.

David leaned his torch against the wall and held his hand under the tube. He didn’t want it falling to the floor. It was a wise decision.

The tube burst free of the wall, heavier than David had been expecting, propelled out of the hole by the force of the jet of water behind it. The white froth drove the cylinder painfully against his chest, and knocked David backwards halfway across the chamber.