Dominance (30 page)

She stared into his face, trying to find the words. To understand what it was he was telling her.

I'm sorry, Alex, but I think I may have led you right into his trap.

“Are you saying Fallows is behind all this?” she asked. “Fallows is dead, Keller. You know that as well as I do.”

Keller flinched. Then he said, “Let me show you.”

At first she didn't budge. She held him, pulled at him with all the strength she could muster. But then she relented. By degrees she pulled away until he was free, massaging his palms where she had torn into him.
I have to see,
she thought.
If I'm ever going to forgive myself for letting him find the manuscript, then I've got to see what he kept.

Cautiously, she backed away. Keller turned around and went to a small writing table in the corner of the room. He opened a drawer and removed something. It was a yellowed sheet of paper. When he held it up for her to see, the light shot through, revealing unbroken, heavily struck-through typefont. He held the page at a distance, as if it might infect him.

“One page,” he repeated. “It's all that's left.”

He placed it on the dresser beside her. In the half-light, Alex read.

There were nine of them. His job now was to bring them all together. But how?

This question had consumed him for the last few months. He waited on some kind of special knowledge—a secret whispered by a passing stranger, a note handed to him at the library where he spent his evenings—that would explain how it could be done. Instead there was nothing but endless days of confusion, impotent nights where he lay in a sweat and turned the plan over in his mind. And then, almost by accident, it came to him. They could all return to mourn. Perhaps he had been going backward, taking his plan from the end and trying to weave it through the needle's eye. Here was the
way: give them a reason to come back. And suddenly he knew how; stuck there in his darker nature like a shard of black glass was the first act. One of them would die—a suicide, perhaps, so there could be no questions about him—and then he could truly begin. The eight would inevitably return to the old house and he would be there, waiting for them. Observing.

Alex read the page, and then a second time. She traced the bubbled type with her finger. Even the words, the way they were chipped and broken and hanging apart like a busted hinge—tilted
e
's, frantic and struck-through lines—held an intensity. A pulse.
It's Fallows.

“The end,” she said then, her voice a hollow croak.

Slowly, Keller looked up.

“How does it end?”

He stared at her as if trying to find the words, to put this awful thing into some kind of context. “They . . .”

“Tell me, Keller.”

“They all die. All of them except one.”

She waited for him to continue. It was the last thing she wanted to hear, but she couldn't turn away. Not now.

“It was Fallows himself, Alex. The last line of that”—he made a face as if he'd just tasted something awful—“goddamned thing was that Fallows lived. The author himself is the narrator. He killed them all and made it out of the old house. Aldiss must have gotten to the manuscript. Re-created it. Put the game into motion”

It hit her in the gut. She drew back, nearly doubled over.
The game. Aldiss is the one. Aldiss was there all along. Aldiss created the
cyndrot.

But then she looked up at Keller. She saw him dropping the manuscript into the fire, watching it burn, the paper falling into shreds and the flames licking in his eyes. She saw him smile.

“You're lying,” she said.

Keller blinked. He looked like he'd been slapped.

“This is all bullshit. I don't believe a word you're saying.” He reached out for her, and she yanked her hand away. “Don't you dare or I'll scream. I'll fucking scream for them and tell them that you're the one who did this. That you're the reason we're all trapped in this house.”

“Alex . . .”

But she was walking away, leaving the room. Out in the hallway now, her anger disorienting her, she saw the form of a man standing on the other side of the hall, hidden in shadow. It was Frank again.

“You scared the hell out of me,” she said.

The man said nothing. He was looking out a porthole window down onto the front lawn. Alex stepped out into the hall and Frank still didn't move. He stood there, leaning against the wall and looking outside—

Alex stopped.

She stared at the man.

Thought,
No.

She looked closer. Noticed the unnatural way his head was bent, how his chin cocked at a strange angle. Then she saw something glisten in the window, the thing catching the moonlight and running upward like a spider's web. And Alex followed the thing up, up, to the top edge of the porthole that had been pushed inward. Saw a wire anchored there, yanked taut to the windowpane.

She screamed for Keller.

“What is wrong with Lydia's son, Dr. Locke?”

Keller's question was where they had been moving for the last half hour. Locke was loosening up to the two of them. Perhaps it was being around students again; perhaps he simply wanted to discuss Fallows for the first time in years. Either way, Alex saw a change in the man. He had begun to trust them.

“No one is quite sure,” the professor explained. “My guess is paranoid schizophrenia. But I was never around him enough to know. She hid him away in that house on Olive Street. Every time I saw him he was watching cartoons like a child.”

“He was in a home for a time, wasn't he?” asked Keller.

“That's right. But Lydia became convinced the experience would damage the boy. That she could raise him on her own. So she brought him home, and that's where he has been ever since.”

“And now he's thirty.”

“Twenty-nine, I believe. Exactly the age of Charles Rutherford when he died.”

Alex looked at the old professor. They were so close, but not quite there yet. She could feel it, feel the pull of Richard Aldiss from his prison cell. He'd learned something new. New. Locke appeared to have
stopped looking decades ago, so sure was he that Charles Rutherford was Paul Fallows.

“The doctor,” she said now. “Dr. Morrow.”

Locke looked at her. “Young lady, I'm afraid I don't—”

“Fallows used that name in
The Golden Silence
, and Lydia Rutherford also said it. Dr. Morrow treated Charlie.”

Locke looked startled. “I don't believe,” he said slowly, “that you will get anywhere if you follow the ‘clues' in those books. People have been searching for years but have yet to come up with anything substantial. Lord knows I spent a great deal of my life doing the same. My theory is correct: Charles Rutherford was Paul Fallows, and his novels were
stories
—nothing more and nothing less. The books only grew in importance when Paul Fallows became a ghost.”

“But if we were to follow this route,” Keller said, “and find this Morrow, where would we go?”

Locke eased back in his chair. There was something in his eyes:
Don't. Don't do that.

“I'm sure the man is retired by now,” Locke said cautiously. “Charlie would have been under his care in the seventies.”

“The home,” Alex said. “The place where Charlie stayed for a time. Where was that?”

“That place.” Locke's eyes went to the window again, as if he was remembering something horrible. When he spoke next his voice was low, almost strained. “It's about an hour's drive from here in a town called Wonderment, just outside of Des Moines. The home itself is called the Shining City. But I wouldn't go there if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“Because all you will see is human misery.”

*   *   *

It was another thirty miles, as Hamlet receded into the gray distance behind them, before she understood what it meant.

It was a memory. A recollection that she knew had dawned on Keller at the same moment. As the landscape rattled past and as Alex drove the rental into the fading sun, he looked at her. The expression on his face said,
Finally.

Shining City.

That was the name of the place, the home where Charlie Rutherford had stayed. And those were the same exact words Richard Aldiss had used in one of his lectures at the beginning of the night class. So innocuous then, so meaningless—but now it was heavy in the cabin of the little rental car.

“But you will go nowhere without the knowledge of who Charles Rutherford was,” Aldiss had said, “and of the shining city from where he came . . .”

Charles Rutherford. Charlie. Father and son, puzzle pieces that fit together in the most natural way. Alex smiled. They were almost there. They had almost passed Richard Aldiss's night class.

Alex reached out and grabbed Frank Marsden, touched his shoulder and felt him shift, fall toward her, slump like the dead weight he now was. She fought with him, her mind a wreck, the wire around his neck keeping the man upright as if he were some kind of puppet, the blood from his mouth smearing against her shirt and—

“Here. Don't.”

Keller behind her now, moving the man back against the wall. The wire sagged, then snapped taut as the actor slumped.

“How?” Alex asked. It was the only word she could manage.

Keller looked. The wire had been dropped in through the window. “The roof,” he said. “Aldiss is up there. We need to get Black.”

Movement. It was the dead man writhing, twitching. Blood bubbled at his mouth. He groaned and Alex stepped back. For the first time since Iowa, Keller looked afraid.

“Go,” he said to her then, reaching out for Marsden. The man's eyes rolled back and he gargled again, his throat ruined. “Get someone.”

She screamed for help.

“No,” Keller said. “The house—it's too big. We're in an entirely different wing. You'll have to go.”

Alex ran. She turned the corner and sprinted for the stairs, her sock feet stinging on the threadbare carpet.

She stopped. The elevator Fisk used to move between floors was to her left. She pushed the down button and waited, heard the thing grind to life three floors below. As it approached she thought about what Keller had said.
The roof.
She imagined Aldiss pushing in the window, dropping the wire, slipping it over Marsden's head and then yanking it taut.

“Help!” she shouted again, her voice echoing.

A door at the far end opened and Christian Kane appeared. The man had been sleeping, and it took him a minute to focus.

“Alex, what's happening?”

“Get someone, Christian. Get Black. Something's happened to Frank.” The elevator ground to a stop and its ancient doors parted. She shoved Christian inside. “Go! Go!”

Alex turned then and ran back the way she had come. She had to get back to Keller, see if she could help him (
He's dead, Alex; you saw his eyes
) with Frank. She rounded the corner in a sprint and looked down the hallway.

Nothing.

The wire hung there, limp as a vine.

Keller and the dead man were both gone.

Aldiss had led them to the end of the world.

Shining City had been an insane asylum in another era: Gothic-fronted, black-shadowed eaves, a turret that jutted anonymously from the side of the building like a portent. It was out of place amid the starkness of the land—and yet weren't the students as well?
Nothing fits here
. Alex thought as they passed the security gate and approached the building.
Especially not us.

A drab, blackened sign announced the place:
SHINING CITY, HOME FOR TROUBLED BOYS, EST.
1957. The two stood outside the entrance, perhaps willing themselves to go inside, maybe waiting for a signal that would explain why they were there.

Because we have to find Fallows. Because Aldiss is innocent. Because the two mysteries are one and the same.

The place held no promises. A few orderlies swept in and out of the great room, but otherwise it was silent. No manic patients, no wandering insane—the home had been left behind in the seventies. Even the wallpaper was stripped, outdated, its rainbow pattern suggesting a sort of happiness that was alien here.

Alex was flying blind. And yet Keller followed her down a long antiseptic corridor and into another just like it. She heard him say, “I don't
know about this, Alex,” the tentativeness in his voice urging her on to prove him wrong. She didn't know, either—and the thought enraged her. If they had made a mistake, if this was not where Aldiss wanted them to be, then there was nowhere else. Tomorrow they would be on a plane back to Jasper College and the night class would be over.

“Can I help you?”

She turned. The woman who had spoken was standing a few feet from them, clutching a stack of folders. She wore flat shoes and a white coat. A doctor.

“We're looking for someone,” Alex said. “A therapist who worked here at one time. Maybe he still does.”

“There aren't many docs left now,” said the woman. “They're razing this place, and we're in the process of transferring patients to an institution in Des Moines right now. What was his name?”

“Morrow,” Alex said. “His name is Dr. Morrow.”

“Can't say it's familiar,” she said. “But I've only been at Shining City for two months. Let me ask someone who might know. Wait here?” She gestured toward a dim lobby.

Alex sat in the kind of unwieldy chairs you only find in hospitals. She offered Keller the chair beside her but he waved it off as if he was fine with standing. Then she saw: the plastic chair was too small for him. Alex smiled despite herself.