in yearning and gentle melancholy, flowed through the living room and into the hall and up the stairs, perhaps to call the boy out of the shell in which he had closed himself.
38
In the vividly imagined high redoubt of Castle Wyvern, lying on a bed of reeds, Woody stared at the glassless panes of the southern window, which was where the sign always appeared, the bluebird or the soft-furred white rat, to certify that he’d suffered enough for his errors. Iron-dark clouds scudded fast across the sky. Waves of lightning throbbed through those curdled masses without thunder, the forces of these heavens as silent as the boy who conceived them. If he’d done even worse than he thought, if he’d drawn the murderers out of the Dark Web and all the way here to Pinehaven, if they were even now in transit, no amount of penance could earn forgiveness or safety, and he would be condemned to this tower room forever.
Then a sound came that he’d never heard before, a curious whine followed by a sigh and a series of heart-wrenching whimpers.
When he lowered his gaze from the southern window to the floor, he saw a golden retriever curled in a ball and sleeping, whimpering because it was caught in a bad or perhaps sorrowful dream.
Nothing like this had ever happened before, and Woody didn’t know what to make of it. Might the dog be a sign, like the bluebird and the white rat, a sign that he had atoned for the mess he’d made and could now leave the castle to rejoin his mother in their cozy house?
While that question remained unanswered, an unseen presence spoke to him, the disconnected words whispering along the stone walls of the tower: “Smile for Dorothy . . . dear, sweet Kipp . . . my special boy . . . my mystery . . . Mysterium . . .”
Woody sat up on the thick bed of reeds and surveyed the chamber, where shadows hung that, with each pulse of lightning, billowed as draperies would when disturbed by a draft. The speaker, a woman, remained invisible.
A harder, scary male voice was almost a snarl. “I know . . . your kind . . . teach you . . . a lesson.”
Three oil-burning sconces flamed and smoked where none had been, because he willed it so, and in the dancing light no other presence but the dog revealed itself.
A third voice, another man. “Never . . . never hit a dog. Clover . . . cancer . . . eating her alive . . . the hardest thing . . .”
And now all three voices issued forth: “Teach you a lesson . . . cancer . . . Clover . . . Dorothy . . . my Kipp . . . my special boy . . . special boy.”
The oil-fired sconces ceased to exist, and shadows stirred by the storm light shivered into the room. Woody rose to his feet as the sleeping dog became as transparent as golden glass and then vanished.
Somewhere a piano played “Moon River.”
As surely as Castle Wyvern was of Woody’s creation, so were the bluebird and the white rat that came as signs to free him from his self-imposed isolation. He knew this. The bird and the rat were expressions of his conscience when he felt that he had done enough penance for his offenses. And he knew as well that the beautiful dog was definitely not his invention, that it had been inserted into his fantasy by . . . someone else. The voices had not been his, and the words had not originated with him. He didn’t understand how that could be or what it portended, but it seemed to him that this was the first real sign that he had ever received. A gladness overcame him, and he was greatly relieved of his fear that denizens of the Dark Web would find him and his mother.
He didn’t need to throw open the massive bolts on the door of the high redoubt, did not need to descend the tower stairs and make his way through the inner ward and raise the portcullis and exit the inner gate. He merely turned in a full circle, and in his turning, the medieval chamber became his modern room, where he stood beside a bed not made of reeds.
The familiar, haunting melody rose from the piano downstairs, and as always it spoke to him of all the things he