to be, and I’m not. Because he’s really been gone for a long time.”
It was good to be hugged. I loved my mom and I love her still, but I lied to her that day, and not just by omission. It wasn’t like losing a tooth; what I’d found out was like growing another tooth, one there wasn’t room for in my mouth.
Certain things make the story I just told you seem more likely. Lester and Norma Conklin were killed by a drunk driver while on their way to a Christmas party. Harry did come back to Illinois for their funeral; I found an article in the Arcola Record Herald that says he gave the eulogy. Tia Conklin did quit her job and go to New York to help her brother in his new literary agency early the next year. And James Lee Conklin did make his debut nine months or so after the funeral, in Lenox Hill Hospital.
So yeah yeah yeah and right right right, it could all be just the way I told it. It has a fair amount of logic going for it. But it also could have been some other way, which I would like a lot less. The rape of a young woman who’d drunk herself unconscious, for instance, said act committed by her drunken, horny older brother. The reason I didn’t ask is simple: I didn’t want to know. Do I wonder if they discussed abortion? Sometimes. Am I worried that I have inherited more from my uncle/father than the dimples that show up when I smile, or the fact that I’m showing the first traces of white in my black hair at the tender age of twenty-two? To come right out and say it, am I worried that I may start to lose my mind at the still-tender age of thirty, or thirty-five, or forty? Yes. Of course I am. According to the Internet, my father-uncle suffered from EOFAD: early-onset familial Alzheimer’s disease. It bides its time on genes PSEN1 and PSEN2, and so there’s a test for it: spit in a test-tube and wait for your answer. I suppose I will take it.
Later.
Here’s a funny thing—looking back over these pages, I see that the writing got better as I went along. Not trying to say I’m up there with Faulkner or Updike; what I am saying is that I improved by doing, which I suppose is the case with most things in life. I’ll just have to hope I’ll be better and stronger in other ways when I again meet the thing that took over Therriault. Because I will. I’ve not glimpsed it since that night in Marsden’s house when whatever Liz saw in that mirror drove her insane, but it’s still waiting. I sense that. Know it, actually, although I don’t know what it is.
It doesn’t matter. I won’t live my life with the pending question of whether or not I’m going to lose my mind in middle age, and I won’t live it with the shadow of that thing hanging over me, either. It has drained the color from too many days. The fact that I am a child of incest seems laughably unimportant compared to the black husk of Therriault with the deadlight shining out from the cracks in its skin.
I have done a lot of reading in the years since that thing asked me for a do-over contest, another Ritual of Chüd, and I’ve come across a lot of strange superstitions and odd legends—stuff that never made it into Regis Thomas’s Roanoke books or Stoker’s Dracula—and while there are plenty concerning the possession of the living by demons, I have never yet found one about a creature able to possess the dead. The closest I’ve come are stories about malevolent ghosts, and that’s really not the same at all. So I have no idea what I’m dealing with. All I know is that I must deal with it. I’ll whistle for it, it will come, we will join in a mutual hug instead of the ritual tongue-biting thing, and then…well. Then we’ll see, won’t we?
Yes we will. We’ll see.
Later.
From the Author of LATER…
Don’t Miss Stephen King’s
JOYLAND
College student Devin Jones took the summer job at Joyland hoping to forget the girl who broke his heart. But he wound up facing something far more terrible: the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and dark truths about life—and what comes after—that would change his world forever.
A