The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,204

on his cheek, and the suddenly slamming door. Maybe in the heat of the moment he had simply imagined all of it. He told them he’d found a stairwell and let it go at that.

They returned to a great commotion; they were four days overdue, on the verge of being declared lost. At the news of their return, a crowd had assembled at the gate. Leigh actually fainted before anyone could explain that Arlo was not dead, that he had stayed behind at the station. Peter didn’t have the heart to go find Mausami in the Sanctuary, to give her the news about Theo. In any case, someone would tell her. Michael was there, and Sara too; it was she who washed and stitched his elbow while he sat on a rock, wincing at the pain and feeling cheated that the trancelike numbness brought on by the loss of his brother did not also apply to having one’s skin sewn closed with a needle. She wrapped it in a proper bandage, hugged him quickly, and burst into tears. Then, as darkness fell, the crowd parted, making room for him to pass, and as Second Bell began to ring, Peter ascended the rampart, to stand the Mercy for his brother.

He left Alicia at the bottom of the ladder, promising that he’d go home and sleep. But home was the last place he wanted to go. Only a few of the unmarried men still used the barracks; the place was filthy and reeked as bad as the power station. But that would be where Peter lived from now on. He needed a few things from the house, that was all.

The morning sun was already warm on his shoulders when he arrived at the house, a five-room cabin facing the East Glade. It was the only home that Peter had ever known, since coming out of the Sanctuary; he and Theo had barely done more than sleep there since their mother’s death. They certainly hadn’t done much to keep the place tidy. It always bothered Peter what a mess it was—dishes piled in the sink, clothing on the floor, every surface tacky with grime—and yet he could never quite bring himself to do anything about this. Their mother had been nothing if not neat, and had kept the house well—the floors washed and rugs beaten, the hearth swept of ashes, the kitchen clear of debris. There were two bedrooms on the first floor, where he and Theo slept, and one, his parents’, tucked under the eaves on the second. Peter went to his room and quickly packed a rucksack with a few days’ worth of clothing; he’d look over Theo’s belongings later, deciding what to keep for himself before carting the rest to the Storehouse, where his brother’s clothes and shoes would be sorted and stowed, to await redistribution among the Colony at Share. It was Theo who had seen to this chore after their mother’s death, knowing that Peter could not; one winter day, almost a year later, Peter had seen a woman—Gloria Patal—wearing a scarf he recognized. Gloria was in the market stalls, sorting jars of honey. The scarf, with its bit of fringe, was unmistakably his mother’s. Peter had been so disturbed he’d darted away, as if from the scene of some misdeed in which he was implicated.

He finished his packing and stepped into the main room of the house, a combined kitchen and living area under exposed beams. The stove hadn’t been lit in months; the woodpile out back was probably full of mice by now. Every surface in the room was coated in a sticky skin of dust. Like nobody lived there at all. Well, he thought, I guess they don’t.

A last impulse took him upstairs to his parents’ bedroom. The drawers of the small dresser were vacant, the sagging mattress stripped of bedding, the shelves in the old wardrobe barren except for a filigree of cobwebs that swayed in the shifting air when he opened the door. The small bedside table where his mother had kept a cup of water and her glasses—the one thing of hers Peter would have liked to keep, but couldn’t; a decent pair of glasses was worth a full share—was ringed with ghostly stains. Nobody had opened the windows in months; the atmosphere of the room felt trapped and ill-used, one more item that Peter had dishonored with his neglect. It was true: he felt like he’d failed them, failed them all.

He