ride."
Nyebern was afraid. It was the first time he had shown any capacity for
fear. "And I thought I was the spider."
With strength, agility, and economy of motion that Hatch had not known
he possessed he grabbed Regina's belt in his left hand, pulled her away
from Jeremy Nyebern, set her aside out of harm's way, and brought the
crucifix down like a club upon the madman's head. The lens of the
attached flashlight shattered, and the casing burst open, spilling
batteries.
He chopped the crucifix hard against the killer's skull a second time,
and with the third blow he sent Nyebern to a grave that had been twice
earned.
The anger Hatch felt was righteous anger. When he dropped the crucifix
when it was all over, he felt no guilt or shame. He was nothing at all
like his father.
He had a strange awareness of a power leaving him, a presence he had not
known was there. He was a mission accomplished, restored. All things
were now in their rightful places.
Regina was unresponsive when he spoke to her. Physically she seemed
unharmed. Hatch was not worried about her, for somehow he knew that
none of them would suffer unduly for having been caught up in...
whatever they had been caught up in.
Lindsey was unconscious and bleeding. He examined her wound and felt It
was not too serious.
Voices arose two floors above. They were calling his name. The
authorities had arrived. Late as always. Well, not always.
Sometimes. .. one of them was there just when you needed him.
3
The story of the three blind men examining the elephant is widely known.
The first blind man feels only the elephant's trunk and thereafter
confidently describes the beast as a great snakelike creature, similar
to a python. The second blind man feels only the elephant's ears and
announces that it is a bird that can soar to great heights. The third
blind man examines only the elephant's fringe-tipped, fly-shading tail
and "sees" an animal that is curiously like a bottle brush.
So it is with any experience that human beings share. Each participant
perceives it in a different way and takes from it a different lesson
than do his or her compatriots.
In the years following the events at the abandoned amusement park, Jonas
Nyebern lost interest in resuscitation medicine. Other men took over
his work and did it well.
He sold at auction every piece of religious art in the two collections
that he had not yet completed, and he put the money in savings
instruments that would return the highest possible rate of interest.
Though he continued to practice cardiovascular surgery for a while, he
no longer found any satisfaction in it. Eventually he retired young and
looked for a new career in which to finish out the last decades of his
life.
He stopped attending Mass. He no longer believed that evil was a force
in itself, a real presence that walked the world. He had found that
humanity itself was a source of evil sufficient to explain everything
that was wrong with the world. conversely, he decided humanity was its
own and only-salvation.
He became a veterinarian. Every patient seemed deserving.
He never married again.
He was neither happy nor unhappy, and that suited him fine.
Regina remained within her inner room for a couple of days, and when she
came out she was never quite the same. But then no one ever is quite
the same for any length of time. Change is the only constant.
It's called growing up.
She addressed them as Dad and Mom, because she wanted to, and because
she meant it. Day by day, she gave them as much happiness as they gave
her.
She never set off a chain reaction of destruction among their antiques.
She never embarrassed them by getting inappropriately sentimental,
bursting into tears, and thereby activating the old snot faucet: she
unfailingly produced tears and snot only when they were called for.
She never mortified them by accidentally flipping an entire plate of
food into the air at a restaurant and over the head of the President of
the United States at the next table. She never accidentally set the
house on fire, never farted in polite company, and never scared the
be-jesus out of smaller neighborhood children with her leg brace and
curious right hand. Better still, she stopped worrying about doing all
energies that she once had wasted upon such unlikely concerns.
She kept writing. She got better at it. When she was just 14, she won
a national writing competition for teenagers. The prize was a rather
nice watch and a check for five hundred dollars. She used some of the
money for a subscription to Publishers Weekly and a complete set of the
novels of William Makepeace Thackeray. She no longer had an interest in
writing about intelligent pigs from outer space, largely because she was
learning that more curious characters could be found all around her,
many of them native Californians.
She no longer talked to God. It seemed childish to chatter at Him.
Besides, she no longer needed His constant attention. For a while she
had thought He had gone away or had never existed, but she had decided
that was foolish. She was aware of him all the time, winking at her
from the flowers, serenading her in the song of a bird, smiling at her
from the fury face of a kitten, touching her with a soft summer breeze.
She found a line in a book that she thought was apt, from Dave Tyson
Gentry: "True friendship comes when silence between two men is
comfortable." Well, who was your best friend, if not God, and what did
you really need to say to Him or He to you when you both already knew
the most-and only important thing, which was that you would always be
there for each other.
Lindsey came through the events of those days less changed than she had
expected. Her paintings improved somewhat, but not tremendously. She
had never been dissatisfied with her work in the first place. She loved
Hatch no less than ever, and could not possibly have loved him more.
One thing that made her cringe, which never had before, was hearing
anyone say, "The worst is behind us now." She knew that the worst was
never behind us. The worst came at the end. It was the end, the very
fact of it. Nothing could be worse than that. But she had learned to
live with the understanding that the worst was never behind her-and
still find joy in the day at hand.
As for God-she didn't dwell on the issue. She raised Regina in the
Catholic Church, attending Mass with her each week, for that was part of
the promise she had made St. Thomas's when they had arranged the
adoption. But she didn't do it solely out of duty. She figured that
the Church was good for Regina-and that Regina might be good for the
Church, too. Any institution that counted Regina a member was going to
discover itself changed by her at least as much as she was changed-and
to its everlasting ben
efit. She had once said that prayers were never
answered, that the living lived only to die, but she had progressed
beyond that attitude. She would wait and see.
Hatch continued to deal successfully in antiques. Day by day his life
went pretty much as he hoped it would. As before, he was an easy-going
guy.
He never got angry. But the difference was that he had no anger left in
him to repress. The mellowness was genuine now.
From time to time, when the patterns of life seemed to have a grand
meaning that just barely eluded him, and when he was therefore in a
philosophical mood, he would go to his den and take two items from the
locked drawer.
One was the heat-browned issue of Arts American.
The other was a slip of paper he had brought back from the library one
day, after doing a bit of research. Two names were written on it, with
an identifying line after each. "Vassago-according to mythology, one of
the nine crown princes of Hell." Below that was the name he had once
claimed was his own: "Urie-according to mythology, one of the archangels
serving as a personal attendant to God."
He stared at these things and considered them carefully, and always he
reached no firm conclusions. Though he did decide, if you had to be
dead for eighty minutes and come back with no memory of the Other Side,
maybe it was because eighty minutes of that knowledge was more than just
a glimpse of a tunnel with a light at the end, and therefore more than
you could be expected to handle.
And if you had to bring something back with you from Beyond, and carry
it within you until it had concluded its assignment on this side of the
veil, an archangel wasn't too shabby . . .
the end.