Breathless

there be guards between us and the woods?”
    “Yes,” said Lamar. “Definitely.”
    “We’ll know,” Puzzle said. “We see everything in the dark, all the way to the bottom of the night.”
    To Cammy, Grady said, “I’ll grab a jacket. Collar Merlin for me. We can use flashlights when we’re so far into the woods no one here can see them, but for some distance, when the branches are too thick to let the moonlight in, we might need Merlin on a leash to lead us. He knows the paths that way, it’s one of our favorite walks.”
    Cammy slipped into her jacket, collared Merlin, and clipped the leash to the collar.
    Standing at the door, ready to open it, Lamar Woolsey said, “Too bad I don’t have time to run a probability analysis on this plan of yours. I have a nasty feeling, there’s chaos brewing in it.”
    Puzzle said, “What is leads to what will be, and all will be well if we do what is right.”
    Lamar nodded. “If you say so.”
    “She did,” Riddle told him. “She said so. And she’s right. Never fear the future. Whatever happens, the future is the only way back.”
    The novelty of hearing them talk was probably years away from wearing off, and Cammy listened, rapt. “The only way back to what?”
    “Back to where we belong forever,” said Riddle. “The future is the one path out of time into eternity.”
    Grady returned with three flashlights. “Are we ready?”
    “Absolutely,” Lamar said. “The coach just gave us a pep talk, and we’re in gear for action. I’ll scout the way.”
    Lamar stepped onto the back porch, leaving the door open, and after a moment motioned for them to follow him.

Sixty-five

I n Jim’s cramped study, Henry Rouvroy put down the hand grenade, looked over the books on the shelves, and removed the volume of his brother’s haiku.
    The noise in the attic faded away. He took no comfort in the silence. He knew the rapping-out of meter on a ceiling beam would soon resume.
    Or the torment would take another form. His tormentor had not finished with him yet; and would not be finished until he thrust in the knives, thrust again and again.
    Restless, Henry walked the house, back and forth, around and around, carrying the hand grenade in one hand and the book in the other, reading haiku, thumbing pages.
    He didn’t know why he felt compelled to read Jim’s haiku. But intuition told him that he might be rewarded for doing so.
    When he found the harrier poem, his breath caught in his throat:
    Swooping harrier—
calligraphy on the sky,
talons, then the beak
.
    Henry’s keen intuition served him well, and his classes in logic at Harvard prepared him to reason his way quickly to the meaning of this discovery.
    The poem left on the kitchen notepad was not a new composition. Jim had written it long before Henry’s arrival, not just hours ago.
    Therefore, the poem could not possibly refer to the harriers in the sky moments before Henry murdered Jim. The poem had nothing to do with Jim’s murder and nothing to do with Henry’s, either.
    Not that he had believed for a minute that Jim had returned from the dead to compose verse and threaten him with it. Henry was not a superstitious person, and even immersion in the primitive culture of these rural hills could not so quickly wash away the education and, indeed, enlightenment that he received in those hallowed halls in Cambridge. But at least finding the haiku in this book
confirmed
his certainty that his tormentor must be someone
pretending
to be Jim.
    Or did it?
    Jim didn’t need to copy a haiku out of a book. Having written it, he would remember it. Remembering, he would see how useful it could be in the current circumstances.
    No. Jim was not alive and was not one of the living dead. Jim was, damn it, as dead as—
    In the attic, someone rapped out a few lines of iambic pentameter, then a few lines of dactylic heptameter.

Sixty-six

A fter more than thirty-one years, Tom Bigger remembered the way home as clearly as though he had left it only a month before. The street canopied with alders that were old even when he’d been a boy, the cast-iron streetlamps with the beveled panes, the grand old houses behind deep lawns all stirred in him a time when he was a boy, preadolescence, before he became so angry, before he was made angry by ideologies that now seemed insane to him and alien.
    Like some others, his parents’ house had not been restored so much as remade into a greater grandeur than it originally possessed.