Dark Rivers of the Heart

corner There I halt, because a vehicle I've never seen before is parked behind the barn: a customized Chevy van that no doubt isn't charcoal, as it appears to be, for the moonlight alchemizes every color into silver or gray.
        Painted on the side is a rainbow, which also seems to be in shades of gray. The rear door stands open.
        The silence is deep.
        No one is in sight.
        Even at the impressionable age of fourteen, with a childhood of Halloweens and nightmares behind me, I've never known strangeness and terror to be more seductive, and I can't resist their perverse allure.
        I take one step toward the van, and-something slices the air close overhead with a whoosh and a flutter, startling me. I stumble, fall, roll, and look up in time to see enormous white wings spread above me.
        A shadow sweeps over the moonlit grass, and I have the cray has swooped down m Heaven to warn me away from the van. Then the celestial presence arcs higher into the darkness, and I see that it's only a great white owl, with a wingspan of five feet, sailing the summer night in search of field mice or other prey.
        The owl vanishes.
        The night remains.
        I rise to my feet.
        I creep toward the van, powerfully drawn by the mystery of it, by the promise of adventure. And by a terrible truth, which I don't yet know that I know.
        The sound of the owl's wings, though so recent andfrightening, doesn't remain with me. But that pitiful cry, heard at the open window, echoes unrelentingly in my memory. Perhaps I'm beginning to acknowledge that it wasn't the Plaint of any wild animal meeting its end in the fields and forests, but the wretched and desperate plea of a human being in the grip of extreme Terror…
        In the Explorer, speeding across the moonlit Mojave, wingless but now as wise as any owl, Spencer followed insistent memory all the way into the heart of darkness, to the flash of steel from out of shadows, to the sudden pain and the scent of hot blood, to the wound that would become his scar, forcing himself toward the ultimate revelation that always eluded him.
        It eluded him again.
        He could recall nothing of what happened in the final moments of that hellish, long-ago encounter, after he pulled the trigger of the revolver and returned to the slaughterhouse. The police had told him how it must have ended. He had read accounts of what he'd done, by writers who based their articles and books upon the evidence. But none of them had been there. They couldn't know the truth beyond a doubt.
        Only he had been there. Up to a point, his memories were so vivid as to be profoundly tormenting, but memory ended at a black hole of amnesia; after sixteen years, he'd still not been able to focus even one beam of light into that darkness.
        If he ever recalled the rest, he might earn lasting peace. Or remembrance might destroy him. In that black tunnel of amnesia, he might find a shame with which he could not live, and the memory might be less desirable than a self-administered bullet to the brain.
        Nevertheless, by periodically unburdening himself of everything that he did remember, he always found temporary relief from anguish.
        He found it again in the Mojave Desert, at fifty-five miles an hour.
        When Spencer glanced at Rocky, he saw that the dog was curled on the other seat, dozing. The mutt's position seemed awkward, if not precarious, with his tail dangling down into the leg space under the dashboard, but he was evidently comfortable.
        Spencer supposed that the rhythms of his speech and the tone of his voice, after countless repetitions of his story over the years, had become soporific whenever he turned to that subject. The poor dog couldn't have staved awake even if they'd been in a thunderstorm.
        Or perhaps, for some time, he had not actually been talking aloud.
        Perhaps his soliloquy had early faded to a whisper and then into silence while he continued to speak only with an inner voice. The identity of his confessor didn't matter-a dog was as acceptable as a stranger in a barroom-so it followed that it was not important to him if his confessor listened. Having a willing listener was merely an excuse to talk himself through it once more, in search of temporary absolution or-if he could shine a light into that final darkness-a permanent peace of one kind or another.
        He was fifty