upon such a sight again.”
Dad stood up and fumbled for his wallet, but Mr. Steiner put money on the
table. “I’ll take you to him,” Dad said, and he started for the door.
“Such a bright young man,” Dr. Lezander said, standing between me and the
way out. “There’s that terrier determination, isn’t it? Finding that green
feather and then pursuing it to the end? I admire that, Cory, I truly do.”
“Dr. Lezander?” I felt as if my chest were constricted by iron bands. “I
sure would like to go home.”
He took two steps toward me. I retreated as many.
He stopped, aware of his power over me. “I want that green feather. Do
you know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because your having it upsets Miss Sonia. It’s a reminder of the past,
and she doesn’t like that. The past should be put behind us, Cory. The world
should go on, and leave the things of the past alone, don’t you agree?”
“I don’t—”
“But no, just like that green feather, the past has to turn up again and
again and again. It has to be plowed up and spread out for everyone to see.
The past has to be put on exhibit, and everyone who struggled to keep from
drowning in that sludge has to pay the price over and over. It’s not fair,
Cory, it’s not right. Do you see?”
I didn’t. Somewhere along the line, his train had derailed.
“We were honorable,” Dr. Lezander said, his eyes feverish. “We had honor.
We had pride. And look at the world now, Cory! Look what it’s become! We knew
the destination, but they wouldn’t let us take the world there. And now you
see what you see. Chaos and vulgarity on all sides. Gross interbreedings and
couplings that even animals wouldn’t abide. You know, I had my chance to be a
physician to human beings. I did. Many times. And do you know that I would
rather kneel in the mud and attend to a swine than save a human life? Because
that’s what I think of the human race! That’s what I think of the liars who
turned their backs on us and sullied our honor! That’s what I… that’s what I…
what I think!” He picked up the collie cup and flung it to the floor, and it
hit the tiles near my right foot and shattered to pieces with a noise like a
gunshot.
Silence.
In another moment, Mrs. Lezander called from upstairs: “Frans? What
broke, Frans?”
His brain, I thought.
“We’re talking,” Dr. Lezander said to her. “Just talking, only that.”
I heard her footsteps, heavy on the floor, as she moved away.
Then a scraping sound above us.
And a few seconds later, the piano being played.
The tune was “Beautiful Dreamer.” Mrs. Lezander was actually a very
talented pianist. She had the hands for it, I recalled Miss Blue Glass saying.
I wondered if she also had the hands that were strong enough to wrap
hay-baling wire around a man’s throat and strangle him to death. Or had Dr.
Lezander done that as Mrs. Lezander had played that same tune in the den above
and the parrots had squawked and screamed with the memory of brutal violence?
“Twenty-five dollars a week,” Dr. Lezander said. “But you must bring me
the green feather, and you must never, never talk to Miss Sonia Glass about
this again. The past is dead. It should stay buried, where it belongs. Do you
agree, Cory?”
I nodded. Anything to get out of there.
“Good boy. When can you bring me the feather? Tomorrow afternoon?”
“Yes sir.”
“That’s very, very good. When you bring it, I’ll destroy it so Miss Sonia
Glass won’t think of the past anymore, and it won’t hurt her. When you bring
it, I’ll give you your first week’s money. Is that agreeable?”
“Yes sir.” Anything, anything.
“All right, then.” He moved aside from the stairs. “After you, mein
herr.”
I started up.
The front doorbell rang. “Beautiful Dreamer” abruptly stopped. I heard
the scrape again: the piano bench being pushed back. At the top of the stairs,
Dr. Lezander put his hand on my shoulder again and held me. “Wait,” he
whispered.
We heard the front door opening.
“Tom!” Mrs. Lezander said. “What may I do for—”
“Dad!” I shouted. “Help—” Dr. Lezander’s hand clamped over my mouth, and
I heard him give a muffled cry of anguish that it had all come to this end.
“Cory! Get outta my way, you—!” Dad started into the house, with Mr.
Steiner and Lee Hannaford behind him. He shoved the big woman aside, but in
the next instant Mrs. Lezander bellowed, “Nein!” and slammed a forearm across
the side of his face. He fell backward into Mr. Steiner, blood trickling from
a gashed eyebrow. Only Mr. Steiner could understand the things Mrs. Lezander
shouted to her husband: “Gunther, run! Take the boy and run!” As she was
shouting, Mr. Hannaford grabbed her around her throat from behind and with all
his weight and strength he wrestled her to the floor. She got up on one knee
and fought back, but suddenly Mr. Steiner was on her, too, trying to pin her
flailing arms. A coffee table and lamp crashed over. Mr. Steiner, his hat
flown off and his lower lip burst open by one of her fists, yelled, “It’s
over, Kara! It’s over, it’s over!”
But it was not over for her husband.
At her warning cry, he had picked me up with one arm and scooped the car
keys off the kitchen counter where his wife had left them. As I thrashed to
get free, he dragged me out the back door into the falling sleet, the wind
whipping his red silk robe. He lost a slipper, but he didn’t slow down. He
flung me into the Buick, slammed the door almost on my leg, and came close to
sitting on my head when he leaped behind the wheel. He jammed the key into the
ignition, turned it, and the engine roared to life. As he put the gears into
reverse and the Buick’s tires laid rubber on the driveway, I sat up in time to
see Dad run out the back door into the glare of the headlights.
“Dad!” I reached for the door handle on my side. An elbow crashed into my
shoulder and paralyzed me with pain, and when the hand gripped the back of my
head and flung me down onto the floorboard like an old sack I lay there dazed
and hurting. Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke, the murderer—whom I still knew as Dr.
Frans Lezander, the murderer—crunched the gearshift into first and the Buick’s
engine screamed as the car tore away.
Behind us, my father was already running back through the house to get to
the pickup. He jumped over the struggling bodies of Mr. Steiner, Mr.
Hannaford, and Kara Dahninaderke. The woman was still fighting, but Mr.
Hannaford was using his fists on her horsey face and the results were not on
the side of beauty.
Dr. Lezander was racing through the streets of Zephyr, the Buick’s tires
shrieking at every turn. I started to crawl up from the floorboard, but Dr.
Lezander shouted, “Stay there! Don’t you move, you little bastard!” and he
slapped me in the face and I slid back down again. We must’ve passed the
Lyric; I wondered how much hell a hero could stand. We roared onto the
gargoyle bridge, and when the steering wheel slipped out of Dr. Lezander’s
frantic hands for an instant, the Buick sideswiped the left side of the bridge
and sent sparks and pieces of chrome flying into the air, the car’s frame
moaning with the impact. Then he seized control again and, his teeth gritted,
he aimed us onto Route Ten.
I saw light leap from the rearview mirror and stab Dr. Lezander in the
eyes. He shouted a curse in German that was louder than the Buick’s wail, and
I could just imagine what the parrots had had to endure that night. But I knew
whose lights those were, ricocheting off the mirror. I knew who was behind us,
right on the Buick’s tail, pushing that old pickup truck to its point of
explosion. I knew.
I reached up and grabbed the bottom of the steering wheel, jerking the
car to the right. It went off the road onto loose gravel, the tires slipping.
Dr. Lezander gave me another Germanic oath, hollered at the velocity and
volume of a howitzer shell to the skull, and pounded my fingers loose with his
fist. With that same fist, he knocked me in the forehead so hard I saw purple
stars and that was the end of my heroics.
“Leave me alone!” Dr. Lezander screamed to the pickup truck whose
headlights filled the rearview mirror. “Can’t you leave me alone?” He fought
the wheel around Route Ten’s snaky curves, the force of gravity trying its
best to rip the tires off. I pulled myself up on the seat again, my head still
ringing, and Dr. Lezander yelled, “You little shit!” and grabbed the back of
my coat, but he had to use two hands on the wheel so he released me.
I looked back at my father’s pickup, twenty feet of sleet and air between
Dad’s front bumper and Dr. Lezander’s rear bumper. We hurtled out of the
series of tight curves, and I held on to the seat as Dr. Lezander accelerated,
widening the distance between vehicles. I heard a pop and twisted my head in
time to see Dr. Lezander reaching into the glove compartment, which he’d
knocked open with a blow of his fist. His hand emerged gripping a snub-nosed
.38 pistol. He threw that arm back, almost cuffing me in the head with the
gun’s barrel before I ducked, and he fired twice without aiming. The rear
windshield exploded, the glass fragments flying toward Dad’s pickup like
pieces of jagged ice. I saw the pickup swerve and almost go off the road, its
rear end wildly fishtailing, but then Dad got it righted. As Dr. Lezander’s
gun hand passed over my head again, I reached up and grabbed his wrist,
pinning that gun against the seat with all my strength. The Buick began to
slew from side to side as he grappled with the wheel and with me at the same
time, but I hung on.
The gun went off in front of my face, the bullet passing through the seat
and out the door with a metallic clang. The sound and heat of it going off so
close to me sent a shock and shiver through my bones, and I guess I let go but
I don’t remember and then Dr. Lezander hit me a glancing blow on the right
shoulder with that gun barrel. It was perhaps the worst pain I’d ever felt in
my life; it filled me up and overspilled from my mouth in a cry. Without the
padding of my coat in the way, my shoulder would’ve surely been broken. As it
was, I grabbed at it and fell back against the passenger-side door, my face
contorted with pain and my right arm all but dead. I saw, as if locked in a
cyclic dream akin to that in Invaders from Mars, that we were about to pass
the dark plain of Saxon’s Lake. And then Dr. Lezander jammed on the brake with
his bare foot, and as the Buick slowed and Dad’s pickup gained ground, the
doctor threw his arm back again and this time he looked over his shoulder to
aim. His face was slickly wet in the wash of the lights, his teeth clenched,
his eyes those of the savage, hunted animal. He fired, and the windshield of
Dad’s truck suddenly had a fist-sized hole in it. I saw his finger tighten on
the trigger, and I wanted to fight him with all the want in my body, but that
pain in my shoulder had me whipped.
Something huge and dark and fast burst out of the woods on the other side
of the road, near where I’d seen Mrs. Lezander standing that morning in March.
It was on us before Dr. Lezander even saw it, and it was headed straight
for his door.
At the same instant, the gun went off and the beast from the lost world
collided with us.
This, truly, was a noise like the end of the world.
Over gunshot and Lezanderscream and crash of glass and folding metal, the
Buick was knocked up onto the two tires on my side and they shrieked like
constipated banshees as the entire car was shoved off the pavement. Dr.
Lezander, his door buckled in as if kicked by God, came tumbling into me
across the seat and my breath burst out, my ribs in danger of snapping. I
heard a snort and grunt: the triceratops, protecting his territory, was
pushing the rival dinosaur off Route Ten. Dr. Lezander’s face was pressed up
against mine, his weight crushing me, and I smelled his fear like green
onions. Then he screamed again and I think I screamed, too, because suddenly
the car was falling.
We hit with a bone-jarring jolt and splash.
Dark water seethed up into the floorboard. We had just been received by
Saxon’s Lake.
The Buick’s steaming hood was rising. As it did, water began to surge
over the slope of the trunk and pour through the shattered glass. The window
on Dr. Lezander’s side was broken as well, but the water hadn’t yet reached
it. He was lying on top of me, the gun lost. His eyes were glassy, blood
oozing from his mouth where he must’ve bitten his lip or tongue. His left arm,
the arm which had taken the brunt of the beast’s power, was lying at a weird
crooked angle. I saw the wet glistening of white bone protruding from the
wrist in the red silk sleeve.
The lake was coming in faster now, air bubbles exploding around the
trunk. The rear windshield was a waterfall. I couldn’t get Dr. Lezander off
me, and now the car was turning slowly against me as the Buick rolled over
like a happy hog and my side started to submerge. Dr. Lezander was drooling
bloody foam, and I realized his ribs must’ve taken a wallop, too.
“Cory! Cory!”
I looked up, past Dr. Lezander to the broken window rising above me.
My father was there, his hair plastered flat, his face dripping. Blood
was creeping down from his cut eyebrow. He started wrenching out bits of glass
from the window frame with his fingers. The Buick shuddered and moaned. Water
edged up over the seat and its cold touch shocked me and made Dr. Lezander
start thrashing.
“Can you grab my hand?” Dad wedged his body in through the crumpled
window and strained to reach me.
I couldn’t, not with that weight on me. “Help me, Dad,” I croaked.
He fought to winnow in farther. His sides must’ve been raked and clawed
by glass, but his face showed no pain. His lips were tight and grim, his eyes
fixed on me like red-rimmed lamps. His hand tried to part the distance between
us, but still the distance was too great.
Dr. Lezander’s body lurched. He said something, but it must’ve been a
snarl of German. He blinked, his eyes coming into painful focus. Water sloshed
