The grass where I stood at the top of the hill had been flattened, as if by feet. I stepped onto the flattened portion, peering for footprints I had no idea how to identify. Pickwick remained near the tree line a few feet away, sitting quietly, his tongue lolling as he panted. I saw nothing until I raised my eyes, looked back the way I had come. And then I understood.
From there I could see curling before me the road I had cycled down. I could see the bend I had taken, the ditch I had fallen into. I could even glimpse the wreckage of my bicycle beneath the leaves. This was where the killer had stood, aiming his rifle as I had come down the road.
I closed my eyes. A familiar feeling tickled the back of my neck, the base of my skull. He was still here, then, the man in the houndstooth jacket. I had seen his deathbed vision, and part of me called him even now.
I turned to find him standing six feet away, looking at me.
I took a breath. For the first time in a long while, I did not tell the dead to go away, to return where he had come from. I did not flinch at the smell, or at the sight of him, and I did not recoil in fear. I did not try to harness my power. Not this time. Instead, I looked straight into his ghastly, uncanny face.
“Speak to me,” I said.
* * *
When I told James that the dead do not speak in sentences, I had spoken the truth. I had also spoken the truth when I said it felt like plunging a hand into a bucket of worms in the dark. I plunged my hand now with the man in the houndstooth jacket, the chill of it freezing my spine and roiling in my stomach.
He was sadness and anger, frustration and overarching grief. I closed my eyes and saw things that had been left undone: a wife who had left him, to whom he had never apologized; a friend he had betrayed long before, though I could not see how; a brother he had not spoken to in years. I saw flashes of things I should not have seen—private memories, sensations: a woman sliding the straps of her brassiere off her shoulders and reaching for him; his mother weeping in unremitting pain in the last days of her life. Usually these were memories I pushed away, because they were unbearable, but now I let them wash through me, let their raw emotion fill me. I smelled late-autumn leaves burning and rich coffee, felt the sting as a long-ago teacher slapped his cheek, and then I saw the hillside, the last moments of the man’s life.
He had parked the car and come up the hill, his gaze on the slender figure, its back to him as it aimed the rifle. The images were jumbled. The man with the rifle had been smoking a cigarette, its smell pungent in the autumn air. He wore a cloth cap and a simple farmer’s jacket and trousers, but he was no simple farmer. The rifle was held rigid on his shoulder, its aim precise, and as he pulled the trigger the crack of it barely shifted his body, the recoil entirely controlled. The man in the houndstooth jacket had shouted, pulling a handgun from his pocket, thinking, Black dog, black dog, as the other man slid the bolt back on the rifle, ready to fire again, and the man had turned and lowered the rifle and—
I groaned, pressing my bare hands to my face. The sensations were furious now, too fast, and I had to stop them. Everything was out of order; I could make no sense of it. I pushed back, shutting the images out one by one, forcing down a rigid control. I opened my eyes and told him to leave, that it was over, that he should go and rest. The images slowed, trickled, stopped. I staggered, nauseated. The smell was gone, and so was the man in the houndstooth jacket.
With careful deliberation, I fell to my knees in the grass. That was it, then: He had saved my life, and he had died. If he hadn’t come up the hill, shouting and drawing his gun, the man with the rifle would have taken another shot at me as I’d lain in the ditch, and he would not have missed. I remembered hearing the shouts, and I also remembered hearing the sound of a motor as I’d gone through the woods. The killer had taken care of his witness, then, and driven off in his own vehicle, even as I’d followed the dead man here. I glanced at the body again, unmoving in its bloody spot in the grass. The gun he had drawn, I guessed, was in one of his hands, pinned under his body; he’d had no chance to fire it, so quick had his killer been. Black dog, the man had thought, but there had been no black dog in the images I’d seen, and Pickwick did not seem alarmed.
I went back and forth through the pictures in my mind, shuffling through them like a stack of grisly photographs, trying to make sense of them. Coming up the hill; the man with the rifle . . . He had turned, and I’d seen the shadow of a face, but that did not matter. Something else mattered—something important. I was light-headed and terrified, but I had gone too far to stop now. The man who had saved my life had left me something I was meant to see.
I took a breath, calming myself, and went through the images again. That last moment before death. The man with the rifle had turned and—
I laughed aloud, my legs folding under me until I was sitting in the grass and staring at nothing, looking at the pictures in my mind. It was just possible—only just.
The man with the rifle had been smoking a cigarette, and when he’d turned in surprise, it had fallen into the grass.