By the time he’s reached the oilfield and the first of the old canals, his duck-and-cover routine has grown tiresome: he’s feverish again, wracked by chills, ready to get off the street. He crosses his arms, hugs himself, lowers his head and quickens his step, muttering curses through chattering teeth. Cursing himself and the world. Cursing Welles most of all. Maybe you conjured me, Stanley seethes. You ever think of that, you fat son of a bitch? Maybe it was me all along you conjured. Maybe you conjured me.
For a long time he walks without being aware of walking. His mind is elsewhere, or nowhere; his feet advance mechanically, of their own accord. When he snaps back to attention with the sensation of waking up, he’s surprised to find himself still in motion, and uncertain of where he is. He stops by a parked car, puts down his pack, unsheaths the canteen and drinks. The taste of the water is sharp on his tongue, flavored by the old tin; he thinks of his father in Leyte and Okinawa, deadened and enlivened by hours of fighting, tasting the same tinny water. He remembers struggling to lift the fieldpack the day his father gave it to him: it was bigger than he was then. If I don’t get into this war, I’ll go nuts. I don’t understand nothing about peace. That may be fucked up, but it’s true. People don’t want me around, and I don’t want to be around. In peace I’m nobody. I don’t even recognize myself.
The rain has stopped but the clouds are low; they push against the rooftops. Stanley is still among the canals. Mist rises from them like curtains, sealing each block of houses in a gauzy box. Just ahead there’s a bridge; beyond it, a pair of derricks burns off natural gas, their crowns lit by slow-moving pillars of clean flame. Their unsteady lights throw two faint shadows behind every solid thing within reach.
Figures on the bridge: a large man, and a small crawling child. The man leans against the rail; the child huddles at his feet. Both peer at the oily water below. Stanley shoulders his pack, moves closer. The child is no child at all, but a stocky dog; Stanley can hear the hoarse rasp of its panting. One of the burning derricks is directly behind the man, and it puts his head in silhouette. Stanley can make out the edge of his face, the tiny flames reiterated in his spectacle lenses. Smoke swirls around his fleshy chin; a pipe dangles from his mouth. He wears a tweed driver’s cap identical to the one that now sits atop Stanley’s head.
It’s Welles and his little dog, out for their nightly walk. It has to be. But then, as Stanley approaches, he sees that it’s not. Exactly what it is about this guy that fails to match with Welles Stanley can’t say, but he’s certain this isn’t Welles at all. Something is off. This guy’s dog looks a little bigger. Or—Stanley draws closer—a little smaller. He still can’t see the man’s face.
Stanley steps onto the bridge. He’s tiptoeing now; he’s not sure why. The low roar of burning gas sounds like flags blown flat and straight by a steady gale. This has got be Welles: it looks just like him. Stanley tries to rationalize it, though he knows it isn’t true. Could he be back already from the hospital? If so, why didn’t he stop at home? Maybe Synn?ve drove Claudio to the hospital on her own, and Welles stayed behind. But this is not Welles. It’s definitely not. Could Stanley’s eyes be playing tricks? Could Welles have a twin? Or could this be the real Adrian Welles at last, and the other one—the one Stanley met, the one who signed his book—be the counterfeit?
The figure lowers the briarwood pipe. His hand comes to rest on the railing. Something about the sight of that hand freezes Stanley in his tracks, raises the fine hairs on his neck. It looks just like Welles’s hand: a normal human hand. But it is not.
The dog plants its front paws on the railing’s lower crosspiece. Then it tips back on its hind legs and walks, tottering like a wind-up soldier. It rotates slowly to look at Stanley. The furry bug-eyed face beneath its long velvet ears is human, or not inhuman. It grins at him with drool-glazed rows of white baby-teeth.
Then it speaks. It calls to Stanley in a low croaking voice. It calls him by his name, his birth name, the name he buried with his dreadful grandfather, the name no living soul but his mute lunatic mother knows.
Or at least, many years from now, this is how you will remember it.
Stanley stumbles backward. The little dog stomps gracelessly toward him. The figure on the rail is turning around. If Stanley meets its gaze, everything that he is will disappear. This is what he came here for. This is what the book has tried to tell him. Some dark thing in this world shares his face.